It’s been a long, long ride
I don’t know where I’ll sleep tonight
Under the stars
Or maybe in your bed, alright
‘Torn and frayed’ … ‘torn and frayed’ … That is the phrase that kept running through my head, as she bucked and scratched under me that night, while I was meanwhile losing myself in her, and in the drugs and sex and rock and roll that constituted the basic framework of my lifestyle then.
My apartment was a block from the St. —‘s Hospital emergency room, and two blocks from St. —‘s Church. I used to hear the ambulance sirens at night, as I lay in bed, and they kind of haunted me. When they came screaming down my street, they sounded like wailing, and when they went screaming away down my street, they sounded like moaning; but for a split second, when the sound changed from coming to going, time would stop … time would stop for a split second, and in that split second, all the sadness of the world, all the sadness in the world, seemed to want to come pouring in.
I heard the church bells as I lay in bed sometimes, too; tolling and calling the faithful to the weekday 6:00 a.m. Mass. I didn’t get up and go to church when I heard them, but I felt like I knew who those bells were tolling for. Not so much to entice me to Mass … they were more like a send-off, a fare-the-well, as I was just then embarking on a several-years-long journey that took me far away from the Church or anything like it; away from much of anything good and/or just, really.
Spike had smooth skin, but her cheeks were beginning to look hollow, and one could definitely see the decay setting in. She was jittery and I worried about her teeth, which she grinded (ground?) powerfully in her sleep … damn speed freak. She was modestly endowed, but oddly, I didn’t care that much about breast size in those days – as long as there were long, slender legs leading up to a proportionately sized and shaped backside, I was quite happy, and Spike had that. My dad gave me a lot of bad advice over the years, especially concerning women, but one useful thing he told me – “If you are going to date a druggie, try to find a responsible speed freak, if you can. She’ll be less trouble; and she’ll never get fat on you, either. For one thing.” Thanks, Dad.
I got so fucking drunk the night I’d decided to tell Spike we were through … she was coming over later, after work, and I sat in my apartment in the dark for a couple of hours, listening to the occasional ambulance go by, while drinking strong Jack Daniels mixed with a bit of water, and listening to Live At Fillmore East over and over, especially “In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed”, which seemed really appropriate that night, for some reason.
Against the wind
I crossed your desert today
Don’t care what you say
‘Cause, baby, I’m gonna stay
Spike didn’t take the news I wanted to break up with her very well. She ran her Trans Am into the side of a 7-11 over on 7th Street later that night, going 30+ miles per hour. Tore up the store, and her car, and bashed her head into and nearly through the windshield.
I heard about it all later on, but I was already long gone from her by then, because I’m a faithless motherfucker, or I was then, or I thought I was then. I seriously abused myself for months after that chaotic fucking night, with whisky mostly, because I thought I was such a terrible person for abandoning my junkie girlfriend like I did, so that she smashed up a really nice car (black w/gold trim, and gold honeycomb mags) and really fucked herself up, while meanwhile I carried on with pretty much every decent-looking thing that came along, there were so many … I thought I was such a terrible person for abandoning my junkie girlfriend like I did, but I think it might have saved me … but then again, maybe I should have just stayed with her, while we rode out the chaos and corrosion and everything – just sort of thrown myself across the pyre, so to speak.
I’ll never know the truth of it; but in a sense I have been on the run ever since then, all these years. Running from something or to something, I really don’t know.
What I do know is I’ve come a long way since my days with Stacey/Spike, but I still don’t really know sometimes if I am better off for it, or not. The whole experience altered my trajectory in some way, I am sure of that. And I’ll never really get back from it.
And I’ll never get home again, either. And no matter how well things are going for me – and they are going damn well right now … No matter how well things are going, I know I will always hear those sirens, singing in the night, pulling me away from warmth and comfort and love, and drawing me out, into the darkness. And one day, sure as hell, I’ll ditch my hard-won happiness, and walk away from it, and never look back. I’ll walk and walk, until I get to the water’s edge. When I get there, I’ll stop for maybe a few seconds. Then I’ll step on in, and wade out toward the sound of those sirens. They’re still out there, I can hear them … they’re still out there, just beyond the second sandbar, I think … just beyond my depth … and they are singing to me, from just out of my depth.
They are singing, from just beyond my depth out there, singing just for me …
Yeah, I’ll comb this old beach over
Trying to find a love that’ll stay
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Flower child, I’m growing wild, but I dig your style
I’m just a child, but I like drinking those cigarettes
You love me, you love me not, you got me feeling like a robot
I’m just a tot, I’m all in knots, but I like drinking those cigar-rottes
I picked up Stacey from the duplex she lived in, out by the university. There was a wrecked car in the yard next door, and the landscaping around there was sort of hit-and-miss, to put it mildly. The dude that lived on the other side of the duplex was a weird older guy, a writer for the newspaper or something. He kept odd hours, but Stacey said he looked out for her, in a paternal way, and she felt safer with him around there. And though the place was lacking aesthetically on the outside, it was in good shape structurally and all, and she had the small interior on her side fixed up decently. All on the cheap, you know? That was the main draw of living there in the first place. Rent was something like $75 a month, which was cheap even back then.
Anyway, I picked up Stacey that night around 8:00, just as it was turning from dusk to dark (it was late spring.) As we walked out to my car, I trailed slightly behind, admiring my date’s erect posture and effortless gait – she walked everywhere like she was a fashion model, going down the runway. I was feeling a strange mixture of pure lust, and the beginnings of an alcohol buzz; and also an odder feeling, something akin to love, I would assume … although it wasn’t love … more of a beyond normal intensity of caring for someone who you haven’t known long enough to love but who you’ve already spent a little time with and are beginning to care about, a little. Something like that. As we approached my car, I stepped ahead and opened the passenger side door for her, and she slid her fine self into my Camaro, all stylish and graceful and everything, like she fucking owned it. She didn’t own it, but that is beside the point.
She looked so awesome that evening, Stacey did. She’d taken her time with her makeup; and it looked damn good on her, not overdone or anything. She had some kind of camisole or bustier on under her top; it made her smallish breasts look more ample, in the context. She had on faded Levis worn low on her hips, with a hole in them here and there. Also, some type of muslin top, off white, sort of vaguely sheer; and these silvery high-heeled sandals, with straps all across her tanned feet and ankles.
Goddamn. She could look really hot when she was in the mood to.
Hell, I wanted to jump her right then and there, in the front seat of my Camaro, but I couldn’t do it. I was driving, for one thing. Anyway, the Camaro had a console and a shifter between the bucket seats up front, and … by then, Stacey had reached into the glove box and pulled an already-rolled doobie out of a Ziploc bag that also had a couple more joints in it, in addition to a fair amount of loose, manicured weed. Pretty sure it was Oaxacan – that was mostly what we smoked back then – and by the time my over-sexed mind was trying to imagine some way to negotiate the obstacles GM had engineered into the passenger compartment of my car, Stacey had already fired up the blunt and had taken a couple of long, contemplative drags off of it. There was a quarter-inch ash hanging off of the end of the doobie, and just before it dropped onto Stacey and/or my vinyl upholstery, she reached out and caught it in the palm of her hand. It was still smoldering, but she calmly opened the window on her side, and tossed it out. I think it just made me
We were on our way to the Sigma Nu house, for the frat’s annual TGIO (Thank God It’s Over) party, held at the end of each spring semester. It was an annual tradition; and although I wasn’t into the Greek thing (and neither was Stacey), I had friends in that fraternity, who were pretty cool to me; so I had a kind of affinity with those guys.
Besides, it was a kick-ass party. They had live music, and the local Budweiser distributor backed a reefer truck full of kegs into the back yard of the frat house, right next to the portable stage set up for the band to play on. Those Sigma Nu guys kept the music and beer flowing all night long. My kind of party.
But really, the whole reason Stacey and I were en route to this shindig in the first place is because the fraternity boys were magnanimous enough to open the party up to everyone on campus, not just the frat and sorority types. The school would start buzzing in anticipation weeks ahead of time. The party was scheduled for just after the last of final exams, so everyone – Greek or not – was ready to fucking cut loose by then. There would be an interesting mix of partygoers … your requisite number of hopelessly deluded nitwit Greek types, as well as seemingly out-of-place stoners … but also a mix of (relatively) normal students, and a smattering of stone fucking crazies, too. It was great to see the Greeks hitting the bong and running around loose on MDMA, and the stoners dancing to the music and talking about the applied physics exam. And everyone in between, pretty much all of them, laughing and enjoying themselves, in some state of inebriation.
Stacey and I could pass for frat/sorority in that hazy setting; but I suppose in truth we fell somewhere between “normal” and ”batshit insane.”
And as that particular night progressed, it seems we began to veer off markedly toward the latter.
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Leave us alone and we’ll come home
Wagging our tails behind us
Oh, my dear, down on the pier
Where cops are shooting cops and acting kind of weird
I woke up suddenly in the darkness, on my back. I was outside. The temperature out was balmy, and the firmament above seemed incredibly bright, incredibly clear. I lay there for a moment, taking it in. It was quiet. I felt like I could see every star in the sky. And every planet rotating around every star, and every moon around every planet.
It crossed my mind briefly that this would be the perfect way to be born. Instead of coming abruptly into the world after being forcibly thrust from the warm, dark comfort of the womb, pushed out for a long, slimy ride down a dark, scary tunnel and then into the bright lights, where a bunch of alien-looking motherfuckers are leaning over you and glaring and probing you with shit, and then when you (naturally enough) cry out in horror at all these goings on, the biggest alien-looking motherfucker of them all slaps you – hard – right on the ass … Rather than that sort of chaotic mind-fuck, what if you could instead come peacefully to consciousness, lying on your back in the soft grass, in the dark, in the quiet … and all you could see were billions and billions of stars, as if God, and Carl Sagan, and who knows who else was smiling down upon you. And you couldn’t remember how you got there or what went on before; so, in essence, that peaceful, comforting tableau would be your very first memory.
Now, wouldn’t that be a better way to get started on a life? Better than an over lit, noisy room with a bunch of big people fucking with you and talking baby talk and shit? Damn morons …
Anyway, I couldn’t remember how I got where I was; which, I’d figured out by then, was on my back in a shallow, grass-lined ditch in front of a house on a suburban side street lined on both sides with similar houses. I had no idea what time it was, either; so I looked to my left, at the gold Armitron watch on my wrist, the one with the black glass face and the red LED readout. 3:23 a.m. it read, as it and the little piece of quartz inside it pulsed along quietly in the night. I looked to my right, and saw my trusty 1977 Chevy Camaro, all silver and gleaming in the starlight, parked neatly next to the ditch I was lying in – between it and the quiet street on the other side, which it was parallel to.
Wow. I slowly raised myself up and looked around; and after a minute or two, I had figured out where I was, more or less. I was on Campus St., which was, among other things, about a block-and-a-half from the old Sigma Nu house, and then I remembered that I had attended the TGIO party that night, like I did every year. Only, I must have got myself even more fucked up than I usually did, because I had no recollection of how I got from the frat house to where I was. Near as I could figure, I had somehow found my car after the party and was trying to get in it to drive myself home when I must have decided lying down in the ditch for awhile was a better option. And you know what? It probably was.
What had happened to my date that night, I could only guess. Stacey was faithful enough, as those things went. I never worried about her sneaking off to fuck some other dude. If she wanted to do that, she would just tell me. Anyway, she was as much into getting fucked up as she was the other. Guys would occasionally come on to her, but all they had to offer was some tired masculine idea of how wonderful they were. I didn’t have any illusions about why Stacey stayed with me. She knew I could take care of her well enough in bed, okay; but she also knew there was a baggie of hash in the glove box of the Camaro, and a stash of blue-and-clears and yellow jackets under the T-shirts in the third dresser drawer, back at my apartment.
Those other cats would flex their muscles and unbutton their polyester shirts another button or two, and Stacey would just laugh, and hold me tighter. And I would laugh, too.
After sitting there awhile in that well-manicured, comfortable ditch, collecting my thoughts, I decided it was time to get up and brush the grass off of myself. Get in the Camaro, and just move on. Just because no Beaumont cops had stopped by that evening to see what the fuck was up with me didn’t mean they still might not. So I stood up unsteadily and got my bearings, dug my keys out of the black Levi straight-leg jeans I was wearing that night, and began trying to unlock the driver’s side door of my car. That is when I heard her.
I looked down Campus St., toward Highland Ave., and I saw a girl running down the middle of the street, in my direction. Stacey! I felt a flood of emotion go through me as I saw her running toward me down that street. She was frantic, obviously. And why wouldn’t she be? Left all alone at a wild party by her drunk-ass boyfriend, to fend for herself, and she was probably hopelessly fucked up by that time, too. I suddenly felt like a dick about it, and was beginning the thought process that led to self-chastisement, as she ran up to me, crying my name. When she reached me, she enveloped me in a bear hug, sort of, and held me tight. All was forgotten, she was just relieved to find me, and could we please just go home now?
Okay, Stacey. OK, baby. I’ll take care of you … I meant it, too. But at that moment, while I should have felt relief mostly, I was mainly just confused. This girl I held so tightly in my arms that night, and who held me so tightly, was someone I knew well, obviously; a girl I had known for close to ten years. Through jr. high and high school, and now, most of college. But her name was Sheryl. It wasn’t Stacey.
Sheryl had been at the TGIO party, too; and her drunk-ass boyfriend, whoever he was, had at some point disappeared on her. She had passed out around the house somewhere, probably in the back yard; and when she came to, everybody else was either hopelessly drunk or semi-comatose, or gone, she said. And she didn’t know any of the remaining drunks, anyway.
She’d been hiding, first on the porch of the house, and then in some bushes nearby. Finally, she couldn’t stand it anymore, and she’d started wandering around, looking for someone, anyone friendly and familiar. In an okay-but-not-great neighborhood, at 3 o’clock in the morning. A suggestively dressed coed from the West End, who didn’t know anything about anything, really. No wonder she was so overcome with relief at the improbable sight of me standing there at that ungodly hour of the morning, just down the street from her, trying to get into my car. She jumped out from behind a tree and came running.
I guessed at that point I was some kind of godsend in her eyes, once I thought about it. And that was cool. But, you know? She … she wasn’t Stacey.
And how could she have been? Stacey had been dead over a year. She had come around a blind curve one night, on a winding farm road outside of Lumberton. Hauling ass in that cool, black Trans Am, going 70 miles an hour. Only to find, once she got around the curve, that some drunk in a pickup was coming the other way, and he was all the way over in her lane, too.
I thought I had seen her that night, on a darkened street, running toward me. I knew it was her. I had brought her to that party, after all. But it had been two years earlier that I’d brought her to that party. I figured that out later. The girl I had brought to the party that night … I saw her running toward me, and when she got closer, I saw her red hair and familiar features. Sheryl! But, where was Stacey?
Where was Stacey? And who was Spike? I thought they were one and the same, and I thought I had loved them both. But I am not even sure of that anymore. As I move forward, further and further through time, I realize my mind, in order to save storage space, or who knows why? As I move forward, my mind slowly and quietly folds my past up behind me, and I am pretty sure it all gets deleted, sooner or later.
I lie awake at night, trying to remember; and I wonder what all, and how many, are already gone from me. And I don’t even know it, yet.
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