John Henry Days

In room 17, Dave Brown cleans out his thermos.

In room 27, J. Sutter sleeps and dreams of a blizzard of receipts, a million fluttering tallies that he captures on his tongue.

Benny looks at his rack of room keys, remembers screwing the hooks into the plasterboard. Each hook is a room and all the people who will stay there for a time. Lives converge on those hooks.

This weekend is going to be good for the town: that phrase is the going rate. Before his retirement, Josie’s father had been a station man in Hinton for thirty years. They are railroad towns, Hinton and Talcott, and everybody who lives here has railroad in their bloodline. Not so Benny, whose family moved to Talcott when he was a teenager for reasons he still does not understand. He feels out of place when confronted with the railroad nostalgia of the two towns, that is to say nearly every waking moment. But as he waits for the next guest to arrive, he thinks perhaps he is learning to understand the mythology of his adopted home. He is learning what it is to wait for a train.

No one, it seems, wants to go to West Virginia. West Virginia contains many natural wonders. The New River Gorge is spectacular. A number of the bituminous coal concerns have informative tours and dioramas for the curious visitor. The historic stand at Harpers Ferry, to name another thing. And yet. Just last week at a bar on M Street in Washington, D.C., an inquisitive patron could have overheard this conversation between two postal employees:

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

Pittsburgh I wouldn’t mind. It’s a big city. I have a college roommate in Pittsburgh.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

I don’t know why they picked John Henry in the first place.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

You know. They got three white ones, you gotta mix it up these days. Nothing against John Henry. I just wish he was from somewhere else.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan—who’s the other guy?

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

Mighty Casey.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

(sipping lager)

“Casey at the Bat.” I don’t even know who Pecos Bill is.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

(gritting his teeth)

Nobody knows who the fuck Pecos Bill is. He wrestled a rattlesnake.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

You got Babe the Blue Ox in the Paul Bunyan one?

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

That’s exactly what I said. What’s Paul Bunyan without Babe the Blue Ox? But we just did an animal series a few months ago.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

(nodding ruefully)

To take care of the animal lovers. We don’t want to alienate that segment of stamp consumers. Not in Marvin Runyon’s Post Office. Whose idea was this anyway for a Folk Hero series?

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

Who do you think?

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

Yeah.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

(shaking his head)

And he wants some target marketing people to go along. You know his big thing now. I don’t know why it has to be me, but there you have it. I know the beds are going to kill me. I can feel that already. My back is fucking killing me already. It’s enough to make me go—

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

(looking over his shoulder)

Don’t say it!

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

I wasn’t going to say that. I was going to say, go nuts. I actually talked to the son of a bitch mayor of the town. We got a registered letter from the Chamber of Commerce. They sent a registered letter to the Post Office like it’s some kind of threat. The Post Office! They go, “Pittsburgh may be Steeltown U.S.A., but John Henry is Talcott’s native son.” So he gave in, canceled all the Pittsburgh plans that had already been planned out. Christ, this city is a fucking sewer in the summertime.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

It’ll be good for you to get out of the city. Get some good country air.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

Why does everyone keep saying that? Country air, country air, everywhere I go. Watch me get a call from some guy in Minnesota saying we got to do the same thing there for Paul Bunyan. “An office of the United States Government can’t show unfair treatment blah blah.”

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

I have some “relations” as they say, in West Virginia.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

(rubbing a cigarette burn on the bar’s surface)

They’re trying to use the John Henry thing to make the town into a tourist trap. The stamp gave them the idea apparently. All sorts of big fun.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

Tractor pull. Hayride.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

They got Ben Vereen coming.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

(grinning)

Pulling out all the stops. Look at it this way—you get to hang out with the stamp collectors.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

That’s a pleasure.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

You can look forward to that.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

They always got those moist lips.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

They’re always licking their lips because they got all those stamps but they can’t lick ‘em.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

Turns my stomach.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

They always try to be your best friend.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

Like I’m going to give them free stamps.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

Like we got stamps in our pockets that we’re going to give them. Maybe the Weirdo is going.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

If the Weirdo is there, fuck Runyon, I’m turning back.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

Shit yeah.

(gesturing)

Can we get another round?

Everything on him is free. His black Calvin Klein jeans hard won two years prior at a party celebrating the famous designer’s spring line. Stacks and stacks of the jeans, up to the ceiling, but more pertinent than the company’s publicity budget was the fear they might not have brought your size, or another journalist might beat you to your size, thus the resultant frenzy described the next day in Page Six of the New York Post. His T-shirt arrived in the mail one day with an advance copy of Public Enemy’s latest release. Mickey Mouse heads festooned his socks, Goofy his boxer shorts. His shoes bounty from a Michael Jordan–Nike charity event, intended for the disadvantaged kids but everybody helped themselves so J. figured why not. They are a little tight, and pinch.

J. rummages through his canvas bag for some new clothes. They had been washed by Laundry in the hotel he’d stayed at the night before and charged to his hotel bill, which was in turn picked up by the record company that had invited him there. There is always an entity at the top who pays for things. While sifting through his bag, J. notices a log of tissue paper and opens it up. He remembers: at the end of the night he’d wrapped up a small ham sandwich from the food table to save for breakfast. One time he woke up with dozens of cocktail napkins in his pockets, all stuffed down in there. He pulled out the dingy bouquets from his trousers like a hobo magician. The sandwich still looks edible. J. picks off the dried brown edges from the ham, considers for a moment the wilted iceberg lettuce, and sticks the sandwich in his maw. He starts to feel better.

Strung out from the gin and tonic and the nap dream, which was antic and enervating and which he cannot recall, he wonders what time it is, how long he slept. The desk man at the motel gave him a press packet when he registered, checking his name off a list, but J. hasn’t bothered to look at it so he doesn’t know what time dinner is. It is still light out. Someone will come fetch him. Out of boredom he picks up the glossy folder of the press material. In a golden circle, John Henry pounds a railroad spike with a gigantic hammer. He has a big grin on his face. Behind him the other workers are bent over the track, small and human compared to the black titan in the foreground. Building the country mile by mile. This is the forging of a nation. This is some real hokey shit.

After the knock on his door, he hears Lawrence call his name. He reluctantly opens the door for the publicity man. Lawrence Flittings is tall and boyish, attired with his usual elegance in a light blue summer suit. Current New York style straight out of the lifestyle mags; a subscription card could fall from his navel at any moment. His blond hair is compact and slicked back with a particularly obedient mousse, considering the Southern humidity. He smiles at J., green eyes penetrating, and says, “I’m glad you could make it, J. Get here okay?”

Lawrence is a lieutenant at Lucien Joyce Associates, one of the most influential publicity firms in the country. Have their hands in everything from home electronics to beauty products to independent movies, an interdisciplinary and gangster army of hype. They’d publicize the debut twitch of a bean sprout, an unspectacular bud in a field of identical bean sprouts, if the money was right. Lawrence is Lucien’s new right-hand man, replacing Chester, who is now in Development at Paramount. J. still runs into Chester at various events. Chester enthuses about his new job profusely and at length. The man has yet to connive one of his projects into the multiplexes; the scripts in question endure successive drafts, gain talent, lose talent, find new talent and sigh through more drafts. Chester draws up budgets, revises, revises again to accommodate the new people who have come aboard, and then the new people lose interest and the budgets are revised again. He is highly regarded and considered successful.

J. has yet to warm up to Lawrence. He still sees him as the new guy, a judgment that flatters J. somewhere because he has been around for so long. J. tells him he arrived without incident.

“How have you been? I haven’t seen you since the Maverick Records event.”

“The usual. Working a lot.”

“I loved that piece about Whitney Houston. You’re so clever.”

“Thank you, Lawrence.”

“I’m not the only one who thinks so, J.,” Lawrence says, spinning the valve. The publicity man proceeds to name publicists and personages whose events J. has attended on his recent junketeering streak, the ones who have fed and housed J. over the last few months. J. thinks it is his way of saying, I know what you’re up to. A smug little display of Lawrence’s power, a momentary adumbration of the inner chambers. And another indicator that Lucien controls the List. As J. dangles in the door frame and listens to Lawrence’s spiel, he makes a note to share this tidbit with One Eye, should One Eye show up this weekend.

J. nods and listens to Lawrence explain about the shuttle bus that will ferry them to the dinner venue in Pipestem, a resort town a few miles south. J. admits that he hasn’t had a chance to look at the press material yet.

“Unfortunately,” Lawrence frowns, almost sincerely, “I just talked to Ben Vereen’s people and they told me he won’t be able to attend tonight’s dinner. He’s taken ill, apparently. But the town people have lined up some local talent instead, so it should be splendid. It won’t be the Puck Building, of course, but I think you and the boys will enjoy yourselves.”

“I’m sure we will. I don’t suppose Lucien is coming down here, is he?”

Lawrence smiles. “He’s flying in tomorrow morning, actually. He’s very anxious to see how this turns out. We’ve never done a whole town before. And we’ve worked with the government, but not the Post Office. We’re all very excited. I’ll tell him you asked about him.” Lawrence pretends to glance at his watch. Duty done, time for the kiss-off. “I’ll let you go, J., I’m sure you must be exhausted.”

J. closes the door and is disappointed that there are only two locks. That bit about J. being exhausted—was that another dig at his junketeering streak? Streak, jag, binge. He crawls on top of the bed, swiping the publicity folder to the floor. He can expect Dave to make a few Bobby Figgis jokes at dinner. Junketeer jokes and junketeer chuckles all around the table. Public shame to reinforce their community’s values. But behind the jokes there will be their very real discomfort with what he is doing. J. wishes he’d gotten the official lowdown from Lawrence on the exact nature of dinner.

He tries to remember why he started. He sees himself kissing Monica the Publicist at the Barbie event. They were on the second floor of FAO Schwarz in a display of radio-controlled toys. His hand moved down the back of her black publicity dress and he heard a whirring sound. The toys were active, autonomous rambunction, tanks mostly, with a few hot rods from the future thrown in the mix. The robots collided with each other and spun off. They ran into the bottom of shelves and got caught there, unable to understand why they could not progress. They let out whines of frustration. She bit into his tongue and he tasted his blood. The next evening he went to a TNT event for their latest Civil War movie, where he dined from a menu of authentic Confederate Army rations. It was kitschy. Everyone dug it and made ironic comments. The day after that he went to the Palladium to see the hot new band from England and the next thing he knew he was going for the record.

It has been six months since her father passed away, and she feels she may be ready to say good-bye to him. His remains are in storage.

Her father has been dead six months, but she isn’t sure if she is able to make the final step and take care of the items in the storage facility.

Six months after his funeral, it is time to bury her father. The monthly storage fees are a bitch.

It is the first time Pamela Street has been out of the city in two years. She pulls the curtain string, looks out on the quiet grass and cement walkways in front of the Talcott Motor Lodge, looks past the blue slit of the empty swimming pool to the soup line of begging trees, and decides it is a welcome change from the air shaft that howls outside the window of her studio apartment. At this time of year the air shaft rattles with the exertions of air conditioners, reeks with the cooking exhaust of the Chinese takeout place on the first floor of the building. The smoke from below grits the yellow bricks of the air shaft black and brown, decrees the windows de facto antiwindows, portholes onto a sea of grease. She cracks the window of room 14. This is an honest to God breeze.

The funeral was the easy part. There was a mechanism of loss in place, the Yellow Pages were handy. The funeral salesmen brandished multiple-choice sheets, coffin make, viewing rooms by rank, appendixes referring affiliated firms that specialized in exotic disposal if you wanted to scatter the deceased’s ashes into the sea near Ellis Island or out an airplane window circling over Coney Island. That was the easy part, the funeral salesmen were kind and efficient shepherds. But Mr. Street inconveniently died in the last week of the month, which left Pamela only a few days to take care of his things. His landlord, a ballbusting wretch of long standing, had been firm on this point, keen as he was on chopping the newly vacant apartment into two separate units. Pamela returned to the Yellow Pages to find a storage facility for her father’s remains.

Pamela took trains and buses to the edges of New York City. There are rules about the placement of storage facilities, zoning laws. Many have enjoyed former lives as warehouses for industries that no longer exist or have relocated to more appropriate locations outside the city. The reconditioned warehouses now serve as repositories for things of no immediate purpose but infinite unquantifiable value. If you want to know what a person is about, all you have to do is look at what they put in storage. The superannuated but too expensive to throw away. Crates of illegal revolvers. Children who have moved away to start their own lives and have affixed their favors on new objects find their childhood possessions put in storage by parents who wait for their return. People move into new, smaller apartments and exile their too-much stuff into patient solitude until the day of their improved fortunes. People disappear into the world and leave clues in storage. In storage is optimism, everything temporary and defined, it promises a reversal of destiny and yet speaks in the dull syllables of finality, has the eloquence of a cemetery. Occasionally people remember an object during blank afternoons in their new kitchenettes, seek after it, realize that it is in storage and know it is gone forever. The possessions of the dead find their way into the gigantic and solemn storage facilities of New York City, interred there by family and attended by dust.

Pamela met the caretakers, fat cigar-smoking men who had no time for questions. They kept their eyes on the loading doors, greeted movers whom they had come to know during the course of their mutual interest in other people’s things, scolded do-it-yourselfers who stared dumbfounded at the freight elevator doors. No one rushed her when she said she’d have to think about it and get back to them; they understood the traffic of their enterprise and knew there were others after her, just as there were others before her. Men in brown uniforms obligingly gave her tours of the spaces, asked her if she wanted nine-by-eleven or seven-by-five and directed her down dark corridors, switching on hanging bulbs at every turn. They brushed aside the lights’ strings as if they were cobwebs. The men illuminated storage rooms that resembled the interiors of ancient ovens. Some rooms had doors that slid up and down, others had walls of metal grating that allowed her to see the other bins, the stuff of other people, bicycles of dead children, histories of upholstery, lamps from bolder decades, dartboards and family portraits. She couldn’t judge spaces. They asked her if she was storing a studio or a one-bedroom or a two-bedroom, and she told them she was storing a museum.

After visiting a dozen storage places, Pamela decided on Dalmon, which is only two blocks from her house. Only two blocks away her neighborhood changes; Tenth Avenue broods near the river, where the city has different priorities. Dalmon has reasonable rates and even offered to move the material for her, at a small cost. It is very convenient. She met the movers the following Saturday at her father’s apartment in Harlem. The movers were two young Dominican men who smiled a lot at her throughout the job, nice guys. She showed them the boxes that contained her father’s John Henry museum and they urged dollies up the brownstone steps, coaxed carts through door frames, gouged walls. Pamela left the furniture, the plates, the rest of her father’s things for the landlord to clean up, fuck him. The movers drove their van downtown and banished the boxes from her immediate responsibility.

No one wanted it. She made a few inquiries, called universities. Tuskeegee, Howard. She got lost in voice mail, mailed letters that did not receive responses.

She stalled out that spring. Pamela temped aimlessly, a migrant worker harvesting words per minute. The agency called her early in the morning if they had anything for her; otherwise she watched television in her pajamas and contemplated the bills from the storage facility, which distilled her hatred for John Henry into a convenient monthly statement.

Haunted by stuff. Hunched over ramen, in the same clothes she’d worn for days, she felt dazed. She was on the patch. She was off the patch. She was on the gum and smoking in between. She didn’t go out that much, partly because she couldn’t afford to, partly because going out did nothing for her mood. Her friends understood, her friends told her it was natural. It was part of the grieving process. Therapy diffuses: everyone knew the cant, the correct diagnosis. It was natural. It had nothing to do with her father, however, it had to do with John Henry, the original sheet music of ballads, railroad hammers, spikes and bits, playbills from the Broadway production, statues of the man and speculative paintings.

She thought about not paying the bills. When Dalmon finally unloaded the stuff (there must be auctions for such things, an entire culture based on the commerce of the dead or bankrupt, what did they do with what they bought), it would be like they were selling John Henry, not her father. This argument never got very far in her head. It was her father. She paid the bills on time and stopped eating out as much.

In May Pamela received a call from a representative of the town of Talcott, West Virginia. The months after her father’s death marked the longest stretch in her life that she had not heard the name. The woman on the phone was very kind. The town was planning a festival to celebrate their town and John Henry and wanted to know if they could buy her father’s collection of material. She hated the name Talcott and refused, even though it was the obvious solution to her dilemma. The woman, Arlene, was persistent but Pamela did not budge. It wasn’t a matter of money; they made a generous offer. She knew there were reasons, probably pertaining to the so-called grieving process, that she did not want to relinquish her burden.

In the end the matter was decided by the arrival of a handsome invitation from the Talcott Chamber of Commerce. Perhaps a few days out of the city would help her make up her mind.

J. catches up with Dave Brown in the parking lot of the Talcott Motor Lodge. The night is clear and naked and swarming with so many anxious stars that it almost seems to him an invasion, a celestial troop movement auguring nothing good. In the cities it is safe because there are no stars, the light from a million apartment windows provides protection: they reduce the night into a vast purple mediocrity shielding against higher thought. J. nods at Dave, who is suited up in his bulging khaki jacket. Dave starts, “I think that in all my years of freelancing, I have never been to West Virginia. I’ve been all through Europe, South America. I saw Ali take out Frazier in the Thrilla in Manila—remind me to tell you about that sometime—I was one of the first people to interview Vaclav Havel—we talked about Lou Reed. The U.S.S.R., former U.S.S.R., Brazil, whatever. But I don’t think I’ve ever been to West Virginia.”

“Clear night,” J. says.

“Clear now,” Dave responds. “But that’s weather for you.”

“What’s up, Dave? Hey, Bobby Figgis.”

They turn to see Tiny and Frenchie, two fellow mercenaries in their covert war against the literate of America. Hail, hail. They encounter each other on the newsstands, they chafe against one another in the contributors’ notes of glossy magazines, but primarily they meet like this, on the eve of war, hungry, sniffing comps and gratis, these things like smoke from a freebie battlefield on the other side of morning. At stake: the primal American right of free speech, the freedom, without fear of censor, to beguile, confuse and otherwise distract the people into plodding obeisance of pop. Their ideals: the holy inviolability of the receipt, two dollars a word, travel expenses. The junketeers are soldiers, and they hail each other. “What’s up, Dave? Hey, Bobby Figgis.”

“I hope you don’t mind that I told Tiny about your streak,” Dave says. “I ran into him at the ice machine earlier.”

J. shrugs. He appraises his comrades. “Tiny, Frenchie. Good to see you.” The law of nicknames: contradictory or supremely apt, born of accidents and sticking for life or arbitrary and annoying. Tiny, of course, is not; he earned his nickname by not being so. At three hundred pounds, the man is hunger, gorging and grazing at the free spreads of life. If any person deserves to be on the List, it is Tiny, a creature who has evolved into the perfect mooching machine, leaving no glass undrained or napkin unstained by chicken skewer residue. He sucks up freebies in a banquet room like a baleen whale inhaling colonies of hapless plankton, swooping primeval and perfect, eyelids blinking slowly in the unlit fathoms of media. The dirigible prowls the food and travel magazine circuit; as a party trick he has been known to throw darts at a map of the world and name a princely dish native to that region, belching up its flavor on command, an archival gust from deep in his belly. Not to mention his thoroughly unwholesome fascination with curry.