three VINCENT part 1
THAT WAS THE NIGHT I TOOK EVERYTHING I COULD CARRY AND SLEPT ON THE HIDE-A-BED IN MY DRUMMER’S MOM’S BASEMENT.
Carl was at the kitchen table filling out forms for hospice care when I came knocking.
After a radical double-mastectomy and two years in remission his mom’s cancer was back but she was done with doctors. Said fuck it to further chemotherapy and had Carl move her bed to a first-floor room with a view of the birds in the backyard. Bought a ridiculously large TV that made all four of “The Golden Girls” look big as Mount Rushmore when we crept past her open door on the way to the basement.
The bed looked unmade and empty but she was there, sleeping while a studio audience roared and a cellular mutiny of rot multiplied unopposed inside her body.
Carl went through this with his dad around the time I moved to Seattle.
He opened a door at the end of the hall and led me downstairs. Asked:
How’d you fuck this one up?
I said I wouldn’t drink. And I did.
I dropped my backpack and stood my guitar upright in the corner under slanted bands of streetlight.
Carl flicked a switch, powering fluorescent tubes that popped softly, snapped and clacked overhead.
That’s your M.O., he said. Dogs roll in smelly dead shit and you drink.
My movements felt remotely controlled, vision detached and delayed. Eyes red and raw from processing grainy video feed from an undersea probe.
I submerged further into shock. Looked at my hands, saw my legs below me and my feet beneath them, attached but somehow separate and uncomfortably abstract. A photo of a drawing of an image of me, standing in shoes my fingers laced up that morning in a thoughtless moment of automatic action. I considered how my fortunes had changed since I left Margaret asleep in our bed, tied those knots on my feet and walked downtown to open PapaTaco.
I turned my hands over and studied parts of a puppet impostor incapable of doing all the things I’d watched them do that day. I couldn’t understand or accept the fact that I was here now, shot down behind enemy lines, seeking shelter from a sympathetic partisan ex-bandmate.
Carl lifted cushions from the couch, jimmy-jacked the tubular frame upward and out to form a bed and for a moment we stood without speaking, mourners at the edge of an open grave. I’ve logged a great number of hours on countless couches and I’ll testify that the only thing more depressing than sleeping on a shitty couch is sleeping on one that transforms into a shitty bed.
Springs plucked and hummed as I crab-walked my ass to the cold musty middle of the mattress. I shucked my shoes and let them thump to the Berber carpet.
Carl opened a closet and began to unpack a suburban yard sale of snowboards water skis life jackets chest coolers and tents stuffed into slippery nylon bags. He stacked those items against the wall. Made enough room to disappear inside and dug deeper.
And I got myself fired today.
Nice, Carl said. You file for unemployment?
No way. Pure fucking misconduct.
He stopped rummaging, poked his head out like a prairie dog.
So? Fuck it. File anyway. They deny, you appeal. Every time I was denied, and every time I appealed and got my benefits. You have to file.
Carl knew how to game anything, anyone. No was never no to him, rejection never truly final. Those things simply didn’t translate, wouldn’t stick. Carl could sniff out an unknown angle and juggle the odds in his favor. Prop a mirror in front of the situation and disappear into it, running upside-down and backward toward some M.C. Escher vanishing point where downstairs was upstairs and he somehow came out golden.
He threw a shriveled down sleeping bag over me. I drew it across my chest and turned onto my side, already splendidly uncomfortable.
Your mom’s okay with me staying here?
You know she fucking loves you man. She still thinks you’re going to write a hit song, take me on tour with you somewhere. Get the band back together. She always believed a hundred percent in Clownhunter.
The rest of our parents saw the band as a lark but Carl’s mom was an active supporter, a true Clownhunter believer. When none of us had credit cards she phoned ahead and booked motel rooms on her Visa. We put a million miles on her camper van touring in high school. That woman had a heart as big as a barn.
Carl returned items to the closet in order by season.
©2017 J.R. Schaefers — all rights reserved.