Like Reverb But More Heartbreaking
I one day left Albuquerque riding on a Greyhound bus. My expectations were unsatisfied. You’d think that it was an easy proposition—I’m riding on a cheap A to B vehicle, one out of many that happen to operate over a nation-wide network under a single corporate moniker, an aegis. But I had in mind a mythical animal. Not at all like the dogs inspiring the name; more like the associations around the dogs (which I hadn’t seen often but of which I knew the way people tend just to know things, like that New York City throbs with excitement while simultaneously it withers, decays). I thought it would be like a greyhound dog: fleet and lean. I thought riding the Greyhound would be capturing a little of the American Dream. Total freedom of movement. But it didn’t seem like the mythic vehicle of discovery that Maurice Kenny waxed poetic riding on. It wasn’t at all a vehicle of discovery. It was just a regular tour bus with the same patterned seats and narrow aisle with rubber piping that’re in all tour buses. The Albuquerque bus station foreshadowed this discovery, and I thought that it deserved its meager station, run down but not really seedy, it was small and sad.
But once we got going outside of the city, though, I felt different. On the one hand we were traveling—it all of a sudden didn’t seem like a one-hour commute. And it was beautiful to look through those big polarized bus windows at the dusty country between Albuquerque and Santa Fe. A road I’d driven on a hundred times before looked different when I was a total, passive passenger. I didn’t have a driver to make small talk with nor a car to drive. I was on a tour bus and the trip therefore assumed the character of a tour. The Sandia Mountains dominated the east side of the bus where I was seated. They looked like absurd hills—sand hills, even—the way they started and stopped so abruptly on the otherwise flat plain. They looked bulbous and obscene, a middle finger to the dead gods of the flatlands. Ranches and corrals carved up the space near the foothills, but closer to the road lay squat roadhouses, tourist-trap restaurants and general stores all under powerlines. They all looked desperate. Cloud shadows floated on the wide empty land. They made the sky look like a fake or a negative. I’d seen the ocean reflecting the sky, the up above imprinted on the down below, but I’d never seen the scene’s reverse. All of a sudden, the particular Greyhound I was riding didn’t seem so sad.
We were traveling on the one hand. But after a while, maybe ten minutes or fifteen miles after we left the city the landscape failed my eyes, let them down. The countryside did kind of look all the same. Like the universal concept of New Mexican flatland, its Form. I was less interested in the universal, more interested in getting personal, meeting everyone and seeing everything. And there was on the other hand a loud conversation behind me. I had on my big sunglasses and my hat. I didn’t bother turning around. I just listened. There was a woman whom I pictured to be a blonde. A man who sounded like a mexican, and a young woman, who turned out to be a bit player only. The mexican was a recovering alcoholic who had been shot and stabbed. Being stabbed was much worse, pain-wise, he said. The young woman agreed and said that she’d heard that from a friend. Affirmed, the mexican went on about the amounts of blood and pain and all the great things they put with a needle into your body after being stabbed. But it turned out that the girl was pregnant and the pain of pregnancy is of course nothing to fuck around with nor is there any pain outstripping it. Such is the mythological force of childbearing. It’s actually not the worse pain ever: consider torture, having to cut off your own limb (to escape, for example, being pinned down by a large object and starving to death) or being burned alive—all things that happen to have happened. But the psychical associations—we’re all expelled from the womb—the cultural importance and universality of childbirth keeps it the reigning champ of pain. The myth of woman and her reality bear the same shape, share some aspects, but they are two entirely different things. But they’re often confused. Woman menstruates, she pisses sitting down, and she’s the one who bears babies. The myth of woman has her being the matriarch, a title earned in no small part by her undergoing the Worst Pain which is not necessarily just physical but has to do with the importance of birth to the human species—and we’re told since we’re born that important things are hard, even sometimes painful. This conversation about childbirth was the overture to the real story. It hit the main points and brought the myth of woman into the fore. After a while I couldn’t tell if I was myth-making or decoding or just reading a little too much. But at a point I was sure that just one seat behind me and chattering almost like one who’s done a little too much coke sat an instantiation of the mythological woman—Cleopatra, Ophelia, Molly Bloom and this woman whose name I never even caught. She was like one of the Sandias which we were driving quickly by getting up close and personal, too ready to tell you that it wasn’t just one with the whole range: it had its own character, a story. The woman behind me was the universal and the particular coming beautifully together, a Hegelian wet dream if ever there were such a thing.
This is a story of sundering and reconciliation.
The woman and the mexican talk for a while about New Mexico; how fucked up it is. She’d spent a good amount of time in the destination, Santa Fe. Sowed her oats, I imagine she was still sowing them on as she moved on back to Colorado. It turns out that the blonde worked as a stripper at the only strip club in Santa Fe. In the southside of town there is a strip club without a pole, just a single stage backgrounded by mirrors. Vomit lay like a welcome mat on the floor before the men’s room. It’s to this kind of place that you go to be a government whistleblower. Privileged information is offered in its rear parking lot. But if you drive around to the back, there you are beaten near to death and then allowed to retire due to medical disability. Things happen there, bad things.
Did she know Rita who worked there, too? No, she worked there in ninety-nine, no, eighty-nine. I picture lots of makeup on the blonde, tight skin with little capillaries showing like stress marks on her face in lieu of wrinkles. Crows’ feet walk over all women’s faces in New Mexico young and old alike. A teenager looks twenty, a forty-year-old looks like a grandmother. The mexican wonders, did she know about that blonde guy, the bouncer who was gay and who was the owner’s boyfriend? Yeah, she did. He got killed there. My buddy Rico killed him. Why did he kill him? I dunno, but he’s in jail now. I didn’t really know him I worked there so long ago now, the blonde says. She didn’t know why a faggot owned a stripclub and hired his faggot boyfriend to work the door. Seemed like he was asking for trouble, he thought. I knew why a faggot would own a stripclub. Why he would give gift of troubled sight to his lover. The troubled sight of lonely men standing at attention giving dollar bills to ugly women with titties exposed barely dancing. I thought it was funny. I didn’t think that men who love men would automatically then hate women. I love women and I love men alike—I love people. But I love women more. I knew the sight of ugly strippers could reaffirm the strength of love’s bond through this zero-sum thinking: I’m better off than them. The lovers of pock-marked, fleshy women are less tolerable—more disgusting—than any amount of sagging flesh. Lovers can’t stay the gentle, incremental eradication of wind and death but they are better off. Aren’t they? I would guess that the satisfaction of bouncing from the club a burly small-armed man, bouncing him for the singular crime of licking a stripper’s breast, the only firm flesh on her body, that satisfaction would have to be life-affirming to any man in love. It doesn’t matter if he loved man or woman; the sin against love that the crime represented—a dirty act perpetrated upon a dirty woman, an unloving act of animal desire flying in the face of aesthetics or emotion—stomping out that sin would make the vomit and jiggly ass-revealing mirrors palatable. Would make the low hourly wages seem to be just the icing on the cake. That he would be mowed down, stabbed or shot likewise seems to be logical. The real mirror of nature isn’t hung on a wall. It is in that poor, dead gay man’s face illuminated by normal love for another person. I didn’t know him but I knew he wouldn’t be bounced from any strip clubs. He was the bouncer.
The mexican asked her what she was doing in New Mexico.
It turns out to be interesting. I gather that the blonde had left her husband and kids in Colorado Springs not too long ago. She makes comments on her wanting to be a regular housewife and cook and have a garden, the whole nine yards. A few months ago, she said, she’d left her husband and kids went to San Diego. That is, the blonde up and left. Once she got to San Diego she bought a new car, a Cadillac. I hear her purse open and plastic things shake against themselves. She says, here, look at this. She took a picture of it on her cell phone, and the caption read, “Don’t Worry Be Happy”. She shows it to the mexican. The young pregnant girl is asleep. She doesn’t get to see the ocean in the background. There are a few seagulls floating above the car above the ocean circling. It seems like it was a nice looking car. Well, the very next day, after she snapped the photo staring off her phone, she got a DWI and wrecked her car all in the process. She was fine. But her car was wrecked. Now she’s on a bus back to Colorado Springs. That explains it all.
But I wonder if she wouldn’t be on the bus if she hadn’t wrecked her car. I guess that she would be able to drive back to Colorado if she hadn’t wrecked her car. That’s obvious. Who would want to travel on one of these damned tour buses if she could drive in style in a Cadillac? But I think maybe that she might have blown her getaway money on the car. She blew her money on the car and she wrecked the car, therefore she wrecked her money: she wrecked her getaway. Driving around the coast in a new Cadillac must have been liberating. In fact, there’s just about nothing more thrilling than driving fast, really red-lining it, with a bottle of bourbon between your legs or a gin and tonic in the cup holder. Once you’ve drank your head away and you keep drinking and shifting when the engine roars like a chainsaw, then you can get that transcendent feeling the birds might feel flying over the same road. Birdbrained, drunk, you can drive through hairpins and switchbacks like blood running through a vein, fast and pumped by an involuntary and inexorable force, like one’s heart, for instance. First gear, thump-thump. Round a corner of the coastline road. Second gear, thump-thump, and you’re propelled along a rare straight-away. A dazed driver gives you an unfeeling, vague look that you barely can discern before… Third gear, thump-thump. You pass quickly by a diamond-shaped sign, a glyph implying curves with squiggly lines and an arrow’s head. It looks like an invitation to go faster, to propel or reach lift-off like a rocket. Turning, your two passenger-side tires lift off the pavement and you get a sense of flight, finally. Fourth gear, a beat is skipped, the clutch grinds. Looking down at the gearbox you see that your cup has spilled on the shifter and your hand slipped off. There isn’t anything to wipe it with. Sucking some gin out of the U-shape between thumb and index finger, you look up at the road. The engine whines unbearably, stuck in third and going seventy miles-per-hour. And then—
It’s a good thing you were wearing your seatbelt, the mexican says. The blonde admits that if she were going faster, or if she weren’t drinking and therefore loose like a goose, then she probably would have died. As it was, her car glanced off the guard-rail, ricocheted and fishtailed right into the side of a large truck bearing a load of oranges to some environs east. She was fine, but many oranges were lost. The road was sticky and smelled of rotten, fruity musk for the rest of the day. After her accident she spent a few weeks in California drinking, recovering. She must have settled her DWI or else been on the lamb. I hoped that she’d done the former. Then, she hitched a ride with a friend to Albuquerque. I have no idea what she did there, but now she’s going home. She wants to be a regular housewife.
A phone call. I hear her talking to her husband in waiting—her husband who is, let’s be honest, more of a Penelope-type than any man I’ve heard of—on the phone asking him what they were barbecuing for dinner and to get ready for her arrival and whatnot. And then she said, I love you, and it sounded like every other I love you ever uttered by a woman left wide open with vulnerability or desire. Her voice’s timbre was the same. It had the same quietness, like a bubble formed around the words, dampening the acoustics but preserving their meaning. Lacuna. I love you. Lacuna. Coming like that, all breathy and slow. I felt I’d heard that same effect hundreds of time, breathes in like she’s going to blow out a birthday cake, the words, their sound. Make a wish. The words I love you always washed over me easy and fine like running through a sprinkler on a hot day. Childhood and innocence. And now this woman who left her husband and kids, bought and wrecked a car in San Diego, and from what I’d gathered had called every ex and one-night-stand thus far en route—this woman had at her disposal the same vocal effect. It seemed like a knob on an amp or a studio control board, one that’s not even especially rare or expensive. There are probably quite a few knock-off brands that aren’t really so bad, a good bang for your buck; and they all have the same effects knob, like reverb but more heartbreaking. This woman is quite obviously a slut and an alcoholic, and she has at her disposal the voice all women have, the voice of pain and desire. I couldn’t quite set this all straight in my mind.
