Adios, Nirvana Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Sample Chapter from DIRT BIKES, DRONES, AND OTHER WAYS TO FLY

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  About the Author

  Copyright © 2010 by Conrad Wesselhoeft

  Four lines of “no leaders, please” from THE PLEASURES OF THE DAMMED by CHARLES BUKOWSKI, copyright © 2007 by Linda Lee Bukowski. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

  Two sentences from THE GARDEN OF EDEN by Ernest Hemingway. Reprinted with permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Copyright © 1986 by Mary Hemingway, John Hemingway, Patrick Hemingway, and Gregory Hemingway.

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  Houghton Mifflin is an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Wesselhoeft, Conrad.

  Adios, Nirvana / Conrad Wesselhoeft.

  p. cm.

  Summary: As Seattle sixteen-year-old Jonathan helps a dying man come to terms with a tragic event he experienced during World War II, Jonathan begins facing his own demons, especially the death of his twin brother, helped by an assortment of friends, old and new.

  ISBN 978-0-547-36895-5

  [1. Death—Fiction. 2. Friendship—Fiction. 3. Grief—Fiction. 4. Musicians—Fiction. 5. Guitar—Fiction. 6. High schools—Fiction. 7. Schools—Fiction. 8. Seattle (Wash.)—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.W5166Adi 2010

  [Fic]—dc22 2010006759

  eISBN 978-0-547-50504-6

  v2.0214

  “Every moment of light and dark is a miracle.”

  —Walt Whitman

  For Claire, Kit, and Jen, with love

  Chapter 1

  “Hey, man, get down!”

  “Dude, don’t be an idiot!”

  It’s my thicks calling to me. They’re standing just off the bridge, in the little park with the totem pole. The one that looks out over Elliott Bay and downtown Seattle.

  But tonight you can’t see a thing. Tonight, the world is a giant shaken snow globe. Big flakes tumbling down. The size of potato chips.

  In this city of eternal rain—snow! Once-a-decade snow. Maybe even once-a-century. It’s piling fast.

  We’ve been tossing frozen grapes at each other’s open orifices. Kyle is extremely good at this—can catch a grape in his mouth at fifty feet. So can Javon. They dart and dive and roll, catching nearly every grape despite the swirly snow and patchy street light.

  Nick and I pretty much suck.

  I dig the grapes out of the snow. Eat them.

  They are Mimi’s little specialty, cored and filled with vodka. One or two or ten don’t do much, but thirty or forty—whoa! Kyle lifted the whole bag from my freezer. I’ve had . . . god knows. I lost count a long time ago.

  And now I’m feeling it. All of it. I’m spinning. Delirious. A little sick.

  Plus, I gotta piss.

  I’m standing on the rail of the bridge, midspan, grasping the light pole.

  It’s an old concrete bridge. The rail is waist high and just wide enough for me to perch on without slipping, as long as I hold on to the light pole.

  I gaze up into the blazing industrial bulb. See the flakes lingering in the little upswirl. Below, the ground is bathed in perfect white darkness. It’s not all that far down, twenty or thirty feet. Just enough to break a few bones—or kill you. It looks like a soft pillow. Dimpled by shrubs and bushes.

  “Dude, dude, dude . . .”

  “What’re ya doin’, man?”

  I unzip and explode, blast a twelve-foot rope of steaming piss into the night.

  When you piss off a bridge into a snowstorm, it feels like you’re connecting with eternal things. Paying homage to something or someone. But who? The Druids? Walt Whitman? No, I pay homage to one person only, my brother, my twin.

  In life. In death.

  Telemachus.

  Footsteps crunch up behind me. I know it’s Nick—“Nick the Thick.”

  “Hey, Jonathan.” His voice is quiet. “C’mon down.”

  Just then, my stomach churns. I tighten my grip on the light pole, lean out over the bridge. My guts geyser out of me. I taste the grapes, the soft bean burrito I had for lunch. The tots. The milk.

  Twisting and drooling, I see below that spring has bloomed on the snow-covered bushes. Color has returned to the azaleas.

  Another wave hits me. And another. All those damn grapes. And, god knows, more burrito and tots.

  Till I’m squeezed dry.

  Pulped out.

  Empty.

  I watch snowflakes cover my mess. It’s like we’re making a Mexican casserole together, the night and me. Night lays down the flour tortilla, I add the vegetable sauce.

  When I look around, Kyle and Javon are standing there, too.

  Kyle says, “If you break your neck, dude, I will never forgive you.”

  Javon says, “Already lost one of you. Get your ass down, or I’ll drag it down.”

  It hurts. They are my oldest friends, my thicks.

  And thickness is forever.

  But somewhere in that snowy world below, Telemachus waits.

  I loosen my grip on the light pole.

  “Hey!” they shout. “HEY!”

  My frozen fingers slip. Their panicky hands lunge for me.

  But I’m too far gone.

  I’m falling . . . falling. There’s ecstasy and freedom here. Somehow I flip onto my back, wing my arms, Jesus-like, and wait for my quilty azalea bed to cradle me. And my Mexican casserole to warm me.

  I fall, fall, fall into the snowy night.

  Thinking of my brother.

  Thinking of Telemachus.

  Chapter 2

  An angel is peering down. Dressed all in white. Everlasting worry creases her forehead.

  When she opens her mouth, I smell unfiltered Camels. Her halo hair is a slummy orange. Her white gown is a silk kimono—the one with the fiery dragon on the back.

  “Gawwwdddd, Jonathan!” she sneers. “You reek of puke!”

  She flings open the curtains. Outside, the trees and rooftops are caked in white. Snow is still falling. It calls to me. I’d answer, but I’m wired for sleep. I flap the quilt over my head.

  “You’re lucky you didn’t get yourself killed, Jonathan. Or freeze to death. If it wasn’t for Ni
ck and Kyle and Javon . . .”

  I have a vague memory of being lifted out of a snowy bush and stuffed into the back of Kyle’s brother’s ancient VW bug.

  “They say you fell twenty feet—twenty feet!”

  The angel is none other than the Reverend Miriam Jones. Mimi. My mom.

  “How the hell did you fall off a bridge, Jonathan?”

  “Go away, Mimi.”

  Here it comes . . .

  “Jonathan, Jonathan, when are you gonna fix your life?”

  Mimi’s been asking me this for sixteen years. Since the day I popped out, two minutes and twelve seconds behind Telly, and winked at her.

  “Next Tuesday,” I say.

  “Jonathan, Jonathan,” Mimi says, pulling back the quilt and planting her face in mine. “Doesn’t your mother have enough to cry about?”

  I have a headache that begins in my tailbone, pulses up my spine, and plays “Purple Haze” in my sixth and ninth vertebrae. My mouth’s a bag of cotton. My eye bones ache.

  I stretch my arms and legs, test my fingers and toes, roll my neck. I’m not broken, but I feel like I’ve been flattened by the Green Bay defense.

  “Gawwwdddd,” Mimi says. “I can’t even get down to the Bean.”

  Mimi’s a barista at the Bikini Bean Espresso Drive-Thru. Their slogan is way more effective than anything Starbucks ever used:

  “Only one string attached.”

  I wrote that line.

  Based on all the truckers and welders that jammed the window lane after they posted the sign, I should’ve gotten paid at least one thousand dollars. Instead, they paid me in caffeine—one frickin’ latte, and not even a venti.

  Writers never get paid what they’re worth.

  “Take the sled,” I say.

  Mimi coughs, like a trucker.

  “There’s a letter for you, Jonathan.”

  She snaps the envelope against her ass.

  “Not now, Mimi. Go away.”

  She dangles the envelope in front of me. “It’s from Dr. Jacobson.”

  Thwack!

  Gupti the Witch. The last person I want to hear from: the principal at Taft High School, a six-foot-two Indian from Mumbai. I can’t think of her without hearing sitar music or smelling saffron rice. I’ve been expecting her hammer to fall for weeks.

  Sleep is pulling hard. Beautiful little sirens. Pixie dancers. Four or five Tinkerbells. But they tremble at the sound of Mimi’s voice. Poof! Gone.

  “Look at this room! Gawwwdddd! It’s bombed-out Baghdad in here. Why must you throw your T-shirts on the curtain rods? And pick up your damn books! My god, Jonathan, why are you so hard on your books?”

  It’s true, I am hard on my books. You don’t get your money’s worth till you’ve slammed them against the wall a few times. Broken their backs. My books are my family—the more they hurt me, the more I hurt them. My most hurtful, beaten book is Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. Telly gave it to me on our fifteenth birthday, scrawling these words inside the cover:

  CONTRADICT YOURSELF.

  CONTAIN MULTITUDES.

  SEE YOU IN SKATER HEAVEN.

  Now, there was a visionary.

  “And what happened to your guitar?” Mimi says.

  She slips her fist through the splintered hole. “You and Telly used to play such sweet things for me, Jonathan. Why don’t you play ‘American Pie’ anymore?”

  My guitar, Ruby Tuesday, is the unrivaled queen of my room. She’s a six-string Larrivée acoustic, a pretty Canadian from upcountry Saskatchewan with a nasty hole just south of the pick guard. What happened? Kyle’s oafy foot happened.

  “Didn’t you pay something like five hundred dollars on eBay for this guitar?”

  “Three eighty.”

  “You’re always throwing your money away, Jonathan.”

  Like hell. Ruby’s worth every penny, even with the extra hole. She’s tattooed with lines of poetry—a mix of my own, Whitman’s, and others’—plus autographs and snide Kyle-isms. And she always smells nice—the scent of ancient forests, lavender, and tacos. Right now, she sits in my rocking chair wearing my North Face vest. She’s the only girl I put my arms around.

  Mimi fires up a Camel. Then she slips the letter from the envelope, unfolds it.

  “Open your ears, baby.”

  “Jeezus, Mimi.”

  “‘Dear Jonathan . . . Miss Sosa informs me . . .’”

  I bury myself in my quilt, press my hands against my ears, create my own soundproof chrysalis. Mimi steps up to my bed, bends over. Her voice cuts through the chrysalis fibers and I hear every one of Gupti’s words.

  “‘. . . that, as of today, you have missed sixteen consecutive Spanish III classes. I checked with Mr. Maestretti, and apparently you have not attended physics for eight of the past ten days. In history and math, your grades are, respectively, anemic and dire. Only Dr. Bramwell, in American Lit, reports that you are doing good work. For a student who showed so much promise one year ago—and who bathed our school in glory last October—this is a major disappointment. The tragic loss of your brother . . .’”

  Mimi gasps. A sob bursts inside her. I respect it. Lie totally still. For a millisecond, nothing separates us. I even ponder putting an arm around her. She takes a deep breath and keeps reading.

  “‘. . . does not alter certain facts about your education. Here is one hard fact to consider: on your present course, you will not be promoted to the twelfth grade in June. Please come to my office Monday fourth period prepared to discuss your strategy for success. Sincerely, Gupti R. Jacobson, PhD, principal, William Howard Taft High School, West Seattle.’”

  Mimi paces back and forth. Mumbling.

  If Gupti is my enemy, I do have a friend: Dr. Robert Bramwell (a.k.a. “Birdwell”). He’s my champion. But he’s also a hemorrhoid. Because of him, I’m famous. Because of him, people think I’m a prodigy. They expect me to pull a rabbit out of a hat. Part the Red Sea. Win the Nobel Prize.

  Telemachus got hit on April 17. He died twenty-five days later, on May 12, at 2:11 a.m. at Harborview Medical Center. In June, Birdwell entered my poems in the Quatch—Washington State’s best-young-poet competition—and in October I won. Beat out students nineteen years old, twenty, twenty-one, including guys majoring in creative writing at the University of Washington. And here I was, barely sixteen. In all the Quatch’s thirty-nine-year history, the judges had never picked anybody so young.

  All hell broke loose.

  ALL HELL.

  A tidal wave of fame lifted me out of the backwater kelp, flung me onto the sand. They flicked on the bright lights. Everybody smiled, except for the losers.

  “Birdwell called this morning,” Mimi says. “He got a copy of the letter. He has an idea.”

  “Holy jeezus! Leave me alone, Mimi.”

  She pulls back the quilt. “A job, Jonathan.”

  Her lips curl pleasurably around the sound of those words. “It’s got white collar written all over it.”

  “It’s six a.m. Let me sleep.”

  “It’s eleven eighteen a.m.,” Mimi says. “Get your sorry poetic ass out of bed!”

  “Bring me some orange juice,” I say.

  “A little money on the side, Jonathan.”

  “Get me some goddamn orange juice, Mimi!”

  She swishes out of my room and comes back with a mug of tap water. It’s an old coffee mug, and she hasn’t bothered to wash it. Globs of scum float on the surface.

  “It would be more than I could pay you,” she says.

  For the past five months, my job has been to prime and paint the house. It’s what I do every Saturday and Sunday. Stand on scaffolding, sand, and chip. All day, rain or shine.

  Painting is phase one in Mimi’s grand plan to convert our house into a wedding chapel: “The Chapel of the Highest Happiness.” Once I get the primer done, I’m supposed to paint the house purple. We’ll be the pride of Delridge Avenue. Mimi’ll dress in her white minister robe, put on Songs of the Humpback Whale, and mar
ry people of all shapes and shades—midgets and giants, angels and murderers—in a cloud of incense and plastic roses.

  Mimi pays me nothing for weeks, then suddenly waves a few twenties in my face. With her, it’s feast or famine. But it never adds up to minimum.

  At the rate I’m going, I’ll break the seal on the first can of purple in about twenty-five years. Mimi wants it done by June 1, in time to catch the wedding season.

  “How’m I gonna do a second job?”

  “Whatever it takes, baby,” she says. “Cut back on sleep.”

  I sip the rancid water. “What’s the job?”

  “Writer,” Mimi says, picking a tobacco nit off her tongue.

  “Writer?”

  “Some dying old man wants somebody to write his life story. Or something like that. I’m not sure. You’ll have to speak with Birdwell.”

  “You gotta be joking.”

  Mimi leans close, revealing too much under her kimono. I close my eyes.

  “Cross my heart, baby. I’m not joking. Birdwell nominated you.”

  A flame flares to life, but I don’t show it. I deepen my frown.

  These days, I seem to disappoint everybody except Birdwell. For some reason, he won’t give up on me. In his classroom, he’s tacked the Seattle Times article about me next to posters of Jack Kerouac and Mark Twain, two other writers who lost brothers. He’s also tacked up two of my poems, “Opaque Miracles” and “The Day I Saw a Sasquatch.”

  Back in October, I rode that wave. Now I’m through with fame. All I want is to rest, get some sleep. Sleep for a thousand years. The lesson of fame is simple: it sucks. My advice to anyone who wants to be famous: stay obscure, and get a good night’s sleep.

  “Birdwell thinks you’re god’s gift to creation, Jonathan. I think he’s in love with you.”

  “Go away, Mimi.”

  “Baby, get out of bed and go talk to him.”

  “Are you crazy? I nearly died last night!”

  “My poor little boy,” she says. “Somehow you managed to survive.”

  Classic Mimi. Sixteen years, and she still doesn’t know the first goddamn thing about being a mom.