disconnect (May 20, 2009. Issue 5.)
a memoir in five pieces

I.

Paul slept under the table. Always. He fucked on the bed, he played guitar on the bed, we all smoked up on the bed, but nobody slept on the bed unless somebody passed out. Paul says this is how they got him for resisting. He was under the table, drunk, half asleep, and he didn’t hear the cops come in. He found out later it was a no-knock warrant, called in because they thought he had enough crank to supply most of Floyd County for a month, but that didn’t matter to him. Hands grabbed him; he bit.

They took him to the city cop shop first, but didn’t bother to make him empty his pockets. All he had were a driver’s license, half a pack of crushed Lucky Strikes, and a couple stickers for his band. He called, I came, and there we were, sitting on a hard wood bench, waiting for the bondsman, looking at the sticker he’d placed low on the front of the booking desk—“Nerve Jerk” in jagged red letters.

“They got nothing, fucking nothing, and they’re keeping me because I bit some fucking fascist who broke into my house and grabbed me in the middle of the night.”

At that moment, Paul looked a lot more like a gray river rat than a French Resistance fighter—his long hair was greasy and matted, and a week-old beard hung in wisps and whiskers from his pallid cheeks—but for once he was probably right.

“I’m gone. I’m so fucking gone. They let me walk out of here, and you will never see a dime of your bail money back. Say goodbye now. I’m moving to fucking Seattle, and I’m going to play guitar and fuck Kurt Fucking Cobain in the ass until he starts shitting his sellout money all over me. The guy fucking grabbed me, while I was sleeping, with no fucking reason. He’s lucky his arm was closer than his fucking balls.”

The desk sergeant came back into the room. “We’re not pressing charges—apparently the arresting officer doesn’t think you’re worth the paperwork. I’ve have you out in a few minutes.”

“Let me guess, no apology, no fucking ride home. If I thought any judge in this county could read the fucking constitution, I’d sue this whole fucking department for violating just about every right I’ve ever fucking had.”

Ten minutes later, we were on the curb. Thirty minutes later, we were back at Paul’s, drinking vodka and Mountain Dew, picking up the mess the police had left. Paul had never had crank or any other powder at his place, but there were thirty-two separate sheets of blotter hidden under the carpet, and two cannabis plants just starting to emerge from a clay pot by the window.

Three weeks later, Paul moved to Seattle.

II.

The first time I went to visit Paul in Seattle, I spent four days and never found him. Before I left, he told me from a pay phone that he lived in a camper some old lady had given him just for hauling it out of her yard. He gave me directions, but when I got there the directions led to some gas station in the middle of a bunch of warehouses and an empty rail yard. I asked the attendant where I could go to kill some time. He looked at my Doc Marten’s, my graffiti guitar case, and my surplus green backpack, and sent me to a punk club near Queen Anne Hill. The doors were locked, so I sat down on the sidewalk and played a couple new songs I was working on. A girl, heroin thin and hollow-eyed, sat down beside me to listen. She told me her name was Clem. I played all I could remember of Clementine and told her she reminded me of a friend of mine. She told me I was blocking my aura on purpose and gave me a tarot reading to find out who I really was. The hangman came up three tableaus in a row. I told her I was homeless, and she said I could crash with her if I didn’t mind cats and roommates.

When we got there, there were already seven or eight people sitting around on the floor. There were two bedrooms—one belonged to Clem, and the other to a couple girls trying to make it as models.

“I don’t suppose anybody here knows a guy named Paul Bond. We’re supposed to meet up, but somehow I lost him.”

One of the roommates—I think her name was Kelly—told me she thought she knew the name, but she had no idea where she’d heard it. I tossed my gear in a corner and sat down with my back against the couch. Kelly pulled out a dugout with a trumpet-shaped one hitter and started packing it.

“You can smoke with us if you want, but you have to play our game,” she said, setting down the pipe and tucking her hair back into a bun.

“What game?”

“You have to answer three questions. If we like you, we’ll keep you. If we don’t like you, you have to sleep in the garage.”

“What are the questions?”

“Do you have a name?” Kelly was flirting now, full on. She sat cross-legged, one knee out of her torn jeans. Her back was ramrod straight, and her nipples showed through a threadbare white tee-shirt.

“Yes.” I smiled, trying to let her know I was playing. Kelly smiled back and switched to a fairytale princess voice.

“What,” she said, “pray tell, is your name?” I told her. She held up the one-hitter and a plastic lighter, my prize.

“Last question, Jim Coppoc of Not From Around Here…” Kelly paused and thought, pointing the pipe at my chest.

“What… do you want?”

III.

By the end of the evening, almost everyone was gone, and I was more stoned than I had been in my life. Kelly told me it was because all anyone smoked in Iowa was ditchweed and oregano. Looking back, it was probably more because I’d spent most of the day without eating. Kelly curled up beside me, and fell asleep with her head in my lap. She said I was bony, but honest. Clem sat down across from me and starting laying out the tarot to answer some unspoken question. After a long time, without lifting her gaze from the cards, she spoke.

“You never answered question three.”

“What do you mean?” I said. “She asked me what I wanted, and I said infinite riches, godlike powers, and a good buzz. That’s three answers.”

“And all three were bullshit,” Clem said. “You don’t want any of that. Tomorrow, I’m going to cook you my last two eggs, help you find your friend Paul, and we’re probably never going to see each other again. You could at least give me a good story.”

“Fine. I assume you have some idea where Iowa is.” Clem nodded.

“And I assume you have some sort of stereotype in your head with miles and miles of flat cornfields and red barns, as far as the eye can see.” Clem stopped shifting cards around and looked up.

“Go on,” she urged.

“Well, stereotypes like that exist because they are almost completely true. Iowa is cornfield after cornfield after small town after fucking cornfield. Everywhere. Except this one place—it’s called the Lobster Farm. It’s a couple miles south of a tiny town called Stanhope, and there’s this giant wooden lobster cut out of plywood and tacked to the barn with one nail. It’s been there as long as anyone can remember, tornadoes and all, tacked up by one little nail.

“My friend Matt lives at this farm, and he throws parties almost every weekend. There’s this old chicken coop out back called the Chicken Coop DeVille, where all Matt’s art hangs, and behind it is a sound stage we made so bands can come and play. Behind that is a trail, some woods, and a clearing with a giant bonfire pit. We’ve had a hundred people back there, and the place never gets busted.

“The last time my friend Paul was in town was last Halloween. We all showed up in costume, and Matt started burning haybales we’d stolen from the neighbors. I was dressed up as Andy Warhol, wig and sunglasses and everything, and Matt was dressed in dark, flowing, monk’s robes, with a communion tray full of whiskey shots. Paul didn’t have a costume, but it was perfect, because for once he actually looked like everybody else.

“Anyway, Paul is a skater and a pyromaniac, so he jumps up on a flaming haybale to see how long he can stay up there. I jump up next and stay on for a little bit longer, just to fuck with him. After I get down, the haybales are pretty much broken, but our friend Matt, the guy who owns the place, jumps up in full monk’s robes, holding the communion tray up like the Statue of Liberty’s torch, and rides the bales for a full minute, not looking down once, flames licking at the hem of his robe, a statue, perfect. We all just stood there, watching in awe. Mojo Nixon was on in the background, Are You Drinkin’ with Me Jesus, but other than that everything was silent. Not a sound. Nothing. A whole party gone completely mute just watching. At the end, Matt just jumped down and started walking around like nothing had happened, like he had no idea at all that anything he’d just done was any different than any other action he could have taken. You want to know what I want? I want that moment, that last moment before Matt jumped off the fire. I want the whole world hanging in the balance—the flames, the robe, the silver tray and the whiskey on it. I want to know that any second everything will come crashing down, but that it hasn’t yet, and that right now—for right fucking now—this one small moment--nothing is moving—nothing but the flames and the stars and the music and maybe our hearts—everything perfectly suspended, everyone at perfect attention, all together thinking just one thought—no words--just one thought stretching out like time into infinity.”

I stopped, suddenly shy about everything that had just come out of me. Clem looked at me and smiled. She waved her hands, palms upward, over the tarot and said, “No Hangman this time. The last card I laid, though, was Death. Change.” She started to gather the cards. “I don’t really believe anything this deck has to say, but sometimes it’s the only way I have of seeing myself.” Clem kissed me once on the forehead then walked down the hall to her room and left me sitting there, Kelly still asleep in my lap, my legs now numb from being too long in one position.

IV.

When I got home, Kay was waiting—long, black hair spread around her on the floor like a halo or a fan.

“I missed you.” Kay reached up, grabbed me by the wrist, and pulled me to the floor beside her.

“Li’l ole me?” I kissed her neck gently, teasing.

“You know what I mean. I’m starting to get attached. You are a complication.” Kay turned to face me. We’d talked before about her plan to get clean, to avoid complication, but this time she was smiling, eyes flashing, skin flushed, looking as good as I’d seen her since we met.

“Yes, but you would be complicated with or without me.” I kissed her again, this time on the lips, and moved a hand down to cup the curve of her hip. Kay pulled me closer, deeper into the curve of her body, and started to unbutton my shirt. Her waistband was loose, and I moved my hand inside her pants, reaching farther, following the contours of her ass, fingering her from behind. She abandoned my shirt buttons and moved her hand lower, searching. We stayed like that a long moment, holding each other, touching. I twisted my body up and over her, sliding off her pants, and worked my way down until I could taste her wetness.

V.

When I knew Kay had finished, I moved back up the couch to face her, to kiss her mouth. We held each other a long time, neither of us wanting to break the moment. Finally, Kay spoke.

“You didn’t fuck me.” Her voice was awed, incredulous.

“I didn’t think you wanted me to.”

“I don’t. I mean, I do, but I don’t know. After what happened, it’s hard for me to trust anyone like that again, you know?”

“I know. It’s okay.”

“But you could have fucked me.”

I reached out and brushed the hair back from her face. She kissed me, then pushed her face into my shoulder. I could feel her sobbing against me.

“Jim?”

I kissed the top of her head and waited for her to go on.

“If I told you I was in the bathtub already, and I invited him in, would you still think he raped me?”

“Did you tell him to stop?”

“Yes.”

“Did he know you meant it?”

“I think so.”

“I believe you.”

Kay waited before she spoke again.

“If I told you I made him wear a condom…”

“Kay, I believe you.”

“I know you do.”

Another long kiss, and we never spoke of it again. I wanted to a thousand times, to tell her things would be alright, that I would do anything to held her bear this memory, but somehow the words wouldn’t come. Years later, in Austin for a writer’s conference, I found Kay again. We emailed a couple times, and she gave me her number. I tried three times when I got there, but she never answered. The next time I found internet access, I saw that she’d deleted her Facebook.