Lit Riffs (26 page)

“Dylan’s a funny kid,” I say. My voice is in rags. “He’s always goofing off. That’s why we call him The Goofer. Really, we do. He likes being The Goofer.”

No one’s listening.

Stampp tells me something and picks up the phone to start dialing, and when he passes me the receiver, I want to be nice to Dave the Rave, to sound like I’m not upset.

“Hello,” Dave says. I catch my reflection in the window. My hair is gray.

The receiver gets damp with my sweat before the Rave and I start talking to each other.

Years and years ago we’d spent a few hours on Hilton Head. This’d been the dawn that Morrison was conceived. The Rave’d been on tour with The Lilacs. We hadn’t been together in a while, and the band was set to run off again.

Dave and I saved cash by sleeping on the beach, not that it was so romantic with the bitter cold sand, and my mouth dry; still, at the best moment the sun was rising and the water was rising, The Rave slept on his side near me, his hands tucked under his face, his bangs covering up his eyes, the air smelling like seaweed and like salt and Drakkar, and with a flicker of the brain, I knew then his baby was in me, don’t ask me how I knew it.

It’s not like I’d thought of ponies and nannies, a big stone house. But we’d have to make a family now, I’d told myself.

Dave and I worked a deal on our own. No courts; easy peasy. I said fine, big shot, try it for a month—Dave’d see if he could deal with the costs of kids and such, costs that are more than financial, as I told him. He swore he’d get up early enough to drive them to school, so they wouldn’t have to change districts.

The boys couldn’t hold back from crying, of course, when The Rave rolled up this sunny morning—not even Morrison. I didn’t say a word, just opened the fucking door, handed my ex a bucket, a mop, a towel.

“What the hell’s this?” Dave’s baby blues got all squinty and his mouth had trouble. His shirt showed lightning bolts around the word
Alcoholica
.

I cracked open the door a little wider and let Dylan walk out. “You’ll see,” I said. My voice broke, but I managed to pat Dylan on the head without losing it too badly.

As he followed his brother into The Rave’s Civic, Morrison wheeled back as if to say good-bye. He was carrying the George Foreman grill I’d got him for Christmas; then he turned again, away from me and toward the car. He said, “Move over, Dickchew” to his brother, and climbed in.

And so.

Sitting at my small kitchen table in the middle of this quiet, undemanding Saturday, I have mac-and-cheese for one. Right away my place feels so big. I smoke inside. I haven’t smoked inside for years. Can’t say what I’m going to do the rest of the afternoon or tonight—that’s an unfamiliar feeling, and I guess sort of scary. A terrible crying’s stuck in my throat, wedged in there and waiting, I’m pretty sure of it. I blow my cigarette ashes around the ashtray. Two crickets are arguing at the window. Against my better judgment I’ve made it to middle age; I can smoke inside and it feels awfully dead here except for the crickets, who make it even more dead somehow. The crying will come even if I can’t feel it just yet, and I’m betting it’ll be pretty bad. Any minute now.

author inspiration

The Black Crowes are not my favorite band, not by a country mile. But once, when stitting on the 6 train in Manhattan, I came across a middle-aged woman who was dressed in a Black Crowes T-shirt and who told her companion, “For me, rock and roll is it. It’s rock or nothing at all.” Maybe I’ve just been blind to the obvious, but the woman’s attitude seemed revelatory to me: there are thousands, perhaps millions, of sixty-year-olds in America who still listen exclusively to music made for adolescents. I wasn’t really curious about why she’d chosen the Black Crowes—who make “rebellious” music that’s really just a form of nostalgia for lost sounds from lost rebellions—but I began to think about the effect of rock and roll itself on the generations who have grown up knowing no other music.

Rock music and its offshoots—and I use the term broadly enough to include such youth music as hip-hop—are wonderful at moving the young; at helping bourgeois youth develop a skeptical disposition, a safe hint of the bohemian irreverence of the spirit, an aversion to complacency, and a democratic belief that the unschooled, even sometimes the untalented, can create vital art—but isn’t the belief that rock and roll is the be-all and end-all of American music something to be outgrown? I guess maybe we live in a society in which nothing immature is ever outgrown.

judy budnitz

T
he simplest way to put it would be to say that your father is in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. But there’s more to the story.

First let me tell you about the town we grew up in. That will explain a lot, I think. Things were different back then. It was a different time, a different place. What I mean is, there was a real sense of community. People looked out for each other. People would give you the shirt off their back, that sort of thing. It’s not like here, where you don’t know your own neighbors, where they’ll steal your laundry out of the machine if you’re not watching it, and then
wear your clothes right in front of you without batting an eye
. Here, if you hear strange things through the walls at night, you pretend you didn’t.

Where I grew up, it was the sort of town where people stayed put. People were born there, lived out their lives there, and died without venturing more than fifty miles from the place. Small-minded, you might think. But they weren’t. I mean,
we
weren’t. We were broad of mind, big of heart.

It was a place of flat horizons, empty plains. The land was shaped by the weather—cracked dust bowls could change to gulchy swamp beds overnight. And the skies—you were always looking up, you couldn’t help it. Wide, inescapable skies, they were the only entertainment around. They gave us spectacular dusty sunsets, blushing and subtle sunrises. You could watch the births of storms, clouds colliding, darkening, starting to swirl. Growing bigger, rolling closer, rumbling to themselves, electric strands reaching down to touch the ground like insect legs. Old men on front porches used to place bets on when the storms would strike, and how hard. They said you could measure the fury based on the color of the clouds, and their shape. The more bulbous and warty and cauliflowerish the clouds, they said, the worse the storm. “When it looks like your wife’s face glaring down, you’re in for a doozy,” they’d tell each other.

The earth all around had been drained and leached by years of careless farming. I can’t remember ever seeing crops; I think all the farmers and ranchers gave up and sold their lands long before I was born. You might see patches of hardy grass or bushes or leathery weeds, but that was it. Windstorms swept through the town, eroding away everything that wasn’t fastened down. Dust, brush, clumps of earth. Swing sets. Cows. When I was a girl, I used to worry that I’d wake up after a storm to find the ground gone. I imagined the only things left would be the buildings, balancing on tall, wobbly columns of earth, with giant wind-carved mile-deep canyons gaping between. I imagined how we’d get along, rope bridges slung between the houses, walking a tightrope to school.

I was one of a whole mess of girls. My father was a barber, and how unlucky for him that he had only daughters, who wore their hair long and untrimmed. My father was the sort of man who liked to do things for other people, he’d bend over backward to help you out. And I think it broke his heart that we didn’t let him expend his only talent on us. He used to sleepwalk. We’d wake from snip-haunted dreams to see him swaying in the doorway in his white nightshirt, a pair of shears flexing in his hand, murmuring,
Just a trim girls, just a trim. Please, for me
. I think the main reason he looked forward to us getting married was so that he could indulge our husbands with a lifetime of free haircuts.

Our town, like many, was dominated by one industry, upon which the town’s entire economy depended. When I was a girl, I didn’t understand how our local business was any different from others. Neighboring towns held fairs, parades, elected a Beet Queen or a Dairy Milk Queen or a Nuclear Power Princess. I remember being disappointed that we didn’t do the same.

Our town was home to the largest prison in the state. You could see it from any point in town, and most people drove past its gates at least twice a day. It was made up of several unadorned, boxy buildings of yellowish brick, the same brick as our school building. If it weren’t for the watchtowers and three rings of fences, you might think it was a hospital or an office complex. The prison clock could be heard all over town, you’d hear it at the end of your math class and know that over at the prison the inmates had finished a shift in the workshop. My father was the prison barber, and my mother worked in the prison kitchens. Most of the men in our town were employed by the prison, and most of the women, too.

You couldn’t ignore it or forget about it. It was a daily fact of life. Prisoners made up over three-quarters of the population of our town.

Yes, it was uncomfortable to think that other people’s wrongdoing put food on our table. But that’s how it was. What could you do? You didn’t necessarily like it, but you didn’t want to go hungry either. You got used to it after a while. And though we didn’t hold parades, the people in my town clearly took pride in their work. They felt they were providing a necessary service.

It was the sort of town where everyone knew each other by both name and profession, from Warden Bane to Mrs. Birdie, the prison librarian, from Miss Maudie Manguson, who x-rayed the visitors’ packages and cakes, to old Mr. Crouch, who looked after the electric chair.

People were proud of the fact that it was the biggest prison in the state. People like distinctions, they like to be the best, the biggest, the superlative of something.

I know you hear a lot nowadays about prison workers abusing their authority, making life miserable for their charges. But our town wasn’t like that. People were idealistic, they believed in the system, and its power to educate and rehabilitate. My father always strove to preserve the individuality of the inmates. I remember going with him on Take Your Child to Work days. He tried to please each prisoner with the cut of his choice—curls, feathers, wings, layers, stubble, shiny bald—you name it. He burned his fingers with bleaches, made gifts of expensive pomade, did his best to comply when men brought in magazine pictures of what they wanted. He had hundreds of men to trim, a ceaseless stream, and he looked like an exotic lawn ornament as he worked, arms flailing, scissors a blur. He was on his feet twelve hours at a time, never resting.

And the pressure was constant. Ifs a fact that a man’s hair grows more quickly in prison. Maybe it’s because of the inactivity, all that excess energy expended through the scalp.

And my mother, too. Though she was constrained by the budget, and by the massive amounts she had to cook, she still did her best to make the prison food resemble prison food as little as possible. I would venture to say that the prisoners ate better than we girls did, because she was usually too tired to cook for us by the time she got home, after cutting the crusts off several thousand sandwiches.

My mother’s special responsibility was Last Meals. She would spend weeks ordering rare ingredients, experimenting with techniques, marinating, sautéing, stewing, stuffing, spicing, so that a man’s last meal should be exactly what he desired. “It’s the least I can do,” she’d say.

But I’m sure she had mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I know she looked forward to the Last Meals, because it gave her a chance to stretch herself, explore, test herself with foods exotic and difficult. She’d get so excited when the requests came in and would be horribly disappointed if they were not sufficiently sophisticated. “Cheeseburger and fries,
again?
” she’d moan. She took great pride in rising to culinary challenges. I’m sure in a way she was proud to have the distinction of being the
last
, the
final
, the
ultimate
. How many of us can claim that, really, about anything? To be the last, the best, the pinnacle of.

And yet, on the other hand, how could she really look forward to those meals? I’m sure deep down she dreaded them.

Did I mention that our prison was a men’s prison? For a long time I didn’t realize that there were women’s prisons elsewhere. I assumed the absence of women meant women were incapable of doing anything bad. Or perhaps they were capable, but too crafty to ever get caught.

I have said we didn’t have any parades or festivals. But we did have one big yearly event: the prison rodeo. These rodeos are my most vivid childhood memories. I remember the sawdust in the arena, the smell of horses, the flying hooves, the windmilling arms and snapping heads and bobbing torsos, the strange slow-motion swoop of a man floating through the air. The
noise
. I remember the tension, the excitement, I didn’t want to look, but I couldn’t
not
look when all around me people were gasping and moaning sympathetically. I remember men getting hurt. A lot of men always got hurt. Some of them had never been on a horse before, but insisted on trying, they wanted to do something, or prove something.

When I remember those rodeos, I think of the smell of my hands (cotton candy) pressed against my face, peering at the action between my fingers.

The rodeos were held in the big arena on the prison grounds. The families of the inmates filled one side of the arena, and the families of the employees filled the other. There were no assigned sections, but people always segregated themselves.

Both sides cheered with equal vigor. They sounded the same to me. But I was very young then, too young to notice differences of tone and tenor. At the time I thought it was nice that everyone was being entertained.

Afterward there would be a big barbecue, ice cream and games for the kids, sack races and three-legged races and that sort of thing. We’d chase each other around on the dusty brown grass that the prisoners kept cut short, snatching fireflies out of the dark. Quit it, our fathers would say, damn kids, they’d say, and go back to their beers and slow drawly jokes that died out before the punch line. Our mothers would have their shoes off and their legs stretched out. The night would come down so slow and easy you wouldn’t notice until you realized you could see stars, bright and thickly clustered and low enough to touch.

The inmates’ families never lingered. The prison grounds seemed to make them uncomfortable. To me they always felt like home.

But as I was saying, the rodeos only happened when I was very young. Then they stopped.

As I got older, the prison population dipped. The population had always fluctuated quite a bit, but this was different This was a significant and steady decline. At first we wondered if for some reason a share of our usual quota was being assigned elsewhere. But no, we were told, we were still the biggest in the state and took the largest proportion. It was just that the overall numbers were declining.

“The courts are going soft,” my father suggested.

But no, it seemed that fewer people were committing fewer crimes.

“It means the prison system’s actually working,” one of my sisters said. “Isn’t that a good thing?”

“Of course,” our mother said with a worried furrow between her brows.

As the population fell and fell, as more inmates reached the ends of their terms and left us and no men came to replace them, my parents grew more and more worried. We heard their voices in the kitchen late at night, discussing.

Because more and more prison employees were getting laid off. Guards, custodians, guidance counselors, art teachers, dishwashers, dentists, secretaries, were being told to hand in their ID badges and uniforms and go home.

“I could be next,” my father said.

“Impossible!” my mother declared. “You’re the only one. You’re essential. But me—thirty people work in that kitchen. We’re dispensable.”

“But … the Last Meals …”

“Nobody’s awaiting execution these days. When they notice up in the head office, I’ll be out on the street in a second! What then? We can’t support the girls on your salary!”

Before you start thinking my mother was being overly dramatic, I should mention that back then people tended to have many more children than they do now. Pecks, packs, passels, posses of children. There were quite a lot of us girls.

People continued to lose their jobs, but my parents did not. My mother somehow managed to prove her indispensability. And as for my father, it seemed that hair growth increased as the prison population decreased, as if the inmates who were left were trying to make up for their missing brethren. My father was kept busy.

But no new prisoners came in. My parents worried more and more. So did their friends and coworkers. It was all they talked about, the numbers, the numbers.

“I don’t understand it.”

“Can it be that people have actually learned to behave themselves?”

“I don’t believe it. Not even any petty thievery? There has to be another explanation.”

“This is terrible.”

“It’s a kerfuffle, that’s what it is.”

All the people who had lost their jobs, they had nothing to do but sit and wait and watch the storm clouds. They were idle and hopeless. You could hear them singing sad songs late at night around campfires. They did not know what to do with their specialized skills. Move to a new town, start a new life, you might say. Go work in a different prison, a school, a hospital, if they were so attached to institutions. But these people had only known one life. They didn’t want anything different. All they wanted to do was wait and hope that the tide would turn, that things would go back to normal. They could only hope that people would go back to killing and stealing and hurting each other so the prison would fill up and things would be just like the good old days.