“Freedom to do what?” I’d asked so many people, yet everyone’s plans sounded nearly the same, all equally bleak: Dinner, then a date with the tube for Moonlighting, MacGyver, or Mr. Belvedere, and then bed. Or perhaps a movie like Twins, Crocodile Dundee II, or Die Hard. Maybe a video. Occasionally a singles bar, hoping for a chance in the money machine to grab as much cash spinning in the air of that clear box as possible in thirty seconds. Week after week I heard this. It was desolate, passionless, and devoid of dreams. I stopped asking and kept to myself.
The months went by. Our band Arcade Land stumbled badly; people kept quitting, and we had fewer and fewer gigs until there were none, but by then I’d stopped caring that much. The rut of nine to five had metastasized, spreading to every part of my life; I thought more and more about five o’clock and my escape from those cubicles.
Sometimes I could hear songs struggling to form in my mind—desolate melodies and quiet, desperate lyrics imploring an indifferent universe to reveal to them that there was something else: something more than merely surviving yet another day. Something that felt like being truly alive. That there had to be. One hideous afternoon, I realized that these were also the sounds of my own life—sounds so different from those I’d always heard before, that I’d caught on paper and then loosed on stage: the sounds of growing up, of always being hungry, of always wanting to be older, to be bigger, to be more real, of needing to matter to anyone—at all—and, most urgently, to know who or what I am. These new sounds repulsed me. They scared me even more, for they howled that there was no answer, no end to this yearning. Not ever.
By then Scott had changed too, acting more like a happy homemaker than a driven band manager or striving lead guitarist, as if this, our living together, and talking about putting Arcade Land back together again, someday, was good enough.
The Friday I met Amy, I’d arrived home from my cubicle, unsure if I’d tell Scott about this party I’d heard about. I hadn’t decided if I’d go yet and could bail easier if I didn’t say anything. I found Scott in the kitchen, chopping vegetables on the counter next to a large salad bowl. Bags of groceries were on the table. He looked up at me and smiled.
“So,” he said, “How was your day?”
Right then, an icy slush filled my gut. This was it; I’d failed. Making it as a musician was a chimera, and 5:00 p.m. would be all that I would look forward to, free to come home, have dinner, and watch TV. The idea of being onstage—something that had buoyed me through all trials, every setback we’d then overcome, and had filled my days with purpose and told me who I was—finally collapsed and shriveled up. It’s all been a waste of time. The three clean white walls of my cubicle marked out the silhouette of who I’d become.
Had it remained like this, I would have gone out at the end of a leather belt I tied around a chandelier, kicking at the smoke-filled air.
Though I didn’t know it, at that very moment, my deliverance was dressing herself for a party I’d decided I couldn’t bear to attend.
I shudder to think of that now; I’d almost stayed home and watched something on TV with Scott. I’d had every reason not to go. I would avoid having to face people who knew I didn’t have a band anymore, and avoid admitting that I was now a cubicle automaton, that I wasn’t who they thought they knew—that I wasn’t the person I thought I knew.
After dinner, I went out for cigarettes, but on the way back home, for reasons I still wonder at, I turned left on Neil Avenue and walked the three blocks to that party and straight into a different life.
The party was in a third-floor apartment, and once inside, the smells of cigarettes, kef, and incense; the sounds of the Eurythmics’ “Love is a Stranger”; and the sights of people like I used to hang with jarred me, as if I’d walked head on into a glass wall. It took me a few moments to get my bearings and find out that the drinks were in the kitchen. “Over there, down that hall,” somebody told me.
There, through the doorway, in the cramped, smoky kitchen, she stood next to a table, indifferently sipping from a half-filled plastic cup. She was nearly as tall as me—a couple of inches shy of six feet—and had very dark brown, almost black, wavy hair to her shoulders, with bright blue eyes; they looked like a cat’s eyes in the dark. Meticulous makeup highlighted those eyes, raised her eyebrows, accentuated her high cheeks, and plumped her lips. The whole effect betrayed that she was older than the touch of baby fat under her chin suggested, with a body that didn’t seem quite real. She looked like a cartoon bombshell—a taller, sleeker Betty Boop: full breasts, a wasplike waist that flowed into round hips, and long, lively legs. She was dressed to show herself off: the thick seams on the backs of her black stockings drew my eyes along her calves and then her thighs until the edge of a micromini abruptly ended the trip up her legs. A snug-fitting gossamer top revealed a tattoo on her left breast—of what I couldn’t make out through the hunter-green fabric. All of her clothes were ten or twenty years out of date, worn rough in places and threadbare in spots. She, though, pulled off this type of secondhand-store shabbiness in a way few could: fiercely.
You have to be sleeping with someone here.
Then I remembered I was a cubicle drone now, and that I was here only because it was after five on Friday—not a school night. What the hell does it matter if you’re free? What am I going to say? “Oh, today was a bitch. My batches wouldn’t add up. Three times in a row?” I’m ashamed of who I’ve become. I’m sleepwalking through the empty hours that make up another day.
Still, I kept putting off leaving for another few minutes, time and again, lurking as I watched people laugh, talk, and simply enjoy being here. I wanted that too, but I felt embarrassed for myself and so out of place. It hurt being here like this. I decided to leave after one last cigarette.
She was standing almost next to me when she bummed a cigarette from someone, and I had my Zippo in hand so lit it for her—a meaningless gesture that led to a smile, a first few words, and then more, and then to casual touches, purposeful caresses, and finally to a kiss. An hour later, we were in my apartment, sitting on the edge of my unmade bed, her arms draped around me. I slipped my hand between us and fondled the bottom button of her blouse. As our kisses grew deeper, I pushed the domed button through the slit that held it, and then I released the next and the next of those tiny black buttons until I came to the last.
As that last button of her blouse slipped from my finger, she pulled back and said, “You know you’re raping me.”
My fingers froze.
“I’m only seventeen. I’m not legal for six weeks.” She watched me. “Rapist.”
I stared at her, not understanding why she was saying this. Do I stop? Do I—
“You’re not going to torture me, are you?” she said, running a hand along the inside of my thigh. “Leave me guessing when you’re going to do it—going to have me?”
I shook my head. I don’t know if I believed she was seventeen or not. I want to think that I didn’t, but it wasn’t until six weeks later, on her nineteenth birthday, that I actually found out she’d been eighteen, and then it became clear that her jailbait claim was a lie to push further, to see if I could keep up with her, to make touching each other mean something more than merely having sex.
That first night, she smiled and leaned back on my bed, her shirt falling open, revealing her tattoo: a butterfly, its wings teardrops of reds and blues within thick black lines, one wing grazing a nipple. I touched the edge of a wing and ran my fingers around it; then I ran my fingers around the other wing until I came to her lavishly pink nipple. I kissed it.
“Rapist,” she said, unbuttoning my jeans.
My bedroom swallowed us whole that weekend, and every night for the next week, and then the weeks after. The clean white sides of my cubicles no longer fixed who I was; they morphed to mere walls, keeping me from my lover, and five o’clock transformed into the key that let me free of them and back into m
y newly vibrant life. On Friday, five o’clock meant whole days with her and late-morning hours spent in bed as we consumed every particle of each other’s bodies and imbibed the merest details of each other’s lives, the sheets knotted and twisted around us. I felt as if we had stepped off an infinitely high precipice and, as we fell together, that we were actually flying. Gravity ceased to be. I’d never lived this vividly.
While Amy and I spent every moment we could unearthing the pleasures of being with each other, Scott grew testy, sullen, and snippy, snapping that she left too little milk and grumbling that he found her things around our house. After three weeks, hints about my true commitment to reforming Arcade Land sprung up whenever we talked.
While Scott the grump grumbled, Amy expanded me. Opened me up to things I’d never known, such as Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet. “Passionate existentialism” is how she described it.
I scoffed.
“Shows we truly exist only through our passions.” She rolled up against me in bed. “One of my favorite quotes is ‘There are only three things to be done with a woman,’ said Clea once. ‘You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.’”
“Love, lose, or preserve?”
“You’re a writer.”
“A songwriter. Yes.”
“Then turn me into a song. Or three. Preserve me. Preserve us.”
These words would soon change everything. For all of us.
The next Tuesday afternoon, I’d gotten home early enough to catch him in the hallway as he was leaving to work one of his two weekly shifts at Denny’s he had to pull now.
“Jonathan,” he said, blocking me from walking in any farther. “There’s something wrong here. You’re not acting right.”
“What?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Not acting like you give a damn about playing any more. You only care about sleeping with your girl—”
“Hold up here, now.”
“You told me once nothing mattered to you more than playing. That it’s your reason for being, or some shit like that. Now? I don’t know. Do you even want to play in Arcade Land? Or is she your instrument now?”
“My instr …” I said. “No. No. This … No.”
“When was the last time you even looked at your keyboard?”
“When I had a reason to,” I said. “When we had gigs to play. When we had a band. Right now, Arcade Land is only the two of us. That’s not a band.”
He glowered.
“I took a miserable day job so you could ‘work on the band,’ and what?”
“Look. You need to make up your mind. Do you want to play in a band with me? Or are you more interested in balling her?” He slid past me to the front door. “Just let me know.”
He slammed it behind him before I could say anything.
After that, Amy and I hardly saw Scott any more. Instead we got notes instructing what food not to touch, or asking why something got left out, or complaining that our dishes weren’t done or that his towel was left wet.
This silent quarrel of notes lasted about a month until it got very loud one Sunday afternoon. Amy was looking over my shoulder as I poked around the refrigerator to find something to eat when Scott walked into the kitchen.
“Doesn’t she have a home?” he asked.
I let go of the container of leftover Chinese I’d been looking at and pivoted on my heel.
Amy straightened up from a crouch. Her expression was severe—jaw jutting out, eyes thinned to slits—I’d never seen her angry before. Not like this. She turned, slowly, to face him.
“What’s your problem?” she asked. “Jealous I’ve got all your boy’s attention?”
His lips curled, and he pushed his head toward her. He squared off his thick shoulders like a bull about to charge. This I’d seen before, many times: Scott supremely pissed off. He’s frightening like this.
I caught my breath.
“My boy?” he asked scornfully. “My band’s lead singer. Songwriter. Keyboardist.”
“Oh, is that all?”
“What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”
“Whatever you think it does.”
“Look, woman,” Scott said, jabbing a meaty finger at her. “This is my house, and—”
“Guys! Guys!” I shouted, jumping between them, my palms held up to both. “Just. Stop it.”
“No. Not in my house—”
“Our house,” I said, cutting him off, holding a finger up at him. “In our house. And”—I threw my thumb at her—“she’s in my life.”
He balled his fists and glared. I waited, my breath ragged, heart hammering. Amy watched.
“That mean you’re quitting Arcade Land?” he asked. “Punking out on me? Giving up on us?”
“No,” I said. “It doesn’t. At all. But damnit. I need …” I threw my arms down. “Not this.”
“You wanna be in Arcade Land,” Scott said, jabbing his finger at me. “Act like it.” He turned and walked away.
Shaking, I stared at the empty doorway he’d walked through.
“Hey,” Amy said softly.
The caress of her voice allowed me to let go of the tension. My body finally went slack, my breath slowing.
“Hey yourself,” I said, still watching that doorway.
“I didn’t expect that,” she said.
“Him not liking you here?”
“Hardly. You standing up to him.”
I made a puzzled face.
“He’s not used to that. Big guys like him—bullies—they’re always the boss. And he liked things as they were, being the boss. Domestic bliss. The happy married couple.”
“What are—”
She put her fingers over my lips. “Shh.” She shook her head. “Don’t worry about it. He doesn’t see it that way. Best not tell him.”
She smothered my bewilderment with a long open-mouth kiss. I don’t think I cared what she meant; I felt so intensely alive with her.
The next day, Monday, she went to work as usual, but I didn’t have an assignment, and Scott was off doing something he hadn’t bothered telling me about. For the first time in months, I broke out my keyboard and hooked it into the amp. I started dabbling with melodies, trying out whatever came to mind, the sounds I created groping after all the raw feelings racing around inside me, both those born of the fierce joys of stepping off the edge with Amy and those of the somnambulistic desperation of the five o’clock world. When Scott got home, he listened for a couple of minutes and then pulled out his guitar, and we started shaping these fragments into full songs, extending melodies, filling out choruses, and building rhythms. In the next days, I froze moments of passion as well as moments of desperation into lyrics and quickly found the sounds of passion far easier to work with, just as falling is easier than climbing. I strung only those ardent moments together like crystals on strings, song after song.
When we played these new, fiercely passionate songs in auditions, bassists and drummers strove to be the ones to play them with us. We dumped the name Arcade Land and the stain of failure it carried and renamed ourselves White Heat. We chose Sean for our bassist and Marsha for our drummer.
When we played out, we drew crowds. The Main High booked us again and again, and we practically became Crazy Mama’s house band. In half a year, we were playing all original works, including our first seriously popular one—“Amy’s Face.”
I quit temping and went back to waiting part-time. Five o’clock melted back into being nothing more than one of the other twenty-four hours. The sanitary white walls of the cubicles receded into memory; their hold on who I was crumbled completely, though broken bits of them appeared in nightmares, which sometimes woke me late in the night. At these moments, all I needed to do was reach out for Amy, and her warm flesh would dispel them completely.
Being br
oke no longer mattered to me. Ramen noodles tasted fine even ten times a week. The mirages that chained us vanished. We needed more than commitment, more than good music, more than a solid band. We needed opportunity. As the weeks and gigs passed, and the cheering crowds led to nowhere new, it became ever more clear that the opportunity we needed wasn’t in Columbus. Scott wondered about it out loud, but I turned my thoughts away whenever it led to leaving here, because that meant leaving Amy; Amy and I had never spoken of endings, making believe nothing would ever change, and fought off the bite of routine by acting out fantasies, whims, and melodramatic jealousies until it became hard to know what was real and what was play—until one Sunday afternoon, a line was stepped over.
Scott had gone out to run errands, and Amy and I were being bums, lying in bed, doing a lot of nothing, and really enjoying it. I didn’t feel like getting out of bed and rushing to the phone when it rang, but the noise did make us get up and get dressed, and toy with the idea of going for a walk or something to get us out of the house. A half hour later, we’d only walked downstairs and decided to have coffee. It was two in the afternoon; we were in no rush to leave. From the kitchen, we heard Scott get home, and then came the sound of the answering machine: “I’m trying to reach Scott Marshall or Jonathan Starks. This is Maury Jenko at the Agora, and we’re interested in talking to you about opening for Warren Zevon. We need to know in the next half hour. Give me a call at—”
“Jonathan!” Scott yelled from down the hall. “You got that, right? You called? Tell me you called.”
A Perfect Blindness Page 3