Grounded

            “You did this to yourself, Gramps.”

            “What?”

            “You don’t apprehend a thing I’m saying.”

            “Yeah.”

            Silence for a second. “Yeah what?”

            The dapple-grey grandpa shook a bit, pulling his hands off the table as if he needed to scratch his chest. Decorum, more than Tommi Iommi on his t-shirt, prevented him from doing so.

            The adolescent moved in to megaphone, “you did this to yourself!”

            Grandpa flinched in his reply, “doesn’t everyone?”

            “Everyone what?”

            “Yeah.”

            There had been a time when the two were close—or closer, unimpaired by circumstances. So what, a geezer goes deaf. Par for the course, he might have said. What hearing aids are made for. But that’s not what made for the distance. It was rather an abdication of that ‘march to the beat of a different drummer’ thing he used to preach. He didn’t buy his own belief anymore.

            Never a legend in anyone’s mind, he played in several warm-up bands across the eastern half of America, mainly. Nothing memorable—‘The Rustlers’ probably the only thing YouTubable, if anybody checked. They shared a stage with the likes of REO Speedwagon and The Outlaws—how stupid was that, he liked to recall: The Rustlers followed by The Outlaws in some suburban stadium like the Palace of Auburn Hills. Stupid was a good time, though, and maybe paid the bills.

            He didn’t budget for the baby girl left at his hotel door with a post-it note from a groupie insisting she was his. His girlfriend at the time—Grandma, nowadays—was magnanimous to take the infant as her own and raised her until, predictably perhaps, the grown-up little girl ran off to her own rock n roll fantasies. Some dirtbag—probably a drummer—knocked her up and disappeared. He would have been the father to this adolescent now, who had to learn to hate him more than he hated his mother, who at least darkened the door of Grandpa and Grandma once in a while, begging for cash before crying at how tall her baby had become. Grandma would beg her to stay, but that motion was never seconded.

           

            The good years, it seemed, were unattached to warm-up bands. Filling in for Blue Öyster Cult when Albert Bouchard cut out, something of the same with the circuits of Ritchie Blackmore bands. He provided a couple extra arms to Def Leppard to help get them back on their feet.

            If it bothered him that his daughter bolted just like her mother, and that he constantly excused himself from the steadfast woman who loved him,… if it bothered him…. The grandson could never tell. It bothered him, though, when Grandma would shrug in her mirthless count-your-blessings sort of way.

            Sure, it was a thrill at age ten to go backstage and meet Joey Kramer, an old friend of Gramps who never needed a sub, because Steven Tyler, crashing in, laughed that he’d get back in that saddle again, the way Aerosmith began. Dudes like them esteemed their fellow beat makers—‘veterans of a thousand psychic wars’, as Gramps and BÖC would say, by far his favorite concert piece.

            “By far,” he’d mouth again, as the adolescent tore out of the room.

            It was just last week his mother returned after more than a year away. She towed a sleeping newborn in rag-tag pram and said, in so many words, she couldn’t take him anymore. Grandma was nonplussed but didn’t holler at her; Grandpa did, but partly for his lack of hearing: what the fuck’re you saying? Heroin or otherwise, there was nothing to resolve.

            The adolescent stared at his half-brother sleeping through this din. He tacitly beseeched Grandma not to give in, not to let his mother win, but also not to give his grandpa something else to lose. He had been less shiftless this past year—another post-it infant would drive him to that cruise ship that did the Boston drummer in—not Joey Kramer, but what’s-his-name that died recently.

            “Sib Hashian,” Grandpa read his mind, “and no, I’m not going to drift away this time.”

            He became an instant patron to this rescue dog, walking the pram to one store and the next, upgrading clothes and the vehicle itself—a Mercedes, for heaven’s sake to Grandma’s shaking head. Of course, the thing he couldn’t buy was breast milk, though some stores promised what they had would be about the same. The baby cried incessantly.

            His brother (half, or less) didn’t sympathize. He retreated to his room to study as he usually did and practice for the final concert of his high school life, a farewell tour with just one stop, as he wasn’t sure he’d play marimbas at university. He wouldn’t bring his own set, at least.

            Grandma figured out a remedy for food, which quieted the infant a little bit. Grandpa thanked her and headed for the pub, an hour deserved he shouted as a joke, which maybe softer would have made her smile.

              The concert had just begun when Gramps pulled in with the Mercedes. The baby evidently liked the ride or didn’t want it to stop; the first three minutes of parked whimpering escaped the oblivious man, who strained to listen for marimbas. The audience around him shuffled indications to shush the baby up, one kind soul even rocking the buggy, to no avail.

            The kid started to wail, and Grandpa, accused of having a snootful coming here this way, shushed him overmuch, again to no avail. Strangers whispered “sir, you’ve got to leave,” which lip-read the same at any pitch.

            “I haven’t heard my grandson yet!”

            Titanic they were not, the adolescents muscled on. Some sniggered while others concentrated more intently. If someone asked the blushing percussionist about the scene,  he’d say he knew enough about not enough, just like anybody else. The conductor might agree: ‘The Pirates of the Caribbean’ was the next piece up, and maybe that would be enough to drown the shouting match.

            Someone had the sense to get Grandma on the phone. Grandpa had, by the time she came, settled into a noiseless pout. He told her, even keel, “I paid my dues to be on this side of the stage.” Maybe she didn’t disagree, but, wordlessly she rolled the Mercedes out and into the fuller darkness of the evening.

            They came home separately—an adolescent buzz from the farewell tour and Grandpa stopping at the pub for a drink or two. The house was silent and abandoned. On the fridge, on post-its overlapping, as Grandma often did to guide which meal to microwave or when the milk was to expire, there was this note instead:

You like to cite ‘A Veteran of a Thousand Psychic Wars’

and I do, too—I’ve been living on that edge so long,

beating to a time that few have ever tried to hear….

If peckers play it every day, shakes are destined to go on,

flung afield and grounded, like grandchild number two.

Deem it what you will, I intend to Odyssey this through.

Meanwhile you can be—what’s her name?—Penelope.

            Neither said a word as the old man wobbled to the table and the adolescent to the pantry door. Throw some cheetos at the night, vigil to prepare for. The adolescent pulled a chair and began to talk about the things he had been hoping for—this summer, maybe even into autumn, cleaning up the yard to make it toddler-safe; sure, the infant wouldn’t crawl until the snow would cover over, but maybe weed that hill where one time we tobogganed, and tidy up the shack to clear out broken glass, a trampoline, eventually, and—

            “I wonder why she did this,” he said, absently.

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2017)