Can’t Keep a Good Girl Down: : A Roller Coaster Ride through the Other Side of Nashville
What would I find behind door #302?
Neal Cappuccino pokes his tiny head, which is hidden underneath a long, thick mane of frizzy brown hair, inside the door. “Hey Warren!” he calls to his friend, who is hidden somewhere inside the vast live/work space he shares; I mean, shared, with John. Nothing has changed inside. It’s as if John is just at work.
Warren and John spent months renovating #302 from a big white-washed box into a rugged-but-livable loft apartment. The living area alone is at least 400 square feet. The 16-foot-high ceiling is covered with black plastic and held in place by copper piping. Large, sooty windows open out to a view of a trash-strewn alley. When they moved in, Warren and John started their own recycling program: They’d throw beer cans out the window. By morning, they’d be gone, snatched up by the homeless who would cash them in for liquor money.
John and Warren built a small kitchen and a bar, which they painted bright red. They kept the top unfinished so friends could carve their initials into the wood and doodle their initials with Sharpies. They taped an old Sex Pistols poster to the wall between the kitchen and bathroom, and strung up John’s pig lights (think Christmas lights with pigs. He had a thing for pigs.) I don’t know the story behind the monster claw clutching the globe. John painted his bedroom door, located across from the kitchen and bathroom, dark purple. Warren’s room on the opposite side of the cavernous space is marked by a black door.
In the middle of the main room sits John’s extra-long cushiony black sofa, TV, and stereo. This is where dozens of drunk friends passed out for the night. The sofa was like a seven-foot-long pillow.
Near the back of the apartment, near the vintage Pabst Blue Ribbon and Miller signs, a few token plants cling to life. On the front wall, super-sized paintings from friend Hunter Bryce offset the rest of the college dorm-room-type decor. Hunter uses strong lines to paint bold images: jazz musicians, an African American man playing cards, a ghostly headshot of a man that looks like Jimi Hendrix hiding in a dark room.
With artists, musicians, a fencing studio, and Neal Cappuccino’s recording studio as neighbors, John and Warren created the ideal bachelor/party pad. They had loads of room for people to mingle, a bar, and a wooden floor that hides beer and alcohol spills. You do not have to remove your shoes in this apartment. Actually, it’s safer if you don’t.
How would I find Warren this morning, on our first day of life sans John? Would I find a broken man, devastated, speechless and lost without his companion nearby?
Not so much. Warren greets me looking and acting surprisingly like; well, Warren. He gives me one of his usual boyish smiles, which looks as if it were drawn with crayon. And when his lanky, six-foot-one frame, clad in an old Misfits T-Shirt, knee-length denim shorts and black Chuck Taylors, ambles to the front door, I can see that his boyish presence has not aged in the wake of loss. He is fair, with a shock of dark, spiky brown hair that never seems to cooperate.
For a man approaching his late ’20s, there is a simplicity about Warren that I appreciate. He’s not one to overanalyze a person or a situation and he seems to cruise through life’s hills and valleys with relative ease. I have yet to see him angry, stressed or overexcited. I see him as either happy or calm or some combination of the two. He has a gift for tinkering and fixing things. And he really dug John.
Whereas Warren’s high school friends didn’t do much more than sit around and smoke pot, John hardly ever sat still. John liked being out in the world, whether at a club or on a quest to discover the best barbeque dive, and he took Warren with him.
As the days wear on, would Warren remain so unaffected, so un-jaded? Would he continue to seem unscarred by life’s curveballs?
“Hey Neal. Oh, Hey Heath — ,” Warren calls, leaving the second syllable off of my name. “How are ‘ya.” His greeting sounds like both an exclamation and a question. He greets everyone this way.
Standing near the bar, near the spot where John would normally leave his keys, and in fact did leave his keys before…he…well…you know…I survey the scene at Apartment #302. Dave Digby, a tattoo artist and one of Warren’s longtime friends, sits on the cozy black sofa with his petite, sleepy eyed girlfriend, whose bone-white skin is much less decorated than her beau.
“Heywassup,” Dave says in one long, drawn out syllable.
“Oh…just…you know…wanted to come over,” What the heck am I supposed to say? I barely know Dave and his girlfriend. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the girl speak. I turn to Warren and give him a long hug, none of that one-armed stuff.
Just as I’m about to ask, “Are you okay?” the electronic jangle of the cordless phone jolts us out of our greeting. Warren darts nervously across the room to grab the white brick from the coffee table. He keeps it attached to his ear for most of the rest of the day. He continuously fields calls from John’s friends, John’s family, friends of his, acquaintances of both. He retells the particulars dozens of times:
“Hey Matt….Oh, doing fine…No one’s really sure…I guess the platform wasn’t where he thought it was…yeah, they think instantly…about nine o’clock last night…I was out with a friend and when I came back, the guys from Java Christ were all hanging out downstairs with Neal waiting for John….Yeah, I knew something was up when I saw his keys on the bar…doing fine…Heather’s here, my buddy Dave’s here…Next weekend? Sure, that’d be awesome dude…see ‘ya…”
“Hi Connie, how arrre ya’…Oh, doing fine…thank you, that’s sweet…no, I can’t think of anything I need…How’s Mike… yeah…his little brother, that’s gotta be hard…sure, anytime…we’d love to see ya’…”
When the phone quiets down for a few minutes, Warren, uncomfortable with the silence, grabs an address book (John’s I assume) and paces about the apartment while he calls someone else that he forgot to report the news to.
“Hey Keith …Doing okay man….I have some bad news…uh huh…No, Hell No, there’s no way he would…you know John, he was the same as always, happy, social, talkin’ shit…How’s New Orleans?”
I want Warren to sit a spell, rest, visit with me and the tattooed ones, but I don’t press the issue. The phone is his way of coping right now. Introverted, reserved Warren’s newfound gift of gab is keeping him from falling apart.
He calls, he makes arrangements, he plans. He does not cry. Warren found his best friend dead in Big Red’s elevator shaft just a little more than 12 hours prior, but he reveals no outward signs of trauma.
Finally, the phone goes quiet again, giving Warren a few spare moments of downtime. As he relays tidbits from his conversations to Dave and me, Warren’s eyes divert to his hands, with the callused palms and random nicks that come from wielding tools for a living.
Eyebrows furrowed with concentration, Warren rubs and digs at his fingernails. At first, I don’t think this odd. Warren bites his nails sometimes like I do. We both internalize our anxiety. But as I watch him closer, I notice that he’s not removing dirt from under his nails. It’s his friend’s dried blood.
Another jangle snaps Warren into the present. What will he experience later tonight, I wonder, when the phone calms down and the guests go home? Will he remain stoic or break down in those first moments alone? His grief is unique from mine, the slow leak, just as my grief is unique from John’s brother, John’s parents, John’s coworkers.
After sitting motionless on the black sofa for an hour or so, I decide to make some calls myself. Alyson, another one of my closest friends from college, is first on my list. We lived in the same apartment complex — Le Beau Chateau (we called it Le Beau Shithole) — during my last two years of school. Alyson introduced me to the god-awful Mickey’s beer (“Mickey’s! Mickey’s with a sting!”). She talked me into writing for her anarchist fanzine AOA (Awful Organized Anarchy) Alyson even talked me into taking a Greyhound bus from Nashville to San Francisco. (I’m glad she did.) I love that she talks me into wacky ideas that I would never consider on my own
Having recently returned from a stint in the Peace Corps, her work in Kyrgyzstan cut short due to her resistance to certain Peace Corps rules (I’m not sure what rules she resisted, just that she mentioned a “conflict” with a Peace Corps higher-up), Alyson is scraping together work as a substitute teacher in Murfreesboro right now. I’m hoping she’ll be at home when I call her on a Thursday late morning.
“Hi! How are you?” she asks when she picks up on the third ring. I love how she sounds so happy when I call.
“Oh…not too good. Something happened to John. Um, he died.” I’m sitting on the floor of John’s bedroom, my knees folded up to my chest. I can rest my head on them.
“Oh my God. Where are you right now,” Alyson asks. She sounds serious now. That’s odd.
“I’m at Warren’s.”
“Okay. I’ll be there in 30 minutes.” Click.
Give or take a few, she was.
After I hang up with Alyson, I call my mom. Hearing her voice feels like a glass of warm milk before bed. But after a minute or two, I realize I don’t have anything to say. My hadn’t met John, and I didn’t talk about him much. I didn’t talk about anything much with my mom. Yet I’m glad she answered the phone.
“I should give Warren his phone back,” I tell her, which is true, since half of Nashville and the other half of Lafayette, Indiana are probably trying to call. My mom says she will check in on me soon, and I know she will.
With that call complete, I don’t feel like calling anyone else. No more tasks today.
###
The atmosphere is pretty heavy in Apartment #302, and my German goddess friend Alyson is making a strong effort to lighten it up. “Hey Heather, guess who I saw at the ‘Boro last night?” Alyson says during a lull in the conversation. She had thrown on a flannel shirt, long denim cutoffs and black work boots for her rushed commute. No makeup, as always, and still beautiful. Our college bar, the ‘Boro, seems a million miles away right now. “Your old boyfriend, Brian Brown! He was there with his new stripper girlfriend. When I walked by he didn’t say anything — he just looked at me like I was the devil.”
“Huh. Well, they’ll have a wonderful life together,” I reply, my blue eyes staring into her two emeralds. My words fall flat, void of their usual sparkle. I glance over at a cluster of novena candles that John was so fascinated with: Peaceful Home, High John the Conqueror. I remember how Brian suspected that I had feelings for John, but I always denied it. “Maybe Brian doesn’t hate me for breaking up with him now,” I say, still staring at the candles.
I relax a little with Alyson here. She’s my life preserver in this ocean of grief, which pulls me away from reality. Even though Alyson’s good-natured gossip seems out of context in the thick air of #302, it does pause the nonstop John Van Etten reruns in my head. Little do I know how important it is to have my confident confidante by my side. Alyson wasn’t as close to John as Warren and I, so it is easier for her to be strong. She seems to know what I need even when I don’t.
After a crack she makes about a random X Files show draws only a blank stare from me, she says, in an exaggerated, pitiful voice, “Oh…but you look so saaad.” Of course I’m sad! But I didn’t realize it was so obvious. I thought I could keep most of my grief concealed, unless I make some obvious gesture, like cry, which I’ve already done once today. One minute I’m sitting on the sofa with Dave watching a stupid talk show, the next I can’t see for all the tears.
Alyson may not have magic words, but her presence means more than anything she could say. She has the emotional fearlessness to stay close to me in the midst of tragedy. She does not run away from the intensity of my feelings or distance herself because I am not “fun” right now. Just by being herself, she gives me what I need. My sanity is all the better for this. Our friendship is stronger for this.
While Alyson visits with Dave, the girlfriend, and Warren when he’s not on the phone, I spend the rest of Thursday’s daylight hours rooted to John’s sofa. John’s sofa. I fell asleep on this sofa many nights while John and I watched movies. We lounged on this sofa while waiting on one friend or another to show up before we went out to some concert, some bar, or some party. Now it is the mourning sofa. The Thursday morning mourning sofa.
I stay sunk into the same cushion as a parade of sympathetic visitors march in and out of the apartment. Warren politely greets his guests — some I know, some I don’t — and tells and retells the story of John’s accident without much variation in his words.
Warren resumes phone duties, leaving Dave and me to make small talk with whomever’s standing around looking uncomfortable. I don’t and can’t offer much to these visitors beyond a few polite comments:
“Oh, what a pretty basket.”
“Yes, Warren will like the cheese and crackers. He’ll eat anything.”
“A beer? Oh, no, not right now, thanks.”
The visitors in #302 get about ten percent of my attention. The other ninety percent of me is absorbed in memory, reliving random moments of the brief couple of years that I knew John. I remember the party he and Warren had before we started dating, when we sat near the train tracks outside of Big Red and confessed our feelings for one another. I remember admitting my confusion because I was seeing someone else at the time. John told me something to the effect of, “I think you’re great. I’d love to go out with you, but not if you have a boyfriend. So if anything changes, let me know.” Simple as that. Before long, it did, and I did.
On our first date, he took me to San Antonio Taco Company, and we sat outside on a warm late-summer night with burritos and Dos Equis. I remember how excited I was to finally sit across the table from this man, whom I had felt so strongly about for so long. I remember how right it seemed to be with him: a man I was both crazy about and could have a conversation with. Usually I get one or the other, but not both.
My attention wanders back to Apartment #302. Nothing has changed, really. Television, telephone, random conversation of little interest. I disappear into my head again.
I remember how John begrudgingly danced with me when we went down to Lower Broadway to hear BR5–49 play their hip hillbilly music at Robert’s Western World (known as just Robert’s to locals) on a Friday or Saturday night. We saw that band almost every weekend at least once, sometimes twice. John didn’t like to dance much, especially to slow songs, but I’d always ask and he would usually oblige, grumbling and rolling his eyes. I remember the smell of his leather jacket. With his fair, smooth skin, inches away from mine, shuffling around Roberts’ tiny crowded dance floor, everything was okay, any conflicts or grievances erased in the span of BR5–49’s cover of Gram Parsons’ “Hickory Winds.”
Staying with these memories comforts me much more than carnations or kind words from strangers. It is easier to keep my mind rooted in the past rather than face the present. So I drift off again, the same way I’ve done since I was a kid. I can spend hours somewhere other than the present through daydreams, through books, through my diary. As a young girl, this meant I could escape the alcoholic father with an unpredictable temper who said I was “dumb as a box of rocks.” He didn’t realize that I was Snow White in her glass coffin waiting to be rescued by the handsome prince, and not just a seven-year-old girl laying under the coffee table for no reason.
Today, the present is even less appealing than being awakened from a daydream by an insensitive father. In the present, I have to face the fact that John is dead, and I just can’t fully face that right now. In the present, I have to hear the story about the elevator and the fall again…and again. I have to hear people say things like, “I’m so sorry for your loss. Is there anything I can do?” No. “If you need to talk, I’m here.” Thanks. But finding words to unload my scattered thoughts would require some effort on my part, and at the moment, I do not have the energy to do much of anything except sit on John’s cozy sofa, smoke Camel Lights and let the memories have their way with me in between the spontaneous crying spells that escape from that darned slow leak in my psyche.
And really, does that seemingly sympathetic person really want to hear me wallow anyway? I would burden them, I think. My parents taught me to keep my emotions in check. Happiness, excitement, sadness, anger are to be tempered, especially in company outside of the immediate family. Smile and say you’re “fine,” even when you’re not. I watched my father walk away from my mom and me. I learned not to rely much on others. I can only really count on myself. Don’t cause trouble. Be quiet.
“Stop whining and get off your ass and do something about it!” I hear John saying.
There’s nothing I can do about this one, John, wherever you are. No action on my part will make you come back; no action on my part will restore things back to life pre-September 6, 1995, and no action on my part will make me “better” right now. So I’m gonna sit on your sofa, stare at your things, and wait to see who walks in the door next.
###
