Four: Prescience is a chancy vanity
From Some Stones Don’t Roll
In Stockbridge, Massachusetts, during the 1970s, the author befriends a young man, unaware that this newcomer is a paranoid-schizophrenic who depends on medication to keep him from suicidal and homicidal behavior.
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2014
Maybe I have gotten to now. It feels that way. We went out as we always do Saturday nights. You will remember yesterday was presaged doom-laden. But I watched and nothing like that transpired. Prescience is a chancy vanity, a Bardian scutcheon. Another strip of death material. There is nothing in now but now. It is the readiness that Hamlet, even sad Hamlet, knows is all. It is a state. It is being. With the drip. The traffic. Ready. No place to go. Billy Joe Shaver has a song I love that is not among his hits. We all have hits that are not the best of what we did. This is his celebration of Brenda, light and lively, and in it he speaks of there being nothing much to do and longs for her in the now that is so palpable. It is too good. My books are all around me. A stack of three sits between me and my monitor. Beyond the Psychoanalytic Dyad, Shakespeare A Biographical Handbook, Hamlet. Ophelia was not crazy. That I know. Most probably the victim of rape. All women are. She states truth in her crazy rhymes. I do not understand scholarship. Traffic is knowledge. Hum is knowledge. Drip. And still no pigeons.
So Bill got dropped off at the Red Lion and went into the Den to hear her sing. That is what he said he wanted to do. It was dark. Early evening. Then he must have walked down the hill and gotten to George’s apartment and they talked into the night about freedom. About free will. Or so the story went. Then the long blade serrated that miraculously missed the death artery by a millimeter and off into the night with the knife went our Bill an ordinary guy. Ordinary except when not ingesting whatever he was being given to keep from doing such things. His Mom and Dad are probably dead by now. I never knew them but I can see them peering out from some suburban door near Boston. The man had the nerve to call me after we finally found Bill four months later. He had run off with the serrated knife and we did not know where he was. He the dad wanted to know if I could sell the new guitar Bill bought the day he disappeared, the one I had driven him to Tony’s in Amherst to find. You do not buy a guitar on the day you intend to end it all. You do not intend to end it all. It was all a matter of the pills. What gall. I mean about wanting the money Bill had spent. That would put you on pills. That would send you raging down the street stripped naked. Like Lucy Jordan.
What is reliable to me? The rhythm of the vertical line after each just-witten word. It has the beat of life. They call all this computer stuff virtual but it is as real as me driving Bill up to town silently seeing that everything will be alright as long as I can forget I’ve ever known him. My then-wife was not reliable. She was one of those early ministers, those pioneers, the generation that would catch the wasp churches on their way down, projecting smiling wisdom in place of the scrimped faces of the men who suffered the end of their era. She told me Bill was a bright fellow over in the rehab place (where she is chaplain) who just wanted to play music and write songs, a perfect fit with laid-back me mouldering in the Berkshires still in exile, my future murdered long ago. And so we wrote for some months and performed. I cannot remember a word. A title. A thing. Just Bill in the car. Or Bill unleashing a mad pool shot at Mundy’s Silver City in Glendale. Or Bill in my kitchen the evening of the night he disappeared saying he was not getting what he needed from our relationship and me saying well I give what I can give you know. And that fading into the meal the kids and my ex and Bill and me. Yep. We fail without looking. No hands. She never told me he was a paranoid schizophrenic who had gone naked down the street from McLean’s a year before, after trying to assault someone with a knife. It’s that confidentiality right. What would I have done if I had known? Did she know? We do not lock people up just because they … Or do we? In the last analysis, the only real victim was Bill. No wait. We are all victims.
It is 8:43 AM. It is 2014. The tub drips. The traffic moves. I have family scattered all over the place. My dear boy is in Nevis. My youngest is in Bristol, the UK one, with her hub and the two beautiful children, girls. My other daughter still in Massachusetts, a minister no less. One daughter in Chicago, another closer to home. My angel is across town at the laundromat. I do no work. I am a spoiled boy. Nothing I do all day is work. It is a stab. Did I say stab? Yes, it is a stab at form, creation, connection, nowness. No, get it straight. The NOW is stopping all that. Everything. Closer to what goes on when I attend to the drip and the traffic and the flexibility of fingers on plastic. Tub dripping. Life ambling. I could not abide the reality of those I did not will to know. I am better among the crowd of strangers. One day, it was Christmas, I drove to NYC to the Port Authority with my Marveltone guitar and sang “I Am a Pilgrim”. And a stranger. Travelling through. This wearisome land. Then I turned around and drove back. Acts and road. Those were the days. It is my fantasy that if we come back at all, we do so as entities who can access every memory by thought alone. Everything we ever did, went through. Every conversation. Nietzsche’s eternal return. My ultimate universal judgment. We will all be condemned or privileged to know every element of our lives. Whatever existence we have that has a future is a mystery. But there is that capacity to grasp every moment, every nuance of every time one summons up. Would Bill know I had sung Charley Pride in my silent head sitting next to him in the car? No. Could he intervene and ask me a question? No. He would merely see into the car and perhaps surmise things in the light of what happened. Oh no. He could also access this truth telling. Yes for now is this already in memory and my imaginary entity can access anything that has transpired in the great continuity bazaar.
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Stephen C. Rose has written a number of books (Fiction/Non-fiction). You can tweet him here.
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