Jay Fox - THE WALLS

“Will he mind?”

“Are you kidding me? He brought them out here for me.” He pulls two out and tosses one my way. A lighter soon follows. “Do you mind if I change the music? I'm not really feeling this right now.”

I toss the lighter back his way. “No.”

An early Medeski, Martin and Wood album begins to play.

“I love these guys.”

“You know them?”

“Yeah. Chris Wood is kind of a hero of mine. He knows how to keep a steady head in the middle of chaos.” I reflect for a moment. “That's probably one of the only pieces of fatherly wisdom I ever received in my life. When my grandmother died, my dad came up to me and said, 'Son, you know you're a man when you can keep your head when everyone else is losing theirs'.”

He nods. “Sounds about right.”

“So what's the story with him?” I ask after a few moments. “I don't see the two of you being friends — or cousins for that matter.”

“He's here on vacation. From Detroit.”

“And he's your cousin?”

“My mom was real close with his parents. They never knew my father. He — my dad — was born in the City, and he moved to Detroit in the sixties to pursue a music career. He was a singer, and he was under the impression that Motown was just handing out contracts to anyone who could carry a tune.” Caesura . “I shouldn't say that. He wasn't naïve or conceited; he just thought he had a better chance of making it out there than he did back here. Who knows? He may have been right.

“Now, my granddad wasn't happy with my father's decision. He wanted his son to go to college to become a doctor or a scientist. And it's not like my dad didn't have the brains to excel in either field; he was a brilliant guy. It's just that he believed himself to be an entertainer and an artist. But there's one thing that my father was not, and that was stubborn. So, to appease my granddad, he enrolled at Wayne State as a part-time student. And he did well there. He also did fairly well gigging with his group, the Detroit Diamonds. It's not like he made much — I mean he still had to wash dishes in order to pay his rent.

“Things were going well for him for a few years. He was making a name for himself in the music scene, he was doing well in school, and he was even getting a few articles published in the school paper. And then the riots happened.”

“This is what? Sixty-eight?”

“Sixty-seven. It was really bad, man. And it changed my dad. I mean, he was sympathetic to the cause, you know, the movement — Civil Rights and Black Power. He went to the rallies, and he marched; he read a lot of the literature, too, but he wasn't ready to seriously commit himself to anything beyond his own pursuits. He was an artist first, an activist second. But the riots changed him. The riots changed a lot of shit. The racism within the ranks of the police was a lot more pronounced back then. In the most basic sense, there was the simple fact that the police were white and the majority of the people on the street were not. It affects you even when you see pictures of the things that happened. But he was there. And that's one of the primary reasons that he got involved.

“I don't know much after that. He and my granddad stopped talking because he thought my granddad was a Tom; my granddad thought it was best to just kind of let my dad be, let him be an angry young man. My aunt kept in touch with him, but she didn't really know much because she was only twelve at the time. She and my dad wrote letters back and forth, but he never went into details. In fact, all she ever really knew for certain was where he was living. A part of me feels as though he became a Panther. That would explain why he ended up moving out to L.A. and, later, to Oakland.”

“Why don't you know? I mean, what happened to him?”

“Well, a few months after I was born, he was shot. He ran a stoplight, got pulled over, and apparently reached for his wallet too quickly, if you know what I mean. The cop got a slap on the wrist — you know, 'Don't you go shooting any more niggers, Dan, otherwise we may have to give you another week's suspension. This time without pay.' My father, meanwhile, died of complications in the ER.”

“Jesus. I'm sorry.”

He gives no response. “Anyway, long story short, my mother and I moved back to Detroit — she was from there. Do you know the area at all?”

“Just the suburbs.”

He shrugs. “Well, we ended up in Ann Arbor, in Scooter's house. It's not like it was a hippie commune or anything like that. My mom just rented out the top floor of their home. We lived there until I was four.”

“Then what?”

“My mother wasn't a saint. I'll be the first to acknowledge that.” He's quiet for a long time. “She was dating this fucking guy. I still don't know how serious it was. Scooter's parents didn't pry into her life, and my grandparents didn't hear anything about him. I guess they had been seeing each other for a couple of months — you know, long enough for her to know that she'd gotten pregnant and that this guy was definitely the father. But she didn't want a child. So she did what she thought was right. Only, she didn't tell him.” He takes a long, lachrymose drag from his cigarette. “But he found out.”

He winces and lets out a sound that one could mistake for a chortle, though it clearly wasn't something so frivolous. In fact, there is no way to refer to the gravity it represented. “He didn't mean to kill her. That's what he's told me. In letters. But he did.” Faxo looks down to his cigarette. “He never could explain what came over him.”

“I'm so sorry.” There are no words that can ameliorate such a wealth of pain; sometimes one can only provide a presence. “Really,” I add without thinking. It feels contrived no matter how much I don't want it to be.

“Well,” he says as he looks up, “I ended up living with Scooter and his parents for a little while before moving in with my granddad. And I've always kept up with him and his folks. He comes out here every once in a while. I go to Detroit every once in a while. Well…not Detroit. Ann Arbor or Royal Oak, which is the suburb to which Scooter moved a few years ago.”

There's silence for a while. I try to think about what my parents were doing during the sixties and the seventies. My dad was born in 1951. My mother was born a year later. They don't talk about the past much. When they do, they concentrate on their early childhoods or on the fact that they hated the seventies — probably because they were both stuck in med-school and residency during much of the decade, even if my father is the only doctor in the family. I can't imagine them going to rallies or even being politically conscious. My mother saw the Dead in 1973 while she was attending the College of William and Mary. She enjoyed a few of the songs, but was rather turned off by the scene surrounding the band. My dad only listens to jazz records. He wasn't what Mailer would have called a White Negro, nor is he much of a musician. He really wanted to be, but he just never had the time to cultivate much of a talent. I guess that explains why I had a bass in my hands at the age of seven.

My parents are not Episcopalian, but they do exhibit the characteristics that one typically associates with the sect. They don't talk about the three things that most New Yorkers dwell upon: politics, religion, and sex. They are quiet, polite, socially conservative (with the exception of the issues of abortion and euthanasia), and active in the clubs and civic communities that comprise any suburban town: the PTA (maybe they've finally included an 'S' in there by now), the church, the book clubs that read best-sellers that are “cultural” in the sense that the setting of the book is different than suburbia or some nineteenth century British estate. They wear clothing that is shipped to them from Maine, and blush when they hear certain words. One would think them incapable of farting or shitting due to the tightness of their sphincters.