Adonais Opted Out

I warded off a threatening cold with raw performance anxiety until my last residency interview was over. Once I was safely parked in my parents' home in Los Angeles, I went into respiratory collapse with a 102-degree fever and watched MTV for hours on end. I also watched a work of art titled “Calypso Reef” that my brother and sister-in-law had given me for Christmas. It's one of those holograms that look like wavy patterns of pretty colors until you unfocus your eyes beyond the plane of the picture. Then it all goes 3-D like a bad flashback of the early Seventies, and you see silhouettes of whales, palm trees, sea-birds and fish. Everyone in the house was eventually able to do the unfocussing thing and see the shapes except my Dad, who as a radiologist supposedly recognizes patterns for a living. He couldn't pry his mind open enough to see whales and palm trees for even a nanosecond. Every morning he would read aloud the weather in Connecticut with a sadistic chuckle: “It's 7 degrees and snowing in Hartford, be careful of ice on the bridges, heh heh heh. Gonna be 72 degrees in L.A. again today.” But I was completely unglued between the fever and the television and the unnerving surreal quality of the constant bright sunlight outside and paying very little attention. This is your brain, this is your brain on MTV; is it delirium, is it the City of the Angels, or is it your 51^st music video? I became enamored of an Arizona band called the Gin Blossoms. Their lyrics, in particular, really spoke to me: “…when you're in the company of strangers/ or just the strangers you call friends…” “Did you love me only in my head?” “…if you don't expect too much from me/ you might not be let down…”

When I got back to New Haven, the heat in my apartment wouldn't turn on. Snow was blowing in through the torn weather-stripping, forming a little pile in the living room and not melting, so I put on my overcoat and went outside to get warm. In front of a storefront window filled with these 3-D hologram wavy-colored pictures, a bunch of people were standing up to their ankles in slush, clinging to each other and shivering, saying “I can't see it. Where? I don't see a palm tree. I don't see a Romulan warbird. All I see are these wavy little colored lines….” I walked past the staring people and on to the music store, where I bought the Gin Blossoms' CD “New Miserable Experience” and a copy of Rolling Stone magazine. I went back home, turned on all the lights, plugged in both the space heaters, switched on the bathroom wall heater, set the oven on High with the door open to warm the kitchen up, played the Gin Blossoms on the stereo full-blast, and read my magazine with my overcoat on. In the pages of Rolling Stone I learned that the Gin Blossoms' guitarist, Douglas Hopkins, who wrote all the songs I liked, had killed himself on December 5^th, some time after his fellow Blossoms kicked him out of the band for alcoholism. Then the fuse blew, and the rest was silence. Out in the hallway, the elevators were in a separate but parallel universe again, alert but unresponsive, lighting up but never arriving. I walked down eight floors to the rental office and coughed on the owner until he sent someone up. The repairman replaced a steam valve and laid healing hands on the fuse box, raising the ambient temperature to a toasty 63 degrees. I lapsed comfortably back into delirium to the tune of the Gin Blossoms' plaints.

* * * * *

Somewhere hot and silica-dry, Douglas drank to see his angels and fell, blazing no track across the sky; Arizona's boy just burst each neuron delectably like a caviar egg on a melancholy Russian tongue and left nothing but a few songs of desperate loveliness. Dead guitarist, you were so self-absorbed, so immature in your responses to women's infidelity. Whom did you want, some Madonna, that you preferred your angels to the nymph on the nearest bar-stool? How did you elicit order from cacophony or romance from the barren sand, with only the moon and arid ground around you? You rediscovered the Bacchanal and died in the service of that god. It might as well have been maenads, boy; I hear them in your guitar, I hear the plea with no expectation of salvation in the telegraph of sound and fury, spare bleak words so much more powerful than those of your more artful partners. It was you who were the animus of that band.

Hear me gods, you who tune into our casual comedy, you the millennial TV audience: all of you pause and listen to Douglas, take this cactus-child of the semi-Mexican desert and cut him out in little stars, etc. Juniper and mescal, grape and rye, barley and corn, all were cultivated not to build cities but to brew aquavit of one variety or another. Child of that consuming god, you were young, foolish, maudlin and bitter, and still you were a greater soul than will be found among ten thousand. Whenever I take cup in hand I'll drink first to you, musician, explosion of hopeless yearning in a wasteland of stones that move to no rhythm or melody and from which no riffs can call water to bubble from the rock. Stranded on this planet, insufficient gravity to hold you down, spinning out far below Fahrenheit in the bright glare and endless dark, the spaces between particles like the gaps between soul and soul, galaxies, eons—Who poisoned your well, brother? Was it in the genes or the upbringing? Brilliant boy, lost forever but always here in that aria of your fingers and a few words evoking a whole life: hands that could make such sounds, mind that could write such words, why should I lament your passing? There were always those like you who burned too brightly and found only emptiness and ashes at their own center. If I could meet you on a meteor in some hallucination, I would say:

Sway to a music most of them no longer hear, personify that long-forgotten deity, that wind that blows across our wasted moors; don't forget our haunted places. On a stage I hear your drums swirling; from a proscenium your voice whirls us away over balconies and rooftops. The city's walls collapse under their own weight, while those brief light verses you spin will last as long as the race lasts to chant your words aloud. These are realities that will endure, truths that will not perish until the last man collapses on a hilltop or drowns at the bottom of some unforgiving sea.

So screams the God through the blind-drunk boy: Remember, remember, that fire from heaven I gave you, the song, the words, breathed into clay. From the grinding of my bones I struck the spark that created you sentient. God or Goddess, it's all one, child of mine; I will never die while you persist.

So raves the boy gone mad in the desert: Is it all in the striving after something ungraspable that looked like perfect beauty indistinct from afar? Caress the face in the pool and it will ripple and disappear. The eyes of all the singers were pierced by slivers of divinity in their gin-soaked visions, in their mescal-lighted dreams, in the falling of the night and rain, in imperfect fragments. Is that not more poignant than the thing complete? Isn't it that much more beautiful for being half-veiled from sight, like the shining rainfall veil of her hair about her face, some radiant Godiva incarnate in your apartment?

But after all, what was that petulant MTV Orpheus to me? Just an archetype of something hard-wired into the human soul. Son of the black water, forgive us the eternity of forgetfulness, our breakings of faith, our infidelities great and small. It will be long before comes such another.