Our Funk Did You Some Good

Matthew was having, I think, his second annual White Elephant / caroling party. It is quite possible there had been many others that I had not been invited to, a whole history of kooky and fantastic gift exchange ‘tis the season festivities, but this was one of the only for which I made the cut. There was snow—wet thin Portland snow—slopped over the sidewalks and trees. Matthew lived in what seemed like a distant southwest outpost—not as far as Karen, but far—down by the Albertson’s just off the Beaverton Hillsdale Highway. The living room was a jumble of Matthew’s innumerable friends, acquaintances, friends, and various other impossible to define relationships. There was a tree blinking in the corner. Boys wore the button down waistcoat, the guatamala woven shirt, dressed down up, and long hair. Girls in flowy cotton, vaguely ethnic prints. Everyone in chunky ecuadorean sweaters, rag wool. Winter in Portland, late 80s early 90s, I do not know. But I do know that when this unruly tribe of earnest yet overly ironic teenagers came warbling up to the suburban crackerbox houses, clove cigarettes blazing, ukeleles astrum, bearing—as a distinctly non-Christian talisman—a plastic horse enshrouded in duct tape (weirdly anonymous, like Jeff Koons’ rabbits with their faces spray-painted silver), singing cracked versions of ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ in increasing volume as the tedium of the song wore on, well, the staid Beaverton-Hillsdalers were either nervously forbearing or festively creeped out. We only sang at houses with garish displays of Christmas lights and our biggest fan was an older woman whose astigmatism and hearing loss allowed her to witness a denomination of angels laud a stirring ‘Silent Night’. A hasty retreat was beat. Back at Matthew’s we drew numbers from a paper bag, and went round in a circle, gifts piled stage center. In order, each could take a gift from the center, then choose to open it, or take a previously opened gift from someone’s sometimes welcoming hands. Earlier that afternoon, Karen and I went to Django’s Records and flipped through the bin of 50 cent vinyl. I found a few things including John Cale’s pseudo-classical album with both words by Dylan Thomas and a cover photo of Cale wearing an astoundingly assymetrical haircut. Karen came away with the Brothers Johnson’s ‘Look Out For #1’. Let’s just admit right now that the Brothers J had hair that immeasurably surpassed Cale’s coif by at least as much as their album did. As the gift game went on, with arch comments, profound sarcasms, and naïve peacey love sentiments, my Cale record got taken and opened. Luke Adcox soon traded for it: his Velvets completism was clearly more powerful than what good sense he had (if any). Karen’s Brothers Johnson record was taken as well with much hilarity as we marveled at the helium afros and attempted to replicate the climactic blissed out grimaces of ‘Lightnin’ Licks’ and ‘Thunder Thumbs’. Rachel Fox maybe had it or was it Rachel Blumberg? When Karen’s turn came around, she slyly and quietly took a gift from the dwindling pile, handed it to Rachel, and reclaimed the Brothers Johnson. The exchange wound down to its end. Hot chocolate. Egg nog. Dr. Pepper. After setting the wrappings ablaze, the albums were test run on Matthew’s stereo. Cale did not last long. But when the funk came on, we got the fuck down (at least as well as a bunch of pseudo-hippy college rock white kids could, which is to say, not that well). Blissed out grimaces achieved.

The Brothers Johnson, 'Get The Funk Out Ma Face'

When we get older

We were all clumped in Karen’s car, Petunia, coming down out of the parochial southwest hills. Karen came from farther out, over the hill past the Alpenrose Dairy and Albertson’s to my house in the hills proper. Then down twisty Vista and over the bridge, across Burnside past Henry Thiele’s, with its odd palm treed grass triangle, over to Everett where we went right and left on 21st—then looking for parking. Cinema 21 was showing the Talking Heads’ ‘Stop Making Sense’ again. I had never seen it, I think Karen had, and we were meeting people—this kooky mix I mostly knew. But of them, I was only friends with Karen. Little spider webs of teen-angst twisted. The Talking Heads were a mystery too: ‘Road to Nowhere’ had this compelling video, ‘Stay Up Late’ was kookily charming, though it wasn’t nearly melodramatic enough for me in my deep drama days. Schmeer knew things about Jonathan Demme: movies I hadn’t seen (yet: as time went by, Karen made me see them): ‘Something Wild’ and ‘Swimming to Cambodia’ which we talked about a lot. Spalding Gray was fascinating to her, while I couldn’t believe a movie was just one man talking. Mike Sweeney had us watch it in class once. I’ve wondered since if Karen was drawn to Gray for his staid neurotic intensity and the haunted sadness that coursed through his tales. She always had a thing for freaky geniuses. When Petunia was embedded in her spot, we walked a few blocks. This was when Northwest 21st was still sketchy at night for young dressed down teenagers from the hills. Weird exhilaration of walking in the fluorescent corner store glow, the shabby building shadows, and the muttering of down in the heel locals. Being out of place was fun. But the movie: I had no expectations. Sometimes I felt like Karen invited me into these para-worlds: gritty NW at night, or loopy people she befriended at Saturday Market, these sorts of things. I have realized since then that she loved the movies and it was a ticket into this scene. I might have (or mostly) cared about the scene—and she did too—but she also cared about the movie. I didn’t think about the movie: I was thinking about who was there, how cool it was to be out, my girlfriend, if this was the place to be. Parking meters. Small line at the booth. And then we were in, past the concessions, into this huge room of seats, red curtains, too much space and not enough people there. Things were scarce at the Cinema 21, even then. As we sat, more people we knew came, leaning their heads to see who was where. I worried about who would be near by, if I was with the people I thought I should be by: Stranger Than Fiction: were those people there? Doug Kenck-Crispin and Andy Lindberg: really? Matthew? Luke? I stuck by Karen, but kept wondering if I should look around. Really, my overriding deep insecurity and pathological need to not miss out makes me cringe. Film came on. And with it I was distracted from myself—thankfully—and all the double self-consciousness melted in complex polyrhythms and words, giant suits, hand-held lights. Things kept creeping upward: the energy, the volume, the surreality, the pace. Dancing standing up. Popcorn flying. Seat drums. After the crunchy ‘Burning Down the House’, people started running laps around the blocks of seats—down the right side, across the front, up the heft side, across the back—round and round during ‘Life During Wartime’. It was so cool and it took me a minute, but I realized Schmeer was off, hands making big circles, loping with everyone round and around to the driving complex paranoid wonder of the song.
‘You make me shiver, I feel so tender
we make a pretty good team
Don't get exhausted, I'll do some driving
you ought to get you some sleep.’
I knew I would not look as good, wheeling about the place. I sat for a stretch during that song, wondering if that was me, if I could be that. But then, I jumped—ran out behind Karen and started doing laps. I was just getting sweaty when the song ended—I think the movie breaks there—and we sat back down. Intermission. Breathing heavy. It was really fun. I wanted to rewind. Best part of the movie. But on the way home, cassette of ‘Speaking in Tongues.’ Petunia played ‘Naïve Melody’. That’s my favorite.

The Talking Heads, ‘Naïve Melody (This Must Be the Place)’

Feel so bad with the radio on

I cannot really stop myself from retelling this story. In a lot of ways, it perfectly defines my friendship with Schmeer circa 1989. Either that, or it was among the best twenty-two (or so) minute slabs of my life. I posted it on Facebook, but I will post it again here. In part because the Modern Lovers’ song is so very good. But also because maybe if I keep telling it over and over, the sheer ineffable perfection of that moment will ward off the queasy hollow cold that seeps in when I think about Karen’s death. Maybe if I rewrite it and rewrite it, like Orm and his frenetic OCD medieval poem, I can stave off its conclusion. One more time.

At the end of my year in Santa Cruz, after a strange and excellent summer living in Mill Valley with Gretchen, working at the Roastery and waiting each night for Gret to finish her shift at the Depot before biking home in the warm dry poppy-laden California air, there was a bit of a problem. I desperately wanted to get back to Portland, having not given up on my life there, panicked by my worst of all fears: missing out. But I had no car and certainly wasn’t flying home. Karen had this ingenious plan: she was already in Portland that summer, and she would come down, stay in Mill Valley for a few days, and we’d drive back to Portland together. Better still, Matthew and Katy could come. And they did. All three did.

We packed up the car with an assortment of my motley barrage of stuff—the remainder was staying on at 17 Plymouth MV—and we did not get an early start. It was August. The stretch up 101 can be trafficky and gross, though beautiful at the right time, and crossing 37 to 80 and then going through Vallejo and Vacaville was thick and East Bay hot. Then 505 turns into nothing: the malls give way to dry brown and the stretch up the valley is long, monotonous, and hard. The chatter and jokes gave way to long silent stretches. Agricultural machinery. Trucks. Matthew was done at Lincoln and what came next seemed very sketchy. Katy was going to Bates in Maine. Karen liked BU. Where we all were right then was like a weird time-out, or weird time back in. Dry fields. Bad country radio.

The afternoon had grown old when we finally broke free of the flat dry heat, and sped up I-5, on a clear and summer twilight, and just about where the freeway winds and climbs up from Lake Shasta. Karen plugged a tape in the stereo and blasting like the wind through the open windows at maximum volume came an old favorite, the Modern Lovers’ ‘Roadrunner’. It’s a hard song to sing along with, but we totally did. Karen leaned on the horn over and over. Shirts came off and were waved out the windows at the truckers we blew by, lungs were shredded as we shouted along with Jonathan. Fucking wild mercurial glory. Karen rewound several times. We were pouring through the coming night, I was with my best friends, and it was okay to stupidly yell ‘Radio on!’ over and over, on our way home. Maine and Boston and NY and Santa Cruz did not loom, just ponderosa woods and a long stretch of I-5 and unreal twilight.

Later that night we stopped in Weed, and the Hi-Lo for dinner, and drove on further, until we followed some signs up into some campsite in the pitch dark, which we found, when we woke up, was on the shore of a dried up lake. And later that summer, which we spent dorking around Portland as usual (downtown, shows, movies, parks, working, driving), Karen gave me a 30 minute per side tape. The label had been torn off—it had clearly been repurposed—and the case was just clear plastic. One song, over and over, like six or seven times per side: ‘Roadrunner’. I’ve been listening to it a lot again.

The Modern Lovers, 'Roadrunner'



Katy T., Matthew H., and I in the Hi-Lo in Weed, California, 1989. Photo by Karen Schmeer

Humanities

There was a new class being offered and it was absolutely a big deal. Something like seventy students, juniors and seniors in one room. Three teachers (two of them I remember well: the whip smart—in a sometimes scary way—Sally Schultz and Shelley Washburn, who benignly tolerated my overwrought teen-age poetry long enough to be an encouragement). Humanities: history, literature, art. Intimidating: ancient Greek tragedy? Roman Empire? Dante’s allegory? And the people: all of the straight-A masters who blew through calculus as sophomores; the ‘pseudo-intellectuals’ as I believe they self-proclaimed; the cool publishers of ‘Death Quarterly’ (Garrick, Steve, Glynnis, et al.). Impossible set of variables. The room was in a corner by the auditorium, near a remote alley of lockers, free of the blaring orange metal and gray-brown linoleum of the main halls and the gladitorial social combats. Ah, Lincoln High, Lincoln High, for you we live, for you we die. This room had a wall of windows towards the field, and inside, risers, with rows of terraced chair-desks. Stadium seating for the cerebral circus. The whole idea—once it began—was intoxicating and scary. Actually understanding the cultural and intellectual history of Western Civ (or at least the thumbnail sketch) was much different than the kind of intense immersion into single authors or books that passed for being smart. Sure, I could talk about ‘Moby Dick’ or Jack Kerouac, but thinking about how Antiquity bubbled back up in the Renaissance and its slide into the Enlightenment and how Ovid or Petrarch or Shakespeare or Keats were related or how Gothic contended with Rococo or Romanticism seemed impossible. How could anyone get Fragonard? By the way, it was very cool to make fun of Rococo in Room 189 that spring—the fat girl on the swing flipping her tiny shoe off was too much. And the whole course was too much sometimes: between my magpie like darting attention to girls and my systemic devotion to R.E.M. (fostered by Alice Vosmek and Joanie Menefee), all of the high culture, real culture, serious business was beyond me, like a Golden Retriever staring at a passing satellite. I would learn it, but getting it seemed beyond. And I assumed beyond any of my friends. Impossible.

Either before class or after, as the desks rumbled and backpacks rustled, Karen pulled me aside. Ostensibly, I think we were planning a movie or me coming over (I always went to Midmar—she never came to Montgomery), but she had a Walkman in hand and really wanted me to hear something. Assumption was that it would be something I knew from the vaguely 80s college rock genre. O, how cool we were. Or it could be one of the bands that Karen liked but I had not yet (or never would) acquire a taste (Frank Zappa is the stand-out in this category). Not even leaving the room, most people had filed out, she smooshed the headphones on me, rewound the Memorex tape and intently stared at me as she pressed play. It was piano, classical piano. It was fast and contrapuntal and complicated, starting and stopping on a dime and then driving. It kind of freaked me out because I didn’t get it: mathematical, but grand, precise, wordless—how could anyone play that quickly, correctly, gently and forcefully at the same time? And I didn’t get how Karen could have found out about this stuff, listened to it, liked it, and liked it enough to have a favorite song that she had to have me listen to. Impossible. It was short. She rewound. ‘Again?’ I thought we should leave the room. ‘So?’ I remember telling her I thought it was kind of crazy, but that I didn’t get it. Chihuahua and Halley’s Comet. We planned to go to her house later on. There she showed me the brown LP sleeve, with a baroque coffee table, a jigsaw puzzle of wild haired Beethoven, and some guy, Glenn Gould’s name in 70s font. She must have borrowed the record from her dad or picked it up in a bin downtown somewhere. She did that. She pulled that stuff all the time.

The piece she played by Glenn Gould (later, after the Gould movie came out, she got really into his Bach recordings, but it was Beethoven back in the 80s)

Beethoven 'Seven Bagatelles Opus 33 No. 7' played by Glenn Gould


She didn't play this one--it wasn't the one that she was obsessed with in Humanities--but it is the one that wrecks me now that she is gone

Beethoven 'Ten Bagatelles Opus 126 No. 3' played by Glenn Gould