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NOCTURNE
by Mike DeCapiteUA Flight #148 to Chicago O’Hare, departing two p.m. People file slowly down the narrow aisle. Outside the small wet window is a world of rain.
Nice to be flying at a human hour for a change, mid-afternoon, rather than rushing to get to the airport by 5:30 a.m. with a belly queasy from jalapenos and scotch and a soul queasy from sleep, or conveyed into the machinery of night on the Redeye, from which you have a clear view of the giant crushing gears of Fate in the loneliness of the void. Christmas is stark enough without starting off that way.
We’re late in Chicago and they hold the connecting flight just long enough for me to run the length of the terminal like the Grinch’s wheezing cur with his sleighload of outlandish baggage while the flight crew claps and cheers me on and, inside the plane, two hundred silent passengers are unamused.
At 11:00 we land in Cleveland in the rain at what seems too fast a clip. I wait outside, it’s warmer than expected—even though the pilot announced “to all our guests, including Mike DeCapite, our johnny-come-lately” that the temperature is 52 degrees—staring into the wet headlight parade for my parents’ car, and for life to get specific again: for life to wheel down from the abstract of transit to the particular pinpoint of us and emphasize our insignificance.
My mother drives slowly along Snow Road. We say little. It’s late for them. The wet streets, which want only to be dead, are kept artificially alive by the strident signs of closed businesses. “Well, Cleveland looks just about like I left it.”
Beside the couch where I’ll sleep, a lamp is lit.
Now I’m home, where am I?
*
Friday night, Alex is ready to go. There’s no moment at our seeing each other again. It’s the same with all of us—family, friends—and with the place itself, no mystery has accrued to them or to me during our separation. You’re apart and then you’re back. The only mystery is that we can all go on living and living without any essential change. We stop in at a Speedbag rehearsal at their studio on St. Clair. As we pull up, Guy is striding manfully down the unlit street. Alex rolls down the window, Guy leans in. He’s on his way—somewhere, although nothing’s open across the plains as far as Chicago—to get a sausage sandwich. I last saw him two months ago in an airport bar in Vegas. There/here. We walk into and out of each other’s lives without surprise like characters in a play.
The band sounds good as always. Gary’s laying down a lot of guitar, which he won’t have room to do once Brian Cox shows up for their gig next week. They take a break, we have a few drinks, Alex and I take off. It’s the usual loud night out at Mitzie’s bar. I drop Al home, and then the long wet freeway ride, and blessed return.
You drive and drive and bless the skies for no cops.
We choose our moods, of course. I’m playing an old tape containing an instrumental piece by Jim Jones called “Nocturne (Forever Lost)”, which is similar in mood to Samuel Barber’s “Adaggio” and George Delerue’s theme for Contempt—layer on layer of gently falling tragedy, like a man who’s been sighing so long he’s forgotten why. White exhaust from the shuddering tailpipe of a car at a payphone.
There’s a traffic signal strung over Chevrolet Boulevard that stops you every time. It was hung there to enable GM workers to leave the parkinglots. You sit below the red light swinging in the wind, looking out across vacant acres of glimmering tar. When it turns green, you wonder whether you should sit through it again. What the hell.
Soft quick flapping of flags at 1:30 a.m.*
I drive to Euclid to pick up my cousin Rosemary, and we spend the day with her mother, Rose, who’s 94. Rose is Da Vinci beautiful with the most brilliant blue eyes and white hair. We fry smelts as an appetizer. We sip wine and whiskey and smoke cigarettes. Over lunch, Rose tells stories about her girlhood, about my grandmother and grandfather, about uncles and cousins and sisters and parents and others. She sits on a throne of 94 years without judgement: tangy, sexy, and wise. She’s talking about these people, seeing them again, and we’re laughing. She’s talking about the food she used to cook. She glances along the table with its torn loaf of bread and dishes of olives and sausage and cod and its shadows, where the dead are crowding out for another chance at her regard. She says “It must be terrible, not knowing about these things...”
Waiting on the Snow
The weatherman says 10:00. It’s ten after now and the night sky doesn’t look substantial enough to bear snow. Through the glass balcony door I can see two sodium lamps, the corner of the building opposite, and Christmas lights tracing the pointed eaves of a house set in a black wall of trees. The trees are darker than the sky above them, which is cathode grey.
Tomorrow is Christmas. The cuff of my left sleeve smells of garlic where I pressed it repeatedly against the flat of a knife to crush the cloves I was chopping yesterday. Six years ago Guy and I started a holiday called Nella Cucina, two days before Christmas, on which he and I would cook for everyone who showed up. What started as a good idea has become a day and night of excess during which everyone is wondering when the coke will arrive and trying to track it once it does. I got tired of myself and everyone and wandered upstairs at 11:00 to bed. This morning I woke in a small bed, got dressed, cleaned up some empties and drove across town on dry pot-holed streets to my parents’ apartment building.
I watch a couple hours of television with my mother. My father’s gone to bed. She says “Well, I’m going, dear,” and clicks the TV off by remote. When I drift into the dark livingroom, snow has fallen. The lot is white, and the air is filled with a thin screen of it. The cars parked side by side look pretty much the same. Standing at the cold window I hear the tick of snow against the glass.
I lock the apartment door behind me. Jim Croce is playing in the elevator. Outside is still except for the snow crackling against my leather coat, and the buzzing of a streetlight, and the flipping of two Now Leasing flags in the night. You see a few blades of grass poking through the snow, and a stand of weeds, and a manhole cover discernible by its holes. And then you’re looking at your boots as they walk you along. Black boots on a white field. And this is what it’s like being here for the holidays: at home and out of context, walking softly on slippery ground, exactly yourself and abstracted, watching your own black boots as they walk you through the snow.I’d like to walk all night but I’m unwilling to worry my parents, even in their sleep. The livingroom is dark. The concrete floor of the balcony is snowblown, the metal rail is topped with white. The night sky is no color at all. Tomorrow is less exciting to me than previous Christmases because I’m unexcited by anything I have to give. But who knows what I have to give, or what details will make tomorrow worthwhile.
*
Christmas. It’s been snowing hard all day, driven down. At 9:00 I unbury the car and haul it to the Southside. Alex and I drive across town to see the Chargers (Street Gang), and the guys are friendly, The Godfather’s eternally on tv, everybody’s holiday movie, but the club is too crowded and foul to hang around, so we drive back to the Southside. The only place open is the Lava Lounge, a Southside hipster bar. A guy in shades asks for a menu and squints to read it. We sit in the window which separates us from the snowy world outside., sipping Rolling Rocks and Glenlivet. What we say and don’t say are about our self-defeating strategies, and diminishing expectations, and suicide, and our resignation against it. We both seem to have run out of ideas. It’s an old conversation, but one that we’ve each personalized by now, and cultivated in private, so that it shouldn’t be mistaken for desperation or self-pity or anything other than its own logic, and we’re disappointed to run into each other so far down that road. Of course, after I drop him off, the drive home is trippy—wet road in your face framed and banked by snow below the blue creamy lucence of the sky. It’s a moment by moment wonder to be alive: the world rushing into your eyes and swimming in the surface of the streets, and suddenly the car’s driving you as you roll through bedded precincts, past houses with snuffed-out windows and snow-laden trees and all-night signs, knowing that you’ll enfold within sleep a lifetime of unrecapturable raptures.
Once again, I’ve made it home.*
The day before I leave, after a tunnel of dark days, I go out on the balcony at dusk with a glass of wine. My parents and Aunt Marie are at the table after dinner. I don’t need the wine, I just want to be alone. It feels like I just got here and like I’ve barely survived. Most of the time I’m here I’m on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Whatever that means. I’ve driven through flurries of it, and squalls, while waiting for the big storm to come. Now the sky is cornflower blue. All the failures of the past year have repeated and concentrated and have reached an exemplary crowning glory in the last ten days. Failures of honor. Failures of nerve, purpose, sobriety, realization, of love and faith. Failures, primarily, of imagination. All of them add up to a failure to be here. To be here. To be here in my life. On the other side of the glass, Aunt Marie—at eighty!—is sitting in the knit hat she wore to cross the parkinglot with a cherry pie she baked this morning. “Character is fate.” I set my wineglass in the snow and move along the rail. Along the top of the opposite building, a metal strip is blushed. A new year is coming. I say a prayer to the woman I love, who is far away, and try to muster some devotion to hope, however faint its apparition.
*
The plane floats up and tilts rightward. From a window on the left I gaze down on a landscape of black and white. It must be terrible not knowing about these things.