“No,” he pants. “It’s a tent.”
“It’s a dog tent.”
He corrects me. “Pup tent.” After that, he can do no wrong. Pup tent. We all had dismal summer jobs and he was hanging with toddlers in Pup Tent. I don’t care if Mark gets me arrested anymore; I’m ready to do whatever he tells me to.
Suddenly, there is a ripping sound as he gets the zipper loose and then a splash as the bulldog vomits copious amounts of fluid. We jump out of the way. Pup Tent is puking a truly impressive amount of water out of its half-open mouth. Plastic toys ride the rapids down the hill: little action figures and Lego pieces. It goes on and on.
Eventually, the torrent slows to a trickle. Neither of us moves. I think we both expect it to start up again, like Pup Tent is actually sick.
A light rain has begun to fall. I look at Mark. He seems deflated, though it’s hard to make out much more than his posture in the dark. “Um . . .”
“I know,” Mark sighs.
“No, I was just wondering if there was somewhere else we could camp.”
“Where, in a tree?”
“Well . . . is there a porch? I can’t see.” When I was a kid, I’d crawl under the porch when it rained and spend hours there. Mark is silent. “It’d probably be drier than inside Pup Tent.”
He walks slowly to the moped and grabs his backpack. “Yeah, there’s a porch,” he says, sounding a little less deflated. “By the back door. And I have a candle and some matches we could start a campfire with.”
“A campfire?”
“To roast marshmallows.” Poor Mark. Forget breaking and entering—he’s gonna get us arrested for arson. “The Bells didn’t seem like a marshmallow party, so I held on to them.”
“This is a marshmallow party?”
“It will be.”
I pick up every snake I see. Every single one, and I see a lot of snakes because I look for them. Now that spring’s here, they’re everywhere. Snakes’re perfect. What a handle they’ve got on locomotion . . . they swim, climb trees, glide across rocks and sand, through grass and leaf litter. I can only do a couple of these terrains comfortably and I’m fairly sporty. Snakes can eat things that weigh more than they do, they come in all sizes and colors and they can adjust their temperature just by hanging out in the right places—they soak up weather and wear it. Snakes win; the rest of us should quit.
♋ snake oil
soak up the weather
suck up the sun
into your bones
then move on
When I was little, I carried snake books with me everywhere I went. I had the books memorized, but I carried them around anyway, on a pathetic hunt for rosy boas and green tree snakes, cottonmouths, sidewinders and any number of other snakes I wouldn’t see. I found only garter snakes.
But I didn’t care. A snake is a snake. They don’t bite if you hold them. Jerky movements freak them out and they strike, but if you move slowly and become their climbing surface, they fold into your warmth and calm right down. It’s an honor to spend even a few minutes with a snake.
Right now I can see one a few feet away, right over Mark’s head. It’s looking right at me. I don’t want to scare it, so I’m not moving, but Mark’s squirming around, waking up, and I’m scared he’s gonna startle it. A frightened snake’ll disappear in a flash.
“What are you doing?” Mark asks sleepily.
“Writing in my diary.”
“About me?”
I think about that. “What’s the right answer?” He smiles, then turns over and goes back to sleep. I consider waking him again to tell him about the snake, but decide against it. Some people don’t like snakes, and he’s had a rough night. He changed into sneakers under the porch, Mister Rogers style, and then set a sneaker on fire trying to balance dryish leaves on top of a candle. Eventually, he coaxed some paper and what looked like old birdseed into burning brightly enough to singe a marshmallow or two, and in fact, the birdseed is still glowing. But I don’t know that he’s calling this “camping” anymore.
My childhood camping memories consist mostly of mosquitoes and Sterno, so I wouldn’t call it camping, either; this was way better. It was fun. Not stupid fun, either. Mark made a little orange light, like the big orange light at the Bells, but just for us. That’s poetry.
♋ rock candy brains
your orange fingers are glowing hot
i think your sneaker’s on fire
up in flames
I spit on the glowing birdseed till it goes out. I have to leave. A song is starting; its jangly, rattling tones barely discernible over the industrial whine that precedes every song. Soon I won’t be able to hear anything else, so I gotta be alone.
I draw a heart on a page from this diary and stuff it into Mark’s backpack, then wave goodbye to the snake.
Allen Ginsburg writes a poem for me that goes like this:
“I have two eyes because I have two eyes
I have a nose because I have a nose
I have two ears because I have two ears
I have a mouth because I have a mouth”
That’s true, I think. But it’s not a very good poem.
Sunday morning.
I left Mark sleeping last night and walked back to the Bullet in the rain, this new song playing louder and louder. Poor, old shitty Bullet looked so forlorn, sitting at the beach alone, like a sad dog left behind. She leaks, of course, so I had to jam my YMCA towel into the crack in the door where the seal should be.
Mark’s gonna wake up wet and alone this morning . . . with a snake next to his head.
Gotta face this music. I lean on the damp Y towel and watch water pour down the windshield, the song rattling along with the pounding raindrops. Man, our sky. What are the odds it would turn these sick colors and spill pretty liquid all over us? What I see through this windshield is incredible. And when it isn’t, I drive away. That’s what I like best about the Bullet: she makes me a moving target.
Of course, she can’t help me escape a song.
♋ styrofoam rattlebox
i’m shatterproof
but cranial impact
taps something true
It was a witch that gave me the double concussion that made me start hearing songs in the first place. A couple years ago, this old witch drove her car into me as I raced to a summer job on my bike. She wasn’t a bad witch necessarily, but she wasn’t a good witch either. I remember her blank face over the steering wheel, about to plow into me, like she was on a mission. I pedaled as fast as I could, trying to escape her speeding Chevy, but I never made it to work that day.
Instead, I flew up into the air: one minute, everything was like it usually is and the next, I was flying. Flying through the air in vivid slow motion, thinking, so this is what this feels like.
As the pavement came toward me, time stopped abruptly. I hovered over the street; tree branches blew in the breeze; I could smell cut grass. Somehow, I hung between flying up and falling down. A thought occurred: “You’re about to hit your head harder than you’ve ever hit it before, so maybe you should . . . you know . . . go limp.” I did.
As soon as I relaxed my muscles, time sped up and the ground jumped up in the air, crashing into my head. I slid down the street on my face for a while, then flipped over; my neck snapped back and my legs twisted up underneath me. The witch and her Chevy were long gone—she hit and ran.
I lay there on the street, feeling the brand-new sensation of a lot of blood leaving my body, then tried to unfold myself. Lifting my left leg, I noticed that there was no longer a foot at the end of it.
Suddenly, I was very, very thirsty. Blood spread across the ground in a deep red puddle, pouring into the sewer. I’d never seen blood pour into a sewer before (it looks really cool). Then a woman appeared from nowhere and leaned over me. She was wearing mirrored sunglasses. What I saw in her glasses was bizarre: I had no face. The front of my head was hamburger and blood with two blue eyes staring out. Even my hair was red with
blood. It snaked out from under me, unrecognizable as hair—Medusa, I thought. Behind the woman’s head and my monstrous reflection was a clear blue sky.
When I turned away to look for my missing foot, the woman grabbed what used to be my face and turned it toward her. “You were hit by a car!” She spoke loudly and slowly, carefully articulating each word. “You’re going to be fine!”
Why is she talking to me like I’m foreign? I flashed on seventh-grade health class, where they taught us what to do in case we ever came upon an accident. We learned to tie tourniquets and perform CPR, how to recognize the symptoms of shock and what happens to the person in the backseat if you keep a crowbar on the dash (hint: don’t).
They also taught us how to talk to the victim. You speak loudly and slowly, carefully articulating each word. You tell them what’s wrong and then you tell them they’re going to be fine: “You have a crowbar through the middle of your skull! You’re going to be fine!”
A few more people joined the mirrored sunglasses lady, kneeling on the ground, looking concerned. I thought about asking them to help me look for my foot but figured, if I were them, I wouldn’t want hamburger talking to me, so I felt underneath my leg and found the foot myself. I was sticking it back on when I saw my mother’s face floating in the clear blue sky.
Aw, geez, I’m dead! You’re definitely dead if you get hit by a car and then see your mother’s face floating in a clear blue sky. Wait . . . my mother isn’t dead. I noticed her car parked by the side of the road. “Hi, Mom!” I said. She looked upset. “What’s wrong?”
I heard sirens as she started to cry.
♋ pretty ugly
look up
a clear blue sky
In X-ray, I lay on a metal table wiggling my front teeth with my fingers. The X-ray technician noticed and asked what I was doing. She was a typical Rhode Islander: Irish, rough-hewn, thick New England accent, heart of gold. I remember her type from when I was growing up: everyone else’s mother. “My teeth are loose,” I said.
“Really?” She peered into my mouth, interested. “They might turn black and fall out, honey.”
I put down my hand.
A few days later, lying in my hospital bed, I heard my first song: a metallic whining, like industrial noise, and a wash of ocean waves, layered with humming tones and wind chimes. Intermittent voices talked and sang. I thought it was the TV in the next room. The TV never shut up, though; nobody ever turned it off or even changed the channel. I started to worry that the patient next door had died or slipped into a coma.
When the noise increased in volume, I asked a nurse what it was. “I dunno what you’re hearin’, dear,” she said kindly. “Dear” is pronounced deeya in Rhode Island. They take the r’s off words here and put them on other words. For example, boa constrictor is pronounced boer constricta.
“This room over heeya’s empty and little Josh on the other side is takin’ a nap. He’s got a compound fracksha, too. He isn’t watchin’ TV.” She frowned. “I have no idear. Maybe ya hearin’ . . . machines?”
“Machines?” I asked.
“Machines?” she asked again, perplexed. We stared at each other, but neither of us could answer the question. I was sure she was wrong. Josh is a little kid, right? He’s gotta be watching TV.
Over the next day and a half, the tones began to distinguish themselves from the industrial noise; different frequencies were clarified as notes, though it still didn’t sound like music, just disparate melody. Percussive sounds, like someone banging on metal, kept time for a few moments, then gave way to slow cymbal crashes that blended with the ocean waves. I lay in bed and listened until the noise became intrusive. I gotta turn off that kid’s TV. “Can I meet Josh?” I asked the next nurse who entered the room with a tray of hospital food I didn’t want. Her response was buried in a ringing wash of sound. I didn’t know it had gotten so loud. “Excuse me?”
She leaned in. “I’ll get you a wheelchair, deeya. But first, eat your lasanyer.” I was scared of the lasagna; thought it’d make me throw up. It already looked like vomit.
“I’m not hungry!” I said loudly over the noise. The nurse looked startled, but she left and returned with a wheelchair a minute later. Then she pushed me into Josh’s room and left the two of us alone. Hope Josh likes people with monster faces. I wasn’t allowed to see my face, but I had a feeling it wasn’t pretty.
Josh was about ten years old and his leg was in traction. His TV was on, but it wasn’t playing what I was hearing. He was watching a cartoon that both mimicked and clashed horribly with the song noise—lots of banging and crashing, unrelated melodies and grating voices. I had really, really hoped Josh’s TV was making the sounds I heard. Seeing him watching Looney Tunes was like having a weight dropped on me: an Acme Products anvil. The noise is mine. I was deeply ashamed that I’d asked the nurse what it was.
“Hi, Josh,” I said through the waves of sound. He smiled and his lips moved. He was talking really quietly and his TV was screaming. Now what do I say? “Does your leg hurt?” I asked him. Josh stopped smiling and nodded. Poor kid. I pointed at the TV. “What’re you watching?” and his lips moved some more. Gosh, this is hard. Everything’s noisy but this sad little boy.
My song moaned and rattled, talked, crashed, hummed and whined; Looney Tunes did the same. But Josh was lonely, bored and hurting and wanted someone to talk to. I listened as best I could, picking out words here and there, trying to get him to smile and wondering what the hell was going on, until the nurse came and brought me back to my room. I waved to Josh and he waved back sadly, then turned his attention back to the TV.
Soon, the song began organizing itself into discernible parts that sounded less like “machines.” Instruments played melodies rather than disembodied tones in the bed of ocean waves: bass, guitar, piano, cello. Punctuated clanging became drums and percussion. I guessed that my brain was making sense of something, turning this sonic haunting into vocabulary with which I was familiar.
It was all so irresistably colorful. Every chord I heard carried with it the impression of a color; these colors blended along with the chords in gentle swathes of sound-light. Each beat had a shape that appeared and then disappeared instantly, creating its own visual pattern that coincided with the rhythm. I watched and listened, bewildered and enthralled, as sound and color filled my empty hospital room.
One of the humming voices eventually . . . refined itself ? enough for me to discern syllables in its talking and moaning. Unintelligible at first, the syllables eventually arranged themselves into words that told stories from my life, clarified by dreamlike images—animated home movies, a mythology of reality. The lyrics were at once impassioned and removed, as if someone else, someone who cared, was telling me what happened in black and white and then coloring it in with dream crayons.
I had a few weeks in the hospital to figure out that a song was writing itself, but I have yet to figure out why. Or what made the old witch drive her car like that in the first place and cast this music spell on me, making me a lightning rod for songs. She’s dead now, so I can’t ask her. She ran me over and then went and died, like, immediately. My impression of the event is that she was born in that Chevy seconds before she hit me. Then, her work done here, she just pulled over and expired.
I really didn’t mind getting hit by a car, though—it was interesting, and probably my last chance to fly through the air in nonjudgmental fashion. I think if I got hit by a car now, it’d bug me, but before we learn to be whiny about our existence and how comfortable it isn’t, we’re still open to being thrown around, even if we bust our faces when we land. So what if sudden contact with the street makes your teeth fall out, maybe snaps off a foot or two? At least you know what that feels like.
But the musical bump on the head the witch cursed me with means that every few weeks, song noise will begin again, and when its parts have arranged themselves, I’ll copy them down and teach them to the band, making them hear what I hear. As soon as I give
the song a body in the real world, it stops playing and I breathe a sigh of relief, in precious silence.
I revisit this experience when the band plays, but the re-creation of a musical event, as charged as it is, doesn’t take the journey from chaos to song; the song just walks into the room, a fully formed being.
It’s not me. I don’t talk that way because I’m not always “right now.” A song lives across time as an overarching impression of sensory input, seeing it all happening at once, racing through stories like a fearless kid on a bicycle, narrating his own skin.
Dude sets our projector on the windowsill and we sit in the dark yard while he shows home movies on the side of the neighbors’ white house. In the movies, my parents hug each other and make goofy faces, take turns riding my tricycle, paint a third eye on my forehead.
It’s amazing to see the skin spaceship you inhabit, running around on the side of your neighbors’ house. Right now, I think, I’m a little kid. I’m amazed by this.
Crane and Dude and I smile at each other in the starlight and then grow solemn, watching another now move across the wall.
The birth of a song, the wackiness that’s going on as I watch rain fall on the Bullet’s windshield, is always disconcerting. It interferes; it’s lonelifying. I wanted to spend this rainy morning with Mark and a snake, under the porch. Instead, the ocean waves outside, the wind, the sound of cars racing by blend with the knocking, talking music I hear.
Rat Girl: A Memoir Page 9