Boarded Windows

A NOVEL

COFFEE HOUSE PRESS

MINNEAPOLIS

2012

For Nina

T
HE LAST TIME I SAW WADE SALEM WAS THE MORNING of December 21, 1991, through the window of a green-and-white taxi. I stood on the sidewalk’s lumpy mattress of snow and watched him toss a backpack to the other side of the seat, and pull off his pomponed Washington Redskins cap with a nod toward urgency. The taxi was overheated, it’s safe to imagine. I had recently turned twenty-one. I had even more recently lent Wade the backpack, in the way one lends out a quarter or a piece of gum. In the trunk was my former guitar, a midpriced acoustic on which three or four nights earlier Wade had played “Gentle on My Mind” and “The Poor Orphan Child.”

Something—my sticky-zippered backpack, or, more likely, the Redskins cap—must have slid off the backseat’s slippery vinyl, because just as the taxi was about to pull out into the lane, its wheels creaking the snow, Wade leaned over (to pick up the cap, I’m speculating), erasing himself from the rear passenger-side window, like I and millions of others had slide-erased stale sketches from our magnetic drawing toys, such as the one Wade long ago brought home to me, unwrapped, as an ingratiating gift. His head reemerged as the taxi made its first turn toward the airport. For a moment I lingered on the sidewalk, across the busy westward one-way from a pretentiously named Nixon-era apartment building, its mansard roof covering most of its face like the
Fat Albert
character’s nonpomponed cap. The bare trees and dirty boulevard snow were aptly gloomy, but the sky was blue, seemed too blue for the nostril-stinging cold. I felt tired and brittle, wished my feelings of good riddance weren’t so mixed with longing.

H
E HAD CALLED ME IN EARLY OCTOBER. HE SAID HE’D heard through one of my erstwhile Enswell “playmates” that I was living with a woman, “an
older
woman,” he added, belaboring the jokey condescension. He asked a few questions about Wanda (only five years older than I). He asked about my mother. He said he was moving to Berlin, after a final tour of the States. He said something about Hank Snow and the incantatory power of American town and city names, and that he’d be in Minneapolis soon. It was probably six days later, around midnight, when he called. Wanda was already in bed. “I’m at a pay phone on Lake Street,” he said. “Looks like I’m sharing the corner with some working girls.” At most he was ten minutes away, but an hour passed before he buzzed. He smiled broadly when he saw me coming down the stairs; the immoderate width of his mouth made it hard for him to smile narrowly. We pumped hands in the vestibule, somewhat awkwardly, either for emotional reasons or because, having left my keys upstairs, I at the last second remembered to stop the fast-closing door with my left foot (resting demi-pointe, it might have looked to a fanciful observer), and as a result was slightly off balance. “I’m still taller,” he said. He was holding a yellowed pillowcase, presumably containing clothes and toiletries.

His American hatchback, also yellow and about a decade old, was filled, to an extent that would have frustrated visibility and fuel economy, with about a dozen square cardboard boxes filled with LPs. Loose LPs had been stuffed like Styrofoam sea horses in the car’s few unfilled spaces. Quite a few discs had slid out of their jackets—Wade always threw away the inner sleeves (the bunchy plastic ones he threw away with particular contempt)—and I mentally cringed at how roughly he stacked and fingered the unclothed vinyl, and how some of the discs had picked up flakes of peanut skin and other car-floor garbage. “These are just my country records,” he said. “I sold everything else—everything, barring the car and the contents of its glove box, and the road atlas and the clothes off my back, as well as the clothes off my feet, legs, groin, and head, and a sleeping bag that I intend to keep rolled up and stashed behind your couch indefinitely.” I nodded. “And the few items in this pillowcase,” he said, swinging the half-empty pillowcase till it wrapped one and a half times around his index finger.

Having forgotten to prop open the door, we had to buzz Wanda several times to let us in. She was a heavy sleeper like me. (These days I have trouble sleeping and suffer from nocturnal polyuria.) I staggered two or three ineffectual buzzes, then Wade stepped in to accelerate things. “She’s probably incorporating the sound into her dreams,” he said, buzzing with the resoluteness, I thought at the time (now I dislike the analogy), of a lab rat attempting to self-administer a drug, the supply of which has been depleted or removed. “Right now she’s dreaming of a reversing forklift,” he said. I caught a whiff of the sweat-abused sheepskin lining of my calfskin slippers, my mother’s last gift to me, it turned out, or last antemortem gift, since I did, only a few months later, begin to inherit some of her things. Wanda finally came down, squinted irritably through a quick introduction, and trudged back up to bed. “She’s exactly my height,” Wade said, palming the top of his head, extending his arm as if Wanda were still there to vindicate his estimate, then retracting his arm to scratch his head, whose hair, excepting one handsome gray cataract, was still shiny and black, as black as an Ad Reinhardt canvas in an attic at night, as black as the vision of the painted red door, the black of the blackest stereo component, the black that, like the song by Los Bravos,
is
black, with the same shoulder terminus I remembered, the same way of falling over his cheeks yet leaving most of his forehead rampart exposed, the same slicing part down the middle, like Geronimo, or Neil Young circa
After the Gold Rush,
James Taylor circa
Sweet Baby James
and
Two-Lane Blacktop.
(Although I see now from a photograph that Taylor’s part was softer than Wade’s.) “Exactly” went too far, but later I confirmed that Wanda’s and Wade’s driver’s licenses each read “6-2.” Of course, such numbers are self-reported, and my sense is that DMV agents challenge only the most outlandish misrepresentations.

“We’ve got a little storage locker in the basement,” I said, pointing to the record boxes. “About this time last year, I was
living
in a storage locker,” Wade said. “Just me and my sleeping bag, my books, my records, a few minor works of regional art—solitary refinement, you might say, a condition the NoDak aesthete grows accustomed to. Has the basement ever flooded?”

I didn’t know that history, so we humped the heavy boxes up to the one-bedroom apartment. Once inside he pulled a bootjack from his pillowcase and took off his orange-brown cowboy boots, then his fringed suede coat and flannel shirt. Underneath those layers he wore a faded blue bandanna and a black T-shirt that read, “Here comes one good-looking Indian!” a feather serving as the capital
I
in the word
Indian.
And he was, no question, exceptionally good-looking. I’d heard my mother say some bitter things about him. “A dirtbag,” for instance, and more colorfully, “the scum lurking under the ridge of a penis acorn.” But usually at the same time she’d recall his looks. “God, he was good-looking,” she’d say. He was macrocephalic, as movie stars are said to be. His jaw was almost squared, with a mild cleft. He had glassy, orangy skin, an aquiline nose, brown eyes under heavy lids. If one were to draw a circle between his arching eyebrows, one would have the simplest frontal rendering of a midsized bird in flight. I motioned to a seat on the couch, but he sat gingerly on one of the box towers, drinking tap water out of a filmy tumbler while I found him some couch-clothes, a pillow, and a scratchy, football-themed comforter mottled in ways redolent of male adolescence. (He didn’t bring his sleeping bag in the house till a few days later, and never used it.) I offered him the polenta Wanda had brought home a few nights earlier, and he ate from the glossy to-go box without complete decorum. He took out a lighter and an ornate metal pipe from his jeans. “There’s only one hit left in here, but I’ll pack more if you want,” he said. Uncharacteristically, I declined. He’d driven that day from Columbus, he said. “You must’ve left early,” I said. “I left late,” he said, “late last night. I have to stop all the time to piss, so I like to give myself a nice time-cushion. I almost hit a fawn outside Tomah. You’re not supposed to swerve, but I did, and it worked.” When he got up for more water, I read the back of his T-shirt (“There goes one good-looking Indian!”), and noted the saggy seat of his dull dark jeans, epigones of the faded and close-fitting yet not teasingly feminine Erizeins he had worn when I was a kid.

That’s more than I remember from that night. It was nearly twenty years ago. What was it Wade said? It was something like: “I’ve done a shitload of skinny-dipping in the River Lethe, taken in many mouthfuls.” He liked to blend the demotic and the fancy, liked to be imagined naked. In any case, I’ve done some embroidering, intentionally and unwittingly, and will continue to flesh things out with invented details and almost wholly reconstructed dialogue. My story is in part drawn from other stories, from the colored and conflicting stories that Wade and my mother told me, so in spots this book will be embroidered embroidery, in service, I hope, to some fundamental emotional truth, even if at times I fear that such foundations elude me. I’ve been said to be cold, passive, and evasive; a nonprofessional once spittingly diagnosed me with borderline adult autism, and while I trust she overstated the case, it does often seem as if I’m experiencing things at one remove, that my feelings, like an elusive sneeze, vex and tingle but don’t really come. The problem has worsened over the years; I haven’t cried in a decade; I don’t hear music in the same flooding way I used to. For a long time I blamed this growing coolness on everything that happened and all that I learned in late ’91, defined myself through those events and their numbing, sometimes twisting effects. I’m not sure yet whether writing this book will combat or continue this pattern, but I suspect it will only further blur and tangle my legitimate, fabricated, and passed-down memories, and I suppose that’s what I want. “Why are you people so
[the exact adverb escapes me] obsessed with the limitations of memory?” someone once asked me. I didn’t pursue whom she meant by “you people,” didn’t come up with an incisive rebuttal. It was she who was really on the defensive. I had challenged one of her stories, a rather too psychologically pat story, or a story imputing dubious and convenient motives to some ex-boyfriend or relative, a story from her deep, amnestic childhood, a story for which she seemed an unlikely primary source, a story derived from photo-album captions (“into dolls”), photo-album commentaries (“you loved that doll”), from movies or books, an epistemologically untenable (I argued) story of some type, patched together in some way, I can’t be more specific, in part because I can’t remember the story, only that I couldn’t accept it. Had it been cooked differently or with less certainty, I might have hidden my skepticism. “It’s my story!” she said, more than once, but that was precisely what I was trying to question.