John Henry Days (50 page)

The music stopped, a giant lifted the roof off the club: a sudden shift in the barometric. The sound system cut out in the middle of a song that had shrieked for so long that it had come to seem the sound of their bodily processes, enzymatic reaction, mitotic doubling, a siren deep within the guests that made them go. Dazed, unable to account for this alien silence, the people in the room looked at each other, blinking, they looked at the sky to confirm that the shelling had stopped. Lights choreographed by computer, tilting on gyroscopes, burst in frenzied illumination, in a welter of patterns. This was a new effect to the night, novel sensory vandalism in an evening of myriad crimes. More than one among them wondered what they were in for next.

Along one innocent wall perpendicular to the bar, nondescript and overlooked all night, a curtain began to rise, a prehistoric red eyelid. Behind the curtain was a stage. The roving lights converged upon it, became one light.

The falling starlet contemplated a stick of celery and realized in its rectitude the fact of her wilted career. The polymorphously perverse and those repressed in that area hit it off like old army buddies until it came to the deed, where they parted ways.

Godfrey Frank took the stage and the four boys from Fire Drill and the Orderly Fashions trailed behind him, seizing guitars, a gold bass. One crawled into the drum kit. Godfrey Frank stood on bright green platform shoes. He had squeezed his sausage legs into black leather pants above which damp chest hair weaseled through a red mesh T-shirt. His long brown curly hair, glistening with a relaxing fluid, poured down his shoulders. He grabbed the microphone between his hands as if wrestling a rattler and screamed, “New York—are you ready to ‘rock’?” The deficiently jaded in the crowd assented and he repeated, “I said, New York—are you ready to ‘rock’!” The lights fled from each other again, seeking every inch of the room for a millisecond and roaming farther, and the guitarist pummeled the first chord of “Awestruck Post-Struct Superstar,” the song that would haunt all of them for months, on the radio, on the television, in the listless aisles of supermarkets and gourmet delicatessens while shopping carts skidded on hobbled wheels.

J. couldn’t make out the words. He looked back into the crowd, daring
the replacement of his every cell with salt, and saw heads tilted in angles of strict attention, eyes split wide in hunger and mouths tastefully ajar as the ravenous lights licked their faces, savoring and considering who will be the first to go. He turned back to the stage. It was not that they liked the music or didn’t like the man they had come here to celebrate, he thought, but that something was happening they could talk about later, and talk was important, it filled minutes, it flattered the speaker when delivered with the correct wise and knowing intonation. Information the last currency in this town. The act onstage was conversation tomorrow morning, an anecdote at next week’s dinner party. The audience that night thought about the next audience and watched.

The editor of the magazine that published the finest literary fiction found that no one had ever heard of him, the publication, or those he published, and he longed for the days of Fitzgerald. The ne’er-do-well daughter of the famous actor and the tycoon’s son got along swimmingly because they both lived off another’s name.

J. couldn’t hear the words, but when Godfrey Frank got to the chorus a tech man flicked a switch and the words were projected on the face of Lenin, that old Russkie hustler, which had been painted on the far wall of the stage:

Some people sang along, some merely pretended to.

The best man and the groom kissed for the first time and the wedding was off. The architect to the fabulously stupendous misplaced all sense of the perpendicular that night, and turned to igloos. The hot, the tarty and the downright slutty traded notes with the well endowed, the flaccid, and those who just liked to watch, and come morning destiny’s inscrutable hand had transformed all of them forever.

E
ven this late in the performance, there is still one more member of the ensemble yet to make an appearance. Standing patiently in the wings, resisting the temptation for one last smoke before the big scene, the steam drill, the heavy in this particular drama, waits for the cue. What’s a hero without a villain?

Much maligned, much vilified, few songs celebrate the struggle of the steam drill. The hand-shy childhood, the ups and downs in the early days of implementation, the sad defeat on the proving grounds. “Ballad of Jo Jo the Steam Drill” is no chart-topper, virtually unhummable by human mouths, and you can’t dance to it besides. Things looked so promising, too, for the Burleigh steam drill, with that sexy new drilling bar. Replacing all the luminaries of mechanical drilldom up to that point, the Brunton Wind Hammer, the Couch Drill, the Fowle, the Fontainmoreau. 240 pounds, 200 blows a minute, nifty pneumatic action. Until the Ingersoll came along, and Charles Burleigh’s baby was just another bunch of obsolete scrap. This is the way the world works.

Progress may be imagined as a railroad line, its right-of-way surveyed through rough plains of trial and error, deep gullies of botched innovation, until the terminus of perfection is reached, the last cross-tie firmed into earth with one final spike. One day’s bustling depot, current pinnacle of human invention, is tomorrow’s skipped-over station, glimpsed in staccato through grimy windows and swiftly banished from consciousness. The Burleigh steam drill is the terminus of a series of inevitabilities, but only terminus until the line is extended, the rails laid farther into frontier, until the next model replaces and advances the heading. The new timetables say that the locomotive stops there only sometimes, at odd hours, and never the express. It’s not like it used to be. Few talk of the Burleigh much anymore, and the ticket window accumulates dust and no one bothers to repaint what the weather has kissed away.

No one writes the songs, no one remembers. Perhaps a quote from the
engine itself might shed some light on the situation, explain the events of that day in Big Bend Tunnel, lend some perspective. Let the other side speak.

Steam drill, can we get a soundbite? Silence only greets that quiver of jabbing microphones. No comment, no comment, sweatshirt hood cinched tight for anonymity on the perpwalk. Even if its lawyers hadn’t given strict instructions, it is just a device, it cannot answer. It is only a machine, and it keeps its own counsel.

T
he purpose of the blackout curtains utilized by hotels and motels throughout the land is to engineer various mental states in the guest. When a guest opens her eyes in a completely dark environment, the first sensation generated is often one of anxious dislocation, which may escalate to modulated panic if the guest is slow to situate, find a landmark, reconstruct the journey to this darkness. Once the guest has oriented herself, reassuring notions introduce themselves. In the case of the guest in room 14 of the Tal-cott Motor Lodge, for example, after the digital display of the bedside alarm clock firmly tethers her to reality, she is relieved that life seems to continue pretty much the way it always does even if one has temporarily been removed from engaged participation by an overlong nap. It is this feeling of relief or reassurance, not the blockade of irritating sunshine, or the excitation of the fear impulse, that is the final aim of the blackout curtain; it is hoped that this feeling of comfort will be permanently associated with the particular place of lodging or chain of establishments, and encourage return visits. For we need our safe places in this world, there are far too few.

When Pamela Street wakes there is nothing beyond her skin but darkness. Deep inside the Talcott Motor Lodge and Sensory Deprivation Tank. She is not the first to be saved from madness by the soothing red numbers of an alarm clock. The cord of the alarm clock, trailing into the wall socket, is a lifeline to a verified world, power plants, standardized time, civilization. She knows where she is, disquiet exhaled. Retracing the events is no problem. Once the taxi dropped her from the fair, she stumbled on the bed, pratfalled into a deep sleep, and now she recovers, sensation by sensation. It is eight-thirty. Men talk in the parking lot. The circulation in her foot is ransomed where the blanket has kidnapped her sneaker. By the time she turns on the light she has forgotten her first thought on waking. She thought J. was lying beside her and something had happened.

She’s not hungry right now. Had plenty to eat at the festival, a periodic table full of concocted nitrates and artificially colored beverages. She’ll be
hungry at some inappropriate time in the future, she figures, a couple of hours from now when the entire county has retreated behind screen doors, and her only choice will be stale pretzels from the vending machine. That will have to do. This time tomorrow she’ll be back in New York, coated in a city summer sweat, but currently she’s still in between towns on musty sheets. A big breakfast in the morning will have to sustain her for all she has to accomplish before she escapes on the plane.

Half an hour later she’s smoked the room into an advertisement for cancer (the Compulsive’s Council and League of Lonely Folks perhaps chipping in for this particular media campaign) so she slides back the blackout curtains and shoves the window across its grooves. The breeze wants into room 14 as much as the smoke wants out, and they negotiate border crossings. By the pool the journalists explore a case of the local discount pisswater beer, jiving it up with mosquitoes. J.’s out there, too. He raises a glass and they all toast to something. Did she actually grab his hand in the tunnel. Do anything else out of character. They stood in the tunnel she had heard about for so many years, and the poison that the stories had put in her blood drained from her, leaving her veins frigid and depleted as that stuff disappeared into puddles the earth drank. She felt like saying, my how you’ve grown, as if the rock were a gawky cousin not seen for a long time and now matured into his own person with quirks. Pools of gray water for a floor, an emphysematous gurgle for breath. Everybody else was outside watching the steeldriving contest, Pamela and J. missed the steeldriving contest and don’t know who won. Not that she knows one of those crackers from another, to tell the truth. They heard the cheers, far away in the fairgrounds, but didn’t leave the tunnel until the main event was over and the victor was at the microphone, thanking an extensive genealogical tree for their support. She grabbed his hand and asked if he’d come with her tomorrow. There, that was the dumb part; not holding his hand but asking him to come along. She didn’t know if it was worse that she asked him or that he said yes. He’ll think she’s crazy when she opens up the box. Even from the bed she can make out that laugh of his. It hitches a ride on the breeze.

On the plane she took the box as her carry-on. A white guy in pinstripe pants and power tie came up the aisle when he spied her wiggling the box into the overhead; he didn’t want her to mess up his suit jacket, wrinkle or otherwise mar it. The box fit, tilted a bit, and the latch shut without fret. She rode through the air with the box directly over her head; it perched, corrugated
gargoyle, above the air nozzle and light, and this set childish tremors of unease inside her until the landing gear groaned open. At the arrival gate the driver’s spotted hand went for her bag but she thrust the box at him instead. As they drifted down the escalator, with him in front carrying the box, she felt like a fake billionaire, the scruffy taxi driver her chauffeur chained to the briefcase full of bearer bonds. But it didn’t contain bearer bonds. He put the box in the trunk, tilted again, this time over the spare tire and a couple of girlie mags, and when the trunk closed she was able to shut the box from her mind. On the ride to Talcott the mountains claimed her attention. When she unlocked room 14 she put the box in the closet, where it remains. Or the closet area, more properly: there is a clothes rack and handcuffed hangers and a shelf, but no door. She managed not to look at it nonetheless.

On the sides of the box, in the style of a design aesthetic long extinct, the Diego Grapefruit Company falsely describes the contents. That box hasn’t held fruit for a long time. Along the corners of the box silver duct tape pinches, a discontinued brand drawn from the shelves of her father’s hardware store. Miracle it still sticks. Some of her father’s suppliers specialized more in indictments than quality merchandise. The white cardboard has been blackened by a hundred reconsidered situations. Move it over there, make room over there for it, put this in it and take that out.

The first time she saw it was fifteen years ago. She had made plans to go to the movies with Angela; the teenage guys who sat on the right side of the theater smoked cheeba and if she asked they’d give her a hit and she’d hope it wasn’t laced with something and when the credits started she’d have to run out or else they thought they had the right to rap to her. That had been her plan until her father told her she’d have to wait for the package. He was expecting a package from one of his John Henry dealers; he’d wait for it himself but her mother wasn’t letting him off the hook, not this time. It was her club’s Christmas dance and he’d skipped too many. Her mother said Pamela was old enough to take care of something like that, she was big enough, so there was no way he wasn’t going to be her escort. Walk in there without her man on her arm. She hadn’t made a special trip to get his suit dry cleaned so he could back out for John Henry. She knew how to make him behave, sometimes, when she really wanted to. Back then, for a time. He’ll be here in time for you to make your movie, her father said as he put on his fur hat. He better, Pamela said to herself.

When the room was suddenly rocked by a swell of gamey romance, via
the title theme of
The Love Boat,
she knew she wasn’t going to make it out that night. The theme of
The Love Boat,
in her history, meant that she was staying in for the night. Usually her father met his John Henry pushers at the store and Pamela never witnessed their ridiculous transactions. Just saw the crap when he brought it home, beaming, dying to show it to her as if she gave a shit. Already cluttering the house would be a dozen identical John Henry statues, a gang of shellacked gremlins, and he’d hoist in another one that was exactly the same and try to get them excited about this new piece of garbage. The house brimmed with John Henry. Not that she cared about her childhood toys at that point, but when her father discovered a box of her old toys in a closet one day he made her throw them out so there’d be room for more John Henry. There was no room in which John Henry did not hunch, no wall across which John Henry did not heave and toil and die in paint and ink and charcoal, no tables where smaller memorabilia, diecast and ceramic figurines, did not pose in martyrdom. (She didn’t have friends over because that meant explaining. She met them downstairs when they buzzed.) He made it out like it had been excavated from King Tut’s tomb. He usually got the stuff at the store, and the few times he conducted John Henry business at their home, Pamela beat it upstairs and turned her boombox on real loud, until the latest batch of weirdos got the hell out of their house with their smelly-ass selves.

Her friend Angela called from a pay phone and Pamela told her she wouldn’t be coming out. The street noise made it sound like Angela was in the middle of a big party Pamela was missing. The second she put the phone down the buzzer rang. On
The Love Boat,
the bumbling white people set a course for adventure, their minds on a new romance. Pamela hustled to the intercom, and it took three tries before the weirdo employed the talk button correctly and she heard clearly, “Mr. Mails.” She rolled her eyes, buttoned the top two buttons on her shirt and buzzed him up.

He looked nasty. Loitering there on their doormat, in his stained tan overcoat, with those fogged-up, big-ass glasses on his face, he looked like a bag lady. Looked like her biology teacher, who was from Yugoslavia, and when he talked about “the genitalia” everybody had to laugh because he sounded like he was talking about his girlfriend. He was the inspiration for vulgar caricatures that bore no resemblance to him yet incited giggles as they passed furtively row to row in sneaky gestures. This man, Mr. Mails, could have been his cousin. Mr. Mails scraped his boots on the doormat too many times, as if it was the first time in years he has been invited indoors. She had
no intention of letting him inside. Hell no. She grabbed for the Diego Grapefruit Company box, the envelope tucked into her right hand for implicit handoff. Give him the money, grab the box and with subway luck she could still rendezvous with Angela and the big party at the other end of the pay phone. “My father said to give you this,” she blurted, curt, in undisguised revulsion. They traded goods, but before Pamela could slam the door, Mr. Mails said, “May I use your facilities?”

He could be a rapist. The
facilities,
the
genitalia;
now he was her biology teacher’s brother. It would be her father’s fault if he was a rapist. He should have done this himself. From hypothetical stench her nostrils reared. She led him down the hallway, gestured to the room where pink tile shone through the half-open door. He shuffled. The rain had swept the back of his black hair into a duck’s butt. His head swiveled left and right, registering, cataloging her father’s collection of John Henry memorabilia. It was not yet a museum, if it ever was, it was junk on the wall. He paused only at the sledgehammer, which rested on the wall across nails that lacked resolve; periodically they’d leap out of the walls, inevitably when the family was asleep, and the hammer would hammer on the floor. He started to comment but seeing Pamela’s expression, that potent concoction of adolescent contempt, he decided against it.