Adios, Nirvana Read online

  Agnes rolls her hands. “Play—play!”

  I unzip the gig bag. Slide bashful Ruby into my arms. Ruby the Lute. I fish a pair of old shades from the zippered pouch. Put them on. (This is a public performance, and I need to hide behind something.) I dig out some picks, choose a thin one for the thinner sound, which is probably closer to the sound a lute would make.

  I slide to the floor, back against the wall.

  Fast-tune on the fifth fret. Pluck some chimes.

  Then I cradle my medieval beauty. Summon up images of Henry VIII and Mel Gibson in a kilt.

  Hmmm.

  What do you play to a ninety-nine-year-old woman who thinks your guitar is a lute? Who talks about dark swimmers? Who wants to be an angel?

  Definitely not “Californication.”

  And I don’t know any Barry Manilow.

  Only one tune I know seems to fit, an ancient rock-poetry number with oracle-like overtones called “Knight Flight.”

  The secret is in the strum. Two beats. Half beat. Five beats. Half beat. Three beats.

  I find it. Chord it. C to E minor . . . C to E minor.

  Hammer a bass line.

  I play this over and over, building a mood somewhere between outer space and King Henry VIII’s court. Somehow, this surreal intersection seems appropriate for the Oracle at the Delphi.

  Now I’m practically in a trance. I open my mouth, add a bit of synthesizer to my voice:

  “Tell the lords the King is dead.

  The astronauts have gone to bed . . .”

  I peek at Agnes and Dreadlock. They stare saucer-eyed at me. I have no idea how I sound to them, but I sound okay to myself. Maybe Jimmy Crockett, who wrote the tune, would have problems with my arrangement, but I don’t.

  Agnes jerks. She sits straight up. Before I can get to the part about the multiple vitamins and god’s love, she starts singing along with me. Actually, she’s a beat behind, so she comes across as an echo.

  “Tell the lords the King is dead.

  The astronauts have gone to bed . . .”

  She starts to sway, swinging on the lutey vine between C and E minor.

  And then she snatches the song away from me. Begins to chant her own lines. Her voice turns whispery. What comes out is part poetry. Part dirge. Part oracle. Part drivel.

  Down in the sea the swimmers drown,

  Shackled in darkness, all around.

  Waters rise; I hear their cries.

  Free the swimmers in the dark.

  Free the swimmers in the dark.

  Over and over. Chanting:

  Free the swimmers in the dark.

  Free the swimmers in the dark.

  All spiced with insanity.

  Prophecy.

  Enlightenment.

  Demented gobbledygook.

  In all my thousands of guitar-hunkered hours, this moment is the weirdest. I have no idea where Agnes is coming from, what well she drinks from. But her song is pure. Unfaked.

  It’s exactly the kind of music I like to make.

  Reaching for the unknown. The painful and urgent.

  The tune could get boring fast, so I toss in little chord jams—C to F to G to A. Plus a seventh here, a ninth there.

  Agnes sways.

  After about ten minutes of this, she is sweating. The twinkle in her eye fades. She falls back on her pillow.

  Dreadlock has been holding her hand. Now she pets the ancient, cotton head.

  Lowers the bed. Pulls the blanket up. Tucks her in.

  “Go to sleep, Agnes.”

  “Dear ones,” Agnes mumbles. “Dear ones.”

  I play a final, quiet jam. Plant a penultimate A. Stitch it with a hungry D7 and a compassionate E.

  The universe vibrates.

  The room rings silent.

  Ching!

  Chapter 15

  “Well, Jonathan, did you look inside the suitcase?”

  “Yeah,” I say to David O. H. Cosgrove II. “I looked.”

  “Any observations?”

  “What about the rest of your life—all those other years?”

  “They are packed away in other suitcases,” David says. “These are the years I want to share with you.”

  “World War Two?”

  “Yes, World War Two.”

  “What about it?”

  “For a long time, Jonathan, I’ve needed to make peace with something. That’s where you can help.”

  “Me?”

  He nods. “Jonathan, something happened long ago . . .”

  He looks blindly at me, about twelve degrees east of my face.

  “Something bad?”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “But you’ve had, like, sixty years to figure this out. What can I do in a few days?”

  “Just listen. Take notes. Write.”

  “Write what?”

  He shrugs. “Whatever you think is true.”

  “Hey, the truth is just the truth,” I say. “It might not even be the truth.”

  “Jonathan, we’ll get to all this in good time. Are you comfortable with old-fashioned paper and pens?”

  “Yeah, I think I remember how to use a pen.”

  He points to a drawer. Inside are a box of Bics—not cheap plastic ballpoints but sleek metal-on-plastic retractables—and a stack of canary yellow legal pads wrapped in cellophane. He’s ready for me, all right.

  I peel open the packages, grab a pen and pad. Settle back in my chair.

  “Well, then,” David says, “anchors aweigh.”

  It’s the blind leading the blind because I have no idea where this is going. I just start jotting and scrawling. Sometimes he gets winded—cancer winded—which is a mix of rattly lungs and haggardly tired.

  At these times, I wait a minute or two until David recharges. About every half hour, he says, “I have to transact a little business with Mr. PEE-buddy.” Then he reaches for the red bottle with the picture of the winking elf.

  I duck into the corridor, trade smirks with Dreadlock sitting at the reception counter, step back in.

  As I make notes about David’s life, I add my own editorial comments:

  Born Grosse Pointe, Michigan. (A fuck of a long time ago.)

  Father: Electrical engineer. Not rich. Not poor. (Somewhere in the Wonder-bread middle.)

  Mother: Second-grade teacher. Specialty: Hot cross buns with currants. (What are currants?)

  Older sister: Anne. Plump. Glasses. Never laughed. Never married. Died of boredom in 1972.

  Younger sister: Sarah. Skinny. Freckles. Laughs a lot. Lives in Coral Gables, Florida. Twenty-eight grandchildren. (Moral,: Laughter and skinniness are the secrets to long life and fertility.)

  Family dog: Gil. Wire-haired mutt. Hit by a laundry truck. “Saddest day of my childhood.”

  Boy Scouts. Paper routes. Baseball.

  Winters: Skated on frozen ponds. Played ice hockey. Chipped a tooth.

  Summers: Fished on Upper Peninsula. Cabin on Walloon Lake. Black flies. Learned to shoot. Birds. Squirrels. Quota of three bullets a day to teach accuracy.

  Size twelve feet by age twelve.

  Six foot three by age fourteen. Nicknames: Beanpole. Cornstalk. Later: Shafty.

  Lettered in swimming. Broke high school records in freestyle and butterfly.

  Graduated: Grosse Pointe High School. Report cards “peppered with gentleman’s Cs and dubious Ds.” But As in history and English.

  First “official”girlfriend: Lillith Sparks of Grosse Pointe.

  First “unofficial” girlfriend: Blue Feather Chang, an Iroquois Chinese living in a shack outside Petoskey, age uncertain. (Damn, I need an “unofficial girlfriend.”)

  Attended University of Michigan on swimming scholarship. Switched major from journalism to medicine back to journalism.

  Heroes: Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Lawrence of Arabia.

  Favorite books: Great Expectations, The Jefferson Bible, The Boy Scout Handbook.

  And so on.

 
All the way up to December 7, 1941.

  I catch it all in my butterfly net. Everything. Not just the high points—the low points, the midpoints, and all the fractional points in between.

  As a poet, I know that truth hides in the nuance.

  Is the particle of gold in the bucket of sand.

  You gotta sift.

  Pan through a million grains to find it.

  Right now, I haven’t found much.

  David Cosgrove’s life is mostly sand. The start of it, anyway.

  Just when it’s getting good, when the Japanese pilots are slipping on their goggles and roaring off the flight decks of the Kaga and Sōryū, aiming for Pearl Harbor, David says, “That’s enough for today, Jonathan.”

  He opens the drawer of his bedside table and pulls out an envelope.

  “For you,” he says.

  I slip the envelope from his trembling hand.

  “See you on Sunday, Jonathan.”

  “Adios, dude.”

  “Adios to you, too,” he says. “Dude.”

  Chapter 16

  “Holy shit!”

  The envelope contains three bank-crisp one-hundred-dollar bills. That’s more than ten times what I expected.

  Finally, somebody’s paying me what I’m worth.

  I soar past Dreadlock.

  “How’d it go?”

  “Phenomenal,” I say, and keep on soaring.

  Between buses, I duck into 7-Eleven and buy a twelve-pack of Red Bull. This time, I splurge and buy the tall 16-ounce cans, not the skinny little 8.3-ouncers. Also, I buy a big bottle of maximum strength NoDoz.

  Trucker size. Guaranteed for long hauls.

  I’m feeling pretty good: Ruby on my shoulder, Red Bull in my arms, a fortune in my pocket.

  I’m standing in line behind three guys.

  The guy up front is ordering a lottery ticket. Big and lunky, he grips a giant Target bag under his arm. Tufts of gray hair spill from under his ball cap. He’s dressed in the greasy, baggy clothes of a tire mechanic.

  Uh-oh.

  I cock my head.

  View him one degree at a time.

  Ear—could be.

  Jawbone—could be.

  I lean farther out and see all the way to the chin. The bushy eyebrow.

  Jeezus!

  It’s Vic.

  I slip on my hood. Pull Ruby high onto my shoulder, hoping she’ll cast a shadow.

  Then I fade into the far aisle and ponder him over the SpaghettiOs and Wish-Bone dressings.

  Biologically and technically, Vic is my father. But that raises the question: What is a father? A sperm-blasting shotgun? Or a shepherd who pulls the little lambs out of the quicksand and keeps the wolves away?

  I vote for the shepherd. In which case, the guy buying the lottery ticket is definitely not my father.

  I haven’t seen him for nearly eight months—since the funeral. He sat two rows back, off to the side, alone, a brooding pastrami sandwich in a stained tie and shades.

  Afterward, he walked up to me. Took off those shades.

  “Why?” he asked.

  Why!

  “How?” would’ve been easy. Just quote the Seattle Times:

  “A West Seattle teenager was struck and severely injured by a Metro bus late Tuesday . . . . ‘He just shot out of the dark on his skateboard,’ said veteran driver Griffin Delmorio. ‘I didn’t see him.’”

  What the Seattle Times didn’t say was this: that bus would’ve killed anyone else instantly. But Telly was too full of life to die instantly.

  Or this: that Telly was on a mission to buy me a bottle of cold medicine.

  When he offered to skate down, I said, “Yeah.”

  I could’ve said, “No.”

  But I said, “Yeah.”

  His whole life and future were tied to that one word, uttered by me.

  A shrugged “Yeah.”

  Just as all our lives are tied to shrugged words and thin strings of mortality.

  “Why?”

  I turned and walked away from Vic.

  Now he shifts the giant Target bag to his other arm, drops coins and wadded bills onto the counter. The clerk hands him the lottery ticket, slides two pecan snack pies and a motor magazine into a paper bag.

  I zoom in on Vic’s hands. Fat fingers.

  I remember how he raised those hands. Made pretend swats. And real ones.

  Tried to slow us down, shape us in his Cro-Magnon image. But he couldn’t.

  I look at my own hands. Are they getting a little chunky?

  He heads for the door of 7-Eleven. I sink inside my hood.

  As he passes, I glimpse inside the Target bag.

  It’s diapers. A forty-eight-pack of Huggies.

  Uh-oh! The last thing a baby needs is Vic for a father.

  Chapter 17

  When I get home, I pop a Bull. The taurine kicks right in.

  Ah, taurine. I ponder the spelling: T-A-u-r-i-n-e.

  It covers the basics: tits, ass, and piss.

  I make a stockpile of all my projects. Spread ’em out before me, at least in my mind:

  Homework: Cram for a Spanish III test. Read four chapters of Talleyrand and write a three-page essay, due next week. Read fifty-two pages of physics, quiz Thursday.

  Murchison: Dig into the diaries and make copious notes (what I call “copu-noting”). Also, go through more photo albums. The good news is, this stuff is raw. Even though it’s old and faded, it’s fresh. As soon as you open an album or diary, you’re right back there. Can feel the sun on your face and the wind off the waves.

  “Tales of Telemachus”: All I really want to do is work on this poem. If I could just shove all the other crap into a ditch, bury it with a bulldozer, and work on this poem, I’d be happy.

  The girlfriend project: This skips along the garden path from mind to penis and back again. My mind likes one kind of girl, with poetic sensibilities, and my penis likes another, with poetic curves. Rarely do these two qualities merge in one girl. Result: confusion. I’m as virgin as Italian olive oil. There’s a good reason happiness is not spelled “hap-penis.”

  The Pinky Toe project: It ain’t crystallizing. “Crossing the River Styx” is just as pussified as ever. And the thought of playing and singing in front of all those people scares the shit out of me. Basically, I can’t do it. I won’t do it. I’ll tell Gupti—or write her a note.

  Sleep: I’m going on day four without it. Thanks to taurine and caffeine, and heavy lacings of sucrose and glucose, I’m wired. But the wires are getting thinner. Think light bulb-filament thin.

  To make it all happen, I’ve got to find a system—some new level of hyperefficiency. But what?

  I’m pondering this when there’s a knock on my door. Mimi comes in. She’s wearing her tight-ass Levi’s. She’s barefoot and in the process of buttoning her blouse. I can see the fringes of her lacy bra and the cloven depths that drive the Thriftway dads wild. Today she’s favoring green eye makeup.

  “Listen, Jonathan, you’ve got to work on the house. We open in four and a half months.”

  Oh yeah, I can’t forget “The Chapel of the Highest Happiness.” I need to add that to my list. Mimi’s romantic little dream. True, I haven’t set foot on the scaffolding in two weeks. The south side of the house cries to be scraped. The entire house screams to be primed and painted.

  “Later,” I say.

  “Later meaning in ten minutes?”

  “Later meaning whenever.”

  “We can’t wait that long, Jonathan. The season starts June first. Also, I want you to write me an ad for the West Seattle Herald. Just a little something about the chapel.”

  “Write your own damn ad!”

  “You’re the writer,” she says.

  “Hey, Mimi, look.”

  I fan my two remaining hundred-dollar bills and my four twenties.

  Mimi gasps. If there’s one god she worships, it’s the god Cash. I don’t mean Johnny.

  “Did you turn Jesse James on me?
”

  “My new job,” I say.

  “That writing job?”

  “Yeah.”

  She grins. “I told you, baby. White collar.”

  She leans in to take a closer look. Quick as a rattler, she strikes. Snaps away one of my Benjamins. Tucks it into her bra.

  I start to lunge, but that’s one place I’m not going.

  “Ha!” she says victoriously. “If you want it back, you’ll do three hours on the house, starting now.”

  How could I be so stupid!

  I glance out the window. Perfect catch-pneumonia weather. It’s getting dark. What kind of mom would send her kid out on a day like this? And I’ve got a ton of homework to do.

  “You bi . . . witch.”

  “Yeah, you better say witch,” Mimi says. “But a good witch—like Glinda in The Wizard of Oz. I promise to keep it cozy and warm.”

  “Hey, Mimi,” I say, “does, uh, Vic have a girlfriend or maybe a new wife?”

  Her face darkens. “How should I know?”

  I shrug.

  “Baby,” she says, “get your butt scrapin’!”

  Chapter 18

  To get my head in the right place for scraping, I pop a Bull and swallow three NoDoz. One thing about all this taurine and caffeine, I’m losing weight. Notching my belt tighter and tighter.

  Last spring, before the accident, Telly and I stood and weighed about the same—five nine and one forty, give or take a pound or two.

  I’m taller now, maybe five ten, but as for weight . . .

  I go into the bathroom and step on the scale. The dial sways dreamily, then stops at one . . . twenty . . . seven. I tap the glass with my toe to see if the needle is stuck, but it seems to be working.

  Down thirteen pounds. Jeezus.

  I check in the mirror. My cheeks have hollowed. My face looks ashen. Or maybe that’s just my hair casting a shadow.

  To pack on some weight, I start thinking about apple pie for dinner. A whole one. And a half gallon of vanilla bean ice cream.