Boarded Windows (22 page)

A few weeks ago, I pulled out
Hope Springs Eternal
and listened to it on vintage, long-corded headphones, stolen from Wade, I may as well now confess, over three decades ago. Inside the jacket I found a pencil drawing of a bald man with a thick mustache, prominent cheekbones, lonely eyes, and, on his flat forehead, two differently sized avian furrows. He was wearing a plaid shirt with a narrow, button-down collar. Underneath the drawing were the words, “Grady McGill, jazz man.” I knew it was Wade’s drawing, both because I recognized his hand and because I knew Wade would distinguish
a jazz man,
a man who loves jazz, from
a jazzman,
a man who plays jazz, although on the other hand Wade loved ambiguity more than fine distinctions. “I’m a red man,” he once said at a restaurant, meaning not that he was an American Indian but that he preferred red wines to whites, though the waiter (“My grandma was Mandan”) reached the former conclusion.

I also knew it was Wade’s drawing because he left a number of other scraps in my records, how many I’m not sure, since I’m trying to discover them naturally, in the course of regular listening. So far, despite periods of financial duress, I haven’t had to sell any of my several thousand records. I’ve even kept the thousand or so that I never play and have no desire to play. Sometimes I pull out one of those undesired records, partly to challenge my ear, partly in random search of Wade’s leavings (and in so doing I suppose I’m disrupting the course of what I just called regular listening). The Hope record, though not his best, isn’t one I’d consider undesired, though I guess I haven’t played it in nearly two decades, or I’ve played it but overlooked Wade’s drawing. Had there not been a legend underneath the drawing, I might not have recognized Grady—I see now that the cheekbones are especially off, the whole face short on flesh. Still, there’s a resemblance. Probably a coincidence, but maybe Wade knew Grady too. Maybe they’re still in touch. I didn’t meet Grady till long after Wade left Minneapolis, so I couldn’t have described him to Wade. I’m not sure how meaningful or eerie this really is, this possibility that Wade knew Grady and left a clue pointing to their acquaintance in that Elmo Hope LP, but it seemed that way, eerie and meaningful, when I discovered the drawing a few weeks ago.

Also not so long ago—it might have been a year ago now—I found a strand of long black hair sticking like a bookmark out of a 1990 world almanac. Right away I was sure it was Wade’s. I held it up to the light. It was sable. It’s possible that the almanac hadn’t been opened since Wade’s stay with Wanda and me, and that the hair was never displaced during my several moves or at the yard sale at which the almanac was predictably passed over. In other LPs I’ve found Wade’s pornographic drawings, an annotated take-out menu, a few defaced dollar bills, and one poem, slipped inside the Carpenters’
Close to You:

I’ve read worse. That’s the only poem I’ve found in my LPs, but I found another one written in minuscule script on the interior bottom of the matchbox Wade left, circled with a green rubber band, in the glove compartment of his hatchback. All the other items had been removed. This poem read:

A ready-made. If I find another of Wade’s poems in my records, I’ll submit the trio to literary journals. They’ll be rejected without encouragement, I’m sure, but I might take some comfort in that.

I
N LATE SEPTEMBER OR EARLY OCTOBER OF 1998, I WAS gently summoned to Chicago’s northwestern suburbs to get the last of my mother’s things. “There’s some stuff I think you’d like to have,” my aunt had said over the phone, “some keepsakes, and her favorite easy chair.” I’d been to Chicagoland twice since the funeral of late ’91: once in early ’92, to fill Wade’s former hatchback with some of Marleen’s belongings; another time in ’96, to finally apologize to my aunt and uncle for my callow and callous behavior at and around the time of my mother’s funeral (my uninspired eulogy; my crude beseechments of near and distant relatives for plane fare to Berlin; my actorly tactlessness and calculated, ostentatious frazzle: the loosened knit tie; the tousled hair; the pant leg trapped inside the sock; the incoherent, vaporously metaphysical responses to simple condolences).

The hatchback wouldn’t hold the chair, and I couldn’t afford to rent a truck, so I borrowed the failed singer-songwriter Maggie Tollefsrud’s van, which had been driven nearly three hundred thousand miles and nicknamed. Maggie and I first met as fellow temps at a print shop, assembling ad supplements for the Sunday paper. Somehow, though I dislike being onstage, she later talked me into playing bass guitar, rhythm six-string, rhythm synthesizer, ornamental electric piano, and occasional vibraslap in several of her bands, including Terrycloth, the Sullen Nieces, Hash Slingers, and Mag and Her Wheels. A few of these bands made vanity records of not entirely merited obscurity.

My other motivation for going to Chicago in ’98 was to see Maryanne, who’d moved there sometime in ’92. I’d thought about contacting her earlier but always came up with a reason not to. Now the idea seemed more pressing, and I managed to get her mobile number from a shared acquaintance. She seemed unsurprised to hear from me, even said she’d been meaning to call
me,
though it had been a long time since we’d seen each other, the early spring of ’92 it must have been, and we’d never socialized without Wanda or Wade and Wanda. On the phone, she said she had a six-year-old son named Rowan and was working at a shop that engraved plaques and trophies for schools, businesses, chess clubs, curling leagues, and the like. She said she’d love to see me, said so with a mellow yet frank enthusiasm that made my penis creep tinglingly away from my slightly tacky testicular skin. I decided to drive directly into the city and pick up my mother’s last unclaimed things on the way home.

A few mornings later, I got to see the skyscraper sunrise from the Kennedy Expressway. In the city itself I spotted what looked like a funky breakfast joint, but I couldn’t find a parking space big enough for the Rhino, so I kept driving, eventually wound up at a regional franchise where I spent an hour reading the paper and eating not truly scrambled eggs and ultimately disagreeable hash browns. It still felt too early to call Maryanne—we’d discussed a midmorning meeting—so I left the van in the restaurant’s lot and took a walk, sticking to a single street so I wouldn’t get lost. The sky was the color of grimy snow, the trees mostly leafless, and the air felt cooler than the forty-eight degrees claimed by a bank’s digital thermometer, but the walk did me some good, and by the time I returned to the van my dour achiness had given way to achy punchiness.

Maryanne lived in a warehouse in Wicker Park. I’m pretty sure it was in Wicker Park, but maybe it just seemed like Wicker Park. I don’t know Chicago well. More and more I think it was probably not Wicker Park. She came down to meet me, and we took a freight elevator, the kind that requires a key to operate, up to the third floor where she lived. Like a janitrix, she had her keys on a leather ring hanging from one of her belt loops. She was wearing red jeans and a cleavage-revealing Gypsy blouse that mostly covered her full hips. “Is this a legal residence?” I asked. “I don’t know,” she said. “It has a bathroom.” As we walked down a long hallway, she explained that she subleased a corner of a recording studio from a guy named Luke. The words “Smash Palace” were stenciled in red spray paint on the studio/apartment’s heavy door. Maryanne moved closer to me and stood on the toes of her white nurses’ loafers. I leaned down and her lips brushed my ear when she whispered, “I’ve never actually seen a band come through, and I’ve been living here a year and a half.”

It was an enormous space, once a tea factory, Maryanne told me. The windows were covered by soundproofing material, but there was enough light from three banks of overheads and a Tiffany-style lamp that stood near Luke, who was arched over a workbench. There were faded Oriental rugs all around, overlapping each other like sleeping kittens. Luke said “hey” in a low voice when he heard us come in, raised his hand to say “just a sec.” From what I could make out, he was burning a cigarette mark into a drum-machine pad. He had frizzy brown hair and was wearing pajamas, expensive but unfashionable tennis shoes, and a velour bathrobe with a torn belt loop. He officially lived in an apartment a few miles away, I later learned, but spent most of his time at the warehouse and often slept on a soft leather couch in the control room. When he finished his work with the drum machine he greeted us less passively, answered some of my questions about the studio, and handed me an unwanted rate sheet. Maryanne went to check on Rowan while Luke showed me around. The space was shaped like a fat L, with the control room at the top of the vertical line and much of the horizontal line unused except for storage. I spotted something like thirty electric and acoustic guitars on stands or in dusty cases; also a mandolin, a banjo, a cittern, and a gimbri (“What do you call that thing?” I asked, and Luke misidentified it); plus old brown synthesizers and shiny new red ones; digital samplers; garagey European organs, Hammond organs, and a Leslie speaker cabinet; a half-dozen electric pianos; four upright pianos and a disgraced grand; a Mellotron; two clavinets; a theremin; two marimbas; a vibraphone; drum machines and nonmechanical drums; several turntables; a precarious mound of boom boxes resembling installation art; a few dozen microphones and mike stands; a large, rectangular spring-reverb box; probably a hundred stomp boxes and other electronic umlauts; a yellow racetrack for toy cars; and, reportedly, in the control room, which I never entered, a British mixing board once owned by Todd Rundgren, and a German tape machine that had taken in some of the basic tracks for Don Henley’s
Building the Perfect Beast,
or so Luke said, in a tone that attempted to both deprecate the album and call for its imprimatur.

Maryanne returned to the tracking room and smoked a cigarette as Luke finished giving his overlong tour. She seemed more subdued than she’d been when I knew her before (or maybe
relaxed is
better—I don’t mean to say she seemed repressed or conquered). She asked Luke if Rowan could watch TV in the control room awhile; Luke seemed cheered by the idea. Then she took me to the end of the L opposite the control room, to a byroom something like a large serif off the L’s horizontal line, where she and Rowan had their beds and dressers, a TV, a portable refrigerator, an enormous sculpture of some sort, and not much else. Luke’s tour hadn’t driven deep into the L’s horizontal line, so I’d caught only a glimpse of this byroom, had heard the TV but hadn’t seen Maryanne’s son, who was now sitting on his single bed watching a kids’ sitcom. There were toys, watercolor trays, books, loose sheets of paper, videos, and Pokémon cards heaped on, around, and underneath the bottom shelf of the old TV stand, but aside from that the byroom was fairly neat. Both beds were made. Rowan had black, home-cut hair and sounded like he needed to clear his throat. He looked a bit like Wade. “You can watch till the next commercial break,” Maryanne told Rowan, “and then you’re going to hang out with Luke.” The three of us watched the program for a minute. I laughed politely at a punch line. When Maryanne smiled at me, I pointed to the sculpture and said, “Did you make this?” My tone might have been too incredulous. “Well, I’m
making it,”
she said, and then the commercials started and she turned off the TV and took Rowan’s hand.

The sculpture was about nine feet tall, an Amazonian or Lachaisian woman with a stump for a head and skin made of plastic tiles—Shrinky Dink plastic, I realized as I got closer. On each of the die-face-sized tiles Maryanne had drawn some portion of the figure’s oddly shaped body in colored pencil: part of a toenail or ankle, part of a navel or areola, or just a square of peach-flesh skin. When I kneeled down, I saw that the figure’s dark pubic hair was suggested by tile-sized drawings or tracings of Freud’s head (“the Shrinky Shrink,” Maryanne later explained). The imbricated tiles tinkled from the breeze of my waving hand, since they weren’t stuck like skin to a hidden skeleton as I’d imagined on first glance, but were finely punctured and hung by fishing line from a framework of white cardboard and silver wire, resulting in an impressive if not unquestionably beautiful mosaic sculpture. I was still studying the thing when Maryanne returned to the room. “This is fantastic,” I said. She thanked me and described in unintelligible detail her ingenious method for making the sculpture. I complimented her again. “It’s too lumpy, though,” she said, “and I can’t figure out how to make her head.”

She walked over to her dresser, on top of which there were maybe a dozen tapes and CDs, a boom box, and a school portrait of Rowan, manifesting the genre’s ironies, I hoped, in that the most contortedly counterfeit school-photo smiles are forced by the purest of heart. She put on a Tricky CD and sat down on the edge of her queen-sized bed, dressed with a quilt made of brick-sized patches of small-town suits. I sat down next to her. “So did you go to art school?” I said.

She laughed. “I can’t afford art school. I just wing it. I’m almost a folk artist. When they interview me, I’m gonna act super bumpkiny.”

“You think they’ll buy that? I mean, you’re in Chicago and all.”

“I don’t really think there’ll be interviews.”

“There might be.”

“I still need to make the head.”

“I like how swirly this music sounds,” I said, and lay down with my legs still hanging over the bed, my boots grazing the floor. I turned my head to look at the trophies on Rowan’s dresser. The quilt smelled like the corner of a storage closet that was itself in the corner of a thrift store’s back room. The trophies were topped with chess knights and kings, bowling balls and bowlers, tennis rackets and players, curling stones and brooms. “Rowan must be really smart and athletic,” I said.