Love Is the Law (6 page)

The basement was spotless. Not even spotless in the lived-in rumpus room way. Like the house above, everything looked brand new—the clean boiler, the blank gray walls, the freshly poured cement floor, the unfinished wooden staircase in the corner leading back upstairs to, I presumed, the empty living room and static-charged wall-to-wall carpet. The basement was so pristine that it looked empty even though about a dozen people were already present, clumped in twos and threes. Nobody turned to greet us, or even look at us. And I recognized nobody. This wasn’t the usual crowd. One girl had a Chelsea haircut with a pretty pronounced curl, looking more like a mostly bald Bob’s Big Boy than was good for her, but most of the others weren’t even punks. The great big graduate student from my route, and his tiny girlfriend, were in one corner. I wanted to rush up to him and say, “Aram, hello!” but of course he’d have no idea who I was. But then I realized—that’s exactly what I should do, especially as Greg was getting antsy and twitchy standing next to me and waiting for something to happen.

“Aram, hello!” I said as I walked on up to him, my hand out like a used car salesman. “And Karen.”

Aram smiled and shook my hand. “Hello, how are you?” he said, his face exploding with a real, authentic smile. Karen looked confused and wilted. Clearly, she should be paired off with Greg, and I should have had Aram. We both decided to play friends.

“So, Abyssal Eyeballs!” I said. “Haven
’
t seen them before!”

“Me neither. It should be . . .” Aram said, glancing around the room. His hair nearly scraped against the low ceiling. “An interesting show.”

“My name is Karen,” Karen finally said.

“Dawn, and this is Greg.”

Greg mumbled a hello. Then he said, “Where
’
s the instruments?”

“It
’
s not a musical,” Karen said. “It
’
s a straight play.”

“More performance art, actually,” Aram said. “I
’
m pretty sure there will be instruments.”

“See, performance art,” I said to Greg, nudging him with my elbow. “With instruments.”

“What happened to your face?” Karen asked him.

“Pit bull with AIDS,” Greg said with a laugh. Wrong crowd for bumper sticker humor. Nobody found his joke funny, but
everyone in the basement quieted down and turned to look at him. Or past him, as the lights overhead dimmed and the door to the upstairs opened, yellow and orange light, and fog-
machine fog spilling out onto the staircase. The cellar door through which we had entered slammed shut behind us.

Karen was wrong—there were instruments. Two surpetis sounded from somewhere in the room, droning on at tones so slightly different as to almost create a third, weird buzz. A strobe started. Someone had a violin. Most of the people around us weren’t waiting for a band; they were part of a show. Aram and Karen, and the Chelsea girl, appeared to be spectators, but that was it. One man had glow-in-the-dark face paint. Then things got a little weird.

“If I do not throw a physical bomb, it is only because there is none big enough . . . There can be no peace between Socrates and Athens, between Jesus and Jerusalem. We must then first throw moral bombs!” someone bellowed. It was a line from Crowley’s
The World’s Tragedy
. A guitar started grinding away, more black metal than hardcore. The surpetis droned endlessly. Other members of the band—the cast?—started taking off their clothes. Greg was making out with the Chelsea girl, or seemed to be as best I could determine in the momentary flashes of light. We’d gone looking for politics, but found some sort of vaguely occult performance. I suppose that was to be expected.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said another voice. It was the Latin kid, but far away and tinny. It took me a second to figure out that he was still upstairs and speaking into some kind of vent or pipe that led into the basement. “The Abyssal Eyeballs.” The strobe slowed down. Three people descended from the steps leading to the upstairs. One of them was under a sheet with three circles over the head, like a cartoon ghost. The other two were a slightly overweight woman in sweatpants and facial mud, the other a man dressed as though he should have been much older—high pants, a straw hat, black socks, and sandals. As if we already didn’t know that suburbia was a soul-raping nightmare. If the ghost was supposed to be the soul of either an abortion or some kid who committed suicide, I was going to leave. But it wasn’t. The guitar changed up a bit, the woman started doing some human beatboxing, and the ghost raised its arms under the sheet and twirled like a dervish. It was a woman too, a real dancer. The man began to sing. I heard Aram say aloud to Karen, “This is supposed to be a straight play?” but then I wondered if they too weren’t actually part of the show rather than just spectators. Much of the song made no sense to me, as most of the lyrics weren’t in English. Each line seemed to be in a different language. Only the old saw from Nietzsche, “Whatever is done from love always occurs beyond good and evil,” was in English. I’d taken French in school, but the vocabulary of the lyric in that language was beyond me. Someone handed the ghost woman a guitar. She draped the sheet over her arms to play. The Chelsea girl shouldered past me, tugging Greg behind her. They started pogoing in front of the band. The woman in the mud mask had a bongo drum. The Abyssal Eyeballs got some pretty solid riffing going. I took a deep breath, found a shadow, and got up the steps unmissed.

The kitchen was bare. I noticed that the fridge wasn’t humming, and opened it. No light, no power. And the food was all props, like they have in Sears. A big plastic turkey with little plastic trimmings. Empty no-brand juices and sodas. Even fake bread, actually sliced. A pair of plastic fried eggs, with big yellow staring yolks. The living room had no furniture either except for a tall lamp in the corner. Of course, no vent. There were two doors—one was likely a closet, the other perhaps a bedroom. I inhaled, didn’t think, grabbed a doorknob, and opened it. A bedroom, yes, with a cot and the Latin kid on it, a small desk lamp on the floor, and some random junk—an easel, paint tubes, a pile of towels, a bass drum and a floor tom, some cardboard boxes likely filled with stuff.

“What?”

“What
’
s with that show downstairs?”

“Don’t like it? We’re in progress. Making changes. You can leave feedback afterwards, but I have to say I won’t take it very seriously if you’ve already left to come look for me,” the kid says. His voice sounded a bit hollow, as though he was still speaking into the vent.

“I mean, what is this supposed to be about?” I was angry, annoyed, asking all the wrong questions. I felt like some Long Island idiot wandering the halls of MOMA and snorting derisively at the artwork.
My kid could paint that!
“I mean, what’s your name? Are you new in town?” Below my feet, the band in the basement thumped like the building’s very own heart.

The kid smiled. “You meant to ask me my name, but instead you accidentally asked me to explain to you the themes of the Abyssal Eyeballs. Honestly, I don
’
t even know. This just felt like something I had to do. It
’
s, like, important somehow.”

“Let
’
s pretend that is so,” I said.

“My name is Roderick.”

“Do you live here?” He looked around the room, eyes questioning. “Yes, I mean in this house?”

“Of course not.”

“New in town?”

“You forgot to preface that with ‘Hey, sailor,’ ” he said. That made the blood rush to my head. My Will was totally scattered. His was quite focused. “Anyway, I have to do something now,” he said, reaching for some papers on the cot. Then he leaned down near the vent in the wall and put his hand on the lever to open it. “Please close the door behind you. Help yourself to anything you might find in the fridge. And promise me you won’t do something crazy, like kill yourself and leave blood everywhere, while I’m setting up.”

He chuckled, and didn
’
t even look up at me, but I said, “I promise.” I stepped out and closed the door. I even went to the fridge, in case he was giving me some sort of clue. Life wasn
’
t like that; there was nothing of interest in the fridge, though it did occur to me that the Abyssal Eyeballs were squatting here—maybe for the night, maybe forever. I could go down to the deli and call the police on the pay phone to shake things up. But cops can ruin things, and I was no rat, plus the notion smacked of spite, of flipping over a chessboard. From the small kitchen window I saw the backyard filling with people. The show was already over. Greg and the Chelsea girl were holding hands. I decided on a disappearing act.

I
’
ve been a punk for three years. My initial reason was pretty stupid. Once my father started disappearing for a few days at a time, I realized that I wasn
’
t going to have a sweet sixteen party when the time came. The lights went off, and Grandma had to call LILCO to get the power back on. She thought she was growing forgetful, and she was, but paying the bills had always been Mom
’
s gig and she had never let anything slip, until Dad was home one summer after a layoff and decided to take over. Then the phone started ringing off the hook, and the caller on the other line was always asking for her, even after she died. You have to pay for cancer treatments whether they work or not, as it turns out.

Life was getting a lot smaller. People started drifting away from one another, finding their own little sections of the unicursal hexagram back when I was thirteen, when Mom was still alive, when I was spending a lot of time at the hospital. Then Dad started acting oddly, and as news travels fast in a small town the good girls started keeping me at arm
’
s length. The bad girls didn
’
t give a fuck about me either. And guys—it was either play Dungeons & Dragons, or spread my legs. Neither option was all that appetizing. So I spent a lot of time in my room, compulsively rereading the few books I owned:
Anne of Green Gables
, and
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me
, which I
’
d liberated from Dad, were special favorites.

One night I was fiddling with the radio and turned the knob almost all the way to the left of the dial. Someone on TV had said that classical music helps with relaxation, but instead I got an ear-raping roar of guitars and vocals that sounded like barking. It was WUSB, the local college station, and the program was Outrage, a hardcore punk show. For what seemed like a very long while, I didn
’
t move. My hand stayed on the knob. I don
’
t remember breathing, but I must have, because a dozen songs later, when the DJ
’
s voice came on to read off the names of the songs, and the bands, and where they were from—England! California! Mexico!
Long Island!
—I exhaled so completely I nearly fainted. I
’
d never heard of any of the bands, but rushed for a pencil and paper to write down some names.

The show was two hours long, and I
’
d missed some of it, but I spent at least ninety minutes practically wrapped around the radio. Critics and parents say that hardcore is just noise, and honestly, they
’
re right. On that first night, and for many Wednesday nights thereafter, I could hardly tell one song from another, and the DJ never repeated a song. I wrote down snippets of lyrics I could comprehend and even attempted to transcribe riffs that I liked, scribbling down brbrbrbrbrbrbrrrrreeeeng and the like. It was a whole new secret world, populated mostly by guys, doing things all by themselves. They were bored and disgusted, just as I was, so they created their own little kingdom with its own aesthetics, politics, and foreign policy. An aggressive, expansionist foreign policy aimed at colonizing the suburbs where I lived. By the end of the month, I was a dedicated fifth columnist.

The weeks between Wednesdays dragged on. That
’
s when I took up my hobby of peering in through windows to see how the other ninety-nine percent lived. I suppose I was trying to find a new way to live, or at least a happy family that I could pretend to be a part of. That, and I wanted to get caught doing it, so that my father would wake up, so that some kindly social worker or teacher would take an interest in me. But I was already invisible. One night, instead of listening to Outrage, I decided to try to meet the DJ, whom I imagined to be a boy maybe just a year or two older than me, with a great cockscomb of a Mohawk and long muscular arms. A thin guy, tall too. So I took the bus to Stony Brook, as on-campus parking is terrible, found the student union, and for about an hour before the show started, hovered around outside the door to the station.

WUSB
’
s studio was on the far side of the corner of the student union, so there was little traffic in the hallway. I didn
’
t attract much attention. I didn
’
t even bring a book to read, or a snack, and spent about forty-five minutes silently fuming at myself, my stomach enflamed and squirming, should-I-stay-or-should-I-go arguments won and lost every second. Finally, with a grunt, a man carrying a milk crate full of records turned the corner and walked past me. I got a look at one of the covers, and it was nothing like hardcore. He hit the buzzer with his elbow, and said, “Trevor, let me in.” Trevor was the name of the hardcore DJ—he must have already been in the studio preparing for the show, even before I got there. And there was Trevor
’
s voice, tinny and distant, saying, “Okay,” then the door buzzed, and the man shouldered open the door and let it swing shut behind him.

I took a deep breath, and pressed the buzzer. I heard Trevor
’
s voice saying, “WUSB?” impatient and questioning at once, and then I ran from him like a fool.

“What is the sound of one class struggling?” a guy behind a card table asked me as I tried to hustle out of the student union. There were a number of student clubs out that afternoon. Some Hindu cult with a diorama of a lion about to attack a sheep with a man
’
s face, a number of ethnic clubs and frats, and this guy, who didn
’
t look like a student. A perennial graduate student, maybe. He was tall, even in his chair, with glasses, and balder than any teacher in my high school. If there was anyone else in his club, they weren
’
t tabling with him. A sign taped to the edge of the table read
red submarine
in handwritten black swirls and a number of zine-like pamphlets decorated the tabletop. They were all homebrew jobs.

He handed me one entitled
The Tao of Marxism
and said, “Interested in overthrowing society?”

“Well, which society?”

“What you got?” he asked, and laughed.

“I
’
m not a student here. I go . . . somewhere else.”

“It
’
s okay. We do work in the community too. And in our minds.” He tapped the pamphlet he
’
d given me with one thick finger. “The old revolutionary methods don
’
t work anymore. I mean, look at the Soviet Union, at China.” At the time, I knew almost nothing about either country, except that they had nuclear weapons and were “bad” and the people were poor and had to stand in long lines for toilet paper in Russia, and rice in China. “They
’
re just the other side of the coin.” He leaned in close. I took a step back. We had opposite ends of the pamphlet pinched between our fingers. “What
’
s your major?” he asked me.

“Uh . . . psychology?” I blushed hard. I certainly didn
’
t feel like a college freshman. I wanted to run again, but there were so many eyes on me, or there seemed to be anyway. And I did want the pamphlet. “But I have to go now. Can I just take this . . . ?” I tried to pluck the zine away from him, but he had a well-practiced grip.

“It
’
s a dollar,” he said. “It’s a Red Submarine pamphlet I wrote. Not to be confused with any other organization on campus, or anywhere on earth with a similar name, like Red Bal—” He stopped himself, probably because my eyes were rolling to the back of my head, caught his breath, and started again. “I’m Mike Schmidt, the leader of Red Submarine.”

“Mike Schmidt—like the baseball player?”

“Yup! Iron Mike. I actually love the Phillies,” Mike Schmidt said, suddenly happy. “Are you into baseball?”

I dug up a crumpled dollar from the pocket of my jeans. Bus fare, plus if I bought his shit I wouldn
’
t have to talk about baseball. I
’
d have to take the train home and hope that either the conductor didn
’
t bother to check for new passengers between Stony Brook and Port Jefferson or hide in the lavatory the entire trip. “Wait, is paying for things properly Communist?”

Mike let go of the pamphlet and smiled a big toothy smile. “Excellent question!” Then he snatched the money from my hand anyway. “The answer might be in the pamphlet, which is now yours to read.”

“So . . . are there even any other members in Red Submarine?”

Mike shrugged. “Sure. We keep the group small, though, to avoid splits and purges. You know, arguments over political questions and disagreements often lead to organizations breaking apart.”

“So you keep yourself a small group on purpose, to not break apart?”

“That
’
s
reverse
psychology,” he said.

“Well, then, if I find the pamphlet persuasive, I certainly won
’
t come back and join your group.” I was pleased with myself for that little rejoinder. Generally, I wasn
’
t very good at thinking on my feet back then.

“You have leadership potential,” Mike said.

“How did you become the leader of your group?”

“By founding it,” he said, a little abrupt now.

“Just like in China and Russia, then?” I asked, and he frowned. I
’
d gone a little too far with the teasing, and was growing embarrassed again. I wasn
’
t here to meet this weirdo, and the guy I wanted to meet was behind a closed door, and his show was about to start. My Walkman had an FM tuner, so I put my headphones on, waved the pamphlet like a goodbye, and tried my best to walk away without rushing. There were free copies of the
Village Voice
in the vestibule, and I
’
d never had access to one before, so grabbed one too.

The Tao of Marxism
, I understand now, made very little sense. Mike Schmidt was a “freelance revolutionary” and had been since he was a freshman back in the 1960s. The About the Author section was two pages long. The whole pamphlet was only sixteen pages. But in its way it was mind blowing. Mike liked Lenin, which surprised me given his comments on the Soviet Union, and was enthusiastic about what he called “the anarchist Lenin,” whom he found hiding between the lines of several of Lenin
’
s writings. A lot of the rest of the pamphlet was a rant against traditional leftist organizations—SWP, CP, RCP, RWG, the IS and the ISO, with the ISO being a split from the IS. I was reminded of a microbe budding little O-shaped daughter cells in order to reproduce. Regents-level biology, you know. There were a whole raft of other abbreviations he never deigned to name or even describe. That was all fine and sensible, if poorly written, radicalism, but then there were the last three pages. The revolution wasn
’
t an event that was going to come; it had already happened. There were a couple of million leftists in the US—anarchists and Marxists and Greens, anyone to the left of the Democrats, basically—and they were all doing something in culture, in industry, in schools. One day, they
’
d all do the same revolutionary thing at the same time, like iron filings influenced by a magnet, and the revolution, already “both imminent and immanent,” would be complete. All we had to do was join up, somehow. One didn
’
t even need to be a member of Red Submarine to be a “red submarine,” obscured under the waters of capital, ready to act in response to the revolutionary yang impulse to overthrow the yin of reaction. These were the cadre of the Imaginary Party.

It sounded good. Good enough that when I got home and started flipping through the
Village Voice
I decided, on impulse, to shave my head. Plus, maybe then my father would talk to me, and my grandma would say something to me that wasn’t about meals or television. I used my father’s clippers, and didn’t clean it out afterwards. I was ready for an infinity of abuse, and I got it. Kojak and Ban Roll-On jokes from the boys, sneers and outrage from the girls. I shut myself away, piloting a submarine in my own belly, waiting for the revolution.