Boarded Windows (14 page)

“Fantastic,” Wade said.

“Yeah, and eventually I could splice and rearrange the tapes into some kind of whole, some cohesive—well, maybe not cohesive—some whole. And that …”

“Yeah?” I said.

“Would be the audio for my second movie.”

“Fantastic,” Wade said.

“Isn’t that squeaking just driving you nuts?” I said.

The movie receded into the background while Wade further commended Maryanne’s project, started talking about Beckett, Joe Gould, Tony Schwartz, went into a miniature history of audio-vérité. It was pedantic but sufferable, I guess because he was so enthusiastic, so encouraging. He wasn’t saying that Maryanne’s experiments would in truth be replications of experiments already conducted long before she was born, as my cobwebby artistic experiments, not to be described here, have been; he was saying that she’d be honorably carrying on unfinished, unfinishable work. Now it’s true that Gould’s major work, an enormous social history supposedly composed of eavesdroppings, was unfinished in a more empirical sense, and as I listened to Maryanne and watched her listen to Wade, I suspected that her projects would suffer similar but less legendary fates—but that wasn’t the point. “We must judge men not so much by what they do, as by what they make us feel that they
could
do,” a minor English ethicist once said, italics mine, and one sensed that Maryanne could do something great, could make a great artwork, or a great creation of some other kind, and that even if she didn’t create such a work, her unrealized potential, her failed, unfinished work, her refusal to “prefer mean victory to honourable defeat,” as John Ruskin put it, wouldn’t be shameful or pathetic but rather a calm reproof to those who toil steadily and vainly to finish mediocrities. I was falling for Maryanne, of course, and I considered that this falling was a defense mechanism, that, seeing Wanda’s eye turn toward Wade, I’d simply come up with a ready turnabout, a hopeful contingency plan, though my feelings felt too sharp and instinctual to give that consideration much credence. Occasional whiffs of Maryanne’s perfume led to nascent erections, for instance.

Wanda got back from work around eleven with a box of cookies (I loved all the merry sitcom coming and going) and took a seat next to Wade on the sofa. Not long after, Maryanne and I happened to get up at the same time for drinks, Diet Rite for me, a cocktail for her, very stiff—she added just one thimble of tonic to the up-brand vodka she’d brought over, smiled at me, and put the thimble back in the coin pocket of her jeans. After she finished her drink in a cowboyish gulp, we found ourselves messing around in the dining roomlet with her recorder. To facilitate transcription, the recorder had a range of playback speeds, so we taped our voices and then pitched them down and up to ursine and rodential frequencies, I speaking in my regular voice, she employing accents: hillbilly, Canadian, cockney, black (American and Jamaican). None of the accents were accurate; some were mildly offensive. We’d been sharing a joint Wade had left half-smoked on the Formica table—I can’t mix narcotics, but Maryanne seemed to have no trouble with that, and I even absurdly imagined that she could choose from one minute to the next which effect she wanted to enjoy. From the living room Wade yelled for quiet, but after a while he and Wanda deserted
One-Trick Pony
to join us at the table, where we all fiddled with the tape recorder, and Wade told stories about his days with Bolling, and everyone but me did a few lines of coke and talked and laughed or cackled well into the night.

B
OLLING GREENE FIRST PERFORMED IN THE RAIL-GOADED valley city of Enswell, North Dakota, on Thursday, July 28, 1977. The country station was playing his latest single every two hours, plus sprinkling in oldies with the same frequency. The station’s program director was an almost discomfortingly zealous fan, and it was largely as a result of this PD’s devotion that Enswell, though a city of just thirty-three thousand, became Bolling’s fourth-largest market, after Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, and Munich. Against managerial counsel, Bolling had brought with him a three-piece horn section comprising a trombonist who ate Dexedrine like Certs and whose other job was to drive the bus, and a pair of chubby alto saxophonists, hoisted from the University of Texas marching band, who could make their horns sound exactly like teakettles. Backstage before the show, excitement was passed around like a joint; among the crowd like a beach ball. Bolling walked onstage sans introduction and yelled, as he did at the start of every show, “Y’all hungry?” The crowd cheered, and I waved my corndog in the air, splattering ketchup on my mother’s shirt.

But the forecast had called for intermittent showers and it started to rain during the opening number, “The Infractor,” its chorus harmonies widemouthed and sandpapery. The rain, wary of cliché, refused to fall torrentially, but it did get harder. After the third song, the dutifully fat and unstylish stage manager trotted out from the wings and said something in Bolling’s ear, but the singer shook his head sheriff-like and wiped the strings of his guitar with a red bandanna, leaving cranked his Telecaster’s volume thimble so the crowd might be inspirited by the strings’ defiant, whooshful zip. In fancy silver letters on the guitar’s neck were the words “Don’t fret.” Bolling looked out at a thousand view-obstructing umbrellas, at a woman in the second row tenting her gray-blond head with a fairgrounds map, at the poor planners or simply poor, or relatively poor, or penny-wise, in the sheltered, faraway seats, enjoying their rare luck, and he called out “The Storms Are on the Ocean,” as if to will the storm (no storm, really, just a good rain) back to the ocean, about fifteen hundred miles away in any direction.

By the song’s end the rain had stopped, and though Bolling didn’t believe in an intervening God, he doffed his trademark leather havelock to the sky and the crowd unleashed a terrifying cheer. A woman climbed atop a speaker and tried to rent her poncho. Even those of us close to the speakers couldn’t have distinguished the tears from the rain on her face without tasting them. As the cheers died down, the woman on the speaker started to yell: “Do you think we’ve given up? Do you think we ever gave up? Do you think we’ve given up in Enswell, North Dakota? Do you think the people of Enswell, North Dakota, have given up? Do you think we thought it was all a big joke?” And there is no typographical trick that could do justice to her concluding “No!” Bolling smiled, and the woman jumped into the arms of two burly security guards in green T-shirts, who let her return to her seat after a short lecture. Bolling sang songs about orchids, wind, love, and madness in front of sixty-five hundred North Dakota State Fairgoers, including, as has already been indicated, Marleen Deskin, who sometimes held my hand, but not Wade Salem, on his knees in a Los Angeles motel. My mother and I had great seats in the sixth or seventh row. We’d waited all afternoon.

That night the band played to beat itself. Bolling sang and danced before Enswell with such jowl-jiggling might, he may as well have been wearing King David’s ephod instead of sky-blue bell-bottoms, a tight armadillo T-shirt, and a bandolier, stretched snugly across his hogshead chest like a rope round a sleeping bag. Bolling himself thought the bandolier was ridiculous, had first allowed it to be wrapped around his chest only because an art director and photographer had more or less insisted, but the longer he wore it, the more natural it felt. And as it turned out, he went on wearing the costume long after his manager dropped him, after no one cared what he wore except a few thousand diehard fans, who probably didn’t care much either.

In any case, one could feel it that night. The sometimes indifferent sidemen, one could feel, felt that Bolling was feeling it, and they sweated, seemed even to call on reserve pores, so their employer (and everyone) would feel even more. “Let’s try to play the music and not the background,” Ornette Coleman said somewhere, and that’s what Bolling and his band did. The lead guitarist wore, in the rainy heat, a black three-piece suit with trousers that squeezed his thighs and flared over his white boots, and his solos and fills seemed to loose arrows from the tear on his amplifier’s silver face; when the trombonist emptied his spit valve, the spit turned on contact with the grimy stage into pools of honey; the drummer played with a necktie wrapped around his eyes but didn’t miss a cue; geothermal bass notes throbbed in our chests like love. “What
is
that?” I asked my mother during the solo on “West Texas Winds.” “That’s a steel guitar,” she said. “That’s what people can do.”

During the encore, Bolling felt a raindrop on his wrist. He motioned the six-stringer to make another pass through the verse changes of “Misstepchild,” and then another, and another, and called on more dilatory tactics, till the time was right for Bolling to switch to the Wurlitzer electric piano, and close, as he always closed, with a wistful version of “My Red Ideal.” Rocks in his throat, rocks in his bed, rocks from the fields stacked into mysterious cairns. Did he oversing it? Yes, but no. The sometimes overloud, stick-breaking drummer tapped out the beat with his paws, and the guitarists stood with fallen crests, muting their strings—“unheard melodies are sweeter,” Bolling had told them before the show—while the collegiate saxophonists, slobbering for post-performance beer, triumphed again with their teakettle trick.

Moments after the death of the last D chord, not quite a common chord due to the Wurly’s aphasic F-sharp above middle C, the rain resumed with full seriousness, and the crowd cheered louder even than before, and some of them danced like Gene Kelly back to their cars and trucks, vans, motorcycles, and class-B motorhomes. A few of them walked right past their vehicle and laughed over the mistake. The rain stopped again. My mother and I left the oak tree we’d been shrinking under, started for home on foot, until a family offered us a ride in the back of their pickup, and the tire humps soaked the seats of our jeans but the wind dried our hair.

B
Y MID-NOVEMBER OF ’91, MARYANNE STILL HADN’T found another baking job and was nearly busted. Her overdraft account was tapped. She’d sold CDs, LPs, books, vintage dresses, a somehow collectable toaster, her motorcycle as-was. She’d borrowed money from her parents and others but hadn’t touched Wanda, not directly at least, perhaps because their friendship still seemed too young for loans. And Wanda hadn’t made any offers, not even of twenty or thirty bucks; her parsimony—that’s unfair: she treated Maryanne to a few meals and more drinks—in the face of Maryanne’s crisis seemed uncharacteristic, and on a few occasions Maryanne lamented her poverty with such anxiety that I, tough-minded about such things, almost stepped in to offer a small loan myself.

In the end, Wanda came through with fifteen hundred dollars, just about all the money she had. It wasn’t a loan, it was a gift, given moreover in nearly perfect concordance with the directive of anonymous generosity outlined in the Sermon on the Mount—and not the sort of Christian anonymity that scatters hints all over the place and then denies being the munificent phantom with rosy-cheeked gulping, winking, and shoulder-rolling, but a graceful, natural anonymity that doesn’t even require a stone face, as if there were no internal squirming to repress. The gift wasn’t fully anonymous, since I knew about it, but that’s only because Wanda felt the need to involve me in its distribution.

Wanda had come up with a plan, a goofy plan that I’m reluctant to describe on account of my distaste for farce. She explained it to me one night over yet another joint. (It’s surprising that I remember anything at all from those days.) We were sitting at the Formica table, her great-soled shoes resting on the table’s ridged silver edge, sometimes tapping to the Sousa CD Wade had playfully brought home a week earlier. Wade was out, so we were smoking from Wanda’s stash. Already I’d been spoiled by Wade’s weed, worlds better in terms of aroma and potency than the green hawked by Wanda’s stereotypically mindless and feckless dealer, who also ran a hat kiosk at a nearby mall. Not once did I help Wanda pay for so much as a quarter-ounce bag, though I smoked as much as she and earned more money. This injustice was never brought up. My mooching wasn’t of the lowest order, I privately held (still more privately I was unconvinced), since I never strongly desired the weed, never demanded or even asked after it, never smoked it alone or missed it much during dry spells, but just accepted the joint or pipe when it came my way. Even the idea of smoking alone depressed Wanda, so in some convenient way I was being generous. Maybe our symbiosis was mutualism more than commensalism much less parasitism. I miss marijuana. I’m sober now, though unaffiliated, and take any tenuous opportunity to announce my sobriety, in hopes that people will imagine my past as a collage of Dionysian ecstasies and genuflectory humiliations, all sorts of glamorous decadence, and that after such sensational, fact-flouting images flash through their minds, they’ll consider the paucity of my accomplishments in light of the routine public vomiting and bathroom-stall demise I so teeth-skinningly escaped and continue to escape through ongoing fortitude or grace.

“It seems strange to give that kind of money to someone you’ve only known for a month,” I said at the table. “Sometimes you know the poetry before the poem,” Wanda said. I thought that sounded pretty good. But answered, “Still, why give her so much? Why not just enough to make rent?” And so Wanda reminded me of the poor price Maryanne had gotten for her dinged motorcycle, the likewise insufficient profits from that other stuff; also the bicycle she’d had stolen; an obligatory, overpriced bridesmaid’s dress; a few other exigencies and tough breaks. It was Wanda’s money to give, of course, but if she depleted her savings, I figured, she’d soon need to borrow from me. And I was right. I didn’t bring up the obvious if morally irrelevant point that Maryanne’s tough times were partly self-created: it’s true that she’d recently been fired (coolly and by telephone, we were more than once reminded), but only after repeated no-shows (she admitted to three, but one suspects there were more); I’ve already suggested that her job search was too fatigable and I’ll add here that it seemed overnarrow; also it was unwise of her to live alone in a high-rise geared toward up-and-coming or low-ranked professionals when she could easily have found a bohemian studio or at least a roommate; and, from what I’d seen, she’d not been a model of jobless frugality—not all her drinking expenses, for instance, were turned over to friends. Moreover I doubted the direness of her situation. I pictured supportive, middle-class parents who’d ultimately bail her out with a second and larger loan. She’d made a few remarks—a shallow, classist dismissal of country music, to cite one—that seemed typically bourgeois. But that wasn’t quite true, Wanda told me: Maryanne’s parents were supportive but poor, poor at least in the American sense, which is often poor enough, and they’d already given all they could afford for now.