The Big Noise!

 
It was the first, or at least one of the first that took place after everything slid sideways. After our whole worlds exploded. We were both still raw and bloody, and the sunlight, even the gray filtered sunlight of Columbus Ohio, burned like lemon juice in our eyes.

Nothing was easy then. Not even the simplest things. The easy everyday actions which healthy well adjusted people take for granted felt to me like climbing mountains. Climbing mountains everyday just to scrape the bottom. Climbing mountains just to stand and walk and talk and look your best friends in the eyes. Everyday climbing mountains to accomplish the basest, barest human functions and even then falling short most of the time.

Climbing mountains just to reach the base of your own humanity.

I hated leaving the house for fear of being seen. Not that I was hiding. I hadn't gone into hiding yet, though I had plenty to be ashamed of. I had plenty to hide from.  At that point I wasn't even aware of what I had done. I just didn't want anyone to see me, lay eyes on me. I felt condemned and guilty in my own skin, ashamed to have to walk around town wearing my own thin and obvious face.

Then it was the night of the Big Noise!!!. He rented a theater space from an experimental theater company. Mad Labs I think it was called. Hired all manner of poet, musician, artist. Assigned them time slots. I left the house fearfully anticipating a crowded theater and drove two hours to arrive just before the first act of the show.

The place was full, maybe seventy people, dressed in black, or with hair-dos that reminded me of cotton candy. The whole scene was circus like. Standing on stage, looking out into the crowd made me feel for a moment like I was the audience and they were on stage, until I noticed their eyes. All those eyes staring up at us waiting for us to do something that would make them feel like they got their five dollars worth.

"You folks ready to watch me climb this invisible mountain to the base of my crumbled humanity?
Got five dollars on ya?"

That is how I felt but he was fine. He swam through the night like he was born broken, displaying it on stage for anyone to see. He stood behind a folding table of cassette players and turntables all strung together with colored wires. It looked like a bomb and he resembled some kind of crazed, wounded anarchist standing behind it all. Manipulating records with weights. A dozen inch long lead weights that he placed on the records in just the right spots. He knew all the right spots, and the weights would nudge the arm of the turntable just enough so that the needle would never leave that single groove. Just playing that small bit of that single record  over and over. He built songs out of these loops balancing two then three and so on. With five or six turntables the effect was chaotic, like a building collapsing methodically. But as if a building where intentionally wired to collapse in a specific pattern so that the cacophony of each disintegrating floor falling into the next was a different note or movement of a song. That was the way his music sounded to me. The audience got their five dollars worth and I stood beside the stage imagining the theater collapsing musically into a heap with all of us inside.

Then he finished and exited to my side of the stage. I asked him if he would get me high.

We went to the mens room near the entrance of the theater. The girl collecting the cover price didn't see us both slip in together. It was a one man restroom mostly.

She saw us on the way out though and asked him what we were doing in there. Her teeth were white and straight and her eyes clear as glass. She was clean and beautiful and I remember thinking that if I hadn't just gotten high, I wouldn't have been able to look her in the eyes, if I wasn't so high, I thought, I might have a hard-on. I was so weak and sick and willing to fall into any simple, fast escape. I was so ready to believe in anything that from a distance looked like it might be love.

She said "What were you two doing in there?"

He said "Rock star stuff baby" and then he teetered off toward the stage to finish out the night.

By the time the show ended I was coming down and that feeling was creeping back through me, like I needed to hide my face from their eyes. Like every person who looked at me could see every dark shameful secret. The eyes of strangers so effortlessly cut me to the bone.

So I exited the theater, passing the the clean girl without a word, got in my car and drove two hours home. I drove thinking about fear and fearlessness, about lead weights, vinyl records, About music and about buildings that collapse like songs, and all the fast and  simple escapes of my life that I have allowed to masquerade as love.