I. Whitaker Featherstone
Whitaker Featherstone II lived with his wife Jackie and his retarded son on a street of crumbling row homes in South Philadelphia, without a patch of grass in sight. A slat of plywood framed in limp ribbons was glued to their front door, on which a song was written in black marker, a song that Whitaker had bellowed each of the last thirty-one New Year’s days during the Mummer’s parade:
"Here We Stand Before your door
As we stood the year before
Give us whiskey, give us gin
Open the door and let us in "
These particular adornments were to be temporary, until Whit thought of the next party’s theme. But they remained intact through all the winter’s parties and had withstood the first couple spring rains. Whit decided if they held up through spring and summer, the Mummer’s song could complete a year’s cycle. Increasingly, the years went faster and faster, too fast to change door adornments with proper speed, and the song was an appropriate Featherstone mantra year round. Neighbors, co-workers, atheist church choir members, and bar stool pontificators continually materialized at their unlocked doorway and were met with Jackie’s famous Tiramisu Cups or Jelly Rolls, and a homebrewed Whit-Ale. Mad clutter and the roaming drooling eighteen-year-old were inclusive; the guests that could handle it were always welcomed.
On weekdays, when visitors were less frequent, Whit returned home from the college where he vigorously taught evolution, neuro-linguistics and, inexplicably, Canto 5 of the Inferno, in multiple sections of “Intro to Psychology.” At the rowhome’s door, he would leap off his trusty bike and toss it to the side of the neglected living room. “My beguiling, exciting, magnificent wife,” he would announce barreling into the kitchen -- Whitaker was not a man who was afraid of hyperbole -- “the pastries look divine.” He would crane his long neck over Jackie’s steady shoulder and gently pull her long braid, but would not sample a pastry. Five years previous Whitaker had begun to resemble a jelly roll himself and having since lost the weight, he would indulge less frequently on the constantly revolving tartlettes and mini-quiche stacked upon metal sheets on the cramped countertop. But he never neglected to admire them.
Jackie would respond, “Stop ranting. You’re drunk as a Hatter.”
And he usually was. After all, Whit past the Battle Axe Pub everyday as he rode his bike home, so there no point in arguing. Instead, Whit would kiss Jackie’s cheek with an exaggerated pucker, which made her smile just enough, and turned up the Eagles game, or the Phillies game, or any damn news show, comedy or drama, to keep the kitchen ringing with noise while Whit made a sandwich. The TV was in the kitchen as the kitchen was the undisputed center of Featherstone family life. Whitaker would then open the newspaper with a grand flap, its sails would riding high, his long arms extended. Commentary on current events would include mutterings of, “Bastards!” or a jubilant exclamation of, “Ha ha!” and Jackie would ask him to please shut up so she could hear fucking Oprah. Typically he did not shut up and typically Jackie forgot about her request and read over Whitaker’s shoulder. Soon Nicolas would return from his special education program and the administration of pills commenced. It was a ritual that Whitaker and Jackie went about methodically and cheerfully, cooing to Nicolas, “You little bugger, there ya go, stop picketing, open wide.” When Nicolas wandered off to bang Jackie’s spatula on the counter, she pulled him back gently and kissed him three times. After the pills, it was time to change diapers, usually in the living room. If a visitor were to walk in at this juncture, there would be no explanations and no apologies. Instead the visitor would find his or herself holding a Whit-Ale and was whisked into the kitchen by Whitaker as Jackie finished the job. Plates would fly before the visitor displaying special breads and cheeses, then giant garlic shrimp, corn-on-the-cob, and finally the pastries. It is true that some people who came once were too uncomfortable to come twice, but those who came twice would continue to come forever.
The most frequent visitor to the Featherstone kitchen was Fred Onda, a wry lanky painter of ambiguous ethnicity and sexuality, who had hunched over the table, nibbling on cheese with his long fingers and sipping a wine that Jackie stocked especially for him, and had for the last thirty years. The decibel of Fred’s voice was perhaps two-thirds softer than Whitaker’s, but unlike most other guests, Whit always settled down to listen to his friend’s sardonic observations. He always stopped to appreciate the gleam in his friend’s blue eyes as he told the punch line of a joke. And because he loved his friend, funny or not, Whit would chuckle and Jackie would warmly roll her eyes because, being nearly one-third quieter than Fred, that was her modus operandi. As for Nicolas, he wouldn’t stop banging the phone receiver for the joke, much less get the joke, but because he had lost the oxygen to his frontal lobe at birth, no one expected him to. When the banging became hazardess, Fred Onda gathered Nicolas in his lap, and kissed him.
*
After the third spring rain Fred stopped teaching painting at the college where he and Whitaker were employed. Since the onset of cancer two years prior, he had only missed five days total through chemo and radiation. Finally, the previous semester, he scaled back to a single class. Despite drunken boasts to the contrary, Whit could not paint, but valiantly covered Onda’s classes for two weeks. Like Fred, he wove between the students and whispered off-beat questions and observations in their ears. Like Fred, he would distract them from their own resistance and help shift their mental space. But now it was clear that Fred would not return, and the administration had installed a permanent new instructor in front of Fred’s class. Whitaker, who always welcomed new-comers with open arms and beer, could not help but feel queasy at the site of this young artsy-fartsy stranger who might turn out to be a good man, but could never be Fred.
After all, Fred Onda had worked at the college for twenty-eight of the thirty years Whit had known him. He was one of the founding faulty, a core member of the dwindling hand-skill component of the Graphic Design program. Fred Onda taught the classes where one would actually draw. He felt every charcoal mark from every student was potential salvation. When they were young, Whit mocked his friend’s pedagogic idealism, but when Whit finally despaired of defending juvenile at the DA’s office, when he’d seen too many underloved children have the door slammed on them forever, Fred Onda encouraged Whit to teach, to open doors instead of fighting to keep them from closing. After eleven years of returning home to a child who was loved but would never make a choice beyond what to grab, when to groan, and what direction to walk, Whitaker needed to see memes in motion. Although his credentials weren’t quite right for the job, he dazzled the Dean with rhetoric. In the end, Whitaker found not only a new a job but a new revelation: In the end all anyone chose was 1) what to grab; 2) when to groan, and 3) in what direction to walk. The rest was elaboration and ritual.
So for the last seven years the self-proclaimed epistemologist strode through the college halls with a buoyant gait, jovially talking over everybody, preaching Darwin and Dante to each student, teacher, administrator, maintenance worker, and temp. He knew that he would never quit teaching. And each day in his heart he thanked Fred Onda.
The rainy afternoon when Whit first saw Fred’s replacement, he rode his bike even more recklessly than usual, through the pot-holed streets, through puddles that lapped at his blazer, through hurdling traffic that always just-missed him. The buttons on his fisherman’s cap, which read “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” ”“Screw Neo-Freudians,” and "There is no god and Mary is his mother," clattered as Whit cycled furiously over the curbs.
“Jackie,” he bellowed as he entered, “Fred is dying.”
“That’s not news, Whitty.”
“I don’t mean as a diagnosis, Jac. I mean there is less of Fred Onda each day that goes by, I mean each goddamn day there’s less. Today I saw his replacement, standing right there in his shoes.”
Jackie kept her back to Whit as her fingers tucked chocolate squares into flaky dough.
“Damned hospice workers, he’s alone half the time.” grumbled a pacing Whitt, “Goddamn ineffective morphine.” Spittle shot out of this mouth as he punctuated each syllable. “God-damn.” He sank into a kitchen chair. Jackie just kept moving her deft hands across the counter. Nicolas paced.
Whitaker then left Jackie and Nicolas alone in the kitchen, amongst the pastries, the hospital forms, and a brigade of prescription medications. He left them as they had been most of the day. He read the paper upstairs and surfed the internet to collect his thoughts. He came back down for a glass of bourbon, which, after pulling a sixties-style poncho around him, he carried outside. With long strides he traveled three blocks of puddle-filled gutters to the home of Fred Onda.
“Onnnndaaa!” Whitaker roared from the ground floor of the row home, placing his empty glass on the coffee table while the cats gathered at his feet. “Onda, wake up, Featherstone has ar-rived!” Whitaker wanted Fred to stay as connected to the waking world as possible, since the more he slept, the easier it would be to drift away, each little furtive door of consciousness closing.
At sixty, Whitaker Featherstone II had no trouble bounding up the stairs like a six-foot adolescent. He bounded past the paintings of nudes, fruits, parrots, and Battle Axe Pub patrons. He bounded past the foreign film posters and African masks that were collected during Onda’s travels.
Whitaker swung open the door to Fred’s room with bravado, only to find his friend sprawled on the floor in a tangle of tubes. Fred rolled his blue eyes toward Whitaker and Whit rested Fred’s head in his lap.
“I never fully appreciated this view,” Fred smiled weakly.
Whitaker scanned the walls covered with Onda’s paintings, “I see you have favored the angle under Melanie’s skirt.” Melanie was one of Fred’s favorite models, narcissistic and curved. Whit gathered Fred Onda in his arms.
Fred Onda could muster no more humor. “I just need to sleep.”
“Damned sleep,” muttered Whitaker, who could argue with anyone but a dying man. He sat and watched Fred Onda’s chest rise and fall, heard his belabored breathing. He remembered a camping trip in the 1970s -- they were in their thirties then -- and watching his friend pass out after a five-hour marathon of dirty jokes and questionable wine. He remembered several times in his kitchen when Fred dozed off during an Eagles game. Fred had no enduring interest in sports, but never thought to ask Whit and Jackie to change the channel.
As Whit observed the untouched breakfast and lunch trays, he realized Fred’s days of solid food were over. With a slower step, Whit descended the stairs and plundered the kitchen cupboard, where there was still ample wine for him to drink alone. Jackie would understand if he needed to stay the night.
*
The next day Whitaker endeavored to provoke his students, who had only the vaguest notion of Darwin, to deal with their evolutionary heritage, their hunter-gatherer brains, and their mortal bodies. Although they sat slackly, Whitaker perceived a small flare in their collective pupils, indicating they were inwardly intrigued. Since existentialism was on his mind, Whitaker quoted Sarte generously and generally, and ended class by assigning fifty pages of Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine with convulsive passion. Now his mission was to coax the Old Timers from their territory in the teacher’s lounge. “The Battle Axe at 4pm,” he told them, “No horseshit.”
*
Viola of The Battle Axe had been behind the bar almost as long as Whitaker and Co. had been in front of it. She wouldn’t admit she was nearing fifty, especially since she was sexy enough to almost get away with plunging tops, fishnets, and streaks of bright scarlet in her hair. She served Whit and Jackie the day Jackie finally decided to marry him. Fifteen years his junior, she’d been hesitant to turn her life over to just one person at age twenty-five. She’d only recently left Iowa with her sister, and the two had just finished hitchhiking across Mexico, where Jackie had pre-marital sex in Jalisco, Hidalgo, and the Yucatan. But here was this loudmouth lawyer, a man of old money who had been cut-off from his conservative family years before, who was turbulent in his demeanor, but who knew everyone, who almost everyone loved or tolerated, and who had picked her. He picked her because her hair smelled of Iowa corn and because his new fascination with psychology had affirmed that love was about pheromones. And he smelled good too, like constancy.
“Now or never,” she said to his third proposal. Viola gave them each a beer on the house. Jackie and Whit drank and kissed in silence, then off they went to gather their papers and waltzed into City Hall. Fred Onda was their only witness.
*
The Old Timers filed in to The Battle Axe. All were from the Art Department, except for Whitaker and Mitch Dunslap from Marketing. Some held up better than others. Mitch, for example, had a full head of hair and was suspiciously tan year around. The others were a more dilapidated bunch, in baggy pants and old sweaters, with protruding paunches. This applied even to the second generation of Old Timer’s, who had been trained by Fred Onda in the magic of painting pedagogy, and in some cases had even been his students. Pat, the one woman amongst them, was crotchety by turns, but with enough drink and music, told dirty jokes with the best of them. Whitaker would recite Shakespearean sonnets to Pat just so she’d feel sufficiently exciting in her middle age. The younger women who joined the faculty were wary the Old Timers would make passes at them. They were wrong. Despite lascivious thoughts, the Old Timer’s were perfect gentlemen.
“The usual, you handsome devil?” Viola asked each. Middle-aged art professors were the least of her concerns.
“Yeah,” replied each, “and it’s on Featherstone.”
With drinks delivered Whitaker restored order by announcing, “It’s time to do something for Fred.”
All joviality ceased as the Old Timers’ eyes turned to the ground and their bad posture grew worse.
“Things looking bad, Whit?” asked Mike Picolli.
“Whatever it is, we’re here for him,” asserted Pat.
“What’s the plan?” asked Mitch Dunslap, who was always ready to solve a problem that could be fixed.
Whitaker, who hosted poetry readings at the Battle Axe, who built websites to show off his students psychology papers, who had befriended Dan Dennet and Steve Pinker over the internet, and who was always the one to get the party started, could only say, “Gentleman and Lady, I’m standing at the suspension bridge and it just won’t come down.”
It was clear that for the first time in the years they’d known him, Whitaker Featherstone was asking for their help.
“We could fly in his son or estranged wife.”
“I thought we were trying to keep him alive.”
Laughter.
“ We have a roast.”
“How about offering up two virgins?”
“Girl virgins or boy virgins?”
“Virgin virgins.”
“You won’t find any around here.”
Laughter.
“To bad we can’t send him on one more trip. Is there a country he hasn’t seen?”
“Scotland.”
“Always said there was a family castle in Scotland.”
“Onda’s Scottish?”
“No. He was Italian.”
“No, Portuguese. Or Greek.”
“He had blue eyes!”
“His grandmother was Scandinavian.”
“Well, it’s too late for trips anyway.”
“How ‘bout a retrospective of his art.”
“He can’t stand.”
“We could videotape it.”
“Is there time?”
Whitaker let the suggestions wash over him. He considered the merits and failings of each, downed his whiskey sour and threw a wad of cash on the table. “Thanks, fellows, I think I have it now,” and he left.
*
“Gather ye rosebuds as ye may,” recited Whitaker Featherstone as he flipped through the yellow pages. It was a saying he had attached to any quest spiritual or psychological for the last nineteen years, since the day he had sought a church for his new wife. “You are so full of rosebuds,” he told Jackie once. Being one to deny all romantic notions out of hand, she rolled her eyes. When she first made the request of finding a church, Whit had scowled. But Jackie looked at him squarely and said, “That’s where I gather my rosebuds.”
He said, “Gather ye rosebuds where ye may,” and set off to help her find them.
Whitaker located the oldest and quaintest church in Philadelphia, built in the 1600s. He accompanied Jackie for although he had already commenced the part of his life where he was an atheist, he liked the people, the songs, and the ritual. Besides, the annual Passion Play needed a director and Sunday services needed refreshments. Naturally, Whit’s Passion Play was off the charts in passion, and the amateur actors were stretched in erotic ways they’d never dreamed possible, delighting three-fourths of the attendees and propelling a defection of the more literal-minded from the congregation, which nobody minded. In turn, Jackie’s refreshments compelled several atheists to join the church. Eagerly they sampled the explosion of rum liqueur in her cherry bombs. Each would sport a flag that unfolded into a handwritten note by Whit: “Read Pinker and Dawkins”
or even tinier: “If you are a Christian, give your guilt to Whitaker Featherstone. He sure as hell will know what to do with it.”
When Nicolas was born oxygen-deprived, the congregation brought food and words of comfort. Jackie renounced her own faith in God, but not in humanity, not in Whitaker, not the atheists and believers she won over with pastries. Not in Fred Onda in whose lap Nicolas would sleep.
Eighteen years later Whitaker and all of his memes gathered what rosebuds were left for Fred Onda in the yellow pages filed under “bagpipes.”
CONTINUED...
