“Why not? You tell me why not!”
“Because it’s bigamy! That’s why not! You’re married to me!”
We sat in the front seat of the old VW bus, in the vacant lot where some grand house once stood, in dusty furnace-hot Carson City, Nevada, and stared at one another.
His silver eyes were wide with amazement, and filled around the edges with fresh tears. One loose tear, forgotten, found an escape route down his cheek.
I wanted to touch it. Wipe it.
I wanted to touch him. I wanted to pull him right inside of me, and never let him out.
Tom gave a kind of delayed strangled screech. He grabbed my waist in both hands and bounced me bodily up: my knees smacked into the steering wheel and my ear grazed the roof; I was traveling a perfect arc, over the back of the driver’s seat, into the mid seat of the bus. Touchdown: the Eagle Has Landed.
I did some fancy screeching of my own: The sun shone on the seat, the vinyl was hot enough to fry eggs. But Tom was coming down on top of me—He was on top of me, and he was hotter than the seat by orders of magnitude.
———
You know all that trendy business in the schools, the rah-rah programs to molest-proof kids? They had the nerve to tell us, “You have to learn you are free to say no.”
I made radical trouble at that point, and a really evil name for myself, by raising my hand and saying, “We aren’t ‘free to say no!’ Not unless we’re also free to say ‘yes!’
“What a bunch of hypocritical schlock! We’re required to say ‘no,’ that’s what you’re saying: we’re under obedience to our parents, the schools, the cops; we aren’t allowed to be sexual. What’s with this ‘Free to say no’?”
Ground Zero, you guys!
Free to say yes!
Has anybody thought to teach me how?
All I know is, if I raise an eye, I’ll find the entire van surrounded by raunchy paunchy Nevadans in iridescent mirror shades and cowboy hats.
But there wasn’t any crowd of strangers watching. I was the only stranger watching. And watching. Watching me and watching him. Ut Videam. I didn’t know how to stop.
Suddenly, a tenable reason why we shouldn’t get it on in the parking lot. I tried to wriggle and say, “No!” Only the wriggling worked; my mouth was occupied. And wriggling is subject to misinterpretation.
Wriggle and squirm and go, “Mmwpf!”
Wonderfully unsuccessful. He was stronger than I was.
“Wedding night!”
“Don’t shout!”
Silence. The still, hot, drowsy car knew one sound, heavy breathing. His. Mine. We were wound up in each other like a bucket of snakes. “Sorry,” I whispered in his ear. “What I meant to say was, I only plan to have one wedding night, and I would very much like to do it right.”
Tom sat up, and I sat in his lap. There was no other car but ours in the entire blazing vacant lot. “I can understand that,” he said.
I watched a lizard scoot across the gravel. Another followed it.
“Fact is, I can understand quite well. Furthermore, I know exactly what to do about that. C’mon.”
———
Back on the main drag, headed south. Married. And getting close to the edge of town. But the middle of Carson City is close to the edge of town.
“Hey.”
We were passing a sun-blasted shopping plaza, around a Skagg’s market. A sign on the market’s front said Liquors.
I parked against Skagg’s plate glass. All across the store, just inside the glass and long before you came to the food, stood a phalanx of slot machines, and before every one stood a middle-aged woman in polyester, pulling the handle, letting it go. Putting in money, pulling the handle. One left empty-handed; a sister took her place.
Tom also came out empty-handed.
We saw one other liquor store, featuring slots: Tom did such a fast in-out there it amounted to a rebound. “You’d think,” he said, “a place like this’d want more liquor to get by.”
True: there would have been a Liquor Barn on every block in California. Now we were on the edge of town. We passed an empty field, a well diggers’ supply, a feed-and-grain. Then a little pink house made over to a store. The sign said Marge’s Licker Locker.
Hold it.
Marge was pushing fifty, bare-armed and burly. She tendered Tom the wistful once-over some people save for brand-new Cadillacs.
“I’ve just been in two bottle shops,” he said, “and asked them for their best champagne. The clerk said this, and I said ‘Wrong,’ and he said thus-and-such, and I said ‘Wrong—’ I found nothing there worth over twenty pounds! I must not be expressing myself too plainly in the local patois. What I meant to put across: I want the best all-out fuck-’em-dead champagne in the state of—”
He looked perplexed. I said, “Nevada.”
Marge’s eyes bounced back and forth from Tom to me for several seconds, like a spectator’s at a tennis match. She shook herself. “Hold on, now.” She gave a last speculative look at Tom over her shoulder. “You’re English, ain’t ya?” She went, and from the back came splintering crate sounds, popping staples, ripping cardboard.
Tom shook his head. “Feel really foolish never remembering the name of this place: must put me in mind of something I don’t want to think about—”
“‘Neva’ is Spanish for ‘snow’,” I whispered, and regretted it: his look could have withered trees.
“Didn’t have to say that.”
Marge came back with a bottle. Instead of a paper label, a name was painted on the glass in art nouveau sinuosity: “Perrier-Jouet, la Fluor de Champagne.” While on every side, white painted opium poppies swayed and danced against the green glass bottle, and hung their drowsy heads.
Tom’s eyes kindled. “All reet petite. Why didn’t y’say so in the first place?”
“—’Cause I don’t carry this, is why. It’s special for a lady out of town. One of her friends from the coast is partial to it.”
I reached up, and whispered, “Whorehouse,” in Tom’s ear. He gave me a startled look. “Legal in Nevada.”
“Like instant weddings?” he whispered back.
“More like slot machines.”
“God.” Then to Licker Lady, “How much are you asking?”
“—Now she don’t like people to mess with her orders. Still, I suppose one of these babies could get broken. Never has, but you know it’s always possible—I just know that I remember you from someplace.”
“How much?”
“One hundred dollars.”
“Oh God!” Tom squawked. “What’d y’do? Pack it in on native porters?”
“I’m a businesswoman, be fair: I gotta charge something for a breakage fee.” But she threw in two cheap glasses and a cooler of ice. Her last words, plaintive, longing, drifted down the steps behind us: “You wouldn’t be on the soaps, would you?”
———
The desert softened; it reverted to the nineteenth century with a sigh the minute Carson City fell behind. There were katydids singing in the grass. Dead skunks on the road. Lights coming on in squat, substantial farmhouses. And squat, substantial steers and quarter horses standing up to their bellies in sweet pasture.
Down behind the mountain, but still making himself known on his long retreat to the west, the sun spouted an amazing baroque fan of coral rays into the sky. The nearest ridge was gray-brown burlap stitched black for thickets and ravines. The one behind was flat dark purple, a cutout in wool felt. The height behind that was mauve, and behind that stood another, palest lavender; absurdly, almost tearfully like that place in the song:
Oh beautiful for spacious skies
For amber waves of grain (oat hay in this case)
For purple mountain majesties
Above
the fruited
plain.
Getting atop those mountains from the fruited plain is a two-hour’s drive on the California side. Fifteen rock-hard vertical minutes does it from the east:
up Woodford’s Canyon where the West Fork of the Carson tumbles down its shadowy chute into Nevada.
The old VW lugs on up and up the darkening grade. A doe high-steps her twin fawns through my headlights. Our first California sign says “Toiyabe National Forest: Land Of Many Uses.”
Above lie Faith, Hope, and Charity: three high valleys, shallow granite sky-bowls spilling evening light. Mormon settlers named them, clambering up this way with their pushcarts and their piety. The one the road runs through is Hope. And just beyond that, at the very top of Carson Summit, is a sign reading “Amador County Line.”
People notice what pertains to them. Like say, an Australian aborigine can spot a kangaroo in the bush a hundred times faster than a white guy, but the white guy’s faster at coins on the sidewalk. So here’s this sign. I saw Tom’s head crank right around to follow it. “That’s ‘Lover County!’”
“Well,” I said, “they try to make out like it means ‘Love of Gold,’ but that would have been ‘Amor d’Oro’—”
“It’s plain ‘lover.’ A weekend on Ibiza will give y’that much Spanish.” He shut up like a trap.
Caples Lake slips by in the twilight, followed by the looming mass of Carson Spur. Then Silver Lake, twinkling yellow nostalgia from store and lodge and campground. Our highway roller-coasters down the ridges; headlights turn approaching trees to ghosts. The sun has danced away over the edge of the world, “laughing,” as the Psalm puts it, “like a giant to run his race.” One last persimmon smear out by the coast still marks the way he went.
———
Yesterday afternoon, and far out there, I pursued that westering sun across the San Joaquin. My cabin chores were finished, I’d powered up pump and water heater, stowed my groceries, put fresh sheets on my parents’ big bed. Checked off my list of Tings 2 Do.
Getting on toward 3:00, I launched myself downhill for Oakland Coliseum and Bill Graham Presents. Ut videam. Well, I was going to see all right. Hope, depression, fatigue, and adrenalin began to fight it out. Almost an hour from the cabin to the highway, an hour down to Jackson, an hour from Jackson to Stockton across the Valley, pit stop for gas, two cups of coffee, and a fast trip to the bathroom. An hour from Stockton to Oakland Coliseum.
Smog, heat, crawling traffic, sinking sun. Belshangles won’t be on stage yet; your main attraction waits for dark. The Red Hot Chili Peppers might be doing their thing about now.
I abandoned the VW at the rim of the Coliseum lot. One last Ting 2 Do, find a good home for my extra ticket. I have an appreciation for fanatics. Sure enough, on the asphalt by the box-office window still lounged a line, two dozen of the hardcore ticketless. I applied myself to the end of it.
Ahead of me, a tall skinny kid was rattling around in new black Levi’s two sizes narrower than mine. He had blond hair and he’d dyed it black, then he’d dyed it red and it’d all grown out and gotten cut off in patches: it was really decadent if you took a close look. If you didn’t, it looked like mange. The front of his shirt said Psychic TV, and the back, “Brian Jones Died For Your Sins.”
We started to talk. Not that much younger than me; sixteen maybe. Not going to school. Playing guitar (sort of) and looking for a band (sort of). Living in Vallejo. He said his name was Joshua Sweet. I’d known at least a dozen of him. He was cute and sad and last in line. People at the head had hope even now for returns. He didn’t have a prayer. Thought to myself, I’ve found my boy.
I said, “I’ve got something that might interest you.”
We hunched over my purse, away from predatory eyes of types who hoped this was a drug deal they could join. There was the dog-eared envelope with the British stamps, inside that, the colored envelope, inside that, two precious strips of multicolored cardboard:
Bill Graham Presents: A DAY ON THE GREEN
Sunday August 17: BELSHANGLES
and special guests
Reserved Seats
Row Number:
Joshua Sweet gave it the long perusal of a kid who set great store in cool. “Ting, tang, walla-walla bing bang.”
“You might say that.”
He walked me further from the line. “How much?”
“Somebody gave ’em to me. I’ll give you one.”
He thought. “What for?”
“Fun.”
He thought some more. “I can live with that.”
“Look at it this way: I can’t sit on both of ’em.”
The line grew shorter by two bodies. Joshua Sweet and I loped toward the stadium. One last mysterious barricade of fear, that the tickets were a hoax which everyone would spot but me. Not to worry. The takers took ’em, tore ’em, and turned us loose, up the long concrete stairway to heaven.
J. Sweet’s practiced cool evaporated. He’d wanted to see the Chilies. I would’ve liked that too, but you can’t have everything. He’d writhed in helpless torment, hearing the thunder of their set from the Coliseum parking lot.
He’d wanted to see if Kiedis and Flea had the nerve to (or if Bill Graham let ’em) pull in a stadium what they usually did in clubs: get naked for their encore, with a gym sock apiece on their privates.
I went to hear them last October: crushed in the front row of a local club with an idiot crew of dudes who repeated like mantras every last word to the Chilies’ songs, and whose epitome of wit was to shout, “Whazzat in yer pocket?” and make a flying grab at the other’s shirt, to frantic evasion attempts and shrieks of “Fuckitman! You leave my goddamn tit alone!”
Or to bellow “Penis!” back and forth at one another.
I wanted to shout, “Shut up! You guy’s have all got ’em; be a whole lot funnier if you didn’t!”
Finally, there was Anthony Kiedis.
God help us, what a stage presence. He stalked and strutted, swung punches, fondled his crotch, flung himself into the crowd. It was a great act: obnoxious as hell, but great. Male authority at the sub-basement level, like a bull ape hooting and putting on the primal Ritz to the delirious wonder of his tribe.
Then the same stupid thrasher stepped on my head twice in successive kamikaze rushes to the stage. Nobody needs that. I headed for the tables and chairs in back. The whole back quarter of the audience was male. Guys who’d come with guys. The few chicks who’d gotten in the wrong rooting section beat a huffy retreat during the show.
And Kiedis kept egging his audience on to fuck each other (assuming of course, he said, that it was true love), and when that didn’t meet with much compliance, he ordered ’em all to kiss each other like crazy, and they wouldn’t. Somebody shouted that he didn’t want AIDS. I saw the sexual revolution ending, in much the manner T.S. Eliot says the world does.
The man on stage shouted back, “What d’ya mean it isn’t worth it?”
They stared up at him with little kid’s adoration—that said in every line “Look, just look up there! He’s our beauty! That’s what we are! We’d all be lean, splendid, fearless, just like that, if only you could see us right—”
Even then, nine months ago, they’d bagged the “sock” finale. Kiedis climaxed by binding himself, knees to nipples, round and round, with a roll of silver duct tape. A techno-punk Statue of Liberty he stood, and showered his screeching vicarious lovers with “canned confetti,” that spews out wet and white as semen, and dries to papery colored strips.
Nevertheless, J. Sweet kept asking kids he met about the socks. Legendry dies hard, I guess. It did appear the answer was “no.” I could have told him.
People flowed, each head a living corpuscle in the great slow veins of the stadium. Arteries pulsed up and down the concrete stairs. Small streams filtered through the toilets, past sticky soft drink outlets, and hotdogs duded up in catchy hues of mustard, ketchup, and relish. Past bazaars all rich and titillating with their heaps of T-shirts, pins, and programs. Capillaries fed them back into the seats. And the field below, what was that? The pumping heart of the matter, so full of celebrants, they compacted to a solid single flesh.
The crowd amused
itself, and waited for its heart’s desire. Recycled soft-drink cups, big tall ones, eight or ten inches of wax-coated red-white-and-blue commercialism, industriously smashed flat, make splendid disposable Frisbees. Collect several dozen, you can fly ’em off the stands at once, joined by hundreds of others’ zealous collections, and the air grows full for a moment of flying jubilation, like a swarm of bees in May. Fifteen minutes, the collectors will have done their work again: gathered up all their waxy colored fliers with newly flattened reinforcements from colas bought and guzzled in the interval—up they go.
We’d put ourselves in the reserved seats, and they were splendid, perfect comfort, perfect view. J. Sweet emitted all the small talk he could think of, and a distinct impression he wasn’t happy sitting there with me. I knew what he wanted to do, go down and mingle. Hack, stab, kill, and bullyrag himself through that human flesh-flow covering the green until his belly touched the stage front.
The man I loved had put my name on the seat I was in. Nobody gets that kind of treasure and the stage front too.
“Who’d you say gifted you with these fine seats?”
I said, “Tommi Rhymer.”
“Himself?”
“Himself.”
“Right. Well that was really—ah—kind of him.”
Well do I know the look; he thinks I’m crazy or druggy or both. “Yeah. It was.”
“Be sure to thank him for me.”
I said, “Will do.”
“I suppose you wouldn’t very much mind—”
“No,” I said, “Feel free.”
Last seen bouncing down the stands, he vanished at the bottom, a grateful fish into the human sea. Darkness falls sedately and seductively, ten thousand wisps of pot smoke rising past it like the sweet odor of evening sacrifice.
Think about the person who marries Tommi Rhymer. What will she get for her portion? Backstage, for sure. In his dressing room, in the limo, in his bed. But never front-row center anymore. I hadn’t penetrated the outmost of those places: and here already, a wave of nostalgia for front-row center. I felt remote and solitary as the moon.
Canned rock thunders from the speakers. Monster video screens flash bright seductive images above the stage. Down on the field a dude is getting tossed in a blanket: popping up from human anonymity with arms and legs spread wide and flailing, into the festive summer evening. And see there? Halfway across, another spread-eagled body accelerates into view! Competition! The first bounce takes him maybe two feet over people’s heads, the second three, the third five—
White Leather and Flawed Pearls Page 8
