Know Your Beholder: A Novel (2 page)

In the attic, to which I repaired almost two years ago, after my ex-wife’s departure, I have a twin bed (the one from my childhood) with a good mattress. The small bed affords me a surprising amount of floor space. I have a wall of paperbacks, mostly twentieth-century American fiction, arranged alphabetically by author; a dozen binders containing my complete baseball card collection; two wave-shaped CD towers; a few crates of beloved vinyl; and a midlevel stereo system featuring a Crosley Tech turntable finished in fine mahogany, a mini-CD jukebox, and a pair of state-of-the-art Polk Audio R300 tower speakers. I have an unremarkable stuffed chair (burnt-orangish and corduroy) and a vintage freestanding gooseneck Zoalite reading lamp that Lyman didn’t bother taking with him to Florida. It’s the lamp my mother used to read under in the living room, and I honestly believe that having it near him would make him feel like an infidel.

Other possessions worth mentioning: My authentic ’69 Les Paul Epiphone electric guitar and a small Marshall kick amp, on top of which rests a wireless telephone and analog answering machine from the late eighties that requires authentic minicassettes and makes people sound trapped and desperate, as if they’re transmitting vocal arrangements from outer space.

I haven’t changed the strings on the Les Paul in over a year and I recently sketched it in the margins of the very manuscript that I am using to chronicle all of this. (Whatever this winds up being—a novel, a confession, a grand, self-indulgent, one-sided palaver—is anyone’s guess.) Sketching things that historically resonate with me is perhaps my one sentimental guilty pleasure. I sketch my ex-wife a lot. I am not a very good artist. My faces have a tendency to look unfortunately lagomorphic. As a child I was fascinated by
Watership Down
, and harelips seem to plague my drawings of human faces.

No one has seen the margins of whatever this is, so between my guitar and the various curves and planar pleasures of my ex-wife’s anatomy, I’m confident that the drawings’ various implications will remain an author’s secret.

I also have my own bathroom up here, properly tiled, with what I’d wager to be the quietest toilet in the Midwest (I splurged at Home Depot), a working sink, and a showerhead with enhanced water pressure. My kitchen is elfin, with a half-fridge, a portable double-burner stovetop, and a lone Formica counter space crowded with enough English muffins, Skippy peanut butter, instant oatmeal, wild flora honey, and Maker’s Mark to get me through the winter. From the top of the minifridge rises a pyramid of canned goods: beef Burgundy, stewed tomatoes, chicken giblets, pears, sardines, Green Giant corn, myriad Campbell’s soups, etc. I eat my meals at a portable “Nantucket” kitchen island. Yes, I have become a man who spends a good portion of his time bellying up to a mostly useless three-foot-high rectangular mass.

Centered on the attic floor is a bearskin rug that Glose, the troubled drummer in my band, left crudely folded and boxed in our rehearsal space. I had the surprisingly high-quality bearskin professionally flattened and steam-cleaned, and I will occasionally lie on it and think of my ex-wife, Sheila Anne:

Her strawberry blond hair and small perfect breasts.

The beautifully arranged astral dusting of peach-colored moles descending below her right ear.

The slender subtle natural arc of her back.

Sheila Anne left me for another man.

A man so intergalactically fit he could be cast as some physiologically advanced alien on the SyFy network. A man whose teeth are so white and straight it almost hurts to think about them (Sheila Anne insists that they’re natural). A man five years my junior whose chiseled, perfect jawline is deftly offset by one of those undeniably aquiline Mediterranean noses. A corporate alpha male who dresses like an adult and shaves every morning. A man with a wolfish, charming smile who can no doubt execute twenty military-regulation pull-ups while carrying on a lighthearted conversation about the pleasures afforded by his new, ergonomically contoured office chair.

Sheila Anne and Dennis Church live in New York City, in what I imagine to be some cobalt-blue-themed, sleekly furnished apartment located on the twenty-third floor of a gleaming high-rise overlooking the Hudson River. They eloped on a beach in Mexico with only a priest, an authentic mariachi band, and a local photographer as their witnesses. Sheila Anne accidentally posted public-access wedding photos to her Facebook page, and I was dumb enough to let curiosity get the better of me. Though my band did have a fan page, I refused (and still refuse) to become a member of Facebook. But after I learned of their elopement from Bradley (Sheila Anne’s younger brother), I couldn’t help putting myself through the misery and wound up clicking on her unrestricted page.

After she heard from another bandmate, Morris (via Facebook message), of my being crushed by the photos (I was bedridden for close to four days), Sheila Anne changed her Facebook settings and sent me an e-mail of apology:

Yes, her farewell salutation was distinguished by a lowercase
l
. She obviously exclusively reserves the capitalized version of the word for her new husband.

In the photos, Sheila Anne looks nauseatingly beautiful in her sunflower-yellow summer dress, with Mexican poppies arranged in her hair and a bouquet of the same flowers in her hand. Her ankles are ringed with braided sea grass and anemones, the tops of her bare feet flecked with damp, Yucatán sand.

Dennis is wearing seersucker shorts; a matching jacket, the sleeves rolled to the elbows; a white dress shirt with a yellow bow tie; and a straw porkpie whose hatband smartly matches his neckwear, not to mention his bride-to-be’s dress and floral accents. He too is barefoot and his tan, ultrafit legs look somehow appropriated from a world-class tennis pro.

He’s one of those guys who can wear pastels and not in any way compromise his masculinity. I suspect you could walk up to him at a cocktail party and say, “Why, Dennis Church, what color is that four-hundred-dollar, seemingly-normal-but-designed-to-the-tits casual shirt?” To which he might reply, “It’s actually blood-orange-infused salmon,” then sip from a glass of chilled rosé in sort of a faggy way and manage to somehow
increase
his masculinity quotient.

The uncredited photographer captured their nuptial kiss while a corona of Mexican sun was forming a divine, perfectly timed halo around their soft joined faces, the porkpie off now (perhaps flung down the beach dramatically), the ocean calm and cerulean and twinkling behind them, an impossibly white Caribbean seagull passing overhead, high in the cloudless blue sky, wings wide and still as if in benediction.

Sheila Anne and I were married in the back room of a steakhouse in Branson, Missouri (B. T. Bones Steakhouse), during what would wind up being the band’s final tour. That morning I had passed a kidney stone and managed to sprain my ankle at the precise moment it disgorged itself from my urethra. I was high on Morris’s Percocet, and in the few Polaroids chronicling the sad but perfect little evening of ribs, smoked sausage, and pulled pork (the Three Amigos Combo), assorted sides, and a red velvet cake that the B. T. Bones manager allowed us to bring into the restaurant, bless his mom-’n’-pop heart, I look like I’m about sixty-three years old. I’m wearing a Carolina-blue cotton-blend suit that I’d purchased from the local Sears and a pair of canvas Chuck Taylor low-tops, also Carolina blue, with white laces and white athletic socks.

My collared shirt, also white and also from Sears, is too small, and my tie is of the paisley variety, phantasmagoric in that insane way paisley can be, and knotted with a misshapen Windsor that was executed by Glose while in deep, furrow-browed concentration. Despite my garroted neck, my facial muscles are somehow either so relaxed or so pain-fatigued that I appear to have jowls. Sheila Anne is wearing a candy-striped fifties thrift-store dress she bought in Branson and baby-blue rain boots (not quite Carolina blue, but close enough) and her hair is in French braids and she’s laughing sweetly at my terrible state.

We’re so in love that just thinking about it makes my viscera feel like it’s turning to landscaping mulch.

Bassist and childhood best friend, Kent, deejayed with his cheap portable boom box, pulling CDs out of an ancient duct-taped binder, while Morris and Glose basically got shitfaced on consecutive tumblers of the B. T. Bones signature drink—the Slippery Tin Roof—which, if I remember correctly, included “ice cream” vodka, chocolate syrup, and coffee liqueur, among other ingredients you might find stockpiled at a four-year-old’s birthday party.

The said Polaroid is currently affixed to the bottom of my minifridge with a plastic carrot magnet, which means I have to lie prone and drive my chin into the backs of my hands to really look at it.

I’ve been doing exactly that a lot lately.

I have never been to New York City but I visit often via the Internet. Someone called Ivan Ivanovich authors a blog chronicling the streets of Manhattan, with little abstract captions below photographs of storefronts, bridges, an East Village farmers’ market, Central Park, ethnically diverse children frolicking in urban playgrounds, the Hudson River at dawn, pigeons posing along the edges of tenement rooftops, etc.

When the band was touring we got as far east as Pittsburgh, but the Big Apple has eluded me the same way large game bass elude certain kinds of cursed fishermen.

Oh, the band.

The band the band the band the band the Motherfucking Band…

The band is—or
was
—called the Third Policeman (a flagrant plagiaristic homage to Flann O’Brien’s underappreciated masterpiece), and we made a pretty good go of it here in the Midwest, mostly headlining college bars and occasionally opening at larger venues for some younger, sexier indie/new school postpunk outfit from Portland or Akron or Walla Walla; some slack-haired, waif-thin copycat quartet brimming with wit, donning perfectly distressed clothes (matched only by their carefully ragamuffinized hair) accented by trust fund–financed tattoos and exhibiting a lazy live-performance habit, unwarranted industry irony, and stupidly large amps.

The Third Policeman, on the other hand, was a well-aged, anti-industry psychedelic semi-jam band with a penchant for outro pop harmonies and the occasional speedy punk vibe. We had smallish amps and old duct-tape-corrected quarter-inch cables that had survived the spaghetti-blob insanity of years of bad postshow breakdowns and crammed-to-the-tits gig bags.

I mostly fronted, wrote a good share of the lyrics, and played rhythm guitar. Backed by a small label out of Madison called Slowneck Records, we recorded an EP and an LP. After the LP (
Argon Lights
) was released we spent most of our time touring highbrow indie music towns (Cleveland, Louisville, Chicago, Austin, Pittsburgh) and making the occasional college-radio appearance.

At our best we were as tight as anyone, and when our drummer, Glose, wasn’t fucking us (and himself) over during his huffing stage (as in airplane glue out of small brown paper bags), we looked like a band that could break through the ranks and make a real go of it on the national level. Before Glose wound up in an emergency room in Lawrence, Kansas, for accidental self-induced septicemia (blood poisoning) that he’d contracted from a dirty fork he’d been using to pop a blood blister on his foot, Slowneck Records had planned a monthlong European tour that included Berlin, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Paris, which would have surely taken us to the next level, or simply improved the quality of our lives by a modest percentage.

Glose has since sworn off forks, though I have no doubt that his lifestyle still affords him ample opportunity for some other form of accidental self-poisoning. Once he ate a
TV Guide
just to see what would happen. Nothing happened, so he decided to follow that up by ingesting the first three books of the New Testament. The shame about Glose is that when he has his head on straight, watching him drum is like witnessing someone operating a flying machine.

Besides Glose’s erratic episodes, which included shoplifting, public nudity, urinating on small-town barbershop windows, and several fistfights (for some reason he liked to head-butt other bands’ bassists, rugby-style), our biggest weakness was our lack of focus. Or maybe it was fear of success, or some combination of the two. We were creepily Chekhovian. Our Moscow was New York and LA, and we talked about testing those larger markets with emphatic music in our voices. But whether our handicaps were financial (no one made more than $300 a week), romantic (what became fondly known as the Third Policeman’s “Yoko Factor”—my bad, fellas), spiritual (depression, lack of artistic faith, fear, etc.), or transportation-related (no one ever seemed to have a large enough car to fit two guitar amps, a bass amp, a drum kit with hardware, and a bunch of gear, or good enough credit to rent one), we couldn’t manage to get our shit together. Everyday distraction is a syndrome that can cripple any band, especially one with four members. At least one of them has to be the organized one who keeps things rolling with the booking agent and label rep, not to mention manages the responsibilities of maintaining the website, silk-screening the T-shirts, preserving a good vibe with the tour manager, etc.