Late Arcade

by Nathaniel Mackey

  It was with this step or this quantum step that the comic-strip balloons began to emerge. They did so, when they did, not from Drennette’s drumset but from the balloons the balloon choir held, from each and every one of them in fact, whether rubbed, plucked, popped, stomped, twanged, snapped, whatever. The sound had reached a fever pitch, the rich cacophony of a philharmonic orchestra warming up, squealing, keening, groaning, squalling, when the first set of balloons appeared. They arose from each and every balloon choir balloon, all of them bearing the same inscription: By whatever birth was, back at some beginning, I lay on my back unable to see past my belly, legs up, legs bent, legs open, knee on either side of my belly barely visible. I’d been riding a horse I thought was a bicycle, a bucking horse I was thrown by. I lay on the ground bleeding. I lay bleeding on asphalt, meaning it must have been a bicycle I rode. I lay bleeding in the dirt, meaning it must have been a horse I rode.

  Aunt Nancy, Djamilaa, Lambert, Penguin and I looked on, taken aback. We all looked at one another, perplexed, all of us, that is, except Drennette, who kept on drumming, looking out at the balloon choir, nonplussed—in fact, with a gleam in her eyes and a grin on her lips that seemed to say she knew something we didn’t. The audience, the balloon choir, seemed also to be taken aback, albeit, following Drennette’s lead, they pressed on, unperturbed, balloon arraignment engaging their energy and their attention all the more. The sound got louder, more complicated, more intense. Balloon valence was now balloon-on-balloon valence.

  The first set of balloons disappeared, followed, a few measures later, by another, each bearing these words: Unprepossessed, my horse told me get off, get a life. It bucked and reared up and threw me to the dirt, threw me to the pavement, a bicycle I did a wheelie on. Thrown off, unsure where I was, was it asphalt or dirt I was on, unsure what it was I’d been on, I lay on my back, a ballooning belly’s dispatch, I lay bleeding. My lips bled, blood I took to be a kiss. Balloon-on-balloon valence made for a thicketed feeling, a thicketed field, a density of atmosphere the Comeback Inn could barely contain, a thickness of air. A hothouse compactedness reigned, implication and legibility at once at odds and in league with each other. This was deferred buildup’s bequest, nothing if not hothouse complication.

  Things had sped up. When the second set of balloons disappeared another quickly followed, inside each of which were these words: Sweet rotundity. Fecund recess. Ride had been all there’d been, ride was all I wanted. Thrown off as to where I was, what I’d been on, my long legs straddling my horse, my long legs pedaling, I lay on my back riding myself hard, I lay on my back giving birth to myself. My ballooning belly took the place of the hill I’d begun to climb, the hill at whose base my bicycle’s pedal broke, at whose base my foot slipped from the stirrup, causing my horse to buck and rear up. Aunt Nancy, Djamilaa, Lambert, Penguin and I looked at one another again, taken aback all over again. The balloons appeared to be channeling Drennette’s bike ride with Rick, the concussive spill she says taught her percussive spirit. Their apparent equation of spill with birth especially caught our attention we all agreed later, as did their confounding of the bicycle with a Haitian vodoun horse.

  Taken aback notwithstanding, we urged her and the balloon choir on, the five of us a rooting section now, offering such exhortations as “Drive it!” and “Take it out!” Drennette did exactly that, putting together a run of rolls that were to a drummer what circular breathing is to a horn player, the rolls a set of uroboric wheels balloon arraignment and balloon-on-balloon valence rode for dear life, the balloon choir doing all it could to keep up, straining to keep up, hothouse compactedness bringing sweat to many a brow.

  The moment the third set of balloons disappeared Aunt Nancy yelled out, “Kick it!” Drennette, with a flurry of thumps, was all over the bass drum pedal, almost, one thought, as though it were the broken bicycle pedal come back to life. This took things up a notch, a notch no one, the balloon choir least of all, knew was there, though, well before they knew it, that’s exactly where they were. The rubbing was much louder now, riddled with screeches and squeals, and the popping accelerated, aleatory detonation taken to a new high. It had gotten to the point where the poppers, whether stomping or wielding a pin, worked in pairs to speed the process up, one person inflating the balloon and then handing it to the other to pop. The proverbial mine field, brer patch could not have been more explosive.

  It took a couple of measures for the fourth set of balloons to emerge. They bore these words: A flood ran down the far side of the hill, blood gushed at its base. I lay on my back bleeding between my legs, legs bent, legs up, legs open, the lips between them bleeding, blood I knew could only be a kiss, a kiss boats bearing a message were afloat on. They floated leaving the hill behind, each of their sails having the same thing written on them: “Tell my house it’s hot in here.” So spoke my sailor boy, hot to be with me, my sailor boy who was all but back, due back on Sunday, a Sunday that couldn’t come soon enough.

  When the fourth set of balloons disappeared the fifth emerged: I tore myself to be whole, tore myself to possess myself, no matter how unprepossessing, no matter how unprepossessed. I lay thrown off better to know what on was, my host part horse, part bicycle, house hot church, house heat’s ashram, house blood’s hot retreat. I lay thrown off better to get back up, sit sweating deep in yogic labor once up. My sailor boy more me than I was, blood lotus, I lay, legs uncrossed, recuperating. I lay percussing, I lay getting ready to sit, repercussing, I lay repossessing myself.

  Balloon arraignment, all said and done, kicked as hard as Drennette did. The inscriptions’ ballooning belly took balloon valence to another power, balloon-on-balloon-on-balloon valence, a run of introjection tending outward. The sound hit like aspirated static by now, an unremitting rush the balloons rode like pneumatic surf. They kept emerging, a sixth, a seventh, an eighth, on and on, ringing changes on birth, blood, lay, sit, house, horse, kiss, hill, bicycle, legs, lips, labor, sweat, heat, boat, belly, possession, percussion, lotus and the like that would never, it seemed, end but did. The final set of balloons bore these words: Having been thrown off taught me what on was. I found myself on the far side of my ballooning belly, blood-soaked, smothered with kisses. When I sat up I sat on having been thrown. I made a throne of having been thrown, having been thrown the throne I sat on, lotusheaded, legs crossed, Queen of No-Show Sunday, my sailor boy’s home but to be gone. Drennette, shortly after these balloons emerged, nodded to Lambert to give the audience the halt sign. He did so, whereupon they stopped on the proverbial dime, the balloons disappeared, Drennette soloed a few more measures and then nodded for us to come back in, which we did, restating the head to end the piece.

  The audience was on their feet right away with a loud standing ovation. Most of them simply clapped but some shouted, some whistled and some went at it on their balloons again. They all knew, as did we, that something phenomenal, even by balloon standards, had occurred. The ovation was long as well as loud, more heartfelt, I thought, than any we’d ever received before. The experiment, we felt, had succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. Many a thought was provoked and many a question raised, thoughts and questions we were quick to discuss on our way from the gig.

  As to what we made of the evening’s events, I’d have to say it’s too soon to say more than what I began by saying: Boy, what a night! Drennette, for example, insisted, right off the bat, that she didn’t, as we thought she might, know anything we didn’t know. We’ll be talking about it for days I’m sure. I’ll let you know what comes of it.

  As ever,

  N.

  3.III.84

  Dear Angel of Dust,

  It turns out a writer for one of the local alternative papers, Santa Monica Weekly (Aunt Nancy calls it Santa Monica Weakly), was at the Comeback Inn the other night. He wrote it up and his review (I guess you’d call it) is in the issue that just came out. The balloons, not surprisingly, get most of the attention, beginning with the head
line: “The Molimo M’Atet Makes Peace With Its Balloons.” He expands on this right away, opening with an assertion that he’s always sensed “a certain keeping of the balloons at bay” in our public statements as well as in comments acquaintances of his who happen to know us recount having heard us make in private conversation. Why this is, he goes on, he’s never quite been able to figure out, though his guess would be, he ventures to say, that what he would term “a confusion of artistry with austerity” wouldn’t let us come to terms with “the bid for attention the balloons can’t but be augurs of.” He allows that there might well be something noble about this, something valiant about our “holding out against easy acclaim, commercialism, sensationalism and the like.”

  He devotes a good deal of space to describing the décor at the Comeback Inn Sunday night, detailing the arrangement of the tables, the location and dimensions of the performing space, the lighting and so on, saving the balloons lining the door and strung along the walls for last. Referring to the balloons as “a foretaste of what was to come,” he notes the range and variety of their sizes, colors and shapes before announcing that Sunday night marked “an epochal transition point in the band’s career to date.” By this, he goes on to explain, he means that “on this particular gig, at this particular place, on this particular night,” we made peace with the balloons, “came not simply to bear but to embrace them.” He resorts to metaphor in his reiteration of this point, referring to our “détente” with the balloons, our “extending an olive branch” to them, our “smoking the peace pipe” with them.

  He delays going into exactly what he’s referring to by this even while admitting some readers may already, by way of the grapevine, have “gotten word of the goings-on” he’ll in a moment get to. He then proceeds to discuss the music we played, the music the two sets were comprised of, addressing it piece by piece, saying a little about each, on the whole positive, albeit not without the obligatory quibble (“Fossil Flow” could’ve been longer, “Bottomed Out” shorter and so on), but quickly and not with a great deal of detail, saving a more sustained, more lingering approach for the encore, the balloon-assisted version of “Some Sunday,” the “goings-on” he delays going into while being anxious to go into. Once he gets to that, that is, he takes his time, carefully narrating our return to the performing area, recounting the passing out of the balloons with great attentiveness to who covered what part of the room, repeating Lambert’s instructions verbatim. This, the passing out of the balloons, he announces, “the peace overture, the peace offensive,” was our epoch-making move.

  He goes on to spare no hyperbole, pull no rhetorical punches, peaking, I think, when he calls it our “come-to-Jesus moment.” He waxes patronizing, paternalistic and psychoanalytic rolled into one, praise notwithstanding, writing that it’s us coming to terms with our need for attention, “getting beyond a conflicted desire to reach a wider audience.” Having dwelt on this a while, he caps it off by saying “their nobility of abstention, their nobility of abeyance, is hereby moved on from in favor of a greater nobility, that of diving in, joining the fray, putting the hay on the ground where the horses can reach it.” He then turns to the encore itself, the music itself, the balloon-assisted “Some Sunday.”

  First off, he writes, he has to “confess to being one of said horses,” to “admit to having joined in and fully enjoyed it.” He goes from this to a detailed account of “Some Sunday”—Djamilaa’s long lead-in, Lambert’s, Penguin’s, Drennette’s and my solos, and especially the balloon choir’s participation. He’s happy, he writes, to have been “a participant-observer,” from which perspective, he admits, he “can’t but have experienced it all in a special way,” a special way he’s not sure, try as he will, he can do justice to. We next read a good deal about him choosing how to address the balloon (he decided to rub it), the challenges of hearing oneself while hearing the band and the other balloon players as well, his and the other balloon players’ “gains in confidence and competence” as the piece moved along, his and the other balloon players’ “delighted surprise” when the comic-strip balloons appeared.

  He has nothing but praise for our “decision to embrace the balloons and the audience both in one bold stroke,” calling the passing out of the balloons “not simply the turning of a corner but collectivity’s deep dream come true.” Not only did we open ourselves to the balloons “more wholeheartedly” than ever before, he writes, we “tapped a live, open vein of musicianship in the audience one wouldn’t otherwise have known was there.” He himself, he adds, despite having no prior musical experience, “discovered a resident, recondite prowess the band and the balloons apprised one of.” He crescendoes to this conclusion: “In making peace with their balloons the Molimo m’Atet made them our balloons. May they long let the balloons take us all higher.”

  It was Aunt Nancy who phoned and said, “We’ve got a problem.” She was the first to see the review and she quickly gave each of us a call to alert us to it. She said we should pick up a copy of the latest Santa Monica W-e-a-k-l-y (she spelled it out) and we’d find a review of the Comeback Inn gig. She gave us the gist of it but again insisted we each pick up a copy and read it. She said she considers the problem the review makes apparent a crisis, a crisis calling for what she termed an emergency summit. She insisted we meet at Gorky’s a few hours later to discuss it, which we agreed to do.

  Gorky’s is a place we go to from time to time, either all together or in smaller groups, an all-night cafeteria downtown on Eighth Street that opened two or three years ago. It’s gotten to be a bohemian café, a hangout for artists, catering to and something of a creature of the loft scene downtown, featuring cheap food, coffee and beer, an interesting clientele, live music (usually not much to our liking) every now and then. Anyway, we all went out and got copies of the Weekly, read the review and headed there, Lambert the last to straggle in. Our feelings were mixed, as you can imagine, both individually and as a group. It is, after all, a positive, at points ecstatic review, lavishing praise upon us and the music in multiple ways, and we ourselves consider the experiment a success. The pitch of the praise, the assumptions underlying it and the framing of it, though, confirm our reservations about the balloons.

  Aunt Nancy could hardly wait to talk about it and she got us going as soon as Lambert arrived, not waiting for him to get food and drink as the rest of us had. Her being the one who came up with the idea of passing out the balloons may have had something to do with her sense of urgency but the review was something we all felt we needed to air our thoughts about. Queen of nothing if not irony, she spoke for all of us by saying, to kick things off, that what bothered her was the reviewer’s literal-mindedness, “a kind of tone-deaf earnestness that misses our mock literalness or mocking literalness, our mixed-emotional ‘embrace’ of the balloons.” This was a risk we knew we were running we reminded ourselves, Lambert going on to point out that the prophylaxis the literal balloons were to perform turned anaphylactic in the reviewer’s hands. “The balloons embody their own self-critique,” he said, “a hedge against what they otherwise embody, advancing legibility as an inflated claim. The reviewer misses that.”

  We went around on it for a long while. Djamilaa, for example, said she resented “the condescension, the turning of something we did into a command or a mandate to do it, an after-the-fact mandate or an after-the-fact command, as though the reviewer were somehow in charge.” Drennette, for another, talked, as Aunt Nancy and Lambert did, about what the reviewer missed, taking up his trope only to qualify it, torque it, saying that “if it was an accord it was a sideways accord we came to with the balloons or they came to with us.” After a pause of only a beat she added, “It was, after all, No-Show Sunday’s throne they put us on.” Penguin, to give yet another, agreed. “Not to mention,” he said, “the horsecycle,” at which we all laughed.

  We kicked it around, as I’ve already said, for a long while, got more and more into the ambience at Gorky’s and w
ent off on tangents. We got off track and went on tangents quite a lot in fact, as more and more food and drink came to the table. We ended up hanging out for a few hours and we had a good time. There was no live music, so it was easy to talk, to hear and be heard. A couple of painters came over to our table at one point, saying they recognized us and that they were big fans of our music. We all shook hands and they stood chatting with us for a while. Frank (their names were Frank and Renée) said he listens to Orphic Bend while he paints, that it’s become for him what Kind of Blue was for painters during the sixties. He said he’s in fact working on a painting called “Orphic Bend” and he’d like us to visit his studio and see it when it’s finished. We exchanged contact info and they went back to their table.

  What we’ll do next we didn’t decide. Hold a press conference? Issue another press release? Never pass balloons out again? We don’t know.

  Yours,

  N.

  [Dateless]

  Dear Angel of Dust,

  Djamilaa and I awoke with a balloon between us. It lay in the space between our pillows. She sat up and stretched, her light cotton nightie exposing her close-to-the-bone shoulders, her dimpled elbows and her elegant, outstretched fingers a true boon above her head. She yawned. I followed suit, yawning as I sat up and stretched. It was as we turned to each other, smiling, and said good morning that we noticed it, the balloon nestled between our pillows, a third head or an extra pillow bearing these words: I walked around inside a mall where I was to meet a certain someone, music deeper in my ear the longer I walked. The someone I’d come to see wasn’t there. A strong wind blew the roof off and the stores were suddenly booths. The music inside my ear visited booth after booth, a late arcade it kept me wandering in all night.