Decline and Fall of Alternative Civilization

by G S Oldman

  ~ ~ ~

  A 1956 Ford was a thing of beauty and his was a powerful beast capable of outrunning unsuspecting takers on the open road. The big-block side-oiler was a far cry from all sensible coupes and, like war, nothing made sense anymore. He was the last tin soldier standing his ground and he had learned that no war is ever really over. At best, it stops roaring, orders are no longer given, it becomes a brooding monster at idle, but the soldier is never free of it.

  The potent manifold atop the big V-8 was crazy-four massive Webers instead of the Holley setup-but he had all day to wrestle with them. As every day. By nightfall a serious test run was possible; another escape from the prison he could leave almost anytime he wanted. Another midnight run, another launch toward the vanishing point but he knew?he could drive all night and never leave home.

  VI

  "If you do not expect the unexpected you will not find it,

  for it is not to be reached by search or trail"

  -Heraclitus

  With Wendell and Jerry out of their lives, the girls were again on their own-a fine duality on the threshold of discontent. June wondered what made a Farrah Fawcett start fires. Dedra asked what made a Stevie Nicks want to put them out. A band. What exactly did that mean? This time no one had pulled the rug out from under her. June's own hand had done the yanking, the falling-on-the-ass part was like a day at the carnival, and the pickins for new players were slimmer than ever. Even with more musical purpose, no one, other than Bryan, took them seriously. He was in two fashionably humorless bands and, having thrown a rod in his old Plymouth Valiant and being financially unable to fix it anytime soon, every few days his girlfriend would sensationally kick him out of the house. The gals got used to coming home from work to find him sleeping on their porch, huddled in a sleeping bag with his bolt-neck Rickenbacker 480-the guitar he loved (and his peers hated). For "rent" the girls made him play music with them and show them new stuff.

  A challenging time for all, life annoyingly went on. June had long proven herself one of the best waitresses that ever stood at attention and saluted under the Double Burger. Sold American! Fried and cried and clipped to the wheel of the cooks' card-trick fortune! Her bass playing was escalating to a higher level and her fingers were making shorter work of learning catchy riffs. Night after night she would drag the instrument into bed to pluck notes in the privacy of darkness, to feel them vibrating through the wood like a massage. The sound of the low twang was magic. Love was just love, lust was just lust, but magic would always be magic-a prayer thanking St. Leo Fender for making her nights more sleepful.

  Dedra, ever more frustrated with the demands of digital dumbdowns, found a welcome muse in her withdrawals from white line fevers and soul-sucking boyfriends that booted her into a fertile writing spell. She was the "Yellow Chicken-Shit Rose," and from this persona came the lyrics to their first decent song:

  The girl at ground zero's star.

  Ice cream at the whiskey bar.

  Snakes at the edge of darkness

  under a full Alabama moon.

  Yellow.

  There was no explanation for what the eerie hallelujah meant. Both girls wrestled with it until the night they sizzled into mid-tempo heat over a simple four-note phrase. June was less able to explain it. Literalism was overrated and too much music was crippled by it. It was all about the colors that not only baffled others but also baffled her. No wonder she was trying to be a musician. It was a valid canvas in which to discover and hide a rainbow of life's confusions within the folds of a dumb beauty. All they needed was a guitarist and a drummer.

  Born the day Elvis died,

  Mama left, Daddy cried.

  Black skirts against fire velvet

  under a full Alabama moon.

  Chicken.

  Most of their songs had been simplistic (stupid, even), girlish rants on boys, alarm clocks, drinking coffee, drinking whiskey, killing customers and gynecologies (well, something had to come out of the G-CC experience). This melodic backwoods road was actually taking them somewhere. The bassist plucked and twanged onward, closed her eyes and remembered the early 1980s when she flew the coop, left her mom to rot on her own terms. Waitressing stayed her through college until the hunger, the change of life, the next point of debarkation, the Chicago denouement-where the filter collapsed and the grounds spilled into the brew.

  From the nights of drinky, druggy punk clubs, there came that guy, the guitar boy, black jeans and half-stack attitude. Standing right in front of her, he held the promise of fulfilling the optimism her schooling seemed incapable of, and came the day when the bus driver had to stop and use the bathroom while waiting passengers stood on the curb and got splashed when another bus went by. With the motor running and all the washing machines in Lincoln Park jammed in the spin cycle, June listened to the boy pop the question. No transfers were given; no one got off; no one pushed; she buried her face in his shoulder, bit down on her lower lip. Jesus, if he had any sense at all, had gotten the hell out of the city for good. She said Yes, and was ecstatic she had worn underwear that day.

  She endured the alterations of a third-hand bridal gown, and the day of the wedding-nervous, sweating, tangoing down the aisle, the words "man and wife"-it seemed a good fit. Dozing off with her bass one night she remembered all of it and scribbled the image that summed up the expectation; her lyric contribution to Dedra's song:

  Pulses rising, all the things

  that vibrate in dizzy strings.

  A million legs were dancing

  under a full Alabama moon.

  Shit.

  It could easily have been a blue Chicago moon.

  Uncle Kevin, please save us.

  He gave her away at the altar and would have talked sense into the girl's head or given her earplugs so she could never have listened to REM. In 1984 punk rock was dead. Long live the body of the queen, and to the queen all would march. Parades of vinyl wishes prayed 'tween the motorcades of tape-to-tape dubs, and a rainbow coalescence of a dancing minority hop, hop, hopped to the beat of a new Republican sincerity. "O say can you be an alternative to taste?" said the mincing spider to the prancing fly. In a red garage, an ex-livery stable, the spider and the fly smoked the hand-rolled tobaccos of the old regime. O'Malleys who would have opposed DeLucas had they not decided to simply get along and let their paper citizenry cut and trim their own waste. For every established profit there is an alternative profit; for every alternative profit there is an anti-profit; for every anti-profit there is a road that lies between loss and profit where highwaymen and samaritans stay busy 24 hours and patronize the all-night restaurants. They order their existence, wink at their angels and tip their Junes. Regardless of their moral illusions, all men will pay for a smile.

  At first she liked REM and so did her husband, as did the rest of the hip young world that had given up on the inadequacies of a hardcore that slouched toward power steering and automatic translucence. It was time to be an adult and prove that the college experience had not been in vain. That the Schopenhauers had not been irrelevant to modern human will. The books had rounded off the edges and REM could roll her into the ball that made life, loss, and love easier to accept, easier to project into a future with someone who was prone to roll into a similar adult ball. Able to leap lofty ideals with a single bounce on a double bed, but unable to leap the plaints of Leonard Cohen or any reminders of a youth that imploded into a hollow clown's laugh.

  The song "Sisters of Mercy" could only make June laugh and think of the time when she stood alone in the middle of her room. The night her brother left with barely a word, nary a smile, just a silence that couldn't bring him back home. A trick of light or an aberration of four-eyed vision made the walls ripple like curtains as he stepped through the door and she felt herself pulled by the slipstream of his disappearing footsteps. To the downbeat of the front door closing, she became the pivotal anchor to a music that bore down on her like a dark forest of shimmying nymphs
. A waltz, and she was the rhythm section rooted to a melody that couldn't be heard. June laughed up the strength to move from the middle of the room to her bed where she sat, laid down, stopped laughing, and wondered what song could make her not hear the voices in the walls laughing at her. Some moments go beyond anything pain can make sense of. Some things, at best, make no sense at all. Some music can never fill an emotion with reason.

  REM? What on earth had she been thinking?

  Ah, yes, Perpetual Optimism!

  When her dear uncle died, it was the last old-style wake the family knew. On the third day of the affair it sank in that the feisty storyteller, whiskey-puller, coffee-brewer from the County Cork was gone and there was no substitute for the pure magic of his Gaelic ways or the music of his voice-the sound of a smoky tenor saxophone played by the last good piper on earth. No substitute. Not in this family. She imagined, in the next shot of Bushmill's, this voice forever weaving stories in and through the spirits of air that rose above his grave to give the ghosts of his ancestors a place where they could come, wake up, and smell the coffee. But in this family: no, nay, never?no, no more. In her life: no, nay, never?no chance, lass.

  Pouring another Big Mac shot, there was the cracked mirror of marriage, and Uncle Kevin was the only person who could have saved her from its easy, crumbling disintegration. Hope being the virtue that not only springs eternal, without it Faith would barely exist, leaving Charity the bastard child seeking something to follow, and as unlikely to make sorrow more sensible or death more endurable among the living. She could only hope to keep her glass empty to see more clearly all it contained.

  Optimism?

  Her husband was a bon vivant who couldn't leave the breezy life behind. But he managed. She got her wings with Southwest, and things seemed to manage pretty well for themselves when he got the job with the freight company that moved them to New York and forced June to seek employment with Continental where her training in Houston became a separation from domestic uncertainty. The flight attendant managed for his mismanagement more and more, til she managed to notice how he managed to not change the oil or even check its level in the old Thunderbird he claimed to cherish so much.

  Capitulatory economics.

  The day it spun its vintage bearings and hurdy gurdy-ed across the Brooklyn Bridge for the last time, she was furious to arrive home and have to manage the towing of its classic 1962 hulk, and more furious to see the chic metalwork that reeked the ugly odor of 10w-40 heavily seasoned with steel garlic and fried in a cast-iron oven. He told her it would be OK, not to worry; it was a tough old car, it could be rebuilt.

  With whose fucking money, she screamed.

  We'll get by, he reassured.

  Ready to walk out on him, she felt silly for wanting to bust up a marriage over an automobile she cared more about than he did. He had never raised a hand or lifted a finger against her but this example of man's inhumanity to machine she took personally. Not because he had promised to restore it and give it to her, more because she sensed a rugged American solidity had been destroyed that could not be repaired. He balked, he whined, she made him sell it-a parts car, dissipation. She handled the negotiation and the sale. He held it against her in meek accommodation. The silence of a wolf in lamb's clothing, sans the dignity to attack her openly, forever waiting in wide-open shadows, hiding fangs that insisted they would not bite?

  With the T-bird gone, they continued making payments on the GLC. A lame high school cafeteria car, most of the payments came out of her paycheck, with the reasons to not drive it:

  1) It was his car and he was probably well on his way to destroying it.

  2) It was her feet and she knew what they were connected to.

  3) She didn't want to take responsibility for anything other than what she could destroy on her own.

  4) Finnegans Flyer had been a good car in its prime; she had learned a lot from it.

  5) She still had the idea of making the marriage work and the thought of busting it up over an automobile as lame as the Mazda made no sense.

  (But, uhhh?

  VII

  ?to set the record straight, self-propelled road vehicles can be traced back to the year 1769, and Leonardo DaVinci had already sketched the concept. Academically, the "first automobile" was built by Karl Benz in Mannheim, Germany in 1885 and patented in 1886. There were steam-driven machines and obscure European internal combustion experiments [and a few electric-powered attempts] before that, but the Benz garnered the documentation to establish it as the first practical car: El Primer Coche sin Caballos!

  Wonders in their day, for almost a quarter century these contraptions lumbered along in noisy, infernal slowness, scaring pedestrians and horses with rude explosions of petroleum-based fuel and electrically-generated fire. Eventually, practical thinking men conjured up the technical refinements that made estos coches almost civilized.

  Far less practical men, who were usually more forward thinking, knew that los coches diab?licos could move faster and race each other a la their four-legged forebears. These were the logically sane, the logically insane, the daredevil-dreaming European sportsmen whose spunky visions would bon essayez! muddy road courses with their Peugeots, Delahayes and Daimlers. Americans then took up the mechanized cause, and by the turn of the century, a wizard named Henry Ford proved that bone-rattling speed was attainable via simple, confident technology. Behind the tiller of his famous 999 race car, in 1904 he brightly knocked the land speed record out from under the French. Indeed. Still, automobiles were a dicey proposition-a rich man's toy that was generally unreliable and not universally liked.

  All other rolling innovations aside, the first automotive distributor was created in the early twentieth century, and in 1910 it was successfully utilized on that year's Cadillac. Credited to Charles Kettering under the auspices of the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Co. [Delco], it was quite an advancement. Early gasoline-powered engines had been sparked by means of a magneto-a simple, static device that proved impractical since once the ignition timing was set, it was a done deal; that was as fast as you could go, and forget about snappy acceleration. After the introduction of the distributor [whose design gave a system of variable timing and more efficient combustion, contingent upon engine speed], things began to change. During the First World War this electronic improvement gave vehicle and tank operators and their respective mechanics more control over their machines in the field. It was cutting-edge technology, and any advantage that made machines of destruction more workable in combat was quick to be manufactured and put into use.

  Romantically, the first distributor cap theft occurred somewhere in an enemy motor depot. It was a foolproof method of keeping a machine from running-an essential sabotage: once the cap is removed from the system, no electricity will get to the spark plugs-and the tradition continued in postwar years and flourished in the 1920s when burgeoning industrialism and the popularity of the automobile were on the rise. Thanks again, Mr. Ford. And while he leaned against Chicago lampposts tossing his lucky coin, mechanic Lefty O'Connor didn't think his fingers would cause such sticky legend during the dark nights of Prohibition. He was just a man, after all.

  As men go, Lefty was almost simpleminded and wasn't afraid to dirty his hands underneath the hoods of sickly automobiles. He also liked the taste of whiskey but the law was standing between him and his glass and he knew something had to be done about it. Some say he commanded a fleet of fast boats but that would have cast him as a mere rumrunner. Perhaps he did, perhaps he didn't. It was true he often spent his daylight hours at the lakefront but it weren't no crime if a man wanted to watch boats come and go, were it? And it weren't no crime for a man to cock his head and harden his gaze when he heard one o them boats' motors not running smoothly, now, were it? It was also true that when he did hear such an aquatic flivver down on its screws he would soon be conversing with the helmsman about something that made the helmsman smile. In no time, that flivver would be purring
like a seagoing pussycat, quieter than ever. He had the fingers to make it happen.

  While Treasury agents like Elliot Ness had some fast boats and big cars, the Mob had Lefty and Lefty had the means to disable the big bad Untouchable machines, and the booty went through more often than not. No one knew how he did it [or who did it for that matter] but he did it, dammit. He did it. He knew their distributor caps were very touchable. No fingerprints were left, just a slender ribbon of horsehair cloth gathering the spark plug wires together, tied in a neat bow like a present. The calling card: the Capper was here. Once called in for questioning, no one could prove it was Lefty O'Connor, so the T-Men let it go.

  He would ditch the stolen caps in places the T-Men were sure to find them, with actual horsehairs attached to them. The message was clear. The Big T could be outwitted at any time. In the hallways, on the streets, in offices shuttered to all other ears it was quietly spoken: "It was the Capper, Elliot. Yeah. The damned Capper got us again." But the Capper was just a man, and somewhere he smiled at the lucky coin on his fingertips, seconds before he flipped it.

  After the fall of Prohibition, when liquor-loving men and women were no longer criminals, Lefty O'Connor disappeared. Not a matter of great concern, it was simply mysterious-neither the Mob nor law enforcement officials having a clue. Distributor cap thefts no longer occurred. The more common and easier theft of the single coil wire became the norm when disabling automobiles. Face it, Lefty was an artist; wire stealers were thieves.

  In the 1940s, when "Guv'mint Revenooers" stepped up efforts to stop the flow of illegal spirits in the south, distributor caps were disappearing again in Lefty-like fashion. Backwoods lore does not reveal many details, but the perpetrator was a great friend to those boys whose white lightning cargos thundered through the pines in the trunks of their hot-rodded Ford coupes.

  Later still, a spate of cap thefts wandered across the face of an America that was eager to stow its Atomic Age Denial behind whatever convenient wall it could. Few people paid more than passing attention until they happened near the old mining town of Jerome, AZ. Arizonans are dryly accepting of fate. They view it as an immutable standard of that thing most folks call Reality, and accept it as something that cannot be changed quickly or on a whim. It stands as a door through which the mind must first knock, then enter, and from which it will emerge richer in terms of its own perceptions. Arizona abounded in ghost stories and Jerome had its generous share of hauntings and sightings, having once been designated the "Wickedest Town in the West." Such hot-blooded pedigree made it all too easy for fringe occultists to create another tantalizing theory where one may or may not have already existed.

  An old mining site about a mile outside of town was converted into a museum where stand the openings to mine shafts, the remains of living structures and shacks, a vast array of ancient trucks and vehicles and machines, an even vaster array of paraphernalia. On the side of lore, rumors point to an obscure collection of distributor caps that languish inside one of the shacks. No details, just speculation that they appeared during the last great gasp of Jerome's ghost town phase, before the rise of post-hippie "New American Arts and Crafts" economies. In a town inundated with tourists, hardly anyone mentions The Jerome Capper anymore.

  Distributor caps began disappearing in the Seattle area in late 1989, far from any previous occurrences. Victims were local musicians and music business professionals. Then the phantom started hitting visiting bands. This Capper would always leave a distinctive calling card on the hood-a small piece of flannel attached to a sticker declaring either "corporate rock" or "still suck." Much underground ballyhoo was made about it. In a 1991 interview with Matt Vialto of the Los Angeles-based band Barco Fuego, he spoke of the Capper:

  "He got us too! Twice now!" said Vialto. "He got us a couple of years ago in Seattle, and then again in West Texas!" While en route to El Paso, the band stopped at a Dairy Queen in Pilchard, the "fourth or fifth smallest town in Texas," where they were hit by the mysterious criminal. "Twice now. It was the Capper all right. He left the flannel."

  Vialto believed the Capper was never a resident of Seattle. "The flannel's too old and worn," he hooted. "All the flannel in Seattle is new."

  Vialto expounded at length on why he felt police investigations were "way off track" but summed up by saying, "Don't think of Seattle when you see flannel, think of John Fogerty or Neil Young."

  When asked if the blame rested on a past musical culture, Vialto crankily retorted, "Ooooh, don't be a corn dog! Don't blame the hippies or the punks! Blame god!"

  The thefts ceased abruptly in January of 1992.

  No one the wiser.

  No one the dumber.

  That thing called grunge or alternative or shoe-gazing mumbled along in its autistic musical glory and the road continued going on for what seemed forever.)

  "Objects, material, possessive, unreal circles,

  and games contradicting lies?"

  -Dennes Boon

  And with words?

  VIII

  ?June understood finally that poetry was random and that all of a king's horses and all of a king's men could storm in a light brigade and storm and storm and keep on stormin' and it might all amount to much noise but very little sound. John Steinbeck proposed the automatic story in one of his novels, wherein an eyeful of pages open to let in an earful of tales. He understood that the twists of fate made patterns that patterned out to yet more patterns. One line to another, to a moir?, to a curving of space. This was the natural reinforcement of the infinite-Steinbeck's Law: to let infinity take care of itself. The random perceptions, inflections, twitchings of ideas could neither be forced onto page nor into the air nor across anything resembling cyberspace. They could be wrestled with but once they are body-slammed no poetry results and only words have been yelled by thyroidian dwarves and fullback artistes who ache to be the village blacksmith smashing a metal dream into its hard shape. But smithies were hard to come by these days and such Neanderthal beauty was even more difficult to approximate.

  After leaving her husband and being fired from her job with Continental, June's last flight was starkly poetic. She had located her brother Tom and had a window seat to Seattle from Houston. Window seats were inconvenient if you needed to pee but safer if you needed to hide. All the attendants on that flight were aware of this simple feature of the DC-9-80, and most of them were disdainful of her occupying any seat on the aircraft. In the banishment of misfortune, the final trace of an air chased by a familiar jig, the man at the controls in the cockpit had supplied her last ticket and no one could say or do anything about it.

  Her termination came as quickly as the hand that groped beneath her skirt. A man may be a frequent flyer and a member of the legal profession, and he may talk knowledgeably about rights and never once mention how a woman may be wronged in the spirit of something less than contempt and when the dust of the settlement clears, nothing may have changed the fact that there are people who shouldn't imbibe or rationalize on the ground, let alone at 35,000 feet. By law, defense of dignity is reduced to an expensive proposition elevated to habeas corpus, and courage may claim that justice does not serve truth. In some forests seen from that altitude, the ear does not listen; the eyes and cheeks turn away to ensure that no tree has fallen.

  Summarily dismissed.

  A snake basked on a rock in full view of the jury, flicked its tongue in a practiced obsession of lust that failed to ignite the pretense of modern folk-telling. The handmaiden knew the nature of snakes, but she still had to carry Ms. Riding Hood's basket down the aisles and through the woods in the hope grandma was home.

  once bitten, twice warned, thrice befouled.

  If Adam had sinned against weakness, Eve had sinned against strength, god and satan were accomplices in entrapment. The last tango in paradise, enriching the topsoil and loam for the roots groping of human conditions. The last straw, the last wall pushed up against before inadmissible adrenaline react
ed inexcusably. The deep breath that couldn't be taken, the foot on her philosophical throat, the volumes of reason that fell from the hole in her baggage. If metal can break, a human being will also snap once she is bent too far. A herd of camels broke down under a blade of grass borne along the winds of an unfitting storm and light flashed like cutting torches opening her skull from the inside out. One solid punch to his jaw was enough?

  ?but

  what good was justice in a life bereft of truth?

  Hands on the wind?

  hands on his ears?

  pounding his head on the galley doorway?

  summarily dismissed?

  a non-acquittal.