Sour Times: A Memoir

She spies one of them. Another trapped like her in the hard amber of Brattleboro sap. Except this former student apparently grew up here, so it almost doesn’t count. It isn’t like seeing Kevin Mears from Gloucester working the ticket booth at the Latchis, or Kelly Howard, another Californian expat like Lena, now a hostess at Friendley’s with a carved on smile. Lena doesn’t go to the Latchis or Friendly’s nearly as much as she used to, because of them.

 X is approachable, because he isn’t a hateful mirror. He might still be here anyway even if he didn’t go to Middleton. 

 X is also in the basement of the used bookstore. He is picking random books off the clogged shelves, carefully reading the front dust jackets before putting them back. The ones that don’t fit get stacked up. He hasn’t seen her yet, so there’s still time to run. Lena never thought she would ever consider him again. Even he didn’t seem to know what he was doing in Kelly Teagarden’s American Lit class, emptily pontificating on things he didn’t understand, making wild speculations on Faulkner when it was clear he hadn’t done the close reading. He found intonations of pedophelia in The Sound And The Fury where it simply didn’t exist. He pegged Holden Caulfield as gay, Benjy as a kid toucher, Nick Carroway as loving Gatsby as much as Gatsby loved Daisy Buchanan. What was more surprising than these reaching declarations was the intensely, morbidly serious way he delivered them. X appeared even more confident of what he was saying than the most intelligent literary students. Up in that cramped bookish room, they met twice a week for one semester before Kelly’s sabbatical, housed in by Library Of America editions. Out of all of them, X was the only one that interested her. They never had another class together, and Lena would only see him periodically across the expanse of her remaining two years at the school. He might have commuted from home, she didn’t know. One mid-November Tuesday after class he approached Lena to ask about a poem she had posted on the school’s network. He told her he liked it more than the “Little Miss Fauntelroy” garbage normally “shat out there.” She thanked him, not caring either way. Lena had shared the poem with the rest of the school during the tail end of a long night of catch-up in the computer lab. The poem was a rather acidic detonation of an ex-boyfriend, a periphery member of the Gang named Cory. “His cock is nothing/nothing.” X walked on, clumping through the snow.

 Yet here he is. Too late, he’s seen her already. The slow glide of recognition sears his face. Again it is winter, a grisly chill. February. A terrible storm is predicted for the night. Snow was already falling down when she stepped inside Brattleboro Books.

 When the books couldn’t be shelved they were piled up in massive rows. Here were the intellectual remainders, science fiction and horror, stocked here away from sunlight. Lena is divided from X by a wall of space books. He sits in her stool, gently fondling a mildewed science-fiction paperback. She spies through random gaps. On the book’s cover, a lone astronaut, standing on the redness of Mars, gazes with helpless desperation as his massive ship blasts off without him. She can’t make out the title. X skims the text. She doesn’t approach him yet. They both know the other person is there, and they’ll be alone in the basement until one decides to leave, because nobody else is coming down. He wears a black hoodie out of sync with his age, which has to be mid-twenties by now. X remains trim, clean shaven, the few gray hairs she remembers from class having metastasized across his head so that from a distance, with his height, X could be mistaken for a senior citizen.

 X walks upstairs, holding the little book. Lena follows him.

 She watches as he purchases the pulp novel and goes back into the thickened snowfall. It is almost impossible to see anything, but she makes out his receding black shape and catches up.

 “Hey you.”

 He turns around.

 “Hello,” he says.

 “Do you remember me?”

 “I’m not sure.” Of course he does.

 “From Middleton. I’m Lena Cole. We had Kelly Teagarden’s class together.”

 Calmly, dryly, he says, “Oh yea.”

 “Long time no see.”

 “I guess. How’s it going?”

 “Good,” Lena says. “How about you? What are you up to now?”

 “Grabbing some light reading for the storm.” He holds up the book. By now they are both topped with snow, though for Lena, wearing a coat tailored from fake white fur, the snow blends into her.

 He’s close to ending this and continuing on.

 “Are you doing anything now?”

 X shrugs. “Not really. Why?”

 “I don’t know,” Lena says, “want to get some dinner with me?” It's almost 6. She hasn’t eaten for two days.

 X wasn’t expecting that. From the look of him, X had resigned himself to a night of silent reading.

 “Ok.”

 “Ok.” Lena points across the street. “My car’s over there.”

 As they cross, X says, “Good thing we’re going now, before the world ends…”

They decide on China Buffet, a choice eatery in Middleton. The ample amounts of fatted up Lo Mein are a particular stoner cult favorite. Lena can’t go by herself. It’s too sad alone, with buttery regulars who are always pushed into the back by staff. A rambling, clearly unstable and overweight woman Lena had dubbed “Lilith” is there when she arrives with X. They didn’t speak on the ride over as X flipped through Lena’s Cd collection, occasionally nodding in approval or scoffing in musical disgust. As Lilith talks a little too loudly on the phone-“What do you WANT? I’ll BRING it to you? What do you WANT?”-Lena and X order two Pepsis from the waitress and make their way around the buffet table, awkwardly meeting as they both scoop reheated lobster tail. Vaguely exotic muzak zones the place out. They’ve been seated underneath a rectangular glass image of the mainland, lit from the inside by grub neon.

 Between bites, X asks her if she’s still writing poems.

 “No,” Lena says, with the final slamming tone of not wanting to continue discussing the matter. “How about you? What are you doing now?”

 “Freeloading. My aunt doesn’t seem to mind.”

 “You weren’t at graduation, were you?” She remembers his name being called, but nobody arriving onstage to accept the diploma.

 “No. I had…other obligations.” He takes a bite of fried rice. Now that she studies his plate, Lena realizes that X didn’t really take a lot of food. “What did you do after graduating? Looks like you didn’t get very far.”

 That smarts, but she lets it go. “I lived with somebody here for awhile, and that didn’t really work out. And then I was still here. I don’t know, I like it. I’m comfortable in this place.”

 “I’m not. I hate this fucking town. It’s incestuous. If I wasn’t dirt poor I would have moved to Brooklyn years ago.”

 Lena is starting to regret this. Why did she go after him to begin with? X ignored her in Brattleboro Books. And he was never really her friend to begin with.

 They go on eating. Now Lilith is grabbing at her natty black hair, asking the waitress if she can bring three portions home with her, not understanding why she can’t.

 X leans back, rubs his tired eyes. He groans. “I’m a bummer today, I’m sorry. I’ve been awake forever. I went to the bookstore on a whim because I couldn’t sleep. I would have nodded off if you hadn’t come downstairs.”

 Lena smiles a little. “You were in my spot. And that’s ok, I’m pretty wiped myself.”

 “I would have said something to you down there, but I wasn’t sure you were you.”

 “I understand.”

 “Because I always noticed you. In class. I mean I didn’t regard you with the same contempt that I did most of the others there. I mean, I knew I was out of my depth. I did pretty much all of the reading in the library six hours beforehand. I was a music major who found himself short two classes. Oh god, the seething pomposity of a Nate Clay!”

 Lena was in a relationship with Nate for a month after the class was over. But she doesn’t interrupt. X crazies on. “I heard their petty coughs whenever I talked, and I always thought that even though they were ‘right,’ they weren’t right. Because they didn’t approach it with the same full out, sleep deprived intensity that I did. I always thought they considered their intellect a status symbol in itself. You think I’m reaching, don’t you?”

 “Maybe a little. But I haven’t really thought much about it.”

 “Did you like it there?”

 “I did. I had a lot of friends and I liked the isolation of it.”

 “So did I.” X has some Lo Mein in his prickly beard. “Sometimes. I didn’t like it when I was lonely as the moon and pitching around the library at 3 in the morning, crying to faggy Bon Iver and knowing, knowing I was the only person on campus who didn’t have a warm body to love.”

 “I’d experienced that too. Not like that, but I had plenty of lonely nights in the library.”

 “Where were you? I was in there all the time. We could have made a cruising.”

 By now more people have entered for dinner, good-looking families and the multiplied elderly. The wait staff is nervously circling X and Lena’s table, roving sharks, hoping they finish up and leave soon to make more room. By now, the sky outside has darkened. The volume of snow is mounting.

 X pays for everything.

“Do you want to come to my house? It’s right by town.”

 “I don’t think I should. I have some stuff to do tonight.” All Lena really hopes to do when she returns to the apartment is to masterbate and fall asleep. During the snowfalls that entombed Middleton she would sit by a window in the library (spotting X, once or twice, wandering around the exterior) and wrote verse in her notebook. Could she do that again if she tried?

 The roads are still drivable, so they’ve gone to Hannaford, X to allegedly buy canned peaches and browse through the cheap DVD bin. She had lost track of him until X magically appeared beside her, walking with her, that’s all. At first she thought he was another worrisome shopper, treating tonight’s blizzard as The End.

 “You’re not getting anything?”

 “I don’t think so.” She wants to escape. She doesn’t want to know who else could be here.

 “I come here all the time. Why don’t I see you?” They stand before sushi rolls.

 Without meeting his eyes, Lena says, “I shop in Keene.”

 “That’s kind of a drive.”

 “I like driving.”

 “I would too, if I had a car.”

 “We should go.”

 “But it’s so nice in here. So vast.” The other shoppers fastforward beyond them. X says, “I almost never want to leave.”

In the car, watching the empty town, Lena asks where he wants to be dropped off.

The blinds are drawn. She won’t survey the damage outside yet. Let her hibernate, with the heat jacked up to boiling, as the only living organism should.

 Lena knew she would still be awake at the time she’s thought of as The Witching Hour since childhood. She lies face down on the floor, hugging a pillow and watching TV. She only gets twenty channels now since her father stopped paying for Time Warner Cable. That was one of the conditions he had for her if she wanted to keep living in Brattleboro without a job. It was acceptable. She might get a job in Keene soon. Why doesn’t she just live there? The Turn It Up is better, or at least safer to inhabit than the Turn It Up here. They have better bootlegs of artists like Boris and Neil Young. The town has people she loves because they are strangers.

 Lena watches static when the Paid Programming fails to keep her awake. There are a thousand stories there, worm flurries that can be traced across the screen if you’re observant enough. Unlike Lou Reed’s false promise of the melodic richness lurking beneath the dirt of Metal Machine Music, the electrical snow contains multitudes of artful transgressions, faces of the noble ghost Marvin Rodgers and other trapped souls, armies of blink that storm the spaced out void. Because the remote is currently lost, Lena, still wearing the fur jacket and nothing else, wrapped in a large down comforter, reaches to change the channel to something less invigorating. Keene public access. The real Twilight Zone. She’s arrived at the tail end of a high school lunch menu running over Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.” After Sunday’s lunch, displayed in affectless white text, the image fades out. Another hour begins, washing up new programming. A man in a gorilla mask and a cheap suit stands in front of the Keene movie house, holding a microphone. This is Werewolf Willy, part of the “Scare Bears” brigade, a novelty troupe hosting screenings of older horror movies. Frankenslime is offscreen, but Lena has seen this promo before and knows what’s coming.

 “Hey boys and ghouls, do you wanna celebrate spring with a scare?”

 “God I do,” Lena says to him.

 “Then join the Scare Bears as we present a special 35 mm print of King Kong Vs. Godzilla, April 15^th at 8. Bring the whole family! Purchase your very own Team Godzilla and Team Kong T-shirts in the lobby.” Willy produces one of the shirts, and is about to continue when Frankenslime, slick with green goo around his mask and tall person-obviously wearing shoes fitted with lifts, as Lena observed when she went to a screening of Theater Of Blood last Halloween.

 Frankenslime grabs Werewolf Willy, fitting him into a headlock. Willy struggles to get the rest out, “Also, stay for the halftime battle royale between myself and---“

 Lena switches channels, manually still. There’s something to be said for not using a remote. It makes veging like this more physical.

 She comes across a necklace of Paid Programming across the channels. Suzanne Sommers (wasn’t she in Serial Mom?) displaying a special oven that literally sucks unnesscesery fat from all beef, pork, steak and veal products; here’s a smarmy, tight faced actor Lena recognizes from red hour Cinemax softcore, here sitting with two hot women talking up another variation of a pill that has gone by many other names in the visscissitudes of nighttime streaming. Attention really shouldn’t be paid, but what can be revealed if it does? Lena used to wake early back home to see these, and even recognizes the “Talk Show” set from earlier exholations of earlier versions of that special pill. She can’t be cynical. Snark melts. She doesn’t love anything more than she loves these stupid things right now.

 “I want to love you,” she says, the tips of her small fingers cautiously touching the danger zone just so she can get closer to one of the implanted women. “Is loving someone’s body the same as loving them?” Lena asks the woman on television.

 “When I see a guy with confidence…all bets are off,” the woman answers.

 Lena starts fingering herself to the half-blooded fantasy of having sex with all three of these pitiful night workers. Their bodies become a mutant savage as the first ample, altered woman hackjaws her gums on Lena’s pussy and the man who has played so many unnoticed doctors, lawyers, adulterous traiterious Suburban husbands makes adventurous love to her breasts. Maybe his hair piece can fall and be accidentally kicked somewhere by a bucking foot. Lena smiles and comes. It’s a slight orgasm. She didn’t work hard to achieve it. It was nothing more than what it gave her.

She rolls over and steadies her laptop on her chest. Now the screen is the only light there is. Lena decides to check her Middleton Email, even though she hasn’t received anything besides spam and new issues of The Collegiate, the online school newspaper, after graduating. Still, it’s the only Email address she has.

 She has a new message. It isn’t spam, or the official word. It’s him.

Hey there

Thanks for hanging with me today.  I think I needed it, therapeutically speaking. I needed the being with another person. It was a pleasant surprise. Who knows how long we’ll know each other, or if we’ll ever speak again. Who knows?

Anyway, if you didn’t think today was a waste of your time, and you can’t sleep (one look in your eyes and I saw another nocturnal bat-thing. To the dreamers we are a threat) meet me in town. It’s gorgeous and we can literally go anywhere. The plows haven’t been dispatched. The roads are as white as virgin cream. Finally. Let’s meet in front of the bookstore at 2. We can break inside and loot all the fucking books we want.

Branches crash near the vacancy of Brattleboro Books. It’s close to Last Things. The snow glitters like Glam Rock, and Main Street has been defeated. The burden of the white weight is too much for the decorative trees, the sound of breaks and snaps send Lena twitching against the force.

 She tries to discern her own reflection in the store’s glass, but there’s only the dark approximation of a face, warped and funhouse-like, staring back at her, pocked with the white tendrils of her silly faux fur coat.

 X runs his finger over the bounced reflection. He’s wearing the same hoodie as before with no additions, shaking steadily. Isn’t this pure masochism? “You came.”

 “You were right. I don’t sleep.”

 “After awhile, it starts to feel good. You’ve resensitized yourself to the world.”

 “Come on,” Lena says. “Follow me.” She takes his ungloved hand.

 Past the Co-Op, the parking garage where Lena’s car is safe, past the Latchis-past everything safe and sane, to the sad crack house at the edge of town.

 She tells him what she knows, or what she thinks she knows, plucked from heresay and her own poet’s expressionism. “It used to be an apartment building for lower income families, and there was a community here. People helped each other out. But then came word that an out-of-area developer had purchased the property and was going to tear it down. Everybody had to move, and they did: back with families, into smaller places, away from this sinking ship. Except the developer never built here, and the house remained, decaying. It attracted slivers of people, gory half moons who squatted and made this place their own. I call it the Palace Of Dreams.” A few windows burn from within, some lights bubbling, others fading out quickly like dying stars. There are people inside, but X and Lena cannot see them. They stand in the yard of another empty house across the street, a real estate sign planted firmly. Their feet are as thoroughly sunk as the snowed-out broker's professional name.

 “When we were kids it was called the Witch’s Castle. We knew to stay away. How often do you come here?”

 Lena says, “Whenever I can. I try to keep a safe distance. I don’t want them seeing me.”

 “Have you ever thought about going inside?”

 “Yes.”

 Something happens. Lena grabs X’s hand. A figure passes behind the dirty attic window. It is more than a shadow. A tweaker must have finally reached the next evolutionary step: pure viscuous oil. The moving dark shape steps to the window, but firelight keeps the face obscure.

 They walk on, Lena following X reluctantly, afraid to leave the tall white house behind. There can’t be a heating system beyond the pipefire and huddling bodies. Whoever finds themselves inside must have to sleep with their backs against the wall. There is no greater horror beyond satisfaction.

 The abrasive dirge of the first plows begin, echoing through the backstreets. Lena thinks they’re just walking for the sake of it. She assumes neither of them knows exactly where they are, until X points to a minor one story place right beside a guardrail, with the river close behind.

 “Here’s me.”

 “You live here?”

 “It’s not home, but it’s much.” He’s suffering in the cold and is practically close to running cartoonlishly fast to the house. Unlike the Palace Of Dreams, there is no evidence of life in there.

 “Do you want to come in?”

 “I suppose I have to. I wouldn’t want to walk back alone, and you look like you’re about to die.”

 “Yea, I really fucked myself in the ass by not layering up.”

 So many Middleton students she used to know would regard the kitchen and living room with impenetrable snark. Illustrations of Jesus Christ hang in nearly every corner, with one especially devotional painting struck above the sink. A Palin in ’11 sticker is righteously placed in the most visible area of the refridgerator door, surrounded by assorted cat magnets and other discount trinkets. X pours himself a bowl of Fruity Pebbles and eats with a large plastic spoon as he walks into the immediately connected living room.

 “My aunt is asleep, obviously,” he says between crunches.

 The living room floor is carpeted and smells like a subversively homey mix of incense and cigarette smoke. There is no TV, which X incoherently blurts is in his room, along with his computer and pretty much everything else he needs to keep abreast of “that outside world.” His room is located at the conclusion of a long, narrow hallway. It’s unbearably clean, with a small multimedia center cradling the bed, the most care having been placed in a 6-Cd changer below. Two large speakers complete the sound-alter, and a fake woodstove has already been activated. He kneels next to a sizable, obsessively organized collection of records and cds. Lena sits on a red beanbag chair that’s large enough for her to sleep on.

 He starts playing the vinyl of Brian Eno’s Another Green World, creating the slightest bump of the needle with his shaking hands, but the extra-terrestrial ambient rock shortly begins unhindered. Pulling a cutting board from underneath his bed, X rolls them two joints.

 “I’m not going to sleep with you,” Lena says.

 X chuckles. “Please, let’s not get bogged down in that stupid shit.” He hands one to her and she takes a long drag.

 “Wow, this is great. Did you get this from Kevin Mears?” He’s the only one of the left-behind students who deals, and is known far and wide as the only dealer whose shit is actually good.

 “No, this is from my buddy in Mass.” Lying on his bed, X disappears under the covers. “This is a gateway drug, ya know. Only a short time till we’re in that white house with the dregs.”

 “Rebel Rebel,” Lena says. They both look up at the ceiling. “You have a view of the river, a kick ass set-up, and the best pot ever. Why would you ever want to leave?”

 “Because my Aunt is practically a shut in, and if I stay here indefinitely we’ll theoretically find ourselves in a sexual relationship. I’m not trying to be gross, just accurate. She’s on disability. I get a check from my father every month that he thinks is a bonus for the money I get from the job I don’t actually have.”

 “Dad pays for my lifestyle, too.”

 “Where’s my cereal,” X asks, before quickly answering himself. “Who cares. Anyway, that’s awesome. We’re lucky we ran back into each other, two spoiled brats who’ve never worked a day in their lives. We’re so contemptable.”

 “I guess we are.” Her eyes adjusted, Lena notices the green glow-in-the-dark solar system hanging still on the ceiling.

 “And I think I can speak for both of us when I say we’re both deeply unhappy people. But we don’t have to be, of course, because there’s really nothing to worry about, theoretically. We’re healthy and paid for. We have college degrees and no debt from housing and student loans! We’re the envy of millions we don’t even know, and we could care less! We’re in our early twenties and already at the end of the road, the future doesn’t seem likely, happiness doesn’t seem at all attainable, ever, the past trips us up wherever we go. People we used to know have been transmogrified into religious Idols, the very possession of which would never leave us wanting for warmth and happiness again. But those people are gone! And they want dick all to do with us! They’re embedded in the American roadmap, they’re gone. We waste the day buried alive in them. We brand ourselves and hate and loathe ourselves for not reaching our potential, because when we finally die there won’t be anything to sustain our legacy. We can’t be the stonemasons of the history of our own lives.”

 “Speak for yourself.” She exhales smoke and watches it ascend to the nuclear stars and planets.

 Rosalie. I’ve been waiting all evening. Passing the years I don’t know.

 “Whatever. I wouldn’t want to be aligned with me. I get you. I think. I don’t know. I think too much. I talk too much. I’d like to be high all the time, like every single day of my life.  I want to reach a point where I’m too lost to even remember the extraordinary baggage. Have you reached that point yet?”

 “Maybe.”

 “You’re so hard to read. Like my Russian history assignments.”

 “Fine. I reached that ‘point’ a long time ago. I used to make up stories for the therapist I saw for my mother’s sake as a teenager. I started by simply giving false information about my life, like saying that I had been doing a lot of reading even though I really hadn’t read a thing. Then it progressed. I think he saw me as a peer more than a client. He told me how I saw things other people my age didn’t. His defenses lowered. I told him I had sex with my father, that it was mutually consensual, and he was nothing but quiet, kind of breathing heavily. I told him I had a lesbian three way during a sleepover at my friend June’s house. I gave him every detail, like I was a singing Penthouse letter instead of a singing telegram. I told him that June, my ‘lover,’ was going to kill herself and wanted me to join in. He seemed genuinely concerned for my safety.” She takes a long, sensuous drag. “For my very soul.”

 “How long did this go on for?”

 “Till I graduated and headed here. I haven’t seen him since. He emailed me a few times my first semester and I never got back to him so he stopped. That was something I did. I realized how easy it was for me to move on from one thing to another. I can’t care. The people who became my friends at school didn’t realize how little investment I actually had in them. Some, like Gina, acted as if they loved me. Campus was too evil to sustain such love. I lived next door to a guy named Kevin Bower. Remember him?”

 “The tall guy. Yea. Didn’t know him well. We talked a little. He liked Animal Collective.”

 “Well, he had a girlfriend. Claire Morris. In the last Spring semester before they broke up Kevin used to beat the shit out of her, pretty much every night. I heard it all. He punched her in the gut. He told her to suck his dick, because that was the only thing she was good for. She was my roommate after that. She barely left the room except for classes. She would stream weird pornography all. The. Time. Japanese shit, snakes and eels spewing from the pussies of girls who looked pre-pubescent. Incest scat. Did you even know there was an Incest Scat daughter? One video, the only video she convinced me to watch with her, featured a Philipino mother and daughter shitting into each other’s mouths in a classroom. The words ‘Death’ and ‘Dog’ were written in English on the blackboard. When the cameraman kneeled below the mouths and exposed brown asses I tried to look beyond the main action and saw that above the women were exposed pipes and fluorescent lights miles above the action. They weren’t in a classroom but a warehouse, with three walls erected to create the illusion of a classroom. Claire watched that particular video in one endless loop. I don’t remember much else about her. She dropped out, eventually.”

 Unknown hours later, after more records and dashed sleep hoarding, X flicks the molten end of the joint through the slightly opened window before playing another side. Live jazz now, though Lena couldn’t say who the composer is. Jazz all sounds like itself to her.

 “Still awake?”

 “Yea.” Bare blue morning light peeks through. X closes the window and brings down a blanket, keeping the light out. He rolls them two more and somewhere in the house a toilet flushes. X switches on a lamp beside his bed and picks up the science fiction novel he bought earlier. He’s already made it halfway through. After a while, he lays it on his chest and stares at her.

 “Were you lying about all that? Claire Morris and Kevin?”

 “I wish I was.”

 “I never lived there, but I heard things about what went on at night.”

 “I used to hear screams,” Lena says, “Very late. I would be jotting stuff down in my notebook and I would hear blood curdling screams from outside. It happened four times, I remember because I would make a slash in red ink on the cover of my notebook. There would never be second screams. But I knew they were all female. And the next morning I would stumble to the Dining Hall and investigate. I wanted to see if the world had changed?”

 “And did it?”

 “No, never. Faculty sat with young guys and treated them like people who would never hurt a woman. Girls waved to me and kept to themselves. Did they know I knew? Once, when only a few days were left in the semester, I was leaving the Dining Hall and walking back to my room when I passed a group playing foursquare. I was reading Keats and making notes with that same red pen when I heard a scream, this one of delight, yet it matched one of those death rape screams I had intercepted during the Witching Hour.”

 “Did you figure out who it belonged to?”

 “No. I walked back to my dorm. I’ve never told anyone that before.” He switches off the lamp. She confides to the lone ember. “Gina wanted to sleep with me so bad. The friendship she offered was always haunted by a love that I could never understand. Why me? And you know what I did, instead of simply telling her off? I teased her, I kept her on a chain, I made out with her sometimes and let her go down on me, then I would freeze and tell her that I only wanted to be friends. I would let her sleep in my bed and Gina was just emotionally fried. That’s one of the reasons she doesn’t keep in touch. Fuck, it might be the only reason. She kissed me with so much love. She wetted me with so much love, kissing and licking every part of me. And I didn’t feel one thing. And it wasn’t because she wasn’t a guy.”

 “I didn’t have a soul who is hungry for me like that, you know. Still don’t. And I never will. You should count yourself lucky you had at least one person like that.”

 “I know! And you can tell me that a thousand times and I still won’t believe it. I knew she would pass out of my life, just as she came into it for awhile. This music is really good. Who is it?”

 “Monk. Are you happy?”

 “That’s a weird question. Happy can be different things to different…”

 “I know, I know, but are you?”

 “Yes. Because I don’t need another person in my life to bring that happiness with them. I realized at Middleton that having a specific romantic alliance with another person is something I simply don’t want.”

 “So you don’t want to be with anyone? Ever?”

 “No, I don’t. I’ve thought this through. I only want to take as much as I need from other people and then go back into my own place. And this resolve didn’t come from one specific guy dumping me or anything like that. I was never happy in relationships; I always felt locked in.”

 “You’ll still think this way in your fifties?”

 “I plan on keeping people on retainer to fulfill me in ways that only other people can. But I’m not starved for intimacy enough to chain myself to another person for life, tolerating their tremendous flaws just so I won’t have to face some make-believe abyss. When I’m fifty I’ll be alone and very content. I’ll have numerous arrangements. What I want out of life is virtually undefinable by the standards of the rest of the world. I suppose you want to find that mythic ‘right person,’ correct?”

 X is quiet until his silence stops. “Sort of, but I’ve given up by now, and not out of some ascetic resolve. I get fixated on people. I have a habit of fooling people into thinking I’m healthy, and then they figure out the truth and I beg to be allowed back into their favor. But it’s too late. I’ve built a collection of these women. I could have been very happy with several of them. One or two even attended our esteemed alma matter. But sooner or later-always sooner-they’ve become tantalizing what-ifs. So I stopped trying, to save future unknowns from myself. I’ve learned to get along fine by myself, but I make the mistake of slipping into that old want when the rest of Brattleboro is asleep. I look up people who could theoretically still be in my life. I send them long E-mails that are nothing more than screams in the air. It’s funny when your own pattern becomes clear to you. The last someone was almost two years ago. There’s a small window where I think, ‘It’s my turn now. Like everyone else. I get to feel those things that I’ve heard the world speak of.’ But it slips on by. I miss it. I’m a little bit closer to death. And I never even began to live.” 

from nowhere to nowhere

ONE

On May 25^th, Luka Rocca Magnotta, real name Erik Newman, dispatched a video called “1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick” into the deep web. It was initially hosted on shock site Best Gore.com before spreading into the popular consciousness and being viewed by thousands upon thousands of eyes. The 10-minute video displays the Canadian ex-Gay porn star and hustler Magnotta’s dismemberment of the body of Lin Jun, a Chinese foreign exchange student. “True Faith,” a single by the band New Order, plays throughout. After the video was made, Luka mailed parts of Jun’s body to Canadian political officials and public schools.

Magnotta was apprehended shortly thereafter in Germany, while searching for news about himself at an Internet café.

Probes into sites like Best Gore and Encyclopedia Dramatica reveal a man with a history in social media self-promotion. On May 15^th, a Youtube account called “alexisvaloranreich” uploaded a short video called “1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick Video (Non-Graphic) Discussion Only.” The video is simply one still of a figure posing before the Casablanca poster later seen in 1 Lunatic, his face concealed by a hoodie. Magnotta holds the aforementioned weapon in a typical Killer’s pose. The uploader’s comment is “There is apparently a video circulating around the deep web called “One Lunatic One Ice Pick” Video. Does anyone have a copy of it? The first comments are from “alexis,” asking if anyone has any info because “im curious to see it.” There is another video posted with essentially the same gist, except the picture is a slightly different angle from the first (Luka is facing farther away from the camera). Because of the date of the uploads, it’s likely they were posted by Luka before he committed the actual crime. There’s a comment by “Genisismaster,” obviously another Luka account, reading “Apparently there is another video…of the same guy performing oral sex on a dead woman laying on a sofa?” Another upload is titled “Cannibal Serial Killer-Luka Magnotta,” with the account name “Rita VanVolkenberg.” The 3-minute video is a slideshow of Luka glamour shots. The song playing is “True Faith.” It was posted on April 22, 2012. There are dozens of “reaction” videos, people playing I Lunatic and taping their dazzled first impressions. Click on enough of them and you’ll hear the third generation fuzz of “True Faith” on a loop.

I’ve seen it. I wish I hadn’t, and I knew when I found it that I shouldn’t have watched it but I watched it anyway. As I was reading, as I was searching, my sister invited me upstairs to watch Food Network Stars with her. By the time the show was airing I had played “1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick” and later, when I decided to write this piece instead of soldering on with an essay that I’ve been planning for a while, an essay that means a lot to me and would be what you’re reading now if I wasn’t self-blocking myself on its progress, later I thought about structuring this viewing of Food Network Stars in the context of an article on Magnotta, maybe putting it at the end as the light in my night’s darkness, my redemption, washed up on the shores of the warm innocuous mainstream.

I could have used my sister in the way I used a dancing girl encountered in a Bagel shop last month, but that’s not how this is going to go. My sister’s room is sunnily illuminated and mural’d with posters for Say Anything and The Breakfast Club. The air-conditioning is breezy and members of the house’s plethora of animals usually slink inside and rest on her bed. I couldn’t concentrate. I found my gaze repeatedly pitched to the floor. A floor that was closer to the basement and screen where I had watched Magnotta stabbing Jun Lin even after he was dead.

I don’t want to describe this thing in detail, less out of consideration for any hypothetical reader than out of a desire not to give Magnotta any more free publicity, which I’m probably doing already just by writing his name. The only factor I can say in the positive is that he kills Lin early before desecrating his body. Watching “the real thing,” those few times I have, is always a deadening rather than truly horrific experience. “The Real Thing” leaves no place lower to go. The senses are dulled. The worst is happening, and it’s almost anticlimactic. His fixation on the New Order composition drags future listenings into what the gorgeous song could mean in the brainpan of a deviant:

I feel so extraordinary

Something's got a hold on me

I get this feeling I'm in motion

A sudden sense of liberty

This pop euphoria was absorbed by Magnotta as something mutant and contrasted from what most would take from the song. Then the chorus, which plays during the video’s most disgusting passages (I used to think that the day would never come/I’d see delight in the shade of the morning sun/My morning sun is the drug that brings me near/To the childhood I lost, replaced by fear) is stolen from complexity and joy, perverted forever by what transpires in this little room and the thoughts of narcissistic empowerment no doubt trolling through Luka’s mind-I feel so extraordinary…A sudden sense of liberty. 

The Food Network show ended and brought no liberty from Magnotta’s self-smear across the internet. Before 1 Lunatic he tried to gain viral notoriety from torturing and killing kittens. There are interviews on Canadian tabloid news shows where he talks about his experiences hustling under the name “Jimmy.”  Magnotta is also interviewed as a potential contestant on a plastic surgery program where, in an unexpectedly deep and authoritative voice, he discusses the work that’s been done on his too-smooth visage. After he fled Canada he posted update videos where he alluringly smokes and addresses “all my fans.” 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick has been removed from pretty much every site that once hosted it, but I knew where to look. He probably put it there, the viral spot where I dug it up.

Drive thirty minutes north and there’s a deluxe Price Chopper that stays open through the night. Enter at 3 or 4 in the morning and it’s just you unless you’re with friends, but tonight they couldn’t come, and you needed some product, some necessity they wouldn’t have at any of the 24/7 convenience stores back in town. The night owl is you, flying over stock boys and the store’s lone A.M. cashier. Walk to the final frozen isle where the lighting is operated by motion sensors. Walk through and florescent lights crackle at the whim of your passage.

Those lights, those living organisms, remind me of the sensation I get midway through night’s progress when something like Luka Magnotta or Ricardo Lopez triggers my Shock Site investigations. I get into a taut, uncomfortable space. I open links that fall to deeper links, some without a net. 1 Lunatic leads me to watch a prolonged murder video by Ukrainian mass killers dubbed “3 Guys 1 Hammer.” Yes, both videos are named, one colloquially and one intentionally, after “2 Girls 1 Cup” the old guard of reactionary sick, along with pictures and videos named so cryptically-“Goatse,” “Swap.avi”-they could be zines you find stuck under your foot as you walk across wet gravel after visiting an urban mallscape. When I’m in my unfortunate Shock Site roving mode, former darkness brightens to lives so cavalierly sharing death and snapshot anguish. I’m angry, at what our world can vomit forth, at the fact the site is called “Best Gore,” but I can’t do a thing about it (whatever “it” is) because I’m actively seeking out this content, I’m scouring Best Gore, I’m one of those tiny cars bumping against more cars in the metaphorical nexus of Web traffic. The agitation a monster like Magnotta inspires is grounded primarily in sandpit desperation. He wants all of this-our collective attention and disapproval and fear. And for the moment, he’s got it.

It’s easy to cynically place the Magnotta crimes within the same apocalyptic prism of the recent Miami cannibalism incident, where Rudy Eugene attacked derelict Ronald Poppo and consumed the majority of the skin on his face. These are two separate atrocities, but the allure of poetic maneuvering is eerily succumb-able.  At first people were making jokes about the Eugene attack being the first salvo of a zombie invasion. I would probably enjoy both of these crimes in a movie or work of fiction, the Magnotta slaying even recalls the gruesome fantasies of a gay chat room in Dennis Cooper’s 2005 novel The Sluts. I don’t know if these digressions to art and media serve as a palliative or not. Does making zombie jokes or comparisons to fiction render these somehow less raw? Why did Rudy Eugene and Luka Magnotta’s actions happen weeks apart? Because they did, that’s all, and that conclusion feels both final and weightlessly inadequate.

Eugene’s mauling of Ronald Poppo could have been any year and lost none of it's visceral impact; Magnotta’s entire personality has an aura of calculated Nowness. Like “Psycho” Sam McCrosky, Luka knew his way around a computer. Unlike Sam, he indulged in a heavy degree of networking to cultivate and promote his infamy. This signals the dawning of a new age of viral true crime, the BTK Killer’s letters shifted by technological advances into E-mails, status messages, parasites wriggling into the stream.

The image that stays with me above all others: the posed “promo” shot of Magnotta, the ice pick, the Casablanca poster, harsh light riding over it all. This bookends 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick, in fact it’s the last thing we see if we’ve managed to make it through the 11 minutes at all, right after still frames of Jun Lin’s severed body parts, including his decapitated head, which has yet to be recovered. Did Magnotta arrange and edit this footage? If he did, why does the Toronto PD claim to have a longer version locked tight in evidence? Did he send it to the police, a more graphically extensive version, just as he’d mailed Lin’s body parts around the country?

What if that protuberance of a face-red lips, jutting nose, stabs of hair- doesn’t actually belong to Magnotta?

Of course, it most certainly does, though in that terrible frame, just as, arguably, in that terrible crime, and the terrible video that emerged from it, Magnotta astral projected outside of himself and became “1 Lunatic,” an abstract being of blood watercolor and a keyboard. Matter changes to gigabits. Women with lives thousands of miles long are nothing more than “2 Girls,” now till the end of time. Sergei Yatzenko, the man bludgeoned and butchered by Viktor Sayenko and Igor Suprunyuck, has been subsumed into the pixilated chain-letter havoc of “3 Guys 1 Hammer.” 

RIP Jun Lin, who lost his life. What Magnotta took from the rest of us in comparison is microscopic. Our time, our comfort, our enjoyment of an old pop song-that’s meaningless compared to Lin’s fate and the suffering his family is enduring right now. Fuck Luka Magnotta, may he rot in a dank cell for all time. I could say that and try to walk away, pushing away the counterthought that you, I and Luka himself all know that because of Now he has triumphed. I want to reprimand something or someone. I want to go back to the human I was before.

That day will never come.

TWO

“I sit down and cut. And cut and cut. I lose sight of time, but that doesn’t matter, because I only do “it” at night. And nights are long…”

Glance back and there isn’t a soul with you, nobody manning the checkout lanes and not one customer in sight. You go forward. Around the corner the frozen isle doesn’t end but blooms out towards infinity. There’s darkness where the ice cream hides until you activate precoded light with yourself. Who are you? What happened to others? Suddenly the way to another person, the path to a connection, the potential for nectar and conquered time, holding and being held, smiling with rare holy joyous tears, the knowing, the great relief, dismay receding-all that is now as distant from you as the moon is distant from planet Earth. The intercom sounds like roughly thumping vinyl. A scary voice hawks gibberish and phlegm. You reverse direction and yet the way back isn’t what it used to be, merely one long chilly row. And when you continue on, you realize the freezers aren’t stocking the same products as before. There are different, unwelcome objects and entities through the glass now, slightly obscured by trails of frost that remind you while still darkened of static X-rayed bones.

Her name is possibly Joan. Encyclopedia Dramatica refers to her as the “Emo Cutter Girl.” The Girl surfaced on various websites and message boards around November 2008 with dozens of photographs chronicling her intense, detailed cutting and self-mutilation. She cuts so deep into her legs and arms the pictures vividly showcase The Girl’s cartilage and bone marrow. She markers a sentence into her arm that reads:

                                    RIDER ON A DOWNBOUND TRAIN

The Girl collects her blood, letting it soak into napkins or drip on the floor tiles. Her results evidence the passage of hours. The skin around a long gash beneath her knee is yellowed. There are stitched ripples near new cuts. She goes to the hospital and they sew her up but since she doesn’t commit herself The Girl can’t be put on suicide watch. So she goes back into the night after the healing efforts are complete.

The flesh on her wrist has been opened, a crimson portal stares back at us. Parts of the story become unveiled, against their own will or not, on the margins of her cuts. She wears a ring on her thumb. She has a tattoo of a rat in clear motion. The Girl doesn’t cut into her tattoos at all, as if she got them for the express purpose of having reprieves on her body, areas that will always be safe.

Dramatica is the only place to see all of The Girl’s photographs in one place. The first few have cheeky captions (“Frankensteinesque,” “worst period day ever”) but expand the gallery and soon there’s no more snark, only one thumbnail still after the other, silently speaking. There’s only one proper image of The Girl and it’s blurry, her emaciated, androgynous face achieving a nonchalant desperation through technical fog.

She wears a T-shirt with the logo of a band or club called “Lucky 13." Every wound is presented to us in deep, still focus. The atmosphere gleaned in the world outside the boarders of the frame is one of silence punctured by tap water drips, a ringing telephone overheard in the next apartment. She doesn’t hear any of this noise.

When she shared herself The Girl didn’t know, or care, who saw. They first landed on some obscure website whose admin also, allegedly, posted child pornography in his gallery. He wouldn’t give inquirers any pertinent details about who she was or how the photos were obtained. Armchair “Goon” detectives searched far and uncomfortably wide, discovering finally that she was 23 and lived in Regensburg, Germany. They supposedly got her some help. I don’t know if any of this is true, or if the text was something improvised around photographs that so disturbed the Dramatica writers they had to weave some remedial fictions to give them a story. A reason.

In writing about bluesmen like Skip James, Robert Pete Williams, Mississippi John Hurt, and rough-hewn musicians like Dock Boggs, rediscovered in the 1960s after a period too long in obscurity, Greil Marcus sums their passage back into the same vault as traveling “from nowhere to nowhere.”

To paraphrase a line he writes about Boggs’ singing, to bring it to The Girl's silent apartment, we could say, “She cut herself as if she could see her life as something that had already passed.”

Rider On A Downbound Train paints the word “ZOMBIE” in her own blood on the floor, decides to snap a photo of the lonely word even though, at that probable instant, she’s torn open enough major portions of herself, careful to avoid rupturing arteries so that she’ll stay alive and still be a victim of her surrender to the long, long night. The pictures I find hardest to closely observe are simply the ones without her in them. The Girl focuses on the silence and blood around her. She's exhausted herself.

These are dispatches from another place, a different dimension or planet. When The Girl is cutting and recording she is far away from the human race, in a different atmosphere of spotted cleanliness. Look around the room and it’s another normal room. But you haven’t seen the whole thing. Breath from somewhere. You’ve never heard a blink before now. 

When she was tracked down, her words, or the words of someone claiming to be her, were translated by the Goons. “…it seems like my judgment tends to slip during the ‘action.’ I can see that I am cutting on muscles, bones, nerves, tendons, that the muscles and blood vessels are tearing, but that’s exactly the point: my concentration is focused on the details.” Can she feel the pain, or is the pain silenced by the awe? And what are "the details" to her?

The Girl goes deeper into the zone where only committed artists and the hypnotized reach. This zone isn’t safe when accessed by the wrong person. The silence and the eroded limits augment into a searing majesty for The Girl. “…but it is really strange, to stand up when you’re done and see (sometimes shockingly) a wound or a ‘massacre.’ Was that really me…? Clearly. I know it was.”

She sits down and cuts. And cuts and cuts. She looses sight of time, but that doesn’t matter, because she only does “it” at night. And nights are long.

She claims to have Borderline Personality Disorder. She keeps her legs and arms mutely still when taking stills of “it.”

Joan holds a blood clot in her hand. It could be mistaken for a small rodent, like the tattoo on her arm that's forever safe.

She touches a red wet pool on the floor. The rings and bracelets on her gaunt hand are close to slipping off the minute she lifts her bloodstained fingers from the mess that used to be inside her.

Another scrawl: “I WANNA DIE, ASAP. RIP JOAN.”

There are so many pictures.

If she gets help, what happens after she comes home and she’s alone and it’s night again?

A user named “kamikaZi_blitz” on the Flamehaus forum says, “Id slip it in her arm.”

The Girl cuts until she’s gone beyond blood. She’s found masked whiteness and veiny pink anatomy.

She uses needles and syringes to extract more blood. The Girl jams a needle through her nostril and stares down the lens of a camera that is a vessel bringing her back here.

A toilet bowl reflects the massacre.

Trail of red napkins.  

Domino

The rain outside twanged our ground, and I had just rolled out of a sleep that felt the length of a decade. My head still ached and fogged. There was no question: I’d be up all night. The little lamp on the floor painted the room with Technicolor noir. I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror and saw a shaggy beast. For the last week I had been very sick, had felt the horror amass itself through my body during an uneven, ultimately good romantic comedy I watched in theaters on a day that would be the last day I could venture out for a long while. The symptoms were disgusting to the point of self-parody. I couldn’t read, listen, or even watch anything longer than a half hour sitcom. But in that lateness I regained something, a light momentarily twisted strange.

The monitor was closed but the viral universe inside it hummed and whirred like Shatner/Pine’s Enterprise flying on downtime between battles, between movies. All I needed to do was crack it open like a shine-reflecting book and spend the rest of the night in company with pop newscasts and a few hundred Facebook feeds. Facebook: the great novel about the representation of personality, written and drafted by most of the planet. Sometimes it sooths. That night, the prospect of logging on was disheartening. It would even be a defeat. Staying off Facebook is notoriously difficult. Last year I deleted my account and read Joyce Carol Oates and watched the UK comedy Peep Show for two weeks. Of course I came back. Facebook is a healthy place for people who have been found; its even an ok place for the lost because the lost might find each other there if lucky. But when you become one microbe, still lost, still repetitively checking for and instigating unwanted contact, the social network is dangerous, for other people, for yourself.

My friends were asleep. My friends were helpless to the grime demands of late shift blues. I wasn’t lonely, just alone. Not depressed, merely in a post state of numbness before the arrival of a life’s new currency. Plane tickets to Portland, Oregon had been purchased. I was leaving these moist Berkshires very soon. Beginnings and endings were coiled together like mating snakes.

I stepped out the door as teething rain from the back porch hit a little of me and the ground. Calling for the skittish, eccentric cat resulted in no cat-he appears when he wants to, maybe when I shoot Terry Lennox I can complain about this-so I went back inside.

I could feel my blue illness spreading its talons through my body during a showing of The Five Year Engagement, which had Jason Segel and director Nicholas Stoller pIaying a handful of Van Morrison songs and a few repulsive Van song covers. A few crappy days later I had the urge to dive back into Van The Man, listening to a few albums I’d either never heard before or given proper consideration to, and finally reading a massive biography by the meticulous Clinton Heylin I’d had dusting on the shelf for a year. My body was too wracked for movies and fiction, but the rollicking malevolence of Heylin’s bio (which could be subtitled Portrait Of The Artist as a Young, Middle-Aged, and Older Douchebag) and the tucked-away Van works like Veedon Fleece, Poetic Champions Compose and the monolithic Common One were just the ticket, so to speak. Morrison fans who come to Heylin’s tome are in for a traumatic experience, even if they knew beforehand the depressive mood swings and notoriously prolific-yet-uneven output of the artist who made Astral Weeks, the choice of many (myself included) as their personal favorite album. Heylin accomplishes hagiography's cosmic reversal. 2002’s Can You Feel The Silence: Van Morrison, A New Biography offers an epic portrait of a miserable, transcendentally gifted artist whose considerable accomplishments are buttressed by years of childishly sociopathic behavior and reams of contradictions and undistinguished, place-filler music. For the most part it reads not as hatchet job but the attempt of a serious journalist and critic to maneuver through the labyrinthine maze of a legendary man’s deranged personality. Heylin looses his cool only in the last few sentences that close out the book proper before the epilogue finally disengages him from this wretch for good. After freefalls personal and artistic (Heylin coldly relates Van’s flameouts with one confidante and band member after another alongside increasingly blah albums he seems to produce to satisfy workaholic OCD at the end of the twentieth century) Heylin’s disgust breaks through at Morrison’s treatment of vocalist and touring partner Linda Gayle Lewis (sister of The Killer). When relations between them break down he ends up calling her a “fucking cunt,” adding “Don’t fuck with me, I’m not a nice guy.” One of Heylin’s last paragraphs on his subject includes a critique beyond song reviews that we haven’t seen for the last 500 pages. The effect is devastating:

“It seems that the melancholia that has haunted the man from the days before rock and roll has eaten away the will to rise above it all, which once inspired so many of his best songs. As it stands, the intellectual blindness that has resulted from this condition seems to have left George Ivan Morrison with little left to say in song, and nothing more life-affirming than, “Don’t fuck with me, I’m not a nice guy,’ outside of them.”

Young readers of Silence who have had their lives changed by Moondance, Astral Weeks, possibly St. Dominic’s Preview will come away from it with a desire to sail into Common One. This 1980 Morrison release is all-but-forgotten today. In his novella-length critical study When That Rough God Goes Riding, Greil Marcus places Common One within the grid of a seventeen-year losing streak. Heylin disagrees. In fact, he calls “Summertime In England,” the second cut on the album, a song that is quite possibly Morrison’s best work. The book’s title comes from the song’s ending lyric. Lovers of “Madame George” and “Listen To The Lion” take immediate pause, but the book is very persuasive. In the throes of sickness I finally played Common One, and in the ensuing days I rarely stopped.  

The track is fifteen minutes long. A fifteen minute pop song. I won’t get into the rest of the album (which I like, even though Heylin hates the equally time-consuming final track “When Heart Is Open”) because, as moody and nourishing as cuts like “Haunts Of Ancient Peace” and “Satisfied” are, Common One is “Summertime In England.” The songs around “Summertime” don’t compliment it. The sequencing reminds me of Neil Young’s American Stars’N’Bars, which contains two of his best songs, “Like A Hurricane” and “Will To Love,” and others that are pleasant yet forgettable. Since being taken off the unreleased Chrome Dreams, the two masterworks needed a home on a platform where they wouldn’t be compromised by anything, good or bad, that could distract from them. That’s how I feel about “Summertime In England.” Either release it alone or with a merely good platter. It fulfills my top litmus test for music: the composition makes me ask myself, “How could I have lived without this song before?”

“Summertime in England” is about falling in love with someone and wanting them to fall in love with the things you have fallen in love with. Van claims the song is addressed to his daughter but, as Heylin notes, lyrics like “Can you meet me in the country in the long grass?/With your red robe dangling all around your body” are distinctly sexual, even fetishistic. Van asks her, this Venus in the long grass, “Did you ever hear about

did you ever hear about

did you ever hear about

Wordsworth and Coleredge, baby?”

He’s sat in a low-lit room reading these men, and now he’s met a woman he wants to share them with. He’s revealing his knowledge along with his heart. And he sounds as vulnerable as if he were standing before her fully disrobed. His conclusion doesn’t strain for anything beyond his typical scatting, “it ain’t why why why/ it ain’t why why why/ it just is…” The instrumentals gallop along with the giddiness of new love and new sharing. (Mark Isham was one of the session players.) I can see it all: the tall grass whipping past our gliding, Van leading the woman with the red dress by hand into his mind and heart. Now I want to hear the response, her song, what she plans to share with Van. We’ll never know. In the years to come, Morrison’s muse betrayed him, and in the duet album with the fairer Lewis the singers’ voices go together about as well as peanut butter and mud.

I listened to “Summertime In England” that rained-out night, again, for what is probably the twentieth time since I finally brushed cobwebs off the Amazon purchased MP3-good luck finding a physical copy anywhere outside Turn It Up. He just goes on and on. He’s uncontainable. “Yeats and Lady Gregory corresponded/corresponded/corresponded/and James Joyce wrote streams-of-consciousness books…T.S. Eliot joined the ministry…” The album’s title is free-associated, though it isn’t the song’s title (one thing Morrison does that I love-see also “In The Garden” from No Guru, No Method, No Teacher and “You Don’t Pull No Punches, But You Don’t Push The River” from his second-best album, Veedon Fleece). “Summertime” isn’t obscure if your “Wordsworth and Coleredge” are movies, comic books, novels, video games, The Sopranos, sports, water sports, whatever, so much so that they’ve become yourself, and you want this new person in your life to drink these things, in essence drink you along with them. I realized that’s what the song was about that exact night, as outside it carelessly poured. I thought of the time I was in high school and screened Barbara Jean’s last song in Robert Altman’s Nashville for a girl I liked. Later, after she kissed me the first time, I said something about how recovering the lost footage The Magnificent Ambersons wouldn’t be better than that.

“Did you ever hear about, Welles and Cotton baby?”  

After “Summertime In England” I couldn’t listen to anything else. The song was rich enough for one night’s musical consumption. I went outside, stood under the back porch and called again for the eccentric cat. He vanishes for days and is suddenly at the door unless he’s roughing through an upstairs window ready to eat. I don’t worry about him like I used to, though I still got antsy when he didn’t materialize from the rain that looked like showering glass. This was a time of uncertainty. What was going to happen to all of us?  And I wondered if those Veedon Fleeces I couldn’t claim in the turbulent past were still attainable now that life had cycled itself to this voided placidness. I didn’t watch as many movies as before. Now I listened to albums, watched scores of TV shows (mostly comedies and a currently Golden Age period Mad Men) and wrote for this blog. When I was 15 I envied certain filmmakers for the amount of movies they’d watched. Now I tried not to envy them for being able to do what they were born to do and make a living doing it. I used to have a lot of opinions, now I had this: It only takes one person. I took shelter. No cat.

The Dark Side Of Porn was a rather dire series that used to air on the BBC, though you wouldn’t expect anything else from the sensational title. Dark Side was, as promised, a self-serious panorama limning the shadier alleys of an already shady industry (both here and in the UK). The first episode tilled the perpetually plowed field history of XXX’s shutdown in the wake of an HIV outbreak, spearheaded by Dr. Sharon Mitchell, quite possibly the only hero in porn. I’d seen a lot of porn docs, ranging from the HBO toe-dippers to obscurities like Gregory Dark’s astonishingly excellent Fallen Angels, and while there’s everything from gonzo reports on Gonzo (Louis Theroux) to moralizing finger wags (the ones that blast Bill Margold’s talking points far out of context) I hadn't encountered something like the BBC series before. This was objective disgust, which is paradoxically challenging to pull off. There has to be a thoroughgoing commitment to something one hates, which the producers of the show obviously do. They’ve been assigned this world against their collective wills, and everything from the shot composition, pointed narration and juxtaposed sound bytes make the hidden distain perfectly clear, yet I love how Dark Side doesn’t overtly preach despite all this. The program is from-the-trenches reportage, more Joan Didion than P.T. Anderson. (“A writer is always selling someone out,” she once wrote.) The second episode introduced me to a woman who needs her own feature film. In turn, I’d like to introduce you to Frankie.

Episode 2, “Porn Virgins,” chronicles the fortunes of Sahara, an affable young Muslim woman, and Frankie, a successful business woman, wife, and mother in her late thirties, who both want to change careers and become adult movie starlets. Sahara’s rise is just as meteoric as Frankie’s fall. Sahara, with her luminous brown skin, everygirl charm and rarity of type (not to mention her willingness to be on piss websites) is in demand right out of the gate. She can raise her asking price before she knows it.

Why does Frankie want to enter this universe? She confesses self-esteem issues to the camera, enough psychologically to want to be there, yet reveals herself to be skittish with boundaries on set. She won’t do girl-on-girl and she won’t do a certain act illegal in some countries but a veritable prerequisite in XXX. She calls her supportive husband with the time he can expect her home. Frankie rides trains to mysterious amateur shoots with only the crew as her disapproving, arch companion (“Will you meet me in the country/In the summertime in England/Will you meet me?”). When she lands her biggest gig yet, a gang-bang under the eye of England’s top pornographer, the filmmakers cut to Frankie’s pounded shadow and recycle an earlier, gushing VO from the day she quit her job. “I feel so free!” she says, as our humble observers convey to us a nation of otherwise.

Frankie has curly blond hair and a face she’s allowing to age gracefully. There’s just so much unabated awkwardness. Frankie appears happy enough in her nude photos, but we know even then that she’d probably be more content simply as a nudist. She wanders around a dungeon set like a deer in headlights or a high school freshman. She doesn’t want to film a lesbian scene but makes enough of an effort, emptily poking her tongue in the other performer’s mouth. Talking with the jocular director after the gang-band, she hints that she might be interested in doing Anal next time, and plasters a mockery of a smile on her face as he gives her detailed techniques on how to handle it properly.  Dark Side makes a point of passing judgment on a business that has no room for someone as particular as her and not actually passing judgment on Frankie. She’s the only person that elicits a margin of sympathy from this austere crew. As she trudges on, Frankie becomes a figure out of Herzog, pulling the weight of herself and that old baggage up a mountain of disapproval in flesh. As the phone stops ringing and Frankie realizes its time to move on, it becomes apparent this isn’t underhanded journalism as much as it is a portrait of someone seeped in their own patterns of emotional masochism. Why is she doing this? We’ll never know. Where could she have ended up? And why write about her?

Because she kept my eyes open that night. I might have gone back to sleep if I wasn’t bleakly invigorated by her story. And I’m glad I stayed awake.

Frankie trainbound for a shoot.

Frankie, waiting for a ride from producers she's never met.

Getting in.

I checked my e-mail. I had one new message, from “Holly Bain.” Did I know a Holly Bain? The subject line was blank. The message read as follows:

The bad is over. We found each other. I liked you and you liked me, what a surprise, that never happens but it did right now. I was charmed by your hair and other things like your voice and infectious personality. We will touch fingers first then hands, palm to palm, and our skin will know what is happening before we do. Isn’t it lovely how this all worked out. And with me you don’t have to fret. There are no lines in me that you must read between in order to understand. There is no other shoe dangling hangman from my foot. No. This is this and the world is a greenblue globe. We will talk our lives out until the words form a third person who has been released from the shackles of us and who will leave us alone forever once we’ve ridden ourselves of him. I’ll cradle you and we’ll both cry. The tears will dart away like inchworms and follow the man made of words. We are finally alone, just together. I always wanted to lie in your bed. Your pillow is comfy but I fluff it anyway. And then finally you lay next to me and we don’t let go of each other for as long as we can. The only moment we break is when I tell you to put on some music. I rub the small of your back as you place a CD somewhere in the dark. The album reels us in after we’ve reeled in each other. You’re playing it loud. We accelerate together because of the music, as the stars outside your window tear away like outer space seen from within a ship on warp speed in the movies you loved as a child. If we let go one of us will get lost in the music and it could be centuries before we’re reunited again. The music brings me closer to you. I never thought I could get this close to anyone. I’m so glad it’s you! You tell me we’ve flipped over, that the bed is actually on the ceiling and we’re looking down. I open my eyes and you’re right. The music has flown up here with us, ducking a few feet away, crouched and sticky, a spider. You know, we’ve never kissed before now. Let’s remedy that. Ok? The lights from passing cars spilling through your window have been transferred by God into the twinkles of my eyes. Kiss them both and drink the light. That’s an order, my love.

I knew to keep scrolling. At the bottom of the page there was a link to a pay website past the message. Localsluts. A few years ago I might have been fooled. But I was beyond the capacity to get preyed upon by this Internet I’ve so scoured all these many years. I deleted it.

Who ate the time? It was morning already, a wet foggy morning. Outside it was slippery and a mess of green like the body of a toad. I would be up for a while to come. I was hungry. I went back to my lookout spot to smoke a Sherman and try again for the cat. The backyard was marshy, pre-civilized. He was hopefully sheltered in some turned-over glen. The rainfall was calmer but the sky was still dirty and sere. It took me a long time to force myself to live without being in thrall to someone else. I tapped ashes from the Sherman into an empty mug. Soaking birds chirped. I left the back door open a little for the eccentric cat.

I drove through the still-slumbering town to an excellent bagel place for breakfast. I’d driven past these streets, the same cemetery, the houses and apartments. I knew where to go. It was autopilot. I would make sure to get lost in Portland. Thinking was now the best way to cut through the familiar. How could an artist who made something as all-embracing as “Summertime In England” (playing then in the car) be such a loathsome human being? What did Frankie want? I hoped she was happy. I hoped she was still alive. When Van The Man repeats “oh my Common One,” he could be referring to her, or even Holly Bain, who was nothing more than a Tinkerbell forged in the cave of a man perpetuating an advance-fee scam and thinking he’d succeed by compromising the light of the suffering one.  

There weren’t many cars at the bagel place. There weren’t many people inside, but the radio was playing old songs as if this was that longed-for juke joint in a fifties heaven we’ve all imagined with winsome sighs and total disgust. The woman who took my order was the kind of virtual stranger you felt safe around, as I’d seen her many times before on the later side of midnight, hanging out in the 24/7 convenience store up the street and killing time before her morning shift began. I took a seat and waited for them to call my name.

I brought Heylin’s biography with me to rescan through some things. I read an insight about “Summertime:” Though the song passes through several tiers of consciousness, it always returns to the temporal state-a day in the country with his daughter and/or sweetheart. In this sense, “Summertime” resembles ‘Cyprus Avenue [from Astral Weeks]. Like its eminent predecessor, it concludes with the singer back in the present, though not alone, as he asks his companion a key question, ‘Can you feel the silence?’” Could Frankie feel the silence? If not, her documentarians felt it for her. It ain’t why why why, it just is. Holly Bain couldn’t feel the silence because she was the silence, another false Internet promise, the red dress with no body of a woman inside. We’ve all fallen in love with a keypad more times than we can count. It all comes down to a planet of want. Or whatever, I didn’t know, it was too damn early for all that.

This concludes with me back in the present, though not alone, as a smattering of elderly couples and early bird students occupied other tables nearby. There was a mirthful ding as more customers entered. A woman and her two children, a young boy and a girl I pegged was just entering teenagehood. Her green eyes were clean and watery. She had slept through the night. Her brother poked her but she maturely ignored him. While their mother ordered for them, the boy opened the cooler to get drinks. The girl wore a sweater that matched the color of her eyes, and a cap that concealed most of her hair. From the girl’s light complexion I assumed she was blond. A song began that really bopped and shimmied. I didn’t know it, and I wish I could say it was Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti,” but that came on later, after the trio was gone. Then, at that moment, the girl started dancing to this corny old song, jutting her shoulders forward and back, letting the movement propel her across the room. The Woman is the child of the Girl. She didn’t care who was watching, though most likely nobody was beyond me. Her shoulders gyrated front to back. Her little head was delicate in motion. I focused on Heylin's book, smiling silently, and by the time my breakfast was ready the girl and her family were gone. I never caught her name. So I decided to call her