Lost River: The Sinks

By Farley McAllister

A raw tour through an aging songwriter’s life as he watches his Alzheimer’s stricken spouse deteriorate, Lost River (The Sinks) weaves intellect and emotion into an expansive exploration of how protagonist Carson Hicks (and we) experience consciousness. Like a collaboration between Montaigne and James Joyce were they gifted twenty-first century knowledge, Lost River alternates still waters with rapids, leaving you at the end of the ride with your sense of place, time and memory altered, replaced by a new physics of Being.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jul 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781665531924

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© 2021 Farley McAllister. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 07/13/2021

ISBN: 978-1-6655-3190-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-3192-4 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

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this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views

expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the

views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

FOREWORD

It seems only appropriate that a non-writer write the foreword to a non-novelist’s novel about a songwriter who isn’t really a songwriter. Farley McAllister would appreciate the irony, as would Carson Hicks, his real-life pseudonym as well as fictional protagonist of Lost River (The Sinks). As his attorney, left with the task in his will’s instructions, I consider it a bit of playful, posthumous passive-aggression. I hope he’s laughing now.

Farley placed Lost River in my hands to make certain it became public—but not too public, according to his will’s somewhat unusual stipulations. He knew his children might disappear the manuscript, hence the small print run, the lack of advertisement, and the absence of press events. If you’re reading this, save your copy for a future trip to Antiques Roadshow. It might be worth something someday.

When The Hog Panels’ cover of McAllister’s (let me abandon the Carson Hicks shell game) song ‘Hangin’ Trail’ hit the country charts at number one, you might reasonably have expected a long, illustrious career for its young songwriter. You’d have been wrong, in part because his interest in the trade waxed and waned in conjunction with his impulses, but also because he chose anonymity—and enlisted me as his attorney to enforce it as best as legally possible. I believe I succeeded. Once I heard his songs, not quite serendipitously since my curiosity led me to first search for them, then painfully anticipate the arrival of each new one, I regretted his decision—and hence mine to abide by it—while admiring him for his modesty. You don’t witness much of that virtue as a lawyer, particularly in the selfie era.

Over an eight year period McAllister penned a dozen hits (and three dozen less popular songs) for other musicians, the overly represented subject matter of which earned him (after his disappearance) the somewhat derogatory, somewhat worshipful title The King of Leaving. I imagine McAllister’s droll response: don’t you mean ’The King of Being Left’? Besides, he would add (and offhandedly did, to me), aren’t all country songs about either getting someplace or leaving it?

McAllister’s self-appraisal of himself as a non-professional musician was accurate. He only spent a short season performing in small venues throughout the West, though he played alone or with others in spontaneous local gigs. By his standard he failed the true guitarist’s test, the ability to deftly handle B and F (hence, McAllister’s B chord scribble gracing this book’s cover). His audiences, small and infrequent, found his performances moving, but his attention drifted when his mood wavered or the crowd failed to respond. He tended to disappear when jamming with other musicians, in ways so gradual as to not be noticed—he would be there, then gone, and you would not be able to recall how it happened.

Part disguised autobiography, part philosophical treatise, part novel, Lost River is best read as you might listen to a McAllister song. Fill in the negative space yourself, it’s there for a reason. Be prepared for the hidden melodies. Consider stylistic failures as part intentional, part character. Just as many songs play lax with syntax, omit necessary segues in order to fit the form, and cut corners here and there, McAllister’s book doesn’t hold to structural rules you expect in respected literature. He would have laconically called it experimental.

While The King of Leaving, in his final note accompanying the song ‘Jigsaw’, wrote that he intended only acquaintances read Lost River, the presence of a preface suggests otherwise. Just as Moses was a reluctant prophet, McAllister was a reluctant songwriter, then a reluctant novelist, considering himself a fraud but diligent at whatever trade he was faking at the time. Reluctant though he might be in terms of self-promotion, he passionately desired the ideas in ‘Lost River to enter the intellectual canon, hoping someone might solve the mysteries that he struggled with for decades—or so he wrote to me in a private note mailed the day before he disappeared.

McAllister no doubt appreciated that his dry years presented the only fertile time of his career, giving rise to not only the title song ‘Lost River (The Sinks)’, but ‘Just Put a Bow On It‘, ‘The Other Left’, ‘Whitefall’, ‘What Promise?’, the cult classic ‘Wishin’, Wishin’ Back’, and his only album (soon to be a collector’s item) ‘Yes or No, Either Works’, which he put away in the closet just six months after recording it. He claims not to have written another song after marrying, though ‘Jigsaw’ and ‘When Dreams Burn’ (started by McAllister and completed, at his family’s request, by the songwriter Eamon Frandsen), seem evidence to the contrary.

Musical artists cover others’ songs, Shakespeare’s works get revisited, ballets get revamped, but no one rewrites novels (unless you count translations). Themes recur, formulas get followed, and writers use the same tools, but they don’t, out of homage or arrogance, try to do Middlemarch again. McAllister, however, wrote Lost River in the same spirit as he wrote songs, intending it to be covered by a better writer, a professional with, in his mind, more skills.

Let the reader, and hopefully another writer, decide.

My legal obligations so discharged,

Dwight Fullmer, Esq.

May 29, 2021

PREFACE

I never thought of my song ‘Hangin’ Trail’ as a metaphor for vigilante justice against past selves until I read a critic’s review, but what the hell, everything you say gets misconstrued. Why should I be exempt?

Somewhere in the following pages you’ll see how ‘Hangin’ Trail’, ‘The Sinks’, and other songs emerged, but if you’re reading this because you hoped to get a behind the scenes look at the people who sang them, well, I apologize, I’m just following an American tradition of mislabeling goods. If instead you’re reading this because you know me personally and feel obligated, I again apologize, and can’t emphasize enough that none of the characters herein are you. Not entirely, anway.

When ‘Hangin’ Trail’ came to me, I wrote the words down first and went from there, the tune slowly emerging with the words in the back of my mind. I saved the song from oblivion mostly by luck, as you’ll read. Lost River (The Sinks) arose much the same but was elusive in a different way—unlike ‘Hangin’ Trail’, which I was afraid to forget, Lost River wouldn’t go away.

I started it a decade ago as self-therapy (ironically so, you’ll see), a way to get the subject out of my head. Every late fall a new version began and every spring it was deleted. The words went away, the subject matter didn’t.

But I stuck with it. Eliminated voices. Purged structures. Changed the process. I wanted it done. Gone. Finally, the subject matter itself wanted done, though it expanded itself considerably.

Imagine that.

During the long process of this novel’s creation, my wife slipped into dementia, her memory on a trajectory opposite to mine, causing Lost River to become a book less about me than a bigger set of matters, emotions and the mind in general, and a minor addendum, the nature of the subjective universe. Alcoholism, the self, consciousness, memory—if you read this book you’ll see the relationships between them, though you may have to read it more than once to fully see the connections.

Writing songs came somewhat naturally for me but I doubt that writing novels comes naturally to anyone. Verse, verse, chorus, verse, throw a bridge in and you have a song, but a novel doesn’t evolve that way, despite what how-to-write books tell you. You can dream a song and you can dream an idea but you can’t dream a novel—you can’t sleep that long. It’s a concoction all its own that takes its own sweet time.

Lost River, in a sense, is two books braided together and should be read as a schizophrenic exercise, the reader alternating personalities. Did I just say that? is a twofold state of mind any adult knows, the sensation of self looking at self, present eyeing past, and Lost River illustrates that dialogue by jumping from subjective to objective and back, so you could conceivably read first as one self, omitting the parts in regular font, then as a second self, omitting the italicized parts. Think of it as two versions, the acoustic first and then the electric with its added enhancements.

Gregory Bateson and his daughter Catherine’s nonfiction work (half posthumously, her father died before it was completed) "Angels Fear inspired the unusual structure. Each nonfiction chapter in Angels Fear was followed by a metalogue" that referred back to it, in the form of a fictional conversation between father and daughter. The metalogues structurally copied the chapters’ ideas, a clever device that sneaks into the reader’s consciousness through the back door, thus driving the crux of the matter deeper. I’d have liked to be so inventive as the Batesons but ended up with…well, call it a sideways semblance asking you to connect the dots.

Were it a song, Lost River might be from the late sixties, early seventies, when amateur musicians put things together until they sounded good. The hell with structure, the hell with tradition. Occasionally, something good comes of such a process.

I hope this book is one of those good things.

LOST RIVER (THE SINKS)

His hand unsteady, Carson funnels the crushed pills down the V of a makeshift tray, tapping the paper awkwardly into an amaretto mini, the undertaking done over the truck’s console should he spill. Whichever Natalie she is today, she’ll like amaretto, making the test run easier.

Parked in the Source Care lot, its automatic lights still on this early on a December morning, the autumn unofficially turned as good as winter in terms of light and temperature, he breathes deeply and with intention, as if that basic act might prepare him for all the possibilities—who will he have to play? Eric? Kurt? Kenneth? Mike? David? Tom? Someone else she’s not yet mentioned? Or the two husbands preceding him? He taps the notebook paper, freeing the remaining strayed particles, sets it aside. Next time he’ll do this at home. He screws the lid down, shakes the bottle, raises it to the tense winter light. Particles swirl as if in a snow globe and no sediment rests at the bottom. He pockets it.

The multiple personalities don’t bother the nurses like they do him, they’re used to random memory in Alzheimer patients. They witness decades regularly disappear in an instant and possess an arsenal of ploys to handle the time travel. Teenager one minute, dowager the next, pre-teen after that. But they weren’t married to her for thirty years, didn’t know her for fifty. The selves she tosses to them, having the heft of balls of yarn, transform into darts when aimed at him. Even when he’s ready he’s never ready.

She at least gets the right gender, though she occasionally confuses him for their son, Jason, despite differences in build and looks—Carson’s balded badly, Jason still has his hair, and Jason has fifty pounds on him, mostly muscle. He’s her son, technically, was two years old before Carson got involved the first time, eleven on the second go-round—luckily, the boy didn’t seem to remember earlier meetings, they were spared that discussion. Sometimes Natalie sees Carson as a cousin, a brother-in-law, ex-brother-in-law. Sometimes she just stares blankly. They said it might go fast, early onset often does.

He waits for the day when she sees him as himself, but forty years younger, the Carson when they first united, not the Carson she finally married. She could start talking to him like they just ordered onion rings at Humpty’s Dump, the drive-in. After all, in his mind he can see her as seventeen. Though it’s oddly true he fails to recognize her in photographs at that age. He sees her essence in his mind, not physical details. Memory’s a funny thing.

But most likely she’ll see him as an old boyfriend, if those men rated that high a description, one from a list he hadn’t known to be so lengthy, stretching through the eighties, from the day her first divorce finalized (the same day, he knows now as he didn’t then, their own affair ended) into her second marriage four years later. Maybe beyond, he certainly can’t say, didn’t know, won’t ever know. Maybe he wasn’t the only one instigating that second divorce. Or the first divorce, for that matter.

Funny, the patchwork of her exposed, frayed memory seeping into the vacant spots in his, those eight years between her leaving and returning, if you can call what she did leaving, if you can call what she did coming back. Each little short term relationship—was it one night, one week, one month?—is a bubble she reinhabits briefly, one reminding him of those years, the drought years, the Reagan Era, the longhair band period, when he was a backup plan, background noise, or maybe just an annoyance, and he, clinging to memory and clutching at hope, unwittingly fostered that status.

She remembers each guy briefly but still too long for his taste, the moments driving into him like slivers and never leaving. It’d be worth it if they answered his questions, but they’re never complete enough. Sometimes, if a moment is specific, it coincides to a time he remembers, and always it upends his own memory, exposing his perceptions as flawed, his misinterpretations as far too generous. And then he has to rework the way his mind unfolded from that moment clear to the present. It’s a constant remodel.

When did each instance trail through her life in relation to his own efforts to win her back, what was she telling him while she was sleeping with them? Do her transgressions excuse his mistakes, his shortcomings, if they were mistakes, were shortcomings? Were his and her brief, mismatched encounters in those dry years—for him, their raspiness sometimes bordering on anger, always edgy with fear, jumpy and multilayered, frequently confusing—just a matter of her irrational impulses, the Freudian id, just an expression of her shallowness and not the universe’s indictment of him? Maybe he was just an extraneous bystander, his importance to her minimal despite her ultimate significance to him.

Enough. The pickup door creaks, he needs to oil the hinges before he ends up crumpling the door. He urges his arthritic hips out of the truck a little at a time, they’re worse in the morning, and he’s careful not to move his frozen shoulder to where he becomes spastic from pain. It gets better, once he’s moving the pain shakes out, and if anyone were looking they’d see him transform from old and decrepit to a reasonable facsimile of youth in a pretty short time. As he morphs, like the evolutionary fish-to-amphibian-to-ape-to-man, an exiting nurse passes, Julie if he remembers correctly. Hard to say, there’s such a high turnover rate, low pay, bad hours, the work suited to the temperament of few. He punches the code that opens the door, enters what he calls the decompression chamber, punches another code, hits the lobby. Natalie’s standing just beyond the fake fireplace, in front of her door, still applying lipstick in a Joker-face way that would appall her if she were aware. The community poodle, circling, yaps at her feet. She’s arranged her hair with what must have been considerable effort but without the desired effect of removing five decades—except in her mind. Her eyes light up in recognition.

Kurt!

No, he thinks, but I can be him. I can do that. For now. For a few minutes.

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Space and time, Kant insisted, were the only two a priori concepts of consciousness, all else being learned. If you look at how we parse things you might agree, since we regularly, perhaps exclusively, use objective, spatial terms for subjective experiences: we’re behind the times, ahead of the pack, under the weather, over the moon, have inside jokes, think outside the box—the list is endless. But do our innate perceptions of space and time determine how we feel internally, funnel our experiences into conditioned categories, or do we simply lack words and standards of measurement (as we once lacked them for space and time) for the sensations that erupt in our life?

We name emotions, but just as every unhappy family experiences a unique unhappiness, each griever suffers differently in type and intensity, each lover gets overtaken in a way, that while similar to others’ experiences, sprawls across his or her psyche distinctively. Fear, anxiety, distress of any sort, joy, exuberance, agitation whether pleasant or painful, might be grouped broadly as single things, but just as a racial stereotypes seem obvious when carelessly observing, then turn meaningless upon close perusal, each emotional event shares only likeness, not sameness, with any other. But isn’t that also true of place, true of time?

Maybe you drive through the same intersection on the way to work and then again after, eight hours later. A resurrected Heraclitus would say you can’t drive into the same intersection twice, since you’re a different person the second time and the intersection is a different version of itself, too, but Henri Bergson, brought back for commentary, would spin it differently, allowing memory to keep the original in your mind so that maybe, as you physically drive through Heraclitus’ changed version of the place, in memory you’re in an unaltered area, that same intersection your friend was killed at in a car accident decades earlier.

Einstein disagreed with Bergson’s subjective focus on time, his theories winning out in philosophical and physics circles. But their conflicting perspectives remain alive in today’s wave-particle debate, just as the two viewpoints countered one another millennia earlier in Greece. In simplistic terms: if you’re moving, you see the world as still, and if you’re still, you see the world in motion, but simultaneously seeing the world both ways, now, that appears to be impossible. Sartre riffed on this dichotomy when he split consciousness into the for-itself and the in-itself, sociology’s Symbolic Interactionists divided the same problem of self-perception into the subjective I and the objective me, and any public speaker recognizes the difficulty here—if you, even for a moment, stop looking at audience members as objects and instead focus on yourself, you’ll falter in your delivery, lose your place in the stream of your speech, and only with the aid of long practice, the mental equivalent of muscle memory, regain your composure. Sartre called the experience of being looked at as being under the gaze, and while the sensation is most apparent in such a public situation, privately we can induce it to excruciating levels when we overly attend to ourselves, by being self-conscious.

Self-conscious typically describes a personality handicap, but all of us experience it as necessary to move through life. If you think of the active, subjective I (the part of you conscious of others but not of itself) as one leg and the objective me (the part under Sartre’s gaze, a fixed image or impression of the past, real or imagined) as the other, you’ll see that the interaction of the two gives us movement through time. I/me/I/me/I/me—we regularly check in on ourselves, assessing that thing we just said or did and feeling embarrassment, then swearing we’ll never do it again, or instead, building a self-image with the sort of work promulgated in every self-help book and sales staff meeting. Some religions, particularly those of the West, emphasize shaping the me while others, primarily Eastern, consider me a nuisance and seek to eradicate it. The result of the way we treat the relationship between I and me becomes obvious in our behavior—someone experiencing themselves solely as an object will be wooden, even catatonic, while an unleashed subject moves quickly, freely, unhindered but unthinkingly, erratically and possibly psychopathically. Either way, the self’s gait gets determined by the relationship between the two legs, and a too swift oscillation results in the mental distress we call self-conscious behavior, its various forms the cash cow of the counseling industry.

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1974-78. Dust rises behind Carson’s car, a gold 1970 Maverick inconveniently acquired from his parents when they bought a new vehicle—another Maverick. Not a chick magnet, for sure, but neither do cops notice it, though if they peered at the driver, his hair past his shoulders, they would. They might smell weed in his car when they picked him up. See empty beer cans in the back—he was a drunk, not a litterer. His graduation tassel, a stump now, its strands burned during a moment of irony, swings from the rearview mirror as he speeds up on the loose-graveled road, forty miles per hour as fast as he can go and maintain control, hoping to get ahead of the dust but failing. It seeps in through the door and window seams, into the trunk and from there to the back seat, settles finally when he gets to the recently paved secondary two miles west of their home. Sometimes when he gets to town and parks at a store or diner, he returns to his car to find WASH ME fingered in the dust on his trunk or window. How clever, those anonymous strangers.

Years before, his older brother drove a slick Camaro, metaflake paint job, oversized wheels, fancy rims, and not wanting to ding his paint job with flying rock, not wanting to wash the outside and mop the inside every trip to town, he idled the two miles of gravel. Their dog heard him coming home late nights a mile and a half away when he hit the cattle guard down by Pedersen’s, barked for fifteen minutes while he idled home, an awakened Carson cursing adolescent oaths. It was worse when his sister and her boyfriend parked down at the gravel pit, those barking spells lasting over an hour. Maybe if Carson felt he could impress the girls, he’d take better care of Marvel the Maverick, wash it once in a while, but it seemed a losing battle given his lack of suaveness, money, or Adonis-like looks. Even two out of three would have been nice.

The dust works its way into the eight-track tape player, makes regular cleaning a necessity. His music collection deteriorates daily, each play destroying the magnetic imprints as the dust sandpapers the tape heads and tape. The machine itself, were he to open it, would be filled with enough grime to frighten its designers, though given the system’s ramshackle nature they’d have no right to be alarmed. Any tape deck ended up needing matchbooks to prop up a particular tape so it properly played, and if you go around the Dump you’ll spy someone rewinding a mangled segment of music with a pencil kept for that purpose. Along the highways more evidence, big wads of tape knotted like errant kite string.

Humpty’s Dump, drive-in morphed into teen hangout. It’s where he first met Natalie. Trash-laden parking lot, garbage cans protected by two-by four cages but somehow still severely dented, a cinderblock rectangular building that hasn’t been painted since it was built. If the owners aren’t around, the staff gives out free food. No inventory taken here.

Cars circle counterclockwise, outside the north lane, back down the south, impeding paying customers, to see who is parked in the lot, measure their worth in the coinage of the moment—sexual, intellectual, social, simple curiosity—then, if uninterested, onto the street, left turn downtown or right turn to the beach or out of town. It’s a small city, population ten thousand, takes twenty minutes to go down Broadway and past the high school, return down the one-way to the beach. Finding nothing new, no one new, back at the Dump, hoping something changed.

Carson, first fascinated by the habit of cruising, gets nauseated now. And yet he persists, moving the sprinkler pipes on the farm hurriedly, showering, driving twenty miles every night to town. Sometimes during the day, too. Even mornings. Otherwise, in his teens and miles from neighbors, he’s home alone with parents nearing retirement.

Initially he parked for hours at the Dump, it was like playing the slots. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Jackpot. The jackpot remembered, no matter how small, the nothing part forgotten. Typical gambler mentality. He spent twenty thousand miles a year driving to town and haunting the streets.

The Dump, though no panacea, no magical solution, no center of transformation, nonetheless meant hope, if in a very small way. Any moisture to the thirsty means a lot. There, on the drive-in blacktop, he believed, had to believe, the faces in the passing cars yearned as he did, that someone might look, stop, change his day—perhaps even his life.

If he wasn’t sitting and watching passing cars then he was a circling driver, eyeing parked cars, some empty, others filled with teens eating fast food, drinking beer, smoking, listening to music, in variations of boredom or ennui, some even excited, freed from school or home. Maybe he’d see someone he knew, someone with an idea of what to do, a plan, short term or long, a spark of possibility otherwise absent, propelling him from here to there.

There, Linda, Becky and Elaine, in a baby blue Fiat spurting blue smoke erratically, a worn-out muffler warning from four blocks away. There, the rich Blackfoot boys in this year’s birthday present, a decked out Bronco. In a beat up white Beetle, Mark and Paul fresh off a joint, maybe with a tale rivaling their climb of the airport light tower one winter night, cops searching their unlocked vehicle beneath them, finding weed in the jockey box. They walked the empty lake bed after the cops left, called in the car as stolen, avoided a charge for possession.

There, Crazy Billy, who inched his dad’s cattle truck along the Dump’s awning, its tall sides shattering hundreds of pulsing light bulbs one by one. Tracy, into town after feeding cows, in the shit-stained farm pickup, ready to drink beer, cruise, chase girls. He’d still be doing it decades later, a noon swing