In the middle of winter we loaded everything we had into a shopping cart in the alley behind the Bloomington House and pushed it over the snow, and ice to our new place on Cedar. The new apartment, two rooms with a shard bathroom in the hall, was conveniently almost directly above the bar. It also ended up being nearly free, even turning a small profit. For half of the months rent we had to clean out the common bathrooms, halls, etc. The other half was taken care of by inflating the hours and cost of materials on various repair and upkeep jobs about the falling down rooming house.
The first major cleaning job was to clear out and scrub the upstairs apartments where one of my best friends had recently overdosed. The two junkies who had been renting the place had, unsurprisingly, not been paying any rent at all. They also had never even attempted to keep order or any semblance of sanitation. I helped out for less than an hour before begging off on the grounds that I could not handle scooping up the shit and needles from the room where Little Bob had died. Jenny finished it by herself. It was her that Bob's ghost visited first, in a dream, appearing at the top of the stairs clothed in light and telling her it was all going to be alright. He never visited me at all, though I suspected that his spirit was still playing the occasional childish practical joke on me keeping up a tradition he had established in life over the decade and a half we had been friends.
In a world where it quickly becomes obvious that we are all, barring a few small idiosyncrasies, basically all the same- Bob had proven himself to be unique. He did this without effort or forethought. He simply went about his days like the fool in the Tarot, stumbling into miracles with a giggle and a smirk as if everything that was happening around him was completely normal. And it was, if you were Bob; or one of his close friends. His family. Our family- all of us just odd enough not to fit in anywhere except amongst ourselves. Still, Bob had most of us topped by a large margin.
One of my first memories of Bob was from an apartment on the second story of a building on Third and Franklin. There was what most people would call a party but to us was just another night of too much booze (or not enough) and madness. I remember Bob was sitting on the window sill. We were talking about nothing and drinking beer after cheap beer, listening to some punk tape or another. I turned away for a second and when I turned back Bob was gone. Now this was a bit troubling. There was no way he could have gotten around me without me noticing, no matter how small he was or how drunk I was. I stood there puzzling over this when the door bell rang. It was Bob, who appeared at the apartment door a moment later , grinning and giggling. He had tilted himself backwards to take a drink of his beer and tumbled out the window. But everything was fine, he said. Not only had he bounced unscathed off of the dirt yard below, but he hadn't spilled a drop of his beer.
I remember this story so well because it became the model of all things Bob to me. Bob had the worst possible luck possible, but somehow managed to come through all of it unscathed. He carried around a hernia the size of a softball for years without having it burst in any of his daily mishaps. He got guns pulled on him by people who were more than ready to murder him and then danced and joked his way into them buying him drinks. He flipped his truck sideways down a mountain road in Tennessee ending up ass over tit, his head by the pedals, his feet on the wheel, with nothing more than a good story and a sheepish grin for his troubles. It goes on. Many nights can and have been spent by his family, hour upon hour, just reciting the stories. The liturgy of Little Bob. Someday someone will get around to codifying the stories and set them all down. Until then, we just tell the stories and laugh to keep ourselves from crying.
Bob's last story is the bitter-sweetest. Bob after years of trying finally managed to end up with a kid. Azzy was, and is, absolutely beautiful. Where she got her looks from no one will ever know. She is infinitely better looking than either one of her parents. What she did get from Bob was that untouchable grace that protected her father for so many years. What Bob got from her was the desire to live.
The bitter then is Azzy's mother, a speed addled wreck who was determined to keep Bob out of his daughter's life. Not that Bob could be considered responsible or particularly trustworthy in most things. But when it came to Azzy there was no doubt that he would be the best of fathers. Even watching him bike off from Miz Molly's birthday party with his infant girl on his shoulders, one hand on the handle bars, one wrapped around Azzy, no one felt anything than the slightest twinge. They would come to no harm and we knew it like we knew that the sun would rise, or that humanity as a whole could never measure up to this man's capacity for love.
In the end it was his love that killed him. I could probably say that about any of my closest friends who have died over the years, and there are very, very many of them. But with Bob it was so apparent. He was in the midst of a custody battle to determine whether or not he would lose his daughter forever and he was certain he was going to lose. We all were. Any judge looking down at that broken grinned, tattooed little man would imagine the worst and immediately grant custody to anyone but him. He died less than a week before the final court date.
We signed the lease agreement on that apartment the night of my thirty-second birthday. We found out that Bob was gone on our way to the bar to celebrate our new house, and that he had died in the house we were moving into.
The floor of the apartment was covered in a miserable, filthy, blood red carpet. The walls were the tobacco-stained white of all rooming houses and cheap motels. The furnace regularly tried to asphyxiate us and gave Jenny endless headaches. We drank too much there and fought always. We tried and failed to make the moments of beauty that managed to creep in in spite of ourselves last. But we always ended up back in the mire of our lives. If someone had set up to film us they could have pawned off the result as a lost Hank Chinaski story. It would have sold millions to the disaffected masses who chew on that sort of crap like some romantic Bible. I would have been one of them.
I was certainly the cause of most of the misery in that house. Ask anyone whose ever dated me, or known me for any length of time- I am split almost in half by magic and misery. Sooner or later the misery becomes too much for anyone to bear. In the end I ran off to New Orleans to get away from myself. Unfortunately, I brought myself along. It goes on in circles.
The most remarkable thing about that apartment was the Miracle of the Dimes. No matter how often you cleaned, no matter how many times you picked up everything off of the floor, the carpet would be covered in dimes. It was eerie. We would clean the house and go out, or go to bed. Nothing on the floor at all. And the next morning or later in the night there they would be. Dimes. Not just one or two, but half a dozen, ten, fifteen. It took us a while to notice it. When we did we first thought nothing of it. One of had spilled the contents of our pockets, that's all. But it was always dimes. No pennies, no quarters, and it happened at times when we both knew that we were dead broke. We'd wake up and go off to the bar to beg a drink or two and come home to a dollar in dimes on the carpet. That horrible blood red carpet, spotted in shiny drops of silver.
Maybe it was Bob's last gift. A tip for cleaning up after him that one last time.
Music for the Day
No comments:
Post a Comment