These are massive buildings, built with friction and dusted-off bad ideas. The buildings capture the city and the city raises its hands and stretches its arms and all that comes of any of it is a new experimental age of commerce and technology.
In one of those buildings there is a risen corpse with his arms around a small boy. The corpse is telling the child that he has come back for him, that the two of them will be together for a long time and no need to bring your winter coat, it’s warm there. The boy resists the invitation and screams, scaring the risen corpse out of his borrowed clothes and the corpse plummets, naked, like a show horse.
There are other buildings; let’s go to one now. In this one there is a writer’s block-addled songwriter in a bad mood, smacking at her piano with a pencil and saying “Why me? Why today? Why not yesterday? I didn’t need you yesterday?”
She is older now. Older than when she broke into the business, into the mainstream, in the early nineties. She is older with better, smaller hair but writer’s block just the same. She is trying to break through a blank wall and her fingers have dulled and her pencil is old and her piano is just an instrument, an entitlement.
When she was young, things would happen to her – bad things – and the songs would write themselves. These would be painful songs however. She would have to summon up nerve from her youthful reservoir when it came time to perform the songs live, but that was easier than this, than having nothing. And now that she is without hope, seemingly, without a way through this brutal wall, she thinks... I wish I was young and troubled. But the thought vanishes and she starts imagining her neighbor’s lives and what they may have gone through just this morning to make it to the afternoon and this seems strained, so she walks.
She sees the corpse as soon as she opens the front door of her apartment building. They were once friends. They were once lovers. He had killed himself because of her, mostly, according to his note. But if you pin him down these days, he’s tell you it was all him.
She runs fast from the corpse because it’s a normal first reaction. Her gait is more relentless than troubled and she goes far – miles down this one street, before tiring and looking up to the clouds for forgiveness. Which, if she pinned him down now, she would not need. Not at all, in fact she’ll get an apology from him. An apology as sincere as he could make it, being a corpse newly risen from the dead below us and is that a hat he’s wearing? She never knew him in a hat.
He is gone. She has escaped. She feels it’s safe now to walk, not run, home. This is something she can write about. She’s already thought of the first lines: “Why the hat? What’s with the hat? Take off the hat.”
It’s snowing when she gets back to her building which is unusual if not impossible for late March in New York City. She isn’t dressed for snow, just for rain, so she’s shivering when she gets inside. Manhattan glistens in new snow and she wants to go inside and get a warmer coat so she can go back outside and bask in the white magnificence. But today she has a song to write. And today she saw her second lover’s risen corpse naked save for a hat. So today she must stay inside and write. For the good of the band.
2.
The night before he killed himself he called his friend, the one he had traveled around Europe with the summer between high school and college. It was a glorious trip but it was marked by several events that nearly destroyed his friend and will destroy him. Tomorrow. He told his friend of his plans, that what had been foreseen will happen tomorrow, that there will be a note, that he is not at home and he cannot be found. That he will call the woman who scorned him, the songwriter, after he swallows the pills and before they take effect. That even if she figures out where he is, if she has caller ID, she will not get there fast enough, help will not arrive soon enough. There is nothing anyone can do. He is going.
His friend has heard this all before and though he suspects that this may be the time that it will really come down, he does not want to buy into the scenario and heighten the sense of drama. The friend is a playwright and knows all about moments of pause, about abating the swell. So when he says goodnight and good luck, he does it without judgment and does not allow a sense of finality to permeate his voice. Even though he feels it. Even though he knows this is the time. If it happens, it will happen no matter how he says goodbye.
The playwright does not know the songwriter’s phone number. She is famous now so her number is not listed. The friend does not think of calling the police. He knows that if he calls the police, it will happen anyway, maybe a day later, but it will happen and he will not get a goodbye phone call this time. He wants to find the songwriter so it’s less of a surprise. He imagines her receiving the phone call from her suicidal ex-lover. He imagines her wishing she had more time, so he’ll give it to her. Even if he’s certain now that more time won’t change a thing.
The playwright has heard enough of the songwriter’s songs to know that the suicide of his friend and her ex-lover will not destroy her. She will turn it into music, beautiful music, and she has the right, not to mention the obligation to do so. He knows this. He and she are artists. She has turned pain to melody before and will do it again. It is what she is best at.
So he calls people, people who might know her or where she lives, people who might know people who know and he comes up empty. He calls her record company and they are closed and have no provisions for such an emergency. He calls a friend at the local weekly newspaper who then leaves a voice mail message with the paper’s music critic who knows people in the business, but the music critic doesn’t return the message and midnight is approaching. The playwright knows only that the planned suicide of his friend is tomorrow. It could be in the morning. It could be late at night. It could be one minute past midnight, but that’s too literal. His friend isn’t that literal.
Though it makes no sense to not try to stop it, he knows he can’t stop it. He just wants to warn her. The warning, although it will make her subsequent songs less urgent perhaps, will be a good deed and he has goodness in his heart.
3.
He is threatened more by his sense of malaise than by his imminent death. He breathes like a mannequin would. He breathes like it’s breakfast. He shakes for the fountain of rain that’s spanking his window now. He’s loved. He’s lost. He’s done.
Haphazard thoughts spark through his mind, just staying long enough on the lily pads between his synapses to grant him moments of recognition but nothing more. When the colors on the walls around him become one, it will be almost time, not quite yet. Almost time.
He thinks of London with Eric. He thinks of not knowing the neighborhoods, not bringing his travel books – we were all cocky then – and not knowing where to find new ones. He thinks of weak shoes and scandalous nights. He remembers coming home, to Los Angeles. He had not gone to New York yet to follow her. That would come later. He remembers the flight home, after London and Amsterdam and Rotterdam and (West) Berlin and Barcelona and the smaller cities, and he remembers the realization that yes he will make it back to his city’s airport. But he had no home. On the plane, he decided he would live in motels by the airport, cheap ones. He had no car and no friends, now that Eric was in the hospital in Paris, cursing the wallpaper in English and the medicine in French. So, motels by the airport, that was as good a place as any.
On the side streets near LAX, in the shadows of the Sheratons and the Hiltons and the Holiday Inns, there exists a small village of lesser motor hotels, two or three stories high, exterior hallways, will take cash if need be. He found a good one at the best price. He thought then that he would be there a few weeks at most. And then something would have to give.
He remembers interrupting his concern over not having a permanent home to realize that he had been in most of the world’s great cities (at least as he saw them) in a span of a few weeks, especially if you count the layover in New York on the way there, the glorious inbound day, full of glitter and promise and nothing abject yet. He had been in the world’s great cities, was now in another one, his home, but all he owned was in a suitcase and all he had in front of him was nothing.
But then he got lucky and found a bartending job on a lark. Then he got luckier and met her and fell in love. Then came New York and then a phone call from Eric’s sister – things are cool now, he’s home, he’s quiet, he’s definitely a changed man. He wants to talk to you.
He replays these scenes in his twelve-by-twelve grid of a mind and he looks at the pills and he thinks of who to call and who not to call and of the mistakes of New York, of which there were many. He replays these scenes and builds new ones out of their slow fades and he can’t help but imagine himself in her arms again, that first spring in the city, in the dark apartment with the wood shutters, such a Lower East Side anomaly that place was. He is falling hard. This will take him down as far as he’s got room to fall, thinking of the spring when the fruit was sweeter and the moon was clearer and her eyes hadn’t seen through his own just yet.
He is in the middle of his life's country now. He has left his two corkscrewed lives right where they left him. He is hiding and he is falling and no one can see his sleeved arms over his head and his legs shaking as they rise to meet his arms, two pairs of limbs winging him from head to torso and he’s the only one who can see this. The pills are still in the bottle. But the cap is coming off. The pills are going down. He drinks the bottled water. He swallows its velocity. He can almost hear the pills breaking apart and each little piece is destroying its own little city block of tall shadowy apartment buildings and gilded vague dollhouses. It’s over.
4.
He remembers the exact moment he slipped. When the pills were done manipulating his system and simply shut the system down. And then he slipped. He remembers it as his corpse walks along the Pennsylvania Turnpike, heading west but not quite certain how far west. He remembers the way the noise, almost unbearable, certainly tragic, suddenly ceased and the colors abruptly stopped swirling, becoming one certain color: a sunny pink – the last color anyone would ever expect of death.
He wanted a better color at first, as he floated toward wherever it was he would float toward. He wanted a dark blue or a forest green or a sturdy deep purple or, if it had to be the red family, a historic battlefield crimson. But eventually the sunny pink was like a pillow of cotton and fluff that comforted him on his long, circular float through the highest clouds. He was ecstatic with the thing with the clouds: this was better than permanent residence in heaven or an eternity in fiery hell – floating, just floating. Silent, yes. Lonely, for certain. But these were clouds and it was warm, oddly warm he always thought. The pink eventually became his favorite color and the only one he was capable of imagining. That is, until yesterday, when he came back: to New York, where she lived now. Yesterday, all the colors became available to him and he embraced them. He missed the clouds but he knew that couldn’t last forever, what with the unfinished business.
He mapped it all out from the clouds – the fastest way west, away from his Manhattan visitation. He chose the interstate highway system for the company mainly. The walk would be a long one. Though he was incapable now of tiring, boredom was still a likely possibility. And he wanted faces, even if they had to be seen through the well-plied glass of passing cars and trucks – he knew he wouldn’t be alone. Some of them, they could even see him, even if they couldn’t touch him.
When they first met, it was quiet. They spent a lot of their clandestine dates – she was dating a prominent musician then – staring into each other’s eyes, waiting for someone to break and say something. He relished this silence. Even more, he relished his control over not breaking down and blinking (talking) first. He was very tired during this time – mentally stuck somewhere far away and uncertain and just looking at her thin and pretty eyes was enough for him then.
Eventually, they started speaking to each other – it had to happen. They were sweet and doting and curious, like all lovers at the beginning. Like all young lovers. She told him about her childhood, her father, the stories behind the songs he was familiar with and the new ones she was still working on. Most of the stories were well-documented in the music press, and he read about her frequently, both before and after their meeting in the bar. But he liked hearing them in her words. He liked gauging her pain or joy directly from her eyes and limb movements and stuttered breaths. And he told her things too. A little bit about Europe and Eric. A little bit about living in the airport hotels, how the smell of jet fuel was eucalyptus and the sounds of takeoffs and landings were his bird songs. She considered his living situation romantic and literary. Just like he did.
What would she think of this? Him, walking the length of the United States, a country he wasn’t even born in, in a state he had never been in before. Walking, to a place he couldn’t name, away from and to people he couldn’t reconcile, in a form he couldn’t quite explain to anybody, much less those who could see him but couldn’t touch him.
Like the boy yesterday. He didn’t know the boy. The boy wasn’t hers. She didn’t know the boy. He didn’t know anyone who knew the boy. The boy was simply there, near her, near where she was supposed to be living. So he tested himself on the boy. He wasn’t sure if anyone could see him or hear him or touch him, much less believe him. He thought he would try himself on an innocent. He figured the boy would just chalk it up to a bad dream. The boy couldn’t have been more than six, though his scream seemed like it could belong to a ten-year old. Either way, he was sure that the boy wouldn’t be believed by adults, much less by himself. He tried his hardest not to scare the boy. He tried to be gentle, maybe even comical with his word and his actions. He reasoned that a child’s imagination is creepier than anything he himself could place in the boy’s reality.
So, now that his material had been tested on a very surprised audience, he set out to see her, to find her building, to give it his best shot. And really what did he expect? Of course, she would run. Maybe she wouldn’t scream but she would have to run.
5.
(Eric)
There are no more things that I have to say to you. There is only this sky-blue day and the scattered plums it permits to clog the gutters above its streets, the red-blue rain that I can only love as much as I used to love...
Then what? Then I remember (for the most part) the odd remnant of a columnar building, the one with the lone fire escape in town. For it is a modern town. For is it an insular, private town.
Europe. Walking like crabs, me in morning, you in the light of your own masked memory. Then when the covers come off and the rain resists the temptation to fall, all of us are left without a longing and the skin of your hands is peeling off. You forgot to wear gloves as you held on, held on, held on. And it’s a random act that got you help and an awful slur that got you home and back in trouble. There was the time when... no, you know, you know how it felt, you made it happen and that’s all I can like about you.
Rooftops were the magical world. But that was before I was allowed inside. Now I prefer to remain inside or on the street level outside. I cannot for the life of me admit to missing it, the exalted state that left my poetry stranded in the mind. But not on the skin. But that’s 1997 for you. That’s the panorama that got the words out. Still, I couldn’t sleep without a little help. Still, I couldn’t breathe without the window open and my ears burned from your words, the three of them, the words. I am no longer still. I am all the way home. I am all they way back. I am struggling to stay alive. But it feels so good. I am loping. I am pulling. I am magnetic. I am aromatic. I am Elliot Smith when he feels like a second draft is necessary. Which is never. Maybe he should, maybe he will, maybe he should.
And though there are days when I feel less run down than others, I still make drama out of nothing but an incident. And it’s not so bad, never so bad, for a playwright. Let me list the things, there’s this first, there’s the way I’ve given up completely on doing what I never should have considered in the first place. I’m not an educator. I look like one, I walk like one, I seem like one. But I’m not. There are others. Let them do it. They will be the giants in the field. Then, next, second, there’s the fact that I’m thinking of starting to do the legwork that it takes to become an auteur. Though I’m tired, I’m not impossible. There, that’s not so bad. That’s kind of sexy. How was New York? Does it get cold in the elevator rooms? In January? When there’s no one to go out with and nothing to do on the inside? Does it get cold and dark?
My predilections for questions give you pause? Is that a long black hair in your hand, something to remind you of the old day, the harvest months, the long drives down Laurel Canyon with the wind all unruly and the music unforgettable? Not to mention cool and melodic. There are moments and then there are months. Tell the difference and you will go places, far away from any here that I can build for you.
It was one night, one 4:00am in particular, when I got the phone call, that the situation was indeed, finally, changed. I received the phone call and was told to drive south, over the canyon and into the city. And when the lights of Hollywood washed over my own well-accorded personal vista I felt a twinge of something graceful. And a lot of something scary. I was just a voice and she was just a remnant, a well-accented actor, breathless in her way with old words we don’t use much anymore. And then, after we went inside, as the table seemed to shake and the restaurant started to empty, the sun peeked through the window and I realized it was indeed a new day. That could be why I stopped paying attention to her movements and only noticed her rare words. That could be why it led nowhere, nothing to hold on to, no one to grab and unwrap.
She could be anywhere now, but I assume she is right where she’s expected to be, living in the same apartment, regaling other strangers with stories of Van Nuys High in her campy British accent. She could be telling lies about medical school and granting wishes to friends and suitors and others. But not to everyone, there are always those that have to be, need to be disappointed. And the only reason I know this is that there are only so many siren sounds in the city firmament.
So you’re the latest incarnation of the impetuous observer, with a notebook or a laptop or both on Saturdays. You’re the blue-haired roustabout skewering our notions of fair play and slandering literature. I give you credit for this. I will be sure to honor you in many more ways, not just this, here today, not that this is not enough. This is barely audible. This scream is fading fast. This light is dark and darkness has no place. Not today, in the sun, with my skin like this.
I ought to stop spilling it all. I ought to remember that a day without sun is still a day in many parts of the world, maybe even Los Angeles, maybe even (if it mattered) New York, maybe even Ohio or wherever you have gotten to by now. It’s a long road between where you found her and where you must be going to truly save yourself, to truly get your life back. You have eyes for so much more than what she is expected to have. There are a lot of smaller words and littler sentences that could describe her, or describe you and her, but I choose not to write those words. I am unlimited now. You are not here to strike anything down. You are dead. To chop any little sense of meaning off the edges. You are not here, so I do not have to answer to you. Though I am speaking to you. Only to you. It’s complicated and I can’t get out of it without just shutting up, so I will.
