I Was There the Night He Died Read online

“And what deal is that specifically?”

  What deal indeed. “I just meant that we’re just—”

  “Just what? Just fuck buddies?”

  “No. That’s not what I said.”

  “It’s not what you said, but it’s obviously what you meant. Which is fine. It’s completely fine. I’d just like it if we were both on the same page, is all.”

  “Look, I … I just don’t eat meat, okay?”

  Rachel lets her eyes linger on me for a long moment before re-opening the fridge door. “What about vegetables? Do you actually eat vegetables?”

  “I have been known to eat some of those occasionally.”

  She starts pulling carrots and celery and red and green peppers out of the fridge. “One chicken stir-fry minus the chicken coming up.”

  “That sounds great. Can I do anything to help?”

  “Why don’t you carry on with what you were doing?”

  “You got it.”

  I kneel back down and study every CD spine from top to bottom, then start all over again; if only there were some Duran Duran. What’s musically worthless might at least be good for some nostalgic groans, a little Auld Lang Syne self-aimed laughter. What we have instead is plenty of Blue Rodeo and Tragically Hip and Dave Matthews and, for those more introspective moments, Sarah McLachlan and Tori Amos and Alanis Morissette. If you can’t love, you should at least be able to hate, but all I feel is boredom. I’m almost ready to suggest we turn on the dishwasher and listen to that instead when I spot Tom Waits’ Rain Dogs. I slip it into the CD player and head to the kitchen.

  “Can I at least set the table?” I say.

  “Sure. The plates are right to your left, second cupboard.”

  “Got it.”

  “Before you do that, though, would you do me a favour?’

  “Shoot.”

  “Put another CD on, would you? It doesn’t matter what, just as long as it’s not this. One of the teachers at school made me borrow it from her and I’ve been avoiding bringing it back for months now because I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to hurt her feelings, but, I mean, is this guy for real or what? Didn’t anyone ever suggest to him that a singing lesson or two might be a good idea if you’re going to be a singer? Hello?”

  * * *

  First I hear it, although what it is isn’t clear. I go to the living room window and slap my way through the sheers and see that it’s just the fat man from before on his tiny mini-bike chugging around the block, the sound of a tired tug boat panting its way to shore. Except that he doesn’t disappear around the corner but turns back at street’s end, all the better for his almost identically blue snowsuit-outfitted fat girlfriend or wife to capture on video the heroic putt-putt up and down the street. He waves at her on the way by and she pivots right around so as not to miss an instant of his virtually seat-swallowing ass travelling the other way. I wish there was someone here to witness what I’m seeing, and then there is, there’s Samantha standing on her front step, jacket undone and running shoes unlaced. I haven’t seen her since she ran away from me at the mall. I step out onto my front step.

  “The call of the wild,” I shout.

  In spite of herself, she smiles—sort of. Doesn’t answer, however. I know I’ve got my work cut out for me.

  Seeing that the woman working the digital camera is also listening to an iPod, I feel it’s safe to ask, “How long do you think before it shows up on YouTube?”

  Samantha folds her arms across her chest, but I don’t think it’s because she’s cold. She’s not going anywhere, though. Not yet. I’d better work fast.

  “I’ve got something for you,” I say.

  “What?”

  “I want to give it to you.”

  “That’s kind of usually what happens when you’ve got something for someone, isn’t it?”

  “I mean I don’t want to ruin the surprise.”

  “I hate surprises.”

  “Everyone likes surprises.”

  “I’m not everyone.”

  “Just come over. It’ll only take a minute.”

  She looks at her running shoes. I want to tell her to do up her laces or she’ll trip, but I don’t want to sound like my father. Without looking up, “How do I know you’re not going to cut me up into fifty pieces and stick them in your freezer?” she says.

  “I’m a vegetarian, remember? Besides, my parents’ freezer is full of about two hundred pounds of frozen cow parts. I simply don’t have any room for any Homo sapiens at the moment.”

  This time she does smile, if begrudgingly. “I’ve got to get something inside. I’ll be over in a minute.”

  While Samantha retrieves the something that I know is her pot, I’ve got to make good on my promise of a gift. She doesn’t have a record player, so nothing in this morning’s eBay delivery will suffice. My mother’s Swiffer Duster? A sample of her choice from Mum’s miniature spoon collection? One of Dad’s several screwdriver sets? When she simultaneously knocks and enters, I spot my salvation just in time. “There she is,” I say, picking up and holding out to her what every eighteen-year-old girl simply can’t get by without.

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  We both stare at what she’s holding.

  “Don’t think I’m not grateful,” she says.

  “But?”

  “But what is it?”

  “It’s a paper shredder,” I say.

  “Oh.”

  “You know. For shredding paper.”

  “Okay.”

  We both stare at the paper shredder.

  “It’s so people don’t get a hold of your mail or anything with your personal information on it. Apparently, identity theft is a growing problem among the elderly.”

  “The elderly.”

  “Or the young. The young too. It’s never too soon to start safe-guarding against identity theft.”

  “Well, thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  We both stare at Samantha’s new paper shredder.

  “I’m going to get high,” she says.

  “I think that’s a very good idea.”

  While Samantha settles back on the couch and pulls out her weed and rolling papers, I turn up the thermostat. “I think I told you I got the heat turned back on,” I say. “You can take your coat off if you want.” I know I’ve said what I shouldn’t have said as soon as I say it. The whole point of inviting her over is to subtly coax her into talking about the scars I saw, so appearing as if I’m trying to sweat her out of her coat in order to expose the evidence is the wrong move. I won’t be surprised if she flees me again.

  Instead, “You told me. But why did you do it? I thought you didn’t want to feel too settled.”

  “The real estate agent said I needed to if she’s going to be able to sell the house.”

  “Was that the blonde in the red minivan?”

  “Aren’t you ever at school?”

  “When I need to be.” Samantha slips the readied joint between her lips; makes it crackle alive with the flame from her lighter and a sharp intake of breath that turns the joint’s end orange, expert stoner alchemy.

  “Speaking of,” I say. “What universities did you apply to?” If the front door to the present is presently off limits, maybe I can bluff my way in through the back.

  “How do you know I applied to any?”

  Because you’re eighteen years old and living in Chatham, Ontario, with your drunk of a father and your fourteen-year-old brother. Because when I was your age and living in Chatham, Ontario, I couldn’t wait to leave, had literally worn out the guidance office’s copy of the University of Toronto calendar, the once-glossy cover thumbed dull and the endlessly turned pages falling out by the time my acceptance letter finally arrived in the mail in the spring.

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bsp; “Okay,” I say. “Have you applied to any universities?”

  “I’ve applied to a few.”

  “You don’t sound too excited.”

  “I never said I was.”

  “Don’t you think you should be?”

  “I don’t know. Should I?”

  Instead of beginning, When I was your age … , “Is U of T one of them?” I ask.

  “One of the ones I applied to?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “I can’t remember. It was like three months ago when I filled out the form.”

  “I know, but … ” But now I’m starting to understand why your right hand has sprouted an extra appendage in the form of the joint that’s perpetually stuck there and why you may very well have self-inflicted cut wounds on your arms. “But you should have applied to U of T as well. For one thing, you’d love Toronto.”

  “I told you, I’m from Toronto.”

  “Right, I forgot.” Forgot that Oakville still spells Toronto to her, the latter of which she really would love once she got to know it: antiquarian bookstores with signed Virginia Woolfs and Jack Kerouacs and Walt Whitmans you could never afford to buy but it’s thrilling all the same just to know that someone in your very own city can and will; Nigerian taxi drivers who listen to the BBC World News in their cabs and who can make sound arguments for Canada’s military withdrawal from the world stage; wonderfully crazy street scholars running around town armed with thick black markers correcting the spelling and grammatical mistakes of their fellow graffitists; a city, in short, too expensive, too crowded, too stuck up, and much too much alive for you to risk missing out on being alive there and being a part of it all.

  Instead of saying any of this, though, I tell her how big U of T is and how it can offer so many different kinds of programs and courses and how its library is the nation’s largest and how much money it has for scholarships and guest speakers and how many well-known writers and thinkers and scientists are part of its alma mater. I also tell her how even my mum was happy I was going away to university, just not so happy that the university turned out to be in Toronto, not after she and my father helped me move into residence, the first time in the big city for any of us. The ego-dwarfing buildings; the undeniable energy in the streets; all of the people who didn’t look like her—none of this boded well for her only baby boy. It smells like curry, she said once we’d gotten me settled in my room. What does? I said. Everything, she said.

  “Okay, okay,” Samantha says. “Enough with the hard sell. You made your point. I’ll add it to the stupid list.”

  “If it’s not too late. You need to talk to your guidance counsellor.”

  “Okay, I will.”

  “Right away. It might be too late.”

  “All right, all right.” She relights her joint; inhales; exhales. “So,” she says. “Who died tonight?”

  So why do you have cuts all down your arm? I want to answer. I realize I have no idea what I’m doing, that I’m in way over my head. There were good reasons, after all, besides ecological farsightedness and simple personal selfishness why Sara and I never had children. I’m in the story business, I’ll tell her a story, that might make her feel better. Will certainly make me feel better.

  “John Hartford died tonight,” I say. “But this one has a happy ending, I promise. If John Hartford’s music was about anything, it was happiness. Except that’s not the right word—happiness isn’t a big enough word. Joy. John Hartford’s music was about joy. Is about joy, I mean. Is.”

  I sit down on the other end of the couch, lean back for the long haul; the living as well as the dead are counting on me this time.

  “John Hartford was born in New York in 1937 to a prominent surgeon and his wife, but grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, where he worked on the Mississippi River as a teenager and listened to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio, Earl Scrugg’s brand-new three-finger banjo playing technique the road to Damascus sound that got him walking on his life’s plucking path. By the age of thirteen he was an accomplished fiddler and banjo player and led his own high-school bluegrass band.”

  “I bet that got him a lot of action.”

  My instinct is to dismiss her sass with a choice anecdote about Hartford’s late-’60s Hollywood lady’s man days, but then I remember that his song “The First Girl I Loved” was written about his cousin. I motion for the joint instead so she’ll feel like I’m with her, not against her; puff, pass it back. I’ll have to work fast, will have to talk Hartford back to life before the fervour-flattening effect of the pot takes hold.

  “He dropped out of university, he worked as a disc jockey, he played in country and western bands for drunks and tips, and he began writing songs that were one part bluegrass, one part Beatles, one part post-beatnik wit and wisdom, and in 1966 he signed with RCA and came up with his first album, John Hartford Looks at Life. The six records he made for RCA over the next five years are lovely and funny and never less than inimitably hummy, but can’t help being what they are: albums recorded for a major record label in the late 1960s by a very idiosyncratic musician and songwriter who nonetheless was recording for a major record label in the late 1960s.” Samantha offers me the joint; I don’t want it, but I take it, toke, hand it back. “There’s no such thing as revolution from within. If you lie down with dogs, you’re going to get fleas.”

  “There are dogs who would find that offensive, I bet.”

  “No doubt.”

  I lean even further back and sink into the couch as deep as I can; here comes the important part, the part Samantha needs to hear. That everyone needs to hear.

  “The first song on side two of Hartford’s second album is a song called ‘Gentle on My Mind,’ which Glen Campbell heard and thought was catchier than the flu and could be a hit if sufficiently polished and pimped, and he was right—it won four Grammies and went on to become one of the most widely recorded songs of all time. More important though than helping to serenade elevators and dentists’ offices around the world were the royalties it brought in that allowed Hartford to quit his various day jobs and leave L.A. and move to a home in Tennessee on the Cumberland River and make the kind of music he’d begun to hear in his head. He hired the best pickers around—Vassar Clements on fiddle, Tut Taylor on dobro, Norman Blake on guitar—and in 1971 created Aereo-Plain, which sounds like smoking hash out of an old corncob pipe, or, if you prefer, Paul McCartney being molested by Flatt and Scruggs.”

  “I don’t. I definitely don’t prefer.”

  “Smoking hash out of an old corncob pipe it is then.”

  “Translation, please.”

  “Meaning that the album begins with a faithful version of its only cover tune—‘Turn Your Radio On,’ an old gospel call-to-angelic-arms song—before sneaking into ‘Steamboat Whistle Blues,’ another verse-verse-chorus corker delivered pickin’ and strummin’ style but which, if you stop humming long enough to really listen, isn’t just some old-timey sing-a-long but is actually about how the food we eat is processed and the news we’re allowed to hear is processed and the buildings we live in all look the same and that the only thing you can trust these days is an antebellum steamboat plodding off down the river. This is post-Manson-murder music—wilted flower-power music—made by a hippie with a head on his shoulders, somebody who knows that to forget the past is just as foolish as being afraid of the future. Hand me that joint, will you?” I’m almost at the finish line; nothing can slow me down now.

  “Maybe you should slow down,” Samantha says. She’s looking at me like Sara used to look at me when the words couldn’t come fast enough to say all they had to say.

  “I thought you hated mellow,” I say.

  “In moderation.”

  Taking the joint from her, “You know what William Blake said about moderation.”

/>   “Hold on. Is that this Hartford guy’s guitar player?”

  “Now that would be a duo that even Lennon and McCartney would have had a hard time competing with.” I only take a quick hit before handing it right back.

  “And because it didn’t matter anymore if Billboard magazine liked it or not or whether he ever got invited to perform on Hee Haw, Aereo-Plain could comfortably be what it wanted to be: full of songs about falling in love with first cousins and being too dope-paranoid to talk on the telephone and the insanity of modern urban planning and the enduring value of friendship and family and wide open spaces and even acapella odes to the wonderful word ‘boogie.’”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Why would I kid around about something like that?” Her joint has gone out now, but she makes no move to relight it. She’s listening.

  “Morning Bugle came next and was much the spectacular same, while 1976’s Mark Twang was just like it sounds, with the added aural oddity of Hartford accompanying himself alone on banjo or fiddle or whatever other instrument the tune at hand required—on one song it’s just him and his cheek—plus, for rhythmical accompaniment, periodic clogging.”

  “Pardon my ignorance, but—”

  “But what’s clogging?” I’m on my feet and approximating Hartford’s stylish stomping before her sentence is finished. Still moving my feet, “Hartford and his wife and a driver who doubled as the sound man would tour all over North America by this time on a bus with just his banjo and fiddle and guitar and a four foot by eight foot piece of A-grade plywood that he’d use for clogging.” I stop, but don’t sit back down. “And keep this in mind: everyone goes on and on about the Sex Pistols’ album being such a punk watershed, about how its aesthetic is so raw and primitive and DIY. But Steve Jones laid down weeks of electric guitar overdubs on that thing and its budget came in at well over a hundred grand. Compared to Mark Twang, which was released a whole year earlier, Never Mind the Bollocks sounds like L.A. session hacks backed up by the London Philharmonic.”

  I realize I’m standing in the middle of the living room. I’m a little uncomfortable, just like you always are when you tell someone the truth.