by John Raymond
The final feedback jam was not perfunctory, and Aaron’s ears were still ringing as he shuffled down the broken stairs, and ringing still when he got to the sidewalk and smoked a cigarette, the magic spell conjured by the din already evaporating from his nerves. He wasn’t that high anymore, just burned out and shaky, and as passing headlights flashed on broken glass and fellow showgoers trudged by at dazed, postcoital speed, the everyday current of acid criticism again began rising in his blood.
He surveyed the other showgoers on the sidewalk, the part-time punks and belated Goths, the eternal hippies and bewildered jocks, and silently judged them. He could ID a published poet and a photographer with pictures in a museum, so they said, and a whole, elaborate hierarchy of shoes. He saw the filmmaker, Dan, talking to the bassist of Powerstrip, making some plan of future collaboration. And then there was Dana Star, only seventeen and already known for the video she’d screened a month back. It wasn’t a very interesting video—home-birth footage cut with hard-core porn—but the idea had been so obvious, it had almost seemed necessary, and people had been talking as though she was some kind of comer ever since.
Over near the streetlight, he spotted his buddy Karl deep in conversation with the brain-fried panhandler people called Mr. Africa. Karl loved Mr. Africa and sought him out after every show at the Ooze, soliciting his cracked notions about lost languages and God’s quantum will, confirming his theory that crazy black guys were inherently more cosmic than crazy white guys. “Crazy black dudes have it down,” he liked to say. “Better fashion, better theories, better hats. Crazy white guys are just a bunch of mumbling pants shitters. What white guy would ever be Sun Ra, dude? He could never be white.” Aaron was still trying to figure out whether Karl’s ideas were blatantly racist or not, but at the very least they were better than the covertly racist ideas of the people who treated Mr. Africa like some kind of mascot or pet. And it was possible they were even more advanced than his own ideas, too, which generally just led him to keep his distance.
Aaron had another cigarette, arranging his shoulders in a zombie hunch, arms adangle, glad to give Karl his space. If nothing else, the rap with Mr. Africa meant they weren’t talking about the sunporch in Echo Park anymore, thank God. All night long, between bands, out at the burrito cart, Karl had been laying into him about the sunporch. According to Karl, his uncle’s friend Duane had a sunporch attached to his living room, and he was willing to rent it to them for a mere three hundred bucks a month. Split two ways, Karl said, that was basically nothing, and thus for basically nothing, if they could just get their shit together, they could take possession of a space. And with a space—a space!—they’d have everything they needed to start their lives of insurrection and poetry. Not that Karl ever said anything about insurrection and poetry—that would be too corny—but that was the tacit understanding between them. From this sunporch in Echo Park, they would commence their journey into the great lore of the scene, moving beyond any known category or school, unearthing all manner of secrets hidden to the vast population of squares.
Aaron liked the sunporch idea, and he was flattered that Karl, a person of such strange promise and adventure, would want him as a roommate. But unfortunately he was already committed to a handful of other plans next fall. His mom, for instance, assumed he was going to college, as did his dad. His grandpa wanted him to visit Israel, preferably soon. And then there was Joel Sterner, another friend, with whom he’d promised to drive around Mexico, a plan advanced to the degree that they were already shopping for cheap vans. At some point, he could see, some people were going to end up being disappointed, and, as much as he liked Karl’s sunporch scheme, he didn’t see the point of adding yet more disappointment to the list.
Normally they would have driven to Chow’s, but because Karl had almost no gas, they had to walk. The trip was fifteen blocks and took them through a veritable obstacle course of ghetto traps, starting with a shitty bodega where prison-built dudes loitered, followed by a park where a knot of kids was torturing a rat, and then a vacant lot where a guy was twirling nunchakus, at every station of which Aaron’s white skin glowed with invigorating vulnerability and self-doubt. At last the beacon of pink neon appeared and they crossed the final boulevard, shaky but unhurried.
Inside, Chow’s was hot and loud, jammed as usual with time travelers from every epoch and dimension. Rockabilly dudes, Confederate colonels, drunken gurus, gold prospectors, wasted fairy queens, gypsy witches. The ubiquitous guy with hair cut into harsh bald patches, as if he’d been in a fight with a hyena, was there, as was the torpedo-headed guy in a motorcycle jacket with the extravagant muttonchops. Most of the crowd’s costumes were not that amazing, but a few were impressively fully fleshed, not that it really mattered one way or another. In this room, no one really cared who you were. The only real crime was not pretending to be someone else.
They found a free booth patched with duct tape and ordered a mound of cheese fries from the tattooed ghoul who paused at their table. The sound of a brawl in the kitchen flared and ended with an explosion of glass as the sizzle of frying grease roared on like a monsoon. Karl had gotten onto the subject of taking a shit on acid—the terrible stench, like a ghost rising from the toilet with clanking chains, the terrifying wiping experience, like sucking one’s own hand up one’s ass—but as soon as the steaming pile of fries appeared, he took it as a signal to switch gears and return to the unfinished business of the sunporch, and their future.
“Duane is into it, dude,” Karl said, extracting a cluster of moist potato strips from the heap. “We can move in whenever. We just say the word, dude. We’re in.”
“I never met Duane, did I?” Aaron said, although he knew something about Duane. He was a self-proclaimed collage artist and long-ago drummer, now a carpenter specializing in custom cabinetry for tech moguls. Aaron only brought up the subject hoping to lead them into a digression, possibly a whole new conversational galaxy.
“Duane is cool,” Karl said. “Very philosophical dude. Very gentle. Deep soul. Killer pad. I told you there’s an empty pool in the back, right?”
“I think so.”
“And I told you Jeff Johnson’s moving in, too, right? Fucking amazing dude. Total shredder. And funny as fuck. He’s taking the pantry. The sunporch is by far the best spot, though. Good air. Good light. Hang a sheet and we’ve both got our own private pied-à-terres.” He drew out the last s into a long zzz sound, curing the word of its pretensions.
Aaron nodded, folding another pinch of fries into his mouth. He chewed slowly, savoring the grease, but not slowly enough to outflank Karl.
“So, what do you say?” Karl said. “Come on. Let’s do it.”
“I want to,” Aaron said. “I do.”
“So let’s.”
“I’m just not sure if I can, is all.”
“Why?”
This time the question came with a certain hardness and left a glassiness in the aftersilence. It seemed even Karl was getting worn out by the unresolved tack of the conversation and couldn’t understand why his friend was being so adamantly evasive. He wanted some kind of agreement to occur so they could move on—they both did—and thus Aaron, against his earlier vows about keeping his other plans to himself, knowing it was going to open a whole new, seething pit of issues, went ahead and dealt the card he’d been hoping to keep facedown.
“The thing is,” he said, “I might have a plan with Joel in the fall. We’ve been talking about driving around Mexico. I’m not sure what’s happening. We might get a van and do it.”
“Joel Sterner?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh,” Karl said, with a rare kick of surprise in his voice. He was usually seven steps ahead, or at least five steps off to the side, but this was information he hadn’t anticipated. He wasn’t ashamed to show he was knocked off balance.
“I see. Okay. I get it. I see what you’re saying.” His face darkened, and Aaron immediately felt a grave confusion enter his mind. He didn’t want to
throw away the sunporch just yet, and he definitely didn’t want to offend Karl, not that he’d ever thought that was even possible. He’d never imagined Karl as vulnerable to something as conventional as rejection before. But he didn’t want to ditch Joel, either. His two friends led toward such diametrically different lives; he didn’t want to miss out on either one.
“It’s not for sure or anything, though,” Aaron was quick to add. “Who knows if we’ll get our shit together. But if we do, I don’t want to leave you hanging, you know? I want to get the sunporch. It sounds awesome, it does. I just, you know, I don’t know what’s happening, and I’m still trying to, you know, figure it all out . . .”
Aaron’s mealy words petered out in a shrug, and when Karl spoke again it was soberly, and with a wise broadness of vision.
“I get it,” he said. “I love Joel. He’s awesome. I see how it is. I guess you just have to make a decision. That’s all.”
They continued eating. Aaron chewed without pleasure, disgusted by his own weak duplicity. He’d been thinking he might be able to avoid a decision in this matter, that fate might intervene and decide his future for him without any conflict or choice or rejections on his part at all. Surely, he’d thought, something would fall through, and he’d be left with whatever remained. It was a feeble way of blazing a trail, he realized, but he’d managed to convince himself there was even a certain Zen sagacity underneath, a principled passivity in the face of illusion. If he just waited and did nothing, destiny would have to step in, wouldn’t it?
Aaron kept picking at the fries as a guy with a ridiculous mohawk held court in a packed booth across the room. The kid was pale as chalk and cadaverously thin, his body an ideal rack for his studded biker jacket and pale-blue mesh shirt. It was an impressive display, fashion-wise, very London 1978, and Aaron continued watching as the kid mimed a full Sid Vicious routine, snarling and snaring the salt shaker and shaking it on his friend’s head. He instinctively hated this tenth-generation clone, this model with his mall-bought personality. He was not a lifer, he judged. Anyone could see that pose would never carry him far.
Karl blew his nose and inspected the discharge before plunking his napkin on the cold fry plate. His eyes were also fixed on the liberty-spiked punker, and to Aaron’s surprise he seemed almost amused by the costume, maybe even impressed. A smile was coming over his face. Usually he wasn’t moved by such derivative efforts.
“That guy wants his ass kicked,” Karl said with admiration.
“I don’t know,” Aaron said. “Pretty stock, I’d say.”
“In this neighborhood? That takes some balls.”
“His mom’s Navigator is parked outside.”
“No,” Karl said, brooking no argument. “He’s cool.” He lifted his snot napkin and took another huge pinch of fries. “I was just reading this book about Nazis,” he said, chewing wetly. “That dude is like a badass storm trooper or something.”
Aaron kept his eyes on the punker, puzzled by the turn of subject. Nazis? He couldn’t tell whether Karl was being stupid or advancing some hurtful, ulterior agenda. Karl knew Aaron’s family’s story, of course, but his sense of political history could also be embarrassingly limited and off base. If he had some kind of twisted Nazi-chic fascination going on, Aaron didn’t want to hear it. Not to mention, this kid didn’t look like a Nazi.
“Okay,” Aaron said. “I don’t know what that means, but whatever . . .”
“The book was about goose-stepping,” Karl said, obviously proud of his extracurricular readings. This kind of academic knowledge was normally Aaron’s purview, and he was gladly poaching. “I’ve always wondered why they did that, you know? I mean, what was up with that? Goose-stepping? Kick, kick, kick.” He bashed the underside of the table with his feet, unconcerned by the bothered looks from the neighbors. “The Nazis made themselves look so fucking stupid. Walking down the street like a bunch of fucking Rockettes. What was the point?”
“It was the style,” Aaron said. “The Prussians started it. Armies actually still do it all over the world.”
“Yeah, but this book was saying it was all just a way of fucking with people’s heads. The Nazis knew they looked like total faggots doing it, but they were basically telling the people: Come on, laugh at us, you bitches. We are so fucking badass, we can walk down the street looking like total fucking faggot morons, and no one is going to call us on this shit. That’s what that guy’s doing. He’s goose-stepping around, saying, Fuck you, motherfuckers! Suck on this! I dare the world to call my shit. He fucking rules.”
“I wouldn’t call him a Nazi for that.”
“I would. He’s a fucking awesome faggot Nazi.”
Aaron sipped his drink, staring at the congealed remains on their plate. If this was Karl getting back at him for his indecision about the sunporch, picking some kind of meaningless fight, he was doing a good job of getting under his skin. He hated the frivolous Nazi talk, and even more he hated being thrown outside Karl’s circle of logic, if “logic” was the word. He wondered, cringingly, if Karl’s theory could somehow be construed as antiSemitic or offensive in any way. He knew his grandfather would certainly not approve of the theory, but then again any mention of Nazis was strictly forbidden in his grandpa’s presence. The Holocaust was an event so sacrosanct, it was never discussed, and thus, in a sense, any theory would be offensive. But dragging the storm troopers through Chow’s, tossing them around like they were nothing? That didn’t seem right, either.
The kid with the mohawk was now stripping off his jacket and flexing his pitiful muscle, inviting his fake Nancy Spungen to touch his small lump, and the whole room was pretending not to ogle him. The goose-stepping theory was aggravatingly glib, Aaron thought, but it was hard to think around, too, he couldn’t deny that. There was something to it. So the verdict was still out. Was Karl a racist? An anti-Semite? A genius? An idiot? Who could say? He might be all of them at once. Part of the fun of renting a sunporch with him would be figuring that out.
4
How long ago had she stopped being happy here? It was so hard to tell from inside her fog of unhappiness. If Anne’s unhappiness had taught her one thing, it was that it was the nature of unhappiness to make everything, past and present, appear as the same long, continuous unhappiness, an eternal force binding every unhappy era, even those that might have seemed otherwise at the time, into one unbreakable, unhappy life. Aaron’s birth: unhappy. Falling in love: not that happy. But wasn’t there some ebb and flow to it all? She’d been happy before, she remembered. Wouldn’t she be happy again? But seriously, what could ever happen in this room that could possibly make her happy?
She knew the Bureau of Sustainability was a fine place to work, as fine as any, most likely. The organization’s mission was unimpeachably correct—ecological stewardship of the municipal infrastructure, with an eye to global leadership in the arena of sustainable technological innovation. The pay was adequate, as were the benefits. And the office itself was a perfectly comfortable environment in which to while away one’s working years, a realm of thoughtful, ergonomic furniture, modular bookshelves made of reclaimed wood, and whimsical cubical decorations proclaiming the cheerful individualism of all those who toiled here. If exotic air plants, foreign-movie posters, Japanese toy figurines, and friendly dogs roaming the maze of workstations signaled happiness, this was surely heaven on earth.
So why, then, did it all make Anne feel like sawing off her own head? Alice, her neighbor, wasn’t helping matters. Her endless phone conversation about green this, nano that, eco-eco-eco, was like a vise tightening on Anne’s skull. For at least twenty minutes, her voice had been flowing over the cubicle wall, piling sustainability jargon into a giant, stinking, nonsensical heap. “The retrofitting technologies are going to be game changers in the sustainability category.” “The real game changer is the emergence of the social-performance corporation.” Fuck that. The next time anybody stuck the prefix “eco” onto an innocent noun or verb, she was person
ally going to stab that person in the face.
She sipped her coffee and tried blocking Alice’s voice from her head, but she didn’t know where to turn. Her desk was a dreary tundra of work shit. The window in front of her was a tableau of brutalist state office buildings and unused lawns. The air was a cocktail of orange blossom room freshener, off-gassing carpets, and recycled farts. She’d been sitting in her chair for forty-five minutes, and thus far she’d managed only to open her email page, and that only in case anyone walked by and doubted her productivity. Not that anyone noticed or cared. Among the many bothersome aspects of her workplace environment, the one truly excellent thing, the thing that kept her clocking in day after day, week after week, was the incredible lack of oversight.
Her boss, Susan, was almost never there anymore, too busy off nursing her own minor celebrity as an eco-guru at environmental symposia around the globe. And, since Anne’s job title, assistant to the director of the Bureau of Sustainability, made her neither answerable to anyone else, nor directly responsible for managing anyone else, she lived her days in a gilded cage of benign neglect, free to pursue whatever personal agendas she chose as long as the basic work duties for Susan got done. Today, the personal agenda was the locating of a live-in caregiver for her dad. Following the trip to Fountainview and the subsequent thirty-second conversation they’d had about the experience (“I’m not going there,” “You’re sure?” “Yes.”), it had become apparent that he wouldn’t be moving into managed care just yet, and that meant he was going to have to accept a live-in nurse to make sure his house was reasonably clean and his meals were hot. A paid roommate would be easily as expensive as the tuition at Fountainview, she’d already calculated, but without the sauna and fine china in his face, her father might not suspect it. She had power of attorney, which meant he would never have to know the true numbers.
She looked over her crimped notes, the crossed-out names and phone numbers, a few with scratched words beside them. “No English.” “Weird vibe.” “Phone disconnected/bad sign.” She’d assumed it would be easy to find an angelic helpmate, considering the amount of money she planned to spend, but the search was proving harder than expected. Didn’t anyone want to take her money to wipe her father’s ass? But, as it turned out, the market had once again beaten her to the punch, mopping up all the best caregivers in a seventy-mile radius. They were already wiping the asses of Mr. Cody and Mrs. Hutchinson, Mr. Johnson and Mrs. Margolis, all the ancient lawyers and surgeons of yesteryear. What was worse, the best caregivers tended to stay on their assignments for years at a time, what with modern medical science expanding the twilight years into perpetuity. She was left in the awkward position of hoping one of her friends’ parents had a sudden aneurysm just so she could scoop up the help.