Cincinnati

There's this song by Robyn Hitchcock called "Raymond Chandler Evening" that I absolutely adore. I knew Raymond Chandler, of course, and there were many nights spent sitting and talking with him that I still recall fondly, mostly when I'm sitting on trains reading one of his books, or when I'm watching Humphrey Bogart play Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep. It always seemed to me that he was how a grandfather should be: soft-spoken, kind-eyed, and smelling faintly of pipe tobacco.

But that's not what I love about Hitchcock's song. What I do love is a line that goes: There's a body on the railing that I can't identify, and I'd like to reassure you, but I'm not that kind of guy.

That's always been my line. Dying without a name isn't so bad once you realize that there will always be one person who remembers you.

The bus station smells like a fruitless attempt by lemons and pine to catch up to the stink of urine. Always the endless race. The old man on the bench trying to sleep with his old knapsack as a pillow, he's grown used to the smell. He's been through two wars, three divorces, and twenty-eight funerals. The shoes he's wearing were stolen from a David Bowie tour bus. They're silver cowboy boots specked with golden glitter, and if he had sold them earlier, then he probably would have been able to die in a five-star hotel suite.

When he drinks, he thinks of his children. He's not the type to spill out his life story to random bartenders, so he'll sit alone in the corner, stare into his Johnny Walker, and try not to cry when those images of Jack and Diane eventually swim into his mind. After the doctors found the cancer, he tried for a year to find them.

He never did, and it's probably better this way. At least he'll never know that they didn't want him to find them.

It's a cold night, and I can see his breath.

“Hello, Frank,” I say, sitting down by his feet.

He lifts his head up slowly, one eye bloodshot, the other glassy. He looks at me for a while, and I wait for the realization to dawn.

“You know my name,” he says. In his youth he had a voice that people compared to Leonard Cohen. Now it sounds like two flints striking together.

“Of course.”

And for the first time in years, Frank smiles.

“That's good enough,” he says.


remembering

One time, a little girl in the Sudan asked me, “Why?”

I couldn't answer her. I never could.


Detroit

I saw Iggy Pop here once, after a concert, but the bastard just keeps refusing to die. Sometimes I wonder if Ockam's Razor applies to immortality as well—that the easiest way to live forever is to just not die.

The bus ride downtown is miserable. It's always winter in this city, and the bus has no heat. The dreamer across from me, she's twisted around in her seat, facing the window, and tracing the beginnings of a novel in the condensation. It's going to make her famous one day, but not until long after she's dead, and millions of teenagers and twenty-somethings will jump in front of trucks in sad attempts to emulate her.

This is the way we made the world work. The measure of your success is determined by the number of people who will kill themselves or others for you.

Iggy Pop's first solo album The Idiot was a landmark for the artist, one that many critics have claimed to be his best work, though some fans derided the departure from the hard rock of his previous band, the Stooges. The dream imagery in the album is quite stunning, from the oedipal “Sister Midnight” to “Nightclubbing,” which was said to be the precursor to David Bowie's Berlin Period.

Ian Curtis, lead singer of Joy Division, hanged himself in his kitchen one day in 1980 at the age of 23. When his body was discovered, The Idiot was still spinning on the turntable.

If I could, I'd kill myself to the Sex Pistol's Never Mind the Bollocks. I spend whole days sometimes imagining people's reactions if that ever happened.

The bus stops a block from the apartment building. The snow is still falling and already it's turning to slush.

Thank God. The building is heated.

“Hey, kitty,” I say to the dirty white and ragged-eared stray sitting just inside the vestibule. It hisses at me, but doesn't resist my attempts to pick it up. I cradle it gently and feed it a dream of a warm patch of sunlight on carpet and, together, we walk up the steps to the fifth floor and the tiny studio apartment at the end of the hall.

Shyla's already got one foot of the chair when I come in. You can call me shallow if you want, but it always seems more tragic when they're beautiful.

And she is. Painfully so.

“Sorry I'm late,” I say, giving her my friendliest smile. I hold up the cat. “I brought a friend.”

She smiles back and, despite the rope around her neck, the room suddenly feels like spring.

“You came,” she says as happily as a child. “I knew it. I was fucking right.”

Her stereo player sits against one wall. I give Shyla the cat as I pass and head over to it. I recognize the song. Verve Pipe's “Freshman.” I wrinkle my nose and say, “Not about your taste in exit music, though, doll.”

There's still a trace of the girl she used to be when she laughs. “Sorry. It's a sentimental sort of moment.”

As I sit down on the floor and leaf through her CD book, I sort through the moments of her life and wonder what could have been changed that would have led to a different outcome. She had loving parents, after all, loyal friends, a great GPA, and, as it turns out, a pretty impressive record collection.

Still. Ennui is and forever will be sufficient reason for some. Mix it with the inherent loneliness that all humans possess, and you have a cocktail deadlier than booze and sleeping pills.

Apparently, she can read my mind as well. “It was always going to be like this, wasn't it?”

“'Fraid so, love. But, hey,”—my face breaks out into a big, goofy grin—“look on the bright side.”

“Which is?”

“Hell still has the best musicians.” I hold up the re-release of Buffalo Springfield's self-titled album. “For what it's worth.”

The smile is sadder now. “You'll stay with me, right?”

“For what it's worth,” I say again.


overheard conversation, Brown College:

“God, I can't believe they let Avril Lavigne cover “Knockin' On Heaven's Door.”

“I know, right? Axl must be spinning over in his grave.”

“Uhmmm ... Axl's not dead.”

“Really? Oh. Well, if he was, he would be.”

“Why?”

“'Cause she's butchering his fucking song, moron.”

“... Don't you mean Bob Dylan's song?”

“... Who?”


somewhere

I leave the cat with a homeless woman. I hope she won't eat it. She looks hungry enough to.

“It's pointless,” she says, but she still takes it gratefully. Whether she's talking about the cat or life, I'm unsure, but my reply is the same.

“I know.”

It's sad. Even at her age, with all she's seen, she still has beautiful eyes, and yet no one will ever look at them twice.


Los Angeles

The future lies in the western edge of the world. Fifteen minutes from now, Los Angeles will be a different city. And again after that. And so on, and so forth. They knock down the old to build the new, and they knock down the new to build the newer. And when they are finally done expanding outward, they will expand up. Entire worlds will exist in these self-contained mega-skyscrapers—from shopping malls to schools to forests and military installations; these acropolises will stand over the ruins of the old world like a giant standing on the shoulders of a dwarf, crushing it in the process.

Shit rolls downhill, and eventually Hell will take over what they leave behind.

Casper and Turk have been best friends ever since they were children, when their mothers would dump them off at Mama Seti's house to go down to Vegas every other weekend and blow their welfare on the slots. At first it was Cowboys and Indians, then Cops and Robbers, and then Crips and Bloods.

It was Turk who first took a life. Both the boys were fourteen at the time. Casper helped hide the body, though the precaution wasn't really necessary. People live in L.A. at their own peril, after all, and those things happen. It was already easy for them then. It only got easier over time.

I exit the gun shop just in time to see the two of them, now in their mid-twenties, run across the sodium-washed street, away from the park and into a late-night liquor store, whooping and hollering and high on drugs and blood and life. They'll be there for a while, since they've only got small bills and mostly change, and it'll take a minute to count those out. The people who live around here know better than to carry more than that on them.

Sometimes, though, like tonight, it doesn't matter.

I walk as slow as I can on my way to the park. I don't really relish what's ahead. It seems like I'm here more and more these days.

The boy's still kneeling by his mother's body when I get there, but he hasn't started to cry. Something about the kid makes me doubt he ever will. Already the grief is turning to hate.

They start them young, these parts.

The first thing he asks me is, “Is this Hell?”

I lower myself down next to him and ruffle his hair. “Not yet.”

He nods knowingly, a young child made old in the time it took a bullet to travel five feet.

“What happens to me now?”

“Several things. You get to choose which.”

“I can't go back, can I, mister?”

They're almost done inside. Two bottles of Ketel One and three cases of Coors. Time is all I have and yet it's still running out. This is the nature of things. Every possible future is just a decision needed to be made, and made quickly.

“You can,” I say, not rushing him. “But there'll be nothing left for you there. Because of what happened here, your whole life will be spent avoiding other people. You'll grow up, marry, divorce, die old and alone and unloved. Three people will attend your funeral, and you'll be forgotten forever soon after.”

He wipes at his nose with the sleeve of his Dodgers jersey: a decidedly child-like action that makes me hate this job all over again. Finally, he nods.

“Okay,” he says as resolutely as he can.

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

I straighten up and hold out my hand, helping him to his feet. Inside my coat is the revolver I took from the gun shop. This I hand to him. He takes it, not like a child taking a toy, but someone who knows what it's for.

“They'll be coming out in about thirty seconds,” I tell the boy. He doesn't reply, only starts walking towards the store entrance.

Nietzsche was right. The abyss stares also.

I say, “See you in a while, champ.”


in transitus

I still see them sometimes. When you can remember them all, they never really go away.

And when I do see them, it's my turn to ask, “Why?”

They don't answer. They never do. And all I can do for myself is listen to some Warren Zevon, keep them in my heart a little while, and hope that I can join them someday.

For what that's worth.




For Snapperz