Notes Toward The Story and other stories Read online

  And it came to pass that Sharilyn woke one morning with a familiar nausea, a fluttering in her vitals which she remembered and knew for what it was. She was fearful. What type of ensorcelment was this? A false pregnancy to bait her, to reemphasize her inert apparati? She felt, initially, that something was wrong, something insidious, destined to foul up her contentment, her fresh, new life. Grit in the cream.

  She didn't know how to broach the subject with Jim. But, one evening after bathing both children and seeing them off to sleep, she settled next to her husband and took a preliminary deep breath.

  "What?" Jim said immediately.

  "Honey," Sharilyn whispered, her voice hoarse with emotion, misgiving.

  "Shar, Godsake, what's wrong?" Jim spoke now, quickly, afraid one of the children had a lump again (an early parenting panic).

  "I'm p-p-pregnant," she sobbed.

  Jim waited a beat, preparing his feigned astonishment.

  "Jesus," he said, running a hand through his hair. It was a performance. "How. How could you be?"

  "I don't know," Sharilyn said, now shaking with gulps of feeling. "I took the test though. It's positive. Positive."

  "Oh migod."

  "I know."

  "When did you suspect? I mean, had you missed a logo?"

  "Period?"

  "Of course."

  "Yes. I mean, I guess. You know I haven't been that regular. I just figured it was something I didn't need to keep track of anymore. Oh, Jim. Should I be miserable?"

  "Oh, Shar."

  "I mean, I don't know. Is this something we can do?"

  Jim appeared to think it over, studio-wrestling with the thorny predicament.

  "Yes. Yes, Sharilyn, if you want to. I'm prepared to do it."

  Sharilyn threw her arms around her foolishly grinning spouse and Jim beamed with the satisfaction of a dumb show well- executed. Sharilyn relaxed into her husband's determination and assurance, her life reconfiguring, crystallizing around her like a house of ice. It was all new, it was really all new.

  As the months accumulated and the visits to the midwife became part of the routine again and the children adjusted to a different future, in which their parents’ love was spread even thinner, like spider web, like Elastic Plastic, the Cherrys reconfirmed their abiding familial togetherness. They were quite a sight to see, and the neighbors whispered about what a model family they were as if reporting indiscretions. And it was practically shameful the way they radiated gratification, an unintentional happier-than-thou aura.

  Sharilyn's water broke one Tuesday evening in November like the twanging of a single guitar string. Practiced in this now the Cherrys knew the signs, were comfortable with the amount of time they had, calmly called Katy to take the kids, called the midwife who assured them she would be there on time and would call ahead to the hospital and arrange the arrangements, grabbed their prepacked bag, and drove the 7.3seven point three miles to St. Thomas Hospital.

  And as prepared as they were, the birth, like all births, was concurrently a thing of magisterial beauty and a plunge into suprahuman pandemonium.

  Babel, hysteria, benevolence. Those crowded moments, flashes of light, as if divine. The rush of faces and hands, and during all this Jim Cherry, outside of time, felt a clutching in his chest. The delivery room, the room of delivery. Deliver me, O Lord...

  And during all this Jim Cherry felt the clutching in his chest, the flutter there, and was, in short, afraid. Afraid this was it, all he had left, these frenetic moments, his wife grim faced and clenched, the noisy mouths around him, swallowing up all air, all sense. He felt foreign to it, foreign to all of life, a specter, an uneasy presence.

  But Jim Cherry did not die there. He did not. He survived to hold his wife the morning after and kiss her wrinkled brow and tell her how brave she was. Jim Cherry died two days later, in a Walgreens parking lot, where he had ventured on a mission for his expanding family. He drove out that evening for sanitary napkins for his sanguinolent wife, who bled the blood of life onto their full-sized bedsheets, who bled so that their son Chris could be born, could enter this sad old world with every prospect of a long and fruitful life.

  And he died, Jim Cherry, quietly, in the front seat of his car, behind his steering wheel, in a Walgreens parking lot, his last sight, an old man with a handful of fliers, begging, sad- eyed, preaching to no one.

  Jim Cherry lived long enough, though, to bring his new son home, his delicate little frame swaddled in hospital blankets. Jim Cherry lived long enough to unwrap the boy and marvel at his evanescent flesh, smell the sticky black meconium, like something infernal, in his first diaper, to rub the feathery little nubs on each shoulder blade where the child's inchoate wings poked through.

  Jim felt those preliminary, aliform growths, and he thought about his life and its pied beauty, its embarrassment of riches, and he thought about Mr. Shrive, and the Otherworld, and the plan, and Jim Cherry saw it all whole, just for a moment and for the first time, and he thought that it was good.

  Punk Band

  Chuck calls me. It’s been months.

  “I’ve got a great idea,” he says.

  “Okay,” I bat back.

  “A punk band.”

  “That is a great idea,” I say, facetiously. Chuck.

  “What?”

  “They’ve already thought of them.”

  “No, fuckhead, we start one.”

  “We can’t play any, you know, musical instruments.”

  “Right,” Chuck says in that over confident way he has that is sometimes endearing and sometimes grating. “That’s punk.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “You sing,” he thinks to add.

  “I can’t carry a tune in, what?, a raku?”

  “I don’t know what that is, but, that’s my point. You’re our word guy. The poet of the obscene.”

  “Ah.”

  “I’m gonna play bass.”

  “Have you ever even seen a bass?”

  “Sure. On TV.”

  “Right.”

  “Hey, Sid Vicious did it.”

  “Somehow I thought we’d get around to that.”

  “You’re dubious, you mock.”

  “We’re a little old for this.”

  “This is gonna keep us young. Out there. Cutting edge.”

  “Hey, I just flashed on a great name for the band.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Jism.”

  “See, I knew you’d get aboard. Fucking Jeb, I told Whit. He’ll get aboard.”

  “Whit is…”

  “He wants to play drums. He’s the only one with money enough to buy a set.”

  ***

  Our first practice was at Whit Whitaker’s. I think this was because, once assembled, he was unsure if he could take his drum kit apart and put it together again.

  Joining us was Larrivee on guitar. Larrivee is his last name but it’s all he wants to be called. He actually knows how to play the guitar. And someone I didn’t know on marimba, cowbell, and cardboard box, who called himself Norm du Plume. I’m sure this isn’t his real name.

  And, finally, Garland Draper, who is lovely. And that is her real name.

  “Who’s the woman?” I pulled Chuck aside.

  “Garland Draper.”

  “I know her name. I heard her say her name. What does she play?”

  “Nothing,” Chuck says, in that way.

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, she’s going to add assorted vocalizings.”

  “Then I am not the singer. Thank God.”

  “You’re the singer,” Chuck says as if this is still obvious.

  “And Garland…”

  “Will add miscellaneous grunts and squeals and whistles and hums and backup. Wait till you hear her. She can do amazing things in her throat.”

  This is beginning to sound like quite an avant- garde group. Is this punk? I really have no idea.

  “Just a quick jam to loosen up?” Larrivee asks.

&nb
sp; “Great,” Whit says from behind his colossal cymbals.

  “How about “I Fought the Law,” Larrivee asks.

  “Great,” Whit says.

  “You know that?” Chuck asks me.

  “I can’t sing,” I say.

  “Right,” he says.

  “I know the words,” I think to add.

  “Great,” says Whit.

  Whit clicks his drumsticks together three3 times. I’m sure he saw this on TV.

  Larrivee launches into a fluid guitar intro and Whit and Chuck stumble behind him. It sounds vaguely like “I Fought the Law.” Norm du Plume is banging away on his marimba and cardboard box. The result is like a thunderstorm in the middle of the Beatles’ dissolution. Raw. Like meat left on the sink overnight.

  A marimba didn’t seem right for a punk band—Norm said he found it at the dump—but, to his credit, Norm du Plume played a mean cardboard box.

  I don’t know where to jump in. Larrivee nods his head at me.

  “Breaking rocks in the hot sun,” I speak into the microphone. I’m standing back from it and leaning forward as if I expect it to strike like a cobra.

  I speak a few more verses and suddenly Garland Draper is next to me saying something like “doodling-doo-doodling—ooo” into my mike. She smells like milk bath.

  After about four chaotic minutes we stop.

  “Great,” says Whit.

  ***

  I would have bet the farm that this experiment had about as much chance of succeeding as Nixon’s skullduggery.

  And, yet, after about two months we actually were starting to sound like a punk band. Or, what we thought punk bands sounded like.

  I grew more comfortable in front of the mike and my spoken singing style was somewhere between Rex Harrison’s and Frank Zappa’s. Larrivee told me to put more grit into my voice. It worked.

  And, with Larrivee’s help, we began to forge our own songs, using my words as the lyrics we would gargle into the din.

  My early attempts at songwriting were pitiful. But, I was making headway.

  One afternoon Garland Draper appeared on my doorstep.

  My girlfriend, Page, was away. She was almost always away. She was almost not my girlfriend.

  “Larrivee said, maybe, I should help with the songwriting.”

  “Come in,” I answered.

  “Larrivee said since I was sort of the backup singer that maybe I should know more about the words.”

  This sounded better.

  “Um, sure,” I said. “You want a soda?”

  “You got any tequila?” she hummed.

  “Uh, no, no tequila. Do people keep tequila in their homes?”

  I was honestly baffled.

  “I don’t know,” she answered. “I don’t.”

  This was an awkward conversation.

  “You wanna see some of the lyrics I’m working on?”

  “Yeah,” she shrugged. She said everything as if it were a shrug.

  I showed her about a dozen songs I was finished with or in the middle of. These included “Shark Snack,” “For Kim Because it Went Bby Sso Fast,” “Goddamned Past Full of Sex,” “Jeopardous Heart,” “Hogmagundy,” “An Afternoon with Godard,” “Helen Across Time,” “Vertiginous Waves of Murmuring Need,” and, what was to become our signature tune, “Sleep, Silence, Death.”

  “These are wonderful,” Garland Draper said, looking up. Her eyes were the color of loam. She smelled like milk bath.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I have no idea how to write a song.”

  “Nonsense,” she said. “You’re our poet of the obscene.”

  Chuck.

  ***

  It was startling to me when we actually started getting gigs. I felt foolish—I still feel foolish—using the word “gigs.” Who was I kidding?

  Our first public appearance was outdoors, in Overton Park, in an afternoon concert at the Shell, which also featured Neon Wheels and Tav Falco. How Chuck ever got us on this bill was beyond me. We opened. Neon Wheels and Tav Falco were waiting in the wings and, surprisingly, very kind to us naives. They helped us by telling us where to put our equipment and where to stand and how to use the microphone so that you didn’t sound like a high school thespian. I was discomfited to be pointed out as the singer.

  Of course, we had to take another name for the advertisements for this triple billing. Chuck came up with Ginger and the Minnow Crew. Garland was now called Ginger on stage. I hated Chuck’s new name, so twee, so Chuck.

  And we began what became a tradition. At the opening of every concert Chuck would intone, “Our real name is Jism, but they wouldn’t let us put that on the posters.”

  This generally got a good laugh.

  And we always began with “I Fought the Law.” I admit this was a good choice. A rollicking good song and a statement of purpose. And Garland and I had formed a sort of intertwining singing/talking style that sounded weird and off-center and just right for the times.

  We began playing around town. Small clubs, often at The Antenna, which was a hell-hole and hence the center of punkdom in Memphis. Black Flag played there. I think REM did. We were still clumsy on stage but getting better.

  One night at The Antenna we were in the middle of “Secretly All Women Aare Named Suzie,” an original that started out as “The Agoraphobic’s Pandiculations,” but through alchemy and tired, late-hour rehearsals became one of our better songs. There was a buzz in the crowd. Alex Chilton was in attendance.

  And, suddenly, I saw him, off to the left of the stage, almost in shadow, small, wiry man, arms crossed, appraising us. Garland was oblivious and I sure didn’t want to clue her in. I was as nervous as Macbeth before the ghost of Banquo.

  I botched some of the lyrics, fluffed a whole verse, repeated another. Instead of “She’s off her rock, I got a tip about those kind of women,” I sang, “She’s off like a rocket, tipped, a kind woman.” Garland thought I was ad-libbing, scatting to my own disheveled lyrics. She began to grunt and howl with renewed enthusiasm. Her hand went to my lower back as she leaned into the mike; she almost caressed my right buttock.

  Really, most of my earnestly wrought lyrics were lost in the pandemonium of Whit’s pounding and Norm’s boxing. Still, it made me panicky and I wanted to impress Garland, still. She smelled like milk bath and sweat.

  Her soft caress helped me through. A sort of symbiosis was forming between us.

  We finished the number. We counted ten and launched into “Blunge.” When I stole a glance at where Alex Chilton had been he was gone, like smoke. Had he really been there,? I thought. Somehow we made it through our set.

  And, afterwards, we were all at the back, near the bar, near the frightening hall which seemed to be an entranceway to Gehenna but only led to the bathrooms. On it was written every kind of obscenity. Love is dead.

  Suddenly, Mr. Chilton was standing next to me. I was a good head taller than him. Or a bad head.

  I smiled a tight smile, almost an apology.

  “You guys kick ass,” he said, simply.

  Whit whispered, “Great.”

  Chuck stumbled over the feet around him to reach us.

  “Alex,” he said, as if they were old compadres. “Chuck Kom.”

  They shook hands. Alex Chilton looked like he was almost asleep.

  “We’re looking for studio time,” Chuck said, overly anxious. I felt for him. Fucking Chuck.

  The stillness of a sepulcher surrounded us. I turned to take a swig of my beer before remembering I hadn’t ordered one, nor did I drink beer.

  Garland slipped her arm through mine.

  “Gimme your number. I’ll call you,” Alex Chilton said.

  We were sanctified. We were validated.

  ***

  You know a lot of the rest, if you listen to this kind of cacophony. We recorded our first album at Ardent, with Alex Chilton producing. “Suck it Up,” by Chism (our compromise), became something of a local cause célèbre and, nationally, actually charted somewher
e in the high 90’s.

  This was before compact discs. Like many musicians in our chosen genre we would have eschewed the new and committed solely to vinyl, because we were pure, but it wasn’t an issue until later. It is only through the love and persistence of some of our supporters (thanks always, Alex, Jim) that our work now exists on CDcd.

  Here is the song list from “Suck it Up,” for those who never picked up a copy:

  Side One:

  Helen Across Time

  The Agoraphobic’s Pandiculations

  Hogmagundy

  A Party in Diddy-Wah-Diddy

  For Kim Because it Went By So Fast

  Sleep, Silence, Death

 

  Side Two:

  Blunge

  A Day of Rue

  It’ll Kill Mme If it Doesn’t Kill You First

  Cicisbeo

  Shlomo in Love

  Child

  Dakini Blues

  and, hidden, uncredited on the LP but listed on the subsequent CDcd, our bombs- bursting-in-air version of “I Fought the Law”

  That was our first studio effort. In retrospect it’s not a bad endeavor. It has a certain energy to it, missing perhaps on our later LPs. I still pull it out occasionally and give it a listen. It makes me smile to hear that cardboard percussion or Larrivee’s smooth-as-a-river guitar. Even Chuck’s ridiculous thumping on bass guitar has an élan that more- polished groups missed. But, it makes me cry to hear Garland’s voice, as sinuous as a serpent, as smoky as night-swollen mushrooms.

  My own “singing” still embarrasses me: like the shouting of a backstay in a gale, as Kipling said.

  From there it was more live playing, more money, and the offer of a second record deal. The good folks at Ardent treated us like rock stars and damned if we didn’t try to act like we were. Bless our hearts.

  Page left me somewhere between our first and second albums. I hardly noticed.

  Our second album, “Vertiginous Waves of Murmuring Need,” should have collapsed under the weight of its pretentious title. But this was 1979 and such affectations were not only accepted, they were rewarded.

  Alex didn’t produce this one. It is listed as “Produced by Chism, Engineered by John Kilzer,” but, really, without John we would have been whistling in the wind. John also contributed one track to the album, the beautiful “Figs,” on which Garland took her one and only solo singing credit. She should have fronted the band. I felt that then and I sure as hell feel it now.