On a Mortal Blow

 

I was 24 when I got my first place.  Before that time, I lived with my parents in a comfortable suburb west of Minneapolis.  I commuted to college, riding with my father – the campus was on the way to where he worked.  If I wanted to stay later, I rode the bus home.  For about a year, I lived in an apartment with a roommate.  But I had never lived alone until I moved from the Metro area one-hundred miles south to Austin, Minnesota where I had been hired as an associate at a law firm. 

I had a small car, a brown Chevette, that froze solid as a block of ice during the cold Winter.  My father had negotiated the car’s purchase for me, but, of course, I was making installment payments on the vehicle.  My salary was negligible – I was paid just a little more than a brand-new school teacher.  (During my first year as a lawyer in 1979, my annual wages were $12,000.)  Of course, as a young man, my first priority was to purchase a high-fidelity stereo system.  Music was important to me at that time in my life and the records that I played established my identity, defining qualities that were otherwise a little obscure to me.  (When you are young, half your life is spent figuring out who you are.)  At my parent’s home, my father had a modest stereo system – in those days, good HiFi was a status symbol – and I owned about twelve vinyl albums, among them records by Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, Tom Verlaine and the three-record set from the soundtrack of Michael Wadleigh’s documentary Woodstock.  My father had sixty or seventy classical records and some Dixieland Jazz (Count Basie and Louis Armstrong) and I often listened to that music after everyone else had gone to bed, lying on the floor in the dark in front of the living room stereo system with headphones over my ears.  I lived inside of that music and, reciprocally, it lived inside of me and I defined myself by the records that I bought.  

After about three month’s work as a lawyer, I had some money and went to the stereo store at the Mall.  Some kid about my age worked with me on the transaction and I bought a tuner, record and cassette player, and two Altec speakers on cherry wood mounts.  The kid had red hair and freckles and ornate sideburns fused to his ginger moustache.  He was wearing a leisure suit with tight trousers and lizard-skin cowboy boots.  The salesman spoke quickly, but with authority and knew everything about music and its reproduction and the components in the stereo system that I purchased cost me about one-and-a-half month’s salary, a vast expenditure for me at that time.

I don’t know how I got the speakers back to my apartment.  The Chevette would have been too small for them or, perhaps, I had to drive slowly over the streets under their shrouds of autumnal trees with the hatchback of the car perilously open to the elements.  I think I could have laid the tuner and other components in the car’s backseat.  I recall setting up the stereo in my small apartment, half kitchen that opened into a small space where there was sliding door that accessed a ground level deck.  The living room was carpeted and there was a small closet with mirrors on its doors and a little niche where my bed was located next to a tiny toilet with shower.  I didn’t have a television.  The stereo was more important to me than TV.  

A neighbor loaned me a screwdriver so that I could connect the big speakers to the receiver.  I put the speakers on their dark cherry wood pedestals and they were big as tombstones, cumbersome and heavy and shadowy as a forest at midnight.  When I had everything set up, I slid a cassette into the machine and waited anxiously to see if anything would play.  Music flooded the room, rich and dense, an astonishing presence that took my breath away.  I played Neil Young’s album Live Rust: some of the songs were acoustic but the second side was thunderous rock and roll: “Powderfinger” and “Like a Hurricane.”  The sound expanded to the edge of the earth; the guitars probed the horizon as if it were a wound under the howitzer fire of the percussion.  A short track on Live Rust, something I recalled from Woodstock, turned my living room into an open-air concert.  Thunder rumbled and someone with a microphone warned people to not climb on the sound towers and, then, there was a sound of rain like a thousand cascades and it was all marvelously exact and lifelike.  I was there, in the multitude, mud under my feet and rain pouring over my shoulders.  

When I was done playing Live Rust, I put on a Van Morrison record that I had purchased at the mall’s record store.  In those days, I subscribed to Rolling Stone and had bought the two albums, all that I could afford at that time, on the recommendations of the magazine’s critics.  Into the Music was the name of the Van Morrison record and I recall listening to “Full Force Gale” and “Bright Side of the Road.”  Again, the music made me feel proud and courageous.  It gave me hope.  And, although I was lonely in my new town and fearful in my brand-new profession, the songs that I played on that stereo filled me with joy and optimism.  Every day, I thought that I would come home from work, take off my suit and tie, and, then, lie on my couch listening to the stereo.  Sometimes, I would make myself a drink with coke and whiskey and turn up the music as loud as I dared. The booze and music emboldened me to think about the future and, I thought, that I would spend three or four years in Austin, away from my girlfriend and my parents and friends, but, then, would return to Minneapolis in triumph and work downtown in one of the glittering skyscrapers from which you could see the blue lakes in the parks with jade and emerald trees surrounding them, bright water dotted with the white flags of sailboats.  From my Austin apartment, I could see the endless prairie from my deck and the savannah with lawns and old oaks around the little Community College and, when I opened the sliding doors, the stereo-serenade escaped my rooms and went out onto the turf and crossed the street where the State Highway plugged itself into town and, then, the music fled across the prairie to where storm clouds were clawing at the horizon with flashing talons of lightning.  I was no longer a boy or an adolescent but, now, a fully grown man and my responsibilities didn’t seem like burdens to me, but were occasions for joy and I felt, without really thinking about it, that all my future was ahead of me, dark but, also, pierced with radiance – what would I become?  How would I prosper?  What victories would be mine?  These questions, with cheerful answers implied as well, were part of the music that radiated from my new Altec speakers with their HiFi sound perched atop elegant cherry-wood pedestals, wooden platforms cantilevered like diving boards into the future.  Maybe, I would meet a girl and bring her back to my apartment to listen to my upscale stereo.  The future was unknown but the music made me hopeful.  All would be well.  

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My mother-in-law died.  The home where she had lived for fifty-six years was crammed with her stuff.  There were knick-knacks, ceramic cats and gnomes, agates, boxes of toys that had amused children who were now entering old age, threadbare couches and recliners and love-seats, cutlery, souvenir plates, cardboard boxes full of birthday cards and anniversary greetings and picture postcards with writing on their backs.  There were hundreds of books and cabinets full of cutlery and closets packed with clothing and pictures on the walls and stored in the basement, tools and power equipment with stepladders and sheets of wood and stacks of timber that my father-in-law (who had carpentry skills) had planned to fashion into useful objects.  All this stuff was overwhelming and it took my wife and her siblings weeks to empty out the house and the process was not only infuriating and complicated by grief but, also, expensive.  A dumpster was rented for the household debris and this proved inadequate to the materials that my mother-in-law had accumulated so that a crew of workers had to be retained at the cost of several thousand dollars to haul things that someone had once purchased for good money away to the local dump.     

The process was agonizing and it led my wife and I to think that we should start throwing away the mountains of stuff cluttering our home.  A salvage firm sent out fliers, stuffed into mailboxes in the houses in town.  If you carted your electronics and old TVs and computer monitors and keyboards with printers to the county fair grounds, the company would accept that trash and, presumably, recycle it, although for fees that were not inconsequential.  So we dragged an old TV and printer and some tuner/receivers that I found in the basement to the porch and, then, loaded them into my wife’s SUV.  Then, it occurred to me that I hadn’t listened to music on my old stereo system with the big Altec speakers for, perhaps, ten years or more and, in fact, some boxes full of luggage and paperback books that I had written (but not sold) blocked access to the HiFi occupying a congested corner of the living room.  So I thought I would dismantle the stereo system and discard, at least, the old tuner/receiver and the CD player that my father had bought for me a couple years before he died, now three decades earlier.  The speakers on their elegantly tilted cherry wood mounts were too bulky to move, at least on this occasion.  I supposed I would have to dispose of them later.

The old stereo components were on shelves in a case mounted on caster wheels.  The equipment was behind glass doors.  When I pulled the shelf system forward, rolling it on its wheels, dozens of CDs stacked on top of the case slid onto the floor, an avalanche of cases clattering as they dropped.  Squeezed between the entertainment center shelving and the wall, a sort of talus field of CD boxes and disks formed.  I detached the CD player from the back of the tuner-receiver from which it was powered and, then, set the device on a chair.  The tuner-receiver was plugged into a hidden floor socket and more difficult to disconnect and, of course, the back of the appliance was wired to the speakers by a rat’s nest of copper wrapped in orangish plastic.  I pulled the wires out of the back of the tuner-receiver, uncovered the electrical socket buried in fallen CDs and fist-sized tufts of dog hair that had drifted behind the stereo.  The air whirled with dust motes and I was sneezing and my eyes were filled with tears as a result, I suppose, of allergies.  Heaps of wiring rested on the CD spill.  I took the tuner-receiver and the CD player out to the porch.  Birds were singing in the trees and a squirrel on the deck eyed me nervously.

In the garage, I found a shears with a rubbery grip and a beak like a parrot.  I cut apart the wires leading to the speakers – snip! snip! – and carried tangled bouquets of the stuff out to the garbage.  The speakers brooded over the fallen CDs, now inert and completely detached – the electronics were gone, stashed in the rear of my wife’s SUV to be taken for disposal to the fairground and speakers were cadavers.  There was no more space in the vehicle and, in any event, I didn’t have the heart to drag away the speakers standing on both sides of the ruinous glass cart – somehow, it had losts its caster wheels – that rested crookedly on the wooden floor.  

It took me ten minutes to sort through the CDs.  I took half of them to the garbage and threw them away.  I have thousands of CDs, but I rarely listen to them.  My heart for music seems to have withered away.  Disposal of those things would have to await my death.  I held the fallen CDs in my hands, before stacking them on some shelving, and I thought each one of these things I had once purchased – I had spent money for these disks that were now heaped up in windrows in the corner of the room.  It was too much for me, a metaphor too penetrating, perhaps, and I brought one of the CDs to my Bose wave-machine and plugged it into the device: Haydn’s Creation.  The music was beautiful.  You could spend a lifetime studying it and discovering its secrets, but this would have been someone else’s life.  The chance had been missed and the opportunity had turned into regret and time was running out.

I thought I should have a drink to celebrate the destruction of my stereo system.  But what would be the point?  It would have just been an unbecoming exercise in self-pity.  The next morning, my wife took the components to the fairgrounds and a crew of athletic young men unloaded her car and sorted the equipment and stacked it neatly on the concrete beside trucks waiting to haul it away.  It was all well-organized and efficient and cheaper than I expected, a mere seventeen dollars.  Later, the skies darkened and it rained but the morning had been bright and clear. 

My mind was inflamed around the injury inflicted by the disassembly of my old stereo system.  I couldn’t sleep and lay stark and rigid on my expensive mattress in my expensive bed.  The night passed in phases: first, drunk people laughing and giggling and cursing at a neighbor’s house, then, dogs barking, then, distant thunder, then, more rain falling on the roof and the shrubbery, then, the deep silence of early morning, broken, once or twice by a train sounding a warning at crossings far out in the country that it was approaching, metal on metal, and the locomotive monstrously heavy and dangerous, and, then, the first stirrings of workers getting up for the early shift at the Plant, cars starting tentatively and vehicles unsettling the puddles that the rain had left at the intersections and, in the half-light, birds all singing so loudly that there was a note of desperation in the music that they made... The future was still all dark and obscure before me, but clasped more tightly around my imagination, and the gloom was no longer pierced by radiance.

May 16, 2023