Blazed
Page 8
Around eleven, I tried to jack off but I never came. Three times, I worked myself up to the verge of ejaculation only to stop because the scenes in my head weren’t the scenes I wanted to come to.
The image of my mother’s stained body just won’t leave. It comes in flashes, and I can still feel her sweat on my skin, and smell her vomit. Smell the iron in the puddles of her blood.
After I viewed all the comments my poem had already received, I deleted them. That’s when I heard my father and Leslie go into their bedroom down the hall. The smell of dope then filled the air. I could hear them laughing and coughing and coughing some more. They listened to Pulp, the Violent Femmes, and Mazzy Star.
And then the house got still.
I left my room with a piece of foil, a whole baby blue, and my notebook.
Down in the kitchen now, I write the first page of a screenplay about a boy who robs a liquor store to buy a crate full of rare Smiths B sides and signed LCD Soundsystem records and the entire Nirvana catalog signed as well. Then he buys a one-way ticket to Baltimore to see a Future Islands show and ends up living on the floor of the apartment of one of the members of Beach House for a week.
I immediately throw the page away after I’ve written the last word on it. Then I grab this bottle of red wine from the kitchen counter and a wine opener from a drawer, and go downstairs because I haven’t been down here yet.
It’s so fucking nice. A huge part of me wants to smash everything down here. To break everything, throw it in the middle of the floor, and piss all over it. This chick isn’t even my father’s biological kid and her space is nicer than the house me and my mother have been living in for most of my life.
It’s so wrong to me, but it’s not her fault. Besides, I don’t want anything from that bastard. My mother told me once that sometimes he’d ask her to dress up like a super-young girl, a young teen, and let him pretend that he was raping her.
When I asked her why she told me this, her face got white and she looked like she was going to be sick.
When I pressed her about it, she fumed, “Because you need to understand how evil this man is. I’m not going be around forever, Jaime. If something happens, he will try and swoop in for you. He’ll try and fuck your girlfriend, and she’ll probably let him.”
There are two black leather couches down here and two black leather reclining chairs. There’s a record player and four stand-up speakers. Just like in the living room, a large flat-screen television hangs from a wall. I see an Xbox 360 and a Wii. Crates of records are stacked against another wall. There’s a refrigerator down here.
But the most interesting thing are the six racks of clothes and shoes, each one at least fifteen feet long, that occupy the back half of the basement. Two of the racks are full of tops. One rack is full of bottoms. One rack is full of dresses, all kinds of sweet, pretty dresses.
My eyes are drawn immediately to this peach-colored sundress with these four white squares on the front. There’s a certain unflattering innocence about it. The color makes me feel calm, but the dress itself has an aura of shame and guilt, too. Like this is the dress a girl wears on a date with some older boy who finally asked her out after she grew some tits. It’s the same dress that girl wears when she loses her virginity in the backseat of some shitty Honda that smells like Newport cigarettes and Boone’s Farm wine while a Jewel song plays from the speakers. It’s the dress that soaks secretly in a bucket of warm water the next morning to get out all the blood that wasn’t there before she got fucked.
I run my hand down it slowly before crunching the hem in my fist. I hold it up to my nose and bite down on it. I imagine the brutality of the girl putting this dress back on a month later for a date with another boy, a nice boy this time, a boy who will call and make plans to see her again, a boy who won’t high-five his stupid friends and laugh every time he sees her, a boy who’ll have to wait a long time before he gets to push up the bottom of this dress in a dark room because somebody has to be punished; somebody has to pay for a simple girl’s disastrous foray into the false, bright spotlight.
I let go of the dress and turn away.
There’s a bathroom down here, and Kristen’s bedroom is across from it. The door is locked, though.
A picture of Basquiat is taped to it.
Pulling my tank top off, I walk over to the record player, and this is when I spot the acoustic guitar leaning next to a stack of crates.
I pick it up and sit down on the couch. It’s a beautiful fucking piece too. A Gibson Hummingbird that’s so clean. That looks like it’s barely been touched, let alone used. If I had decided to turn this basement upside down and ruin its existence, I would’ve saved this.
I woulda also saved the stack of first pressing Replacement records and first pressing D’Angelo records that were sitting out.
Other things I woulda saved: This pair of sick fucking boots on one of the racks. This amazing poster of Madonna from the Bedtime Stories album. The Pusher film collection on DVD that’s lying a few feet from me. And I woulda carefully peeled off the Basquiat picture and folded it perfectly and slid it into my wallet.
I pop my notebook open to continue working on my song, “Black Vulture.”
I tune the guitar.
While I do, I think about the last forty-eight hours and how fucking insane they’ve been. My life has totally changed forever. Like, nothing will be the same as it was. That call from my mother in the middle of the night fucking altered my world the way a tornado destroys everything in its path once it touches the earth.
It’s like James Morgan said a few months ago in an interview. Most of his books, they all take place over a week or so, but they’re all superthick. All of them four hundred pages or more.
He was asked about that in the interview. Why they were so long when other writers can span a year in two hundred pages? And Morgan immediately rolled his eyes, wiped his nose, then laughed, before naming off everything he’d done in the last twenty-four: taking a shower with his chick and balling her in the butt before she moved the rest of her shit out of his apartment, scoring ten handfuls of pills, flying to New York and pissing his pants midflight after falling into a Xanax coma, having drinks with Selena Gomez to discuss a script he was developing for her to star in, him receiving an all-access pass to the M83 show later that night, making plans to go to the show with James Murphy, hanging out at Vice headquarters so they could tape him reading his short story “Fisting You on Your Boyfriend’s Couch,” which is from his short story book, Where the Mean Girls Are, buying a new pair of Asics and grabbing a burrito with Zachary German, and then finally getting to the studio where the interview was taking place and changing into the new suit he’d bought the day before, then talking to Chloë Sevigny on the phone for a half hour and text bombing Earl Sweatshirt.
“Point being,” he said, grinning ear to ear, “there’s a ton of fucking shit that can happen in a day. Important shit. Seminal shit. And I like to think about all of it and crib those details.”
Dude’s a fucking hero.
Once the guitar is tuned, I drop my blue heaven onto the foil and spend the next thirty seconds chasing the dragon.
When my eyes open, I’m back in the castle.
I open the bottle of wine and take a pull. It’s really good too. Like, I’ve never tasted wine as good as this and I’ve drunk lots of wine in my short life. I was twelve the first time I got drunk. I puked. At first my mother thought I was puking blood, and freaked out until she realized it was red wine. She grounded me for a week, but then undid the grounding two days later when she got wasted while shopping and needed me to bike to the mall to drive her home.
I count off and begin playing.
First verse:
“Black vulture, black vulture, gliding through the sky, black vulture, black vulture, he’s going for a ride . . . remains and death, doom in the air, black vulture gonna smell you, black vulture doesn’t care . . . Cos he’s a lurker, he sits and waits, to get what he want
s, he knows his time is coming, he knows he’s gonna shine, black vulture don’t care, black vulture’s gonna feed, black vulture’s flying high, just waiting till you die . . .”
Second verse:
“Moving down the coast, these sunny warm days, the remains of our memories, buried in a grave, I thought I saw her in Texas, I thought I saw her die, I thought I saw her in Portland, I knew I’d made her cry, wings spreading wide, cutting through the wind, black vulture’s gonna catch you, gonna swallow all your sins . . .”
Bridge:
“Those sticks and stones, gonna break them lovely bones, feeding on your misery, stealing your ivory throne . . . he breaks into your dreams, he lives in your shadow, laughing at your simple life, he’s winning all the battles . . .”
I play what I have three times before setting the guitar down and chasing the dragon some more. I’ve become better at playing the guitar than the piano, which means I’ve become really fucking good.
In the last six months, I’ve self-recorded and produced six songs under the name Tiger Stitches. The first two were called “Cuddling” and “Blood Zebra.” I used a drum machine I stole from this place called the Instrument Center. Me and my mother used to go there all the time. My two electric guitars, my bass, and both amps were purchased there. So were my two keyboards and my sampler. I used to love that place. Then the store manager, this fucking crusty loser who wore tie-dye shirts, baggy pants, and shorts and sandals, exposed himself to my mother. He cornered her in his office after she used the restroom while we were there once. He groped her and told her he’d give her a thousand dollars’ worth of free gear if she gave him a blow job.
She laughed in his gross, fat face, and he kicked us out of the store.
Two weeks later I jacked the drum machine right from under that dude’s double chin. He never got that hummer, but we got that free gear.
Anyway, I named the drum machine Coady after my favorite drummer in the world, Coady Willis (Murder City Devils, Big Business), and over an eight-hour session one night, I recorded the two songs, and then mixed them on my computer using Ableton.
At first I was pretty bummed about the sound quality. You could tell it was recorded in a garage with no soundproofing. Also, the fucking cops showed up three times. Not only did they finally write a ticket for the noise on their last visit, my mother was super wasted and threw an egg at their squad car when they were pulling out of the driveway, which resulted in two additional tickets. One for vandalism. And one for public intoxication (after she threw the egg, she ran after the car and stepped off the property for, like, three seconds).
Whatever.
I didn’t think it was funny at the time but right now, sure, it’s making me smile pretty big because it reminds me of how much she can care when she wants to.
After, like, a week of debating it with myself, I finally decided to release the songs. I created Bandcamp, SoundCloud, and Facebook accounts and uploaded the tracks. I fucking spread my beautiful filth all over the web, posting links to the pages, like, six times a day on my Tumblr, my regular Facebook, and my Twitter. Then I e-mailed the songs to at least three hundred media outlets. I just fucking pressed that shit onto people, because that’s what you have to do. Like, it’s insane how accessible your art can be to people now. I could start a band tomorrow and a week from now, we can release a digital mix tape or an EP and have a thousand fucking listeners from all over the world a few days later. That’s some beautiful shit right there. A totally built-in advantage that my generation has over any other generation.
Back to the songs now.
It sorta worked for me doing what I did. Kids really dug it. After a month, both songs had over ten thousand listens, and kids were sharing them on social media and writing reviews of Tiger Stitches’s music.
So I pushed forward with it. I decided to release a four-song EP.
The songs were:
1. “Hard Palms”
2. “Night Diamond”
3. “Fogman”
4. “She’s Pushing Her Luck (She’s Still Winning)”
I needed a better place to record this time, though. After thinking about it for a couple of weeks, the only place that made sense was the band room at my school. So I staked out the place for two weeks. I snuck out of my house at night and biked to the school and did surveillance and figured out who came and went after school hours and before school hours. I got the schedules down perfectly. I saw some pretty incredible shit too.
Like the head volleyball coach, saw her and this freshman girl, who made all-conference, pull into the school parking lot together late at night. The passenger-side door opened, and the dome light came on, and the freshman chick got out, but not before kissing the coach on the lips.
Also, I saw two of the English teachers and the head librarian smoking a blunt in the parking lot one night while AC/DC blared from one of their car stereos.
Rad.
The most fucked thing I saw, though, was the blow job that my, like, fifty-year-old, married-with-three-kids science teacher got from a student, Byron Malone. It disgusted me so much. It pissed me off real bad. Dude called me a faggot at least ten times every day. He would swing at the schoolbooks in my hands while I walked down the hallway. Sometimes it worked and my books would go slamming to the ground, which everyone seemed to get a big kick out of. A couple of times, when I wasn’t paying attention, that turd burglar pegged me in the back of the head with a basketball. All this pseudo-macho hate talk directed at me and there he was, on his knees, blowing some overweight science teacher with gray hair, glasses, and brown-stained teeth.
Man, what a loser. I mean, to call me a fucking faggot and a queer every day to get some laughs out of the blubber butts who attend that awful school. Then I see him actually being gay with some disgusting older man.
I was so upset.
I also thought it was sort of funny.
How he was the one on his knees with a dick in his mouth. My first reaction was to expose this douche, out both of them, but then I decided not to. Doing something like that woulda made me no better than him. Actually, it woulda put me on a lower level, and that’s not something I could’ve lived with. I’m better than that meathead. I’m better than all those trolls.
Like, I’m sure he hates himself, which is why he was so cruel to me to begin with. Just total deflection. If you call enough people a faggot enough times, I guess everyone else thinks it’s impossible for you to be one. So I let that sleeping dog lie, although I did extract a little bit of revenge against that terrible dude.
One afternoon I snuck out of the school building after I asked to use the bathroom. I walked out to the parking lot and found his new Beamer and broke into it with a hanger. Then I took my switchblade and cut a small hole in the upholstery on the back of the driver’s-side seat, dumped a can of sardines into it, then sealed it back up with superglue. I also slashed his back tires and keyed that nice paint job.
Anyway, on the night of April 13, when the janitor left the school for the night and the coast was totally fucking clear, I climbed to the roof and pulled an amp, a keyboard, and two guitars up to me with the three bedsheets I’d tied together to use like a rope.
Then I popped open this access panel with a crowbar, and I was in.
For the next nine hours, I played my fucking heart out and recorded my four amazing tracks. The acoustics of the room were pretty all right (so much better than my tiny garage). It was so sick. So dope. Then, before I left the building, as the sun slowly rose outside, I took a piece of chalk and wrote this on the blackboard:
Ten best bands of the new millennium:
1. LCD Soundsystem
2. Beach House
3. M83
4. Thee Oh Sees
5. Lamborghini Dreams
6. Youth Lagoon
7. The Fresh & Onlys
8. Tycho
9. Future Islands
10. Deerhunter
Then I wrote, Run out of school now & go list
en & learn, bitches!!
Then, Dickpigs! All of you!
Then, James Morgan is God!
And then, Purity Ring & Salem rule too.
Also, The principal is a total d-bag. Fucking Hallway Monster Booger Pussy! Yeah!
Then I threw away all the stained black pieces of foil, the empty six-pack of Coronas I’d taken from my house, and the half-eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwich I’d made, and fucking bailed back home.
When it was time for me to get up and go to school just an hour later, I told my mother that I wasn’t feeling well, then shoved a finger down my throat when she wasn’t looking to make myself throw up (which I did. A couple times actually).
My mother called the school and told them I wasn’t going to be there. She left a couple of hours later with her Realtor to go look at buildings for the dance school she’s been talking about starting for at least ten years and never will. She just never will do it. She doesn’t have the toughness to do that. To be responsible for more than just me. I mean, she’s struggling just trying to take care of me.
While she was gone, I got to work mixing the tracks. This time I used Pro Tools. She bought me the program after I played her my first two recordings. When she heard the songs, water flooded her eyes.
Then this soft, sweet smile spread across her face. I remember thinking how I hadn’t seen her smile in three days when that happened.
“Blood Zebra” ended and there was silence for at least a minute. My heart was beating fast. The thing is, I don’t share my art with my mother. She knows I’m great at the piano because she hears me practice and comes to my recitals. But those songs aren’t mine. They’re somebody else’s.
Truth is, before that night, I was terrified to show her my own, original work, because she’s a harsh critic. She takes art that serious. It’s as important as breathing to her. My mother’s favorite quote is from Nietzsche: “Art is the highest task and proper metaphysical activity of this life.” That quote lives in at least ten different places in our house.
My mother was a pure artist. At one point, she was considered one of the top artists in her medium. That’s insane. She was that good.