Rain Out

Gretchen and I had been living in Oxford, it was 2001. When our time there was up, we blew all our deposit money on mailing our crap back to the U.S. and changed our flights to stopover on the East Coast. It was June, and hockey was on television at Gretchen’s sister’s house in Larchmont, New York. Amidst the family visit, we decided to borrow a car and drive up to Boston and visit Karen. The complexities of East Coast highways (make that turnpikes, parkways, and so forth) seemed challenging, but we managed the drive. And waiting was Schmeer: we hiked up into the Somerville apartment and balanced our bags between the perilous piles of books, papers, photographs. Karen made us coffee in the golden sunflowered kitchen and we plunged into the catch up part of the visit, before emerging in the Thirsty Scholar (I always made her go there because I was flummoxed by the miracle of having a pub downstairs). We were pronouncing it, ‘da terstee scole-air’, our fake Irish accents sounded like fake pirate accents. This is how we made plans. One of the plans was a going to Fenway for a game. However, we had no tickets and there were none to be had when we called. We decided that we would go anyway and scalp tickets. A day game. We rode the T to Fenway, wandered around with plenty of time. Getting into a bar was a heroic effort, as each and every seemed packed with game dayers. Finally, we crowded into a slot behind a door, pressed up against the window and leveraged the bartender into drinks. The sky was heavy, the light gray, and surges of thick mist came and went. It didn’t look good, but we walked to the park and started listening to the scalpers. A wiry guy had three tickets that were pretty close on the third base side. I felt very illicit—looking this way and that—but Karen was worse: ‘you have to do it, Matt’ and she sidled off out of view, like we were in high school and I was buying certain health products or a DeBarge cassette single. I fumbled with the money, had to ask twice how much, and didn’t get change. My worry that the tickets were fake melted as we went inside the park and milled around underneath before heading to our seats. The rain was falling and game time came and went. We sat, just under the roof above, talking, watching the rain, waiting. People started to leave, but we stuck it out until the announcement over the P.A. that the game was called. We filed out, slowly, and back to the T, disappointed and moist. Back above the Thirsty Scholar we started thinking about dinner, but Karen made some kind of fruit juice slushy vodka concoction. We started making a list of the songs that were huge hits but that we hated with bilious venomous disgust. We sang them. ‘Let’s Hear It For the Boy’, ‘Who’s Holding Donna Now?’, ‘Zanz Kant Danz’: it was despicable and reprehensible. The rain fell some more. Further blender related beverages. Maybe we should get take-out. ‘Rico Suave’ and Four Non-Blondes. Utterly repugnant and loathsome. We could just go downstairs to the scole-arrrrrrh! ‘One Night in Bangkok’, ‘Walkin’ On Sunshine’. We never made it to the Sox and we never made it out that night. I told Karen she should return the tickets for the refund and it turned out that the scalper messed up and she came away with forty extra dollars. Missed the game, got wet, made money, suffered the bad music juke. It was such a good trip to Boston, we did it again a year or so later.

Macy Gray and Erykah Badu - Sweet Baby

Underground

At some point in the last few years of high school, late junior, maybe even senior year, Becky had this plan. A photo essay. I think all of the Mort acolytes in the photography classes had a final project of some kind and Becky, rather than a tour of Guatemalan sweater vendors and street musicians at Saturday Market or the tedious inevitability of a series on her grandmother’s hands, invited Karen and I to take part in this adventure-slash-photographic essay. The Plan. At Lower McCleay Park under the bridge of Upper Thurman, there was a trail that led up into the forest. I would walk there sometimes with various friends, sometimes with Joann. The trail led up to an odd mossy stone structure whose roof had long since disappeared. Kids—freaky ones that freaking freaked me out—would say that every Halloween, there was a witchcraft mass there and black cats would be sacrificed. I would venture to guess that mainly there were just a lot of vaguely odd sketchers getting stoned. Before the trail though, just beneath the bridge, the stream that tumbled out of those woods went below a huge and tightly spaced wooden grate. From there, it plunged into a tunnel: essentially a huge sewer pipe. This tunnel, it was thought, ran under Portland to the Willamette. Becky, Karen, and I—daring souls that we were—were going in and down. Becky would take pictures as we scrambled. It would be dark, strange, wet. A daring hair raiser? A parable of loss and recovery? A metaphoric plunge into a trickling unconscious? D: all of the above.
Becky, Karen, and I parked in the lot under the bridge. We had a few flashlights each, relatively sturdy shoes, and our usual 80s grasp of 60s hippie-wear all about us. Looking back, I think costumes of another sort would have been more appropriate. To evoke the binding strictures of oppressive conformity, K and I sprawled out on top of the jail-bar-like slats of the grate. The wrinkle of my blue flannel shirt pressed by the parallel bars undoubtedly told of society’s pressures as well as our heroic rebelliousness. Then it was time to go down. It took some squeezing, but we fit through a gap between the wood structure and the carved out ground, and we climbed down some rock under the vast cage-like grate. More pictures. My favorite was when I pressed Karen to be in a ‘meaningful’ pose. Slouch like the world makes you sad. Hang your head at the weight of it all. Let your hair cover your face. You are an allegory. I had just figured out that word, allegory. Literal, historical, typological, and the inexorable mystic swing into the divine. And I took to calling Karen, ‘Allegory’ after that. I even painted a t-shirt that proclaimed her as an ‘Allegory’ whenever she wore its sloppy too brightly colored letters. The thing is, in the moody, world-weary pose, communicating the sadness of an uncaring universe, on Karen’s black vest, she still had her chipper, ‘Hug Me! I Gave Blood!’ sticker. This was overlooked in the high drama of the photo shoot. With the introductory photos taken, we went in. The cement tunnel was round, not quite tall enough that I could stand up straight, smooth along its interior, and one had to walk in an awkward straddle because of the small steam of water running down the center floor. As we walked the bright blank white diminished behind us, and soon it was impossibly black. If I stretched my eyes wide, and concentrated intently, I could still see nothing. There was a complete, whole, and entire absence of light. The sound was water running, and the unsettlingly loud echoes of our voices. Despite being deep underground, in a small tunnel, far from anyone, my voice sounded like a bad a.m. radio with the volume all the way up inside a tin box: everyone could hear me, everyone knew. We trudged along, talking some, laughing at stupid things, turning on our flashlights, but their light was fearsomely feeble: shining out ten or twenty feet ahead revealing only exactly more of the same: cement pipe, dark water, circle of abyss. I have no idea how far we went or how long it took, but we came to a place we had heard about, ‘B Wetz’. At this point, the round tunnel dropped off a small ledge, and the new lower drain went on, but about waist deep full of water. Scrawled on the wall in crude graffiti was the place-name, ‘B Wetz’. We stopped there, and like backpackers surveying an alpine ridge, we ate trail mix and took snapshots. I knew people who said they had gone on from there, but not us. That was all there was. We all were ready to go back, and we began the slog. The air was dank and only gave way stintingly. My muscles ached from walking splayed out, my battery was dying. Eyes ached from trying to see. It was a long while before the small disc of gray white showed, and longer still until we got out. Coming to the forested brightness, the air’s density gave way ethereally; it was scented with doug fir and sap. Green as pea shoot Sundays. The open space released the clanging echoes from around my head. It was warm and it was spring. We shimmied out and skipped like third graders on the path back to the car. Put all our bags and flashlights and things in the trunk. Sat on the bumpers in the sunshine looking up. Almost directly under our feet, somewhere down there, was that pitch-dark hollow concrete passage, the small slip of water sliding by.

Camper Van Beethoven - 'She Divines Water'

Photos by Rebecca Clements

Memor et vivax

This small post is deviant from the usual self-indulgent recollections here. But I am not sure if or how many people even read this, so it's probably fine. It's been a few (too many) weeks, and mainly because over the last month Paula and I have been planning--from our various long distances--the memorial for Karen in Portland. We've now come out on the other side, and everything went very well. We had lots of help from awesome people in Boston and New York, and in Portland too. In the finally emerging sun, skylights flooded, at the excellent BodyVox, quite a few (more than expected) people came together and remembered and celebrated Karen with words, music, film, photos. And we had a reception afterward with her favorite Portland pizza and three kinds of pie and lots of friends and family.
Selfishly speaking, it was intense, exhausting, satisfying, and awfully sad. I threw myself into the memorial with increasing intensity as it approached. On the Friday, as I shuttled between the printers, big box stores, photo processors and more, I started to wonder why I was doing all this. And I stopped cold when I realized that no matter how much energy, time, money, thinking I threw at this, no matter how hard I worked, none of it would get her back. It was a sickening feeling. I cringed at myself. But then I just kept going.
And it all came together. Alexis' art and idea gave us a theme. And between Alexis and Peter, old childhood Portland came to life. Nicky shredded gorgeously. David was brilliant. Mary and Paula played and sang heartrendingly. Leah mixed the sweet and funny in such a way that I felt like I was back in the Somerville kitchen. And then it was over. I saw lots of old friends, remembered Karen in numerous ways, ate Escape pizza, drank a beer, gave away flowers and food and pictures. At the end, I was really tired. The bright open space was clean. There were about eight of us left: Paula, Miska, Leah, Alexis, Gretchen, myself--maybe more. We were done. It was over. So we put on James Brown, the Brothers Johnson, the Beastie Boys and we danced. And I knew a little better why I did it.

A few people asked me to post the program--we ran out--and so here it is. Others have asked me to post what I said, and I will soon. (What I'd really like is "To Be Schmeerish" as my new modus operandi). For now, here's the program. My thanks to everyone who helped make it happen.
Link to program below.
Karen's Portland Memorial and Celebration Program

Faintly Falling

Karen and I were in Ms Finch Miller Jones’ ‘British Literature’ survey. This was one of the three English classes I was taking my senior year. I was typically scatterbrained and scrappy, reading Carlos Fuentes with Lenore Allison, Thomas Hardy in BritLit, being a teaching assistant for Gerry Foote, parsing the lyrics of ‘Graceland’ and trying to read ‘Orientalism’ with Sweeney. It’s a wonder I passed any classes. The Brit Lit class was hard, serious, not to be trifled with, the real deal. It had that stentorian glint that the supremely canonical picks up with age. Karen and I commiserated, by turns angry, sad, disgusted, enlightened by one early scene in one book. At one point, in Dickens’ ‘Hard Times’, Sissy recounts her father beating their dog, Merrylegs.

-

‘And your father was always kind? To the last?’ asked Louisa
contravening the great principle, and wondering very much.

‘Always, always!’ returned Sissy, clasping her hands. ‘Kinder and
kinder than I can tell. He was angry only one night, and that was
not to me, but Merrylegs. Merrylegs;’ she whispered the awful
fact; ‘is his performing dog.’

‘Why was he angry with the dog?’ Louisa demanded.

‘Father, soon after they came home from performing, told Merrylegs
to jump up on the backs of the two chairs and stand across them -
which is one of his tricks. He looked at father, and didn't do it
at once. Everything of father's had gone wrong that night, and he
hadn't pleased the public at all. He cried out that the very dog
knew he was failing, and had no compassion on him. Then he beat
the dog, and I was frightened, and said, “Father, father! Pray
don't hurt the creature who is so fond of you! O Heaven forgive
you, father, stop!” And he stopped, and the dog was bloody, and
father lay down crying on the floor with the dog in his arms, and
the dog licked his face.’

Louisa saw that she was sobbing; and going to her, kissed her, took
her hand, and sat down beside her.

-

Out by the fountain in Lincoln’s back courtyard, Karen flicked leaves off the concrete edge, and we worried over Merrylegs. This minor scene in a very long book is the only one that stuck. And we talked about why all of our pity was heaped on a dog amidst the ceaseless barrage of sorrow in Dickens’ novel. And in talking about Merrylegs, we found that the real dagger to the heart, the real yank that left gaping holes, was that Merrylegs licks the face of his brutalizer. A small epiphanal moment that reminded me of Tara Colleen B.’s poem about how she would still want to kiss Jason Applebottom even if he shot her dead. Karen tallied it up as another example of how fucked up love can be.

In the Brit Lit class, we chose authors. Hubris led me to Joyce. I read and reread ‘Dubliners’ because it was one of those books that gave the impression of so much going on, and yet in the actual perfect and spare prose, all that I thought was going on was absent, materializing from the open white spaces between the words. Only the last story in the book was satisfying in its slip into the cosmic moving from the self-conscious nitpickery of manners and quips and details into some vast opening of dark and perilous regret, loss, realization, and doubt flecked by snow and song and lamplight. ‘The Dead’. Karen decided we needed to see the new movie, John Huston’s adaptation of the story that came out in December. We talked about this in class, making a plan. Another student in the class, Renee Robbins, also had Joyce, and somehow she was worked into the plan. A Friday or Saturday night. Dry and cold in that chalky winter way that Portland sometimes gets. Karen and I drove way out to pick up Renee. She seemed to live impossibly farther south than Karen lived impossibly west. With Renee we returned to downtown Portland and the still glossy, bright and angular KOIN cinemas. In my neophytism, the place still smacked as some kind of upscale high-brow place that showed movies for opera aficiandos. Escalators. Glass. The scent of popcorn suppressed probably by some elaborate robotic system. Instead, essence of hotel lobby and German chrome. Carpet. But we saw the movie and it was very good, though much is lost by not being inside Gabriel’s both insecure and arrogant head. It all comes together in the final reverie as he looks out into the swirl of flickering and vanishing snow and reflects on the world’s transience. We walked quietly to the car, but we started talking more when the heat came on, the radio came up, the city sped by. Did she always love Michael Furey? Would Gabriel’s epiphany mean anything to him? Can people really love that long and tough and deep? Just before dropping Renee, we were driving on a straight flat stretch crowded by trees on either side. Thump! Karen slowed and almost stopped. ‘What was that?’ She pulled over. She asked me to look. I climbed out and walked back and found a crumpled gray heap, a possum. There was no blood. And the possum was still breathing, short flashes of breath. I was afraid to touch it or move it. I went back to the car and told Karen. Renee had to get home. As we drove away, Karen was crying. ‘I killed an animal. I killed an ANIMAL.’ She put the emphasis on the last word, as if killing something else would have been better. I looked back and told Karen that the possum was crawling away, to the side of the road. I wanted her to feel better. We dropped Renee, and driving back, we could see no possum in the road. Karen was still sad, telling me that she never wanted to kill an animal. An animal. She told me that she was going to drive by the possum spot extra fast, so we wouldn’t see it if it were dead. Okay, I said. She floored the gas and I think we must have been going about 50 when we passed the possum spot. Back on normal roads and normal speeds, I was (and still am)—as Gabriel—casting about my mind for words of consolation and finding only lame and useless ones. So I lied and told Karen that the possum was gone. ‘When we went zooming by, I saw that it was gone. You didn’t kill an animal Karen. It’s okay. It walked into the trees. It will be okay.’ I am not sure she believed me. It snowed the next day, and I drove all the way back down there to the possum spot. I didn’t find the animal. There was just snow, and brittle frozen grass, and the rush and spatter of cars rushing on.

U2, 'I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For'

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

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.