by James Greer
• Imprimis: I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that everything revolves, in other words that there are cycles, and that these cycles are limitless and not necessarily intersecting (in other words bicycles). When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse, out of the corner of my eye, of a woman walking on water—impossibly, because I was at home in bed, sick with fever then, and cannot trust the memory of my senses. She was bathed in light not from the sun but that somehow she herself provided, proceeding from inside her but not herself glowing. And not so much walking as gliding, on a cushion of air, a visible inch or two above the shimmering surface of what looked exactly like Mad River where we sometimes fished, down south. In that instant—which I have always regarded as the defining moment of my life, though I did not confide my vision (if that’s what you want to call it) to anyone, except K., who promised never to tell anyone, and may have kept that promise, as she kept all but the most important one—my duty, my purpose, my destiny unfolded like one of the Moorish carpets now spread on Albion’s floors. That part of the vision I did not share with K., I was afraid she would think the fever had diseased my brain, and that I would end up confined in some dreadful ward for the insane. But I was not insane, then, and I am not insane now. I know the reason I have kept myself alive the long and dreary years since we invented flight, since we helped invent flight and freed man from the shackles of gravity. But that reason, that secret, I must bring with me into the grave. I dare not speak aloud, nor write down, even here, the words the skimming woman spoke, in the brief second her path bisected mine.
• I am an engineer, not a scientist. The new theories that led to the development of the atomic bomb I have struggled not to understand but to comprehend, and I hope that I have made some progress in that regard, but remain far from expert. Splitting atoms, the relationship between mass and time approaching the speed of light—all of this makes solving the problems of manned flight seem as complex as a game of cards. To split an atom: why? Unleash the fearsome power of the sun, by force creating exponentially greater force. I see the applications for good, I see that we can harness these limitless forces as a source of energy, and that the sun’s process becomes our process. Again: why? We are told that the atomic bomb was invented by us to prevent our enemies from acquiring the technology first. This implies an inevitability to the development of the technology that I am inclined to believe; just as the discovery of the means of flight was inevitable, so the discovery of the means of nuclear fission was most likely inevitable, despite the well-intentioned efforts of some of the scientists. I bought a book recently, intended for laymen or perhaps children (I’m not sure on which count I qualify, possibly both), called The Einstein Theory of Relativity, in which the authors use a method of emphasizing their points by placing certain stress words in ALL CAPITALS. It’s a VERY distracting method, and FURTHER has the opposite effect of the ONE intended: It ENCOURAGES speedreading and skimming by MAKING you think that only the words and phrases so capitalized ARE important ENOUGH to read. Nevertheless, the authors’ explanations are relatively clear, relatively concise, and relatively informative. The included algebraic and mathematical formulations even a school boy could follow. The most interesting part of the book, for me, was the last chapter, which—after exhausting the various implications of relativity—treats of the atomic bomb. It was written recently, very soon after the conclusion of the Second World War (published in 1945), and as such seems awfully full of self-righteous justification for the bomb’s use, which, as coauthor of the invention which delivered the atom bomb to its destination in Japan, I understand but find silly. The bomb was made to be used. The bomb was used. What other purpose has a bomb than its use? Here the authors come to my aid: The MORAL is obvious: “We MUST realize that it has become too dangerous to fool around with scientific GADGETS, WITHOUT UNDERSTANDING the MORALITY which is in Science, Art, Mathematics—SAM, for short.” That’s my favorite part; suddenly there are only three branches of human endeavor, and they are a boy named Sam. As for religion: “Religion has offered us a Morality, but many ‘wise guys’ have refused to take it seriously, and have distorted its meaning! And now, we are getting ANOTHER CHANCE—SAM is now also warning us that we MUST UNDERSTAND the MORALITY which HE is now offering us.” I have forgotten to mention that these urgent strictures are accompanied by whimsical illustrations that rival the visions produced by my pipe, though never my childhood. Never that. I’m not convinced that Einstein’s theory and its practical applications (if you call blowing up cities a practical use, and I suppose under limited conditions I would) has produced any great change in the world, the way the authors of this book seem to think. Certainly we are too close to the subject to judge. The distance of time, which makes all things, even the airplane, commonplace, is required. And I am afraid I have very little time to give anymore.
Notebook Fifteen
Record 4 (3:42)
Simplicity
Watcher of the Night
A Plea for Common Courtesy
When a man allows music to play upon him and to pour into his soul through the funnel of his ears those sweet and soft and melancholy airs, and his whole life is passed in warbling and the delights of the song; in the first stage of the process, the passion or spirit which is in him is tempered like iron, and made useful. But, if he carries on the softening and soothing process, in the next stage he begins to melt and waste, until he has wasted away his spirit and cut out the sinews of his soul.
Within the space of one sad week we learned that Kurt C—had committed suicide and Michael Goodlife had died in a car accident. To further an already unbearably dreadful irony, since Kurt’s body was not discovered for several days after he shot himself in the head, and Michael’s accident took place as he was driving home from Albion, it’s possible—and therefore, in our minds, terrible and true—that Michael and Kurt died at almost exactly the same time.
Of the two deaths, Michael’s was more immediately and deeply felt, for two reasons: that we knew him better and for longer, and that we found out sooner. Had our consciousness been less fully dissolved by drink, we would perhaps have been woken by the early-morning phone calls from various friends whose whispery, somber messages gave no details but, when we eventually pulled ourself groggily from the depths of alcohol-related shut-eye, communicated by tone the morbid news. We did not yet know who, but we knew what, because we had received this type of message before.
So we returned calls, and though we like to think we are perpetually prepared for bad news—that bad news will be greeted by an attitude of weary surprise but not shock, not anymore—our reaction to Michael’s death was just that: shock. Because he was not one of the ones who figured in any reckoning of likely too-young-to-die candidates. We would have been less surprised to find that we ourself were dead.
That we quite think.
And the result of the whole discussion has been that we know nothing at all.
We felt Michael’s loss keenly not just out of affection, but out of the inaptitude of his passing. His band had only a week earlier signed a deal with a major record company, and was preparing to leave town for New York to make a record, which would be financed and produced and distributed on a worldwide scale, with everything such an endeavor implies or entails. He might have flopped, he might have risen to the top of the pop firmament, he might (most likely would) have fallen somewhere in between, but we were happy, by extension, for him and his bandmates, but mostly for him, because we knew him best, and because we knew that he wrote all the songs and sang and that the band’s success was his success.
During the week before his death, whenever we gathered in the Hive or The Pearl or at Albion, we were excited, there was a real thrill in our conversations about and with Michael. Something had actually happened, something good, or something that seemed good—someone with aspirations had seen those aspirations met. That he had managed to meet this aspiration while remaining a citizen of Dayton
—anyone with genuine ambition along this line, like Kurt, usually plied their luck in a far-off city on one of the coasts—only enlarged our estimation of his accomplishment, because not since Henry Radio had anyone stayed here while succeeding there, and Whiskey Ships were elder statesmen by now, happily so, and Michael’s potential accession to the World Stage was confirmation that Henry and Kurt were not a fluke, that Dayton had begun (as we always pretended to think) to invent America again, just as in the old days of Kettering and National Cash Register and Wright Bros.
None of this matters, of course. It didn’t matter then, and after the accident it mattered even less. Guilt’s a strange thing: We were one of the last to speak to Michael before he left Albion. We were on the front steps, smoking a cigarette as pretext for a moment alone with thoughts. He asked if we wanted a ride home. We said no, that we had driven ourself, which was the truth. We could have said yes. There was absolutely no harm in saying yes. We could have said we were too drunk to drive, and left our car there, to be retrieved the next day or several days later, which we had often done in the past. It’s just always been a difficult word for us to say. Had we said yes, Michael might still be alive.
Michael hopped into his aging station wagon for the downhill drive north through the city center, across Monument Bridge, to the house he shared with Joe Smallman on North Main. Joe had left earlier, slipping away without saying goodbye. Michael crashed his car five blocks from his front door, directly across from McCabe’s. No one else was involved in the crash. No one else saw the accident happen. Two theories presented themselves in the aftermath. The first: that a known and very small leak in the exhaust pipe had somehow found a route into the car’s cabin via its rust-ridden body, and that because Michael was driving through a freak late-spring thunderstorm, he’d rolled the windows up. Thus, even in the short trip from Albion to his house, he absorbed enough carbon monoxide from the exhaust to cause him to pass out, lose control of the car, spin around and around, smash into a utility pole, and sprout a penumbra of devouring flames.
The other: that he was drunk.
Of course he was drunk. We were all drunk. We were always all drunk. But we’d seen Michael drive drunk before, we’d been in the car while he was driving drunk, and we can say without hesitation that he was an excellent drunk driver. Such a thing exists, despite government propaganda to the contrary. We’ve been in the car with excellent drunk drivers and terrible drunk drivers; the difference is related less to their actual driving skills than to their respective abilities to handle liquor. Michael could handle liquor as well as anyone we’ve ever met, and we’d ask you to consider the source.
So we’re inclined to believe the first theory, with the amendment that perhaps his alcohol intake diminished his sensitivity to the presence of the poison gas. There remain, of course, alternative theories, but these exist in alternative universes and as such are as infinite as possibility itself. In the months ensuing Michael’s death, we examined many of these anyway (aliens, jealous rival bands, terrorists, some unspecified emotional distress that clouded his eyes or his judgment), and rejected them each by turns. It was something to do. A form of grieving, you might even say, but we don’t think so. If you follow that line of thinking everything becomes a form of grieving, and we worry that might be true. Certainly in our case there’s limitless potential for morbidity, and we’re afraid of morbidity and morbid people. “Morbidity” reminds us of “sobriety,” produces in us the same repulsed shudder. The medical examiner said he probably never regained consciousness, so therefore didn’t feel any pain, at least, which for some reason always comforts those left behind, as if any death is painless, or painful, or can be measured in terms of pain.
The image we have had trouble erasing concerns McCabe’s, which broadcasts at all hours and at unreasonable volume a tape loop of barnyard chickens clucking frantically, which is supposed to stir the appetites of passersby. We don’t know anyone who’s been brave enough to sample the chicken there, though, at any hour, no matter how drunk, with the exception of our former bandmate Tub, who used to tell a story about going on a crystal meth binge that culminated in a visit to the talking chicken place, but even if true he could not remember any details about the visit, although he claimed to have been overcome with a serious case of the shits for days afterwards. The idea of Michael’s burning car careened to a stop right out front, with the sound of clucking chickens easily audible above the flames, and the sirens of approaching firetrucks in the distance, and the rain hissing on the crushed car frame, Michael dead or dying inside, trapped, burning: We don’t know how many more saisons we need to spend en enfer with that vision engraved in our mind.
Not long after, the news of Kurt’s death spread among us, and was confirmed by a sprawling invasion of media trucks and reporters and camera crews with long, dangling microphones that no one had any problem shoving in our faces at any time or in any place, despite that we had nothing to say and would not have said anything anyway. The only comments the news people were able to gather came from those who did not know Kurt, and whose insights would have made us laugh if we had not temporarily lost the capacity for laughter. The reporters were reduced after a day or so of aimless milling to interviewing each other on the significance of Kurt’s life and career and the innumerable warning signs, missed by everyone, of his suicidal bent: warning signs which, we might add, everyone of us has exhibited regularly, and which have proved unreliable in the extreme as a yardstick for guessing who’s going next.
The presence of the media made our grief both less personal and more trivial, and further complicated the process by which we would normally have excised that grief—which is to say, by drinking; we could not go to the Hive, we could not go to The Pearl, because that’s where the news people lay in wait, and after the news people, the swarms of fans, for which we were wholly unprepared, not having any real notion of celebrity except on a local level—for instance, Whiskey Ships was not a well-known band except to a devoted few across the country; we were more likely to be recognized and treated with anything approaching fanlike veneration in New York City than in Dayton, where most citizens outside our group of friends and acquaintances did not know what we did for a living, nor care—who thronged any spot Kurt was rumored to have hallowed with his shabby shoes—and so through circumstance and because we didn’t know where else to go, we ended up mostly at Michael Goodlife’s house on Main, drinking John Glenn cocktails, a modified screwdriver which Joe insisted Michael had invented. The atmosphere was both dreamlike and wakelike, and strange ideas were embraced without reserve; the unexplained absence of both Fiat Lux and Amanda Early was regarded an ill omen, and the behavior of Mary Valentine regarded unduly giddy, even though that’s the best word to describe all of us, at that time: giddy.
When we went up to the Hunt Club to meet Henry and the rest of the band, we were more reserved, especially Henry, who had nursed a secret bitterness toward Kurt, or rather toward Kurt’s success, mollified somewhat by Kurt’s worshipful attitude toward Henry. We had all seen a good deal more death than the younger crowd, and were somewhat inured to its effects, though Henry could not stop saying, “Can you believe he did that?” and pointing out the coincidence of Kurt and Michael’s twinned passing, as if we had not noticed, or could not without his help. In general, Henry Radio was the kindest human being we have ever known, but the obverse of his kindness, most often to be found in private among intimates and when well-hungover, was a misanthropy you did not want to find yourself in the way of, ever. In rough times, though, there was no one better suited to provide perspective, because few have survived rougher times than Henry.
Eventually we realized we could not stay drunk and with other people forever, and besides, we don’t like other people all that much, and we went back to Hickory and our apartment to sleep, which is when the trouble started.
Now, he said, every art has an interest?
Certainly.
For which the art has to consider
and provide?
Yes, that is the aim of art.
And the interest of the art is the perfection of it—this and nothing else?
The whole point of shooting himself, of making his death an act of will, was to reinforce the purposefulness of his actions. Kurt C—wanted us to know that he meant it, man, and he didn’t want to take the junkie’s easy way out, even though he was undeniably a junkie and it would have been undeniably easy. But that way would have absolved him of responsibility, to a certain extent, and he wanted, with horrifying clarity, to take responsibility for his death. What scares us about Kurt’s death is our underlying suspicion that he was right, and that his suicide was a pure, noble, and even brave act. What we’ve been fighting against in the ensuing days is the idea that rock is worth dying for, which is something we would have unhesitatingly affirmed as an immature, unformed, ridiculous teenager, but have long since rejected, as we all do. We don’t think Kurt ever got past that part. He was unable to come to terms with the ridiculousness of his passion for and belief in rock as a force for redemption. That’s a part of the reason why he killed himself—the only nonchemical reason—and while that makes him immature, unformed, ridiculous, it does not make him wrong.