Chicken Out of Hell
An Andrew
Hamlin Joint
Wednesday,
March 11, 1998, 1:15 pm: STAR 101.5's DJ
announces that a man is holding six hostages at a
SeaFirst bank in Auburn; he's let one go already,
and police are negotiating to secure the safety
of the others. March 12's Times will
identify the gunman as David Toppen, age 34, an
Auburn resident. He had no intention of robbing
the bank, he just wanted the world to know his
life had become "pathetic." The article
features a picture of Toppen pointing a gun at a
woman's head. By the woman's head a poster reads,
"Do You Have Overdraft Protection?"
Without cracking a
smile the DJ does a station ID and puts on a
record I've heard a hundred times. "Gimme
one reason to stay here," Tracy Chapman
sings, "and I'll turn right back around/I
don't want to leave you lonely/But you got to
make me change my mind." I'm left with an
unfortunate, insulting, but persistent vision of
Tracy as Aretha Franklin in The Blues
Brothers, spiking her defiant chin at the
gun-wielding Toppen as her lover Matt
"Guitar" Murphy. Tracy wants to walk
out, Aretha wants her man to stay in, but the
crux is the same: I'm worth it, and both of know
it, but if you won't say you believe it, then
fuck it.
It's hard for me
to believe the DJ wasn't making a joke, or at
least running commentary. The song was for a
lover to sing to a partner; is it now for the
hostage let go? For the ones left inside? Is it
for the gunman, who sounds like he thinks he's
been left lonely?
Without letting
Tracy finish I click off the radio and put on my
shoes for my usual brunch of pizza at
Pagliacci's. A song from the 80's lunch runs
through my mind as I coast southward along
shopfronts, a song about a dream, and a telephone
operator speaking to the dreamer in an unknown
tongue. The song is "This Is Ponderous"
by 2nu, which includes at least one former DJ at
STAR 101.5, and upon hearing its title I figured
it for a transcription of Casey Kasem's famous
microphone outburst ("ponderous, man!")
immortalized in Negativland's ill-fated U2
single, and more recently Nick Bougas
Presents Celebrities...At Their Worst! on
Mad Deadly Worldwide Communist Gangster Computer
God Records. It emerges, instead, as a welling of
unease from a synthesizer jungle through which
Baltimora probably swung several kilometers to
the east, what Less Than Zero's Clay
probably heard in his head while noting on the
freeway from the LAX that people were afraid to
merge.
"Oom
papa-chucka manka nahnoosing cow," sings the
operator, "Ting kappa-lana wahny
double-ching pow. Heady capa-luwa coma chenasing
jee, Oom mama-chucka mana one is now three."
At Pagliacci's,
"Promises Promises" by Naked Eyes
abruptly cuts out midsong. It occurs to me that I
have never been inside Pagliacci's without music
playing. The pizza guy pulls his juice spritzers
out from the wall to reach the satellite feed
controls. "Life without music sucks,"
he laughs.
A man in a worn
jacket that says "Your Guide to Personal
Fitness" in dirty gold lettering on the back
walks backwards at the bus stop plays air guitar.
"Great solo," he whispers.
After sunset I
meet friends at a neighborhood bar for a movie.
We're actually watching the movie on the bar
TV--an odd practice, but we know John, the owner,
quite well, and he enjoys it.
Heading to the
bar's front door I see a man lugging a guitar
case in my direction. "Didn't know the Bar
had music on Wednesday nights," I offer.
"New
thing," says the man.
Dan and Aaron
huddle at the television end of the downstairs
bar with their copy of So I Married An Ax
Murderer. John mans the bar; Shannon, a
waitress with a tight shiny shirt that ends above
her midriff, stands in an office alcove to the
left, occasionally carrying drinks to the tables
in front of the stage.
So I Married
An Ax Murderer is funny, but I'm glad I
watched it at Dan and Aaron's house a few nights
before, because the band drowns out all but the
most yelped of punchlines. I enjoy their use of a
bongo drum in place of a drum kit, but my likes
and dislikes of them are both grounded in the
five years I spent in college with people who
listened to the bands this band is covering,
covering, and occasionally formed such cover
bands themselves.
The Grateful Dead,
to name the act from whom most of the songs come
from, were frequently anesthetized, often groggy
or listless; their zeal for experimentation
produced at least as many failures as successes,
and they labored for the last twenty years under
the burden of at least one singer who, in
addition to his narcotic befuddlements, had lost
his voice in the most pathetic and scratchy
manner possible.
For all the above,
the Dead possessed a power, on a clear night or
even a semi-cloudy one, to present sensations
bare and gleaming. This is painful
yearning, "Deal" would say, or this
is the comprehension of mortality, "Death
Don't Have No Mercy" would pronounce,
mush-mouthed, or this, proclaimed
"Casey Jones," is about opening it up
as far as you can go and pretending not to care
whether it'll close back up again. And then it
wrecks. Then all the bones break.
The band on stage
plays the songs as bar band songs, chords
strummed urgently, bongo bonged in surprising
taste, melodies shaped by mouths into cohesive
harmonies. The bass boogies enough dance off of,
but no one does. "They aren't real
drinkers," says Shannon after a rare trip to
the tables. "Six glasses of water
each."
Tom joins us. I
show him my copy of the February 1998 issue of Esquire.
O.J. Simpson is on the cover, holding a hand over
the black v-neck sweater over his heart. There is
a picture inside on page 59 of O.J. flashing a
grin with a thumbs-up sign on a Pasadena golf
course. The first time I beheld this picture I
was listening to Rick Springfield sing, in a
voice so high it was became a wailing weep,
"IIIIIIIIIIIIII've got a hold in my
heart." I very nearly started crying.
The movie
finishes. We move to the bar's upper floor, with
pool tables, a jukebox, a Pop-A-Shot machine
Aaron plays with listlessly, pinball, another TV
tuned to ESPN2, and another bar, not in use at
the moment. The tables have faded tops and
peeling finishes, like beach furniture. We take a
table near the back.
Aaron plays
several Nine Inch Nails songs. I skip to the juke
and deposit two of the few dollars I have left. I
show Tom an article in the Esquire about
a convention for dwarves in Atlanta.
Back at the table
one of my first choices, "Don't Stop
Believin'" by Journey, comes on. Dan, at the
left end of the table, winces in pain. Aaron
winces in pain. Aaron grimaces and makes a motion
of general destruction with his fingers. I lean
into the second verse, after the guitar
crescendo: "I seen'er in a smo-kay room/The
smell of wine and cheap perfume/For a smile they
could share the night/It goes on and on and on
and ohh-h-nnn..." I look up after
slam-miming the first keyboard break and find
Aaron and Dan davining in rhythm. "Some will
win," we belt in unison, "some will
lose"--stabbing pointer fingers at the
floor--"some are born to sing the
blues..." By the time I stab through the
second keyboard break and flip into the guitar
solo, I'm no longer self-conscious.
"The Lion
Sleeps Tonight" by the Tokens takes its
place. Aaron's mouth drops open in
astonishment--"Is this one of yours?"
Together we arch for the high note in the middle
of the chorus, falling away, falling back in our
chairs, allowing me, at least, the short but
sweet fantasy of imagining I could do this song
at karaoke. Do it well, of course.
Aaron's girlfriend
is very sick. She collapsed and had to enter the
hospital yesterday. Very carefully, I work up the
nerve to say Aaron's name across the noise
between our ends of the table.
"Aaron,"
I say, nodding emphatically but curtly as I do
when I'm nervous, "Aaron, I just want you to
know that if there's anything I can do, just ask
me. Anything I can do."
He nods, more
slowly, eyes on mine.
"And even
things I can't do."
He smiles.
"Thank you, Andy." He drags on his
cigarette.
Tom looks up from
Mark Leyner's article on his own "One Man
March" through Washington D.C. "Hey,
listen to this--`I chanted the irresistibly
catchy slogan, "Hey, hey , what do you say?
The Dysphoric, Spiritually Crippled,
Self-Loathing, Embittered, Death-Haunted,
Shrunken Man Who Is Succored Only by His Own
Solitary and Fetishistic Routines is here to
stay!"
"People Who
Died" by the Jim Carroll Band comes on. In
the ten years since I first entered college this
song has gone from a beguiling and hilarious
rarity encountered on a tape made for my
soon-to-be girlfriend by someone far cooler than
I could hope to become, to an album in the
coolest record collection I'd ever seen, to an
album in my own collection, to Sedated in the
Eighties Volume One, to the soundtrack of The
Basketball Diaries, the prominent Leonardo
DiCaprio movie about the life of Jim Carroll, who
wrote The Basketball Diaries and wrote
"People Who Died." I'm trying to
impress Shannon the waitress by reciting the
whole song top to bottom. "Jimmy and Georgie
let their gimmicks go rotten/So they died of
hepatitis in upper Manhattan/Sly in Vietnam took
a bullet in the head/Bobby OD'd on Draino on the
night that he was wed/They were two more friends
of mine--" FOUR! I always yell at this
point, that's FOUR, you NUMBSKULL!!! Shannon
gives me her best "indulge the loony"
smile.
Then, from
someone's picks, "Glycerine," by Bush.
The only song by them I can stand. "Friend
of mine says this is ripped off from the
Psychedelic Furs," I offer, over the
continuing maelstrom. "I don't know what he
means by tha--"
"What?"
Dan shouts back.
"You have to
imagine Richard Butler singing this song,"
Aaron puts in, leaning over to Dan. "Richard
Butler. Singing it."
"Oh, oh, oh
God," says Dan softly, eyes closed, rocking
side to side.
"God, God.
Yes." "Glycerine" continues. It is
said you can never know what another person is
thinking. For about three minutes for four men at
the end of a long day, it isn't true.
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