I am pretty ambivalent about this installment from the archives. It is from 4-5 years ago, and I do not consider it to be very well-written, or polished in any way. There are incomplete themes, ideas not fleshed out, and the whole thing has no point, really.
On the other hand, it has a sort of jagged quality (to me) that pretty closely captures the way I was feeling at the time, I am pretty sure. Jagged and dark and uncertain. I like that. That is a hard thing to write about if one sets out to do it, which I am pretty sure was not what I was doing here. I think I have held onto it – and republished it here – mainly for that reason.
Just another sordid little story, an event or convergence of events along the way … from someone who went three roughly three-quarters of his life up to this point without a fucking clue, but still turned out all right. Well, I’d like to think so, anyway.
That’s something.
“The man is gone
Mary’s dead
Good morning, midnight”
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UNDER THE BIG BLACK SUN
It was 1983 sometime. Mid-morning. I was lying on my side in the queen-sized bed, my head dug down into the cool, goose down pillow lying underneath it. I was in the bedroom of my apartment at the time, and it was time to get up, I guess. Half of me wanted to get up, half of me didn’t. I was hung over as hell, which was one reason I didn’t want to. I’d gone out the night before with this girl I was seeing and some other people we knew, and we’d hit the whiskey pretty hard. And then we hit the MDMA sometime after that.
My . . . what? I didn’t consider her as my girlfriend, not really . . . My then current female companion, I guess you could call her, was sitting across the bedroom, slouched across an armchair, looking stylishly disheveled and a bit like Anita Pallenberg, circa 1968, before the rot set in. She was eyeing me accusingly. “Get up, lazy ass. I want to go to the beach today.” I rolled over onto my other side, so I wouldn’t have to look at her while she was mildly vilifying me; but she continued with the nagging, “You’re so lazy . . . you’re so lazy . . . you have a lazy life.”
“I’m lazy? R-i-i-i-ght,” I was thinking to myself. This chick was a borderline speed freak, and she stayed up until ungodly hours, chain smoking cigarettes and watching the dreck that passed for all night television programming in those days. And that was about all she did. Oh, she did make herself available to me when I wanted, and she seemed to participate in the subsequent goings-on with something approximating passion, which is probably why I had kept her around as long as I had. But I always knew she was just temporary, that she wasn’t long for my increasingly dark little fucked up world.
She was right about me being lazy, though. I had lately been overcome by a powerful lethargy I could not shake. It had dominated my life for months. My limbs felt inordinately heavy, and I would sit and think for minutes or even hours before deciding to do get up and do something as simple and mindless as turning down the air conditioner. I had lost interest in the things I used to be interested in, and I’d neglected most of my friends and family for months. And I never really wanted to go out and do anything anymore, at all.
I still don’t know exactly why I’d become so lethargic; but I suspect now that some of it was the onset of temporary clinical depression. And also the fact I was shoveling down unknown quantities of alcohol and pharmaceuticals every night and well into the next morning. That may have had something to do with it, too.
And now this tweaker chick I was dating said she wanted to go to the fucking beach. Great. Understand, going to the beach was something I would normally be ready to do at any time, at the drop of a hat. The sand and the ocean and the waves had powerful meaning for me, and had a spiritual and intellectual and emotional hold on me as basic and primal as the church I had been born into and had given my lifelong adherence to (with varying degrees of devotion over the years.) I went to Mass when I was in the mood to, and thought I probably should. I was always ready to go to the beach. But on that morning, my girlfriend’s insistence that I get up and take her was more annoying than anything else. I rolled over in the bed, away from her, so I could lie there in peace for a while, and think about it.
By that time, this girl and I had been together about a week, I think. Maybe two. I’d met her one night in a bar my crowd and I frequented in those days. It was just a dive, really; a place to drink and play pool and shuffleboard, and not much else. It was not a place one immediately thought of if one was looking to go out and score some acceptable if temporary female companionship.
The night I hooked up with my speed freak girl was an exception, I suppose. I’m not 100% sure, though; because I don’t remember any of it. It was later that my friend Tony recounted the whole romantic story for me.
***************
“You were playing shuffleboard, and kicking ass,” Tony said. “Seemed like every third puck you slid hung over the edge at the other end. The guys you were playing were bluffing you, saying those pucks weren’t hangers, and you challenged ‘em every time, and won. You were out of your head, and playing like a demon, winning tons of free beer. It was awesome.”
“Somewhere in there this chick just kind of showed up. I don’t know where she came from. She wasn’t all that attractive to me – kind of skinny, and her hair was long and straight and almost stringy. Tits, yes, but nothing really to make a big deal about. She had on a pair of worn out jeans and tennis shoes, and a baseball undershirt with dark blue sleeves. Three-quarter cut. Nothing to get your attention, really. But she stood there alongside the shuffleboard table for a while, admiring the way you played. And before long I guess you noticed her admiring you, and after that we could guess, from the look in your eyes, what was going to happen next.”
“Sure enough, before long you had your arm around her, and she was drinking some of the beers you’d won, and smoking your cigarettes. It wasn’t that much longer until you guys looked like you’d been together for years. I didn’t get it. Not your usual type. If Diane had seen her, she’d have laughed, right before she kicked you in the stones. The guys and I thought it was funny … Mike said you’d finally found yourself one that looked like Tom Petty, with tits. Ha ha.”
I was a big Tom Petty fan back then. I’d got into him soon after his first LP came out. I’d come across it by chance. He and his band were basically unknown at the time, at least around here. They recorded for Shelter in those days. The Tulsa scene. Some of the band’s early cuts employed Dwight Twilley and Phil Seymour as background vocalists, Twilley and Seymour playing Flo and Eddie to Petty & the Heartbreakers’ T. Rex. It sounded really good and different at the inception, both retro and new at the same time. 1975, I think, or 1976 … you’ll have to take my word for it . . . but anyway, this chick was better looking than Tom Petty with mid-sized knockers. And I wasn’t sleeping with her because she bore a resemblance to one of my rock ‘n’ roll heroes at the time. I wasn’t that screwed up. She was a decent-looking girl, okay? Starting to show the effects of persistent drug use, yes, but … she wasn’t great, but …
In retrospect, though, through fuzzy recollection, I can kind of see how my friends made the Tom Petty connection. She did kind of look like Tom Petty, in a certain light. Tom Petty, with tits. Maybe I really was that screwed up.
Oh, and the ‘Diane’ my buddy Tony referenced was a girl I loved, the true love of my life to that point, a beautiful, wonderful, gorgeous woman I’d had an on again, off again relationship for nearly two years by that time. Diane was nothing like the somewhat torn and frayed girl I’d hooked up with playing shuffleboard. At the time, Diane and I were in one of our “off again” phases, I guess. But I don’t want to get off into that, here. Anything to do with Diane is a whole other story.
***************
While my girl sat there telling me what a lazy-ass I was, I started drifting off into reverie, if not quite outright sleep. I could hear the dude downstairs’ stereo playing The Police. I could hear the rather haunting sounding opening bars to “Wrapped Around My Finger”. That album hadn’t been out that long, but dude (his name was Doug or something) played the fuck out of it, all the time. Including when he was screwing his girlfriend, which I could hear sometimes, the sounds coming up through the floor between us. He also beat his girl to that song. I could hear that sometimes, too. He swore he didn’t, and she swore he didn’t, but I could hear it, sometimes; the girl’s piercing wails of pain stabbing through my mind. After that, every time I heard that Police album I thought of Doug’s girl in pain, and me upstairs, doing nothing about it, unable to do anything about it. It made me hate that LP after a while, which was okay, because I never liked The Police very much, anyway. Back then, some retarded Rolling Stone critic went so far as to classify them as “punk.” What a moron. Andy Summers could play a little bit, okay, but come on . . .
It was kind of hot and sticky in the apartment that morning. I’d decided that spring to save money to buy a truck, a Silverado I liked, so I scrimped wherever I could. I’d taken to setting the air conditioner’s thermostat at 78 or 80, and turning it off altogether at night. I usually just wore a pair of gym shorts around the apartment most of the time, anyway – no shirt, no shoes. I’d leave the windows open in the evenings. In the early part of spring, it was a workable plan. But as it got on from April to May, and then into the first part of the summer, I knew I would have to shelve my plan before long. It would get too fucking hot and humid in the apartment, and I wouldn’t be able to sleep. Or, alternately, it would make me drowsy-sleepy during the day and, as my girl said, lazy. Before long I would have to shut the windows, crank the A/C down to 72 or so, and just let that motherfucker run, all summer long.
***************
I finally got it together enough to get my ass up out of the bed; and take a shower, ice down some beer, and pack up the truck. All this because my little Amphetamine Annie wanted to go to the beach that day. It pissed me off that I was coerced into taking her, but once I got down there, of course, I was fine.
It was an average summer weekend – not too crowded, but the beach was far from empty. We secured a good spot to park and set up, not far from where Swede’s Rd. (Crystal Beach Dr.) emptied onto the sand. I set up our lawn chairs and cooler and this 8’ x 8’ canvas canopy I had, for shade if it got too hot. I was up in the bed of my truck, setting up the external stereo speakers, when my girl walked over and asked me to slather her down. So I stopped what I was doing, and proceeded to cover the parts of her body not covered by her bikini, which was by far most of it, with a thick coating of Coppertone Savage Tan, the kind with coconut oil in it. As I finished, I realized the scent of coconut oil had aroused me a little – well, that, and the sight of my girl barely dressed and all oiled up, with the sun glinting off of her smooth skin. But she sensed my arousal, and got out of range before I could do anything about it. I shook my head and went back to setting up the stereo.
Once I’d got everything the way I wanted it, I settled down into my lawn chair and did what was just about my favorite thing in the world to do – I got pleasantly smashed, while contemplating the ocean, the waves, and the horizon. And eventually, I slipped off into a daydream . . .
It was 2011, a mid-summer weekend day. I’d been out working in the yard earlier, but now I was lying on the sofa in the living room, half watching a ballgame on the television, and half dozing/daydreaming. It was a pleasant feeling, to lie there and know I had taken care of my weekend around-the-house obligations, and now I could snooze and half-ass watch a baseball game, with no guilt or recriminations. The guilt would have been self-inflicted, as would have the recriminations, by then. The soon-to-be ex-wife had moved into a townhouse with my youngest son, and my older son and I were left at the house, on our own. And he didn’t give a shit about the yard, or household chores in general, obviously; so the only person left to bitch at me about putting off doing what needed to be done around the house was me. And I was rarely in the mood to do it.
As I lay there between innings of the game, staring at the ceiling and pleasantly zoning out, a car commercial came on the TV. I don’t remember what brand of vehicle it was for, but they were using music in the background that I found out later was from a then popular pop song. I’d never heard it before that. It was some European-sounding female singer, singing to music that sounded vaguely like electronica, or maybe trip-hop. To be honest, I wasn’t 100% sure I knew the difference. But anyway, this music was going on during the commercial, and I was barely aware of it, or of the commercial itself. Then the Euro-girl sang a lyric that just jolted me to attention: “You’re so lazy, you’re so lazy, you have a lazy life.”
It is startling how strong a memory trigger popular music can be. As soon as I heard that lyric, I was transported back 28 years, laying around my hot apartment with this kind of pretty but admittedly Tom-Petty-with-tits-looking chick, who was eating amphetamines like candy and babbling a bunch of shit I had no idea of. Trying to get me to get up and take her to the bed and service her, which wasn’t that hard for her to get me to do, normally. But I felt almost too lethargic, too lazy, to even stir myself for raw, jagged sex with this terminal junkie . . . Having a girl like that had been my lifelong ambition, for quite some time; but the lethargy that plagued me then was so powerful, I barely even wanted her.
The whole period I was remembering was one of the worst and most difficult of my life. But here I was, nearly three decades on, in the house my wife had left me alone in; and I was remembering the surroundings and events and the speed-addled chick I was sleeping with thirty years ago. I was remembering it all wistfully, almost. In some ways, no matter how much I reflect on things, and try to work things out . . . there are some parts of me, and some things I have done, that I will never understand or be able to explain to anyone’s satisfaction, least of all my own.
I’d misheard the song lyric in the car commercial, of course. The girl was actually singing something about an amazing life. But it hardly mattered. Once I heard it the way I heard it, well, it was going to be that way in my head forever. Up there in my mind with the lethargic days, the drug taking and the listlessness and the settling for a tweaker chick who vaguely resembled a rock star … with the appropriate female accouterments, of course.
Sometimes I think it really is an amazing life.
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