John Henry Days, page 13
Soon Bobby Figgis had entree to the best parties in the city. Publishing parties and movie parties and big-time fashion parties where he worried, not without cause, about dandruff. He expanded his specialty. He married a stockbroker he had dated in business school. It hadn’t worked out before but now they just clicked. She looked good on his arm, she had lost weight, and she liked to charge into the office each morning to tell her coworkers of the party she had attended the night before. She wasn’t bragging, she was sharing the details of her life as anyone would. She had to be at work at six in the morning because of the foreign markets and soon she could no longer attend as many functions. He started fucking around.
One day Bobby Figgis bet another member of the List that he could do an event every day for a year. Bobby had become quite a bullshitter at this point and his fellow junketeer said why don’t we put some money on it. They shook hands. The next day Bobby remembered the bet and pledged not to drink any more during the week, only on weekends from then on but he forgot his pledge once he got something to eat, around two in the afternoon. He ate and attended a party thrown by the Elite Model Agency that night and nailed the first day of his bet.
Bobby Figgis made it through the first week fine. A week of nightly junketeering was no big feat. Publicity cycles ebbed and flowed, all junketeers found themselves pulling a full week from time to time. It was part of the job. After two weeks he grew tired, however. It was the same food night after night, it seemed to him. His colleague reminded him of his bet and he continued, cursing the afternoon light when it woke him.
A thought emerged in the minds of the junketeers, almost simultaneously, as Bobby Figgis entered the third month of his bet. That there might be some kind of record involved. The younger junketeers consulted the older junketeers and it turned out that Bobby Figgis had entered into new terrain. He had set a record for the longest bout of junketeering anyone could remember. Bobby Figgis had entered into new terrain.
They asked him if he had taken a day off and he replied that he had not. They asked him if he wrote about all the products or human beings or concepts the events were intended to promote and he replied that he filed the usual amount. It became official. Rules were drawn up for future challenges to the record. Junketeers began to wager on the wager. Everyone wondered how far he could go. His wife had stopped speaking to him some time before. She punished herself for her husband’s obsession by driving herself at work. Bobby Figgis stuck to the wager and departed every afternoon or evening to an event or events described on the List, which arrived by fax every noon.
Bobby Figgis lost weight and did not seem his old self. This occurred in the sixth month of the bet. He interviewed this week’s starlet in her suite at the Sherry Netherland Hotel and sometimes answered his questions for her. He attended computer conventions at the Jacob Javits Center and asked the bright young geniuses of Silicon Valley if their data compression devices could store things other than data. His jokes, always stiff, became obtuse and seemed to refer to a new brand of humor. A noticeable lack of affect. His fellow junketeers waited for him to throw in the towel. He had nothing to prove anymore. The man he had bet informed him that the contract was void. He could stop his odyssey short of the agreed-upon year with honor. He did not stop.
In the ninth month Bobby Figgis attended a video game convention. He was flown out to Arizona by a kids’ gaming magazine that lasted only one issue. He walked down the rows of the convention hall to a symphony of electronic beeps, whistles and gunfire. Middle-aged men aimed electronic machine guns at screens, decimating street criminals in a game endorsed by the U.S. Department of Justice. Sword blades directed by joysticks hacked at dark-skinned creatures. The monsters exploded in vivid pixelated death and were replaced by identical monsters. There was no end to the monsters. They came from within the machines. Bobby’s skin felt on fire. The middle-aged men loosened their ties and took aim. Bobby stopped before a strange machine. A young techie put down his sandwich and urged Bobby into a black body suit equipped with sensors. Bobby put on gloves and stuck his head into a heavy black helmet. He stepped into the gyroscope and said he was ready. The techie pressed a button and the gyroscope began to move. The screen inside the helmet blazed brilliantly into his eyes, describing a high resolution dream that did not seem to end.
Bobby Figgis returned to New York the next day. He did not file the story on the video game convention. He stopped filing any stories. He showed up at events but had dropped all pretense. Bobby Figgis had established a record of nonstop junketeering that no one dared match. He smelled bad. Some of the regular suppliers to the List barred him from their events. Everyone felt a little awkward about this. His picture was taped up at movie premieres with a prohibition against his entry. Stories continued to circulate. His wife was long gone. Soon he attended only the subterranean events that are the fear of all junketeers, events without names, held in places without addresses. He disappeared. He was never seen again. The keeper of the List deleted his name after a time. He had been devoured by pop.
Yes, her father would have loved it and probably would have stormed the microphone to make a speech. And perhaps they would have let him speak. First the mayor, then the man from the Post Office, and then her father takes the podium to deliver a few remarks. She’s heard each sentence before, ten years before or fifteen years, he stitches the stiff threads of ancient and favorite rants into one bitter shroud for John Henry the man and his times. He runs over the allotted time and people shift in their seats, strangling the necks of napkin birds in their laps. Mr. Street has not even approached his point, whatever that may be. One or two repeated sentences, the blurred edges of phrases make the people wonder if he is drunk and they listen more closely following this lapse—is he drunk or crazy. Obviously he feels for John Henry keenly but there is a pace to the night, when they will drink and when they will eat and who will speak and that boy at the end who will sing. The mayor wonders if they need this man’s collection of artifacts as much as he thought they did. Maybe they can hire someone to make things out of plaster and call them replicas of the genuine article. The tourists will have already paid their entrance fee and tourists never feel completely ripped off at tourist places, no matter how much they have been misled. The tourists are glad to be out of the house, and the real is so hard to come by these days, they understand and expect these deceptions. Maybe if the kitchen staff brings out the food, the guests will slowly get up to get something to eat, and Mr. Street will get the message.
Pamela sits in a plastic chair outside her motel room, legs crossed, right hand cupping her left elbow, expelling colonies of smoke from her mouth at regular intervals. The smoke lights out into the dark lands and swirls away by forces into diasporic scattering. She looks down into the foiled maw of her pack and counts the cigarettes, placing her nervousness and resulting hunger for smokes on one hand, and the dwindling number of smokes and her imprisonment at the hotel on the other hand. She is stuck at the hotel until morning, which would be fine if she were sleeping. But she can’t sleep, even though she turned the picture of John Henry walking down railroad tracks to face the wall. Rather than making her feel at home—her parents’ house had been crammed with mawkish pictures like that—the motel picture bullied her into ruinous confessions. She dragged a chair from the empty pool and sits outside her door, smoking, sometimes watching the crackling blue death of insects in the coils of the bug trap, sometimes watching her cigarette tip wither to ash. Sometimes the face of the choking man at dinner creeps up, his thrashing body and bulging eyes, and she shivers.
Talcott. She had heard the name thousands of times over the years, her father shaping the name as paradise or proving ground or just another town on a map depending on his mood. How far is she from the town itself? She still hasn’t seen it. The Motor Lodge is on the outskirts and the Millhouse Inn is part of the town of Pipestem. The black laborers on the C&O weren’t allowed in town, she remembers that factoid from her father’s sermons, they lived in shanties near the work camps and were allowed into town only for one hour on Friday afternoons to buy supplies. She wondered if any of their shanty town remained, and if it was part of the weekend’s festivities. Take a walk through John Henry Town! Here’s the man’s very own lean-to, notice the spaces between planks allowing nice cross-ventilation in the summertime, and the tar-paper roof protecting a full 35 percent of the abode from the rain and snow. No, it isn’t here. If it were, her father would have put it on a flatbed and driven it up to their apartment as part of his collection. Probably would have slept in it too, poured some scotch into a clay jar and sat inside there at night, tapping his foot to some old work song and sipping from the jug of ’shine. Where they lived after they walked away from the plantations, pieces of paper signed by a magistrate in their hands, to trade tobacco and cotton for the currency of the industrial South. Coal and steel. And layin’ the line.
Layin’ the line, out of her father’s mouth, became this all-purpose non se-quitur that testified to balance in the world, whether the matter be existential or quotidian. Stub a toe? Layin’ the line. Passing grades in chemistry? Layin’ the line. Summer heartbreak, a backed-up toilet, walking pneumonia, winning three bucks in Lotto. Layin’ the line, girl. You were layin’ the line whatever you did, trudging through dust until you returned to it.
It began, like most obsessions, as a harmless interest. She was six, her family returning from Delaware from a visit with her grandparents when her mother noticed an antique store by the side of the highway. They stopped. It was a good point to stretch their legs. While Pamela provoked to no avail the scarred old tomcat perched on a barrel, its green eyes squinting timeless feline reproach, and her mother peered through a glass counter at what can only be described as the heirlooms of the damned, her father discovered something in the recesses of the musty store, past a neighborhood of decapitated street signs named for trees native to North America. It was a ceramic figure about three feet tall, its base a short expanse of railroad track supporting a hunched black man with a hammer poised to slam a railroad spike that jutted from the track precociously. Her father prowled around the object like a wrestler. Sections of it were chipped away, a bit from the man’s cranium, a crescent of his cheek, exposing the crude white matter beneath. Her father called Pamela and her mother over to that corner of the roadside antique store, where lawn jockeys of variegated expression and purpose gathered, arms tired. The figure of John Henry layin’ the line was surrounded on all sides by small men in red outfits hefting the strange burden of gold rings. The hammer’s impending but stalled convergence with the spike had a spooky presence to it and Pamela felt a chill: it was a fragment of something larger fallen from above, eternal forces glimpsed for a second. She asked her father what it was. He told her it was John Henry, and John Henry sat in the backseat with her all the way back to Harlem, swaddled in her favorite red blanket, her blanket.
She exhales smoke into the night air, aiming for a denomination of gnats a few yards away. So it is sibling rivalry, she thinks. John Henry took her blanket. It started with that. At first she and her mother made fun of the little creature. Her father placed it in the doorway next to the umbrella stand so that it was the first thing you saw when you unlocked the three locks, that tumbling line of security, pushed in the slow door and entered their apartment. Sometimes they’d talk in his voice, a deep “How do you do?” and chuckle at their stupid joke. The hardware store thrived, it was on a corner with a lot of traffic and had a domain. Mr. Street hung his shingle at the right time, at the right place, and he joked with the handymen who did odd jobs in the neighborhood, he swept down on homeowners and renters as they dozed along the aisles looking for something to unstop the drain or punish the truant hinge, understanding exactly when their postures intimated defeat before the long and stocked shelves of Street Hardware. A man of his age and success could use a hobby. Model airplanes, collecting stamps, or John Henry: he had earned the solace of taking his mind off things. And as the pictures of Mrs. Street’s family came down to make room for framed, faded sheet music and photographs of the Big Bend Tunnel and woodcuts of a hero, she thought, the man has earned it.
She hears laughter from down the row of rooms. It is one in the morning. Pamela breaks the rules of cigarette rationing she set a few minutes before and lights another Newport while still exhaling the smoke from its predecessor. Then how do you trace the course of an addiction. It is a child. It feeds off nurture and care, it learns how to crawl and learns cunning and suddenly it is its own being, willful and scheming every second at survival.
The hobby grew. The traces of its development were savored and polished by Mr. Street, he talked to the artifacts when no one was around, or he thought no one was around, or he thought everyone was asleep and he had John Henry to himself. Chronicles of mechanical production. Yellowed and tattered handwritten drafts of ballads, nibbled and yellowed published versions of the ballads for drawing room amateurs, early sound recordings—one hundred twenty versions of the song and counting. Ink scratched into paper at midnight by hopeful songsmiths under lantern flicker; Yellen & Company Music printed sheet music, a tavern favorite in some localities; the recordings, expression of those written notes, piled up in their sleeves in alphabetical order, subcategorized by region. Fat 78s preserving the croaks of bluesmen who chronicled the showdown at C&O’s Big Bend Tunnel, dainty 45s from sixties English bands that garnished the fable with paisley chords and frenetic sitar of the psychedelic sound, eight-track tapes of Johnny Cash on pills singing of John Henry, C-60 bootleg cassettes of Johnny Cash on pills singing of John Henry. Recording equipment necessary for the 3 A.M. playback of said recordings.
Mr. Street made weekend pilgrimages to antiquities shows and fairs, he wrote to terse P.O. boxes in the back of obscure magazines unavailable on any newsstand. Certainly not in their neighborhood. He assembled John Henry. A playbill from the Broadway show and the original score. The very trousers and shirt Paul Robeson wore during the show’s troubled and truncated run. Did Mr. Street decline the temptation to wear the clothes from time to time? Pamela cannot find any way he could have. Hammers. Ten-pound and twenty-pound sledges in pairs. He rubbed brown oil into their handles with one of her old T-shirts, loving the wood as it was said John Henry did, to keep the wood limber, to allow it to absorb the shock of each blow. A grizzled old geezer from Charleston showed up at their apartment one Sunday night and opened a suitcase containing five of what he claimed were actual drill bits used by the Big Bend Tunnel crew, long rusted javelins with mashed plug ends. Her father bought them all, the new school clothes could wait, and hung them over the mantel, five fingers of a railroad hand.
At one point he proclaimed, over a pot of string beans entwined with bloated flats of bacon, his artifacts the largest collection of John Henry in the world. None stepped forward to dispute his claim. Some houses smelled of dogs or cats. The Street household smelled of her father’s rotting mania and the sour reek of Pamela’s and her mother’s snuffed lives. He tried to acquire one of Palmer Hayden’s famous paintings of John Henry, a piece of the Harlem Renaissance. The owners wouldn’t budge. Like he had the money. He settled for a poster and in the dining room John Henry sprawled dead on his back, surrounded by the witnesses of his feat, arms spread wide like Christ’s and his hammer in his hand, he died with his hammer in his hand. One time her father disappeared for two weeks to hunt down an old Adirondack hermit he’d heard of, to tape record from the man’s drooling lips a variant of the John Henry ballad, which had been told to him by his grandfather, supposedly a Big Bend worker who had toiled with John Henry. Her father had cleaned out the receipts from the hardware store for the trip, leaving Pamela and her mother with no money and the Street women ate tuna fish and macaroni and cheese for two weeks. The tape turned out to be unintelligible, the old hermit muttered dementia but if you listened hard enough, and her father did with all his life, you could hear the big man’s name.
The air is cool. This is the country. She hears steps down the cement walkway. Pamela sees it is the writer, the one who choked at dinner. He walks slowly and timorously, as if on a listing deck. He looks up from the ground and sees her, lifts a hand. “Still up?” he asks.
“How are you feeling?” She blows out smoke through her nostrils.
“Better,” he mumbles. He raises the soda can. “This should help,” he says. He doesn’t sound as if he believes it.
“That was pretty scary.”
His eyes dip down again. “Well, the guy saw what was going on and knew what to do.” They give their names to each other and he apologizes for his colleagues’ behavior in the van. He tells her they get a little excited sometimes.
“No problem,” she says. “I lived next to a fraternity house in college.” He smiles at this and she offers him a cigarette.
“My throat,” he says, shaking his head. He asks her what brought her down here.
“My father collected John Henry material,” she says. “It was his hobby. They want to buy it for a museum they’re planning.” She is entirely truthful.
“Must be a big collection,” the writer says.
“It is,” she answers and she lights another cigarette. One of the rooms down the line opens and the man with the eye patch pokes his head out. He yells out the man’s name and waves his arm in circles.
“Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says.
“Probably.”
Tomorrow she has an appointment to meet Mayor Cliff to hear his personal appeal. She has already decided not to give it to them.
Soon it will be time for the night rider to take his journey. His head is full of steam. He can feel the pressure in his head build to shift pistons, he can see by the few remaining drops in the brown bottle of Quint’s Elixir that his boiler is well fed. Soon the car will begin to move.
