Long Past Stopping

by Oran Canfield

It didn’t slow down my brain, though. It just made my thoughts more ugly. They were no longer appearing in the form of childhood memories, or anything I could attach much meaning to. Weird blurry figures appeared, and what seemed to be animated piles of grayish meat. It was as if I were living inside a Francis Bacon painting or Peter Greenaway movie. Or a fucking Caroliner show. I tried to take off my mask, but it wasn’t a mask. I was a deformed bull-person in an 1800s band. We were trying to make our way west for some reason, but the farther west we went, the more deformed we got and the brighter the colors became. We were forgetting how to talk like people, but we could understand the cows, and they kept telling us to keep going. It was a slow journey because I could see only out of my mouth, and Groat Pulp, our leader, kept putting dirt in the spaghetti and tripping over his gigantic foot. Gris Welled, the banjo player, was trying to tell me something in the old language, and I vaguely recalled that I hadn’t always been a bull-person named Both Oars. I was a human person lying in the third row of an old airplane limo heading east, not west.

  “Huh…what?” I said, opening my eyes.

  “Hey, Oran, sorry about waking you up, man, but we’re in St. Louis. You can stay in the van if you want, but I thought I should tell you where we’re going in case you woke up later.” Thomas was whispering, as if he could convey the message subconsciously without really having to wake me up.

  But I was wide awake and had been for almost three days now. I was just too physically tired from the NyQuil to move. “Okay,” I said.

  “We’re going to a club down the block with a big neon sign. Just tell them you’re with us and they’ll let you in.”

  “Okay. Thanks, Thomas.”

  “No problem. Hope you feel better.”

  We had the night off, which was a relief, as I could not imagine playing a show in my condition. Eventually I did get up and walked around looking for food. I ordered lasagna at a diner, stared at it for about twenty minutes, and headed over to the club, leaving the food untouched.

  The club looked like an MTV set, or a Mafia club in a Hong Kong action movie, and there were hundreds of good-looking kids standing still, intently focused on one of the most boring bands I had ever heard. When I was in the van, at least I knew the shit in my head was just that—shit in my head. What I saw in that club was real, and in that moment, still sick, and feeling the toxic aftereffects of the NyQuil, reality was way too much for me to handle.

  I went back to the Suburban, hoping to escape back to the land of Day-Glo cow-people, but it never came. It was just my saliva on the cold vinyl of the bench seat and silence for the next three days. I had ceased talking, except to update the others on the state of my “insomnia.” They were all pretty nice about it, despite the fact that I had stopped taking part in any of the loading or setting up. The only relief I got was when I put on my mask and played for the increasingly larger crowds. I started looking forward to our shows with an almost religious fervor, because the other twenty-three hours of the day were unbearable.

  WE WERE IN DETROIT when Jeremy came and found me in my usual spot, lying horizontal in the third row while everyone else was setting up.

  “Hey, man, I found this guy who says he has some methadone. You want some?”

  Even at this point I was still trying to hide what I was going through, so I tried to control my excitement and said with a hint of disapproval, “Why would I want methadone?” Did he know what was going on? Did all of them know?

  “Don’t tell Grux, but I just kicked dope a week before we left because I didn’t want to go through it on the road, and…well, I just thought that you were…uh, never mind,” he said, getting ready to shut the door.

  “Hey, Jeremy, wait. You’re right, it would probably help with this fucking insomnia. Where is this guy?” I was still unable to admit it.

  “He’s across the street, but I can go get it.”

  “Nah, I’ll come with you.” I wanted to see who he was so I could maybe get a few more pills later on without Jeremy seeing me. We crossed the street, and this regular-looking guy pulled a prescription bottle from his pocket and handed us each a pill.

  “Thanks, man. How much do you want for these?” Jeremy was already taking his, but I knew that if I took mine now I would be catatonic by the time we played.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said.

  “Cool. You sticking around for the show, man?”

  “Fuck yeah, I drove up from Chicago to see you. You guys sounded amazing last night, but I couldn’t see shit. Too many people.”

  “Yeah, it was insane.”

  It had seemed as though there were five hundred people packed into this little Greek bar in Chicago, which was a startling turn of events for us. It was too bad I missed most of it, but I had spent the majority of the night down the street lying on a pile of secondhand clothes in a thrift store owned by a guy in one of the bands we were playing with called the Beast People.

  “What is this place?” I asked the methadone guy, looking up at what must have been a fifteen-bedroom brownstone mansion. “You been here before?”

  “Yeah. It’s some kind of anarchist collective. They got a 1 percent interest loan from the Catholic nuns and bought the place,” he explained.

  “Wow. There’s so much wrong with that I don’t know where to begin. First of all, isn’t an anarchist collective a contradiction of terms? And second of all, since when do Catholics buy mansions for anarchists?”

  “Detroit is fucking weird, man. That place there,” he said, pointing to the mansion next door, “is owned by the communists. Same thing. Nuns bought it for them.”

  “Really? You think they’d buy me a mansion if I told them it was for satanists?” Just knowing I was finally going to get some sleep tonight had put me in a better mood.

  “I’m pretty sure they already bought one for the satanists. I think it’s one of those across the street.” We were both looking up and down the block for any sign of satanism, but there was nothing obvious.

  “Shit. What about a house for atheists?”

  “Maybe, but then you’d have to live in Detroit. And believe me, you don’t want to live here without believing in something.”

  We went inside to see the Beast People rolling around naked on the floor, covered in black and brown greasepaint and wearing unidentifiable animal masks. I think they were an a cappella act, but the sounds they were producing were totally inhuman. I was glad I hadn’t seen them before I drank the NyQuil.

  Next up was a more straight-ahead band, but not too far into their performance, someone in a blue whale suit ran in screaming and started attacking the audience before chasing the band offstage. I almost lost the guy with the methadone in the confusion, but I found him right before we went on and convinced him to give me a couple more pills. He still refused to take any money for them. Once again, I found myself having to sleep on a hardwood floor, but after being awake for five days I could have slept on a pile of nails.

  The next night we played in a building owned by the Cleveland Communist Party since the 1930s, but since party membership had been on the decline, they had donated the first floor to a bunch of runaway teenagers, who were allowed to do whatever they wanted with it.

  A couple of frat boys had apparently beaten up Grux during our set, but it was always hard to tell when the line had been crossed from good-natured violence to mean-spirited violence. The fight had gone down outside of the narrow vision of my mouth hole, but Grux looked pretty bad after the show. They had gone after him with a ladder, but he couldn’t run with his three-foot boot on, and I doubt he could see any better than I could. I took only half of a methadone pill that night and slept on the stage with four cute two-week-old kittens. They were still cuddled up with me when I woke up the next morning, finally over the withdrawal.

  I felt great, but Grux was bruised up beyond belief, and his mood was deteriorating. He claimed it was the result of getting closer to New York Shitty, as he called it, but now that I wasn’t so si
ck and self-absorbed as I had been, it was clear that no one was doing that well. Cheryl had had it with Grux and was on a hunger strike due to the lack of anything remotely edible. Thomas, who was a pretty quiet guy to begin with, had receded even further into his silence, and Jeremy was limping around in severe pain as a result of not taking off his shoes.

  “Jesus Christ, Jeremy,” Thomas said as we all stood around looking at Jeremy’s green foot in the parking lot of a truck stop. “You’ve been wearing them since we left?”

  “I took ’em off to take a shower, but…yeah. They smell so bad I got to keep ’em on.”

  “Come on, man. If you don’t give them some air, you’re going to lose your foot. It’ll be fine if we just leave the windows open,” I said.

  It didn’t work, though. Even when he tried sticking his foot out the back window, it caused all of us to gag, and we had to air out the Suburban at the next exit while he put his shoes back on. It was an unfortunate example of the good of the many outweighing the needs of a few, or in this case, one. I gave Jeremy the rest of my methadone, hoping it might help with the pain, but there was nothing else to do about it.

  After Buffalo, we got a much needed day off, so Thomas could hang out with his family. I woke up early and caught a train to Manhattan to meet up with Heather. I didn’t know what was happening to me, but for the whole seven-hour train ride down, all I could think about was sex. It came out of nowhere, and I kept having to shift around in my seat to hide what was going on. I hadn’t experienced anything like this since high school. It occurred to me that my lack of sex drive may have been at least part of the reason I had been so productive over the last six months. I wondered if there was some sort of substitute that would curb my sex drive the way heroin did without the nasty side effect of addiction. I had heard about kings in olden times putting saltpeter in visiting princes’ wine (or was it sex offenders in modern times? I couldn’t remember), but I don’t think it took away the urge, just the ability to perform. I needed the opposite of that.

  God, I couldn’t wait to see Heather.

  RUNNING LATE, I found Heather waiting outside for me. I was actually a tiny bit proud of myself for having just gone through the worst experience of my life and come out the other side, and Heather was the only person on the planet who knew about it. We went straight to her friend’s apartment, and on the way there I gave her a short recap on my adventures of the last two weeks, but didn’t go into too much detail about kicking. Other than not sleeping, the crawling skin, the nausea, the aching, the sweating, and the diarrhea—the boring shit everyone has heard about a million times—I couldn’t find the words to describe it. What does any of that mean to someone who hasn’t been through it? It didn’t matter. It was just good to be around someone I wasn’t lying to. Heather’s friend was out of town, so we had the place to ourselves. After what must have been another hour of talking about myself, it finally occurred to me to ask how she was doing.

  “Fucking Scott is driving me crazy,” she answered.

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Oh you know, just being Scott.” Her boss was always driving her crazy, but that was the only reason she ever gave me. He seemed like a nice enough guy to me.

  “How’s New York been? Have you seen any friends? Has it been fun at all?”

  “No! I’m here for work! I sit in that fucking building all day talking about Ansel Adams to idiots! I wish I was on vacation, or touring across the country, playing music with crazy people, but I’m not! I’m fucking working!”

  Whoa. I had never seen Heather like this, or I had been oblivious to it before. Wrapped up in my own shit for as long as I had been, I’m not sure it ever occurred to me that she might have problems of her own. Of course that made me start thinking about myself again and what an asshole I was for being so selfish. It felt as if the dynamic had shifted, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  “Hey. Tomorrow night we’re doing an improv set under a different name. If there’s another drum set, why don’t you play with us?” I said, partly trying to change the subject, and hoping to give her something fun to do in New York.

  “I don’t know about that. I can’t play that stuff.”

  “What stuff? There is no stuff until you play it. It’ll be fun. You just said you wished you were playing music.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Good,” I said, leaning in to kiss her.

  She was still preoccupied about something, and the sex felt a little one-sided, as if she wasn’t really there. It made me feel kind of gross about myself afterward, as if I had just experienced what it was like to fit my mom’s description of all white men everywhere. Usually, just thinking about sex made me feel guilty of that, but I had never experienced it in real life.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, for no reason in particular.

  “About what?”

  “Everything.”

  I MET HEATHER the next night after work, and we headed up to Harlem on the A train. The crowd was neither communist nor anarchist, but some weird brand of negative urban hippie I hadn’t encountered before. Long hair and beards were not to be mistaken for peace and love. There were little groups of people hiding in dark corners whispering to one another, lest they be overheard and judged by another little group of whispering people. As more and more of these quiet hippie artist types showed up, the small whispering groups morphed into a larger silent group. It was an uncomfortable atmosphere, and Heather really didn’t want to play. I wasn’t sure I did either, but I kept trying to talk her into it anyway.

  “Don’t worry. We’ll be wearing masks. If it really sucks, no one will know who was up there anyway,” I said as I tried to convince her.

  “I’ll know,” she responded. I didn’t have an answer for that one. No one ever judged me as badly as I judged myself.

  “Well, yeah. You’re right, but look at these people. They’re just here to be seen anyway. They’re going to like whatever we do just because they’re supposed to.”

  Since we were performing under the name of the Commode Minstrels, not Caroliner, we had to come up with a different idea for the masks. We all had clean laundry, courtesy of Thomas’s family, so I thought of wearing underwear. It wasn’t all that creative, but we didn’t have time for anything more elaborate. Heather joined us in donning our various tighty whities, boxers, and long johns, and we played forty-five minutes of some of the most jarring, unlistenable music possible. As I expected, the audience loved it. It had very little to do with us and almost everything to do with alcohol.

  The next morning I said good-bye to Heather, and the band began its journey back to California. After kicking dope I found that life on the road rather agreed with me. Our only responsibility was to show up at the next club on time. The shows got progressively worse as we made our way back west. We played for video game nerds in Philly, empty cages that were supposed to contain naked women in South Carolina, alcoholic ghost people in New Orleans, one confused guy in El Paso, and a pretty good sampling of almost every stereotype Los Angeles had to offer.

  As Grux said, “the best thing to ever happen in L.A. was us going home.”

  nine

  Is where he gets some new clothes

  AFTER FINISHING OUT my fifth-grade year at Malcolm X Elementary School on the south side of Berkeley, we moved across town, two blocks away from the Arts Magnet School. Considering my history as a performer, it didn’t seem that far-fetched that I would qualify for admission, but something to do with racial quotas prevented Kyle and me from being eligible. Instead we were to be bused a few miles away to Columbus Elementary. Mom tried every method of persuasion she could before deciding to boycott the Berkeley public school system and charge them with engaging in reverse racism, which according to my mom wasn’t as bad as the regular kind but was pretty bad nonetheless. I said good-bye to my dream of a normal childhood and reluctantly went along with the boycott.

  The truant officers came around every couple of days to try to get u
s to go to the other school, but Mom just lectured them on how she never would have joined the freedom rides if she had known it would have ended up keeping her kids out of school.

  “But, lady, your kids got to go to school. It’s the law.”

  “First of all, my name is not lady. You can call me doctor. And second, when a law doesn’t make any sense, I’m just supposed to follow along? There wouldn’t be any civil rights if we had just mindlessly obeyed the law. That’s the problem with this whole country, and frankly it’s the last thing we expected to encounter when we moved to Berkeley.”

  “Okay, lady. I mean doctor. But can’t the kids go to Columbus until we get this figured out?”

  “No way. This boycott is in response to an unjust system that victimizes kids because of the color of their skin. If the school was full, then that would be one thing, but can you honestly say that it makes any sense to keep my kids, both of whom are very involved in the creative arts, from going to the Arts Magnet School because they are white? Reverse racism is still racism.”

  “I’m just doing my job, ma’am.”

  “Yeah, that’s what they said in Germany.”

  I turned away in embarrassment. Sending us to Columbus Elementary was a far cry from sending us to the gas chamber.

  “And I’m not a ma’am, either,” she added. “I’m sorry about your job. Will that be all?”

  “For today. But we’ll be back. You can’t keep your kids out of school forever.”

  “Oh, really? These are my kids, and I am not raising them to mindlessly participate in a system whose only concern is filling quotas and has no respect for the individual, especially when the victims are innocent kids. So don’t bother coming back if that’s what you intend on asking me to do.”

  Not surprisingly, a different truant officer would show up every day, each one higher up in the chain of command, until the superintendent himself came by.

  Kyle and I were shut out of that meeting, but afterward Mom called us downstairs and said, “Guess what? The boycott worked. You guys are starting at the Arts Magnet School tomorrow.” It was confusing after all that to find only two other white kids in my class. What kind of quota were they trying to fill?