Know Your Beholder

by Adam Rapp

Genres: Humor & Satire; Coming of Age

Synopsis

From a Pulitzer Prize finalist comes a hilarious and heartbreaking novel about a musician climbing back from rock bottom.

As winter deepens in Pollard, Illinois, thirtysomething Francis Falbo is holed up in an attic apartment while recovering from a series of traumas—his mother’s death, his beloved wife’s desertion, and his once-ascendant rock band’s irreconcilable breakup. He hasn’t changed out of his bathrobe—the uniform of a life in default—for nine days. All he has left is his childhood home, whose remaining rooms he rents to a cast of eccentric tenants. Francis becomes increasingly entangled in their lives, with results that are disastrous, hysterical, and ultimately healing.

Know Your Beholder is an uproarious and affecting novel about what we do when our lives have crumbled around us and we must collect the jagged pieces to begin anew. Seldom have our foibles and our efforts to persevere in spite of them been laid bare with such heart and hope.

Release date: March 3, 2015

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 352

Sample

 

I haven’t left my house in almost a month.

It’s either Tuesday or Wednesday—most likely Wednesday—and three days ago a foot of snow fell on Pollard, Illinois, and its surrounding farmlands: storybook snow as soft as sifted cake mix. Although an old municipal plow has scraped down the street exactly twice—the driver’s head enshrouded in wool—clearly it’s been an effort in futility as the snow continues to fall at a dizzying rate.

I’m in the attic. I’ve been spending the last few hours counting the number of people laboring down the middle of my street on cross-country skis. Laboring, not gliding, as one might expect from a sport that uses a pair of long, preternatural runners. There have been seven skiers so far. Velocity-challenged and hunched over, the cross-country skier fights the snow, driving his poles into the frozen crust, desperate for purchase. The snow doesn’t welcome his pursuit the way it coaxes the downhill skier with its powdery, virginal shimmer. It bewilders rather than bewitches.

The cross-country skier exists as if trapped in a purgatorial silent movie.

It’s strange how full-body winterwear makes gender difficult to identify. Each goggled cross-country skier seems androgynous, machine-like, somehow pneumatic. It appears that the sport is a solitary pursuit, as I have yet to witness duos or trios. Perhaps there is something about the threat of being snowbound in a small town that inspires the lone adventurer? Where are they going, one by one? Are they skiing away from lives of ill repute? Or to a lover? Or simply to the library to return overdue books because the car won’t start?

Whatever the case, those lone skiers, as they probably already know, are not going to find much in Pollard aside from Our Lady of Snows shrine, an embarrassing, miniaturized counterfeit of the shrine at Lourdes, France (ours looks more like an interstate rest stop for science-fiction enthusiasts than a place of pilgrimage dedicated to Christ’s mother), and an enormous bookbindery on the outskirts of town.

What snow does to a small town like Pollard is vastly different from what it does to a mountainside. Whereas it beautifies the mountainside, beckoning photography and sporting life and teams of people in expensive, pastel-colored, waterproof Gortex to gather on outdoor lodge decks and drink mulled wine and hot toddies, it shuts the small town down, rendering it municipally constipated.

Mountain snow has the power to be painted. Small-town snow just gets dirty.

Architecturally speaking, the houses on my street are sort of interesting in that they are mostly mid-nineteenth-century, three- to four-story Victorians in various states of structural and aesthetic decline. The less compelling houses are a pair of low, flat Tudors and something four lots down that looks unfortunately log-cabinish. From my vantage point (the attic), the neighborhood has been suddenly blessed with an innocent gingerbread-house quality, featuring meringue-like gables, sugar-glazed finials, and frosted yards. Things look downright Alpine. But Pollard is no mountainside. Soon it will be dirty.

It’s warm and dry here in my attic room and the portable humidifier beside my writing desk issues a calming, attendant hiss and the occasional gurgle. It smells cedarn up here today. I’m dressed in two pairs of slightly yellowing, old-school, waffle-patterned long johns (long johns on long johns, if you will), a moth-bitten, Brillo-pad-gray cardigan sweater, a pilling wool winter hat the color of kelp that mostly hides my asinine hair, merino Ingenius camping socks, and a light-blue terry-cloth bathrobe that has become a low-grade monastic cloak. It is definitely the outfit of the nonattendant. The uniform of a Life in Default.

I am also now sporting a beard, and have developed a very real anxiety about it smelling gamy, like wet squirrel or coon. Beard pong can be an acute social/hygienic problem and when I encounter my tenants at the front porch mailboxes or in the basement laundry room I make an effort to keep at least an arm’s length between us. Though I twiddle and stroke the beard compulsively, I don’t know what it looks like, as I’ve been doing my best to avoid mirrors and reflective surfaces of any kind out of fear of what I’m liable to see staring back at me. I’m starting to imagine the beleaguered Civil War soldier. Or the banished indie record store warlock. Or a derelict from the northwest United States. Like one of those Olympia, Washington, societal dropouts who eats only frosted Pop-Tarts, living out a nineties grunge fantasy. The beard is mangy and random, with riptides and lots of wiry rogue strands.

The word wayward comes to mind.

But I’m a musician, so doesn’t that make my current state okay? Musicians have beards. And many musicians live outside of time. There’s Time and then there’s Musician’s Time.

This morning the molten plates of my personal history took a tectonic shift when I realized it’s been nine days since I’ve removed the bathrobe. Yes, attired in ancient terry cloth, I’ve slept, eaten, landlorded, gone to the bathroom, washed dishes, and guitar-noodled for some unfathomable number of hours.

One of the strange symptoms of even the mildest form of agoraphobia is that it gets progressively difficult to distinguish between personal and household odors. Beyond my beard, which I really can’t smell, as I’ve no doubt grown immune, the rest of my person stinks of the attic’s aged cedar, fiberglass insulation, and the faint aroma of dead mice. Mold memory. A skosh of Lysol-covered bird death. At least I’m still brushing and flossing. My mother used to say that when you give up on your teeth you might as well lie down in a ditch and wait for the dirt. I guess I’m still keeping that proverbial ditch at bay.

I inherited this house from my father, Lyman Falbo, after he retired from the accounting firm Falbo Financial Management, which he founded in the early seventies with his college roommate, Big Stu. Three years ago, upon selling his share of the company and handing over the reins to Big Stu (now Skinny Stu after turning vegan), Lyman took his second wife, Sissy Bisno (now Sissy Falbo), to live out their days in a cream-colored, heavily stuccoed ranch house in a cul-de-sac retirement community in Jupiter, Florida.

Sissy, a waggly-breasted, six-foot Lutheran widow, boasts burled hands, the shoulders of a veteran lumberjack, and a face somehow reminiscent of a young Garrison Keillor. I’m convinced that if I were to challenge her in any number of one-on-one combat exercises, she would put me on my ass six ways to Sunday. Her bidirectional, east-west breasts jiggle around so much underneath her many lilac-colored church sweaters that you have to wonder about not only their shape, volume, and bra strategy, but also their quantity. Does she possess three breasts? Five? Some large, some small, some upside-down or sideways? She’s forty-nine but looks sixty-five, and I would swear one arm is longer than the other. I keep looking for the thing that attracted my above-average-handsome, sixty-two-year-old, semi-wealthy, charming-in-a-golden-retriever-sort-of-way father, but I’m at a loss.

Lyman claims she’s a great swimmer, uncorks a deadly tennis serve, and possesses a beautiful singing voice. Her former husband, the late Southern Illinois meat-packaging mogul Chuck “the Bull” Bisno, died under the knife, during bypass surgery following a massive heart attack, and Sissy and Lyman “found each other” (the agreed terminology of their first encounter) at the weekly Wednesday night Grief Support Meeting held in the basement of First Lutheran Church. They fell in anodyne love shortly thereafter.

Why Lyman, a stalwart Roman Catholic his whole life, suddenly decided to sample the First Lutheran programming is anyone’s guess. My dead Roman Catholic mother, Cornelia, would be horrified.

Cornelia Wyrwas and Lyman Falbo fell in love in Chicago. Having just graduated from Kansas State University, Lyman was on an entry-level-job interview at an accounting firm in the Loop. Cornelia, seventeen at the time, was changing linens at her parents’ small bed-and-breakfast on Milwaukee Avenue, where Lyman was staying. I don’t know the moment they found each other, be it on the stairwell, in the dining room, or at the threshold of some potpourri-scented linen closet, but I imagine them making love on the B&B’s creaky antique furniture, Lyman covering Cornelia’s mouth, my virgin mother biting his fingers and bleeding onto fresh sheets (which she would later have to abscond with and drop in some far-off Dumpster she would walk to in hand-me-down shoes), the two of them spooning awkwardly afterward, my father inhaling the scent of her blackberry hair, the light from a bedside harlequin lamp spilling softly across their young, postcoital faces, my mother whispering Polish into the musk of his boyish neck.

Lyman’s new wife likes to make casseroles and Lyman likes to wear suits even when he’s not within twenty miles of an office building. They like this about each other and they both like that they like this about each other.

Since meeting Sissy, Lyman has been taking a large daily dose of Lipitor. He also rides a stationary bike until he starts to wheeze asthmatically, and eats a low-cholesterol, high-fiber diet.

Despite her seemingly plentiful mammae, Sissy and Chuck Bisno never had children, so marriage was a relatively clean move for Lyman. In the twilight of his life, he pretty much gets to have his new lady all to himself.

Based on an early visit to their Florida home, this is what I observed: Sometimes they play gin for a buck a point. Sometimes they’ll watch PGA golf and she’ll sit on his orthopedically replaced knee and he’ll position his hand between her gargantuan shoulder blades and call her his “girl” as if he’s talking to a beloved German shepherd. She doesn’t mind his taking his post-dinner carminative pills in front of her, and doesn’t mind even further when, while encamped on the living room sofa (Sissy crocheting scarves for Midwestern relatives, Lyman watching his prized DVD boxed set of B. J. and the Bear), he releases farts that sound like a drunk attempting a blues scale on a waterlogged clarinet. Lyman will even pat his tummy and send her a thumbs-up down the sofa.

It took more than a year after they left for Florida to rid the house of the scent of filterless Pall Malls and hemorrhoid ointment. The Preparation H was my mother’s, bless her heart, and even though she died of a brutal, soul-crushing stomach cancer two years prior to my father’s leaving-slash-retirement, I believe Lyman still hoards tubes of the ointment, whose strange medicinal odor of mink oil and boiled turnips serves as a sentimental reminder of his true love and substitute mother. The Pall Malls were Lyman’s and I’m convinced that despite his grisly alkaloid teeth, receding, stout-colored gums, and two-packs-a-day habit, he will live to be a hundred and twelve.

The house is a Queen Anne Victorian with a wraparound porch; deep, overhanging eaves; decorative milled panels; pointed dormers; lots of well-glazed, double-paned, stormproof windows; authentic nineteenth-century wainscoting; ample parking space; three ancient climbing trees; and a handsomely paneled, industrial-carpeted, mold-free basement that has never flooded. Despite recent insulation upgrades, it still gets cold in the winter but stays somewhat cool through the humid part of the summer. In other words, heating it is a hellacious money-sucking bitch, but it’s tolerable in August.

During my time on earth, the house has survived three tornadoes, a first-floor electrical fire, an authentic wild boar, and a wave of resilient, late-seventies termites that took six months of an archaic baiting process to get rid of.

In the house’s original state, there were three upstairs bedrooms and one on the first floor, just off the living room. Now the first floor functions as a single-family unit. A year ago I converted the second floor into a pair of one-bedroom apartments, adding a dividing wall of Sheetrock, a bathroom, and two kitchenettes, whose need for a shared wall and shared plumbing and electricity eliminated my boyhood bedroom. Three months before that, half the basement was outfitted with a false gypsum ceiling, the industrial carpet, pairs of bathrooms and kitchenettes, and eight panels of Sheetrock, to prepare for the two one-bedroom units down there as well—humble, dormitory-like, but very livable—I’d even say cozy. Although I’ve been running oscillating fans for weeks, however, the basement still smells like joint compound and bleach.

My first basement tenant is scheduled to move in the day after tomorrow. His name is Bob Blubaugh, which sounds like some unfortunate character in a bad American independent film. I don’t know much about him beyond that, like me, he is in his midthirties and, unlike me, he was an alternate on the 2002 American Olympic luge team at Salt Lake City. Over the phone his voice was soft and clear, verging on soprano, and I imagined it emanating from someone with an inflamed, permanently chapped face.

Also living in the house are my ex-wife’s brother, Bradley, who stays on the second floor; the Bunches, a former circus couple who rent the ground-floor family apartment; and Harriet Gumm, an art student who occupies the other second-floor unit.

The remaining basement unit will be filled soon. Just this morning I received three responses to my Craigslist posting, which makes eight total. Of those eight, I will winnow it down to five and I predict three of them will actually show up for a look-see. It’s winter break at Willis Clay and outside of a man with the unfortunate name of Victor Mold, each person who responded to my ad claims to be a student, which means they will likely be financed by their parents, which is as close to a sure thing as it gets when it comes to renting out a basement apartment with a false gypsum ceiling during the worst economic crisis in recent history. Tomorrow I’ll do some reaching out via e-mail.

In the attic, to which I repaired almost two years ago, after my ex-wife’s departure, I have a twin bed (the one from my childhood) with a good mattress. The small bed affords me a surprising amount of floor space. I have a wall of paperbacks, mostly twentieth-century American fiction, arranged alphabetically by author; a dozen binders containing my complete baseball card collection; two wave-shaped CD towers; a few crates of beloved vinyl; and a midlevel stereo system featuring a Crosley Tech turntable finished in fine mahogany, a mini-CD jukebox, and a pair of state-of-the-art Polk Audio R300 tower speakers. I have an unremarkable stuffed chair (burnt-orangish and corduroy) and a vintage freestanding gooseneck Zoalite reading lamp that Lyman didn’t bother taking with him to Florida. It’s the lamp my mother used to read under in the living room, and I honestly believe that having it near him would make him feel like an infidel.

Other possessions worth mentioning: My authentic ’69 Les Paul Epiphone electric guitar and a small Marshall kick amp, on top of which rests a wireless telephone and analog answering machine from the late eighties that requires authentic minicassettes and makes people sound trapped and desperate, as if they’re transmitting vocal arrangements from outer space.

I haven’t changed the strings on the Les Paul in over a year and I recently sketched it in the margins of the very manuscript that I am using to chronicle all of this. (Whatever this winds up being—a novel, a confession, a grand, self-indulgent, one-sided palaver—is anyone’s guess.) Sketching things that historically resonate with me is perhaps my one sentimental guilty pleasure. I sketch my ex-wife a lot. I am not a very good artist. My faces have a tendency to look unfortunately lagomorphic. As a child I was fascinated by Watership Down, and harelips seem to plague my drawings of human faces.

No one has seen the margins of whatever this is, so between my guitar and the various curves and planar pleasures of my ex-wife’s anatomy, I’m confident that the drawings’ various implications will remain an author’s secret.

I also have my own bathroom up here, properly tiled, with what I’d wager to be the quietest toilet in the Midwest (I splurged at Home Depot), a working sink, and a showerhead with enhanced water pressure. My kitchen is elfin, with a half-fridge, a portable double-burner stovetop, and a lone Formica counter space crowded with enough English muffins, Skippy peanut butter, instant oatmeal, wild flora honey, and Maker’s Mark to get me through the winter. From the top of the minifridge rises a pyramid of canned goods: beef Burgundy, stewed tomatoes, chicken giblets, pears, sardines, Green Giant corn, myriad Campbell’s soups, etc. I eat my meals at a portable “Nantucket” kitchen island. Yes, I have become a man who spends a good portion of his time bellying up to a mostly useless three-foot-high rectangular mass.

Centered on the attic floor is a bearskin rug that Glose, the troubled drummer in my band, left crudely folded and boxed in our rehearsal space. I had the surprisingly high-quality bearskin professionally flattened and steam-cleaned, and I will occasionally lie on it and think of my ex-wife, Sheila Anne:

Her strawberry blond hair and small perfect breasts.

The beautifully arranged astral dusting of peach-colored moles descending below her right ear.

The slender subtle natural arc of her back.

Sheila Anne left me for another man.

A man so intergalactically fit he could be cast as some physiologically advanced alien on the SyFy network. A man whose teeth are so white and straight it almost hurts to think about them (Sheila Anne insists that they’re natural). A man five years my junior whose chiseled, perfect jawline is deftly offset by one of those undeniably aquiline Mediterranean noses. A corporate alpha male who dresses like an adult and shaves every morning. A man with a wolfish, charming smile who can no doubt execute twenty military-regulation pull-ups while carrying on a lighthearted conversation about the pleasures afforded by his new, ergonomically contoured office chair.

Sheila Anne and Dennis Church live in New York City, in what I imagine to be some cobalt-blue-themed, sleekly furnished apartment located on the twenty-third floor of a gleaming high-rise overlooking the Hudson River. They eloped on a beach in Mexico with only a priest, an authentic mariachi band, and a local photographer as their witnesses. Sheila Anne accidentally posted public-access wedding photos to her Facebook page, and I was dumb enough to let curiosity get the better of me. Though my band did have a fan page, I refused (and still refuse) to become a member of Facebook. But after I learned of their elopement from Bradley (Sheila Anne’s younger brother), I couldn’t help putting myself through the misery and wound up clicking on her unrestricted page.

After she heard from another bandmate, Morris (via Facebook message), of my being crushed by the photos (I was bedridden for close to four days), Sheila Anne changed her Facebook settings and sent me an e-mail of apology:

Francis,

I’m so sorry you saw those photos. I hope you’re okay.

With love,

Sheila Anne

Yes, her farewell salutation was distinguished by a lowercase l. She obviously exclusively reserves the capitalized version of the word for her new husband.

In the photos, Sheila Anne looks nauseatingly beautiful in her sunflower-yellow summer dress, with Mexican poppies arranged in her hair and a bouquet of the same flowers in her hand. Her ankles are ringed with braided sea grass and anemones, the tops of her bare feet flecked with damp, Yucatán sand.

Dennis is wearing seersucker shorts; a matching jacket, the sleeves rolled to the elbows; a white dress shirt with a yellow bow tie; and a straw porkpie whose hatband smartly matches his neckwear, not to mention his bride-to-be’s dress and floral accents. He too is barefoot and his tan, ultrafit legs look somehow appropriated from a world-class tennis pro.

He’s one of those guys who can wear pastels and not in any way compromise his masculinity. I suspect you could walk up to him at a cocktail party and say, “Why, Dennis Church, what color is that four-hundred-dollar, seemingly-normal-but-designed-to-the-tits casual shirt?” To which he might reply, “It’s actually blood-orange-infused salmon,” then sip from a glass of chilled rosé in sort of a faggy way and manage to somehow increase his masculinity quotient.

The uncredited photographer captured their nuptial kiss while a corona of Mexican sun was forming a divine, perfectly timed halo around their soft joined faces, the porkpie off now (perhaps flung down the beach dramatically), the ocean calm and cerulean and twinkling behind them, an impossibly white Caribbean seagull passing overhead, high in the cloudless blue sky, wings wide and still as if in benediction.

Sheila Anne and I were married in the back room of a steakhouse in Branson, Missouri (B. T. Bones Steakhouse), during what would wind up being the band’s final tour. That morning I had passed a kidney stone and managed to sprain my ankle at the precise moment it disgorged itself from my urethra. I was high on Morris’s Percocet, and in the few Polaroids chronicling the sad but perfect little evening of ribs, smoked sausage, and pulled pork (the Three Amigos Combo), assorted sides, and a red velvet cake that the B. T. Bones manager allowed us to bring into the restaurant, bless his mom-’n’-pop heart, I look like I’m about sixty-three years old. I’m wearing a Carolina-blue cotton-blend suit that I’d purchased from the local Sears and a pair of canvas Chuck Taylor low-tops, also Carolina blue, with white laces and white athletic socks.

My collared shirt, also white and also from Sears, is too small, and my tie is of the paisley variety, phantasmagoric in that insane way paisley can be, and knotted with a misshapen Windsor that was executed by Glose while in deep, furrow-browed concentration. Despite my garroted neck, my facial muscles are somehow either so relaxed or so pain-fatigued that I appear to have jowls. Sheila Anne is wearing a candy-striped fifties thrift-store dress she bought in Branson and baby-blue rain boots (not quite Carolina blue, but close enough) and her hair is in French braids and she’s laughing sweetly at my terrible state.

We’re so in love that just thinking about it makes my viscera feel like it’s turning to landscaping mulch.

Bassist and childhood best friend, Kent, deejayed with his cheap portable boom box, pulling CDs out of an ancient duct-taped binder, while Morris and Glose basically got shitfaced on consecutive tumblers of the B. T. Bones signature drink—the Slippery Tin Roof—which, if I remember correctly, included “ice cream” vodka, chocolate syrup, and coffee liqueur, among other ingredients you might find stockpiled at a four-year-old’s birthday party.

The said Polaroid is currently affixed to the bottom of my minifridge with a plastic carrot magnet, which means I have to lie prone and drive my chin into the backs of my hands to really look at it.

I’ve been doing exactly that a lot lately.

I have never been to New York City but I visit often via the Internet. Someone called Ivan Ivanovich authors a blog chronicling the streets of Manhattan, with little abstract captions below photographs of storefronts, bridges, an East Village farmers’ market, Central Park, ethnically diverse children frolicking in urban playgrounds, the Hudson River at dawn, pigeons posing along the edges of tenement rooftops, etc.

When the band was touring we got as far east as Pittsburgh, but the Big Apple has eluded me the same way large game bass elude certain kinds of cursed fishermen.

  

Oh, the band.

The band the band the band the band the Motherfucking Band…

The band is—or was—called the Third Policeman (a flagrant plagiaristic homage to Flann O’Brien’s underappreciated masterpiece), and we made a pretty good go of it here in the Midwest, mostly headlining college bars and occasionally opening at larger venues for some younger, sexier indie/new school postpunk outfit from Portland or Akron or Walla Walla; some slack-haired, waif-thin copycat quartet brimming with wit, donning perfectly distressed clothes (matched only by their carefully ragamuffinized hair) accented by trust fund–financed tattoos and exhibiting a lazy live-performance habit, unwarranted industry irony, and stupidly large amps.

The Third Policeman, on the other hand, was a well-aged, anti-industry psychedelic semi-jam band with a penchant for outro pop harmonies and the occasional speedy punk vibe. We had smallish amps and old duct-tape-corrected quarter-inch cables that had survived the spaghetti-blob insanity of years of bad postshow breakdowns and crammed-to-the-tits gig bags.

I mostly fronted, wrote a good share of the lyrics, and played rhythm guitar. Backed by a small label out of Madison called Slowneck Records, we recorded an EP and an LP. After the LP (Argon Lights) was released we spent most of our time touring highbrow indie music towns (Cleveland, Louisville, Chicago, Austin, Pittsburgh) and making the occasional college-radio appearance.

At our best we were as tight as anyone, and when our drummer, Glose, wasn’t fucking us (and himself) over during his huffing stage (as in airplane glue out of small brown paper bags), we looked like a band that could break through the ranks and make a real go of it on the national level. Before Glose wound up in an emergency room in Lawrence, Kansas, for accidental self-induced septicemia (blood poisoning) that he’d contracted from a dirty fork he’d been using to pop a blood blister on his foot, Slowneck Records had planned a monthlong European tour that included Berlin, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Paris, which would have surely taken us to the next level, or simply improved the quality of our lives by a modest percentage.

Glose has since sworn off forks, though I have no doubt that his lifestyle still affords him ample opportunity for some other form of accidental self-poisoning. Once he ate a TV Guide just to see what would happen. Nothing happened, so he decided to follow that up by ingesting the first three books of the New Testament. The shame about Glose is that when he has his head on straight, watching him drum is like witnessing someone operating a flying machine.

Besides Glose’s erratic epi. . .