Constance Squires' short fiction has appeared in notable literary journals and has been named among storySouth's Million Writers Award Notable Stories of 2005, nominated for Best New
American Voices 2003, the O. Henry Prize Series 2004, and twice for the Pushcart Prize (2003, 2005).
She has been awarded the Bob Shacochis Award for the Short Story, The Briar Cliff Review 2004 Fiction
Award, Honorable Mention in the 2002 Atlantic Monthly Student Fiction Contest and Third Place in the 2005
Atlantic Monthly Student Fiction Contest. A novel, Absorbing the Blow, is currently a finalist in the James
Jones First Novel Fellowship.
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well, the queen of spades is a friend of mine
the queen of hearts is a bitch
someday when I clean up my mind
I'll find out which is which
Gram Parsons
“I’ve got a new song,” said Fern as soon
as she walked into the room.
Jade was sitting cross-legged on the huge, high bed where she transacted all of her
business. “Fern,” she said, patting a spot in front of her on the iridescent peacock-blue and scarlet tie-dyed
bedspread, holding a pinch of weed between her fingers and looking at Fern over her bifocals. Fern had never
seen her in glasses before--Jade hadn’t worn them on her album covers or in the appearances on “The Tonight Show”
or “Cavett” or “The Midnight Special” that Fern had seen rerun. They made her look like her age, which Fern
realized, with a start, must have been somewhere close to sixty. Fern hesitated a moment, then crawled onto
the bed. “Who let you in just now when you knocked?” Looking out from under her curtain of long black hair,
Jade asked this as if it were a riddle.
“Gram. Why?”
“How was he looking, my son?”
The way Gram had looked when he answered the door made Fern understand the
Beatles lyric “Got to be good looking cause he’s so hard to see.” Fern could barely look at him; his strong
jaw and long eyelashes made her ache. He stood back and held the door open, muttering, “She’s in her room,”
while Fern squeezed past him trying hard to ignore his pointed nipples through his T-shirt at her eye level.
She wanted to bite them. His looks were just one more thing she held against him, the first being his inability
to appreciate how lucky he was to be a bonafide rock prince. “Like his usual precious self. I guess he’s been
working out, so he looked like himself, but sweaty. Totally mute--he hates me, you know.”
“No, no, he doesn’t. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. He loves you.”
“He what?”
“Worships you. And he’s a virgin and you’re a virgin--right?”
Fern nodded.
“You’ve been like a daughter to me these last few months since you’ve been coming
by to buy grass, Fern.”
“I don’t smoke it,” Fern interrupted. “I just buy it because I think one day I’ll
show up and you’ll let me play you one of my songs.’
Jade didn’t seem to hear her. “And he’s so uptight. He says he’s going to go to
college and major in business when y’all graduate and that’s just crazy and he wants to quit my band. I can’t have
that, Fern. My son may want to grow up to be some kind of suit, but he’s the best rock drummer since John Bonham,
whether he likes it or not. I can’t let him throw it all away just because he’s going through a phase.”
Jade was talking faster now, leaning forward as she spoke so that her hands pressed
on either side of Fern’s thighs and her face was close enough for Fern to smell her patchouli perfume and her smoker’s
breath, with its underlying odour of decay.
Ordinarily Fern stood at the side of the bed while Jade sat ensconced in fur and velvet,
the lacquered mahogany headboard behind her, making her look like a queen enthroned. She was beginning to see that
Jade expected something in return for the privilege of joining her on the bed. Fern tried wriggling away from Jade,
sending pillows scattering to the floor. She leapt off the bed to pick them up. “Gram’s just trying to be different
from you, Jade,” Fern said, tossing jewel-toned velvet and satin pillows onto the bed. Gram was no mystery to Fern.
What could the child of southwest Oklahoma’s most famous and rebellious citizen since Geronimo, its only
hippy-gypsy-rock star-queen, do to rebel against his mother but become a straight arrow? Fern had seen him
cringe in History class when his mother’s purple Cadillac drove down the street past their high school, throbbing
bass, and everyone looked out the window. While the rest of the students cheered, he took the end of the thin
metal spiral to his spiral notebook and pulled it straight, then tied it into a knot. Fern herself was Jade’s
biggest fan. She had posters of Jade from the seventies when she was still making hits and had saved all the
clippings of her local shows and her various arrests.
“Being different from me can only mean being mediocre, sugar. I don’t have time for
him to find himself if he’s going to do it in such a dumb ass way. I need my drummer.”
Although Jade hadn’t been in a recording studio for twenty-five years, she and her
band the "Grievous Angels", with Gram on drums since he was fourteen, played regularly at clubs throughout the
southwest and the south, living on a steady but static fan base. “I thought I was prepared for his teenage
rebellion. Sex, drugs, rock-n-roll, you name it--I can deal with that stuff.”
“But that’s how you live. Those things are normal to you. It wouldn’t be rebellion
if he got into all that.”
“I see that now, but never, never did I expect to see him turn into a puritanical
little prig.”
“Well, it’s nothing to do with me. He hates me and we have nothing in common. He’s
going to be a normal guy, like you said. I’m not going to college. No way. I’m going to be a singer, like you.
Not the same kind of music, but still.”
Jade’s nightstand was draped in black velvet and covered with incense burners,
one-hitters, pipes, hookah pipes, and water bongs made of ivory, onyx, turquoise, acrylic, varnished wood,
and anodized metal.
| "The story repeated across the fan websites devoted to Jade said she
owned a jade bong that she made people smoke when she wanted to seal a deal. She had been given the pipe by David
Bowie, that was the story, although Fern had seen one website that disputed this claim and attributed Marc Bolen
with giving the bong to Jade." |
These were her workaday bongs. But now Jade reached under her bed and brought out
an ornate green bong made of jade, and Fern drew in a startled breath. The story repeated across the
fan websites devoted to Jade said she owned a jade bong that she made people smoke when she wanted to seal a
deal. She had been given the pipe by David Bowie, that was the story, although Fern had seen one website
that disputed this claim and attributed Marc Bolen with giving the bong to Jade. Fern had never seen it,
but she had heard enough about it to understand what was going on when she saw Jade draw out the deep green
bong, mermaids, writhing and swimming, carved all over it. She understood suddenly that Jade was quite
serious about the conversation they were having about Gram. Jade told Fern, “I want to be buried with
this bong. David Bowie gave it to me the night he wrote ‘Queen Bitch.’ ” She took a long hit and handed
it to Fern, “Go on,” she said.
Fern hesitated. “Are we making some sort of deal?” If so, she wanted to know
what was expected of her and what she might expect in return.
“Hit it, kiddo, and we’ll see.”
Fern inhaled, feeling the smoke roll down her throat like blazing tumbleweeds
scorching a path across the plains. She held the air in her lungs, feeling an immediate change in the quality
of air around her as the room seemed to dilate.
Jade waited until Fern had exhaled before she spoke. “You got a fake ID?”
Fern shook her head, coughing.
“Never mind. Come to the Signal Flare Friday night. I want you to see Gram
in action.”
Fern, who was only seventeen, had never been inside a bar in her life and had
only seen Jade sing in a documentary about Rock Music of the Seventies that showed the notorious footage of
Jade performing her biggest hit, “Trip the Wind,” on the Midnight Special so stoned that she had sat down
in the middle of the song and started braiding her hair on live television. The idea of getting into the
Signal Flare at all, much less as Jade Stone’s guest, thrilled her. She sat on the bed with Jade feeling
like a drowning woman pulled into a life raft. A black and purple velvet life raft without paddles.
Jade slid out of bed and threw open her closet. “You’ll need to dress up a little.
Show Gram what you got.”
Fern couldn’t imagine herself in any of Jade’s baroque, hyper-feminine gear, and
knew that her only pair of shoes, a pair of combat boots from the Army surplus store, weren’t going to work, but
the idea of wearing one of Jade’s costumes was too much of an honor to worry about it. She would shimmer when
she walked.
Jade tossed a sheer black minidress to Fern and said, “Wear this. You and Gram
are going to be a great couple. Trust me. I know what I’m talking about.”
“Listen, Jade,” Fern said, folding the dress against her chest. “I’m flattered that
you want me to date your son.”
Jade interrupted, “Not date him, deflower him. I guess you can date if you want,
but I want him to lose his virginity.”
“Why?” Fern was suddenly high, so she couldn’t tell if what Jade was proposing was
really as weird as she thought it was, but she was sure that most parents spent a lot of energy trying to keep their
teenagers from having sex, not arranging it.
Jade drew deeply on the bong and handed it to Fern. While she was holding in the
smoke Jade struck an exaggerated pose, contemplative, resting the flat of her hand against her cheek and turning
her eyes to the ceiling. When she finally exhaled, she rose to her knees on the bed, looming over Fern, and said,
“Rock lives at the intersection of spirit and sex. It’s all about sex. That’s what you like about it, if you
didn’t know. Not the only thing, but it’s a big part of it. Gram’s trying to resist sex, I can just tell it
by his drumming, and the rock’s getting locked out in the process. I can hear it. Once he opens that door,
the music will flow again. I know it sounds weird, me being his mother and all. But it’s the life source,
and I want my son to draw as much from that source as he can.”
Fern thought this was deep, maybe the deepest thing she had ever heard. Jade was
so much more than even her iconic image conveyed. She was subtle. She was smart. But still, Fern thought of
Gram and his superior smirk and the way he wore his hair buzzed on the sides like a GI, and the way he carried
around Money magazine, and she knew she couldn’t oblige Jade. She wanted a highwayman. “Jade, man. It’s
so true. All that. Why me, though? Gram and I--I just don’t see how that could ever be.”
“You’re the right kind of girl. You’re going to be a great success, I can tell.”
“But you’ve never heard me sing. And you don’t like my kind of music, as you keep
telling me.” Fern had always thought of Jade’s music as kind of rural psychedelic, Emmylou Harris meets Grace Slick.
Fern’s musical models, on the other hand, were Kim Gordon and Lucinda Williams, and she also liked to think she
sounded a bit like P.J. Harvey, with what she felt was a better howl.
“All right. Sing for me now. Go ahead.”
Fern looked at her. “Right here, right now?”
“Yeah,” Jade nodded. “Here, have another hit. Now. Go stand in the middle of the
room. Grab that guitar in the corner if you need it.”
Being high was suddenly like being tightly wrapped in wet sheets at a moment when
she needed her full range of motion. It was unbelievable, but this was an audition. Was it part of the deal?
Fern couldn’t tell. After retrieving the guitar, she stood in front of Jade and twisted the pegs, tuning it.
It surprised her that Jade’s guitar would be out of tune as it always surprised her that Jade was never playing
any music in her house as it surprised her that Jade wasn’t rich, clearly needing to supplement her income selling
weed and playing at the Signal Flare. The old mansion where she lived in Medicine Park had once been a resort
hotel in the 1920’s, but it was dilapidated now, and Jade seemed unable or unwilling to do anything about it.
She’d let you know that Clara Bow had stayed in what was now her bedroom, but she seemed oblivious to the large
water stain that spread across the plaster above her bed. Fern fixed her eyes on that stain, stretched above Jade’s
head like a storm cloud. “I’m going to sing a song called ‘You People Bore Me, You Really Do.’ ”
“Title’s too long,” Jade said, arranging herself against the headboard. Her bright,
glassy eyes shone with amusement. “Call it ‘You Bore Me,’ or ‘Bore Me,’ or even just ‘Bore.’”
“Well, but you don’t know how it sounds yet. Wait till you hear it. It’s got to be
the whole thing, because that’s what I say in the chorus.” Fern stood on the exact centre of the red Persian rug
strumming the guitar, staring at the water stain. The song was harsh--she deliberately sang against the rhythm
in places and she howled, not in a traditional love-lost way, but the way you want to howl when someone has
bored you and you can’t get away from them. Frustrated. Fern wondered if Gram could hear her sing and what
he thought. She had often wondered if he liked playing in his mother’s band and if his own musical tastes
were any different from Jade’s. She imagined him and his admittedly sexy body doing bench presses in the
basement, sweating and listening to tacky jock rock, annoyed to have the steady rhythm of his exercise
interrupted by her more difficult syncopation. He probably hated it. He probably didn’t get it and she
was surely too much woman for him. She imagined him hooking up with some simpering zero of a girl,
someone who would think business school was a swell idea and would put his unimaginative goals ahead
of her own unimaginative goals and would act impressed while he talked about mutual funds or whatever.
Whatever, whatever. She growled at the end of her howl.
When she finished, Jade clapped and whistled and yelled. “Fern, Fern, Fern!” She
sprang from the bed and joined Fern on the rug. “How did a virgin ever tap such sacred rage?” She laughed and took
the guitar out of Fern’s hands. “Here’s my thought,” she sang, strumming the guitar and strolling barefoot across
the room. “I’ll let you open for me. I’ll give you a gig. You’ll get a following. You’ll get really big,” Fern
chuckled, but Jade kept her eyes on the frets of the guitar, singing her offer. “No, I’m not joking, but there’s
just one thing. I want you and my son. . .” Jade laughed this time and played a little guitar solo before she
finally finished, “to show each other some affection.” She gave Fern a stare that was like taking her by the
shoulders. “So that’s my deal, child. Do you want to open for the lady who opened for the Rolling Stones?
Mott the Hoople? David Bowie? Is that a good enough rock genealogy for you? That’s where Gram comes from.
Or are you going to save it for some redneck? Do you think any of these local boys will understand your music?
Gram does. He’s going through a creepy phase, but he’s still my son, and he’s going to need someone like you.”
As she spoke, Jade strummed the guitar with one long, red fingernail.
Fern smiled at her and reached over to the bed for the dime bag she’d bought,
stuffing it into the front of her jeans. This is blackmail, she thought, if you want to get right down to
it. Anger flooded her and she knew she needed to get out of the room before Jade, who had settled herself back onto
the bed and laced her fingers together over her breasts, could tell. Fern could feel her expectant gaze as she
said, “Let me think about it,” and shut the door firmly behind her. Jade’s offer of a chance to play at the Signal
Flare was more than she had dared hope for. She grew angrier and angrier as she strode down the dark hallway.
Gram was finished with his workout, lying on the sofa in the front living room leafing through a copy of Money.
He didn’t even shift the magazine to look at Fern as she passed by him on her way to the front door, much less
say good-bye, have a nice day, nice to see ya, your song sounded great in there. This infuriated Fern. Her
hopes and dreams were being compromised by this asshole’s virginity and he couldn’t even acknowledge her presence?
She reached the front door, then stopped, turned around and walked over to Gram. She stood over him, breathing,
but he still didn’t move his eyes or make any sign that he could see her. But his nipples knew she was there.
She snatched the magazine out of his hands, bent down and gave him a hard kiss on the mouth. Then she dropped
the magazine in his lap and left. As she pulled the front door shut she glanced back over her shoulder and saw
him staring after her.
* * *
“Mom? Hey, Mom?” Gram walked in first. It was Sunday morning, and Fern and Gram
had arrived to make their usual post-Saturday night concert brunch, a habit they had developed over the last five
years since their band, The Black Sheep, became Jade’s opening band at the Signal Flare. Fern was carrying groceries
and a bottle of champagne for mimosas that she and Jade, but not Gram would drink with breakfast. Abstinence had
always been the cornerstone of Gram’s quiet resistance to the rock-n-roll lifestyle he had been born into. In point
of fact, it was the only vestige of his resistance, since he had renounced his college plans and kept going as Jade’s,
and now Fern’s drummer.
“Yo, Mom,” Fern called, stopping to set the champagne and the bag of eggs and orange
juice on the kitchen counter. Three years after her marriage to Gram, and it still gave her a weird kick to refer
to Jade Stone, rock goddess, as her mother-in-law. Fern followed Gram down the long tiled hallway to Jade’s room
where they expected to find her propped up in bed, long black hair brushed out and spread around her, red silk
kimono wrapped around her tiny form, joint in her hand, smile on her beautiful face. Instead they found her dead,
slumped against the massive mahogany headboard, eyes open, syringe standing in her arm like something that had
landed there from a great fall.
Gram fainted. Fern stood still for a minute, then she walked to the bed and held
Jade’s wrist in her hand, looking for a pulse, although she knew that Jade was gone. She had never touched a dead
person before. The cold, dry feeling of Jade’s tiny wrist—the thingness of her body, the absence of anything Fern
could appeal to for an explanation—forced Fern to the floor beside the bed. She put her head between her legs and
tried to breathe. When she heard Gram begin to move in the doorway, she stood up, closed Jade’s eyes gently with
the side of her hand the way she’d seen it done in movies, pulling the needle from her arm and lifting the
weightless corpse enough to lay it flat in the bed and cover it. She wasn’t sure why, but she felt that these
small gestures might make the sight of his dead mother less horrifying to her husband when he got off the floor
and tried to take in the unthinkable.
At some point in those first pain-drenched hours, a feeling of relief, of having
reached escape velocity, had pricked Fern’s consciousness. She knew that she had been released, that the sign
she had been waiting for had arrived. She and Gram could finally leave town and pursue their dreams, away from
controlling, benevolent Jade, whose help had always carried with it a patronizing estimation of what she thought
they were capable of, a judgment that kept Gram right where she wanted him--with her. No longer would Fern have
the afternoon she played her guitar for Jade hanging over her head. Fern admitted to herself that she had tacitly
agreed to Jade’s deal, such was her desperation to have her music heard, but she had fallen in love with Gram later,
and on her own. It was just coincidence that her relationship with Gram was what Jade wanted. But Jade threatened
to tell Gram about the deal if Fern tried to talk him into leaving town with her.
As the ambulance drove away with Jade’s body, Fern stood on the lawn of Jade’s old
cobblestone mansion in Medicine Park holding her husband’s hand and hating herself for her selfish thought. Fern
wasn’t accustomed to having thoughts that shamed her. Seeing someone else’s death as an opportunity, a sign.
How sick. It was something Jade, who had been so blithely self-absorbed that no one expected anything else
from her, would have thought. When Gram had been accepted to the University of Oklahoma, the University of
Texas, and Indiana University, Jade’s only comment had been, “I guess God did this to punish me.” Unable
to console his mother, who had threatened that she would relapse on heroin—after being clean all of Gram’s
life—if he went to college, Gram had said no to all of the interested universities and stayed home. Fern
had often been flabbergasted at Jade’s capacity for seeing people as props in her own self-starring drama,
and now she recognized the same kind of thought in herself. After discovering Jade dead, Fern’s first thought,
like a wisp of airy flute music escaping from an orchestra pit in front of a sonorous booming dirge, had
been Free at last, I’m free at last.
* * *
When the preacher said, “Brothers and sisters, let us pray,” everyone bowed their
heads. Southwest Oklahoma’s rockers and druggies, hippies and cowboys, closed their eyes and heard Jade’s voice
singing “Trip the Wind” through the funeral parlour’s sound system. The preacher had started the prayer in time
for Jade’s long-ago recorded voice to sing into the silence “I don’t believe in Heaven/You can’t cheat me that’a
way/We’ll trip the wind, slow it down/make the night come out and play.”
“Let’s hope heaven believes in her,” Fern heard someone mutter from a pew behind her.
She felt the muscles of Gram’s thigh, pressed against her, grow tight. “Fucker,” he
growled. Fern grabbed his arm and pressed him into his seat.
“He didn’t mean any disrespect. Take it easy,” Fern said, keeping her eyes closed.
She felt Gram turn around, trying to identify the speaker from the crowd of lowered heads behind them. Nobody’s
voice Fern recognized, but all kinds of people had shown up for Gram’s mother’s funeral. Just fans without the
sense to stay away from what wasn’t any of their business. Gram gave up and settled back into his pew and began
to sob.
When the prayer ended, Fern opened her eyes. There was Jade, laid out in front of them,
her beautiful profile visible above the side of the casket, the jade green bong poking out of the casket like a
periscope. Jade’s face was no more pale in death than it had been in her last, hard-partying days. She never
had any wrinkles, something she always thanked her Apache blood for, and she still had the same long black hair
featured so prominently on her album covers. Her face was thinner, deep blue circles under her eyes covered with
the pancake makeup morticians use. She was wearing the long, black buckskin skirt and the purple velvet empire
top with belled sleeves and Moroccan brocade trim that she had been wearing on her second and most famous album
cover, “Falling Star Catcher.”
Now the album cover was mounted on a tripod next to the casket, together with her
other two album covers and a picture of Jade with Gram as a baby, standing in front of a purple Cadillac in front
of the old mansion in Medicine Park. Looking at the photograph, with Jade standing in the same place Fern and
Gram had stood when paramedics carried her body out of the house, the purple Cadillac on the same quadrant of
the curved driveway as the ambulance had parked when it came to take her body away, Fern thought how good it
was that no one could see their future.
On the cover of “Trip the Wind,” Jade had been wearing huge white-framed shades
and amethyst chandelier earrings, legs slung across a white chaise lounge in a sunny, bare room. The purple
velvet blouse featured her breasts prominently, and there had been no way to change the cut of the top now that
she was dead. Fern found it disconcerting to stare into the coffin at the tops of Jade’s breasts, shelved and
featured like produce. The wrongness of Jade’s final wardrobe choice reminded her of a picture of Geronimo,
available on postcards in truck stops from the Red River to Black Mesa, in which Geronimo is wearing a
three-piece wool suit and full headdress. He’s riding in a model T down Cache Road in Lawton, the same
road that ran by the funeral parlour where Fern now sat, and he looks pissed off and hot. The suit, his
look says, looked good in the mirror this morning. I forgot about the Oklahoma sun, though, and I am a
damned fool. But Jade had told everyone she partied with over and over that she wanted to be buried in
this outfit, and so they had honoured her wishes.
Gram sat next to Fern on the front row, rocking back and forth, keening sobs pulsing
from his chest. Since Sunday, when they found her, Fern had begun hoping that Gram would go into shock soon, but
he hadn’t. For three days he had been wild with grief. It seemed like he would die, too, if he kept on like
this much longer. She knew for certain that he had not slept since Saturday night. She was so worried about
Gram that she had barely slept either, waking up every couple of hours to see if he was sleeping, finding him
in front of the television, or standing in their backyard staring at his mother’s house, which was in front
of theirs. She held his hand, helpless, in shock herself, and tried to listen to the preacher, who had made
a real effort to find all the scripture he could pertaining to music and musicians.
Jade’s band members, Leland, Jody, and Cole, her best friends, were in the front
pew with Fern and Gram, sitting pressed together in suits that Fern realized they must have bought for the occasion.
Fern could smell some strange old cologne that one of them had dug out, and Cole’s cigar smoke, and also the whiskey
that one of them had been drinking. The smell really seemed to be coming from Gram, but she had been with him all
day and hadn’t seen him take a drink, never mind that he never drank anyway. In suits, the band looked like
different people. They looked like the middle-aged men they were, and Fern wondered for the first time if
Jade had subjected them to the same kind of pressure she and Gram had felt—if Jade had convinced them to
devote their lives to keeping the show going around her, holding them to her when they might have done
better to leave rock-n-roll and become the attorneys or businessmen that they looked like now. Leland,
her lead guitar player from the beginning, and her lover, too, if Gram’s theory was right, had slicked back
his long blond ponytail; his angular face with its shiny expanse of forehead that extended to the middle
of his scalp was pink and splotchy with emotion. He was folding and unfolding a piece of paper in his
hand covered with something he intended to read.
But it was Gram’s turn first. The preacher called him up, and he rose, sliding by
Fern’s knees and walking up the aisle. She watched her husband stop and close his eyes in front of Jade’s casket.
It didn’t look like he would get past it, but he finally cut left and found his way to the podium. He had told
Fern that he didn’t have anything good to say about his mother, something she knew wasn’t true at all. But Gram
believed that there was no other explanation for a fifty-eight-year old woman with twenty-five years clean time
deciding to go back to dope except that she intended to kill herself. He was furious. Fern didn’t believe she
had deliberately OD’d, but she didn’t know what to think beyond that. No one knew why Jade had decided to take
that terminal hit of dope, or where she had gotten it. A doctor told Fern that Jade had probably cooked up the
same dose she had been accustomed to before she quit twenty-five years earlier, not realizing how much stronger
the stuff was now, or how much weaker she was. She had gone out instantly, not unlike her son’s namesake, that
ill-fated country rock star, Gram Parsons, whose own corpse had been stolen and torched by drunk buddies intent
on honouring his wishes after he OD’d in Joshua Tree National Park.
Fern watched Gram look out over the audience, his blue eyes scanning the crowd with
contempt, his now long brown hair limp around his face. His lips were pursed in fastidious disgust. She thought
he might faint again. He began, however, to speak. And everything seemed fine. “Everybody knows my mother’s
biography. You all know her voice, we can all sing her songs. You know what she looks like, looked like.
But I guess I’m the only one who can tell you what a good and loving mother she was. She gave up her
rock-n-roll career to come back home to Oklahoma and raise me. She always told me she didn’t mind.
Maybe it seems like she could have done both, or that I didn’t need to be reminded all my life of what
she gave up for me.”
Fern leaned forward. Gram was voicing his resentments against his mother—in a
hypothetical way, but Fern knew this was how he really felt. “She told me she couldn’t write any new music
after she got off the heroin, but that she got clean for me and I was a more important creation that any old
song. Most ex-junkies, you know, they’ll say the opposite. Tell you how much more creative they are without
the drugs. Of course, those people quit all drugs, but I guess it wasn’t like that for my mom. She was always
saying, ‘It’s like gunpowder without a match. Just sitting there inside of me. I can’t light it. It’s dry.’
So I guess it’s just because of me that she never wrote another damned word. So you all can blame me that
there were no more Jade Stone albums,” he said, taking a bow. “And I’m real fucking sorry.”
Beside her, the guys in Jade’s band swung into motion. Leland stood up and said
in the voice that had been the closest thing Gram had to a father’s voice for most of his life, “Nobody’s
blaming you, son. Time to sit down.”
But Gram continued, his voice shaking. “I guess you see what she chose at the end,
though. Maybe if she hadn’t OD’d, her creative juices would be flowing right now, and you’d all have some new
Jade Stone songs to look forward to.” Almost before Fern knew he was out of the pew, Leland had joined Gram
at the podium and put a big hand on his back. Gram looked for a minute like fighting. He was drunk, Fern was
sure of it. For almost the first time in his life. He must have taken a bottle into the restroom at the
funeral home, Fern surmised. Leland steered him away from the microphone and Jody and Cole met him by
the coffin, in front of the centre aisle. Always the tight band pulling together a show, they were
treating Gram like he was out of his head with grief--which he was--for the benefit of the crowd.
But Fern could see how angry they were.
| "Gram sat down next to Fern and accepted the bong when Leland
passed it to him. As far as Fern knew, it was the first time he’d ever gotten high. He coughed after he
inhaled the smoke into his lungs, pounding his chest. Everyone laughed as he gagged and choked." |
After Gram’s outburst, Jade’s band took turns speaking. Each of them spoke, telling
the stories that they wanted to be Jade’s legacy. And it was all true, Fern knew. Jade had been the great lady,
the visionary, the rogue talent they painted her as. At least two of her songs were emblematic of the early part
of the 1970’s--she had received dozens of letters from GI’s who told her they were playing “Trip the Wind” in
their helicopters during the fall of Saigon and dozens more from people who had listened to Jade’s music while
protesting that same war. It was true that she had perfect pitch and could play any song on most any instrument
after hearing it once. It was true that she almost single-handedly kept the music program alive in Oklahoma
schools through support she could not afford to give, and probably true, although the story reminded Fern of
the one about Arthur pulling the sword out of the stone, that when she was a girl, a hummingbird had landed
in her bare hand after Jade had imitated its song. Fern knew these loving stories were the right way to bury
someone, not with Gram’s rage or with her own shameful feeling of freedom. She could not believe she had felt
freedom at seeing Jade dead. She didn’t know if she could ever like herself again, but she knew that to
pretend she hadn’t felt as she had would be even worse. Then she would be like Jade, made fragile by
the things she could not see or say about herself.
* * *
Fern and Gram each grabbed an amplifier out of the back of their van and began
carrying them into the back door of the Signal Flare. Gram hadn’t said a word since his explosion at the memorial
service. It looked to Fern like he was sobering up and getting depressed, but she didn’t try to talk to him.
All the other musicians, who hadn’t joined them at the grave site, were already there, setting up the stage for
the benefit concert that was to be Jade’s wake. Fred and Leanne, the bar owners, had “Falling Star Catcher” playing.
A huge blow-up, probably ten feet by ten feet, of one of Jade’s old publicity shots was hanging from the back of
the stage, where she would oversee the evening’s festivities. The poster was a close-up of her face, smiling,
with a straw cowboy hat tilted back from her brow.
It was standing room only by the time Fern and Gram took the stage. Fern and Gram
moved around each other without speaking. So many musicians had shown up that everyone had agreed to play no more
than 15 minutes, with everyone coming together on stage at the end to sing a Jade Stone medley: “Trip the Wind,”
“Falling Star Catcher,” “Queen of Spades,” and “Apache Mountain Stomp.” Fern stood in front of the microphone,
looking over the amazing show of support. Someone had hung Jade’s tambourine over the mic stand, so Fern picked
it up and began shaking it slowly over her head to get everyone’s attention. Behind her, Gram began a slow count
on the snare.
It took awhile before anyone heard them. The musicians intending to play were a
crowd by themselves, but then the place had filled up with the regulars, most of whom had been at the funeral,
followed by people from the community who did not usually come to the bar, but who knew Jade--her attorney,
her mechanic, her accountants, and most of her old teachers. There also appeared to be a large number of
people who had heard about the benefit on the radio and were there to hear all the bands. Some of them
probably didn’t even know Jade’s music, Fern thought. But tonight we will turn them on.
Fred and Leanne had been forced to use tables that could have held paying customers
to set out all the food that people from the community had brought. Coconut cream pie and watermelon, fresh fried
okra, buffalo chili, venison chili, longhorn chili, emu chili, chicken chili, turkey chili, pink ambrosia, green
bean salad, macaroni salad, red velvet cake, a case of moon pies, hand rolled tamales, Indian fry bread and many
cases of beer--Budweiser because everyone knew what Jade drank--all weighted down the tables set up against the
front windows. The people still in line to get food were the last to heed the calls to sit down, but finally
Fern picked up her guitar and the show started.
* * *
When the Black Sheep finished their set, Fern left the stage and pulled up a chair
with the rest of the musicians. “Hey Fern, how you surviving?” asked Maybelline Proudfoot, a contemporary of
Jade’s and a one-time rival who had driven in from Dallas. “I was trying to tell these folks about how Jade
fixed you and Gram up together. I can’t tell it the way Jade told it to me--nobody could tell a story like her.
You met the devil at the crossroads, though. I know that much. Sold your soul so you could play music.”
“I don’t think of it that way, Maybelline,” Fern said.
“Why not? I would. Puts you in the line of the finest musical tradition going back
to Robert Johnson.”
“Or Faust, if you want to go back a little further,” said Andre, a harmonica player
from San Francisco who had once made a pilgrimage to Lawton to hang around Jade and learn her musical secrets.
He had driven Gram crazy that summer, asking him questions and horning in on every dinner, rehearsal, or fight
that he could. Fern thought he must be writing a book about Jade, although he said he wasn’t.
“Jade wasn’t the devil,” Fern said flatly, waving a waitress over. “And Gram and
I didn’t get together just so she would help me with my music. It just all worked out.”
“Nobody’s calling Jade the devil,” Maybelline said. “Of course not, Fern. Didn’t
mean it that way. Hi Gram. Son, I am so, so sorry for your loss.”
Fern spun around to see Gram staring at her, stricken and furious. “What’s the
matter?” Fern asked, trying to take his hand.
He snatched it away from her. “I knew she had me by the balls, I just didn’t know
you were in on it.” Gram turned and strode out of the club.
Fern became aware of all the musicians around her listening. “Fern, honey, I am so
goddamned sorry,” Maybelline said. I didn’t know that story was such a big secret. I shouldn’t have opened my mouth.”
“Don’t worry about it, Fern,” Leland said, putting an arm around her. “He’s the only
reason you’re still in this town; he knows that. I don’t see how that’s any kind of bargain for you. He knows you
love him. He’s just hating everything right now.” Fern thought again of the afternoon that Jade had invited her
to smoke from the jade bong with her. It was absurd, making a deal like that, part of Jade’s guileless acceptance
of all the trappings of rock. Talismans, symbols, secret pacts--Jade took it all seriously. Fern didn’t though.
It had been a coincidence that she and Gram ended up together. Jade had given her the gig at the Signal Flare
shortly afterwards, but that was just good timing. Still, she felt guilty enough about the conversation to
hide it from Gram. And the freedom she felt when Jade died was real.
She wandered to the table of food, dimly realizing that she hadn’t eaten all day and
was famished. Gram hadn’t eaten, either, she knew. That morning they had both stood at the kitchen counter in
front of the coffee pot drinking black coffee in a fog of grief and sleep deprivation and had agreed to skip
breakfast. She looked around, tempted to make him a plate, but she didn’t see him anywhere. As she was
ladling a bowl of buffalo chili for herself, Leland came up and offered to hold the plate for her. “Listen,
after the Pinkertons finish we’re all going to get onstage and sing ‘Rock’n-Roll Heaven’ before we do the
final medley, okay? Jody thought of it, and I can’t believe I didn’t come up with it myself.”
“You mean ‘If you believe in forever, then life is just a one-night stand. If
there's a rock and roll heaven, well you know they've got a hell of a band, band, band band’?” Fern said,
singing her question.
“Yeah. The Righteous Brothers. I forget how young you are sometimes. Me and Jody
wrote a lyric for Jade, putting her in between Jimi and Janis.”
“I don’t know, Leland. Gram and I hate that song. All that cheesy sentimentality
about the sixties--it’s so self-congratulatory. You guys have absolutely no sense of irony, I swear to God. Can’t
you hear how sickening that will be? Jade’s of the seventies, anyway. You’ve got new fans here tonight who will
love Jade’s songs if they hear them straight, but you’re going to run them off.”
Leland looked at her as if she were speaking Japanese. “We’re playing it, Fern.
Sure will be a shame if her own son won’t join in, but you and Gram do what you want. We got plenty of drummers
here tonight.”
Fern took the plate of food out of Leland’s hands. “Thanks. Listen, I don’t mean
to be harsh. I’ll join in--of course I will. But you see what Gram is today. He won’t even speak to me.”
Leland nodded. “I’ve only seen him drink one other time, and that was the night
you and he decided to lose your virginity.” He smiled. “That was so damn funny.”
“Funny, hell.” Fern suddenly felt again the humiliation she had felt that night
when she realized that Jade and the rest of the band were having a party in the front yard while Gram and she
were in the house, trying to get up their nerve. She would never forget looking out the window and seeing Jade
swishing around the yard with her tambourine, serenading them. She could still see Leland, kicked back in a lawn
chair like he was watching a football game. “We had to get drunk. We’d still be virgins if we hadn’t.”
Leland’s face broke into a huge smile, the first she had seen in days, and then it
collapsed, turning into a mask of grief. “A lady like her rises once in a thousand years, Fern.”
Fern sat on top of a keg behind the bar and ate, still looking for Gram, realizing
as the night wore on that he was gone for the night. What would become of them now that Jade was gone? A couple
of months before she died, Jade and Fern had been in Jade’s living room doing yoga, when Jade had said, “Fuck
someone long enough--or just love them, any kind of love--and you will eventually see them cry.” They were both
in the proud warrior pose, hands extended above their heads, facing away from each other.
“So the thing to do is make sure it’s not you doing the crying?” Fern asked. It
was strange to hear Jade talk about having lovers. Whatever eccentricities she was guilty of--her rock-n-roll
lifestyle, her drug use--she was strangely reticent about her own sex life, and had never, so far as Fern knew,
openly had a lover since Gram’s father had died. Most people thought that Jade and Leland were longtime lovers
on a slow burn, although he was married and had four kids, but there was no proof. Gram may have grown up having
to shake out the sandwich baggies he used for his lunch to make sure there was no marijuana residue in them, and
may have known Zeppelin and Hendrix the way most kids know Kermit and Big Bird, but he had never had to watch men
stream through the house. Of course, the house was full of men--Jody, Leland, Cole, other musicians, people
partying and buying dope--but these were all friends, father figures, the committee of mystics and burnouts
who tried to help him with his homework.
“You’d think so, but I never could. Can’t stand to hurt somebody. Makes me feel
worthless. For me, it’s easier if I can get them to break up with me. Act up, make them mad, let them believe
something terrible about you. Rage propels them forward, it’s the best anesthesia in the world. That way they
don’t suffer as much. You can’t just lower the boom while they’re still worshipping you. It’s cruel.” Fern
realized Jade was offering some sort of cryptic advice about her marriage, almost as if she had known what
was coming, but she didn’t understand it at the time. She and Gram were fine. But Jade’s advice seemed more
relevant now--now that Jade was not holding them to Lawton, now that they could both do what they wanted, what
would happen? If Gram decided to go to college and Fern went full out with her music, would they survive?
When the Pinkertons finished, Leland took the stage and called all the musicians up.
Fern walked outside, making one last check in their van, one last tour of the parking lot in a vain search for Gram,
before she returned to the stage, sharing a mic with Maybelline and Jody. “Rock-n-Roll Heaven” was even more
sentimental at a wake than it was on the radio, but it seemed appropriate, Fern had to admit. In the face of
Jade’s death, the question of what happened to all that talent, all that music, now that Jade was gone, begged
for the sort of simple and pleasing answer “Rock-n-Roll Heaven” provided. It shone a light even for the younger
members of the crowd, due in large part to a shattering guitar solo by Leland. He seemed to disembowel the notes,
unseaming them from nave to chaps and letting their blood run until he finally cauterized the wounding sound by
coming to a full stop unexpectedly and standing in a silence that everyone went with intuitively for almost a
minute before the applause began. Leland never looked up.
The medley of Jade’s songs lasted for over an hour, turning into a jam session in
which almost every musician on the stage took a solo. The audience rose to their feet at the beginning of
“Rock-n-Roll Heaven” and stayed on their feet until the end. Somewhere between “Queen of Spades” and
“Apache Mountain Stomp” Fern forgave herself for her feeling of freedom at Jade’s death. She thought
that the one person who would completely understand the feeling and have something useful to say about
it would have been Jade herself.
As the crowd cleared out, Angel and Lucinda Perrotta, Jade’s accountants, tapped
Fern on the shoulder and ushered her to where they had been sitting, in one of the few booths that lined the wall
below the stage. There was Gram, passed out on one side of the booth, his feet sticking out into the aisle.
“We were talking for most of the night,” Lucinda said.
“He talked to you? Really?” Fern asked, leaning over to look at Gram’s face, flattened
against the red vinyl seat. She glanced up at them. “He’s not talking to me.”
“Talked and talked. He was drinking like crazy. He was asking us about our business.
Where we got our MBA’s. I think it’s great he’s decided to go to college now, Fern. I thought it was a terrible
mistake for him to stay here, with all his promise,” Angel said. “But at least he got to spend his mother’s
last years with her.”
Fern nodded. So he was going to college now. Deliberately or not, no one would ever
know, Jade had followed her own advice about relationships. She had done something horrible enough to propel her
son forward in a rage that might save him and put him on the path he had wanted to be on in the first place.
Then it occurred to Fern that maybe she should accept Gram’s condemnation of her in the same spirit. Let him
believe she had screwed him to get a gig at the Signal Flare. He would be free then to leave behind the
rock-n-roll life he had never wanted in the first place.
Not knowing what to do, she watched as Leland pulled Gram out of the booth by his
feet and Cole carried him like another piece of equipment out to their van, loaded him in the back with their
guitars and amps, planning to drive him home to the small house he and Fern rented from Jade behind the old
mansion. Fred and Leanne sat at the bar and counted the proceeds from the door and from the bar. Everything
was to be donated to the children’s home where Jade had grown up. “Those little orphans will all get Porsches
this year,” Fred joked. Fern helped wash glasses and clean off the tables. She gathered all the mics and
extension cords from the stage and wrapped them tightly for storage. Then she took down the huge poster
of Jade that had hung behind the musicians all night, folding it like a table cloth into smaller and
smaller squares, Jade’s face disappearing with each smaller square, until finally it was small enough
that she could tuck it under her arm and give it to Leanne to store under the bar.
As Fern handed the small square of plastic to Leanne, Leland and Cole came back in
looking solemn and purposeful. Leland sat down at the bar next to Fern and took the jade green bong that had been
in Jade’s casket out of a paper bag. “My friends,” he said, looking around reverently. “Let’s get high.”
Fern was stunned. “Leland, you took the bong out of her casket? She wanted to be
buried with it. She said so all the time.” The bong seemed lit from within and almost alive, as if the snakes and
mermaids that decorated it might writhe away down the bar.
“I couldn’t stand it,” Leland said. “It’s an heirloom. It belongs in the Smithsonian.
To me, it’s her soul.”
“All the more reason it should have stayed in the casket,” Fern said.
“Come on, Fern, Cole. Come on over here Fred, Leanne. Let’s smoke the great lady’s
soul.”
“You’re a damned soft-headed sap, Leland,” said a voice from behind them. It was
Gram. Fern turned to see him shuffling across the black-and-white tile of the bar towards them. He looked
like a corpse himself, still in his suit from the funeral, his tie hanging loose and his shirt wrinkled and
untucked. Apparently Leland and Cole had roused him when they carried him to the van. Staring at them, he
said simply, “My mother’s gone.”
Leland’s pink face shone with feeling under the bar lights. “Gram, do you remember
the story of the great Gram Parsons? You should. You’re named after him.”
“I know that,” Gram said. “She must have really loved his music, because he’s
about the only musician from that decade she didn’t claim to have met. You knew she was reverent if she wouldn’t
lie about somebody.”
Leland was determined to make his point. “His friends bribed the Los Angeles
airport guard that was keeping watch over his body, which was to be flown back to his family in Florida. They
loaded it into the back of a pickup, drove it out to Joshua Tree National Park and lit it on fire. Because that’s
what he said he wanted. It may have been illegal, but they knew it was the right thing to do. Me stealing this
bong out of her casket is kind of the same thing.”
Fern expected more fire from Gram, but to everyone’s surprise his face seemed to
seal over and he was silent. He laid a hand on Fern’s shoulder and she looked up at him. Leland’s words had
pushed Gram around some kind of corner. Finally he said, “It was exactly the right thing to do. She’d love it.
Fire it up, Leland.”
Gram sat down next to Fern and accepted the bong when Leland passed it to him. As
far as Fern knew, it was the first time he’d ever gotten high. He coughed after he inhaled the smoke into his lungs,
pounding his chest. Everyone laughed as he gagged and choked. “Somebody’s got to write a song about this,” he
managed to say. “About Leland stealing the bong. Fern, you should do it. I’ll start you out like this.” He
passed the bong to her and then played a drum intro with the flats of his hands on top of the bar. “Then you
come in with a line about how she wanted to be buried with the bong.”
Fern nodded at him. “David Bowie gave it to her the night he wrote ‘Queen Bitch.’”
She sang the lyrics, watching Gram’s face, which didn’t look very much like the face of an accountant, at least
not to her.
* * *
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