by Don Lee
for Jane Delury
Lonesome Lies Before Us
1. The Days As We Know Them 3:37
In his teens, Yadin Park had considered himself ugly—a judgment that was overly harsh, yet, at the time, not entirely unfounded.
To begin with, he had been big. Not obese, exactly, but chunky, ungainly, tall, a couple of slugs over six feet. Since a child, he had yearned to be smaller, less conspicuous, inhabit less specter, but his body always betrayed him. He swelled his shirts. His neck distended. He was pigeon-toed, and his pants buffed where his thighs corraded. His feet were clowns. Then there was his head, which to him felt elephantine. His hair was black and matted in wiry waves and seemed vaguely pubic in origin. His face, he believed, bordered on barbarity, with its hocked jaw, thin, chapped lips, and knob of a nose. Most tragic had been his skin, pocked and gullied with acne, rippling hieroglyphs of teenage sorrow.
Thankfully, as he entered manhood, his appearance mellowed. His body subtly wedged, fat shifting to muscle, and his skin cleared. More than once, women told him he was sexy. Yet Yadin could never purge the image of himself as someone who was grotesque, and, haunted by a host of other wounds, he remained cripplingly shy.
Little wonder, then, that starting out as a singer-songwriter, he was offered publishing but not recording contracts. People loved his songs, they loved his voice, yet he was a dreadful performer, forever petrified onstage. Early on, he did shows with the lights down low, facing the drummer, his back to the audience throughout. Then for a while he employed squinty light installations, akin to eighties Lite-Brites, blinding, glowing yellow pegs that, as he sang, slowly changed arrays, projected onto a screen from behind so that he was silhouetted in the black-dark of the bar or club or auditorium, apprehension pooling as the crowd waited for the stage lights to come up at some point during the set, which he never allowed. Bowing to complaints, he discarded the backlights and grew a beard and wore baseball caps, snug down, and large sunglasses, and annealed himself with various and voluminous anesthetics—pharmaceutical, herbal, hallucinogenic, and fermented. In the end, this did not, as anyone could have predicted, go well.
He released four albums in his twenties and thirties through a small indie label. Each one sold less and less. He never produced a crossover hit, never scratched the Billboard 200. His music was in the nebulous, uncomfortable classification of alt-country, not quite folk or rock or down-home country. In other words, not at all radio-friendly. Save for a few critics in No Depression and American Songwriter who extolled his songs—beautiful, mournful, anguished, devastatingly sad, they raved—the media ignored him. At best, he was an underground cult favorite, virtually anonymous. The small indie label became a subsidiary of a major label, the major label merged with an even bigger label, the subsidiary was folded, and the new mega-label dropped him.
Now it was 2011 and he was forty-six, eking out a living as a carpet installer in Rosarita Bay, a town on the California coast that had seen its own vicissitudes, briefly blooming into a hip tourist haven, then—with the recession—falling back to seed. He worked for Matsuda Wall to Wall, a small operation with just the owner, Joe Matsuda, and two other employees besides Yadin. They did commercial, residential, marine—whatever they could get—but lately most of their projects were on derelict houses that had been foreclosed and were now, with the glints of economic recovery, being quickly rehabbed and flipped.
This morning they were working on a ranch house in the Spanish Flats neighborhood east of Highway 1. The developer wanted them in and out in one day, and he’d opted for a low-pile olefin. He didn’t care that the carpet wouldn’t last, wasn’t very stain-resistant, would flatten and indent and wear out. It was cheap, but would look good enough when the house was shown. He had wanted to stinge out even further with four-pound rebond padding, but Joe convinced him to spend a bit more for the six-pound to defer wrinkling and buckling. It was a crap job, but Joe took pride in his work.
When they ripped up the old carpet, though, they discovered that the subflooring was in bad shape. Much of the plywood was mildewed and rotted and warped, there were gaps and holes, nails protruding and bent. They needed at least another day to do the job properly. Joe called the developer, who refused more time for repairs.
“What a prick,” Joe said to them.
They did the best they could, Yadin starting on the living and dining rooms with Rodrigo, Joe on the bedrooms with Esteban. They scraped, whacked, scrubbed, swept, and vacuumed. They snipped new tackless strips to size and nailed them down, rolled out and trimmed the padding, stapled the edges with hammer tackers.
Outside, they pulled out the spindles of new carpet from the two blue company vans, whose sides advertised MATSUDA WALL TO WALL. JUST CARPET! and, in smaller letters, 100% CUSTOMER SATISFACTION GUARANTEED and NO MONEY DOWN. They rolled out the carpet in the driveway, measured, notched the corners, rerolled, and chalk-lined the backs before cutting them. They carried the sections of carpet inside and unfurled and knifed them and started gluing them together with handheld irons. They didn’t break for lunch until midafternoon, when they had dry-fitted most of the house.
They sat on the tails of the two vans, which were parked on the street with the rear ends facing each other, the doors open. Piles of old carpet were humped on the front lawn. It was gray and chilly, typical May weather for Rosarita Bay.
Joe finished a salami and cream cheese on toasted sourdough, and as he fished into a Ziploc for a second sandwich, he glanced at Yadin’s stainless-steel bento box.
“What the fuck is that shit?”
Yadin pointed with his spoon. “Lentil salad. Quinoa salad. Red cabbage salad.”
“Any of it have any taste?”
“Not much.” He had been on this diet for six years now—not out of vanity, but for medical reasons—and the restrictions were rather extreme. No salt, no MSG, no caffeine, sodas, or chocolate. No processed foods. No milk or wheat or corn or eggs or peanuts. No cigarettes or alcohol or drugs of any kind, prescription or recreational. None of his clothes fit anymore. He had lost forty pounds in all, and for the first time in his life, he looked almost svelte. In mirrors, he was unidentifiable to himself.
“Rodrigo,” Joe said, “you got another tuna? Trade?”
“Not a chance, man.”
“Esteban? What you got there?”
“Nothing for you, boss.”
Yadin snuffed a laugh. He listened to the crinkling of tinfoil, the rustling of plastic wrap. Wind waffled through the trees. Birds chirred. He relished the sounds. He knew that someday soon, their clarity would be denied to him forever.
“You motherfuckers are cold,” Joe said. “Cold. I ought to fire you all.”
Joe was sixty-five, a tree stump—short and thick and strong—but after forty years of laying carpet, he had been slowing down of late. Stooped, grunting with pain when he had to get up and down. With all the kneeling and bending, back problems were not unusual for those in the trade. Neither were carpal tunnel, arthritis, thoracic outlet syndrome, and an ailment called carpet layer’s knee—prepatellar bursitis—from pounding the kickers.
Ironically, Yadin had gotten his CFI certification because he had thought carpet installation would be easier on his body, not to mention steadier work that paid better. Even when he had been signed as a recording artist, he’d always had to take on odd jobs between album releases. He’d pumped gas, mopped floors, plowed snow, washed dishes, worked the line at a pet food factory. Mostly, though, he had been a day laborer on landscaping and demolition crews.
He didn’t know now which type of work had contributed most to his present medical condition, an inner-ear disorder called Ménière’s disease that was slowly robbing him of his hearing. The leaf blowers
and lawn mowers? The reciprocating saws and sledgehammers and crowbars? They didn’t wear lead-safe coveralls or masks back then. They didn’t use ear protection, either. In fact, Yadin often blasted music from a Walkman over the din. Stupid. All that cumulative exposure to noise, dust, asbestos, mold, insulation, the myriad toxic chemicals he’d breathed in, gutting houses and killing weeds—he had never imagined the effect they would have. Carpet was not markedly better, with all the VOCs in glue, fibers, things like chlordane that were sprayed into carpets for fleas. Along with kneepads, he wore a ventilator mask and acoustic earmuffs now. He was the only one on the crew who did.
They went back inside the house and started kicking out and stretching the carpet into place. Every now and then, Yadin hummed into his mask. The night before, a thread of a melody had begun noodling inside his head, and today, as the notes fattened and congealed, he’d go somewhere private and take out his cellphone—an old flip model—and call his home landline and leave messages on his ancient answering machine, singing the melody. It would have been simpler to use a portable recorder, but he preferred this method, was superstitious about it. Later on in the afternoon, a few words and phrases burbled up, and he tore off pieces of brown masking paper and scribbled the lyrics down with a Sharpie and stuffed them into his pockets. This was how he’d always written music. After a long fallow period—lasting almost a decade, in fact—he had regained his old fecundity in the past month, and now songs were sprouting out of him unabated. A chord progression, a melody, a chorus or a verse, a title would emerge, and he could work out the rest of the song in a day or two, often mere hours.
They finished carpeting the ranch house a little after seven. Yadin rode back to the office with Joe, staring at the twilit road before them, listening to the groan of the van engine, the rear struts squeaking whenever they crossed an intersection and dipped into a concrete valley gutter.
“It’s looking more and more like I’m going to have to let someone go,” Joe told him.
Yadin numbed. Of the crew, he had been with Wall to Wall the shortest time.
“Not you,” Joe said. “Don’t be an idiot. You’re practically family.”
Yadin had been dating Joe’s older daughter, Jeanette, for over two years now, yet there was a tenuousness about their relationship that never let Yadin feel secure about it. “You heard something about the city council vote?” Yadin asked.
“Nothing beyond the two proposals.”
“What disposals?” Yadin asked.
“Proposals, proposals,” Joe said louder, impatient. “It’s not looking good.”
After a succession of budget cuts, furloughs, and layoffs, Rosarita Bay had begun contracting out its municipal services: public works, inspections, recreation. In two weeks, on June 3, the city council would be voting on whether to outsource the library and the police department as well, which would have a direct impact on Wall to Wall. They had won a bid to recarpet the police station later that summer, a major contract that might soon be null and void, with no money down.
An hour south of San Francisco, Rosarita Bay was encircled by foothills and farmland. To the north was a picturesque harbor, to the south a marsh preserve, and to the west the Pacific Ocean, roiling in endless horizon. There was a Main Street lined with gas streetlamps and shops with shiplap siding, and the town held a well-attended pumpkin festival every October. It should have been a popular seaside town for day trips and weekend retreats. It should have been a burgeoning bedroom community.
Yet, for most of its history, Rosarita Bay had remained a backwater. There were only two roads in and out of town, Highway 1 on the coast and Highway 71 through the San Vicente Mountains; the weather was dismal most of the year—a microclimate of fog and wind and rain; and the town had long been known as a developer’s graveyard, saddled with some of the most stringent zoning regulations in the country.
The latter began to change a decade ago, when a new generation of residents elected themselves to the city council. Gated communities of fancy homes sprang up, strip malls emerged on Highway 1. Chic restaurants and art galleries and coffeehouses opened on Main Street, and, after thirty years of opposition, a massive luxury hotel and golf course were constructed along prime oceanfront. The population grew from ten to twelve thousand, and it seemed that Rosarita Bay was on the verge of becoming the next Carmel or Taos or Aspen.
Now, there was talk of Rosarita Bay filing for bankruptcy, even formally dissolving the town and becoming an unincorporated part of San Vicente County. It wasn’t just the lingering recession that was hurting them. The owner of a parcel of scrub grass had filed a lawsuit against Rosarita Bay because the sewage department had botched a storm drain project, inadvertently turning the plot into wetlands that could no longer be developed. A federal judge had ruled for the plaintiff, and the town had had to issue bonds to cover the $25 million settlement.
It had become a sad place in which to live, businesses closing, people having to relocate. Yadin constantly feared he’d become another casualty. He was vested here. He had Jeanette. He had a house—the first piece of property he had ever owned. He didn’t want to leave.
“I thought you had a string of jobs lined up for us this summer,” Yadin said to Joe.
“Not enough to make up for that contract,” Joe told him. “I should’ve never specialized in just carpets. Everyone wants fucking hardwood now. Carpet is dead.”
Yadin had inherited his house four years ago, in 2007, from a grandmother he’d met just twice as a kid, the last of any relatives he knew of. He was living in Portage, Michigan, at the time, another in a series of random, anonymous Midwestern towns where the rents were cheap but in which he never remained long. He readily drove cross-country to Rosarita Bay to take possession of the house on Las Encinas Road, which he had never visited.
It wasn’t much to look at from the outside, just a ramshackle cottage. From the inside, it was even shabbier. The rooms had once been stuffed with his grandmother’s furnishings and bric-a-brac, but everything was gone now, the house purged, save for the orange and green shag carpeting. What little furniture Yadin had were street finds or foraged from Craigslist and thrift stores. There was a café pedestal table with a mismatched ladderback chair in the dining area. A scabby upholstered armchair and an ottoman, also mismatched, in the living room. An old Sony Trinitron TV on a plastic milk crate. The master bedroom was even sparser, just a twin bed and a bureau, although half of one wall was covered, from floor to ceiling, with neatly stacked cardboard boxes.
Home from work, Yadin passed through the kitchen, where his answering machine sat on the counter, the red light blinking, announcing the messages to himself singing the melody. He was tempted to attend to them right away, but resisted the urge. He wanted the new song to germinate a little. In his bedroom, he took off his flannel shirt and construction boots and emptied out the pockets of his gray work pants onto the bureau: keys, wallet, cellphone, some change. He pulled out the day’s scraps of paper, flattened them, and stacked them in a pile. The bureau’s top drawer was filled with similar crumples, patterned in inky scrawls, alongside a jumble of microcassettes.
He took a shower and changed, then returned to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. Several plastic tubs were tucked inside; otherwise, there was not much in there except bottles of mineral water. The cupboards and drawers were equally bare. The laminate counter had a thirty-inch cutout where the stove should have been; he had intended to replace the stove at some point until he realized that, with his diet, he never cooked anything anymore.
For dinner, he pulled out the same stuff he’d had for lunch: lentil salad, quinoa salad, red cabbage salad. These were new recipes, and he had made large batches of them the previous night to store in the tubs. He would be eating them the rest of the week. Sitting down at his café table with the salads, he wished it were one of his evenings with Jeanette.
They rarely saw each other more than twice a week—at church, at her house, sometimes at Joe’s ho
use, but never at Yadin’s house. She hadn’t entered the cottage in two years, in fact, ever since he had had to declare bankruptcy and liquidate most of his possessions. Looking around the gloomy interior, he could hardly blame her. Yet he didn’t fully understand why, after all this time, she kept herself so distant from him. The house wasn’t the reason, he knew. She seldom even called or texted him during the week, saying she was too tired from work, too overwhelmed with things she had to do for the church. He wanted to spend more time with her, talk to her more, feel closer to her, be with her. But she remained remote.
After washing his plate, bento box, and utensils, Yadin turned on the television and tuned in to the second half of the San Francisco Giants game. The closed captioning scrolled across the screen, the sound muted—a permanent setting. The audio control buttons on the set had been squashed and inoperable when he’d found it. He had an old transistor radio for the simulcast, but it never quite synced with the TV broadcast, always off by half a second or so. Still, baseball wasn’t the same without the sounds.
Watching the game in his armchair, Yadin fingered a rosary. It was made of black cherry and had a two-and-a-half-inch crucifix. He had ordered it online last month and hadn’t memorized all the prayers yet, but pushing the beads between his left thumb and the callused tip of his fat index finger—nail bitten to the quick—soothed him.
At the bottom of the seventh inning, he began humming to himself. He couldn’t wait any longer. He wanted to work on the new song. He turned off the transistor radio and walked over to the answering machine on the kitchen counter. He’d accidentally broken the cover off the machine long ago, exposing the two microcassettes inside, but it was still in good working order. He pressed the play button, skipped ahead several messages, and increased the volume. Leaning in with his left ear, he listened to himself singing the melody, hoping it’d pan out as the final track of his new album, which would be his first in nine years. He had been working on the record every night for the last three weeks, since the end of April. He’d told no one about the project thus far, not even Jeanette.