Black Hole (19 page)

I'm by far the oldest guy at this show. They probably think I'm
some creep or maybe someone's dad. This band is as good as everyone said it was. Out in the parking lot, a younger me is passed out in a van.

I could try to warn myself, but young me is way too fucked up right now, and even if I did get me awake, I would never believe this bullshit.

In true East Bay punk fashion, Op Ivy broke up way too early, and they became legends having never played in their prime; all their shows were their early days, if you think about it one way. The amount of people who claim to have seen them is about four or five times as many as people who actually saw them.

There's probably a dozen or so people I know in here right now, right before I will meet them in a few months to a year. These are their teenage selves.

I walk through the crowds, looking into faces. The skin is young and unscarred for the most part. These are teens who feel like old people—god, I felt like I had seen it all; I felt washed up and done at nineteen. I looked like all of these kids. There was so much future, but it felt like the world was ending at dawn.

When I started listening to punk, Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys had already broken up, other bands like Minor Threat were long gone, and the bands like the Ramones were playing huge venues and already seemed like a nostalgia act. I thought I had missed everything.

Everything I was into—music, film, poetry—had just passed its heyday if you asked anyone who was involved. The story was that everything was better and cheaper five years ago and now it sucks and its all been ruined by posers or yuppies or Christians or some shit.

Of course, things were great, and there was a lot of great shit around, but it's hard to notice when you're there. When it's in front of you, you don't realize how special it is, how much it will mean to you. It's all the other things—the shows were better because of the friends you went with, the getting there and back, when it wasn't easy to get to a show, cramming six into a car that seats four and getting all of you in for fifteen dollars when it should cost eighteen.

I think I see Liza at the front of the stage. God, she's so cute. She's like seventeen or something. She would've made my teenage brain explode. She has that Chelsea fringe that was popular with the skinhead and mod girls at the time. It's bleached bright—must've done it right before the show. The little skull tattoos right below her neck are new. She got those on the run from teenage rehab. Later, she'll get them covered with roses. I want to say hi to her, but I can't. How would I explain any of that? Just enjoy the band.

More often than not, how you remember things is not how they happened. You remember how you felt while they were happening. You remember your emotions. But what was happening is not what caused those emotions. Being with your friends made you feel good, and the band, in reality, sucked ass, but you didn't care because you had a crew full of guys you cared about, they had your back, and you had theirs.

Now that you're old enough to get to a show without a problem, you've forgotten what that's like; you drive your Prius to a punk show and pay to park. You watch the show and someone tells you the guitarist was from another band, the drummer is nineteen, and well, this isn't really the band anymore, is it? The singer is the same, and he's playing all the hits, and the sold-out
crowd at The Warfield gives up a cheer as each song starts as if to tell everyone,
I like this song, this is my favorite, I'm a real fan.
But it's only slightly better than a karaoke band; it's a wedding band for rich aging punks. What happened? The songs are the same, but you've changed. You went to a show by yourself because you lost touch with your old friends or they moved away or they won't go out on a night when they work the next day. Instead of enjoying the band's songs, you spend the whole show worried about whether or not someone's breaking into your car.

Op Ivy finishes up. I wish I could just rewind all this and watch it again. There's a drug for that, or there will be in the future, and I'd love to have it right now.

Hotel room on Sixteenth smells like an old sock. Ears are ringing from the show. Haven't eaten in . . . since the '80s started, I guess. Exhausted but won't be able to sleep real sleep.

That half sleep of the strung out and coming down. It's like you're staring at the insides of your eyelids. It's a Rothko painting. It's the void. It's a red that any darker would be black, but red enough that you can't sleep. Not really. Sometimes your body shuts down, it has sleep paralysis; sometimes you can hear yourself snore, but you're stuck there, for hours, with your body passed out and your mind wide awake in freakout mode.

It's the boredom that makes me crazy. The pure boredom. Alone with my thoughts, there's nothing worse for me. I need stimulation. TV. Talk radio. Books. Podcasts. Movies. I don't care. I need to hear things, other thoughts than my own. My own thoughts while coming down are like a pop song played repeatedly.

I could smoke more. Get high. But who knows where I'd end
up. When I'd end up. If I don't smoke again, I can stay here. Move to Reno or Vegas or something and make millions betting on sports. I should buy some Starbucks stock. Fuck. Microsoft, Apple. I could build a crazy portfolio. Just don't smoke anything.

But I'm itchy. I'm itchy and stiff. Nothing's comfortable.

Fuck, I need a drink.

Walk across the street. Cars honking, headlights trail off. Feet hurt. I should get new shoes.

Liquor store. Bright lights, tinnitus hum. Fluorescents flickering in a pattern. Round mirror in the corner. I look like shit. I look like a crackhead, and there's plenty out right now. Luckily, no one gives a shit about another crackhead on San Pablo.

Six pack of cokes. Bag of ice.

Fifth of Jim Beam, please.

Do you have money?

What? Yes, I have fucking money.

I take out a twenty and throw it on the counter. He puts all the stuff in a thin plastic bag.

There's a junkie wearing Saran Wrap underneath his shirt. He's like a clear plastic mummy under his clothes. I can see it sticking out. I don't know why, and I don't want to know. It's more drug-addict bullshit. He has a hood pulled down over his face. Creepy as fuck.

Bag strains, stretches out with the weight of the cans and ice. Don't let it tear open. Hold it like a baby.

Saran Wrap wants to talk to me. I can feel it.

Hey. Hey man, let me talk to you for a minute.

Ignore him. Keep walking. Don't engage.

Hey. Hold up.

Fuck this guy. He wants what's in my bag, and he has nothing I want.

Hey, I just want to talk to you.

Switch tactics:
Fuck you.

Hey, don't be like that.

I don't want to talk with you. Beat it.

I know you.

No, you don't.

I know you, from the future. Chuck. Right? That's it, right?

Stops me. Chills. Fuck. I do know that voice. Andy. NSA Andy.

Please, I just want to talk to you.

Okay, yes, follow me. Hurry.

Shoes feel like lumpy steel. Joints ache. Headlights trail off. Doppler honking.

Hotel room. TV on.
WKRP
rerun. I make Beam and Coke cocktails in plastic cups. Take a long drink. Doesn't feel like much, but it's refreshing going down. I hand one to Andy.

I swear to god, I thought turkeys could fly.

What?
Andy says, taking his drink.

It's the last line of this episode.

Did you get sucked here through the black hole, too?

Yeah.

How do we get back?

I don't know if we do. Well, I don't know how to get back to the right place. But if we smoke up again, we'll be somewhere else.

Let's do it. Do you have yours still? I lost mine.

No. I'm good here. The '80s were better. Easier to navigate. I go back, and it's all bullshit. And I've seen what happens to you.

What?

Sorry. No. I shouldn't tell you. Maybe it still won't happen.

I flip around on TV. It's the World Series game with the Dodgers and the A's. Gibson is up.

Oh, I love this game,
I say,
It's a classic.

Baseball is corporate bullshit.

You're in my hotel room, Andy, drinking my liquor. Shut up, drink, and watch. I just want to get drunk and see if it takes the edge off these withdrawals.

Baseball is a tool of the government.

Shut up, Andy. Drink. Watch.

Hoping this shit hits my system. It burns in my throat and cools it right after. Hell yes.

Gibson strikes out.

That's not what happens.

What?

This game . . . this game is a famous game. Gibson comes up to bat and wins the game with a home run.

That's not what happened this time.

That's exactly my fucking point. Gibson gets the home run.

That's not set in stone. In every universe in which this guy . . . what's his name?

Gibson. Kirk Gibson.

In every universe in which this precise moment happens, he has a chance to either hit it or get an out, right?

No. I've seen this happen.

Listen to me. You saw this guy at this moment once before. Right?

Yes.

Every time, in every universe in which this precise moment happens, it plays out any number of ways: a base hit, a home run,
a strikeout, whatever. You've seen it be a home run. This time, it's a strikeout. It wasn't some kind of pure destiny that Kirk Gibson hits this home run. What are the chances of him hitting one?

Slim to none. He was hurt; he could barely walk.

And that's what makes it a great moment. You saw something that probably exists in less than 1 percent of the universes in which this moment exists.

You're hurting my brain.

No, I'm helping you. Listen. No matter what the humans do on this earth, the earth still spins. That's what matters to the space-time continuum. Not whether your parents meet or not, not this home run, not any of the fucking wars or anything you think really matters on earth. Not even if humans ever evolved. The earth forms, and there's this tiny chance over billions of years that humans end up happening, so if you think that some poem you write or some baby you make matters one way or another to the way the planet spins, you're fucking out of your god damned mind. The planet doesn't give a shit whether or not you're on it. Neither does the solar system, the galaxy, or anything else in fucking space. Got it?

No, someone else tried to explain this to me another time, and I feel a lot like I do now.

Trust me. This is how the shit is.

So the Oakland A's take game one of the '88 World Series. Fuck. Maybe they still take game two. That would put them at two up rather than tied. Then the Dodgers win the next two, but instead of that winning the whole thing, they just tie up the series. Maybe the A's take it.

Sure. Whatever. Let me ask you this: does any of it matter? Really?

Yes. What happens matters.

Yes, what happens in each universe does matter, to that universe only. Things have a way of evening out. Picture pouring water through a pipe. Each time you pour it through, the molecules have an infinite amount of ways to interact and get through the pipe, but at the end of the day, all you care about is did the water get through the pipe or not? Imagine each water molecule was sentient and wrote thesis statements and opened small businesses and got on Star Search—they would all be thinking they're important when, in fact, they don't matter to you, me, or the pipe one fucking bit. You take the same water and pass it through the pipe again. It all comes out, but infinitely different each time.

I still don't get how this has to do with me.

The black hole puts us at different points in the time pipe. We're the water, and we're pouring through the time pipe over and over again.

Your mind is pouring through a crack pipe. You're fucking nuts.

I'm the only sane one left.

Just you wait. I'll be getting high with strippers while you're smeared in shit and running down the street.

Now who's crazy?

Let's just watch TV and drink.

I wake up. Something's gripping my spine. Fuck this hurts. I move, it calms, then hurts. I move and it calms again.

The lights come on. Interrogation lights. Floodlights. Where am I?

Black hole smoke gets in my nose. I inhale. Hold it.