The Business of Naming Things (20 page)

Such interiority, once such a comfort, then such a danger, is, in its way, a comfort once again, though the means of achieving it, as an adult and not as a safe and daydreaming child, are toxic: We're talking about booze.

Liam has taken a potion on the way to his garage, where he keeps, unbeknownst to anyone, his Jeep—paid for in cash. The She never knew. The garage rent billed to his studio address, and fuck the insurance—he's careful, he needs to be discreet more than he needs to be protected—he pays for minimum coverage once a quarter, again in cash. If he hurts anyone, the aggrieved may get the place in Harrison. Life's a risk.

His potion isn't taken in much of a joint—not every place has the shutters up at 7
A.M.
, but Blue Ruin does, a place
named after a Prohibition bathtub gin that'd kill you, and situated in the shadow of Port Authority and a block from his cheap garage. Tracy's there, the barkeep, and she's been there all night, by the looks of it. Liam can see thin lines of grit in the creases of her neck. Two double screwdrivers and a black coffee from the next-door deli—no smokes, of course—and Liam is ready to go to the mountaintop. On TV he watches every bit of every moment of the looping shot in Paducah seen round the world. And now some believe Obama really was hit. Where is he? Fox wonders. They have a reporter at Walter Reed.

Fuck the president, thinks Liam. Where's my boy?

Turns out, by midday, Fox will be wondering that, too.

T
HE SUN SPILLS YELLOW
across the windshield—like chicken gravy, thinks Liam. He's navigating within the thickening Saturday-morning traffic, like a giblet—in chicken gravy, thinks Liam. The sun isn't yellow it's chicken—he's listening to Dylan, and Dylan for the moment covers everything—like . . . He won't do that. He turns the music off and switches to radio and reminds himself again that he still doesn't smoke. Oh, how cigarettes used to punctuate the road trips—life measured out not in coffee spoons but in Marlboro Lights—one per county he used to try to do—city, Westchester, Putnam, Dutchess, Columbia, and so on, but always doubled up on each, at least. Still, it was worth the effort. Living longer now, look out! He is over the Spuyten Duyvil bridge now and had better pass that belching panel truck. He gets winding along at better speed and on into rocky Riverdale, light glancing through the bare trees. He realizes he is still scanning through stations on FM mindlessly—without hearing, anyway—and
begins to listen. NPR will have something—would it be all-day coverage? The welfare of our president, and the search for the would-be assassin, full team coverage. This should be good, thinks Liam as the back vent of his old tweed coat flaps at him like a signal of hello in his mind, and he wonders, How? What if? No. The road banks and torques under a stone bridge, and a block of Tudor homes crisscrosses in his vision. He can hear Scott Simon, still misses Daniel Schorr, and his heart is pounding and the car is stopped and steaming and there is a rocky outcrop with a bush and a Gristede's bag caught in it right in front of him. His face is hot and he hears something strange, like a little boy's voice asking, Are you okay, Dad? Are you okay? Or is it, Are you a hockey fan, then? Are you a hockey fan, then?

When he wakes up, it is with a sense of embarrassment—it is the embarrassment of drool on his chin that has roused him to consciousness and the sight of a young man's face framed with unruly hair—What are they called? Dread something. He can't think—looking right at him, his eyes speckled and bright with youth, and he is asking if he is okay.

I don't know, says Liam. Who are you?

You took a bad turn, says the kid. This ain't the road here. It's like a little service road, just from here to right over there. Some kind of turnaround. You okay?

No answer.

Your Jeep looks okay. The brush and stuff slowed you down. You almost killed me, though!

No answer.

Listen, sir, you okay? The cops'll be here quick, if you want that.

That gets Liam's attention, and he grips the steering wheel hard and winces in pain, like he'd been grabbed by something
steel. Both wrists screaming, now held limp before him like dead animals.

You must've sprained 'em, said the kid.

No answer.

T
HERE
'
S A HOSPITAL UP HERE A BIT
, says the kid, who is driving now.

No no no, says Liam. What?

You need a hospital, for your mitts. And a garage, for the Jeep, or both.

No answer.

What I need—should anyone ask!—the kid says it as a theatrical aside, half over his left shoulder, as if there was a passenger behind him, offstage as it were—and Liam realizes with a shiver that the kid is narrating himself.

Did you say,
as the kid says as a theatrical aside?
asks Liam.

Hey, he speaks, says the kid, says the young man.

Pull over, says Liam.

I won't. Can't. Not here. No room on the shoulder. That was your mistake, Pops.

Hey, the kid continues, looking at the old man, I called you pops, and you got a bump on your head.

I
T
'
S A LITTLE HOSPITAL IN
E
LMSFORD
, the parking lot, and Liam is standing beside the Jeep, bent over, vomiting. Like chicken gravy, he thinks to himself, and then says it aloud, straightening up, laughing.

I'm an asshole, he says, looking skyward, whispering it. The sky is far and gray, and he looks into it, blinking away the shards of tears on his eyelashes. He tries to travel mentally,
projecting himself, such as he is, as an entity higher and higher into the upper atmosphere, seeing that little sad tableau below—a red Jeep poorly parked in a half-empty parking lot with two chaps standing either side of it, looking lost. Not even a father, not even a son.

He's feeling better.

T
HEY ARE HAVING A DECENT BREAKFAST
at the El Dorado Diner in Elmsford. They are almost out of the city, almost across the Hudson. Almost gone, Liam is. And he really rallies, over a short stack and scrambled eggs. The kid has a chef's salad and a seltzer. Liam considers a Bloody Mary—he could use it—but decides for the moment, his breast flushing with pride, that he will not corrupt the youth—or his driver.

The kid says his name is Henry Gibson—at which point Liam orders a Bloody Mary.

Did you say, you did, Henry H-E-N-R-Y Gibson?

Yeah, Pops.

Not Henrik Ibsen. Hen-Ree Gib-Son?

Yeah. It's a simple name.

It is, it is. But it sounds like—do you know what a homophone is?

An instrument?

No, no. You're a sweet kid, Henry. No. I just saw a play last night by Hen-Rick IBB-sen. A great Norwegian playwright. Say it fast—say your name fast.

Interesting. The kid picks around at the curls of ham that sit atop his salad. Liam draws on his Bloody Mary. This is not that interesting, to the kid.

It gets worse.

Did you know—of course you wouldn't know—that when
I was your age there was a comic—he was from around Philadelphia—who took the name Henry Gibson in drama school because it sounded like, it was, a spoof on Henrik Ibsen, the playwright.
A Doll's House
, stuff like that. And the play I, er, we, saw last night. By the unexciting name
John Gabriel Borkman
.

The kid drums his right-hand fingers on the tabletop, but silently.

No. I mean no, I didn't know that.

Spicy, Liam says, trying a weak whistle. The vodka brightens his eyes. His mood. His hands still hurt, but a little less. His head still throbs, but a little less. He jumps up—somehow renewed—and grabs sections of the
New York Times
spread out on the adjacent sit-down counter.

So, who do you like in the game tomorrow, kid?

The Super Bowl. I don't care much. I play music.

Liam is plowing into his pancakes, his palate absolutely alive from the spicy tomato juice. He's never tasted pancakes this good—and from the El Dorado Diner, no less. I like Green Bay. I've got a hundred units on 'em. I gave the points, he mumbles to himself, distracted.

What do you mean, you play music? Liam notices a stout waitress lingering, with a look on her face that says she's spotted a pederast, or doesn't like the look of a slight black kid having a meal with an older white gentleman. Crime's all over—and in her precinct! He puts down the sports section.

I play, man, the kid says, and then hauls up a black trumpet case, holds it there for a second, and then returns it to a spot under his chair.

Oh really?

I'm on my way to Montreal, to see Roy Hargrove. Do you know Roy Hargrove?

Liam nods and smiles and leans back. He wants to just listen, as does, apparently, the waitress, who busies herself at a nearby table.

But the kid returns to his salad.

Well, then, what about Roy Hargrove? says Liam. No, I don't know
anything
about Roy Hargrove. Tell me.

He's my teacher is all. A great, great horn player. He's taught me a lot. And that's why I was hitchhiking on the Saw Mill. To get to Montreal. He's playing at the Monument National, Sunday night. Tomorrow. He's left a ticket for me.

L
IAM IS CHARMED AND WARM
and getting comfortable in the front passenger seat of his Jeep. He's asked to see Henry's driver's license, and Henry, producing a legitimate Delaware card, has agreed to chauffeur them north, as that's where they both are heading, though Liam has a destination short of Montreal. At least it will get Henry, they figure, four-fifths of the way there.

The kid's got quite a story, and a lot like Hargrove's. Hargrove played trumpet in the high school band in Waco, Texas, back in the eighties, when Wynton Marsalis visited the school. He spotted the young man, then sixteen, and got him a scholarship to Juilliard. It was Hargrove twenty years later, visiting a YMCA in Philly, who spotted Henry, and worked the same magic. Henry's family was poor, and living and studying in New York, even on scholarship, has been tough.

Henry is eighteen, according to his license, born on the Fourth of July. Like Satchmo, Liam thought.

Liam then told the kid everything he knew about jazz.

W
HICH WASN
'
T MUCH
. He only knew the stories. He didn't know anything about the music, all the stuff the kid knew. He knew Charlie Parker—Liam listened to Phil Schaap's
Bird Flight
for years, the entire chronology of the recorded Bird, but wouldn't know a chord change from a key change—though he knew that it was Bird's changes that made him a legend. But he went on.

Now kid . . .

I invented you as a plot device, says Liam as Henry turns cautiously back onto the Saw Mill River Parkway. Now I can drink and drive, and still keep myself on the right side of the law—most worthy of the sympathies I hope to attract. It's my genius, you see: I drink;
you
drive.

XIII

H
E TRIED TO TELL HIS STORY
in several voices. He could never find one. The first person was his first choice and the obvious one—this is my story. The
I
has the authority of firsthand experience of the tale to be told; incident and emotion are conjoined in the one, the first. There's no guessing at how love or pain affects the
I
; for I will tell you. And life's early stories are filled with emotion and a kind of amazement at emotion—a thrall—to feelings that are being felt for the first time; the early stories are filled with accounts of events experienced for the first time. It's the coming of age and its first voice is often first person.

That's not to say that one outgrows the first person and then it is of the past. And he did not believe that, as, on the contrary, the first person and the novelty of experience appealed as an option for the telling throughout his life. And every time, from first to last, he discovered that, perhaps for want of genius, perhaps not, his story was not his own; he
did not possess himself or his tale. Because there were more people in his story that were not him. What could
I
tell about them? And who cared to know the limits of what
I
knew?

Third person suggested itself, and often did so first. A thousand times abandoning the first will eventually recommend you start somewhere else. A dog would do it. And so would he. Like now. The spirit of some intelligence, disembodied, grazing over incident and time and conveying what happened, happens, and is said or thought or felt. But third person, in the end, is always too scary. It is like a hand grenade in the pantry. It has too much power; it might go off. If it knows everything, then what doesn't it know? And wouldn't it always have to tell? If it doesn't know, why doesn't it know? What is it? How can the authority of a story being told reside in an unknown force? Who made it God? Is it a device or is it an ideology? Is there a person in third person? And what's he doing in my kitchen? The kitchen is mine.

Frustration leads to the final choice—the second person. This is death. This is the intimate accusatory voice—sharp and deadly whether accusing the self or others: “You are the body and the blood.” Really, who says so? You?