Parking’s utility attendant, working two shifts a week, Tuesday afternoons and Sunday mornings (comin’ down). The gig was something of a cover for Wade, who made most of his money dealing, but I suspect the meager supplemental income came in handy. My impression is that he never made much money as a dealer, and wasn’t terribly ambitious or competitive regarding his share of the market. My observations of his work, however, were fragmentary. I’ve long imagined that he made some transactions at the ARE Parking lot, if only because it was a frequently underpopulated place where passing money through car windows was sanctioned. But dealing there was probably more trouble than it was worth. Mostly he operated out of Oran’s Bar, arranging house calls or rendezvous from his regular booth.
I got to join him in that booth one late afternoon in the spring of ’78. I’d come in looking for him because I couldn’t find my skateboard. I was really worked up about having misplaced, lost, or been burgled of this thin, yellow skateboard, which I’d only had for a few months. I walked tentatively into the bar like the start of a half-remembered joke. I was wearing, to paraphrase Gogol, whatever God or JCPenney sends to a provincial town (now the choices in Enswell are wider, though no better): slightly diluvial jeans, it might have been, and a screen-printed tank top on which a beer-guzzling rat raced a speedboat (caption: “River Rat”). Millie the tenured barmatron was patrolling the place with a bottle of off-brand glass cleaner and a loosely balled newspaper while Oran’s son Marty built tumbler ziggurats on the long, rectangular bar. Everyone—Millie, Marty, the seven or eight pensioners and early-shifters around the bar—stared at me, and I pointed to the adjacent room, the band room where the Seed Sacks and Hailstorm played on weekends. “My stepdad’s in there,” I said. Marty, an old friend and probable client of Wade’s, knew I wasn’t Wade’s stepson. He gestured in some smirking way that welcomed me with reservations. From North Dakota’s finest jukebox, I want to say, Tommy Duncan moaned, “My brain is cloudy, my soul is upside down,” but maybe I’ve just put that in there along with the high-waters and the off-brand glass cleaner because it seems right, because Tommy Duncan is moaning now in my low-ceilinged, carpeted apartment. Wade was reading alone in the band room. He didn’t know where my skateboard was. As I turned to leave, he touched my arm and gave me some money for a soda, said I could hang out with him awhile. “Thanks!” The cola foam danced like ocean spray on my hand as I walked carefully back to Wade’s booth with one of Marty’s hot, just-washed tumblers, and I remember how impressed I was with the slice of lime, how good it felt to squeeze it into the cola. By that point Wade’s friend Karl Tobreste was onstage setting up his drums, a cheap kit from Sears but he made it sound like a Ludwig. Wade closed his book. I asked if he ever wanted to be a kid again, like my age, but with his adult brain. He said no, because he would just become a disappointing prodigy. Then he made some convoluted objection to the question, said it relied on a strict Cartesian mind-body dualism that could no longer be supported, argued that right-thinking monism renders all such switcheroos meaningless or undesirable. I don’t actually remember what his objection was, just that it was over my head, and that I sensed it was spoken for Karl’s amusement. Wade was a great one for that, talking indirectly to others within earshot while pretending to talk to me. It’s not unique behavior. I sucked on my soda-sopped ice, then sucked on the lime, until a tall, high-foreheaded man in a khaki shirt approached Wade’s booth, and I was gently told to go home.
The story of Wade’s parking-lot conquest had given me an erection that I hoped wasn’t obvious through my twills. As I shifted in my seat, he started
I got to join him in that booth one late afternoon in the spring of ’78. I’d come in looking for him because I couldn’t find my skateboard. I was really worked up about having misplaced, lost, or been burgled of this thin, yellow skateboard, which I’d only had for a few months. I walked tentatively into the bar like the start of a half-remembered joke. I was wearing, to paraphrase Gogol, whatever God or JCPenney sends to a provincial town (now the choices in Enswell are wider, though no better): slightly diluvial jeans, it might have been, and a screen-printed tank top on which a beer-guzzling rat raced a speedboat (caption: “River Rat”). Millie the tenured barmatron was patrolling the place with a bottle of off-brand glass cleaner and a loosely balled newspaper while Oran’s son Marty built tumbler ziggurats on the long, rectangular bar. Everyone—Millie, Marty, the seven or eight pensioners and early-shifters around the bar—stared at me, and I pointed to the adjacent room, the band room where the Seed Sacks and Hailstorm played on weekends. “My stepdad’s in there,” I said. Marty, an old friend and probable client of Wade’s, knew I wasn’t Wade’s stepson. He gestured in some smirking way that welcomed me with reservations. From North Dakota’s finest jukebox, I want to say, Tommy Duncan moaned, “My brain is cloudy, my soul is upside down,” but maybe I’ve just put that in there along with the high-waters and the off-brand glass cleaner because it seems right, because Tommy Duncan is moaning now in my low-ceilinged, carpeted apartment. Wade was reading alone in the band room. He didn’t know where my skateboard was. As I turned to leave, he touched my arm and gave me some money for a soda, said I could hang out with him awhile. “Thanks!” The cola foam danced like ocean spray on my hand as I walked carefully back to Wade’s booth with one of Marty’s hot, just-washed tumblers, and I remember how impressed I was with the slice of lime, how good it felt to squeeze it into the cola. By that point Wade’s friend Karl Tobreste was onstage setting up his drums, a cheap kit from Sears but he made it sound like a Ludwig. Wade closed his book. I asked if he ever wanted to be a kid again, like my age, but with his adult brain. He said no, because he would just become a disappointing prodigy. Then he made some convoluted objection to the question, said it relied on a strict Cartesian mind-body dualism that could no longer be supported, argued that right-thinking monism renders all such switcheroos meaningless or undesirable. I don’t actually remember what his objection was, just that it was over my head, and that I sensed it was spoken for Karl’s amusement. Wade was a great one for that, talking indirectly to others within earshot while pretending to talk to me. It’s not unique behavior. I sucked on my soda-sopped ice, then sucked on the lime, until a tall, high-foreheaded man in a khaki shirt approached Wade’s booth, and I was gently told to go home.
The story of Wade’s parking-lot conquest had given me an erection that I hoped wasn’t obvious through my twills. As I shifted in my seat, he started
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