The Sea Came in at Midnight

by Steve Erickson

  Got away, back to Europe, where else. To Amsterdam, where I lived in the red-light district above a bakery now converted to a nightclub, with the usual haze of hashish and the house chanteuse who sang nude every night with the broken line of a highway painted up the front of her between her breasts. A month later I got Jenna’s card casually announcing she’d be in Madrid in two weeks, and my instinctive reaction, so fast I barely noticed, was not to go at all. My next was to immediately check out of the hotel and head straight for the central station, where I bought a one-way ticket on the next train out, somehow assuming life would get warmer the farther south I got. … I was a little surprised to find the train getting colder the closer it got to Spain, and by the time I reached the frontier in the middle of the night I was feverish in a way that had nothing to do with her. I had a seat in a second-class compartment with an older Spanish businessman who looked and dressed like he should have been up in the better part of the train, and the whole trip we didn’t say two words until crossing the border, where Spanish soldiers went through my bag and found my bundle of old articles and news photos. One magazine cover in particular, from May ’68, was of a car exploding spectacularly in the Paris streets. Are you a revolutionary? the border guard said very calmly. Once back on the train, I asked the businessman what was going on, was it always like this, the guards and soldiers, and he didn’t say anything, just stared back at me and then back at his newspaper, the same paper he’d been reading for twelve hours, and then without lifting his eyes from the paper, as though speaking to no one at all, he answered, “The General is dying.”

  On and on he’d been dying, an endless dying, days and nights, weeks and months, and by the time I got to Madrid police and guns and martial law were everywhere, with everyone else behind closed windows and locked doors. No one was in the streets, no one was in the bars or tascas or cafés, even the famed fountains of the city seemed frozen. So it was very deliberately into this Madrid that Jenna came, on orders from some Spanish-lisping apparatchik no doubt, to prepare for and bear witness to the reclamation of a Spain that had slipped from her comrades’ fingers thirty-six years earlier. That it was her Stalinists who had stabbed the Republic in the back while Hitler’s Stukas flew overhead was precisely one of those unseemly loose ends for which history is so conscientiously and completely rewritten from time to time. In Madrid, Jenna was in her element. “Anarchists,” she advised me, “are only bourgeois turned inside out,” but as far as I could tell she thrived in the anarchic Spanish air. If anything it brought out the flushed carnal glow of her, her red lips all the more luscious with paranoia.

  I had grown a beard in Amsterdam. … Jenna wasn’t so impressed. She didn’t find it radical or dangerous, in the fashion of glamorous Cubans, but self-indulgent and undisciplined, in the fashion of odious hippies, the dregs of capitalism—first thing she said when she got off the plane was, “Why did you grow that awful beard?” In her very smart little cocked red beret with the little red Soviet star pinned to the front, she had big brown eyes, a moist mouth that glinted with the gold earrings that hung from her strawberry hair, a body capable of evoking such wild and meaningless upheaval as to completely disprove the “science” of her ideological certainties. The Party back home in the States didn’t get so many gorgeous recruits. Actually the Party back home hardly got anyone at all anymore under seventy years old, so already they were grooming her accordingly, to fill the ranks with new recruits, young men in particular, although to anyone giving the matter careful consideration there was an obvious contradiction inherent in the advertising: Comrades! Check it out! Under socialism this is the sort of foxy chick you would get to fuck if socialism were as corrupt, decadent and self-indulgent as capitalism! If it was as corrupt, decadent and self-indulgent as capitalism, then the Party could afford to be generous with Jenna’s body since she had already given it her heart, a softer slushier more malleable organ of less functional value than shoulders, back, hands, feet, but certainly more useful than a brain, which could be troublesome when it had an inclination to operate on its own. Jenna’s never presented that problem. Compliant as the Party could ever wish for, Jenna made all the necessary dialectical transitions with utmost agility, even aplomb—the gulags were a myth, the purges a hoax, invasions of various countries a matter between comrades and none of the West’s business, the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 a complete invention of the bourgeois press.

  When Jenna wasn’t talking Party politics, her other overriding object of interest was her father, who she hated, and who I’d been hearing about from almost the moment I met her. From the cafés of New York to the cafés of Madrid, she’d sit staring and sputtering at the photo of her father she always carried with her. “We don’t look anything alike,” she’d say. … of course they looked exactly alike. She also had, crumpled in the back of her wallet, a photo of her mother, with whom she was on good terms and to whom she bore no resemblance at all. She also had a brother, or half brother, though which half was which was so unclear to me I wasn’t sure Jenna herself knew who mothered who, who fathered who, a confusion that terrified her. Jenna’s involvement with the Party was a secret her family agreed to keep from each other in mutual pretense, with the exception of the father, from whom it really was a secret. The idea of her father learning the truth was so mortifying to her she couldn’t stand it.

  What did she expect of fathers in this day and age? At the time I couldn’t figure out if Karl Marx was Jenna’s surrogate father or surrogate lover, when now the answer is so obvious. Night after night the three of us slept in the same bed, though every once in a while I’d wake to find myself on the floor, Karl having rolled over in his sleep. Up and down the Gran Via, from one end of the Sun Plaza to the other, from Hapsburg Madrid to Bourbon Madrid, from the Prado to the Toledo to the Convent of the Barefoot Nuns, from the Moorish shadows to the white doves dissolving into foam on the fountain waters, day after day I tagged along after Jenna and Karl on their rounds, waiting plaintively in black archways as they visited friends, attended meetings, plotted history. “You treat me so well,” she sneered.

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  “You’re so understanding, aren’t you,” she said, “you’re so caring. But what you don’t understand is that history doesn’t care at all about how caring you are, about how understanding you are. History doesn’t care at all what you want or need from me.”

  “I don’t give a fuck about history.”

  “Exactly,” she said, “that’s how limited you are. That’s how narrow. You don’t see the big picture. In the Soviet Union everyone sees the big picture.”

  “This isn’t the Soviet Union.”

  “Not for the moment,” she allowed. “You came all the way down to Madrid just to see me, didn’t you? All that way. You came all that way just to see me—and it isn’t fair. I have work to do. I’m part of something bigger than me, bigger than you, bigger than us, that’s what you can’t understand.” In the meantime the old Spanish General went on dying. By now he’d gotten it down to such an art there was no big rush to finish. He’s dead! word would filter out into the street, and then, Uh, no, actually, he’s not dead. A day or two later, Yes! this time he’s really dead! and then a few minutes later, Well, actually, he’s almost dead. As Spain became a ghost country, riots and demonstrations broke out across the rest of Europe, I’d seen one myself from the train leaving Bordeaux, marchers pouring up the boulevards by the thousands under red banner after red banner, chanting Fran! co! As! sas! sin! over and over. … On the face of it there was a rationale for this. Five Basque separatists had just been put to death by garrote for the alleged murder of some Spanish cops. But of course that wasn’t what the riots were about at all.

  The riots were a release, after thirty-five years of suppression and silence. The riots were a cheer, urging the old General on to his end. The riots were a protest, that death and time had let him off so easily. The riots were a complaint, that he wouldn’t be around to hate anymore, that he
wouldn’t be around to fear anymore, that the last monster of a clearer, more morally delineated age was now exiting the premises and leaving everyone else behind to sort out the moral confusion.

  Jenna, I whispered in her ear one night as she slept. By now I’d lain chastely beside her five consecutive nights.

  “Is he dead yet?” she murmured back.

  No he’s not dead yet—and in her sleep she swooned. Then she blinked her eyes open in the dark, and turned to me, and saw I wasn’t who she was looking for. Where’s Karl, she said, glancing around. Karl’s not here, I said. Karl went down to the corner for a beer, or maybe he’s in the toilet jerking off because he’s become bored with you, Jenna, as I have finally become bored. I moved to her and she tried to pull away and I held her. I was naked. Not bad, eh, Jenna? tell me Karl is this big. Tell me you’d rather be lying with his corpse out there in the street. I lowered my mouth to her and put my tongue inside her. “What are you doing,” she said in horror, trying to twist herself away from me. Her climax wasn’t a moan or shudder or even a cry, it was the scream of a woman in labor, it wasn’t a climax but deliverance, and I especially enjoyed the wracked humiliated sobs afterwards, the way all her comradely discipline was in shambles, the way the fragile sense of herself she had created so carefully and artificially out of her inane ideology was smashed. When she finally began to calm down I did it to her again, till I was confident I’d taken her far beyond the point of ever again entertaining even the fleeting conceit of knowing herself, of ever being so smugly certain of anything in her life. I got up, dressed, walked out the hotel, flagged a cab in the street, and went to the train station.

  BY THE TIME I got on the train, news that the old General was dead had spread up and down the platform. Descending the Meseta, winding alongside the Manzanares, the train headed north, into the face of an Andalusian rain from the south that had swept through Madrid the night before; and as dawn came over the plains I could see peasants dressed in black darting furtively through the tall golden fields. …

  Back to New York. Spent the last days of summer ’76 moving up and down Third Avenue from a small sublet on East Fifth to a flat on Bond Street, where I crashed from time to time with the editor of a literary magazine who viewed every night as a race to the finish with Jack Daniel’s. Dawn always lost. I was almost twenty. In the quiet of my muteness over the years, besides the clothes on my back, all I had was a box of tapes I had collected—bits and pieces of Indonesian chants, surreal bebop, gamelan rain songs, war-documentary soundtracks, Saint-Saëns, water chimes, Jamaican dub, police radio signals, recordings of howler monkeys, all smashed together on a single soundloop and broadcast from a pitiful little tape player run by ever-dying batteries. … Then, soho and noho, I heard something else.

  Downtown was littered with punk enclaves now. From Broadway to St. Marks, the musical center of the Village had shifted from west to east, its hub a vertical bomb crater of a club at Bowery and Bleecker: I cared nothing about the Scene. I cared nothing about the hair or ripped clothes. I cared nothing about the pierced flesh. I cared nothing about the piss on the floor or the posturing in the dark, about the quaaludes or the coke or the needles in the backstage toilets. I cared nothing about the graffiti on the walls or the charred hallways. I cared nothing about the bikers or the junkies or the vampires or the groupies or the backstreet dadaists, or even the people who made the music itself. I didn’t care in the least about whatever inane blurtings were passed off as polemics. I found the professed rage of the Scene amusing to the extent I found it to be anything, I found the bodies slamming at the musicians’ feet tedious to the extent I paid any attention to them at all. I found every other thing about the Scene an affectation except the sheer shimmering beauty of the racket it made.

  They considered me a slummer, they were right … but I was slumming not inside their noise but outside my silence—that was the difference! I confounded them with tenacity, night after night, week after week, month after month, till one night after finishing her set Maxxi Maraschino took me home. Max was the one who looked like Bardot and served as the Scene’s resident blond sex goddess when she wasn’t working her day job at an uptown strip joint … secretly pushing thirty-five, some years earlier she had made a film with the notorious New York pornographers Mitch Christian and Lulu Blu, and many years before that, when she was seventeen, rumor had it she was the long-lost member of the Shangri-Las, expelled from the group before their first hit record for the one night she went down on an entire college fraternity. …

  Now Maxxi had a three-bedroom flat at Second and Second known as Depravity Central. It was across the street from the most popular drug house on the Lower East Side and provided an emergency landing-strip for every crashing drooling smack-shooting would-be rock-and-roll colossus in the neighborhood. Three in the morning was the designated Suicide Hour, when people routinely passed through threatening suicide or, in a smacked-up and otherworldly stupor, claiming to have in fact already committed suicide. Bandage-bound wrists were chic. I lived for a while in Max’s apartment, where she gave me a tiny bedroom to myself, with its own bathroom and a window that looked out on a vacant lot and the building next door where the kids lined up on the sidewalk for their daily score. There I fooled with my shitty little tape player as the traffic of musicians and hookers and strippers streamed in and out of the rest of the flat.

  “What are you doing,” Max said like Jenna had, the first night I woke her in a cloud of vodka to slip my tongue up inside her. “What are you doing,” whispering it even though on this particular night there was no one else at Depravity Central to hear us, “and why are you doing it?” and I said, Because I want to.

  Oh, well, in that case. As long as it was because I wanted to. As long as it was for me, not her. As long as I didn’t care in the least whether she wanted me to or not. As long as I expected no sort of response from her whatsoever, as long as I wasn’t trying to resurrect something from the dead. As long as it was because I couldn’t stand to leave untasted every last drop of her. In that case she would collapse back into the pillow, feel every part of her implode to her core, grab my hair in her hands and hold on with everything she had. I fell into the arms, went my favorite song of the time, of Venus de Milo—like I was in a universe of sound surrounded by a curtain of pink water, the slim white disembodied arms of the world’s most beautiful woman reaching through to me.

  I fell into the soundtrack of the subterranean imagination. The nine years since Mama disappeared into the riots of Paris came bubbling up around my ankles like the sound that rose around me and drowned out my eleven-year-old cries for her. In the moment of the gunshot there was a whole world unto itself, and I came back for the dark and the noise again and again, standing in the back of the clubs at the edge of the gorgeous black din while everyone around me got more and more deranged. My drug of choice—not that I chose it but it chose me—was bargain-basement fiorinal for the blinding headaches I was starting to have around then, chased down with Black Russians and suspending me in an incandescent blast of vodka and caffeine and painkiller. … Word spread. Guys hated me. Twenty-five years later they probably still hate me, if my name should happen to come up or if they should happen to have survived the years’ cocaine not so dream-exhausted and sensually constipated they can’t remember it. I kissed all the girls. Poised between my teeth every one of them gasped, caught her breath, held it. Before placing it on the lips of their sex I tasted it on the tip of my tongue: the Kiss of Chaos! an apocalyptic delirium exhaled into all of them … and in response there came from out of them the music of the subterranean imagination like the tapes I played—squalling guitars, pirate chanteys, pygmy tribal prayers, Four Freshmen outtakes, shrieks of sea buffalo stranded by high tides. … And though I didn’t know it at the time, with every kiss another day was marked on the Blue Calendar of years later, every woman marked by the Kiss of Chaos became a day in the Apocalyptic Age, so years later when I went back to New York I kept my eyes peeled
for punk goddesses I knew in the Year Eleven, on the twenty-fifth of July 1978 (first baby born from a test tube) or the second of September (first girl murdered in a snuff film) or the twentieth of November (mass religious South American Kool-Aid suicides). …

  By the time I was done with them, in the waning days of ’78, with the Scene only a winter away from rigor mortis, the girls of chaos were crawling the Lower East Side with a thousand anarchic anniversaries and a thousand nihilistic holidays in their throbbing little wombs. In the clubs in the dark, from under the glorious sublime howl of the music, at first barely discernible, the sound of the subterranean imagination poured out of them between their thighs, rising to their waists then their breasts, then to their necks, till everyone’s ears was full of it and the music couldn’t be heard at all, only the cacophony of oil wells exploding in the North Sea, jumbo jets colliding in the Canary Islands, rioting Persian Moslems protesting the Twentieth Century, Manhattan serial killers murdering on the orders of barking dogs, firing squads carrying out executions in Utah, missionaries executed for no reason in Rhodesia, thousands executed for no reason in Uganda, millions executed for no reason in Cambodia, restaurants blown up for no reason in Belfast, gas tankers running aground off the coast of Brittany, not far from the tiny village of Sur-les-Bateaux. Only thing anyone could hear anymore was these girls transformed by the Kiss of Chaos into human jukeboxes of the apocalypse, till their last song, most deafening of all, was the final death throe of the Scene itself—the suicide of the Scene’s most notorious and pathetic figure, following the murder of his hooker lover, a crime for which he was the prime suspect. With that, everyone knew it was all over, including Maxxi Maraschino when she heard the news at dawn from a junkie on the street … and then she came back up to the flat, stepped among the various unconscious bodies crashed out on her floor, looked in my room to determine I was still asleep, and locked me in.