Boarded Windows (7 page)

The drive from Minneapolis to Owatonna takes about an hour and fifteen minutes, though it probably took us longer since Wade drove unexpectedly under the speed limit. Shortly after we cleared Minneapolis’s southern suburbs, he pointed out something about an airplane passing over us, something semi-technical that I didn’t understand, and from there he segued into a story, both titillating and dull, about how he’d once managed to get a blowjob in his booth at Airport Road Enswell Parking. For a few years he was ARE Parking’s utility attendant, working two shifts a week, Tuesday afternoons and Sunday mornings (comin’ down). The gig was something of a cover for Wade, who made most of his money dealing, but I suspect the meager supplemental income came in handy. My impression is that he never made much money as a dealer, and wasn’t terribly ambitious or competitive regarding his share of the market. My observations of his work, however, were fragmentary. I’ve long imagined that he made some transactions at the ARE Parking lot, if only because it was a frequently underpopulated place where passing money through car windows was sanctioned. But dealing there was probably more trouble than it was worth. Mostly he operated out of Oran’s Bar, arranging house calls or rendezvous from his regular booth.

I got to join him in that booth one late afternoon in the spring of ’78. I’d come in looking for him because I couldn’t find my skateboard. I was really worked up about having misplaced, lost, or been burgled of this thin, yellow skateboard, which I’d only had for a few months. I walked tentatively into the bar like the start of a half-remembered joke. I was wearing, to paraphrase Gogol, whatever God or JCPenney sends to a provincial town (now the choices in Enswell are wider, though no better): slightly diluvial jeans, it might have been, and a screen-printed tank top on which a beer-guzzling rat raced a speedboat (caption: “River Rat”). Millie the tenured barmatron was patrolling the place with a bottle of off-brand glass cleaner and a loosely balled newspaper while Oran’s son Marty built tumbler ziggurats on the long, rectangular bar. Everyone—Millie, Marty, the seven or eight pensioners and early-shifters around the bar—stared at me, and I pointed to the adjacent room, the band room where the Seed Sacks and Hailstorm played on weekends. “My stepdad’s in there,” I said. Marty, an old friend and probable client of Wade’s, knew I wasn’t Wade’s stepson. He gestured in some smirking way that welcomed me with reservations. From North Dakota’s finest jukebox, I want to say, Tommy Duncan moaned, “My brain is cloudy, my soul is upside down,” but maybe I’ve just put that in there along with the high-waters and the off-brand glass cleaner because it seems right, because Tommy Duncan is moaning now in my low-ceilinged, carpeted apartment. Wade was reading alone in the band room. He didn’t know where my skateboard was. As I turned to leave, he touched my arm and gave me some money for a soda, said I could hang out with him awhile. “Thanks!” The cola foam danced like ocean spray on my hand as I walked carefully back to Wade’s booth with one of Marty’s hot, just-washed tumblers, and I remember how impressed I was with the slice of lime, how good it felt to squeeze it into the cola. By that point Wade’s friend Karl Tobreste was onstage setting up his drums, a cheap kit from Sears but he made it sound like a Ludwig. Wade closed his book. I asked if he ever wanted to be a kid again, like my age, but with his adult brain. He said no, because he would just become a disappointing prodigy. Then he made some convoluted objection to the question, said it relied on a strict Cartesian mind-body dualism that could no longer be supported, argued that right-thinking monism renders all such switcheroos meaningless or undesirable. I don’t actually remember what his objection was, just that it was over my head, and that I sensed it was spoken for Karl’s amusement. Wade was a great one for that, talking indirectly to others within earshot while pretending to talk to me. It’s not unique behavior. I sucked on my soda-sopped ice, then sucked on the lime, until a tall, high-foreheaded man in a khaki shirt approached Wade’s booth, and I was gently told to go home.

The story of Wade’s parking-lot conquest had given me an erection that I hoped wasn’t obvious through my twills. As I shifted in my seat, he started another story, and continued with stories or fragments of stories till we got to the bank. Although I broke in from time to time and some back and forth resulted, at one point I imagined that he might have told his stories even if I hadn’t been in the car. It occurs to me now that Wade might have made his monistic objections (or whatever objections they were) to my time-bending fantasy not for Karl’s amusement but for his own. Sometimes during his stay in Minneapolis he’d talk without looking at Wanda or me, or without looking at our faces. He’d turn his head from side to side or toward the floor, as if he resented our being in the way of his voice, as if he didn’t really want an audience. But of course he did, and at other times, I recall, he stared at us too intently.

On the drive he told me that his older sister was a decent pianist, that he used to help her push the untunable Salem spinet out from the wall so he could lean against the soundboard and listen to her play show tunes at incongruous tempos: a dirgeful “Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” a sprightly “Ol’ Man River.” He told me about the time he was hit, while jayrunning so as not to arrive even later for a dishwashing shift, by a Dodge Dart “the color of a jaundiced pear,” and how useful it is to know “severe collisional pain.” The restaurant’s manager, who had strange, winged hair like Schopenhauer’s or Bozo’s, Wade said, called the hospital to find out when the accident occurred, then fired Wade for tardiness. He told me about a Grand Forks doctor, a sometime customer, who for a few years offered back-alley vasectomies to the promiscuous and uninsured, either as an act of Malthusian charity or because he was a sadist, Wade wasn’t sure. A Yellow truck passed us going north, and he said he’d often thought about getting a trucker’s license. “Isn’t it disorienting to see these huge orange trucks rolling down the highway with the word
yellow
painted on them?” he said. “Ceci n’est pas un camion orange.” He told me again about Jaco and the catalpa leaf. Since we were sharing encounters with jazz bassists, I told him my (light-on-action) story about shaking Ron Carter’s hand, and he answered that one of his ex-girlfriends had gotten a splinter from Charlie Mingus’s bass lodged in her ear. Mingus, Wade said, telling his ex-girlfriend’s story, had been plagued at a Chicago nightclub by a pair of incessant chatterers near the stage, loud chatterers and glass-clinkers who wouldn’t shut up even after repeated calls for attentiveness from the bandleader, who finally picked up his double-bass by the neck and brought it down like a hammer on the middle of the chatterers’ table, not more than a ruler’s length from the table occupied by Wade’s girlfriend. “Mingus himself tweezed out the splinter with a pair of dessert chopsticks while Dannie Richmond took a long solo,” Wade said. “Then Mingus brought his totaled bass backstage, grabbed another one—a wasted old thing with just three strings—and finished the gig, playing better than before.”

“Man,” I said.

“Her implication being that something magical happened to the ear as a result of the splinter. But I have my doubts. This gal, she lacked discernment; her ears were too soon made glad.”

“Maybe before the splinter they were—”

“Even sooner gladdened? It’s possible. I don’t even like to think about some of the crap she made us listen to. Mingus and Van Morrison were the only worthwhile musicians she liked, and probably their music sounded especially strange and unprecedented to her ’cause she listened to no other jazz or blues or soul, not even fusion or blues-rock or blue-eyed soul, unless it came on the radio or I put it on at home.”

“You lived together?”

“For a while.”

“What was her name?”

“How’s that?”

“Her name,” I said.

It seemed like he couldn’t remember or was reluctant to report it.

“Rae,” he said after another moment.

“Ray?”

“Rae, R-a-e. Rae Morgenson.”

“My mom was a big Van Morrison fan. Both my moms were.”

“Yeah, well, everyone was,” Wade said.

“Not everyone,” I said.

“I would rather you not question the universality of the white hippie experience.”

I laughed. Then, “Do you consider yourself white?”

“I consider myself blue.”

It was a cool day, but the car’s heater worked surprisingly well (and still does). I shimmied off my L.A. Kings starter jacket. “So what kind of crap did she listen to when she wasn’t listening to Mingus or Van?” I asked.

“I just told you I don’t like to think about that.”

“Yeah, but—”

“I don’t know. Commercial stuff, phony head music: the Other Knee, the Cryan’ Shames, Iron Butterfly, Wind Shadows, Vanilla Fudge, the Eggs of Misconception, the Ghosts of Electricity. A lot of questionable shit. She’d dated the drummer from the Other Knee. Frog, he called himself. I think he was the one who gave her the Mingus album. She liked Mingus’s music purely, you know. She didn’t like it ’cause it was cool or sophisticated, ’cause it might intrigue someone who called on the phone and heard it blasting in the background, she having turned it up before answering. She just liked it.”

“What did Ellington say? ‘If it sounds good, it is good.’”

“But I couldn’t figure out
why
Mingus sounded good to her, because as I say most of what she liked was garbage. I tried to listen to her music with new ears, you know, thinking maybe she was hearing things I couldn’t hear, me being too much the yeasayer of prevailing critical opinion. Didn’t work, though. I’ve always been mystified by people like that, the sporadically, randomly tasteful. My problem isn’t indiscrimination, it’s that I have such a painful sense of where my discrimination gives out. Hank Adams said he knew his inferiority in taste just like he would’ve known it in smell, had he been hard of smelling.”

I grunted.

“A lot of times I’ve felt too smart for my life, but too dumb for another one. You’ll probably find that too.”

I didn’t like the sound of that, and we drove without talking for a few minutes. Then he told me about some of his other girlfriends. He said he’d had a “soap-bubble affair” with Mollie Katzen, the beautiful author of
The Moosewood Cookbook
and
The Enchanted Broccoli Forest,
and that he’d spent one night with Bolling Greene’s ex-wife, the singer and one-hit-wonder Penny Sakes (’77’s
For Heaven’s …
holds up pretty well). Also he’d loved a woman whose great-great-grandmother may have been the model for Courbet’s
The Origin of the World.
“I’m a bit of a starfucker,” he said. He’d also gone out with an artist who believed in “booksong,” the idea that one could develop a “mystic’s ear” for which book to read next. He’d dated a court reporter who was into bondage and discipline and some sadomasochism, he said, and from her he’d picked up a mild taste for that sort of thing. He’d grown equally comfortable as top or bottom. One of his favorite things was to be punched in the eye while coming, he said, but the court reporter didn’t always get the timing right—apt, he said, since she was also a not fully competent percussionist in a folk-rock band. Desire, Wade told me, wants nothing more than to destroy itself, as the Trammps had more or less maintained. He said he’d had a lot of girlfriends and had loved them all, but none as much as my mother. “She was a real connoisseur of coffee on book leaf,” he said, as if that were her defining trait. “Probably still is. She loved to stare at the stains and wonder over the words they’d landed on. She was deliberately careless with her cup. Your mother appreciates things, you know: blackbirds on white skies, raindrops on sidewalk gingko leaves. She would never explicitly point those things out, but … she’d draw your attention.”

“I don’t remember any gingko trees in Enswell.”

“But I saw some raindrops like that the other day and thought of her. So this is it,” he said, parking. I leaned against the car while he studied the bank for two or three minutes. “Can you grab me the SX-70?” he said.

“What?”

“The SX-70, please.”

“What?”

“The Polaroid in the glove box.”

He took a photo of the bank, and did a few dozen squat-thrusts. “Okay, let’s split,” he said.

“You don’t want to go inside?”

“Not really.”

“You want to stop for lunch at all?” I said.

“Let’s just grab sandwiches at a gas station.”

“A lot of those sandwiches are slimy.”

“This place isn’t happenin’ for me right now, okay?”

About twenty miles out of town, we stopped at a gas station where I bought sandwiches in triangular containers while Wade altered his Polaroid photo with the rusty fork I’d seen in the glove compartment. The sandwiches were slimy. The rest of the way home we took turns naming professional or notable collegiate football players. To make the game more challenging, we had to circle through the alphabet, forward and backwards, him saying “Grady Alderman,” me saying “Fred Biletnikoff,” him saying “Jimmy Conzelman,” me saying “Tony Dorsett,” him saying “Bill Earley,” and so on. We were allowed to skip
X.
The first person (me) who couldn’t come up with a name lost. I challenged some of Wade’s names—a few seemed patently fictional—but each time he unhesitatingly offered corroboration: always a position and a team, often a jersey number or a metaphorical description of the player’s style and form, maybe a bit of human-interest trivia, the marital history of some ancient Canton Bulldog or Rock Island Independent, the stray border collie that really taught him how to run. I held a few of the suspect names in mind, and, sure enough, they turned up in a football encyclopedia. It was hard to know when Wade was telling the truth, and I think one of his tricks was to make some truths sound like lies, so that if you discovered enough of his seeming lies to be after all true, you might start to think that everything he said was true.

I
MENTIONED ABOVE THAT THE WOMAN I’VE BEEN calling my mother, Marleen Deskin, wasn’t my biological mother. This fact was never kept from me. Martha Dickson was my biological mother. Between my mothers’ names there’s obviously much similarity—alliteration, assonance, consonance, and so on—and perhaps this similarity (unfortunate in the present context, and I apologize) readied or at least encouraged my mothers’ short but important friendship, since all sorts of superficial similarities can at least briefly make a friendship seem inevitable.