by Camden Joy
Inside there was just one person, an unshaven guy. He seemed a hundred years old. I remember the bony arc of his sweeping limbs folded over some greased-up tee shirt. I remember his head tilting into an easy scowl as he listened to my complaints about skee-ball coupons and camp skits, about being made to gargle rubbing alcohol, to paint shields for the Renaissance Faire, to learn the thirty-five key dos & don’ts to well-done crafts. He clicked his tongue thoughtfully, squinted down at me in my camp sweatshirt, studied his motorcycle boots. He seemed a hundred years old and very wise. This then was Guy. He was just nineteen, twenty. The bar would not serve me alcohol but what they would do was to serve me coffee. And so my first cup of coffee, Guy bought it for me. I realize now that he was just pleased to have an audience, any audience at all, for in fact the entire saloon consisted of me and my cup of coffee and him mouthing along to Creedence songs. (I recall no bartender.) He was the evening’s entertainment: “This Guy’s Band.” He would mount this sort of impromptu stage. He had a guitar, not plugged in, on which he pretended to play all of John Fogerty’s parts.
Strangely, every adult at the summer camp was familiar with Guy as a sort of town character, they were even fine with me hanging out with him (how is this possible?), and so after my initial disciplinary requirements had been met (“You are never again to go off alone without a supervisor, do you hear me young man?!”), they agreed to lend me to him during prescribed hours in the interest of being taught automobiles and music appreciation. Mostly I’d go to the yard with Guy, where inside a high fence he worked on the town’s cars with two older guys named Crane and Ellis, alongside a big brown sweet-faced dog named Cronkite. Guy blasted distorted tapes of Creedence Clearwater Revival on a small Panasonic tape recorder as he assembled Muncie transmissions and dropped bored-out big-block V8s into Oldsmobiles with a cherry-picker and showed me how to troubleshoot baffling electrical drainages by checking the parts linked to the battery. A typical moment might be Guy leaning way in over some engine, supported wholly by the front end, as a vaguely audible semblance of “Fortunate Son” screamed nearby, and calling out to me for tools, “Okay, end wrench—Fogerty, you know, wrote this in twenty minutes—no, I need something smaller, looks like a seven-sixteenths—twenty minutes! He was twenty-five years old! That’s better, that’ll do it.”
The director of the summer camp would call me over every few days to quiz me on what I was learning, but she didn’t know much about cars and didn’t know much about music either so it was easy to impress upon her the value and stuff of my lessons.
Some days we’d knock off early and go over to where Guy lived, this musty cabin that smelled of sulfur, of old eggs, as if the stove leaked (it probably did). We’d sit in his living room, me insisting how bad things always seemed, and Guy calling me a regular riot, he’d call me smart as a whip and he’d go how it was all gonna get so much easier for me once I got older, just wait and see, life’ll become fun, and he’d boil me up a cup of this coffee stuff, which was rapidly becoming my favorite beverage (though the first cup that night at the roadhouse had just sat in my stomach for an hour gurgling and curdling like a something-salad-sandwich b/w bad stone soup before—good gracious—dissipating to set my entire world on edge . . .).
His decor? Guy had no windows. In place of this he had positioned up on his walls all seven Creedence record album jackets in chronological order. There was that first one (June 1968), a window overlooking the outdoors, them all with mustaches, standing in an oak grove, obscured largely by tree trunks, in turtlenecks and soldier coats, an unplayed trumpet enigmatically dangling from Doug Clifford’s hand. Window number two (January 1969) also was very tree-filled and woodsy, except that as a window it was impossible to look through, it seemed designed to induce instant vomiting with its tunnel acceleration, its exaggerated migraine technique (enhanced no doubt by the nausea of Guy’s gas leak). The only image I can remember from it—who but Guy could stand to study it for very long?—is that of some central guitar-toting figure with a gruesomely elongated aquatic-looking bare appendage where a foot belonged. Record album jacket three (August 1969) was again another window to the outside. The group stood dappled in the forest, intentionally avoiding the warm patch of sunlight just before them (one began to surmise Creedence went inside only long enough to lay down the tunes, then raced back out amongst the trees to snap the sleeve). But then—at last!—by the fourth window (November 1969), a bit of the inevitable cityscape entered, the inkling of a DON’T WALK sign, some kid extras from the ghetto, the Duck Kee Market • Beer • Wine • Frozen Food • Produce • Meat. So now we had provisions and passersby, and even more importantly we had buildings, and yet CCR remained outside them. Did they never go indoors at all? Was this the secret point of these record album jackets, the telling Creedence phobia? Or, if they did—what exactly did they do once inside, in their homes, in stores, shops, restaurants, and banks, were their internal activities so embarrassing as to remain necessarily undocumented? Apparently so. The next one (April 1970) gave in to popular demand: at last, horribly, tragically, Creedence was pictured indoors. Doing what? It was easily their worst record album jacket, maybe the worst record album jacket of all time. Doug Clifford was on a stationary bicycle—what?—dressed like a fool. The others lounged about. Was that a telling photograph? Only J.C. seemed ready to acknowledge that there were instruments on the floor around them. Sadly, this was their best-selling record album, and consequently the window most stared through by fans. Next! No doubt reeling from the fallout and blatantly attempting to compensate for the misguided, ill-advised disaster of the last window, the follow-up (December 1970) showed their heads in extreme close-up as they leaned in over us, eyes full of sinister purpose. Outdoors or indoors, it was hard to say. The world beyond them fell away in indistinct inkiness. They were perhaps preparing to boil us in a pot, to rid themselves of us while in a night storm at sea, or in deep space, it was impossible to determine. The last window (June 1972) I cannot remember at all, I have a vague recollection of them on crucifixes, being fed wine vinegar from a sponge held on the stalk of a hyssop plant, sides pierced by centurion spears, eyes pleading heavenward. But this may be inaccurate; it may be hampered by the fact that these windows, through which Guy interpreted and connected CCR’s travails, arranged as I said in this conscious careful manner, always resembled so much to me the stations of the cross in a church stainglass.
It was here—lounging on the soiled print sofa of his musty cabin, high probably on natural gas fumes, gazing deeply into the nailed-up Creedence LPs, our heads out of control and cop-free with caffeine—that Guy impressed upon me the darting sudden-ness of Creedence’s radio reign, how their reputation depends on songs written and recorded in a narrow span of eighteen months, three record albums in one year and two the next.
He also said, and I had not previously heard this, how early reviewers were unaware that Creedence grew up in the Bay Area, how they assumed the CCR sound was genuinely a product of the bayou. Which was quite okay with them for, as Guy told me, CCR did not appreciate the Bay Area scene, did not really relate to the hold-hands, drop-drugs spirit of the ’60s. One of their most hated moments was headlining at Woodstock—yeah, believe it or not, they headlined the festival—a performance which the band barred from use in the concert film or either soundtrack record album. They came on at two-thirty in the morning. J.C. grumbled that they went on after the Grateful Dead, who “had played about six songs for three hours. They were the band that put a half a million people to sleep.”
No one had ever talked to me that way, like I was somebody worth instructing in the important ways of the world, like I mattered, except maybe my Mom, and on the whole Guy and I didn’t spend nearly long enough together in that dizzying cabin. When he wasn’t solving car problems or reviving the entire Creedence Clearwater Revival he usually preferred to be out on his motorcycle, all hellfire determined to make himself dead, to push beyond the boundaries of these things we call our stupid lives
, going way too fast, leaning so hard into mountain turns his bike would slide away, tilting, tipping almost parallel to the ground, and he would aright himself by bouncing a padded knee off the asphalt. He would not take me along on these midnight rides (no matter how much I begged) though eventually he would allow me to bend the rules, at least to sneak from camp to see him off, he’d allow that much without telling on me. Then after a bit he put me in charge of the stopwatch (he was always racing against the clock) and soon—what would he have done without me?—my responsibilities expanded to holding onto “the sealed envelope,” which was left with me I suppose just in case he didn’t return. There’d even be those cold wet nights when (stupidly) he’d honor me by letting me wear his jacket to stay warm. In a gale of noise and smoke he’d roar off, leaving me with my domestic duties, heart pumping like a war-time bride. The envelope—well, I felt pretty sure it said how being of sound mind and body he did hereby surrender his few earthly possessions to his new best and only friend me—it was his final testament, written out of the conviction that testing himself this way deserved commemoration (or at least documentation). Each time he came back from these daredevil jaunts—“I outran the Pensacola freight tonight,” he’d breathlessly confess, or “Unbolted the headlamp on the thoroughfare and went 100 against traffic”—and he would demand the exact second count of tonight’s death-defying venture. But my point is that each time, when he came back, he was in near-perfect health. Always against the odds this kamikaze boy survived, thank god, he was Lindbergh, Legs Diamond, Lucky Luciano, he could not be killed, or so it appeared. In truth it was almost as if the chances he took were not chances at all because the risks were completely elsewhere.
But hell, how can I tell you what he meant to me when I mean so little anymore to anyone? Why would you listen? I do nothing but diminish Guy’s significance every day just by being what I am. Oh, there was a time (it sure seems far off now!) you thieves didn’t all look identical to me, there was a time you foxes and dudes with your cars and jobs and houses were awesome, terrifying, seductive to me, a time I too would scurry past any scrawny boy who would get in my way, he’d be reclining on a sidewalk on some comfy cardboard slab—as on occasion I am apt to do—beside a tore-open sack of your aromatic cast-offs, eyes sick, head like a trashed mop, swollen feet, scabied legs, blackened face . . . But now, well, who cares what I think? Recruit J.C. to paint his portrait!—is any Fogerty still alive?—and then Guy’s memory will be appropriately upraised and honored, because for Guy there was no life, it seemed, outside remembering Creedence.
It was some time before I ever learned that Creedence’s first words to the world (first song, first record album) were, “I put a spell on you.” And it was some time still before I put two and two together and realized that Guy had—in the most extreme sense—been altered, entranced, bewitched, inhabited by another’s spirit, that they had put a spell on him and none of this danger- and death-seeking stuff was his true self because he behaved simply as a medium acting on their behalf.
I say all this about my friend—that he was not himself, altered, possessed by spirits, &c.—but I should also emphasize he struck no one as weird. Maybe Ellis and Crane thought him a bit excited at times, maybe the camp director didn’t thoroughly trust him with me, but still Guy was a normal enough guy, a swell guy, a regular guy—he would ask me what I thought about bad moons or chooglin’ and say how once I got a little older we could go together and see the good side of the city from a riverboat queen, go chasin’ down a hoodoo there, go look at all the happy people dancing on the lawn—he was a Guy you’d take home to your sister hoping that she liked him like how you liked him and they’d marry and you and this Guy would at last be brothers—as you always knew you were—but now Official Brothers, in the eyes of God and the law and everybody.
Hopes like these abruptly ceased when out of nowhere on one of those cold, wet nights Guy . . . well, it happened very fast. Guy caught a cold in the rain and died from it. They have a name for that. I can’t remember what it is but it’s Latin for shitty luck. He was dressed inappropriately, the doctors said—or at least they thought that, if not actually saying it aloud, because he was not wearing his jacket that night, I was. It was the least heroic thing that could’ve happened, I’ll tell you that. A speedy and splendid life, a disgracefully mundane death, this—with my help!—was to be his fate. And as for me, after that a long series of tepid events rolled right on past, I spent my cares haphazardly until they ran out, years of stuff, schooling, jobs, nothing came of anything until eventually I was cut loose and deposited down right here, at this spot, under my tree, where I am content and now would like to be left alone.
But yet I’m thinking how I gotta do something about this Guy situation, it’s gotten way beyond me, unable to hear myself sleep, so I get up and I go over to beneath the freeway, keeping an eye out for Rojo, who—with his hunched idiot shoulders, sloped brow, scuffing stupid way of walking—is the only one there who really scares me, being as since he got free of his last holding cell he’s carrying a banana knife which he has already put into several people and who knows what all other maniac crap he’s got while he waits—like we all do—for someone to drive up with a truckful of friends and make him pay for how he made a trash heap out of what used to be his life. Though, frankly, I don’t have the luxury of waiting for such things anymore, with Guy on my tail. Rojo now’s begun to swear I got his cat, this is his latest phony obsession of the last few months, that I stole his mud-caked cat, even though there’s cats aplenty for all to behold, they’re shitting and pissing all over us when we sleep, even though I hate cats, still he insists.
“Take another cat, man,” I tell him. I’m pretending to be very ‘so what’ though I’m truthfully about to croak from the terrorizing way Rojo’s squint just steadily burns into me. I can’t look up at him anymore. It feels like somebody chalked all around the inside of my mouth. My arms are going off in wild directions. I behave as would one guilty sick individual.
Johnny Tornado—with arms like bread loaves, our own chesty comic book hero—intercedes on my behalf, bless him. “Cats’re all the fuck everywhere,” Tornado goes. “Just grab one and name it. Christ, Rojo.” And on this the great Tornado is 100% correct, they are like violent furry weeds underfoot, these freeway cats, hissing and slashing each other over rats and garbage. Still Rojo believes he had this one mean tabby all trained, his loyal guard cat, his attack kitty.
“You know what a damn sentimentalist is?!” Tornado bellows at him. He’s worming his way between us. “These cats can’t tell you from shit! You’re a damn sentimentalist! They know you like a hole in the ground!” I also want to interject, but don’t, that since we’re awakened every night by car thieves and state vehicles skidding through road kill it should make even the most dense of people comprehend this as a bad place to get too attached to one’s pet; still Rojo blames me for the cat’s vanishing.
“People vanish everyday,” I suggest to Rojo, hesitant at first because I’m a little uncertain about the precise accuracy of this remark, so I look over to check my facts with Tornado and he nods reassuringly. “Hunh,” I go in my devastatingly funny ‘let’s-go-shopping’ voice. “So. Your cat vanished.”
I’m thinking he might laugh at this with me and Tornado but instead this is—surprise!—when Rojo hauls up and punches the bejeezus outta me, and I go down like nobody’s business, there’s the crash of breaking pop bottles, and he swings a fat foot into my face and this is finally when he laughs, there’s Tornado screaming expletives, I’m tasting blood and that’s just about that to the story, after a good chunk of world history saunters by I wake up in the county ICU with a wired jaw and a nose two times normal size. They trickle painkillers into my arm and these things (in combination with what all else) make my mind like loose paper, like a newspaper hat, an object of outlandish ridicule, a cotton can. Worse, in kicking the flickering screen that was my TV head, Rojo has done something to my dreams, for I can no longer
sleep right anymore, now whenever I weary Mister Guy Glass stands before me like a decal on my eyeballs that just will not rub off, Guy the mouther of garagey dance music, Guy the daredevil of my summer camp, Guy the Auld Acquaintance Not Forgot—he appears in all his youthful glory and promptly renews his lecture series.
I see Old Man George by a cardboard fire and looking very at peace. There’s flickering movement in the shadows which is probably Tornado or the cats but visibility is poor so I feel it’s worth checking on: “Rojo ’round?” George gives me the a-okay sign. George used to be, of all things, destined to be some Texas Senator, this is what he says . . . but who cares about his life story, you don’t. Important point here is, George has this great spine and these good manners. Rojo used to sock him around too, pretty regularly, but got cured of it this once after George stepped in as the cops were about to haul Rojo off for a breaking-and-entering and amazingly enough George argued them out of it. Rojo was impressed by this, we all were, and so he never damaged George again.
“The,” I announce, “damn burger place started locking up the water heater when they go at night, you aware of this? Hey, you still got any vodkamelon left?”
George takes a hit of something and catches his breath. He shakes his head, holds a bent-up can out to me sideways.
I decline. “Vodkamelon, I said. And sleep.”
He shakes the can at me. “It’s sleep,” he croaks tightly. The can is lit. It smells like citrus.
Fury rolls through me then is gone. “I’m saying, I need help. I wish the Christians would come by. I’m starved. Why hast thou forsaken me sandwiches, brother?”
George shakes the smoking can again. “It’s help,” he croaks.
Before my jaw thing happened, and it’s only been unwired now for two weeks, I used to smoke whatever Old Man George offered because he called it ‘Help.’ It was usually a little something of who knows what, a combustible solid distilled from household cleaners. I enjoyed my lighter-than-air limps but sometimes I’d get godawful skin rashes or, when I’d come to, it would be much, much later in a traffic island, cops leaning in over me with their teeth full of breakfast. Finally, I take the can from George but I can’t find it in myself to suck on citrus cleaning solution or whatever, I just set it in my lap like a cat.