“He was an alcoholic and heavily into cocaine. There was not much left [of him]. And he hated his family. Most people do.”—from Dan Simmons' 1989 novel, Carrion Comfort
“They're goddamned chafed.”
“That's nice.”
The parking lot stayed empty.
“They're a bunch of psyche scars, piled on together and formed into a mass, which is why they grin there and say ‘hi!' so astutely. It's eerie.”
“What do you mean, ‘chafed'?”
A bunch of kids came out of the movie theater, yelping. They disappeared as soon as they came.
“It's like a compress, you know? Imagine lots of skin pushed together that have no business being together — like a Frankenstein monster.”
“You're pleasant.”
An old lady came out of the door, by herself. No-one held the door for her. She started walking towards her car. It looked like she had a long way to go.
“Something took over — you know? Like: the oven — or whatever — just processes whatever's in it. ‘Here, time's up: here's you.'”
“This is making me feel great about the future.”
A security guard carried a kid out by the scruff of his neck. He ceremoniously dumped him in the bushes, and — I swear — actually made a ‘that's that!' smacking-his-hands motion afterward, like he'd learned it in a movie or something.
“Well . . . it helps. It's like that Talking Heads song: ‘How did I get here?'”
“Too true, too true.”
The bushes rustled, then stopped. It was as though the person inside them was thinking, or had given up.
“You just wouldn't know which ‘how did I get here?' you'd have to watch for, though. Nobody thinks that. Everybody thinks they'd know for sure, see it coming, something like that.”
“You're positive?”
The bushes started rustling again.
“I fell more alive with you, and I feel more numb with them.”
“Really?”
The waitress asked if they wanted more coffee, received two nods, poured, and left.
“It makes it harder.”
“I'm sorry.”
There was an explosion of laughter at the other end of the place, nearer the door — drunken revelers invading the 24-hr. diner for mozz sticks and coffee.
“No no — I'm grateful. It's like the contrast is more marked, though.”
“What?”
The waitress told the revelers to please be quiet. They acquiesced.
“I feel like it makes some sort of adolescence transit more drastic — they really don't leave home, these all.”
“These all?”
Headlights flashed as a car pulled up into the parking space outside the window, stayed on, then cut out.
“I have a lot of relatives. A lot of 'em.”
“That's nice.”
A door slammed as someone left that car to enter the diner — too loud, as compared to the other three people leaving the car.
“It actually isn't. They project the frozen grins around each other, and it feels mean to even size them up that way, let alone break free . . . ”
“ . . . like you'd be upsetting the applecart.”
The ceiling fan whirred — a token gesture at clearing out cigarette smoke in pre-smoking ban late-'80s upstate New York.
“Right.”
“That's odd.”
The ashtray almost overflowing — they'd been there 2 hrs, 43 min. — Brenda flicked another Camel Light end onto it, taking an absurd amount of caution to do what she could getting the mountain containable, as if she could, anyway. What could you do.
“Should I drop you?”
“Thanks for doing this.”
The trees whizzed by.
“No problem.”
“You enjoy driving?”
The sun was coming up.
“Love it.”
“I hate driving.”
Birds were fuckin' chirpin', and shit.
“Why on earth?”
“Stop kidding.”
Click of the blinker — plock-do, plock-do — as he prepared to make a turn.
“I just find it so liberating. After riding in the backseat so long . . . ”
“Big kid now?”
Plock-d. He flipped the blinker off, turn made.
“It is like that. It is that obvious.”
“Master of your destiny.”
Wheels droned on pavement.
“Why don't you put that Cowboy Junkies tape in?”
“I lost it.”
Not much happened — the road was boring.
“Shame on you.”
“I know. Don't need to tell me.”
More road.
“We teenagers need to stick together.”
“How trite.”
Her house was coming up — how to make this last longer? Slow down to 5 mph? Miss the turn, and drive and drive for 20 minutes, for no purpose?
“He had me do it like 8 or 9 times.”
“Really?”
The heating panel ticked.
“It's like fuck, Reed, I'd be happy to, it's for a grade, you know?”
“You call him ‘Reed'?”
The house made its settling noises — hard to pin down, you're sure it's just nothing.
“Well, ‘Mr. Reed' just becomes ‘Reed,' so yeah. We all sit in his art room a lot, whether we're taking photography or painting or not with him, during our free periods. So.”
“So.”
The whole thing seemed uncomfortable with itself — at the end of the street's cul-de-sac — like every house just thrown there in hopes of keeping things out. It catches up with you.
“So I feel like I'm finally taking a class with him for real — you know? — so I'll do the goddamn photo a hundred times, if he wants.”
“Kiss-ass.”
The heater ticked again. Ticked off?
“Nah. He seems really taken with it, as a person. He's looking at it and looking at it . . . ”
“The one with me wearing the Ramones t-shirt?”
A dog barked. Somebody's.
“Yeah. And Jay playing guitar, and the lawnmower and stuff.”
“I see.”
Chris looked at the window. Curtains still there, all right. He leaned back into the waterbed.
“‘That's it! That's a garage band!'”
“Awesome!”
The waterbed made gurgling sounds, making up for the shift down into it, as water (and air) sloshed around.
“Funny thing, though . . . I couldn't quite get the balance right. The more you develop the same negative, so the background shows — the stuff through the garage windows — the more the stuff in the front's lost. I never could get it quite right. That's why I had to do it 8 or 9 times.”
“Was he mad? I mean . . . disappointed?”
The water shut up its gurgling. Basically. Try not to move.
“Nah. It was intrinsic to the negative. It was a well-caught shot, it's just . . . ”
“ . . . it's just.”
She drags on a cigarette, too loud through the phone, like standing near a mic you didn't know was amped that much, it's loud in Chris's ear. Bitch, you should know better than that, he thinks, the most sarcastic and un-meant thought he's ever had in his life. His heart is beating. His dick is getting hard.
“Thanks for telling me I should apply to B.U.”
“Nobody gets told this stuff.”
The moon is full through the clouds, out the window. It's ten weeks later.
“I can't believe I'm going. My whole life is changed.”
“Parameters. It's like . . . this what you have a shot at, you know?”
Chris is being blinded by the moon — the moon, what the fuck? — but he'd have to lose his equilibrium, lying back, on the waterbed, and they're having A Bit of A Moment, here. He's fully in the phone with her.
“I mean . . . this is my life now, you know? I never thought I would . . . I just . . .and WOW! I got in and they gave us financial aid and everything.”
“That's what they do. They let you in, then adjust to what you have. Mostly.”
The house'll be quiet for, maybe, 20 more minutes. Already they're pushing it — already they've been lucky. He hopes, he hopes, please longer, please longer, don't come home, leave the house empty . . .
“God! I just never would have. Just shrugged it off, like, ‘oh, that's not me . . . '”
“Totally. And our parents pay and arm and a leg to The Academy so we don't shoot ourselves in the foot by fucking up our applying at all, it seems like.”
20 minutes for the next two months. It hardly seems fair. What am I saying — 19. 18, really.
“Thanks. Thanks really. I gotta go, though. Talk to you later.”
“OK Brenda.”
They say their goodbyes, and hang up. She's more choked up than she wants to admit — she feels dopey. She's pleased. He's pleased. He can't wait for summer. The moon's going to get blocked out too, in a minute, in a minute . . .
“How long's it been?”
“Since I've been skinny dipping? Never?”
She takes her Ramones t-shirt off — same one from the photograph; they're young, they don't have many — and tosses it at him: Silly! Resplendent in her white bra — she's got quite a pair of boobs on her, especially for someone sorta short — she starts unbuttoning her olive-green cargo shorts.
“Where'd you get that R.E.M. tour shirt?”
“The last leg of the Green tour at Great Woods, just outside Boston. We drove all the way out there and back in the same night.”
She unhooks her bra, and drops it carefully-enough near her pile of clothes safely up from the water's edge, and the revelation of what's she's kept under there the whole time — her breasts bobbing, her nipples longer than you'd think — is so erotic she looks different, registers as a different person, like: I. Never. Knew.
“Good drive?”
“Sucked. It was exciting and fun — just to have something to do — but this friend of Jay's, this guy from Shaker who drove us in his mom's space van, wouldn't, incredibly, pull us over so we could take a piss, and then, when he got a speeding ticket on the way back, we were like Serves you right, dick.”
Speaking of which, his dick is half-hard (and being seen by Brenda!) and dangling between his legs, nothing she doesn't know about him now. If it weren't for the chill and the motion and the talking he'd be full up. She's stepped out of her panties and tosses them with a goofy gesture as though they're kidding around at the Dunkin' Donuts shop where they went after doing ‘Can't Find My Way Home' and ‘Behind Blue Eyes' at Caffe Lena's that one time — but they're the fucking panties she's been wearing under her cargo shorts all day and her bush isn't guised anymore, either. Best to keep talking, and die of happiness inside. Only. Crushes. Are Worth It. Like This.
“You going to drive me home?”
“Anything for you, darlin'.”
Blinker: plonk-do, plonk-do. And they're out of that dirt road they had no right going down, anyways.
“How's it feel to not be a virgin?”
“Couldn't ask for better.”
She pop in Cowboy Junkies: The Caution Horses, the new one. She lights a Camel Light from his pack, uses the car lighter (used '82 Cutlass Supreme — teenagers live in the vestiges of Things From Before), and rolls down the manual window with that curious sort of offhand care he's come, dareIsay, to love about her. She's like a little old woman. Who's pretty and blond and petite and listens to Mudhoney: ‘Flat Out Fucked' and The Replacements: ‘Love You 'Til Friday.'
“Thanks for the compliment.”
“You're welcome. It's your due. I'm your loyal servant. Sooo . . . how 'bout yourself.”
The trees whizz by. They always do. Upstate NY is bland; not homey like Vermont or Massachusetts. Nothing to complain about, but still.
“(she drags on the cigarette, waves her hand like comme ci, comme ça; she's fucking with him) Not bad.”
“I'll try to do better.”
And I'd rather listen to Coltrane than go through all that shit again, the radio says. Brenda's eyebrows go up. Swear words in mass-released albums are uncommon and striking; Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction, with its deluge of f-bombs on every song but one of the non-singles, seem to be a bigger deal to the kids than the adults in the music press, who've been reacting to it for good, bad or indifferent reasons as though they missed this component entirely. Like the drug-taking at Grateful Dead shows, since coke and heroin are eschewed and it's mostly pot and hallucinogens: nobody notices but the teenagers how screamingly obvious these two-or-three day events are compared to everything else, since it's new to them, and a total joke that people would go and not get high or trip on acid. Where else?
“(she leans over and kisses him on the cheek, free to do so since he's absorbed in his driving, darting back, hummingbird-like, to leave him to it) You better. You'll have plenty of opportunities. (she blushes, at this admission)”
“All summer.”
He keeps his head tightly gripped on the wheel, to keep his focus so he doesn't float off into space, and she's right here, she's right next to me, we've got this time at last . . . Margo Timmons keeps singing, and they're all feeling so pleasantly world-weary.
“How many people do you know who've died?”
“Not many.”
She flicks her cigarette. They're beyond irony; they're living anyway. What can you do?
“That Jim Carroll song was cool.”
“It was.”
She bangs her head, goofy, grinny, a couple of times, her bangs bouncing in her face. She's high on the goofy afterglow of first-time-for-each sex, but she still stops, because it's embarrassing if you mean it too much. Funner just to kid around about headbanging.
“I'd like to hear your list. Non-stop.”
“Okaaay . . . my great-aunt Virginia died of lung cancer after smoking 3 packs a day since whenever, weighed less than a hundred pounds. Someone I knew in 6th grade for about two weeks shot his brother over an argument over whether they were going to watch TV or listen to the radio — it was in the papers and everything — and he ended up killing him. I never knew the brother. His older sister was in my 7th grade class. I say behind her. She was Korean. We never talked about it.”
Another diner. You have to drive all over the place to find one that isn't Denny's, but who cares, what else is there to do? 24 hrs is 24 hrs. Usually Greek, these places. Always worth it. Pie and cake display in a glass case when you walk in, shit like that.
“Wow.”
“And I never knew nor met Melina Hudson, but I knew her older brother from Stage Band class at school — two years is a pretty significant gap, otherwise. Right? So. She died on Pan Am 103.”
People seem to be overhearing bits of this, but they don't say anything. It's too much to just drop in from overheard to eavesdropping to butting in. Somebody at the counter nearby rustles his paper, as though shaking off these troubling implications from the teenage brats mouthing off a table-or-two over — stay away! To no avail.
“Let's go bowling.”
“OK.”
So they did. It's the next weekend — they're ticking them off like the opposite of a prison sentence; so many more 'til fall, and departure — and being a relationship insulated them from goofy bleed-in's and aw, c'mon's from (would-be) friends and (allegedly-content) family; even if they're not fucking, or doing other than making microwave popcorn or playing mini golf, it's bad form to interrupt — if they play it right.
“Why this place?”
“I came here at the suggestion of some girl who goes to Bishop Maginn who knows my aunt, who decided she liked me and felt confident about it. She took me here 'cause her family bowls a lot. Her father's a cop, or something. Our first date we went to see Wes Craven's voodoo movie The Serpent and The Rainbow and I paid attention the whole time, and she had to make a sort of pass at me after it was over to get me to kiss her. ‘Something in my eye' sort of thing. I was like, People actually do that?”
“Sounds like a real prize.”
She bowls. She's prissy, and it doesn't translate well: her care about holding the ball reverently (a squashed-pink one she took delight in finding after a three-rack search) only leads her to 
PLOP! it and it rolls in to the gutter after completing two full revolutions only on the wood of the lane.
“Dang it!”
“Don't worry. You've got a future in academics.”
She laughs. It's hard to know how little to care (or not) about such things when you're young enough to do them for the first time on your own: does it not matter, or are they declaring defeat prematurely?
“Is Heathers a good movie? I've heard it was.”
“Yeah — like I said, I saw it with our ex-drummer and his Latvian friend. She was more into it than he was; he's kinda mopey, looking at his shoes: ‘A movie?' Like he'd rather be skiing. Or playing golf.”
They've take a break from making out in the backseat of his car — some empty parking lot for a roller-skating rink, I think. It's like they're going rounds and then catching their breath.
“Golf. (she laughs) Oh Christ.”
“We drove around the parking lot at SUNY Albany for the Red Hot Chili Peppers concert for a while — saw your car there, with all the stickers, I'm like, ‘That's Brenda's!' — but he was too shy to ask someone how to buy tickets. His dad's a professor there. Christ.”
Cigarettes, all around. Brenda reads the “Smooth Move #291” insert from the pack. She inhales and through a series of fluid careful movements brings the ember out to the window crack and flicks out ash. Like it's just another thing.
“Well (puzzled) Joe Camel's not offering any good advice.”
“(looks at it) No, he isn't.”
The ashes burn down. The lot stays empty; it must not open until 5 or 6 pm, or something. No place better to hide than where nobody's looking, nobody cares, anyway. For what that's worth. And how long, anyway?
“There's a place to watch the airplanes fly in over you? Really?”
“You should get down here from Saratoga more. Fuck the racetrack — Albany's hoppin'!”
They're already driving. Fables of the Reconstruction is playing.
“Will wonders never cease.”
“They, like, ZOOOM (Christopher makes a gesture with his hand) right over you. Apparently.”
There's a lot of roads, a shopping plaza, more stoplights. “It's a Man Ray kind of sky . . . ”
“You've never gone.”
“My uncle did. And his wife and kids — they'd sit in the back. We went to the drive-in with them, once.”
Sun's coming down.
“What movie — err, mov-ies, excuse me.”
“Uhh, Fletch, I think. The second movie was Into the Night, so we had to leave. It was rated R.”
Casualties of sprawl: except nobody minds, 'cause everybody has their own stuff, and they all leave each other alone. The two of them drive past all of it.
“Older kids?”
“Younger, actually — ha ha! My mom's what you might call ‘stuck up,' except without any religious beliefs or cultural interests past better TV, anyway. She's very ‘better than them.' Makes them all vaguely uneasy. Their kids all watch HBO, each of my dad's three siblings. I'm not allowed to see Blood Simple or Stranger than Paradise when I hear about them on Siskel & Ebert, so . . .what's the point? It's like, lose-lose. Easier to avoid them both. Going to school up with the Ivies, now, so let 'em bicker.”
They pull into the gravel before a chain-link fence before a great expanse before the tarmac and — perfect timing! — a plane goes ZOOOM! and not quite rattles but quakes their windows a little. Awesome. Now wait 10, 20, 30 minutes . . . “the power lines have floaters so the airplanes won't get snagged.”
“How'd you find out about this place?”
“We played monkey tag here, once. How you find out about schools you didn't go to.”
They're in a place where the car parked a ways away on a side street wouldn't look unobtrusive, out of place. By the time it'd be noticed as sticking out or looking weird, they'd be long gone.
“Great place to fuck. You fucking pervert.”
“You couldn't do better, is all.”
He loves her. She's already pulling off her shirt with that offhand abandon he still can't believe he gets to witness, he'd keep taking her different places so she wouldn't get bored with him or herself or them both — oh, wait, there's that old-woman trait again, persnickety-careful about her near-spectacle glasses getting in the way, her angle-by-angle-by-movement of them from the bridge of her nose a surreal counterpart to her full bosom and teenage bra — dick's hard! — and bellybutton all part of his life. His wife? They're going off to school though. Got a lot ahead of them. Better make this time count . . .
“My mom'll ask you to call her ‘Donna.' She always does.”
“O.K.”
The drive is long, but they're pleasantly tired. Surfer Rosa is playing now: “You're so pretty when you're unfaithful to me . . . You're so PRETTY when you're UNFAITHFUL to me!”
“She seems to want to be friends with my friends, or at least . . . ”
“ . . . not be a mom, exactly.”
They're tired, but it's a pleasant high: some sense of purpose intrinsic to youth, not just available to a person when you've been up all night working on a project, and thus easily squandered.
“Basically. I mean, it's o.k., but it's just . . . ”
“Honest. Strikes me as honest. Or at least not dis-honest.”
Stoplight. Tape flips over: it's ‘auto-reverse.' They've been allowing a lot of silences between thoughts expressed. It's weird. They just keep driving and riding, and the conversation's evolving at a glacial pace — though maybe it's a question of glaciers being bigger, and it warrants taking that long? I don't know. It's the Northeast. These corny school-and-from-history images abound, easily. What was I saying again?
“I wouldn't go that far.”
“Well . . . grass is always greener, I guess. But at least you can tell. The other side of that is . . . the other variant — I mean, ever get the feeling nobody really likes their lives, but they think and feel through them, so what're they gonna do?”
Some jerk cuts off a yellow Datsun hatchback in front of them. They're on the Northway — not going the back way, for variety. Exits and everything, though it'd take a ways up into the Adirondacks before you'd encounter a rest area — pittances, really, just bathrooms and vending machines, not like the ones on the Mass. Pike with video games and Burger King and maps galore. The event in front of them seems like a signal fire on the horizon — the worry's not there, but they feel empathetic. Chris notices his girlfriend tense — that's wrong, like a picture frame on a wall that's off, simple as that — and then she unclenches, and he wonders if there aren't other sorts of lifelong commitments that aren't picket-fence, Leave it to Beaver marriages that leave people drained and unhappy by the time the kids are eight. Will. Never. Not. Know. Her. She's so great — hit the brakes. Accelerating too fast. No need. Why worry?
“She told them I slept on your couch last night?”
“Yep. Thanks, Donna!”
She grins, like some teacher gave the two of them a free pass out of some other class or event they didn't want to go to — duly noted, but a little sarcastic in that we get to do it outshines the conspiracy of three potentiality — it's not that, just this. She doesn't like her mom, and feels like she's getting an awkward short shrift from someone who's so offhand about diluting or “playing down” the role that she resents being put in this position — but, your mom's the only one you have, and it takes some doing to disengage those child-like psyche structures effectively. Too many Gen X'ers end up being stuck in the role of their parents' best friend, without any ego-loss to the parent, or acknowledgment of the emotional larceny involved — let alone the acknowledgment that it's turning a solid failure into a worse failure, ie., the family structure's just there for the unwilling reproducers to use as a catch-all for atrophied needs and unarticulated desires. Ugh.
“Who's watching Woody Woodpecker?”
“My little brother. He's 10. I taught him swear words at a very young age. I regret it now.”
Somehow, she seems ironic, so noted, and deeply mournful of this at the same time; the little(r) kid is in the next room listening to “nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyehnyeh” right now, so whaddaya gonna do, reprogram him right this instant?
“We should really sleep.”
“You should really take the couch. I'll get you some blankets. We're aboveground now, back in ‘up-and-up ville,' didn't you know that?”
She's kidding, big joke about how clever the two of them are, but, still, it would seem to be the case. Are they figuring something out? Are there no maps for these territories? Stay tuned!
“Are you going to band practice?”
“Looks like it.”
It's the next Saturday. Chris had worked at Burger King — and “oddly satisfying” job, as he calls it — and Brenda has been scooping cream cheese — it's a truly ungodly amount — at Bruegger's Bagels. He wears a lapel pin with “CHRIS” on it and a maroon Burger King™ (instead of Izod™) labelled t-shirt and regulation navy-but-almost-regular-blue pleated pants, and she wears a white t-shirt and an apron. They rarely see each other, all told — but that time spent is time spent.
“Can I come?”
“It's like the Little Rascals sign out front, actually: ‘No GIRLS A-L-O-U-D.' So sorry.”
They're driving in circles, kinda like life. In suburbia, anyway. Spinning wheels, spinning wheels . . . stuck in gear.
“Oh, you're all done with me? $40 for signing ‘Gigantic' and ‘Headstrong' and see ya, that's it? Why don't I doubt it.”
“Maybe you can sing an Indigo Girls song.”
It's a forced sort of kidding, indulging themselves 'cause it wouldn't touch down, leave any bruises: he's listened to the Indigo Girls album more than R.E.M.'s Green by a narrow margin, and now he studies 10,000 Maniacs Blind Man's Zoo the way he used to Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy or Who's Next. Ditto The Trinity Session — it's a relief to be “above it all,” and not feel like a ninny or a girlfriend hater, because it's just so patently absurd: the world is changing, hair metal's looking pathetic, macho is a joke. She rests her head against his shoulder while he drives (it's automatic transmission); she worries a little about how skinny he is, a female-motherly reflex that can't but cross her mind, useful or not. His dick gets hard.
“This is a song about something squandered. It's called, ‘I Don't Want to Get Up.'”
“I can't hear you. Turn up the microphone.”
More fiddling. The fiddling turns into re-tuning the guitars, which turns into doing the chorus instrumental before the first verse, so it's sort of like catching up with a freight train already in motion . . . this goes on for long enough for order to fall apart, chaos to descend, and the drummer, never a focused sort in the best of times apart from his time behind the kit, is already down the basement hall, drumming the bricks on the wall as though testing them for depth melodiousness and thickness whether he's taking his boredom out on them or sincerely curious it isn't clear whether he himself knows exhaustively, and the group assembles in the backyard for a cigarette, sans drummer (who doesn't smoke).
“Sounds good in there.”
“Thanks.”
Typical practice talk — who knows? It does, but it could be better . . . probably. Brenda's less a complaint, “with the guys” girlfriend than astute other ear . . . she hangs 'round as though the hanging 'round position is more comfortable. In suburban Albany, there's no band scene to speak of, and they're too young to play clubs where you'd have to be 21, and too experienced, and the drive's too far and most of them are going to college in the fall, anyway, so . . . why bother? It sounds good. It comes like songs they like, and identify with. It's a small miracle in an oasis of boredom and foosball. They're actually doing this.
“Can I hear you guys play ‘White Room'?”
“I don't have my wah-wah-pedeal.”
They play it anyway, the drummer's involved back in the night's energy (he gets to play the Ginger Baker role, a sure enticement to get the seat hot behind the kit), and the energy picks up for the better part of two hours, 14 min. or so . . . freight-train intro with instr. chorus it is. It rocks! We think. They think. Whatever . . .
“Don't you ever use alternate tunings?”
“No. ‘Drop-D' tuning is as exotic as I get.”
It's past 1 am — maybe past 2 am, who fucking cares?
“J Mascis said, ‘If you can do everything, why do anything?' He was talking about Sonic Youth.”
“I see his point. I'd say I'd agree with that. Besides, Sonic Youth is D.I.Y. in ideology only — how the fuck are you supposed to do that? Shit just towers, it's staggering. They throw the whole book out and start over again, every time.”
She's astute; he likes that — prefers that. People looks at you weird like you think you know everything is you know about stuff. She's written for the Saratogian as a high-schooler about bands and things he's never heard of, with a grasp not just a frame of reference beyond what's familiar to him. She puts them in the paper, and nobody cares. Except for him.
“What are some ‘Drop-D' tuning songs?”
“The Doors' ‘Land Ho.' Ahh . . . I don't know. Classic rock stuff? Jimmy Page'd use alternate tunings, for ‘Black Mountain Side' and stuff . . . No, wait. Let me think of one.”
Red light. She looks out the window — what else? It's strange to make very moment count. The radio is singing, ‘We're all gonna burn, we'll all take turns, I'll get mine too . . . ”
He can't think of one. They'd backed themselves into a conversational corner, anyway — a little too persnickety and pedantic. Better to let the air go out of their tires. The tape flips over. “Hope everything is ALL RI-HIYE-HI-EYE-IGHT . . . ” They drive on to Denny's, the bright yellow sign in the parking lot looming as a beacon to travelers, making everyone feel like they're on the road or in a rush, depending on your perspective. Adolescents or truck drivers making a long haul or people rushed without knowing why. It just feels that way, you know? Like the ground under your feet is slipping away, and the structure's built — physically but culturally, too — like it's intended to stave off such worries, temporarily. How can you not be made nervous by such referring-to-itself bulwarks against entropy, lost time, the never-sleeping rust? Unless you learn to welcome it. No wonder the teenagers seem to feel the adults are in worse than a bad mood; they're shut down, and can't notice it now, they can't afford it.
“French Slam? Moons Over My Hammy? Oh, the choices.”
“You're such a dear.”
She is. The band's broken down for the night, and now — stolen time — they get to build their relationship over coffee and cigarettes. Great.
“Why don't why . . . go to a drive-in?”
“We should. We really should.”
Plans, plans to make. Somebody at the counter coughs. The muzak's playing something saccharine, so you “feel” comfy. Somehow, they can tune it out.
“Did you ever read that William Gibson I gave you.”
“Speaking of Sonic Youth. No, not yet.”
He's barely finished with Pynchon's V. — which he first read about in Stephen King's Danse Macabre, of all things. The suburban ambience is, shall we say, unrelenting: “Are you comfy?” People have to insist they're not worried, and they've long forgotten why. Christopher still has to go to Church every week. Brenda's dad is rarely around, even though he's revered by his English students at the high school he teaches at — leaving her under a weird, unfelt-by-her shadow — and her mom seems uncomfortable fulfilling her motherly duties or taking off outright. All of it's desultory. None of it adds up. Allegedly.
“Cops.”
“Shit!”
It's incredibly how powerless you feel, how the blinking lights in your rearview make you feel like you've done something wrong — it turns out it's just a broken taillight, probably the chinciness of the rust-bucket car with the Grateful Dead sole dancing skeleton sticker on the back attracted them for the “just in case” fishing-for-something-anyway reason and they're just about to let them off with a warning when the flashlight the guy has lingers on Brenda and it's all Chris can do to grit his teeth and do nothing but cringe.
“Those guys were assholes.”
“Bored. Rookies. Rookies at 40, it looks like.”
She laughs, and it's half hollow, some relief but hardly getting at all of it, they've both got a bitter taste in their mouths, like bile. Maybe they'll write a song about it, together. Who cares.
“Don't speed the rest of the way back to my house.”
“I won't. Needless to say. Fucking tempting, though.”
They're both in shock, of a mild sort. Where the fuck did that come from? Did they deserve this? Does it mean people do or don't deserve what happens to them. No it doesn't. It just shitted their night up, is all. Turn up the radio, is all: “Does fuck you sound simple enough? Are you for sale?” They feel slightly better. The 8-band graphic equalizer with 40-watt amp Christopher installed with pluck and a pair of wire cutters and some leftover birthday money and Burger King pay helps; the fucking car is filled, it's like the music space surrounds them. Gotta have priorities.
“Whatever happened to that dude we were freaking out at the party by making out in front of?”
“Vipul? He killed himself, actually.”
Vey rare: a Monday night where no-one's home. They're not out for couples therapy: people in Albany don't do that, besides, the besides, the ‘staying together just for the children might actually make things worse' logic hasn't reached this burg from Northern California from the late '60s or other cultural centers throughout the late '70s if it ever will, in time: people just tighten the screws, grin and bear it more, read the funny pages and Parade™ magazine supplement, freeze-dry their emotions, since, hey, who wants to climb down the life ladder, and where to, and why? So they're at some dinner with her two “well off” friends and their middle-middle class husbands; his lowermiddle class relatives are comfy in their atavistic pull, maybe watching HBO, or shooting hoops.
“Why?”
“No to sound ridiculous or unconcerned, but . . . no-one ever know what the deal was with him. He'd be like trying too hard with everything he said: ‘But isn't it awsomecool?' And you're left with nothing left to say but, ‘Um, ok, Vipul.' And the Academy, I hasten to add, is strewn with enough second-gens, from India or Asia or whatever, that it's just part of the makeup, just part of us, who's there, who's doing well at sports or academics or conversation or what-all, so . . . nobody knew why he was so over-heated. And he took his own life.”
There's a silence on the phone. There are actually cricket sounds coming from outside. There is the temptation to think it's either ridiculous or too apt, but it isn't. It's just crickets. Doing their thing. They don't care.
“Wow-ow.”
“Yeah. It sucks, but it puts you in a difficult position, when you simply are or aren't close to these or those individuals, intrinsically, regardless.”
There's the distant sound of a siren — an Albany siren, it would seem, not in any particular hurry; it's serious, but nothing to panic about. It's languid and echoes through the night. This place could seriously fuck with your sense of what's final and what's not. Or maybe it's just me.
“How long ago?”
“Last week. Friday, actually. The night before we were playing. Kevin told me — remember him? he was the one laughing at me drunkenly pawing you in your prom dress, which only made you drunkenly laugh harder and made Vipul with his ‘girlfriend from Canada' date from last summer's Swarthmore summer school more mortified — he said he heard from . . . ”
The garage door starts its automated opening: ca-chunnng . . . with other noises to follow. Like the garbage disposal, another payment plan. Like the Buick LeSabre, and the Pontiac Firebird, and the above-ground pool, and the not-bad deck. No wonder everyone feels so trapped in paradise (small p, though). This is a surprise. Christopher will have to cut this call short.
“Saratoga's nice.”
“Isn't it?”
Compared to Harvard Square — or most-or-any of Boston, really — Saratoga's jackshit, Carly Simon song or not. But. It's Friday, and the “hipper” district, such as it is, is bustling. They're at Ben & Jerry's — new-fangled, like how Little Caesar's was a quirky step up from Pizza Hut, but better. Smashing stuff in your ice cream is kinda Dadaist.
“Smashing stuff in your ice cream is kinda Dadaist.”
“Like that guy ‘goofed on' in the Pixies song.”
He is referr