The Unexpected and Fictional Career Change of Jim Kearns
After the Incident: Chapter 4
With Eric and Rachel by my side, I looked out at the city through the decades of grime covering our third-floor loft’s neglected front window. A lot more top portions of high-rises showed from this vantage point than I’d remembered, with cranes and skeletal substructures jutting over the rooftops across the street like projects from a child’s erector set. The analogy wasn’t lost on me. Here I was, viewing an ever-changing present through the past . . . that is, a window obscured by time and the accumulated dirt of existence.
Etc., etc.
“So. It’s up to you guys,” I said at last. “You can either help me renovate all this” — I turned and swung an arm around to encompass the area, a tent-shaped room that stood eight feet high at its peak and measured thirty feet in length; flotsam of half a lifetime and more from both sides of the family littered the floor, and fully exposed insulation, much of it sagging from between wall studs, left a permanent itch in the air — “or you can take a trip with me back to my old hometown for a weekend before school starts. It’s your call.”
“With you. Does that mean without Mom?” Eric asked.
“Yep.”
“How come?”
They waited, smiling, assuming rightly that my overuse of the word labor these days (in reference to my seven deadly, at least) was starting to cause me pain. So I simply stated, “You know why.”
“Will we be staying at Aunt Anita’s or Aunt Jenny’s?” Rachel asked.
“Neither. We’ll be staying at a hotel.”
They didn’t think I saw their eyes light up at my answer to that question, but I did.
“All dinners out?” Eric asked.
“All dinners out.”
“So, in effect,” Eric said, “you’re asking us if we’d like to spend a week slaving in a dark, broiling room that leaves your skin feeling like it has ants crawling all over it, or if we’d like to go on a hotel vacation complete with restaurant meals?”
Before I could respond, Rachel said, “I’d call that a no-brainer, Dad.”
“Not necessarily,” I said. “If we’re looking to bond, then sharing a bit of hardship and reaping a reward in the process is the perfect glue.”
Rachel performed a gagging motion and Eric stared at me, one eyebrow arched, before saying, “My God, that’s right out of a nineteen-thirties Boy Scout manual.”
“And it’s still a no-brainer, Dad,” Rachel said. “You’re going to be doing the renovations anyway, so we might as well skip the hardship and use the reward as the perfect glue.”
“But it’s not the same rewa—”
“I agree with the girl, Monty,” Eric said, cutting me off. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to stick with what’s behind door number two. The all-expenses-paid vacation.”
How could I reason with a generation who’d sharpened their logic on the Game Show Network? My course with the children had been set.
Satisfied that they’d bested me, the kids slipped away and began snooping through the paraphernalia, leaving me to peer out at the cityscape once more, but something caught my peripheral vision, pulling my gaze down to the dust-coated desk nudging my thighs. There, partially hidden beneath a box filled with unlabelled and forgotten household goods, lay two parallel lists of words carved into the desk’s wooden surface:
Amo John
Amas Paul
Amat George
I knew that “Ringo” lay just underneath the box, adjacent to whatever came next when conjugating the Latin verb for love. I pushed it forwards and found him.
Amamus Ringo
When we were growing up, this had been Anita’s desk — Anita, the so-called good sister of my two siblings, the Beatles lover. Jennifer, a year and a half younger, had fallen into the Stones camp, pigeonholing herself, for that period of time, anyway, as the “edgy” sister.
Somehow over the years, as we’d gone our separate ways, the desk had followed me, winding up as a combination bric-a-brac/dust collector in our neglected loft; but in its prime it had been well-used and privy to all the adolescent angst (love letters, journals, or whatever) that a young girl may have been prone to.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, though, it’s these kinds of moments that truly make me feel my years. Knees may pop and backs may lock, but running across certain objects or memorabilia that almost makes you start reminiscing in black and white remains a more telling benchmark of your age. For me, the older the crap I unearth, the more this holds true; if I tweak myself far enough back, I can dig up a childhood that feels like another life lived, vexingly intimate, impossibly remote.
And when I ponder my childhood too closely (particularly the pecking order of the children in my family), I sometimes wonder if I’d been an accident — maybe yes, maybe no; my parents weren’t talking — but I did sail into view eight years after Anita’s birth and almost seven after Jennifer’s, totally missing the schizophrenic tug they had to endure in giving up Bobby Darin, Gene Pitney, and The Platters for peace, love, and understanding. I never had to choose between the mods and the rockers or the Yohawks and the Squirrels as my era evolved. I was born into it, a mop-topped youngster, singing “Hey, you’ve got to hide your love away,” swaying, with my hands clasped endearingly behind my back, as my parents’ friends and acquaintances squirmed on our sofa.
I was twelve years old when, as I’ve noted, I enjoyed my first cigarette; I was fourteen when I found that small chunk of hash wrapped in tinfoil in the very desk I stood before now. Nepalese it was, with that little white streak in it that my friends and I, in the years to follow, vowed was an actual vein of opium, giving it that hallucinogenic quality that you wouldn’t find in blonde or red Leb or any of the lesser quality hashes. That was the summer, I think, that I went to bed every night listening to After the Gold Rush, my ancient RCA turntable skipping, wobbling, and making Neil sound like he may have owned a nasal twang.
That year, if I can put things into any sort of chronological perspective, was a turning point for the rest of my family, too. It started with my mother’s mother breaking her hip when she missed the last step of our staircase on Easter Sunday morning. Had she been rushing down early to partake in what would have been our last family Easter egg hunt (a tradition that had already gone on too long, with my scampering and squeals of delight long since faded and replaced with a grim-faced and clinical search for cocoa and sugar), or had she just plumb missed the last tread on the staircase in one of those micro-seconds of forgetfulness that shatter a life? I don’t know, and I don’t really want to, but I can still remember watching in horror as the event unfolded — the way Gram accelerated on those last couple of stairs, her gloved hand flying from the newel post like a startled bird, her foot dropping that extra seven inches before driving itself into the floor; a dry snapping sound followed, along with the rustle of chiffon and a tiny yelp as she buckled inward and down like a demoed building. She dragged down the phone table at the foot of the stairs with her, and when all the clatter and commotion stopped, a dial tone with the presence of a fire alarm pierced the awful silence.
Her shattered hip killed her, or the pneumonia and drawn-out complications that followed, and in passing, she took her Chinese checkers board, countless jigsaw puzzles, her glass eye and false teeth (both of great interest to me in my formative years), and a portion of my mother along with her.
Within that same timeframe, Anita, fresh out of university, spent the spring and ensuing summer looking to find herself (in locations my parents found both unsanitary and unsuitable, from what I could interpret of the sound and fury of their meetings on those rare occasions they crossed paths). By the fall they’d reconciled, but the time had come for her to go.
Jennifer, not to be outdone in the alienation department (this was 1971, after all) followed suit. Already attending Anita’s alma mater, and no longer a silly teen with a crush on Keith Richards, the works of Herman Hess, J.R.R. Tolkien, Saul Bellow, and Phillip Roth filled her bookshelves, and a Jim Morrison poster (the one with Jim doing his Christ imitation) dominated the wall behind her bed. Most weekends some wispy-bearded guy, a dead ringer for Shaggy in the Scooby Doo cartoons, would pick her up in his mystery-mobile and they’d head downtown to folk-rock coffee houses like L’hibou, where they’d sit around, stoned and introspective, listening to Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan clones.
Mathematically speaking, by that June only one person had departed, yet it seemed as if a mass exodus had taken place. Almost in a heartbeat, a house that had displayed hustle and bustle from the first floor to the third fell quiet. My parents hit some sort of wall then, too, amplifying this effect; either they’d lost the energy to fuss over me, or they’d simply decided that their small-child-rearing days were over (of course, as a man on the other side of forty now and capable of contemplating the emotions they’d faced back then, I realize that their confrontation with death, along with the imminent departure of their eldest, might have had a say in their behavior). But whatever their reasons, as a fourteen-year-old, I’d noticed only one thing: our home had become boring.
So somehow, on one warm summer’s eve as I roamed a house now replete with personal freedom, I inadvertently stumbled across Anita’s cache, in the recesses of her desk’s bottom right-hand drawer, beneath a jumble of stationery supplies. Coincidentally, a small fan sat facing the open bedroom window and the lilac tree in the backyard beyond. It was, as Rachel might say, a “no-brainer” for me to pinch off a tacky morsel of her prime Nepalese, drop it into her little hash pipe, turn on the fan, and spark up my first toke.
Of course, come September, when Anita did finally bid her goodbyes, family members were touched by my emotional outpouring, my heartfelt must you go and I’ll miss you more than anyone. It was a melancholy I continued to show until I discovered that Jen kept her dependable bag of weed in an old shoebox at the back of her bedroom closet.
But I’d be lying if I said I was old enough (or anywhere near bright enough) to have been looking for social consciousness or enlightenment back then. I was just a kid in a time; “Four Dead in Ohio” was a cool tune, and so was “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain),” but they weren’t protest songs. And those six- and ten-o’clock images of Vietnamese peasants getting their brains blown out at close range, Czech protesters setting themselves ablaze as Soviet tanks rolled into Prague, and blue-jowled politicians denying anything and everything sickened and saddened me, but they didn’t set me on a course to pick up a flower and try to change the world as I expanded my mind.
I was … just a kid in a time…
At that moment, Eric’s voice pulled me from my reverie. My fingertips still rested on Anita’s Latin engravings.
“Hey, Dad. What’s this?”
I turned and saw him kneeling behind an old chest, delving into someplace hidden, getting into Lord knows what. He paused briefly, then turned and held up his find.
“In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida by Iron Butterfly?” His tone sounded … what? Incredulous. Disbelieving.
Rachel turned from her foraging. “Get outta here.”
“I’m not joking,” Eric said, brandishing the cover for her to see.
“Whoa, hold on there,” I said. “I was young. You guys should know all about youth and bad taste.” But too late. They’d started that laughing thing again, leaving no opening for me to defend myself.
Rachel stepped up beside Eric, still snickering as she examined the cover, and asked, “This is that tune in The Simpsons, isn’t it? The one with the seventeen-minute church organ solo that put everyone to sleep?”
“You betcha.” Eric handed her the cover and began an air-organ mime: “Doo, doo, doo-doo-doo-doo, doo, doo, doo.”
They started into it now, a-swingin’ and a-swayin’, with Rachel droning the lyrics in time to Eric’s keyboard imitation. A mini Vegas floorshow loomed, but they knew the ground rules (meaning just how long they had till I got pissed, not that my wrath would deter them; they were always willing to pay the tiny price).
But for the time being, I turned and tried to ignore them, surveying the window alcove in front of me and reaching for the tape measure hooked into my jeans pocket. The job ahead shouldn’t have seemed that daunting: the simple functions of measuring, cutting, and installing. I’d performed those kinds of tasks my whole life.
The thing is, I’d always dealt in brick and stone, and now another medium, more yielding in some ways and less forgiving in others, stood before me. And although I had some building experience and didn’t have to be perfect (my mission here merely being to give it a shot and produce a viable living area), for some reason I felt frozen in time and space, afraid of making a single mistake.
I was out of my milieu and the displacement had happened so quickly. Who’d have thought two weeks ago that my life, my so-simple life, something I woke up and slid in to each morning like an old pair of work boots, would vanish and leave me in this dank place?
Behind me, the kids kept at it, capering like monkeys, wearing those twisted comedian faces that really aren’t so funny after all, and before I knew it, the urge to march over and whack their little melons together possessed me.
The feeling, so nasty in intent, blindsided me. I don’t hit Rachel and Eric. I never have and I never will, but that overwhelming desire — not to punish them so much as knock a bit of that infuriating and totally unearned cynicism out of them — just kept building.
And standing in that dark spot, as unsure as I’ve ever been, my skin crawling with scattered insulation and a lifetime of dust, exposed this now obvious fact: I was, indeed, a bad person, all knuckles and knees and blind anger as a first-priority defense against circumstances beyond my control.
Now, warm and itchy isn’t exactly eternal damnation, and regardless of my kids’ cavorting, I still loved them madly, so I can’t exactly say I stood in the depths of hell. But with the guilt factor firmly in place, and the prospect of life not taking a turn for the better any time soon, purgatory, at least, seemed like a reasonable analogy.
Thank you for reading. Jim’s adventures will continue next Saturday. In the meantime, I am contemplating some new ways to keep you entertained. Stay tuned.