Excerpt: ‘Thirteen Question Method’

The thirteen question method is the one to use.—Chuck Berry

QUESTION NUMBER ONE: DO YOU WANT TO HAVE FUN?

The woman across the courtyard was screaming. Ribbons of raving like a coyote’s wail. I was in the living room when it started, feet curled beneath me on the sofa. For an instant, her voice sounded predatory, and my heart jolted with adrenaline as if I might be the prey. Then I recognized the modulations, intonations, that elaborate ebb and flow.

It was a Saturday night in late July and the weather had felt tropical for days. Muggy, sultry, heat rising from the pavement in shimmering waves. Out in the canyons, wildfires scorched the dry brush. Control was a word from another lexicon. People say fall is fire season in Southern California, but I think of summer as the meanest time. Tonight, however, the air was clear and I’d had the windows open. Now, I got off the couch and went around the room, closing myself in. I switched on some music. The problem with the woman wasn’t that she was screaming, it was that I had heard it before.

I knew who she was. Sort of. Which is to say I recognized her face. Angular yet also moon-shaped—a different look each time she caught my eye. Hair just below the shoulders, brown with fading streaks of blue. She lived alone, in the unit across the courtyard. Mid-thirties, just a couple of years younger than I was. Slender but full-hipped, a little swagger, stylish in her skinny jeans and ankle boots.

I noticed stuff like that, especially the boots…

It would be a stretch to say she noticed me.

No, that’s not right, I’m sure she’d noticed, in the way we have of noticing people we don’t particularly care about or know. I was just a guy living in another unit, non-descript, going prematurely gray. I had moved here after the implosion of my marriage, in the slipstream of that assault. I had been looking…not for a home, nor for any feeling of belonging, just for a place that I might land.

This apartment was the first I’d looked at: one bedroom, a living room with a kitchen on the other side of a half-wall, counter, a couple of stools. I bought all the furniture—couch, bed, chair, coffee table—in a single afternoon. I just wanted it dealt with, didn’t want to have it weigh on me.

In the final weeks, or months, that had been how I felt about the marriage also; I just wanted it to be finished, whatever it was. Should I stay or should I go, like the old Clash song, which I remembered listening to a lot the year I turned twenty, a couple of decades after its release. I was just starting with the woman who would become my wife. Now, that part of my life was finished. In this apartment I was waiting, waiting for a future that would never come.

The music growling through my speakers was of an earlier vintage: Little Walter, Memphis Minnie, Bessie Smith. My wife used to chide me for living in the past. Why don’t you listen to music from this century? she would ask, not always kindly, but the truth was that I wanted to be reassured. Old music didn’t hold surprises; I knew every riff, every note and flutter. Old music didn’t knock me off my stride, didn’t need to be assessed or figured out. Old music came with its own, familiar associations, as fully formed as memories.

This could be a mixed blessing, as when a recording like Howlin’ Wolf’s “How Many More Years” came up in the mix, as it did now. That was a song I used to belt out in the car, thinking about my wife, angry tears, the product of some projection, building up behind my eyes. This is the other thing about old music, that it encodes our memories, the couldadones and shouldadones, the lines we once believed spoke to our souls. How many more years…what a fucking joke. We couldn’t even keep our wedding vows.

And yet, what did I expect? It wasn’t just her, it was me also, and anyway the point of the song was not about loving someone, it was about how it feels to be unloved. Maybe that was why I responded to it, because it allowed me, when I sang along, to imagine myself into that cycle of regret and recrimination, the way the singer is always singing to himself. As for my wife, ex-wife, well…she didn’t exactly figure into that equation. With her, there had been no regret, no recrimination, no waiting.

One day it was over, and we were done.

Whatever, old news, water under the bridge. Another aspect of my life I could not control. The song came to an end, as they always do, and in the sudden silence, I was aware of a deeper silence: the woman across the courtyard had stopped her screaming, had ceased to make any noise at all. The air in my living room was still and close, as if a blanket had been dropped over the night. I could feel sweat bead in my armpits, at the base of my back. I felt a little dizzy as I drifted toward the windows, thinking I might open them again. Before I could work the slide on the first one, I became aware of a scuffling sound, as if a small animal were burrowing or hiding; as I stood there, it resolved into a quiet knocking at my door.

I looked at the clock—nine thirty. Crossing the room felt like wading through a swamp. Suddenly I became aware of an exhaustion so deep it was all I could do to remain upright. I took a step and then another one, that knocking in the background like a blinking pulse. At the door, I drew a deep breath, ran my fingers through my hair. I knew who it was without even asking, no need to look through the peephole, and sure enough, once I turned the latch, it was she who was revealed. The woman from across the courtyard, two-tone hair hanging in front of her eyes like a cowl, a mask, some form of protection, as if she were hiding in plain sight.

She was pretty, that was the first thing. I had never seen her up close, or not up close enough, had never noticed the lavender that flecked her hazel eyes, and her lids were ringed with kohl. Her hand was raised, fingers arranged into a loose fist, as if I had caught her in the middle of a knock. She wore black nail polish, chipped and frayed.

“Hello,” I said. “Can I help you?”

“I” … she answered, and her voice trailed off, as if she had not spoken at all.

In the distance, a siren, police or ambulance or fire truck, dopplered its careening wail against the hills. The building was in Hollywood, on the south side of Franklin, just below the Magic Castle. Not long after I moved in, there had been a pandemic of car fires in the neighborhood. One night, twenty-one, the next eighteen, and each time I heard a siren now, it brought back those desperate hours, cruisers crisscrossing the neighborhood, a sky that stank of kerosene, or lighter fluid. The guy the cops arrested said he didn’t do it, but he’d been through some shit, a breakup, the loss of a loved one, I can’t remember anymore. Eventually he walked, and disappeared back into the city as if he’d never emerged from it at all.

The woman from across the courtyard didn’t meet my gaze.

“You live across the way, right?” I asked, waving in the direction of her apartment. She nodded but still she wouldn’t look at me. “Is there something” … I went on, and now she glanced up and shook her head sharply, eyes glinting in the light from the living room. “Do you want to come in?” I said.

Inside the apartment, she peered around like a wary animal before turning to me. “I want to apologize,” she started, voice flat and liquid, with a throaty rasp. I gave her a look as if I didn’t know what she meant; she raised her eyebrows and threw the same look back at me. “I know you heard me,” she continued. “I saw your windows go down. I couldn’t help it. Don’t you ever need to scream?”

Ever need to scream? My whole life felt that way, but how could I explain that to someone I’d just met? Anyway, what about last week, or the week before? This was not a one-time thing, after all.

I felt paralyzed, as if I could stay in this room, this position, forever. The fires would arrive, or the hills would come pouring down in an earthquake or a mudslide, and they’d find us, still standing here before the door. It would look like something, like we’d been together, but it wouldn’t be. Just two separate lives, in parallel. How could they know that we had only met this moment, that we had exchanged barely a dozen words before the walls came tumbling down?

And yet, what if all that chaos, that cacophony, led not to devastation but to escape, an unexpected freedom? What if it could set us free? Like the old spiritual promised: My dungeon shook and my chains fell off.

That was what I wanted to happen to me.•

This excerpt appears in Issue 25 of Alta Journal.
SUBSCRIBE