by Rob Spillman
The following Monday I told Dan and Joe about the cool band I had seen on Friday night. “We were at the Marble Bar seeing DOA,” Dan said with a sneer.
“I’ve never been,” I said. I had been intimidated about seeing punk bands in the basement of the Congress, a notorious old transient hotel in a sketchy part of downtown.
“Nothing like Bread and Roses,” Joe said. “Any of those hippie losers step in, they’d get slammed into paste.”
“What’s so bad about them?” I asked. “They aren’t bugging anybody.”
“That’s just it, man,” Dan said. “They’re part of the fucking problem.”
“This Friday, the Circle Jerks are playing at the Marble Bar,” Joe said.
He didn’t need to say that I’d be a loser if I didn’t go.
Okay, then—that was path number two. Marble Bar, Circle Jerks, paste.
Path number one was still clearly Abby. A reggae band was going to be playing Bread and Roses that same night. “Sally’s scoring hash oil, and her parents are going out of town. We can party at her place before, okay?” This is what Abby said, and what I heard was I’m going to take you to Sally’s and get you really stoned and jump your bones.
Path number three was pretty lame in comparison, but a lot safer than the other two. My cross-country teammate Russ was having a party, his parents also out of town for the weekend; I guess it was Parent Abdication Night. The last time Russ had had a party, his huge Roland Park house was crammed with kids, the bathtubs filled with ice and expensive beer. How could his parents not have heard about the noise and mayhem from the neighbors?
But even when Russ’s parents were around, they were clueless about their son. Once, after practice, when I was over for dinner, as we were sitting down to the table, Russ leaned over to me and whispered, “I just dropped a tab of Windowpane.” His mother talked to his father about the day at the firm while Russ stared at his peas. Russ was mesmerized by his peas. I nudged him and he smiled at me, took a bite of his pork chop, then froze, his fork hovering over the peas. He remained like this for a minute, and I kept waiting for his parents to notice. Suddenly Russ mashed down his fork and pummeled the peas, then ran away from the table. “I’m sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Jensen, I think Russ’s not feeling well,” I offered to the mildly surprised parents. “If I could be excused, I’ll go check on him.”
Three would be the path of least resistance.
But when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. I stepped off the stoop and followed my feet. Twenty minutes later, before I lost my nerve, I strode across the transient hotel’s lobby, past the overstuffed chairs and sofas with sleeping winos, the once-opulent grand hotel bar where Edgar Allan Poe was said to have gotten sauced. I descended a flight of stairs, pushed through thick folds of black curtain which reminded me of the front curtains of the many stages I had been on, and bang, I was slammed with a wall of pure noise. Up on the Marble Bar’s small stage the four scrawny Circle Jerks were launching into their first song, and the entire bar was in a black broil—bodies bouncing off of every surface, the white marble columns, and the white, eighty-foot-long eponymous marble bar. Arms pinwheeling, leather-clad punks hurtled themselves at each other in front of the low stage. Kids were being shot out of the mass, ricocheting back into the mosh pit.
Chaotic lunacy. I couldn’t believe I was in it, and all of a sudden Dan was inches in front of me, smiling. Blood crept from his right nostril, yet he was smiling a contented, beatific smile. I wanted to contemplate this incongruous image of blood and happiness, but Dan grabbed my lapels and threw me toward the pit. Blam. Ouch, damn it—my back. I was going down. No, hang on. Smack, my ribs, but at least I wasn’t on the ground. I spun around and sidestepped the kid with a foot-high green Mohawk. Pissed off now, I grabbed a handful of leather and shoved, surprised by how far I threw the kid, and for a split second I worried that it was too hard, but I was smashed into and had to push some part of someone else’s body off me and damn, got hit in the back again. Tried to jump to the music, which was too fucking fast. I couldn’t understand a word. Into the chorus, they were repeating it. Listen: “Live fast, die young, live fast, die young.”
One more time . . . and is the song over? Yes—and they’re ripping right into the next one. I pushed, I bounced, I lowered my shoulder. I got Dan! And he was smiling. Now here he came back at me. Good one. Don’t get blindsided. Never close your eyes. Another song. And another, and another. Slam-dancing was like running—self-inflicted pain. But different. I was also inflicting pain on others, and they were all enjoying it. It was licensed aggression, but with no premeditation, no thought. It was violent Zen. Nothing else existed. I ran into whoever was near me, I ran into the walls, I jumped up and I jumped sideways into anyone near me. I was a charged particle attracting and repelling all other particles.
The band stopped. The four sweat-soaked Circle Jerks dropped their instruments and left the stage. I was drenched, adrenaline rushing through me. Dan reappeared.
“Yes,” I said.
“Yes,” Dan said, and led me outside into the cool air.
I kept walking, toward home, alone. Soreness crept into my arms, legs, back, ribs, head, my ears still ringing. I felt as if I was vibrating. I had seen the Way and the Light. All I wanted was the Truth. At Bread and Roses I had been offered a watered-down religion, a thin Presbyterian broth of “Love Thy Brother” platitudes. At the Marble Bar, the Word was handed down to me, a stout Catholic meal of individual and collective rage.
45
“She has feelings; what she calls her feelings are only her ideas of what feelings should be: She is full of ideas about feeling.”
—Peter Handke
Soundtrack: Birthday Party, “Nick the Stripper,” 1981
“HOW LONG CAN WE LAST?” Elissa asked.
It was a drizzly Monday afternoon and, with the exception of a droopy guy in a damp turtleneck reading a paperback in the corner, we were alone in the CV.
“Tell me the truth.” Elissa shut her eyes and pretended to brace herself. “How bad is it?”
“It’s fine. We can make the money stretch,” I said. We’d done it before. In Boulder we lived on eggs, onions, and potatoes, and apples stolen from a neighbor’s tree.
She opened one eye. “How much do we have left in overdraft?”
“A few hundred.”
“A few hundred?” She blinked. “Are you fucking kidding me? That’s not possible. A few hundred?”
“I can get work, you know, as a stringer. . . .”
“Really? Like with the track meet?”
“I can still write that piece.”
She rolled her eyes. “Like you’re going to get your driver’s license renewed? No, excuse me, were going to get your license renewed.”
Elissa had intended this as a stinging jab, but I was proud of my suspended license, revoked because the uptight asshole Baltimore cops hated my art car and gave me tickets just for driving it on their streets and so I refused to pay their stupid tickets.
“And how long is this, how long do you think all this this is going to last?” Elissa asked, waving at the fake-wood-paneled walls of the CV and beyond it Prenzlauer Berg.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean what’s going to happen when West Berlin takes over? What’s going to happen to our place?”
“Squatters’ rights.”
“You’re sure?”
I wasn’t. “But can’t you just see how amazing this place will continue to be, and we’ll be the pioneers, we’ll—”
“Do you really believe that?” Elissa asked, her look slightly shifted from hostility to curiosity.
“I am sure of it,” I said, and Elissa nodded, took a sip of her beer to gather herself for the next assault.
“Aren’t you afraid,” Elissa said, “that it’s going to be like home—just like the East Villag
e? Look, the theater people are already fleeing to Odessa to wait tables at the Russia mafia resorts. Artists are like the tree frogs of society—when they start disappearing you know that gentrification has entered its final stage.”
I reached for my beer, and Elissa said, “Don’t you dare smirk at me.”
I hadn’t seen her this animated in weeks. She hadn’t engaged at all the previous night when we were here. When a big group of us were talking about agitprop theater, she had put her head on the table.
“You really don’t think,” Elissa continued, “come October 3, the West isn’t going to swallow the East? And the East is not going to fight, but welcome it. You’ve seen those Mercedes trucks driving around with guys tossing cartons of ‘West Brand’ cigarettes to the Easterners. They’re excited about bananas. They’re throwing out Bauhaus furniture.”
“You don’t have any faith, do you? In any of this,” I said, wondering when she had given up hope in this place, hope in me. “So what if you’re right, that the worst case scenario happens? If it does, we should be here to fight.”
Over her shoulder I could see people trickling into the CV, including several people I’d been talking to last night, musicians and this girl who’d told me about a new dance space. They nodded at me, but they could tell that we were deep into it, sadly.
“What are you talking about? This isn’t our fight, Rob. This isn’t our home.”
“It could be,” I protested, wanting to be anywhere but here now. It was like being trapped in quicksand—the more we talked, the faster we sank.
“Seriously?” Elissa said.
“Think of the Spanish Civil War.”
“Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so,” Elissa said. “Please. Spare me the Hemingway histrionics.”
“We should be writing about this,” I said, stung. “You can’t argue with that. It’s what artists do—report, reflect, give voice to the voiceless.”
“Of course. It’s material. And if you got your shit together you could write something about it, but guess what?” Her eyes flashed. The question hung in the air between us. She shrugged and looked at me like I’d been lying to her. “I don’t think your heart is really into this reporting business, is it?”
“It is,” I said, hearing the lie out loud for the first time. “Well . . . I do think it’s important for this”—I waved my hand to indicate the CV, which was filling with people—“for all of this to be documented. To bear witness.”
“I came here to write fiction, not be a foreign fucking correspondent. And what do you mean, ‘bear witness’?”
Hank was late. I could’ve really used him now. And Elissa had liked his idea that the CV could put in a gallery and local artists could sell their work and we’d help hook them up with New York galleries. Hank could take care of the wiring and carpentry while—
“We have lives,” Elissa continued, “friends, things we really want to write about. This is a great and wonderful diversion, but we have to think realistically about what’s going to go down next month. Honestly. What we’re going to do with no money, no citizenship, no—”
“Why do you always have to look at the downside?”
“Somebody has to.”
“Why?”
“Wouldn’t it have been nice if Colonel Kurtz had someone pointing out the dangers of going upriver?”
“Right,” I said. “I’m just paddling us upriver into—”
I felt a hand on my shoulder. Günther, one of Ringo’s fetchers, was wondering if I had seen his boss. We spoke in German and Elissa rubbed her temples. I felt like going with Günther to search for Ringo. Instead, I turned back to Elissa. “Do go on,” I said in my Grey Poupon voice.
“All I’m saying is you’re not opening your eyes to the reality of the situation.”
“And that’s a bad thing?” I said, joking but not joking.
“Oh, Rob,” Elissa said with an exasperated smile. If this had been a chess match, I’d have declared a stalemate, more out of fatigue than an actual deadlock. For one of us to win, the other would have to give up.
“We should go,” I said. “We don’t want to be late.”
“We’re already late,” Elissa said. She was right. Of course she was right. We silently nursed our beers, the mutual dissatisfaction lingering until Hank finally showed up. It was a relief to get up and walk the half-dozen blocks to Ralf’s small, clean apartment, where he made us dinner, something resembling Hamburger Helper washed down with jelly jars of a lighter-fluid-like German cognac which made Ralf all the more serious, and Hank uncharacteristically mute. It’s possible he was too busy enjoying his first real meal in days.
“No, you do not understand,” Ralf said as he topped off our drinks, the four of us wedged around his tiny, black-painted kitchen table. “We want the socialist experiment to continue.”
“L’Oréal puts lipstick on rabbits,” Elissa said, “and shoots hair spray in their poor little pink eyes.”
Ralf looked confused.
“All in the name of vanity,” Elissa continued. “Disgusting.”
“Animal testing,” I said. “She’s tired of this conversation. Go on. Ignore her.”
“We in the New Forum advocated for the removal of the corrupt government, but not socialism,” Ralf said.
“So you wanted the Wall to stay?” I asked.
“Not then, of course, no, but now, yes.”
“Really?” Hank asked.
“Your unchecked capitalism will crush socialism.”
“Wait,” I said. “You don’t think the elections—”
“No. I’m most worried about the people in the streets, the workers. What happens when you bring in your twenty-four-hour ‘convenient stores’?”
“What’s so bad about convenience?” Elissa asked.
“Exploitation of workers.”
“But most of the ‘convenient stores,’” Elissa said, making air quotes, “are family-run businesses owned by immigrants—imagine generations of a family working together in harmony.”
“Elissa, even if it is someone’s son working from midnight until eight in the morning, the son is still being exploited.”
Elissa shook her head.
Hours later, after Ralf had once again done his best to explain the importance of accurately measuring the number of neutrinos emanating from the center of stars—“the very foundational knowledge of the universe depends on this”—the conversation drifted to the East Village, the music and art scene, and our own troubles with gentrification.
“Didn’t you say that artists are being driven from New York?” Ralf asked me.
“Yes, somewhat—” I began, but Hank jumped in.
“We’re like rats there,” Hank said, slightly slurry. “We move away from the poison of gentrification and find the blighted spaces where only we will live. Now it’s Brooklyn.”
“What happens when there are no more blighted places?”
“In New York? That’ll never happen,” I said, for the first time feeling nostalgic for the city. I had to admit that I missed the energy, the tenacity.
“I have only been to West Berlin, and once to Rome for a conference where I had a Stasi escort. I would very much like to see New York,” Ralf said.
“Then you must come stay at our home,” Elissa said. “We’d be happy to show you our city. Wouldn’t we, Robby?”
46
“I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.”
—Joan Didion
Soundtrack: Bad Brains, “I Against I,” 1986
A FEW WEEKS AFTER seeing the Circle Jerks, I was at a party of stoners, Abby in another part of th
e big house, off with some other guy, my Marble Bar evening not forgiven. Someone handed me a white marble pipe and I was surprised by how hot is was and by my taking another hit, since I was already stoned and didn’t even like pot that much. I hated the clawing in my lungs and the floaty, stupid feeling afterward. I preferred the angry numbness of alcohol. Yet I liked the stoners, the Deadhead types, better than the prepsters, and wanted them to like me as well. I had just turned fifteen and punk was an answer. But it was only one answer. Peace, love, and understanding was another. So was art, but at the moment my creative thoughts were being asphyxiated by the pot, and, in a stoned revelation, that Baltimore was asphyxiating my creativity. Before any more deep thoughts could develop, the sofa swallowed me. It was so soft I felt like I was inside of it. It was an aquarium and everyone else was outside of the glass.
How in the world was I ever going to get off the sofa, or home? I was a mere mile and a half from my house, a distance I could have easily run in nine minutes. If I’d had legs. And all these fucking fish couldn’t give me a ride. How could fish drive?
“Don’t ever get in a car if the driver has been drinking or smoking pot.” I could hear my mother. “I’ll come get you, anywhere, anytime.” Oh, Jesus, not that. I was going to have to call her. She knew that I went to parties where there were drugs and alcohol, but she never asked if I drank or smoked pot. I wonder if she was afraid of the answer.
