Mike With The Withered HandsThe vinyl smells of mildew and damp. It smells like the streets of Rochester. Black vinyl with rugged grooves cut deep in its flesh. The records make me think of the skin he showed me. But I think I'm getting ahead of myself. This is the tale of how I met Mike with the withered hands. And it's based on a true story, I guess. Which means I'm only going to lie in the places where doing so makes it more true. My folks met on a rooftop at a party in New Delhi. They were introduced twice in the same week by different couples that thought they should get together. By the time my dad got around to proposing, my mum was living in London and so he used his old military contacts to hop a flight to Gibraltar, then took a train. The train left him in France, where the Frenchies were thoughtlessly engaged in a national railroads union action which left him stranded. So he hitchiked across France in the big trucks to get to London to propose to my mother. Real fairytale stuff. The year was 1969. In December 1970, Martin Ahrens and Patricia Davidson were married in Biggar Kirk in the lowlands of Scotland. The day was Patricia's 35th birthday. Her brother, Hugh, was the minister at the service. More fairytale. Shortly after, they moved to Washington DC, where Martin briefly resumed his career with AID - the Agency for International Development. Patricia found it pretty tough looking for work in a foreign country, despite an impressive array of language teaching credentials. The employment secretary at a major Washington university actually told her that 'Lady, we don't hire foreigners to teach English.' Patricia left the campus with clouds of steam shooting out of her ears. No. Literally. It was on the news and everything. Her friend Susan Stamberg, of NPR fame, told her that the appropriate response to such ignorance on this side of the Atlantic was to say 'Hey lady, bug awwwwwfff,' a phrase which remains prominent in the Ahrens family canonical lexicon to this day. But Patricia always a little too British for her own good. Eventually, she found some part-time teaching work at Georgetown University, which is where she met John Albertini. John was still in applied linguistics in those days, which means the language teaching end of the discipline, and had recently moved to DC looking for work. Earlier that year he had proposed to his fiancee, Kathi. Kathi had fallen in love with John whilst hanging out with him and some of his Peace Corps buddies after a truly awful concert of French music in Boston a couple years earlier. Her previous suitor, Biker Bob, had taken his Harley and motored west, out of the picture, and that left the field for John. John tactfully took the matter of his proposal up with Kathi's staunchly Catholic father after he and Kathi lost a doubles tennis match to the elder couple. Sweetened by the recent victory, Kathi's dad asked only one question: Had John found religion? A brief examination of his conscience allowed him to produce a 'yes' which was mostly heartfelt, although what Kathi's parents thought a few years back when the Albertini's church in Rochester defected from the mother church by opting to excommunicate themselves is not here documented. Kathi met Martin and Patricia on a couple of trips to hang out with John in DC and found that they were people she was looking forward to spending time with after her marriage and the subsequent move. But such was not to be, for in 1973, the Ahrenses finally left DC. Martin had parted ways with AID in an ignominious matter and Patricia wasn't making enough money to both keep them and maintain Martin's alimony payments to his first wife, Betty-Jean. Martin wasn't in danger of finding any more work with the various branches of the US government. As a last ditch effort, Patricia applied for a job with NPR at Susan Stamberg's suggestion but, at a time when the 'British Invasion' was sweeping rock and roll, television and cinema, it was NPR doctrine to move away from BBC-style programming and develop a more all-American style of programming content. And that meant no announcers with British accents. Like I said, too British for her own good. So they said their goodbyes and moved to York, England and later, when Martin got a job with SCRE - the Scottish Council for Research in Education - back to Patricia's ancestral home and family in Edinburgh, Scotland. A couple of years passed and Patricia got pregnant and had a kid - the last of his generation to be born on either side of the family. A couple years later, Kathi also had a kid, and a couple years after that John took a job at the Rochester Institute of Technology and they moved to Honeoye Falls, just south of Rochester. John moved over into working with deaf children and studying their acquisition of language. Walking in the snow around a set of ponds near his house, skiting dangerously in his untreaded loafers, he explains it this way: 'For years, cognitive scientists thought that deaf people were just like hearing people, apart from not being able to hear. But nowadays there's more and more evidence that that's not quite the case. For instance, a hearing child is born already being able to distinguish sounds in his mother tongue from other vocal noises, and already being able to identify his mother by voice alone. So there's really a rich field of cognitive development which we're able to study amongst the deaf.' At which point he slides violently and goes over ass-backwards in the snow. Yes, it's a cold winter in Rochester when Martin and Patricia's son finally rolls into town to visit the Albertinis. By now, the kid is packing two Master's degrees and has worked in a bunch of weird little occupations - two months in a box factory (E&E), six in a caf�, four developing web-search software for a dot.com that never did startup (K2K), two months software consultancy for various banks and financial institutions in Holland (ABN) and Belgium (FD) - though based in Belfast and London. And most recently two months political canvassing work for the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG), based out of Ithaca, New York. Like his Dad he has a thing for acronyms in his employment. All this before falling into an apparently long-term job at Cornell University doing Bioinformatics, the cutting edge science of the twenty-first century. By now John and Kathi have two kids and they younger one, Dorothy, four years my junior, is about to graduate from Bard college. Her parents are throwing a party for people to come and give her suggestions of what she might profitably do with her life. On the phone I warn them they should talk to Patricia before they ask me to do that; she might tell them my advice isn't worth the hot air it's printed on. Not, as it turns out, that Dorothy Albertini is in any particular need of advice as to what to do with her life. When I arrive at the Albertini homestead - a mid nineteenth century woodframe house which once marked the edge of Honeoye Falls and is now quietly preparing to sink into the soft ground below - she is presiding over a soft-spoken coterie of upstate liberal intellectuals whom Kathi and John know through a variety of connections, including Kathi's business consultancy and John's post at RIT. These are the kind of people who take their retirement in Morocco and own condoes by the Finger Lakes, who send their kids to Bard and Sarah Lawrence, who argue over the comparative merits of the Tuileries and the Royal Gardens at Kew, yet are polite enough to tell me that the Edinburgh Botanics outshine them both. And I have to agree. It only takes five minutes of conversation for me to dope out that Dorothy is a lot more sorted out than me and any advice is going to be both superfluous and curmudgeonly. That lets me off the hook nicely and leaves me free to kick back and enjoy the weekend with no particular sense of unfulfilled duty. On Saturday night, Dorothy takes me to init.one at the Rochester School of the Visual Arts to hear her friend Andy Gilmore perform an acoustic set, and it's outside this venue, smoking a roll-up in the chill January night, that I meet Mike with the withered hands. It happens thus: Andy plays early in the evening ' a set list of ten ambient acts with accompanying visual palaver - and rocks the house in his own introverted style, bald head occasionally dipping forwards from out of the darkness to gleam in the corner of the rectangule of film being projected onto the back wall of the venue. He plays acoustic guitar, fed through some kind of repeater module which echoes a distorted refrain of the previous two bars back to him, so that he is playing a constant medley with his own recent performance, interspersing tight guitar riffs with the sound of a violin bow drawn hauntingly across the strings and the whirr of the motor of a tiny camera with which he occasionally snaps pictures of his rapt audience. Afterwards, the crowd scream 'Andy Gil-MORE!' and the artist, who looks like Michael Stipe might if you stretched him on the rack, rubs his bald head and gazes studiously at his toes. The well-wishers form a ring three deep around him and whilst Dorothy waits her turn I slip outside to smoke a cigarette. Not that I don't wish well, you understand, but we are due to be there another couple of hours and Andy will be around. The need for nicoteine is now. And on the way out the door, rollie formed on the stairs, I interface with this scraggly little black dude, dredd-bag distorted in a weird and lumpy way which makes him look as though he has an l-shaped bar slid through his skull, something wild in the white zone of his eyes amidst the black and the night that tips me off to the element of the fringe in his mind and he petitions me for a cigarette. I say sure and offer to let him roll one and he tells me he can't, his hands are all messed up. To which ends, he pulls off his gloves and tosses them on the ground, showing me hands which are all callous - polished, almost, like the old leather gardening gloves my parents keep at the bottom of the stairs, rough hide worn smooth with the constant rub and gnaw of trowels and secateurs. Only the smooth surface is divided into a checkerboard quilt of sections by deep and jagged grooves, edges bubbled like the troughs truck tires make in new snow, a fractal rope of dead skin. His hands seem too large, as if they are encased in the exoskeletal armour of some beetle, with here and there a peek through the segments to soft and disturbingly vulnerable beetle-flesh within their casing. 'I'm Mike, man,' he says extending this horned edifice to me, 'what's your name'? And so I shake and say 'Robert' and his hand feels like a store mannequin's, wrapped in the rawhide of an old gym horse across which I laboured all sweaty and fat and aged fourteen in another life when I was still juvenile and acned and used to have fantasies about losing control and using my superpowers to injure or kill my classmates because they'd bullied me once too often, once too hard. I light our cigarettes and a couple of RIT students dressed all in fashionable black with black and logoless baseball caps pulled low over their eyes come out the door. Mike turns and asks them if they've got any change they could spare a brother, but I guess they don't hear him because they just keep walking. Mike turns and tells me that I've got a good soul. He's got the wisdom, you know, and he can tell. Can just see a person's soul like that. And the way he says it it's not like you'd think he's crazy. It seems as reasonable as me saying I can design interface software, or that Dorothy can write fiction about her life in Spanish. Just this little thing he's got. 'I've got something for you,' Mike says and makes his way over to a bulging shopping cart I only then notice and starts rummaging through its contents, returning with a grubby stack of a half a dozen 7" singles in aged and tattered brown paper sleeves. While I'm protesting that I can't really accept a gift from him, a girl with spiky blone hair comes out and starts smoking and Mike turns and tells her his hands are cold, asks if she's seen his gloves. I scoop them up off the snow and tell him he threw them on the ground. 'Oh yeah,' he answers, a little sheepish, 'I guess I got mad at them.' 'I guess they do seem like bad gloves,' I acknowlege and Mike says 'Yeah, I'm going to get my good gloves,' wanders over and stuffs them in the cart and returns with a pair of industrial mitts of soft white doe-hide, arm-length and oversized. But he doesn't put them on. Instead, he returns to the subject of his hands. The girl, whose name later turns out to be Katharine, tells him that he can get free lotion at the shelters, but he laughs and says it's too late. It was frostbite that did it, this one time when he was in Alaska and it was twenty-six below zero. (Which, I can't help but calculate, is about -32C.) They'd warned him not to take his gloves off, but they went deep into a chasm out in the Alaskan ice and he just had to take his gloves off to try and touch the walls, to know what they feel like. He only had them off a couple of seconds, but his hands turned three colours at once - black and green and yellow. He thanks God regularly that they turned all three of those colours, because that means they flash-froze through frostbite immediately and the cold didn't get to his blood. If they'd only turned one or two of those colours they would've had to amputate, but fortunately (thank God) they turned all three and so he got to keep his dead beetle-hands, with which he can smoke cigarettes and push his shopping cart through the streets of Rochester and distribute vinyl recordings from 1956 to complete strangers and push his misshapen dredds into their bag. And then he turns to me and says, 'Hey man, you got a good soul. Could you spare a brother a cigarette?' and I say sure and hand the stack of records to the girl whose name will turn out to be Katharine and start to roll him one, ignoring the one he still has tucked between the unfeeling fingers of his left hand and when I hand it to him he takes it and holds out his hand to shake and says 'I'm Mike, what's your name?' and I take it and say 'Robert' and try to stop the nasty upper-middle-class-liberal part of my brain from thinking about the kind of bacterial life that can live on dead skin as we shake and that beetle-flesh rasps against my baby-smooth, lotion-rich skin which is hateful and healthy and white. And then Mike asks me if I've got any spare change and I look in my wallet and there's a Jackson and seven Washington's and I still have another day to spend in Rochester and maybe get the bus home ($17) and so I give him all the ones and try not to think about how Cornell University pay me $35,000 a year to write computer programs which draw pretty maps of the chromosomal structure of tomatoes to facilitate the cutting-edge science of the twenty-first century. And Mike takes the money and slips it into his jeans and drops his two cigarettes in the snow and goes inside to see his buddy who works as a janitor in the School of Visual Arts and I get talking to the girl with the blonde hair, whose name turns out to be Katharine, and who also has a sad story, which is not detailled here. And when I go inside to pee I wash my hands before I touch my penis and try hard not to feel like Lady Macbeth. On Sunday night I sit in own room in Ithaca, New York and sniff those musty records. Mildew and the scent of Mike's shopping cart have intertwined in their skin and their vinyl forms are warped by passage through heat and snow and black of night and other things that might not detain a mailman but don't necessarily benefit an acoustic recording. And I think about Mike and his shopping cart, about the grooves in his hands like the cut of that chasm through the smooth ice of Alaska, like the black rivers I saw in the frozen seas off the coast of Greenland as the 747 swung me from London's night back to the morning of New York City a couple weeks ago. And I think of Martin, who hasn't worked in twenty-three years and who got laid off from AID, from SCRE, who was supported by his wife for the majority of his life. I think of him sitting in his armchair at two am, watching the Open University, learning about the life-cycles of African beetles he will never see. I think of how I am not a feminist but it never seemed strange to me that my mother was the wage-earner and my father the house husband, with his routine of laundry on Tuesdays, shopping on Thursdays, of how he has lived a quarter century away from his friends and his family, of how his daughter from the first marriage won't talk to him anymore because he can't forgive his wife for the lies she told that daughter. I think of how he stopped painting, stopped doing calasthenics, stopped reading, stopped smoking and started wheezing with a terrible asthma. And I try to think of some useful thing that I could have advised Dorothy Albertini to do with her life. Something else Mike told me was about his relationship with this boy. The boy is about fourteen, still in school, and has accepted Mike as his tutor. Mike told me straight up that he has wisdom - not the shaky insincere kind you get from booklearnin' and trips to Morocco, but the real kind, the kind you get on the streets, or in the ice-chasms of Alaska. He'd been training the boy and his grades were up from a C-average to straight A's, he was going to stay in school. 'I got wisdom', Mike pronounced, then asked me again what my name was. And I guess I wonder. How much of it is the rap? How much of this belief in the wisdom of the homeless and the altered is a modern fairytale, an urban myth, a cultural construct of a guilty liberal conscience, fostered by characters like Mad Hettie in Gaiman's 'Sandman', or Tom O'Bedlam in Morrisson's 'The Invisibles' or even my own 'Joan of Arc Wears Boxer Shorts'? Would I let Mike school my son? Would Kathi and John Albertini invite him into their home to advise their so-cool daughter on what to do after she graduated Bard? What do you think Mike? Is it better for her to move to Santa Fe and work with disadvantaged Mexican children or to take a job as photographer aboard a cruise ship? And so I sit, staring numbly at mildewed vinyls, etched with a rising-sun pattern in two tones of brown and think about myths. About how I am scared of the myth of my father. And when my parents found that I'd started smoking, or when I told them how I could never get to class or work on time in the morning, or when my career started out with all these patchy scraps of employment and lay-offs how all my mother could see my father's life repeated, and fear for me and for whoever might have to carry me. How maybe he saw that too and felt a terrible mixture of guilt and embarassment. How horribly destructive some myths and analogies can be. And yet, for Mike, the myth of the homeless Shaman sustains him and I can't question it any more than I can question the inconsistencies in his Alaska story, like whether -26F is really enough to cause three colours of frostbite. All told, Mike gave me ten records:
Jimmy Dean with Jimmy Carroll and his Orchestra - There'll Be No Teardrops Tonight. In my myth of being a writer, their titles form a Burroughsesque cut-up, a shaman's key to understanding the tragic threads of Mike, maybe a key to understanding my father, my sense of self, my relation to my own liberal guilt as I broke that twenty to buy a rum and coke (proceeds to benefit the Visual Arts School) and went downstairs to wash my hands and play with an interactive art exhibit displaying fractal cuboids computer projected onto a white sheet nailed to a wall. But hear in the real world, those records smell of mildew and will probably never play, any more than Mike's withered hands could caress a guitar's strings like Andy Gilmore escaping momentarily from his ostentatious shyness into the freedom of acoustic melancholy.
Dorothy, just live. For the love of Christ, live and stay warm. For the cold will kill you.
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