Noise

by Peter Wild

  Inside the ballroom, tugging, someone tugging at his hand, stopping, easing him around, a grinning girl, couldn’t be more than eighteen, looked like she’d fallen off the cover to In Watermelon Sugar. He who has no faith, she said, eyes afire and hands raised as if offering invisible fruit, and no wisdom and whose soul is in doubt–is lost. His future self blinked slowly like a cow. He noticed the music blaring, some furious, honking harmonica goose. A Jagger-not-Jagger singing, FROM YOUR SWIMMING POOL TO YOUR BIG CAR TO THAT SENSELESS BOMB SHELTER IN YOUR BACKYARD. For neither this world, the girl continued, nor the world to come nor joy is ever for the man who doubts. He almost but not quite placed his face in her upturned palms. Her expression mutated like candle-flame: her smile fading and sparking, her eyes flaring, malevolent, beatific, thrilling, her bright white teeth shining in the dark. The music changed–a voice, THE UNIVERSE IS PERMEATED WITH THE ODOUR OF KEROSENE, a scream, a crunching, crunching guitar riff that sounded like some kid seesawing abuse at his mother. Kill therefore, she spoke over the noise with a clarity that was angelic, kill with the sword of wisdom the doubt born of ignorance that lies in thy heart. He wanted to speak but the words died in his throat. The girl saw, both the effort and the failure, and placed her hands gently against his cheeks, intent, a mother searching her child’s face for the bee-sting left in the skin. He who has faith has wisdom, she said, who lives in self-harmony, whose faith is in life; and he who finds wisdom soon finds the peace supreme. He dry swallowed again, and then again. The peace supreme. That was what he wanted. Had the song changed? I REALLY DON’T KNOW WHEN OR WHERE TO GO. I CAN’T SEE A THING TILL YOU OPEN MY EYES. I CAN’T SEE A THING TILL YOU OPEN MY EYES. I CAN’T SEE A THING TILL YOU OPEN MY EYES. The girl raised her bare arms in the air, her eyes and her smile pure rapture. Be one in self-harmony, she yelled, and arise, great warrior, arise!…

  The process by which his historical self grew lighter and more carefree continued, through 1966 and into 1965. He was involved with the campaign to save Viola Liuzza. There were things being said, information that was being released to the press, about how Viola was a member of the Communist Party of America, about how Viola enjoyed sexual relations with African-American men despite the fact that she was married and a mother. She was a civil rights activist. That was the story. All these other things were lies and it was his job to go out into the world and scoop them up, that was his job, to scoop up all the lies. There he was talking on the telephone, scooping all the words up. There he was typing, snick-snick-snick, removing ink from letters and stories and memos that were not distributed or stored on file. He sucked them all up until there was nothing left, until Viola was just an activist who was killed by Klansmen in Wayne State. In the weeks following all his hard work dismantling the smear campaign, he was discouraged because it turned out that one of the men who had shot Viola Liuzza as she drove local marchers home in her 1963 Oldsmobile, one of the Klansmen who put a bullet in her head, worked for the FBI. One of his own men had let him down. It was terrible. But then Viola wasn’t dead anymore. She was just one of many people horrified by images of the aborted march on Edmund Pettus Bridge, one of a vocal minority, but then she wasn’t even that. She disappeared from his radar and he felt much better, was much happier in his work, was exonerated, felt like, as the days and the nights drew in on themselves and the winter of 1965 gave way to the autumn of 1964, happier. Happier than he’d ever been. Working alongside cryptographers as part of the VENONA decrypts, infiltrating the CPUSA, working for the good of the country against those no-good commie bastards, a hero, he was a hero again, he wasn’t contaminated, life was good, he worked the side of right, was a good man, had a wife, had a future, spent evenings talking about children, worked but kept work and home life separate, had a home life, was happy, was a good man, was a good, happy man…

  Two…

  His future self was anxiously scanning the crowd for Tuck, they’d got split up, the two of them, somehow, and so he was looking, roaming, another Jagger-not-Jagger singing about THE BANKS OF THE RIVER CHARLES, AW THAT’S WHAT’S HAPPENIN’ BABY, OH THAT’S WHERE YOU’LL FIND ME, ALONG WITH THE LOVERS, THE FUGGERS AND THIEVES, AW BUT THEY’RE COOL PEOPLE. There were gangs and clusters and cliques amid the milling patchouli throng. Young girls with ironed hair in patchwork dresses with bare legs and bare feet and beads. Hairy Raskolnikoffs with open shirts and velvet jackets and flowers. Guys in leather with greasy hair and tattoos stalking women with snake-eyes and snake-lips and snake-hips. Groovy, freakish could-be boys, could-be girls in gold and silver shirts and trousers dancing, spinning with their hands outstretched like fluttering fanatic butterflies. The light show on the stage was becoming frantic, gulls swooping, missiles flying, freaks and pigs clashing in the streets, flowering tapestries of intersecting purple and red diamonds, red and white circles and oily blobs of yellow and orange, cosmic light beams lurching drunkenly over the faces of those near by, transforming stupid, vacant-looking hippy kids into phantoms and spectres and hobgoblins, the Grande Ballroom a shabby haunted house, host to the end of the world. Vedder thought he saw silver-bearded John Sinclair pointing at him over the heads of the crowd, laughing like a demented iron fox from the future. He saw Tuck the instant the music cut, over by the fire exit, waylaid by Panthers. A short guy in a leather jacket with wild hair and sunglasses, arms outstretched like a lay preacher, advanced on the stage, the crowd roaring, a short history of white noise, people clapping, clapping, clapping. BROTHERS AND SISTERS!!! he yelled. BROTHERS AND SISTERS! I WANT TO SEE YOU, SEE YOUR HANDS OUT THERE, WANT TO SEE YOU, SEE YOUR HANDS. Tuck was trying to assert some control over the situation, had his badge out, but the Panthers, one of the Panthers at least, slapped at his hand and the badge disappeared. I WANT EVERYONE TO KICK UP SOME NOISE! I WANT TO HEAR SOME REVOLUTION OUT THERE, BROTHERS. I WANT TO HAVE A LITTLE REVOLUTION! Vedder stood there, watching Tuck as the crowd roared and jeered, shouting and screaming. BROTHERS AND SISTERS! THE TIME HAS COME FOR EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU TO DECIDE WHETHER YOU ARE GOING TO BE THE PROBLEM OR WHETHER YOU ARE GOING TO BE THE SOLUTION. Thasss right, someone close by hissed. YOU MUST CHOOSE, BROTHERS, YOU MUST CHOOSE! Vedder could feel it, what the man on the stage was saying, could feel it in his own heart and in his own chest. Arise, great warrior, arise! IT TAKES FIVE SECONDS, he yelled. FIVE SECONDS OF DECISION! FIVE SECONDS TO REALISE YOUR PURPOSE HERE ON THE PLANET. Tuck was wheeling about, same time as he scanned the crowd, wanting Vedder to emerge out of the dark like the goddamned cavalry or something only he had no intention of saving the day. He was watching. He was listening. He was feeling it, man. IT’S TIME TO MOVE. IT’S TIME TO GET DOWN WITH IT. BROTHERS, IT’S TIME TO TESTIFY. Someone almost standing on his shoulder yelled, Oh yeah! Oh yeah! THE DAY IS GOING TO COME WHEN WE ARE ALL GOING TO HAVE TO TESTIFY. More people were yelling now. Yeah! Oh yeah! I KNOW I’M READY TO TESTIFY AND I WANT TO KNOW ARE YOU READY TO TESTIFY? THE GOLDEN ARMS OF ZENTA ARE GOING TO REACH DOWN–he jabbed a finger into the crowd, pointed right at Vedder, it seemed–AMONG EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU AND YOU’LL HAVE TO GET DOWN AND TESTIFY THEN! Vedder was shivering. Rooted to the spot. ARE YOU READY? Vedder nodded. Ignoring Tuck. Tuck a million miles away from where he was. Tuck lost. Tuck gone for ever. People mounted the stage, men in shiny silver jackets with big hair strapping instruments to themselves like explosives. I OFFER TO YOU RIGHT NOW! A TESTIMONIAL!!! THE MC5!!!

  Centred on Warren and Forest, his arrested self felt the heat, the heat of the crowd and the heat of the historical self burning with righteousness and devotion even as the petrol bomb struck and restruck the Detroit office of the Committee to End the War in Vietnam, fire and flame, the whoomph over and over again, his historical self burning brighter and still brighter as his future self stood transfixed, pending, on the edge, MC5 errupting, JUNG- JUNG-JUNG-JUNG, their noise and volume like fifty electrical storms, his future self charred and burned as if sheet lightning were intersecting him at fifty different points on his body simultaneously. JUNG-JUNG-JUNG-JUNG
. Within their deep infinity he saw in-gathered and bound by love in one volume the scattered leaves of all the universe. The light of a thousand suns suddenly arose in the sky. JUNG-JUNG-JUNG-JUNG. MY LOVE IS LIKE A RAMBLING RO-OSE. JUNG-JUNG-JUNG-JUNG. His historical self obliterating even as his future self exploded, divided and dividing, taking all the paths not taken, plunging headlong into the future even as MC5 THE MORE YOU FEEL IT THE MORE IT GROWSJUNG-JUNG-JUNG-JUNGED. His future self disgraced before the Citizen’s Commission to Investigate the FBI. His future self disgraced before the Church Committee. His future self up to his eyes in the Keith case. And all the radicalism for nothing. No civil war. No end to the war. Not for years. War and strife and civil unrest for years, for decades, but stripped of all of its effectiveness. No winners. No believers. Just war and his part in it. RAMBLIN’ ROSE. RAMBLIN ROSE. I’M GONNA PUT YOU DOWN. JUNG-JUNG-A-JUNG, JUNG-JUNG-A-JUNG, JUNG-JUNG-A-JUNG. The petrol bomb striking the window, blooming and flowering, blooming and flowering, even as the light show behind the band bloomed and flowered, even as the noise shook his bones, scouring him, carving him hollow even as the historical self black to calmed, the exploding exploding exploding exploding like spiders across the stars—

  One…

  And then, suddenly, it was so simple. Everything was laid out before him, everything that was and everything that would be. He saw it all, he held all within him and he was, momentarily, everything. An offer was made, an offer he wanted no part of, and his refusal cancelled all that had been, nullified the diffusion, restored him once more–but he was changed and, rather than complete the arc and throw the petrol bomb at the Detroit office of the Committee to End the War in Vietnam, he stopped, paused, turned about and returned to the car, Tuck instantly crazy, asking him whattthehellyou–even as the rag’s flame caught the bottle and the Highland-green Ford Mustang split like a cheap joke cigar.

  little trouble girl

  emily carter roiphe

  The name Sonic Youth brings an instant jerk to my shoulders and my toes curl with revulsion…not that their music is bad, in fact I kind of like it, especially the Neil Young influenced thrash and trash guitar. It may have to do with envy of course. I was in the same town at the same time and I most emphatically did not get famous. The cameras came down to record the Spoken Word scene at the Nuyorican Café exactly three weeks after I had gone to Minnesota for chemical dependency treatment. Not only that, there was a huge riot in Tompkin’s Square Park the very next day–not the Riot Grrl kind with suicidal nymphettes in house slips shouting and refusing to bow down to anyone’s patriarchal definition of knowing how to ‘play’ an instrument, but the real kind, with cops on horseback hitting people on the skull so hard that they bled internally into their brain cavities. Horrible, but I should have been there, it was part of the history of my city. Sonic Youth was in the East Village air a lot in those days–but mostly as background noise for me and the aspiring writers with whom I came in contact. Their looks embarrassed me, frankly, by illustrating my own pretensions–sullen, arty looking white kids who were attempting to cop some sort of attitude while meanwhile there was actual poverty, tragedy and child abuse everywhere you looked, along with art, of course, on every spare square inch, art and music. I can remember them doing a sound check in the Tompkin’s Square bandshell one morning, no fun for my ears, and watching a dispute going on just east of the stage. One of the many instant art collectives that banded and disbanded by the week had put up a piece of ‘guerrilla’ art, guerrilla because it had neither been funded nor zoned…an act of defiance. A guy from the collective–who would today be called a ‘hipster’–and a woman, who looked like, but was not, Kim Gordon, were disputing with the parents of a couple of kids. The ‘guerrilla’ art looked like a festive and many-coloured jungle gym, and some kids were trying to climb on it. No, no, the arty guy goes, it’s dangerous, stop…The woman said something about cordoning it off. One kid’s father, who was drinking a tallboy, was bellowing loud and full of wounded swagger, ‘The fuck you put something like that up in fuckin park, the kids can’t fuckin play on it? I’ll sue your ass…’ One of the band’s roadies or someone got on the mike and tried to calm everyone down, in the same manner and with just as much efficacy as Mick Jagger at Altamont crooning ‘brothers and sisters’ to a crowd of Hell’s Angels on methamphetamine and PCP. The mother of some other kids started screeching that her kid had got hurt, a bottle was hurled and the artists fled, their sunglasses falling off, carefully moussed coiffures a-wobble. The band played on…Art has no reason to consider practical things like the fact that putting up a sculpture that looks like something kids could play on but wasn’t might not be the best way to contribute to the community. No time to consider that art-noise-rock-screech soundcheck might be the one bit of indifference that would send a depressed, chemically dependent college drop-out over the edge, especially when she looked at Kim Gordon, all ice-cool and swanlike aloofness while the college drop-out scraped the dirty sweat off her own forehead with a matchbook. Ah well, Sonic Youth fades, but Sonic Middle Age also has something to be said for it. I just wish I hadn’t missed so much of the genuine art and music (Sonic Youth included, for all I know) that was bubbling around in the 1980s. Compulsion was yanking me around in those days, and compulsion, no matter what anyone says, is the exact opposite of rock and roll.

  The Minneapolis addiction medicine clinic’s waiting room is quite small and acoustically tiled. Still, it vibrates with a faint fluorescent hum. One entire wall is taken up with a poster bearing a diagram of emphysematic lungs, which sits behind a glass case so no one can steal it. For such a small waiting area it contains a global cross-section of humanity. Sitting in little plastic chairs, waiting to dose, we often look like some kind of small-world diorama designed by Walt Disney if he’d been chronically depressed.

  Aside from the African-Americans from Indiana and Chicago, there are the Native Americans whose antibuse is mixed with the pink Oral Metha-dose in their dixie cups. There are the women, white, black and native, who bring their kids in.

  ‘He’s got the croup. That’s why he’s not in school.’

  Once I saw a mother hemming the cuffs of her nine-year-old son’s suit as she waited to get her methadone. ‘He’s going to his first dance,’ she explained.

  ‘Are you excited?’ asked a man who could have been either thirty-five or sixty. ‘I’d be excited if I was going to see my first dad.’

  No one informed him of the fact that he’d misheard dad for dance. A still silence settled over the room. The hard-time Midwestern white guys stared at the emphysema poster, sitting stock still in the small plastic chairs the colour of baby aspirin, the spidery lines around their eyes etching out the words: ‘Her fault’.

  By rights I should sit with the ageing punk rockers, those in various shades of black denim, just held together by layers of grime, soot and ash, oil and studs. They seem to have been wearing their outfits for thirty years, or since the last time they cared about ‘fashion’, or even ‘anti-fashion’. Perhaps it took that long to create the look with any kind of authenticity. The really young ones have dreadlocks and facial tattoos, homeless kids, runaways, they mess up my mind with a split between maternal instinct and wondering where they got the money to even get an opiate dependence to begin with, especially in Minnesota, where a ten dollar bag from New York or Chicago costs fifty bucks. It can be done, of course…but first off you have to sell or pawn your possessions and these little ones didn’t look like they had any. The boys I don’t know, but the little girls, while still lovely, were not exactly ‘escort service’ material. All these children–maybe started out in the farmland areas, babies in the big town.

  It’s not a big town, of course, not New York or Chicago; social service lines move fast so people can afford to be chatty. Still, if it wasn’t for the bright splashes of Hmong community colour, I might think that all that was left in the world were shades of darker and lighter grey.

  The Hmong are here at the clinic
to get a small taste of an opiate, the herbal and organic version of which is no longer available to them here. In their traditional culture, the elderly would take a bit to ease the inevitable aches and pains of ageing. As in every culture, some people stray from tradition and into obsession. It seems ridiculous in a way, for them to be on methadone – opium being a much less potent drug than any kind of synthesised opiate Western medicine can offer. I do not know what kinds of problems smoking opium caused and still causes, but it can’t be as hard to detox from as methodone…Can it? Or do they have to take it because it’s an opiate-blocker, simply to prevent them from getting high. I am as lost thinking about their lives as they must be having landed here – a frozen, metal planet navigable only by their children.