Authors: Dylan Hicks
I
WAS DUE AT WORK BY NINE THE MORNING AFTER Wade’s arrival, but if I was following my normal schedule for days on which I worked the nine-to-six shift, I got out of bed about twenty minutes after eight. I wasn’t so much lazy as efficient: my showering and tooth-brushing were nearly symbolic; I hadn’t yet taken up coffee; and I wasn’t delayed by vestiary decisions, since I only had one pair of work pants (cavalry twills in Lake Michigan blue; at the time I thought they were called “Calvary twills”), one pair of work shoes (pastiche-cordovan loafers aged to a clownish red at the toes and heels), and four or five billowy button-downs, white or pastel and always dirt-checkered on the inside cuffs. Most days I made it to the corner—often with wet, sometimes freezing hair and an ersatz bagel in my hand or mouth, some crumbs dangling below my lower lip—in time to catch the bus that got me to work ten to fifteen minutes late. I worked in downtown Minneapolis at an unhip record store, a shabby, not terribly profitable branch of a locally based national chain, now shuttered. For the purposes of this book, I’ve been tempted to give myself a different early nineties job, something comparable to the record-store job in terms of status and remuneration, yet more fertile, original, and attractive. For example, I have an acquaintance, roughly fifteen years my senior, who makes hand-carved Judaica and Nativity scenes (his latitude and large collection of Coltrane bootlegs are just two of the things I admire about him), and there’s no reason I couldn’t have served, during the early nineties, as his assistant or paid apprentice. I’m picturing it now: the wood and so forth, the tools, the bench or what have you, the dusty tape deck playing Hedy West. Considering the work, it’d be natural for master and apprentice to talk of theology, philosophy, history, politics. An antimemoir of ideas might result, the carver playing Plato to Wade’s Diogenes. But no, it wouldn’t work. One must write the tedium one knows, on top of which the carver has never been in a position to hire help. My title at the record store was full-time keyholder.
That first morning of Wade’s stay, I had time to eat my bagel at the unsteady Formica table in our small dining room, which was also a library for some of my records, and an office, in that it lodged a sewing table on which Wanda and I kept a collegiate dictionary, its spine held together with packing tape, and a word processor, whose alien-green letters shimmered around their edges as I typed my mostly plagiarized and unpublished record reviews. From this axislike dining room one could potentially see into all four of the apartment’s other rooms, though on that morning I could see only a buttery sliver of the sun-lit bathroom and none of the bedroom, its door closed to give Wanda privacy from our potentially lupine guest. In the living room, Wade had thrown off my comforter and stripped down to his briefs, socks, and bandanna. The socks were the same shade of white but of unequal length. A thick patch of hair protected his sternum. His left leg hung over our spongy, thrift-store sofa, between whose back and cushions his right foot was burrowed; one of his hands rested atop his head (itself resting on the sofa’s arm, my pillow pushed to the floor) as if he were securing a hat (cowboy? beret? cockscomb?) from the wind. An apparently uncomfortable pose, of the sort Lucien Freud favors for his portraits of sleepers and recliners, though I wouldn’t have made that association then. Wade was even thinner than I remembered him—his spidery legs were especially arresting—but it wasn’t a druggy thinness. When I put on my coat, he roused, looked at me confusedly, smiled slightly, and asked a few groggy questions about my job. For instance: “What kind of keys do you hold as full-time keyholder?”
“The one for the front door,” I said. “And a few others.” I’d in fact been given more keys, duties, and privileges than the FTK was officially entitled to.
“That’s a start,” he said. “Later you’ll need the keys to the kingdom and the keys to the highway, maybe those of D and B minor.” He cleared his throat and spit some phlegm into his loosely tied bandanna. “I’m gonna be a deejay in Berlin,” he said.
“Berlin Berlin or Berlin, North Dakota?”
“Berlin Berlin. That’s what the records are for. I need to ship them over, over the world-sea. I’ll need some information about your post offices.”
“Okay,” I said.
“They’re bats for C&W over there, man,” he said, now sounding more awake. “Cowboys and Indians, swinging doors, sawdust floors. They can’t get enough.”
“They’ll have to self-destruct,” I said.
“Come again?”
“‘Disco Inferno.’”
“Oh yeah,” Wade said, “Tavares.”
“The Trammps, with two
m’s,”
I corrected. I was standing in the doorway, my right hand gripping the door’s exterior knob, my left foot already on the hallway’s indecisively Polynesian carpet. “Well, I should probably shove—”
“Bats for it, especially the Ossis. C&W speaks to them with particular clarity, of course. An old friend of mine runs one of the big stations in Berlin. They just switched to an all-country format, but expertise is scarce, you know, authenticity scarcer. Like everywhere. He says he’ll give me a slot the day I arrive.”
“You speak German?” I said.
“Sure, I was a German major,” he said. “I mean, I didn’t finish, but sure, I speak German. I spoke German when you were a kid.”
“Not to me you didn’t.”
“You wouldn’t have understood me.”
“You could’ve taught me the alphabet or something.”
“It’s the same alphabet.”
“Not exactly,” I said. “There’s that funny
B
and stuff.”
“That’s not a
B,
it’s a double-
s
.”
“I know what it is.”
My defensive tone birthed a short pause.
“You studied German?” Wade said.
“Not really. I took a couple years in high school. I tried French too, but …”
“No Sprachgefühl?” he said. I shrugged and started to say goodbye again, but he cut me off: “You think you’ll ever go back to college?”
“Maybe.”
“I’d advise against it, and against accepting any further promotions at your record shop. Is that a possibility?”
“Is what a possibility?”
“Further advancement at the record shop.”
“I’ll probably get to be assistant manager pretty soon.”
“Well, don’t get sucked in.” He sat up, pushed his hair out of his eyes.
“Sucked into what?”
“Money, status, home ownership, credentials, all that. Embourgeoisement looms.”
“I wouldn’t be able to buy a house on the assistant manager’s salary,” I said.
“Sure you would, eventually. Or it’ll lead to something else. You’ll become the manager, then—what?—district manager, area manager—”
“Regional manager, they call it.”
“Regional manager. Next it’s … that’s probably as far as you could go.”
“Okay, I should shove off.”
“Or the job’ll bore you back to college. You’re smart. No genius probably—I don’t mean that as an insult; I’m no genius either, and still kind of pissed about it—but you’re smart enough; you’ll want people to take you seriously.” He waved a hand like a cat trying to take down a bug. “But that’s exactly what you don’t want.”
As I was leaving, he got up, still in his underwear, to go to the bathroom or kitchen, and while I waited for the bus that got me to work a half hour late, I wondered how much of the day he’d spend undressed, and whether at some point I’d need but fail to put in a request for modesty.
F
OR SOME OF 1977 AND MOST OF ’78, I CALLED WADE my stepfather. He didn’t have a legal claim to the title; he was just shacking up with my mother, and wasn’t even doing that in earnest. He had a basement apartment below our two-bedroom, and while he spent much of his time upstairs, and the advantages of rent-sharing would have been felt by all, he never officially moved in with us. I suppose he would have had trouble fitting his store of records and books into our place, and in fact he kept all but his essential toiletries in his basement apartment, even kept a few items in his fridge and would often walk downstairs to get a beer, a TV dinner, or a cucumber, which to my mother’s amusement he ate uncut and suggestively, not bothered by the bitter, waxy skin. I turned seven during that period. I spent a lot of time listening to music and playing Odin or Pete Rozelle to teams of plastic, green-pedestaled football figurines that ran, stumbled, and waltzed on a vibrating metal field, their numbers stuck crookedly to their jersey backs by my undexterous young fingers. Every month or so my mother would let me pick out a forty-five from the Top Forty endcap of what was then Enswell’s leading discount store. I chose Melissa Manchester, Barry Manilow, Mike Sands, the Trammps (“I couldn’t get enough, so I had to self-destruct” still one of my favorite lyrical sequences), yet defied certain predictions by turning out prevailingly heterosexual.
Occasionally one of my friends would come over after school. Wade only worked his straight job twice a week, and one of those shifts was the Saturday graveyard, so he spent most afternoons in our living room—reading, dozing, watching TV, taking up most of the couch in a pose somewhere between that of an odalisque model and a park-bench hobo, or a sculpture of a park-bench hobo. He had a particularly artistic way of filling a couch, as I’ve perhaps by now overstressed. Sometimes he’d ask if my friend and I wanted a snack. He didn’t care if the snack was big and junky and likely to spoil our appetites for dinner. Other times, not only times when he was dozing, he wouldn’t even say hello.
After my friend and I were in my room, or out in the parking lot of the neighboring Lutheran church, a good spot for bike tricks, I’d say, “That’s my stepdad.” I don’t know if I came up with the euphemism on my own or if I was following my mother’s protective lead. On one hand, conceivably a hand of four fingers, Enswell was a live-and-let-live place with much lawlessness and iconoclasm in its past, a city whose knife-edged tent-town babyhood was led by unmarried railroaders and the scuffling demimonde they lured, whose adolescence found room for hopheads and rumrunners, blind pigs and cathouses. I’m told that for decades a red-light district thrived just a few blocks from the home Wade, my mother, and I shared, the women in spring and summer often sitting, like Rahab with Joshua’s spies, on their rented roofs, awaiting customers, but also just talking or comfortably not talking, sometimes calling out to other groups of two or three women on nearby rooftops, and maybe, I once imagined, finding some of the restorative grace described in Goffin and King’s “Up on the Roof,” so elegantly performed by the protean Drifters, lead singer Rudy Lewis battling the production’s dinky, quasi-Latin rhythm but not surrendering in full to a melancholy that, unchecked, would have destroyed the song. It’s after all not supposed to be a roof from which you might jump, but a roof that keeps you from jumping, by being a serious but not lugubrious place, a place where mindless cheeriness is as unwelcome as mad cruelty, a roof, then, that discourages jumping and falling, through gravity. So while that dinky, quasi-Latin rhythm is in fact terrible, without it Lewis might not have struck the right ambivalence, and the record might have failed, might not have become the sort that enlightens thousands on thousands of radio listeners, that unites the scattered lonely, that seems to sanctify the radios themselves, as “Up on the Roof” may have done, even in North Dakota (where the rats don’t really race and the sidewalk ballet seldom reaches a crescendo) in the fall of 1962, the same fall in which the Jaycees and other blight-fighting civic leaders got the red-light district slated for the bulldozer and wrecking ball.
On the other hand, Enswell was a conservative North Dakota city where, even by the late 1970s, unmarried cohabiting couples may have been sinners in some townspeople’s eyes, such as those belonging to my friends or, more likely, their parents, who, if given the choice, would have preferred to picture their kids being casually watched over by a stepfather instead of some mere boyfriend, long-haired and nearly jobless.
Since I was already lying about Wade’s relation to me, I don’t know why I didn’t just say, “That’s my dad,” the assumption my friend likely would have made had I, most wisely of all, passed over the matter in silence. More than once the stepfather fib invited unwelcome questions about my so-called real dad, whose identity was unknown to me. There weren’t so many friends to fib to, at least, nor too few. Then as now I was neither popular nor unpopular. My unusual handsomeness—really, alas, it’s a kind of electric cuteness—didn’t fully reveal itself till I was in my teens, and by then I’d taken on a tentative antisociality. Now I’m very lonely, an impermanent condition, I hope, not squarely resulting from unpopularity. “It’s a hell of a lot easier to be free of things than to be free of people,” Wade once told me, “but you’ve got to be capable of that too.”
He left us on Saturday, November 11, 1978, his ears no doubt still ringing from the previous night’s Bolling Greene show at the Enswell Municipal Auditorium. It was somewhere between seven thirty and eight o’clock when he left. I have a fumelike memory of watching him leave, of watching my mother upbraid the fat country singer in the havelock and bandolier, the men standing on our lawn, she standing on our stoop, I peering through the mail slot. Later, however, my mother insisted that I was hard asleep when the silver tour bus pulled noisily away, its scornful exhaust tones, augmented by a hard-to-attribute auroral whoop, still reverberating several minutes later through the dirty white sky. And that makes sense, since I was coming off a late night and was known to sleep soundly through noises louder than shouts and whoops, louder even than Detroit Diesel 6v-71s. Once during a thunderstorm, Wade carried me from my bedroom down to his apartment and put me in the caved-in middle of his hideaway bed, where I dreamed and drooled between my mother and him, reportedly staying as still as the dead throughout my relocation, staying nearly that still when the thunder got louder and then louder still, though I do remember waking up long enough to feel Wade and my mother holding heavy hands on my chest. In the morning I disbelieved there’d been a storm at all, till an exclamatorily headlined
Enswell Century
was laid next to my plastic, remotely porcelaneous cereal bowl, a Piggly Wiggly premium as I recall, decorated with irises, blueberries, and chubby-legged girls, their bonnets leaking blonde ringlets, the same bowl I used this morning for my sugar cereal. I inherited some of my mother’s things, as was said, such as the cereal bowl and several other things, though pride, impetuousness, or asceticism led me to refuse anything of much monetary value.