love your memory the same way that Sisyphus must love his rock.
Solid, present, painful, my constant companion, so near as to be
almost invisible, but the ground, basis, anchor of my reality. I
have fallen in love with your memory more than I could ever have
loved you. Your memory is mine in a way that a person can't be,
it possesses me in the way I hoped that I could possess you. I
was innocent when I met you, as innocent as a human being can be,
I believed that two people could possess each other. My memory of
you is a blurry aching comfort on mornings when I lay in bed,
hanging on to its slight snaillike trace, reminded once again by
a dream in which we exchange needles like kisses and in which the
taste of death pervades our embraces.
You desired my death, wanting to be emptied of me.
Your hands wrapped around my neck one night in the car, fighting
on the floor of the old Blue Rambler, parked in front of an old
bar room in an old city. Your hands, which I told you I would
never forget, and remember now, more than the endless series of
needle marks that ascended your arms, black and blue storm clouds
that I huddled under your hands were strong and wide and solid,
steady you often compared them to mine, often you would mention
that mine were small and delicate and trembling, never assured
with the needle as yours were. Sometimes I fumble and lose my
hit and you would impatiently push my hands out of the way and
take the syringe like an extension, another finger, tap, tap, slide
it into my vein and watch the tiny red ejaculation of my blood,
the only time I saw true passion on your face, swelling with
desire. That night in the Blue Rambler, I hit you, I hit you with small hands, not able to break your grip, not able to draw blood, feeling the weight of your body on mine,
almost close to letting you go on, mesmerized by the weight and
reality of your flesh. It was you who stopped, loosened your
grip, let me breathe, looked confused, as if you were waking from
a dream, and let me live.
Before the Blue Rambler, early on, one summer morning, windows
open, your beauty still young and radiant as the day, we lay in
bed in the heat and sunlight and you woke. You looked at me and
said, "I had a nightmare."
Hmmm, delicate blue eyes, I was not taking nightmares seriously this morning, not in bed with those blue eyes next to me, and a summer breeze above the bed.
You had a sweet warm armpit to nuzzle my head in, but in this
dream you told me that you were surrounded by rats, terrified, you
were screaming for me, but I showed a little late, a little
nonchalant, perhaps, perhaps I needed to finish my beer, to flick
my smoking cigarette coolly into the street and by then the
rats had done their unspeakable damage. But I said, no, no, that
was just a dream, no, oh, no, I'm here, I'll never let anything
harm you, I'll protect you. Snuggled closer to your skin, loving
the smell of sweat and flesh and summer and the moistness of your
flesh, I wasn't yet aware that the rats were real, hiding in your
dreams, in damp dark crevices I hadn't yet discovered, waiting for
the summer to pass. Waiting for the intense heat to cool and
leave them looking for a new refuge, scurrying quickly out of my
consciousness and crouching in my blind spot. Intense summer heat,
intense burning heat, a burning house, your mother screaming,
years later I dreamed that I ran into an inferno and grabbed your
severed head from the flames, cradled it in my arms, told your
mother that I had come to rescue you, that you were fine now,
holding your head with one arm and stroking your hair with the
other. I told her that I would keep you with me, wash your face,
brush your teeth, comb your hair, and miss your hands. But that was
years after the rats had appeared, and the dream was not even a
nightmare, it was a nocturnal prank. The blood from your brother's
head had already pooled on his bathroom floor, and in a
summer yet to come the blood from Jack's head would drip from his
bedroom wall, summer deaths and severed connections.
After the Blue Rambler, after you let me live, let me live to
dream of every lover as you, my first lover, my last lover, my
earliest teacher, after the Blue Rambler became unspoken, looking
out of the filthy hotel window at a cold dull winter daybreak, I
turned my head and looked over my shoulder as you stepped out of
the shower wrapped in a towel, still a young woman but already
ashamed of the aging body of a junkie, the body that I had known
for years now, that only hours ago I had loved in the safety of
darkness. I remember I told you to take the towel off, that your
body was now beyond my concern and now my only concern, now this
dirty hotel room with its dim light Arcadian because you were
behind me, stepping out of the shower with the insouciant care of
a woman dressing for the office or a day of shopping, drying your
hair with a towel. You walked over to the window with me and asked
me if I wanted to get high before we left the room. You struck a
match, you lit a Pall Mall, you inhaled, you exhaled a ghost of
smoke, you lit another match, and you cooked the dope in a bottle
cap. We sat on the bed and fixed. I had given you the drugs I had
scavenged from the previous night's work of theft and betrayal, an
ephemeral sacrifice at this particular altar. Oh! A moment of
ecstasy, and then peace, the consummate momentary reality of a
life together in the future when everything would be perfect,
beyond perfect. When we were done, I told you to keep the rest. I
could find something else, I would have a drink, my heroin use was
a gift to you like the drugs this morning, my real habit was passion and desire and experience. You laughed and turned away with the vial in your hand. Once again, I handed you your fortune, once again I handed off to you my death, your death,
yet another betrayal at daybreak, when your golden tooth was my
coin of the realm in a small obscure hotel in the part of town
where the rats walk openly on the streets at dawn. Later, walking
down the winter street, you told me not to hang onto your arm.
You were wearing a short blond wig, another junkie in disguise.
Many, many years later, as I took my own innocent out for the
sacrificial ride, seducing her with all I had learned from you, I
think of you, or the repetition of sacrificial moments into
an eternal now. But I do now.
Sometimes my refusal to die for you follows me like I followed you
on that street, your shadow within my shadow, my
shadow within yours, it whispers behind me, it cons me with it's
promise: we could have been free. I know you whisper it gravely to
me at night before I fall asleep and dream we could have been
free. I have heard it when I passed the apartment that we
sometimes shared with your husband and son. You never cared
for living. Living never cared for you. I worshiped
this living with every cell of my being, and I worshipped this dying.
Freedom for me, oh, I still imagined it as an eternal night ride. These contradictions became hybrid, bloomed, ripened, decayed, fell back into the earth with
devastating force and smashed the soil and rock under us into
huge faultlines that appeared to be veins of gold. It still
strikes me as curious that a needle can penetrate the skin, and
the consciousness, with no difficulty, but this skin on skin, this
fragile semi-permeable sheath of pores cannot penetrate
another human being and instead we slide across each other, we
stick together in the gluesweat of love, we rub as
though the friction could finally erode the wrapper that holds the gift.
I wake up from my nod and I feel your hand over
mine, the skin on my skin, and I look at it, then at the stage
where the Temptations are doing "My Girl," you look at me
and smile, and I close my eyes again into a lethargic May, into a
honey nod, My Girl, My Girl, My Girl, talkin' 'bout
My Girl, our pop tune tapping on my consciousness from very far
away, my girl dream lover, death lover, a hand to
hold when I get cold, I'll go to sleep and dream again, that's the
only thing to do, until all my lover's dreams come true.
You had always been waiting there, already sitting behind the
ironing board dealing bags of smack and ironing a shirt
for Little Stevie. Richard took me to you house, his error,
eventually enraged and turning blue in my bathtub when he
found that you had stolen me from him, like a bag of dope, like I
stole his. We walked in, carrying beers and arrogant
attitudes. I found your beauty quite embarrassing. It refused to go unnoticed, it asserted itself in room even through your shredded junkie eyes, translucently blue
and swollen red, but unquestionably astute, and
intelligent life was an uncommon commodity in a room like this. I
saw intelligence and beauty, the flash of your gold
tooth, a sarcastic joke, and an immediate mutual acknowledgment of
the absurdity of this situation, of the girls talking over
the ironing board while the boys made a drug deal in the kitchen.
I never thought about dying that night, only
knowing certainly that I would see you again, thinking about it on
the way home, thinking about it seemed like a schoolgirl's crush and I went home to draw your picture from memory, over and over again, never quite
matching the image in my mind, already once removed from the woman
in the room. Drawing obsessively, and I had
just returned to art school when I met you, no more heroin, just
beer in the afternoons, sunny Boston afternoons with a
Laura Nyro soundtrack. I invited you to my apartment, but never
expected you to come. I drew your picture in Boston,
on the train, in my room, I drew you to me with an art spell, and
eventually you appeared in my apartment, escorted to
my door by Richard, smiling in ignorance of having sealed his own
fate that night.
I threw an acid party and you arrived together
with the Ramirez brothers, all making the
drive in the Blue Rambler. I was on the roof, a warm May night,
looking at the sky and throwing fireworks into the
street, slow explosions bursting into sound waves and long slow
flashes of brilliant light, laughing with the boys, our
laughter echoed into the skies, into the streets and then I
remembered that you were there, inside, and I walked down
the stairs from the roof, the stairs tunneled and buckled, little
wings of Mercury on my feet, landing happily in the living room
and you were laying on the sofa crying, very, very gently, and I
slowed, pulled the wings in some, I looked you in the
eyes and I saw it then. I didn't
understand it but I recognized
it, you couldn't live in this world, not my world of
fireworks and posturing and wings and the violence mixed with
laughter. You stated simply (no fire in those eyes, no
wings on those feet, only a smoldering pile of slag this night),
that you would have to leave and find some heroin. I didn't
argue because I did understand in that moment, I wanted you to stay, I
wanted to breathe some life into those little ashes
sparked with red, to explode them like the fireworks and take you
to my roof, but I let you go, and I was still blinded by
my own visions. You told me you'd
see me again.
In San Francisco, years later, there was the burning. A ritual to
replace our rituals, I watched the index of our love catch
to the flame of a match while I lit a cigarette, watched it shoot
up the photographs and letters, a piece of blond hair,
flames to purge a memory of love, I held a beer in my hand and
blew the ashes out of the third story window and
watched them drift down Haight Street. The daily radio broadcast
from the SLA was on in the background. I think they were talking
about wealth and poverty, and families as poor as yours, and what
would happen to you because of it. I knew what they were saying.
And it was my radical manifesto that day that I would not die for you, that I would not
remember you or the tiny ejaculations of red. While the SLA
was holding Tanya, I was freeing myself of you and your
problematic involuntary poverty. Three days later I slid a
knife across my veins, I watched the blood spurt into thin air,
because your ashes were too small to collect, because I
had destroyed the coding of my love, because even when I pieced
together the small notes you wrote and tore up, I
could never decode your pain.
Your pain was your favorite joke, sitting in front of your
Television Sesame Street on even though you son was gone,
I was curled up at your feet, and you called yourself Mrs. Pain,
swathed in bandages, an unknown Schwarzkogler, long
before Mapplethorpe made the image chic. Your pain was never, never
chic, not made for art, Little Judy Sunshine, the
joke was on you like the ringworm that year. You became obsessed
with cleaning your eyes when you were high,
poking at them with small bits of wadded Kleenex in front of your
mirror, certain you could remove something you
couldn't see. Your eye's became Mrs. Pain's
eyes then, red and swollen, with minuscule lines of blood mapping them
like tiny rivers in an unknown land.
It was after the party in Boston, but it was before the window in
San Francisco. It was the first summer of the rat dream
when I asked where you lived. I hadn't
started howling at the rats for love yet. I walked to your house every day and
you would let me in. We sat and watched television, ate methadone,
smoked cigarettes, and I drank beer until it was
time for me to go out, walk downcity to the bar, humming Rocket
Man, gotta rocket in my pocket, drink shots, shoot pool, shoot
the breeze with Jimmy and one eyed George, Liz the spider woman and
see how bad Maureen got beat up last night, and you
weren't interested, you said no, go out, you're a party girl, like
your old man was, go, go, go. Quarters for the juke
box, you knew, I was a drunk like your father how many times
did your mother send you out in the late afternoon, a
little girl looking for Bill Senior, drunk at the Polish Club, is
he coming home for dinner is he coming home?
Finally, no, he isn't coming home, but you learned not to stop
someone from going to the bar. I saw his obituary in the paper a
few years after my own mother had died. I wondered if you had come
to town for the service.
One summer evening, just after dark, you knew I'd leave soon. The
television was on, the news was bad, the war was still going. You had plenty of
methadone that summer, your
life was solitary except for me, no need to hustle, no
need to go out. Before my time to leave, you silently laid your
head on my legs, touched my hand, curled up softly and
we both knew I was going nowhere. A six of beer in the
refrigerator for me, methadone for you, we were safe. So you
took my hand and I followed you to the bedroom, which is where I
learned how to stay home that summer. Eventually
I learned how to hustle the methadone clinic for you, more for
you, some for me, more for you. A few dollars a day from
your husband, the drugs were free, we lived on blueberry muffins
and cheeseburgers from the store across the street.
One afternoon Jack and Doug came by, our first visitors. You told
me how much I'd like Jack, your old friend and him
with his new lover, Doug. You told me that Doug was a college boy.
They came by and we drove the Blue Rambler out
to buy real drugs. I sat in the car with George while you and Doug
went to cop heroin at the high school field, it was late
summer and I was due back in Boston soon. "Maggie Mae" started to
play on the radio, and Jack said, "Mary, have you
listened to the words of this song?" I listened, and I knew that
Jack already knew that I wouldn't be going back to
school. Two months later you ripped Jack and Doug off. When I
asked why we hadn'tseen them, you said,
"Because I shot all their dope."
So I went out and bought Jack a bag, brought
it to his house and we got high together. We were
fast friends after that, for such a long time, until he put Diana
Ross on the turntable and a gun in his mouth.
When fall began, when it was time to pack up and go back to
Boston, I didn't want to go, but you told me to go, told
me to leave, and I said I couldn't, so you drove me to Boston in the Blue Rambler, you
told me you would always be there when I got back.
Three weeks later and I took the bus back, I found you and told
you I wanted to be with you. I didn't know that the methadone
program had ended. The days were getting
shorter and I believed that we could live in that apartment
forever: I would learn how to play guitar, put the curtains up,
let the sunshine in, this was 1969 and the sun was free for
everyone, and I imagined a new future for us not made for
a poor girl from a slum -- you had already been to prison for a
year. Eighteen and in prison for your first drug store.
There wasn't much free love in prison, not much free at all. You
preferred television to music and drawn shades to
sunshine. So I gradually grew accustomed to living in the darkness
when I was with you. Still, I imagined that I was Orpheus, picking
Your song on my guitar and not looking back. It wasn't that I looked back, it
was just that I was blind, and I couldn't look ahead.
But then, there are these moments, before or
after a dream, in this or that reality, when it all blends into
one, and my teachers all become holy, or profane, the faces shift
into each other, and I have to take form, make form, bring it out
again, climb into the Blue Rambler and roll down the windows so
that I can smell that passing scent of roses from your back yard.
[END]
© Mary Lynch 2001
