by Camden Joy
Rosy’d answered when I telephoned in response to a print ad encouraging me to “Ride the Tiny Girls of the Orient Express.” Unlike Marie, she didn’t have to call me back, didn’t require my employment number, no vehicle permit or DOB, no mother’s maiden name. Such trusting times back then (the simpler days of last Saturday).
I hung up very much in love with Rosy. How would it work between us? I swallowed the impulse to suggest, “Move here, hold close to heart.” Instead I expressed my gratitude, and put the phone to bed.
Loudon Wainwright III: “Motel Blues” (2:42), from Album II (Atlantic, 1971). The check-in clerks and hotel receptionists resemble winged things dropped from above. When they page someone to the lobby’s white courtesy telephone or announce my calls over the intercom, I believe myself in the presence of angels, their squawk so heavenly. . . . But the one I most dearly adore is she who makes our beds here. She comes by frequently and leans into my room, taut with curiosity, intent on the blanket mission of folding that unfolds before her. We both know. Nothing need be said. Her name? Irrelevant! It is not a world burdened with “names” that she and I inhabit. Today she wore little beneath her room-service robe and her carriage was so steadfast as to muffle any attempt to converse. We strode at one other from different ends of the corridor, lifting just our knees and elbows. The case in my right hand held a hundred exquisitely flashing blades. Our eyes met for a luridly long moment, a moment measured from the bedside clock of a hotel room in which she and I lay panting, remorseless, exchanging fluids in graceful abandon. “Hi,” I put forth, with such emphasis that I became light-headed after I’d said it. She too glimpsed the room with the clock lacking remorse, its panting and grace, the flashing blades and consequent abandon, and acknowledged everything with her own intense, “Hi.”
The Kinks: “Young and Innocent Days” (4:08), from Arthur (or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire) (Reprise, 1969). Marie and I met far from here, long ago. We were young and naive together—Miserable in Missouri read our tee shirts. Back then we had all the time in the world to debate tariffs in the donut shops and post offices. We viewed the world through a self-centered, undignified emotionalism that turns out to’ve been mere hormones. She’d written a highly touted novel, I’d come up with a civic plan the moneymen loathed. Since Marie had met with more success, I was allowed to feel sabotaged, an architect with incendiary blueprints, like a photographer robbed of undeveloped negatives. We wandered the ashen streets of the central zone in high spirits, planning the new art movement we’d label Gang Detonation or maybe Continental Candle (requirements: gritty and desperate but spiritually nourishing). We preferred breakneck bands with onion breath and words sour like lemons. We liked the works of Brian Eno, not really his own songs but just the ones he helped others write and produce. We concocted elaborate scenarios for every song we heard, interpretative responses that we meant as complementary. Isn’t that what music is for, to aid us in telling our stories and living our lives? These songs belonged to us! All the while, we warned the world it would soon be ours, as the deadening mills and foundries ground out ever more fiery sunsets.
Randy Newman: “Marie” (3:07), from Good Old Boys (Reprise, 1974). I was set to propose to Marie on New Year’s Eve. I had it planned out. She would look like a princess, with her hair piled up high, and I always would love her: Marie. This is not what happened. Instead, a month before I was to unveil the outline of our forthcoming marital bliss, Marie announced that she was leaving for the western province. I was so utterly unprepared I couldn’t speak. What could I say? I was still a month away from proposing. None of the words were thawed out yet. I’m afraid I made a mess of it, and whatever friendship we’d had was lost in a hurried attempt to reveal my heart. Marie departed, and soon fell in with a radioman named Walter. I was enthralled, in turn, by the advertisement of a revolutionary breakthrough popularly known as “the miracle knife,” thanks to which serrated edges were guaranteed to never dull. I was one of the lucky missionaries dispatched to tell the public of the sensational findings, the unrustable surfaces and perfectly balanced grips of our multipurpose implements. Marie? I lost touch with her. She had come before the knife, when life was still scrambled with its sunny-side down. I caught rumors that Walter was an enormous hit on college frequencies and the independent radio circuit, that he and Marie had moved in together, had become inseparable. Frankly, I was too busy with my knives to notice. Only at night, alone in a hotel room—momentarily dislocated when a song from our shared past made it out the clock radio—would I think of her, with slight regrets—and, hugging close a paring knife, I’d release one meager tear or two.
Randy Newman: “Suzanne” (3:08), from 12 Songs (Reprise, 1970). Suzanne is her name today and Suzanne it will forever remain. Over the phone she gave herself to me as I held her like a madness dear. I possess the kiss of a pitchfork and a case of revolutionary knives, I love tiny redheads like you, I love white chiffon. I am beautiful, if you don’t mind my saying so; I’m the hunkiest to whom you shall ever speak. My legs are long and tan, my arms full and muscular, my chest knotty and sculpted, my waist lithe and delicate. My wrists are powerful from making chopping motions all day, my coordination is keen; I am able to hurl a blade and split corn silk at ninety yards. I am all you want and need; my eyes are deep blue, ocean blue, sensitive and bold, hungry yet alluringly melancholic, blue like . . .—God! they just go on forever. My mind is perfect and my heart totally committed to you; I love you absolutely and can remember no other telephone names or numbers but yours; I was born and now I imagine your reflection in my knife and there is nothing else to say, nothing.
Nick Cave: “Sad Waters” (4:50), from Your Funeral, My Trial (Homestead, 1986). Saturday I met the one at the art show in the hotel gallery. I feel certain her name is Mary (hair of gold and lips like cherries). We linked up without speaking, and stood before the pictures with arms folded, sometimes laughing, always reacting (though never to the works but only to each other), never acknowledging. We furtively studied one another’s reflection in the framed works of art, Mary’s long hair braided solemnly, her diminutive figure clad in the clothes of a preteen and those saddle shoes which beautiful women wear now. She was bright for her age. Perhaps we would ride motorcycles once she got her license; definitely we would live in only the most colorful of hotels. If school ran late, she would always call. She recognized in me the certainty, the immense authority that customers reliably see in my knives. She laughed at the photo of the fat man with the buttoned jersey, which was ever so good of her. We lost sight of one another for a time. Doubtless her young heart fell to wondering, Did I imagine this? She was relieved to come across me in the hotel’s next room, staring at the statue of Saturn devouring his offspring. Mary sidled up noiselessly. Saturn was livid—Rhea has delivered another!—his mouth wide to consume the infant’s arm. Both Mary and I knew the eroticism behind Saturn’s oral talents, we felt like experts, in fact. . . . When she left my side, it was only to roll off the bed and dress for school. I know I will find her at tomorrow’s hotel and it will be as if she has just returned from her class and now she is ready for me to welcome her in.
Talking Heads: “Once in a Lifetime” (4:09), from Remain in Light (Sire, 1980). One summer night I left the hotel for a stroll, turned a corner, and came upon perhaps three hundred and eleven people milling about on a sidewalk. There was a motorcade, one block in length, parked before a well-regarded food establishment. Inside was David Byrne, eating. This was earlier in the decade, when Byrne was running for president. I joined the crowd, hoping to glimpse the aging candidate. There were quite a few floodlights and cameras, naturally, and several Bowie fans with protest signs. Hawkers were on hand to supply paperbacks, pineapple, and massage. After perhaps twenty minutes, an announcement was made to the crowd that Byrne had finished with his entree and was ordering dessert. A raucous cheer went up. Someone felt up the flabby inside of my arm. I shook it off. They tried to touch me there again. I was unable t
o turn. I blindly threw an elbow. Next they tapped my shoulder. I shouted. Someone gently spoke my name. I recognized the voice. It was Walter.
’Til Tuesday: “Have Mercy” (4:37), from Welcome Home (Sony, 1986). We shoehorned our way out of the mob’s grasp. I took a long look at the man who stole my Marie. In his heyday, Walter was unbeatable, magnificence embodied. He had the voice, the drive, the look, the stance. He was like one of those walking wonders of the western world. That was, as they say, no more. What had once been the penetrating gaze of this wonderboy was now a multitude of scattered refractions such as result when a heavy mirror is dropped. His eyes were ash-filled marbles glued into the shriveled disaster that’d once been his handsome face. “What’s that you’re carrying?” he croaked, indicating my case. I began to speak about the miracle knife. “Right,” he interrupted. “Right, I tried to sell them. Couldn’t move a damn one.” I was dumbstruck. I had never heard of anybody failing to sell a single miracle knife. Why, they sold themselves! It was inconceivable. One would have to work hard to keep a customer from recognizing the revolutionary quality of these knives. . . . “What’s happened to you?” I sputtered. Walter sighed, and then I understood: He had lost his Marie.
The Kinks: “Rosie Won’t You Please Come Home” (2:20), from Face to Face (Reprise, 1966). What happened, Walter explained, was that Marie got quite caught up with something else, a lost cause, and her interest in Walter evaporated. Walter didn’t actually use the words “caught up.” Understandably sore, he called Marie “psycho” and “obsessed.” To the exclusion of all else, Marie became devoted to the passing out of hand-made flyers about that girl, the one who disappeared at the U2 concert. Roseanne, the girl was called, or Rosie. The flyer showed a young redhead in a white chiffon dress with a happy, sunburned face. It bore the date Rosie’d disappeared, described the guitar solo during which she’d last been seen alive and what she’d been wearing, gave her employment number, vehicle permit, date of birth, how she would’ve voted in the last plebiscite, what year she eventually would graduate from middle school, her height, weight. Desperate investigators contacted the band for assistance, although they possessed scant evidence connecting U2 to the redhead wearing the white chiffon dress. Later flyers even took Bono to task for somehow helping to abduct Rosie and implied that the lead singer was aware of the precise circumstances of the girl’s gruesome death. (These rantings were rightly dismissed as irresponsible and thoroughly unsubstantiated.) The redhead in the white chiffon dress never turned up.
Rickie Lee Jones: “We Belong Together” (4:52), from Pirates (Reprise, 1981). Of course there is little you can know for sure about how our life together will turn out, but much is obvious to the point of inevitability. When your daughter stirs, I will say, Don’t bother. I’ll calm her. I’ll leave our bed and sing her songs, maybe Aimee Mann or Ray Davies or something I myself wrote back when I loved this land like I love you. And your daughter will demand a story, which is when I will tell her of the city that was all cobalt blue and the girl who collected up the yellow and stored it in her pillowcase so that it would not be captured and stained blue by the men in the city. And when I return to our bed a fat moon has dropped through our window and your dark black skin in the pale ghostly light excites me tremendously. I wrap my paltry self around you and I am white as the moon and blue as the city. And I pronounce your name, Marianna, is it? or Susie Rose, I forget. Like a fog machine it clears the world and steers me home.
David Bowie: “Be My Wife” (2:55), from Low (RCA, 1977). Just now the phone rang and there she was. Remember how I told you of the girl with whom I strode beneath the stars, past midnight, kicking our way through thick mounds of autumn leaves, that sweet smell of eucalyptus and burning sour pine rising through shadow chimneys from dying fireplaces and we talked non-stop or else not at all, it was late and cold, I had been up since dawn, and now here we were, and without touching we knew everything. (I did not tell you? Oh, but I meant to—!) She was impatient with her words, rushing breathless, and I became challenged and similarly dashed through thoughts without punctuation and it was heaven to be so very tired and so very vibrantly in love. (No, I did not make her up! Did I? Could I? I don’t believe so.) There were books on our minds, as I recall, and with her leading the charge of the idea brigade we walked with hands in jacket pockets, talking cloudy bursts, like dynamite in our chests. This is where we walk now with conversation and it’s true, very soon we will be together and very soon begin to touch.
Randy Newman: “Rosemary” (2:08), from 12 Songs (Reprise, 1970). When I swam yesterday at the hotel gym, she was on the basketball court, two walls, one refrigerator, and countless stationary bikes away from exchanging glances with me, yet still I knew we both could feel it, as I breast-stroked through the water in just my teeniest Speedo and she practiced reverse lay-ups in tank top and Reeboks. To articulate the sex act to one another, much less to enact it, would have been so redundant as to be boring. “Well, of course,” would be her response. “What do you think I’m doing out here, shooting baskets?” I’m thinking about her all the time. I did not need to see her to know the sweat which glistened upon her freckles or to understand the bath that was coming afterwards to uncramp her weary shoulders, eyes closed and head lolling loosely on neck, as feet turned on and off the hot water, waist bent and scooted beneath the spigot such that the warmth pouring from the faucet flooded directly onto her tenderest spot.
The Kinks: “Susannah’s Still Alive” (2:22), from Something Else (Reprise, 1967). She turned out to be blond last night—Susannah, voice of humor and ease, floating in from planetary time.
“You are said to have,” I informed her, paraphrasing what the service told me, “an assertive manner.”
“Little old me?” she mused, and then she asked, as they all do, what I was doing at that moment, as though there were any doubt, as though I weren’t spending $2.50 a minute ($25 minimum) to hear her pose the question.
I answered, we exchanged a few particulars (she claimed to be blond down there), then she growled a little too huskily for my taste, “How big is it?”
“Not too big, I guess.”
“Mmmm. Could I hang a towel on it?”
“Well, I don’t find that such a sexy option, you know. But yeah, I suppose. Assuming we’re talking a dishtowel.”
“Mmmm-hmmm.”
“Or maybe a wash cloth.”
“Could I grab it with both hands and swing from it?”
“Not without hurting me you couldn’t.”
Some speculation ensued. Now I realize that maybe Rosemarie was a little wrong for me. (You remember Rosie, Marie?) I mean—make no mistake—Rosemary’s great, truly and utterly, just maybe not enough of something for my taste. Heck, she probably sews her own clothes, works wonders with an ice machine, all that. But my heart right now is as full as can be with this young Susan, my sole love of last night. She claims our orgasms were simultaneous (“cum d’habitude,” she says they call it in the French quarter), although I suppose she’s paid to say that. Still, she will never leave my thoughts.
David Bowie: “Strangers When We Meet” (5:08), from Outside (Virgin, 1995). We are—all of us—so exceedingly handsome. It’s a shame we can’t meet. We each spend the day stranded on an island of sorts, coding what goes out, decoding what comes in, you know? Crossing this sea of automobiles to pick up one another seems impossible. Heading to our next hotel, we travel alone, wearing the safety harness at all times. I look into the windshield in the mist and I see you watching me, your eyes speaking novels, and the wipers swipe past, then return you to me, you with those books in your face. When yesterday, the sun fell for a moment I called your name aloud. Upon the utterance daytime returned. There is none other like you. Am I making a fool of myself, committed to the purpose of you so totally, dedicated to your functioning as the worker is to the plant? Come to me. I will introduce you to knives such as you have never seen. All that you were before will drain from you.
The Ki
nks: “Do You Remember Walter?” (2:15), from The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society (Reprise, 1968). Sometime after I bumped into him at the Byrne viewing, Walter drifted up to the town of Pinardville in the eastern province. He entered a sporting goods store on South Main Street and picked up a bolt-action 30.06 deer rifle with a scope. The newspapers reported that Walter had his own ammunition. The gun was on a display rack in the back of the store, where customers could pick it up without assistance from a sales clerk. There was a sudden discharge. “Everyone looked,” said the store’s owner. “And there he was, slumped to the floor.” The owner called the city police, who pronounced Walter dead at the scene. Police said he had a note with him that indicated he planned to kill himself. After the shooting, the owner closed the store and sent home the four employees on duty. “He sort of ghosted in and did his thing,” shrugged the owner. “There’s still this anger about why do this in front of me. I don’t know, it’s sad. I have all kinds of emotions going through me.”
Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians: “She Doesn’t Exist” (4:16), from Perspex Island (A&M, 1991). You couldn’t have been more wrong when you insisted—last night on the phone—that you were interchangeable and that it scarcely mattered to me who I was with as long as it was some female. You were so very, very wrong.
You were all I needed: my five senses, my four basic food groups, my tri-state area, my twin cities. You are the partridge in my pear tree. And when the phone rang, it was all I could do not to say your name and instantly demand your hand in marriage. There is nothing, finally, to help me distinguish your concerns from mine. We are one. And when you criticized that guy, that one who lives almost exclusively in fantasy, who flings around the word “love” like a dickhead ordering juice, like an addict in a nervous twitch, who can’t act on what he wants because he wants it all, everything. . . . Well. I hated him too. I glimpsed him on the boulevard once, elbows and knees down, and I started hurling my steel-clad boot into the Italy of his soft white underbelly, and he gasped with each kick. God, such a fool! an idiot, a waste. Then I recalled it was me you were criticizing and I insisted, No. You couldn’t be more wrong, my sweet child, my thin fat one, my red-headed blond, my Hispanic Arab. You are perfect to me, the only one . . .