Know Your Beholder: A Novel Read online

  Sheila Anne and Dennis Church live in New York City, in what I imagine to be some cobalt-blue-themed, sleekly furnished apartment located on the twenty-third floor of a gleaming high-rise overlooking the Hudson River. They eloped on a beach in Mexico with only a priest, an authentic mariachi band, and a local photographer as their witnesses. Sheila Anne accidentally posted public-access wedding photos to her Facebook page, and I was dumb enough to let curiosity get the better of me. Though my band did have a fan page, I refused (and still refuse) to become a member of Facebook. But after I learned of their elopement from Bradley (Sheila Anne’s younger brother), I couldn’t help putting myself through the misery and wound up clicking on her unrestricted page.

  After she heard from another bandmate, Morris (via Facebook message), of my being crushed by the photos (I was bedridden for close to four days), Sheila Anne changed her Facebook settings and sent me an e-mail of apology:

  Francis,

  I’m so sorry you saw those photos. I hope you’re okay.

  With love,

  Sheila Anne

  Yes, her farewell salutation was distinguished by a lowercase l. She obviously exclusively reserves the capitalized version of the word for her new husband.

  In the photos, Sheila Anne looks nauseatingly beautiful in her sunflower-yellow summer dress, with Mexican poppies arranged in her hair and a bouquet of the same flowers in her hand. Her ankles are ringed with braided sea grass and anemones, the tops of her bare feet flecked with damp, Yucatán sand.

  Dennis is wearing seersucker shorts; a matching jacket, the sleeves rolled to the elbows; a white dress shirt with a yellow bow tie; and a straw porkpie whose hatband smartly matches his neckwear, not to mention his bride-to-be’s dress and floral accents. He too is barefoot and his tan, ultrafit legs look somehow appropriated from a world-class tennis pro.

  He’s one of those guys who can wear pastels and not in any way compromise his masculinity. I suspect you could walk up to him at a cocktail party and say, “Why, Dennis Church, what color is that four-hundred-dollar, seemingly-normal-but-designed-to-the-tits casual shirt?” To which he might reply, “It’s actually blood-orange-infused salmon,” then sip from a glass of chilled rosé in sort of a faggy way and manage to somehow increase his masculinity quotient.

  The uncredited photographer captured their nuptial kiss while a corona of Mexican sun was forming a divine, perfectly timed halo around their soft joined faces, the porkpie off now (perhaps flung down the beach dramatically), the ocean calm and cerulean and twinkling behind them, an impossibly white Caribbean seagull passing overhead, high in the cloudless blue sky, wings wide and still as if in benediction.

  Sheila Anne and I were married in the back room of a steakhouse in Branson, Missouri (B. T. Bones Steakhouse), during what would wind up being the band’s final tour. That morning I had passed a kidney stone and managed to sprain my ankle at the precise moment it disgorged itself from my urethra. I was high on Morris’s Percocet, and in the few Polaroids chronicling the sad but perfect little evening of ribs, smoked sausage, and pulled pork (the Three Amigos Combo), assorted sides, and a red velvet cake that the B. T. Bones manager allowed us to bring into the restaurant, bless his mom-’n’-pop heart, I look like I’m about sixty-three years old. I’m wearing a Carolina-blue cotton-blend suit that I’d purchased from the local Sears and a pair of canvas Chuck Taylor low-tops, also Carolina blue, with white laces and white athletic socks.

  My collared shirt, also white and also from Sears, is too small, and my tie is of the paisley variety, phantasmagoric in that insane way paisley can be, and knotted with a misshapen Windsor that was executed by Glose while in deep, furrow-browed concentration. Despite my garroted neck, my facial muscles are somehow either so relaxed or so pain-fatigued that I appear to have jowls. Sheila Anne is wearing a candy-striped fifties thrift-store dress she bought in Branson and baby-blue rain boots (not quite Carolina blue, but close enough) and her hair is in French braids and she’s laughing sweetly at my terrible state.

  We’re so in love that just thinking about it makes my viscera feel like it’s turning to landscaping mulch.

  Bassist and childhood best friend, Kent, deejayed with his cheap portable boom box, pulling CDs out of an ancient duct-taped binder, while Morris and Glose basically got shitfaced on consecutive tumblers of the B. T. Bones signature drink—the Slippery Tin Roof—which, if I remember correctly, included “ice cream” vodka, chocolate syrup, and coffee liqueur, among other ingredients you might find stockpiled at a four-year-old’s birthday party.

  The said Polaroid is currently affixed to the bottom of my minifridge with a plastic carrot magnet, which means I have to lie prone and drive my chin into the backs of my hands to really look at it.

  I’ve been doing exactly that a lot lately.

  I have never been to New York City but I visit often via the Internet. Someone called Ivan Ivanovich authors a blog chronicling the streets of Manhattan, with little abstract captions below photographs of storefronts, bridges, an East Village farmers’ market, Central Park, ethnically diverse children frolicking in urban playgrounds, the Hudson River at dawn, pigeons posing along the edges of tenement rooftops, etc.

  When the band was touring we got as far east as Pittsburgh, but the Big Apple has eluded me the same way large game bass elude certain kinds of cursed fishermen.

  Oh, the band.

  The band the band the band the band the Motherfucking Band…

  The band is—or was—called the Third Policeman (a flagrant plagiaristic homage to Flann O’Brien’s underappreciated masterpiece), and we made a pretty good go of it here in the Midwest, mostly headlining college bars and occasionally opening at larger venues for some younger, sexier indie/new school postpunk outfit from Portland or Akron or Walla Walla; some slack-haired, waif-thin copycat quartet brimming with wit, donning perfectly distressed clothes (matched only by their carefully ragamuffinized hair) accented by trust fund–financed tattoos and exhibiting a lazy live-performance habit, unwarranted industry irony, and stupidly large amps.

  The Third Policeman, on the other hand, was a well-aged, anti-industry psychedelic semi-jam band with a penchant for outro pop harmonies and the occasional speedy punk vibe. We had smallish amps and old duct-tape-corrected quarter-inch cables that had survived the spaghetti-blob insanity of years of bad postshow breakdowns and crammed-to-the-tits gig bags.

  I mostly fronted, wrote a good share of the lyrics, and played rhythm guitar. Backed by a small label out of Madison called Slowneck Records, we recorded an EP and an LP. After the LP (Argon Lights) was released we spent most of our time touring highbrow indie music towns (Cleveland, Louisville, Chicago, Austin, Pittsburgh) and making the occasional college-radio appearance.

  At our best we were as tight as anyone, and when our drummer, Glose, wasn’t fucking us (and himself) over during his huffing stage (as in airplane glue out of small brown paper bags), we looked like a band that could break through the ranks and make a real go of it on the national level. Before Glose wound up in an emergency room in Lawrence, Kansas, for accidental self-induced septicemia (blood poisoning) that he’d contracted from a dirty fork he’d been using to pop a blood blister on his foot, Slowneck Records had planned a monthlong European tour that included Berlin, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Paris, which would have surely taken us to the next level, or simply improved the quality of our lives by a modest percentage.

  Glose has since sworn off forks, though I have no doubt that his lifestyle still affords him ample opportunity for some other form of accidental self-poisoning. Once he ate a TV Guide just to see what would happen. Nothing happened, so he decided to follow that up by ingesting the first three books of the New Testament. The shame about Glose is that when he has his head on straight, watching him drum is like witnessing someone operating a flying machine.

  Besides Glose’s erratic episodes, which included shoplifting, public nudity, urinating on small-town barbershop windows, and several fistfights (for
some reason he liked to head-butt other bands’ bassists, rugby-style), our biggest weakness was our lack of focus. Or maybe it was fear of success, or some combination of the two. We were creepily Chekhovian. Our Moscow was New York and LA, and we talked about testing those larger markets with emphatic music in our voices. But whether our handicaps were financial (no one made more than $300 a week), romantic (what became fondly known as the Third Policeman’s “Yoko Factor”—my bad, fellas), spiritual (depression, lack of artistic faith, fear, etc.), or transportation-related (no one ever seemed to have a large enough car to fit two guitar amps, a bass amp, a drum kit with hardware, and a bunch of gear, or good enough credit to rent one), we couldn’t manage to get our shit together. Everyday distraction is a syndrome that can cripple any band, especially one with four members. At least one of them has to be the organized one who keeps things rolling with the booking agent and label rep, not to mention manages the responsibilities of maintaining the website, silk-screening the T-shirts, preserving a good vibe with the tour manager, etc.

  Of the four of us, Morris, our lead guitarist, pedal collagist, and minimaster of the Arto-Lindsay-No-Wave-inspired punk incantation (in one of the Third Policeman’s signature bits, his voice would break through an aurora of guitar shimmer like a mad dog barking down rabies), was that guy. He knew it but didn’t like it. I could have been that guy, but I was too in love with Sheila Anne and my priorities were shifting away from the band and toward the false ether of married life. For seven thousand reasons, Glose most certainly wasn’t that guy, and Kent, despite his genuine Third Policeman enthusiasm, had a hard enough time simply balancing his checkbook.

  Sitting here, at this very moment, it’s somehow Morris I miss most. Morris “the Cat” Sparks, who ran a 10.8 100 meters in high school and was the first white male to win the state of Ohio in that event in almost thirty years. Morris turned down Division I track scholarships to three Big Ten schools to attend the nonathletic, cannabis-saturated Reed College in Portland, Oregon, for the sole purpose of studying with the poet Gary Snyder. Morris, the left-handed “white Hendrix.” The enigmatic master of the upside-down imitation Danelectro with which he could make more exciting noises than a guitar jock with a five-thousand-dollar axe and nine-hundred-part loop station.

  Morris came to Pollard by way of the Wicker Park area of Chicago. He wanted to live cheaply while writing prose poems about power stations and dirty Midwestern children and the encroaching dominance of what he called the “Great Digital Eye.” He was a graduate of the U. of Chicago (he transferred from Reed after his sophomore year), and I happened upon him playing an open mic at Pollard’s lone independent coffee shop, Hello Hi Coffee on Plano Street. He had long dirty-blond hair and a reddish beard, and was busing his solid-state imitation Danelectro through a delay pedal and triggering some other low-end sound bed with his left foot while performing selections of his poetry. It might sound like utter pretentious nonsense, but it was one of the purest forms of human expression I’ve ever heard and witnessed. His face did honest things, as did his voice. It was as honest as milk from a cow squirting into an aluminum pail. He performed barefoot, and his slender, surprisingly clean, feminine feet, which he didn’t even bother tapping time with, seemed honest too. When I later asked him why he chose to perform barefoot, he said it was important for him to feel the vibrations come up through his heels. The thing about Morris is that he meant it when he said and did stuff like that—stuff that, coming from anyone else, would likely seem affected or snake-oily or just plain random.

  He rented an apartment above the coffee shop and survived by working as a barista at Hello Hi Coffee and giving guitar lessons. For nearly a year I courted him to form a band with me, and when he eventually caved, I thought I’d acquired a great secret that would solve perhaps .3 percent of humankind’s foibles.

  After Slowneck Records was absorbed by a soulless industry monolith, they dumped us; at least that’s how I’ve managed to arrange that narrative. The truth is, we sort of dumped ourselves. Imploded is a good word. Before Slowneck made the move to the big leagues, they actually tried to rally us to stay together and keep grinding it out. But unfortunately things were already too far gone.

  After the band split up Morris stuck around Pollard and we jammed in my basement for a few months, trying to work up new material, but there was something missing that the four of us had had together—something intangible and tense and roundly inspired—something that made jamming feel necessary, even religious at times.

  Morris eventually left without a good-bye, which would continue a recurring theme for the Third Policeman.

  He currently teaches language arts at a junior high school in Durham, North Carolina. I imagine him barefoot in the classroom, still long-haired, clad in chinos, a plaid button-down and navy knit tie, reading Edgar Allan Poe to eighth graders by candlelight while scoring it with one of his guitar collages. The kids probably love him.

  All four members of the Third Policeman had always held day jobs. Glose was a technician’s assistant at Pollard’s lone stand-up MRI clinic. Morris eventually became the lead barista at Hello Hi Coffee. Kent, a certified librarian, worked at the Pollard District Library re-shelving books and on the sly sold vintage rock ’n’ roll T-shirts to the kids who would frequent the library’s surprisingly sophisticated, Kent Orzolek–curated Young Adult section.

  I wrote a column for the local alternative weekly, the Pollard Pigeon, mostly charting my experiences, opinions, and attitudes about the regional and national music scene. I would occasionally embed a record review in my generous thousand-word allotment, which was no problemo for my editor, an old hippie who called himself Chuckie Skyhawk. I’d been a writing major in college (Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa), so my byline gave me the false sense that I was actually applying an otherwise wasted higher education.

  My column was called “Notes from a Rock ’n’ Roll Windsock,” and I had a good readership and a modest but lively online dialogue that would follow each entry. I thought about continuing the work as a blogger after the Pigeon, like so many other small-town weeklies, folded, but I couldn’t get beyond the pride-spurning, reductive fact that I would no longer be getting paid for my important, expectant work. Despite the Pigeon’s meager circulation (2,500), the byline was surprisingly good for my ego.

  For reasons I don’t completely understand, my Sheila Anne did not take Dennis Church’s unfortunate last name, so it is a consolation to me that she did take mine, the unlikely Italian cognomen Falbo, which translates as “fair-haired” or “blond of beard.” Unlike Lyman’s prior to midlife, my hair is not fair, though my beard is sort of reddish. I believe I inherited most of my external physical attributes from my mother’s side. She was a hundred percent Polish, dark-haired and pale-skinned, with icy blue eyes. I got the dark hair and pale skin from her, and the tired, grayish eyes from God knows where, as Lyman’s hound-dog-sad eyes are one of his best, most lovable features.

  Perhaps my eyes are simply Pollardian?

  Sheila Anne and I were Mr. and Mrs. Francis Falbo for exactly three years, eleven months, and twenty-two days. I arrive at my number based on the Thursday evening she walked out of the house, not the postmarked date featured on the top left corner of the divorce papers, which arrived by way of certified mail not even two months after her leaving. In official terms, our divorce was based on “irreconcilable differences,” for which Illinois law requires a two-year separation before the divorce can be completed, but the separation can be reduced to six months if the proper waiver and stipulation are filed correctly. And, yes, I somehow agreed to all of this, always the gentleman, always the fool.

  The summer following our elopement, in an effort to satisfy both sets of parents, we held a Commitment Ceremony in the backyard, where we recited carefully composed vows to each other under Cornelia’s copper beech. While I know Cornelia and Lyman would’ve preferred a Catholic church, they were more than happy to host. Sheila Anne and I were staunch agnostics, so w
e didn’t want to go anywhere near a place of worship.

  Cornelia’s cancer treatments hadn’t become too debilitating just yet, so she was in great spirits, making her signature paczki (Polish donuts) and welcoming everyone with smiling eyes, offering shots of Nalewka Babuni, an ultrasweet Polish liqueur.

  Sheila Anne’s parents and several members of her extended family drove down from Minnesota. They were a tall, hearty lot, some of whom looked Nordic, others more ruddy and Irish. They wore a lot of Ralph Lauren and liked to drink Budweiser out of the can and talk loudly about their baseball Twins and football Vikings.

  This was the first time I met Sheila Anne’s parents face-to-face. Her mother, Erin, a beautiful former model and tennis pro, immediately hugged and kissed me on the cheek, welcoming me warmly to their family. Robert Farnham, on the other hand, a tall, broad-shouldered corporate attorney with unimpeachable silver hair, was more than a little circumspect. He was handsome in the same way sailboats can be, and when he shook my hand it felt as if I were being administered a gentle life-or-death warning.

  Glose oversaw the proceedings wearing what appeared to be a white pleated muumuu that was supposed to be some sort of official-looking garment.

  Our vows were embroidered with words like eternity and collaboration and life-partnership. And humor and fun and devotion. Authenticity was one particular word that seemed to hang in the air that night like a magic spinning platter.

  Morris performed a genuinely moving ballad on his nylon-string guitar, and Glose played accompaniment, using only a brush and his fingers on his snare drum. After this, drinks were served and Morris and Sheila Anne’s brother, Bradley, sixteen at the time, took turns deejaying and both sets of parents lit tiki torches and citronella candles to keep the mosquitoes at bay and everyone danced under the copper beech. It all went down without a hitch in that no one tore an ACL or passed out in the front yard.