Can’t Keep a Good Girl Down: Chapter 1, Part 2

[Chapter 1, part 2]

Two weeks, post-breakup, I’m easing into my new role as a 20-something single person. I spend weeknights at home with my roommate, S., who owns the townhouse where we live. Today, a run-of-the-mill Wednesday, concluded uneventfully with Stacey and I watching an ER rerun. She gives me one of her skinny Capri cigarettes to smoke while we mull over the day, each of us flicking tiny piles of cinder into separate ashtrays.

When the evening news comes on, I say goodnight to S. and walk up the stairs — those same stairs John clomped up two weeks ago — to my bedroom. I like to be rested for my admin job at Woodland Studios, one of Nashville’s many — and one of its most historic — recording studios. Despite the breakup, I’m sleeping like a champ these days. For much of the past year, I’ve gotten most of my shut-eye on the turbulent waters of John’s sloshy waterbed. Shifting position on that vessel could leave a weaker-stomached person heaving over the edge like a tourist on a whale-watching trip.

Comfortable and stable underneath a black fleece blanket in my own bed, I sleep soundly with my journal on the pillow beside me. In an hour or two, S. will retreat to her room across the hall with an Anne Rice novel. She’ll read for hours more from her king-sized bed with the black wrought iron frame.

I hear the phone ring, but don’t give much thought to a late night call — at first. Most of the time, when the phone rings at odd hours it’s Michelle, my college roommate, calling S. to talk relationship drama.

With this ring, I don’t fall immediately back to sleep like I normally would. I linger in that in-between stage for a moment or two, as if I’m expecting the call to be for me. But why? Even if John and I were still together, he wouldn’t call this late. He likes to be alert for his job as broadcast engineer for Jim Owens Productions. He runs the mixing board for a talk show called “Crook and Chase.” Actually, no one would call me this late unless it’s…

A minute or more went by, then a knock on my door. “Heather?”

I mumble some syllable to confirm I’m awake. Is the call really for me? S. opens the door and steps into my dark room. I sit up in bed. She stands in the doorway wearing a white V-neck T-shirt and pajama bottoms, staring into the darkness. Her blonde hair is thrown up in a bun mussed from the pillow. She looks somber. This is not unusual, but the room gets warmer anyway.

“That was Cat. John was in an accident,” she says, frozen in the doorway. My ears start to ring.

“What?!” I sit up in bed, wide awake now. “Is he okay? Did he get hurt?” My heart thumps like a big bass drum. My cheeks burn.

“He’s dead.”

###

You know how when you stub your toe, or hit yourself in the shin, there’s a few seconds when you feel nothing, but you know something terribly painful is on its way? You secretly hope that it won’t hurt, that you have somehow escaped the inevitable, but you know you won’t. Then, a second or two later, you feel the result of the impact move through your body and land at that toe or that shin and set it on fire. I’m in between the impact and the pain.

At first, shock, numb, nothing. This is not happening. The air hums. The world is on pause. My ears really are ringing. But it’s coming, I know it’s coming, like watching a tsunami rush toward the shore before it sucks me and everything around me into its deep, dark muck.

I don’t believe what S. just told me. Maybe Cat is wrong. Maybe John is just hurt really bad. Within seconds, the horror of this news crowds out my feeble hope that this is all a bad dream. I don’t know what to do with this much pain.

Every word bores into my being as S. explains the accident. “Cat said John was supposed to record Java Christ at Neal’s studio. He left to go send the freight elevator down so that they could get their gear up to the third floor. He didn’t come back.”

I know that building well: Big Red Rocket, a large warehouse converted into live/work spaces. John and his roommate, Warren, have an apartment there, down the hall from Neal’s Poppy Studios. Big Red’s rickety elevator always scared me, the way it lurched to a stop and the way the up/down lever never worked right.

S. stays with me in my dark bedroom and holds me while I hyperventilate and dribble snot on her old, white T-shirt. S. knows loss deeper and more tragic than even this. Plus, she and John pretty much couldn’t stand each other. He irritated her so much that she banned him from spending the night at our house. With good reason: “You’re a frigid bitch. You need to get laid, you’re too uptight,” John told her once. Not a good way to keep the peace.

So, considering S’s feelings about John, coupled with her own experience with grief, it was with conflicting and confusing emotions — love, grief, guilt and regret, perhaps — that my good friend padded across the hall to tell one of her closest friends that the man she loved had just fallen down an elevator shaft and died.

I expected to cry for days, soaking S’s T-Shirt, but I don’t. Shock stifles my need to weep. After several minutes, I’m not sure how many, I calm down enough to eke out a word or two.

“Are you sure? Are you sure he’s not just hurt?” I ask her, knowing the answer before I even sputter the words. She is sure. She calls Cat back for me so I can hear him for myself. Stacey hands me the phone, and I huddle on the floor to listen to his first-hand account.

“I stopped by Big Red to just hang out and see how things were going with Geoff and the other Java Christ guys,” Cat says. “When I got there, they were all hanging out outside, waiting for John. They said he went upstairs to get the elevator and hadn’t come back. They thought he just got distracted. Maybe he bumped into someone in the hall, or he got a phone call. Then Warren showed up — he was out with Erin…”

“Erin?” Warren’s ex-girlfriend who won’t eat anything with a face.

“Yeah. I don’t know why…anyway, so Warren went looking for him. He found John’s keys on the bar in their apartment. He knew something was wrong then, because, you know, John always has his keys. So Warren started looking around the building and…found him.”

Cat’s voice gets softer, yet more strained, as he continues. “Warren tried to give him CPR but he said it was no use…” I assume that means he died instantly. I can’t imagine an alternative.

Cat and I talk for a few minutes more. He can’t give me a good explanation as to why the elevator was down when it should have been up, or up when it should have been down, but I don’t argue the issue. I can’t.

“Thank you for thinking to call me,” I say. We promise to talk tomorrow.

Disoriented, I hand the cordless phone back to S., my mind spinning. She offers to drive me to Big Red to see Warren, but I say no. I don’t want to be alone, but I can’t move. S. sits beside me on the bed, letting me alternately talk, cry, and stay quiet. When she senses that I’m somewhat stable, S. says good night and goes back to her beautiful bed with the satin sheets, though I doubt she will sleep. She shuts the door quietly, leaving me alone with this…thing. Did someone just whack me with a hammer?

Through the night, I cry some, stare into the darkness more, and float in a desolate space of disbelief. Slapped in the face with death, I go numb, as if buzzed but not in any way fun. I know I’m in my room, but nothing is the same, as if someone rearranged the furniture but didn’t. Jetlag without going anywhere.

The emotional ache isn’t raw, like a bad breakup, which would leave me blubbering and pitiful, but mostly fine and functional the next day. The shock of this loss seems to have lodged into every cell, leaving me a zombie. It’s an ache that’s too deep to be felt, at least right now. It will work its way through eventually, and, for me, slowly over time.

I spend the better part of what started out as a restful night’s sleep trying to get my mind around what could have happened at Big Red.

What the Hell were the Java Christ guys doing outside Big Red? Didn’t they wonder why John was taking so long just to walk up two flights of stairs and flip a switch? Didn’t they think it odd? And why didn’t they go and look for him? If the Java Christ guys had gone to look for John right away instead of just hanging around outside, maybe things would be different. Maybe someone could have saved him. Didn’t they care? John offered to record them for free. Why John? Why on a Wednesday? Why didn’t they just carry their stuff up the stairs?

Memories of us — in New Orleans, out on Lower Broad, the impromptu surprise party, hungover trips to Bobby’s Dairy Dip — flash through my head like flipping through a photo album while I stare into the darkness. In the first hours of September 7, 1995, the weight of what occurred just a few hours ago bears down on me. In the first hours of September 7, 1995, I want to die too.