Lit Riffs (14 page)

There is a dog walker with seven dogs—two dachshunds, a beagle, a golden retriever, a pit bull, a Burmese mountain dog, and a mutt. Bits of plastic fly through the air as the hard hat hits the bottom of the fountain and the dog walker can’t help himself—he lets go of every leash and brings his arms across his face and the dogs run for it, shaking the water off their bodies as they go, breaking out in all directions.

Red is still waiting for the safety catch. He wonders at the length of the rope. The wind is tearing at his legs, blowing so strongly against him that he thinks for a moment it is holding him up. Red stretches then, reaches his hand out, and it knocks against the side of the building and he hears his fingers snap. The world is moving toward him like someone opening their arms, wider and wider until he can’t see anything else.

The second splash booms.

Police sent to investigate the lunch cart pull out their yellow plastic tape and quickly circle the fountain. For good measure, they also place two sawhorses on the sidewalk. They radio for an ambulance and fire trucks. They spread out to find the dogs.

The tourists finish taking pictures and climb onto their bus. The street vendors hide around the corner, their stolen goods wrapped up in blankets. The homeless men of the church slide their cardboard signs out of sight. The woman in the pink suit has removed her jacket. She holds it now in the breeze, waving it back and forth like a flag. She has fifteen minutes to dry out.

The owner of the kebab stand drops his frozen meat and stares at the scaffolding, still dangling at the top of the building. It is a tooth hanging on by a thread. The fire trucks arrive. They park on top of an abandoned case of plastic frogs and the toys splinter across the street, all broken eyes and webbed toes. The firemen pile out, hook up hoses, roll their ladders. They ask what happened and are told: cannonball. The dogs are collected. The pizza boy moves on. There are more pedestrians coming down the block. More taxis and buses and limousines and motorcycles. The police swing their arms and keep it all moving. Some people crane their necks at what is floating in the fountain. Others simply dodge around this new thing standing still.

author inspiration

“Milestones” is one of my all-time favorite pieces of music. The energy is like a busy street in New York City, all that motion and franticness, where your eye pauses and begins to follow one person, one story, before it gets caught up in the bustle again. One section in “Milestones” made me think of a man falling, and another section made me think of a man rising, which is why Red is falling and John is going up in the elevator at the same time. I was interested in personal vertical movement, in comparison to the horizontal movement of the street. I also tried to follow Miles Davis’s structure, using the solos as moments to go into the lives of the characters before they get caught up in the music again and are lost.

neal pollack

I
was underneath my 1967 Chevy pickup when I found out that Blake had died. It was a slow resto job, but it didn’t matter because I loved that car. I’d already pulled the original 283 and put in an ’86 350 four-bolt, block-bored .030 with high-compression TRW pistons. I couldn’t decide what impressed me more: the custom Corvette cam that I’d transplanted from an L82 or the Edelbrock performer manifold with a 650 CFM carb that I’d so carefully restored. Well, now I was installing a high-volume oil pump, and nothing was going to stop me.

“Isn’t that right, Lyman?” I said to my basset hound.

Lyman looked up. I put out a grease-stained hand for him to lick. He obliged. Then he went back to chomping on his pig’s ear.

I rolled myself out. It was time for a cold Tecate, and a new album on the boom. It’d been a while since I’d listened to that Townes Van Zandt tribute for cancer survivors. I’d also been eyeing volume two from the Gram Parsons compilation reissue boxed set.

My cell phone rang. It was Randy.

“Rick, where are you?” he said.

“In the garage.”

“Oh, man.”

“What?”

“Blake’s dead.”

I was silent.

It’d been a while since the death of a friend of mine.

“Fuck,” I said. “How?”

“He was on the Kennedy. Tires blew out on his Ford Explorer. They found his head on the median.”

I sobbed a little into the phone. But I adjusted myself quickly. Blake didn’t like it when we cried. Blake had been a man. He’d partied like a man. He’d played his vintage Hank Martin Stratocaster like a man. And we were going to send him out like a man.

“Let’s start planning the funeral,” I said. “Come by tomorrow.”

“Totally,” Randy said.

I went inside and had a stiff shot of bourbon, Gentleman Jack, superpremium. Sad times meant breaking out the good stuff. It was hard for me to think about anything, so I turned on the computer. So many digital photos to look at. There we were, me, Randy, and Blake, at South By Southwest, with our cowboy hats on. That’d been some party in the park. The Drive-By Truckers played before anyone had heard of them. We stayed up all night doing Stooges covers with Alejandro. Blake was so happy. He’d always said that the best festival parties were the ones that the A&R people didn’t know about.

I scrolled to a photo of Blake singing “I Will Always Love You” at Big Lula’s Ukranian Village Cowboy Karaoke Night, and I got a little choked. Did you know that Dolly Parton wrote that song originally? Well, she did. “It was a real good tune,” Blake used to say, “before the wrong people got hold of it.”

I was starting to get some good ideas for the funeral.

The doorbell rang. It was the UPS guy. I’d ordered a bunch of corrugated tin. A lucky break had landed me this installation gig for a sculpture garden in Lawrence, Kansas, but now my friend was dead, and my project could wait. The tin would have other uses.

I wanted to do a sculpture for Blake, starkly beautiful and really cool, completely representative of his tastes and interests. Blake always said he loved my work, particularly the Wilco album cover I’d designed and they’d rejected. Blake said mine was better than the one the band had finally chosen.

“Don’t do business with Tweedy,” Blake said. “You’ll always end up getting hurt.”

Blake was an honest man and I wish he wasn’t dead.

Randy and I planned one other funeral. Back in 1992, a guy named Gary got shot in the stomach. He was riding his bike on Irving Park, coming back from a rehearsal of a Brecht play he was directing. The shot came from nowhere, and they never found the shooter. There was a lot of blood. Gary died in the ambulance.

We’d known Gary at Northwestern. He was the biggest Nine Inch Nails fan in the world. One time he came back from spring break and said he’d partied with Trent Reznor in Jamaica. None of us believed him, but he had the photos to prove it, and from then on, it was nothing but “bow down before the one you serve” in our dorm.

Naturally, Randy decided to throw Gary a Nine Inch Nails funeral. There’d never been a dead guy in our life before, and we wanted to mourn properly. Gary’s girlfriend thought it was a good idea, so we sent out invitations telling people to wear leather and chains. “Prepare to Be Dominated,” the invitations read, “As We Celebrate Gary’s Life.”

It was a crazy S&M party. We invited the rat lady, and she brought all her animals, including a mongoose and some kind of miniature lynx, and I had Cynthia Plastercaster bring her mold of Reznor’s dick. The dancers in cages were a nice touch. A guy we knew from the Fireside Bowl scored us a smoke machine. Sergio from Weeds donated a case of tequila. Best of all, we hired a DJ who knew the Nails, and he had Reznor make a tape saying, “Fuck you, Gary. Meet you in hell in about twenty-five years.”

I got a couple of girlfriends out of that night. Not like I meant to, of course, and neither relationship turned serious. But sometimes grief makes people close.

This all came to mind while I was thinking about how to send off Blake. Randy came over. I broke open some Knob Creek. We played my Xbox and shot around some ideas for the Blake gig.

“Maybe we should do it at The Roundup,” I said.

“Nah,” said Randy. “They had two memorial services there last month, plus the diabetes benefit.”

“Right,” I said.

“What about Bill and Sarah’s Record Barn?” he said.

“Too small.”

We sat around for a while, listening to Whiskeytown. Randy poured himself a double, and I had a beer to go along with my shot. He scratched himself through his cowboy shirt.

“Pig roast,” he said.

I said, “Yes.”

The building I live in now used to be a Mexican-owned autoparts store before I bought it. That was back in 1996, so I got a really good deal. My realtor scored me a big lot behind the house. I fenced it in so the neighbors wouldn’t steal my outdoor art, built a patio, bought a couple of used picnic tables, started growing tomato and weed, put up some trellises.

Blake said, “Man, you need yourself a barbecue pit.”

Everybody back in Kentucky had them, he said. There was nothing like slow-roasted meat and good-old country banjo picking. They used to roast pigs at his prep school all the time. So he came over one afternoon with a shovel and a bundle of hickory, and we dug.

It was a beautiful pit.

“We’ve gotta have a pig roast,” he said.

That first roast was all Blake’s idea. We started calling some bands we knew. They’d get free beer if they played, we told them. Word got out on our email lists that we’d have a prize for the best-looking pair of overalls.

Blake carved the tops out of some leftover beams I had in the garage. He said the centerpiece of the party would be table-saw races; people could trick up their saws however they wanted and cut them loose on the track. We provided the electricity; the ones that went the farthest without breaking won. Blake made the call on my PA: “Oh, yeah. It looks like The Virginia General is gonna win the first ever Pig Roast Table-Saw Race, right here in the heart of Pilsen! We’ve made some crazy table saws, that’s for sure!”

On the day of the party, we went to a slaughterhouse in Back Of The Yards and came home with a prize hog. We tossed it in the pit with the wood and coals and slammed shut the cast-iron doors. The article in the
Reader
about our party said, “The highlight came when they opened up the pit and the hog appeared in all its apple-mouthed glory.” There were nearly a hundred of us. We slapped that hog up on a table and picked away; I’ve never had meat so tender or satisfying. In later years, people started coming to the roast because they’d heard it was cool, not because they really belonged there. But the first-year people knew we’d been part of something great, and every one of us wore our First Annual Pig Roast T-shirts proudly.

So of course we had to have a pig roast to remember Blake. He deserved the party of all time. His death had made us very sad.

The bands from the scene all agreed to play, even Washboard Billy. The musicians donated money so we could rent a stage. We got a beer sponsor. Randy made some calls and the radio station from UofC agreed to carry the music live. A lot of people I knew were having kids now. I even set up a play area for the kids, with a magic show, and piped-in kids’ music.

We knew Blake’s funeral would be a success, but we weren’t prepared for just how successful. The roast was supposed to start at three. People started showing up around noon. I was glad that twenty or so of us—his really close friends—had stayed up drinking the night before, because it was obvious that we weren’t going to have much of a chance to talk.

We had to make a keg run early. By 5 p.m., my backyard was just brimming. I couldn’t believe that Steve Albini showed up, and the guys from Tortoise. Blake had some Mexican friends, too, so we had a norteña band playing
cumbias
on the sidewalk as everyone came in.

Randy got onstage with his band, Hellhound Hayseed. He played the guitar, and there was a drummer and a stand-up bassist. Washboard Billy, to everyone’s surprise, was there with them. Randy leaned into the microphone.

“This one’s for Blake,” he said. “He was the goddamn best guy, and he’d want you to eat some pig.”

The crowd went nuts.

The bassist played a few notes. The drummer started in. Randy sang Blake’s favorite song, like he did every Monday night at the Roundup:

Jug of wine
Jug of wine
I’m gonna drink another
Jug of wine.
When I’m with you,
I feel fine,
Without you I’m just fixin’
To drink another
Jug of wine.

Oh, jug of wine
Jug of wine
I’m gonna drink another
Jug of wine.
Our love is dying
On the vine
And so I think I’ll go home
To drink another
Jug of wine.

I grabbed the nearest girl and started to dance, even though this wasn’t much of a dancing song. It was just hard without Blake. I needed to feel close to someone. Randy sang, and the crowd sang along:

Oh, jug of wine
Jug of wine
I’m gonna drink another
Jug of wine.
My baby drank
Some turpentine
And so I think I’ll go home
To drink another
Jug of wine.

“The pig is ready!” I heard someone shout. “The pig is ready!”

And there it was, in the pit, a really beautiful forty-pound hog. The people were starving, I guess, because they didn’t even let us get it onto the table. I turned the crank and it rose above ground level, still on the spit. Hands started flying, tearing at the skin. Even the table-saw races stopped. Everybody was gathered around the pig, grasping, groping, and shoving little globules of fat into their mouths. There wasn’t nearly enough food for everyone. Blake would have probably thought it was funny.

Over by the back door, I saw an old couple. The woman was small and kind of stooped. She wore a nice pair of dark slacks and a black, frilly blouse. The man had on a navy blue pin-striped suit. His hair was slicked and austere. They were the only people at the party not in jeans. But they were my guests, so I had to greet them.

“Howdy!” I said.

“We’re the Rosens,” said the woman.

“Who?”

“Blake’s parents,” the man said. “You invited us. We came from Lexington.”

“Sure!” I said. “Sure! Blake’s parents! Wow! Come in. We’re almost out of pig!”

“We don’t eat pig,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “We’ve got coleslaw.”

“I’m not so hungry,” said Blake’s mom.

“Of course,” I said.

Randy and Washboard Billy launched into their cover of “Mind Your Own Business.”

“I love this song!” I said.

Mrs. Rosen started to cry. Her husband put an arm around her. She seemed to get swallowed into his suit.

“If it makes you feel any better,” I said, “we used to have parties like this pretty often. Blake was real happy and fun and had all kinds of friends. This was his favorite kind of music.”

The mother just kept crying. Blake’s father stroked her hair. He looked at me with pity.

“Blake was our son,” he said. “We don’t care what kind of music he liked.”

“Oh,” I said.

God! I was so dumb. I hadn’t even thought about it before. These were real people, Blake’s parents. It wasn’t about a scene or a pose or what kind of a turnout you could get at a funeral. Regular people work all day. They don’t have time to plan parties or think about the most appropriate song for any occasion. I looked at Blake’s parents and thought, now that’s how to mourn. That’s ordinary folk and how they feel. That’s what they sing about in country music, at least the old country music, not the synthetic stuff that comes out of Nashville now. And that’s what was missing from my own day-to-day life. Blake was a real person. They don’t come around that often.

It’s been a few days now. I’ve cleaned up from the party and cut out the newspaper clippings. I’m putting them into a scrapbook that I’ll send to Blake’s mom.