you better come on

Dix is checking out beef jerky but only for a second before four of them are in his silver metal basket. His eyebrows go up as he stares at jars. I feel like pocketing those eyebrows.

He’s still looking at jars, so I bump into him with my freshly coffee-stained jacket. Got coffee all over it when the Greyhound ran into a squirrel.

“What else can I do about dinner?” he mumbles. He picks out some Nachos and a jar of cheese dip.

“You are such a bachelor, aren’t you?” I say. I break open a cinnamon gum packet not being able to wait. Tossing it into his metal basket. There is only one aisle in this crowed store and it leads to a steaming-ice refrigerator.

“Well, I’ll tell you something about singing,” he says heading for the cash. “If you’re going to be a singer, singers need that extra fat around their vocal cords. Think of it, can you think of a good singer that isn’t fat?”

I nearly swallow my gum in a laugh thinking of girly singers with tambourine hair, but then I realize he’s talking about blues singers.

Dix has done all these computer-work jobs and tossed it all out the window when his girlfriend left him. He is staying at his friend’s flat, my friend’s flat, and together in the living room they have seven guitars. When you pull back the curtains in that living room you can see a garden of stones that they’ve never set foot in. I said I wouldn’t be a lot of trouble. I just lie down between two amps sideways. They keep drinking and smoking, this intricate continuous movement of fingers that remind me of my eyelashes watching them, Dix with a winter hat balanced on top of his head and our friend playing songs like “Sister Ray.” Dix starts singing when our friend laves the room to crash: “You better come on in my kitchen, because it’s sure to be raining outside.” I pretend I am asleep but I’m not.

I wake up at three in the afternoon, bits of pain on my exposed skin. Dix stumbles into room, when I’d just started to tinker on the guitar. He walks right by. Goes for the refrigerator. And there’s that tinkling sound of glass touching.

I look at my skin and realize I’ve been bitten by bottle caps. The one on my neck might even look like a hickey.

Dix never shows his teeth. He just sits there on the curb outside the store smiling, waiting for me to say something. I instantly feel like I need some coffee.

I grab the Nachos bag, teeth it open and start eating.

“Can I have one?” he says, always soft-spoken.

When he takes over the Nachos bag, my knees are up just knocking each other and I notice I even have stains on my socks.

“I’m just going to stay one or two more days, that’s it,” I say, thumbing an eyebrow.

“Well, my friend doesn’t care,” he says still smiling, always smiling.

Dix’s friend, my friend, you can tell he’s a real rock guitarist. Bangs out power chords. Tells about his old band where his ex-girlfriend was the singer with very big hair. But Dix is a one-man show. He picks all over the neck slowly drawing you in. Sings softly. Leans back in the chair. Says he made some kind of wish by a gravestone about being able to play guitar well and now he can play well and is terrified about what it all means.

This afternoon I sabotaged his plans for job-hunting. I said he had to take me around. He looked at me smiling like he got some joke and asked if I wanted a cigarette, a beer maybe, very politely. The top of the living-room table was a real picnic. About seven ashtrays. He wasn’t even thinking of playing one of the guitars, it drove me mad.

I have this small notebook I keep in my fanny pack. I take it out and show Dix when he shows me his little black book of his own possible lyrics. We don’t read each other’s lyrics of course. But I like that line he sang earlier. The Robert Johnson one. What was it? He says it word by word slowly.

“I’m making an appointment with you now, that in ten years, I’ll have figured out the song and I’ll come and find and I’ll play it for you.”

“You’ll be playing it at my grave,” he says just like that. But he’s linking arms with me now and walking out the door.

Dix finishes the last Nacho and is still hungry. He wants to go to a diner for some more food.

Dix is on his tenth life.

He looks at me and says, “Your jacket smells like rain.”

“It’s coffee,” I say with swelling vocal cords.

Diners are the land of newspapers. They’re splattered on all the tabletops like minefields.

He picks up a newspaper right away and starts reading.

It is freezing in here. I look at my stained jacket, I look at the clock on the wall, I look at him reading.

Writing now would be like clawing out of his guitar case.

(with love to Joel Caspar Dix 1968–1997)