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Fiction |
These short stories are as yet unpublished in the print media. I would appreciate any feedback.
Torn And Frayed Fog And Sympathy
Torn And Frayed
by Spike Perkins
He showed up shortly after dusk, drunk and haggard, knees bloody like a small boy who's been playing rough games. It was actually worse than a childhood skinning--the knees looked deeply gashed. He pushed a tan bicycle into the patio--the old, heavy American Flyer type.
"Jesus, what happened to you?"
"Got too drunk to ride home. Fell down twice between here and the Maple Leaf Bar." That was about three blocks.
"Well, come in and sit down." He got the kick stand about halfway down and let go of the bike, which stood alone for a crazy half second before it crashed.
"It's that bitch Francesca--I'm still in love with her," he mourned as he took a seat at my kitchen table. "It's been three weeks and I haven't even thought about fucking anybody else."
He was wearing an Iggy Pop T-shirt, cut-offs and construction boots with no socks. His tousled hair was dyed black--probably to hide gray, but he'd never admit it. I don't know what he used--maybe shoe polish. I sat down across the table from him and thought about all the years I'd known Gabe.
I could see him in that ratty long coat he used to wear, the wool a color somewhere between gray and olive drab. He loved it because he thought it made him look like a bona fide wino and not just a punk rock kid. That was back in the early eighties when he and his girl Janet lived in an old mansion on the corner of Magazine and Euterpe that had been gutted prior to being restored and turned into a bed and breakfast. It was in an area known as the Lower Garden District--older than the Garden District proper. More down at the heels it was, too, but in those days had begun to slouch towards gentrification.
The building had been a band house for various punk groups--most of whom Gabe disdained as "not angry enough in their sound." The plaster walls of the once grand main stairway were covered with graffiti and spray can art, which Janet had photographed on color slide film before the plaster was repaired and painted over. The living quarters were at the top of the stairs behind a sign on the door stolen from some factory: WARNING. DO NOT ENTER. CHEMICALS BEING INJECTED.
Downstairs there was not much except for two pianos, covered with sheets against the dust. Both were Janet's. She had been classically trained as a child, and could play Bach from memory. But she had no ear for improvisation, and couldn't jam along with even the most simplistic of Gabe's rock tunes.
Gradually, the walls were stripped of plaster and lath to reveal three inch thick studs with mortise and tendon joints. In their midst lay a mattress on the floor, a few crates of books, Gabe's guitar and amp and the electric coffee maker. The care and solidity of nineteenth century craftsmanship lay revealed in contrast to a late twentieth century attempt at nihilism.
Janet wasn't crazy about the conditions, but rent was free, which left plenty of money for clothes and drugs. She made most of the money, catching the bus every day to her job as secretary.
Tall and slender, she wore clothes well. Her hair was short and changed colors weekly, but was usually some shade of red. There was an ease to her manner of walking and speaking which was elegant, yet devoid of pretension. This was in sharp contrast to Gabe, who in those days was always performing, or trying to. Janet let her dress make the statement, whether it was a simple black knit clinging to her slinky body, or some outrageous vintage sequin number she had found in a musty trunk.
When he bothered to go, Gabe and I both worked for a large painting contractor, Herman Hunter. The company had a two-tiered labor force. Skilled painters and foreman, such as myself, were spared most of the hot and dirty prep work--disk sanding and scraping one hundred plus years of paint off the massive wooden homes of the Garden District. That work was done by a separate prep crew, mostly Central American. Erica, a clever lesbian writer who was one of the other supervisors referred to them behind their backs as the "sandinistas." Gabe was one of the few Anglos among them, and he took a vaguely Marxist pride in this, though most of the immigrants leaned to the right politically. They dreamed of cheap land and a trailer in Mississippi, not returning home to foment revolution.
On the job, Gabe's greatest pleasure was tormenting Herman's partner, Tom Wills. Tom had been a career man in the Navy until a car accident in Tokyo had resulted in a head injury and earned him a medical discharge. After recovering, he was still lacking full control of his facial and jaw muscles, and he talked out of one side of his mouth. Tom was a good painter, and he and Herman had started the business as a two man operation, but he was pretty worthless at bidding jobs and administrating since the business had grown. Herman still let him run crews, and he took his frustration out on the "spics, niggers and dikes," as he referred to most of the work force.
With Gabe the issue was usually insubordination, for he was actually a hard worker once he got there. But once assigned to Tom's crew, he would bring beer to the job, or stockpile materials somewhere Tom couldn't find them, just to get him started. Tom would always fall for it, calling Gabe down from the scaffolding with the most sarcastic "C'mere, son," his crippled mouth could muster. Gabe, ready for what was coming, would swing down, arm over arm, begoggled and covered with dust, like a space age Tarzan from some desert planet.
"Now this ain't no playground," Tom would sputter.
"It doesn't look much like a kennel, either, but you're sure a sick puppy," Gabe would smirk. Tom would order him off the job, even threaten to call the cops, and Gabe ignored him.
Herman never fired Gabe because he and Janet had once briefly been lovers, back in the days when he was an artist and only painted houses when sales were slow. She has a portfolio of nude sketches he had done of her years ago, which she would sometimes show at parties if she became inebriated enough.
For all his angry talk, Gabe was really a pretty mild rebel. I never knew him to commit violence except to his own body in drinking mishaps, and to a few cheap guitar speakers. He loved to talk of anarchy and nuclear aftermath scenarios, but if you knew him, you got the impression that his idea of a revolutionary act would be egging the President or mooning the Queen. But then, he could talk nonchalantly about near death from cocaine and heroin overdoses, as if death were truly insignificant in a doomed world ruled by chaos.
"It happens very early in the morning, " he always said, "when you've been up a couple days and aren't sure anymore how much you did or whose works you used, and you feel like you're losing it, and wonder if you're going out." Then he would shrug his shoulders. The drug experience was a social statement, a hedonistic pleasure, and a creative act, all in one. To him, it was worth dying for.
Myself, I was old enough and curious enough to have investigated other bohemias, including some before my time. To me the irony was the most interesting thing about the punk scene. You never knew whether those saying "destroy society," meant it, or if they were trying to save it by showing how bad things were, or if the whole thing was a joke.
Gabe's music did have a certain power to it, when he was straight enough to play coherently. His slashing, distorted guitar chords moved at savage tempos, and his songs were full of odd, jagged rhythms--some were actually quite complex.
He could rarely find others to play with, because he was so arrogant and convinced of his own genius. When he would try to form a band it was usually with musical incompetents he could intimidate. Most of the time it sounded simply dreadful. But there were times--at parties, usually--when the feeling was right and he had just the right combination of substances and he rode a wave of electricity--Gabriel, Arc Angel, Master Of The Blown Circuit.
Music was the other thing I did for a living, and Gabe was full of derision for what I played--"regressive" rhythm and blues, reggae, jazz. He really howled when I tried to coax him into the studio, telling him I could produce powerful, clean takes of his songs, resembling some of the more disciplined bands he admired, like the Bad Brains or Husker Du.
"When was the last time you had a gig at a bar with a real band?" I would asked him. "How can I take your music seriously on any level when all you do is play by yourself at parties, and mostly uninvited at that?"
"That doesn't matter. My sound is pure and it's now, not like that old shit you play, and plus I get laid every time I play at those parties."
* * * *
I looked across the kitchen table at the hangdog eyes of my friend.
"Well, you knew Francesca had to go back to Germany sometime." Gabe rubbed his bloody knees and shook his head.
"Yeah, but I hitchhiked all the way to Nueva Laredo with her just so she could cross the border and renew her visa. All the way across Texas with nothing but country music on the radio. And then we stayed in a real crummy motel in Mexico, and I even drank the water and didn't get sick. It was such a great trip."
"So, you say she didn't go back?"
"I don't know if she did or not. She dumped me, and I haven't seen her in three weeks. She was twenty-three and a virgin--that's pretty weird. It's not the first time my heart's been broken, but not wanting sex with anyone else--that's scary."
Gabe had never been faithful to any one woman since I had known him, so I could understand his self-doubt. But his belief in Francesca's virginity was odd, for a street wise druggy, even one with a naive belief in his own cultural significance.
Back in the Magazine Street days, it seemed like Gabe and Janet tried to outdo one another with their infidelities. The little punkettes at the parties actually did go for Gabe, though not as much as he boasted. I guess there was something about the big, hulking workman's frame, the Frankenstein haircut, and the cynical babble, all in one package.
He made short work of many of his conquests among the overgrown ginger lilies and elephant ears of ill-kept back yard gardens. Or he would tie up the house's only bathroom for a quick one, leaving the other guests to piss off the back porch. If he found someone who really got his hormones flowing he might disappear for a couple days, and Janet would call me up in a sad, wistful voice and ask if I knew where he was.
Janet, on the other hand, went for the exotic and expensive. Her lovers were visiting sculptors hiding out from New York critics, or Latin American lawyers who flew their own planes. I was not immune to her charms, and had made subtle overtures to her in my weaker moments. But I guess my wings weren't bright enough, or my venom strong enough to be worthy of a place in her collection.
Gabe could dish it out a lot better than he could take it. Janet's affairs had been known to reduce him to spending an entire weekend in bed alone with a bottle of K&B Drugs' finest vodka.
So it was a relationship of continuous pandemonium, which was how they liked it, from what I could tell. Not at all the kind of situation in which to bring a child, but they talked constantly of trying to get pregnant. Gabe wanted offspring he could raise in anarchy to prove his commitment and spite his own parents. I could never get much out of him about why his folks were so bad, only that they were "Jesus freaks" and lived in some suburb in Virginia. Naurally, since he was so short on details, I imagined the worse. I vacillated between two images—a Bible-thumping redneck preacher, beating him behind the garage for some trivial infraction, or a milquetoast couple sitting glassy-eyed in front of a television set, from which an oily clergyman cajoled the faithful to sign over their savings.
Janet had a son by her first husband, Daniel. The boy was about seven or eight at this time, and lived with his father. Daniel was overweight, slow moving, and gentle--not at all the sort of man to whom you would expect Janet to be attracted. She didn’t seem to remember why she had married him. But there was another side of Janet that was nearly submerged during this period in her life. She had grown up in an outwardly conventional but troubled family in Mobile, Alabama, and the strain of Southern romanicism, with all its contradictory yearnings for propriety and passion, had deep roots in her psyche. Probably Daniel had offered her security and a way out from under her parent’s roof.
Daniel always seemed to have enough money, though the jobs held were often unconventional, and didn’t require much of his time. He moved Janet to New Orleans, and set her up in a residence in The Columns Hotel, where he was overseeing an historic restoration. The building, a landmark mansion on St. Charles Avenue, had recently been used by director Louis Malle to shoot the film Pretty Baby. This had given the owners the notion, and the money, to make The Columns an elegant, as well as intimate, small hotel.
The painting contractor was none other than Herman Hunter, and it was his first big commercial contract. He was also living on the premises, in one of the unfinished rooms, since his wife had kicked him out. The three spent many evenings drinking, talking about the pictures Herman still painted in those days, and imagining an ambience of Southern decadence. Janet fantasized about growing up in a Storyville brothel, like in the movie, and posed for Herman, trying to make him her E.J. Bellocq. If Daniel ever knew that her relations with Herman went beyond modeling, he never let on. She divorced him, a few years and one child later, out of boredom.
At the time of Janet’s life with Gabe, Daniel held a political job he had earned by paying off a Federal Marshall's gambling debts. He was in charge of providing guards for vessels that had been seized by the Federal Court system under a provision maritime law which allows plaintiffs to sue the vessel itself, in addition to the owner, and immobilize said vessel until bond is posted. Guarding the vessels paid $100 a day and required no more than the guard's around-the-clock presence on board. Needless to say, this was a calling to which Gabe felt he had been born, and out of his affection for Janet and general good nature, Daniel was more that happy to hire him.
So Janet would pack him off with his guitar and his beer to little Cajun fishing and oil field towns like Morgan City or Golden Meadow every other week to baby-sit boats. The vessels ranged from freighters with crews still living aboard and cooks cooking meals, to barges with no sleeping quarters. In that case Gabe usually slept in the car he had gotten from a New Orleans rent-a-wreck agency.
Eventually, after a few astronomical phone bills, including one I had to pay, the arrangement led to the end of Gabe and Janet's relationship. Janet, sadly, took up with a psychotic drummer from Upstate New York who made Gabe look like a candidate for the priesthood, and had none of the worldly success or intellectual glamour of her other lovers.
Gabe met Laura, a young woman who sold real estate by day and organized punk shows at VFW halls by night. They moved into a little house across the Mississippi River in Algiers Point, and I began to see less of them. In New Orleans, a city of close knit, self-contained neighborhoods, a lot of strong drink and general lethargy, a bridge and five miles of Interstate can be a major obstacle.
What Laura saw in Gabe, once she had known him long enough to see through his studied self-destructive glamour, isn’t clear. Surely she wasn’t naïve enough, or traditional enough to have wished to reform him. Perhaps she had hoped to renovate him, like an old house—keeping the charming eccentricities, while gutting the interior and adding practical improvements--track lighting, a double vanity in the bath, a garbage disposal. New Orleans has such a stock of charming and historic dwellings in need of preservation, which are usually available cheap, that home renovation has become part of the culture, like the celebrated food and music. Half the population seem to hold real estate licenses, from professors to preachers, and the other half has tools in their trunk and the skill to earn a few dollars, at least part time, at carpentry, painting or drywalling. Perhaps, subconsciously, the leap is made to people.
In time, they married and had a daughter, fulfilling Gabe's fondest wish other than stardom. Of course, he was a typical doting father, and all his anarchistic theories of child-rearing went out the window. He even tried to work more regularly, though he still drank as much as possible and ran around with other women.
The whole thing struck me ironically, the same as I had always viewed Gabe's life, though I wasn't sure whether it was because fatherhood had changed him or because it hadn't. Laura was a woman with a solid, big-boned physique, and prosaic middle class values to match. She liked punk music without buying into the lifestyle very heavily. In fact, she made money from it--a cardinal sin. She gave Gabe hell about his carousing but she stayed with him, and their marriage began more and more to resemble working class truisms rather than punk manifestos.
Some uninvited guests at a party they gave began the final unraveling. Some punks had long flirted with Nazism, but it was more for the shock value than any deep conviction, like most of the punk culture. But it was now the late eighties, and "skinhead" had come to mean more than a hairstyle. The rhetoric was turning racist and seemed to go deeper than glamorizing black uniforms and thumbing noses at the illusion of democracy.
There were those was still thought it was a fad and a joke. Our old boss Herman Hunter's son claimed to know the skinhead who had broken Geraldo Rivera's nose on T.V. To hear him tell it, all the guy's friends had been black only a few months before. His commitment to White Supremacy consisted mostly of liking attention, and liking to hear bones crack from the kick of a steel-toed boot with a head full of beer.
So, the self-styled Nazis at Gabe and Laura's party may have been mostly casual hangers-on in search of a free buzz. But they said a few of the wrong things to a few would-be "gangstas" hanging in front of the corner grocery, and started a near race riot in their predominantly black Algiers neighborhood. Repercussions persisted long after the troublemakers had been ejected--the couple was threatened, their home was graffittied and windows were broken. They decided it would be best to move, even though Laura owned the house.
Gabe hated Nazi punks and always had, even in his most anarchistic, anything goes periods. Being run out of the neighborhood drove him to the first overt political act of his life--he registered to vote.
They moved to Metairie, a bland white suburb just west of New Orleans, with an unfortunate proximity to the in-laws. Laura began dragging her parents into their arguments more and more as she became disillusioned with the marriage. On one particular occasion, she had left Gabe and gone to their home. He confronted them on the front lawn, waving a bottle of tequila he had nearly finished. The scene turned into a shouting match, and when they locked the front door Gabe broke it down. The police were called, and Gabe ended up spending several weeks in the Jefferson Parish Prison.
I saw him right after he got out. "Yeah," he said, "there was nothing good on T.V. in there, but it was a good rest." He tried to act nonchalant, but I could see that he was shaken. His eyes were bloodshot and I noticed tiny lines around them for the first time. Gabe was starting to show signs of age. Laura left for good after that. She when into therapy and joined several twelve-step programs.
Gabe had the baby on weekends. If he was late with his child support payments, she would come to his apartment raging, and uproot Gabe's roommate's plants if no one were home to listen to her tirade. Gabe was the same as always, but she seemed more unhappy than ever.
Soon Gabe moved into the Carrollton area where I had been living the past few years--in fact, right down the street. He started hanging out at the local bars, and amazingly, trying to fit in with the neighborhood. He developed a taste for Saints football, he even came to tolerate zydeco music. His favorite running joke was about writing a Cajun French drug song entitled "Fais Do Dose."
I knew Francesca too, of course. She looked anything but German, with dark hair and olive skin. I suppose she was sexy enough, with large limpid brown eyes and round breasts that looked pneumatically inflated. Maybe that was it--she seemed like a cartoon character, a late century Betty Boop--with those looks and her engaging but shallow chatter, and none of Betty's warmth and vulnerability. In fact, she had the subtle underlying arrogance that sometimes came with great wealth.
That night in the kitchen, I asked Gabe what it was about Francesca that obsessed him so.
"Her ancestry I guess mostly," he said, "and her tits. She's got German, Algerian, French and Italian blood. I'm just American--well, some Irish, and I always thought what a beautiful exotic child we could have. But her parents offered her a Mercedes to come home, so tough shit."
I thought about the daughter Gabe already had, and wondered how often he saw her. Does anyone ever really change, or does life just wear us down, like old weather boards on a house, overdue for painting, erode with the wind and the rain? Peoples' lives run in cycles and intertwine regardless of whether you notice or care, like cat's claw vine climbing up a ramshackle fence.
Gabe stood up, shook his head and rubbed his eyes.
"Well, I'm feeling better now, I should go. Mind if I leave this bike here?"
"Only if you lock it up. You never know who might wander into this patio."
"Don't have a lock with me. Will you take care of it?"
"Yeah, sure, I guess." I watched Gabe walk unsteadily toward the gate, and then I picked up the bicycle and brought it inside.