a snippet from Your Silent Face:
Sometimes the humidity caused my thick bang to wing away from my forehead like a Lays potato chip. I looked more like Duckie from Pretty in Pink than Tom Bailey of Thompson Twins. It could have been worse, though. I could have looked like the lead singer from A Flock of Seagulls.
In Nigel’s bedroom, the question buzzed the air like a fly: “Now what?”
“Let’s make a cento.” I sat at the typewriter. You could only play so many records in one shitty night: R.E.M., Clan of Xymox, Kraftwerk, Brian Eno.
“A poem made out of lines from other poems.” Nigel yawned. Was he impersonating my best imitation of the HAL 9000?
Kimberly sat on the edge of the bed, as motionless and oblivious as a rose in my grandmother’s crystal vase.
(Grandma Norcross loved fresh flowers.)
Karen sat by the window. The light allowed me to admire her wheat-colored hair, the fresh Page Boy haircut, the way she tilted her head and pointed her chin at an obtuse, hostile angle.
I wondered about her.
Nigel snapped photos of their faces, torsos, legs.
Stay here, I told myself.
Nigel quoted a line of poetry from memory (from T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock): In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo.
“Good one,” I said, typing. We were almost out of beer.
Nigel and Karen bickered.
“The old modes are dead.”
“And a cento is new?”
“We have to stretch the boundaries.”
“With lines from poems that have already been written?”
“Everything’s been written.”
“Lame.”
There was a stack of library books beside the typewriter with due dates that had expired six months ago.
Karen drained the fibrous pulp of a California Cooler. Where had she found them?
“Fuck poetry.”
“No!”
“There have to be different modes of communication.” Nigel sighed. “Different openings. Different end games.”
Ennui flitted through the weak light of the room like a battered moth.
“How about slamming a beer?”
Poetry was taking a beating. The cento was trapped in the typewriter—the pale figure in Magritte’s painting, ‘The Menaced Assassin,’—beyond resuscitation.
“All right, fine. Fine.” The cameras were rolling. “I’ll slam a beer by myself. Who wants to see me slam a beer?”
Kimberly tipped her hat back. Something was happening somewhere.
“Me,” she squeaked.
I gave her a look. My eyes said, “Did that noise come from you?”
For the first time all night, Karen cut through the awkwardness and spoke to her. “No. No, you don’t. Don’t encourage him. He’s already trashed.”
I wasn’t.
“Karen!” Nigel exerted more energy than he’d expended all week. “Stuart is no mere amateur when it comes to slamming a beer. I’ve seen him slam any number of beers. I think you owe him an apology. Look! You’ve wounded him.”
Wounded was not exactly what I was feeling. I was feeling more like a funnel cloud.
“Dude!” He was more animated than he became after two Long Island iced teas at El Oasis and the DJ put on ‘How Soon Is Now?’ “You have been challenged by this, this woman. She has challenged the value of poetry—arguably the highest art form.”
Karen laughed. “For Christ’s sake, let’s just make a cento.”
Kimberly looked like she was witnessing a stick up in an East Side bakery.
“No!” I put my foot down. I was calm. I was anything but calm. I positioned myself at the end of the bed. “It’s too late. Look! The cento lies bleeding on the Smith Corona, clamped beneath the paper bail like a fox with its leg in a trap. Nigel, change this fucking record!”
Nigel slid a record from its cover and spun the grooved plastic disc between his fingertips until the side he wanted faced him. “This should help.” New Order’s Power, Corruption and Lies.
I looked around Nigel’s bedroom. I vowed to myself that I would sit around and tape all of these albums and cassettes after I moved in, that I would not leave this house for a solid week. Maybe I would read all of the books, too.
The speakers hissed. ‘Your Silent Face.’ Not exactly a rousing tune. Raising the bottle to my lips, I chugged the warm beer while Nigel feinted around me like a boxer, snapping pictures. We’d been drinking for over an hour, I was drunk, was well aware that the foam might easily trigger my ultra sensitive gag reflex—which just might make for an ugly painting, a fucked up still life or a poorly executed landscape, a pile of puke on the carpet or bed—but I didn’t give a damn. Chugging the beer, the cassette in my mind spun maniacally. Now what? Now fucking what? Desperate times require desperate acts. It was a sentiment Nigel had stolen from the Surrealists. And then, reaching the dregs and foam, I blindly whipped the bottle toward the window like a Frisbee with a flare that was as reckless and blind and aggressive as it was impressive and graceful, and for a split second the words Oh, shit visibly appeared in the front of my mind like a neon exit sign as Kimberly clapped, almost giddy, and Karen and Nigel froze.
The green bottle pushed through the sheet.
Nothing happened.
It was as if, during a chess match, I had sent the chessmen flying across the room with a sudden, vicious swipe of my forearm. None of us knew how to respond. The last Grizzly roared its fucking head off in Nigel’s primeval forest, flexed its dark claws, bared its bloody teeth. Karen gulped for air. Kimberly’s voice was like velour. “That was wooowwww.” I hadn’t seen Nigel this animated since the night he’d given the bouncers the double barrels in front of El Oasis. He was riding over a cliff on the backs of a herd of swine possessed by demons. “You broke out, man! You broke free. I don't know what else to say. This is why we need beer, right? This is why we need art. Fucking a, man. This is what the Surrealists were talking about.” He implored us to comprehend him one last time, using frantic gestures and wild expressions, as he went over the cliff. “There are things we can’t describe with words, right? Karen, shake his hand. Somebody do something! Wait, let me take a picture!” He backed away, and tripping on the corner of the bed, toppled over the mattress and landed on the floor with a thud, his elbow cracking a bowl of moldy macaroni-and-cheese into shards.
#happyfriday #80s #NewWave #GenX #postpunk #flint #poetry #neworder #comingofage #novels
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