Every anxious wave, p.7
Every Anxious Wave, page 7
Elliott played a jittery set for less than an hour. He glanced shyly at the crowd as he retreated backstage with his guitar tucked under his arm. Then Lena, black mascara tears making the Nile delta on both cheeks, found me. Red-faced, she just shook her head from side to side and told me to take her home.
I saw Meredith in the crowd just before Lena and I were sucked through the floor of T.T.’s. I looked away, typed the digits into my phone, and grabbed Lena’s hand, happy to be returning home, happy to be holding Lena’s hand. Shivering upon reentry to the present, I apologized like my life depended on it, which it did. I sank to my knees and pressed my cheek to Lena’s belly.
“You’re an asshole,” she said, shaking her leg to remove me from her person, and I agreed with her with all my heart, but what does a man gain when he admits to being an asshole? Nothing, Lena reminded me, and I told her I was grateful for this, and she told me that she was just one person, someone who wanted to understand the velocity of stars, not someone charged to correct the asshole behavior of assholes. Then she said she had to go to the bathroom, ran down the hall, and threw up in my bathtub.
After I applied sponge and Pine-Sol to the bathroom, leaving the stench of vomit plus pine cleaner plus Ming’s Panda oily chicken plus wormhole accelerator to linger in my apartment, I watched as Lena brushed her teeth with a blob of my toothpaste on her finger.
“Sorry about the barf,” she said.
“It hurts to come back.”
“It hurts to be there.”
“You have to be somewhere,” I said.
“Right now, I’d like to be nowhere.”
“Can you be right here?” I said, holding out my arms.
She hung back, shaking her head. “You can’t do this, Karl. You can’t use me and then throw me away when I’m not who you want.”
“I want you. I don’t want to lose you. I want to hold you. Please.”
She didn’t move. She just stared. I couldn’t tell if I was scaring her. I didn’t want to.
“If the answer is no, that’s cool,” I said. “Just say no. I still want to be your friend, even if the answer is no.”
She covered her mouth with her hand. She didn’t run back to the bathroom. She just stood there, her finger coated with white bubbles of Crest, not moving away, not moving toward me, not saying no.
“I’m not going to hurt you, and I’m not full of shit. I’m sorry about the Meredith thing. I’m sorry I called you a bitch. That was wrong and it will never happen again and I feel like a giant piece of shit about it. This is why I have my rule against using the wormhole for stuff other than shows. It turns me into a big, raw nerve. I promise you, my aim is true.”
Lena looked at my face, then the door. “You know this is a point of no return, right? If we do this? By ‘do this,’ I mean date. You’re never allowed to hurt me.”
“I never want to hurt you.”
She examined me like I was a difficult problem she needed to solve. “Should I rinse my mouth out first?”
I went in for a mouthful of toothpaste. The kiss burned a little. My mouth filled with minty bubbles and Lena’s tongue. I wasn’t lying when I said my aim was true. Don’t lose Lena. Only a fool doesn’t listen to his future self.
4
I RECEIVED A long e-mail from Wayne:
The native tribe I have hooked up with has names. I wrote them down with ash on a leaf. Would it be wrong to teach them written English? They are long and complicated names, names that contort the tongue in new and stretchy ways. They gave me a name that sounds like Honnakuit. It probably means “tall pasty white guy.” They are not armed and seem to be very concerned with one another. They sit very close to each other in a circle to eat. They all have long hair, even the men, and spend a lot of time doing each other’s hair. I mean updos held together with tree sap and strips of cloth. They weave cloth. They are very small stature-wise, but they do a lot of singing and have musical instruments. Lots of drums. Some stringed instruments, not really guitar-like, but maybe along the lines of a round ukulele. They would make an excellent band. NPR would do a story about them.
I eat with them: fish cooked over fire and mushrooms and nuts mixed together to form a paste. We eat berries when we find them. I help the women mostly, tearing the skin off of fish and plucking their bones out with the tips of my fingers. The women hunt. Mostly squirrel and raccoon but the occasional moose-like animal happens by and BLAMMO. Arrow to the heart. They are excellent bow-and-arrowers. Everything is shared. I wish they had computers, not because they need technology but because I want to be able to fix something for them, to show them my worth. I have no talents here. The only thing I know how to fix is a computer. They have math and birth control and it appears that no one is married. No couples, but lots of babies and children. They smile a lot. I like them. The oldest woman of the tribe gave me a big piece of leather.
I wish you could smell the air here. It smells of dirt and flowers and is so clean. I could just lay in the grass and breathe all day. It’s not winter anymore. The thaw came and my tribe jumped naked into what I guess is the East River. No body shame and full of joy. They were confused about why I wore tight white cotton around my manhood, and I realized that if everyone else was naked, I was supposed to be naked, too. I took off my clothes and jumped in. This experience made me see my penis differently—just a silly knob of flesh, neither shameful nor powerful. Why was I circumcised? I can’t ask my mom that, she’ll get mad, but the people here, they noticed and said something. I don’t know what they said in words, but one of the women made me a little foreskin out of brown cloth for me to wear on my poor, exposed peen. A little sleeve to keep my man part safe. That sounds weird, right, but it was an act of kindness. Part of my body isn’t right and they fixed it. Why are we walking around with cold, unprotected dicks, Karl? Mine’s wearing a love jacket and it doesn’t make me horny at all.
You know what really stands out to me, buddy? These people—they don’t hate or compete. They just do. They find food, they eat, they share everything, and they all seem to love each other in this really magical, uncomplicated way. The women are in charge, and it’s weird—when one of the older women gave me a few bits of fish she’d cooked in the fire, she touched her cheek to mine and pressed my mouth to her mouth, as if to transfer her love to me. My own mother never did that. That would have been dirty kissing, but this wasn’t dirty. It was pure.
I miss you and the bar and my mom, but I don’t miss Chicago or my job, which I’ve probably been fired from. I don’t even think about it at all. The sunsets are too beautiful here.
Please say hello to Lena and give her my best.
HONNAKUIT aka Wayne A. DeMint
My riot grrrl worker bee was working furiously on math problems that would allow for Wayne’s reentry without the propulsion of an electromagnetic field, on top of her own doctorate and teaching the twelve or so students who actually showed up for her summer session of Intro to Cosmology, and all Wayne could say is “Give her my best”?
She doesn’t want your best, Honnakuit. She wants to get your ass back here.
Wayne:
FWIW, I’ve been giving your wormhole dough to Lena for her diligent work on getting you back to 2010. Since you got lost, I’ve been hesitant to send folks on trips, but Lena’s been an enormous help. People at the bar keep asking about you, and I don’t know what to tell them.
You would love Lena. Get back here so you can meet her. She’s super smart and has great taste in music. We went to see Elliott Smith last night. 1997! She’s totally your new best friend. And my new girlfriend! Lena. She’s amazing. Super smart in a tough-girl punk rock package. I have no idea what she sees in me but I’m going to go with it for now. You two have tons in common and would be best friends. Seriously, she is special.
Not much else is new, other than your new best friend/my girlfriend Lena. Still working on getting you back, buddy. I miss you. The whole bar misses you. You’re missing a fantastic summer in Chicago, man! Come back!
—KJB
I would not call him Honnakuit when he got back. That is what we in the drinking industry call bullshit.
I also got another, far more disturbing e-mail. Worse than having your friend in 980 tell you his new name is Honnakuit:
Dear Karl,
Strange thing—I was cleaning out some stuff in the garage to make room for my daughter’s baby things and I found a note that a girl gave me one afternoon thirteen years ago, when I was in Cambridge visiting Kate Voss (remember her?). It was the year after I moved to DC. Kate and I were sitting on the old porch on that nasty couch that gave me rashes all the time and this crazy woman with pink pigtails approached and said she was from the future and knew you in the year 2010 and that you were still in love with me. And then she told me Elliott Smith would die in six years.
I blew it off at the time—so much crazy shit happened in 1997—but when I heard the news about Elliott and looked at the calendar and saw that that girl was right, I couldn’t get her—or you—off my mind for some time.
I’ve been thinking about that girl a lot lately. Lena Guldig. Do you know her? I know it’s weird, but I swear to you I am not making it up. Anyway, I just wanted to give you a little shout and find out how things are by you. Definitely not trying to find out if you’re still in love with me. I think about our shared past a lot and realize you probably wouldn’t be in love with me now. I’m a total sell-out, got a kid, have a real job. Time does crazy shit, right, Bender?
I don’t mean to put you in a weird position. I just want to tell you this story and tell you I am well. As you probably know, I had a kid a few years ago. Saoirse (pronounced Seer-sha—I went turbo-Irish on the name) turns four this August and keeps me very busy. I take it you’re still in Chicago, still running the bar, still breaking hearts with that guitar of yours? I picked up a copy of Dreams of Complicated Sorrow in a used CD bin not too long ago. It still sounds great.
Hope you are well and happy, and do let me know if you make it out to the Bay Area. I would love to see you.
Obligatory picture of the rugrat attached. Being a mom turns you into a cheeseball.
All best,
Meredith McCabe
P.S. They tore down Berkman a few years ago to build condos. Fuck that.
I closed my laptop before further bad news could come through the tubes at me. This is why you don’t talk to people in the past when you travel, Lena. You change the future, you mess with the right now, and that is trouble.
Meredith.
She was the fifth of nine kids from an Irish family in Southie. She had a purple scar across her forehead from the time her father was out on parole and had slashed her face for losing the keys to his old Firebird. And she had four older brothers, brutal, bug-eyed bastards who slapped her around for good measure. Meredith left home at sixteen and lived on the streets until she took up with the anarchists. She was unbelievably breathtaking, a rose blooming from a pile of shit, her strength collided with her beauty and took away my words and my will.
“Fight me,” is what Meredith McCabe said to me after an hour of beers and idle chatter about bands and lefty politics, digging her dirty feet into my thighs as I sat beside her on one of Berkman’s crusty couches. I’d had three shots of whiskey and more than my fair allotment of oatmeal cookies that one of the Berkman residents had brought home from his job at the cooperative bakery. I admit, I noticed her the moment I walked in: the way she seemed to be in charge of the entire joint, passing around a jumbo bag of stale barbecue potato chips, making sure everyone got to take a handful.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“I’m training to be a boxer. Fight me. You look like a tough guy. Square jaw. Head like a toaster. Let’s fight.”
I examined her sinewy arms. Rock-hard muscle peeked out from beneath the apricot freckle constellations that swirled about her flesh. She had a rose-colored, jagged scar up the length of the underside of her right forearm.
The people who had overheard her gauntlet-toss began to hoot and holler, demanding the satisfaction of seeing the new dude get his ass kicked, and so she dragged me off of the filthy couch to the patch of burned, spray-painted grass out back. A murmur erupted among the crowd, and soon she and I were at the center of a circle of cheering punks. She raised her fists at me.
“Don’t hold back because I’m a woman.”
“I’m sure you can take me,” I offered.
“Stop talking. Punch me. In the face. I see you hesitating. I have four older brothers. Do you think any of them have a problem hitting me in the face? Do it!”
My flimsy fist brushed her chin. Meredith returned with a sock in the gut. Not a regulation move, I’m sure, but then this goddess-pugilist felled me with a left hook to the chin. A stream of blood from the torn flesh inside my cheek trickled onto my white T-shirt. I lay there on the scratchy grass and gazed skyward as Meredith McCabe collected a series of high fives.
Someone handed me an old T-shirt to collect the blood spurting from my mouth. And then Meredith, holding a towel full of ice to her knuckles, sat beside me and said, “I hope you’re not mad at me. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“It was an honor,” I mumbled. The bleeding, as I recall, didn’t want to stop.
“I’m going to kiss your cheek.”
She leaned in and gave it a painful kiss. “There. That should heal it. I hope I didn’t hurt you too bad.”
“Nah, it’s fine.”
“I hurt people.”
“Good to know.”
“Hey, do you have a bed?”
“What?”
“A bed? Like a real bed? You live in some sort of apartment, right? I’m sore, not just from fighting, but from sleeping on a wood floor every night. If you have a bed large enough to share, do you mind?”
You might judge such an inquiry to be sexual, or ridiculously romantic, but the way she asked it, very matter-of-factly, didn’t indicate to me that there would be quid pro quo booty attached to this request. The next day, after eleven hours of restful sleep, with our arms and legs tangled like hair, our genitals safely tucked in our respective underpants, Meredith took a long shower and used one of my clean towels. (I don’t remember how, at age twenty-one, living in that sticky Somerville rattrap with Milo and two other guys, I had clean towels, unless my mother had been by my apartment and had done my laundry for me.) I made her maple-flavored instant oatmeal in a mug stolen from the Tufts dining hall, for which she kissed me on the tip of my still-throbbing nose and told me I was sweet.
Lesson number one, dudes: being a gentleman got me laid five days later, when, on a mattress that technically belonged to everyone in Berkman House, I had sex for the first time with a woman I loved. Knowing the difference between basic friction and making love to a woman whose every cell fascinated me and whose company I considered an undeserved privilege, I felt myself metaphorically leaping over some invisible wall, from stupid kid to Man of the World. The experience filled me with fervor, such that I saw for the first time how religious men before me had fought so hard to ruin the holiness of sex for everyone else.
Fourteen years.
Fourteen years of one-night stands, of female friends needing a postbreakup hookup, and three “girlfriends” I didn’t miss, once they wised up and left. I hadn’t seen God since 1996.
* * *
LENA ARRIVED AT my place at nine in the morning, her arms weighed down with two paper shopping bags.
“What’s all this?”
“Flashlights. We’re going to send Wayne some flashlights. Hopefully he’ll locate the flashlights and turn them on, thereby creating the appropriate electromagnetic field. At that point we’ll reverse the charge and, faster than you can say, ‘Frostbite on my scrotum,’ Wayne comes home.”
Lena had re-dyed the ends of her hair to an Easter grass greenish yellow. I wondered if she went out of the way to make herself less attractive. An ancient memory of my mother, a cigarette between two thin fingers, nails painted beige, leaning back in her red velour La-Z-Boy and remarking upon the singleness of one of my overweight cousins: “She’d be so beautiful if she only lost that wide bottom.” But Lena was beautiful—she had perfect, porcelain skin and a rather intriguing bump in the middle of her nose, rosy cheeks, and a rack that would have made Tom Waits pull out his harmonica. I loved looking at her and drinking her in.
“Here’s the receipt for the flashlights,” she said, digging it out of her bag. “Add it to my check.”
“Wayne sent me an e-mail. He met up with a native tribe. They’ve adopted him and given him a name.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “Wow. I want to be adopted by a native tribe. Pre-European infiltration. They’re probably amazing.”
“He’ll probably die of cholera if we don’t get him home quick. He’s already got itchy critters living in his body hair.”
Lena frowned. “Most of the people in the world have bugs, or at least an intestinal parasite or something. Americans are the clean-freaks of the world.”
“I like cleanliness. I had crabs once. That woman on the couch with Meredith? She infected the whole house with crabs. We spent days sitting around in our underwear covered in this strong, stinky ointment. I had to shave my entire body, which was not sexy.”
“I bet that was fun for you, Karl,” she said. “I bet that’s one of your favorite memories.”
Wow. She had called me out something wicked.
“It’s hard to be a person,” I said.
