That Time When All the Sad People Came and Stayed at My House
Part One
I haven't left my house in fourteen months. It is January 25th and three days ago a foot of snow fell on Pollard, Illinois and its surrounding farmlands and I have been spending the last few hours counting the number of people laboring down the middle of my street on cross-country skis. It is strange how full-body winterwear makes gender difficult to identify, especially during a snowstorm. Cross-country skiing is apparently a solitary pursuit, as I have not seen duos or trios forging out together. Perhaps there is something about the threat of being snowbound in a small town that inspires the lone adventurer in all of us? They're not going to find much in Pollard (and they probably already know this), although the houses on my street -- the ones I can see at least -- suddenly have an innocent gingerbread quality, with snow-heaped gables and frosted yards.
Inside my attic room it is warm and dry and the humidifier beside my writing desk issues a calming hiss and the occasional gurgle. I am dressed in long underwear and a light blue terrycloth bathrobe that has become a kind of monastic uniform as of late. This morning I believe my life took a subtle but tectonic shift when I realized that I hadn't taken the robe off in nine days. I smell like the attic, or maybe the attic smells like me. One of the strange symptoms of even the mildest form of agoraphobia is that it gets more difficult to distinguish between personal and household odors.
I inherited the house from my father after he retired and took his third wife, Sissy, to live out their days in Jupiter, Florida. That was four years ago and it's taken almost half that time to get rid of the scents of filterless Pall Malls and hemorrhoidal ointment. The hemorrhoidal ointment was my mother's and even though she died nine years ago I believe my father hoarded its strange medicinal odor of mink oil and turnips as a sentimental reminder of his true love and high school sweetheart. The Pall Malls were his and I'm convinced that despite his two-packs-a-day habit he will live to be a hundred.
It's a solid brick, Victorian home with a wrap-around front porch, lots of well-glazed, double-paned windows, and a handsomely paneled, industrial-carpeted, mold-free basement that has never flooded. Since my time on earth, the house has survived three tornados, a first-floor fire, an authentic wild boar, and a wave of resilient, late 70s termites that took six months of an archaic baiting process to get rid of. There are three bedrooms upstairs and one downstairs, off the living room. A year ago I converted the first two floors of the house into individual apartments, adding a bedroom to the first floor and a kitchen to the second. Three months before that one-half of the basement was outfitted with a false gypsum ceiling, a carpet improvement, a kitchenette, and eight panels of sheetrock. Even though I have been running fans for weeks it still smells like joint compound and bleach down there. My first basement tenant is scheduled to move in the day after tomorrow. His name is Bob Blubaugh, which sounds like some unfortunate character in a bad American independent film. I don't know much about him beyond the fact that, like me, he is in his mid-30s and, unlike me, he was the second alternate on the American Olympic luge team at Salt Lake City. He says he has very few belongings.
On the phone his voice was soft and clear and I imagined it emanating from someone with an inflamed, permanently chapped face; a result no doubt caused by years of coping with icy luge chutes and high-velocity winds.
In the attic I have a twin bed with a good mattress and plenty of floor space. I have a wall of books and a midlevel stereo system with state-of-the-art speakers. I have an authentic '69 Les Paul Epiphone electric guitar on a beat-up guitar stand and a small Marshall kick amp that I make noise with for a few minutes each day. I also have a wireless telephone and a small analogue answering machine from the late-80s that makes people sound like they're transmitting vocal arrangements from outer space.
I haven't changed the strings on the Les Paul in over a year and I have recently taken to sketching it in the margins of the very manuscript that I am using to chronicle all of this. (Whatever this winds up being -- a novel, a confession, a grand, self-indulgent palaver -- is anyone's guess.) Sketching things that historically resonate to me is perhaps my one sentimental guilty pleasure. I used to sketch my ex-wife a lot. And there was even a time when I spent a lot of time sketching my little brother Al, but he's dead now and like most things that pass through memory I have lost hold of what the story of his face was. Al was a special-ops Marine and he was killed by a car bomb in Iraq sixteen months ago, approximately three weeks before their purportedly democratic elections. He was the one member of my family who I actually got along with and I really believe he thought he was over there doing the world some good. We disagreed about politics and books but loved the Chicago Cubs with the same blind passion. So much so that we actually both wept when they let go of Sammy Sosa.
My wife left me ten days after Al's funeral so it was a pretty rough month. No one has seen the margins of whatever this is, so between my guitar, Al's face, and the various curves and planar pleasures of my ex-wife's anatomy I feel pretty safe that their various implications will remain an author's secret.
I also have my own bathroom up here with a working sink and shower. In the center of the attic floor is a bearskin rug that my father left boxed in the basement. I will occasionally lie on it and think of Sheila Anne (my ex-wife), her strawberry blond hair and her small perfect breasts and the slender, subtle natural arc of her back; my wife who left me for another man whose teeth are so white they almost hurt to think about (Sheila Anne insists he doesn't bleach them), a man five years my junior who dresses like an adult and has a lot more money than me. She and Dennis Church (is his middle name Catholic? Presbyterian? Lutheran? Russian Orthodox?) live in New York City in what I imagine to be some gleaming high-rise apartment building overlooking the Hudson River. I have never been to New York City. When the band was touring I had gotten as far east as Pittsburgh, but The Big Apple has eluded me the same way large game bass elude certain kinds of cursed fishermen.
Part Two
The band is -- or I should say was -- called The Third Policeman (an homage to Flan O'Brien's masterpiece) and we made a pretty good go of it here in the Midwest, mostly playing college bars and occasionally opening for some indie/new school band out of Portland or Akron; some slack-haired, waif-thin copycat quartet brimming with wit, a lazy live performance habit, and unwarranted industry irony.
The Third Policeman, on the other hand, was a well-aged, anti-industry jam band with a penchant for outro pop harmonies and the occasional punk vibe. I mostly fronted, wrote a good share of the lyrics, and played a vaguely informed rhythm guitar. We released an EP and two LPs on a small label out of Madison, Wisconsin called Foundry Records, and spent most of our time after the release of the first LP ("Argon Lights") touring highbrow music towns 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), 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, Foundry had planned a month-long European tour for The Third Policeman that would have surely taken us to the next level. The shame about Glose is that when he had his head on straight, watching him drum was like witnessing someone operating a flying machine.
Besides Glose's erratic episodes, which included shoplifting, public nudity and several fistfights, our biggest weakness was our lack of focusing our ambition. We were creepily Chekhovian in this way. Our Moscow was New York and L.A. and we talked about testing those large 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"), spiritual (depression, lack of artistic faith, fear, etc.), transportation-related (no one ever seemed to have a large enough car for two guitar amps, a bass amp, drums, 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 kind of syndrome that can cripple any band, especially one with four members. At least one of them has to be the organized one and keep things rolling with the booking guy, the label rep, website maintenance, silk-screening the T-shirts, the tour manager, etc. Of the four of us, Morris, our lead guitarist and king of the inspired punk incantation (one of The Third Policeman's signature bits), was that guy, and he knew it and didn't like this fact. I could have been that guy, but I was too in love with Sheila Anne and my priorities had already started to shift away from the band and toward the false ether of married life. Glose most certainly was not that guy for a thousand reasons and Kent (our bassist) had a hard enough time balancing his own checkbook.
Sitting here at this moment, it is somehow Morris I miss most; Morris "The Cat" 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 20 years and who turned down Division I track scholarships to three Big 10 schools to attend the very unathletic, highly cannabis-saturated Reed College in Portland, Oregon for the sole purpose of having the opportunity to study with the poet Gary Snyder; Morris, the left-handed "White Hendrix," enigmatic master of the upside-down imitation Danelectro with which he could make more exciting noises than a guitar jock with a $5,000 axe and a 900-part pedal rig. Morris came to Pollard to live cheaply while writing poetry about power stations and the encroaching dominance of what he called "the radio trees." How he sought us out is anyone's guess. I ran into him playing an open mic at a poetry reading. He was using a delay pedal and reading some of his work and it might be the purest form of human expression I've ever witnessed. For over a year I courted him to form a band with me and when he eventually did I thought I had discovered a great secret that would solve at least three percent of mankind's foibles. After the band split up he stayed around and played in my basement with me for a few months but eventually left town without a goodbye and is currently teaching Language Arts at a junior high school in Durham, North Carolina.
There were four of us in The Third Policeman and we all had day jobs. Glose handed out meds at the local mental hospital. Morris did sod work for his father's landscaping business. Kent worked at the library re-shelving books and sold homegrown weed to high school kids that looked like dehydrated Japanese noodles. I wrote a column for the alternative weekly, the Pollard Pigeon, mostly charting my experiences, opinions, and attitudes about the local and national music scene and how it related to just about anything. I was a creative writing major in college (Loras College, Dubuque, Iowa), so my byline gave me the false sense that I was actually applying an otherwise wasted higher education (yes, I'm still paying the loans back).
Pollard, Illinois is a small town, of about 25,000 people, whose chief source of industry was for years a flourishing steel mill that was eventually squeezed out of the market by the Koreans. Since its demise, the town had been in a long economic decline until the arrival of a pair of gambling boats, which are now parked on the Blackhawk River like two enormous floating pastries. Now people from miles in all directions descend on Pollard to play slots and try their luck on table games.
For reasons I don't completely understand, my ex-wife did not take Dennis Church's last name, although she did take mine. We were Mr. and Mrs. James Ingalls for exactly four years, seven months and 22 days. I quantify my number based on the Thursday evening she walked out of the house, not on the post-marked date featured on the divorce papers, which arrived by certified mail almost exactly a year after her departure. She now uses her maiden name -- Glavine -- and mine has been deleted from her identity like a smudge wiped clean from a bathroom mirror. Sheila Anne, who was for years a serious photographer, has been hired onto an elite sales force of a leading pharmaceutical company. I imagine her walking around New York City in mannish suits, carrying an expensive leather attaché full of brightly colored psychoactive samplers that might do a world of good for yours truly.
Although she travels often and makes frequent visits to nearby St. Louis, I haven't seen my ex-wife in almost two years (688 days to be exact).
Part Three
Enter to win a copy of Adam Rapp's novel "The Year of Endless Sorrows" by joining the FiveChapters mailing list with an email to editor@fivechapters.com.
So now I am a landlord in the house I grew up in. I feel neither sentimental nor disturbed by this fact. I'd like to think that after a failed marriage and a semi-promising rock-n-roll career that has evaporated into the Mist of Destiny (or Irony), that I have found the comfort of acceptance in the simplicity of my life. Is this grace, I wonder? Or is a series of small rationalizations that mask an enormous failure? I probably won't know until I reach old age, if I'm that lucky (cancer runs in my family like salmon in the River Tweed).
Todd and Mary Bunch, a young married couple in their late twenties, live in the ground-floor apartment (#1). Their six-year-old daughter, Larel, has recently gone missing and as of late there have been detectives and representatives from the Pollard Missing Persons Bureau hanging around. It's been two weeks since the disappearance and Todd and Mary owe me January rent. It's not easy wrangling money from people when they're down on their luck, let me tell you.
The Bunchs were former trapeze artists in the Ringling Brothers Circus and they gave that up after their daughter was born, and now Todd is a rookie at the local Fire Department and Mary, a petite, doll-eyed, slightly haunted-looking milk-maid-of-a-girl, spends almost as much time moored to the house as I do.
This morning a detective from the Missing Person's Bureau visited the house. His last name was Mansard and he had the face of an insomniac and his line of questioning had mostly to do with the Bunch's domestic habits, specifically odd behavior, and whether or not there has been any sings of spousal or child abuse, to which I could only answer -- and honestly so -- that I didn't know; that I never noticed anything out of the ordinary like bruises or limps or silent cries for help. I explained that the house was nearly a hundred years old (it's 96, actually), with thick walls and floors and a layer of acoustic vinyl I had installed underneath the carpeting on each story. Mansard seemed suspicious of me, like I was somehow in cahoots with the Bunch's.
"You really haven't seen anything?" he asked.
"No," I said. "Nothing."
He gave me his card the way they do in 70s movies and walked off the porch with his head tilted slightly to the left. I'm sure he'll be coming around again.
In the second floor apartment (#2) is my ex-brother-in-law, Bradley, who was living with Sheila Anne and I for a few months before she left me. Bradley had dropped out of Wisconsin-Whitewater for unexplained reasons and was wrestling with a pretty ferocious weed habit, which, after his money dried up, was quickly replaced by his sister's 27-inch high-definition television. Bradley is one of those handsome, athletic-looking types who've never played a sport in his life. Women seem to descend on him the way crabapples fall out of trees and he is the least bit interested. In my opinion it is not his sexual orientation that accounts for this lack of interest -- he's obviously straight -- but a kind of disconnect from the world that, in its most elemental state, is plant-like. And like most plants, it is only sunlight and water that he needs; a condition that might be called human photosynthesis. Recently he has grown a full beard and exists largely in his underwear (not terribly unlike Yours Truly). When he does leave the house he wears a long black trench coat and an equally black skullcap. I suspect that underneath the trench coat he is still clad in his BVDs.
Part Four
Despite the fact that my ex still pays his rent, Bradley and I seldom speak, and when we do our conversation is executed with the fewest possible syllables.
"Hey," I'll say, after he opens his door. "Bradley."
"Hey," he'll reply in his sleepy baritone.
"How's it going?" I'll ask, hanging on to a thin vestige of the former familial tissue that existed when his sister was still officially in my life.
"What, she didn't send the rent?" he'll say after a genuinely blank moment.
"No, she sent it," I'll reply. "I just wanted to see how you were doing."
"I'm cool," he'll say.
Then we'll stand there and stare at each other, the smell of reefer creeping into the hallway, almost man-like in its sharpness, his sister's TV murmuring in the background.
"If you ever need anything...," I'll offer with open-ended sincerity. And then he'll nod and I'll nod and we'll just stand there.
"You have snot in your eye," he'll say -- or something to that effect -- lethargic as a well-fed lion.
"Thanks," I'll say, wiping my eye.
And then he'll shut the door -- not quite in my face -- and I'll turn and head back up to the attic.
I've seen exactly 32 women knock on Bradley's door -- yes I count them (I actually keep a tally on a piece of paper that is thumb-tacked over my desk) -- most of whom I estimate to be between the ages of 20 and 30. They are all beautiful, and slightly agitated. The majority of them leave dramatic notes taped to his door.
"Bradley, Why won't you call me back, you fucking boner!"
Or simply: "Bradley, Please call."
I have no idea where he meets these women or how he goes about accumulating them. I thought for a while that it might be some sort of personal dating enterprise developed on the Internet, but Bradley doesn't own a computer. I almost believe that he is the kind of member of the male species who simply has to put out an odor and that the ladies come swarming, ovulating rapturously, drunk with pheromonal confusion.
Although I know that I am pathetically still in love with a woman who no longer wants me (other than the wretchedness of what I vicariously came to know through my mother's cancer there is perhaps no other greater misery), I could certainly use the services of one of Bradley's visitors. I would like to believe that I have evolved into my own plant-like state, solitary, self-sustaining, only animated by moisture and the sun, but I can't deny that I long for the simple creature comfort of companionship -- particularly feminine companionship. And it's not sex that I'm talking about, although that certainly accounts for something; it's the warmth of another; the reliability and purity of a woman's shape moving through a shared room; the cast and cant of her shadow on a wall; the warm apples-and-smoke scent hanging faintly in the air; the perfect spider web smallness of bras and panties clinging to a hamper's wicker skin.
In the simplest of terms, according to her, Sheila Anne left me because she felt I lost my ambition, because I settled, because I grew to be satisfied with our life in Pollard and the cresting of The Third Policeman and the cluttered familiarity of the basement studio (now I have moved all of the equipment into a cheap fiberglass-and-sheet metal tool shed that I purchased from Sears), and in my opinion because I let love become my priority, which, in retrospect, I discovered results in too much doting, a compulsive need to touch and cling, and the dissolution of any mystery that might exist between even the most intimate companions. It is mystery after all, that keeps a marriage interesting. Things secreted in drawers. Unknown telephone numbers on the long distance bill. Unusual URL address on the Internet Explorer. I think I took marriage to be a kind of pre-midlife apotheosis, but instead of it inspiring me to continue growing as James Ingalls the Man and James Ingalls the Rock Musician (and increase my mystery quotient), it pushed me into a strange mode of self-satisfied semi-retirement. I loved getting domestic and cuddly. I could have floated in that warm, three-foot pond for the rest of my life. I might has well have followed my father and his wife Sissy to Jupiter, Florida and set up house among the golfers and the elderly.
Part Five
Enter to win a copy of Adam Rapp's novel "The Year of Endless Sorrows" by joining the FiveChapters mailing list with an email to editor@fivechapters.com.
Sheila Anne and I met after a gig in Louisville, where she was getting her M.F.A. in photography. The Third Policeman had just played one of our best gigs of a six-city tour, at the Rudyard Kipling, and as we were breaking our equipment down she introduced herself and minutes later at the bar offered to take some photos at our next gig in Cincinnati, the following night. She was only 25 at the time, with beautiful, long braided hair and the same enormous gray eyes that never seemed to tire, age or lie. I invited her to have a few more drinks with the band over at Freddy's, another local bar that kept later hours, but she declined the offer, saying that her boyfriend wouldn't approve. The fact that she had a boyfriend was an immediate disappointment and I wound up going to Freddy's with Glose and drinking consecutive shots of Maker's Mark and passing out at a booth. Nevertheless, she wound up showing up in Cincinnati and shooting three roles of digital film that became the first images on The Third Policeman's now semi-frozen website (it hasn't been updated in over a year). She decided to stay out late with us that night and while she was in the bathroom of a bar near the new ballpark, Glose kept saying, "She totally wants to fuck you, James," which I didn't believe, despite the fact that Glose was the resident chick shaman and could suss out these kinds of things the way master plumbers can find a bad section of piping.
She stayed with me in the hotel that night, although we didn't sleep together. She wound up following us to Chicago, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, too, taking photos of shows, and helping us out at the merch table. Kent's girlfriend had left us just prior to Louisville, accusing Kent of being a homosexual, which seemed preposterous but wound up being true. (It turned out that Kent had been in love with Glose for several years.)
Earlier, out of curiosity, I keyed into the Bunch's unit. You could feel the grief of their missing daughter tainting the air like a piece of spoiled fruit. Their apartment was surprisingly neat, with furniture that was as beige as it was simple. I thought I might find a series of photos of their daughter hanging in the living room, but save for what appeared to be a wool Navajo blanket hanging above the sofa, their walls were blank. In their entertainment console, the Tivo's red light was engaged. I imagined them recording "The Oprah Winfrey Show" -- an episode about the epidemic of missing children in the heartland, no doubt. The Bunch's would view it on their lumpy sofa, their legs extended under their unremarkable coffee table, while eating microwaved Stouffers. Then Todd Bunch returning to the living room after Mary falls asleep and masturbating to the pretty young mother sitting across from Oprah, white, peroxide blond, sad blue eyes, maybe twenty-eight, arms thinned from grief, Todd Bunch's semen leaping out in dying arcs while the young mother weeps for her lost child.
Mary walked in while I was stealing their remote control. I have no idea why I put the thing in my pocket.
"What are you doing?" she asked. Her voice was high and small and trapped in her nose.
"Nothing," I said. "I heard a noise as I was coming up the stairs. There was a raccoon in the attic last night. I thought maybe there was another one in here."
"Was there?" She hadn't blinked and the air between us had a strange voltage. Her eyes were enormous and seemed glued open.
"Not that I could see. I'm sorry if I crossed a line. I normally wouldn't..."
She was wearing a nylon Adidas sweat suit top with a hooded sweatshirt underneath, and mismatching jogging pants.
"Can I help you with that?" I asked, taking her bag of groceries. There was another awkward moment and then she seized the bag.
"I'll put these up," she said and exited into the kitchen.
The warmth of their unit was making my pulse drop and suddenly my feet felt incredibly heavy. I could hear her putting things in the fridge. I imagined it filled with doubles and triples of things. Jars of mayonnaise and bottles of catsup. Eight quarts of whole milk, most of which would never get drunk.
When she came out she had taken the sweatshirts off and was now wearing a plain white T-shit, too large, probably her husband's.
She said, "You think we did something, don't you?" Her voice was still congested and I had an impulse to go to a knee but I remained standing.
I said, "I'm not sure what you mean."
"To our daughter."
"No," I said. "No, I don't."
Mary Bunch was surprisingly attractive in her big white T-shirt and although I had never thought her to be less than that, the sudden charge I felt between us took me by surprise.
"I saw you speaking to that detective earlier. What did he want?"
"He just asked a few cursory questions. If I'd seen anything out of the ordinary."
"Meaning what?"
"Strange behavior, that type of thing."
"Like would Todd and Mary Bunch harm their daughter?"
"He did hint toward that, yes."
"I saw he gave you his card."
"He did."
"Are you gonna call him?"
"Not unless I have a reason."
"Why are you holding our Tivo remote?"
"Oh," I said. "I didn't even realize... Here."
"I think you should go," she then said. "I'm not comfortable with this."
"I'm sorry," I said. "I'll be sure someone's home next time."
She crossed her arms and nodded. She had soft, perfect skin and her breath smelled like maple syrup.
Later in my room I took a Viagra. Earlier that day I had bought three for $50 from my old pot dealer, Haggis. I had been anxious about impotence because in recent months my erections had been weak and infrequent. The snow was still descending diagonally across the attic window and the sounds of snowplows scraped by on the street below. I laid on the floor for a while an pressed my ear to the central air duct and listened to the Bunch's apartment, imagining Todd and Mary not talking, but passing notes to each other across their kitchen table, their daughter's small body rotting in a hole in some nearby town.
When the Viagra would kick in, I would man my desk, open my manuscript to page 84, where I had sketched a fairly decent likeness of my wife's naked body, her dark eyes staring back at me, all pupils, eyes larger than her real ones, fawn-like and filled with yearning, and orgasm copiously and directly on my kick amp.
