Author: Brad Zellar

—Abel Pann

You know how your heart moves, how it lurches and staggers and sways like a beaten bell in your chest.

You know how it sounds: That sound. Those noises. That familiar music. The rattle of a cold slate shingle banging up against your ribs. The squeak of its eraser at work somewhere just behind your sternum. Its fractured song.

You know its strange language, all its clipped dialects and speech defects, the things it can and cannot say. The things it will not say.

You know when it’s reaching for something outside its grasp, when it is straining to become a heart more human than any heart can ever be.

You know the relentless rhythm of its shovel at work in the orchard at night. In the morning you can see where it has been foraging in the garden, the glistening scarlet trail in the dew where it has dragged itself to the river’s edge.

You’re familiar with its murmurs and lullabies, its myriad prayers and laments, its low, protracted moans.

You know when it has been looking at this world through the wrong end of a telescope and when it has bundled itself in burlap or nestled deep in shavings to protect itself from the cold.

You know when it’s gone feral on you, when it is limping down off the mountain under a January moon, in search of companionship and sustenance from needy things and dead things preserved by the snow. You love and fear its animal moments, its wild spasms of longing and lust and unspeakable loneliness.

You know that it does not live by breaking, that nothing truly broken can ever again be made fully whole.

You see it in the space behind your closed eyes, a dark crimson planet wobbling through its slow, liquid orbit of the soul.

You know what it looks like in a masked man’s hands; how it looks when it’s laid out and all alone on a stainless steel table, and when it’s simmering in a soup pot, and turning black at the bottom of a bucket on a hot dock. You know what it looks like projected on a giant screen and impaled at the end of a sharp stick.

You know its heaves and hesitations, and how it learns, longs, wishes, and crawls for miles along dark roads following one dim, diminishing star on the distant horizon. You know how it holds on, gives out, gives in, and gives itself up, and over. How it gives up.

How it goes on, and lives by beating, lives by bleeding.

You still don’t know, though, still don’t understand, what your heart is. You still don’t know what it wants. This is one of those things it will not say. You only know that it belongs to you and you’ll never let it go.

And when it grows weary you cradle it in your arms and talk to it through the long, dark hours. Together you keep your vigil, waiting for a sign. You plead and sing and whisper old, familiar stories and lies to it, until the beating stops, until at last you are carried off together into deep sleep, merciful sleep, into silence, into a safe place far beyond the terrifying world of dreams, and need.

…what is it we are all doing, what is it we are about, pray tell? And why are we gathered here?

—Raymond Carver, “All My Relations”

I’m on my way

with dust in my shoes,

free of mythology:

Send books back to their shelves,

I’m going down into the streets.

I learned about life

from life itself,

love I learned in a single kiss

and could teach no one anything

except that I have lived

with something in common among men….

–Pablo Neruda, “Ode to the Book“

I frittered away a ridiculous amount of time over the last week or so trying to finish an essay that was supposed to address the decline of reading in America, and, specifically, the question of what this decline means, and whether stories matter.

Your eyes, I’m sure, immediately rolled back in your head when you read that paragraph, so I’m going to presume you’ll understand what I was up against. Too many words have already been wasted on this subject, which essentially boils down to this: Are too many words being wasted on this and other subjects? Are words wasted? Are there too many words? Or: What the hell is wrong with words that they don’t seem capable of stirring the American imagination as they purportedly once did? Have words suddenly –or slowly– lost their ability to make sense of what we are going through, both individually and collectively? Are we, in fact, going through anything collectively anymore, or at least anything that words might make sense of? And if we are not, then might not that be one primary reason why books fail to speak to so many of us?

Or: What the hell is wrong with Americans that so many of them are now apparently incapable of (or entirely indifferent to) being stirred by a language that is still capable of giving voice to all manner of incredibly stirring and dazzling stories?

Or: What?

Never mind, of course, that this is all hogwash. If there’s one thing I’ve proved in my long and distinguished career, it’s my ability and unhappy willingness to wallow in all manner of hogwash in exchange for the most paltry of compensation. Time and again I’ve proved (right here, in fact) that I’ll wallow in all manner of hogwash for free.

And never mind that these people who wring their hands over the alleged decline of words and stories obviously haven’t been listening to much music –hip hop, specifically– or spent much time lately hanging out in decent barber shops. Just for starters.

I made the mistake of engaging my doppelganger in this discussion, which only confused matters. The doppelganger fiercely and mercilessly blocked every one of my entry points into this exercise in futility, challenging each of my arguments with withering rebuttals that increasingly felt like taunting, and, eventually, mockery. It was plenty clear that the doppelganger had no patience, no patience at all, for this foolishness, and was merely humoring me. At one point I somehow found myself defending even my hairline –which needs no defending– and the orthodontic irregularities of my smile.

By this time words truly did not matter. They had ceased to matter.

The problem was, though, that I had a looming deadline. And I had already managed to waste almost two thousand words on this subject, words that, if published, would expose me as merely one more cloistered blowhard braying from the tower into the thick clouds of smoke billowing from the funeral pyres far below. I have already published far too many words that have exposed me in a similarly humiliating fashion.

I scrolled down to the tail end of those nearly two thousand words and hit the backspace key. Eventually I was left with only the most modest and forlorn little neighborhood of words, huddled together at the top of an otherwise empty screen, all that remained after the rest of the towering city of my indignation had been burned to the ground by the furious onslaught of my doppelganger. Eventually I was left with just these two sentences that I couldn’t bear to part with, and I suppose they’ll have to do:

At precisely the moment that man began to try to write down the story of God, at precisely that moment God turned His back in disgust. He knew what was coming: Lies.

—Abel Pann

He would have been seventy-two years old this week.

By the time he was my age he had four children and a literally broken heart.

He did what he could.

He taught wonder.

I still sense him coiled like a discus hurler behind every one of my best intentions.

His blood is the blood that calls me back to this world each time I crawl away disgusted.

His are the words of forgiveness I am always surprised to find crouched at the back of my tongue. The tenderness, unexpected, that seizes me when I am in the presence of suffering or helplessness, that also is him feeling through me.

My biggest dreams are his.

He pointed out the stars, and taught me to appreciate the gorgeous example of upholstery that is a baseball mitt. The short trigger, the hatred of condescension, the intolerance of cruelty, his compassion and affection for the little guy and the underdog, all these things he gave me.

He could not, unfortunately, give me his unbridled optimism, his undying faith in human goodness, his stiff upper lip, or his genuine willingness to just let the world be the world.

But his capacity for love, his sense of loyalty, his appreciation for a good road trip, and his eagerness to play the fool –What can I say? I am his boy.

Even when he was ultimately defeated by life, he showed me again and again how to live.

I’ve forgotten so much already. I’d give anything if he could come back for just one day, for just one hour, for just one cup of coffee, to help me remember.

I was born a clown, and in retrospect my parents were incredibly good sports about what must surely have been on a number of levels a shock and a disappointment. They’d been trying for years to have a child, and they accepted me immediately as a blessing and loved me unconditionally for what I was.

My father likes to tell the story of how on the day I was born he went right out and bought me my first pair of big red shoes. I took my first tentative steps in those shoes.

From the very beginning my lips were preternaturally large, and I have never required much in the way of embellishment beyond a basic application of lipstick for color and a bit of accenting around the outline. I have no memory of being outfitted with my rubber nose, but from the first time I can recall gazing at my reflection in a mirror it was a source of great pride and enduring pleasure.

One morning in early childhood I awoke to discover that overnight my chin and jowls had acquired an application of Vaseline and coffee grounds.

I was, I am told, an uncommonly stubborn and willful child, with a clear and unwavering self-image. I was as a result always allowed to choose my own clothing, and favored a ragged old porkpie hat, an oversized smock with red polka dots and shiny buttons, and baggy trousers covered with brightly colored patches. I was a very happy boy, and a happy clown.

Childhood is of course an awkward and confusing time in the life of a clown. By the time I was old enough to attend school I had grown used to the charmed attention of adults. All of those I had come in contact with had seemed both amused and enchanted to find themselves in the presence of a happy little clown. I suppose in hindsight there was a good deal of condescension in this response, but I loved the attention all the same. I craved and needed attention; there was nothing I could do about it. It was hard-wired in my brain. My self-esteem was entirely dependent on entertaining people and making them laugh.

My parents were an unfailingly compliant audience. They adored me, and I could induce heaving fits of laughter in them with little more than a wide-eyed grin or a startled spit-take at the breakfast table. To their credit they never pushed me. They didn’t have to. I was, however, an unusually sheltered child, and though I don’t believe this was ever a conscious decision on the part of my parents, I had had precious little interaction with other children by the time I started elementary school. As such I was utterly unprepared for the reactions I received from the other students. I understood neither the casual cruelty of children, nor the irrational fear that clowns seem to inspire in so many youngsters.

There were long, unhappy stretches where I got the shit kicked out of me every day I went to school. Bullies on the playground held me down and wiped my beard of coffee grounds from my face; they stole my ragged hat, stepped on my big red shoes, and tore the shiny buttons from my polka dot shirt.

In my teenage years I would stand alone and friendless in the darkened gymnasium at school dances. No girl would dance with me. Even balloons could not get me a date. I eventually taught myself a few simple magic tricks to try to impress my classmates, but it was too little, too late.

I ate too much candy and gained a great deal of weight.

I learned this difficult lesson: a clown is simply not equipped to handle the brutal truth.

By the time I dropped out of high school to join the circus my fate was sealed. I would be a sad-faced clown to the end of my days.

It’s no secret that people of great achievement are often abject curiosities and spectacular failures as human beings, and this was certainly true of Tchaikovsky, who lived in my hometown when I was growing up.

I can’t truly claim that it was my privilege to know the man, or even that to know him would have been, in fact, any kind of privilege at all. (My understanding is that this was decidedly not the case.) But I certainly remember the old man, and recall seeing his stooped and wretched specter stumbling along the sidewalks of my neighborhood.

People around town knew Tchaikovsky, of course, or certainly were aware of his strange presence. Few, however, apparently realized he was writing music. Most folks remember him as a stunningly bad amateur painter whose crude oils of birds –robins, almost exclusively– were entered in the art show at the county fair each summer.

Somewhere I have a snapshot of the garish tattoo of a clown bleeding from his eyes that Tchaikovsky had etched into one of his forearms. I can’t recall how I came by this photograph, to be honest with you, but it remains among my most prized possessions, and countless scholars have tried to buy it from me over the years.

There was always a great deal of speculation that Tchaikovsky was consumptive, or infected with venereal disease. There did, certainly, appear to be something wrong with him. There were clearly health issues of one sort or another, most obviously a painful-looking skin condition. He also had dodgy hygiene, and always seemed to be in need of a new pair of shoes.

Late in his life Tchaikovsky wore a beat-to-shit pair of purple moon boots, no matter the season. This was after moon boots had long since gone out of fashion, and I suppose he picked them up on one of his regular visits to the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store, where he was also said (this was in the newspaper after his death) to be an indiscriminate hoarder of “potboilers and paperback westerns.”

I can also tell you that he rolled his own cigarettes, and spent a great deal of time drinking coffee and banging away at the Cannonball Run pinball machine at a local pizza parlor.

Whenever we’d see him out and about, my mother would always say, “That poor man doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going.”

“I could help him out with that,” my father would say. “He’s going.”

Tchaikovsky had one sister still in town, but she was said to find him repellent, and more than once sought a restraining order against him on the grounds that he “creeped her out.”

He occasionally played chess at the public library with the conductor of the high school orchestra, and somehow managed to talk this man into performing some of his compositions at the annual spring orchestra concert. Nothing much was made of his music at the time, however, and when Tchaikovsky died he was largely friendless and wholly uncelebrated.

Even to this day there are people in my old hometown who will insist that the music now attributed to Tchaikovsky was, in fact, composed by some other person, or persons. Repeated attempts to raise money to erect a statue in his honor outside the library have been unsuccessful.