Not
Available in Stores
Kim
Shable
Radio is in the hands of such a lot of
fools
trying to anaesthetize the way that
you feel
Elvis
Costello, “Radio Radio”
The
Playlist:
1.
Birthday- The Beatles, White Album
2. Moonshadow- Cat Stevens, Teaser and the Firecat
3. Eye of the Tiger- Survivor, Soundtrack, Rocky III
4. I’ll Get You- The Beatles, Past Masters Volume 1
5. Space Oddity- David Bowie, Space Oddity
6. American Pie- Don Maclean, Starry Starry Night
7. Put On a Happy Face- Cast Recording, Bye Bye Birdie (The one with Dick Van Dyke)
8. Roundabout- Yes, Fragile
9. Betterman- Pearl Jam, Vitalogy
10. Closing Time- Semisonic, Feeling Strangely Fine
11. One Week- Barenaked Ladies, Stunt
12. Summer Girls- LFO, LFO
13. Minority- Green Day, Warning
14. Crunchy Granola Suite- Neil Diamond, Stones
15. Me and Bobby McGee- Janis Joplin, Pearl
The
liner notes:
1.
Birthday
Every year since forever, forever
and ever, my parents and I do the birthday dance. Or I do it and they watch. We
do it on our birthdays and Jesus’s, because we can
think of no better way to celebrate the birth of our Lord than to flail our
limbs like starfish out of water. The dance is loosely choreographed, not
unlike the Dance of the Unstrung Christmas Lights my father performs every year
around the totem of our plasticine tree with its
metal trunk. There is a lot of bouncing in the birthday dance. When John Lennon
asks if we’re going to the party, party, we bounce in affirmation—hell yes, Mr.
Lennon, we are going to the party, party. The parts where we do not bounce are
free-form; my parents take that time to breathe, and I cut a space for myself
in the world with arms like snapping rubber bands. Our faces are serious. It is
our birthday.
At seventeen I try to shoplift a
copy of The White Album. Our LP is
worn smooth from overuse, and my birthday is coming up. I have a cassette, but
it won’t be the same—“Birthday” always comes from a round thing, not some flat
plastic cracker with unreliable spools. I put the CD in my shoplifting bag—navy
blue and printed all over in raised pink letters:
I am caught by the screeching
sentinels that flank the doors and the cashier takes the CDs away and tells me
to run. I do.
2. Moonshadow
When I am three I am a star in the back seat of my
parents’ car for two minutes and fifty two seconds when, as if I had come
preprogrammed from the factory, I sing “Moonshadow”
along with the radio like I had written it myself. Later my parents try to make
a recording of me singing it, holding a mic up to my
face as they puff on their Newports and Salems. I can’t do it. I need Cat Stevens to back me up,
and he isn’t home.
Thus begins my singing career.
By the time I am seven my parents
cannot stop me from singing and I am tape recording myself in the basement,
singing “Yesterday,” singing “In My Life” and “Mercedes Benz.” One night after
dinner I sing “Take Me Home Tonight” too loud, drowning out Eddie Money and his
back-up singer, a woman with no name whom I idolized and imagined with jet
black hair cut at a crooked angle. My parents introduce me to the headphones,
telling me to sing silently. I perfect the art of lip-synching, and sing aloud
only in cars and at camp sing-alongs. I lose my voice
in this way.
3. Eye of the Tiger
One day in kindergarten me and Tony run away before day
care. We hide behind a dumpster when the short bus that will take us to Little
People’s University goose-steps into the parking lot behind
My dad comes and gets me and I get
spanked and then the next day in gym we do the obstacle course. The gym teacher
leans against the wall, fingering his whistle, as he plays a forty-five of “Eye
of the Tiger” again and again, watching five-year-olds climb through tires and
jump caverns of plastic snakes. He loves obstacle course day.
By the sawhorse under the basketball
hoop I call Tony a spaz and say I won’t play with him
anymore. That afternoon in the treehouse I touch
Michael Carlotta’s tallywhacker.
4. I’ll Get You
Except for
“Birthday” I hate the Beatles and I hate John Lennon and I hate them so much
that when my parents play their albums on our stereo I go into the bathroom and
flush the toilet until they are done. They play the Creepy Beatles, the ones
with the sitars and the sounds of piggies in the
background, the ones that made people kill movie stars.
One day I am home sick from school
and watch a movie starring Matthew Broderick where he mounts a float in the
middle of downtown
Now I am seven and living somewhere
else, going to a different day care center where they make us all sit in a
wading pool and call it swimming. For Christmas my parents bought me a small
tape recorder, and I take it to day care with me, sitting in a rocking chair
next to a window, listening to the Beatles sing “I’ll Get You” over and over,
mouthing the oh yeahs
and feeling the hand claps in my twitching wrists. The other kids love Bon Jovi and running around and splash in the wading pool with
the zest of freshly hatched ducklings. Next to that window, I feel very, very
old.
5. Space Oddity
My favorite food is astronaut ice cream, little
freeze-dried blocks of Neapolitan ice cream in a shiny silver bag. I imagine
myself lounging couchlike in space, conducting tests
on the stability of cute diapered monkeys in zero-g, a piece of the strawberry
side of the block fizzling out on my tongue.
Then the Challenger blows up. The
same day there is a mild earthquake in
Three years later: I am playing
Barbies on the floor at Wendy’s house and her parents are listening to the Bad
Oldies station, the one that plays drug music and advertises Grateful Dead
concerts. Our Barbies are robbing banks and cutting their Ken boyfriends into
small pieces, flushing the remains down the toilet. One of Wendy’s Barbies used
to have eyelids that fluttered, but they have fallen out, and now she is
lidless and grotesque. All the other Barbies hate her.
“Space Oddity” comes on the radio,
and David Bowie’s Major Tom goes crazy in outer space. He is going to die
there. For a moment my Barbies and I are free floating, a vast black enveloping
us, dotted with white track mark stars. I begin to cry. I am afraid of outer
space.
6.
American
Pie
At a dance at band camp I sit on a
wet wooden piling overlooking the mammoth hill we march down every day to get
the practice field and brood. My friends play Egyptian Rat Screw and they won’t
teach me because I am slow at learning card games, so I imagine myself
somewhere else, or here, the only one here, this whole camp mine, with its soda
machines full of Cherikee Red Pop and its dirty
swimming pool. I spin around with my arms helicoptered
out, Sound of Music style, and yodel.
I throw my trombone in the lake.
“American Pie” comes on, and it’s
the last song, they announce, so get your flashlights ready and lights out at
11. I scan the concrete patio for Eddie, the man of my dreams, Eddie who has a
solo this year in “Killer Joe” and who keeps his buck shoes whiter than
everyone. I ask Eddie to dance and he agrees, and we move around the concrete
like a man leading a cow. When Don McLean sings that the marching band refused
to yield, everyone cheers, and Eddie lets go of my sweaty hand. The song is
four minutes longer.
No one will ever love me.
8. Put On a Happy Face
When I am fifteen I try out for Bye Bye Birdie, and am cast as the
mayor’s wife. The director is new, obviously hasn’t seen the star turn I made
as Dolly in Annie Get Your Gun or
Mildred in Done to Death. I am a
firefly that will one day light Broadway. I try to explain this to the
director, Bernie Keister, a balding, Claymation architect who wears patterned sweaters and
wrinkled pants. When I ask why I wasn’t considered for another part, he tells
me I am unfit to act on stage with the other kids.
Later, Megan confronts Bernie Keister’s beastish wife in the
hallway by the pay phone. Megan used to hate me because in the seventh grade I
was a hitter, a smacker, but I had changed, and now we are best friends
forever. She asks Chris Keister, she of the Cleopatra
eyeliner and blue eyeshadow reaching for its brother,
the sky, why I am so frowned upon, why I am not welcome on their stage. Chris Keister tells her that I am too fat and ugly to be in
theater, quite frankly, and it’s time to come in for notes. Megan and I escape
and sit out by the trailer where we learn Algebra II, making up songs about how
Bernie Keister stuffs his pants.
8. Roundabout
I go out with John for ten months because he is the only
boy who will go out with me, even though he told me that my Homecoming dress
reminded him of something a Klingon had worn in one
of his favorite episodes of Star Trek:
The Next Generation. For Valentine’s Day, he gives me five dollars. I
decide to break up with him.
But then I don’t, and he takes me to
the movies and I don’t want to go, don’t want to be there, so I won’t be. I
roll down the window and sing “Roundabout” into the wind, the words
crystallizing in the gingerale air of early March.
John tries to talk to me about the upcoming jazz band concert, but gives up.
The song is eight minutes long. We don’t go to the movie. During the ride home
I sing the song again but he makes me keep the windows rolled up, so I stare at
the hideous birthmark on his neck, the one that looks like a thousand pimples
have tackled some unseen ball beneath, a mountain of zits stacked like a golf
ball display. I will break up with him, but then I don’t, because he’s the only
one interested, the only one who has ever been interested except Michael
Carlotta and Barney, and he kisses like my grandma, dry and fast, but I don’t
care. He is nice to me, nice to everyone, a nice guy, a shame to lose. I will
keep him as long as I can stand it.
Ten months after Homecoming I dump
him over the phone because we are too different. He calls back the next day but
I am distracted—someone has blown up the federal building in Oklahoma City, how
can you talk to me about love when terrorists are peppering our land with
evil?-- and we never speak again. A few months later, I see him getting a blow
job in the front seat of his car from his new girlfriend. Me, I have no one.
But it doesn’t matter, because that thing on his neck, it could see inside me
like a fly’s million-surfaced eye.
9. Betterman
At the last game of the season we play “
In the fourth quarter Mr. Brookhart sends us into the school for hot cocoa—it is ten
degrees below zero, wind chill, and a tuba player’s lips have frozen to his
mouthpiece once already. Karin approaches, her maroon coat a squelch of
coagulated blood in the green tide of our uniforms. Her mum is gone. I give her
my car keys and tell her to wait, turn the heater on, get warmed up, we’ll take
her home. When the game is over Megan and I find her in the back seat, crouched
low. Karin, I say, you are very bad at hide and seek. We pound on the windows
and hoot, we can see you, dumbass, we see you. She doesn’t get up, and when we
get in the car, we find she is sobbing.
Her father, you see. Her father
wants to kill her. He said so himself when he took away the mum. The pin is
still in her coat; he ripped the mum right off it and threw it on the ground
and stomped on it. He tried to get her sister’s, too, but she took off.
We take Karin to my house, turn the
radio on to ease tension, and Eddie Vedder sings
about a Better Man, and how this woman he’s singing about, she can’t find one.
When we tell my parents what happened my father gets out his gun, one he built
himself from a kit in the seventies, and waits by the door, just in case. My
mother tells us to sleep at Megan’s to throw Karin’s father off the trail.
This is the only time I think
someone might kill me.
10. Closing
Time
In college, now, the boy I love turns on me.
He turns on me at a football game,
and I have the same trombone, only now my uniform is white and purple and looks
like a doorman’s. He and his roommate turn on me together, like an alliance, a
game of Risk. At pre-game, before the Star Spangled Banner, we are planning a
trip to
So I stop eating and become an
expert at fake eating, pushing my
spaghetti around the plate, bringing forkfuls of it to my mouth and then
stopping to tell a joke—what did one
ocean say to the other? Nothing, it just waved—and then setting it down
again. Then I stop sleeping and stay up at night e-mailing him, the boy I love,
and his evil roommate, evil Rich. What
have I done? What can I do?
I have a paper due about the week I was born—is Disco
dead? the Times wonders—and a paper
on Ellison’s Invisible
On a Monday morning, the papers due
in two days, I wake up like a race car starting. All of my hair wants to jump
off my body, strains against it, and my heart wants out too, tunneling through
my chest. I call my mother and my professors and take a week off school, taking
drugs to open my stomach and calm my nerves. The Wigs on Wheels woman comes to
outfit my mother, who has breast cancer, with a Gidget
wig that she swears will look just like her own hair once they get it in her
color. It does, and I begin to believe in miracles.
11. One Week
On New Year’s Eve I get really drunk and fall asleep at
seven o’clock. When I wake up at two I find Denise in the hall, holding a
vomit-stained comforter at arm’s length away from her. I did not go to sleep at
seven, she tells me. Or I did, but then I got up at ten and came into her room
and barfed on Amy’s bed and on the floor, then mouthed all the words to “One
Week” when Barenaked Ladies were on Dick Clark’s Rockin’
New Years Eve, even the part where he goes really fast about how much he loves
vanilla shakes. Then I made Kelly come into my room and try on all my clothes
to see if they made her look fat.
I bet it was hilarious. I wish I
could have been there.
12. Summer Girls
Evil Rich dies in a construction accident the weekend
after we all go to Canada without him. I eat snails while we’re there. The boy
I love has patched things up and moved out of Evil Rich’s room, calls me every
night from home. At graduation, I sat by Evil Rich in band and he leaned over
and whispered “Next year, your life is going to be hell.”
“Let’s just get through this song,
and we’ll never have to see each other again,” I tell him. And we don’t because
he dies.
The boy I love and I go to his
funeral and play in the jazz ensemble, “Woodchopper’s Ball” and some
Confederate dirge There isn’t a casket, just pictures of Evil Rich on his bike,
or with his euphonium. I cry more than the boy sitting next to me, because Evil
Rich, he was my friend once, too, and I am shunned by the others in the band,
because I was an enemy of Saintly Rich, Bigger Than Jesus Rich. His parents
shake my hand. They remember my name.
The director talks me into joining
the band again in a low voice. “We are short one trombone now,” he says.
On the way home we listen to a CD
single of “Summer Girls” the boy I love bought for a quarter when the best
radio station in town went out of business. When the lead singer says “When I
met you I said my name is Rich,” we don’t sing along. We listen to the song
about a hundred times, and then we stop at a restaurant in Clyde, Ohio, where
some people once said they saw Elvis. I ask the boy I love if he’s ever loved
anyone and he says no.
13. Minority
I drive home to vote in my first presidential election
and feel I am changing the world, carefully preserving my I VOTED TODAY sticker as its edges curl on my sweatshirt. Then I
drive back to college and go to work on the newspaper—Gore Wins, then Bush
Wins, then no one. We change the front page three times.
After I finish I go downstairs to the college radio
station and make out with the DJ, just because he will and I will and it’s late
and we have no leader of the free world. When I drive back to my dorm I play
“Minority” loud because that’s what anarchists do, play their music loud and
make out with ugly boys whose hair smells too clean. This is what you do in a
country with no president.
In the bathroom I brush my teeth three times. I want to
rip my tongue out of my head and mail it to the DJ in a box—because of him it
tastes like beer and feels rough, like a cat’s.
I wonder if our new president, whoever he is, will enact
a health care program for people who sully their tongues in the name of
patriotism.
14. Crunchy Granola Suite
The apartment I live in after I graduate from college is
always dark, and that’s the way I like it. Katy and I watch Survivor and make fun of the Fat Man in
the Little Shirt who lives across the street from us. Katy and I were afraid of
each other when we first met, but now we live together because it’s cheaper
that way, and we have fun. We listen to Neil Diamond and cry on the kitchen
floor sometimes, dance others. We play cards and hunt men and don’t write
anything.
The time we spend in the apartment
is cold and smells like asphalt, and we play “Crunchy Granola Suite”
constantly, so we can hear Neil Diamond yell dig! We listen to it the night that Dr. Haven comes over for
Cornish game hens that we cook ourselves, and he makes us put in a Neil Young
tape instead.
Dr. Haven does not dig.
15. Me and Bobby McGee
On a night in July I learn to sing the blues from a sockless loafered man, French
teacher by day, spiritualist by night. He plays the guitar and I sing “Me and
Bobby McGee” and then he makes me sing it again, and tells me that it gave him
a boner. I don’t think he’s serious, but I’ll sing it again, anyway.
When I sing it, my lips move like Elvis’s
hips and I close my eyes up until they wrinkle and I bellow. I wail. Tonight,
on this picnic table, I am Janis
Joplin. People gather around and clap when I’m done and I blush, and I want to
sing it again, but we move on. He plays “American Pie,” he plays “Closing Time”
and “Moonshadow.” He knows my soundtrack and it’s not
even available in stores yet.
When he puts the guitar away I go
back to my room and don’t sleep. I hum “Me and Bobby McGee” with my eyes shut.
I wonder what it means, this stirred up feeling in me. I wonder if something
has been knocked loose, if I am doing the right thing by leaving this place of
song and beauty, if I am not a writer but a torch singer, meant to be draped
over a piano with a lazy microphone in hand and a red spangled dress. I wonder
again if I am doing the right thing, if this man with no socks and a guitar
with his name tattooed on its neck like a beautiful thug knows something more
about me than I do.
These are the things I wonder. But I think it just means that he taught me how to sing the blues.