My brothers very quickly demonstrated themselves to be much more musically gifted than I.
I could, however, sing. When I sang, pleasant things happened.
My father would pause in the doorway to his den and pull on his pipe reflectively. My mother would lay aside her book (for she read constantly), and a vague, somewhat wistful smile would visit. When we three brothers joined forces, my brothers would let me sing lead, while Joel undertook the higher harmony and Tony essayed the bass.
The music we favoured was bluegrass, popularized in those days by groups like the New Lost City Ramblers. During those sessions with my brothers, I imprinted upon myself particular notions of music-making. For one thing, in bluegrass (the result of a backwoods tryst between English traditional folk music and the blues), instrumental virtuosity is encouraged, the musicians bellying forward in turn to improvise over the changes. Also, bluegrass features harmonies, dense and often a little dissonant, the characteristic “high lonesome” wail of Bill Monroe. And I adopted, back then, an iconography of trains and birds and churches that would show up later in my songs. Finally, bluegrass music, for all its up-tempo spirit, often embraces dark subject matter: murder, alcoholism, the untimely death of loved ones.
All right: on that note, here comes the new thematic material.
As Martin and I drove home from the meeting with Dr. Frazier, we weren’t sure how to proceed. There seemed to be very little to do. Very little to say. At one point Martin ventured, “Well, I guess if you ever wondered what you’d do if someone gave you that news, now you know.”
“Uh-huh.”
Martin is not technically my oldest friend, but he is my dearest. He had come with me to the doctor because several people had suggested it was good to have two sets of ears. But the truth of the matter was, Marty had been every bit as gobsmacked as I, and neither of us had heard much more than dick-all of what was said. Somewhere in there Dr. Frazier had seemed to suggest that I was going to die in a few months.
I called Dorothy at work. Dorothy and I had divorced several years prior to all this, but when I first got ill she took me back into the house on First Avenue. (The house on First Avenue is next door to the house owned by Martin and his wife, Jill, which is no coincidence. We bought the houses together, two adjacent row houses, and then we tore down the fence separating the gardens, giving us a larger shared space. This wasn’t done for any Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice type reasons, rather so that both couples would have handy babysitting. Indeed, my daughters, Carson and Flannery, think of Marty and Jill as a second set of parents, especially since their first set of parents split up.)
Anyway, Dorothy worked part time for E & C Marine, the “C” of which was Charles Gallimore, who had sold me my houseboat, and she arrived home a little while later, seeming very calm and collected. (I found out later, from Charles, that she’d done her crying there in the shop, a nor’easter of misery, so that she could appear at home unruffled and strong.) “So, it’s lung cancer?” she asked.
“Uh-huh.”
Again. Very little to do. Very little to say. We exchanged words of some sort, and then I announced, “Well, I think I’ll go for a little drive.”
I headed, without thinking, toward the east, way out into Scarborough. As I drove, I said, under my breath, “Fuck fuck fuck fuck” over and over again.
My cellphone rang. It was Shaughnessy, who often phones up to see how I am. I dare say he didn’t expect such a blunt answer: “I’ve got lung cancer.”
“What?”
“Non-operable.”
“Shit shit shit shit.”
