Pigs on the Wing (Part Two)

Reading all of this back, I realize that I may have put Robin in the shadows. Anything that happened that night, and God knows if my memories are correct, was my doing. I have to take it all on. Robin was from New Jersey, and there’s nothing about her at all that I don’t remember as beautiful. She allowed me into worlds in which I still journey and fumble and wonder about within. My memory of that night is just me pushing her away and into Tim’s room. That part becomes murky. But within days, maybe hours, we’d all fallen back into our normal roles. Tim with his chubby Goth chick girlfriend from Monongahela, PA, and Robin and I together again, and ever-spinning albums of Eno and Dead Kennedys and ‘Live from the Deaf Club’ and On The Beach. We just all sank back into the present. We bounce back quicker when we’re young. We’re stupid, but we’re elastic.

California was situated at the base of a mountain. The college and some train tracks and the Monongahela river formed the bottom. Cheap spindly houses marched up to the top and disappeared over the ridge into desperation. There was simply nowhere else to live. Just permafrost and terrorblast. It was always early winter in California. Always trenchcoats wrapped around drunk giggling bodies and marches towards parties or the chance of drugs. In between, there were hours of math and chemistry and sociology and physics classes. They were easy compared to becoming an adult in such a place. At such a time. In such a person.

Life continued. Our little band switched partners and living arrangements. Robin and I moved apart as I zeroed in on Leslie. There was no overlap. I really don’t think there was. When I met Leslie during the summer of that first year, I fell all the way in. It took Leslie a summer to realize I lived within her, that I had somehow crawled in with laughs and charming her parents, who I truly loved, but it seemed like it had happened by fall. The Violent Femmes’ first record had done the trick.

I write this in a fog. The thoughts and the themes get all swirled around. I sit at this beautiful, blue plywood table which I know you imagine wrong, and I look for secrets. I look for things to tell you that even my dogs will tilt their heads at. Imagine your dogs looking at you like, “you sure? Really?? Alright, Dad, um….” I want to tell you everything, but it’s not so simple. It never occurred to me that confessing my sins would be the easy part. The hard part would be remembering them.

Maybe it was the second year, maybe the third. I could easily take a moment and figure it out, but I want to go with the fog. I know it was 1984. Hardcore Bob came into the picture. Bob Mullins was a 6-foot-four (at least) 125-pound guy who charged up to me one day in a fluorescent hallway. I’d already had my Sex Pistols/Dead Kennedys confirmation, and I was wearing a homemade tie-dyed Dead Kennedys shirt. I was still on the fence. I could feel myself tipping, but I still held on. This spectre of a human appeared before me in ash-covered dime store jeans and an army jacket. His head was shaved to almost scratches, and his sunken-chin-smile was more like a leer than the shy, brave act I realized it was later. “You like the Kennedys?” Remember the Chris Farley character on SNL where he’d interview people like Paul McCartney, ask obvious inane questions, and then beat himself on the side of the head, yelling, “Stupid! You’re so Stupid!!!.” That’s what the question kinda sounded like, looking back. “Yeah.” I just said, “yeah.” Man, everything changed

1984

We were so primed for this year, and here it landed on us, and nothing changed besides little quips and smirking grins. It was 1984. I know that much. I was with Leslie. She’d come up for the weekend if I didn’t go to her, and we’d have sex in the sunlight from the curtained window that spilled upon my little rented bed. I see that. I see her body and her face and her mouth and the light, and I feel my love for her. I feel the incredible luck I’d had to wind up on a mattress in such a moment, exactly like this. It still feels lucky. Fuck, everything good feels lucky.

I think she and Tim got along pretty well. Minus the Anti-Social Personality Disorder, Leslie was probably more like Tim than she was like me. I can’t really explain how. Maybe they were just more inward-focussed than I was and more into the details. They both seemed to love the details of life, the little loose ends and things others missed. I was struck by those things as well, but I was always putting so much energy into keeping everyone happy that all sorts of cool, weird little squiggles slipped past me.

And throughout all of this Hardcore Bob artfully and expertly led us down a path and to cliffs and fights and weirdness and hours in his bedroom watching him smoke his weird skinny cigarettes and listening to Finnish Hardcore or some other “non-poseur, non-pussy” hardcore punk. Man! I get exhausted just remembering stepping into his bedroom. All the curtains drawn tight. Both his parents were weird, unseen professors lurking somewhere else in the house. He drank coffee from a never-empty green plastic tumbler and rubbed all those skinny cigarette ashes into his cheap jeans. And he was fucking serious about hardcore. This music was his entire lifeline to some sort of manageable, if only barely unincarcerated life. Fuck. I could write forever about Bob and his impact on all of us. Most of the time, he was just preposterous and a figure of fun. Sometimes he got so deep under your fingernails that you just wanted to bash the side of his face in with a shovel. And ultimately, after we left, he lost his grip on the kite string of sanity, and he simply blew away into Pittsburgh hospitals and, I guess, a Pittsburgh cemetery. I remember standing in the kitchen of my first apartment at Penn State after the three years at California were up. I’m on the phone. It’s the kitchen wall phone. How odd to think we could only talk in certain rooms then and usually standing up. Someone told me he’d died. They said he’d seen sparks fly from his mouth before they took him in. And now he was dead. I don’t know who told me or any details or hell, even if he’s actually dead! But I suspect he is, and I just remember feeling a kick to my stomach and knowing that I should have been much kinder to him. But the truth is, I was easily the one who was the most kind to him. It wasn’t enough.

We had formed a band. Bob demanded it. Fred Hate and I played bass and guitar. We alternated. My name was Choreboy. It was taken from the name of copper scrubby pads sold in cheap grocery stores. Years later, I’d buy Choreboy pads every few days to cut up and jam in glass pipes to smoke crack through. Ah, the prescience of youth. Bob was Lex Luther, and Tom was Larvis K Gravis. Tom’s still around and still making amazing music in SF, but then he just laughed and played the fucked up drumset I hauled up there one weekend. We were called “99cents.” We’d found a long roll of 99c stickers somewhere and figured, hey, we already have stickers! 99cents it was.

God, I want to write so much more about the four of us floundering and exploding into finding our way towards playing LOUD in front of shocked eyes in a dark Pittsburgh dive called the Electric Banana. We all have wildly different memories of it, I’m sure. But Jesus, those times did a number on me. I never would have had the balls to go where I eventually did with music without them or Hardcore Bob. Bob, I love you. I should have loved you more. I should have made sure you knew I love you. I fear that you never knew that from anyone.

1984. That year came and went. Tim and I shared a room in a house with two other guys. I still talk with Blair on Facebook from time to time, and I can’t remember the full name of our fourth roommate, but I know he was Paul. Paul and I bonded over The Dead. He drove me home to Leslie’s apartment one weekend. We listened to Dead bootlegs and drank a big jug of wine. A comically big jug of wine. I was hammered by the time I got to Leslie’s. I feel like she had some friends there to boot. I’m sure I made a great impression. We lived these kinds of moments together. We’d drink wine all night, go to class, and dodge the silly attacks of the lummoxes who called us fags. No big deal. We just rolled through it. We pushed their nose’s in it.

One day, I went to make some dinner. We were all living on generic “fish sticks” we bought from that market halfway up the mountain. Total “Deer Hunter” sorta place. Always early winter. I put four frozen fish sticks into the toaster oven, turned it on, and left. I had 4 or 5 minutes. Maybe I went and laid down to listen to music, and maybe Tim left the room. When I returned after hearing the Ding! of the mechanical bell in the toaster, I looked and stopped. Flummoxed. My little fish sticks had transmuted into ash. Ash occupies the exact space and volume of the generic fishsticks. They’d just vaporized. I felt wonder. I looked around like you do. Nothing. I opened the door and poked one. It fell away like houses of ashes do. I pulled back. A miracle has occurred. Bob was right! There are forces much bigger at play, and also, nothing matters, and nothing is at play.

I remembered a comic I’d seen floating about the house in a book. Just some little book. Fuck, what was it called? Let me Google………

The Far Side! Gary Larson! Remember? We had a little square paperback book of comics floating around the house. I think it was the cover, but maybe not, but one comic killed me. There was an illustration of a big Kafka-esque cockroach drinking from a bag slumped against an alleyway wall. Surrounded by bemused but uncaring bugs. “One day, I was a Fortune 500 executive, and then the next day, they realized I was just a cockroach.”

I don’t want to oversell the obvious parallels, but I distinctly remember that. I remember thinking, “Yeah, of course, they’ll find out.” And my fish sticks had been found out. They pretended to be the thing everyone who loved them wanted them to be, and they blew it. They’ll find me out too one day. I’ll be a cockroach-shaped bit of ash.

All of this happens in a nanosecond. Boom, Boom, boom. And I stare at my uncloaked fish sticks, found to be just ash. And I hear laughter. I hear Tim. He slithers into the kitchen with that bemused sociopath smile that I loved. I saw it all at once. He’d rolled up light cardboard in the shape of my fish sticks, swapped them, and just let them burn.

Perfect. Like the kids’ arms in Apocalypse Now! And it’s not the arms that Brando marvels at; it’s how sacred the memory is. If I remember nothing else about that world, that time, that kitchen, Tim’s face, please let me remember this.

Brando:

“….Horror. Horror has a face…And you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies. “

We willingly became the ‘fags’ of the school. We forced them to look at us, fought them on rooftops, and lost all the fights with laughter. Fuck em!

“I remember when I was with Special Forces…Seems a thousand centuries ago…We went into a camp to innoculate the children. We left the camp after we had innoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every innoculated arm. There they were in a pile…A pile of little arms. And I remember…I…I…I cried…I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget.”

We had three, really two years together, and despite the pathology, the addiction, the youth, and the awkward disease of becoming a man, we did what was before us. We formed a band. We turned fish sticks into ash, and we beat them at their own game.

“And then I realized…like I was shot…Like I was shot with a diamond…a diamond bullet right through my forehead…And I thought: My God…the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters…These were men…trained cadres…these men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love…but they had the strength…the strength…to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral…and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling…without passion…without judgment…without judgment. Because it’s judgment that defeats us.”

There’s so much I never want to forget. Every little sneer of Bob as he told me I listened to the wrong music. Every dismissal of Tim when I shared something excitedly. Every friend floating away from me to form new clusters circling around my head, hurling down rocks. Fuck! How do I stop forgetting? How do I remember?? Where has so much of my life gone, unrecorded, unnoticed? How much of my life do I even remember? Ten percent? Five percent? Is it even two? Think of all the hours we’ve been alive, and how many of those hours are, in any way documented, or recorded or remembered? Jesus, most of my life might as well not have happened. There’s no reason to suspect it did. Life becomes a matter of faith. I am nothing if not a man of faith. Truly. I have faith that these hours did exist with me experiencing something, and yet… they’re gone.. they’ve long ago floated away into an almost-always winter of forgetfulness. Most of my life never happened.

And we bring it down. We lower it down to now, and me thinking of then. We contain emotions, and we straighten up, and we think of things clearly. We pretend we have any fucking control over our memory and the things that loved or hated us.

I don’t think I was hated a lot. At least I can say that. I’ve been hurt, but it wasn’t from malice. It’s always from fear. Fear of something is what drives the entirety of what seems to attack us. Well, except for the sociopaths. Maybe they just want to hurt. I choose to push it away.

In any case, the fish stick prank was fucking brilliant. Just four sticks of ashes perfectly sized to replace my fish sticks. And in such a quick time. I never want to forget that feeling.

We spent the year there, and we slithered through 1984. So few memories. I only remember the fish stick ashes, Leslie’s naked mouth, and the wrath of Bob. But we move on.

The next year, the wholly inconsequential 1985, we moved upstairs. 1985 is the most vapid of all years. There was some confusion about us all living in some other shack outside of town. We even moved in. I remember a huge dark living room with our bedrooms off to the side. But the landlord appeared. He just appeared. I just remember him becoming flesh in the light, and poof! Something had happened, and we couldn’t live here anymore. We went back to the yellow house, back where we were except one floor up.

This was so much better.

I roomed with Andy from New Jersey from the New York trip story. Tim and Fred Hate lived in the other room. One night Andy went to sleep while the rest of us, Tim, Fred and I, stayed up on acid. We decided to wake him up every thirty minutes and make him eat a popsicle. Offer him a popsicle. We’d walk in there with a blue or red or orange frozen, um, thing and proclaim, “Andy! Time for your popsicle!” I remember him lifting his head and eating it over the next ten minutes. Fucking magic. Had to be at least 5 hours worth.

One time Andy told me, “Ed McMahon met my Father.” Listen. Not “my Father met Ed Mcmahon,” but “Ed McMahon met my Father.” That means everything to me. It’s the most beautiful, accidental expression of love I’ve ever heard.

God, there’s so much to tell, and I’m sinking into Highland Park Police helicopters and sleep wrapping around all of my worlds. I’m off. We’ll see where this goes. I have an ending. I always have an end that never appears.

But I remember one last afternoon. Tim came back from a weekend at home. He’d been to Eide’s. The Pittsburgh place to buy real records. He had a few albums, which he showed us. One was from New Order. Maybe the first one after they ditched Joy Division after it stopped at the end of a rope. I always hated them for that. A few others and then one with a big rat on a hotrod spraying Tommy gun fire after fleeing rats. Big Daddy Roth sorta deal. He put it on. I hated it. He took it off and walked into his room with his piles of records. Fuck, I really hated that record. He walks around the corner with this thing in his arms that would change everything for me. I’m only writing this now because of that.

It. Changed. Every. Thing.