Stone Arabia (9 page)

By any standard, reasonable light, I appeared to be a crappy mother. I had an inappropriately casual relationship with my daughter. Of course her father, Chris, saw it that way. Even Nik—
Nik,
for God’s sake, the least judgmental person on earth—thought I was too easy on Ada. It is all true. But Ada, somehow, still managed to become this wonderful, thoughtful young woman.

“I think I want to make a movie about Nik,” she said. “You know, he really is like a folk-art genius. Not just his music but the whole deal, the whole constructed lifelong thingy. He would totally be a great subject. Don’t you think?”

I thought about it. Nik might be a good subject. He was so eccentric, so hardworking, so unapologetic. But I didn’t think enough about it, or about what making a movie would do to the delicate balance of a secret life. I forgot, maybe because it was Ada, that I needed to look out for Nik.

“He would be a great subject, and he would love it. But then again, he might not be totally receptive. Nik, he seems like he’s hungry for attention, but I’m not sure he is. Not anymore. Besides, he is used to controlling the whole story.”

Ada glanced at me and nodded. She had short, shiny black bangs and long, straight black hair. Her eyes were heavily lined and the penciled-in arches of her brows precise. Her eyes looked enormous, even as (or because) her lids appeared halfway closed when she looked straight at you, sleepy kewpie-doll eyes.

I poured myself more champagne. “We might have to talk him into it. Nik has his world, and I don’t think he even sees himself …Let’s put it this way: I think his whole life is a private joke that he doesn’t want to explain to anyone.” I took a sip of champagne and felt the bubbles fizz on the sides of my tongue as I swallowed. “And I think part of his pleasure, or at least his freedom, is he doesn’t think anyone will see it or judge it.”

Ada nibbled at a cracker with a delicate sliver of cheddar on it. She had the eating habits of the relentlessly waifish.

“I don’t know. Of course, it’s up to him—he will know if he wants to do it.”

Ada nodded.

“But what if people think the music isn’t any good?” I said, something I never considered before because it just didn’t apply. I listened, I paid attention, I enjoyed.

Ada straightened up and leaned across the table toward me. “You think his music is, uh, not good?”

“I do not think his music is not good, or what we sometimes call bad. I think, with as much certainty as I can bring to these kind of judgments, that Nik’s music is really, really good.” I had never said that in quite that way before. It took on more certainty as I heard myself say the words.

“Me, too. It’s great. Totally great, c’mon,” Ada said.

“And we are so objective, aren’t we?” I said. I started to laugh, and then I felt sad about laughing. I didn’t need to throw up all these cynical equivocations any time I said something important. Not even equivocations, but little sarcastic tics. It didn’t feel good, or even particularly true. We sat there without talking for a few moments. The lights started to come up from all the houses in the surrounding hills. When I first moved to Santa Clarita, the hills behind my house were empty. I used to be able to hear coyotes howling at night. I wasn’t supposed to feel this way, but I didn’t entirely mind all the development—at night, seeing the lights of the houses reassured me.

“I think Rob is seeing someone else,” Ada said.

“No, seriously.”

“Of course he is. He’s
married,
” I said. “No, I mean someone else, not his wife, not me.”

I sighed. (I actually made some of those mouth-clicking or sucking sounds, usually written as a
tsk
or a
tut,
but that doesn’t look right to me.) I liked Rob. I had never met him and probably never would meet him. But from what Ada had told me, he was very funny and smart. He didn’t lie to her. This was clearly another instance of my poor parental guidance. I know
I should have disapproved, but she appeared to be so in love, so happy. Ada’s father, I was sure, had no idea of the existence of Rob. Only I got to be her trustworthy confidante.

Ada started to cry.

“Oh, honey, come on.”

Ada sniffed, then she smiled and wiped under her eyes with her knuckle, pushing back mascara and tears. “I’m okay,” she said. I put an arm across the back of her shoulders and squeezed her toward me a little. It was more of a buck-up gesture than an actual hug. She would be fine.

But I should have realized how the movie would complicate things.

Nik called to tell me his old bandmate Tommy Skate was dead. Congestive heart failure, which was expected.

Nik had made me come with him to visit Tommy a few months ago. I hadn’t seen Tommy in years. He was the original lead guitar player in the Demonics. He used to wear plaid pants and creeper shoes with a wifebeater T-shirt. Tommy smoked menthol Marlboros because they made his breath smell good. He asked me out about fifty times from 1977 to 1990. Tommy played in punk bands, new wave bands, power pop bands, grunge bands, and so on, then he stopped playing. Later he became a Buddhist (he still indulged his every desire, but he would lecture you about “letting things go”), he developed a leather fetish, he defended Ronald Reagan, and he knew everything about martial arts movies. He worked lots of bad jobs, but mostly I remember he worked at a hospital switchboard, because he would tell stories about the crazy calls he would get at three a.m. Oh, and I guess Tommy was married once to a woman I never met and then quickly divorced. He never had any kids.

Tommy moved back in with his mother when he got sick. They shared a two-bedroom house in the Valley. It was an aging 1950s ranch, with sunflower wallpaper in the kitchen and mossy
wall-to-wall carpeting in the living room. We found Tommy encamped on the sectional couch near a large TV.

Nik hadn’t said a word the whole ride over. He drove, smoking and holding the wheel with one hand. The CD playing on his stereo was one of his own productions—I never understood how someone could listen to his own CDs. Isn’t that just unimaginable, or at least indicative of a malignant solipsism? But Nik, going back a long while, listened to his own music if he listened to anything. The older he got, the less he wanted to hear any music at all. It seemed to irk him or bore him, but less so when it was one of his albums. I can imagine no equivalence to this in my own life—again, we have veered so far from each other. Except I also listened to Nik’s music, so we had that in common.

An ancient air conditioner hummed overchilled but under-circulated air into Tommy’s house. A stale sweet smell barely covered the acrid and unmistakable yellow stink of a lifetime of cigarettes. I didn’t ever tell Nik how much it bothered me, that same sad undersmell in his apartment—he was used to it, after all. Tommy sat with his feet up on a pillow. His ankles and feet looked swollen to the point of formal uselessness. His wrists and fingers appeared puffy and immobile. He explained he could no longer play his guitar, but he still could play the keyboard. He explained further—just the sound of those words,
pulmonary edema,
whispered our future to us.
Myopathy, necrosis, infarction
—the serious words I would put into search engines late at night and then watch them multiply.

Tommy turned the knob on his old stereo until Richard Hell and the Voidoids poured out of the speakers in the high
volume requirement of both 1978 punk rock and damaged old ears. Hell’s sneery vocal instantly grated on me. At first I thought Tommy chose it for the horrible ironic effect of punk vitality. But then, as I watched his hands weakly chug along to the contrary guitar, I could see that Tommy really loved the noise, the refusal and the stubborn assault of it. It wasn’t an ironic gesture, it was a sad and nostalgic gesture.

“I hate this album,” Nik said.

“Yeah, but the guitars,” Tommy said.

“The guitars,” Nik said, a concession lurking in a nod and pursed lips. Nik wore his sunglasses, but from where I sat at his side, I could see him dart glances at the room, at Tommy’s swollen white feet, at the array of pills on the side table.

Tommy’s face—his nose in particular—had grown doughy over the years. I tried my best to conjure how he used to look in the old days. Without moving my head, my eyes looked up and back, as if that would somehow help me see the past better. Maybe people do that with their eyes because looking at the present is too distracting. I could glimpse him standing at Nik’s bar maybe fifteen years back. It was horrible to contemplate how much the past fifteen years had worn on him, or, really, on all of us. He was truly unrecognizable, just a damp, congested distortion of his younger face.

I didn’t say anything to Tommy as we sat there, I just listened—how could I not, at this volume?—to the music. We all felt relief when the “hit” came on, “Blank Generation.”

I belong to the blank generation and
I can take it or leave it each time

The nihilism of the lyrics came with a bright up-hop to the guitar riff and some nice sloppy
ooh
s that made us all feel momentarily happier, though it couldn’t have been lost on any of us how young the music sounded, how ridiculous.

“It’s just the—” Tommy started, then paused. We looked at him. “Shit, I can’t get the word I was about to say. It is the strangest sensation, knowing something but not being able to remember it. How can you not remember it if you know you forgot it, you know?”

“It’s called aphasia. That sensation—you remember the thing but not the word,” I said. “Nominal aphasia is when you can’t recall names.” They stared at me. “I have it, too, all the time.”

“Oh, fuck, everyone gets that,” Nik said. Although Nik had an excellent memory for an unrepentant alcoholic. He never forgot anything.

“It doesn’t matter,” Tommy said, but I could tell he was still trying to think of it. Nik took out his gifts: his latest CD in a Collector’s Limited Edition case and a liter bottle of handsome-looking scotch.

“I figure if you can’t drink much, it should be the best, right?” Nik said.

“Thanks, man.” Tommy looked at it. “I can’t drink at all anymore, it interferes with all these meds. I can’t tolerate it at all. But it sure is nice to look at the bottle. You want a shot?”

I was so irritated by this. I just hated, deeply, the idea of Nik taking a shot. Right here, in front of bloated Tommy, in the morning. And I hated that Nik spent a lot of money on an expensive bottle of scotch when he had no money. And then, through my anger, I figured it out—he knew that Tommy
couldn’t drink. He knew that he would end up drinking it himself.

Nik uncorked the top and poured some in a water glass. He threw back his head and slammed it down.

“Is that the way you’re supposed to drink that kind of scotch?” I shouted over the music, and I heard the pointless harsh scold in my weary rhetorical inflection. They didn’t even look at me, and who was I to rain my judgment on them, now, after all? This was a special occasion; I was a prig. Except there would be another shot, surely, and another, and then we would drive home, me terrified not that Nik would crash—he seemed unaffected by drink—but that he would be pulled over and get a DUI. Which wouldn’t be his first. And maybe he would lose his license and then wouldn’t be able to get to work. At the very least it risked a big fine, not to mention the possible bench warrant that was no doubt outstanding from previously unpaid tickets. Fifteen years ago Nik actually had to spend a couple of weeks in jail. All due to years of ignored traffic tickets. He stamped handcuffs in the LA County Jail. And washed police cars. They let him leave the jail to sleep, I think. I don’t remember. He was pretty careful for a while after that, to pay or respond to tickets. He had become more careless the last couple of years. Careless or reckless? None of this appeared to concern Nik in the slightest as he downed another shot. Tommy dissolved into a hacking coughing fit, and then we watched as he worked to find his breath.

As soon as we left Tommy’s door, Nik felt in the pocket of his jacket for a cigarette. In the walk down the driveway, he lit up and took a deep drag. He would chain-smoke all the way home.
I knew Tommy upset Nik, and I knew that the scotch and the cigarettes calmed him down. I knew that. I also knew that he had coughing fits similar to Tommy’s. I had never bothered to ask Nik to quit smoking. Not once. I knew he never would. I had asked him about other things, drink and drugs, at various crisis points. He would not consider my concerns, my calculations, my projections in fear and the future. He would say, more or less,
This is how I want to live and I won’t complain when it finally takes me out.
Which was true, he did not complain. He wouldn’t curtail his life to protect against some theoretical consequence that might never come to pass. Unlike most normal people, he didn’t regret his habits and he never even pretended he would try to quit any of it.

By now I should have been used to his—what should I call it? Need? Requirement? Accommodation, maybe? He wouldn’t call it an addiction. He would call it his consolation. As far back as I can remember, Nik always used—the consoling part came later—whatever was at hand whenever he could. He just wanted and needed to get off his face, out of his head, expand, shut down, alter, spin, fly, sleep, wake up, float. When we were small kids, we would grab each other’s arms and swing in circles faster and faster until our brains’ equilibrium was nauseatingly off. We would walk in staggers and feel the earth come up to meet us in giant waves as we collapsed in breathless laughter. This odd feeling was a pleasure, and enjoying it is common, right? Nik also loved to wind the chains of a swing in creaking twists, pushing his leg off the support poles until the chains would twist to their very top, then he would push himself in the opposite direction, flying in tight fast circles as the chains
unwound, throwing his head back to augment the spin. I read somewhere that the brain needs disorientation to properly develop. That childhood desire to feel dizzy has something to do with increasing the vestibular and cerebellar interaction in the young brain. Proprioception is the activity where the brain orients the inside world with the outside world. Spinning throws off your proprioception and the brain works and develops as it tries to get it back. The desire to spin around is healthy, I guess, because it teaches the brain how to get a stable fix on the world under any circumstances. But Nik got stuck there, somehow, and had to do these activities over and over. Getting dizzy-high was just the beginning. Swing sets were his gateway drug. Nik had an intense appetite, a special extra need, and as he grew older he grew more hungry for any and all alterations. I watched it; it was impossible to miss his difference, how he craved anything that undid his equilibrium.