Let's Go!

The red four square balls sailed through the air, bound to knock a player out, crossing the street-yellow complexities of lines, boxes, corners. The soft small rain drifted through the doug firs that sealed the Ainsworth annex off from the strange big and vaguely haunted house below (once a country club I hear, then dilapidated but occupied, now gone) and the grey rush of Vista above. The fourth and fifth graders had their own remote domain exiled away from the red brick kingdom of the old school down below. I was in Miss Madden’s class: she read us ‘Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing’ and taught us how to get a sun tan at recess (‘You can feel where the sun is with your eyes closed’) and had her coffee cup half full of Diet Pepsi, which at the time I thought was scandalous. This place was strange. Next door, Mr. Gable’s class. He was fun and rambunctious; he had no compunction about dominating the lunch-time four-square battles on sunny days. I learned what spring fever was, not from being told by him, but hearing other teachers talk about him. I went to math in Mr. Gable’s room for parts of some mornings, like that rainy one. It was not—I don’t think—his expert math instruction that shunted me to his class, but because there was a back corner of his room with a small work area (tables, chairs), enclosed in low bookshelves, near the brown streaked linoleum and a sink and one of those ancient pink powder soap dispensers. I had no idea why I was in ‘advanced math’ nor did I think about it: it could have been some fortunate bubbling of test sheets or some parental remark to the ‘right’ person or something else, but I was in this advanced math group and it was terrifying. Zan, Elisabeth, Karen, they all seemed to move through the worksheets with ease. I didn’t even like to pick one up, knowing the work it took to get through it. Back by the sink, faking my way through—it was like mime, which I had just learned about in a library unit on Marcel Marceau, whom Ladybug Anderson reported she actually got to meet one time—I listened to Terry Butler talking about this movie called ‘Rock ‘N’ Roll High School’. It scared me witless. At this place, in that time, whether one wanted to or not, it was imperative to proclaim allegiance to the Rolling Stones and to the Grateful Dead; this may have been because of their logos (the Stones’ tongue, the Dead’s ‘steal your face’ skull), just as it was imperative to proclaim allegiance to Izod and the even more exalted (and at that point very rare) Polo, again, probably because of the logos (Izod’s alligator and Polo’s polo player). Ainsworth was a cut-throat social hierarchy and these sorts of markers were complexly performed and displayed as some possibly non-existent circle of insider popular kids passed irreversible judgments: it was like Olympic figure skating: bladed and icy, but smiles all around, as on the day when, on the steps of the auditorium after music class, Matt Chick looked at my clothes—I had somehow got a hold of a long sleeved striped alligator shirt which I wore as often as good sense allowed—and asked, ‘Are those Levi red tags?’. It was too late to pull the shirt tails lower. ‘Umm, no’. ‘Too bad’, he said, ‘so close’. When a non-Rolling Stones and non-Grateful Dead (a band I actually had never even heard in my cable television trollings for ‘Video Concert Hall’ and certainly not on the radio) reference was made, I grew gelatinously cold, knowing it best not to say anything. This could be a test. Work sheet rustling, pencil sharpening, quiet withdrawal to the math table. And Karen was there with her worksheet. ‘Matt, do you know the answer?’ And, I, idiotically (in perpetuity) confessed: ‘I never heard of the Ramones’. Karen looked at me very funny. ‘No. The question’. I was doomed. Now another kid knew I didn’t know who the Ramones were. Were they part of the canon like the newly anointed Police? Would I get another ‘too bad so close’? A blow as brutal as any the years of Toughskins and liking M’s ‘Pop Muzik’ could offer. ‘Let’s try and do the question’ she said. I think I felt the air cool my tense skin. I ventured a look. ‘The problem?’. We shoved our chairs together. I only found out years later she loathed advanced math like I did and felt just as much an alien there. I was out by the end of the year anyway. And the Ramones weren’t so scary. They attack the 1960s angrily, longingly, and with stupid sweetness; they look back like I look back.

The Ramones - Do You Remember Rock 'N' Roll Radio?

Cheese and Peas

In late fall or early winter of 2004—in Wisconsin, that line between late fall and early winter is exceedingly blurry as golden cold light turns into thick heavy snow very fast—Gretchen and I were in the teeth of the new two kids phenomenon. Evelyn was two, and Silas was two months, or close to it. I could see the end of my dissertation on a watery and British horizon, and with that end, the outrageous fortune, chock with its slings and arrows, of the academic job market. Like leaves on tree. But that chasm of doubt and fear was easily boarded up and wallpapered over with the sleepy delirium of Silas and his beatific id and his very squirmy sleep and his awesome mahogany eyes. When Karen came—herself saintly, entering into that scene and willing to help—to Madison, we could promise nothing more than a lot of take-out, DVDs, restless nights, and if we were lucky, a few pints in the evening—make that in the late afternoon.

Heroically, we delivered on our promises. Karen was—as always—game. But there were a few moments when I got zapped with an unmooring dissonance. A time or two, she and I escaped the house, and walked around campus: she wanted to see Memorial Union and the Rathskeller, the library with the odd display of David Lynch paintings in Circulation, the brightly colored iron chairs and the falling leaves on the Terrace. The old parts of campus drew her in and we talked about whether the UW left its traces in some people she was very close to, what those might mean. It was then that I felt this vertiginous swing of the pendulum. Karen was so fucking awesome: she lived in big cool cities, she had brilliant artist friends, she made films about tiny robots, electric chair repairmen, Robert McNamara scored by Phillip Glass. I lived in a small midwestern city and rarely saw past mashing up bananas and making up lullabies as I purportedly studied thousand-year-old books. For a bit there, it was colder out, State Street was quieter, the walk back longer. That night we got Laotian food from the place on Willy Street and Karen and I went to the video store for a DVD. There was—shockingly—nothing she hadn’t seen, though she was giddy with one new straight to DVD release, ‘Lord of the G-Strings’ and its epic tale of the Throbbits. I had to pry the box out of her hands. She talked me into renting the British series ‘The Office’ which we hadn’t seen (we hadn’t seen anything). At home, all the usual chaos, but Karen rifled our substantial and varied liquor cabinet and made some freaky concoction involving citrus and some unspeakable blend of things. In the micro-living room, we had on the stereo this kids record, ‘The Bottle Let Me Down’. This is a collection of a bunch of Bloodshot Records artists doing songs for kids and I abashedly liked it. When the hipsters are making kids records, you know a new demographic is reluctantly getting old. With the liberally applied cocktails (beer for me), the kids settling down, and snow outside flaking, we just might have danced to ‘Godfrey the sickly unemployed amateur children’s musician’ and felt the sting of melancholy with ‘I hit the big 1-0, and candy just doesn’t taste as sweet anymore’. Schmeer was into it, but became ecstatically entranced with Gretchen’s favorite, ‘Cheese, Peas, Pickles & Bananas’. It was on repeat until Karen perfectly nailed over and over the quiet sweetness of ‘Get me a banana from a chimpanzee’ with this sideways head move that made her cropped hair sway and swing just so. Later that night, we watched ‘The Office’ and Gretch laughed so hard she almost peed, and we stayed up late, and we ate cake, and we folded out the couch bed contraption, and I guess the pendulum swung back. For a second, Karen’s fantastically best friend Kim Caviness sang the song at the memorial. It was beautiful and felt like someone hit me with a shovel.

Steve Frisbie - Cheese, Peas, Pickles & Bananas

First Day

The moment I found out that Karen died: I sat in the morning at my desk in the study upstairs; the room is painted thickly sky-blue; the gray morning light seeped in; a barrage of emails with spooky subject lines piled up on screen; the kids bashed around downstairs and my t-shirt still smelled like pancakes. A grievous error has been made. I don’t think they have that right. Do you mean this to go to me? Things went prickly at the edges. There was an awful lot of snot and spit and it was hard to catch up breathing. Gretchen was screaming and kept saying ‘no’. I’ve never liked what I look like when I cry. No, not so much.

We didn’t really know what to do and the thing is, we still don’t really know what to do. As the quotidian blur pushes the first wave of sorrow back and out and away, I dislike more and more how grimly and grotesquely it fades, and yet something else calcifies into a nasty clot of sharp cruelty. To absurdly mix metaphors, I feel like asphalt kidney stones are snagging the ghosty high wires that I imagine broadcasting back and forth throughout my body. Especially in my spine, right between T12 and L1, I think. It hurts and I am sad and this vicious mean grief is stuck and sticky. Yeah, right: fading and failing as well as tenacious and brute. I don’t just go back to that moment I found out Karen died, but all kinds of other moments: unstuck in time like a film chock full of bad jump cuts. Stuck and unstuck. In the slog of hours and days that passed after finding out about the impact, the street, the neighborhood, the car, the crime, the police chase, the shopping bags—each goddamn thing—I compulsively returned over and over to the computer and its inexhaustible news items, Facebook messages, maps, photos, emails et cetera. Correspondingly, I am going to give it a go here. This is what I’ll do, at least for awhile. This blog will be a work in progress, and a temporary one. My sights are set very low. But thinking out loud, letting others in on it, sharing what little I have with Karen’s generous, amazing, and good circle of friends, and giving some solid shape to the transitory and now—more than ever—irrevocable parts of my long past as Karen’s friend, as we turned into who we are, will be a step, a budge, a move.