Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Post Graduate Work

I lived simply to keep my freedom intact. I bought a trailer outside of town picking up jobs as I needed them, janitor, convenience store clerk, telemarketer, gas station attendant, everything except Indian Chief. I only took the jobs to finance the buying of bootlegs and books. I wanted but didn’t want the things that my contemporaries sought out, a kick ass stereo, a hot car, a big house, those things that salved their conscious of abandoning their dreams. I wanted more. If a job started to last too long, or started making too many demands on me, I quit. I wanted to be free.

I found the buying of bootleg concerts provided the same thrill as scoring dope. You had to know someone, who knew someone who was "dealing". Connections were loose, people tenuous. On the way to a "score" I'd look over my shoulder to make sure I wasn't being followed, and that no one suspected what I was up to, which may have lead people to suspect I was up to something much more illegal. And you had to be wary of new people. Were they trying to rip you off? Were they trying to sell you a commonplace concert that everyone has and they just added on some songs from another concert or cut a tape short? Were they "narcs" from the RIAA's police, or cool like you, just trying to score some stuff? And once you got your "stuff'' you ran off to the secrecy of your own pad to ingest the substance. In this case, listening to your contraband concert. A totally furtive lifestyle.

In a college town there's a new influx of excitement and adventure every fall, in the form of a new class, especially the girls. My brother and sister always teased me, asking if my girlfriends were at least eighteen, it was just that as I got older, my girlfriends didn't. Most of the girls thought I was a local and didn't fit their definition of success. They were unimpressed with my dreams, and they would soon be off to trendy careers and successful husbands anyway. They were interested in one thing, and it wasn't the one thing I was interested in. The girls I did interest ran from the neo-hippie chicks who loved to wear tie-dye and have sex, which they considered a form of rebellion, but as their graduation loomed and their rebellion came to an end, so did our relationships. Then there were the girls I always seemed to fall for, the girls with purple hair and problems. They were the wildest. But I was saving myself, not from sex, they were the type of girls that you could take to the bars and concerts, but I was looking for someone more in line with my ambitions. I started to see the passage of classes as the passing of seasons, one piling upon the other. First there were a few, then a handful, then more and more, until I became worried the passage of seasons was becoming too many.

I had just broken up with my last girlfriend, Deidre. We'd had an on again, off again relationship for about a year. Whenever we had a fight, or she was acting like she wanted something more from the relationship, I sent her home. She wasn't beautiful, but she wasn’t ugly either, and there was something latently sexual about her. She was twenty-one to my thirty, and I liked her because she wore low cut blouses, short skirts. I guess I wasn’t very good on waiting for all the rewards later, there were other benefits to be had, namely blow jobs, I knew the luxuries would come later. The ironic thing was she turned out to be a local, and not from the college. She was a Rock 'n' Roll chick through and through. She had a collection of black concert T-shirts from the 70's, which in some kind of relativistic universe should have made them antiques. The glass of her vanity mirror was almost obliterated by the ticket stubs of every concert she'd ever been to. She was not quite a groupie, and something more than a fan. It was like she lacked the imagination or perhaps the ambition to be a groupie, I knew almost from the start it wasn't going to work out. I met her at a party. I didn’t notice her until she came up to me.
“You look like Jim Morrison!” She shouted above the music. I was already drunk and being complemented by a pretty girl added to my euphoria. We started talking, she agreed with everything I said.
“I want to move to Los Angeles.”
“Me too!” She enthused.
“What you going to do there?” She asked.
“I don’t know, see what comes up.”
“Me too!” I couldn’t believe how much we had in common, she was infectious and I was enthralled. She was also lying about everything, but I didn’t notice until later when we had nothing in common. She was a neo-hippie chick who had never met a hippie, or a counter-cultural thought, break the skin and she was like the surrounding town, conservative. I knew from almost the beginning that it wouldn’t work out but she came along at a time in my life when I was feeling particularly vulnerable, and didn't want to be alone, I should have known better, but I consoled myself with a steady supply of sex until she discovered the truth. There are times of our lives when the answers to our problems seems to be to bury our flesh in that of others. And what happens when you make compromises? You end up compromising yourself.

As time went by I felt trapped with her at the trailer, like any good college town Madison has its own strip of bars. So, to avoid the realization of the inevitable, I'd taken to spending afternoons in the various bars, alongside the locals avoiding wives, girlfriends, and responsibilities. Whenever the phone rang someone invariably yelled across the room to the bartender,
"Hey, Sue, if it's my wife I'm not here." I was avoiding going back to my trailer, dreading one of those crushing relationship ambushes when the other person is there at an unexpected time, and you know you're in for one of those heavy talks about the relationship that you usually experience right before you break up. The death of our relationship was my ambition, and hers was to be married. It was beginning to look like any other relationship, I was beginning to look like any other resident. I was looking for a new world of thought and feeling.

(The Last Stage is available on Kindle, Nook Books, or if you would like a signed copy of The Last Stage they're available from my website (only $20!) at Jymsbooks via Paypal, please don't forget your mailing address!)

Chapter IV: The View From The Audience

No comments:

Post a Comment