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GRAB ON TO ME TIGHTLY AS IF I KNEW THE WAY
1
When you grow
up you can be anything, they said, but that's a lie too. So I go to
band practice and plug in the Twin Reverb, the Stratocaster, and the
noise is a beautiful plane crashing into my face. So I make a gun with
my finger and thumb and aim heavenward. So I dream of a landscape, this
one, darkened by the slow rolling shadows of cloud-sized tits.
2
You can wish in one hand and shit in the other etc.
The sun don't shine on the same dog's ass forever etc. I don't know
but I been told etc. No matter how much you wiggle and dance the last
few drops end up in your pants etc. There is a world war in the heart
of every father etc.
3
My name is Vincent Joseph Sweeney and I am an alcoholic.
Just kidding about that second part. No one calls me Vincent, or even
Vince, except sometimes my mom when she's really pissed. Last Friday
I graduated high school. In ten years I'll be dead. That's according
to the ninth-grade me, a Jim Morrison disciple. Death at twenty-seven
looked good then. Now I say here's to the future, here come the fun
times. College, beer, job, marriage, babies, debt, divorce, nuclear
annihilation.
4
In the winter we get relentless blizzards, in the summer
we get lake-effect humidity that creeps in from the shore and hangs
on the air like a wet wool sweater, like now, first heat wave of the
year. There's no AC in our house and my parents have their ridiculous
cooling method. Around eleven a.m., or earlier some days, they close
every window to a crack, draw the blinds and turn on three or four strategically
placed fans. I seek relief at the East-Towne 5, a crumbling make-out
palace out on Gull Road. Had my first real kiss there. Nora Reperton,
beautiful times. Now the East-Towne shows second-run dollar movies and
I've been known to see two a day during the hot weather. But no movies
today, no nothing. Today I have band practice.
My band is
called the Judy Lumpers.
I drive shirtless
through the miserable early afternoon, WQXC on the radio good times
and great oldies he digs soul she goes for rock and roll pow! quicksee
one-oh-one point nine. It's stifling, even speeding, with all four
windows down, and every song is a comment on the weather.
Hot town
summer in the city back of my neck feelin
just like
a heat wave burnin in my heart
'cause
there ain't no cure for the summertime blues.
Wheeler's
driveway is empty. I walk through the garage and into the kitchen, where
a girl I've never seen before looks up at me from a book. She's at the
small table, bathed in thick hot light and swirling dust and, fuck,
I'm shirtless, skinny white chest and three or four long black hairs
sprouting from each nipple. Before saying a single word, I run to the
car and grab a T-shirt, already damp under the arms by the time I return.
"I'm Vim,"
I say.
"Helene,"
she says.
And our conversation
ends.
Her face so
pale you could touch it and make a ripple, shoulder-length brown hair
parted in the middle, green tanktop, faded cords, red low-top Converse,
great name, great voice. Her eyes so light blue and calm they make me
feel like I've been talking too loud my whole life. Down the hall the
toilet flushes and a second later Wheeler appears.
Wheeler's
been into some shit lately. In the spring he showed up at school wearing
a dress and got suspended. He fought back and the next thing you know
he's on the front page of the Kalamazoo Gazette, posing in a flowery
thrift-store dress on the Gull Lake High School lawn. There's a church
about every eight feet here and the Christians went apeshit. Wheeler
got called every name in the book by dudes with necks like stacks of
tires and even in subtle ways by a couple of the more god-fearing teachers.
The controversy blew over but he never returned to school. His dad,
the lone parent, tried for a while, made him watch a series of tapes
called Where There's a Will There's an A. But Wheeler had lost
the will. These days he sleeps till noon and designs tattoos, one of
which is on his body, an elaborate dragon creature with a tail that
goes up his back and curls around his neck.
"Hey Vim,"
he says, "meet Helene. She's kinda my girlfriend." His nose is all red
and inflamed and I see he's got a nosering, a gold hoop in the middle,
like a bull. "When did you get that?" I say.
"What?"
"The fucking
thing in your nose." Why am I suddenly angry?
"This? Yesterday.
What do you think?"
Wheeler walks
over and Helene puts her arms around his legs and that's when I notice
her scars. I lean against the sink and try to see other things but there's
only so much to see. A couple minutes pass and I'm just here, stupidly
hearing their love whispers, until finally Jake shows up, carrying his
bass.
"Thank god,"
I say.
"What's happening?"
"Just this."
I point at the lovers. "Jake, meet Helene."
"Who?"
"Wheeler's
kinda girlfriend."
Helene waves.
More scars on her forearm.
"Oh no, more
than kinda," Wheeler says.
"I'm just
going by what you said, Wheeler. You said kinda."
"That was
then. Now we're full-throttle."
"Since when?"
"Since this,"
snapping his fingers, "right this second."
"No, this
second," she says.
"No, this
second."
On and on
and then they giggle, actually fucking giggle, like we're ten years
old and this is recess. I hate these idiotic displays of new love.
"Nice nose,
Wheeler," Jake says.
"Thank you.
I did it myself."
Then he kisses
Helene and the tiny wet smack reverberates like a gunshot. "This is
all very great," I say, "but are we practicing?"
*
The basement
is our universe. Drums, amps and four-track on one end, shredded couch
on the other. Almost no light. A lot of the ceiling tiles got busted
out the night we had a show here and this repressed minister's son went
crazy with his two hours of freedom and pogo'd his head through all
of them. There's a single poster on the wall, Marc Bolan coming at you
with a Les Paul.
We do our
set, then dink around on some new stuff. Jake borrows my guitar and
plays a weird dissonant octave chord high up on the neck. Wheeler kicks
in with a heavy backbeat. I shrug. "It's okay."
"What do
you got?"
"Not much.
I'm working on a few things."
"So let's
try this."
I sit on the
couch and listen for a minute. The song evolves into kind of a Sonic
Youth rip, spacey verse bursting into a random, sludgy chorus. It'd
be tough to find a vocal pattern for it unless I aped Thurston Moore's
awful hipster poetry.
I've got no
new songs. I'm trying to get past just ripping off J Mascis but it's
tough. Early Judy Lumpers was Dinosaur Jr Jr, me whining in couplets
under a three-chord wall of noise with an over-the-top solo at the end.
In a way I can't help it. You're Living All Over Me is a Biblical
artifact on a par with Nevermind or Doolittle. I listened
to it so much it went into my bones and blood. And plus I've got the
set-up for maximum fuzz and volume, the Strat, the '72 Twin Reverb,
the Rat pedal, all on permanent loan from my Uncle Bro.
The jam stretches
out, Jake and Wheeler fully into it now, nodding at each other before
the changes. I get up casually, pretend to look in my guitar case for
something, pretend to not find it. Then I go upstairs.
*
Helene, still
at the table, still reading. I pour a glass of blue Kool-Aid and sit
across from her. The kitchen floor vibrates with guitar and drums.
"Hey. Why
aren't you playing?" she says.
"Sometimes
they get into their thing and I have to take a break."
I look at
her arms, the scars, some fat and purple, some thin and almost grayish-looking.
My first thought was suicide but now I see that none are on her wrists,
which for some reason makes me take them less seriously.
"So what
are you reading?"
She holds
up the cover. Naked Lunch.
Ah the Beat
Phase, I'm thinking. Mine came freshman year, when I learned that young
Jim Morrison had been a fan of On the Road. I smoked a lot of
pot in those days, dropped acid in physical science class. I pledged
allegiance to the road by occasionally walking home from school. Then
my poems, long stream-of-consciousness meditations on sex, death and
revolution.
"I read that,"
I say.
"Yeah I've
read it a few times now," she says.
"Wow. There
aren't too many books I've read more than once. Maybe No One Here
Gets Out Alive."
"I read this
one pretty much daily." She puts the book down, twirls a lock of hair
around her index finger. "It's my bible," she says.
Her what?
Bible? Junkies? Anuses, jissom, dripping cunts?
"I feel a
religious connection to every page," she says.
"What about
every paragraph? I would think that'd be the true test of a spiritual
work. If you don't feel a religious connection to every paragraph, you're
probably being short-changed."
"Oh yeah?
And what are you probably being, funny?"
My cheeks
and neck are instantly aflame. She's silent then, staring with those
blue eyes, and the silence is heavy for some reason and I have to keep
talking or drown so I say: "I wasn't going for some hilarious zinger,
if that's what you mean."
"Well then
what were you going for?"
"Maybe just
a halfhearted grin, out of pity. Something."
This creates
the tiniest of smiles, which I devour. Her face opens up through the
curtain of hair in new and beautiful ways. Something is happening here.
"You're not
from Gull Lake."
"No, I go
to Loy Norrix."
"So how do
you know what's his name?" I point at the floor.
"You mean
Bixby? We met at the park."
She means
Bronson Park, downtown Kalamazoo, where the punks, skaters and rejects
from all the different schools in the area commune. You see them in
droves, after school or on weekends, doing railslides in the parking
lot or sprawled on the lawns in stoned, angry heaps.
I lean in
and stare down her scars, no shame, like if I just stare long enough
they'll open like little mouths and say how they got there.
Scars with
voices telling their funny tales of mutilation.
Please baby,
tell me what happened.
Let our scars
have a conversation.
The basement
jam drones on. I take a thousand baby sips of Kool-Aid just to have
something to do. Helene looks back at her "bible." I look too. There's
writing in the margins, whole passages starred and underlined, a note
in large print across the top of pages 156 and 157. I Was Just Saying
I Love You. Not Saying Any Longer. I Am.
The heat is
unreal, like the heat of all summers forever in this one room. Thinking
makes me sweat. Skin like flypaper. Looking at Helene makes me sweat.
I see a drop
of sweat at the top of her cleavage and wait for it to drip.
If it won't
drip, if it won't fall, I'll walk out in the yard and throw rocks at
my heart. I'll fucking get in my car and smash into a tree.
And god must
really care, even though he doesn't exist, because the drop falls, it
disappears between the tits, and a door in my mind kicks open so loud
it almost makes a sound in the real world.
She glances
up, catches me staring, and smiles.
And just like
that I'm saying her name over and over and dreaming of stealing a kiss,
a quick one, and the inside of my head is all painted with visions.
Helene and I ascend through clouds into atheist heaven on a waterbed
with angel wings.
Copyright © 2006 by Bryan
Charles
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