How Best to Avoid Dying Page 6

  And I know how he did it.

  Like sleep. I’ve split my head in two and allow one half of my brain to sleep while the other half works. I’m getting so good at it that some of the regulars think I’m two twin brothers running the store. One brother is logical, no nonsense, good with numbers. The other brother is dazed, but friendlier and kind of artsy. He gives back the wrong change but in beautiful designs, little silver constellations of nickels and dimes in your palm.

  I’m touching your hand. That’s probably inappropriate.

  I should tell you, I am peeing right now. It’s okay. I am wearing an adult diaper, aisle two. Still, it takes a certain amount of effort. I try not to leave the store unattended. I do not go outside. Ever. That’s why my skin looks bad. But what’s skin compared to all this?

  Why? It’s not clear?

  Well, if my left brain were on duty, I would simply point to the OPEN 24 HOURS sign and inform you that I am the sole employee. My right brain might answer with some poetic quip, like, “May my reason be free of reason. Fa la la.” But the both brain truth of it is: “Challenging, repulsive, and awesome.” How could you want more than that? And know, you must know, Simeon didn’t live on a column because he was a saint. He became a saint up there, somewhere along the way.

  My cat had been my father’s before he went to the nursing home. He always had a cat. One would die and he’d replace it with a new one. We can’t go out, he’d say, the cat needs to be fed. Can’t play music too loud—the cat. Can’t travel. Must work. Must feed the cat. He thought his life meant something because he fed a cat.

  Hush.

  Cats feed themselves.

  You—you are unnecessary to your own life.

  I—I’m doing something. I’m doing something here. Something challenging, repulsive, and awesome.

  You laugh, but I could smell the mediocrity of your life as soon as you passed through the automatic doors. It’s stinking up my store. You work some job you don’t like, holding your breath for eight hours a day. You spend your free time on eating, TV, and sleep, or looking for someone to eat with, watch TV with, and sleep with. But I don’t sleep. I’m awake. Your soul is as soft and pasty as my skin. But my soul is as sharp and cool as the silver caps on your rotting teeth.

  Sorry. Sorry.

  Not appropriate.

  But you will keep coming back. You will keep checking, seeing if I’m still here. You’ll try odd hours, and you will always find me. You will ask me math questions and my favorite colors trying to discern which half is at the helm. Some days you won’t talk. Every now and then you’ll buy something, a Slim Jim, perhaps, or a sugar-free Rockstar Energy Drink. You will linger. A little longer each visit. You’ll eye the adult diapers. Your skin will change like mine. You will forget to go home. Forget how to go home. Finally, you will come to me and ask for an application for employment, maybe a stocking job in the back. And I will give you one. Because we’re always open. Always.

  Here is your change. Here is your purchase. Thank you for shopping with us. Come again.

  LICORICE: A STORY FOR JOHN ERLER1

  Zane Bellows: a natural pop star sensation. He was six feet tall with hair that spiked up like flames from a grease fire. He could reach his lanky arm up through the branches of musical composition and pluck the ripest, sweetest little tune, the kind of melody that you’d hear and think, “Why wasn’t that written before?” He’d add some reasonably inspired lyrics and find himself with another hit, songs like “Fruit Fly in Your Eye” and “I’m Stoned and Voting.”

  But in the fall of 1986, Zane Bellows outdid himself. He and his band the Sea Elephants began recording Licorice, the most ambitious album of rock history.2 In a time of pop and plastic, the band set out to create starlight and ambrosia.

  It began with pain.

  Zane Bellows broke his toe on Lane Rope’s mislaid bass as the band’s tour bus barreled through Austin, Texas. The pain burst from the toe up the leg like oil from an old-fashioned oil drill.

  The emergency room’s younger nurses squealed when they saw Zane draped between Polk and Shelly Wallenhump, lead guitar. The older nurses had Zane replace his leather jacket and pants with a short gown that felt and looked like paper towels.

  One nurse gave him a generous dose of Vicodin and left him in a quiet room to recoup. The neat little narcotic started in his head and slowly floated downward, like those thick fogs he’d left in San Francisco, hiding the pain as it went, down his neck, sinking into his stomach, descending along his leg and welling up in the toe. It didn’t stop the pain as much as covered it and made it less important.

  Zane was always an explorer, always restless to see what was around the corner. He was alone for fewer than ten minutes before leaving his bed and heading into the clean smelling halls, his bare feet slapping against the cool floor, his happy ass smiling sideways at anyone caring to look.

  While walking, Zane glimpsed into the rooms of other patients. He saw cancer, dying hearts, and broken bones. He tried to magnify the pain of his toe so he could relate to the pain of these others. Vicodin was working against him. He couldn’t quite empathize, but he wanted to.

  Through one of those windows, Zane Bellows saw a woman. She was tall, almost Zane’s height. She had slouching shoulders and a thin waist. A bright blue top loosely curtained her chest and a lime colored skirt rested on her hips.

  Her hair was straight and brown, the shade of oak-bark, and she had ghost white skin that was covered with a light white fuzz. Her eyes were gray-blue and sad. She stood at the foot of a hospital bed, studying a young man lying there. He was still, his eyes closed, tubes in his arms.

  Zane felt protected from the sorrow in that room only by the door—like looking into a radiation chamber, knowing that if you open the door even a crack all that radiation would zip out and scar your eyes, throat, and skin.

  He might have moved on, considering the danger of a leak, but Zane remained a moment too long, and the girl, sensing his stare, turned and smiled. From straight on her eyes had an even deeper sadness, which made the smile all the more startling.3

  Zane forgot about his toe. He forgot about the Sea Elephants. He forgot about music. He remembered the first time he tasted chocolate. Zane Bellows opened the door.

  She introduced herself as Stella.4

  “I’m Zane Bellows,” he said. No reaction. She hadn’t heard of him and Zane, much to his own surprise, was glad. They spoke quietly. Simple questions, simple answers. Just sounds exchanged more than words.

  After a long while, Zane asked who the young man in the bed was.

  “David, my fiancé.”

  “Oh.”

  Oh, that oh. Such an oh. Like the oh collectively sighed by the population of Pompeii as the volcano’s innards streaked the sky. The oh Captain Smith murmured as he counted the lifeboats on the sinking Titanic. The oh gasped by the pilot of the Enola Gay as he glanced in his B29’s rearview mirror and saw the bright white and reds devouring Hiroshima.

  “What’s wrong with him?” he asked.

  “Coma. It’s been seven months now.” Stella brushed some of the dark curls from David’s forehead and, for the first time, Zane noticed the small diamond ring she wore on her left hand.

  Zane Bellows was released from the hospital that same day. But for the next week, he returned to the same room each and every day. He told the other members of the band that the rest of the tour would have to be canceled since he had been ordered to the hospital daily for physical therapy.

  “For the toe?” Polk asked him.

  “For the toe,” Zane replied.

  But each day he spent talking with Stella. She would sit on one side of the bed, Zane on the other, and sparks flew over David’s prostrate figure like cars on a high-speed overpass. With eager ears she listened as Zane babbled about art, life, the smell of chlorine, or anything else that popped from his buzzing mind. After seven months of conversation with a comatose man, Stella was happy to listen. Her eyebrows, also whit
e, would rise at the subtleties of Zane’s humor. Even her breathing matched the rhythm of his speech.

  Zane adored her breathing. He was fascinated with the movement of her generous chest and the shudder of her thin lips, but most of all it was the smell. A rich smell like the soil of a rose garden. The breath, wafting from the other side of the bed, soaked right through Zane’s person and assured him that he was in love as much as the smell of roast beef would assure him he was hungry.

  Then on Zane’s fourth visit, Stella stood up and excused herself to the little girls’ room and the smell remained. At first he thought, “Ah, her breath lingers.” But then it lingered longer than expected. And it never diluted. Minutes passed and Zane slowly realized that Stella could not possibly be the source of the sent that had seduced him so. His eyes fell to the only other breathing being in the room: David. David, as pale and still as the statue who shared his name. His hair as curly and his features as noble. David. Hadn’t Zane always been pleasantly aware of his silent presence? Hadn’t Zane aimed at least part of his storytelling in his direction? Wasn’t it true that Zane never once asked, never once desired, to see Stella outside of this room, away from David?5

  Zane watched David’s slow breathing. He leaned in closer and caught the warm breath spiraling up like smoke from a chimney. He imagined tracing the breath backward, past the chapped lips, the unmoving tongue, the long red larynx, the spongy lungs, muscle, pumping blood. Stella returned and Zane quickly stood up, cracked his knuckles and said he had to be going. Her wide eyes questioned, but she only said, “Goodbye.”

  He walked the streets of Austin until late into the night, and then continued walking into early morning, drifting in a confused downpour of thought. It was not just that he, a confident and accomplished heterosexual, found himself drawn to a comatose man. Not just that he also found himself attracted to the young woman this same man was engaged to. What squeezed Zane’s mind was that he loved them both, as a unit. He loved Stella and David, David and Stella, her open eyes and his faint breath.

  As the dawn sky blushed over Austin, Zane surrendered all preconceptions and was born anew. “I love them both,” he muttered to the sun. “All things can be.”

  Zane skipped back to the hospital, giggling as he went. He waved at bakers opening their stores and laughed at bankers and businessmen streaming into tall, glass buildings.6

  At the hospital he was told that visiting hours were from 3 PM to 6 PM.

  “Don’t worry,” he told the aging nurse behind the desk. “I’ll be back.” She assured him that she would not worry, and Zane bolted.

  Later that morning, Zane booked a studio on South Congress. It was a large space with hardwood floors and black, egg crate walls. He gathered the band and announced a new project entitled Licorice.

  “Why Licorice?” Shelly asked.

  “Because licorice can only be described with the word licorice,” he explained. “Bite into it and you have no idea what it really is, but it is definitely licorice.”

  They started recording that day.

  Zane’s heart-altering experiences drove him to attempt the new. He wielded the microphone as if it were a supernatural sponge. He carried it outside to record the afternoon sun. He placed it to his and the other band member’s foreheads to soak up emotions.

  For that first day’s vocal sessions he asked that the entire band and the sound engineer be in the nude.

  “Can I keep my boxers on?” asked Lane Rope.

  “Yes, of course,” Zane answered. “But each and every thread of fabric will find its way onto this album and bear witness to your shame.”

  Lane Rope removed his boxers.

  At 3 PM Zane was sitting with Stella/David in their tiny, white room.

  “How did he get like this?” Zane asked.

  “Slipped, hit his head on a doorstop,” she said with a sigh. “Completely random.”

  The concept of random chance became an integral part of the recording process. During one session, Zane released a bag of moths into the studio to interfere with the playing. He hid alarm clocks throughout the studio, all set to ring out at haphazard intervals. On another track Zane had the band switch up instruments so that the bassist was on drums and the drummer had a guitar and the guitarist was on vocals.

  The rest of the band felt lost. The new directions were disorienting. Imagine playing a game of pool on a deep-sea fishing boat. If you’re concerned with the rules of the game or even the rules of land-bound physics, the act would be utterly frustrating, but if you forget about how the game should work or how the balls should roll and just enjoy the colliding of multicolored spheres as they bounce about, popping in and out of pockets, well, then you’ll have a blast. But the band just wanted to play pool.

  Zane tried to inspire them. He told them all things are possible. He predicted that Licorice would end the Cold War.

  “It’s just an album,” Lane Rope said.

  “Nothing is just anything,” Zane shouted. “Anything is everything.”

  But they didn’t understand. In frustration, Zane would retreat to David/Stella. His unmoving strength. Her sweet, soft glances. His stoic resolve. Her sighs and eyes. They were Zane’s muse, his magic, his door into more.7

  “What did David do with his time before the doorstop?” he asked one drizzly winter afternoon.

  “We own a gag gift store. You know, fake poop and things.” Stella reached into her purse and pulled out an oversized nickel and handed it to Zane. It looked exactly like a nickel, except it was four inches wide.

  “That’s funny,” Zane said, and he and Stella laughed.

  “David designed that.”

  Zane patted David’s chest. “Very funny.”

  Laughter became another key element of the Licorice recordings. Zane used laughter as an instrument, hiding giggles in the mix or featuring a snicker as a solo. Zane recorded the laughter of dozens of people of all ages, all ranks, all different levels of joy. The tenth track on the album was seventeen minutes of laughter overlapping and combining.8

  Zane wanted to include Stella/David in the recording process, so he often used their gag gifts to inspire the laughter he recorded. Once while walking to the studio for an evening session, Zane was asked by some tough looking street kids for a little change. Zane pulled out the oversized nickel and told them, “All I have is big change.” The kids beat him severely. Zane hurried on to the studio and recorded himself laughing with a fat lip. The flapping of the lip made for a wild bass sound on track six. Lane Rope was jealous.

  But the other Sea Elephants were starting to follow Zane’s lead. Shelly suggested recording at least one song in complete darkness and it was Polk’s idea to fill a microphone with catnip and let a stray kitten provide the percussions for track four.

  Zane had announced to Polygram that the new album would be complete by spring and it would be extraordinary. Already the rumors were churning. Greedy record executives rubbed their sweaty little hands and set the release date for the week of Easter.

  Zane Bellows was changing more than only musically. He donated his leather pants to Goodwill. He took less time in the mornings to sculpt his hair. He smiled more.9

  “Do you think David is happy?” Zane asked on winter’s afternoon.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him happier,” Stella said.

  “Are you happy?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  She wasn’t. Stella was a tortured soul. She had grown feverishly in love with Zane. And accompanying that love was a yappy runt of a dog named Shame—shame for her unfaithful thoughts in the very presence of her betrothed. Quickly following and sniffing the ass of Shame was an even nastier mutt: Resentment. Unlike Zane, she could not conceive of a balance between the three of them. She began to hate David for standing (or lying) between her and Zane. Soon Stella was spending sleepless nights being chased around her mind by a savage pack of mangy mongrels.10

  Those same sleepless nights, Zane sat in the studio alone,
remixing, changing, splicing, adding harmonies and atmospheric twists, often venturing into bizarre regions of sound and rhythm where even the other Sea Elephants couldn’t follow. When Lane Rope discovered that Zane had backtracked his bass line on track nine and used it to accompany the sounds of dolphins making love, the bassist confronted Zane.

  “Can’t we just record some normal songs?”

  “We’re trying to transform the world here,” Zane said from his seat at the mixing board.

  “I’m a bassist. I have no interest in transforming anything.” Lane Rope said. He collected his gear and left. Zane didn’t bat an eye. He just returned to the mixing.

  By Valentine’s Day the album had only to be mixed and mastered. Zane was nearing exhaustion, but he managed to bring David/Stella a dozen red roses and a book on the Holy Trinity. Three was holy to him now. David as Dreamer. Stella as Listener. Zane as Creator.11 Stella smiled at the gift. Zane was too preoccupied with telling her about the finishing touches he was putting on Licorice to notice that Stella was no longer wearing her engagement ring.

  Over the next month Zane worked almost without ceasing on the album. Occasionally Shelly or Polk would drop by, but for the most part, Zane worked alone. Then on March 14, just minutes before midnight, Licorice was completed. Zane made a master tape and rushed to his most precious audience.

  He bounced up the stairs of the hospital and down the hall to the room where David lived. Before he opened the door, he glanced through the window. To Zane’s surprise, Stella was there as well. She was whispering into David’s ear. When Zane walked in she looked a little shocked, but smiled.

  “I’m so glad you’re both here,” Zane said, his face glowing. “I want you both to be the first to hear Licorice.”

  Stella said nothing, just nodded and watched as Zane readied a tape deck and turned off the overhead fluorescent lights so that the only light came from the door’s window. Zane pressed play. He took his seat on the other side of the bed and the music began.12