“That’s the wrong riff, Bill,” she said all cold and mean. “Can’t you see I’m coming down the cosmic pipeline? You always knew I’d be one spooky son of a bitch. You always did know that.”

  I danced her backwards to our table. When she figured out where we were, she gave me a hard look. “Since when are you so big on the yellow and white stuff, Bill?” she asked. “Who do you think you are? Mr. Eggnog?” Her voice had risen like Norman’s knife, something you just couldn’t ignore in a crowded room, even if all the people, so cool and smoky, were giving it the old college try.

  “Where is it written,” she shouted, “that it’s your job to make me drink eggnog!”

  I sat down and pretended I didn’t know her, and a moment later she sat down, too.

  “Come on, Bill,” she said. “Let’s go to Mexico.”

  “We don’t have much Spanish,” I said.

  The old fart looked around like he expected the CIA to be listening in. Then he leaned in close. “That’s not the Mexico I mean. Deep in the Mexico I’m talking about there’s another secret place where the Spins live.”

  “The Spins?”

  “The land of the Spins is long and shaped like a snake,” she said. “The guts of the Earth. You can get into it easy somewhere around Hermosillo and it runs all the way to Bogotá.” She licked her lips.

  “What you call Spinland?” I asked.

  “You got it.” She sat up straight and slapped her hand down on the table.

  “And these Spins don’t speak Spanish?” I asked.

  “Get this,” she said. “The Spins speak nothing but Spinach!”

  “What would we do there, Jolean?”

  “Down deep, back where Columbia used to be, the Indians have a drug called yage. It’s the final fix, Bill. A telepathic kick.”

  “You don’t want to be reading my mind, Jolean.”

  “It’s the nonverbal level that really counts,” she said. “Intuition and feelings. The very mention of yage has allowed me to read your mind a little. What’s this? You doped my drink? Eggnog is your code word for junk? Who did you think you were fooling, Bill?”

  “Jolean, Jolean,” I said, suddenly in danger of losing the slippery grip on the end of my rope. “Drink your eggnog.”

  She reached over the table and grabbed me by the front of the shirt and got in my face. “Stick it up your ass, Bill.” I watched Burroughs leave her face like she’d wiped off a smile, and saw the old Jolean in there, but I saw, too, that while she was certainly channeling the old fart, he had not taken over. She was, on some level, cooperating with him, which she next proved by saying in her own voice, “And you can just go bite down hard on aluminum foil!”

  She pushed me back into my chair, and we sat glaring at one another for a moment. Then she spoke for him again.

  “This isn’t the kind of dream you wake up from, Bill,” she said. “This is the kind of dream you wake up into. You sit up in bed and look around at the peeling wallpaper and the water stains, the cracks. You listen to the bedsprings squeak when you squirm. You sweat. You listen to the heavy artillery of the city outside. Screaming cats and dogs instead of rain. And the roaches come and go speaking of . . .”

  I stepped into her speech just in time and said, “Yes, it is, Jolean. This is exactly the kind of dream you can wake up from. Come on, I’ll show you.” I pulled her up and away to Scottsdale, Arizona, where we were married by a Mormon who kept apologizing and telling us it would be legal anyway. We honeymooned in Hawaii. We came home and got work. Dr. Benway snapped on a huge rubber glove and pulled babies, one right after another, from Jolean like fruit from a paper sack, and we raised the babies in our own house and got them drivers licenses and straightened their teeth and saw them off to college, felt blue in the big empty house, mooned over pictures of the grandkids, took up hobbies.

  “It’s all junk time, Bill,” she said. “And junk time is all the same time. What will happen, did happen, right now.”

  I suddenly saw her point. Maybe this was a dream you could only pretend to wake up from, your eyes shifting left and right, defensively, sure I’m fine, we’re fine, yes, I said we’re fine. Even so, it’s not like you can just give up.

  I moved my chair around until I was sitting next to her. I pushed her eggnog a little closer. I took her hand. “Drink your eggnog, Jolean,” I whispered. “You’re embarrassing us.” She picked up her glass, drank. Then she got a dreamy look on her face and leaned in from the left and threw up in my lap.

  “Good, good,” I muttered. “Let it all out, Sweetheart.”

  Afterwards we went home, both of us pretending, in spite of the smell that filled the car, that it hadn’t happened. Jolean went into her giggly rehab girl routine, saying How! High are you? Hi! How are you? She poked me in the ribs and giggled, and I said, “Hey, watch it! I’m driving.”

  How! High are you?

  And when the kids called I told them their mother was resting and sure she’d call them back and tell everyone happy holidays. Didn’t she always?

  The Rescue

  He’s your brother, my mother said, and thereby assigned me the job of rescuing Henry. The family had questions. What was Henry up to over there? The speculation was ugly and ridiculous. It wasn’t clear to me that Henry even needed rescuing.

  Doesn’t Henry have email yet?

  What? The very idea! He doesn’t even have a phone! Henry and email. Ha ha. Can you imagine it? My mother couldn’t imagine it. She burst into tears. I know she burst into tears because she typed, “I burst into tears when I read what you said about Henry and his email.”

  Uncle Milo emailed me a story about how El Presidente couldn’t tell a fart from a hurricane and kept looking back at his own butt going whoa! Somebody call the Weather Channel. Whoa! The point of this story was both subtle and serious. Milo was telling me that since he could so openly poke fun at our fearless leader, he could certainly have me roughed up if I didn’t listen to my mother and go check on Henry.

  My sister Stella sent me three typographical frowny faces.

  So, I took a train and a ferry, and in the waterfront district, I grabbed a cab, but it wouldn’t take me all the way into Henry’s neighborhood, so I set off on foot into the heart of dimness and soon encountered a group of pale white children with sticks. They had the steady eyes of wolves as they advanced on me saying, “Bark.”

  Just the one word.

  Bark. Bark. Bark.

  I ran and lost them and then found the building where Henry was supposed to have a fifth floor walkup.

  I, for one, had no trouble imagining Henry with email. In fact, at the top of my to-do list was getting him online so I would never ever have to make a trip like this again.

  I stopped to catch my breath on the third floor and heard someone torturing a violin and someone else shouting for the torture to stop, please stop, just stop, dear god make it stop. Banging doors and ringing phones and screaming children, and someone cooking onions and spicy sausage but the smells couldn’t overcome the prevailing odor of mildew.

  Further up, I stepped over a man crumpled on the stairs. I couldn’t tell if he were dead. Surely not. Everything probably looked very different to the people who lived here. They might say, oh, him, that’s Uncle Albert. He likes to sleep on the stairs.

  How could Henry live like this?

  I came at last to Henry’s apartment. The door was not completely closed. I pushed it open all the way. Inside I saw the backs of the heads of people sitting in medal folding chairs.

  “Henry?” I called and stepped in.

  “Quiet,” someone whispered.

  The focus of attention was a man sitting alone facing the people in the folding chairs. He wore a ragged sleeveless undershirt. There was a cardboard box between his feet.

  The man was my brother Henry. Out of context, I might not have recognized him. He’d lost a lot of weight, and he probably hadn’t gotten his hair cut since I’d seen him last. He hadn’t shaved for days. His eyes were dull and red. He gave no sign he recognized me.

  There was an empty chair at the far left side in the front row. No one objected when I sat down, but the chair had a slightly bent leg, and whenever I leaned to the right, the short leg came down on the bare floor with a thud, and everyone in my row gave me a dirty look.

  They were passing a hat down the line. A black western hat. When it got to me, I saw that it held an astonishing assortment of junk and small coins. A bottle cap. A half a stick of Doublemint gum. Some pennies. A coupon for half off on a bottle of dishwashing soap. A subway token. A dime. A small square of paper with a poem written so small I couldn’t read it. I took a five from my wallet and added it to the collection. The guy next to me made a go-ahead motion with his head that I took to mean I should deliver the hat to Henry.

  I got up and walked to Henry. He didn’t look up at me.

  “Henry?” I said.

  Someone sucked in air behind me — a kind of outraged hiss. I put the hat down by Henry’s feet and walked back to my chair.

  Henry glanced down at the hat. Then he swooped in and plucked out the five I had put in there and poked it into his pants pocket.

  “Okay,” he said, “this next one is Mozart’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra number nine in E flat Major.”

  There was a murmur of approval from the crowd.

  “The Köchel number is 271,” he said and smiled, “for you purists. We’ll do part one, the Allegro.”

  He leaned down and rummaged around in the cardboard box at his feet and then sat back up with a portable CD player.

  “Now the thing to watch for comes right at the very middle,” he said. “The whole piece takes about ten minutes. Halfway in, there is a wonderful surprise of sweet spice. It’s like eating a strange chocolate. You let it melt in your mouth. You taste the chocolate until you break through into the middle and then . . . and then . . . Well, you’ll see.”

  He put on earphones and switched on the CD player. A strange look of peace came to his face and his eyelids fluttered.

  I waited for the music. No music.

  I waited for laughs, for astonished gasps and little peeps and squeaks of incredulity but they never arrived. I took a look around. Everyone seemed entranced.

  Thumbs up!

  We were going to watch Henry listen to music.

  He had closed his eyes, and he was swaying slowly from side to side. Suddenly he stiffened as if shocked, and then he began pointing both forefingers up and to the left and then pointing both forefingers up and to the right, conducting, but without the music, he could have been doing bo doe de oh doe if we didn’t already know he was doing Mozart.

  I glanced at my watch, but it was too late to precisely time the middle of the concerto. I wondered if I would miss it. As it turned out, I need not have worried.

  About five minutes into the performance, Henry started bouncing. Fast little rises into the air followed by slapping falls back into his chair. I couldn’t see how he was doing it. Then there was smoke from around the earphones. Not a lot of smoke, and you might imagine it was a malfunction and worry that his ears would catch on fire, but then there was smoke from his nose, too.

  And then bang! there it was — the middle of the concerto just like that a glow came to his face, a light from inside, a halo, and we were looking at a man who was looking into the very heart of the universe, life, love, and everything, and we knew that was as close as we’d ever get ourselves, and it was enough.

  Then it was over, and Henry went back to conducting with two fingers.

  There was a stunned silence followed by wild applause. Henry said, “No, wait. It isn’t over.”

  But then it really was over, and I had my answer.

  So, what does Henry do?

  He appreciates Mozart, and people like to watch, and they pay him with bottle caps and pennies and half pieces of gum, and they get a lot more than their money’s worth.

  My mother would burst into tears again. My sister Stella would keep saying, “What? I don’t get it. What?” Uncle Milo would probably have me killed.

  I was either going to have to come up with a good lie or make a dash for it like Henry.

  Love Story

  We were doing it like dogs. Or, if you want to get picky about it, we were doing it like everyone imagines dogs do it. Real dogs pump away for a while and then the male twists around and gets off and the two of them share a contemplative moment facing in opposite directions. Private. You take the low road. Pensive. Are you still back there? Such a thing, if not impossible, probably would have been pointless for Lucille and me, but it reminded me of my grandmother and long lazy summers in the Arizona mountains. Grandma had a couple of dogs named Chuck and Muffy who were fully functional pit bulls but no one thought much about pit bulls in those days and most dogs just did what came naturally. What my grandmother liked about Chuck and Muffy was they could and would kill anything that got into the yard.

  When I told Lucy I was thinking about the first time I saw the way dogs do it in the summertime at Grandma’s place, she said, “So this is your idea of romantic pillow talk?”

  My grandmother had a few misconceptions about the way dogs do it, I told Lucy. She never understood why the dogs would choose to ignore her warnings and continue with their nasty ways. They would be fine for months, and then bang! she’d come around the corner of the house and there they’d be — Chuck in the middle of his twisting routine, and she’d shout, “They’re stuck!”

  Because that’s what’s liable to happen to us, Lucy, when we do sneaky, nasty things. We get stuck. Grandma turned the hose on the dogs. Stop it! Stop it right now, you dirty dogs! They always persevered and finished and then sat hangdog and dripping and endured their lecture and then shook the water off grinning and went on with their business. Nothing got them down for long.

  Except when you called the guy dog “Chuckles.”

  Chuck hated that, and he would curl his lip at you like he was saying the old lady seems to like you, so unlike other things that get into the yard, I’m not going to kill you, but you’d better knock off that Chuckles crap or you’re going to be in for it!

  Once I found out Chuck was short for Charles, I wondered if Grandma had named the dog after me. When I asked her about it, she said, “What an idea!”

  Years later when I told Lucy that story I could see the light go on even though she made heroic efforts to hide it, little smiles going on and off, sideways glances. Here’s something I can use! After we were married when she wanted to get my goat she would hit me with it like “I don’t know about that boat, Chuckles.”

  Growling at her was totally ineffective.

  Now we’re grandparents ourselves, but we have no dogs.

  “How come we never had dogs when Jenny was growing up?” I asked Lucy.

  Jenny (call me Jennifer) is our straight-laced daughter. It’s like personality traits skip generations. My granddaughter Amy is a very wacky kid. She drives her mother crazy but in a good way, I think, and that makes me happy. I remember one time Jenny was trying to get me to baby-sit, and being so indirect about it. On the one hand she needed to be somewhere in a hurry, but on the other hand she didn’t want to appear to need anything from the likes of Lucy and me or just me in this case since Lucy was off playing her viola with the community band. My theory is that Jenny’s brain was infested with some conservative virus she picked up from that husband of hers who you have to wonder how he can bend at the waist what with the stick he’s got lodged up his wazoo.

  “Sure, leave her with me,” I told her. “We’ll spend the afternoon smoking big cigars and watching inappropriate movies.”

  “Dad!”

  “Eating foods with lots of saturated fat.”

  Amy was grinning ear to ear, and I could see she enjoyed seeing her mother scandalized. Since it was so easy to scandalize Jennifer, Amy was in for years of laughs.

  “Picking our noses and playing with matches!”

  “It’s like you don’t want her,” Jenny said. “It’s like you’re trying to make me take her to a day care center or something.”

  “What! Not want her?” I pulled Amy into the protection of my arms and she looked back up at me still grinning. “You better watch out. Chances are I’ll just adopt her. You two will come back and we’ll all pretend we don’t even know you.”

  “Dad!”

  But now is now, and oh, look they’ve all just banged into the kitchen, and Amy asks, “Can I have a cookie?”

  “Not now, sweetie,” Lucy says. “Grandma’s busy.”

  Busy having her neck nibbled by Grandpa while the republican son-in-law looks like he’s just walked in on some kind of lowlife, sneaky and nasty activity that proper dogs wouldn’t be caught dead doing.

  “Will somebody hose those two off?” he says.

  “Oh, be nice,” Lucy says.

  “Do we have to stand here and watch this?” the uptight, okay his name is Robert, son-in-law says. I’ve known his name from the very first night she brought him home to meet us. I just don’t like to use it.

  Jenny is speechless.

  “Come on, you guys,” I say. “Hold up your scorecards.”

  “You want points for this!” Jenny is scandalized again.

  I’m about to give up altogether on Robert, but then I have to hand it to him. He does, in the end, flip through his cards and give us a ten.

  A soft smile threatens the lips of our lovely daughter, Jennifer.

  Amy claps her hands together.

  A marching band comes in one door and out the other and you have to wonder how they all fit in there since that second door leads to the bathroom.

  And pipers piping.

  And waves of mice singing show tunes in little squeaky voices sweep Lucy and me up and wash us back into the bedroom where we really belong.

  It’s like someone somewhere has planned the whole thing.

  “So, you can come clean now, Lucy, and admit you’ve really been a CIA operative under deep cover all these years we’ve been married.”

  “We have ways to make you bark,” she says.

 

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