USABLE FUDGE - a glampunk story
Chapter Ten: Moonsong Aperture
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It is really true what philosophy tells us, that life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition: that it must be lived forwards; a proposition which ends up concluding that, at any given moment, life cannot ever be really understood…
Søren Kierkegaard
CHAPTER TEN: Moonsong Aperture
Onaga, Kansas
September 8 1977
The phone had been ringing off the hook all morning, jangling against the soft edges of my thigh. Just when I thought it was done, and quiet had settled over the ranch once more, the thing would start jabbering through the air again and stab me from my trance. I let it ring and ring until my high came to an anticlimactic close, and then I answered with a limp wrist as though I’d been waiting for the call all day long.
“Howdy doo?” I croaked out, head against the window.
“Hex?” A man’s voice. Hesitant, clearing his throat, familiar. “Tommy?”
I flashed the intuition I should hang up then. Instead I said, “Jilk? That you?” My old friend/bandmate/lover/teacher Jilk Stevens. He said he’d been calling all day.
“Man, I, uh. I was calling to express my…” Jilk hesitated. I said nothing. The voice faltered even more. “Uh, you haven’t heard yet, have you?”
The sun from outside the blinds was clutching for my irises. It hurt like the world itself. “Heard what? Jilkie, when was the last time we talked? I’ve missed you, baby.”
“Ah,” Jilk said. “I’m in San Francisco. I got a honey out here, I been meaning to invite you out, but I guess I’ll see you in England at the–” His awkward smalltalk slammed up against reality. “Hex, I don’t know how to tell you this, man…” But he already had.
A sparse, sickly little cloud crept across the sun and suddenly I could see out through the blinds again, across miles and unstoppable miles of Kansas plain. The grass was unmoving. Clarity struck like a chord. “It’s Rask, isn’t it?” My voice betrayed no emotion.
“He died this morning, Hex. In London. It was a car crash. His whole body was—well, he’s gone now. Rask’s gone, baby. I’m sorry.”
“Oh,” I said. “Oh. Okay. Alright. Thank you for calling, Jilk. Love you, cat. Buh-bye.” I moved to hang up. Jilk started to say something, perhaps goodbye, maybe something else, but the receiver was already coming down on him with inarguable finality.
The plains outside the window did not weep. Nor did I. In fact, I was a little bit hard. I stroked it a little but felt no urge to go further.
Using the edge of an inscrutable letter from Rask in which he’d first detailed ‘Usable Fudge’, our punk project which would now never make it off the ground, I cut up another line and blew it up my nose before stepping outside. The wind, the sky, the ground beneath my feet, all met me with a cold indifference. The color of it all was shocking, gorgeous, a jubilant chorus. A flock of–what were those, starlings? Sparrows?–cut across the sky in aimless loops of ambivalent rebuttal. Death never comes, they seemed to say, just soar and soar till you can’t no more.
I walked down the rough path of trodden grass to the dilapidated barn with its pile of warped and crumbling steel besmirching the countryside. The structure’s old, ugly wood creaked like a baby’s exhausted crying. Here, I lodged a cigarette in the corner of my lips, spun in circles till I could get the flame to catch and while the smoke mingled with the tissue of my lungs, I dropped the fly on my pants and beat myself off till my seed stained the rotted steel. Sad release in the cold coke afternoon, and shame the dull companion to all my prairie months.
My daddy used to take me hunting when I was small in order to “teach me good” the importance of killing before I could grow to fear it. All brutal nonsense, as I know now. He’d tell me by the fire in the cold Montana night, Tommy, when a thing is dying and you’ve run out of bullets, you better beat it with the stock. I never paid much heed to my daddy anyhow, never did lend no credence to that ruthlessness he tried to barb my heart with. I was always meant to be a wilder thing than that bleak man he was. Wild love I could kill for, but wild love I could not kill.
A sob crept up my throat and I thought I might wrench it out with a reckless scream just to cut up this quiet stretch of world making an animal of me down here on the tiny earth. Instead, I slumped against the splintering barn and slid to the earth, head leaning against the dripping jism on the rusted beam. The cigarette burnt to its stub and I spit it out.
“You stupid fucking bastard,” I said, almost conversationally. My tone, flat and level, belied the desperation of the words. “Raskal Bolden, you goddamn son of a faggot bitch. Why’d you go and leave me all alone?”
The prairie made no reply but what the silence implied. Everything dies.
It really was a gorgeous day, all its splendor the kind a city couldn’t ever think to cook up. Bright blue like a memory. I might just peel away from the earth and swim up and up into the welcoming bundle of sky. Swim in its blue memory like a heartbroke dolphin.
London, England
September 7 1977
He never learned to drive, not in all his twenty-nine years. Somehow he just never got round to it. At first, when you're a teenage dropout from the East End of London, cars never enter into your thoughts except as rich gliding dreams piloted by smiling Americans, all chrome grins and buffed bodywork bulges. Then, when you're a do-anything go-anywhere rockstar, you've got guys for that. Burly guys with policeman moustaches and fuck-off eyes, squeezing their beergut behind the steering column and asking where to next.
Never stopped dreaming of cars, though. Think of all those Rask hit songs, all the car names in the titles, all the lovers compared to sleek Corvettes or humming high-powered V-8 engines. Love as a speeding sportster, sex as a revving turbocharged piston. Death as a smoking wreck on the median divide, the turbo still running, the flesh and the metal now interchanging their substance and transcending time itself.
Certain names revolving in his head: Bessie Smith, Eddie Cochran, Nathanael West, Albert Camus, Jayne Mansfield, Jackson Pollock, James Dean… all transcended to legend, become icons. As he imagined it, all those beautiful faces of the crashed went on uncorrupted, the cheekbones firm and intact, while atrocities of violence were enacted on the soft flesh of various erogenous zones across the body.
But the faces are beatific, like martyred saints of the Renaissance assured of their salvation. They felt some pain perhaps, but all redemption comes at the cost of a brief scourging, some momentary brush of the lips on the burning chalice of purification. Their apotheosis a tangled chassis and a shattered windshield, the brisk intrusion of a ruptured steering column in a punctured thorax. And the laceration of a hood ornament opening up a brand new orifice for everlasting fame to come and fuck, to fuck now and for all time.
September 1977
Rask Bolden at #78 on the UK singles chart with “Mockers and Goers”
Hexzei Monstrance at #1 in the UK singles chart, #17 on the US Billboard Chart with “Accursed Share”
Rask has a career… and it’s careering out of control.
He has a career, and it’s careering.
They were at a party up Balham way. Semidetached backyard tricked out with faerie lights. Spliff and hotdogs. Friends of Losie’s from St Lucia, a Carnival-themed party, Carmen Miranda maidens and pirate laddies. Not much spangle and flash, though. Not much glam. That time was over.
Rask Bolden was a pirate too, though he’d chucked away his eyepatch on the ride over. As he toked in the backyard next to the barbeque, he considered a possible style marriage of pirate panache with the punk artifice: the tight trousers and voluminous shirt, the cravat and the fat brass beltbuckle. But he soon quit thinking about that. He was weary of thinking about new looks.
Folks here were crowding all around some new reggae bloke, thought by all to be the new upcoming sensation. Young Jamaican. Nobody really had much time for Rask, an old man of twenty-nine.
Once the decision was made, it was the easiest decision of his life. There was a wonderful symmetry in it, the end of the road just like its beginning.
The road trip. But a trip can’t be a long trip, or else it gets tedious and repetitive. Oh look, another offramp, another rest stop. The ride’s gotta go somewhere meaningful. If not, cut it short.
He could see it all play out: Losie, pliant from drink, easily persuaded to take the wheel of her Mini to drive back home. Rask in the passenger seat, seatbelt unbuckled. The short cut from Balham back to their place in Clapham, where the narrow humpback bridge crosses over the railway tracks next to the big blank wall of the bus garage. A nudge on the steering wheel…
Explosion and fireball? Strictly for the movies, mate. There’s gonna be a crumpling, a sudden union, a forcing-out of a foetus into the night-dark air for rebirth. An encounter with finality in the form of a redbrick wall.
A whole life inscribed on the folded chassis of a car, which is then crushed into a cube - a whole identity abstracted and condensed into the geometry of a collapsed square of scrap, a polyhedron of impacted desire. A compacted memorial, dense with ghost being.
Cubic martyr. Someone ought to write a song about it.
Losie came over and passed Rask a can of beer. He would have preferred a glass of champagne to toast his coming rebirth, but he took it anyway. She was happy, relaxed, weaving a little, unsuspecting of her place in this evening’s monumental event soon to be inscribed a hundred thousand times in print, she only a footnote in the grandiosity of Rask’s lore-making.
Sitting in the back garden, sparklers waving and people huddling round the reggae guy as the guy strummed out some anthem of release and liberation, he imagined the aftertime. Impacted with the wall, thoracic cage caved in, spine cracked and softly bleeding out, but the face… his beautiful seraphic face preserved miraculously. Preserved for all time to grace the covers of greatest-hits compilations, to entice the passerby in the record store with that rakish allure.
Losie would be fine, he knew. She would be uninjured, she’d come out of this with a better life, so would little Nathan. Who wanted some washed-up deadbeat for a dad, for a hubby? Moping around and picking his toejam on a wet Wednesday, staggering drunk into the bathroom to grapple round half-blind for his coke stash. No-one. Better to have a superstar on an album cover, angelic, young and beautiful. An icon of forever made up of the scattered fragments of now. Wickedly grinning–plotting his own demise from the very beginning.
“Why don’t we get home then, in a bit?” he said. “It’s getting late and I got new stuff to do.”
“Sure, baby,” she said. “I was just lookin’ at the moon. ‘Xactly halfway between full and dark. Is it waxin’ or wanin’? Waxin’ is gettin’ bigger, ain’t it?”
“It’s waxing,” said Rask. “Getting bigger and bigger. Fit to burst. It’s swelling with the possibilities of rebirth, I’d say.”
She laughed, then stopped and looked at him with a solemn expression. “That’s really poetic, Rask. You should write a song with that line in it.”
“I already did, Losie,” said Rask. “Wrote it for someone I know. I’m pretty sure that someone’s looking up at that selfsame moon right now and hearing it. ”
He smiled and took her arm. They walked out of the party then, Rask leaning in to teach her his old song of the waxing moon. Walked round a corner and out of sight.
Video One - “Cubic Martyr” by A.P. Murphy
Music - “Solo 3” by Neil Young from Dead Man
Cutup audio - William S. Burroughs “23 Skidoo” and Toru Takemitsu “Ay! Vocalization”
Art installation - Edward Kienholz “Five Car Stud” (1969-1972)
Continue the series here…
you know when you just cant really describe what something is ... just after this first piece theres so many flying possibilities you wonder whats going to coalesce out of the maelstrom. ...i once watched a series called I WILL DESTROY YOU.
accidentally watched epidode 6 of 6 first then 1,2,3,4,5...then 6 and realised id seen the end already... and it worked...and i realised i could never experience what the writer wanted the work to deliver cos it all worked different when u watch the end first.
im wondering how this would work if i wait for all 10 and watch ONE next... watch both ends play out to the middle...
Driving my car off of or into something is one of my brain’s favorite intrusive thoughts, so I can relate. I love how your character imagines his face being preserved, made me think of incorrupt saints and their yellow wax faces, hanging around to be venerated.