My guitar fell down a well; something surfaced slowly in its place, stranger, deeper, more resonant, frightening and cold, older and yet prescient, wilder for suggesting a work that lay beyond anything I could reach on any sawhorse of need.
But something had to die. It’s only happenstance that it wasn’t my actual heart. That survived into the next rooms of the tale; call it luck if you will, but I choose to give credit the grace of a power I’ll never know or own. Drunk as I got in that last bad season, on any night I could have veered off the road into an oncoming car or careened into a tree. I was out in the zombie zone, drinking a slow rictus fizz beneath the moon, impeccable, already dead.
And those mornings of coming to with the sun shrieking madly through the tattered curtains of my dirty garage apartment, each brilliant beam an accusing finger, a sword ... How easy it would have been to open that guitar case at the bottom of my nights, climb into its plush blue interior, and close myself there. But I knew I’d only wake up come the next dying of the light and crawl out, emerging from black surf to prey once again up and down the night’s shore, desperate to slake an dry dead for warmth that I had failed to engender on my own. Too chicken to simply kill myself, I opted instead for a long suffocation of nights.
Strangely, the booze proved the whale’s belly which got me through. I kept at my nightly infernoes, drinking through a random motley of fern bars and rock clubs, topless joints and cheap-booze dives so deep in the downtown’s tarry districts of waste you feel forked into by devils beyond measure ... And there I stood, saddled up to the bar, my hair flawless, roostered, tossing back those bottomless shots, waiting, waiting for someone to smile, offering a throat’s pale bed with its red booze to gout and wash the hallows of my need. Waiting for Love in its wallowing brothels, settling for neon and near-nude pasties, handjobs and someone else’s blackout promises, all of those signatures of what a dim soul settles for in failing to write his own name.
And that was Avalon for those nights, strange harbor in the white acre of a bed’s surrendered flesh, drowning the fuse at last in its profanest sources ... And that was the dream. Usually I just shuffled out at closing time with the rest of the preterit, falling into a hell’s mouth of blackout roads to what I had made of a home. There were spinouts and flat tires, mysterious long scrapes in the car doors on either side, front and back fenders cracked from mystery impacts. One night driving home in a blackout I heard a tire go and I just kept driving, not having a spare in the truck and devoutly unwilling to stop and deal with the mess. A neighbor told me the next day she had woken up at 3:30 am hearing a godawaful scraping grinding screeching sound approaching and she looked out her bedroom window to see my car lurching slowly down the street, leaning to one corner where instead of a tire there was metal scraping along the asphalt throwing sparks everywhere. Another night all of the same net whiskey and beer landed me in a drunk tank’s greeny morgue. I came to at 5 a.m. and saw one guy passed out in his vomit at my feet and a second hunched in a corner with his arms tight around his chest, mumbling some words over and over.
In my end is my beginning. That started me sobering up. It was then I saw my drinking as rictus of a life that had died. I didn’t stay sober all the way, but I did keep surrendering, increasingly convinced that the big night music had distilled a fiction of power chords in my brain, a riptiding sound I had worshiped and vaulted as something I could somehow possess and squander and utterly lose.
A something else slowly began to waken along the edges of that dead giant. The perception or intimation of deeper and wilder contours. As the compulsion to wreak havoc faded, a tide unmistakably surged, lucent, strange for refusing to allow itself a name while demanding that I try to find one. Words became saddles for wavelike lines of ink washing margin to margin of the page, galloping mad toward the ends of a sayable world. Or something like that. The big night music in bigger articulation than I could ever have said with a guitar. Had I crossed a guitar-shaped bridge to enter some castle of song in some deeper region of the heart? That was the question I mined for years, reading and writing the inside harrows of a fallen berserker’s undying song.
It sounded that way for the next season, which lasted about ten seasonal rounds. All that ink, dark and measureless as the sea sighing 30 yards from this bed, all liquid vowel, impossible to speak. Such dead shapelessness out there with everything below, drowned, dancing, demiurgic. Two bells, maybe three. The sax player has given up the ghost for the night, thank God, and the arguing couple have warred down to a drone so low the breeze has hidden whatever they needed in its ever-long sighing. I drift on in this bed with an unseen starry canopy arching forever above, my bones like the ribs of a coracle, powerless, free at least to speak of nothing that matters ...
