“What are you doing?”
“Just sitting around, talking… You know.”
She did know. Something in my voice gave it away. “You’re playing with the Ouija Board, aren’t you?” she asked. “Hmmm. Yeah, but we’re almost done. Sorry. What time are you coming home?”
She answered, “About an hour” and then we hung up. I told Deanne “Put that thing in your car.” I didn’t want Nancy to see it. I didn’t really believe that spirit was Flip -- although I thought it could be. Maybe we just wanted it to be true. There was nothing malignant or ominous about anything being conveyed to us. But I felt that we were treading into unknown territory. I wanted to think of Flip as watching over us -- God knows that was a comforting thought. But something about the whole experience gave me the willies.
The three of us sat around, chatting and listening to tunes, drinking Vernors and eating homemade nachos. Around eleven, Deanne hugged me goodbye. I promised to call her soon and she departed.
We waited for Nancy, Sandy and I. Finally I climbed up into bed, leaving Sandy dozing on the couch.
Nancy never came home.
I awoke in the morning and climbed down from my platform. I woke Sandy and jumped in the shower. As I dressed, Sandy fixed herself a bowl of Cheerios. “Do you mind taking me to the airport?” I asked. Nancy had planned to drive me. I also asked Sandy to apologize again to Nancy about the night before. I felt terrible that she wasn’t comfortable coming to her own home. Then again, she was supposed to come straight home after work and instead, went to Anne’s. Maybe she never intended to come to the loft that night. Maybe the Ouija board was an excuse.
I fed Thelonious his mouse, made my bed and wheeled my suitcase out from under my platform. I looked around. My books were on the shelves, my records stacked below. The artwork, pasta maker, photographs. I figured I’d borrow my dad’s car that upcoming spring, make the trip to Detroit to collect the rest of my belongings. I hoped Nancy and I would eventually be okay, and at the same time I felt so sad inside not having her there to help me make that final trip away from the loft.
Love stinks.
We drove to the airport and Sandy dropped me off at the terminal. I hoisted my suitcase from the trunk of her car and embraced my friend, fondly. “See you in a few weeks!” she called out, waving. “See ya, soon!” I shouted back and made my way into the terminal. It was a sunny November day and as my plane ascended, I looked over the city. Downtown Detroit, the Chrysler Freeway, Tiger Stadium, the Ambassador Bridge, Cobo Hall, the Renaissance Center. St. Andrew’s Hall. The Detroit River. Woodward Boulevard. The Detroit Institute of the Arts. The Cass Corridor, the lofts on West Lafayette.
I stared at the city of my birth until I couldn’t see it out the window anymore.
Life Goes On…
I left Detroit on Sunday, November 24, 1991.
I would stay at my father’s house in St. Louis for six months. I relished the quiet and calm I found there.
Chuck moved into the loft a week after I departed. Knowing how vulnerable Nancy was. I worried that the two of them living together would result in their dating again. I didn’t think that was a very good idea.
I left message after message for Nancy, with Chuck and on the voice mail machine. I wanted to make arrangements to either come get my records and other belongings, or have them shipped to me. I also knew there were utility bills that I was responsible for.
Nancy never returned my messages and I didn’t visit Detroit again until Fall 1993.
I heard that Thelonious escaped his cage that winter. Disappeared without a trace. I imagined him slithering his wicked way through the loft, into the waterworks. Perhaps today he is living in the sewers of downtown Detroit, growing fat on city rats, vagrants and wicked politicians, wearing a big gold chain around his neck like a reptilian LK.
During my months in St. Louis I worked two jobs, saved money and took an American History course at a Junior College (to make up the credit I missed my diploma for). I was busy but sequestered myself away from the world. I bought a typewriter and kept writing but with great difficulty. I was haunted by my memories, my friendships and the profound longing for a different conclusion to my life those past five years.
One spring day, Michele called me from Hawaii. She had filed for divorce from Van, who had turned abusive. She confessed that she had doubts, even when they married, but was afraid to call the wedding off. (Explains the chain-smoking, doesn’t it?)
Sandy and I talked once a month and when I moved to Seattle that May, she flew out to spend a week with me and Jef. A month later, Chad came to visit and she came back. They dated casually that summer.
I stayed with Jef about five weeks. I got hired at a cleaning supply company as a secretary. Found a studio apartment in the Capital Hill area. I had just moved into the apartment when I was laid off from my job. I quickly scrambled to secure another position, hostess at the Deluxe Grille on Broadway, a hip burger joint and pub near the end of the strip. One of my coworkers, a dishwasher named Mia Zapata, was a well-known blues singer. I remember Mia blaring Babes in Toyland on her boombox in the back corner of the kitchen. She was raped and murdered in the summer of ’93, sending the women of Seattle, including myself, into near-hysteria and martial arts training. (Her killer would eventually be discovered through DNA testing a decade later). I got laid off from the hosting job that spring and found a job as a legal assistant to two bankruptcy attorneys in downtown Seattle.
My first year away from Detroit I think of as my “Cocoon Year.” I turned inward and tried to heal. I was haunted by dreams of Flip and nightmares about my past. My journals that year, at times, sound vengeful and angry, driven by the desire to prove them all wrong. I had talent. I was my own person. I had defied gravity. Damn it, I wasn’t their girl anymore.
Flip’s death was Gravity’s final unraveling. We fragmented, we disassembled. Many of us left Detroit and saved ourselves at the cost of our friendships
The Generals disbanded. The Colors, too.
I sent Nancy a letter when I first moved into my studio and received a response, six months later. I was in tears all the way from the mailbox to my front door as I tore open the envelope that dismal winter day. She wrote the letter on January 3rd, Flip’s birthday. Her letter was not kind. She was very hurt and angry and not just about that final night. She brought up my irresponsibility and need for approval and every other flaw I possessed. It was like finding the Game again. She also admitted that she was “blaming the messenger”; that my having been the one to tell her that Flip was gone doomed our relationship. She also couldn’t get past the fact that Flip had come to see me that night he was worried something bad would happen and not her. I forced myself to throw away her letter, after I read the bitter missive twice.
Eventually, I would emerge from my small metamorphosis. I made acquaintances in Seattle, attended parties and frequented plays, dated and cultivated artistic opportunities. I never finished the novel, however.
In the summer of 1994 I became incredibly restless. I would dream about getting up in the middle of the night, slipping on a pair of jeans and walking outside to hitchhike, of all crazy things. I would have dreams of lush, wild landscapes across the country. Verdant, green meadows and clear whispering streams. I thought my subconscious was telling me to go exploring. Seattle was nice -- but the locals wanted nothing to do with transplants like myself. Seattle never felt like home. I decided to embark on a road trip -- by myself.
I returned to Detroit that autumn. My mother and I had been mending our relationship and she invited me to stay in the guest bedroom. I needed to buy a vehicle and save money for my trip. I worked at a video store and spent a lot of my time with Deanne and Patrick, at their apartment in Hamtramck. They were both heavily involved in the arts: Deanne was painting and Patrick was growing serious about writing and photography. I sat for a series of nudes with him that winter. I guessed that my crush on him must have truly dissipated: I was at my heaviest when I st
ripped and posed and I wasn’t the least bit self-conscious about it.
Sandy and I saw one another twice during the six month period that I was staying with my folks in St. Clair Shores. She was living with a guy she had met two years before. I finally got my record collection back. When the records were returned to me, there were about fifty left. I don’t know what became of the more than three hundred others. All the good shit was gone.
The week before I left on my road trip, I visited Sandy. Nancy and her fiancé stopped by, while I was there. Nancy met her fiancé through a coworker at Bill Knapp’s. They later married in Vegas.
She didn’t say one word to me.
On May 16, 1995 I set out from Detroit toward Niagara, to the Adirondacks to the coast of Maine, to Cincinnati. I visited there with Michèle and her second husband. Then to Nashville to see family. On to Memphis and Graceland, to New Orleans and El Paso. From there I drove to Arizona to visit my grandfather.
I would spend eight months in Scottsdale, Arizona. My grandfather was eighty-nine years old, widowed, and diagnosed that June with bladder cancer. I had planned to go out, spend a few weeks visiting and then make my way to Los Angeles where I intended to apply to film school.
One glance at my grandfather’s diminishing frame and sallow face convinced me that something was more serious. We got the diagnosis of liver cancer that October and I stayed with him, until the end. He died on my grandmother’s birthday, the next March.
I resumed the road trip, lost in my grief, uncertain of my bearings. I would remain on the road for a while longer. I visited with family and many of my friends during those travels, including Deanne and Patrick (briefly living in Pittsburgh). Patrick and Deanne would be together for around a decade, at one point starting the Sixties-inspired band The Come Ons. They achieved a modicum of success. They toured around the globe, cut a couple CD’s and in 2007 I heard one of their songs on a Hardee’s commercial! When the band split up, Patrick joined the Dirtbombs (with Mick, former frontman of the Gories) and Deanne pursued other musical ventures.
In Spring of ‘98 I came off the road, moving in with my sister Debi and her children in a suburb of Atlanta. I lived with them for a year, moved in with a guy, broke up with the guy and moved out on my own to a five hundred acre farm. While in Atlanta I self-published my second book of poetry. Hit Like A Girl was my attempt to connect with my anger. The rage that, like so many other women of my generation, I never understood how to handle. I had a lot to feel angry about, although I couldn’t always express why. I was sick of turning that anger inward.
In 2000 I accepted a position with General Motors as a Cadillac product trainer. We would have bi-annual meetings in Detroit and I would visit with my mom and friends during those visits. Our offices were in Troy, just a mile south of the White Chapel Memorial Gardens, where Flip is buried. I visited his grave each time I made the outing, leaving flowers or sometimes a lighter at his grave. Flip has proven a rather difficult yardstick for other men in my life to measure up against. I never got over his death. I’m sure I’m not the only one.
I got to travel the world during the six years I worked for GM. I went to Honduras and Belize. Amsterdam, Athens, Monte Carlo, Florence and Barcelona. Turkey, Egypt and Bahrain. I published my third book of poems, Spellbound in 2001 and began working on a novel, Flower of Fire, in 2003.
If I had attempted to write this book in my twenties or even my thirties the story wouldn’t have been what stands here today. I battled, that first decade after leaving Detroit, with thoughts of vengeance, loss and one-upmanship. I see-sawed between feeling angry, missing my old clique desperately and seeking their long-distance approval in the ambitions I set (and achieved) for myself.
I would think about those who had impacted my life during those early years and in my angriest, ugliest moments would think “And they thought they were creative?” They used their talents to sell insurance, to serve steak, to print the art of others. They didn’t even have the talent to make their best damn invention -- me -- last. I was determined to free myself from the mold of their impression and the inhibitions that restrained me.
I would never be their girl again. I had to redefine myself, accomplish everything I desired. I became ravenous for life experiences. I did the road trip. Saw the world. I wrote and published the books. I even worked as a stripper for a few months. Most of all, I built self-confidence.
Later, I would recognize that this hunger for experience had been deeply forged by the pain of losing loved ones at such a young age. The very idea of going to my own premature grave, without having accomplished all that I longed for, fueled my ambitions. The years immediately after Flip’s death, in particular, saw me possessed with an air of fatalism, a sense of potential doom. Those deaths marked me deeply. There was so much they never got to experience. I pursued life as much to prove myself a person of my own making, as I did to ensure that if I died young, it would not be with regret.
When your friends -- your peers -- die young, they remain alive in your imagination for a little while. Maybe a decade. When you experience milestones in your young adulthood, it isn’t hard to imagine them experiencing the same. When you get your first serious job, finance your first car or home, fall in love, have babies, see the world. But at some point, that ceases. You aren’t aware when that moment happens. But some time down the road, some ten or fifteen years or so, you realize… Wow, they’re really and truly gone. They exist only in the past.
I will never really know if they would have accomplished as much as I have. Might they have put their dreams, their hopes, their bands on hold at some point to pursue more mature responsibilities? Could I be sitting with them today and hearing them complain about how dull or disappointing their lives turned out? It’s truly hard to imagine with Flip or with Scott. But, once upon a time, I was a shy and inhibited person who, only because I was propelled by the tragic deaths of those around me, chose to push myself to pursue my dreams as fully as I have. I know how short life can be. I found out the hard way.
When I was thirty-one a remarkable and life-changing experience occurred. I was in the Black Hills of South Dakota on my first visit to the area. I was with Michèle, on vacation. During a hike on a quiet Spring Sunday, in a magical place that we stumbled into, I literally saw my life flash in front of my eyes. I recognized that in my search for wisdom, experience I had exposed myself to some very dark and dangerous elements. That in my pursuit for life, I had nearly jeopardized my very survival. But, I also saw clearly at that moment, a light that had been shining throughout all the darkness of my life. During my time at No Bev, the death of loved ones, the years isolated from those I had been closest to and the craziest pursuits that followed -- there had always been a bright light that led me through the pain and crippling loneliness.
I understood that no matter how dark, how bleak or uncertain the circumstances I found myself in -- that light would always be present. You could call it God, or the Holy Spirit. But this wasn’t a religious awakening. It was a moment of forgiveness, within my soul, for all I had done to survive.
I had long forgiven those who had hurt me all those years before. But I forgot to forgive myself -- for being naïve, for being a victim, even for choosing myself and leaving my friends behind.
The event in the Black Hills was also a curious book-end to the experience Michèle and I shared years earlier near Ann Arbor. It was appropriate that we were together for both occasions.
About once a year, I dream of Nancy. I wake from these dreams with a feeling of loss and sadness. I think about calling my friend. I could -- but I don’t. I will love Nancy forever and I do miss her, but she was damaged long before the death of Flip and well before I left Detroit. The Ouija board wasn’t to blame -- that was an excuse. I am grateful, though, that through Nancy I met Sandy. Sandy was the one who really helped me tap into the sense of whimsy and humor that I needed to survive this journey.
In writing this memoir, I really had to think about the tit
le “The Laws of Gravity.” After all, this group of people chose to define themselves as “Gravity” because they claimed Gravity was the only law they would obey. Were they as rebellious as they wanted everyone to believe? I will let others decide. Were there actual rules, or laws, to being a part of Gravity? Yeah, but I probably never learned them. Most of my No Bev/Gravity years, I felt like I was being absorbed into something that existed long before I was a part of it. I was addicted to something that had, in fact, changed dramatically before I arrived. Sometimes I think that I simply wanted to be part of something bigger than me. Maybe that’s not very punk rock. But, other times, I think I was the most rebellious one, the most avant-garde and the most defiant in all of Gravity. I was the one who left and created this amazing life and I’m the one writing about all this, now.
I didn’t get wise to the ways of the world on June 6, 1986. It took years and experiences and many heartaches to get where I am. Today, I understand things that I couldn’t comprehend at eighteen. I know why my roommates made the Game. They were letting off steam, having a giggle -- and I kinda deserved it. I also gossiped, joked and told tales about others. I am as guilty as anyone else.
I understand Patrick better, today. Not only was he grieving the loss of Scott when we first hooked up and being pulled in many directions with band, school, work, family, friends, etc. Yes, there were moments that he could have been kinder and more sensitive but I long ago forgave his misdeeds and I hope he has forgiven mine.
My thoughts today are much kinder to Jennifer, to Heidi and many others. Jennifer had the responsibility of a household that was nothing less than pure chaos and a father who demanded dependability. We’ve made our peace. I can’t fault her for wanting an accountable roommate.
In the past few years I have connected with many of the old gang through social media. I chat online with Eric and Maxwell from The Mangos, with Lynda and Dave, with Kevin, Elizabeth, Michèle and Jennifer, Sandy and Jef and Deanne. Ian and Terese. Each has made a successful life for themselves and still appreciates reminiscing about our crazy, punk rock, salad days. We share photos and MP3s and stories.
The Laws of Gravity Page 14
