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By Root 360 0

night I had dinner with you at Capiche, the night I learned of Trevor Watt’s passing, I told you he’d been important at first and then I realized I hadn’t thought of him in years. The uncompleted thought is this: No, that was wrong, and I should have gone on to say: Now he’s dead and I realize I feel free, because whether he’s occupied my thoughts or not, Trevor has always been there. Always riding me, riding my life. As melodramatic as that sounds. And now he’s dead and the weight is lifted. What a happy death! That’s what I want to say, and do you see I couldn’t say it to anyone who actually knew him. I suppose you do see that. So you get the news: What a happy, wonderful death!”

J.J. goes on to say he’s seen a piece of mine in Men’s Journal. “What a coup!” he says. I don’t hold the sarcasm against him.

Otherwise I’ve had nothing from any of that bunch, except, as I’ve said, the occasional card from Ted MacKey, whom I invite you to imagine facing me in a booth those several years ago in a basement tavern, our hands around cold drinks, while outside the Midwest pounded in a heat wave. Eloise was with us too. She didn’t talk much today. Ted leaned toward me, drunk, huddled around some inner upright and saying only, “You don’t know. You don’t. You just don’t know.” He’d fed some dollars to the jukebox and set it to play “Let Me Roll It” by Paul McCartney infinitely. After a few drinks Ted conversed very little. He mostly sang.

I went down to St. James Infirmary

And I saw my baby there.

She was stretched out on a long white table,

So still, so cold, so bare,

he was singing now (while the jukebox played Paul McCartney).

Let her go, let her go, God bless her,

he sang, throwing wide his arms.

Wherever she may be….

By wrecking the rhythm, he braided the old spiritual together with the McCartney tune coming out of the jukebox, and made an odd duet.

“Reed,” he said, “Reed. Just, man—bury me where the corn don’t grow.”

Eloise laughed and hacked. She had the smashed sinuses of an English bulldog.

Here I’ve let my memory veer down the stairs and float alongside the bar and hover in the light of the jukebox, when actually there’s no point. Nothing worth telling about happened down there. Or up in the world, for that matter. I’d packed my few belongings in boxes and was ready to move to a motel until I found a reason to depart—until I had a destination. Other than that, the whole month of June had barely managed to occur. But it went out with a lot of noise.

On the twenty-ninth I drove Ted home from Dooley’s because he seemed to think that was best. He hadn’t thought so any of the other days he’d lurched to his feet after several drinks, announced he was hungry, and marched with a mechanical determination up the stairs. But today I drove him, and Eloise Sprungl, too. Ted insisted we go to his house first, however, because he wanted to show me something.

“Okay, what is it?” I asked when we’d pulled up in front of his big home.

“The car. I’m showing you the car.”

“Well, it’s an excellent car, Ted.”

I hadn’t driven a car in a long time, not in four years, plus three months. I liked driving the car.

“It’s a 1985 BMW three-oh-two or two-oh-three, or—do you want it?”

“Want it. To own?”

“It’s for sale.”

“What’s the price of one of these things?”

“Drive it.”

“I just did.”

“Drive it, man. Keep it a couple days. Let’s talk. It’s for sale and I want you to have it and it’s for sale.”

Ted’s home was made of red brick. It had a small entry with white pillars, and a semicircle drive, also small, but there they were, the entry and the drive, saying, “This wants to be a mansion.” To the side stood Ted’s blond ten-year-old son in a white T-shirt and white shorts, puffing flagrantly with large gestures on a cigarette that wasn’t actually burning. The player of the lute. Ted got out scolding and laughing. He grabbed his son’s cigarette and tossed it aside and it bounced on the tight green crew cut of the lawn. Together they went into the house.

I held the steering wheel and tromped the accelerator of my new car.