by Lewis Shiner
“I may need some money, too.”
“I just got ten thousand from Graham. Half of that is legally yours.”
“Half,” she said. “Just to get me started.”
We already had separate accounts. She came the rest of the way upstairs while I wrote her a check. She folded it and held it nervously in both hands.
“Anything else?” I said. “I mean, can I help you look for a place, or…”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “No, that’s it.” She turned and walked back down the stairs. I closed my eyes. After a while I heard a car pull up outside and a few seconds later I heard the front door slam.
I stood in front of the open refrigerator. There were ten cans of Budweiser lined up neatly on the middle shelf. I counted them twice. I shut the refrigerator door and sat down at the kitchen table. I pictured how it would be to take a can out and set it on the table. As I opened the top it would let out a deep, liquid sigh. The first long swallow would tickle my throat and quench my thirst and make the fist in my gut relax.
I pictured Elizabeth going through the paper, calling realtors, wandering through apartment complexes. The cheap carpet, the hairline cracks in the walls, the faint smells of insecticide and latex paint.
God.
I checked the refrigerator. Still ten beers.
It didn’t matter that the marriage had been over for years. It didn’t matter that making love with Lori showed me what it is I really want. What I felt or wanted didn’t matter at all. All I felt then was Elizabeth’s anger and hurt. I couldn’t see myself except through her eyes. Worse, through my imagination of how she saw me.
I stood in the hallway and looked at the phone. I had the number of the dive shop in Cozumel and it was only midafternoon. Maybe Tom was out drinking and Lori was by the phone, hoping I would call. I felt her expectations too. I couldn’t tell her Elizabeth had left, not until I knew that it wasn’t a false alarm.
There was my mother. I hadn’t written or called her from Cozumel either. What did she think, me down there where my father died? It must feel like salt in her wounds. Yet if I told her about Elizabeth she would be on the next plane to take care of me.
Dude walked up and got in my lap. “I think this is it, big guy,” I said. He leaned into my chest and pushed against me as hard as he could, with all four feet, the way he does when he knows something’s wrong. He was in a fight a couple of years ago and his leg got infected. He nearly died, and I said good-bye to him then. I promised myself that if he lived, any time I had with him from then on would be bonus time, that I would take what I could get and not hold him to any more than that. “I promised,” I told him, but I cried some anyway. I was about to lose all my ballast; the things that weighed me down were also the things that kept me steady. With Elizabeth and Dude both gone I wouldn’t be responsible for anybody at all.
The silence in the house stretched to infinity. When the phone shattered it I jumped and Dude rocketed off my legs. It was Graham and right from the start I knew he had something on his mind. He kept to the forms, though, and asked how I was. I told him about Elizabeth and he kept asking how I felt about it. I told him I didn’t know. Then I told him about Cozumel, about Lori.
“You son of a bitch! You gonna bring her up here?”
His enthusiasm seemed painfully out of place. “I tried,” I said. “She wouldn’t come.”
“She’ll change her mind. She’s got to be crazy about you.”
“She may just be crazy. Look, Beth only walked out a couple of hours ago. This is all premature.”
As I went through the options with him—separation, divorce, reconciliation—I felt myself sink under the enormity of it. Even to think about it was oppressive.
“You need to take your mind off it,” Graham said. “A hobby or something.”
“A hobby?”
“Like maybe another album.”
I listened to the hiss of the phone lines. “Man,” I said, “this is not the right time.”
“Okay, okay, forget I said anything. You’re right, I was being selfish. I know Smile was really hard on you. Not that this one would be anything like that.”
I dragged a chair over and sat down with my head in my hands.
“Ray?”
“Look, I’m not going to do it. It’s not just that Smile was too scary and I want to put it behind me, it’s that I’m really fucked up right now. Everything is falling apart and I don’t know where any of the pieces are going to land.”
“I can dig it man, really. It’s okay. Things are weird here too. I mean, Celebration was weird enough, but since Smile…” I didn’t say anything, and he took it as permission to push on. “I mean, I knew there would be trouble over Celebration, and there was, some of my front people have caught hell. Elektra’s looking for somebody to sue, the trades are full of letters from pissed-off Doors fans who want to know why Elektra never released it, Billboard wants an inquiry, it’s been nuts.
“Well, I started pressing Smile CDs as soon as we finished the tape. I had all the packaging done already, so I’ve been shipping them out all week. Yesterday, by messenger, I got a letter from a VP at Capitol. He said he knew it was me, he said he doesn’t know how I managed it, and he doesn’t care. He said he was a shipping clerk in 1966 and he’s been waiting more than half his life for this record and he’s just glad he’s finally got it.”
“That’s great, but—”
“Great? We’re talking Capitol Records here. It’s beyond great. It’s all the way into impossible. And for him to put it in writing? It means that the album is actually changing people. I don’t mean just changing their moods, I mean it’s changing them inside. Hell, I feel like it’s changing me. It’s making us all more like Brian.”
“Graham, that’s crazy.”
“Not any crazier than what you went through to get it. Do you understand what I’m saying here? I’m saying that we are actually changing the world. I screwed up the first time, I should have seen that Celebration was a bad vibe. But we more than made up for it with Smile. And my God, think what we could do with one more record. With the right record.”
“Graham…”
“I’m only going to say one word to you. First Rays of the New Rising Sun. Jimi Hendrix. That’s all I’m going to say.”
“Yeah, okay, you’ve said it. Listen, man, I really have to go.”
“Shit, look, man, I’m sorry. I’m being a jerk. I got myself all stoked up over this, and I had to tell somebody. Forget about it, okay? What do you need? Are you okay for money?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. I’ve got a bunch of stereos here to work on and maybe that’s the best idea right now, to work with my hands and not think about anything else. This has just left me…”
“I understand. I’m going to call and check up on you, though. And if you need anything you’ll call me?”
I told him I would and we said goodbye. I still felt cold and I finally got up and shut the air conditioner off. An hour later the phone rang again and I nearly leaped into the air.
It was Elizabeth. She’d found a place up on Spicewood Springs she thought she could afford. “I’m going to go ahead and stay with Frances tonight. I’ll start moving stuff out tomorrow. We have to decide who gets what.”
My head started to throb. “Okay.”
“We don’t…”
“What?”
“We don’t have to go through with this, you know. I don’t want to leave you. I would rather work things out.”
“Why? I mean, after the things you said today. That I don’t understand other people. That I’m never here. Why would you want to work things out with somebody like that?”
“Because I love you.”
“Do you?”
I could tell from the breaks in her voice that she was crying. “Yes. I do. I’d go to counseling again, if that’s what you want.”
We tried it five years ago. The therapist asked Elizabeth hard questions about her family, especially about her m
other. She refused to go back. By that time I’d used up the worst of my anger and just wanted things back to normal. It was one more crisis that simply ran out of steam. “I don’t think so,” I said.
“Well,” Elizabeth said. “That’s it, then. Right?”
“I guess so.”
I went upstairs and tore apart an Akai cassette deck. There were a few seconds at a time when I forgot who I was, when my hands became the work they did.
Sometime after midnight I even managed to sleep.
I dreamed I was trying to fix the roof of this two-story house with my father. I know the house from other dreams. It doesn’t have any stairs and there are no ladders, so I have to climb over windows and balance on projecting bricks and so forth to get to the roof. I fall and hurt myself somehow. My father wants me to go back up. He has this garden hose with tremendous pressure, like a fire hose. I can actually ride the flow of water upward, and I’m trying to do it, but I can’t get all the way to the roof. I fall again and my father says, “I don’t care, as long as somebody gets hurt.” This freaks me out and the dream turns into another violence thing, with me beating him, trying to smash his nose, maim him.
I woke up angry, had to remind myself that he’s dead. Still dead. Then I remembered Elizabeth was gone and I shivered, even through the covers, even as the house sweltered in the May heat.
The next afternoon Elizabeth and Frances showed up with Frances’s brother and his pickup truck. The guest room had doubled as Elizabeth’s sewing room. She took that bed and all the sewing stuff and her clothes. I let her have the TV and the sofa and the recliner. I helped them load the truck each time they came back. The earrings I bought her from Cozumel were in my pocket; there was never a moment to give them to her.
Between loads I worked upstairs. I had the Holland/Dozier/Holland CD from Motown on and it sounded false, out of date. So I got out my Cry of Love LP. This is the record Graham was talking about, or part of it. The tracks Hendrix had finished for First Rays, which would have been a double album, had mostly been split between Cry and the Rainbow Bridge soundtrack. They were rough mixes, the best Warner Bros. could find at the time. It’s hard to tell from those two records what he had in mind.
It was something to think about, like Graham said. Something other than Elizabeth’s apartment, slowly filling up with things we’d accumulated over more than a decade. Something other than what her first night there would feel like, full of strange sounds in the night. I didn’t want to think about Lori either, Lori and Tom, a thousand miles away.
So I thought about Jimi Hendrix.
My first real date with Alex was to the Hendrix concert in Dallas, February 16, 1968. Hendrix seemed like a god to us then. The first time I heard him was on KVIL FM, a middle-of-the-road station that was interviewing the press agent for the Monkees tour. “You won’t believe the guy that’s opening their shows,” he said. “Listen to this,” and he played the British single of “Purple Haze.” I’d never heard anything like it. It was exactly what I’d been waiting for, the consummation of the need that Bob Dylan awakened in me in November of 1965 at Moody Coliseum when he came on for his second set with an electric band behind him. When Hendrix’s first album finally appeared I grooved it out on my parents’ sapphire-needled monophonic console hi-fi.
In concert he did everything we’d heard about: played with his teeth, humped the guitar, snaked his arm over the top of the neck between chords, produced sounds no one had ever heard before, transcendently beautiful screams and hisses and howls. None of that compared to Hendrix himself. I never saw anyone so much himself on stage, so completely alive in the moment, so full of joy and passion and a need to share it. It was contagious. When I kissed Alex that night I felt the music still burning in her.
Hendrix was the only one who ever put that West Coast psychedelic sound together with the blues and R&B flavor that spoke to my heart and made it work for me. That was where he was headed when he died, and First Rays of the New Rising Sun would have been a new fusion of soul and rock, blues and pop, black and white, healing music that would bring everything and everyone together. On some of what survived—“Freedom,” “Dolly Dagger,” “Straight Ahead”—you can hear him struggle to find that new voice.
When Cry was over I put on Electric Ladyland. I remember the first time I heard it, in my dorm room at Vanderbilt. I turned out the lights and let the music take me, that delicious noise that opens the record, the slowed-down guitar explosions and voices and phasing, circling between the speakers, finally melting into the crystalline beauty of the title song. I can hear the night in that record. It sounds like neon reflected off puddles of rain in the cool and humid darkness. The colors are brighter than anything in nature, smears of pure red and green and gold and blue that shine but never burn.
“Voodoo Chile” came on and I put down my soldering iron and closed my eyes. Summer sunlight streamed across the workbench but I was listening to the silence between the notes, the long, lonely distance between the guitar and organ. It had barely started when Elizabeth came back for her last load.
We said good-bye in the hall. It had turned dark. Dude was in his cat carrier, crying, afraid he was going to the vet, afraid, as all cats are, of change. Frances stood to one side, making a point of not watching. Elizabeth and I stood a couple of feet apart, as awkward as if it were our first date.
She gave me her address on a piece of notepaper. The paper has a cartoon of a cat on it and says, “Make a list…because last time you forgot the cat food.” She said she’d call when she had a phone.
“In case you change your mind,” she whispered, so quiet I wouldn’t have understood if I weren’t watching her mouth. “If you want to try again, if you…” She shook her head. “You can call me.” She started to cry then, hard. I put my arms tentatively around her. She put her head on my shoulder. The hot tears went through my shirt and her hands gripped my back.
I started to cry too, and then I had a moment of perfect clarity. I saw that I was crying because I was scared for her, worried for her, sad for her. It was the same reason she was crying. Which made both of us crying for Elizabeth and nobody for me. My tears stopped and I let her go.
Elizabeth straightened and said, “I’m sorry.” Then she laughed and cried at the same time and said, “But I’m not going to apologize.” She stepped back and kissed me once, firm and quick, on the mouth. Then she picked up Dude’s cage and carried him out. Frances smiled awkwardly at me and followed her out to the truck. I stood in the doorway until they were gone and then I shut the door.
I went upstairs and shut off the stereo, then came back down. My footsteps echoed. There was a silence that wasn’t just the absence of noise, it was the absence of noise to come. No more thumping as Dude scratched in his litter box. No more distant whisper of the TV or water running in another part of the house. I was exhausted. The tension that had held me together was gone. I went into the bedroom and lay down with my clothes on and fell immediately asleep.
Three or four times I came wide awake during the night, convinced that, across town, Elizabeth was awake and crying. I felt like the phone was about to ring and she would be on the other end, hysterical. I couldn’t get back to sleep for the fear of it.
What finally got me up the next day was the idea of moving furniture. I had an old bed in the garage that could go in the empty guest room. I could repaint the walls, fix it up.
I spent the day at it. I’d never finished the shoe molding in there, so I put quarter-round down before I repainted the trim. Then I spackled and repainted the walls, all of it in pure white paint. I got the paint stuff cleaned up and the carpet vacuumed and the windows washed. I moved the bed in and put on clean sheets and a white bedspread. I found an old end table in the garage and put that in too, and a lamp with a red-and-black bandanna draped over the shade.
Late in the afternoon, in the grip of an impulse I didn’t understand, I went to the Door Store and bought a bookcase, the kind made out of pressed wood
and covered with thin white vinyl. I put it together and set it against one of the perfect new white walls. Then I moved in all the rock and roll books I’d been collecting since the business with Graham started.
It was nearly dark by then. I put the light on and fried up some cheese and tortillas for dinner. When I was done I went back to the guest room and stood in the doorway. Everything was white and clean, as if it was me that had moved out and not Elizabeth, and this was my new apartment. I took a spare wooden chair out of the dining room and positioned it in one corner. Then I sat down, my forearms resting on my legs, my hands clasped together, and marveled at how clean and white it all was.
It was Monday when Elizabeth moved out. She called Tuesday afternoon to give me her phone number. It was businesslike and we didn’t talk long. My mind was still on my painting. She said she might be by the next day to get some things out of the garage.
She did come by on Wednesday, already looking different. At first I thought it was me, then I realized she’d cut her bangs. She cut them a little short and it made her look surprised. There was a new distance to her too that made her seem foreign. I helped her carry the boxes out to her car and then we both stood there while I tried again to read her mood. In the end I hugged her and we clung together for a few seconds. It helped, even if it was Elizabeth and I even if I don’t want her back, to have somebody touch me.
That night I called Lori.
I’d been over it a hundred times in my mind, trying to anticipate. It rang five times before Tom answered. He sounded a couple of sheets to the wind. I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d gotten him out of bed with Lori. I asked for Lori in a kind of muffled voice and he wanted to know who I was.
“Her cousin John,” I said.
He put the phone down and my heart went crazy. Then Lori picked it up and said, “Hello?”
“It’s Ray,” I said. “I told him I was your cousin.”
“Uh huh.”