Gravity Sings
by deborah siegel
Date: Fri, 2 May 1997 00:30:10 -0700 (PDT)

 

"we can be heroes...just for one day" David Bowie



The sky veers towards me, the tips of the mountains, by my spirit alone, not too high, just a tad. The feeling: round the maypole feeling. A fairy's pleasure, that. I fall gently and land in what feels like the cradle of creation. There are voices singing: I want desperately to remember the song...

The phone screeches. Harsh light creeps into my cave and slices my eyelids apart. Fumbling. Thought I turned the ringer off. Plastic pressed to my face. It's a recording. "Please stay on the line. This is an important call. All of our operators are currently busy. Please stay on the line..." I rip the phone out of the wall. Fuck. Maybe I'll actually get out of bed today. I wait patiently for the cat to get off me. The balls of my feet feel swollen. Find the enormous clawfoot tub. Finders keepers. Run some hot water. Salts of rosemary, for remembrance. Hoping to wash away some of the madness. Tremolo, my fairie roomate, comes in to fuss. Two janglies around each ankle. Green hair swept up in copper: she's kind of annoying really, always going out, an endless supply of energy, and her favorite topic is herself. Me this and me that, blah blah blah. But we still love each other. When we walk down the street it's still hand in hand. I guess I spend a lot of time wishing I was her. I wish I could get away with the things she does. She's always playing mean and awful tricks on people and no matter how spiteful they always still love her. At least that's the way it seems to me. It's probably not true. But to me it is. She wants to know how her glamour is. I tell her I can still see the glitter-dust around her eyes from the night before. Her nose wrinkles.

I don't have to work today, but we walk down Pratt towards The Doomsday Cafe anyways. It is a dark and stormy afternoon: the air smells like pavement and dandelions. Inside. I order a False Alarm. Tremolo has a mocha with whipped cream.

We sit near an old piano (has not produced a decent tone since 1992). On the other side of the piano is Denny Floss talking loudly to an assembly of assorted freaks "...audio-hallucinations characterized by droning dissonant chords - do not adjust your set, its the real thing you dont want to know. Give up all hopes of 'normal behavior' what is called socializing and discussing FILMS such as P.Glass's 'Koyaniskatsee', what he meant by it. We are not the filmers such that can know what. Witness the utter paranoia and fear with which we are surrounded by. Now, continue talking in normal tones such as you were asking your 'wife' to hand you the 'salt'. Beauty? It was the thumbtack you would sit on if it were later, and I had remembered to put it on your chair which I didnt. I think the causes of said 'symptoms', one dissonant chord, to be nature's rebellion against surety, resolve, and other human creations, taking the form of Metaphor as Metaphor, which is no form atall. Picture, then, would you, having gotten this far, the very first poets who did not know they were poets, being the 'folk' we call'em, rooting their way to meaningful stories, in situ, suddenly we have 'Homer' we call him, and then we got a full-blooming self conscious Literary-World, it knows who it is..." Denny is gesticulating wildly.

At that moment, Trem starts telling me about the time in 1498 when she was helping Shakespeare with one of his plays. "...then he double crossed me and let a human play the part. It still upsets me. Write your own bloody play he said. Well, I can't write a play, Willy. I could not be a writer. Life is too exciting to waste with words, I said. Things really happen. Not that he'd know about that...." I gaze deeply into my False Alarm. She flutters to another table with all her fairie friends. Conversations with Trem always leave me feeling a bit...Pixy-led. I am relieved to be alone with my thoughts in the midst of all the others. They are alone with their thoughts too, whether they know it or not. "That's not entirely true," I suddenly hear from across the room. Great, a telepath.

I look to where the blue eyed stranger sits. He invites me to his table. Hmm. I never talk to strangers but it's begining to seem like the last day on earth.

"Say, what's a girl like you doing in a place like this," he says as he lights up a cigarette. That cliche seems really appropriate for the first time ever. The man has an unsettling way of focusing on the question at hand. I can feel my face getting hot. A million thoughts race through my head at once, but somehow I manage to maintain slight composure. I really really hate it when this happens.

"Can I have one of those smokes, cowboy?"

"You can have this one, cowgirl."

"Oh, I'm just a self-absorbed sometimes poet who grew up in a small Northeastern steel-mill town after the industrial revolution was quite over. I wound up in Chicago on my way to Nowhere in Particular." Sigh... "I was rather idealistic in those days. But enough about me..." I am wondering whether I feel comfortable enough to let Quixote into my world. There has been none in my life recently but the fairie and the street people. I feel stupid even thinking about renouncing my solipsism. I love having vital conversations with imaginary people. The landscape gets that telling "mythical" quality to it. Intimate details are absurdly enlarged. I am grasping for that song, for a bread crumb trail lost long long ago. Absurd colors, vivid contrasts, impossible objects, clashing shapes, I am dizzy with possibility. Gravity sings. At the center: castanets, a six slice toaster, a cigar box, ear jewels like Billie Holiday once wore, a straw hat, camel bucks, watercolors, two thirds of a melted chocolate bar, MAD Magazines, 2 Pynchon novels, love letters, a jar of red earth from New Mexico, obsidian, pink quartz, peacock feathers, tin soldiers, glass beads, chewed pencils, scraps of memory, treasure troves of time, the holy sangrail, authentic psychological baggage, ill-conceived notions, conceits, ridiculous fantasies, unanswered questions: This accumulation is for a hand-me-down purpose long since outgrown. All for a vision the tablecloth is pulled: cups and saucers lay broken at my feet. I follow it ever, and passion is lost. And yes, I can think of a few people that I'm much better off having known.

It turns out he is part of the Inner Gorilla Theatre, in town touring their show 'La Folie Circulaire'. These players are notorious, having been ejected from their hometown of Seattle by the infamous MegaCorporation, InfiniTek (led by His Holy Geekness and The Future Serfs of America). Inner Gorilla Theatre has enjoyed critical acclaim by that guy down the street.

"My friends call me Quix."

"Thats an unusual name for unusual times"

"Short for Quixote. Jerry Quixote. Do you have plans today?"

"Oh i havent thought that far ahead, Jerry. I suppose I'll have some angst."

"Angst?" he says with a strange smile.

"Or some despair."

"Thats more like it," he laughs

"I suppose you have a fancy plan, like getting the hell off this dumpy planet."

"No. Though I do know a few places..."