The best fiction writing is very courageous: the author starts out knowing vaguely what she wants to write about, but she doesn’t know how it ends or where the characters are going to end up. They’ll figure that out for themselves. This post will be a little analogous; I don’t know what this post wants to be about. Maybe something about memory? Or about how we change over the course of a long life? Something else entirely? Because those don’t seem to capture this particular situation.
If you’re too young to remember, Roger Mudd was the anchor of NBC’s Nightly News, a substitute anchor for CBS, etc., and he achieved a degree of renown. He was calm and handsome. He had a southern background, attending Washington & Lee and the University of North Carolina before becoming a journalist. He was famous, at least to my generation.
I don’t know how I figured out that I was living next to his son, Jonathan. When I went to law school at UNC, I lived at 16-C University Gardens, a not terrible apartment complex north of the campus, and Jonathan lived next door for two years, I believe. I recall being annoyed by him before Nancy and I got married and lived there our final year of law school.
It was an odd place; it looked run down, but I had two stories, wood floors, and a graceful layout. Ice formed on the window outside the kitchen. I fixed dinner for Nancy on our first date there. I asked the rice, “Are you warm?” and Nancy said, “I’m fine, thank you.”
Next door was the manager, a large man with a wife who kept cats. When he opened the door, the stench wafted outside into the common foyer, thick enough to cause wretching. He was nice. One Saturday he said, “Why don’t you be like them other Carolina boys and get you a six pack of beer and watch the football game?”
One night I heard an odd sound and looked outside. Some guy was standing in our parking lot with a pistol and firing up into the apartment complex up above. Holy. It only happened that one time, but it happened. After he fired, he’d glance up to that complex and, in some sort of odd reflex, duck. He was a little overweight and wore glasses. It never happened again.
An historical note: Also living there was a law student a year behind us, Harriet Grant, with her collie, Jordie, who would greet us with a big grin and barking as though he were trying to tell us things. In law school, Harriet was a good liberal, but she ended up married to I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. When he was convicted of perjury etc., Nancy emailed his lawyer and invited Harriet to come stay with us in Seattle if she needed to get the hell out of D.C. The guy emailed us back immediately, which made us think: Your client just got convicted of felonies. Don’t you have anything more pressing to do? He promised to pass the word on to Harriet, but we never heard from her.
Jonathan was, and is, a musician. This meant, of course, that music poured from that apartment all day and all night, loudly, sometimes late. He had roommates, too, and friends, so there was a constant low hum, sometimes a rising din. It exasperated me. I am, of course, a stern introvert, and I don’t brook interruption or loud noise, especially if it’s clear that people are enjoying themselves. Everyone should have been as miserable as I was. In those days, I was drinking really cheap scotch.
I have trouble recalling how I handled it, considering that we must have lived there for two years. The music would start after dinner, usually, and the walls—too thin, of course (foreshadowing!)—let a lot of bass and everything else come in. At least twice I spoke to Jonathan’s roommate and asked if they could keep it down. He apologized apparently sincerely but possibly a little too glibly, and nothing changed.
Also, someone was having frequent sex on the other side of my wall. She would start low and her yips would rise, louder and louder, till the end, when they stopped altogether. I always wondered about that. She was way too consistent. Was she faking? Should you fake with Roger Mudd’s son? He was (is) so damn handsome that you’d have assumed that her passion was real. But maybe it was the roommate? In any event, someone over there was having a lot of sex and late at night at that, and I was alone with my scotch. That stuff was so bad it caught in my throat going down.
Finally, one night the music and the blithe indifference to my entreaties put me over my limit. I walked over to the wall separating our apartments and put my fist through it.
What did I expect? Of course there was another wall. As much as I would have enjoyed imagining my fist in Jonathan Mudd’s apartment, and what a point that would have made, it was never going to happen. Nothing changed about the music anyway. Before we moved out, I patched the wall, noticeably of course as I have little skill in that, but somehow the rental company didn’t ding me for the repairs.
I suppose this is true of a lot of people; when I was younger, I was a lot more confident that I could pull off something like that—a six inch hole in the drywall? Sure, I can patch that! Or is it youthful arrogance? Or ignorance?
Jonathan was playing his guitar out on the stoop one night when one of his friends came by and proclaimed, “You can’t play that thing!”—a playful, affectionate jibe. My law school friends were all a lot more despairing, or ironic, or depressed. I envied him that shared nonchalance.
Jonathan and I both graduated in the spring of 1985. His father came for graduation, apparently, because I happened to look out the window and there he was in the parking lot. Roger Mudd was blessed with some pretty great genes, and he was still tall, handsome, and thin.
He looked at our scary brick apartment building, much more livable than it seemed, and smiled—ironically? Condescendingly? If you hadn’t seen him doing news reports, you’d say yes, but he always smiled like that, and in the news context, the smile was comfortable, warm, and imparted a little humor to the end of the day. He was wearing a suit; I suppose he always did.
Sometime in those last few days, I ran into the roommate again, and he said something to the effect of, hey, goodbye, good luck, enjoyed living next to you. As I am a nasty, petty person, I said something like “Well, it wasn’t really so pleasant having to bear all that music late at night.” What a jerk I was. He actually apologized, though he said he hadn’t been aware, which made it seem that our previous conversations had never occurred. But he should have punched me in the face. And then off we went.
It turns out that this is a post about how the son of a famous man carves out a life for himself and discovers how he’s going to stick himself into the world. Jonathan Mudd found himself early as a musician and has been working at it ever since. He produced his first solo album in 2005. If his pictures are accurate, the lucky bastard inherited his father’s lean frame.
I always figured musicians for poets; they flame early and flame out early, like mathematicians. So all the more reason to praise him: he found his work and his people, and he has been true to it, and is still energetically creative and productive in his fifties. I have to envy that kind of life.
(Author’s postscript: Thanks to the magic of the Internet, I discovered the facts of his musical career, and, happily, a way to contact him. He wrote back to say that he did remember me; his roommate and he had called me “the man from G.R.A.D.” He apologized for their behavior very graciously and unnecessarily. Then I wrote back apologizing for having been an old man.)
