Radio Belly (3 page)

“I don't know what the big deal was,” Laureen explained. “I spent half my childhood looking up Jerry's nose. You'd think I'd know the guy.”

But she didn't have me fooled. The Dead were the greatest jam band in history. Nobody knew what they were going to play next; that was the whole point.

ON THE MORNING of August 9, 1995, I woke up to the sound of whimpering. It was early, still dark. I found her leaning over the kitchen sink, where the knife was lying in a mess of blood and dishes. It was the middle finger on her right hand, cut to the bone. She had been loading the sink, she said, and hadn't even known she was hurt until she saw the blood.

In my hasty search for a towel, I remember glancing at the oven clock: 4:23 a.m. By the time I had her hand wrapped, it had already happened: “Jerry's dead,” she said, and she was so shaken, so small, I didn't even think to ask how she knew.

She refused to go to the hospital, so I bandaged her up and put her to bed. I told her a story: of two minds joining over a bowl of peanuts, of a woman who paints all the women of the world a truer colour. “They're all starlets now, baby,” I whispered, “Tahitian starlets,” but she was inconsolable.

She kept muttering that she had done this, turned her back on him, and some other things too, about devouring the things she loves, about people's eggshell edges and sucking the yolk out through the cracks.

It didn't reach the news until much later that morning: Jerry Garcia, dead of a heart attack at exactly 4:23 a.m. Out of respect, I cancelled the trivia segment. I used the extra time to do some research. I found out he played the piano before the guitar, that at his heaviest he weighed over three hundred pounds, that indeed it was the middle finger of his right hand he'd accidentally severed while chopping wood as a kid—but all the while I was wondering, what kind of a person wakes up to do dishes at four in the morning?

LAUREEN STOPPED LEAVING the house, stopped running the business, stopped dressing. She kept me busy though. There were things she needed from the outside world: nail polish and hair dye, waxes and creams, smoothers and straighteners. She wanted loofahs and exfoliants, tweezers and extractors, shavers and strange glues. She wanted food, too: biryani and bulgogi, bibimbap and tabbouleh, donburi and dal, vindaloo, kulcha, edamame and udon. Every day she grew more demanding. She wanted something more exotic, harder to find. She wanted it hotter or colder or saltier or faster. And more, she always wanted more. When she wasn't eating, she was in the bathroom, primping and painting herself. She never failed to tune into my show though. I'd hear a small tinny version of myself playing on the other side of the door. I'd hear her cackling, talking back to the radio, heckling me or heckling them—it was hard to tell which. For months I was at her beck and call. I brought her what she asked for and never once complained. Anything to keep her happy.

Sequestered in the world of our apartment, she started to grow: first two hundred pounds, then on her way to three. And while she grew, in equal and direct proportions, I shrank. The day I found the letters, I was down to a hundred pounds, a mere whiff of a man. I'd started to look vacuum-packed, the bones of my face lunging forward while my cheeks and eye sockets sunk inwards.

I found three shoeboxes full of letters.
My Dear Laureen, My Heart, My Darling Lo-Lo
they read, every last one of them signed by Jerry. I had to sit when I found them. It was the weight of the boxes against my jutting-out bones and it was something else, too—a memory from my first concert. I hadn't found tickets in time, so I'd spent the night of the show camped on a garbage-strewn beach at the edge of the concert grounds. I fell asleep feeling sorry for myself. No ticket, no tent, no blanket, no miracles, and all my favourite songs distorted by the distance. Then, the next morning I woke up at an hour when the sky and water were the exact same shade of blue, and in that stillness I got my “miracle” after all—not the ticket kind but that other kind you sometimes hear about. I watched an eagle circle and then dive in front of me—as menacing as it was graceful. It rose up triumphant, with a huge fish in its claws, but that fish wouldn't quit. It twisted and fought in the air, bringing them both lower and lower until eventually they were thrashing on the surface of the water. They struggled for some time, the eagle beating its wings until its feathers were wet, heavy, the fish muscling its tail into the air.

Sitting there on the floor, with the box of letters in my lap, I remembered there was a quiet moment, when the eagle stood still on the back of the fish, tilted half in, half out of the water. Then, finally, with a sudden twist of its tail the fish pulled the big, majestic bird under and the water was still again. The thing was, with the lake and sky the exact same colour, they probably both thought they were winning.

THERE WERE TEN years of letters, about one a week from the last decade of Jerry's life. He talked about two minds joining in the darkness and all the ways two people can feel like one, even across time and space. He talked about backstage and under-stage and side-stage encounters.

I asked if there was anything she'd forgotten to tell me, if she had secrets, unfinished business with anyone. No, none, nothing, she said. I started pouring salt onto her food, melted butter. I was loading her up with saturated fat, MSG, ingredients I couldn't pronounce the names of. I stopped going out for hair dye, contacts, nail polish, sundresses. I refused to buy any more self-tanner.

Take something away from a person and you'll see their true colours. Without the tanner, she faded from deep orange right through to grey, and I noticed that underneath all that paint, underneath all that colour and distraction, she looked just like the one she loved most. The bulk of her was hanging off her bones now. Her hair was grey and frizzy, and she started wearing an old square pair of glasses that took up most of her face. She was covered in small curly hairs, on her arms, on her chin, even on her back.

I started to call her “Jer-een”: “If Jer-een wants her sushi, she'll have to tell me what happened between her and Jerry,” I'd say.

You have to understand, she had become so big, so persistent in her needs. You have to know, all that time I'd thought it was just the two of us.

WHEN THE SOUL leaves your body, you'll know. It was 8:27 on a Monday morning. The question, in a voice that gave me goosebumps: “After years of playing in the same configuration, why did Jerry and Phil one day decide to swap positions on stage?” I stammered, tried to cover it up with some good-natured banter, but the answer wouldn't come. I entered Laureen's room. Just as I expected, she was sitting up in bed with the radio off and the phone to her ear. I got down on my knees, pleading silently for the answer, but she just sat there with a crooked smile on her face, fat and happy. Her arms were folded across her chest, her mouth was tight, button-shaped.

While the station played all kinds of sound effects to mark the end of an era—applause, the opening of a vault, bottle rockets—I heard my own sound effects, a fizzle like one of those vitamin C tablets dissolving in water, then a small explosion, a pop really, a smell like a burnt raisin and a thin tuft of smoke. There goes my soul, I thought. I was no longer my own person. How does that proverb go? I was a man dreaming I was a dream dreamed by Laureen. I have to admit, down there, with the other parasitic life forms, out from under the burden of desire and free will—hunt and kill, catch and drag, the whole splashing and tugging mess of it—there was serenity.

SUMMER CAME ON hard, the hottest one on record. Rooftops sprung barbecues and the smell of roasting meat wafted in our windows day and night. Desperate for a tan, Laureen spent her days lying out in the full sun of our deck. Watching her struggle to turn over one day I decided, enough with retaliation. I would play the good husband. I would kill her with kindness, if that's what it took. From then on I oiled and flipped her at regular intervals. She turned the colour of tea with milk—slight freckling on her nose, arms, shoulders. Then amber ale—so many freckles it was difficult to see between them. Then the rich brown of a chestnut—freckles joining together—until, eventually, she was just one big, leathery freckle. Every night I propped her limbs, moisturizing and admiring her skin: the way it radiated the heat of the sun late into the night, salty lines running down her back like ocean currents seen from a plane, a million tiny wrinkles fanning out at each joint.

Every once in a while I'd taunt her—“If Jer-een wants a drink, she'd better fess up about that miracle”—but otherwise I was the perfect husband.

I EVENTUALLY GOT it out of her. It happened at a show in '86. Jerry'd just returned to the stage after coming out of a coma and the band was having a bad run. This show was no different. Jerry was forgetting words, fat, clumsy fingers on the guitar as though he was half sunk, pushing against water. Not only that, he seemed resentful, as if he blamed the audience for all that had happened to him.

Halfway through the set, Laureen, a teenager by this point, split off from the group. She'd been waiting in the Porta-Potty line but, giving up on that, had managed to find a narrow opening below the stage. While she was peeing all over the fat wires in that dark underworld, Jerry stormed away in the middle of the set. Laureen was still bent double, struggling to pull up her pants when someone lifted a panel in the floor and climbed down. She caught a brief glimpse of the man before he closed the panel; he was burly, really packed into his skin with curly hairs rising off every part of him. She heard him grunt and lie down at her feet, exactly where she'd just peed. He smelled of sweat and vinegar and he vibrated with tension. “Fuckin' bullshit, man,” he said. “Can't fuckin' get 'em off.” While the rest of the band struggled on above, Laureen did the only thing she thought she could; she leaned close to tell the man he was lying in a puddle of her pee. But before she had a chance, while she was still figuring out if it was more polite to say
urine,
he closed his eyes and began his confession. “Listen” he said, “there's just a few things I gotta get off my chest...” He told her he'd been juicing too much, that he was on a bummer, that things were getting heavy and he kept falling into the space between the notes. Then he told her about the coma, about walking through the valley of the shadow of death and having to choose, having to find one reason. When she finally realized who she was talking to, she said the words just came to her, she didn't know from where. Jerry and Laureen whispered back and forth to each other, two voices in the dark, for at least three songs. Then, near the end, something started to happen, the two of them saying the same things at the same time, as though their minds were one. It was so powerful, so tangible, neither one of them could let go of the feeling. “Meet me at the next show,” he said before crawling away to play the last song. And they did. They met at the next show and the one after that and every other show for the rest of the tour.

“What'd you say to him? What'd he say back? Was it love? Was it magic? Was it wonderful?” I asked that first night I heard the story, and every night afterwards.

But whatever passed between Jerry and Laureen stayed between them. All I would ever know was the trivia: that there were ten years of letters living in shoeboxes in my closet; that, in a silent nod to what had happened under the stage that summer, the band's next album was called “In the Dark.”

IS IT SO HARD to believe two people can become one, that a person can stop existing, just plug into someone else for a while? The Dead made a career of it, picking up cues from each other across space, changing tempo and keys, jamming seamlessly from one song to another. When they first started playing together, the two drummers used to sit shoulder to shoulder during practice. Like a two-headed monster with Shiva limbs waving, they learned to bang out rhythms with just a drumstick each, until one man's left and another man's right achieved total syncopation.

Most people can't imagine a love like this. Just like most people can't imagine why so many reasonable people hopped on buses and criss-crossed this country in the wake of a rock band, or the way, at a really good show, energy would flow back and forth, or that the jam came from the people as much as the band, that something was always shared the way it can only be shared in a family. But trivia can't teach you about a thing like that. It has to go through you.

Another thing trivia won't tell you: suicide isn't always announced with a siren wail or the crunch-pop of pills over linoleum. It can come on slow, over a year or a lifetime. It can wear the guise of food or drink, drugs or love. And you can smell it—sickly sweet like compost or coconuts gone bad—long before you recognize it.

Before she went, Laureen pulled me close and whispered last instructions: she wanted to be devoured; she wanted the letters made available to the family; she wanted to be worshipped—her life put to good use. She opened her eyes, said
please
and
I love you
and then she tried to say something else, something starting with
J,
and it may have been Jenson or Jet or even Jerry, but we'll never know because she died with that sound barely formed on her lips. She quivered then, and shrank in my arms, her skin hanging low and loose off her body like a deflated balloon. For a moment I thought I could see the shape of the old Laureen sinking under all that flesh, and then, because I was nothing, just a ghost of a man, I was swept down and into that black hole of hers. Again a new language; I whimpered and kissed her skin while she groaned and breathed on and on, out and out, like a slow-leaking air mattress. Again three days in which I held her and became her. Three days to learn the miracles of the body, and of the bright still organs, and of the heart, slippery like a grape and too soft for this world.

THE GUYS I found were mostly immigrants, mostly illegal. Mario the butcher. Multiple generations in the business and yet, in this country, he couldn't get certified, so he got set up in a barn on the edge of town and learned to say yes to every kind of work—off-season game and more complicated jobs too. We sipped Cinzano on a couple of overturned buckets in the chill of his workshop, and I asked him, did he ever look at the living and see what they would become, was he ruined by what he did?