I Was There the Night He Died (17 page)

“You mean your dad's?”

The creaking stops; I hear her flick her lighter once, twice, the third time getting the job done. “Yeah. His.”

“Where's your mum in all of this? If you don't mind me asking.”

“She's dead in all of this.”

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

“I thought you said you didn't like it when people said they were sorry your wife died?”

I pull from my bottle of wine. “I guess when the shoe is on the other foot it's easier to understand what the other person is feeling.”

“I guess it is.”

The swing set is creaking again. I take this as my cue to continue. “So it's just your brother and your dad and you.”

“The last time I checked.”

“So why did you say your parents make you see a psychiatrist?”

She's either thinking or toking or maybe both. Probably both.

“Habit, I guess,” she says.

I know what she means. “I know what you mean.”

“You do?”

My head says,
Shut up
, but my gut argues otherwise, argues that if you want this girl to tell the truth, you've got to give her back at least a little bit of the same.

“My wife Sara and I used to talk about everything. It used to feel like something wasn't real unless we discussed it. I remember coming home from her funeral and wanting to tell her about it, to go over what happened with her.”

“That makes sense.”

“It does?”

“After my mum died—I was fourteen—I used to get so disappointed that the sandwich in my lunch wasn't the peanut butter and banana on twelve grain bread that my mum always made.”

“Who made your sandwiches after that?”

“My dad.”

“You could have asked him to make them.”

“It wouldn't have been the same.” She takes a toke; I can almost hear her forcing the pot deep inside her lungs. “I don't know how she did it, but the way she made them was so good, and every time, too. She had her own way of doing it. Nobody else can make them like my mum did.”

“Sara used to wake me up if I was having a nightmare.” I can't believe I just said that. I lift my bottle and see that it's almost empty and start to believe it a little bit more. “Once, I had a dream she was leaving me for some other guy and I guess I was screaming in my sleep and she woke me up. She was the reason I was screaming and she was the one who stopped me.” I get up from the bench and go and sit on the swing next to Samantha's and take the joint from between her fingers. “Now when I have a nightmare I have to see it through to the end.”

“Do you ever … I mean, do you ever have nightmares about what happened? To her, I mean.”

“Sometimes. Less than I used to.”

“That's terrible.” She takes the joint back.

“It has its advantages, actually. I'm usually really mad when it happens—sometimes at her, most of the time just at the fact it happened—and it lets me
be
mad, to really let go and rant and rave until I wake myself up.”

“That's an advantage?”

“It means I don't have to be angry when I'm awake.” This time she doesn't wait for me to retrieve the joint, hands it to me as soon as she's done. “You need to be angry—I'll probably always be angry—but I don't want to live that way. No one ought to live that way.”

A woman bundled up in her scarf so tightly and with her toque tugged down so low and encased in a coat so big she almost isn't there scurries past us, her chihuahua as eager as she is to get where they need to go. I miss walking Barney, miss the easy virtue of doing a dog a favour. If we were in Toronto, the dog would be wearing a coat and boots likely worth as much as its owner's. Despite this, I miss Toronto too.

“Back in Oakville,” Samantha says, “some of my friends and I used to have bulimia parties.”

“That can't possibly be what it sounds like.”

“It was totally stupid. I was the only one who ended up going through with it. Everyone talked so big about how we were all going to drink lots of water and we were all going to do it—no backing out—but when it came time to start, I was the only one to even go into the bathroom. And when I came back out everyone was looking at me like I was some kind of freak. What total wanksters.” She tugs the hood of her sweatshirt forward on each side, flicks the roach onto the snow and sticks her bare hands into the pockets of her coat.

“That's one way of looking at it, I guess,” I say.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, maybe deciding not to force yourself to throw up isn't the worse decision a person can make.”

“You don't get it. We made a pact. It was supposed to be a promise between friends. You know, BFF, all that crap.”

“Maybe with friends like that … ”

She grabs her phone from the pouch of her hoodie and makes herself invisible with her thumbs. I don't know who she could be texting, she's never mentioned any friends or a boyfriend, but I don't want to lose her to technology. I'll give her what she wants, but I'll give it to her my way, the life of a poet with a guitar, but with a message from me delivered directly to her.

“Townes Van Zandt died tonight,” I say.

Samantha looks up from her phone. It's a start.

“Townes Van Zandt was a beautiful human being from the years 1968, the year of his first album, until 1978, the year of his last really good one. A mostly absentee father and quite often a nasty drunk and a dispenser of sweet and sour love depending on which way the wind blew, when he played his guitar and sang his songs, though, he was beautiful, he was perfect.”

“Sounds like someone has got a pretty bad man crush.”

Cynicism is preferable to sulking, so I keep going.

“He was like everybody—had advantages like being born rich, and disadvantages like being born rich and suffering from depression and undergoing electroshock therapy that left him with virtually no memory of the first ten years of life. But the thing, the main thing, is that your life and my life might be different from his, but it's still the same high, low, and in between, the same as it is for everyone all of the time everywhere.”

I lift the wine bottle, but it's got nothing left to give. I'm on my own.

“The music he made came from what Texas does best, glopping together all of the good stuff from folk and country and blues and with a generous peppery dash of good old, old America weirdness. I said once in a book I wrote that when so-and-so sang, he made a broken heart seem like an attractive option. I say it again now.”

“Okay,” Samantha says. “But where's the but?”

“What
but
?”

“There's always a
but
to your stories.”

“That's what makes them real.”

“Because they really happened, you mean.”

“No, because they're really real.”

Samantha replaces her phone with her bag of weed, and I allow her a moment to roll another number. She takes the time to look at the snow that's started to fall instead. I look at it too.

“But he hurt himself. With booze, mostly, although it's not just what you put inside yourself that can hurt you. And for someone who believed that a good song was rarer and more important than anything else in the world, worst of all was that he ended up hurting his music, went from being a deft finger-picker with hands like delicate spiders to a lackluster strummer, and his voice, which was once fragile but forceful, became whispery and croaky weak. I know that the songs he wrote and the shows he played during those ten teeming years are better and will last longer than anything I'll ever do, and what right have I got to toss pebbles at the sun, but it's sad to watch beautiful things turn ugly, is all. It's just really sad.”

It's still snowing. It looks like it might snow all night.

 

* * *

 

“Sam, I
strongly suggest
you
reconsider your decision.”

“Like I said, I just think we can do better.”

“And like I said, this is a very weak market right now, and I'm personally very comfortable with their counter offer.”

“That's less than what we wanted.”

“By only ten thousand.”

“Laura, I'm selling this house to help my father. It wouldn't feel right if I didn't get him everything I can.”

“Well, as it stands right now, you're not going to be getting him anything.”

I put the phone to my other ear.

“Look, Laura, I respect your professional opinion and I appreciate all the hard work you've put into this, but I'm going to have to say no, that's my final answer. Let's just keep showing the house and I'm sure we'll get our asking price soon enough.”

“
Keep
showing the house? Sam, only one prospective buyer has come to see it. And they're the ones who made the offer.”

“And I'm sure there'll be others.”

The phone is silent. I switch it back to my other ear.

“If it's relevant to the sale of the house, do you mind if I ask you a personal question, Sam?”

“Shoot.”

“Does this have anything to do with Rachel?”

“No. Why would it have anything to do with Rachel?”

“Well, I know you two have been seeing a fair bit of each other socially, and I wonder if maybe you might be delaying the sale of your parents' house so you'll have a reason to stay around Chatham a little longer.”

“Laura, I can honestly say I haven't given Rachel a single thought through any of this.”

“Okay, but if—”

“Honestly, I haven't considered her at all.”

“Okay.”

After I hang up, it occurs to me that I don't want to sound as indifferent to Rachel as I did, that I don't like how cold I came across. I hear the postman on the step and open the door in time for him to hand me my most recent eBay purchase, a pizza box-sized brown package with three new records inside, including a white label promotional copy of Gene Clark's
Two Sides to Every Story
. I can't wait to show it to Samantha. I'm sure she's never seen anything like it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Eleven

 

 

 

I've made my first minimum
payment toward my Visa bill. Sara and I had a policy that plastic was strictly for emergency purchases. This month's minimum payment alone is almost as large as any total balance that we'd ever incurred. I hate to give money away to a credit card company, but I don't have any choice. All Laura needs to know is that I'm not accepting the offer we received because I'm holding out for a better one, but the real reason I'm in debt is because Samantha needs to hear who died, Samantha needs to hear the stories I've got to tell.

Stories that I'm uncomfortably way ahead of schedule in writing, incidentally. I didn't intend to be this far along in finishing
Lives of the Poets (with Guitars),
it just happened. In a way, it's Samantha's fault that I'm almost done with what I don't want to be done with. I'd planned to stretch this project out until I was ready to write my next novel, a book that somehow has to incorporate Sara's death. It doesn't have to be about her, she doesn't even have to appear in it, but what happened to her and what it means to me has to find its way into words. You can choose where your book is set and who's in it and what they do and don't do, but you can't control what your book is about. My next novel could chronicle the uproarious cross-country adventures of Canada's reigning one-armed lawn bowling champion and his trusty monkey butler sidekick, but its guts would be about what it means to love someone and to lose someone and to have to go on living anyway. Problem is, once those guts get transplanted onto the page, that's where they'll do the majority of their living.

But Samantha needs these stories. In lieu of getting her to actually tell me why she cuts herself, I went on-line last week to try to understand why people in general do it. Everybody's bad news has its own inimitable tang, but apparently there are some things that are across-the-board bona fide for people suffering from her disorder. Like that cutting is basically a coping mechanism for stress, of which Samantha—with no mum, with a drunk for a dad, with a new school and town to adjust to, with university looming—clearly has. Like that the endorphins that the body releases when cut or injured feel good, and that people can actually become addicted to them when they're otherwise feeling emotionally bad. That some people cut themselves for an entirely different reason, to feel pain in order to feel more alive when they're prone to ordinarily feeling numb. That marijuana is a common form of self-medication since it tends to blunt the desire to self-mutilate.

Samantha needs these stories. I need to write them—would have written them anyway—but she needs to hear them. I need to write them now so I'll know what to say when I see her. She needs to know who died tonight. Who and how and what for.

I realize, of course, that this all sounds incredibly vain. Not that that's any surprise. I do, after all, tell stories for a living.

 

* * *

 

Even though I'm not going
anywhere for awhile, I still need to finish packing up my parents' stuff, so I'm at No Frills to get more boxes for the things I'm keeping and garbage bags for what I'm either throwing out or donating to the Salvation Army. While I'm here, I decide to pick up a few non-packing-related items, but get stalled in the bakery section, the kamut bread that Sara insisted we eat and that I'd ordinarily buy from the health food store down the street not a Chatham grocery store staple. My flesh started to fill out around the same time that hers started to fall, and every aging step of the way Sara would add or subtract whatever was necessary for our continued good and happy health. We used to joke how at least we weren't going to have to endure the encroaching Hospital Years alone, and that if I could put up with her going completely grey, she was willing to accept me wearing my pants chest-high.

Once I settle on a loaf of rye bread whose primary ingredient isn't rye but wheat, I head for the dairy aisle, where I spot Rachel standing in front of a refrigerated wall of egg cartons. I watch her select one, open it up, and inspect it. She's obviously just finished work, still has her teaching clothes on—matching blue blouse and skirt, simple silver necklace, sensible heels—but looks … weary more than simply tired. The dozen eggs in her hand make the grade and get placed in her shopping cart.

I duck back into the pop and chips aisle and ditch the bread on a half empty pretzel shelf and magnet toward the store's exit. Once I'm outside, I can't understand why I'm there. Walking home, all I can come up with is that it felt like I saw something I shouldn't have.

 

* * *

 

I feel it before I think it
, always an encouraging sign when the feeling is a good one. This one is a good one. My only concern is that the nurse who must have turned on the TV to the hockey game for my dad might have put it on a little too loud for some of the other, more sentient patients who might become agitated by it, I can hear it halfway down the hallway. I remember it's Saturday night, Hockey Night in Canada, hockey still hockey even if it's Maple Leafs hockey. Maybe they're getting thumped.

He sees me before I see him, springs up from the chair beside Dad's bed as soon as he spots me coming through the door. His arms are hanging at his sides like a long distance runner ready to race. Uncle Donny might be unforgivably selfish, but he's not stupid. At least not when it comes to his own self-preservation. He's probably expecting me to shout, so I don't.

“Where's the smart money tonight?” I say. “Whoever's playing the Leafs is probably your best bet.”

“I haven't made a wager in over a month. I go to Gamblers' Anonymous meetings twice every week.”

Uncle Donny viewed with suspicion any group or gathering larger or more organized than Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner with my parents and me, even tended to distrust his own union, used to complain how the big shots upstairs in the suits used to be decent guys when they were down on the line like everybody else, and that they had to be watched every minute now that they had their fingers on the purse strings. I have great difficulty imagining him standing up in some church basement full of strangers and announcing, “My name is Donny Samson and I'm a compulsive gambler.”

“And I never bet against the Leafs.” He says it like I'm supposed to be impressed.

“Well, that helps explain why you lost so much money, anyway.”

“I never once bet against my own team.”

“Congratulations. If you couldn't be loyal to your brother, at least you were a rock when it came to supporting the league's sorriest franchise.”

I look at Dad for the first time since I came in the room. If you didn't know what was wrong with him, you might think he was just another guy killing just another Saturday night watching the game, pleasantly bored while waiting for a goal or a fight or something to liven up his night, his life. Uncle Donny sees what I'm looking at.

“He knows when it's hockey, you know,” he says.

“Don't make me any more upset than I already am.”

He contemplates keeping his mouth shut; looks at the TV, then back at me. He licks his lips. “I don't care what you say—or what any doctor says either—I know he's the happiest he is when the two of us are watching the game.”

“The two of you.”

“That's right.”

“I can't believe I'm asking this, but do you mind enlightening me how you happen to know this to be true?”

Uncle Donny studies Dad's face for a moment. “I don't know. I just know it is. I just know it's true.”

Not only is he now an enthusiastic exponent of group therapy, he's also a mystical seer of others' ineffable states. This from the same man whose favourite game with me when I was a kid was to get me to follow his “one skin” with my own “two skin” succeeded by his “three skin” before concluding with the inevitable “four skin.”

“Yeah, well … ” I say and pick up the remote from the side table and click off the television to prove my point.

There aren't any visitors tonight except for Uncle Donny and me. The only sound now that the game is off is Mr. Goldsworthy in the bed across the room making a low, repetitive, monotone noise with his mouth closed that to someone who didn't know any better might sound like humming.

I look at the clock on the far wall. “The game was almost over anyway,” I say.

“I didn't say it wasn't,” Uncle Donny says.

 

* * *

 

The sun, the still industrious sun
, has done its daily thing, come and gone and given way to a black sky stuffed full of bright white stars. The ratio is right. One living life-giver is worth a billion dead suns, no matter how brightly they once shone upon a time. But some things are easier to do or say in the dark, so we need nighttime too. I'd waited for this evening's appearance while revising what I'd written over the last week, a chapter of
Lives of the Poets (with Guitars)
double dutying as a life lesson for Samantha. Art can't be didactic, but its manufacturers sure can.

I don't have to wait long on the park bench before I see her leave her house and cross the road and walk past me to the swing set. I give her time to take out her stash and light up and ask me who died. Instead, “Do you want some of this?” she asks.

I lift my bottle of wine without turning around on the bench.

“You know,” she says, “in certain cultures, it's considered insulting to turn down the offer of a communal toke.”

“What cultures?”

I hear her inhale, hard. “It's a big world. There've got to be some.”

I lift my bottle to my lips without swallowing, not wanting to appear a party pooper, but also not wanting to turn tonight into a party where I'm too pooped to say what I want Samantha to hear. I'd primed the oratorical pump with a few glasses of red wine before I left home, and I've got to be careful not to flood the engine.

“Whatever,” she says. “If you want to be an alky, it's your life.”

I want to answer back that I'm not an alky—at least not an alky like her father is, the one who's clearly scared her clear of alcohol—but I also want her to remain unawares and stay open to what I've written, so I take the seat next to her on the swing set and offer a peace sign that she completes by slipping the joint between my two fingers.

“Don't do it for me,” she says.

“I'm not. It's something you should know about me. I pride myself on my cultural sensitivity.”

I puff and pass it back and hope I've got enough brain cells to spare so that my head can handle being pleasantly muddled when I also need it to be serious and sharp.

“Gram Parsons,” she says. “Didn't he die tonight?”

In spite of being impressed, or at least surprised, that she knows who he is, “I don't do cover versions,” I say.

“It's a request.”

“I don't do requests.”

“You wrote a novel about him, though, didn't you?”

Now I really am both impressed and surprised. “Something like that. Did you read it?”

She takes another hit, passes me the joint. “I read
about
it. On your website.”

“Gee, I'm flattered. The whole website, or just selected parts?”

“Didn't you know that my generation has a tragically short attention span because of all the video games we play and the music videos we watch?”

“And my generation believed that if you didn't eat beef and drink two glasses of homogenized milk with every meal you risked getting sick, and that asbestos was the insulation of the future. That didn't stop us from reading a book without pictures now and then.”

“I believe they're called graphic novels, Grandpa.”

“We read comics too. We just felt guilty about it if we were still reading them when we were old enough to vote.”

And then I don't feel so smart anymore; feel a-okay with it, too, which is even worse, like if I just sit here gently rocking in this icy nighttime breeze long enough everything will take care of itself in time, quintessential stoner satori. This is the price of the happiness that pot begets. I'm okay, you're okay, let's microwave a frozen pizza.

“Do you ever see birds?”

I think that's what she says. “Did you just say, ‘Do you ever see birds?'”

“Yeah, I mean … I mean, I know there are birds, obviously, but … Do you ever
see
them? I don't think I ever remember seeing any. Not lately, I mean.”

I've got to act fast before I lose her.

“Janis Joplin died tonight,” I say.

“But I didn't ask you who died.”

“It doesn't matter. I'm telling you. Janis Joplin died tonight.”

“But it doesn't work that way.”

“It does tonight. Tonight, I'm telling you, Janis Joplin died.”

Before she can again object to my willful disregard of our unspoken
tête-à-tête
etiquette, I proceed to tell Samantha all about Janis Joplin. About how she was an overweight, acne-scarred high-school outcast from Port Arthur, Texas in the late 1950s—where and when being a high-school outcast was the real geeking deal—and how, just like the song says, her life was saved by rock and roll, except it wasn't rock and roll, but Bessie Smith and Leadbelly and Odetta and Big Mama Thorton records. How like thousands of other kids, she eventually migrated to San Francisco in the hope of fewer hometown hassles and more funky freedoms and how she found what she was looking for in a five-man blues-rock band that she stood in front of and which took their orders and inspiration from her because she was the actual reason everyone came out to listen—real rock and roll feminism. I tell Samantha how she screwed who she wanted to screw—men and women both, it didn't matter which, just as long as they were either attractive or interesting or, ideally, both. How she sang how she wanted to sing—ear-drum-bursting, heartache-healing, soul-stirring screams and whispers and sighing supplications. I tell Samantha how she might have worn feathers in her hair and kaleidoscope-coloured bell-bottoms, but she was still that same pimply plump high-school freak from Port Arthur, Texas, the one who forced the world to shut its big mouth and listen to what she had to say because, clearly, it didn't have the balls necessary to speak for itself. I tell Samantha how—and this is the part I've been building toward, this is what tonight is all about—everyone at one time or another drinks or smokes or sniffs or loves too much, but here's the thing, here's the thing to never forget: heroin is no win, and Janis knew it and did it again and again anyway, and she lost. She knew she had a problem, she knew she had a reason to live, and yet she died on a hotel room floor with the change for the cigarette machine still clenched in her right hand, she'd barely even tied-off before she hit the carpet.