Know Your Beholder: A Novel Page 3

  I spent most of the evening avoiding Robert Farnham’s stern, emasculating gaze, keeping within arm’s reach of Sheila Anne, who acted as a buffer between her dad and me after our tense handshake.

  Kent, who was not in attendance for reasons I’ll get to, was sorely missed, of course. I e-mailed him the few digital photos that Lyman took with his iPhone, but I never heard back.

  To bring things to the present, Sheila Anne now uses her maiden name—Farnham—and mine has been deleted from her identity like a smudge Windexed from a bathroom mirror. She has recently been hired onto the elite sales force of AstraZeneca, a leading pharmaceutical company that specializes in medications designed to combat, among other embarrassing afflictions, cholesterol, hypertension, and prostate cancer. It’s no coincidence that Dennis Church also reps for AstraZeneca.

  I imagine my ex-wife walking around New York City in mannish suits and heels fit for a venture capitalist, talking to accounts on her Bluetooth headset, clicking across serious avenue pavement, the Wall Street Journal tucked under her arm, a to-go cup of barista-made cappuccino in her hand, some impossibly crafted foam art like President Obama’s face or a rare rhomboidal leaf keeping its shape through sips one, two, and three, Sheila Anne defying pedestrian traffic signals, hailing a cab on a whim, multitasking her tight little ass off, carrying an expensive but sleek leather attaché full of high-end sales materials and brightly colored pharmacological samplers that would probably do a world of good for Yours Truly.

  Although she makes frequent visits to Milwaukee, Chicago, and nearby St. Louis, I haven’t seen my ex-wife in almost two years (688 days to be exact).

  Sheila Anne and I first met after a gig in Louisville, where she was getting her master’s in health science at Bellarmine University. The Third Policeman had just played one of that particular tour’s best sets at the Rudyard Kipling, a small but indie-respected mom-’n’-pop venue that Slowneck had booked us at as part of one of our many meager six-city treks. While we were breaking our equipment down (we never got to the level that garners guitar techs or roadies), Sheila Anne introduced herself. Those eyes of hers were set against pale, lightly freckled skin and marmalade hair, and although she hid her figure under tomboyish corduroys complete with fob chain running back pocket to belt loop, and an oversized plaid button-down shirt that at one time might have been her uncle’s, there was no doubt that she possessed a killer, extremely feminine body. But in the grand scheme of indie-rock regional chilliness, which was infecting my entire life at that time, it was her engaging warmth that was almost shocking.

  Later at the bar, after we’d loaded everything into our institutional-looking rental van, and following small talk during which I couldn’t really focus because I was so immediately smitten, she offered to take some photos of the band at our next gig in Cincinnati the following night. I hadn’t even noticed the digital camera around her neck. It was her spring break and she had some time off, and although she wasn’t a professional she’d studied photography as an undergraduate (College of Saint Benedict, MN) and had recently developed a passion for shooting the interiors of Louisville bars: those dank, old-school joints that still serve cheap bourbon and don’t give a shit about cleanliness, coolness, or closing time. Classic analog jukeboxes. Fading beer light signs. Bartenders donning flea-market wigs. Half-burnt-out Christmas tree lights twinkling sadly.

  Sheila Anne was only twenty-five at the time, with long braided hair and those eyes that never seem to tire, age, or lie. I invited her to have a few more drinks with the band over at Freddie’s, another local dive bar that kept later hours—and one that she’d recently photographed—but she declined the offer, saying that her boyfriend wouldn’t approve and that she always got herself into trouble when she went to Freddie’s because the Maker’s was so cheap. The fact that she drank Maker’s was an immediate turn-on, but the mention of her boyfriend made it a bitter one. Profound disappointment spread through my limbs like nerve damage. I wound up going to Freddie’s with Glose anyway and drinking several consecutive shots of said holy bourbon, chased by cans of aluminum-tasting Miller High Life, whereupon I passed out in a vinyl booth riddled with duct tape, knife lacerations, and cigarette burns.

  Nevertheless, Sheila Anne showed up in Cincinnati and shot much of what became the first images on the Third Policeman’s now semi-frozen website (it hasn’t been updated in well over a year). That night she decided to stay out late with us. We drank at a bar near the ballpark, and I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. While she was in the bathroom, Morris kept insisting that she was into me, which I didn’t believe, despite the fact that, as our resident chick shaman, Morris could suss out these kinds of things the way pigs can find truffles.

  Upon returning from the bathroom she took my hand under the table. Morris and Kent were at the jukebox, and Glose was skulking around, beating the busboys to leftover baskets of chicken wings. I was overwhelmed with the sensation that my stomach had disappeared and I was turning to powder. I think I fell in love with her at the precise moment she took my hand. And though it was brief and likely unremarkable, it is a feeling I will never forget and one I’m afraid I will never experience again. Elysian Fields and all that.

  She stayed with me in my hotel room that night, but we didn’t sleep together. We mostly shared a bottle of Louisville-purchased Maker’s Mark, passing it back and forth, with no assistance from the Quality Inn’s faulty ice machine. She really liked our music, especially the lyrics, and thought the way I played the guitar was “quietly sexy.” The highest compliment an attractive, intelligent woman can pay to a rhythm guitarist is to tell him that he is “quietly sexy.” It’s like telling a young center fielder that he “runs like a deer.” I felt a surge of confidence, as well as a surging boner.

  She wouldn’t talk about her boyfriend, though she did mention that things weren’t going in the right direction. (They were both master’s candidates in the same health science program. His name was Laird.) But instead of taking the men-as-stepping-stones theme as an early sign, I egomaniacally interpreted the declining Laird chapter as an invitation and opened my lonely heart the same way seventh graders thrust their chins heavenward and free their tender souls after a hoped-for love note is discovered in a homeroom locker.

  Sheila Anne followed us to Cleveland and Chicago, shooting our shows and helping us manage the merch table. Morris was cool and slept in Glose and Kent’s room, and Sheila Anne and I made love for the first time in Chicago, at the Days Inn off Clark Street—appropriately a legendary rock ’n’ roll hotel—with a Lake Michigan wind rattling the window like intermittent applause.

  Miraculously, those brief seven minutes—perhaps the most perfect seven minutes of my life—produced simultaneous orgasms, yielding zoological noises from us so hilarious that upon completion we were immediately seized with hysterical laughter. Someone on the other side of our door might have thought we were watching Monty Python. There’s nothing better than coming and laughing at the same time. It had been a first for both of us.

  The following morning, while I paced along the carpeted hallway outside our room, Sheila Anne called Laird and, through a long, teary phone conversation, ended their relationship. Over the course of the next few days I asked her repeatedly if she needed time to recover/decompress/heal from her breakup. Nobody worth his salt wants to be a rebound lay. But she insisted that we dive right in, headfirst, eyes wide open, and continued from these clichés to her platitudes about how we only lived once and life was too short and we had just a few tragic years to flop around and be foolish and dare the gods of love.

  Again, I should’ve taken note.

  A few days later we got married in Branson, Missouri. Branson was the next leg of the tour. It’s situated in the Ozark Mountains. The Third Policeman got booked to play a Journey tribute set at the God & Country Theatre. This was the kind of gig that would essentially pay for the entire tour. Somehow, Morris can hit all of Steve Perry’s impossible high notes, a challenge for any man who
still possesses testicles.

  High on Vicodin after the gig, I took a knee in front of a packed house of die-hard Journey freaks, professed my love to Sheila Anne, offered her a braided cocktail straw arrangement as an engagement ring, and asked for her hand in marriage. She accepted, laughing, no doubt equally high on Vicodin, and pulled my head into her midriff. She then kissed me so passionately and fully that I could have died right there.

  The following day, a Monday, after I had passed the aforementioned kidney stone and sprained my ankle (were these not omens?), we obtained a marriage license from the local recorder’s office, a document later signed by Morris and Kent in the back of B. T. Bones Steakhouse after a municipal judge named Lester Moncrief, a half-blind, wheelchair-bound albino whose business card we’d found resting on a little shelf beside the marriage-license window, solemnized our marriage.

  While my marriage to Sheila Anne was in full bloom, Kent was heading in the opposite direction as he and his girlfriend, Caitlin, a professional quilter (meaning she hand-made and sold quilts on consignment) as well as our minitour merch manager and occasional head barbecue chef, were about to go through a painful breakup.

  Caitlin Carr of Indianapolis joined the tour in Pittsburgh, five days after the Branson show. Little did we know that she was less than twenty-four hours from leaving Third Policeman bassist and my best friend since sixth grade, Kent Orzolek. She wound up publicly accusing her boyfriend of some three years of being a homosexual. This little imputative nightmare took place in a dive bar on Pittsburgh’s South Side, while we were playing electronic darts on a Friday night in the middle of hockey season among scores of shitfaced, pissed-off Penguins fans, who had just witnessed a hard-fought loss to the New York Rangers.

  Caitlin’s accusation seemed preposterous, but was in fact, as we were about to discover, wildly and unpredictably true.

  Poor Kent.

  It turned out that he’d been in love with Glose for several months and that the reason he’d been putting on weight was that he knew Glose preferred fat girls. Kent had grown particularly heavy, pushing 250 pounds (at a generous five foot ten).

  He came out to Glose roughly at midnight, the night before our Pittsburgh show, in Glose’s Holiday Inn motel room, as Caitlin, Sheila Anne, Morris, and I were getting stoned and streaming a Three’s Company marathon on my laptop in another room. I think Kent got inspired by my sudden, impulsive marriage to Sheila Anne.

  According to Glose, this is what happened:

  Wearing a tight sleeveless T-shirt featuring a Shazam thunderbolt, perhaps to highlight his plump pecs and bulbous tummy, Kent Orzolek professed romantic love to his longtime rhythm section partner. Glose, in response, vomited his Dairy Queen double cheeseburger, root beer, and vanilla shake onto the fire-retardant carpeting. Then he (Glose) freed his uncircumcised penis from his underwear-less pants and proceeded to urinate on the plot of regurgitated matter, at which point (according to Glose) Kent actually went to his knees. This, I assume, was probably out of desperation or relief or horror, or some combination thereof, as those extraordinarily heightened moments in our lives have a tendency to naturally lower our center of gravity, thus the need for phrases like “She took my legs out” and “He made my knees go wobbly.” Glose, however, obviously misinterpreted Kent’s genuflection as an inspired offer of fellatio, and according to Kent, Glose struck him square in the face with the cheap digital clock radio he’d aggressively snatched from the bedside stand. Glose claimed he thought Kent was coming by simply to huff a little glue and watch reality TV, something they’d been doing ad nauseam the entire minitour. (As an aside, Kent swears to the God of Rhythm and Blues that Glose has three testicles.)

  The following morning, while Kent was out gophering coffee (it was his turn), Glose went straight to Caitlin and told her everything, which Kent, of course, despite his inflamed and bruised face, vehemently denied, calling Glose a liar, an iconoclast, and, of all things, a hairy, emotional Nazi.

  That evening’s gig at the legendary Gooski’s, in Polish Hill, was, for good reason (and to put it lightly), a sloppy, unfocused mess, and we lost the room halfway through our set. The rhythm section was a horror show. Glose refused to look at Kent, whose eyes were bulging with tears. To make matters worse, because of his recent weight gain, Kent was short of breath and double-chinned and sitting on his amp the way old people sit on buses, and he was making a lot of faces that the middle-aged antihero stroke-victim character tends to make in American films just prior to having to go to a knee at the wedding reception for his estranged daughter who hates him but will likely grant him forgiveness.

  We muscled through the set and broke our gear down in front of a disappointed crowd and sold a whopping four CDs and maybe three T-shirts, and only half-a-dozen people signed the e-mail list and we loaded into the van and headed back to the motel with our collective tail between our legs.

  Later that night, Caitlin’s Inquisition reached its peak at the aforementioned dive bar on Pittsburgh’s South Side. Through several rounds of Iron City Lights, Kent couldn’t convince his girlfriend of three years that Glose’s story didn’t hold water. It was his word versus Glose’s and Caitlin believed Glose, whose version was sadly and inexorably the truth.

  It turned out that Kent and Caitlin had been having sexual problems for months. She told me the only way Kent could achieve an erection was if she turned the lights off and lightly blew into his rectum while he brayed incoherently on all fours. And if that didn’t work, she would have to gently jab at his puckering anus with the tip of her thimbled index finger.

  The breakup was inevitable. Caitlin wound up boarding a Greyhound bus, leaving Kent and the band for good.

  Along with my marriage, Kent and Caitlin’s breakup was one in a confluence of unfortunate events that would lead to the demise of the Third Policeman. Glose, who’d exposed himself as a passionate homophobe, a terrible friend, and dare I say a hairy, emotional Nazi, basically stopped speaking to Kent altogether, which broke Kent’s heart, smashed it like a felled swallow under the wheel of a two-ton truck. After Pittsburgh we canceled gigs in Morgantown, West Virginia, and Bloomington, Indiana, and returned to Pollard.

  The van ride home was eerily quiet, to say the least. I drove most of the way while Sheila Anne sat beside me in the passenger’s seat. Behind her, Kent basically stared out the window catatonically, while in the far back, amid a lot of equipment, Glose disappeared under a Hawaiian shirt he’d mysteriously acquired in Branson. Morris, as even-keeled as ever, manned the seat between Glose and Kent, reading a paperback and writing in his notebook.

  Despite the tension between Glose and Kent, Sheila Anne and I couldn’t have been happier. In a few days I would be putting her on a bus back to Louisville so she could complete her master’s work at Bellarmine. We held hands and doted on each other the entire ride back. We were newlyweds, after all, and our whole life was ahead of us.

  Back in Pollard, within days, Kent quit his job at the library. Without farewell, no doubt shamed and embarrassed, he packed his things into his ’79 Ford Fairmont and drove north to his parents’ poorly insulated winter cabin in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where he currently resides doing God knows what. He does not answer my e-mails or his cell phone. I’m told it snows six months out of the year in the Upper Peninsula, and I worry about my best friend since sixth grade being gay and alone and cardiovascularly challenged in the hinterlands. Perhaps the saddest part of it all is that he did not take his bass with him. It’s still zipped in its Reunion Blues pleather gig bag, standing upright, leaning against one side of my wall of paperbacks.

  Without any of us realizing it, Gooski’s in Pittsburgh’s Polish Hill would prove to be the Third Policeman’s final show.

  So now I am a landlord in the house I grew up in. Lord of the Land. Francis Falbo, Landlord, take my card, won’t you?

  My mother died on the first floor, in her converted hospice room, roughly where Bethany, the three-year-old daughter of my longest nonf
amily leaseholders, the Bunches, used to sleep. I don’t make a habit of discussing my mother’s death with tenants. No one wants a ghost around, especially the ghost of a woman who spent a lot of time swallowing screams precipitated by intestinal pain.

  I’d like to think that after a failed marriage and a semi-promising rock ’n’ roll career, which has evaporated into the Mist of Destiny (or Irony), I have found comfort in coming to accept the clear simplicity of my life. The practical duties of landlording are satisfying and chock-full of miniprojects that are actually solvable (unlike my personal life).

  Such as: Replacing water heaters. And keeping raccoons out of the trash and bats out of the attic. And clearing gutters and battling ants and devising strategies for eradicating mid-July wasp nests from under the rear eaves. And installing bathtub drains or snaking a sewage pipe when the plumber isn’t available. And the acquired skill of speaking to sunburnt, potbellied, Kodiak-chewing contractors about installing drywall or routing conduit or reglazing windows while they spit tobacco juice into a 7-Eleven Big Gulp cup.

  Is this approaching grace? I wonder. Or is the aggregate narrative of my life a series of small, ill-shaped rationalizations that mask an enormous failure? I probably won’t know until I reach old age, if I’m that lucky, as cancer runs on my mother’s side of the family like salmon in the River Tweed.

  Is becoming the landlord in the house you grew up in sort of like running a funeral home? Or is it awesome and humble and rife with the coolness of familial legacy?

  Two weeks ago, just after New Year’s, Todd and Mary Bunch’s three-year-old daughter, the aforementioned Bethany, disappeared. They were purportedly at the local Target, perusing the Outdoor/Camping aisle, when toddler Bethany wandered off, as toddlers throughout history have been wont to do. Was she kidnapped? Conveniently left?