Wake up this morning at 6 AM, Sunday morning. Something always meloncholy and wistful about Sunday mornings. Nothing ever happens on Sunday mornings...
Theres an almost unbearable sadness to it all. Like something is happening (life) that is so unbelievably incredible, but there is just something missing, some important, mysterious piece that prevents you from appreciating it; prevents you from making sense of it. Maybe thats why I cling to these past memories. Its this sense of something important slipping away -- my life, pissing away -- while something important goes down the drain. Something missing. Always. What IS that tantalizing something? I want to go back in time and do it all over again (and THIS time I'll get it right!)
I have 2 odd memories of Katie. 1995. I'm in Arcata. The town is still fresh and exciting. I hadn't yet walked down the same five streets, five hundred times and realized there was nothing there. So my mind was excited with possibilities and potential. I'm walking past the parking lot of the Co-Op, by the Ride Board. And I pass a hippy school bus full of Dead Heads and Rainbow Children. And they're associated in my mind with: KATIE!! So they fascinate me. They're the in-group I want to join. Later, a year later, I'll look at them and see grubby , dysfunctional bums. But, at that moment, they had a certain magic, as if at any moment, Katie would come walking out of that bus, in her sexy, hippy gypsy Rainbow clothes, with her hemp jewelry and her smile of love and sex, and she'd dance over to me and hug me and love me. Forever. And I scrutinized each face of every hippie street person. But none of them were Katie. It was a sunny day, in my mind's memory. And then, little Hippy Boy Keith comes out of the bus -- not Katie but a FRIEND of Katie's. A fleeting connection to Katie. And I ask him how she's doing ("She's back at her Mom's house in Southern California, working as a waitress at Denny's. She wants to quit her job and go on the Dead tour..."). Dying for every detail about KATIE!, even as I'm playing it cool, as always. And then Keith is gone -- grubby little rip-off Keith with his golden locks and angelic face, like a pint-sized, 24-year-old Robert Plant from Long Island. And I walk down the sunny, pointless Arcata street, alone as always.
And yet, somehow, that mundane little memory, that fleeting, hazy image in my mind, sums up that whole year, 1995. That whole period. Like when a song comes on the radio and it transports you back into your past like a Time Machine, and all the memories and moments come back...
And my other Katie memory from that period is: I'm in the shower in the morning, that crude, cement little shower stall -- no bigger than a box -- on the second floor down the hall from my lonely hotel room at the Greyhound Hotel. Somehow I remember the feeling as being sweaty, feverish, even as I'm in the steamy wet shower -- the hard water pounding on my chest. And the weird thing was, in the year I lived there, I would never see any of the other tenants on the floor, even as there were 7 or 8 of us. It was like a ghost town. A haunted house. You wouldn't even HEAR them in their rooms. We were quiet to the point of being the walking dead. Ghosts. Ashamed to be seen. But I'd be in the shower every morning, preparing to go out on a date with a girl who was never there. And, for some reason, I'd often think of Katie when I was in the shower in that pointlesss lonely town of Eureka at the end of nowhere. And I'd wonder where Katie was at that moment. And what she was doing. And why I was here and she was always somewhere else, a thousand miles away. My one heart's desire. And somehow it was her fault that I had ended up here. She could have lifted me up to superstardon (if only). And instead I had crash-landed to this welfare hotel in the middle of zombie nowhere. And I would think about Katie and the whole dream of being loved and being cool and successful and all the missing pieces in my life, as I stood in that lonely concrete shower stall.
And somehow, that banal memory sums up that who period. Autumn. The end of 1995.
And now I think of this morning, Sunday morning, 6 AM when I woke up and started thinking about Katie and I wrote these words. Was it just 4 hours ago? Or 40 years? Its all gone...