Noise (13 page)
Authors: Peter Wild
Twoâ¦
His future self was anxiously scanning the crowd for Tuck, they'd got split up, the two of them, somehow, and so he was looking, roaming, another Jagger-not-Jagger singing about
THE BANKS OF THE RIVER CHARLES, AW THAT'S WHAT'S HAPPENIN' BABY, OH THAT'S WHERE YOU'LL FIND ME, ALONG WITH THE LOVERS, THE FUGGERS AND THIEVES, AW BUT THEY'RE COOL PEOPLE
. There were gangs and clusters and cliques amid the milling patchouli throng. Young girls with ironed hair in patchwork dresses with bare legs and bare feet and beads. Hairy Raskolnikoffs with open shirts and velvet jackets and flowers. Guys in leather with greasy hair and tattoos stalking women with snake-eyes and snake-lips and snake-hips. Groovy, freakish could-be boys, could-be girls in gold and silver shirts and trousers dancing, spinning with their hands outstretched like fluttering fanatic butterflies. The light show on the stage was becoming frantic, gulls swooping, missiles flying, freaks and pigs
clashing in the streets, flowering tapestries of intersecting purple and red diamonds, red and white circles and oily blobs of yellow and orange, cosmic light beams lurching drunkenly over the faces of those near by, transforming stupid, vacant-looking hippy kids into phantoms and spectres and hobgoblins, the Grande Ballroom a shabby haunted house, host to the end of the world. Vedder thought he saw silver-bearded John Sinclair pointing at him over the heads of the crowd, laughing like a demented iron fox from the future. He saw Tuck the instant the music cut, over by the fire exit, waylaid by Panthers. A short guy in a leather jacket with wild hair and sunglasses, arms outstretched like a lay preacher, advanced on the stage, the crowd roaring, a short history of white noise, people clapping, clapping, clapping.
BROTHERS AND SISTERS!!!
he yelled.
BROTHERS AND SISTERS! I WANT TO SEE YOU, SEE YOUR HANDS OUT THERE, WANT TO SEE YOU, SEE YOUR HANDS
. Tuck was trying to assert some control over the situation, had his badge out, but the Panthers, one of the Panthers at least, slapped at his hand and the badge disappeared.
I WANT EVERYONE TO KICK UP SOME NOISE! I WANT TO HEAR SOME REVOLUTION OUT THERE, BROTHERS. I WANT TO HAVE A LITTLE REVOLUTION!
Vedder stood there, watching Tuck as the crowd roared and jeered, shouting and screaming.
BROTHERS AND SISTERS! THE TIME HAS COME FOR EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU TO DECIDE WHETHER YOU ARE GOING TO BE THE PROBLEM OR WHETHER YOU ARE GOING TO BE THE SOLUTION
.
Thasss right
, someone close by hissed.
YOU MUST CHOOSE, BROTHERS, YOU MUST CHOOSE!
Vedder could feel it, what the man on the stage was saying, could feel it in his own heart and in his own chest.
Arise, great warrior, arise!
IT TAKES
FIVE SECONDS, he yelled. FIVE SECONDS OF DECISION! FIVE SECONDS TO REALISE YOUR PURPOSE HERE ON THE PLANET
. Tuck was wheeling about, same time as he scanned the crowd, wanting Vedder to emerge out of the dark like the goddamned cavalry or something only he had no intention of saving the day. He was watching. He was listening. He was feeling it, man.
IT'S TIME TO MOVE. IT'S TIME TO GET DOWN WITH IT. BROTHERS, IT'S TIME TO TESTIFY
. Someone almost standing on his shoulder yelled, Oh yeah!
Oh yeah!
THE DAY IS GOING TO COME WHEN WE ARE ALL GOING TO HAVE TO TESTIFY
. More people were yelling now. Yeah!
Oh yeah!
I KNOW I'M READY TO TESTIFY AND I WANT TO KNOW ARE YOU READY TO TESTIFY? THE GOLDEN ARMS OF ZENTA ARE GOING TO REACH DOWN
âhe jabbed a finger into the crowd, pointed right at Vedder, it seemedâ
AMONG EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU AND YOU'LL HAVE TO GET DOWN AND TESTIFY THEN!
Vedder was shivering. Rooted to the spot.
ARE YOU READY?
Vedder nodded. Ignoring Tuck. Tuck a million miles away from where he was. Tuck lost. Tuck gone for ever. People mounted the stage, men in shiny silver jackets with big hair strapping instruments to themselves like explosives.
I OFFER TO YOU RIGHT NOW! A TESTIMONIAL!!! THE MC5!!!
Centred on Warren and Forest, his arrested self felt the heat, the heat of the crowd and the heat of the historical self burning with righteousness and devotion even as the petrol bomb struck and restruck the Detroit office of the Committee to End the War in Vietnam, fire and flame, the
whoomph
over and over again, his historical self burning brighter and still brighter as his future self stood transfixed, pending, on the edge, MC5 errupting,
JUNG-
JUNG-JUNG-JUNG
, their noise and volume like fifty electrical storms, his future self charred and burned as if sheet lightning were intersecting him at fifty different points on his body simultaneously.
JUNG-JUNG-JUNG-JUNG
. Within their deep infinity he saw in-gathered and bound by love in one volume the scattered leaves of all the universe. The light of a thousand suns suddenly arose in the sky.
JUNG-JUNG-JUNG-JUNG.
MY LOVE IS LIKE A RAMBLING RO-OSE.
JUNG-JUNG-JUNG-JUNG
. His historical self obliterating even as his future self exploded, divided and dividing, taking all the paths not taken, plunging headlong into the future even as
MC
5
THE MORE YOU FEEL IT THE MORE IT GROWS
JUNG-JUNG-JUNG-JUNGED
. His future self disgraced before the Citizen's Commission to Investigate the FBI. His future self disgraced before the Church Committee. His future self up to his eyes in the Keith case. And all the radicalism for nothing. No civil war. No end to the war. Not for years. War and strife and civil unrest for years, for decades, but stripped of all of its effectiveness. No winners. No believers. Just war and his part in it.
RAMBLIN' ROSE. RAMBLIN ROSE. I'M GONNA PUT YOU DOWN.
JUNG-JUNG-A-JUNG, JUNG-JUNG-A-JUNG, JUNG-JUNG-A-JUNG
. The petrol bomb striking the window, blooming and flowering, blooming and flowering, even as the light show behind the band bloomed and flowered, even as the noise shook his bones, scouring him, carving him hollow even as the historical self black to calmed, the exploding exploding exploding exploding like spiders across the starsâ
Oneâ¦
And then, suddenly, it was so simple. Everything was laid out before him, everything that was and everything that would be.
He saw it all, he held all within him and he was, momentarily, everything. An offer was made, an offer he wanted no part of, and his refusal cancelled all that had been, nullified the diffusion, restored him once moreâbut he was changed and, rather than complete the arc and throw the petrol bomb at the Detroit office of the Committee to End the War in Vietnam, he stopped, paused, turned about and returned to the car, Tuck instantly crazy, asking him
whattthehellyou
âeven as the rag's flame caught the bottle and the Highland-green Ford Mustang split like a cheap joke cigar.
emily carter roiphe
The name Sonic Youth brings an instant jerk to my shoulders and my toes curl with revulsionâ¦not that their music is bad, in fact I kind of like it, especially the Neil Young influenced thrash and trash guitar. It may have to do with envy of course. I was in the same town at the same time and I most emphatically did not get famous. The cameras came down to record the Spoken Word scene at the Nuyorican Café exactly three weeks after I had gone to Minnesota for chemical dependency treatment. Not only that, there was a huge riot in Tompkin's Square Park the very next dayânot the Riot Grrl kind with suicidal nymphettes in house slips shouting and refusing to bow down to anyone's patriarchal definition of knowing how to âplay' an instrument, but the real kind, with cops on horseback hitting people on the skull so hard that they bled internally into their brain cavities. Horrible, but I should have been there, it was part of the history of my city. Sonic Youth was in the East Village air a lot in those daysâbut mostly as background noise for me and the aspiring writers
with whom I came in contact. Their looks embarrassed me, frankly, by illustrating my own pretensionsâsullen, arty looking white kids who were attempting to cop some sort of attitude while meanwhile there was actual poverty, tragedy and child abuse everywhere you looked, along with art, of course, on every spare square inch, art and music. I can remember them doing a sound check in the Tompkin's Square bandshell one morning, no fun for my ears, and watching a dispute going on just east of the stage. One of the many instant art collectives that banded and disbanded by the week had put up a piece of âguerrilla' art, guerrilla because it had neither been funded nor zonedâ¦an act of defiance. A guy from the collectiveâwho would today be called a âhipster'âand a woman, who looked like, but was not, Kim Gordon, were disputing with the parents of a couple of kids. The âguerrilla' art looked like a festive and many-coloured jungle gym, and some kids were trying to climb on it. No, no, the arty guy goes, it's dangerous, stopâ¦The woman said something about cordoning it off. One kid's father, who was drinking a tallboy, was bellowing loud and full of wounded swagger, âThe fuck you put something like that up in fuckin park, the kids can't fuckin play on it? I'll sue your assâ¦' One of the band's roadies or someone got on the mike and tried to calm everyone down, in the same manner and with just as much efficacy as Mick Jagger at Altamont crooning âbrothers and sisters' to a crowd of Hell's Angels on methamphetamine and PCP. The mother of some other kids started screeching that
her kid had got hurt, a bottle was hurled and the artists fled, their sunglasses falling off, carefully moussed coiffures a-wobble. The band played onâ¦Art has no reason to consider practical things like the fact that putting up a sculpture that looks like something kids could play on but wasn't might not be the best way to contribute to the community. No time to consider that art-noise-rock-screech soundcheck might be the one bit of indifference that would send a depressed, chemically dependent college drop-out over the edge, especially when she looked at Kim Gordon, all ice-cool and swanlike aloofness while the college drop-out scraped the dirty sweat off her own forehead with a matchbook. Ah well, Sonic Youth fades, but Sonic Middle Age also has something to be said for it. I just wish I hadn't missed so much of the genuine art and music (Sonic Youth included, for all I know) that was bubbling around in the 1980s. Compulsion was yanking me around in those days, and compulsion, no matter what anyone says, is the exact opposite of rock and roll.
The Minneapolis addiction medicine clinic's waiting room is quite small and acoustically tiled. Still, it vibrates with a faint fluorescent hum. One entire wall is taken up with a poster bearing a diagram of emphysematic lungs, which sits behind a glass case so no one can steal it. For such a small waiting area it contains a global
cross-section of humanity. Sitting in little plastic chairs, waiting to dose, we often look like some kind of small-world diorama designed by Walt Disney if he'd been chronically depressed.
Aside from the African-Americans from Indiana and Chicago, there are the Native Americans whose antibuse is mixed with the pink Oral Metha-dose in their dixie cups. There are the women, white, black and native, who bring their kids in.
âHe's got the croup. That's why he's not in school.'
Once I saw a mother hemming the cuffs of her nine-year-old son's suit as she waited to get her methadone. âHe's going to his first dance,' she explained.
âAre you excited?' asked a man who could have been either thirty-five or sixty. âI'd be excited if I was going to see my first dad.'
No one informed him of the fact that he'd misheard dad for dance. A still silence settled over the room. The hard-time Midwestern white guys stared at the emphysema poster, sitting stock still in the small plastic chairs the colour of baby aspirin, the spidery lines around their eyes etching out the words: âHer fault'.
By rights I should sit with the ageing punk rockers, those in various shades of black denim, just held together by layers of grime, soot and ash, oil and studs. They seem to have been wearing their outfits for thirty years, or since the last time they cared about âfashion', or even âanti-fashion'. Perhaps it took that long to create the look with any kind of authenticity. The really young ones have dreadlocks and facial tattoos, homeless kids, runaways, they mess up my mind with a split between maternal instinct and wondering where they got the money to even get an opiate dependence to begin with, especially in Minnesota, where a ten dollar bag from New York or Chicago costs fifty bucks. It can be done, of courseâ¦
but first off you have to sell or pawn your possessions and these little ones didn't look like they had any. The boys I don't know, but the little girls, while still lovely, were not exactly âescort service' material. All these childrenâmaybe started out in the farmland areas, babies in the big town.
It's
not
a big town, of course, not New York or Chicago; social service lines move fast so people can afford to be chatty. Still, if it wasn't for the bright splashes of Hmong community colour, I might think that all that was left in the world were shades of darker and lighter grey.
The Hmong are here at the clinic to get a small taste of an opiate, the herbal and organic version of which is no longer available to them here. In their traditional culture, the elderly would take a bit to ease the inevitable aches and pains of ageing. As in every culture, some people stray from tradition and into obsession. It seems ridiculous in a way, for them to be on methadone
â
opium being a much less potent drug than any kind of synthesised opiate Western medicine can offer. I do not know what kinds of problems smoking opium caused and still causes, but it can't be as hard to detox from as methodoneâ¦Can it? Or do they have to take it because it's an opiate-blocker, simply to prevent them from getting high. I am as lost thinking about their lives as they must be having landed here
â
a frozen, metal planet navigable only by their children.
Â
Still, I am always so glad to see them because they have yet to âassimilate'âor succumb to the rules of our metro-area camouflage. The women wear brightly embroidered hats and headscarves, exuberantly patterned skirts with shirts that don't match. Checks,
flowers, beads, narrow stripes, wide stripes, textile mosaicsâall in a single outfit, the desired effect being an approximation of the clothes they wore at home. They refuse, in other words, to abandon the beautiful for the appropriate. If you want to talk to them you have to speak either to their generally polite and sociable kids or to Wat. Wat is a counsellor and community liaison and is able to tell jokes in three languages, including, I suspect, Latin.
He thinks I am funny because I am always having trouble with my car. âHeyâ¦' he cajoles, when I use the front desk phone again. Once more calling my husband, Nurse Johnnie, to pick me up because my car won't start in the-20 degree Fahrenheit February temperatures: ââ¦Always Car Troubleâ¦You Little Red Riding Hood. Car Trouble is you wolf. Little Trouble Girl.'
I am not a young girl any more, but an actual young one pipes up next to me. âThat's a songâ¦Little Trouble Girlâ¦'
Leopard-print coat, died orange hair, pale white make-up over acneâ¦Is she even twenty-five? What's she been googling? More to the black and howling point: which one of my aborted children is sheâ¦?
Wat is fascinated. ââ¦A song?'
âYeah, Sonic Youth,' she says. âThey were a group. They had a song that was called something like “Little Trouble Girl”.'
And although I always say I'll keep quiet, I never, ever do. The memory crashes through the window, horn honking, shattered glass, headlights on high beam: how they used to warm up before they performed in Tompkin's Square Park, which was practically my front yard at the time, their snarling but somehow affectless music sending its barbed tendrils through the window of my first-floor apartment, yanking me into another day full of withdrawal,
no money, desperation, guilt and a permanent taste in my mouth of having swallowed an ashtray. They were Hell's alarm clock.
I hated the sound they made, as if they were not really angry, but using the sounds and chord progressions of anger to create something that was wilfully hard to interpret. I was in the minority though, most people liked them in those days, not that anyone would have used the word âliked'. No one ever had any expression on their faces, you had to know someone very well before you declared an actual opinion, lest you show enthusiam. It was as if eighth grade would never end, and no one, but no one, no matter how much they supposedly knew me, would ever lend me ten dollars to try to buy something that wouldn't leave me conned and shaking, as sick as I was before. That was the sound
I
made.
âGod,' I said to the youngster: âI hated that group.'
She looked confused. If I'd been so unhip as to hate Sonic Youth how was it that I'd lived right upstairs from where they played so many of their famous gigs?
Wat, as usual, thought the whole thing was funny. âOne person's tea is other person's urine sample.'
The clinic had mostly cleared out by this time and Wat, accompanied by the little retro-punker, came outside with me to have a look at the car. She said she could possibly give it a jump. âThanks, sweetie.' I smiled at her. She smiled back, blushing under her clown-white foundation; two red splashes of colour it took a bit of willpower not to pinch.
In the parking lot we stood under the huge, brushed steel siding of the winter sky. This is the view of the city you get when you are by the outskirts, it's downtown still rising up before you: a scraped and lead-tinted scene of smoked-glass windows like a million
sightless, square eyes, wind-crazed ribbons of white steam rising from invisible heating ducts, overpasses arcing off into the distance, shelters tucked away, where only the people who need them know how to get to the line they will have to stand on.
We gathered around my 2003 BMW
â
a gift from a deceased relative. âNice car,' Wat declared, as if to encourage me. âMust be nice.' The young woman smiled; the expression and smile distinctly regional, a local way to express envy and suspicion while attempting to conceal.
Just then, however, I didn't like my car very well at all. In the first place I don't like cars since I didn't learn to drive until I was thirty-nine years old and never became comfortable with them. In the second, someone had clearly broken into mine. The door handle had been hit with some kind of mallet, which was entirely unnecessary since I deliberately didn't lock it in the hopes that it would be stolen and I would have an excuse to get a car that worked.
âThat's new.' I nodded at the dented handle, and yanked the door towards me. At first I thought my car alarm had gone off. But then the young woman grabbed Wat's arm and pointed, stuttering. The sound
was
an alarm, of sorts, and had the same jarring effect, more so because the shriek wasn't mechanical but organic, a sharp, desperate, instantly panic-inducing wail coming from inside a tiny bundle of pink blankets.
In two years of coming to the clinic, I had seen Wat almost every day, but I had never once seen him look startled the way he was now. He even spoke in his own language first before he translated, which he never did with us English speakers.
âOh God's dammits,' he blurted, and reached down and picked up a small bundle.
The infant squirmed faintly. Its mouth looked like the kind of rosebud you would see in a florist shop behind a refrigerated glass counter
â
tiny, moist and fresh, dusted with ice crystals. I didn't know where Wat had come from; I wondered whether he had seen babies before, abandoned or dead babies. God's Dammits.
I grabbed at the piece of paper pinned to the blanket. It said: âYou have nicist car at methdone clinic.'
The young punk girl stared and stared. I looked at Wat.
âOK,' he said, âOK. Someone got confuse-d.' He hit the â
d
' on the end of confused hard, as if it didn't come naturally to him to put things in the American past tense, but he was the social worker. He would know what to do.
And what, if I looked at things realistically, did I know? The titles of certain old songs, many of which I had never liked to begin with. And the young woman? She didn't even know how old those songs really were. I held out my arms to Wat.
âFor one minute,' he said, âthen we have bring her to safe release spot in ER.'
All around us things were cold, with no awnings or trees to break the blasts of wind. The baby's living body, in contrast, felt shockingly warm.
âThis Little Trouble Girl,' he said. âNot a song this time.'
He was diplomatically unclear as to which one of us he was speaking.
I held the baby for one minute. Sixty seconds is a long time to stand without talking in a windswept parking lot, looking at a baby with a rosebud mouth, a very, very little trouble girl, who is goingâfacts are factsâto see a lot of trouble.