THE HANDSTAND MAN
Jimi-John Houser, bare chested and ripped jeaned, one sneaker laceless, toted sand up the steps to his fifth-floor walk-up. He was on his third sack, and the sweat formed rivers down his back, pooled in the band of his underwear. He’d stolen the sacks from a construction site three blocks away, and every minute of the agonizing journey back over sun-baked sidewalks, he had expected a hand on his shoulder, a shout, a police officer. But he would get away with this, it seemed.
Inside, he fell to his knees and shoved the sack next to the other two, then crawled over to the tiny refrigerator Jenny had rented for him last month when she’d arrived. He sucked gratefully from a two-liter, ninety-nine cent bottle of orange soda, until the fizz caught in his nose and he sputtered, choking on the sweet liquid.
His door creaked open and the little girl from downstairs came in, carrying a water balloon. She was six, with dark eyes and olive-colored skin. On her feet she wore pink basketball sneakers, the laces undone.
“Don’t even think about it, Celeste,” said Jimi-John. “I’m too busy to play games.”
She sat down cross-legged on the floor, the balloon in her lap. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“Redecorating,” he said. “Hey, your shoelace is untied.”
“Where’s all your stuff?”
He went over to her and picked her up under the arms, at which she began to giggle. “Out,” he said. “Come back some other time to visit, señorita.” Taking her into the hall, he placed her gently, still giggling, on her feet, and shut his door.
With his pocketknife, he cut open the first sack and dumped its contents onto the floor. It wasn’t exactly what he’d hoped for—beach sand, smooth, blonde crystals baked dry by the sun. This was a coarser variety, browner in color, a little damp to the touch. But it made a nice pile, and after spreading it around a bit with his foot, Jimi-John decided that it would dry out satisfactorily by this evening.
The previous summer, just out of a job packing boxes for a toy manufacturer, he had taken his harmonicas, a change of clothes and a New York Mets baseball cap, emptied his savings account of nine-hundred and eighty-three dollars, and bought a round-trip ticket to Paris, France. From there he’d hitchhiked south, down through the wine country, eventually stopping in Perpignan at a hostel, where he fell in with an Australian who was traveling by motorcycle, also alone. They drank quantities of cheap wine daily, starting at noon. The Australian said that Jimi-John, with his new beard and skinny, six-foot frame, looked like a Byzantine Jesus. Together they had listened to the ocean slap at the coastline, lived entirely on fresh-baked bread and tins of pâté, and composed hit songs they could remember none of when they were sober. After a week they left for Barcelona, camping in fields at night, drinking heavily all the while. But when they got there the Australian announced he wanted to visit a mate of his in London. In front of a shop displaying colorful baskets of fake brand-name toothpaste and soap with labels that read “Gleam,” and “Ivorey,” they shook hands and said good-bye.
Immediately, Jimi-John felt lonely, even nostalgic for the good old days by the beach. Barcelona was too dirty, too loud. On the street below the window of his hotel room, vendors sold caged birds and monkeys that screamed. He took a train south along the coast, and got off in Sitges, choosing the resort town mostly because it was not too far away, and therefore an inexpensive ticket.
On the train he met three American girls, all of them nineteen, and at the station they banded together in search of housing. A bald-headed man named Pepé convinced them to come look at his cabaña, and they followed him through the sunlit streets, past white stucco houses, uphill to a quiet residence with three separate bedrooms and an inner courtyard. The girls’ names were Jenny, Karen, and Chris. They wanted to make spaghetti for dinner, but found that only salt water came out of the taps, so instead they ate bread and cheese and drank wine, and afterward, Jimi-John passed out harmonicas, and they all played at once, in different keys.
Jenny was the one he liked, and she seemed to like him. They took walks together through the town, and she told him she was from Michigan, and considering going into theater. She said this as if somewhere out there, contracts existed that merely awaited her signature. She had marble-blue eyes, brown hair that seemed constantly to be in motion around her shoulders, and a small star of David, a gift from an old boyfriend, which she wore in one ear. Her voice was low and serious, and she seemed to Jimi-John years older even than he was. Jimi-John told her why he was called that—to distinguish him from his older brother James Roy, who was dead now anyway, a victim of the war. She’d been born the same year he died. On the beach in front of a boarded-up hotel, she calmly pulled her T-shirt over her head, revealing to him her small, pale breasts, and he felt honored. As she stretched out a few feet away from him, basking in the Spanish sun, Jimi-John was sure he’d never been happier.
He sliced open the next bag, took it by the corners and dumped out its contents. Now there were two big piles of sand on the floor. It was not a large apartment, just the one room. His window looked out on another building, a mirror image of this one, except that it was abandoned—a burnt-out shell. Jimi-John could look right into what used to be the apartment across from his. There seemed to be plants growing inside. Jungle over there, he thought, beach in here. Theme living.
He cut open the third and final bag. All the sand together covered the floor fairly well, but it wasn’t very deep. Still, it would have to do. He didn’t have the energy to steal more.
After Sitges, Jenny split off from her two friends, and she and Jimi-John traveled together, spending long, romantic evenings in tiny pensione bedrooms. They headed north toward Switzerland because she wanted to see the Alps. She’d been there once before, when she was little, on vacation with her parents. In Lucerne, low on funds and struck by an idea, he fashioned a harmonica holder out of two wire clothes hangers, then went down by the lake where the tourists congregated, stood on his hands and wheezed out a tune. While he drew their attention, Jenny passed through the crowd collecting francs in Jimi-John’s baseball cap, filling it nearly to overflowing with gleaming silver.
They repeated this over the next few days, always to good crowds. In between they spent a lot of time just walking around. Jenny took photographs of Pilatus, trying to capture the way the light clung to the mountain at the end of the day, gold and then red and then almost blue. At the bank, their coins were dumped into a counting machine that digested them noisily, spitting out the occasional lire or deutschemark. An expressionless teller would pass them a handful of notes.
In Zurich, Jenny bought a couple of small cymbals for him to tie to his shoes, so that he could smash his feet together every now and then for added effect. She collected even more money, exercising a subtle charm as she moved unnoticed among the crowds that gathered to watch the upside-down harmonica player. Everyone gave her at least something. Inverted, Jimi-John watched with growing admiration. He became convinced that of the two of them, she was the one with the real talent. His arms grew stronger; at first he’d only been able to play one song before righting himself and resting. Now he could do three or four.
“Bonnie and Clyde,” said Jenny, making a gun with her fingers and poking him in the ribs. “You distract them, I stick them up.”
Together they learned the fine points of busking, how to move quickly into the midst of a crowded restaurant or outdoor café, play a song while collecting money at the same time, then leave before the management kicked them out. Jimi-John was a reasonably good harmonica player. He stuck to recognizable melodies—“Oh, Susanna,” Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” some basic blues patterns, and a version of “Amazing Grace” people seemed to enjoy. What he lacked in ability, he made up for in sheer exuberance. Sometimes he wore the cymbals on his ankles even when he wasn’t doing his act, just because it made people look.
“You’ve got them in the palm of your hand,” Jenny told him. “They think you’re crazy. They want to see what you’ll do next.”
“Either that, or they’re waiting for me to tip over,” he said.
They traveled more. In Salzburg, Jimi-John walked back and forth on his hands in front of Mozart’s birthplace, playing “I’m an Old Cowhand.”
“Come live with me,” he said later as they counted their schillings at an outdoor café, taking turns tossing the worthless groschen out into the street.
“In New York?”
“In my apartment.” He pictured the two of them tucked into a big double bed, reading books, sipping coffee. The apartment he pictured wasn’t his own.
“Maybe in the spring,” she said, flicking away one of the small coins.
“Really?” He wondered if this were actually happening, or if he would wake up in the morning and still be where he was two months ago, lying on his bed, timing the intervals between the trains that shuddered distantly underneath his apartment. He examined the red-and-white checked tablecloth for clues that it was not real. A gust of wind blew a piece of paper up against his leg and he shook it loose.
“We ought to think about going back soon,” said Jenny. “It’s starting to get cold.”
“Back to the pensione?” he asked.
She put a hand on his and squeezed. “Back to the States.”
All during the freezing winter, he’d nursed his love for Jenny. She sent him a picture or herself riding a horse, and although his favorite thing about her, her hair, was covered up by a riding cap, he taped it to the door of his broken refrigerator. He and his landlord were at a deadlock—the landlord didn’t fix the appliances or provide enough heat, so Jimi-John didn’t pay his rent, which of course meant that the landlord didn’t fix the heat, etcetera. He did have hot water, though, and what food he needed to keep cold he placed on the window ledge, which was just about the right temperature, although milk tended to ice up. The refrigerator he filled with the paperbacks he read, mysteries mostly. Jimi-John wrapped himself in blankets and fed himself on memories of Sitges, Lucerne, Salzburg. It didn’t seem possible he had lived such a life, only to return to this cave.
For money, he found a job in a record store that paid four dollars an hour, off the books. Everyone he worked with claimed to be a struggling musician. They complained constantly about “the Business,” as if the only reason they weren’t already famous and successful was that a huge conspiracy existed to keep art from the people. They weren’t interested in hearing Jimi-John’s stories of how he had actually been, for a short while, a self-supporting musician, performing in all the great cities of Europe. Instead, they ignored him. In their trendy clothes, they shook their heads as they discussed producers and labels and new artists, dropping the names to each other so indifferently they might have seen these people just the other night for drinks.
Jenny came at the beginning of June, a lavender suitcase in one hand, a dress bag over her other shoulder. Jimi-John met her at the airport, wearing a limo-driver’s outfit he’d bought at Goodwill, carrying a sign with her name on it. He thought it would be a good joke, but wasn’t prepared for what happened, which was that she walked right past him. He had to actually go over and touch her on the shoulder before she realized.
“Oh, I get it,” she said. “A disguise.”
At his apartment they hugged and made love, but he could tell right off that something wasn’t right. Where in Europe she’d clung to him, digging her fingers into his back as if holding on for dear life, now she seemed distracted. She’d cut her hair too, and he had to get used to looking at her all over again. They talked about old times, and Jenny showed him her slides, which they had to hold up in front of a light bulb to view. Many of the pictures were of him, bearded and frazzled-looking, but still glowing with good health. He barely recognized himself. They talked about maybe writing a book together. Standing naked in front of the mirror, they examined their bodies—Jenny had lost her tan; Jimi-John had lost a lot of weight.
While he worked at the record store, she set about fixing up his place. She rented a small refrigerator, cleaned up the stove, put flowers in his drinking glasses, hung bamboo shades over the windows, where before he’d had only dirty blinds. It was a transformation, if a small one.
She enrolled in an acting school in the theater district and walked around evenings with a cork between her teeth saying things like “riding, on a bicycle,” to practice her elocution. When her mother called on Sunday mornings, he had to be very quiet, since the story was that she had her own place. One night he got out a harp and blew a few bars of blues for her, but all she did was smile at him in a sort of forced way, which he found annoying.
Finally, after less than a month, she announced that she was bored.
“It isn’t what I expected,” she said.
Jimi-John was defensive. He’d just returned home, bringing with him Chinese takeout for the third time that week. It was expensive, but it was her favorite.
“Give it some time,” he said.
“I don’t know,” she said, bending down to touch her toes. “I’ve never lived with anyone before. I’m not sure I like it.”
“We were together twenty-four hours a day for two months,” he pointed out.
“But not this way. This place is a box. Everywhere I move, I bump into you. I don’t want to live in a cage. Before, we were always moving from place to place. We had to figure out where to stay, what to eat.” She unbent and faced him. “It was an adventure.”
“This is an adventure too,” said Jimi-John. “All you have to do is look at it that way.” He pulled open the refrigerator. “Look, books in the Frigidaire.”
Moving to the table, she sat down, pushed a couple newspapers out of the way and opened one of the cartons. A pungent Chinese food smell bloomed in the small room. She dumped Szechuan beef out onto a plate, then added a clod of rice. With a fork she stirred the food in slow, careful circles.
Taking off his shoes, Jimi-John walked barefoot through the sand over to the closet, inside of which he had stored the inspiration for the whole production. A six-foot palm tree, left standing at the curb by some people who had moved. He’d come across it last week and known immediately what he would do.
Inside the closet also was a can of sky blue paint he’d had mixed specially and a roller and pan. He took them out, spread some newspaper, pried the top off the paint and stirred it. Then he went to work on the walls.
As he painted, he did his best to conjure up the memory of the beach at Sitges, the warm sun, the light breezes, the incredible blueness of a sky that seemed like a silk canopy high over their heads. The dingy, off-white of the walls slowly disappeared under his roller, though the new color was not all that he’d hoped for. A little too aquarium, he thought. A few drops fell at his feet, flecking the sand with tiny pearls that, were it not for their blueness, would have looked a lot like blood.
When Jenny moved out, she left him an explanatory list, printed neatly in pencil. Number one was age. His being ten years older, she felt he was looking for a commitment that she was not yet ready to make. Number two was lack of direction, something she’d never had before, but felt she was picking up from him. Number three had to do with the way he left the towels in the bathroom, and messiness in general. Number four was the neighborhood, which on top of being dangerous, she found downright depressing. Number five was her options, which she wanted to keep open. “I don’t feel great about this,” she wrote, “but it seems like better now than in six months.” She was going to move in with a friend from her acting class who had a place in Astoria.
He called the phone number she left, and a man answered. “Oh,” Jimi-John said, as if he’d just pushed open the wrong bathroom door. He hung up and stared at the number, then tried again. The same person answered. He put the receiver down and stared again at the list.
For two days he did not go to work, and when on the third, he did manage to get himself onto the subway and across town, he found that he’d been fired. He wasn’t particularly surprised—it came as a kind of relief. Standing in the middle of the sidewalk, disrupting the steady flow of pedestrians like a rock in a streambed, he thought of his friend the Australian. He wished the two of them could get together again over a bottle of wine and a baguette, make up a few song lyrics, tell the rest of the world to bugger off.
When Shahim came by to drop off eviction papers, Jimi-John took it as a sign. “I’m not even going to fight,” he told him.
“Not fight?” repeated the Turkish handyman, momentarily perplexed. Then he shrugged. “Stupid, anyway, to fight.”
“The place is a dump,” said Jimi-John. “It always will be.”
“No,” said Shahim. “Will be co-ops.” He grinned, showing teeth stained yellow with tobacco.
Jimi-John took the papers and closed the door. It was finished now. A chapter coming to a close. What he needed was a fitting ending.
Jenny arrived at eight o’clock, wearing baggy shorts and an oversized T-shirt. He’d been waiting since seven, reading the first page of an old novel over and over, unable to make any real sense out of the words. “My God,” she said when she saw the apartment.
The walls glistened with the still-wet paint. The palm tree stood in front of the window, framed by the vegetation in the abandoned apartment behind it. Jimi-John had read about this in an article somewhere, it was called borrowed landscape—stealing some distant view and making it your own. He’d spread the sand evenly across the floor, and in the middle he’d set out two towels.
“Piña colada?” he asked her. “I made a whole pitcher full. They’re in the fridge.”
“Which is in my name, incidentally,” she said. “I’ve been meaning to remind you.”
“It’s a year since Pepe’s,” said Jimi-John. “Exactly a year this week.”
“And you decided to destroy your apartment to celebrate?”
“Use your imagination. Pretend it’s the beach.”
They sat together on the towels and had drinks. Jenny told him about the play she was working on, not as an actress, but as a props person. “It’s set in the punk period,” she said. “I have to comb the secondhand stores looking for stuff. And we don’t have a very big budget. I bought some barbed wire yesterday that was four dollars a foot.”
“That’s a lot,” he said, nodding.
“You know, when you called me, I kind of thought you might be mad.” She looked at him with an earnestness. “But you don’t seem like you are.”
“No.” He lay back on his blanket and looked up at the ceiling, admiring the job he’d done. The color was even, the roller strokes all in the same direction. “I’m thinking about going back,” he said. “Not immediately, I mean, I’ll need to save a little while to get up the money. But in a month or two, you know?” He paused, unsure whether he wanted to meet her eyes.
She sipped her drink. “You really are crazy,” she said. She scooped some sand up in her hand, let it drain slowly back down onto the floor. “I’m staying put, at least for a while.”
He was surprised to find that this didn’t really disappoint him. It was as if the place in him that had ached for her all this time had grown so large that, like an expanding star, it had given up all its energy. Instead, he felt only a quiet, spinning coolness.
They lay in silence on their blankets, listening to the sounds of traffic from the street below, savoring the light movement of air that came with the occasional breeze through the window. Nothing in particular happened. They were comfortable as long as they didn’t talk.
“I should get going,” she said. “I’m meeting someone in a half-hour.”
“Whatever,” said Jimi-John.
When they stood he tried a kiss, but she slipped her head to one side, presenting him only her cheek. Then she wrapped her arms around him and hugged him as she might have an older brother. She reached up and gave him a tug on the ear, and left.
Alone again, he wondered, just for a second, what had happened to him. The blueness of the walls seemed so obvious, so calculated. They were after all, still walls, not open air. The palm tree stood stupidly in the sand. It had seemed all along such a brilliant idea, but now, feeling as disconnected as the cord dangling from his toaster, it occurred to him that he had no place to go and no particular goals. When he was in Barcelona, he remembered, a monkey had escaped from one of the vendors’ cages. It ran around in circles a few times screaming with glee, attempted to cross the road and almost got hit. With nowhere else to go, it scampered back onto the median with all the other caged monkeys, then clambered to the top of a tree where it stayed, occasionally hurling debris down at its owner. That’s about the level I’m at, he thought. He tossed his empty piña colada glass out the window, waited to hear it smash.
His doorknob turned and he went to unlock it. It was Celeste. “Mira,” she said. “A beach.”
“Go on,” he told her. “It’s too late for you to be wandering around. Where’s your mama?”
“Watching TV.” She ran over to the tree and grabbed its thin trunk. “What’s this?”
“It’s a dum-dum tree,” said Jimi-John.
“No it isn’t.”
“Yes it is. It’s a very stupid plant. It only grows in warm climates, but you can fool it, as I have done here, by making it think it’s at the beach.”
“What did you do with all your stuff?” she demanded, wandering further around the apartment.
“All gone. I’m going to move away.”
“How far?”
“I don’t know yet.”
She found his harmonica case in the corner with his shoes and clothes, and dumped them out in front of her. He went over and picked up two, giving one to her.
“Plants like music,” he said. “But a dum-dum tree doesn’t like just any kind of music. It has to be dumb music.”
She raised one eyebrow skeptically at him. She seemed about ready to put the harmonica down. Positioning the instrument in his mouth, Jimi-John put his hands to the floor and flipped his legs up over his head. His first thought was that his arms had grown weak, because they trembled under his weight, but then he found a balance point and they held. His body was considerably thinner than it had been the last time he’d tried this, so it wasn’t so hard. Blood rushed to his head.
Without his holder, he could do little more that blow in and out of the harp, but that was enough to amuse Celeste. She screamed with pleasure, put the other harmonica to her lips and began playing. Jimi-John hand-walked his way over to the palm, where his feet came just about even with the top of the tree. The sound of the two harmonicas was delicious and discordant, like a hilariously out-of-tune pipe organ. He lowered himself and rested on his back in the sand.
Celeste poked at him with her finger. “More,” she said.
“I don’t know, kid.”
He cast his eyes around the room. “Look,” he said. “You go downstairs now. If you do that, I’ll make you a deal. You come back tomorrow morning and you can help me paint the sand blue.”
“Blue!” she screamed.
“So the dum-dum tree thinks it’s near water. OK?” He stuck out his hand and they shook on it. Then he hoisted her over his shoulders and hiked down to the second floor, where the sounds of a loud TV filtered out into the hallway. He deposited her in front of her door.
“Don’t forget,” he said. “Bright and early.”
“I saw your girlfriend,” she confided.
Standing alone in the dimness, surrounded by closed doors and the phantom hallway smells of cleaning solution, urine, other peoples’ suppers, he wondered if he should just keep going. Tomorrow he would be rootless again anyway. He tried to imagine himself disappearing into the folds of the city, which had been all along his general plan, but right now seemed hugely inadequate. He considered taking a bus to the suburbs, hitching to the interstate and heading west, but this, too, depressed him—he had a good enough idea about California to know he didn’t want to be there. For a moment he stood, leaning in both directions at once, unsure whether to go down the stairs or up, not exactly feeling sorry for himself, more confused.
Sitting down on one of the worn stone steps, he closed his eyes tight and thought about his brother, James Roy, lying boxed and still beneath the North Carolina earth. When the news came, he’d been at first stunned and sad—he was barely thirteen, had never known anyone who’d died. Just plucked out of life, silently, like they’d never really been there at all. Then, slowly, a kind of amazement had set in at the very fact of his own existence. The most ordinary things impressed him. The sun coming through his bedroom window, the way his heart continued to beat all by itself. Stop signs and trees and glasses of milk—for a few weeks they were all equally remarkable. The world had seemed lit from within by a fragile light.
Behind the door to Celeste’s apartment, the television suddenly grew quiet. Someone was putting her to bed now, wondering, perhaps, just what it was the little girl was smiling about. Jimi-John stood and smacked his hands against his jeans to rid them of the dust. For tonight at least, he would sleep on his own private beach, wake up with sand in his shoes.