Oedipussy (7 page)

It was nearing one in the morning. Our energy, enthusiasm, youth, and rock and roll remained coursing through our veins. I would never sleep again.

Steve and I piled into the back of the van this time, and Johnny drove with Kurt up front. Everyone was parked at my house, and we would quickly unload the van as soon as we got home before everyone left to go back to their houses.

He started up the van and began to pull out. The tape deck continued to play bootleg college radio station playlists featuring incredible bands whose sounds shook the foundations of regular radio. One moment, the young announcer mentioned Sonic Youth, and in the next breath he presented a song by Guided By Voices - or at least it seemed like a snippet of a song only moments long - incredible, hard, rocking, low-fi power grunge unlike anything I had ever heard.

"Who are these guys, John?"

"I have no idea. Don't you love it though? I love these tapes I get."

"You should sell them or something. Or keep them. It is an incredible mix the college kids put together."

"I know."

We were driving on fifty, and ahead a pair of bounding high-beamed headlights bounced and bounced and bounced toward us in the opposite direction as we neared the bridge over Snake River Canyon.

The song on the cassette stopped halfway through, and the hiss of the end of the tape, and a ka-chuck, and the hiss of the beginning.

"They've got to put a CD player in this, soon," John said as we drove over the bridge.

Snake River, I thought.

The approaching vehicle was a Bronco, bouncing on an overcharged suspension. It seemed hastily attached, raising the truck almost too high for its bizarrely small wheels, and the headlights grew in the frame of our windshield.

Snake River.

The bronco moved quickly like a train toward us, staggering on the suspension, faster, faster.

"Snake river," I said, "We were almost 'Ouroboros.'"

Lights. Brilliant lights, before,

the truck slammed into us,

                                          and everything seemed willing to be studied in a moment.

I saw the grey form of the driver, as if he wasn't there but was a shadow. The sound of the impact, spa-crackle of glass, slowly, and the front fender of the Bronco travelled into the corner frame of the truck, John's head moved forward with momentum but stopped only by the arriving bumper smashing through the frame and the glass and his head travelling backward again with the glint of chrome. Steve continued forward, and forward, and forward, horizontally swimming like a pencil through the air, and straight through the broken windshield, and he was gone. I didn't move, stuck behind some the amplifiers jamming into John's seat. I was pinched like a vise somewhere.

The Bronco heaved above us like a hinge as we began screeching sideways in a reciprocal opposing force. It was natural. The physics of it all seemed to make sense in the calm, slow motion study. My appreciation was beautifully magnified in this trance of time's elongated terror.

Kurt, seat belted, jerked to the left and now down, rag-dolled into the seat and up, and down again as if he were in one place and the van moved around him. My forty pound fender amplifier finally bounded forward with kinetic energy and slammed into the dashboard.

There was a hiccup of steel, and I noticed the amplifier remained suspended in the air rather than falling to the floor. Kurt's arms involuntarily hung in the air as if he were on a roller coaster. The van had begun to spin, and I realized through the windshield that the horizon was all messed up. The headlights, still functioning, reflected on pavement, and then steel guardrail, and then dark spring-night sky, and then nothing, and then trees, and then the underside of a bridge. My rising organs choked me, and my muscles tensed in reaction to my dire situation.

Wind. It picked up. It whooshed.

Then an impact-clap as we hit the brick wall of water on the bottom of the van, and I watched the amplifier come down hard on the floor just as I felt gravity pull and pull and pull and pull and pull down down down down down, folding me down like a piece of flat paper and my face flatte-

Wet.

Cold wet like piss and stink of mudflat.

A groggle of a winch, blink.

A ringing in my ears, stuck and clammy mouth of mud.

Choke.

Ouroboros.

Lights. I was standing and there were lights, flashy blue and white. Sparkle-white and red. Red white and blue. A dream. American dream. Filled to the topful o'cherry pie fireworks.

I was standing against a...what?

This is a fire truck, and there is a light in my eyes. This is a light shining in my eyes to check my eyes.

"How are you doing, pal?"

"Ouroboros."

"Oh yeah? Not really big on my Greeks or anything, but... What is your name?"

"Dawn Ego."

"John, what, my man?"

"Todd." My legs were killing me, My back was killing me. Pins and needles. I didn't know why he insisted I stand against this stiff truck. Why after talking with me for a few minutes, he was shining the lights back and forth and back and forth and back and forth, and as soon as one of my eyes were used to the dark, he moved it back over to the other eye and I couldn't see a thing. My eyes were opening, closing in concert.

In cement.

"Oh, Todd, okay."

"Todd."

"Stay with me, Todd."

"I'm right here."

"You're doing great, now. What year is it?"

"1994."

"Who is president?"

"Nixon."

"Kid, Nixon was barely around when I was born."

"Nixon was the Ouroboros. I meant Clinton."

"You got it, bud." He stopped it with the flashlight. The crystalline spots hung. "Breathe."

"Yeah." What?

"Good, breathing is getting back to normal. Vitals."

"Yeah." My eyes adjusted and I still couldn't see his face, the lights in my periphery contributing to a blinding ocular magic trick.

Steve walked over. I could barely make him out.

"Hey! Boy."

"What happened?"

"Accident."

"Obviously."

"I'm fine, I was just over there." A strange glitch of black and then the light of the flashlight again, and Steve continued. "Sometimes, I have a real problem with chili. Like real bad. Copper penny bad."

"Yeah." It made no sense, but I couldn't tell what was happening.

"Anyway, I was over there. Seemed like I missed the worst of it. Glad I got out of there! John and that van with no seatbelts in the back. Boy. Copper penny luck, I can tell you. Heads or tails, and a staple in your bellbottom."

I was too embarrassed to ask what he was talking about, because it was probably my head. Then, I remembered the bumper to the Bronco slamming through the corner of the van into John's face.

"What about John?"

"John? He's ok, look."

My perspective of vision altered. Probably my head, again, but I saw him lying on a stretcher with a bandage around his entire head like the invisible man. His tee shirt and jeans were clean except for sparkly glass pieces sprinkled on him like the fake snow in Christmas mall displays. He held a thumb up from his laying position like an injured daredevil. He looked at me through the gauze, somehow, and somehow I was watching above him? Or next to him? No, I was watching him be wheeled and his stretcher tucked into the ambulance.

"Kurt?"

"He already left."

"Oh. Is he... ok?"

"Oh, sure, you know Kurt - he is always okay. Doesn't bother anyone with anything. White bread and molasses."

What?

"What about the guy in the van?"

"Dead. Drunk, dead, and in the grave, the drunk."

"That's terrible."

"What'd you expect?"

"Well... I didn't expect you to talk like that."

"He shouldn't have been hopping around on the moon scooter tires." I knew nothing about cars.

"Even so, we should have respect, because we're okay."

"Yes."

"All that gear and the fan and this man, just a terrible, terrible."

"All insured, thanks to uncle Xiong."

"Uncle Xiong?"

"Johnny's uncle Xiong, of the Vietnamese."

"...restaurant?"

"Yeah."

It was astonishing, what a night.

I patted about myself and everything was awake and functioning. I was here. This would be the story of the ages - one for our children or grandchildren. The night Papa was a rock star, the night Dad got a second chance. The night to begin all nights.

I hovered above my bed, dreary and sick with fatigue. Or stood with a spacy waving back and forth.

I fell into bed, onto my back, and pulled deeper and deeper into slumber. Groanings in my spine, burned muscles, the sore sting of a night that began without event but turned into a station of relaxation. Relax. Relax.

The bedclothes surrounded me, and I sunk.

My mind was clearing and the smoke rose.

This was almost the end. This was the beginning.

I am not what I am.

Behind my eyes, a spinning, chewing, hungry Ouroboros. Scaly and splotchy skin. Chomp, slide-chomp, slide - open wide - chomp.

He massaged his tail down his throat.

Little

                                          by little

                                                                                    by little.

I awoke. The next morning was a strange atmosphere. I wanted orange juice. The room felt cast in an orange juice haze, somehow. I scratched my eyes and it cleared.

Jenny wasn't in my bed. I thought she would have stayed over.

My mind was afog.

The show. BB's.

I touched my head.

There was the accident.

I am here.

I rubbed my eyes again, and stars shot from the back like the flashlight of the... Firefighter?

Fire. No, accident.

I needed some breakfast, and a shower.

I walked downstairs. The familiar feel of gravity underfoot became the feeling of gravity endlessly pulling my body into the bottom of the van and into the ground. It was like in physics class when the teacher described that a table isn't supported by legs, the legs push the table up. Everything wants to fall. Gravity and time: how strange and disorienting.

The kitchen looked different, like explaining a dream, and it is your house, but it isn't really your house. Everything was there, though. I must have really hit my head hard. Everything was unfamiliar, building itself into existence.

I took down a bowl. I poured flakes in the bowl. I poured milk in the bowl. As it came out, it flashed inky white and coaly. Inky white and coal? Just white. Milkwhite black.

No, this was my mind. Where is my mind? A dream only because I was rehashing nothing. Reacclimating to reality. Reset.

Cereal. Flakes. Corn baked in an oven, with milk, and what I needed to begin to feel like myself once more. John Harvey Kellogg told me I would be having this and then a solid hour in the electrolysis tub and then - no. I am mashing this in with - ugh.

I brought the cereal to the kitchen table.

The kitchen table. A tablecloth that was themed in fall colors, even though fall was six months ago. It was ok. This is the way of things.

I put the first spoonful in my mouth, and the silverware tinked on my teeth. Flakes, still crisp, entered my mouth with jagged mountainous impacts on my hard palate roof as the cool and calming milk cascaded from the spoon. My jaw was open, but then slowly compacted the food creating a vacuum and smashing the mountains of processed corn under the heavy weight of the sea of milk.

The sound echoed in my skull.

It was a massacre of geologic proportions.

My eyes were closed, and I chewed and savored in the darkness.

The one thing about being in a near fatal car accident the night before and waking up in your own bed as if nothing had happened, was that there was a certain sense of this meal being the best thing I had ever tasted. These flakes of processed surplus corn smashed into baked flakes was somewhat of a religious experience when eaten in this fashion.

I was here. Here is the table and the tablecloth. There is a bowl in front of me. There is also a salt and pepper shaker. In this bowl there are flakes of reconstituted, baked corn that were purchased in a box at the supermarket, which I poured into this bowl and then soaked in milk. The milk broth added a savory, hearty element to the meal that would make it my high-energy input for the day. It was a supplement. A lubricant enriched with vitamins and minerals that helped the flakes slide down my gullet.

The spoon clinked on the bowl, and I continued to eat.

I ate, and acclimated myself to the sun's position along the horizon. I was secure and focused in my meal and in my mind.

That was it. Simply checked out. I hadn't entirely woken up yet, and perhaps my injuries weren't that bad. I got lucky. That gorge was deep, but apparently we hit it just right between the suspension on the van, the tires, and the water landing.

Incredible.

Why hadn't Jenny stayed over?

No matter. She probably waited in her car outside for half an hour, and not sure what was taking so long had turned around and left for home.

I finished my cereal and walked to the window, somehow expecting to see the van outside in the driveway. It wasn't

Hadn't I seen the sun?

I walked to the basement door, and stepped down the stairs to the cellar. All of our equipment sat in piles. There was a little water stain on the floor next to some of it, which was to be expected considering our watery plunge. I couldn't believe everything was here. I wondered if part of the salvage of the van included bringing the gear back to the house. But already? At least, I hope that John's uncle had insurance - it was a business van and the accident was the other guy's fault. Maybe the insurance company is why everything was taken care of right away.

I ran my fingers over my amplifier and the speaker cabinet. They were dry. My fingers pulled out some grass (marsh grass?) from the fabric in the front of the cabinet, but it didn't appear that it was there from the water. It was just, there.

I opened my guitar case which sat leaning against the amplifier, expecting to find some gross injustice inside. Everything looked normal, snug, safe, and dry. The thing was surprisingly indestructible in the face of having landed in a river at the bottom of a drop that happened in a van with bodies and equipment in it.

My organic self was almost magically unharmed in this, but the discovery that my guitar and amp were safe was almost ludicrously generous. What had I done in a previous life to deserve this?

I returned upstairs, and mother was in the kitchen.

"Oh, Todd, I didn't hear you."

"I didn't hear you, either."

"How was the show?"

"Incredible. It couldn't have gone any better."

"I am so proud of you, Todd."

"Thanks."

"What time did you get in?"

"One, I think. There was a car accident and-"

"Oh, honey, are you okay?"

"Apparently." I didn't want to tell her about the Bronco, and falling off the highway into Snake River Canyon. I was safe, but even recounting it in that simple sentence 'falling off the highway into Snake River' would make it almost ridiculous that I was even standing here. Maybe it was.

"Was Jenny at the show?"

"Front and center."

"She is so good to you. Look outside! She is in the driveway in her little red car!" The grammatical enthusiasm in her voice was strange.

I cocked my head, and slowly walked over to the window. Sure enough, her car was at the end of the driveway. Odd. I didn't notice it.

"I didn't know she was coming," I whispered to myself.

I walked out the front door and down the driveway to the side of the road where she was parked. I could only see the top of her head slumped down in the seat and pressed against the window like she was dead.

The window was rolled down a crack, and she was asleep.

I tappy-tapped on the window with my fingernails, and whispered 'Jenny,' through the small gap in the window.

Nothing.

I increased the tempo, the depth, the strength, the loudness, and repeated her name.

A stirring, her folded arms began to move as she craned her torso around. She looked up disoriented. Her head flipped in the direction of my knocks and she smiled drowsily.

"Hey babe," I said softly.

"Hi," she whispered through the glass. "You took a while to get home."

"I did."

"I was worried strong."

"I know. I'm here." Worried strong?

"Did you go home?"

"That's where we are. You're in your car outside my house. We're talking through the glass."

She came to the realization of her circumstance. She licked in her mouth and cleaned around her teeth before reaching for the door handle.

I stepped back and the door swung open. She got out and stumbled a little before gaining her footing with the pull of morning gravity. A bump of hair was off to the side on her scalp, a lump cascading down in a bizarre fashion that compromised the appearance of her mental health. It wasn't often that her mortality and fragile nature was revealed, but when it was, it was something to behold.

"You're home now, and it's the morning?" She asked.

"I have no idea what time it is."

"I was in the car."

"Yeah, I didn't see you."

"You didn't see me sleeping outside of your house? In my car?"

"Well, no. I mean this morning." I was dancing around these lost twelve hours. "I am actually not entirely sure how I got home last night."

"What?"

"There was an accident. With the van."

"What?!"

"Yeah, a guy hit us and we wrecked it - say, were you here when we were unloading the equipment?"

"Probably," she said uncertain, her hand tossing in the air around her head.

"Me, neither - guess I was really tired." Tired, and the logistics of what was going on was incomprehensible.

The sun beat down on us. It was still chilly. The sun was bright. A bird flew by like a black laser.

"Well, are you going to invite me in?"

"Sorry, I guess I'm still kind of out of it. I hit my head, but they let me go."

We walked toward the house together.

"Last night was awesome, Todd."

"It was. In the last twenty-four hours I've had a crazy itch to write a bunch. Just song after song after song to have a sort of catalogue that I can pull from. I also had this crazy idea that I would put our music up on that America Online group thing I made for people who are fans to download whenever - they could just go on there and grab it. It doesn't make a lot of sense because of the time it would take to download them, but I am sure I could figure something out. I don't even know where to begin, so there's that."

"That sounds like a great idea to get people interested. Free doesn't always mean good, though."

"Neither does fifteen bucks."

"True."

We entered the house and went straight up to my room. I pressed play on the CD player, and a grunge rendition of Led Zeppelin's Heartbreaker began to play. Strange, I thought. I never heard it before.

"Are you going to write, or what? I can go grab a book downstairs."

"That sounds excellent."

I organized my notebooks and tried to remember where I was. I felt like an amnesia patient with a bunch of unfinished, distant situations and projects. My notebooks were unfamiliar and disorienting. There were too many. I had that dream-feeling; this house was my house but not really my house.

The song wrapped up. Kurt Cobain explained the song, title, and band. It was a Nirvana cover. What CD was this? When had they done that? Where did this come from?

Jenny returned, but I remained buried in my notebooks. I moved my hand to the dial and turned the CD player down. I heard her get on the bed, and I remained on the floor at the foot of the bed with my notebooks and a pencil, writing.

My lyrical compositions swam in pages as messy poetry. All but a few of my songs started in this book.

My new words didn't seem to have any purpose beyond the overall focus being related to either a first show or a car crash. They were non sequiturs like "Snake River pulls me on / black reverend following down," and "the string sound of a car crash / a G Major mistake on a black night." I continued writing, "mother and a banjo, on death's line was a hobo." Where did this come from? Just like the new Led Zeppelin cover, these seemed familiar. Had Robert Plant also suffered some kind of blunt trauma as he wrote?

"You have to hear this," Jenny began, looking up from reading from her book. "Baudrillard, this guy, created the 'simulacrum' - well, sort of - and he writes about it all the time. He got it from Plato and some other writings in the fifteen-hundreds. Anyway, it's all about the real becoming real through our interpretation of real events. Of our interpretation of reality. The search for finding knowledge and total understanding of oneself and the universe is ultimately crap because it is all based on this human subjectivity. We are, in essence, delusional and crazy when we explore and try to find out more about a reality that only exists because of the individual us.

"I wonder what that says about art? Come here."