I guess in the end, it speaks to the way that if you threaten to take everything a man has, he may just come out of it wanting more. I was mistaken at first. At first, I thought it was an odd case of senseless entitlement. That’s what it looked like. But I second-guessed myself—I find it hard to judge the ways of folks at home when you’ve been gone since 16. You come off as self-important, the townies don’t want to hear about it, and whatever you say ends up being a waste of time, unless it reminds them of an anecdote about a local.
This is one such anecdote. It’s about my brother, Rodney. He’s a local. He still lives in the Minneapolis suburb where we grew up. It’s called Robbinsdale, and it’s main attraction was once a pizza place. Rodney is four years older than me, and he’s my only brother, since Vance, who was in between us, died. This summer, to my surprise given all that was going on, I visited Rodney. I guess that’s my gift—improvisation. See, I make music for a living. And on that point, I immediately felt out of sync with Rodney. He did not even seem to be in his body, or on this earth, much less capable of adapting, by which I mean veering from what came to look, after a series of uncharacteristic incidents, like a dangerous path. What do I mean?
The first thing I saw after setting my suitcase down was a piece of severe looking black ironwork hanging on the wall. “Faith, Family, Fishing.” The black paint was gleaming and glossy; it looked like it would never fade. Now, I’ve had plenty of groupies do embarrassing things, and on the road you have to deal with all kinds of people, and I am not usually quick to judge. But a blunt pronouncement of values like this does, I think, invite scrutiny. However, I’d only just arrived and I didn’t want to feel harshly towards Rodney so soon. Maybe it was just something he hung up for appearances’ sake. He listed the place—"The Lodge”—on rental sites, you see.
Rodney was 52 now, but back in the ‘90s, Rodney had studied at a well-regarded design school. Graphic arts. He was a film buff, and always toting a tattered tome of Spinoza or some such. Out of college, he rented a place in south Minneapolis with a “nuts and berries” type, as my mother called her, where he practiced permaculture and devoted himself to the art of the salad.
Well, the first morning I came upstairs in search of espresso, as always, and found Rodney at the table, leaning over blueprints, making phone calls, thumbing catalogs, and throwing around phrases that he seemed to have gleaned from the blue collar set, who—it would be proven in the coming days—were his people now.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Let me back up.
It all started with my father. I know, go figure. Yet, I think the contours are revealing. See, I had been in the Pacific Northwest, touring with my band for the first time since the mask mandates ended, when Rodney called me one night. I was in my hotel room. Rodney started lecturing me about our father’s health, how I had to get Dad to take his Prozac and get back to the YMCA and stop smoking cigarettes, for Christ’s sake. Then he said that Bernadette, the church organist my father had been dating with a strange, indefinite casualness for 15 years, was going to leave him, and he might have severe renal problems.
I flew from Portland to MSP (in our family we still call it Lindberg Airport) on a Sunday morning, the first chance I could, on a day when I was not at my freshest, I might add. Throughout the journey, I sensed that Rodney was not appreciating, and would not appreciate, the people I’d let down in order to respond so quickly to his hysterical call, which I wondered if I shouldn’t be regarding as a passive-aggressive way to mess with our dad.
I took my father to lunch at a diner that I remembered for being taken to after I completed my first shift as a dishwasher, at age 16. My father did not remember ever having taken me to the diner for any specific reason, ever. The Rueben was still awful. Then I fixed the WiFi in his house, and made him brief me on his medication regime. Finally, to my surprise, we bowled twenty frames at Ernie’s. Dad was feeling up for it, he didn’t want to “sit around on his ass.”
I had fantasized of counselling him in the spiritual matters I suspected ailed him, in raising his spirits. I had set intentions to inquire about what tests, if any, he’d had done on his liver and kidneys. I would make him show me documents. Was he telling me all his symptoms? I would insist he tell me. I’d had it all planned out, even though no conversation of the kind had ever taken place between the two of us in the 42 years we’ve known each other.
And sure enough it all was made into a fantasy. Our conversation consisted of his upcoming trip to Phoenix, where Bernadette was already lodging with her sister and enjoying whatever it is they enjoy in Phoenix. My father asked me about the band, and otherwise we spoke of the weather, current events, my mother (his ex-wife) and her health. For a long time, the waxiness of the lane was the topic.
On the way home, I mentioned I’d be seeing Rodney. Dad scratched his beard (I was the only beardless one among us three Swanson men) and cried, “Oh! The famous Lodge! The magical moneymaking Lodge!”
Suddenly he sounded like an Irish priest.
“Well,” he added. “God bless you.” I didn’t know how to read his tone. Couldn’t read it any better than I’d read his third-base signs at that horrible championship ballgame when me and my 12-year-old friends “blew it big time.”
Which is all to say that, contrary to Rodney’s assessment, my father seemed not all that different from how he’d always been and about as good as could be expected given his age and lifestyle. I saw no signs of depression. Yes, his vitalities were waning. In his younger years, he’d enjoyed skiing, canoeing, hiking. But to me this slowing down was natural, even welcomed. (I looked forward to what I imagined would be a restful retirement.) I spared my father from the fact that Rodney had painted a picture of him clawing at death’s door like some decrepit ghoul in a horror movie.
Neither my father nor I wished to see the other for a second day, so with my right thumb sore from my imperfect bowling technique, I beat it out of the Twin Cities and drove on up to Rodney’s new place. I had the thrilling reckless feeling of driving a rental and being completely free to do whatever I wanted—and indeed from the highway I saw a glimpse of pink neon glowing from the streets. Good ol’ Washington Avenue. But of course I was not free to do whatever I wanted. In our family, it would be seen as an insult for me not to pay dotage on Rodney’s property acquirement.
See, Rodney had bought a new investment property, a former supper club or something on the eastern shore of Lake Mishawbe, in Dalton County, Wisconsin. This was southeast of the Twin Cities, down in the river valley area near La Crescent, Minnesota, on the St. Croix River, which forms the border. He had bought it early in the first lockdown, 2020, and I hadn’t seen it yet. In our family, the “Lodge” had been much-hyped.
I pulled up, and sure enough it looked like an old Italian supper club, with a wrap-around deck where I could practically see the shadows of dining tables; pillars at the entrance looked to have held a canopy back in the day. I looked for Gombahs with toothpicks, loitering, and seeing none, I walked the grounds. There was a mechanical lift from deck to dock, a pontoon, and a minor earth-moving project underway, which I would learn more about during the week. In this part of the country, they serve fish buffets on Friday nights, and you drink cocktails in the bar beforehand, talking about corn prices.
Our mother had told me of Rodney’s plan to rent the place to families, AA groups, retreaters and such, using the place himself at appointed times of the year, such as holidays. Apparently, in the Christian community of Rodney and his wife Rebecca, a community that my mother approved of very much, there were many Twin Cities families looking to roast marshmallows and escape the urban grind. If people wanted to smell the lord’s miracles wafting off water, they could pay Rodney for the pleasure. That was his take, and my mother repeated it familiarly, as she shared gossip out of her own local parish vestibule.
The first morning, my father’s words came back to me. “God help you,” he had said. Right? Wasn’t that it?
So, I was saying—morning. Rebecca, Rodney’s wife, had put me in the downstairs front bedroom. Just after dawn I was looking out the window onto the shimmering blue/black water when a burly looking fellow in coveralls appeared in the yard, coming from the front. I sat there watching him, flexing my upper back in hopes of releasing the apparent sprain I had—like a dagger under my shoulder blade, coming through my chest like a hot poker. The energetic groupie? The coach flight? The choice of sedan? I didn’t blame the mattress, because the mattress was in fact brand new, bought to accommodate the AIRBNBers, and felt like...well, heaven.
I went upstairs to the kitchen, where Rodney explained the man was the foreman of a crew here to do some work.
HELLO, IT’S BEN, the author, sorry to break up the party, but I’m facing a challenging moment here. I’m sitting here listening to the rain outside my window trying to write this story, trying to continue the story of…what’s his name again, Ronnie? No, Rodney. I knew a kid in second grade named Ronnie Von Bargen, no lie. It was no bargain having to wrestle him in his unwashed gym uniform that he literally never once took home all year.
Funny.
Well, as you can see, my mind is adrift, and I’m trying to keep it on this brother business. Will readers even know that it’s not literally about a brother, but about our compatriots? Our national brothers? In this day and age, given what people are like, you can’t be sure of being understood at all unless you put it so plainly that even… well, no, let’s not start slinging names and blaming others.
The problem—well, one of the many problems—of writing in 2021 is that it feels like work, and doing work winds me up. We’re all dealing with so much. Every week, it’s something worse. Our media addictions are out of control, and we’ve really let our alcohol use reach unhealthy norms. Fuck it, just keep the Scotch in the office. Right? That happened months ago.
How can writing be the same as it always was, given where we’re at, and what’s at stake?
It’s a crazily unimportant thing, writing fiction. And think about how … again, we… used to do it to stay alive, back when literally staying alive was something you took for granted far beyond a future you could imagine. Which of course is not true of today. Today, it’s not hard to imagine a file labelled The Human Experiment. It gets stamped FAILURE in red on the diagonal and dropped into a drawer.
Imagery—try it out sometime. A fleeting pleasure. That solves nothing.
It is this pervasive disjunction, the splintering of the self, the past self, one of ambitions and career importance, and playing the whole sick cultural competition. See my blog post about the amazing Olympic athletes and their concessions to sanity.
Well, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be talking about all this here, but thinking of Ronnie…It is Ronnie, right? I forget. Maybe I called him Roderick or something. No wait—Rodney. That’s it. Rodney and his bullshit just feel like added toxicity, the cherry on the steaming pile, if you will.
Why would I choose to write of these brothers? It’s worth asking before this is all over. We should all be stopping what we’re doing and reassessing the financial systems and thirty-five other things. To enter that space where we write something that shows something about what we believe in or how we experience something, when it’s just a drop in the ocean of media content in an ultra-saturated world that is burning? What is that even?
Nah. Doesn’t add up.
I’m sorry I’m so depressing! I should listen to The Cure or maybe watch Teletubbies.
I hear a voice saying, It might also be this brother material.
Okay, sure. Yeah, that’s it. It feels, what’s the word, accusatory? You know, just plain unkind.
Hold up.
Just hold up.
Hear me out.
I know I’m over the place, but here’s the thing. I’m not being real with you. Obviously. Because, yes, I’ve cracked open the writing, I’ve admitted to writing, and that’s all meta and super. But the thing is, I observed something, something close to home, shall we say. But not geographically close to my home. That’s where The Lodge comes in. Fuck’s sake, it’s so obvious, it’s all on Instagram, and people who know me know that I have a brother!
There it is.
Say no more.
That’s part of the predicament. This game just doesn’t feel like a solution anymore. It’s just a diversion. Literature is a burned-out Cathedral, and we’ve just holed up in it, smelling the sulfur of gunsmoke and the dust raised by the tanks. The rubble still stands, but it shivers with every blast.
Even if it’s in the name of understanding and healing, how can a writer even claim that this is what’s needed most in 2021? More words on pages. More words online. Ugh. How about another political debate too while we’re at it. Hasn’t that awful cycle resumed yet?
I know some writers would put shame on me for giving up on literature. I hear them, the literary angels, raising their heraldic scepters and inhaling, ready to expound. But isn’t it a kind of tyranny, this literary art? Because take for example, the worker, the plumber passing by the window. That happened. I did see a man pass by a window in the morning. In my case, it was the kitchen window. It was not 7 AM, more like 11, and this bearded guy in a black muscle shirt walks by. He’s walking tough, and he’s made of muscle and covered in rock dust, and wearing Oakleys and perhaps there’s a big lump of chaw visible in his jaw, bulging. And I thought it was the neighbor, come to kick my brother’s ass as promised in the text message.
Oh, I’ll get to that! Just hold on.
Just let me get past this first thing.
See, if I show the plumber, then I have to show Rodney on the deck. Don’t I? I’d have to show him just in the spot where my brother stood. And I don’t want to! It’s too horrid! It’s traumatic, is what it is. I’d have to describe his flinty laughter. I’d have to describe the knowing way he and the plumber joked about the neighbor, who they seemed to agree was an asshole.
Did you hear about 17 inches of rain in a day, in Tennessee?
Doctor: “Come on, now, you were having a breakthrough. Don’t change the subject.”
Someone Bob Dylan knew—perhaps Joan Biaz herself—called albums of his like Blood on the Tracks his “finger-pointing albums.” I have at times drawn my inspiration, my authorial drive, from ignoble feelings. In the past, when I had feelings to spare! Ha! Ages ago! Now it feels essential not to pluck that chord. Will it save the world to point out some guy’s foibles and failings? Will it stop the floods, fires, and hurricanes? Will it stop barricades being broken down, and windows shattered?
I can pull myself back to it, writing, but it takes everything. It takes headphones on, the room darkened, the whole damn world tuned out, just a vortex of light from the screen, and a totally exorbitant foolish belief that it could come to something, that somehow it could open some eyes, or help me or help someone. I know that’s what stories did back when stories were all, or most, of what people had as media options. Before digital content even existed and everyone became a full-time marketing department for their own lives. But is it still? It hardly seems so.
Here’s one interesting thing about Rodney though, and this whole predicament. It’s all the same story. Really. I mean, the story of the musician narrator, who is clearly like myself—duh, an artist—and the story of my brother’s hubris, and my story of struggling to do this egotistic activity… these are the exact same thing.
See, we were on the water, my brother and me, on his lake, and surely in the fiction, I’d have to include that scene. I’d have to include the reflections on the water, as well as showing down in that dirt trench with that crazy electric Sawzall slicing up this four thousand dollar bio tube to use the material (the same stuff trampolines are made of) that Rodney wanted my help to cart into the shore where he for two ferocious afternoons had pulled away all the native plants, reeds, clover, milkweed, god knows what, and to drape this fucking thing like a blanket onto the lake floor.
Which we did! Shirtless, me, him, his sons, my wife and mother watching on from the dock, my wife taking video of course.
Even though it’s illegal!
Permaculture be damned. And the first thing I thought was I’d call that girl he dated then, the berry to Rodney’s nut. She’d be outraged.
On the last day of my stay—again I’m getting ahead of myself—he dumped sand there, atop the “tarp” as we called it (better than “Nature’s Death Blanket”) and the plan all along was that he and his wife and dog would walk in bare feet in luxury for the rest of their retirement years. While—though not so much here, in southwest Wisconsin—back in the Twin Cities there was literally dense smoke over the landscape, and in the sky all around town, smoke that rolled in from Canadian forest fires. My eyes itched. I got headaches.
And of course I’d have to work in the line from Rodney’s wife, who had the gall to say “Oh, calm down” when the pastor from their church was visiting and alluded (jokingly?) to “the end times.”
So you see this is ultimately a story about forgiveness. I forgive myself for playing the wrong notes and forgetting the words to songs. And I was saying about being on the water with him, because out there I forgive it, I forgive him, or at least I put it all out of my mind. Because he did have that scare. And perhaps I underestimate that. Very serious myositis. One-third lung capacity for nearly two years. He’s better now, the plaque and other deposits have cleared, but he has various other complications to do with his autoimmunity, or lack thereof.
Did it just come on out of nowhere, this illness? Seemingly. But there’s always more to people’s health stories than they let on. Yet, it’s nothing I’m not capable of myself. I mean, repressing emotions. Getting some stuff wrong. Being hot-headed. Isolating. Whatever—as I see it—internal switch he threw too many times, making his body say, enough!
I was saying about the water[1]. It is a nice lake after all, that the Lodge is on, though I came to resent the place. Out there, we troll under the rusty railroad bridge at Prescott, and there’s a spot further up where we saw a bald eagle hassling an osprey over territory, that territory being the upper boughs right along the riverbank. We’ve waded to islets and peed into sandy backwoods. We’ve raced over the dark water at night, wind whipping, nothing to say, but sharing a glance at our glances to the treeline, the setting sun, the pink cloud, the cerulean blue sky.
In this, and other moments, he’s just a good guy who suffered a lot and had a hell of a scare, and is grabbing on to everything he can. You might be wondering what I mean by that, so it requires explaining (see dictionary: exonerated) that the reason the plumber passed the window is because that’s where the new drainpipe emerged from the house. See, Rodney only rerouted the plumbing to save money on what he perceived would be more frequent bills to have the septic tank pumped. Crazy, right? Because of the frequency of showers with large parties staying on the premises regularly, year-round.
So grabbing, greedily, like when a child has his sucker taken away. That’s what it looked liked. It’s probably fright. That’s a speculation, yes. But some of the things he loved doing I also loved doing, and I cannot imagine, for example, the loss I’d feel if I couldn’t play tennis the way I’m accustomed to playing. By which I just mean, what it does for my mental and spiritual health. Same with riding my bike. And cycling, by the way, is one of those things that I got into mostly because my big brother was into it. There was an affectionate, admiring quality to it, when I took it on, after college. But soon it became my own, commuting to jobs on a 14-pound mountain bike, etc. Or, perhaps, because riding bikes was something Rodney and I had done together as boys, back when we were 20, 22 (lifetimes ago, in COVID years) we could converse about our pursuits of pleasurable, interesting rides, and the quest to get lost and crack some puzzle about county highways. Anyway, I digress.
It’s all about the forgiveness. If he wants to be grateful in the direction of Jesus, that’s his right. Lend him bend iron however he wants.
[1] This morning my basement was watery to 14 inches, a new record. I have a nice data set of measurements of water depth, and corresponding dates. Now the good news is that since I’ve been in this house starting in 2016, there has been standing water in this basement 3 times. It’s presently 2021, so that’s 5 years, so not quite once per year. However, we can easily anticipate that these types of storms will be more frequent in the immediate future. Thanks for indulging this highly unspecific analysis in the realm of climatology. This footnote is dedicated to the memory of David Foster Wallace.