Читать книгу Stone Arabia - Dana Spiotta - Страница 12

DECEMBER 31, 2003–JANUARY 1, 2004

I arrived at Nik’s bar shortly before midnight. I call it Nik’s bar, but it isn’t. It is Dave’s Bar. This marginal establishment—broken stools, gum-stuck linoleum floor tiles, dirty bathrooms, expensive speaker system, heavy pours—has been a functioning bar for three decades, with Nik working there, on and off, for most of those years. While the New Year announced itself in beer and blurry kisses, I sat, on my own, on the other side of the bar from Nik. (It is easy to recall the start of the year because of the holiday. A holiday helps to place you. Memory technique #1, use Dates as Placeholders in your brain. All calendars are simply ancient arbitrary mnemonic tools for the culture. We will take Pope Gregory’s version and move on.) Naturally 2004 was a leap year—already a bad sign, as far as I was concerned, and I was deeply concerned. New Year’s Eve is a rough holiday even in the best of years. 2004 whiffed bad from the get-go.

At midnight Nik would put on the Rolling Stones’ “Dead Flowers.” The song is easy to recall because he played it every year at midnight. Which also makes the actual night difficult to recall, as all the moments hearing that song run into one another, indistinct, uniformly soundtracked. He poured some drinks. He keyed up the song. He poured himself a drink. He let the bar crowd start counting down the seconds until midnight. He poured more drinks. It is just a sloggy old bar, so mostly it was beer and shots and not a lot of complicated cocktails, but this year I saw he struggled to get all the rounds done in time so he could attend to the music and the countdown. He did this and I watched him, sort of hoping to talk for a moment. Although I hadn’t had much to drink, I was feeling a little sentimental about my big brother. I had listened to his latest CD, a seasonal release called Caroles and Candles by his band the Pearl Poets. The Pearl Poets were a side project of Nik’s in which he used the one-name pseudonym Mason. They were a moody folk trio—Mason, Mark, and Chris—but actually all of the parts were voiced by Nik. They all lived together at Tottenham Cottage in North London. They sang pristine Celtic-style layered harmonies, Nik managing all of this with his old Tascam four-track. The first Pearl Poets album, Sylvan Shine, was released in 1980. It was a concept electric folk record. All the songs on that album had sky-related titles: “Aurora Borealis,” “Corona,” “Fata Morgana,” “Airglow,” “Brocken Bow,” etc. The second album, Suites for the Sweet, took ten years to produce. It featured original and traditional folk songs with electric arrangements. As I recall from the liner notes, Nik used lots of fiddle and unusual time signatures. I didn’t think it was nearly as good as the first one. This current seasonal release of obscure traditional carols and a few original ballads was the third Pearl Poets album, and although the concept was a bit stretched at this point, it had been so many years since the last one it seemed fresh. A reunion Christmas album to cash in, I guess, was how he would describe it in the Chronicles. I loved it, and I was eager to report the details of my admiration. At least a superficial report, a first pass at it. But he was busy, and then we were right up against midnight. He drank his shot, “Dead Flowers” came on, the whole bar started singing along. He gave me a sloppy kiss on the cheek, his lips wet with bourbon, and I waited until he turned back to the bar before I wiped the wetness off my cheek with a bar napkin, quickly, and then returned the napkin to the bartop, where it found a wet spot and began to darken.

I suppose as I sat there in the early-morning hours of 2004 I might have been contemplating the previous year. I probably couldn’t recall much—now I can’t even recall if I recalled much. But my memory concerns hadn’t reached their peak yet. My semi-obsessive interest in how my own memory functions would top out about a month later. All of that had begun with my mother’s memory issues, which had really kicked in in the last few months of 2003.

Maybe, though, as I sat at the bar, I thought of Ada, and maybe I tried to picture her in New York, at a party. Which would have been nice. But sooner or later I have little doubt that my thoughts turned to my mother’s mind. It is the kind of thing that occurs to you in the marginal moments of your life: during a commercial, a shower, in the fraught minutes before you fall asleep. Or when you sit at a bar, waiting for an arbitrary holiday marker to pass. You suddenly remember how badly she was failing and it deflates you, just takes the air right out of you. So I was probably thinking of her mind and memory, but I can’t be sure, because I cannot recall anything except the song and the kiss and the cocktail napkin on the bar.

This is one of the reasons I am so squeamish about looking back. Can I even do it? Can I be accurate at all? I have discovered how much memory can dissolve under pressure. The more I try to hold on to my ability to remember, the more it seems to escape my grasp. I find this terrifying. I have become alarmed at my inability to recall basic facts of the past, and I have worked to improve things. I have been studying various techniques and even tricks, and I should employ them. Memory, it seems, clings to things. Named things. Spaces. Senses. I even tried the old trick (memory technique #2, use Rhyme and Stories) where you apply a little poem to things you want to remember. A little nonsense thing, like His name is Ed and his nose is red. Or Bob’s birthday is 11-9-63, ’63 is when Kennedy died, 119 is 911 backward. So Kennedy’s assassination was an emergency is what you have to remember. And truly this stuff works, somehow giving your brain little games of association to help it organize its input. But there are two problems with this: I don’t want to fill my head with stupid games. In the time it takes to think up this stuff, I mean, your life is going by. I just hate it too much, I’ll just write down Bob’s birthday, seriously. And that is the other problem. I don’t want to remember someone’s name or some date. That is the kind of skill a politician needs so he can be fast with hundreds of names. That is an imprinting technique for the future. I’m not interested in that (there are only a handful of names in my life). I’m thinking about past events. I’m interested in recall, exact recall, of what was said, who said it and to whom. I want to know the truth, undistorted by time and revision and wishes and regrets.

Shortly after midnight, Nik did not notice the now smushy bar napkin or the wet spot it indicated. He lit a cigarette and leaned on the ledge of the back bar. He still had all his hair and he could shake it from his eyes, and I guess that made him seem youthful at first. But a closer look revealed how not-young he had become. As he inhaled, he squinted and his face revealed every frown and grimace he had ever made, every cigarette he had ever smoked. He hunched in his black T-shirt and his thin body humped at his belly. It looked as though a tight wedge of flesh had been appended to his middle. He still had muscle tone in his skinny-guy arms, but his sloped posture, which in the past gave him a blasé and phlegmatic glamour, now simply accentuated his paunch. He did not care, or seemed not to care, about his drinking belly or his general, considerable decay. He did not care that his hands shook when he lit his cigarette. He did not care when his conversation was brought to a halt by a coughing fit. He pursued a lifetime of abuse that could only come from a warped relationship with the future. Although I can’t say my brother didn’t believe in the future, I know he was never concerned with it. But for me sitting there, watching and thinking—now I remember—of my earlier visit to our mother, I didn’t like it one bit. It was not pleasant New Year’s contemplation for me. I was irritated by it, by him, and by the fact that the bar was wet and messy. I took the remnant of the napkin and sopped it around. He picked up a bar towel and wiped in front of me, an automatic and long-engrained bartender gesture. The bar towel smelled strongly of bleach and beer.

“I have to call Ada,” I said, and got up from the bar.

“Tell her—”

“Yeah, I will.”

I went to the side door of the bar and stepped into the sudden quiet—the almost ringing quiet—of the alley.

I’d missed a call from Jay. It was eight a.m. in England. Very, very sweet. I didn’t listen to his message. I called Ada instead.

“Hey, Ma.”

“It’s Mom.” I couldn’t get used to people knowing who I am when I call.

“Yes—”

“Happy New Year, angel.”

January first continued after I slept for a while; I got up by six-thirty, as it seemed indecent to sleep late on the very first day of a new year. I drank a full deep cup of coffee and then cleaned the house, easy enough to remember because I always spend New Year’s Day cleaning the house. But again, habits and patterns also make this New Year’s Day hard to distinguish from other New Year’s Days, which were also spent cleaning, at least going back as far as when Will left. And even then it was the same, a deep day of cleaning, except Will would be there, so it would be a very different memory and not easily confused with these later, solitary New Year’s Days.

The cleaning was pleasant and ruthless: I emptied the refrigerator of every object, the jar of butter-flecked jelly, the container of capers floating in leaky brine, the optimistic bottle of multivitamins now in a moist, smelly clump, even a not very old bottle of expensive flaxseed oil. All must go, and so it was easy, just dumping without having to smell or decide anything. I did the same thing in the bathroom, though not quite as ruthlessly. Any really recent and expensive cosmetic or cream was spared, but most of the stuff also went. Then the scrubbing and washing: the grout, the shower curtain, the back step, the under eaves on the porch. I moved from there to the recycling. No magazine and no newspaper lived to see the New Year, no exceptions. If it wasn’t read by that date, it didn’t make it. I got it all out. Finally, I did my clothes. This was the most difficult task, but I usually started this in advance. Everything I hadn’t worn in the last year would be given to Goodwill. I continued in this manner to my desk, and by the evening I felt my space—modest though it is—was airy and open to the future. I felt liberated and purged and deeply in control. I have to admit that my rigor was not completely laudable. It existed in tandem and could only exist because of a twinning rigor on the other side of the Santa Monica Mountains. As I did my discarding, my righteous, relentless emptying, Nik was doing the opposite. He was organizing the year’s remnants. He was logging and archiving and filing it all. The whole swollen yearlong cumulus. He discarded hardly anything; he wanted souvenirs of every moment. And his accumulations somehow underwrote my eliminations. My liberation was brought to you by the ordered collecting and keeping of my brother. But of course his task was much more complicated than mine. He not only kept, he documented. He annotated, he footnoted, he wrote, he arranged. He updated the Chronicles. (Okay, the Chronicles. Am I already going to digress? Because going into the Chronicles at this point could be a huge digression. But okay.)

By 2004 Nik had thirty-odd volumes of the Chronicles (going back to 1978 officially; unofficially they were retrofitted back to 1973 with the rise of the Demonics). They were all written exclusively by him. They are the history of his music, his bands, his albums, his reviews, his interviews. He made his chronicles—scrapbooks, really—thick, clip-filled things. He wrote under many different aliases, from his fan club president to his nemesis, a critic who started at Creem magazine and ended up writing for the Los Angeles Times, a man who follows and really hates his work. Nik had given him plenty of ink these past few years.

It is odd to think Nik’s Chronicles took some weight off me and my life. I am only tangentially part of the Chronicles. They are truly all about Nik. When I am mentioned, it is largely as part of events invented by Nik. I am only ever in the Chronicles as a figure in Nik’s narrative. Like when he produced my girl band back in the early eighties—Hair Krishna. And when I sang backup, or when I happened to be in the house when an interview or photo session happened. It was always entertaining to read what he had me say about his latest record. Or when he had me trying to capitalize on being Nik Worth’s sister by launching my own failed TV variety show (which apparently I insisted be called My Turn. I thought that was pretty weak and just part of Nik conflating all the women in his life with characters from the Valley of the Dolls. I guess I was the Patty Duke character to him, with his projecting on to me a diva-like longing for fame and attention). In the later Chronicles I think I also visited him in one of his stints in rehab (court-ordered), and—oh yes, I testified on his behalf when he was suing his former manager. And one other time when his bandmates all sued one another for divorce. I apparently submitted a friend-of-the-court brief, an unsolicited amicus curiae. So the Chronicles were by no means a chronicle of my life. Ada, for instance, was hardly ever mentioned (a few Linda McCartney–style photos of Nik with baby Ada’s serious, round face peeking out from under his parka). Nik’s Chronicles adhered to the facts and then didn’t. When Nik’s dog died in real life, his dog died in the Chronicles. But in the Chronicles he got a big funeral and a tribute album. Fans sent thousands of condolence cards. But it wasn’t always clear what was conjured. The music for the tribute album for the dog actually exists, as does the cover art for it: a great black-and-white photo of Nik holding his dog with an intricate collage along the edge consisting of images of the Great K9s of History from Toto to Lassie to Rin Tin Tin (credited as “the border collieage compiled by N. Worth”—Nik loved puns, and in the Chronicles all his loves ran without restraint, unfettered and unashamed). But the fan letters didn’t exist. In this way Nik chronicled his years in minute but twisted detail. The volumes were all there, a version of nearly every day of the past thirty years.

Perhaps that really is the reason I seem to have such bad recall. Maybe I threw too much out. Maybe I should have kept a few souvenirs. Or maybe I should have been making an accounting of some kind, not just ridding myself of it all so quickly.

So the day started as an unremarkable New Year’s Day, and I have no doubt I have fused other New Year’s Days with 2004, other jars of moldy preserves and other stacks of unread Vanity Fairs. But I do remember the rest of the day, or at least one very specific thing from the rest of the day. It wasn’t even anything that happened to me, it was something I saw on the news in the evening. Actually, I first saw the photo and read about it on the internet. Does that count as a memory of mine? I’m afraid so, particularly this past year, when I felt myself an observer of events more than a participant. But that isn’t accurate. I was an absorber of events. They seeped into me, and the first indication of this was on the very first day of the year.

I saw a picture of a pale red-haired woman on the front page of a news website I frequently visit. She looked dazed and older, maybe forty, but a rough forty. The headline was “Mother Arrested After Bringing Baby to Bar in Blizzard.” I clicked through the link. I had to—her expression was so raw. The story wasn’t anything all that unusual, a banal tabloid tale. She brought her two-week-old baby to a bar on New Year’s Eve. She got very drunk at the bar and someone called the police, who then took her baby away. But somehow the story opened up to me. I could picture her walking in the cold, the half mile to the bar, the baby in her baby carrier under her parka. She wants to drink, it is New Year’s Eve, she is just starting to feel like a person after the birth. She takes her baby out into the bitter snowy cold—a half-mile walk with a newborn. How unthinkable. But maybe she knows she’s a drunk, and she imagines she is being prudent by walking instead of driving to the bar. Maybe she believes she is even being responsible. Or she simply had no ride, no car, no booze. She just pretended to herself she was getting some fresh air. She told herself the walk would be soothing to the baby, that it would be good for them both to get fresh air. And maybe she just “found” herself at her favorite bar and then she stopped in to show off the baby, and she never thought too clearly or directly about how she would proceed to get drunk. Maybe.

I could see her at the bar, cradling her baby against her chest with one arm, lifting her glass with the other. (The short article said “she held the baby in her arms as she drank, alarming some of the customers.”) This is what kills me: as she proceeded to get drunk, she was no doubt feeling buzzed and cheerful at first. The bartender and others in the bar coo over her baby. Perhaps someone even buys her a drink to congratulate her. She is feeling high and enjoying the attention. She clutches the baby, who is sleeping, and downs another drink. Then she goes further. I can see her, red hair falling in her face as she starts to talk too fast, too loud. She slurs her words slightly, she doesn’t notice the discomfort on the faces of the others. She sways a bit, she has a hazy smile, her face ruddy and her breath sour gin. This is what gets me: she doesn’t realize the room is turning against her. She has become this terrifying, appalling display, and she thinks something else is happening. Her misapprehension, then the exact moment she might sense the disconnect. She is now stumbling, and the baby’s woken up, and she says she’s got to go home and she’s got to feed her baby. Some concerned person calls 911. The article also said the woman was breastfeeding the baby when the police arrived at the scene. I can’t help picturing that, the baby crying, the woman drunkenly breastfeeding to soothe the hungry kid, the baby rejecting the clumsy nipple and the off milk, the long walk home in the cold waiting for them, and the entire room witnessing her fiasco. And then the cops come and rescue the child. And the mother can barely walk. A tiny piece of broken-human shame.

A little story like that can make me crazy. It just breaks me down. I’ve never done anything as egregious as this woman, but I can so easily imagine that I am the woman. Something about the need for company, the inadequate mothering, the total collapse of self-protection and dignity. I clicked on the photo and enlarged it so I could study her face. I felt my own face getting red and I could feel the choke building in my throat. I searched her name and found another article at another tabloid site. This one had the same photo of the woman—the only photo ever of this woman, forever. But it wasn’t just her—the poor cop who had to take the kid, the poor bartender who served her and then felt queasy as he watched her, the people who sat next to her in the bar—but mostly the woman herself with her pale, bony face and long red hair. And yes, of course I felt sorry for the baby, but everyone feels sorry for the baby. I’m sorry for all those compromised adults, bloodshot and guilty and telling the story later to their friends, just not quite honest about what role they each played in its unfolding.

I’m only at the end of the first day of the year and I am already exhausted and defeated.