A hundred adventures with Marine: the afternoon of my twenty-first birthday wandering with her and the filmmaker around the ruins of the vast Sutro Baths at the northwestern tip of San Francisco, where the waves smash hard enough to send the spray dozens of feet up; while walking on a local hillside in the greenness of early spring, stopping to throw rocks in the swimming pool of a world-famous old rock star who was giving young girls hard drugs for the usual reasons; wading in an icy forest stream until our feet were blue during a heat wave, after an expedition to fly her kite failed to turn up any winds; Marine about nineteen, blasé and impatient in a hospital gown after a speed binge resulted in dehydration and collapse; at home, cocking her head to one side to regard her baby pictures, declaring she looked exactly like Mussolini in them; us tossing the filmmaker’s father’s thorny backyard roses at her onstage, roses that the band’s singer took as a tribute to herself; Marine and I climbing the wall of the Catholic cemetery down the street from her family’s apartment as all the dogs at the adjacent school for the blind barked; coming home six months before her death to a message on my answering machine that said in tones of lighthearted wonder, “I love you. It’s Marine!”
When I called back her band’s house the next day to ask about funeral arrangements, I said, “But she seemed so happy, she seemed to have got everything together at last,” and the musician said, “Marine was never happy for herself. She was happy for you.” He told me that after our outing she’d gone home to take care of her grandmother while her mother went away and from there went to a party that Tuesday night. At the party she took something that killed her. It wasn’t surprising and it wasn’t quite real. I kept thinking it was a bizarre mistake or a made-up story, until I called her mother, who told me how beautifully made up Marine’s corpse was and urged me to go see her at the funeral chapel. This, with her cigarettes still in my ashtray, her hair still in my brush, her clothes still in my car, her voice still in my ears, so soon after we’d been looking at ourselves together in my mirror and she the more lithe, the more fluidly beautiful of the two. That Saturday I suddenly walked out of a symposium and went to the chapel.
I’d never been to such a place before. A Georgian portico, a long hallway with doors on both sides, a family with children gathering for a funeral there looking at me doubtfully. The hallway confused me until I noticed lecterns with guest books outside each doorway. The book at the last lectern had Marine’s name written on it, and the curtained glass door was ajar, so I stepped through. The room was a dim mock-chapel. There was a strange hush, there were huge candles and a stained-glass window through which dull, faint light filtered above a vast, ornate, ivory casket like a pastry, set on a bier like an altar, inside which there was a little boy vampire. From the doorway, in profile, she looked tranquil, a sleeper. Up close in that light, she looked only half-familiar, and I realized how much her constant flickering motion had been a part of the impression she made. The coffin was lined with white satin, soft as a bed, and I found myself whispering, “Marine, Marine, Marine, wake up.”
Her mother called me up every once in a while for a few years afterward, and during one call told me that the night Marine died was her wedding night. The man she married was young and well-off, halfway between their ages, and Marine had talked about how much she hated him, though she never mentioned the marriage. Her mother came home the morning after the wedding to the celebratory bottle of champagne that Marine had bought her and to her own mother saying, “You must be strong, you’re going to have to be very strong.” With this revelation, the facts reordered themselves again: it seemed that, in the bitter upset of a marriage that might put home out of bounds, Marine was reckless not to escape but because her return was blocked. I folded up the violet shirt and sweater she’d left in my car and put them in the chest at the foot of my bed. They are still there. In the shirt pocket I found the crumpled wrapper of a Tootsie Pop.
This era came rushing back to me a few years ago when I walked into a New York gallery full of the photographs of Peter Hujar, who died of AIDS in 1986. I had been looking at thoroughly contemporary art in the several galleries that preceded this momentous entrance, art that was sleek, shiny, clever, art about design issues, fashion, disaffection, art that was in some ways about the smooth surface of the new city that had replaced the cityscape that so moved me in Hujar’s work. The very texture was different. In Hujar’s saturated black-and-white prints of animals, outcasts, eccentrics, and ruinous places, the world was rough in every sense. Its surfaces were porous, decrepit, sensuous, full of age and what seemed an ability to absorb: to absorb light, meaning, emotion. The city had mystery and danger of the sort urban renewal pledges to remove. Not far from the gallery was Chelsea Piers, now “a family place,” a high-end sports and exercise complex, pricy, regulated, safe, and predictable, full of healthy people simulating activities like golf and climbing that really only happen elsewhere. It is in a profound way synthetic, a synthesis of purposes and a simulation of places, though it may yet yield to ruin again.
The Chelsea Piers Web site steers clear of all the history beween 1976 and 1992, when its current phase began. “But the Chelsea Piers just sat there rusting in the harbor air until destiny called them back,” is all it said, but they didn’t just sit there. During those years every kind of sexual outlaw and pariah made themselves at home in this temporary autonomous zone, sadomasochists in leather and transvestites in fishnet and homeless people and junkies. Chelsea Piers was the place Peter Hujar photographed and his protégé David Wojnarowicz (who died of AIDs in 1992) cruised and wrote about: “Paper from old shipping lines scattered all around like bomb blasts among wrecked pieces of furniture; three-legged desks, a naugahyde couch of mint-green turned upside down, and small rectangles of light and wind and river over the far wall. I lean towards him, pushing him against the wall, lifting my pale hands up beneath his sweater. . . . In the warehouse just before dark, passed along the hallways and photographed the various graffiti on the walls, some of hermaphrodites and others of sharp-faced thugs smoking cigarettes . . .” Something about the emotional, erotic, aesthetic, and ethical intensity of Wojnarowicz seems inseparable from this kind of place, for if he—queer, punk, desperado, activist—was the quintessential artist of his time it was because the time was about this kind of place, one that was ruinous, bleak, but somehow still imbued with a romantic outlaw sense of possibility, of freedom, even the freedom to be idealistic, idealistic in the bitter vein of the Sex Pistols’ “No Future,” perhaps, but idealistic all the same.
“A nuclear error but I have no fear,” sang the Clash, “ ’cause London is drowning and I—I live by the river.” It was the era of Reagan’s nuclear brinksmanship, and the postnuclear ruins were in every imagination. “The living will envy the dead,” was the phrase Nuclear Freeze activists recited like a mantra, and books, articles, a made-for-TV movie anticipated what kind of ruin the Northern Hemisphere could become. I had always anticipated living in this postnuclear world, and when I thought of my future I wondered whether survival skills or a graduate degree was more germane. Though the ruins were imagined as prophetic architecture of the future, they were the essence of their time. The great industrial cities were becoming something else: San Francisco and New York were almost done losing their ports to more suburban sites, and the small industries of the inner cities were being replaced by artists and the smooth affluence that sometimes follows and imitates artists.
We are now at the beginning of an era whose constructions are far scarier than ruins. In the time of which I write, the new silicon-based life forms were sneaking into every interstice without setting off alarms that all would be utterly changed in a way far more insidious than nuclear war, that they would bring a new wealth that would erase the ruins. In the 1980s we imagined apocalypse because it was easier than the strange complicated futures that money, power, and technology would impose, intricate futures hard to exit. In the same way, teenagers imagine dying young because death is more i
maginable than the person that all the decisions and burdens of adulthood may make of you. Then I thought of Marine’s death as the end of my youth because it signaled the end of my connection to that underworld, but it might instead have been because death became real.
Everything had changed for me in the couple of years that ended with Marine’s death: my father died in a distant country; things that had been too perilous to see before surfaced, and so I wrestled with some highly educational demons; I quit my job and embarked on the life I’m still living, that of an independent writer; and the filmmaker moved to Los Angeles to begin a successful career in the entertainment industry, a transition that made it clear that we were heading in different directions, and so we parted. I lost a whole life and gradually gained another one, more open and more free. Though I think of the 1980s as my most urban phase, Marine and I, who had both grown up in that suburban county of beautiful hills, kept one foot in the rural or the wild, for that direction was also an escape.
I think now that the suburbs were a kind of tranquilizer for the generation before us, if topography can be a drug. The blandness of ranch houses, the soothing lines of streets curving into cul-de-sacs, the homogeneity, the repetition, the pretty, vacant names were designed to erase the desperation of poverty and strife, to erase tenements and barracks and migrant camps and sharecropper shacks. What they wanted to erase, we unearthed and made into our underground culture, our refuge, our identity. We were shaking that trance off us and going out in pursuit of the world of our grandparents, us kids not so remote from a lost Europe, from the Second World War, from desperation and privation. That was what the city offered, a sharp antidote, the possibility of being fully awake, surrounded by all possibilities, some of which we’d learn the hard way were terrible. I am still a city dweller, but in those days when everything changed I first began going deep in the other direction. Another world was opening up to me in which night was for sleep and, far from city lights, for stars. I got to know the Milky Way and the sharpness of the shadows the full moon casts in the desert.
I wonder now about Marine’s abandon. In a way it seems brave to me, this charging into adventure without fear of consequences. Or was it a desperation in which there were more terrible things than death, a desire so urgent for the anesthesia, distraction, and sense of destiny drugs seem to offer, even a desire for death? Was I cowardly not to want to explore the farther reaches of consciousness, afraid of getting lost, of being unable to return? I had been on my own since I turned seventeen, and that early independence made me old: I was never sure anyone would pick up the pieces if I fell apart, and I thought of consequences. The young live absolutely in the present, but a present of drama and recklessness, of acting on urges and running with the pack. They bring the fearlessness of children to acts with adult consequences, and when something goes wrong they experience the shame or the pain as an eternal present too. Adulthood is made up of a prudent anticipation and a philosophical memory that make you navigate more slowly and steadily. But fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and anything less is already loss. I missed a lot of adventures that way early on, but I know that there were many paths I could have taken, and madness and misery lay down some of them, just as death was down one of Marine’s, closing off the others her talents and passions might have taken her down.
On a few occasions a few years later, I would enjoy the metallic taste of poppies in various states of refinement and their effect of turning me into something almost reptilian. Opiates seem to kill not merely physical but existential pain, turning you into a cool spectator of your own sensations and desires and of passing time, as languorous as all those images of divans and draperies and long pipes had promised. Though in yet another version of Marine’s death, I heard that it was not the heroin that killed her but a shot of speed her companions gave her to “wake her up”: the two together are a deadly combination, and in this version she died of cowards unwilling to risk any legal consequences from calling the paramedics who could’ve revived her with a single injection. I cannot say now whether it was a murder, a suicide, an accident, or all those things at once. Marine plunged into the unknown again and again, but she kept returning home, while I trudged on in a straight line away from where I’d started.
The Blue of Distance
Blue was the title I gave a compilation tape I made a dozen years ago, and some of the songs were about sadness, some about the sky, some about both. Every once in a while I made a collection like that, mostly to be listened to on long road trips, and in them I tried to define what it was that moved me in the music I chose. An earlier one had been called Geography Lessons, Mostly Tragic, and there too I had tried to get at something about the evocation of place and its emotional resonance in that music. A compilation about rivers and drinking, about drowning from the inside and out, I called The Entirely Liquid Mr. North, after the fatally alcoholic composer Abe North in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, though the songs were southern. In Blue, most of the music had some relationship to the blues, as if the music was going back to its origins in longing and the blue of distance.
I had discovered country and western music a few years before—not the modern stuff that is mostly sentimental pop with fiddles and a twang, but the older tunes that plumbed the dark depths of emotional experience. I had grown up in immigrant, coastal, liberal culture far removed from the realm of this music and been taught to despise the stuff as banal, as trashy, as vulgar without ever really heeding it. When the music burst upon me all of a sudden one spring, I was stunned to find out that the most popular songs often were, like the stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Katherine Anne Porter, a kind of southern gothic in love with tragedy and topography. Thinking about it now, I wonder about an era when a wrenching poetics of loss possessed the airwaves and wonder too about how it slid over into the true banality of upbeat contemporary country (though there are still great balladeers around the edges of that genre).
The songs that worked their way into my blood were like short stories compressed into a few stanzas and a refrain; they always spanned and layered time. The music was haunted, was about distant memory, was about the dead and gone or at the very least aimed at a beloved far beyond earshot. Like writing, the music was solitary, talking to itself in that solitude of composition and contemplation, in the free flow of time that is before, after, between, but somehow never quite the now of a thriving romance, and perhaps this was also the time of my long summer drives, of driving six hundred, a thousand miles in a day, of unrolling again and again like movies, like stories, like the stories small children demand for reassurance, the sequences of Highway 40 through Arizona and New Mexico, 80 and 50 through Nevada and Utah, of 58 and 285 through the California desert, of many secondary highways and other roads, roads whose mesas and diners were always the same and whose light and clouds and weather never were.
And this wasn’t the obscure or alternative stuff, necessarily. At a flea market, I picked up a cassette of Tanya Tucker’s early hits for a quarter or fifty cents, back when I was first poking around at what to me was a whole new continent. The cassette was like an anthology of stories. A former beauty walked around town, mad from loss, and stuck in a moment that had evaporated away long ago, carrying a suitcase and waiting for a man who had abandoned her long before. A nameless voice asked her nameless lover, “Would you lay with me (in a field of stone),” summoning up a bizarre picture of lovers in one of those unplowable granitic pastures, and the intensity of need seemed to be all the explanation the strange request required. (“Walking After Midnight,” Patsy Cline’s huge 1957 hit, is unsettlingly peculiar in the same way: she walks—in the words of Don Hecht and Alan Block—along the highway in the middle of the night to say that she loves the “you” of the song, not a very domesticated or reasonable or even straightforward way of saying anything, and the obliqueness of the means is in direct proportion to the impossibility of really sayin
g it to the unnamed, irrecoverable beloved in this landscape of loneliness.) A woman recalled the man who had approached her when she was a child. He asked her her mother’s name and whether she ever spoke of a place called New Orleans and, for bothering a child, was thrown into jail. Near the present in which the song is sung, the questioner died, and on his corpse was the note from her mother announcing her birth, so that the one meeting between father and daughter had been a catastrophe of nonrecognition, of the failure to connect that is so much the material of these songs that layer time like dirt on a grave.
They were always about someone recalling a tragedy that unfolded long ago, generally about someone else, so that a sort of haze of remoteness lay over the once wrenching events, the kind of time that Joseph Conrad invoked when he’d set up a narrator on a docked ship telling a tale of another man in another ocean long before, an unresolved riddle to be revisited. The quintessential song in this vein and the one I love best is “Long Black Veil,” which the protagonist sings from beyond the grave, ten years after he was hanged for a crime he did not commit as his best friend’s wife silently watched him die. They had been together, in bed, but neither would invoke the alibi that would have saved him. And so, as the famous refrain goes, she walks these hills in a long black veil “and visits my grave when the night winds wail.” Even Bobbie Gentry’s 1967 “Ode to Billy Joe,” that megahit in which the girl protagonist may have pushed her lover off the Tallahatchie Bridge (below Choctaw Ridge), has something of that sense of looking at ghosts and wraiths in the rearview mirror of irrecoverable time, irrecoverable loss and error.
A Field Guide to Getting Lost Page 8
