Boarded Windows (6 page)

At some point when Wade was more or less living with my mother and me, she told me he sometimes sold marijuana to friends, in the way, she said, that one might sell an extra concert ticket to a friend. I’m not sure why she offered this misleading explanation and its even more disingenuous analogy, since I’d suspected nothing and didn’t quite understand what marijuana was. Perhaps she was preparing me for rumors. She smoked a fair amount of pot herself, and though she didn’t proselytize on its behalf, she was never furtive or apologetic about it. (She did sometimes complain of grogginess in an explanatory way related to apology.) After Wade left us to go on the road with Bolling, first as a batman or Doctor Robert, then as a bassist, I learned from my mother that he’d in fact been dealing more coke than pot, and that the short trips he took, putatively to visit family or play an out-of-town gig, were really visits to his supplier in Los Angeles. To throw off the authorities, my mother said, he’d fly to Los Angeles out of a different city’s airport each time—Bismarck, then Sioux Falls, then Duluth. The more she revealed, the more glamorous Wade became and the more I distrusted my mother.

But surely not all of those trips were to L.A. Some must have been Wade’s semiregular sales trips to Grand Forks, often soundtracked by
Bright Size Life,
though not, eventually, on the return trip, for which the album was or is somehow ill-suited. A few years ago, I tried to verify that hypothesis, playing Metheny’s album repeatedly from Grand Forks to Enswell, Enswell to Grand Forks, Grand Forks to Enswell, Enswell to Grand Forks. It was a peaceful, trancelike weekend. I thought of Jaco and the catalpa leaf, thought of Wade, thought of Wanda, thought of a giant, blanketing catalpa leaf with raindrops on the outside, fur on the inside. But I couldn’t grasp what Wade was getting at; the album sounded great in both directions. My ears aren’t his ears, though, and the scenery had changed over the decades, and no doubt for other reasons the experiment can’t be meaningfully reproduced.

B
Y THE TIME I WAS A TEENAGER, MY MOTHER, WHO as I’ll later explain was my adoptive mother, had forgotten much of the French she’d learned in school, though she hadn’t entirely forsaken the language. Once I saw her reading
Les fleurs du mal
in the original, a French-English dictionary and a cup of her surprisingly feeble coffee at hand. Probably she continued to work slowly through other French literature too, I don’t know. I didn’t pay close attention to everything she was reading. I know she often read Montaigne’s essays, but these she read in Donald Frame’s translation. I have her old edition of Frame’s Montaigne; I like to note which passages she check-marked (e.g.: “A feeble struggle, that of art against nature”), though the book, bought secondhand, is inscribed by a previous owner, so really I don’t know if I’m pausing over her check-marks or Frank Wiechman’s. Sometimes she came close to finishing French crossword puzzles out of a water-puffed paperback, or diagrammed French sentences, though these, I calculate, made up less than two percent of the countless sentences she diagrammed in her relatively short life. After we moved to Minneapolis, she sometimes went to French movies, or, after we got a VCR, rented them—there was a period of about six weeks in the fall of 1988 when she watched fifty or sixty French movies, working through the local video store’s small selection, then tapping the central library. Before watching one, she’d put two slightly overlapping strips of masking tape on the bottom of the screen, to prevent subtitular cheating, insulting a directorial vision already injured by square-screen reformatting. Sometimes she asked me to watch the movies with her, especially if it was something she hoped would speak to my inchoate bohemianism. “Come on,” she’d say, patting the couch, offering to translate for me (“in more idiomatic English than the subtitles”). Usually I declined. In later years I would watch some of those movies on my own with considerable sadness and some boredom.

During those weeks of fairly intense French video watching in the fall of ’88 (possibly the spring of ’89), my mother didn’t bother to peel the masking tape off the screen after finishing a movie, since she’d likely watch another one soon enough. I didn’t bother to remove the tape either. But whereas the tape annoyed me when it covered parts of the few French movies I did agree to watch with my mother (
Shoot the Piano Player, Pierrot le fou,
) the partial concealment seemed to improve my own programs. I suppose the tape lent obscurity and mystery to hopelessly clear, unmysterious stuff, mostly sitcoms and game shows watched slouchingly after school. That said, I did peel off the tape one afternoon to get a full view of a pornographic movie I’d managed to rent, and though I remember nothing specific about the movie and can’t cite its title for cheap laughs, I do remember how nervously careful I was afterwards to stick the strips of tape back in their precise former positions, how the task seemed doubly stressful and humiliating because my penis was bothered in my jeans from having been washed in the bathroom sink under water not given enough time to warm, bringing to mind a chilly swim in Devil’s Lake when I’d gotten scared a few too many yards from shore and had to be rescued by a boy just one grade ahead of me in school. The tape had left gummy traces, as well as a faint outline from having shielded the screen from several weeks of dust, so I was eventually able to restore the strips almost perfectly, though an end of the upper strip started to curl away from the screen like the front of a toboggan and wouldn’t restick. My pains were pointless from the start and proved even more so: removing the tape wouldn’t have been incriminating; I might reasonably have done so to watch
Jeopardy!
; moreover I forgot to take the video out of the player and was thus discovered more directly. My mother left the video on my pillow but never mentioned it. Tactfully, I suppose, or maybe by then she considered her parental work mostly done, didn’t have the energy to deliver a futile lecture or suffer my mumbling shame. She’d adopted me under odd circumstances, without great forethought, and I’ve sometimes wondered if she didn’t come to regret the decision, not that her behavior ever betrayed regret beyond the mild and occasional variety presumably common to many parents.

She had started as a French major at Northern Illinois University, but later switched to English with a French minor. She was a gifted grammarian, though not pedantic, not snobby about everyone else’s solecisms. Many friends and relatives suggested she become a schoolteacher; perhaps no one suggested she become a professor. But she was never interested in teaching at any level, or so she told me when I was twelve or thirteen. Just the thought of standing up all day playing a role or rôle exhausted and even sickened her, she said, and besides, she’d met only one sufferable child (she patted my shoulder). It was bad enough to play a role in an office or shop, she said, but there at least you weren’t performing all the time, unless everything was a performance, and she wouldn’t accept that. She liked movies, certain movies, and a few plays, but held actors in low regard. Not artists, she said, especially those who claimed to be. Nothing ruins Shakespeare quite like its performance, was another thing she said. But, she added, almost all artists, not just actors, were half-talents and tagalongs. Art, once a fruit of prosperity, was in her view now a symptom of it, and she despised the airy promotion of “creativity” that so marked seventies pedagogy. The half-talent’s failure will hurt her as much as the genius’s, she said, and the half-talent’s success will hurt the rest of us. On top of which, all the major art forms were in irreversible decline. When I took up the guitar, callusing a few fingertips for my life as a supernumerary of the artistic proletariat, she looked at me dryly and said, “Just what the world needs, another guitarist,” though it was her old guitar, a beat-up Kay, and later that night she picked it up to play “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” and “The Poor Orphan Child,” her pitch-challenged voice cracking throughout the former’s final chorus.

In her sophomore year (’67–’68), when she was still a French major, she spent a term studying at the Catholic University of Paris. She had a choice to spend either fall or spring term there. Because she liked spring in DeKalb, she chose fall in Paris, thus missing the heady student-and-worker triumph of May ’68. (She also missed that summer’s Chicago DNC, during which she was at a Wyoming dude ranch serving as nanny to a French professor’s three insufferable children.) She had a good time anyway, not at the dude ranch but in Paris, even fell in love with a quiet, dark-haired intellectual whose name I don’t remember. Two or three times she told me about him and her term abroad, but mostly through murky impressions and stray details: a rented car that may or may not have been a convertible, her Tuileries-dusted shoes, the unanticipated cold, a party on a bridge, a joint dropped in the Seine. Let’s call the intellectual Étienne, though he wasn’t a Frenchman; he was another American exchange student, Steve it might have been. He wore oxford shirts from Brooks Brothers, always with one of the babyish collar buttons undone, and wrote poetry, bad poetry, my mother said, had learned all the wrong things from John Ashbery and early Tristan Tzara, she didn’t add, but my invention is probably close to the mark since she disdained amateur modernism more than amateur trash. On Étienne and my mother’s last night together—they never talked about continuing their affair in the States, where they were separated by several thousand miles as well as Étienne’s undiscussed homosexuality—he gave her a cheap but attractive necklace and a recent book by Gérard Zwang called
Le sexe de la femme.
She never described the book to me, or if she did I’ve forgotten what she said, but I remember the slow, ironically bombastic way she pronounced the title:
Le sexe … de la femme,
with the word
sexe
hissed and drawn out like the sizzle of certain tracks in the seconds after a train has passed, then suddenly muted like a hand grabbing a cymbal, after which she included an aroused growl where I’ve placed the ellipsis dots, and finally a quick, coup de grâce–like
de la femme.
It’s hard to convey the humor of this on the page, but I remember us laughing over it more than once. She had a fizzy, gluggy laugh like soda pouring from a two-liter bottle.

Her copy of the reportedly beautiful and limited original edition of Zwang’s book might have fallen into my hands in early ’92, had she not lost it to theft two decades earlier. Were one of the originals to turn up, I could never afford it. I am unexpectedly poor. But from an internet retailer I’ve just ordered an imported, late-nineties reissue. Only a paperback, but who knows. It was Wade who taught me to revere the paperback. The mass-market paperback, he said, did more for art and ideas than the popularization of higher education. All his heroes were autodidacts. In any case, this paperback reissue’s arrival, supposedly within two weeks, is, under uncompetitive conditions, the thing I’m most looking forward to.

T
HERE WAS A BOTTLE OF REGIONAL ROOT BEER ON THE cloth passenger seat of Wade’s car, along with an emery board and a copy of the
Saginaw News.
When I moved the newspaper, I glimpsed a brown stain (root beer, I inferred) shaped like a fat comma. The shotgun floor was covered with Styrofoam coffee cups, peanut shells, hardened banana peels, two tennis-ball cylinders, two unsleeved forty-fives, and a dozen or so candy-bar wrappers. I cleared a level surface for my feet while Wade talked about Berlin, about the obsessively regular morning walks he’d take down Unter den Linden, the museum gift shops he’d visit, how each time before going on air he’d kiss the rank pop guard in front of the studio’s enriching Neumann microphone.

It was a sunny Tuesday or Wednesday not quite a week after Wade’s arrival. I had the day off. We were driving down to Owatonna, where he wanted to scope out Louis Sullivan and George Elmslie’s famous National Farmers’ Bank. He visored his eyes with his hand and asked me to look in the glove compartment for a pair of sunglasses. During the search I noticed a rusty fork, a retracted instant camera, a matchbox girded by a green rubber band, an unused early pregnancy test, and a map of Indiana tucked inside a field guide to Eastern birds. “They must not be in there” he said irritably while patting the floor, steering with his knees till the car passed briefly over the shoulder’s teeth-buzzing cautionary furrows. “Oh, here they are,” I said, and handed him the tortoiseshell aviators, very large though not too large for his face. I couldn’t tell if they were seven-dollar sunglasses or hundred-dollar sunglasses. He was wearing his slightly dirty suede coat and his pomponed Washington Redskins cap, folded above his ears in some cleverly unridiculous way, and when he put on the glasses, I saw for the first time during his visit that he was still something of the style bricoleur I remembered from my childhood.

I picked up the three tapes in his dashboard cubby: Harlan Montgomery’s
K.O.,
in one of the thick, unhinged black plastic cases with adhered cover art; a homemade C-90 in a scratched, cracked, and cloudy case, Gary Stewart on the A-side, Earl Thomas Conley on the B; and Bolling Greene’s
The Infractor,
from the short-lived era of cardboard cassette cases and emblematic of that packaging’s sentimental deterioration: the fraying on the edges, the fanning out on the sides, the cola stain on Bolling’s jowly face. Wade said he needed a break from his tapes, so we listened to the radio, first to the better of the Twin Cities’ two country stations, then to the station for defeated hippies, chronologically confused nostalgics, lawyers in love, et al. On this latter station we heard 10cc’s “Dreadlock Holiday,” one of Wade’s favorite reggae tunes, he said. The chorus (“I don’t like reggae—I love it!”) reminded him of something Werther says about Ossian. At some point during Wade’s visit, I learned to use the phrase “You have me at a disadvantage” when a reference drew from my cavern of ignorance, but I must have picked that up later. Now I call on the phrase all the time. Apparently it’s unclear to a lot of people, and though my aim isn’t to obfuscate, it is much rather to affect a refined, confident modesty, it’s not as if I haven’t noticed that when my interlocutor fails to grasp the phrase, the scales of power are right away balanced if not tipped in my favor. Occasionally I say “You have me at a disadvantage” when someone references something of which I only wish I were ignorant.