The Sabotage Cafe
Page 18
“Yeah, good one,” she said. Then she guzzled and as the alcohol hit her stomach, she bent forward like she was bowing before a god, rode out the warmth rising in the back of her throat, held her breath, spitting the saliva that gushed inside her mouth onto the concrete.
The big hurrah for later that night was to go see a band. Rancid. A bunch of screamers out of San Francisco, machine gunners who, like all bands of their ilk, pretended to yearn for total annihilation when what they really wanted was adulation and the money and women that came along with it.
Trent loathed them. Just looking at the listing in City Pages had thrown him into a fit that afternoon. “They're worse than fucking 'N Sync,” he'd said. “At least the fucking boy bands know what they are. I mean, look at these motherfuckers. They think they're dangerous? They're not fucking dangerous. They're fucking … Look at that fucking mohawk! Green! He looks like a fucking clown. You know what they are? They're the fucking machine. They want us to think they're rebelling when they're really not.”
A lot like you, Cheryl had thought. Then she'd said, “So don't go.”
“We have to go. What the fuck else are we gonna do?”
“Hey, this would be cool.” Devin's forehead strained as he tried to formulate a thought. “We could all shit in plastic baggies or something and smuggle it in in our pants, you know? And then when it got dark and the mosh pit got going, we could whip the baggies out and throw the shit at them.”
Trent smirked. “We'd still have to listen to their crap-ass music, though.”
On his way back from spanging, though, later that afternoon, he'd popped into Rainbow Foods and stolen a box of Glad Bags.
Now, under the bridge, as the bottles emptied and the beer cans piled up, he pulled them out and said, “So, should we do this? You guys got some shit in you?” He threw a bag at Devin, a bag at Mike. He didn't bother to give one to Cheryl.
Mike, with his usual cool, studied his bag with vague interest. Devin, though, was almost drooling with excitement—it was his idea; he didn't have them often.
What they're planning, she thought, it isn't bold. It's idiotic. Insipid. Was this what they thought a revolution looked like? “Don't I get a bag?” she asked.
“I figured you'd be chicken, Betty.”
Devin's snickering needled at her back. He'd crawled off to a corner of the concrete platform, half hidden himself behind a girder. His ass was shoved into the air behind him and he was grunting, dramatically, groaning in ecstasy.
This wasn't the thing that repulsed her the most, though; what repulsed her was the effort they were making. Why couldn't they get it together like this to combat something like the corporate takeover of everything that had once belonged to human beings? Why couldn't they fight the downsizing of lives into lifestyles, the demonization of people who couldn't consume correctly? No new society would be built from their bile if this was all they knew how to do with it.
“Alright,” she said. “See ya,” and she stood up.
“Where you going, Betty? You can't just fucking go. We've got a plan here.” Trent might have been shouting, but he wasn't standing up.
She spun on him. “Don't call me that. You think I'm stupid? I'm not your fucking Betty.”
Then she was gone.
Later, she sat on the City Pages dispenser—down the block, across the street from the Boom Boom Tick—and watched the scene develop out front. The show didn't start until ten, which meant eleven, and the LCD on the credit union on the corner said it was only nine thirty-eight, but the crowd around the club had already begun to sprawl into the street. It was the usual skate rats and gutter punks, the all-ages kids who'd mostly linger outside through the whole show, hanging in the shadows around the corner, guzzling beers they'd slipped into their jacket sleeves, the vodka they'd hidden in Mountain Dew cans, smoking pot out of cigarette-shaped one-hitters. Among the ripped t-shirts and badly shaved heads, she saw a few people she knew. Benny. Tim. Flake. That kid who called himself Sal Paradise. A hippie guy she and Trent had gotten stoned with once; she hadn't bothered to learn his name. The crowd just kept getting bigger and bigger.
She wished for a moment that Trent was next to her so she could rub his face in how wrong he was about Rancid. They weren't sellouts, they were fucking kickass. So, fuck him. Fuck you, Trent. She could like Rancid if she wanted to.
Her buzz had dissipated into a parched, bleary ache. She sat there, kicking the window of the plastic paper box, half wishing someone would wander over and talk to her, half wishing she could make herself invisible.
Little Tornado showed up with a couple of other greasy dirtbags who looked like they were about twelve years old. What do these people do with themselves? They're there and then they're gone and then they're there again. She hadn't seen Little Tornado since that one day at Jarod's house, and his appearance now almost shook her resolve, almost sent her skipping across the street—“Hey, Little T, whatcha up to? Somebody should teach you how to wash your glasses”—running toward him as though when she got there all the complicated and depressing shit she'd been through in the past two and a half months would be hosed away. She'd be back in the swoon of the first time she'd met Trent. She'd still be believing that he could turn her into someone capable of changing something.
But then she saw Mike leaning against the club's brick wall, his arms around the waist of a girl who looked like she must still be living with her parents, fuchsia highlights in her stringy black hair, eyeliner drawn out almost to her ears, a little too proud of being seen in the arms of the single black guy in this derelict scene. Pathetic. And way, way, way too familiar.
When it got to be almost showtime, a mob of thuggish University of Minnesota jocks arrived, guys with tousled hair and cowrie shells tied to leather strips around their necks, predatory looks on their faces, flaunting their pressed Golden Gophers t-shirts like gang colors. The whole football team. They marched through the skinny underfed kids out front, and behind them tromped a bunch of girly girls with belly-button rings and ludicrously high heels, their skin radiating a toxic orange from the fake tan and foundation and blush and cover-up slathered over it like finger paint. Cheryl could smell their bright perfume all the way down the block.
She knew how it went. There'd be a fight tonight.
The punk kids were drunk and daring. They bristled at the jocks pushing past them. Kids sitting on the curb accidentally—yeah, right—stretched their legs under the girls' feet. “Who invited the gorillas?” they muttered under their breath. “How many ways can you say asshole?” Just what the jocks wanted to hear. They muttered back. “Pound another nail in your forehead, dickwad.” “Take a shower.” They threw nickels and dimes at the backs of the kids' heads. Once everyone was inside and liquored up, Cheryl knew, the whispers would grow into shouts. The taunting would turn into shoving. Already, each side was dying to throw a fist. The spark would come in the stupidest of ways. Somebody'd bump into one of the jocks' girls and accidentally spill Pepsi over her top. Elbows would crash into jaws on the mosh pit. Somebody'd stage-dive and nobody'd catch him. The girly girls would whine about how bored they were—“This place is gross. They won't even make me a SoCo and Lime”—and their boyfriends would call them stupid bitches. Some gutter punk kid would defend the girls—not even strongly, just pointing out the obvious lack of respect—and a jock would swoop in and jab a finger in his face. “You only wish you could get ass like this,” he'd say. And that would be that. The baggies Trent and Mike and Devin had filled would have found a worthwhile use after all.
Once the battle overtook the whole club, Cheryl wondered, which side would the band take? Was there any doubt? Trent was right. Why did Trent always have to be right? Rancid wasn't really punk rock. Rape music. That's what they were.
She was shrinking, shivering. She wished she had a golf ball or something small and hard to whip at the green scroll of information tracking across the credit union's LCD. Time and temperature. As if the world could be reduced
to this.
Trent would say, “Resist or die.” He'd say there were two options. Cower behind the social codes, the value systems set up by the fascists in charge, or go underground, live on the edges and fight.
Her problem wasn't with the idea; her problem was with the person spouting it. She'd seen what a flat, ordered existence had done to me. Beneath the gleaming floors of the malls and churches lurked a ruthless disregard for human beings. No matter how big the house you bought, there still wouldn't be room in it for the shaggier, hoarier, illogical and passionate parts of the human beings living within it. Believing you had to conform or die, you discovered, once you hit your thirties or forties—once you were my age—that the choice was false, that conformity was death, but it was all there was, and though your body was still able to make the trip to the grocery store, though you were still sometimes able to win the solitaire game on your computer and chuckle at Everybody Loves Raymond, you kept yourself going out of habit now.
The alternative was to end up like Trent, killing yourself quickly in a mad attempt to achieve some distant glory in a revolution that would never come.
There he was now, smoking a joint with Devin.
She needed to move before he saw her. She needed to propel herself away from the Boom Boom Tick. But where? Yet again, there was nowhere to go.
Later still, Cheryl stood alone on the second floor of the Sabotage Café, the fire already blazing inside her. The smell of the dog was everywhere now—it grew stronger the more she thought about it.
She flicked her lighter. It sparked but didn't catch.
She flicked again, held the flame in front of her and watched it wobble until her thumb began to burn.
She flicked again. The papers and 'zines piled on the shelf ignited.
Again, and the tapestry was aflame and the cardboard box it had been draped over.
And again. The entire Wreck Room lit up.
It pleased her to think Trent would know it was her. It pleased her even more that he wouldn't know why she'd done it.
DINKYTOWN, WHEN I LIVED THERE in the 1980s, was the kind of place where, without much digging, you could procure a copy of Mao's Little Red Book, a slice of vegan whole wheat pizza, or a black-and-white-checkered Palestinian shawl. It was a dusty place, a corner of the city where cigarette butts accumulated and broken streetlights were rarely replaced. The Green Tea Smoke Shop, in its resinous, sandalwood glory could deck you out with clove cigarettes, Nat Shermans in party colors, a bong called the Lobotomizer, shaped like Ronald Reagan's head, the bowl rising from his skull, right between the eyes. You could choose from a vast array of feather-tipped roach clips, devil's head rings and jelly bracelets. Outside the used-record store, Sonic Sounds, speakers had been mounted; during store hours, Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music could be heard from a block away. Ron's Tiny Diner would sell you a hangover cure and a shot of burnt coffee for under two bucks. Now all these places were gone.
As I drove through the neighborhood in search of Cheryl, I found very few of the landmarks I remembered. The cheap Korean joints had been replaced by Japanese restaurants with teak facades, crisp banners flapping above their entryways. Crazy Eights had a new neon feel to it. Instead of the bars where I'd once smoked opium, there were lounges on the corners—coyly named spots in which all the S's had been replaced by Z's. The Den was now the Rec Room, the Blue Room was Lunar. Where there'd once been abandoned factories and parking lots, there were retail stores—Borders, Cingular, Whole Foods. There was a new Eckerd Drugstore, a new Ben & Jerry's, a card shop called Satara with a giant wood carving of a Tibetan eye in the window. A Johnny Rockets was under construction. Caribou Coffee competed with the Starbucks across the street. Ragstock was now called Velvet and Lace. Banks had begun to show faith in the neighborhood, flashing their colors, plopping ATMs onto corners like pop machines.
Everything was new, even the old things. The streets of Dinky-town used to be known for their potholes and fault lines, but they'd been given a gleaming coat of asphalt. They were clean now, and blindingly black.
The sidewalks were crawling with people, but not the kind of people I was searching for. These new people's clothes were frayed, but only slightly, and too colorful—bright and buoyant transliterations of their wearers' ironic dispositions.
There was no sign of Cheryl or her ilk, but I refused to give up hope. They were probably hiding in the aftermath of the fire.
In the spot where the Nix Bar—site of so many of the horrors of my past—used to stand there was a restaurant with outdoor seating. It was going by the name Dinerrific, and though it was Saturday, the words Sunday Brunch! had been written in a cheerful flowery script on a chalkboard out front.
All the places where I'd caroused with oblivion, and where I'd thought Cheryl was doing the same, had been painted over and fumigated. The monuments to my unraveling were gone, utterly erased, except in my memory, and this made me oddly sad. I'd battled so hard, and for so many years, to be able to live with my cruel experiences that to now return, apprehensively, timidly, to the places where they'd been thrust upon me and find them bulldozed, flippantly replaced, seemed like an injustice. A spiritual injustice. There was nothing left for me to point to and say, See, this, here, this is where it all happened, nothing to prove what I'd been through was real.
Or almost nothing. I hadn't gotten everything wrong. The Red Barn was still there, and Positively 4th Street. Dunkin' Donuts and Arby's and KFC were still kicking. The Boom Boom Tick Club was still around, but the marquee no longer advertised live shows; instead it reminded the neighborhood's youth that Thursday was karaoke night and Saturdays did the time warp back to the eighties.
And Sabotage was there—or the charred wreck of it.
I pulled over to examine the damage. The top floor was decimated and the windows downstairs blown out. The crude sign that had hung over its door was propped against a wall; its various grades of paint had burned at different speeds, leaving behind a cracked ghostly negative of what had been there before. One of the side walls had been burned completely through, and I could have stepped inside, but I was afraid. It was enough to see the metal cylinders that, the day before, had supported tabletops, the ribs of bent dowels that had been the backs of chairs. I didn't want to find any real bones— I didn't want to stumble onto the dog.
All I wanted was my daughter, and I didn't have to enter the ruins to ascertain that she wasn't there.
AFTER SETTING THE FIRE, she ran aimlessly, changing direction on a whim, then changing direction again, headed everywhere, nowhere, until stomach cramps forced her to slow down and then she walked. She didn't see anything. She didn't know where she was trying to get, but when she arrived at Jarod's house, it seemed as though a subconscious plan of action had been propelling her forward the whole time.
Just being on the patchy lawn out front calmed her. Instead of knocking, she circled the perimeter, peeping through the windows. Neither Jarod nor his mother seemed to be home, or if they were, they were already asleep. Anyway, the junker wasn't in the driveway.
The front door was unlocked, so she stepped inside and a damp, synthetic, fruity smell wrapped itself around her like cellophane. Nothing had been dusted. Nothing had been washed. The stain from the spilled bong was still there on the carpet, crusty now like a scab, and the couch was still covered in dog hair. But the place had been tidied up—not pristine, but neat. Somebody had been making some small effort. The dirty dishes were now stacked in the sink instead of strewn across the flat surfaces of the house. The litter of junk mail and threats from collection agencies had disappeared from the TV stand and all that was left there were a few copies of Entertainment Weekly and a TV Guide or two.
The digital clock on the microwave said it was eleven forty-five. Early. Jarod's mother would be at work at this time, but what about Jarod? Could it be—was it possible—that he had gone to the Rancid show? Doubtful. Cheryl couldn't see him getting it together enough to even know the band was in town.
She flicked on the TV, turning the volume down until she could barely hear it. There was nothing on, of course, but she kept tapping through the channels anyway. Eventually, she settled on Letterman— he was sometimes funny, if you could get past the show's smarmy vibe of entitlement. Dave was doing one of his audience quizzes— “Name the Cut of Beef,” it was called—commending some old guy with a comb-over and a beer belly on the “service you've done for your country.” It turned out the guy had been in the air force or something. If Trent were here with her, he'd be shouting right about now, “Bullshit propaganda … fucking fascists,” and searching for an empty bottle to throw at the tube. Cheryl simply turned the channel. Howard Stern. A paid advertisement for Nautilus equipment. That idiotic born-again show with the preacher who sported a permed mullet. The least bad thing she could find was MTV Road Rules, and for a while she jumped back and forth on alternating commercial breaks between this and a travel thing about New Orleans.
An especially loud commercial for a local car dealership—“No money down! No money down! And did we mention, no money down?!”—shook her and she realized she'd been dozing. She turned the volume down another notch and sat up a little straighter. A chipper woman wearing a pink silk blouse was standing over a vat of boiling oil, talking to a bony middle-aged black guy—the deep furrows in his cheeks accentuating his every expression—about some sort of deep-fried New Orleans treat called a beignet.