Almost as soon as I arrive in Memphis, Leila and I go to the Lamplighter, a favorite tavern from years past. The lamplighter is small and cozy, accommodating maybe twenty people at most. Nothing in there seems to have changed in decades. It’s a time capsule. Miss Shirley, the bartended who seems to have been there forever too, doesn’t look happy. She’s got cancer. She’s bald now. The whole time, she just stares off into space thinking god knows what. She knows it’s finished. No more tomorrows or next years, just that stinking pile of shit -the wasted past. One can only assume it’s tormenting her. All our lives, Miss Shirley’s included, are centered in some conceptual sense of tomorrow. But for those who know they are dying, tomorrow is revealed for what it is: a cheap fuckaround. Tomorrow-ness steals from us an entire lifetime of now-ness. Miss Shirley must be on the cusp of some sort of epiphany, but it’s too late to make anything of it. She must be thinking to her self, “That’s it? That was my life? What the fuck?” Of course Miss Shirley would not think or say the word fuck. There’s no cussing in the Lamplighter, and she’ll throw your ass out for using language like that. She goes on staring at nothing somewhere back toward the toilets.
I’m sitting at the Bar beside Leila and a couple of her friends. I can’t hear what they’re talking about, so I quit bothering to listen. I look at the weird shit behind the bar. There’s a little pyramid of cans of Vienna Sausages. Jesus, what the fuck is that doing there? My grandmother used to eat those God damned things. She liked canned meat smeared on saltines too. Vienna Sausages are a shitty low-grade meat paste that’s pressed into the shape of little sausages and sold in tin cans. They’re barely fit for legal human consumption. Lips and assholes, man. I get the feeling they aren’t for sale, just decoration. Lips and assholes.
You can order hot food here, but I heard someone got sick from it, so I don’t. I used to eat here all the time when I was in college. The menu is posted behind the counter and appears to have been drawn with a set of magic markers. It’s rife with misspellings and incomprehensible artistic flourishes. Hamburgers cost three dollars. Chili costs four-fifty. Leila gets the idea to make some cool T-shirts for the lamplighter. I suggest that the design on the shirt be nothing but a photograph of this fucking menu. It’s hilarious.
I look around the room. The dying alcoholics that used to frequent this place are absent, replaced by smart-looking young people. Dive-bar tourists. The fucks. As though I can talk! I’m probably one of the guilty assholes that popularized this place with the art school set. The Lamplighter has become a museum, a museum of kitsch. It was never like that before. Memphis used to be completely unconscious of it’s own weird stylishness. I guess thing’s have changed. I’ve been gone a long time.
It’s dark in the Lamplighter. I’m listening to the jukebox when despair comes over me, bad fucking despair. I can’t understand where it’s coming from. I feel fatigue as though I’m dying. The conversation keeps moving, but I have fallen out of it. I get this terrible fear that what I’m feeling is true. As always in these moments, I have a hard time convincing myself it’s temporary. I cant help but feel like it’s always going to be this way, that life is over.
I start to wonder if I’m sensing Miss Shirley’s doomed thought waves. It’s so crushing I actually go and hide in the men’s room -but the fucking door has no latch on it! What if I were peeing for god’s sake? I get up and go outside, just to break the spell. It’s nice and cold. I breathe deeply, but it does no good. I am doomed, and although this makes no sense it’s nonetheless an absolute reality. It’s the kind of thing that make praying to god seem reasonable.
I go back in and order more booze, doing my best to conceal what I’m going through.
Leila’s on the phone, so her friends make one more well-meaning yet totally ill-fated attempt to socialize with me. They haven’t got the slightest idea that the person they are dealing with is not even alive, not even human. I’ve been stolen away by the eruption of some sort of mood disorder -a psychic convulsion of hopelessness, tiredness. I’m tired like the grave.
One of them says, “You’re from Colorado, huh? Cool.”
I say, “Yeah, it’s pretty cool.”
“I like those towns like… Durango.”
“Yeah, those towns are cool.”
“So uh…”
“Yeah.”
And that’s basically the end of that. I go back outside and a fucking crack addict approaches me making pitiful weird sounds. A white person can’t understand a word these crazy Negroes say when they get on the crack. In response to this unknown query I say something like, “Get the fuck out of here leper! I’m armed! I have no sense of morals and I will get away with what I do!” The leper drags himself on sullenly. Shit, maybe he was just asking what time it is. I go on back inside.
The night ends early.
Later, alone with my friend, I know the worst has passed. I’m normal again and grateful for it. The fit of despair at the Lamplighter was bad enough that it actually frightened me. This place used to make me happy. I was another person then though. It was a different lifetime. Between then and now there is no continuity whatsoever except for the bones in my body and a handful of spoiling memories I don’t even understand or believe anymore.
10/30/09
Monday, November 9, 2009
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
The Sound of Speed
My friends have brought me to see something strange on the riverbank. There’s a houseboat left partially sunk in the water, half of the hull sticking up into the air at a weird diagonal angle, the titanic of white trash. On the riverbank there’s a driveway leading out to the disaster and someone has spray-painted a note to the residents on it. The messy fluorescent green letters say, “JIM, WE STOPPED BY BUT YOU WEREN’T HERE. SEE YOU LATER. –BILL BILL.” I’d like to meet this Bill Bill, ask him just what the fuck it was that happened here.
My friends and I follow a broken boardwalk through what looks like a tacky wedding chapel arch, and then board the hull of the boat. It’s hard to stand up on the steep weird angle of the deck, but we manage to hold onto the rails and the structure. All around the boat there’s rot and pollution and astounding filth. The water looks like toxic sludge with mutant algae on the surface. There are lots of beer cans and household items floating in the muck. I peer inside the boat and see the room that must have been the living room. The air is bad and there’s a refrigerator floating in the middle of the room. I wonder if there might still be some drinkable beer in there. John tells me there was a big painting of Elvis inside, but it’s seems to have been looted by abnormally hip rednecks. All the windows and mirrors are broken. Spiders and spider-webs everywhere. Not an inch of the boat is free of these fucking creatures. There must be hundreds of thousands of them crawling in every nook and cranny. This is the last spider buffet before winter I tell you. It’s going to get cold real soon, and there will be fewer and fewer bugs in the muggy river air for these nasty little fuckers to feast on.
John looks down into a shaft on deck and says, “I think I found the problem. There are bricks in here.”
“Fuck the bricks, man” I say, “What about these god damned spiders! They must have killed all those aboard and eaten a hole in the cabin walls. Maybe we ought to burn the wreck and fry the fucking lot of them. Extermination. I’m talking Dresden tactics. Just siphon some gas from your tank and I’ll toss my cigarette in. Fuck these fucking spiders. Fuck them all. Enemies of mankind.”
Brandi says, “I can’t believe you, of all people, are scared of spiders.”
“Are you yanking my dick or something? Spiders are the most deeply ingrained fear in the human psyche. It’s us against them. God made it that way. Spiders are the enemy!”
The light changes while the three of us perch the deck together. Even the Arkansas River looks good in the evening sun’s brilliance. It makes the scene on this tilted houseboat seem beautiful and surreal. Way up ahead of the bend I can see the Pinnacle Mountain, a pile of rocks I used to like climbing around on years ago.
We leave. Amusingly enough, I notice a sign pointing to the wrecked boat that says “OPEN HOUSE.” It’s an open house alright. We take Brandi’s picture in front of the sign with the boat in the background. The evening sun flares a weirdly serious light on the absurdity of the scene. The road back up from the river turns takes a sharp turn past some woods where I see several dozen little white crosses stuck in the ground. I say, “What are those crosses, some backwoods abortion protest?”
John, who must have missed it, says he thinks it’s probably a memorial to someone who died in a car wreck.
I say, “Well there must have been lots of wrecks right there. I bet they were all drunk drivers leaving that houseboat at four in the morning.”
John says he bets a wild party sank the boat. I concede that this is more likely true than my spider theory.
In the back seat of a car, sitting on top of a pile of loose pages ripped from books, I look out and see the molten gold of the sun setting behind blurred trees that race by. We’re headed toward Little Rock. In the front seat my friends have turned up the music, something French and very intense. It sounds good, one of those compositions that awakens emotion, but doesn’t let you know just what the emotion is about. I doubt I could understand these lyrics even if I did speak French. They blend into the heavy electric roar of the song, juts another instrument. This is the sound of a life in motion, goodbyes and memories soaring into the sky forever. The song tells me tomorrow will be another lifetime and we know it’s going to be charmed.
These are the last hours of my sojourn in the south. It’s good that all the sad weirdness of it ended on a happy note. I get the impression that I’m on the brink of something new and wonderful.
Little Rock
11/02/09
My friends and I follow a broken boardwalk through what looks like a tacky wedding chapel arch, and then board the hull of the boat. It’s hard to stand up on the steep weird angle of the deck, but we manage to hold onto the rails and the structure. All around the boat there’s rot and pollution and astounding filth. The water looks like toxic sludge with mutant algae on the surface. There are lots of beer cans and household items floating in the muck. I peer inside the boat and see the room that must have been the living room. The air is bad and there’s a refrigerator floating in the middle of the room. I wonder if there might still be some drinkable beer in there. John tells me there was a big painting of Elvis inside, but it’s seems to have been looted by abnormally hip rednecks. All the windows and mirrors are broken. Spiders and spider-webs everywhere. Not an inch of the boat is free of these fucking creatures. There must be hundreds of thousands of them crawling in every nook and cranny. This is the last spider buffet before winter I tell you. It’s going to get cold real soon, and there will be fewer and fewer bugs in the muggy river air for these nasty little fuckers to feast on.
John looks down into a shaft on deck and says, “I think I found the problem. There are bricks in here.”
“Fuck the bricks, man” I say, “What about these god damned spiders! They must have killed all those aboard and eaten a hole in the cabin walls. Maybe we ought to burn the wreck and fry the fucking lot of them. Extermination. I’m talking Dresden tactics. Just siphon some gas from your tank and I’ll toss my cigarette in. Fuck these fucking spiders. Fuck them all. Enemies of mankind.”
Brandi says, “I can’t believe you, of all people, are scared of spiders.”
“Are you yanking my dick or something? Spiders are the most deeply ingrained fear in the human psyche. It’s us against them. God made it that way. Spiders are the enemy!”
The light changes while the three of us perch the deck together. Even the Arkansas River looks good in the evening sun’s brilliance. It makes the scene on this tilted houseboat seem beautiful and surreal. Way up ahead of the bend I can see the Pinnacle Mountain, a pile of rocks I used to like climbing around on years ago.
We leave. Amusingly enough, I notice a sign pointing to the wrecked boat that says “OPEN HOUSE.” It’s an open house alright. We take Brandi’s picture in front of the sign with the boat in the background. The evening sun flares a weirdly serious light on the absurdity of the scene. The road back up from the river turns takes a sharp turn past some woods where I see several dozen little white crosses stuck in the ground. I say, “What are those crosses, some backwoods abortion protest?”
John, who must have missed it, says he thinks it’s probably a memorial to someone who died in a car wreck.
I say, “Well there must have been lots of wrecks right there. I bet they were all drunk drivers leaving that houseboat at four in the morning.”
John says he bets a wild party sank the boat. I concede that this is more likely true than my spider theory.
In the back seat of a car, sitting on top of a pile of loose pages ripped from books, I look out and see the molten gold of the sun setting behind blurred trees that race by. We’re headed toward Little Rock. In the front seat my friends have turned up the music, something French and very intense. It sounds good, one of those compositions that awakens emotion, but doesn’t let you know just what the emotion is about. I doubt I could understand these lyrics even if I did speak French. They blend into the heavy electric roar of the song, juts another instrument. This is the sound of a life in motion, goodbyes and memories soaring into the sky forever. The song tells me tomorrow will be another lifetime and we know it’s going to be charmed.
These are the last hours of my sojourn in the south. It’s good that all the sad weirdness of it ended on a happy note. I get the impression that I’m on the brink of something new and wonderful.
Little Rock
11/02/09
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