Rob Cook

THE ROOMMATE

arrived in late August. One day his room was bare. Two days later a mirror and drawn blinds. The next week a clock radio, the nautilus-drone of a vaporizer, two cans of Diet Rite in the freezer. I rarely left the house but I never heard him enter or leave. I knew his presence only by the odd can of soda added to or missing from the freezer, and a box the size of a large man containing more belongings where there was no box an hour earlier. I didn’t know what kind of car he drove, or if he drove at all. I imagined him owning the white Ford Galaxie that never moved from across the street, primarily for its mood, the color and shape of something missing from the world. Days went by. I heard the faintest din of classical music where before was only the sound of passing traffic or a game show on the landlord’s television. I kept finding more cans of Diet Rite like gnomons that grew inside the freezer. The tall box still waited to be emptied. No light shone through the crack in his door. One day in September, I heard the toilet flush. When I jumped off my bed and raced out to the hallway hoping to catch him, he was gone. No sounds except for the toilet filling with water.

By October there was a small carton of cherry tomatoes in the refrigerator and a growing collection of cans in the recycling bin. At night I heard him turning the pages of a book; another night I heard him cough once; the next the snap and hiss of a soda can opening, no sounds during the day except the vaporizer like the steady breath of insects that lived in the walls. I never left the house due to my growing anxiety. My groceries were running out. I had not slept. One day the cherry tomatoes were gone, but this was not until November. Six thin envelopes addressed to Mr. Ed Allen Smith from an insurance company in Oklahoma waited months in the letterbox before somebody retrieved them. When I allowed myself to fall asleep, I was woken by water running from the kitchen faucet, but again I was too slow.

By the end of winter I knew he drove a red Toyota Corolla. My landlord, in his late eighties, asked how I was liking my new roommate. He’s a nice-looking, polite young man, he said.  Except for the driver’s seat, every available space in Ed Allen Smith’s car was occupied by empty Diet Rite cans and other assorted garbage, stacked to the ceiling and spilling onto the front seat, trying to breathe. It looked like the recycling center I worked in as a child. One day when there was no food left in the house, I waited across the street from his car. He would have to eat eventually, he would have to at least go out and buy a cherry tomato. I waited and did not see him.

During the spring there were less soda cans. A white Chinese take-out container sat on the refrigerator’s top shelf. The tall box in the foyer was gone. Another month went by. There were no more Diet Rite cans. The car was still parked out front, but now even the driver’s seat was stacked with cans, all crushed flat as paper plates. The landlord asked again how I was getting on with my new roommate. He’s nice, I lied, and went upstairs and waited outside his room. He was listening to his AM radio, the latest news on bacterium, the volume so low I could hear it only when I pressed my ear to the door and stood very still.

LETTER TO MYSELF AT TWENTY-ONE, 1990

Dear Tadpole,

Today you will ride to Promised Land State Park with Ed Glory. A Monday when no one else exists away from their coffin-desks. Both of you unemployed, turned down by Manpower because they didn’t like your typing and couldn’t decide which of you was more afraid. Turning the key in your station wagon, the engine will cough and make the sound of horses and then die. This is the only way to get Ed to drive. He will give his Oldsmobile a bath before leaving, the car strong from him calling it his brother, the maroon Oldsmobile he raised from the time it was an egg that he carried in his pocket. This afternoon the sky will be blue as the best day of your life, clouds drifting in tribes that you and Ed will follow into Pennsylvania, moving past the September moodiness of Stroudsburg and Tobyhanna, Mount Pocono and Canadensis. Driving on a road of loose gravel, Ed will feel the pain of the tiny stones licking the paint off his car, and he will curse you for this, and pull over and make you look at the damage he’s suffered, though not one spot of color is missing.

When you arrive at the park, you will be the only ones there but Ed will lock the car anyway. You never know with all the deer in these parts, he’ll say, putting the keys in his jacket and then shutting it in the trunk. You won’t know this for hours yet, after the two of you feel good about yourselves because you’ve been hitting and catching a baseball. If another person were there to watch, you’d forget how to use your hands and your eyes, the sky dark, vanishing behind a hawk or a brief aftermath of wind. Ed will drop your fifty-dollar glove in the grass on his way to the restroom and forget where he left it. Searching, you will find only crickets growing out of patches where the blades have been torn. Ed will decide, after ten minutes, that it’s time to go home. And then he will remember where he put his keys and curse you again, pointing at the locked trunk.

He will refuse to call the police or a locksmith. My Oldsmobile does not need to be hurt any further, once they cut open the lock I’ll never be able to drive again. And he will believe this because he doesn’t have a mother or father who will go searching through Pennsylvania for their son. His mother, who doesn’t set a place for him at the table, who lurks outside his bedroom muttering loser, worthless, and calls the police about the wrinkles in her neighbor’s drapes, this mother who makes Ed afraid to turn off his television and listen to what she’s left for him in the walls, she loves her Lincoln Towncar more than any of her children and will not risk its life by driving out of New Jersey. Ed will make a fist and force you to call your father who will come out to save you from the deer starting to gather, the animals lured by the holes in Ed’s voice, the two of you standing there helpless with a baseball bat, Flight of the Griffin dying on the boom box, Ed hiding behind his glasses whispering Don’t worry, I’ll protect you, I’ll protect you. Ten years from now, waiting for your generation to happen again because you couldn’t find it the first time, this is what will show up in your mailbox, something you wrote the morning Ed agreed to drive, when you were already missing, when you were already a permanent part of that day, and that day only.

ON THE MARGINALIZATION OF GUITARISTS IN THE REALITY CULTURE

The guitarist hangs a picture of his guitar wherever he’s hurt the walls with his playing. The guitarist bleeds when he puts down his block of wood. The guitarist does not speak in sentences, he forces truth out of the twenty-first fret that screams and shatters and almost breathes. The guitarist tries to imitate the migration patterns of palm trees, the sound of water after it’s been dried out and humiliated. The guitarist has long forgotten the clouds, the mountains drifting toward the moon, the chiming of lost kites. The guitarist falls asleep, where he confuses the crying of guitars with the crying of children. The guitarist fails at everything because he built his house with soil while it slept, and with recordings of turtle orchestras years before the guitar washed up on the shores of that silence. The guitarist has no voice, no voting district. It hides on the radio behind the inferior voice of the mouth and the throat and the words with nothing inside them.

The guitarist records his movement through the world with seven scales, seven worlds of sound:

The Ionian world, where the minotaurs can read no matter how shallow they see beyond the walls of their thin clothing. The Dorian world, where the humidity depends on the number of birds eaten by Latin guitarists before the Latin nightfall. The Phrygian world where no one is allowed, only Alex Masi haunts the half-steps here, and the drama of Yngwie, and the little lightning crowds who remember the sequences of scales and their obvious betrayals when they could still cry and cause many other guitars to move. The Lydian world, where the cloud-civilizations and the remnants of thunder will tell you the direction of the blue sky when the blue sky is already behind them. The Mixolydian world: one stomping chicken, a reservoir of boiling camellias and some chords and hospitals to the south. The Aeolian world with its natural minor sunsets and shreddings in a country of stones and black sand. The Locrian world, which is a heat pattern in the shadow of a heat snake.

The guitarist considers others who live like him:

The guitarist frightened back to someone else’s church by the artificial harmonics and howling of Roy Buchanan. The guitarist who thinks he’s ugly, haunted by the lashings and harshly-lit shimmerings of Neil Young. The guitarist who celebrates Yngwie Malmsteen by making sure his fingers never stop, that they never fall behind the hills of rain inside the diminished arpeggios. The guitarist who stays awake talking in the key of C minor but still can’t bend the strings or the heart as far as Gary Moore. The guitarist who stands like Albert King at the foot of a pentatonic scale, the beginning of the sparse foothills. The guitarist who goes looking through cities at the edge of the soundscape for David Gilmour. The guitarist who knows Eric Johnson can no longer be destroyed, his chords and his leads full of human saguaros and deserts where the water is real. 

The guitarist watches the paper television where it stays gray and muddy like the insides of March.

The guitarist picks up pieces of songs broken by others who want to be known by their obscurity.

The guitarist will teach the horrible blonde singers how to see in the darkness of their expensive bodies, the ones that collapse like the emptiness in the middle of the descending top-forty.

The guitarist will not stop laughing in the gutters.