Basement Tapes

Some great fire had been extinguished when I was born. The bathtub was filled with ice. There was ash in my skin, hair growing on my arms in places unappealing. Cigarettes around. The cars outside paraded up and down the street, the same cars, over and over.

How long had I been gone? My hair wasn’t very long. I smelled like sex, was sore.

Y'all ever been locked in a basement before? Funny how a thing like that comes about… One wishes one had a story to stick between the gossip blogger's lips, 27 angels flew out of heaven avowed to trident-wielding vengeance for wrongs done to Allah's children, a knee crest prayer in vain, six weeks, 100 lbs and a life's total dignity later here I am, but no such luck.

He sounded like I did. That was what it was.

"You sound like me," I said through the last crunchy bits of wheat toast, walking over to him at the chrome-plated diner where he was reading a newspaper aloud to the daintiest of female companions.

"You mean, YOU sound like ME," he corrected without so much as an upwards glance my direction, "I'm older."

"How... how do you know?"
We compared birthdays. He was right.

One man’s pain, another woman’s panties.

He walked to the corner and lit up a blowtorch. “Wanna hear a joke,” he asked, “a heart can be broken but it will keep on beating.”

“I don’t get it,” I said through the duct tape.

“Me neither,” he said, “But I still think it’s funny.”

Through the rush-hour haze and daze twice a day, at night in the darkness each car stalled on the freeway, dreamers and wakers returning to their ghostly roots. I consoled myself knowing that women are like flowers, preparing their coloured petals in private before they blossom into the night. Soft curves waving, somewhere. Little children following their father home.

“Maybe you could do what I do,” he said as he poured out the alcohol on my head, laughing. I thought about systems then. Those that follow them and those written in a complimentary code with derivatives all its own.

I’ve been known to get lost in the lure of a wayward curve. The smell of sweaty netherflesh on a hot summer’s day. Fucking in a car with the stereo crooning indie rock CDs like Wilco or Rishi Dhir. At this time of my life limited budget and a desire for subdued adventure made me a regular patron at a restaurant where I could read bad poems about Southern belles and it happened one day that I saw the man again, at first I didn’t notice, but he did.

Fairly tall, he must have been about my height if you discount the difference in hairstyles. He slunched over when we sat to eat and he dressed like a man trying to look like he dressed carelessly. I don’t remember the colour of his eyes, but I think they were blue. I’ve told myself they were blue, and so they are blue. Blue eyes that speak volumes. Volumes starting with a Foreword reading: my eyes are not really blue, but get over it, this is just the beginning of your suffering.

Sometimes when I look in the mirror there is a kind of intelligent anguish that animates my reflection. Sometimes your reflection sits conspicuously observing you while you’re off doing other things. Brushing the plaque from your teeth for instance. Popping that zit. Shaving the hair from your arms. Your reflection suspiciously sizes you up, anxious for a moment when you’ll look away and he will cease to be.

Death is in our bones. It is the marrow in the skeleton of life. And outrage at the all the wasted circus acts of our golden days is music that rumbles through our hollow core, thumping like a heartbeat that will one day take us into the dream. The dream we think is just a dream each waking day, each waking day we are really dreaming and the night waits.

“We’re not so different, you and me.”

I tell myself my eyes are blue. He combed his hair, and said he was going out tonight,

“Don’t wait up for me.”

Giving her flowers because he can’t afford diamonds. He figures, every flower becomes a diamond. Eventually. On a long enough time scale…

Sometimes we watched movies. He sat behind me and smoked. He made little comments on the plot, the actors. Mostly we watched black and white movies. Detective stories with lush silver damsels and hard-hearted grifters in rumpled fedoras. His voice was the only colour.

I hated colour after the first week.

It’s important to live for the moment every now and again. That one adolescent second of life that is fully and awkwardly inhabited, and wonderful. But to do it right, looking back, you have to plan for it. From Where I Am, to Where I’d Let you Do It All Again. From Immediately And Now until, Just A Little While From Now.

everything
you've ever loved
meant giving up some other thing you loved

“What’s your name?”

“You can call me Orpheus.”

“And this is your own little underworld,” I asked. He had taken pains to furnish it with certain basic amenities. Two hard chairs. Some chains for tying me up. A table under a lamp, with a sink filled with knives. He explained that with this kind of a room he could maintain dignity. Tedium seemed to be a great comfort to him. I spent most of my time alone.

Once there was music coming from upstairs. Carry on My Wayward Son. I think I may have cried. I wrote a letter to everyone I know in my head.

I only know people in my head.

They didn’t like the letter when I imagined them reading it when I imagined myself being free.

I’m living for the nights now. Find my only comfort in the ticklish embrace of swinging neon arms. When the day comes I close my blinds to block out the light, and sleep. Skinny sick. Sometimes I don’t recognize myself anymore. Sometimes I want to pour my tea onto all the books in the library. Sometimes I want to kidnap little children, and I think of him. Sometimes I think freedom is just anarchy. You still have to play within the outline of the system. Mushrooms are just solving very basic equations in the nighttime, the product of a series of numbers. Chaos is a scared look in your reflection’s eye when your own eyes are closed.

The night surprises with the company it brings. I don’t think I’ve ever spent a night truly alone in my entire life.

There is a low rumbling of warfare and foreboding in the room next door. Munitions fire and I slink off into the darkness to hide. When this all started I had a futon to sleep on, upright. Now there is only an uncovered mattress stained on the floor, and soon there will be only pillows, then only floor, until there is no longer any floor. I’ll skip rock bottom by about six feet and then I’ll really get start getting some rest.

You could do some drugs, says the other dude, like Heroin.

Heroin helps insomnia.

No one noticed when I was gone on my birthday. I got 1 email in 30 days that wasn’t spam: “…but, I have to be careful about it, I was told not to talk about my past to much when talking to women, or whatever, and um, they listen in on your conversations in a bar you know, even if you're only talking to yourself, it seems”

Sometimes in a humming silence you can pick up on the dismembered ring of the big bang in the distance. Cobwebs strumming faintly radioactive chords, and all of life having a good time. There are flowers in a distant meadow where the sun is still shining. I haven’t found them yet. I’m not sure I know where anything is supposed to be. Sometimes I think I made it up, this place I think of as home, as in where I was happy. Like it’s a composite of locations that doesn’t exist in reality.

Like well-being, or heaven.

“I don’t know if I am really here,” he said. We were watching a woman play a sad song on the piano. I don’t remember his eyes, or the color of the walls around us. It was dark. Maybe there were no walls then. When I woke up my mother called and everything in my life seemed to be cause for apology. Like I’d done it all purposely to hurt myself.

Cops all have the same haircut. I wonder how many of them are cruising within five miles of me now, this brown bathwater. Or how many girls are getting ready to go out tonight. So much of our time is spent waiting, weighing the options of living. In the morning the sun with breath again, after holding its breath as it dives under the earth. When it comes up for air, some great fire reigniting, I wonder if the first thing it notices is that the earth smells ripe, like a woman, like a flower, like something sweet that’s waiting to be fertilized… or does it see its reflection in the ocean, plotting innocuously to one day to extinguish all that it holds dear, out of love.