Sorta Like a Rock Star (18 page)
Read Sorta Like a Rock Star Online
Authors: Matthew Quick
Tags: #Humour, #Young Adult, #Contemporary, #Religion
These images just are.
I begin to really look forward to reading PJ’s haikus, and going to check the mail is the only time I leave my new bedroom other than to use the bathroom.
Covering the four walls with Private Jackson’s haikus—one page a day—I slowly make my room into a cocoon of poetry.
Here is the first one he sends me:
I
WAKE AND SIT UP
S
QUIRRELS SCRATCHING FROM INSIDE
M
Y WALLS ARE ALIVE
At first, I read it—like a million times, wondering if Private Jackson was trying to communicate with me through metaphor.
I puzzled out all sorts of interpretations too.
Maybe it was a metaphor for the madness—or the chaos I was feeling as of late, which is sorta hidden in my chest and mind, but real?
I had been in my new room for days now.
Maybe it was a metaphor for the madness of the man who killed my mother?
Maybe PJ was telling me that I needed to wake up and see that things were still alive and moving around me, even though my mom was gone and I felt so all alone?
Maybe he meant something else, and I was just too dumb to understand?
But then I remembered what Private Jackson stood for, what he was all about—all of the Zen stuff.
I instantly understood that PJ woke up in the middle of the night and heard squirrels in his bedroom walls, so he took a mental snapshot of the moment and wrote me a haiku.
Nothing more.
The moment just was—free of the emotions and judgments or any of the other illusionary things we humans feel the need to attach to everything we encounter.
Reading Private Jackson’s haikus after my mother’s murder—I totally got why he had been writing haikus all this time, ever since ’Nam, training his mind to allow things to exist without all of the complicated emotional baggage.
Everything simply is—always and forever.
T
HE FALLEN LEAF FLIES
L
IKE A YOUNG
I
CARUS AND
T
HEN DISINTEGRATES
I totally get haikus now. True.
And Private Jackson is my favorite writer.
“Father Chee?”
“Yes, Amber?”
“Why does God allow horrible things to happen to good people?”
“I don’t know.”
One day—on Donna’s iPod—I listen to Dinosaur Jr.’s “Puke and Cry” a million times in a row. I just set it to repeat the one song over and over again, and then I listen for several hours—tripping out.
I pretend that the lead singer—J Mascis—is singing me the song over and over again from Donna’s living room downstairs. Mascis—who has long silver hair, because he is old now—keeps on singing, “Come on down. Come on down. Come on down,” like he really wants me to come down from my little cocoon of haikus and misery.
I don’t come down, but I like pretending there is an obscure rock star who wants me to.
The battery finally runs out, and when I take the headphones off, my ears are ringing, J Mascis is gone, and Donna is calling to me, asking me if I want some soup.
“Father Chee?”
“Yes, Amber?”
“When will it stop hurting so badly?”
“I don’t know.”
G
RASS TEA BOILED AND DRUNK
M
Y DOG ROLLS THROUGH TOMORROW
’
S
C
UP
—
THERE
’
S ENDLESS TEA
After a month or so, Old Man Linder pays me a visit on behalf of the entire Methodist Home.
Donna comes into my room and says that I have to come down to see Old Man Linder because he can’t walk up steps. Donna’s murder trial ended a week or so ago and she has taken some time off from work to care for me, which I told her not to do. She dotes on me now, even though I hardly talk to her.
“I only go down once a day to check the mail,” I tell Donna. “Tell Old Man Linder he’ll have to come up here if he wants to talk to me.”
“The man has tubes running up his nose and is attached to an oxygen—”
“Yeah, I know him,” I say, like a total cat.
“He can’t walk stairs. He said it could kill him, but he really wants to talk to you, Amber. I don’t think he leaves the home much. Please just come down. He’s an old man and I think it might be good for you to—”
“No,” I say. “Tell him he can come back tomorrow around one fifteen when I’ll be checking the mail. That’s when I will next come downstairs.”
“Amber, what’s happening to you?” Donna says in this really dramatic fashion that pisses me off.
When I don’t answer, she leaves.
Ten minutes later, Donna returns and hands me a cup of hot cocoa and a Snickers bar, and then shakes her head at me before exiting my poetry cocoon.
I hear Old Man Linder breathing really hard on the steps.
One footstep, clunk, heavy breathing.
One footstep, clunk, heavy breathing.
One footstep, clunk, heavy breathing.
His oxygen tank makes an awful clunk each time he sets it on a higher step.
“Mr. Linder,” Donna says, “perhaps—you really shouldn’t—”
“Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do! I’m old enough to be your grandfather, thank you very much!” Old Man Linder says, and then sucks in an awful breath like he has been underwater for the last two hours or something.
He and Donna fight about whether he should be walking up the steps for another few minutes before I yell, “Donna, your making him yell isn’t helping!”
And then I only hear footsteps, clunking, and heavy breathing.
When Old Man Linder reaches the top of the stairs, he looks like he might fall backward and die. His face is completely white, which makes me feel like a total cat, so I walk into the hallway, grab his arm, and escort him into my room.
When he squeezes my shoulder football coach–style, I know that he is going to be okay—that he probably won’t die in my room.
He points to the Snickers and cocoa on my dresser. “Compliments of Door Woman Lucy.”
I nod.
“How you holdin’ up?” he asks me, and then sits down on the wooden chair that goes with the desk Donna bought for me.
I shrug.
I can see that his clear air tubes look sorta fogged up, and I wonder if that is bad.
“What are all those papers on your wall?”
“Haikus.”
“Hi-whats?”
“Short Japanese poems.”
“You can read Japanese?” he says.
“They’re written in English,” I say.
“By you?”
“No, by Private Jackson.”
“Who’s Private Jackson?”
“He was in ’Nam back in the day. Now he writes haikus. He’s my favorite poet.”
“I’m not going to get into all that, kid,” Old Man Linder says, adjusting the nozzle on his oxygen bottle, which produces a hissing sound. “I know you’ve suffered a horrific, senseless, and cruel loss, and while I won’t pretend to know what that must feel like—I will say that I’m old enough to know that life throws you a few nasty blows before she’s done with you, but each time you’re knocked down, you have to pull yourself up by the bootstraps, and—”
“Please don’t,” I say to Old Man Linder. “Please.”
He looks confused.
He’s wringing his hands.
He’s so old school.
He’s so out of his league.
“I was nineteen years old when I lost my best friend in World War Two. I never did feel the same—”
“Please stop.”
He shakes off my request, smiles knowingly, and says, “We miss you down at the home. Joan of Old wants a rematch. She’s still contesting your last battle. Stating that the kiss was a violation of the damn rules, not that Old Man Thompson will ever side with her.” Old Man Linder forces a laugh. “But some of the older feebleminded broads have taken Old Joan’s point of view. If we don’t make some sort of public statement quickly, the fans will think—”
“It was just a stupid game. It wasn’t real.”
“The Wednesday Afternoon Battles are something to look forward to and—”
“I’m retired. Joan of Old can have the title by forfeit.”
“Forfeit? Retired?
Are you kidding me?
You haven’t even begun to peak and you—”
“I’m done making old people smile. It’s over.”
He pauses for a second, gathers his thoughts.
So softly, Old Man Linder says, “Amber.”
When I look into his eyes they are moist, and I can tell that he loves me like I am his own granddaughter, but I can’t play that game anymore for him, so I look away.
“Life goes on,” he says. “Whether we choose to enjoy it or not. So you might as well find a way to enjoy the parts you can. You can’t just give up on life, Amber.”
“Why not? Everyone else does. Everyone. Why don’t
you
get up there this Wednesday and tell jokes? Why don’t any of you take on Joan of Old yourselves? I’m tired of carrying all you people. I can’t do it anymore. I can’t be the Princess of Hope for you, because I’ve got no hope left! Didn’t you read the papers? Don’t you remember what happened to my mom? How can anyone have hope after something like that? And yet you expect me to snap out of it and carry on for you? Give you a laugh once a week? Get well just so I can play some stupid game with old people every Wednesday afternoon? For what? Why should I?”
And then I break out in tears.
I sob for minutes.
“I shouldn’t have come,” Old Man Linder says. “I was just trying to—”
“Just leave, okay?” I scream.
It takes Old Man Linder a long time to stand, and from the sounds he is making, I think he is crying now too, which makes me feel even worse, but I don’t try to stop him from leaving and I don’t say I’m sorry.
I just want him to leave.
I can’t be what he needs me to be anymore.
In fact, I was never really who he wanted me to be—I was a fake.
For the next few minutes or so, I listen to him take one step at a time, setting down his oxygen tank with heavy clunks—Old Man Linder sucking air like a madman.
I hear Donna apologizing for me downstairs, and Old Man Linder says he shouldn’t have come again, which is when I realize that I crushed him—that I kicked him square in the metaphorical balls and knocked what little hope he had right out of him, the lightweight. It’s so easy to crush men like him. I pity Old Man Linder. How did he ever make it to old age?
After I hear the front door open and close, Donna comes up to my room and says, “You should be ashamed of yourself. This isn’t you, Amber. You’re better than this.”
“Fuck you,” I say—still sobbing—shocking myself.
Donna looks at me for a second or two—like I had slapped her—and then her bottom lips starts to quiver, which is something I never even thought was possible.
I see a tear slide down her cheek, and then she is gone.
So even the mighty Donna can be crushed, I think.
W
RITING HAIKUS ONE
A
FTER THE OTHER, KNOWING
O
NLY THE MOMENT
“Father Chee?”
“Amber?”
“What is it: is man only a blunder of God, or God only a blunder of man?”
“So you are quoting Nietzsche now?”
“You know his work?”
“Yes.”
“Does reading Nietzsche ever make you doubt your faith?”
“Yes.”
“But you still believe in God?”
“Yes.”
“How do you keep believing?”
“I have faith.”
“Why?”
“Because when I asked Him for help, God sent me a young, hopeful girl who was able to convince a group of shy Korean women to sing The Supremes—making ordinary women into divas—doubling my church’s membership. This was a great miracle that I saw with my own eyes. It boosted my faith much.”
“What if that young, hopeful girl never recovered from the blow God sent her way? What if she never sang with those Korean women ever again, and people stopped coming to your church and the Pope fired you and then you got sick and were about to die all alone feeling like your life meant nothing—and then some mentally insane man appeared and killed you in a strange and bizarre and terrifying manner? Would you still have faith in God then?”