“It’s getting up that hurts,” she whispers back.
♋ day glo
my silver lining: this isn’t anything
getting up is what hurts
Dude deep-relaxes the class by having us progressively relax all our muscles. By tensing them, of all things. I know immediately this isn’t going to work because mine won’t let go; they just stay tensed.
Minutes go by. I can feel the relaxation vibes spilling out of the people around me. I don’t understand how they can just slip into stillness—is everyone always tired? Maybe they’re all hungover. I open one eye and look at the other students. They sure do look peaceful, lying there. The hairdo chick to my left looks freakin’ comatose. I imagine that her ego has stopped chattering, freeing her unconscious mind, which will soon spew forth the eloquence of a psyche released.
My unconscious mind is silent, repressed. Probably pouting. My brain chatters away, mostly yelling at my muscles to settle down and shut up before it slaps ’em upside the head.
Dude knows I’m a spaz—how can he do this to me? Lying down doesn’t come naturally; I feel like a contortionist. Mentally, I place each limb in position, over and over again, to get them to stay still. This is ridiculous.
Dude reminds everyone to breathe. This sends me into another tailspin—one in which oxygen, the lack of oxygen and hyperventilating figure prominently. Chests rise and fall around me, slowly, deliberately. Hungover or not, these people are all goddamn yogis.
Soon, I have no idea how to breathe anymore. I can’t remember ever breathing right. What is it? Back and forth? Up and down? I think I’m breathing sideways . . . that’s wrong, isn’t it? Dude’s calm voice directs the class members to embark on their hypnotic journeys and then falls silent. I guess by now the students around me are all having out-of-body experiences, creating vivid daydreamscapes.
The industrial carpeting underneath us is itchy. Why doesn’t that bug anyone else? I try again to relax my muscles and mind. Maybe if I tense my muscles more, they’ll give up and let go. But there’s no such thing as muscles that are more tense than this. My father’s the teacher; I should be a star pupil, teacher’s pet. Instead, I’m just a rigid little unenlightened tangle of tension.
More time goes by: days, I figure. Maybe weeks. It’s all I can do to keep from leaping up and jogging around the room. I’m like a caged animal; I wanna jump out the window. And I can’t keep my eyes closed, so I watch Betty. After about a month, she feels me staring at her and opens her eyes, looking wiped.
“What?” I whisper. “Did you have a power vision? Are you gonna get a new name now? Can I name you?” Dude invites everyone to sit up slowly. They stretch, murmuring to each other. “You can be Pretty Dirt.”
Then I notice that Betty actually looks ill. “I was back in Michigan. I was a little girl,” she says in a croaky voice.
Oh. “That’s bad, right?”
“One of the women in our building was screaming, so I ran into her apartment.” She stares glassy-eyed at the ceiling, takes a deep breath. “She was having a baby. I ran for the doctor and led him to the woman in labor, but the baby was stillborn.” She pauses. “The doctor was disgusted. He handed it to me and told me to ‘take care of it.’ ”
Wow. Grabbing her hands, I help her sit up. “Jesus, Betty, is that a memory or a dream? Did that really happen?”
She shrugs. “How should I know?” Her pallor is off—she’s a ruddy gray. Dude begins making the rounds, talking quietly to small groups of students.
“Well, it’s Active Imagination,” I say. “So maybe you imagined it. Would that be better for you?”
She nods, looking into my eyes but thinking about something else. “What did you imagine?” she asks, her voice heavy and thick.
I think for a second. “I imagined that we were all lying on the floor.” She nods again. “I’m not very good at this.” She shakes her head. God, she looks bad. “Are you okay?” She looks like she’s about to faint.
Dude walks over slowly and kneels down. “How did you guys do?” he asks.
Betty puts her face in her hands and rubs it, then tries to clear her eyes of the awful vision by opening and closing them a bunch of times. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she says.
“You shouldn’t have made her lie on the floor, Dude,” I tell him. “Look at her, she looks . . . blurry. She had a dark vision.”
“That bad, huh?” he asks. “I’m sorry. But, you know, bad is good in Active Imagination. Bad is very good. I had a feeling your unconscious had some splainin’ to do.” He takes Betty’s arm and helps her to her feet. As we sit back down at our desks, the last Deep Relaxation stragglers take their seats and Dude stands in front of the blackboard. “Good job, waking dreamers,” he says gently. “A-pluses to all of you who managed to freak the hell out.” He smiles at Betty.
I lean over and whisper in her ear. “That guy is so immature.”
“Tell me about it,” she says quietly, hunched over her desk.
“Can you still come to the show tonight?”
She looks very pale. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world. . . .”
♋ shark
this afternoon
your back’s not so straight
your eyes aren’t too clear
The band is really flying tonight. No, not the band. The room and the crowd and the songs are flying; it’s all become effortless. Something between everyone, crawling around in the rafters and across the floor like mad smoke, is making music happen. We’re all just buzzed enough to feel each other’s pain. Even the drunks get un-stupid tonight, wrapped up in the noise.
In fact, you can’t really tell who’s who out there. It’s as if the junkies and the hippies and the painters and the psychos and the musicians and the knitters are all mixed up, have all become the same. So, it isn’t us playing instruments that makes music happen; it’s all those people caring about what’s happening in this dank, dark room right now.
The song heat would be unbearable if it weren’t so enthralling, like lying in the middle of the street in the middle of summer, enveloped in a calm danger. When heat like this soaks you to the bone, you become it, so it doesn’t hurt.
It definitely makes you yell, but not in pain. I yell to drive the song into my head and everything else out. Which sends the band into a fury of intense playing. Which makes audience members yell along: a whole roomful of people, happily freaking out together.
Tonight, everybody yelling together is so smart—ugly beauty—that it becomes vividly clear that the song is the point and must be disappeared into. So I let myself be engulfed by evil and heat, let Doghouse tattoos glow, crawl down into wretchedness, past memories and muscles and guts, then down to bones ’til I’m nothing. And that you don’t have to apologize for. No shame down there in nothingland, ’cause everyone’s the same there—no me’s, just us.
This is fun, of all things. I don’t care if we are spinach, the Muses are the most happyfying spinach I ever had.
♋ solar dip
it was so easy to fly
I guess this is as close to meditation as I’ll ever get—becoming nothing. That’s meditation, right? I’m not lying on the floor, but I am nowhere.
As a chord rings out at the end of a song, I bend down to change the setting on a pedal and see Dude, Father McGuire and Betty standing in the back of the room. Dude catches my eye and grins. Betty waves, yells “Sparkle!” and laughs. She doesn’t look pale anymore.
Beige Mark is in the front row, braving the spaz cases who congregate there. He shouts something at a huge thuggy-looking guy next to him, who laughs hysterically. I smile and he pulls me to him, shouts in my ear, “This is poetry!” I laugh and stand back up, ready to disappear again.
Maybe Betty’s right, maybe this is falling in love. I didn’t know what she meant. She meant: in love with the moment. We’re all in love with this moment.
A junkie died last night. One of the painters finds me on Thayer Street putting up f
lyers for next week’s shows and tells me, so we walk to the park together, afraid of what we’ll find. He doesn’t know which one it is—nobody knows their names.
Carrying my stack of posters, I brace myself; figure it’ll be the funny one, the “husky boy” who took death on as both a mission and a joke. I watched him stick his head in the oven at a party and say, “So how’s this s’posed to work?” Then he told me that if I made friends with junkies, I should prepare to be alone. I thought he was being melodramatic.
But when we get to the park, I see him; he’s on the ground, sitting very, very still. It looks like they’re all there except for the blond kid and the little girl who dyed my hair blue. As we approach, I see the blond kid lying down, his face covered in tears and snot. So it must be the girl. “Shit,” I say. The painter won’t look at me. This is so sad.
The blond kid was her boyfriend. He wails a silent scream that I think is gonna make me throw up. But you can’t turn away—it isn’t fair. That’s why the funny junkie’s sitting so still.
It was fascinating that she was alive. And it’s boring that she’s dead; it’s dumb. And so fucking boring. Poor little thing was so sweet. “Blue is where it’s at; don’t let it fade.” Sometimes a body just can’t handle it, I guess.
The painter and I sit down with the others. It’s a surreal funeral; people are playing Frisbee nearby. The only time anyone speaks, it’s in response to whatever the blond kid wants to say.
“I killed her.”
“No, you didn’t.”
But he did kill her.
“She was crying.”
“She’s numb now.”
And this quiets him ’cause he doesn’t hear how sad it is.
We play a game called “Coyote.” We think we invented it, but no one remembers having done so.
We all know the rules: the game must be played at dusk and cars are to be avoided, since headlights can zap you as they go by. The last coyote standing wins.
As darkness falls, so does each coyote. We tire and collapse. The last to give up running around and hiding in the bushes embraces a comfortable death alongside his or her companions.
Eventually, the moon is out and we are all lying on the ground, exhausted.
The first thing I see when I wake up is a snake, just out of the corner of my eye. When I reach for it, it disappears in a flash of shine.
I slept on Jeff the painter’s floor last night. Soon after he took the Animal to the face, Jeff began filling his basement apartment with pets, and he doesn’t believe in cages. Birds fly around the kitchen and perch on the counter eating crumbs, lizards scatter as you walk through the living room, hamsters live in the couch. I haven’t really kept track of his pets ’cause it’s hard to keep up. He buys a lot of them and they also die a lot, so I guess he isn’t the best pet owner. Yesterday afternoon, I gently suggested to him that he either stop buying animals or stop killing them. “You know you have to feed pets or they don’t live, right?”
Jeff’s glasses make his face seem expressionless, but he still looked wounded. “I know that. I feed them.”
“Not these, you didn’t.” I held up two dead lizards I found in the corner. Jeff reached out excitedly and grabbed them both, then carried them into his room. I followed in spite of myself. When I peeked in the door, he was squeezing glue onto their bellies. I don’t know what I’d expected him to do with the lizards, but it hadn’t involved glue. He pressed the lizards onto the painting in progress on his easel, stepped back to look at them, then jumped forward again to shift the lizard on the left up an inch. The poor lizards. They were still squishy.
“Stop that,” I said. He paid no attention to me, just kept jumping backwards and forwards, shifting the lizards up and down. Clearly, I am one of the pussy musicians the painters make fun of. I leaned against the wall and sighed. “You know, that isn’t gonna work.”
He grinned at me. “Whaddya mean? It’s great! Dead lizards!”
“I know it’s dead lizards, but soon it won’t be anything. They’ll degrade and then eventually disappear.” I waited. “And it’s already gross. It’s only gonna get grosser.”
“Grosser’s not a word,” he murmured, staring at the canvas. “I guess it could be a photo essay . . .”
Yuck. “A little heavy-handed.” He said nothing. “Did you buy those lizards just so you could have some dead ones?” But Jeff wasn’t listening. He was digging around underneath the easel, tossing tubes of paint and rags all over the floor. Finally, he found what he was looking for: a small can. Opening the can with a screwdriver, he squinted at the canvas, then dipped a fat, fluffy brush into amber goo, which he then slathered all over the lizards’ bodies. I sat down on his bed to watch. “Is that varnish? Are you shellacking those lizards?” He dipped the brush in and then ran it back and forth across the lizards’ backs, over and over again—it was hypnotic. “Are you gonna shellac the birds when they die?”
“No.” He was really enjoying his work. “It’d gum up the feathers. I’ll dip ’em in acid first and then shellac their skeletons.”
I laughed, then realized he was serious. “Geez, really? People’ll get mad at you. People like animals.”
“I shellacked a cat skeleton last year. Nobody cared.”
“Bet they don’t talk to you anymore, though.” Jeff just kept brushing. Christ. I decided to leave him to it and go for a walk.
When you walk down any street on the east side of Providence, you get handed a fistful of pamphlets. Well-meaning—though copy machine- challenged—college students line the sidewalks to blab and thrust fuzzily printed booklets at you. Like many things in life, it’s annoying and hilarious. For one thing, their causes just slay me. They can’t seem to come up with anything you haven’t heard a thousand times before:
“Save the what now? Whales? Why? What are whales for?”
“So . . . war’s . . . bad?”
“Are you saying Republicans don’t like me? Why not?”
I’ve found that if I take their pamphlets and appear to be listening to their spiels, they eventually run out of steam. Plus, the pamphlets make for entertaining reading back at Napoleon’s.
This particular walk was interrupted by a kid on Angell Street with a tie and a cherry-red mohawk who stopped me to talk about “killing God.” I was intrigued. Killing God is way better than saving whales. I definitely had not heard this a thousand times before.
And this guy was on fire. His mohawk twitching, he started right in. “Did you know that religious wars kill more people than political ones?” I didn’t answer; I wanted him to hurry up and tell me how to kill God. “Well . . . they do. Historically, that is. And it’s because we as a species have yet to rise above the church and take responsibility for our own actions.” I waited. Kill God, c’mon. “For example, say you’re a smack freak—”
“A smack freak?”
He looked down at me suspiciously. “A heroin addict,” he said slowly. “You’d blame society for your problem.” I nodded. “Which is understandable because you’re hurting, but that’s not taking responsibility for your own drug use.”
“No, it isn’t.” I thought about this. “So . . . do heroin addicts . . . start religious wars?”
“We all start wars!” he yelled. I leaned back; spit was flying. “Throughout time, we humans have fought terrible wars against each other in the name of God!” He wasn’t stopping to breathe. “If you take God out of the equation, we’re all on the side of humans again!”
That sounded nice. Even so, I bet killing God is a hard sell compared to, like, fighting cystic fibrosis, which is what the girl on the opposite corner was selling. He’d probably had a hard day. I smiled. “That’d be great.”
Finally, he took a breath and his shoulders dropped a little. “It would. Because no one is in charge but you.” Pausing, he looked at me intently. “I bet if you were in the Holocaust, you’d blame Hitler, right?”
In the Holocaust? “If I were . . . you mean World War II? Hmmm
. I never thought about it.” He deemed this answer unacceptable by continuing to stare angrily. “Uh . . . I’m gonna say yes. I guess I’d blame Hitler for the Holocaust. If I was . . . in it.”
“That’s the problem,” he sighed. “It’s your Holocaust too, whether you’re a victim or a perpetrator.”
“It is?”
“Yes. When you hate Hitler, you hate everyone.”
“I do?”
“Yes!” He grinned. He was enjoying himself now. I wondered if I was the first person who ever stopped to actually discuss killing God. I’m not sure what he said then because I was busy studying his face. He had thick, dark eyebrows and wicked cool crooked teeth. They looked like they were in backward. I’ve always wanted teeth like that. My fourth-grade science teacher had backward teeth and she was beautiful.
A mustache’d be good, too—the lady kind of mustache, just a little shadow on my upper lip. Or a big shadow on my upper lip, I don’t care. I’d feel lucky to have any mustache. And a huge butt so I could sit anywhere as long as I wanted, and ride my bike forever. I hate my bony ass.
I need new hair, too; real is a dumb color for hair. Blue was good, but now that the junkie girl’s dead, blue hair makes me sad. Can’t say I like cherry-red much. This kid’s hair makes your eyes jump around—it could cause seizures.
Crap, he’s still going. Boy, do these guys like to hear themselves talk.
“. . . say you were unemployed because you didn’t graduate from high school. Most people wanna blame the government for unemployment. But it’s your problem!” He pointed at me. “You can’t blame the government; they aren’t in charge, either.”
“Can I blame God?”
Rat Girl: A Memoir Page 13