In the Mood

by Addison Hoggard

Jerry Garcia showed up not long after I moved into my grandmother’s house; she had died just the week before and I needed the solitude of living in a house with no neighbors, near no shops, nestled into a swampy spit of land hugged by crops of piss-scent sage. Yet, there was Jerry Garcia. 

Jerry Garcia, the first night, sat at the kitchen table with his palms upturned. He said he would bake a cake in exchange for a place to hide out. I’m on the run, man, he said, but it looks like you are, too. 

Jerry Garcia’s cake was covered in canned chocolate icing he’d found at the back of the cupboard. It was pocked with gooey craters. I asked why he’d poked so many holes in it and he said: It’s a holy cake. It’s supposed to have holes. The chocolate choked me, the richness and oiliness of it. Maybe the holiness of it. I told him I didn’t deserve it. He put a big hairy hand on my shoulder and I trembled.

Jerry Garcia squeezed my neck. Why are you afraid? I told him that I’d been afraid of him since I was a kid; my deadhead dad had a blanket with Jerry Garcia’s face stitched on it that hung over the sofa my entire childhood and the fuzzy eyes followed me everywhere I went. 

Jerry Garcia chuckled and a song whistled through his teeth. He asked again: Why are you afraid? 

Jerry Garcia said we’d have to get rid of the Elvis kitsch in the kitchen. The Elvis timer, the Elvis tea towels. I said that we couldn’t because my grandmother loved Elvis. The one thing Jerry Garcia liked in the kitchen was my grandmother’s pot of dancing flowers. He would press the pot’s button over and over; the opening brass from Glenn Miller’s In the Mood buoyed on repeat and the flowers jived in unending loops. 

Jerry Garcia slept in my grandmother’s bed. One night, he came into my bedroom and woke me up. He held a lit candle, white and long, and I immediately recognized it as the one that had been on my grandmother’s nightstand since I was born. It had never once felt a flame until this moment, and when I said as much, Jerry Garcia spun in circles singing: What good is a candle with no fire? I sat up in bed and loved the way the candlelight caught in his frizzy hair-halo. I didn’t sleep again that night. The black smoke from the wick writhed on the popcorn ceiling. 

Jerry Garcia and I pinned our washing to the line wearing only our last clean pairs of boxers. What was your grandma’s favorite Elvis song? I told him Return to Sender and we sang that together until we ran out of clothespins. Our skins were steeped in the smell of detergent. 

Jerry Garcia burned family photos when we ran out of wood in winter. We need new pictures anyways. In the weeks that followed, new pictures appeared. Polaroids of me bare-chested in the living room, climbing up the wicked dogwood in the front yard, filling the hummingbird feeders. The new pictures were hard to look at because they were in colors I’d never seen before. 

Jerry Garcia found a notebook from my childhood, the one with all my drawings. Pictures of knights and princes falling in love waxed across the pages in familiar Crayola colors. He said, I bet your grandma never saw these, huh? Jerry Garcia burned them when we ran out of family photos and the house reeked of toasted rainbows. 

Jerry Garcia cooked cornbread with my grandmother’s recipe, but he couldn’t get the timing right because the Elvis timer rubber-legged at its own pace. The cornmeal bubbled in the butter Crisco for too long and blackened into charcoal. It’s all a part of it, man. 

Jerry Garcia, after a year, told me to write a letter to Cousin Paul and ask for help with our escape. I wrote the letter in red crayon and put it in an envelope before I realized I didn’t know who Cousin Paul was. Cousin Paul! You used to play together. I didn’t remember in the end, but a week later, Jerry Garcia hugged me tight and said: I heard from the birds that Cousin Paul fell from his old treehouse and landed in a fog—he’s been wandering ever since. We never got to send the letter, but Jerry Garcia said we ought to think of someone else that could help us get away. I didn’t understand what we were running from and I couldn’t think of anyone that could help. 

Jerry Garcia spun around in the front yard with a joint in his mouth and the smoke spiraled into tornadoes that ripped up the crops. I told him to stop being so destructive. He told me the same. 

Jerry Garcia gargled instant coffee one morning and then spit it onto the linoleum floor. I didn’t ask why he’d done it, nor did he explain, but he pointed at it and told me to clean. A brown reflection of myself quivered in the sticky mess. I sopped it up with paper towels. 

Jerry Garcia found me in the shower crying. He pulled back the curtain and didn’t flinch from my nakedness. He hummed In the Mood and I thought I would be naked forever. Peeled. 

I poured condensed milk over canned peaches for Jerry Garcia like my grandmother used to do for me. I recited her spell: Peaches are bright like the future, cream is white for peace. Jerry Garcia slurped the creamy dream until all that remained were white beads wet in his beard. Tastes like a sunset, man. 

Jerry Garcia opened the letter I wrote to Cousin Paul after six months had passed. He read aloud: I want to get better.

Jerry Garcia passed me a Vienna Sausage from the can and asked: Better, yet? 

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Addison Hoggard (he/him) is a writer hailing from the rural inner banks of North Carolina. Most recently, his work has appeared in Sky Island Journal, Willawaw Journal, and Wild Roof Journal. He is currently based in Aizuwakamatsu, Japan.