Stunts Like This
Stunts Like This
No more booze. No more pot. No more nothing. Gets in the way, keeps the memories buried under all that gauze and pond scum. That’s what my head’s full of, used battle dressing and pond scum.
Have to clear my head. No more nothing.
Keep running. Running is good. Not just for the legs and the heart and the lungs. More I run, more I remember. If I run fast enough, maybe the gauze and the muck will leak out of my ears.
Here are the pieces, best I can fit them together. Last time I saw my Paula.
Zero the Dials
Monday night show in a club too shitty to call a dive. What was it called? The walls. All the no-talent, post-metalcore bands in the world couldn’t hide the dinginess of the walls there with all their stupid-ass scratchy font stickers and fliers. Floor so sticky, felt like walking in a slaughterhouse, and I worked a year in one to pay for my Eldorado with the blood of ten thousand chickens, so I know what I’m saying.
But the place was packed. On a Monday? Paula said their shows always were.
“Music better be good,” I say.
“They’re pretty decent!” she says, all reassuring me, except the way she says it, I get that same feeling I got earlier, like she’s trying to sell me something she knows I’ll regret buying once I give it a shake and hear loose shit rattling around in it. Which is weird, because wasn’t it her idea to come out here tonight in the first place? She’s been on my case for two weeks to see these guys. OK, fine. I’m here. Now they’re just “pretty decent”?
So she isn’t here for the music after all. Must know someone in the band, I guess. I’d been there before, showing up to some guy’s lame gig for morale support. Clap clap, that was real cool, good job, bro. Nah, I didn’t notice any fuck-ups at all. That kind of thing. I ask her to remind me how she knows these guys, but the house music is blaring--why the fuck do we need loud music between sets? Nobody’s dancing and people want to talk. She can’t understand me over the noise. Pretty sure I yelled loud enough. Nevermind.
We’re waiting off to one side, me with my back to a post, Paula in front of me, leaning back so I can put an arm around her from behind and rest my chin on her head. Feels nice, like that. I watch the roadies or the stage crew or whoever-the-fuck swap the opening act’s gear for the headliner’s. Good gear, too. Way good. Way expensive. The big, shiny shit you see in catalogues and shake your head over. I never heard of these guys in my life, not once. Somebody in the band has a rich daddy, guaranteed. Assholes. Playing with someone else’s money, then singing about politics and suffering like they have any authority on the subjects.
“Zero the Dials”, they’re called? Never heard of them. Sound like a bunch of preening hipsters, if you asked me. Fuck if I care, though. I have good things going on. Had. I am--was-- starting a new job on Friday building a theater at a private school up north, and that’s respectable money while it lasts, and I have Paula in one arm, open and gentle Paula, Paula who loves me even though I make her a starving poet’s girlfriend, Paula, my Brazilian Pardo with the delicate brown skin, hazel eyes in almond shapes, and hair sun-dappled even in dim rooms. And I have a beer in one hand that looks like too much foamy piss in too small a cup, but it tastes alright. For a minute, all is right in the world. Was.
Zero the Dials, or whatever-the-fuck, are taking forever. No surprise, there. I amuse myself calling them Zero the Douches and Zero the Queeros, and other dumbass puns, which earns me a couple of elbows to the kidneys from Paula, but she throws a few laughs in the mix, too, so it’s well worth the pain. Her laughter. It could cure my migraines, if I ever got any--it’s that soothing to me. I take inventory of the hipster ratio in the audience tonight. Pretty high, but what can you do these days? It’s an epidemic. I tell her as much, but she ignores me, or can’t hear me. She does that nod people do when they’re tired of straining to make out conversation in a noisy club and just give your mumble some approval. And her eyes are roaming around. I can’t quite see them from where I’m standing behind her, but I see her eyelashes flickering. Restless glances. She looks excited. Nervous? I should have caught on then.
One or two hipsters meet my eye, and I make them look away with my patented the-fuck-you-looking-at stare. Paula doesn’t notice it. She hates when I pick fights with the hipsters, even if they picked one with me first. If I were honest--and when am I ever honest with anyone but her?--I’d have to say she kind of is one herself, in her own way. But not deep down where it counts. Deep down she’s real. Not even that far down, either.
I usually lose the story, here. Memories all jumbled and coated in that pond scum. Whatever those assholes did to me, it clings.
Forget you ever met us.
Run faster.
Empty cup. I left her for a minute.
I have no more beer, just an empty plastic cup in my hand, and that’s the worst, because what the hell do you do with an empty cup and no trash can in sight? Can’t drop it. Paula hates that. So I hold it like an idiot until my urge to take a leak and buy us a new round overcomes my desire to stand there with my girl in my arms. I kiss her curly, fuzzy head and say I’ll be right back. I don’t think she hears me. I walk off to find the john and a waste bin, but I look back just before she’s out of sight. It’s a habit I had in any public place with her. Look back before you’re gone, scope out the scene. Best way to know which d-bag is eying your girl while you’re not there. Maybe it makes me an asshole, but if I’d done more of it that night, she’d still be here. I'd have noticed the signs.
Pretty People
Losing the thread again. Run, run, run. Remember.
I don’t remember if anyone was checking her out, but I remember her looking around, searching for someone. So what, right? She’s outgoing, people like her. We can’t take ten steps without running into someone she knows from somewhere, men and women. Probably she thinks she’ll find a friend. Big deal. Except that it was a big deal, because I see her eyes. From halfway across the club, I see her eyes twitching around, all nervous and needy. Hungry eyes. It’s the look tweakers get when they know they’re coming down for a hard landing, a real bad landing, a crash landing in a remote jungle crawling with neon snakes and bug-infested swamps, and there’s nothing to bring them back up until their dealer returns their calls.
Shit. If Paula was on anything, I’d know. I can recognize the signs from ten miles back, and she didn’t have any before tonight. Just distracted a lot, lately, and that ain’t a sign, right? Yeah, dumb-ass, it is. It was a goddamn sign, and you missed it.
Always gets jumbled at this part. Have to run faster, baste my brain in endorphins like its a turkey. Think. Think. Think.
I’m walking away. Maybe I’m walking back. I’ve got beer--I’m walking back. I’m pushing through a crowd of kids in hoodies. I can’t put it out of my mind, the way she looked. Those eyes of hers. Or was I clueless? Am I just remembering myself all bothered and upset when really I didn’t have half a clue and was thinking about how good it feels to have an empty bladder and two full cups of beer? No, I picked up on something. My hackles are raised. Paula, Paula, Paula. What’s the deal, Paula? I didn’t want to be that guy, that jealous guy, blowing every little thing up until it’s a Thing. We hardly ever fight, but when we do, it’s about that--my jealousy, or what she calls it, my “mood”. I promised to tone it down some, and I meant it. But that night, in my gauzy memories, I’m toning it back up. Sometimes you don’t make something a Thing. Sometimes it already is one. Bullshit of one type or another is going on, guaranteed.
Is this when I saw them?
Forget you ever met us.
The blonde and her two square-jawed playboy friends.
Forget you ever met us.
They walked past me on their way to the room in the back with the pool tables and the arcades. That girl. Goddamn. I know why they call them blonde bombshells now. You think that term is some post-Marilyn cliché, something that even teens in the 50s who bought 35 cent pulp rags with detectives and busty girls with drooping tops on the cover would groan over. But, no. Lemme tell you. Blonde mother-fucking bombshell. They exist. There are people who hit the room like half-ton bombs and leave nothing alive. She’s one of them. Devastation in her wake. A trail of debris. Everyone caught in the radius of her blast. I’m dying standing up.
Forget you ever met us.
Just looking at her, I feel like I’m cheating on Paula. The blockheads with her weren’t bad lookers too, I guess. Talk about good grooming and better genes. Nothing’s out of place, everything glossy. Must hire sculptors to do their hair and architects for their beards. You’d think they needed a forklift to pack all that muscle into such pricey suits. They could end world hunger by pawning off their wristwatches alone, but these are the kind of dudes who’d much rather know what time it is than lend a brother a dime. Sons of bitches.
Forget you ever met us.
These three--the bombshell and her companions--burn right through the gauze and the muck in my head like a candle flame under a coffee filter. I only saw them for a moment before they disappeared into the back room, but that was enough. They made their mark. So beautiful, so imposing, they left scar tissue in my brain. Fuck.
Forget you ever met us.
I remember thinking, what the hell are people like that doing in a dump like this?
Petitioning the Court
Then things get real hazy and real screwy. Certain parts come through clear, certain parts I think I made up, using my imagination like putty to fill in the holes. That’s what my head is, now. A wall somebody took a screwdriver to, all gunked up with the crappiest putty job in the world, and I’ve done construction more years than I’d like to count, so I know what a bad sealing job looks like.
Paula is leading me by the hand. Where are we going? I’m thinking about that bombshell. Paula tosses her empty cup away, and so do I. This is later, then. The band is playing, Zero the Bore. When did they start? Why are we leaving the stage after we came all the way down here and waited all night for them to finally decide the time has come to play some shitty, uninspired set. It’s bad music, isn’t it? I’m a little tipsy and the sound sucks--hard to tell.
Hypnotism doesn’t help the memory, either. But that happens later.
She leads me towards the back room. She’s giving me the smile I call her skull smile. Sounds macabre, but when she smiles, there’s no part of her face that doesn’t smile, not even her skull. She’s excited, she’s nervous. She’s worried about my reaction. She’s talking about meeting special people. She looks like someone crushing, only worse. Someone crushing on someone who scares them. I’ve never seen her like this. It’s weird, but at the same time, I feel better because whatever’s going on, she’s going to pull back the curtains and show me what’s up. No secrets. The Paula I know. Open, honest. Loving. Fine, you want to go meet some people? Let’s go. I might get a second glimpse of Bombshell. Maybe I should make an excuse, divert us into the back room for a second.
But I’m a moron, so I only put two and two together when we’re already a few steps away. Of course that’s where we’re headed. Of course. Picking our way through the wreckage to ground zero. My heart ticked faster. Funny, more than anywhere else, I wanted to be in that room, getting my fill, letting Bombshell’s image laser itself into my retina some more, but at the same time, the part of my mind not ruled by sex was firing off a warning. A cold and urgent feeling was looping itself around my intestines, tying itself in a knot, and slipping tighter.
Or else I didn’t have a clue, and that’s just the putty filling up the gaps in this narrative.
Forget you ever met us.
So hard to remember. I’m outside the door. They won’t let us in. I see her, Bombshell, standing in front of me. A smile full of scorn, milk skin with flecks of vanilla bean, diamond pendant sitting in her cleavage like it crystallized directly from her rack. So gorgeous she makes me angry. Sometimes the picture changes. One of the blockheads leaning back against a pool table, looking at me like I’m bird shit on his shoulder and he’s not sure whether to swat me away or make me pay for his dry cleaning. A suspicious bulge in his jacket, and since he isn’t happy to see me, that bulge has to be option number two. Paula, gesturing, holding my arm, pleading and smiling. Vouching for me.
Paula, what are you doing? These people are not good news. They’re not our people. They’re so filthy rich, they wrap all the way back around to being mirror-clean again. At least one of them is carrying. Do you get what that means? If you do, can you explain it to me? What are you mixed up in? What have you mixed me up in?
There’s someone else. I see him over Bombshell’s shoulder. He looms in the open doorway to some smaller room. Moneyed but not flashing it like these other three. More class. He can’t be over thirty-five, but his eyes look puffy, sick. Old. That coil of ice I’ve been feeling lassos my guts even tighter at the sight of him. Even now, even with all this time, and all my hatred, I still can’t picture him in my head without feeling a cold tug behind my navel. Some people, you take one look and you just know they’re wrong. Well, not some people. Just this guy. Mr. Wrong.
I'll never forget the three of them looking back at him for a signal, an order. Everything changes, then. Mr. Wrong is the boss. More than a boss. The god-emperor. That moment when they look his way, it’s the only moment they don’t all look like they have literally purchased the whole street and everyone on it. They look like something else, then. Serfs. Votaries.
As soon as they are addressing us again, court is back in session, and I mean the kind of court with knights and queens. Bombshell shakes her head. I shall not pass. Paula presses the issue. No budge. She gets to go in but I don’t. What the hell, Paula. All this attitude from these people, for what? Drugs? A job? I’m sorry, but no drug in the world, and sure as hell no job, is worth this level of disrespect. I am not putting up with this bullshit, not even from Bombshell over here. These fucking people, coming in here with their money and designer shoes, acting like they need to broker power in a goddamn trashy-ass bar with four dollar beer. They make me so mad, I suddenly feel like I have to defend a stupid bar I never even wanted to go to in the first place. Defend it from them. Because they want my Paula, and they don’t want me, and something tells me I’m losing her. Tonight. I’m losing her.
I think I say all this out loud, but I can’t remember. Maybe just parts of it.
I say, “Just ‘cause I got paint all over my clothes. That it? Yeah, I paint houses. I get paint all over my shit. I build shit. What do you do? You ever built anything anyone can actually feel with their hands?” Suddenly I’m getting romantic about the jobs I fucking hate and only do because poetry pays nothing. “Look at you! Never worked outside one day in your life. Buncha vegan lawyers playing prince and pauper.” I’m not making any sense. I’m a little drunk and I’m sick of pretty people ruling my world, forcing me to hate them even when they’re achingly beautiful, and I think about how Paula is a vegan, but the good kind, not the bad kind, and all I want to do is go home with her right this fucking minute and sleep all twisted together with her.
I get right in Bombshell's face and shout.
She shoves me.
The Part Where I Get My Ass Hypnotized
I’m on my ass. I think my eyes are closed, but they’re open into blackness, like staring out a window in the boonies at night. Slowly, my vision irises-out, the room reappearing, but blurred and swarming with candlelight. I think, “Fuck, I’m seeing stars, like in cartoons.” Must have hit my head. There’s no air anywhere in this bar. I’m staring at the ceiling, hearing Paula’s voice all high-pitched and pleading. I’m reaching under me to pick myself up, sucking with my lungs and getting only a few packets of air molecules at a time.
Bitch shoved me. Hard. I’ve been in fights before. I’ve circled around with my friends, boxing each other to see who could take a real hit. This was like that. A real hit. Harder. Cracked a rib, guaranteed. Only she did it open-handed, as easy as pressing the Walk button to cross the street. What kind of Kung Fu shit is that?
I remember thinking, what’s the play? Blockheads are armed, Bombshell knows Kung Fu. I can’t breathe. What’s the play? What’s safer for Paula? Meanwhile, there’s an argument. It’s in hushed tones, most of it canceled by the ringing in my ears.
I hear someone, one of the blockheads, say “Stunts like this are why he’ll never make you a Kindred.”
That’s when someone gets into position beside me and winds up a kick to my head. My arms aren’t moving fast enough. I think, “This is gonna hurt.”
I wake up to a beating in a tiny black, padded room, and fall back asleep to it. When I surface again, slouched in what feels like a leather couch, the blockheads are taking a breather, wiping their knuckles with handkerchiefs. Feel like I've gone twelve rounds with two heavy-weights and I didn't even hear the first bell. Bombshell’s nowhere in sight, and although she’s the reason I find myself cuffed at the wrist and ankles, bleeding so much from the face I feel like I just took a shower, I’m still a little bummed she’s not around. That gorgeous. I realize my tiny torture room is actually a limousine. The blockheads are sitting across from me, facing me. One of them leans across to hold something under my nose. I don’t know what it is, but it smells like braincell genocide. There’s no use avoiding it. Makes my thoughts, sounds, sights, everything run like watercolors. Everything bleeds together.
There’s a repetitive rumble, a slow-moving train doing donuts in my mind. It’s a sentence:
Forget you ever met us. Forget you ever met us. Forget you ever met us. Forget you ever met us. Forget you ever met us.
Over and over, I hear that sentence.
Forget you ever met us. Forget you ever met us. Forget you ever met us. Forget you ever met us.
Has a nice ring to it. All kidding aside, I start hearing it like music. I bob my head to the rhythm and my neck hurts. I’d tap my toe, but I can’t feel my legs.
Forget you ever met us. Forget you ever met us.
Hell, yeah. Put a melody to that, you got yourself a winner.
Punk Rock Saves the Day
A week later, I’m alone in the apartment I share with Paula. I’m still purple and swollen. My chest kills me--broken rib. How? I haven’t seen her since then. She doesn’t return my calls. People at her work say she found a new job. Her sister says she’s on vacation, and isn’t she with me? Her mother says she’s secluded herself to write a novel. Her girlfriend says she’s off taking care of her sick mother. I’m afraid something has happened, but I don’t tell anyone. I don’t report it. I can’t. What would I say? Officer, the love of my life never came home and I can’t remember the last time I saw her. I don’t even remember the bar, at this point. I don’t remember a kidnapping, or a breakup, for a beating, or anything. The most important person in my life has vanished and nobody seems to care--not even me. Every time I sit down and think about it, I find my mind wandering.
I sit around listening to her old punk music from sun up to sun down, and every time in between. Every breath is bought with pain, and lying down hurts, so I hardly sleep. I pace around holding her comfort sweater and smelling it and thinking, Where are you and why can’t I think straight? I think, Lenny, you have lost your mind. You have lost your mind.
From the speakers, Joey Ramone is saying that the KKK took his baby away. I keep this song on repeat. Joey is not allowed to stop singing it.
She went away for the holidays
Said she's going to L.A.
But she never got there
She never got there
She never got there, they say
I make him start over and over. I get so deep, so confused, I think he’s singing directly at me.
Now I don't know
Where my baby can be
They took her from me
They took her from me
My neighbors start a revolt, call the cops on me. I can’t play music anymore. Fuck headphones, I skip straight to reciting the lyrics to myself, first like a song, later like a mantra, later like a solemn oath, the pledge of allegiance.
Ring me, ring me ring me
Up the President
And find out
Where my baby went
Ring me, ring me, ring me
Up the FBI
And find out if
My baby's alive
The KKK took my baby away
Each K is like a scratch awl tearing at the gauze in my head, thread by thread.
KKK.
KKK.
K. K. K.
Kindred.
A soundbite comes back to me: “Stunts like this are why he’ll never make you a Kindred.”
It was just a blip of a clue, but it got me started. It brought me the image of Bombshell. Her scornful smile. The flare of her ass when she walked away. The ache of her. It got me running. Middle of the night and I’m running, and I run until I’m at the bar where I lost my Paula.
My rib is healed now, but other parts of me haven’t. I keep getting into tussles with assholes who won’t tell me what I need to know. I’m investigating. Cops don’t give a fuck--they say she isn’t missing, talk to me like I’m a stalker. Family and friends talk nonsense, like she’s in contact with them and doing fine. Fuck them. I know Paula. She didn’t leave me. She might be in New York City somewhere, but she didn’t leave me--she was smuggled into god-knows-what kind of life and she can’t get out. If I had money, I could pay someone to track her down. If I had money like those pretty people at the bar, I’d just throw it around until somebody talked. For the first time in my life, I hate that I’m a poet. I hate that I can’t open my wallet and fix things the easy way.
Hard way’s the only way. Got my feet. Got my hands. Got a case of tools and I’m thinking of getting creative with them next time I have someone in my sights I think knows something. I’m almost at that point. Hefting a crowbar.
Paula, baby. Sit tight.
I’m on my way.
No more booze. No more pot. No more nothing. Gets in the way, keeps the memories buried under all that gauze and pond scum. That’s what my head’s full of, used battle dressing and pond scum.
Have to clear my head. No more nothing.
Keep running. Running is good. Not just for the legs and the heart and the lungs. More I run, more I remember. If I run fast enough, maybe the gauze and the muck will leak out of my ears.
Here are the pieces, best I can fit them together. Last time I saw my Paula.
Zero the Dials
Monday night show in a club too shitty to call a dive. What was it called? The walls. All the no-talent, post-metalcore bands in the world couldn’t hide the dinginess of the walls there with all their stupid-ass scratchy font stickers and fliers. Floor so sticky, felt like walking in a slaughterhouse, and I worked a year in one to pay for my Eldorado with the blood of ten thousand chickens, so I know what I’m saying.
But the place was packed. On a Monday? Paula said their shows always were.
“Music better be good,” I say.
“They’re pretty decent!” she says, all reassuring me, except the way she says it, I get that same feeling I got earlier, like she’s trying to sell me something she knows I’ll regret buying once I give it a shake and hear loose shit rattling around in it. Which is weird, because wasn’t it her idea to come out here tonight in the first place? She’s been on my case for two weeks to see these guys. OK, fine. I’m here. Now they’re just “pretty decent”?
So she isn’t here for the music after all. Must know someone in the band, I guess. I’d been there before, showing up to some guy’s lame gig for morale support. Clap clap, that was real cool, good job, bro. Nah, I didn’t notice any fuck-ups at all. That kind of thing. I ask her to remind me how she knows these guys, but the house music is blaring--why the fuck do we need loud music between sets? Nobody’s dancing and people want to talk. She can’t understand me over the noise. Pretty sure I yelled loud enough. Nevermind.
We’re waiting off to one side, me with my back to a post, Paula in front of me, leaning back so I can put an arm around her from behind and rest my chin on her head. Feels nice, like that. I watch the roadies or the stage crew or whoever-the-fuck swap the opening act’s gear for the headliner’s. Good gear, too. Way good. Way expensive. The big, shiny shit you see in catalogues and shake your head over. I never heard of these guys in my life, not once. Somebody in the band has a rich daddy, guaranteed. Assholes. Playing with someone else’s money, then singing about politics and suffering like they have any authority on the subjects.
“Zero the Dials”, they’re called? Never heard of them. Sound like a bunch of preening hipsters, if you asked me. Fuck if I care, though. I have good things going on. Had. I am--was-- starting a new job on Friday building a theater at a private school up north, and that’s respectable money while it lasts, and I have Paula in one arm, open and gentle Paula, Paula who loves me even though I make her a starving poet’s girlfriend, Paula, my Brazilian Pardo with the delicate brown skin, hazel eyes in almond shapes, and hair sun-dappled even in dim rooms. And I have a beer in one hand that looks like too much foamy piss in too small a cup, but it tastes alright. For a minute, all is right in the world. Was.
Zero the Dials, or whatever-the-fuck, are taking forever. No surprise, there. I amuse myself calling them Zero the Douches and Zero the Queeros, and other dumbass puns, which earns me a couple of elbows to the kidneys from Paula, but she throws a few laughs in the mix, too, so it’s well worth the pain. Her laughter. It could cure my migraines, if I ever got any--it’s that soothing to me. I take inventory of the hipster ratio in the audience tonight. Pretty high, but what can you do these days? It’s an epidemic. I tell her as much, but she ignores me, or can’t hear me. She does that nod people do when they’re tired of straining to make out conversation in a noisy club and just give your mumble some approval. And her eyes are roaming around. I can’t quite see them from where I’m standing behind her, but I see her eyelashes flickering. Restless glances. She looks excited. Nervous? I should have caught on then.
One or two hipsters meet my eye, and I make them look away with my patented the-fuck-you-looking-at stare. Paula doesn’t notice it. She hates when I pick fights with the hipsters, even if they picked one with me first. If I were honest--and when am I ever honest with anyone but her?--I’d have to say she kind of is one herself, in her own way. But not deep down where it counts. Deep down she’s real. Not even that far down, either.
I usually lose the story, here. Memories all jumbled and coated in that pond scum. Whatever those assholes did to me, it clings.
Forget you ever met us.
Run faster.
Empty cup. I left her for a minute.
I have no more beer, just an empty plastic cup in my hand, and that’s the worst, because what the hell do you do with an empty cup and no trash can in sight? Can’t drop it. Paula hates that. So I hold it like an idiot until my urge to take a leak and buy us a new round overcomes my desire to stand there with my girl in my arms. I kiss her curly, fuzzy head and say I’ll be right back. I don’t think she hears me. I walk off to find the john and a waste bin, but I look back just before she’s out of sight. It’s a habit I had in any public place with her. Look back before you’re gone, scope out the scene. Best way to know which d-bag is eying your girl while you’re not there. Maybe it makes me an asshole, but if I’d done more of it that night, she’d still be here. I'd have noticed the signs.
Pretty People
Losing the thread again. Run, run, run. Remember.
I don’t remember if anyone was checking her out, but I remember her looking around, searching for someone. So what, right? She’s outgoing, people like her. We can’t take ten steps without running into someone she knows from somewhere, men and women. Probably she thinks she’ll find a friend. Big deal. Except that it was a big deal, because I see her eyes. From halfway across the club, I see her eyes twitching around, all nervous and needy. Hungry eyes. It’s the look tweakers get when they know they’re coming down for a hard landing, a real bad landing, a crash landing in a remote jungle crawling with neon snakes and bug-infested swamps, and there’s nothing to bring them back up until their dealer returns their calls.
Shit. If Paula was on anything, I’d know. I can recognize the signs from ten miles back, and she didn’t have any before tonight. Just distracted a lot, lately, and that ain’t a sign, right? Yeah, dumb-ass, it is. It was a goddamn sign, and you missed it.
Always gets jumbled at this part. Have to run faster, baste my brain in endorphins like its a turkey. Think. Think. Think.
I’m walking away. Maybe I’m walking back. I’ve got beer--I’m walking back. I’m pushing through a crowd of kids in hoodies. I can’t put it out of my mind, the way she looked. Those eyes of hers. Or was I clueless? Am I just remembering myself all bothered and upset when really I didn’t have half a clue and was thinking about how good it feels to have an empty bladder and two full cups of beer? No, I picked up on something. My hackles are raised. Paula, Paula, Paula. What’s the deal, Paula? I didn’t want to be that guy, that jealous guy, blowing every little thing up until it’s a Thing. We hardly ever fight, but when we do, it’s about that--my jealousy, or what she calls it, my “mood”. I promised to tone it down some, and I meant it. But that night, in my gauzy memories, I’m toning it back up. Sometimes you don’t make something a Thing. Sometimes it already is one. Bullshit of one type or another is going on, guaranteed.
Is this when I saw them?
Forget you ever met us.
The blonde and her two square-jawed playboy friends.
Forget you ever met us.
They walked past me on their way to the room in the back with the pool tables and the arcades. That girl. Goddamn. I know why they call them blonde bombshells now. You think that term is some post-Marilyn cliché, something that even teens in the 50s who bought 35 cent pulp rags with detectives and busty girls with drooping tops on the cover would groan over. But, no. Lemme tell you. Blonde mother-fucking bombshell. They exist. There are people who hit the room like half-ton bombs and leave nothing alive. She’s one of them. Devastation in her wake. A trail of debris. Everyone caught in the radius of her blast. I’m dying standing up.
Forget you ever met us.
Just looking at her, I feel like I’m cheating on Paula. The blockheads with her weren’t bad lookers too, I guess. Talk about good grooming and better genes. Nothing’s out of place, everything glossy. Must hire sculptors to do their hair and architects for their beards. You’d think they needed a forklift to pack all that muscle into such pricey suits. They could end world hunger by pawning off their wristwatches alone, but these are the kind of dudes who’d much rather know what time it is than lend a brother a dime. Sons of bitches.
Forget you ever met us.
These three--the bombshell and her companions--burn right through the gauze and the muck in my head like a candle flame under a coffee filter. I only saw them for a moment before they disappeared into the back room, but that was enough. They made their mark. So beautiful, so imposing, they left scar tissue in my brain. Fuck.
Forget you ever met us.
I remember thinking, what the hell are people like that doing in a dump like this?
Petitioning the Court
Then things get real hazy and real screwy. Certain parts come through clear, certain parts I think I made up, using my imagination like putty to fill in the holes. That’s what my head is, now. A wall somebody took a screwdriver to, all gunked up with the crappiest putty job in the world, and I’ve done construction more years than I’d like to count, so I know what a bad sealing job looks like.
Paula is leading me by the hand. Where are we going? I’m thinking about that bombshell. Paula tosses her empty cup away, and so do I. This is later, then. The band is playing, Zero the Bore. When did they start? Why are we leaving the stage after we came all the way down here and waited all night for them to finally decide the time has come to play some shitty, uninspired set. It’s bad music, isn’t it? I’m a little tipsy and the sound sucks--hard to tell.
Hypnotism doesn’t help the memory, either. But that happens later.
She leads me towards the back room. She’s giving me the smile I call her skull smile. Sounds macabre, but when she smiles, there’s no part of her face that doesn’t smile, not even her skull. She’s excited, she’s nervous. She’s worried about my reaction. She’s talking about meeting special people. She looks like someone crushing, only worse. Someone crushing on someone who scares them. I’ve never seen her like this. It’s weird, but at the same time, I feel better because whatever’s going on, she’s going to pull back the curtains and show me what’s up. No secrets. The Paula I know. Open, honest. Loving. Fine, you want to go meet some people? Let’s go. I might get a second glimpse of Bombshell. Maybe I should make an excuse, divert us into the back room for a second.
But I’m a moron, so I only put two and two together when we’re already a few steps away. Of course that’s where we’re headed. Of course. Picking our way through the wreckage to ground zero. My heart ticked faster. Funny, more than anywhere else, I wanted to be in that room, getting my fill, letting Bombshell’s image laser itself into my retina some more, but at the same time, the part of my mind not ruled by sex was firing off a warning. A cold and urgent feeling was looping itself around my intestines, tying itself in a knot, and slipping tighter.
Or else I didn’t have a clue, and that’s just the putty filling up the gaps in this narrative.
Forget you ever met us.
So hard to remember. I’m outside the door. They won’t let us in. I see her, Bombshell, standing in front of me. A smile full of scorn, milk skin with flecks of vanilla bean, diamond pendant sitting in her cleavage like it crystallized directly from her rack. So gorgeous she makes me angry. Sometimes the picture changes. One of the blockheads leaning back against a pool table, looking at me like I’m bird shit on his shoulder and he’s not sure whether to swat me away or make me pay for his dry cleaning. A suspicious bulge in his jacket, and since he isn’t happy to see me, that bulge has to be option number two. Paula, gesturing, holding my arm, pleading and smiling. Vouching for me.
Paula, what are you doing? These people are not good news. They’re not our people. They’re so filthy rich, they wrap all the way back around to being mirror-clean again. At least one of them is carrying. Do you get what that means? If you do, can you explain it to me? What are you mixed up in? What have you mixed me up in?
There’s someone else. I see him over Bombshell’s shoulder. He looms in the open doorway to some smaller room. Moneyed but not flashing it like these other three. More class. He can’t be over thirty-five, but his eyes look puffy, sick. Old. That coil of ice I’ve been feeling lassos my guts even tighter at the sight of him. Even now, even with all this time, and all my hatred, I still can’t picture him in my head without feeling a cold tug behind my navel. Some people, you take one look and you just know they’re wrong. Well, not some people. Just this guy. Mr. Wrong.
I'll never forget the three of them looking back at him for a signal, an order. Everything changes, then. Mr. Wrong is the boss. More than a boss. The god-emperor. That moment when they look his way, it’s the only moment they don’t all look like they have literally purchased the whole street and everyone on it. They look like something else, then. Serfs. Votaries.
As soon as they are addressing us again, court is back in session, and I mean the kind of court with knights and queens. Bombshell shakes her head. I shall not pass. Paula presses the issue. No budge. She gets to go in but I don’t. What the hell, Paula. All this attitude from these people, for what? Drugs? A job? I’m sorry, but no drug in the world, and sure as hell no job, is worth this level of disrespect. I am not putting up with this bullshit, not even from Bombshell over here. These fucking people, coming in here with their money and designer shoes, acting like they need to broker power in a goddamn trashy-ass bar with four dollar beer. They make me so mad, I suddenly feel like I have to defend a stupid bar I never even wanted to go to in the first place. Defend it from them. Because they want my Paula, and they don’t want me, and something tells me I’m losing her. Tonight. I’m losing her.
I think I say all this out loud, but I can’t remember. Maybe just parts of it.
I say, “Just ‘cause I got paint all over my clothes. That it? Yeah, I paint houses. I get paint all over my shit. I build shit. What do you do? You ever built anything anyone can actually feel with their hands?” Suddenly I’m getting romantic about the jobs I fucking hate and only do because poetry pays nothing. “Look at you! Never worked outside one day in your life. Buncha vegan lawyers playing prince and pauper.” I’m not making any sense. I’m a little drunk and I’m sick of pretty people ruling my world, forcing me to hate them even when they’re achingly beautiful, and I think about how Paula is a vegan, but the good kind, not the bad kind, and all I want to do is go home with her right this fucking minute and sleep all twisted together with her.
I get right in Bombshell's face and shout.
She shoves me.
The Part Where I Get My Ass Hypnotized
I’m on my ass. I think my eyes are closed, but they’re open into blackness, like staring out a window in the boonies at night. Slowly, my vision irises-out, the room reappearing, but blurred and swarming with candlelight. I think, “Fuck, I’m seeing stars, like in cartoons.” Must have hit my head. There’s no air anywhere in this bar. I’m staring at the ceiling, hearing Paula’s voice all high-pitched and pleading. I’m reaching under me to pick myself up, sucking with my lungs and getting only a few packets of air molecules at a time.
Bitch shoved me. Hard. I’ve been in fights before. I’ve circled around with my friends, boxing each other to see who could take a real hit. This was like that. A real hit. Harder. Cracked a rib, guaranteed. Only she did it open-handed, as easy as pressing the Walk button to cross the street. What kind of Kung Fu shit is that?
I remember thinking, what’s the play? Blockheads are armed, Bombshell knows Kung Fu. I can’t breathe. What’s the play? What’s safer for Paula? Meanwhile, there’s an argument. It’s in hushed tones, most of it canceled by the ringing in my ears.
I hear someone, one of the blockheads, say “Stunts like this are why he’ll never make you a Kindred.”
That’s when someone gets into position beside me and winds up a kick to my head. My arms aren’t moving fast enough. I think, “This is gonna hurt.”
I wake up to a beating in a tiny black, padded room, and fall back asleep to it. When I surface again, slouched in what feels like a leather couch, the blockheads are taking a breather, wiping their knuckles with handkerchiefs. Feel like I've gone twelve rounds with two heavy-weights and I didn't even hear the first bell. Bombshell’s nowhere in sight, and although she’s the reason I find myself cuffed at the wrist and ankles, bleeding so much from the face I feel like I just took a shower, I’m still a little bummed she’s not around. That gorgeous. I realize my tiny torture room is actually a limousine. The blockheads are sitting across from me, facing me. One of them leans across to hold something under my nose. I don’t know what it is, but it smells like braincell genocide. There’s no use avoiding it. Makes my thoughts, sounds, sights, everything run like watercolors. Everything bleeds together.
There’s a repetitive rumble, a slow-moving train doing donuts in my mind. It’s a sentence:
Forget you ever met us. Forget you ever met us. Forget you ever met us. Forget you ever met us. Forget you ever met us.
Over and over, I hear that sentence.
Forget you ever met us. Forget you ever met us. Forget you ever met us. Forget you ever met us.
Has a nice ring to it. All kidding aside, I start hearing it like music. I bob my head to the rhythm and my neck hurts. I’d tap my toe, but I can’t feel my legs.
Forget you ever met us. Forget you ever met us.
Hell, yeah. Put a melody to that, you got yourself a winner.
Punk Rock Saves the Day
A week later, I’m alone in the apartment I share with Paula. I’m still purple and swollen. My chest kills me--broken rib. How? I haven’t seen her since then. She doesn’t return my calls. People at her work say she found a new job. Her sister says she’s on vacation, and isn’t she with me? Her mother says she’s secluded herself to write a novel. Her girlfriend says she’s off taking care of her sick mother. I’m afraid something has happened, but I don’t tell anyone. I don’t report it. I can’t. What would I say? Officer, the love of my life never came home and I can’t remember the last time I saw her. I don’t even remember the bar, at this point. I don’t remember a kidnapping, or a breakup, for a beating, or anything. The most important person in my life has vanished and nobody seems to care--not even me. Every time I sit down and think about it, I find my mind wandering.
I sit around listening to her old punk music from sun up to sun down, and every time in between. Every breath is bought with pain, and lying down hurts, so I hardly sleep. I pace around holding her comfort sweater and smelling it and thinking, Where are you and why can’t I think straight? I think, Lenny, you have lost your mind. You have lost your mind.
From the speakers, Joey Ramone is saying that the KKK took his baby away. I keep this song on repeat. Joey is not allowed to stop singing it.
She went away for the holidays
Said she's going to L.A.
But she never got there
She never got there
She never got there, they say
I make him start over and over. I get so deep, so confused, I think he’s singing directly at me.
Now I don't know
Where my baby can be
They took her from me
They took her from me
My neighbors start a revolt, call the cops on me. I can’t play music anymore. Fuck headphones, I skip straight to reciting the lyrics to myself, first like a song, later like a mantra, later like a solemn oath, the pledge of allegiance.
Ring me, ring me ring me
Up the President
And find out
Where my baby went
Ring me, ring me, ring me
Up the FBI
And find out if
My baby's alive
The KKK took my baby away
Each K is like a scratch awl tearing at the gauze in my head, thread by thread.
KKK.
KKK.
K. K. K.
Kindred.
A soundbite comes back to me: “Stunts like this are why he’ll never make you a Kindred.”
It was just a blip of a clue, but it got me started. It brought me the image of Bombshell. Her scornful smile. The flare of her ass when she walked away. The ache of her. It got me running. Middle of the night and I’m running, and I run until I’m at the bar where I lost my Paula.
My rib is healed now, but other parts of me haven’t. I keep getting into tussles with assholes who won’t tell me what I need to know. I’m investigating. Cops don’t give a fuck--they say she isn’t missing, talk to me like I’m a stalker. Family and friends talk nonsense, like she’s in contact with them and doing fine. Fuck them. I know Paula. She didn’t leave me. She might be in New York City somewhere, but she didn’t leave me--she was smuggled into god-knows-what kind of life and she can’t get out. If I had money, I could pay someone to track her down. If I had money like those pretty people at the bar, I’d just throw it around until somebody talked. For the first time in my life, I hate that I’m a poet. I hate that I can’t open my wallet and fix things the easy way.
Hard way’s the only way. Got my feet. Got my hands. Got a case of tools and I’m thinking of getting creative with them next time I have someone in my sights I think knows something. I’m almost at that point. Hefting a crowbar.
Paula, baby. Sit tight.
I’m on my way.