Exit Nothing

by KUBOA

Even before I came to Philly, I had heard about the Hydrojonian Jungle band and their sideshow act, the Urban Carnival. The Mad Poet had talked them up in e-mails and I was supposed to meet them at a show once when I was visiting, but it was canceled at the last minute. They were hippies, clowns, fire breathers, musicians, filmmakers, sword swallowers and rebel vagabonds. I wanted to meet them as soon as possible. But the week I had arrived was a bad time for introductions.

  Just a few days before I arrived, Jimmy Woosterfield, the bandleader, had punched the Mad Poet in the face at a party. Jimmy just casually walked up and knuckle-slapped the guy and then walked away just as casually, no explanation given. That’s how things worked in that scene apparently. Shit just happened. The Mad Poet was understandably pissed, and didn’t have any desire to see them any time soon.

  And so I spent my first week or so wandering around the West Philly neighborhood, my new home, checking out bookstores, hanging out with the Mad Poet and casually looking at want ads on his computer. I enjoyed hanging out with the Mad Poet, but the fucker could talk. All the time. He rambled as he made breakfast. More rambling after he came home from work. Still more rambling as we relaxed in front of the TV. I tried my best to follow his liquid thoughts on the off chance that I might be able to contribute to the conversation. Yes, yes, poetry. Yup, yup, the Buddha, past lives, magic, neo-liberals, fascists, neo-liberal fascists, cops, the bourgeois, bourgeois cops. Yep. I’d always nod and try to smile or get angry when I thought it was appropriate. I never could figure out if I was too stupid to grasp what he was saying or if he was just fucking insane. Yeah. Probably.

  I loved the Mad Poet. It wasn’t just his free room I was interested in. The guy struck me as something genuine. But being around him all the time was getting tiring. I needed to meet new people.

  Finally, after a week or so, the Mad Poet decided it was time to visit the Hydrojonian Jungle house. Maybe he needed some variety too. Maybe he just wanted to have a good time. And, apparently, the Hydrojonian Jungle house was a lively place, always full of people and booze and drugs and conversation.

  The house was a few miles away. We drove over in the Mad Poet’s clunky Dodge Neon, parking on the sidewalk in front of the place.

  The grass in the front yard was an unhealthy looking brownish-green and it needed mowing. The house was four stories high, impressive to look at on a block of otherwise moderately sized homes. It looked as though it had been painted blue at one time, but it was graying and the paint was peeling. It had a long porch that led to the front door and on it were piles of beer cans, a couple of recycling bins and an old rusty refrigerator.

  We walked up the porch and the Mad Poet rang the doorbell. He waited three seconds or so and when nobody answered, he started pressing the button wildly, almost musically. Someone finally answered the door. He was average height and had long, straight black hair. He looked stoned out of his mind.

  He let us in and we gathered in the hallway. The Mad Poet made introductions. The stoned kid’s name was Bobby Woosterfield. He was Jimmy’s younger brother by a couple of years. I put my hand out and he shook it passively, trying his best at a friendly smile. He was staring at the cigarette in my hand.

  “Oh fuck,” I said. “I’m sorry. Is this not cool?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Bobby said. “We usually don’t smoke cigarettes in the house. It’s cool, though.”

  “Nah, man,” I said. “I’m really sorry. I’ll go outside.”

  And so I went back onto the porch and leaned into an old, fairly wobbly wooden railing. Someone had chained their bike to it, so it must have been stable enough. I looked out into the yard and saw a little dirt path that led to the backyard. It didn’t look like it had been put there intentionally. Rather, it looked as if it took a few thousand trips back and forth by people with shoes, and no shoes, to make the thing. Who were these people? What tribe did they belong to?

  I finished my cigarette and flicked it out into nowhere and then went back inside. I looked around for the Mad Poet and finally found him in the kitchen, sitting at a table and talking to a skinny hippie with long, wavy hair and a gray and brown beard. The Mad Poet introduced us. His name was Charlie Modd and he was the flute player in the band.

  “Plenty of beer in the fridge,” the Mad Poet said waving his own high in the air. And so I went and got one. I brought it to the kitchen table and sat down next to the Mad Poet. That’s when I noticed the strange sounds coming from upstairs. Violent gagging. Sounded like someone was sick but had nothing to throw up.

  “Someone must have partied too hard last night,” I said.

  “Nah,” the Mad Poet said. “That’s just Jimmy. He’s trying to teach himself to swallow a sword. He’s almost got the entire thing down his gullet. It’s actually pretty simple. You just push it down as far as it will go and then go a little further each time. Once you get rid of the goddamn gag reflex, you’re good. Just takes a lot of time and patience.”

  Impressive. “How does he keep from slicing his throat up?” I said.

  The Mad Poet shook his head and laughed. “The blades dull, man.”

  I felt like an idiot. And then I laughed. “Shit. Yeah, I guess that makes sense,” I said.

  It was maybe five minutes or so and Jimmy was in the kitchen. His eyes were half closed. My God, I thought. Am I the only sober person in this house?

  Jimmy was short and skinny and had a goatee that was thick on his chin but got skinnier as it went down. It made him look like a wizard. The Mad Poet made introductions once again.

  “How ya doing, man?” Jimmy said. He had a soft, mellow tone.

  We didn’t talk for long. He was in a rush to get to the practice room and tune his guitar.

  The house began filling steadily with people. The place was getting cloudy with weed. I went into the living room, which was just across from the practice room, while the band tuned their instruments. There were several couches arranged in a U shape around a coffee table. I found a free spot and sat down, the cushion sinking under the weight of my ass. There were people all around me and I wanted to talk to them but I decided to just sip my beer and pretend that I wasn’t interested in them.

  More people filled the room. Hippies and punks with thriftstore clothes and musky scents. Mostly. There were a couple of people who looked as if they might have been homeless and had just strolled in after a little gutter nap.

  The band wasn’t too bad. Their sound ranged from standard jam-band jazzy stuff to psychedelic rock to straight up 70’s rock-n-roll. But after a while the sound sort of blended together and all I could really hear was dah-dum-dah-dum. Five minute songs about a clown and robot apocalypse. That sort of thing.

  Dah-dum-dah-dum.

  I got to know them all a little better, and the Mad Poet and I even read at their first gig of the summer, an acoustic show, since several members of the band were out of town. It was held at a place called the “Maslow Museum,” which wasn’t really a museum per se but an outdoor square of four or five backyards that was closed off from the road. You went through a fence to get there. There was a small, makeshift bar with a bamboo roof where some goon sold overpriced beer and wine and there was a tree fort and old benches and plenty of stuff to play on while you watched the show or got drunk and stoned. There was a stage, and behind it this guy Maslow had painted a mural dedicated to Philly’s black musicians and artists. It was an interesting hell of a gaudy place.

  The next month there was a full show, with the entire band and a sideshow. I’d never seen anything like it. There were close to a hundred people in that old courtyard. It was a chaotic scene. Lots of dancing and boozing and the inevitable smell of weed. The Hydrojonian Jungle played their first set around nine. It was maybe forty five minutes long. They kept the pace upbeat, no slow songs. It started things off right, setting an ecstatic mood. Dancing all around me. I didn’t dance. I can’t dance. Well, ma
ybe I could if I tried. But I just can’t lose myself. I can’t shake the feeling of being me. And these people, these kids in gypsy getups, they were losing themselves, sending their souls into the ether. I watched their gyrations as I moved close to the stage and crossed my arms and tapped my foot, every once in a while moving my head.

  After the first set ended, there was a short intermission and the band started to clear their equipment off the stage. They started setting up the sideshow, loading swords and a bed of nails and weights and pulleys and other gizmos.

  Soon, Bobby Woosterfield began playing his keyboard, the only instrument left on stage. It sounded like an old carnival organ. The song took us all back to another place, where this type of thing took place all over the country, as a matter of course. Or, we wanted to believe that was the way things once were. The music was an invocation, an invitation.

  The performers took to the stage. Axel Able pierced his cheeks with clothespins and then invited members of the audience on stage to staple dollar bills to his chest. Bobby Woosterfield lay on a bed of nails as Jimmy stepped over his chest several times and then pounded it with an oversized hammer. And then there was the girl—the woman—who geeked the worms and crickets and lifted iron weights with her earlobes. Who was she? She was fucking with my head, man. So beautiful, so oddly beautiful. She had a sort of flattop, Mohawk deal going on. She was blonde and chubby and wore a tight leather corset. She had enormous circles stuffed into her overstretched earlobes, to which she attached the hooks that lifted the weights. She had a sort of gypsy dress on and wore black leather boots. At the end of the show, both she and Jimmy swallowed swords.

  She fascinated me. I wanted to talk to her. I ached for her. But I didn’t talk to her. I couldn’t. She seemed too wonderful, unreachable. Besides, she looked a little like a lesbian. I tend to fall for lesbians, unfortunately. I hoped that getting silly drunk would loosen my tongue. But it didn’t.

  She wasn’t at the next show. Or the next. I didn’t see her at another show for a couple months. I wondered if I would indeed see her again.

  Finally, the July show came and she was there. She wasn’t in the sideshow, though. I don’t know the deal, if there was a break with the Urban Carnival or what. But there she was. I stood behind her and watched her watching the band play. She was close to the stage, moving her head to the music, really enjoying herself. I thought maybe she turned to look at me a time or two. But I wasn’t sure.

  I got drunk. Very drunk. I almost couldn’t see. It was nearing the end of the show, the band was on their last set. I sat in a chair a good way away from the stage, drinking a beer, when she sat down next to me. Was she though? I looked again. There she was. I turned toward her and smiled. Fuck it, I thought, I’m going for it.

  “Howya, uh, doin’?”

  “Hey,” she said. “What’s up?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Lenore,” she said.

  “Lenore!” I said. “Like the poem.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “That’s actually where my parents got it from.”

  I introduced myself and we made small talk for a while. And then I said something stupid.

  “So’re you a, uh, lesbian?”

  Her response was casual. “No,” she said. “There’s needs a woman’s got that can only come from a man.”

  Shit. Wow. I was in the clear. I decided to make what was, for me, a bold move. Or another drunk move. If there’s really any difference.

  “You wanna go to, uh, get some beer and then we can go back to my apartment?”

  She smiled. “Sure.”

  This was great. We were going to have a fun night.

  We left Maslow’s Museum and went to a bar across the street and got some beer to go. A few minutes later we were at the Mad Poet’s place. We went into the living room and Lenore sat in a chair while I sat on the couch, resting my head on the arm and looking up into her eyes as she talked.

  We talked for hours.

  It turned out that Lenore was even less experienced romantically than I was. She had two previous boyfriends, though she was only a year or so younger than me. Her last boyfriend was also a sideshow performer and they had toured the East Coast together as a part of Gardner’s Carnival, playing in little tent shows. The two of them had their own act. But they spent all their time together and the boyfriend had tried to assert himself, push her away. Eventually he started to act out on stage, trying to sabotage her while they performed.

  “You don’t do that,” Lenore said. “You don’t endanger someone on stage, no matter how pissed off you are at them. It’s against the Code for one thing. For another, you can get fucked up bad, even killed if something goes wrong.”

  I smiled.

  “It’s not funny,” she said.

  “I know,” I said. “Yer just such an interesting person.”

  She shrugged.

  She continued.

  Lenore was from a small town in Pennsylvania. Her family was comfortably bourgeois, but she rebelled early, running away all the time. She finally left for good, getting work in carnivals when she could, doing odd jobs when she couldn’t. And though she always seemed on the verge of homelessness, the thought of running out of money never seemed to bother her. She never seemed to think about money except as an inconvenience. The little income she had in Philly came from cutting hair for friends and performing in the occasional sideshow. She never had a “real” job, the kind of shit I’d had to put up with, and hated, all my life. She had a tiny room in a big house in West Philadelphia that only cost her a couple of hundred bucks a month.

  Lenore did what she wanted. She had Time by the balls. Her days were slow and her belly was full enough. She might yet starve, but the thought never gave her any trouble. She trusted Fate.

  I was sure that this conversation of ours was a beginning. Of what, I wasn’t entirely sure. Meeting Lenore was what I needed. I finally felt at home in Philly. With her, everything was possibility. Lenore seemed like the only person in the city who had the courage to strip her soul to the core. She didn’t read much, but she didn’t need to. Because it all came naturally to her. What I had to learn from books, she seemed to have almost as instinct.

  I didn’t know at the time that I would only have another month in Philly. I wouldn’t have the courage to go on. I would flee the scene again. Had I had enough time, I might have loved this woman. No, I’m positive I would have loved her. Maybe I did love her.

  I don’t know much of anything. I’m alienated from myself. I read too damn much. I’m not myself, I’m not disembodied. I’m certainly not Lenore.

  But I wanted to be her. Or at least get close enough to her to—to what?

  To conquest?

  No, something more.

  Freakout Dance Party