Now I'm Here

Now I’m Here

Also by Jim Provenzano

PINS

Monkey Suits

Cyclizen

Every Time I Think of You

Message of Love

PINS (stage adaptation)

Forty Wild Crushes: Stories

Now I’m Here

Jim Provenzano

Now I’m Here

Copyright 2018 by Jim Provenzano

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, or conveyed via the Internet or a website, without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews. Please address inquiries to the publisher:

Beautiful Dreamer Press

309 Cross St.

Nevada City, CA 95959

U.S.A.

www.BeautifulDreamerPress.com

info@BeautifulDreamerPress.com

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Lyrics to Now I’m Here by Brian May, copyright 1974 by EMI Beechwood Music OBO Queen Music Ltd.

Lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody by Freddie Mercury, copyright 1975 by EMI Beechwood Music OBO Queen Music Ltd.

Ebook Edition

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN:7978-0-9981262-7-2

Library of Congress Control Number (for paperback edition): 2018933831

Cover design by Tom Schmidt

Cover photography by Dot

for Don Amburgey

Contents

Prologue

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Now I’m Here

Prologue

Face a man with death, let him come out shining, and you might call his bravery simple. Face a small town boy with fame, love, and death, all before legal drinking age, and you will call it anything but simple.

This is not my story. Lacking a family other than my mother, I abide with ghosts. I have a spare bedroom in my apartment, which Mama insists I should rent out to save money or, inadvertently, to find a good man.

But that room is for the boxes. The remnants of Joshua and David, two boys who were my friends: boxes I still sometimes browse, full of letters converted into blog posts, cassette recordings changed to mp3s, photos still to be scanned, to be remembered, to share Joshua’s gift and David’s love and support to the end. And that rickety old upright piano in the dining room sits silently, reminding me.

After I escaped the local burden of working for my family’s small real estate company, I moved to Columbus’s now-fashionable German Village. I mourn the losses of my hometown’s history from a distance, occasionally escaping to Europe, where the ruins are more attractive.

Last year they tore down the old high school and its echoing gymnasium where Joshua Lee Evans once stunned the entire school with his piano playing. That school should have been placed on the historical preservation list, but you’re lucky to find your own driveway some winters in this ever-shifting sub-suburban bliss known as Serene, Ohio.

My mother long ago accepted my distance, so I understand why she likes to cling to some old ways in her days at the Serene Senior Home. Despite her frailty, she has moved forward. Having a son like me, she had to. Despite her tendency for cynicism, she is a decent woman, even at eighty-three. When some bigoted resident at the home makes an unseemly statement about a non-white or non-heterosexual resident of our town, she sighs with a familiar phrase, Honey, the South starts at Lake Erie.

It’s people like Mama and me, I guess, who like to make the regular happenings in Serene—like what happened to Joshua and David—sound like myth. There are those who doubt the veracity of my words. But I know. I was there.

Not now, though; Columbus, where I now live, is a good forty-minute drive from Serene, where most of these events occurred. I return on weekends, and sometimes head up to Cleveland to visit friends or perform there.

My name is Eric Gottlund. When not performing as a guest harpist for the Columbus Symphony, I play piano in the front lounge section of Club Diversity on High Street, a little gay bar in Columbus, a city where every September farm boys in the form of college freshmen come to give away their beauty. We grow homosexuals here.

I play requests. Billy Joel, Sondheim, Spice Girls. I’m a pretty good tenor, but I like some help on those old show tunes, especially in harmony, if you can handle it.

When all the cute boys have moved on to the nearby dance club arm in arm with their friends, T-shirts soon to cling to their lithe forms with the sweat of their dancing, they leave the fat lounge singer with his tip jar. Oh, don’t flatter me; I know I’m big as a house. It’s my protection for a broken heart.

Each night’s flock of boys will ask for Smashing Pumpkins, laughing at their joke, until I play it. Then The Cure, or even a lounge version of a Nine Inch Nails tune, until, surprised and mildly entertained, they find an excuse to go off and dance, be young and thin and deliriously happy.

But I prefer oldies, and I’m not just talking about music. I do prefer those as well: Billy Joel, Elton John, and Queen. Request a song by Queen and I’ll feel a surge of melancholy that does not come from the drinks. Request a song by Queen and I might tell you a story, one you’ve heard before, or in parts. It is sad. They’re all sad, eventually.

I knew Joshua and David, grew up with them. Class of ’79. Go Mounties.

You go ahead and have your fun, with your faux-retro collectibles, salvaging pieces of my childhood as campy. But I remember it.

I watched these two boys from afar for years, being the sissy they rarely spoke to until later, after we’d each traveled down our own roads and then returned home. I am left behind to remember the beauties, when those two boys grew up to be men, then left a small legacy behind. I believe they’re getting it right somewhere else. And as I forage through the boxes, I hope to get closer to the truth.

Part 1

\

Whatever comes of you and me

I love to leave my memory with you.

—Brian May, Now I’m Here

Chapter 1

Who Needs You

Joshua Lee Evans grew up scrawny, some say due to an illness as a toddler. But that fever sickness may have been what first drew him to the love of his life. His mother, Sara Evans, a healthy woman from San Francisco, got along well enough with her husband, Samuel Evans, an assistant manager at Serene’s True Value hardware store.

His parents and various relatives did not eagerly anticipate Joshua Lee, the first of two children and the only boy of the family. Satisfied with one potential heir to his name and a daughter two years later, his father got a vasectomy, thereby avoiding the other, more cumbersome means of birth control that prevented him from loving his wife spontaneously. Despite his occasional lapses into silence, Samuel maintained a quiet passion for his wife and children.

So the lack of attention paid to the toddler Joshua was the same one that would disturb Joshua’s life for years to come: a terrible case of bad timing.

Two years to the day after his birth, Joshua Lee Evans was taken to the Serene Valley General Hospital with a case of Scarlet Fever. It was early in the afternoon on November 22, 1963. According to his medical charts, remnants of which Sara Evans saved for decades, he was admitted at 1:07 pm.

While a nation reeled from the explosion of the first Catholic president’s brain, equally chaotic events transpired on a local level, as if the nerve center of the country had unraveled. The pediatric ward of Serene Valley General Hospital endured some panic and confusion: although a scant two toddlers were being treated, the sole attending nurse, in shock over the news of the president’s death, forgot to attend to Joshua Lee’s most basic needs that day and fed only the other child instead, one Royce Jenkins.

Sedative treatments were all the rage in the early 1960s (several children born at the time with birth defects were not the product of inbreeding). However, Joshua Lee’s mother, then pregnant with her second child, refused medication and remained in the waiting room. Exhausted by the events, she slept fitfully in chairs through the next two days. Upon waking, she was not told that she had a recovering healthy boy, but instead, Oswald’s dead.

In her drowsy state, she wondered why had her child died, and why had he been given such a strange new name?

Dazed by the explanation of the dual assassination, she turned her focus to the care of Joshua. Samuel Evans had spent the days secretively sipping whiskey in the hospital parking lot, a habit he gave up the day they brought the boy home. The two young parents huddled in the nursery and wept until Joshua’s normal gurgles and crying brought them back to a sense of duty and cheerfulness. Children have a way of focusing the most overwhelmed of parents.

Joshua Lee’s bout of Scarlet Fever left a scar on his brain that would heal in time, the doctors said. Doctors out in Serene were pretty smart back then, having to deal with the occasional farm animal as well.

But, due to the untimely nature of his near-death, Joshua Lee’s birthdays came to be gloomy events, to say the least. Joy seemed false and forced. The papers were always filled with anniversary awfulness, since his birthday coincided with Kennedy’s death. Anyone born on November 22, or December 7, or even April 4, can understand. If you don’t know these dates, go look them up.

It is hard to tell Joshua and David’s story because, you see, it is what could have been. What’s left in the boxes barely tells what happened. A mere birthday tends to feel ever so small compared to such a morbid anniversary. When’s your birthday? Pearl Harbor Day, but I had nothing to do with it.

I’m in Hawaii in my dreams, wrote Joshua in a diary he kept. He had finished adoring a Travel and Leisure photograph of a POLYNESIAN man in a straw hula. Joshua spelled Polynesian in capital letters, as if burning its magic into his memory. Joshua often talked about traveling, according to his mother. Years later, he would visit the city where his parents first met.

The people of Serene, Ohio hold fast to their heritage, or used to. Some farms and buildings in town go back more than a century, leaving any residents without an extensive local lineage always to be considered newcomers. Born of both local and California heritage, Joshua Evans’ dual family tree bears telling.

A month into his hitch at Treasure Island Naval Base, Samuel Terrence Evans and Sara Catherine DiGiorno met on an April night in 1959. The two visited a dance hall popular with visiting sailors during Fleet Week. Too young to experience it but young enough to idealize the romantic films of World War II, the two were perhaps not as star crossed as movie star characters, yet they managed to become quite close.

Sara worked between college classes as a waitress at La Tomba, an unstylish North Beach bistro once owned by her father. Her politics, which rejected the conservative Catholic values of her parents, might have also rejected military personnel, but the forward sailor reminded her of Gene Kelly in On the Town, albeit less swift on his feet. With a plodding regularity that she found amusing, the twenty-five-year-old Sam Evans would call once a week to ask the twenty-two-year-old Sara to accompany him to dinner and a show. With two of his friends waiting outside, Sara always accepted the sailor’s stuttered request.

They might have wed sooner, but the Navy interfered by shipping him off to a six-month post at Naval Station Rota near the Strait of Gibraltar. He returned, as he said he would, half a year later. Sara went out for a date that very Saturday. She had already made a new dress and had marked her calendar in advance. When Sam’s father became bedridden back in Ohio, he left again, vowing to return.

I trusted this man, Sara said many times.

Her mother, Katherina DiGiorno, did not. Her only-slightly-wealthy husband, Leopold DiGiorno, once-owner of La Tomba, had died in the Korean War, leaving his wife and children with a small Victorian home in North Beach. I have a photo that features it. Being left to see to the betrothal of her only daughter (Sara has three brothers, whose stories will not be told in this account, since they did not respond to my inquiries), Katherina DiGiorno was disappointed not only by Sam’s non-Catholic faith (Presbyterian), but also by the doleful demeanor and lanky frame of her daughter’s non-Italian suitor. With nothing back in Ohio but a house and a cancer-ridden father waiting to die in it, young sailor Samuel seemed an unlikely, though handsome, choice. Sara’s mother allowed her daughter this steadfast indulgence, for a time. At least she admired his dashing uniform.

Sam returned, only to beg Sara to come back with him and make a home. In a box with an engagement ring, he’d enclosed a snapshot of his house, nothing more. The photo convinced her.

Having been raised in a home with a back yard of jade plants, ginkgos, an evergreen, rose bushes, and dozens more plants, Sara wanted to see that bare lawn in the photo come alive. A long-distance escape from her perpetually arguing brothers held an added appeal. She agreed, only learning later that Ohio’s total of sunny days averaged less than fifty-four a year. Even so, gardening would prove much easier than in a squat North Beach back yard. The two were engaged within the month.

News spread quickly. Sam wrote letters home, which my own mother read to Sam’s ailing father during her days as a candy striper. It irritated the ailing senior Evans when other townsfolk began to call and congratulate the man on a betrothal that he had not approved. When Sam was finally granted family leave, his reunion with his father was less than cordial. Although not uncommon for a Serene bachelor to engage so quickly in the serious business of matrimony, to wed a girl from a faraway city like San Francisco, and a Catholic no less, led to gossip. Of course, we back in Serene—we being my parents and their friends and neighbors—were all shocked.

Sara’s early arrival in Serene came the day of the funeral of her would-be father-in-law. Despite the morbid occasion, Sam supported her, introduced her at the wake and several gatherings. She charmed everyone so, with her then-exotic Italian dishes at the post-funeral gatherings in her new home. I remember my own mother’s accounts as if I had been there.

Mother tells them at the home and tries to stir Sara’s memory. I pay visits, fewer as the years go on. Along with my own mother, Sara has become one of those people I feel obliged to visit. There is the grieving part. I visit to become a sort of translator of the history of Joshua for her, years after it all, when she could talk more easily about him, before she began to forget so much.

When I got here, Sara used to say, I thought of myself as one of those pioneer women, but played by Merle Oberon. She gardened with fervor, one of her many skills. When my mother visited on a weekend day, she used to say, Why, she just kept diggin’ away like a gopher the whole time we chatted. I suspect she’ll discover . . . This is one my mother said so often even Joshua’s mother repeated it to me as we joked at my mother’s expense, . . . she’ll discover that gardening’s much easier in this part of the country.

I met him at a USO night at the town hall, Sara Evans once told Mrs. Humphries, one of three other wives who’d joined the League of Women Voters, in part because they all disagreed with their husbands about the impending 1972 election. None of the women trusted Nixon, who was up for reelection, and only a small minority in Serene could be counted on to vote for George McGovern. They also needed something to do with their thoughts and ideas that ironing and cooking never satisfied. Sara had taken classes at Beekam College only a few blocks away.

She liked the feeling of shaking things up in Serene, if only in a proper way, like in the League. Mrs. Humphries had been involved with it for a few years, as had my mother. Sara invited them over at least once a week for a time; they shared stories.

He’d just started his training, Sara continued, and I know you’ll agree about the sight of a man in a uniform . . .

Oh, yes, my Harry was quite a sight.

But even afterward, I remember something so calm and secure in that man’s eyes.

Joshua sat off in the dining room, pretending to do homework while he eavesdropped on the women in the living room. Joshua knew what his mother meant when she spoke of his father’s face, as honest as the cornfields on Route 93.

That didn’t stop his father from worrying about the tenderness of the boy. It didn’t help when Joshua’s mother continued to refer to him as her special child, as if he were a simpleton.

He’s jus’ scrawny, his father would half-joke as he tousled his young son’s hair, the boy’s thin neck bobbing from the pressure. Kids his age had game plans, activities. They had futures. They cleaned their plates. Joshua seemed a little foggy, but he’d make out.

He often spent summer days lying on the expansive lawn of their home, watching the clouds roll by, imagining his name scrolling past with those of movie stars. Sunday mornings were spent enjoying big breakfasts, the Columbus Dispatch comics, and TV movies.

Theirs was not a religious family. Having abandoned her family’s faith, Sara refused even to visit the nearest Catholic church in Columbus (not counting the tiny church in Lithopolis), much to the consternation of her mother, who continued to mail prayer cards to her grandchildren on their birthdays and holidays along with a ten or twenty dollar bill as a sort of presumed bribe. Sara did consent to the occasional holiday visit to Sam’s less formal Presbyterian congregation, but she won out on Sunday school. Having suffered more than enough being raised Catholic, and those nagging conversations with the Baptist biddies in this town, she declared, Those bigoted yokels won’t get their hands on my children.

In elementary school, Josua did quite well, in fact. For a time, before his genius seemed to separate him from other children, we traded peeks at report cards. I always remember Joshua and I showing off our straight A’s, then running from others to hide the embarrassment. Teachers often wrote in their report cards that Joshua had plenty of intelligence and aptitude, but little motivation.

Our paths also collided outside of grade school, and I have a piano to thank for those brief encounters.

Joshua had a gift for music. After one of our Music Appreciation days where teachers ask the students to do unusual things like making up a song on the piano, Joshua’s mother received a note from school that made her look at her son differently.

When it had been Joshua’s turn to sit before the big black box with the white teeth which Mrs. Spears rolled in once a week (much too limited, as I recall, were the lessons in our small school), he proved himself more than smart.

I remember that day like the sweetest spring breeze that pushes its way in through windows, enticing children outside like a puppy with a ball in its teeth.

Joshua got up to the piano and, without having ever taken a lesson in his life, proceeded to play, improvising. Those little fingers barely hit a single sour note, and a song trickled out of that old box that started some of the kids humming.

I cannot recall the actual chords or notes he played, but I swear to you on a stack of Sondheim that this boy was an idiot savant without the idiot. He took to the piano with ease, and after several minutes, had to be asked to stop. Mrs. Spears nearly had to pry him from the piano bench. He was seven. I believe Mozart had already played before royalty by then. Would that we had kings worthy in Serene.

Culture wormed its way into the family through other means. Joshua’s sister discarded her tomboy years one day after being called a dirty brat by a schoolmate and decided to take ballet lessons.

Joshua thought he deserved to move into the world of the arts as well. His mother kept the secret of his talent, fearing what her husband might think. That Christmas, though, the boy asked for nothing except a piano.

His father scoffed at the idea. Where’d we put it? he argued.

Right there. Joshua pointed to the back wall of the dining room, as if his mother’s china hutch had merely to dissolve to make room for his wish. Judging by his mother’s smile, it did not seem to him like it would be a problem.

It would be 1974 before his dream came true. Pivotal years that might have separated Joshua from very good to great were thus lost. But what is time but water falling past us?

Despite their success and happiness, Joshua’s family was not wealthy, and pianos had to be ordered from out of town. Nevertheless, fate assisted. One of his father’s biggest accounts at True Value, Humerkeiser Construction, planned to demolish a block of old homes on Tremont Street to make way for a new Brethren church and its expansive parking lot. Among the debris of the abandoned houses—which in any more civilized city would have been deemed historical and preserved—sat a rickety upright piano, caked in layers of paint.

On a hot July day, Joshua’s father had it loaded onto his pickup. Two men from the hardware store assisted as he backed the Ford right through the lawn and over his wife’s pachysandras. (She recovered, as did the plants.)

The men wheeled it onto the porch with two planks and dragged it into the house, whereupon Sam handed Joshua cans of paint thinner, stain, and varnish.

When you’ve got that thing lookin’ as good as yer mother’s furniture, we’ll find the money for some lessons, his father said in lieu of announcing an early thirteenth-birthday present.

The boy had never taken to any of his father’s carpentry skills but soon learned, breathing in the dizzying smells of the thinner like an addict. He stripped the ornate piano of its layers of brown, white, and, oddly enough, silver paint, revealing a beautiful framework of curlicues and trim that would soon face him for hours every week at his practice sessions.

He did not, however, wait for lessons before attacking the piano. He doodled, found chords, found notes, found music. Joshua had an ear. He also asked that it be tuned.

Sheet music, or sticks and noodles, as he called them, meant little to him at first. He could see what they meant and how they mapped out where his fingers were supposed to go, but he had to hear a song, memorize the sound, and then play it over and over. Despite his small fingers, he had an aptitude others lacked. He kept going. If he made a mistake, he stayed on the beat, rather than crash back and start again, as if he were in a hurry to improve.

That boy keeps bangin’ on that thing like it means something, his father glared from behind his newspaper, his after-dinner cup of coffee growing tepid. Richard Nixon was on the television, resigning.

Give him time, dear, his mother soothed. She tried not to squint as her special son hit another clinker on the worn keys.

Over the next four years, on each Thursday Joshua walked from our grade school to the home of his instructor, Mrs. Rose, usually needing more brushing up than he admitted, and suffering the light scolding of a small town piano teacher. Mrs. Rose hoped to sculpt her students’ hands into wonderful articulate instruments. She was often disappointed. As one of her prize students, I worked hard. Joshua didn’t have to.

Handing Joshua everything from Swans on the Lake to more intricate folk songs, Mrs. Rose watched, fascinated, as Joshua attempted to read notes, then asked her to play it once, and then, only then, did the boy play better. She knew some students had an ear and others had eyes. She liked to group them, if the other younger ones were even groupable. As one of Mrs. Rose’s accomplished students, I managed with perfunctory if not inspired technique. I had eyes.

On long afternoons at home, Joshua would slip into the dining room to practice during the hours between school and his dad’s return from the True Value. His father didn’t dislike hearing the boy practice, but Joshua always felt more nervous when he listened, every note a penny plunked down, giving Dad his money’s worth.

With the lumbering piano pushed against one wall, Joshua plunked away at yet another uninspiring tune, The Water Mill. He wasn’t sure why he persisted, but sitting before those eighty-eight keys offered an almost magical escape. Five of them, like bad teeth, were broken, the soft hammers and brittle wooden sticks cracked with age. He would open the ornate front panel of the piano and watch the hammers and wires flutter as he played.

Not to say that the boy remained devoted to his newly found art. As he stumbled into adolescence, other activities took priority. Like the piano, which still had patches of different colors here and there, he performed shoddy work, but good playin’, as his father would say.

When he did have a mind to play, I imagine, like me, that he forgot everything else: the taunts at school, the strange feelings for other boys, the fear of wearing the wrong style of sneaker or showing up at school without his gym clothes. Sitting at the old upright, almost every key responded when he touched, so unlike anyone or anything else. That affinity, I believe, we shared.

But unlike me, Joshua felt destined for greatness of one sort or another.

I was there, and heard it the first time when Joshua played, before the school heard him. His lessons preceded mine for years. Once a week, we passed in the hallway of the Rose home. Each week I arrived earlier and earlier, most times content to sit on the Rose’s porch or in the front room, from summer sun to winter freezes, hearing Joshua, knowing that merely being in the same room while he played, watching his small back hunch over the keys, his long brown hair shining in the afternoon light, would bring me to such distraction that I would fail even to find middle C.

But this took place before the unfortunate times. Mrs. Rose did not know whom she taught. She did not know how much it meant to Joshua to play well. She also did not know that the boy had yet to discover his true musical inspiration, a big-mouthed, mustachioed gentleman from England.

Chapter 2

Tear It Up

As parents, Sam and Sara Evans’ next trial to endure after their son’s bout of Scarlet Fever was what Joshua later came to call The Feeling.

The sliver of scar tissue in his brain resulted in a few crossed neurological road signs. A few times a year, at odd moments, the boy’s parents watched in terror as their child broke out in a sweat, eyes glazed, body twitching, his little chirping voice mumbling incoherently.

It was as if he were fighting some invisible spirit, Sara described it to me on one of my many afternoon visits. I came to know Joshua’s mother only in the last few years.

From the inside, the symptoms were the least of these seizures. To the five-year-old Joshua, the room would ignite in a series of horrifying sensory exaggerations that left him silent for days. The brown-orange carpet in the living room became a raging, moving brushfire. The television roared so loud as to be silent, the boy enveloped in its maw. Bodies of lamps wiggled like Disney cartoons, pink elephants on parade. The texture of plastic made