by Joseph Mattson
SIDE ONE
[This excerpt is intended to accompany a soundtrack by Six Organs of Admittance, a clip of which can be heard in our Listening Room here.]
Here I was, doing ninety on the Santa Monica Freeway with a quart of whiskey shoved into my crotch and my dead neighbor in the trunk. It had come time to leave Los Angeles. I'd had a dream the night before, the dream: God told me to shove a sawed-off slug-barrel shotgun into my mouth and pull the trigger--Why not? he said--for the world was going to end in a week, on July 4th. I'd gone to tell Hal, my neighbor, about it, as he had a critical obsession with both guns and the Lord, when I found him there slunk into his favorite chair like wet clothing stripped fresh from the rain, already stinking of mold and turning blue, with a pen clutched in his right hand and a piece of paper lying at his feet with only the salutation '' Dear Magg,'' shakily scrawled across the top.
Jamming into the pale iron face of heavy fog sailing inland from the ocean, I couldn't see fifteen feet in front of me, but I could still see Los Angeles in the rearview mirror, the glowing towers of the heart of the bitch gleaming through the hard black of night, and I thought, Soon this fog will cloak you, you poor, shameless woman, you poor city plagued with hunger, you poor insatiable Our Lady, the Queen of the Angels, and I'll be gone. You took him, and though I am not surprised, I still cannot believe it. Hal wasn't just a neighbor, he was a friend. He'd paid his dues. Belief has always been for noble fools, I concede. I uncorked the whiskey and shoved the barrel of that into my face. It was June 28th. I had six days.
I went west, as I always seemed to do when leaving a place behind. The problem at hand was that one can only go west for twenty miles from downtown Los Angeles before hitting the continent's end, and no boat awaited me there. I didn't have a plan. I just knew it had come time to go. I couldn't bear to let Hal rot into anonymous oblivion in The Amigo, the ramshackle hotel we lived in that decades ago was a toy factory warehouse. If dreams were once born in the belly of that old building's former incarnation, then they sure as hell went back there to die now. No, too many unsigned bodies had been hauled out of that place already. Disaffected former wives surrendering to alcohol, abused and saintly prostitutes, zombie junkies with no discipline, general head-cases fried too long under the unforgiving Southern California sun, vets, the discomfited scarred and obese, unknown blues legends, and a score of forsaken others. The Amigo was first-rate for the crestfallen. Sometimes, refuge is not a pretty thing. Hal and I ended up there for a similar core reason, dressed-up in different circumstances: we were each wholly alone in the world after losing something we couldn't afford to lose, which opened a hole so deep in our lives that absolutely nothing could possibly fill it.
Hal had spoken to me about Maggie just once by name, but every single part of his existence was inspired by, and reeked of, her.
''Real love is the one thing that might give credence to the existence of any of our Gods,'' he'd say, the thinnest line between cold brutal torment and hot ecstatic joy, beyond any other cruel or beautiful thing of nature. Hal had lost his many years ago, on a crusty old farm in southwestern Michigan, in an incident, he contended, that betrayed--and spilled--the warmest of blood. Hal was the first person I ever met that had killed somebody.
''Forget the universe, fuck the stars, and to hell with the ocean and the miracle of conception. Screw the mountains, too. They all have nothing to do with God, boy. You understand? You listening?”
He was in his sixties and looked not a day younger than eighty, yet somehow remained strong, weathered to what I once believed was the point of indestructibility; resigned with boundless sorrow, sure, but unable to die. Until yesterday--presently, literally, a lifetime ago. Beliefs get shattered and then the fools contemplate, so it goes. Yeah, I listened to Hal, he was charming enough, but as for understanding, I had my own ideas about God.
I laid the thumb and three fingers of my left hand on the steering wheel as if studying a splayed, taxidermied game bird nailed to a board. My index finger was missing, and the absence of it glowed in the dim warmth of the dashboard lights like an old ghost, dead but soulful still. I found the whiskey once again and plugged it hard, wiping my mouth with the back of my good hand, missing trickles of wet gold tributaries running through my two-year beard. Before corking it, I reached down between my legs and in the rim of the bottle rubbed the nub of where the finger once grew, brought it back to my lips, sucked on it down to the knuckle, and asked aloud, '' Finger, you waiting for me in heaven?'' I half expected the ghost to reply, '' Heaven, no. Otherwise,'' but all I got was the sound of the air screaming through the slight crack of the window. All I had ever wanted to do in the world was play the guitar, which was execrably ruined when I'd lost the most crucial digit used in my craft just before Hal came into my life and I moved in next door to him.
If by chance God was only pulling my chain about Armageddon, I'd merely turn a bruised, ripened thirty-three years old in just a few months, come Virgo season, and I somehow felt older and younger, dead and alive about it all in the same breath. Yet who am I to say what it's like to feel the thus-far-untread paths, older and dead? The testament to such things was stiffening into a transmuting J-shaped carcass, wrapped in an old woolen blanket, curled around a spare tire and countless emptied quarts of motor oil in the trunk of the car. Hal was also the first dead person I'd ever touched.
Yet in that moment I did not fear the body. No, for the first time in my life what I feared was leaving. Leaving Los Angeles, specifically. Gone would be the long bleached avenues of warm disquiet, the whispering seven-story palms towering with wise endurance above the mashed commutes of countless human insects anonymously stitching paths across each others' sordid lives, nestled below the caustic trademark layer of smog that governs the puppet show, where hope and despair collide in intersections of the same blue smoke that aspirations are made of and then burned to. And with it all, the sanctimony of place. I feared losing the city with neither indifference nor nostalgia. I'd simply gotten too used to it. In its familiarity lived my fear. Los Angeles is tough and scary, and undeniably beautiful. Nothing if not polarized, the city is mean yet forgiving, dirty yet lovely, full of darkness in its harsh burning light, full of light in its cool darkness, all laid bare without apology or expectation, almost human. Assholes are assholes unabashed, angels are angels undefined. It is the most honest place I have ever known. And for better or worse, it had become my place. I had come to know her in all of her shortcomings and promise, in all of her despicable ugliness and secret joy, and simply in knowing her, I was afraid to leave. I feared even leaving the smog and the tired lungs it'd given me. In the right kind of light, at 7pm in the spring, 8 in the summer, 6 in the fall, 5 in winter--at twilight's turning--as the sun lets the hills go and moves on to beat down a firm, fiery fist upon the sea, the smog refracts the most brilliant, enveloping, illuminating mix of orange and purple--a sight both overwhelmingly apocalyptic and hopeful. The color had come to define what it was to know exactly what I was now afraid to admit I was leaving: home.
It was the same color that broke through the tattered blinds of Hal's window in occult shafts as I rolled him up in my mother's old wool blanket, the same light that followed me out to the car heaving with the burden, hours before. The blanket is embroidered with a giant wolf's head and three geese chasing the sun, originally given to me years ago, in a time long before I had lost the finger and other things, and the jolting image of the beast's barren jowls wrapped around the ass of my main man, my patriot, as he lay face down, legs bent backward moments before I slammed the lid against his calcifying backside, was all too fresh in my brain.
I bore down on the gas, ignoring the unsure rattling of the engine and the sporadic, nervous flashes from the beams of other travelers slicing break-neck through the fog, openly apologizing to Hal every time I heard his body bounce up with a dull thud against the trunk if I failed to miss the jarring potholes or scanty asphalt fillers lining the four lanes of road like open wounds and petrified scabs. I gargled down more whiskey as if it were piss and blood, necessary and bitter. The smell of bile creeping up.
Ten more minutes into the fog and she was gone, the lights and the distance obscured by the mist, the mirror filled with nothing but wafts of gray and black, and I still didn't know where I was going. I rolled the window fully down and wet my skin with the vapor, my brain whetting into a razor fever by way of the drink, the ocean's breath on my face, a shitty old compact Honda divided by the dueling mortality of its cargo, blasting into the unknown along an L.A. stretch of highway I'd gone down a hundred times before. I reached into my pocket and thumbed Hal's unfinished death letter. Though not a suicide, it was a death letter just the same. I reasoned that if I didn't think of something soon before the 10 West bottomed out at the feet of the Herculean Pacific, I'd simply drive straight into it and bury us both.