Exile on Kalamazoo Street (8 page)

F
rom the very start of exile, my ability to think had been almost exclusively restricted to the present, not much beyond the hour, certainly not beyond the day, and with the frigid burial of Whiskey River, the past opened up to me again. A vivid kaleidoscope, at first. Even a tad overwhelming and too bright and rapid and kinetic for me to maintain focus and make sense of any one thing. It all sped by in a blur: faces and events coming into focus momentarily before disappearing back into the swirl of images and colors and sounds, and even smells, that formed a river of history. I worried, at first, about the prospect of another river running through me, but then time slowed down, and I began to truly see things for the first time in a long while.

Soon I was able to follow random images and isolate them, zoom in, fix them for inspection, analyze them. I recalled a night before exile began, a night of drinking for no more reason than a bottle and a glass existed, and my ability to pour the glass full many times was unimpeded, and my ability to raise my arm and glass to my mouth worked perfectly and naturally. Alcohol was the wondrous giant killer I accepted and relied on—the Whiskey River—and I welcomed the disease, opened my house to it, opened my mouth to it, left a light on for it, longed and pined for it like a neglected lover, though I did not then know it was a disease, and instead looked upon it as a friend, my good and dear friend.

As with all good friends, it was natural to want to have fun with it, to do things together, to see things together, to go places together—to share and enhance the love and intensify the love with shared experiences—and so I introduced Whiskey River to
Exile on Main Street
, the great Stones album. Much later I would understand that Whiskey River knew
Exile on Main Street
, knew all the great albums, and all the great songs, because they were among the countless artifacts, the infinite multitudes of artifacts and devices that a Whiskey River absorbed on its course through the human vessel.

But it was
Exile on Main Street
that I was recalling so well, and as Whiskey River jumped its banks that night and filled me up and swept me away—swept me off my feet—I floated and drifted and felt no pain and could recall no morality, had no regrets. I marveled at the songs—“All Down the Line,” “Happy,” “Tumbling Dice,” and “Sweet Virginia,” but the next morning, when I could barely function before coffee and food, and not much better after those things, when all the regrets and morality rushed back into me like roaring tide, filling me up so much differently than Whiskey River had, other song titles from
Exile on Main Street
came to me. Those titles were like ominous Burma-Shave signs alongside a foggy road full of twists and turns, and song titles like “Turd on the Run,” “Soul Survivor,” “Torn and Frayed,” “Rip This Joint,” and “Stop Breaking Down,” rushed toward me. They battered themselves against me, and somehow those titles became like voices that succeeded in breaking through the tidal wave of Whiskey River for just a moment, but just long enough. Like the Stones holed up in the basement of a house in southern France to make that classic album, I realized I would have to hole up in my house and become an exile, too.

* * *

There was a girl, and there's always a love interest, if a story or a life is interesting at all. This girl was also a student, my student—not Elsa, but a former student, which is an important distinction to make because it was risky and even dangerous to have an affair with a student, which, of course, only intensified the experience and stoked our desires—made them more feverish—and made the girl even more desirable. There was desire enough, and the spark between us had been real enough, despite the years between us.

The girl's name was Marla. The first time I saw her, as she slipped past me through the door into class, I had only a fleeting glance at her face, at her raven hair thick and unruly on her head and shoulders, and I rather thought she might be part Asian, vaguely Polynesian, perhaps. She turned out to be merely Irish, Catholic, and Republican, but with a glow about her, an aura. When we were in sight of each other, it was as though gravity intensified and somehow pulled us together instead of merely keeping us planted on the ground. Gravity kept us from flying off into space and instead we flew into each other. We merged. And at first, gravity was enough. Later, it just made it harder for us to float apart.

Marla was always late, no matter the occasion. I learned to add two hours to any time she had agreed to as her time to materialize. And always, despite the two extra hours, I was excited when she finally appeared and my frustration melted away immediately. She would smile, tell me how wonderful I was, and I would have waited for as long as it took. She was a woman of twenty-two, but a girl nonetheless, because despite the glow, the aura of promise and spirit, she proved unable to fly, and she was instead the butterfly that sat on a purple flower perpetually flexing fragile wings of yellow and black. She never revealed me to her mother, and when she called her mother to say she would be spending a night in Kalamazoo, she lied, saying she would be with friends. Marla couldn't make decisive moves to advance her life. I often wondered why the flirtation happened at all and why it ever blossomed into something much more. I concluded, years later, that fate had created the flirtation—a test, I suppose, a trial for me to endure and survive and perhaps even gain strength from, to gain some sort of perspective on relationships and the flirtatious capriciousness of love. After Marla, I was courted by Whiskey River, seduced by Whiskey River, honeymooned with Whiskey River.

My second book was about Marla, disguised as best as I could as fiction. It apparently fooled enough people, but it was not as good as my first book, and in the end I was the real fool because she left me. That sounds dramatic, but the reality was less so. In our final conversation, on the sidewalk in front of the college library, we spoke reasonably.

“You were always there,” Marla said.

“Where else would I be?” I said.

Then she turned, slowly, sadly, and my last look at her, seared deeply into my memory and soul, was of her back and long dark hair as she disappeared into a sunset created by fate.

* * *

I had entered exile with short hair, though not a crewcut or one of those concentration camp looks so popular among metrosexual men determined to extinguish individuality, and at first I didn't think much at all about my hair, which was still mostly brown and thick. As it grew and I acquired bangs, and the growing hair dusted the collars of shirts and beyond, I rather enjoyed a glimpse of myself in a mirror, slightly unkempt, disheveled, but not quite in
Aqualung
album territory, either. I supposed I had begun to look like a hippie of sorts, which also pleased and amused me, because unlike the men I went to high school with—who now had graying hair or the balding pates befitting the insurance agents they had become—I could still imagine Woodstock Nation as a viable replacement to capitalism.

The growing hair required a bit of maintenance. My sister commented playfully on my new shampoo and conditioner needs. As my hair grew longer, I began to envision how soon enough the snow would disappear and the grass would grow, too, and all through the neighborhood those men who had become insurance agents, or subservient middle-management flunkies, would obsessively cut that growing grass as though letting it get out of hand was to be avoided at all costs. They saw close-cropped lawns as desirable alternatives to actual nature, while I saw them for what they really were—symbols of the taming of unruly nature—because the men mowing the lawns had traded in their own unruly natures years earlier in favor of uniformity, and they resented anything that contradicted their world view.

* * *

As my hair grew, I joked to Black Kitty that I could imagine getting honorary membership in what was left of The Allman Brothers Band. I realized that some trimming was in order. That was a task I could do, I supposed—with minimum confidence—but perhaps not well. I worried that having self-cut hair would give me the look of a man in a cave, so my main concern was how to get it done without doing it myself, or violating exile. I ran all these considerations by my sister on the phone. She arranged for a friend who cut hair out of her house to come by, which sounded good until I realized she would be the first
stranger
to set foot in my house in months. Perhaps some brushing up on my people skills was in order. I had to make a good run through the house's first floor to make sure it appeared clean enough, especially the kitchen, where I imagined we would perform the transformation, creating a more refined look for an old would-be hippie who didn't think he was all that old or truly a hippie. Hippiedom, I always believed, had died not long after Woodstock, at Altamont, but I knew my sister called me a hippie sometimes just to give me some semi-good-natured grief—I say “semi,” because at least a slice of it didn't come off as all that good-natured. After I straightened up the house I had the brilliant idea for a trial run at being in the same room with a stranger.

I waited by the side door, and when the chirpy letter carrier approached with my mail, I smiled and thanked her and assured her that I would clean up the thin coat of snow on the driveway, and she assured me that it was no impediment at all, that it looked more like a coat of white paint than snow. Abruptly I suggested she come in for a blueberry muffin—an idea I'd had once before—and she said she had a schedule. I asked where she was at on that schedule, and she looked at her watch and said she was actually ahead of schedule. After looking down at her black shoes for a moment, she came in and we sat down at the kitchen table with blueberry muffins and coffee.

She checked her watch as she munched the muffin, which she said was quite tasty, and all I could think of was how odd it seemed to have a stranger in my house. Soon Black Kitty jumped up on the table. I apologized for the breach of manners and shooed Black Kitty off to the floor and the letter carrier said that was common at her house because she had
four
cats. She told me their names and personality traits, and then finished her muffin and we stared awkwardly at each other for a long moment. She got up and said she had to get back on schedule. At the door she thanked me, and we even shook hands. I watched her walk down the block, and even though we had not really conversed beyond the merits of blueberry muffins and a house full of cats, I felt it had been a good trial run at re-uniting with reality.

* * *

The day after the trial run—blueberry muffins with the chirpy letter carrier—my sister's hair stylist friend arrived. She was a bright-eyed and perpetually smiling woman of about thirty-five, attractive in a slightly too much hair coloring and slightly too much blue eye shadow sort of way that avoided sliding fully into trashy. Nonetheless, she was attractive and friendly. Her name was Sherilynn, and she was tall—almost as tall as I am at around five-ten or so—and wispy thin but not emaciated. There appeared to be a good and lean figure under the red sweater and faded jeans. I tried to gauge the lines of her body without getting caught, and although I wasn't sure I accomplished that, I figured she likely got her share of looks and was used to it. She took command and positioned me on a stool at the kitchen sink and washed my hair slowly, lovingly, massaging the shampoo and then conditioner firmly into my scalp. She was very careful to assess the warmth of the water before rinsing, and through it all we chatted about how much snow the winter had brought as Black Kitty sat on a window sill on the other side of the kitchen.

“How's the water?” she said a second time, to make sure. “Too warm, not warm enough?”

“Perfect,” I said. “Invigorating. I think this is the best part of a haircut.”

“My clients always say that. A good shampoo is like a good massage.”

“You could go house to house and make money,” I said.

“People would think I was crazy, knocking on doors to offer a shampoo.”

“Not my best idea, I guess.”

“You keep thinking,” she said. “Since you're a writer, you might come up with one yet.”

“I'll do my best,” I said quietly.

It was a fairly vulnerable position to be in, my head dangling into a sink, an attractive woman washing my hair and then toweling it dry before running a comb through it and cutting it with crisp snips of the scissors, the wet clumps of hair falling onto the blue smock she had wrapped around me. As she cut and combed, she suggested nonchalantly that I needed to get out of the house more, but she never questioned the concept of exile. I figured that my sister must have filled her in.

“You really haven't gone out at all, all winter?” Sherilynn said.

“Not once.”

“How do you stand it?”

“It's comforting. I always know where I'll be.”

“But isn't that boring?” she said.

“No more than always going to the same place to work every day.”

“But at a job, you have people around you.”

“Now people come to me.”

“I guess you have me there,” she said.

“No, you have
me
here,” I said. She laughed and I did, too.

Sherilynn used a blow dryer, which I never used, and fashioned my still long but more manageable hair into something a bit slicker and flatter than I preferred. I didn't mind. I knew that it was just for that day, and after a shower the next morning I could let it slip and slide into the shape it liked and it would look more natural, less choreographed. I decided long hair suited me and I wore it well, but that I should remember to look a little less like Jesus.

I
t stopped snowing.

Days lengthened.

Evening darkness shrank.

Morning light hurried.

Snow melted slowly.