My meteorite, p.11
My Meteorite, page 11
Winter 1977 The guards are shooing us out, Museum is closed, Museum is closed, ma’am. I walk under a huge arch into a different room, a room full of contemporary art, there’s a stuffed goat, then my attention settles on a white plinth topped by a red, translucent Plexiglas box. This sculpture is so neat, so glowing, so perfect and idiotic that it seems impossible to me that someone has designated it as art. The red box is exactly the same outer dimensions as the white plinth it calls home, compliant in this regard, polite; a politesse that, because it is so clearly patronizing, is all the more caustic, and has the effect of condescension, arrogance, grim and silly complaisance. To me, it is roaring. Fourteen inches long on every side, and maybe not quite that tall, just transparent red Plexiglas. I snicker audibly, look around to see if other people can see what I see, which seems to be a joke; someone has played a joke on the museum. Someone witty and tender. This is art? I decide I want to be an artist too. I am ten. When we get home I draw an enormous picture of a nose, in profile, with blackheads on it; snot drips down rendered in a saturated, spring green.
June 2016 Traveling tomorrow. I want to read Virginia Woolf’s The Waves on the plane. We don’t have it here at the house. I call a nearby bookstore, no luck. According to digital records, the central library in Pasadena has it on the shelf so I drive down there, park, navigate an elevator, a small flight of spiral stairs, maneuver into very narrow aisleways in the back racks. Wharton, Wright, Woods, Woolf. But The Waves is not here. Conspicuously, all they have is eight copies of Orlando. (Orlando. Orlando. Orlando. Orlando. Orlando. Orlando. Orlando. Orlando.) I stare at the striped block of faded off-white paperbacks for a while; they make a neat little peck—similar, but with differences worth noting. I stand for a while, consider whether this quiet vehemence is some kind of filament: a tendril from the firmament, some data I’m supposed to make something of, but what? I just head home. A few hours later I learn that singer Christina Grimmie (the kids and I had been fans during The Voice) has, moments before, been shot and killed while signing autographs in Orlando. This news is appalling. The coincidence makes images in my mind bend and melt, my stomach drops, cause and effect disunite. I think that’s the end of it, but a day later I’m at the airport heading east to work at Bard College. My plane is scheduled to leave from gate A37, so I head there, a kind of impressive radial nexus at the far end of the facility. When I finally walk up, the sign at the back of the ticket desk says ORLANDO. My heartbeat roars. For a moment I think I’m traveling there instead. Somehow. The attendant says they’ve just switched around the gates—for the New York flight I need to head back to A11. Walking back I stop in front of the television news and learn that the worst mass shooting in the nation’s history has just taken place in Orlando, Florida.
* * *
• • •
Two black holes collided and became one, an unimaginably colossal black hole. That impact, which was also a union, resulted in shock reverberations—a sloughing of energy—that traveled as a tight band of gravitational waves for (20 million) centuries until they cascaded over our planet and were detected by LIGO: brand-new instruments tuned so precisely that needles register movements as minute as 1/1000th of a human hair. Researchers have situated two observatories thousands of miles apart. If needles in each location move in the same pattern simultaneously, or nearly at once, scientists know that a ripple of gravitational waves has come through, that a pair of black holes has become one, and coughed up this excess, this infant, this emanation.
* * *
• • •
The meteorite isn’t as frightening this evening. I realize I’ve accidentally forgotten about it for a few hours. Before bed I find it and place it (close to me) on the nightstand. I wake up to a mandate—in me, in the room—like an exhalation or a scud but gritty; the meteorite insists that I begin writing this book. The call is clear and feels like a key slipping into some heretofore muffled lock, a song with no sound. I am so agreeable to this cosmic yawp that when I pull out my computer and start typing I realize I am standing up and the soles of my feet still ache: the first full steps of dawn.
10
August 2003 My relationship has worn me down. Other people see it, and say, She treats you like shit. I’m blistered, a thing, the recollection of a snow cloud, an empty, boneless johnny lost offshore. At night it’s a bit worse. I’m half-alive, a snake whose vertebral column has been mutilated by a dozen daredevil motocrossers in Idaho, they jump canyons, do flips, cling to handlebars, and manage to also land on me—my flattened snake flesh. This is the object I’ve become. I used to perform; I excelled. But I am currently Patty Hearst–like, stuck in a closet and made to sing hymns to the SLA. They scream threats but I sing and sing and then don’t sing. I would die and be gladdened at that. I write a short book with nonsense for text; one of the chapter titles is “A guy called pink, made of flesh.”
Email has just been invented. I open one which invites my participation at a performance festival in Chicago. I, who am no one and nothing, accept. In preparation, I write. Struggling to track and weave years of collected research, my document thickens: a grimy boner, a squid with birth defects, too large, too many legs. I melt instead of wake when morning comes. I have arrived in Chicago two days early; they are paying for a fancy hotel near the Art Institute. I sit at a fake cherrywood desk and work to isolate the themes of the piece with the idea that I will do away with whatever is extraneous. I am half-mad and admit (to lobby staff who feign attention) that nothing, in the case of this text, seems too far-flung. I am nexus, affect, the god Janus, of threshold, elbows. The piece in pieces. I am in my underwear pacing; the show is in two days. I do finally notice one pattern: I’ve recorded several dire, desperate narratives of wilderness survival. One guy who was lost in an avalanche rewired his CD Walkman into a primitive GPS. (When the static got louder he knew he was going in the right direction.) He walked fifteen miles on a broken ankle back to the chalet. There was also a lady, who, suddenly lost, made a shelter from sticks, prowled the riverbank in her underwear covered with mud for three months, eating soft-shelled creatures straight out of the squishy embankment. She was sixty-three and just kept her chin up. That was her fucking trick. I have a hunch that if I fit each of these fragments into the whole, it will make a discrete cipher that later I can decode in order to better know myself. My deep poem is being written by thousands of people at once. I lick my index finger and hold it up, rotating slowly in the middle of the room, wondering what direction the wind blows. Even in the still atmosphere of this hermetically sealed hotel, I catch more poem and smear it onto paper pages. Hunches. I know if I heed these urges, my poem will be good. The text grows to over forty pages but I just need two of them, two pages; I need just seven minutes, no, maybe fifteen minutes of text for my performance.
I go down to the lobby again and again to print, as if reading each of the new drafts on paper will somehow clear things up. I have to call the front desk, Hello, I’m a performer from the festival. Can you print this thing for me again, I’m sorry. Then I email it and wait twenty minutes before I take the elevator down thirteen floors and ask someone, Can you look in the back by the printer? There should be more pages. Each time I print there are five more pages. I’m up to forty-three now, forty-three pages. I’m thirty-eight years old. I am hoping I can distill something: edit. But I can’t find any joints at which to break the thing, the thought. Every idea, ravenous, eats and by incorporation, nests almost wholly the proximate thought or subject. Snakes deep throat eels deep throat other slender meats; chains of meat like at the old bathhouses, stooped and sweaty hard-ons hungry for KNX. Sausages with loose, maw-like foreskins sheathing other hotdogs. But this is instead of what I need (which are brutal twists). I need bow ties like scabs tight enough to delineate.
I don’t need those things. The next time I go down to the lobby it is more crowded. Folks are milling around now, an anarchist convention sort of crowd, dressed in spotty, shabby sequins, leather, hairspray. I can tell they are all from the festival. A young woman comes up to me, blushingly, in a polyester A-line Diana Ross dress, platforms, long earrings, dark hair in a tousled bob. A goth matte of powder over the skin on her face, heavy eye makeup, dirty fur coat. Says she saw me perform in Olympia, seven years before. I changed her life. You changed my life, she says. My performance let her know she could perform too. Now I’m in a band, she says, because of you. I think you’re amazing, she says. She is fawning at me. I bask in the glow of her appreciation. Vertiginous, perspiring. Manage to ask her name and tell her mine again, and we exchange dates, times regarding our respective performances.
I hug her and then push the button for the elevator. Turning away.
Other than trips to the lobby I haven’t left the hotel room for days.
The evening of my performance, with no time left, dazed with the still air, the silence of hotel room living, I abandon it—the hulking tract—and resurrect an old text, something I’ve performed before. I brought this and the costume with me—a fail-safe. Thick with inability, my tongue swollen in my mouth, industrially wasted, feeling barfy, I duck into a cab and pull the door closed.
It’s a medium-sized bar, very dark, with a short wooden platform that serves as a stage. I notice a microphone in a stand. They’re playing Bryan Ferry. The bar smells bad—old smoke, a little whiskey, and puke—like it’s early, and empty, although it’s actually 11pm. Music cuts out. Groans and a young woman wrestles a handheld mic from the top of a stand at the center of the platform. About four people wander over, doomily. I can’t actually hear her, the microphone isn’t tip-top, and she’s not absolutely audible above the cacophony that continues in the bar. For almost a full minute I pull on my Fudgsicle outfit (which is made from largish planes of mildly flexible brown foam), find my face, which is poking through the central hole, and realize that this costume, fairly stated, inhibits my movement. I am stiff like a frozen thing, a frozen treat. The Fudgsicle. I haul myself onto the stage. My hands are thin and hilarious, so I try to use them to my best advantage. There are scattered boos. One loud chuckler. My character, a bashful but faultily extroverted clown, overtakes me like a swarm of cockroaches. This effect, normally a good thing, is accompanied here by a clear sense that my ability to connect to (even more interconnected) ideas, which has been Gödel, Escher, Bach–like in its strength and virility, has come at the expense of my ability to connect with an audience. I’m upset, I’m overwrought. My hands are shaking. I’ve designed most of my characters up to this point to be jittery organisms, a functional work-around that comprehensively camouflages my almost nuclear stage fright. I start the text, reading from a small pamphlet. I can tell the mic is weak. I cannot be heard above the din of the bar and the scores of people still engaged in conversation. My monologue is pleading, by design, and it enmeshes thoroughly with my own actual sense of presence and dessicated presentability, which, as I’ve described above, is low-on-dynamics, just susurrating. There is no current between the audience and me, just a vacuum, like deep space, my energies borne by nothing at all. I’m clearly backed up to some sort of event horizon but my mouth, player piano, mechanical toy, keeps reading words. No one can hear me and no one seems to be listening. I see the shining band-member girl from the lobby all of a sudden. She rests, knees pulled to her chest, sitting on the dirty wooden floor with a few other audience members. Nothing shows in her eyes which are underlit anyway. She’s watching me die.
No one says anything to me after the performance and I don’t remember anything from the rest of that night.
A few days remain of my stay in Chicago. I experiment with buying pornography on the festival’s tab and feel worse. I don’t leave the hotel room for days and don’t attend anything else at the festival. But I have promised to see this girl’s band; I don’t want to let her down. It’s late at night and the start time for that show has long passed. I finally force myself to pretend that I am someone who is unafraid. I build a shelter from sticks, eat some soft-shelled creatures from the squishy embankment, walk onto the street and catch a cab.
The music is audible from a block away. It’s a warm night, the street is lit by a wash of pink lights attached to the front of the venue. People stream in, people stream out. It sounds amazing. Loud, booming, raucous, rhythmic guitar fuzz and her voice, boozy, bass—a reanimated Janis Joplin. Is that her singing? The girl from the lobby? This place is palatial. I walk in, midshow, and find her, indeed, onstage, generating and abiding a field of almost unbearable magnetism. She sings, I watch. I realize suddenly that she would never have known whether or not I was at this particular show. There are probably nine hundred people smashed into this place, all of them in thrall to the blazing solar core of this performance. Like them I’m blown away by the roaring quantum wave of her charisma, her vocal ability, her swagger and between-song patter. Born to be onstage, I whisper. I don’t want to speak exactly but can’t manage to squelch this minorest of verbal assertions. I wander the massive auditorium, hallways, proscenium archways, rotunda, bars, all laid out circularly. No matter where one wanders, one is wheedled back to the stage. I am hot with shame—but also feel clear that I, too, was born to be onstage.
The show winds down and outside on the sidewalk, I go into slow motion, force myself to be social, wait for her, in order that I might repay her initial fan-friendly fawning; I smoke cigarettes. The band, a trio, eventually emerges and I congratulate them. They seem down, sheepish, try to avoid me. Though I’m half-mad in (apparently) the most boring way possible, even though she has seen me fail, I will myself to speak, What are you guys doing? Want to get some food or something. I make a question into a statement in order to feign punk rock plaintiveness, peer-confidence. No, man. The band members squirm and move away, down the sidewalk. We just need to go rest. They don’t mention my performance.
I never perform again. Every morning for ten years I wake up and the first thing my mind touches is this particular humiliation. I replay the thoughts I imagine she had: embarrassed for me. I thought Harry was talented. Over years, her band stays together, their popularity waxes, and every now and again I look into collecting some of the music. All of the studio stuff I hear is mixed a little trebly and nothing seems to fully capture the thing I heard that night in Chicago: the largesse, the bass. I lick infected wounds. Eventually begin a different—this time functional—relationship (the love of my life!), partially overcome my fear of uncontrolled public conversation, continue art life by working on sculpture, video, and drawing. I enjoy my successes, and I even find work.
One morning I wake up and feel the oddest thing—there is a performance fetus growing in my belly. I sit down and start writing. A few days later, a young L.A. artist asks if I would perform on a bill at a gallery in West Hollywood. Seized by heat and anxiety I assent, compelled by the buzzing idea that I’ve created this invitation out of thin air, that the overture is a portent of some kind, a reverse-presentiment flopped back over the edge of some wrinkle in time—either that or simple cosmic coquetry. But as Einstein says, God does not play dice with the universe. While writing the new piece I search for and find the hulking tome, the thing I’d written for that bar show and abandoned. It’s dusty, bloodstained, tearstained, still pulsing. I sniff it all over and put it back in the box. I’m climbing out of a hole, don’t want to drop my torch.
A couple of weeks into the prep for this new performance I’m in line at a café and hear an amazing song.
What was that last song? I ask when I get to the counter.
Deceptacon, she says, by Le Tigre.
So I go home and find it on online, Le Tigre, Le Tigre, I am not familiar with the music, though I run passing acquaintanceships with all members of the band. Song after song: I find it absolutely agreeable. So here’s the thing. Down there at the bottom of the screen, in that netherworld of algorithmic coattail ridership, you know, at the bottom of the screen, that “You-might-also-like . . .” feed? I peek at it and I am shocked to note that the girl’s band shows up in the form of various thumbnails, like toxic snails, slow, in a row, coy, inert. I don’t like any of those recordings, I hit the return key hard, Too much high end, too trebly, too trebly, my movements are suddenly uncalculated, I’m hitting the space bar too much, quivering like foam on the muzzle of a badger growl-moaning from the back of some dark cage. But I hesitate; Courage isn’t the absence of fear, I plod through this mental Hallmark card of a puzzle, it is the ability to continue on in spite of fear. I do not want to be perceived—not right now—as cowering; that would send the wrong message to the Fates. I struggle to stay the course. Well, that’s just the studio recordings, they’re mixed weird. What about—let me see if there are any live recordings. Could be those are better—the live recordings—if there are any. Maybe that will have captured what I heard. I find one, a live recording, and sample a few songs—I’m pleased. It does sound great—booming, throaty, magnificent, just the way I remember. I download it. And riffle through a few more live records while I’m at it, reconstruct a fondness for the strange elasticity, the distortion in these types of recordings, the unquantifiable effervescence of the liveness—the missteps even—sometimes captured live.
The morning of the new performance, I’m putting finishing touches on prep, listening to music, the shuffle algorithm chooses this particular new record, the girl’s live record. It sounds amazing, her voice echoes, bellows. The bass is heavy, the crowd wild. Now she’s talking between songs. She’s telling everyone they look fabulous. And then, Did anyone see the spoken word stuff last night? They were amazing. So many amazing performers at this festival. I can’t breathe. Did anyone see Sini Anderson perform? Did anyone see Harry Dodge perform?
