Everything Means Nothing to Me: a Novel of Underground Nashville: A Novel of Underground Novel

By David M. Carew

PRAISE FOR EVERYTHING MEANS NOTHING TO ME,
THE SEARING NOVEL OF UNDERGROUND NASHVILLE

SPELLBINDING . . . I could not put it down until Id read the entire novel
in one sitting. Rachel Gladstone, DishMag.com

HAUNTING, BEAUTIFUL, POWERFUL. Roy E. Perry, The Tennessean

In the tradition of Charles Bukowski and Hermann Hesse, David M. Carew writes dark, searing novels set in the underground of a great city: Nashville. Carews debut, Voice from the Gutter, was hailed a minor masterpiecean existential novel you will not soon forget by Tennessean book reviewer Roy E. Perry.

Now Carew returns with Everything Means Nothing to Me, an impassioned tale of love, loss, betrayal, and redemption. When the sad, lonely, half-mad writer John Werrick meets mysterious singer-songwriter Eva Downing in a Nashville club, it sparks a tragic, haunted love. Obsessed with Eva, Werrick burns to answer the riddles surrounding her: Why does she so passionately yearn to performthen make sure few know about it? Why does she go through a strange, dark ritual before performing? What is the explosive secret she is hiding? As Werrick struggles to unravel the mystery, he discovers the brutal secret shrouding Evas lifeas events surge to a shattering climax.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 28, 2012
• ISBN: 9781479719679

David M. Carew

David Carew was a candidate for the U.S. Congress in 2000. A novelist, poet, songwriter, and freelance journalist, David for two years wrote the popular “Small Business” column for the Nashville weekly In Review, and also has published feature articles in Bookstore Journal, Business Nashville magazine, and Inside Music. Before moving to Nashville from New England in the early 1980s, he published two short stories and three poems in the New England magazine Bitter Sweet. He is employed as a direct-mail copywriter and publicist at a publishing house in the Nashville area.

Book preview

Chapter 1

I’ll never forget the first time I saw him. He was slogging up the stairs of my aunt’s boardinghouse in Nashville—a coarse, bearded, bedraggled fellow in a long, dirty-gray trenchcoat. I noticed immediately that, although he clearly was a man in his early 50s, he wore the traces of a much younger age on his person. His hair was long and unkempt, and a hippie-style tie-dyed shirt and thin dark-leather vest were visible beneath his partially-opened trenchcoat.

But it was his eyes I remember most. As he came up the boardinghouse stairs, bearing the burden of a small suitcase at his side, his eyes seemed to fix on nothing, roaming in stray glares toward the top of the staircase. Then they fell heavily on me, as I stood waiting for him at the top of the stairs, waiting to offer him help. His eyes were dark gray, piercing and opaque at the same time, like one who stares through you and not at you. And there was palpable suffering and unholy memories in those eyes.

Do you have a purpose in staring at me like that? he suddenly asked.

No—I—this is my aunt’s boardinghouse and I . . .

Well, I’ve paid her in advance, he said curtly. I have no money left for a tip.

You don’t understand, I said.

With that, a piece of paper dropped from his breast pocket, and floated choppily downward, in the space between us on the staircase. I had good vision at that time, and could see it was some kind of verse he’d been writing. He picked up the piece of paper, quickly, clumsily, and when he looked back up at me his eyes had assumed an altogether different hue.

What one must do . . . in a world without poets, he said. Write poetry. He looked away again, passing through the shadows at the top of the staircase—moving past me, into the tiny room just beyond, that my aunt just had fixed up for him.

*    *    *    *    *

I didn’t see the strange boarder again for several days. I know my aunt was troubled by his presence, though, during that time. She shared her concern with me. Werrick isn’t right, I don’t think, she said more than once to me. I don’t even think that’s ‘is real name. Werrick, I mean, she said. You know, he kind of stumbled a bit, in the mouth, when I asked him his name, she said. Like he was caught off guard by such a simple question.

Maybe he’s a deserter from the army, I said, teasing her.

And from which flippin’ war would that be? she said, in the way she had of being frightfully serious and mischievous at the same time. He’s fifty years old, if he’s a day.

She went off mumbling to herself, shaking her head.

The next time I saw Werrick was under strange and troubling circumstances. I remember I’d heard him leaving the boardinghouse at about 7 that night. It was winter in Nashville—not as cold as up north but still often in the ‘teens at night—and I remember hearing his door at the top of the stairs open suddenly, then the sound of his shuffling workboots descending the staircase. My room was downstairs, just off the bottom of the staircase, so the sound of the shuffling workboots grew sharper, clearer—in their muddy, obtuse way—then halted for a moment as Werrick quietly opened the front door of the house and made his way down the old, brick walkway out front. My curiosity aroused by his sudden flight from the boardinghouse—after what I believed were several days mostly spent in his room—I went to the window and surreptitiously watched him walk down the walkway and out into the street. A half-moon was up, just above the telephone pole out front, and wisps of ghost-clouds fled across it. When he got out to the street Werrick paused for a moment—a tall, gaunt figure under the assaulted blackness of the winter night sky— then moved, suddenly, in a resolute pivot, down the night sidewalk and toward the box-like cluster of randomly-lit houses just the other side of Music Row. I watched him become a dimmer, smaller, more shadowed figure as he moved in and out of black, stricken shadows cast by telephone polls, and trees, and his own eerie, phantasmal figure.

But hours later is what I recall most clearly. At about midnight, I became aware of a sudden, strange amalgamation of noises around the front door of the boardinghouse, just the other side of the entrance to my room. It was a low, murmured singing of some sort—a low, quiet, in-the-throat howling, the likes of which I’d never heard before. Then I became aware it was Werrick—I heard him slur and spit out the words goddam fuckin’ keys, and then, in the next moment, his singing has resumed. It was the old Irish folk ballad Moorlough Shore—and he was gasping, whispering its plaintive melody as he struggled to free the keys from the front door and get himself upstairs. He was clearly drunk as hell. After I heard him ascend two stairs, then, after a pause, two more—all the while still gasping for fierce, random breath and singing the old folk song—I went silently to the door of my small room and opened it just an inch or two, to secretly watch him attempt to mount the stairs.

When I did, my heart exploded into my mouth. He was sitting on the stairs, part of the way up, staring drunkenly, maniacally right at me.

‘What’s the matter, boy? he said, low and coarse. You’ve never seen the ghost of Dylan Thomas before? He paused, fixing me with his drunken madman’s gaze. I could not get the breath I needed to speak. My pulse suddenly was pounding across my temples. I chased that ghost for hours tonight, he said, then caught it in my own veins. He’s trapped in there, now—captive ’til morning."

I finally caught my breath long enough to hoarsely let out a uh . . . unh-huh. When I did, he let out the most blood-curdling yell I’ve ever heard. Every nerve-ending in my body simultaneously erupted in fear and frenzy. As I recoiled, he suddenly turned, clumsily but successfully, howling like a mortally-wounded animal, his legs churning across the dim light, his boots flailing maniacally, until he somehow, like a lunatic possessed, made his way to the top of the staircase, stumbling as he reached the top, nearly throwing himself against the door, disappearing into the black room on the other side.

*    *    *    *    *

I didn’t see him for several days after that. Occasionally I’d hear him up in his room—dimly, vaguely, quietly humming the strands of a melody by Mozart or John Lennon or some ancient and long-forgotten Irish folk balladeer. I even thought I heard, one night, low and furtive and shy, the dense sounds of a guitar coming from his room as though he were plucking it dully, thoughtlessly, with his thoughts perhaps meandering through dark and shadowed hallways like the one separating me from him—his attention, his being elsewhere.

The next time I saw him I confirmed to myself the guitar had not been phantasmal. I was coming back from one of my classes at Vanderbilt, amid a cold February evening in Nashville, the damp, not-quite-spring winds touching me across my neck, sending a chill down my spine—and I opened the black, lumbering door of my aunt’s boardinghouse, took one step inward—and immediately saw him peering intensely at me from where he sat at the top of the staircase. His eyes fell down on me with a sharp—but not unkind—weariness and irritation, gray and piercing beneath the restless shag of his dirty blond hair, and above the dirty, frayed, gray sweater rolled up, on both arms, to his elbows. His guitar was draped languidly across his lap, its neck stern and downcast, and his left hand, drooped, only half-gripping the neck, so that his fingers lay open and upward, as if beseeching the gods to give him a chord. I was frozen there, looking at him looking down at me, and my Adams apple had risen so high in my throat I could barely breath, to say nothing of speaking.

And your name ish? he asked. His gaze remained intense upon me—and the four words he’d spoken revealed he was again drunk.

A silence fell up the dark hallway again before I said, Paul.

Paul, he said, contemplating the sound of it within his shadowed, glassy eyes. His dull, riveting voice then came again: As in McCartney or Verlaine?

Sir? I said. I had caught the references, but still had no idea how to respond.

He waved his right hand brusquely across his face, as if to make the question disappear from the air before him.

I think you should come with me, he said.

What? I said.

He fixed me with a stare. You know . . . I’m just curious. Have you ever emitted more than a single syllable while speaking? I’m told it makes for more effective communication.

Why should I go anywhere with you? I responded curtly.

"Ah, good, so you do dabble in the language, when the spirit moves you," he said. He still sounded drunk, but speaking seemed to be helping him clarify his thoughts. When he spoke again there was something shaded, softer in his tone.

I think you should go with me around the block to McClaren’s Pub, so I can make something up to you—make up to you for that ghastly scene I brought to your eyes the other night. Come—follow me, he said. And with that, he descended the stairs, and went out the door. Despite myself, I followed.

*    *    *    *    *

I went out into the black, starless evening with him, moving down the sidewalk with him in a haze and maze of swirling, random dances of light and imagery, finally coming up beside him on the sidewalk such that I could look over at him, see his profile, see in profile the wan, dead face, the swaggering, set jaw, the dissolute intention crossing over him.

Where are we going? I asked him, my words clipped and coming before and after my heavy breathing. A car horn honked somewhere under the black, wet, cloudless sky—other cars sped by—all black shadow and piercing, insolent white-hot light—their tires hissing past us through the wet streets. He did not turn and look at me, but, rather, turned away from me to answer.

I just told you, McClaren’s Pub, he said.

But that’s the other way, I said, twirling clumsily, pointing.

The pub, then, he said. The fuckin’ pub up this way. The one a street or two off the Row. You know the one I’m talking about. They’re all the same to me, after all this time. Women with dead eyes, desperately trying to find whatever they want to believe in. All the same, he slurred, seemingly not interested at all in talking to me or making his conversation intelligible.

The Beacon, I said. It’s called The Beacon.

Right. He turned and looked at me then, darting eyes filled with something that looked like embarrassment and despair.

When we got there, his demeanor suddenly changed, as it often will with people whose lives center around bars and drinking. He suddenly seemed to come more to life, become more animated, and he held the door for me in a gentlemanly fashion, motioning me to move past him into the shadows and mute-music background of the bar.

The Beacon was one of Nashville’s oldest watering holes, as people like Harlan Howard and Waylon Jennings used to call them. It had a dank, musty, metallic odor you could not escape, no matter which of its smoke-, music-, murmur-filled rooms you were in. Downstairs was a long, eerie-feeling rectangular room lined with drinking and dining booths on one side; perpendicular to the booths ran one of Nashville’s longest and oldest bars—black, musty mahogany stretching nearly thirty feet, barstools placed every two or three feet . . . the barstools inevitably filled with trampy-looking, hollow-eyed, bleach-haired women . . . alcoholics and sexaholics and drug addicts trying to find A Man to go home with tonight—maybe even for a few days—before they came back to their barstool, their place to resume the search with their now-more-hollow eyes.

Werrick swept past me now, swaggering a bit, throwing a hand through his long, tousled hair and throwing a hand in his pocket, only to take it out a moment later with a twenty dollar bill in it.

Michael, he said, loudly and bawdily, to the tall, muscled, bald man working the bar. This is my new friend, and we are in the mood for your finest. Pour two, please.

Ya got it, the bartender answered, obviously knowing full-well Werrick’s chosen poison—Jack straight up—and pouring double shots for him and me. As Werrick bent in toward the bar to take the stubby glasses half-filled with Jack, he leaned in between two of the barflies, pressing his chest against one of the faded women, as if by accident.

Oh, my sincere apologies, he said, turning to look at the redheaded woman now, close in the face, at very close range, only turning his gaze away from her after a very long, awkward (to me, not to her) moment. How rude of me, he said, more arrogantly and playfully than genuinely. But, please, allow me to make it up to you. To you and to . . .

Ellen, the woman said, at the same time Werrick said, your friend here. Both women simultaneously let out curt, quick, suppressed laughs. They both suddenly looked at me, half-smiling, giving a bit of themselves but not too much, then turned back, feigning boredom, to look again at Werrick. I saw immediately that he had them already—at least for a while.

*    *    *    *    *

As Werrick poured on the charm, holding court with the two mini-skirted redheads—sisters they were, we soon found out—I stood back, a pace or two, saying little, taking in the scene, observing Werrick and trying to come to some conclusion about him, although I soon realized that would be futile—at least for now. He obviously was testing the waters, testing the women, testing himself . . . finding the possibility of picking up two sisters infinitely too tempting to squander by saying much of anything to me. He stood there—tall, semi-emaciated in his worn gray trench coat, his wild, dark eyes flashing, half-seen, beneath the casting of the spectral blue and red and white Market Street Beer sign. After fifteen minutes, he had not even taken off his overcoat, nor had I, and when he finally did, it was with a sort of sexual intimacy that seemed to draw the sisters even closer to him, to make them more ensnared in his web. He lay his coat down on the vacant, rust-colored bar stool beside the younger, homelier sister, looking up earnestly into her face, as he did and saying, May I, then launching immediately back into the intense, laugh-pierced conversation he was having with both sisters, simultaneously, as I receded more and more back from the scene, like a deaf-mute voyeur, not hearing what they said, from the new position I now took up, additional feet away from them, leaning heavily on one elbow as I guzzled down a thick, brown Guinness, staring up through rivulets of gray, seamy smoke at a hockey game flickering on a small television set up high in the corner of the bar.

As I quickly made my way to the bottom of my glass, I decided I’d had enough. By this point I’d been a half-hour in The Beacon with Werrick, and was getting tired of pretending I was interested in the televised game. Smoldering anger suddenly leapt up across my face, and I set my beer glass down so furiously a crack spider-webbed across the side. I waved a waitress over, reached angrily into my wallet for a twenty, and held it before her face between two extended fingers. This is for the whiskey, the beer, the broken glass, and you, I said, fixing my eyes angrily upon her, as she vaguely nodded, saying nothing, her dead eyes drained of everything but a vague, laconic boredom.

I was so pissed at Werrick I didn’t even bother saying goodbye to him or to the redhead sisters. As I moved past them, one of the sisters—for the first time in 15 or 20 long minutes—looked my way, mumbling You goin’?, barely audible over the peals of laughter just then coming from her sister and Werrick.

Yeah, I’m out o’ here. Nice meeting you, I said, so curtly and insincerely I thought I saw her wince. My chin tightened as I swept past them, heading toward the door beneath the flashing neon Miller Lite sign, the release of night waiting just on the other side, as I heard Werrick’s voice rise above the fray, yelling Paul . . . Paul!

I moved through the shadows of the doorway, not acknowledging him, not looking back.

When I got back to my room, I read a novel quietly for a couple of hours before deciding to turn in. Despite myself, I was beginning to feel slight pangs of guilt about abandoning Werrick that way. Not knowing what to do about it, I decided—finally, and after a long time of mulling over the best approach—to write him a short note and slip it under his door. I was hoping, actually, he’d find the note amusing—and marginal evidence of some apology for my behavior.

I wrote on a sheet of paper, So which of them did you bang? walked up the staircase, and slid it under his door.

I slept very late the next morning, arising to find a slip of paper protruding under my bedroom door. On it, Werrick had written:

I didn’t have to choose.

*    *    *    *    *

The next two days I saw Werrick not at all, and only heard him—or believed I heard him—occasionally, randomly, as he played his guitar on the other side of his always-closed door, his guitar’s minor chords coming to me