Dead Rock’n’Rollers
She had been much in few years. Twenty-two years old, in prior incarnations she’d played Tinkerbell in an elementary school production of Peter Pan, was second runner-up in the Carver County spelling bee, a promising equestrian, an incest survivor, cutter, rave girl, juvenile delinquent (GTA; Eugene, Oregon), a GI bride at the age of nineteen, twenty-one years old when Private First Class returned home on leave from Afghanistan and promptly beat her with a fire extinguisher. Then, a patient at Mingus Moore State Hospital and the Transitions Family Clinic in Wyndham, Wyoming, learning how to pronounce her b’s and p’s again. Lately she’d been waitressing.
Actual belief on my part in all this autobiography was kind of beside the point; it was faith which fueled her flights.
We kissed for the first time in a smoky, coughy, flannelly bar in Beumont. Come the next morning we were living together. My place, a feeble apartment above the town’s only all-night Laundromat, the steam and the heat overwhelming the building’s decrepit ventilation system and seeping through my ill-fitting floorboards. She and I both expressed a mutual interest in travel, shared a passion for opiates and New York punk music. We both wanted to see CBGB’s before we died.
Yet, we tarried. Ennui is no good for anyone. Due to having been the victim of police brutality the previous autumn, I was living pretty easy, working my way through a forty-four thousand, three hundred and fifty-nine dollar settlement from the city. A bull cop had repeatedly slammed me down on the hood of his cruiser, shattering my clavicle. Some girl caught the whole thing on her Smartphone. The video went viral; the story even garnered some national press attention. The accessibility of cash money—I still had over eleven thousand left—along with a reliable connection and bartenders who knew our first names served to ensorcel us.
For six weeks we fucked and drank and filled prescriptions and fought and made-up and fucked and filled prescriptions and drank and fought and fell asleep and woke-up. Someone attempted to make breakfast; someone flung a skillet against a wall. Two people shouting, grappling, screaming. Someone stormed out. The same someone downed three doubles at Jackhammer’s on 4th, charged back up the street in the merciless light of a one o’clock workday, heading home for more.
Someone wouldn’t undo the chain from the door, so someone kicked the door down. She ran and locked herself in the bathroom. Here came the police. They got me down, gingerly—I believe they recognized me—on the checkered linoleum. In a professional and courteous manner they led me down the stairs, she above us in the well, booming abuse and directives on how they ought best employ their nightsticks and pepper spray to deal with me. But just as they were about to stow me in the back of the squad car, she abruptly changed, started begging them not to take me in. Sobbing, saying how it was all her fault. Finally, and with an insouciance that was almost insulting, they let me go. There on the sidewalk we embraced, kissing madly. We left town the next day.
In Rockford we seriously contemplated marriage. In Gary, Indiana, we had a semi-successful threesome with a stripper by the name of Naomi. The town of Arden, Ohio, one Sunday morning when I was feeling especially wretched and worthless, she insisted we attend church services. So among the leafy boxelders and patrician dogwoods we walked down a prim avenue to a white stone Methodist church, following the bells. The state of our attire made me squirm with awkwardness, but she was at her best, she was dazzling. Unapologetic, unafraid. And, she could sing. She knew the words without cracking the hymnal, needing only to bluff a bit through the latter verses of A Mighty Fortress is Our God. He voice was tuned to the same key as her smile—a high C, fulsome—and it was like standing in the pew next to an archangel. I kept thinking how wrongheaded everyone in the congregation was for looking towards the pulpit or choir loft, or else upwards at a heaven of dubious authenticity, when a piece of the visible miraculous was here in the their midst, raven-dark and dirty-winged but compassed by an aura of ineffable divinity, the afterglow of grace. Afterwards we hit the matinee showing of some summer blockbuster extravaganza, replete with futuristic mayhem and technocratic carnage. We nodded off slumped against one another while up on the screen the earth howled and erupted and died at great expense.
These were the longest days of the year, which for me are always the most melancholy. In winter, night falling by five pm, I am poised, have my equilibrium, and those extended hours of dark seem proportionate and drawn to scale. But when the seasons shift, and those exaggerated twilights linger on and on, the days sliding into diminished chords, I get pensive, I get sad, like I am grieving something only I don’t remember what. Our serpentine course east in my pond-green Durango meant that of an evening we generally drove with the sun setting in the rearview, the sky painted mauves and mallows, colors of beauty and despair, reminding me always at the close of each day what lay on our trail.
Billboards. Exit signs. State lines. Dairy dips. Stop’N’Gulps. Speed traps. Indian Casinos. Theme parks. Suspension bridges. The Ohio River. Gas prices—regular unleaded, unleaded plus, premium. Diesel fuel. Turnpikes, toll roads. Steubenville. The Monongahela. Pittsburgh to Hampton, Hampton to Penbrook, Penbrook to Harrisburg. It was just outside of Harrisburg that the tape deck ate our copy of Marquee Moon, track one, side one, chilly Tom Verlaine intoning how he gets your point, it’s so sharp, just as the cassette was gobbled up in a squeaky squeal. See No Evil—no more. Which might have been prophetic…
…because in Scranton on a bleak Saturday night we were duped by a hair-lipped, dead-eyed seventeen year old Amish on Rumspringa who sold us a two hundred and twenty dollar baggie of corn starch under the auspices that it was heroin. We didn’t discover the subterfuge until were back at the Ramada Motor Court, giddy with relief because we’d already been a day and a half since last copping and were starting to get the crawls. On snorting the stuff, our sinus passages clogged as if with plumber’s putty.
Awful disbelief paralyzed us for several minutes. Then it dawned on us how bad this really was. She suggested hunting down Shemuel and disemboweling him. I sprang into action, grabbed seventy-four of our remaining three hundred or so dollars, and went out into the rain to see if there were such a thing as Scranton Housing Projects.
I found them. And I found two guys prowling a corner, faces obscured by drawn hoodies and the fine, misting rain. I rolled down the window to place my order. I cannot now recall whether I was still in the seat when the gun butt hit me, or whether I was pulled out first, then pistol-whipped. I came to staring at the needles of rain drops falling from the sky, the streetlamps watery coronas, the sound of my car tires swishing down the wet street before dying out completely.
When I made it back, her first and foremost concern was, I believe, my well-being. She dampened washcloths and placed compresses on my forehead; she cleaned and kissed my cuts. It was at least an hour before the blame began. The accusations were mutual, though more muffled on my end as I had at least one concussion to go along with my junkie flu. She on the other hand was incensed, mighty, energized. Never had I seen her so charged, overwhelming and beautiful as some fiery bird out of mythology.
A plan was hatched. We would go to the ER, where with my injuries I would surely be written a largish scrip. However, disintegration was not to be denied; like all other intended purposes of late, this one unraveled into disaster. Not trusting my claim about a spill down some stairs, the resident called the cops in to question me. I tried to maintain a consistent story, and believe I did so, but the upshot was that I was in the examination room for several hours. When I was finally allowed to leave (armed with a prescription for eight hundred milligram Ibuprofens), I came out to the waiting room to find she’d gone. Maybe she had gotten wind the police were about; or maybe coming had been her scheme from the first, a ruse to ditch me. Any possibility seemed equally likely at this point. I decided to take a sabbatical from thought as one more bad idea at this juncture might prove my undoing.
The clerk at the motor court was all over me as I came limping up. I’d missed checkout. My stuff was there, hers wasn’t. Her panties and comb and tooth brush, her clogs and tote bag, cleared out. A hundred dollar bill was folded neatly on the nightstand, under a bar of complimentary bath soap. I crammed it into my pocket. I grabbed my worldly possessions (loose laundry, motorcycle boots), and hauled everything downstairs to a grassy islet curbside of the parking lot, there to writhe and wait and see if she came back.
The sun went from left to right across the frame, wiped clean the sky. I grew sicker. One of my dreaded dusks descended. She did not return. The clerk came out, said he was calling the police if I didn’t light out. The threat of law kept breaking out around me like hives.
I relented. In something like a blackout I guess, I walked until I found the Greyhound station. Forty-one dollars bought me a one-way ticket for New York City Port Authority.
Sometime in the wee hours of the morning, the big engine rumbled to, juddered me in my seat and reminded me that I was beat to hell. Opening my eyes, I saw the slow roll of scenery slip past my window, the sleeping city in snatches and glimpses through my clinging consciousness like an underlit nickelodeon. We touched interstate and the engine’s chug smoothed into a glide.
Of course I never really knew her at all. Any current vividness in regards to her was an illusion, the misfires of neurons, and was a poor substitute for data and detail. The little of either I had at my disposal I couldn’t quite inhabit—it was just stray flak from some explosion I’d seen at a distance. And even those sundry tidbits I came to doubt, there in my detox reverie with my swollen brain lurching in and out of wakefulness, through rest area stops and the tugs and heaves of the bus at onramps, junctions, as dawn eventually crept wincing and orange across the flimsy gauze of my eyelids. Meaning that maybe the catalog I had of her past, the experiences she’d endured and the parts she’d played, were many of them inventions of my stupor now, sweating and feverish in my unsteady seat, and not all of them necessarily disclosures she’d ever made to me. I cannot now rightly ascertain which was which, what was what. So too with the sensation of her skin against mine, her clover scent, the random images of her which swam to the surface as from the bottom of a black pool. These were undependable recollections, little sunspots, and even in this confused state I was vaguely aware that much of what I conjured was fantasy and figment, how in my palpating dream she melded with other girls I’d known, known but never had, loved but never known, a palimpsest of loss and lust lain over a sheaf of marginal memories. She, whoever she was, almost as absent from my reflections as she was from my side, no more available for summons than tomorrow’s weather.
And yet, I did not forget that we’d been on a pilgrimage.
I walked out of the Port Authority Terminal and into the swelter and geeked activity of the Midtown Manhattan streets. My innards were greasy, curdled; my blood circulated like an oil slick. I felt like a slum in search of a city to house me. Worrisome that I hadn’t eaten in three days; the greater worry was that I wasn’t hungry. But I knew I wasn’t dying. The pain had become too explicit, too acute, and I was so awake.
I departed, tacking south then east, south then east. Through the arcades of the avenues, slipping between the fretwork of the buildings, the architecture lording over me with the pristine malevolence of surgical instruments. Soon the skyscrapers gave ground; quainter grandeur asserted itself; parks and green spaces materialized; the streets unspooled off the grid, narrowed into concrete canals.
I located Bowery. Then walking down its blocks, I came to the corner of Bleeker. Checking the address. Yes, this is it. No, it isn’t. Looking around. She wasn’t there, of course. Neither was it.
I don’t know which I found more disconcerting; that in place of the iconic awning so indelible in my memory from all the photographs I’d seen, there was now frontage with an inky-black canopy done up in Textura lettering, the logo of some sleek clothing boutique; or that when I placed my face to the plate glass to peer inside, the woman flipping through the stack of twelve hundred dollar boot cut jeans was a dead ringer for 1978 Deborah Harry.
I hadn’t been born yet. For all my fanboy ways, I always knew I could never be a part of then. What I didn’t know till now was that I was no part of today, either. When was I again?