“So here we are, pretending we’re right and they’re wrong—”
“When really we both know better—”
“If we don’t they’ll be letting us know real soon.”
“Would you rather spend the rest of your life in prison or the nuthouse?”
“That’s a rough one. Gimme some time. Neither.”
“My answer exactly.”
“But what’s gonna happen when we get to the point—”
“Wait, I already know what you’re about to say—”
“When we both think the same thing—”
“Always—”
“So we no longer need to talk at all?”
“I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.”
“Either that or find out what we can’t stand about each other and go our separate ways.”
“All right. So we’ve agreed about all the things we hate—so much so we don’t even need to discuss them….
“Yeah …”
“Yeah, well, what about the things we actually like?”
“What about ’em?”
“Well, JUST WHAT ARE THEY? I mean, I wanna see an itemized list.”
“Can’t be done.”
“Why not?”
“Guess.”
“We don’t like enough things to fill out the fingers of one hand much less a whole sheet of paper.”
“Right again.”
“Though there is one thing …”
“Yeah … ?
“Well … I’m kinda hesitant to bring it up …”
“For God’s sake, WHY?”
“Because … well …”
“Are you talking about what I think you’re talking about?”
“Uhh …”
“You are. After all we’ve been through.”
“Yeah, but look at it this way: when the rest of human experience is totally worthless, and we see eye to eye to such an extent we can barely talk, that leaves just ONE THING.”
“Hmmm … and what if that runs out, too?”
“It won’t.”
“Why?”
“Trust me.”
“Why?”
“You’ve got nothing better to do.”
“True enough.”
“Hey.”
“What?”
“Let’s fuck.”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
From that night it began to seem as if they measured their time more in terms of when and for how long they had to be apart than when they saw each other. They became so attuned to each other’s thought patterns that conversation did indeed sometimes become all but superfluous. Yet, curiously, that was all they lived for. Or so they thought. So he thought. There was never the slightest doubt in his mind.
After a few months, she began to have second thoughts. They were too much alike. Lovers brought something unexpected, some tension to the relationship that made it click, cook, and change. This was more like brother and sister. Which she never told him, but she increasingly found less than dizzyingly erotic. It was simply too pat. Yet there he was, as happy as she had ever seen anyone be in her life. Her reservations made her feel guilty, and the fact that she didn’t voice them compounded the guilt. She was hiding plenty from him, more all the time in fact. She couldn’t stand the thought of him being unhappy. If things continued on their present course, she was going to end up bored out of her fucking mind. She was beginning to feel like his mother: precisely because she understood all this and he didn’t. Whereas he felt like a 100 percent fulfilled LOVER, if not a flat-out husband.
One thing was clear: they were not communicating. He just thought they were. He was living in a dream that she had the power to break in a moment, with a word. She had never heard of anything more unfair in her life. And what was most unfair about it was that it was nobody’s fault. There were no villains, no excuses, no nothing, and she was going crazy. Something had to give. There was no solution, short of death. And she was not prepared to die. He was healthier than anyone else she knew. Why shouldn’t he be: she, as he’d put it so often, repeating the phrase till she could scream, “completed” him. Completed him. Was that even fair to him, assuming it was true? What sort of life could he possibly have, when both of them were so alienated, and the crucial difference was that she had had over forty years to acclimate herself to it, even view it with a certain wry detachment, whereas he, being a child of the sixties with all that that entailed, thought there was no reason on earth why he should acclimate himself to anything? Why shouldn’t they just be happy? Wasn’t that what it was all about? Hadn’t they found it in each other? But we aren’t supposed to he happy, she wanted to scream.
She thought about it all the time. How could he not notice? Had he gone senile? Maybe his whole generation was senile, with their Beatles and drugs and notions of happiness as some inalienable birthright instead of an occasional holiday that sneaks up on you while you figure out a way to fuck it up. She was just too set in her ways. Whereas he could bend to anything, and did, regularly. Which was one of the main reasons why she was beginning to feel like a mother. Who the hell was she to remake and define his whole life? Yet that was seemingly exactly what he wanted. What else was there for him? It was sickening. Once they were alike; now they were both her. One was more than enough.
One day she sat down and made a list of possible solutions:
(1) Commit suicide. Then he would be free. Unacceptable. As pointless as life was, she had no intention of checking out until absolutely necessary. Besides, who was to say that he might not kill himself in grief immediately thereafter, becoming her shadow even in death?
(2) Confront him. Tell him she couldn’t stand it anymore. Then ask for his advice. Trouble was, she suspected he wouldn’t have any. He had externalized his own emptiness to the point he thought she was perfect. Perfect. Some joke that was. A forty-six-year-old divorcée and intermittent alcoholic subject to chronic depression and conviction that life is meaningless and empty, an individual with zero interests, no skills, shit job, ex-hooker, no children, now carrying on an obviously deeply sick relationship with a boy almost twenty years her junior, half her age. Maybe she had let the whole mess get started in the first place simply as a hedge against the fact she’d never had children. Now she had a son. Whom she fucked. Who imitated her in every way he knew how. Lord help us. If this was perfection, give me a country of miscreants, mutants, psychos, and cripples.
(3) Demand they break up. Break his heart. Deprive him of his sole reason for staying alive. HURT HIM. And herself as well, no doubt about it. Back to the office and the papers and slimy men making hideous propositions over chili dogs? The coffee klatch? Bach and Mozart, even? She’d rather kill herself. She would have nothing to live for in that case. Yet somehow she got by before him. How? She could not remember.
(4) Force herself to develop some new outside interest which was sure to alienate him. A cult? Antirock crusade? Right-wing politics? Jesus freaks? The Chamber of Commerce? Fascinating Womanhood? She would rather learn bass (as he had in fact even on occasion urged her, for Christ’s sake) and join his damn rock band. And she hated his singing as well as his songs. She would rather be dead.
(5) Kill him. At least if she did it right, he’d never know what hit him, never know unhappiness for the rest of his life. But she had no right to do this. Besides, it would break her heart; she would kill herself first. Besides, she couldn’t stand the thought of either prison or the mental ward.
(6) Simply disappear. Pull a Judge Crater. Somehow that seemed the most cowardly way out of all. And more than likely, they’d end up back together.
It was a single word which made up her mind for her. One morning she awoke, turned her head on the pillow, looked at him sleeping so blissfully beside her with one arm wrapped around her naked body and even a sleeping hand cupping her breast, and she thought: I am his guru. GURU. That was the end. To be anyone’s “guru” was more than she could bear, whatever the consequences. It was
funny how life worked. Nothing had changed. Just one word. But that word made all the difference in the world. For her it was like “Hitler” or “nigger” or any of those other buzzwords that set alarms raging in the human heart. She would murder a busload of schoolchildren in cold blood before she would be even one single human’s “guru.” Just looking at him there on the pillow, she wanted to vomit.
But what to do? Stealthily she crept out of bed, padded into the kitchen, and over a cup of coffee plotted. Out of six possible escape hatches, no single one of which was satisfactory, perhaps she could contrive a combination kiss-off that might work. Yes. She dressed, making sure to keep as quiet as before so he’d sleep on while she plotted, then drove the car to the liquor store, where she bought a half gallon of Johnnie Walker Black. Arriving back home, she began to mix it with the coffee, fifty-fifty. Drank it down pretty fast. By the third cup she had hatched fifteen more schemes, each more outlandishly unworkable than its predecessor. By the time he awoke, she was drunker than she’d been in years, plotzed, zonked, a mess. She checked the bathroom mirror: yep, it’d done the trick. She looked fifty years old if she looked a day. Keep this up for a week and she’d be a hundred. How could he possibly want to fuck that, much less idolize it?
He walked into the kitchen and blinked, still half asleep but palpably shocked: “What are you doing?”
“Whaddaya mean, waddami doin’? I’m having a li’l fun, thaz wad I’m doin’. Wat the fugh’s it to ya, anyway?”
She knew this wouldn’t be enough. He commenced to grill her: “Is anything wrong?”
“YA DAMN RIGHT SUMTHINZ WRONG. LIFE STINKS, TAZ WAT. I TRIED TO ENJOY IT, BUT IT WUZZA LIE I’M GONNA DRINK UNTIL I CROAK.”
Jeez, was this corny. But he was buying it. Was there no depth to which her respect for him could not sink?
“But … but … everything was going so well …”
“YEAH-SO YOU THOUGHT. I HATED EVERY SECOND OF IT.” Well, there was certainly enough truth in this. “I’M JUST TOO SET IN MY WAYS. NOT YOUNG LIKE YOU. GWAN AN’ LIVE. I WAN’ DIE.”
“But WHY? You’ve got ME, we’ve got EACH OTHER.”
“BIG DEAL.” Better soften the payload a bit. “All we are is MIRRORS of each other. We used to be two IN … INN … N-DIVVIJAWLS … NOW WE’RE JUST ONE LUMP … not even hardly HUMAN….”
He began to cry. Well, tough shit. “But we’ve shared so much—so many ideas, made so much good love, enriched each other in SO MANY WAYS …
“YEAH, THAT’S WHY I WANNA DIE, JERKOFF … ain’t no YOU or I anymore … just WE … face it: WE ARE BORING AS SHIT. Wanna drink?”
“NO. I want … God, all of a sudden I don’t know….”
Time to up the ante with a little gross-out: “I DO. YER RIGHT ABOUT THE LAV MAKING AT LEAST”—yanking her dress up and panties down, ripping the latter in the process, spreading her legs as crudely as she could—“HOW ’BOUT A LI’L POO-ZEE? C’MON, BUSTER BROWN—LESSEE YA LAP THAT CUNNY UP … or”—in the world’s absolute worst Mae West impression—“PIPE ME YER WAGSTAFF, BIG BOY, I WANNA FRESH LOADA A.M. JIZM RIGHT HERE….”
He was getting physically ill. On the other hand, so was she. This project obviously called for more extreme measures. She ran out and jumped into the car, drove it 90 mph to a shabby house well-known as headquarters of the local Hell’s Angels chapter, and invited them all back to the house for a gangfuck. This was asking for serious trouble, but anything was better than being Baba Ram Dass. Fourteen of them came roaring after her. When they arrived back at the homestead, she lay down in the middle of the living room floor, hiked her dress again, and hollered, “C’mon, boys … firs’ come, firs serve …”
They didn’t look any too eager—but then he like a damn fool had to go and try to protect her Maidenly Honor. He picked a fistfight with them. They beat him to a pulp, one of them demanded a blow job from her, she refused, sirens began to be heard in the distance, they all did the quickest disappearing act she’d ever seen outside the movies. She drove him to the hospital. While he was laid up in there three straight weeks, she hired one whore after another to go into the ward disguised as nurses and seduce him. It didn’t work until she spiked his orange juice with a triple dose of street acid: she sent three different girls up that day, and he fucked, sucked, and orifically jimjammed his little brains loose. With the third one of the day she pretended to innocently wander in on them—“What is this? I thought you LOVED me?”
“I do, I do,” and damn if his hard-on don’t wilt outa guilt. The hooker stalks out in disgust while he grovels, begging forgiveness till it reminds her so much of the first time he ever pulled that act, way back in the beginning, she wants to puke. Instead she whips out a copy of Garner Ted Armstong’s The Plain Truth and begins to hector him at the top of her lungs, liberally peppering this gibberish spew with extensive quotes from said publication, the whole rant to effect that if only he would see the light of Jesus Christ our lord he’d forget about them wicked wimmin forever. By now he’s practically catatonic. Meanwhile she’s taking more swigs of Johnnie Walker Black, holy rolling and mouthing scatological rants all mixed up together at the top of her lungs, till it brings half the hospital staff down on them, who toss her off the premises immediately.
In fact, she is denied entrance to the hospital for the remainder of his stay. So every day by messenger she makes sure he’s sent copies of The Plain Truth, Gerald L. K. Smith’s The Cross and the Flag, Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles, The Watchtower, and The Journal of Krishna Consciousness, as well as more hookers in nurses’ uniforms, drug dealers disguised as staff doctors, forcing every sort of street dope on him from acid to speed to Placidyls to methadone, slimy strangers who regale him with long, involved tales of all the sexual high jinks she’s supposedly been pulling with ’em while barred from his hospital ward.
By the time his broken bones are healed he’s ready for the nut ward, but she carts him home, and all he’ll say is “We gotta have a talk.” At last.
So they sit down in the kitchen. He leans forward over the table, looks her square in the eye, and says, “I realized one thing in the hospital: you’re right. I don’t know what you’re up to, but whatever it is, I haven’t felt this good in years, broken ribs and all. As Crowley said, ‘Nothing is true; everything is permitted.’ So, from here on out, we are libertines.”
This is more than she can take. The whole thing has backfired. There’s only one way out: find some way to make him a rock star, get him a hit record and out on tour, then maybe she’ll be free…. So she pulls out her ace in the hole: “Well, look, I’ve been reading NME a lot while you were laid up, especially the classifieds, and it says here the lead singer of this band is splitting, the band needs a new, dynamic-individual-type lead singer to break them in America. I think that might be you….
“Might. Trouble is, one of those Angels stepped on my Adam’s apple—my voice sounds like shit.”
“Well, hell, look—do yourself a favor, go on down and try out for it anyway. What’ve you got to lose?”
Answer, of course: nothing. What she’s got to lose is one king-size albatross, as he gets hired and the rest is history or what passes for it. He ends up one of the biggest superstars in the world, while she goes back to the bars and stays alive on the occasional check for not all that many bucks he sends along….
Now, you’d think after she went to all that trouble for him, practically made him what he is today, that he’d be more grateful, but he’s not. One day he shows up with an acetate, looking kinda sheepish, and says, “I thought it only fair you be one of the first persons to hear this….”
She takes the St. Matthew Passion off the box and slaps on this circle of black plastic without even a label. What is it? Whadda you think?
When it’s over, she very calmly takes it off, hands it back to him, pours another tumbler full of Johnnie Walker, and says, cool as you please, “Well, I certainly gotta hand it to you: you’ve come full circle: from SOB by minded nature to
reeducated rather sweet fella, which I guess never really suited you inasmuch as your entire personality disappeared into mine and you became merely an adjunct of my apathy, clear through to your present status as SOB who knows just exactly how big a slime he is and is gonna clean up off it I have no doubt.”
“Yes, and I owe it all to you.”
“Well, not exactly. Though the thought is certainly touching. I’m not sure exactly who you owe it to, but please leave my name out of it. Just send a check every now and then….”
“Good as done …” He slides the acetate back in its sleeve and splits pronto, a little nervously methinks. But so what? You’d be nervous, too, if you had to go through life worrying that somebody might spill the beans on you at any moment. She’s not about to do so, of course, because she couldn’t care less as long as she never has to listen to it, and he keeps sending what after all is only her fair share of the royalties for, uh, “inspiring” his biggest hit. As long as he does and she keeps her mouth shut in public, he’s happy, she’s happy, the record industry’s happy, and all’s well with the world.
Of course, she still laughs about it: “Yeah, poor old guy … only man I ever knew with real potential. Trouble is, if he’d’ve told the truth in that stupid song, not only would nobody’ve bought it, but instead of World’s Foremost Casanova Tinseltown Division he would today be a mere drugstore clerk in South Kensington. His sex life would be more satisfying, as I’m sure he recalls it was for a while there. I guess in the end it all boils down to a matter of priorities: Would you rather be the ship or the cargo? He made his choice, I made mine, and I hope you’ve all made yours. Cheers.” And she raises her glass again.
From Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung by Lester Bangs, edited by Greil Marcus, copyright © 1987 by the Estate of Lester Bangs. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
THE NATIONAL ANTHEM
jonathan lethem
Dear M.,
Lit Riffs Page 4