Ice pick | Chapter 1 | roman

But they said nothing at all, and that was the last straw. They pretended nothing at all had happened. Perhaps they were relieved once my mother had gone, but then can’t have supposed it was a bundle of fun for me as well. After all, she had given birth to me, so it was not as simple as my having sight of her as sauntered out of the entrance door. I’m serious. Who gives a shit about how moths and fathers step in or out of doors at our place the way Mother did. I was the first in the family over four generations to know both my parents. That’s a trfle embarrassing, I reckon.

 Translation by Tim Wilkinson

Man! If you’re curious, I’ll tell you: everything is hopelesly crummy, but I have an strong feeling that before long something greasy-new will happen; the kind of thing I can’t even imagine. It is no secret, but for longer than I care to remember the air around me is at a standstill, yet I’ll take bets that within a close deadline the world will be set dead against me. Don’t ask if that will be good or bad for me: I’ve no idea. One thing is for sure: as of right now, the situation is ultra-shitty. In recent days all I have done is read. Right through the night, non-stop and without meals, I only went into the yard to take a piss: that is what Grandpa Coolbirth — if he were still alive — would also do; sally out onto the street or piss his pants and tug them off at the destination for us rather to throw in a joint or two.

     Fuck it! I read so much that by the time I go to bed I have black rings doing the hullahoop before my eyes; I am not reading because I have nothing better to do, but because for the time being I can’t do anything else; between us, that before long I’m going to throw the towel in; until that happens I am devouring books that deal with staggeringly big bunders. Of course, some folks will chant “every cloud has a silver lining” — but if you really want to know a cloud is something which has no lining. It’s crummy because thee is nothing good in it. Isn’t that so? The fact that that’s the case is only blabbed about by people who are faking it and think such stuff and nonsense will make them look wiser guys than those who have a positive attitude to life but in reality don’t subscribe to it n any way, just parrot what others say; that’s how the rot is passed on ftom father to son, check it out — it shrivels one up horribly There are some people, like Casimir or Dick,who can regirgitate that sort of tstuff every hour on the hour.

     I’ve got a collection of disgusting stock phrases. Have a positive stance to life? What tripe, as if life were a dilemma of Galvani’s theory, or as if Faraday and Edison were to clink glasses.

     How many times have I heard the old saw: Money won’t buy you love.

     You’ve heard it slready? It’s fair bet that whoever says that has never had to get refunds on empty bottles and is just shooting the breeze. D’you know what? If I hear just one mpre time, I’ll crack the person’s jaw.

     “Then gimme some money! Don’t be mean, what’s a buck or two to you? I can string a grand out for six months, but you wouldn’t even notice if your bookkeeper ripped off two grand. Your business partner plays cards in Vegas on your account, even yor driver pays for tarts from your dough. You may already have a good idea that anyone who can is ripping you off, incluing you secretary for a grand a month and your Cuban home help for two bars of soap every day. I guess you can afford that and its factored into your business strategy, though it’s somethin else that the pizza delivery man has bonks your wife every ow and again. You’ve never tumbled? The freezer is full, even the tofu there is going off, what do want — the moment you go off into talks — a pizza for? What column does that fall under in your ledger? Those who live around you are only excited by what trickles down, and now you tell me that begrudge me the odd dollar or two for me to test whether your money can make me happy for at a few hours? For me to be able at least to eat as many waffles as I can stuff in — you deny me that? You little shit, with your holier-than-thou’s, you scumbag. If only you had kept your trap shut!

     It would have been cool to see dishing that out to a Wall Street guru. It would be great bellowing until the pupils of your eyes blow out into well cylinders so I might even boldly leap headfirst in like Superman, through your eyes and into your idiotic brain, like Keanu Reeves does into the stomach of Agent Smith in The Matrix, just in order to totally screw you up, like shit in a lavatory bowl.

     Of course, I know I wouldn’t have the bottle to go that. It was for nothing that Grandpaw was constantly encoraging me, lugging me from bar to bar: the sad truth is I’m lily-livered. Not scared shitless, just lily-livered. If a revolt were ever to break out in Oakland, d’you know what my role would be? I would be dusting the barricades with a white rag. In any case, why would I holler when I know a lummox like that won’t part with a cent.

     Fair enough, now I haven’t a bean — neither a lot or a little — it’s true that money won’t buring happiness. Right now it’s down to books. T’s aother matter that those, to, were bought for money, apart from those sent by my mate Goblin. But goldarn it! He himself shelled out for them.

     In any case I carry on with the reading even when I’m flush with cash. I like books There may be several reasons for that. One is genetics. Bit by bit, we are finding that DNA has a hand in everything. Gogol? Long gone are the days when we popped up from his jacket pocket. More and more it seems that we all burst out of Friar Mendel’s peas.

     That stands out particularly with my family. I might say that Granny hewed a book worm out of me, but it wasn’t as simple as that. Grandma Coolbirth was, in fact, Pa’s half–sibling, only as it happened twenty-five years older than him. Since my ancestors just scampered around like poisoned mice and they had no time left for me, when it came down to it for the most part it was her it was who brought me up, so she may well have had a part in my getting hooked on books, despite which it was her person that was decisive, as my paternal father, John Coolbirth by name — in the family he was only ever called Pop — likewise dealt with books: he started out as a bookbinder before going into printing. Supposedly he had printed The Catcher in the Rye in 1951, though Goblin reckons it was published in New York City. What is even closer to the bone, his mother, the first Ina Coolbirth, my great-grandmother, was a librarian. On my reckoning, that works out at at four generations. Just like a dynasty of physicias — not one who wasn’t a bibliophile. Upbringing alone won’t keep a love of books going for more than a hundred years, it has to do with the genes, man! Who knows, perhaps the whole family is descended fro Gutenberg.

     Don’t go thinking it was easy for me to work all this out, but since 2009 I have been absolutely in the picture, In that year both Granny and ny father kicked the bucket. Here I’m talking about a 79-year-old and a 53-year-old adult male. Mother simply left left me in the lurch two years before that.

     “I can’t stick breathing the same air as your Gran. You’re a grown-up now, Dan. Your Dad, God forgive for saying it, is nothing more than a zombie. Some day you’ll understand that I’m driving at. You have all got Angelica; I’m no use to anyone here.”

     So saying — no kisses, no hugs, no promises — she hung the key to the apartment on the coat peg by the door, alongside the picture of Roosevelt and strolled out of our lives. The old man did’t leave even a scribbled note. As a result there were three of us left in the house from 2007.

     My father slaved away constantly whereas Gran tramped around town the whole day long. By the evening the pad could come to life, with Gran staggering back, her lipstick usually smudged, often a bit tipsy, every now and again being broght back in a taxi by her young friend, Angelica Warren. Sometimes Angelica would have supper at our house, so one way or another we ran into each other for a couple of hours almost every evening; all the same. It was just as quiet as in the mornings. As if we weren’t even there.

     In the old days evening were a time for the usual program of incedible putting down to start up.

     “ God, Ina! You’ve been hittiing the bottle again,” my mother would say.

     “Yes. At least eight Bloogy Marys. So what?”

     “Doesn’t it strike you that it would be better if Dan didn’t see you like this?”

     “My darling girl, in case you hadn’t noticed, Dan has passed his twentieth birthday and he might be a fully fledged man if you paid a bit more attention to him. You’d be better acquainted with him if at least you spent the weekends at home instead of in self-knowledge groups. And, of course, John wouldn’t have to look on the house as a motel.”

     “D’you think that I could for once have my supper in peace?” muttered my old man, but only to himself, keeping on my stomach heaved. In the end I would slink off to my crib and only come out when everyone was asleep.

     Incredible as it may sound, once my mother had bitten the dust the quiet of the evenings was more disturbing than the rowing had been. It would have better if my old man had blown fuse, once at least, and beween two slices of toast, out of the blue, would yell out, “Screw your mother!” and then carry on munching his toast and calmly didding his spoon into his 2^1/₂– minute boiled egg.

     Gran could also have pronounced, with wise nonchalance, “Don’t pay any attention to him, my boy! It’s better not to.”

     But they said nothing at all, and that was the last straw. They pretended nothing at all had happened. Perhaps they were relieved once my mother had gone, but then can’t have supposed it was a bundle of fun for me as well. After all, she had given birth to me, so it was not as simple as my having sight of her as sauntered out of the entrance door. I’m serious. Who gives a shit about how moths and fathers step in or out of doors at our place the way Mother did. I was the first in the family over four generations to know both my parents. That’s a trfle embarrassing, I reckon.

     Alongside the fact that Mother went off to lead a happy life, that was less painful than the deaths of my old man and Gran two years later. For that very reason I found the keeping stumm about it all the more unbearable. You wanna know why? I can almost hear Mother rabbiting on: “You reckon you’d be better off without me? You reckon that you can stan on your own feet? Well don’t let me stop you! Eat what I cook.”

     And when all we did for weeks was mess around, it seemed absolutely that we were going to stew in our own juice and Mother had been right: without her things were a whole lot worse, and her leaving was a punishment. Maybe for Gran, too. The way it looked we came unstuck. You know what? That’s exactly what did. By keeping stumm. Came off badly. You wanna know why? Because that’s the way Mother wanted. If only we could have thrown fits for at least a few days. Of course, I was also of shit-all use: I stood in the door, it rained into the hall, and I was dead calm as I watched her hanging the key on the coat peg, and I even trundled the wheeled trunk to the taxi instead of bawling at her:

     “Get the fuck outa here!”

     The taxi wasn’t prepared to hang around for even a couple of minutes in front of the house, it being in a no-parking zone, but parked two blocks further, the road was slippery with mud bubbling out of the drains, Mother trotted in front of me under her umbrella whilst I, like a poodle, followed her step for step, clattering along with the wretched trunk. I didn’t utter a word. Trunk at the back, Mother in front, in the car door —whoosh! — car vanishes. Not so much as a glance at me.

     It’s hard to imagime the hush which descends on a house from which before long first Gran catapulted out the, a month later Father. It’s hard to imagime the bleeding hush which descends on one. If I told you, then you would also flip.

     What coul I turn my hands to? I didn’t even feel like reading; all I did was leaf through the humungous amount of books I inherited. The one day I caught myself paking up all the family documents. I soon came to see that nothing was of any value, nothing was where I should be — and by the time spring came round I had sketched out the family tree on the back of some Xmas packaging paper with poinsiettias for decoration.

     Since 2009 I have aware that not counting a Phineas Gage from New England, it all started with another Ina Coolbirth, my great-grandmother, probably around 1895. That woman, the founding matron of the whole family must have been an extremelt promising woman, and uncannily she was also a librarian, and. What’s more, pecisely in the same Webster Street library as Gran. Great-grandma’s son was John Coolbirth I; in other words, Gramps not only spent his schoolboy years in the library, but he ws actually born there. One day after closing the birth pains so suddenly took hold of great grandma that she collapsed on the spot and she only struggled to her feet again after giving birth to Gramps next to the travel books shelve.

     It is not necessarily of no matter where one is born. For most of us it is in hospital. For Jesus it was on a farm. For Gramps — a spcial case — in a library. It was useless nagging grandma about the “Joseph,’ she kept that strictly to herself. It couldhve bee anyone from the postman, the Holy Spirit, or one of the Rockefellers, even John L. Davie of the House of Representatives, who like a Croesus, financed the Webster Library from his own pocket and, by no chance at all, let’s say, the Salvation Army. Since my great-grandmother was a spinster and Gramps a bastard child, that was where they continued to live for quite a long time. My grandfather, therefore, learnt how to climb on the parquet floor of the library off which not much before Great grandma Coolbirth had mopped up the forewaters. The signs are that Gramps did not land on his head, but one thing is certain that as a youth more than a few times he brushed against a big novel. It’s no surprise that he becae a bibliophile. Thanks to that my father inherited from him — and me from my father — roughly two hundred volumes written in who knows what language.

     Goblin reckons that Gran’s inheritace includes one of the missing manuscripts of Aristotle. If that’s true it would save an worries for a lifetime. It would be like finding a Titian or a Rembrandt in the garden shed. It’s hard to work out whether Goblin was pulling my leg. I don’t think so. For a start he is not given to joking, not that a grazer of classical philology can’t have a sense of humour. For another thing, he was acquainted with my Gran earlier than I was, so who knows what he picked up from her ages ago. He recockons a lot of stuff did a disappearing act duing World War II about which not a soul knew until then. Paintings, stamps, maps, and codices came to light from the most unexpected places, from attics and cellars. Onr part had been syolen by the Nazis, another part by the Russkies. Then the Nazis robbed the Russkies, and still later the Russkies robbed the the Nazis, at which we Americans also stepped in and stole everything back from everybody in order to give everything back to everybody, except a few bits and pieces remained in our hands all the same. In the inal analtsis it is conceivable that in that chaos something like that about which previouslt nobody knew ended up in the States; it is quite another matter how anything would have landed up at Gran’s of all places. In other words, one ought to get an expert to look through the inheritamce, because I have found nothing of special note, or more exactly only a pistol about which I could not decide whether it had my father’s or Gran’s.

     Granpa Coolbirth sailed in my great-grandmother’s side wake in more than one respect. For a start, he made his living from bookbinding, later founded a printing firm, but eveb more interesting than that at the age of 34, in 1930, the worst possible time, the nadir of the world economic slump he knocked up a girl, who for her paart smply vanished like camphor. The abandomed kid was Gran, whom my grabdfather named Ina anfter my great-grandmother. At 72 years of age, great-granny could only help by looking after her grandchild, young Ina while Gramps scraped together a bite to eat.

     For Gran & Co. Roosevelt was a god, with his picture even hanging in the hall as it was thanks to him that Pa was left standing in the Depression. At the time of the New Deal the Public Works Administration put in hand a program of large-scale construction. That was when we became not far short of New Yorkers since manual workers were recruited first of all for constructing La Guardia airport. Gramps, however, hesitated. Leave the West coast? That’s going a tad too far! We then almost became Angeleros as in round two jobs were being advertised for the Griffith Observatory. Gramps was pleased as Punch as Los Angeles was almost the next-door city, and he even got as far as packing his suitcase. He planned that if he landed the job even grandma might move out there later on. He walked out to the station at dawn, an infant in his arms, and as he was standing around on the platform a fellow came by who, likewise on the authority of the PWA, was recruiting workers for San Francisco as they had also dusted down a plan for the Golden Gate Bridge that had been cherished for 50 years. My grandfather chased after the fellow and within minutes had been added to the list, hurried home with the trunk, handed Gran over to my great-grandma, and started work that very day. By the afternoon he was shoveling in the foundations of one of the towers and working hard at pushing a wheelbarrow, but the next day his wrist joints had repetitive strain injury. As a result we remained San Franners.

     Let it be said in his favor, though a printer by trade he crried out the roughest jobs and was devoted in bringing Gran up. However, he did not give up attempts to procure a woman. There’s no way of knowing what went wrong, but it was perilously late in the day that he found a fitting mate, then Gran was already 24 and was working. It wasn’ that he was seeking a woman to take care of the little girl. Still, in 1954 up popped Jessica Vernieu, who in 1955 gave birth to my father. He was dogged by bad luck. It was just the time he coul have let go of his daughter’s hand and lived in a happy marriage, as the printing works that he had bought bak was flourishing mightily, at which point Jessica went and died on him. That was too much. Gramps was crushed.

     See for yourzelf: you pull yourself together seven times, and in the end you don’t give shit. Not even if you do a handstand and shit yourself. And then a New Deal or Woodstock onlt comes along once. In truth, Gramps was not in as crummy a position as it looked. True, hecwas 50 years old by then, and a brat had been left on his hands, but by then his daughter had reached 25 years old.

     One day he plonked himself in front of his daughter: “I brought you up. Now it’s your turn. Raise your younger brother in my place,” and so saying he pressed the infant into her arms.

     Subsequently he disposed of the printing shop that he had managed so nicely in the boom years, put his subsistence into stocks and shares, and resettled in Montana, near the Canadian border. It was no use fleeing, however, because fate overook him there as well. Maybe his conscience would also not leave him in peace, for ultimately the big truth is that it ditched my father, then he squandered it, maybe so that Gran should by no chance be able serve him back. According to Gran, after that he did no work worth mentioning, only swigged at liquor and read; as long as his eyesight allowed, he would go hunting; in the end, at the age of 74, he vanished at Flathead Lake, a vast freshwater lake in western Montana which is bordered by spookily dark forests. Most old buzzards go soft in the head of their own and wander off without any reason into the wide world, but Dad’s case was not shabby like that. So far from it that it is worth jumping back in time.