I HAVE THE BAD HABIT of reading while I drive. Recently I was pulled over in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, behind the wheel of a pale-green Fairlane 289, a copy of True Life Memoirs of Bazooka Joe open on my lap. Stirred by the erotic misadventures of Mort, Joe, Ursula, and Zena, inspired by the defiantly surreal Bazooka Joe fortune which appeared as the bio’s epigraph (“There are more grains of truth than there are stars in the ocean”), I refused the breathalyzer, waived my rights, kicked the bastard police dog in its yapper, and—for good measure—mischievously let slip that I’d plotted to kill the officer’s tiny daughter with the intention of making his scrubbed peasant wife the mistress of Mort. In True Life Memoirs, this is approximately the attitude which resolves Bazooka Joe’s every ethical dilemma in three frames or less. In real-life America, the strategy was less successful: handcuffed into the backseat of a Carroll O’County squad car, I helplessly began urinating all over their plastic seats . . .
Was this a dream? As I recount this to you, such unexpected defiance on my part adds just one more implausibility to the whole affair. By then my experiences had begun to seem so far-fetched that I could scarcely believe any of this viewable footage was True Life. Out of nowhere, a telephone had jingle-jangled and Romanov forces were offering to pay me to write up the Montreal pop show of a band called the Posies. I had been Fed-Exed vouchers for transportation, with which I rented a 1966 Fairlane. It was while traveling to the border in this very Ford that the corrupting influence of the bubblegum kid and his turtlenecked buddy expressed itself on my lap. “Watcha gonna do,” I sneered at the cops, “throw me into rock-crit jail?” This attempt at humor became oddly self-fulfilling. It was precisely what they proposed to do.
Blithely perched on a bluff overlooking Berlin, New Hampshire, the Hunter S. Thompson Penitentiary may represent America’s most secret institution. The inmates (those I met) are primarily Canadian journalists. Ordered once upon a time to race down to NYC for the heart-stopping debut of this or that entertainment marvel, they had unintentionally disobeyed the arcane local traffic ordinances. Soon thereafter, they’d found themselves behind bars. Some have been there for many years, still serving out infractions they can’t fathom, dispatched from long ago to cover a show by Paul McCartney & Wings at Madison Square Garden or Dylan/the Dead at Meadowlands. Occasionally, too, that rare overzealous American gets tossed in.
The food is the inedible slop you’d expect, which hits the cafeteria tray sounding, looking, and—yes—even tasting like coffee grounds soaked in ketchup. It gets served three times daily and, though the food never changes, the name of the meal does. During my tenure at this place, my jailers alternately titled this same slop: “Lester Bangs’ Brains,” “The DeRogatis Blowfish Platter,” “Carducci’s Big Balls and Butt” or the ever-tantalizing “Hunter’s Mystery Catch.”
Locked up in a room with a chair, cot and toilet, I spent the rest of the Romanov voucher on bribing my guard, who reluctantly garnished my living quarters with a cell phone, a Discman, and the last CD single from these Posies. I then rang up the office and read my critique of this Posies show. I reviewed it in glowing terms, leaving out the parts about me not actually making it to Canada, about me calling now from a speed-trap stockade in New Hampshire; nor did I bring up Bazooka Joe and what that wisecracking pirate boy had made me do.
I closed my review in the following manner: “The Posies, two new Beatles named Auer and Stringfellow, have made four CDs in ten years. It has become the central mystery of the ’90s rock world how a band with such melodic gifts (not to mention studio mastery, big record company backing, talent at all instruments, ‘imminent breakthrough’ stamped atop every composition) have failed to become a People cover story. Like a center-seeking Clinton, these Posies unapologetically capitulate to reigning tastes, adapting their handsome materials to screechy grunge arrangements on cue in 1993 (Frosting on the Beater), more recently dressing the songs in once-again fashionable retro outfits (Amazing Disgrace). Whatever dues they still owed were completely paid up over the last several years, as they’ve humbly been playing the background roles of the two dead characters in Alex Chilton’s latest musical revue, thus permitting the so-called reunion of Big Star. Must they serve you eggs in bed before you crack your lids to acknowledge them with a shrug of thanks?”
In jail I confirmed, through lonely lights-out morse-code messages we tapped on our stone walls with crude metal implements, that the failure of these Posies to hit it big haunts the rock critic in all of us (or at least all of us in there). In that way, the Gonzo Hotel (as we brothers called our compound) was one unendurably long music seminar, a camp bursting with pop-market theories and cultural didactics—opinions, opinions, opinions! Since radios and periodicals were strictly forbidden, the all-important rock news came disseminated via a grapevine of rumors. These info scraps were taken very seriously. Men stood up suddenly at meal-time to herald the impending liberation of gay music in phrases which were in turn flowery and apocalyptic. The etymology of the word “skronk” was hotly plumbed. Ritual fistfights erupted in the exercise yard between trip-hop enthusiasts and those more inclined to regard all jungle and techno off-shoots as musical dead-ends. A Courtney Love apologist sliced open a Kathleen Hanna enthusiast with the sharpened corner of a cassette case, while a trembling Cobain scholar mumbled sorrowfully nearby.
I could stand almost none of it. The guard had reclaimed my cell phone. Late afternoons I placed my chair atop my toilet against the southernmost wall and, standing tiptoe on the wobbly arms, tall as I could go, with a hand balanced against the ceiling, I could just peek out the window. Berlin sat in smoke some miles off, trimmed in neon. The light glazed everything in the same goopy pall, the sun not so much going down as moving aside.
A few feet from my window stretched the upper branch on a tall winter tree, stupid and lifeless. A shopping bag fluttered in the branches, snagged by the tree’s bony fingers. New to the situation, the bag was full of personality, confident of an eventual escape. Any strong wind might set it loose. The bag accepted all drafts and gusts without qualification, puffing grandly to its full size, bravely expecting both nothing and everything. I was reminded of my feelings for Marie.
And meanwhile, I sank deeper into a meadow of Posies than any person ever. I had, after all, just the one CD single to listen to—the song was “Please Return It,” a manly yarn by Stringfellow.
Now, focused in and stripped of ordinary ornamentation, I embraced what I’d always suspected but never had admitted to myself—that though I (like the rest at the Gonzo Hotel) grew besotted with the smell of all things Posies it was half the band I most truly liked—the vulnerable John Lennon character, this frayed Stringfellow, pinched of nose and congested with meanings, and not the voluptuous-voiced Auer. Auer’s songs gleamed more deliciously at first but came to depend on tired power chords and snarl-free vocalizings. In the end, they provided the hollow comfort of emerging victorious from a chocolate-eating contest. Having only this one song in hand, I no longer needed to feel guilty (as I so often did at home) for advancing past the Auer tracks, in effect editing him out of the group in favor of the urgent hayfever enigmas wheezed from this knotty Stringfellow’s thin windpipe . . .
“Please Return It” starts with a command expressed so tentatively that the voice wobbles, unable to sustain the note. The singer, uncomfortable, wants back an “it” he’d really rather not address—A letter? His heart? He sounds rattled by how much the singing of this song is taking out of him; the more he says, the more he becomes required to say. He shakes his head. Look at the way we act, the things we say; so many factors, contradictions. “When we live the life we live, it’s never ours completely. Not completely.” What he’s asking for, he continues, it’s not so very much. It’s quite easy. “Put it back,” he recommends. He even suggests what he’ll do with it. “I can burn it.”
This last image ignites a fueled clarity to his thinking. He seizes suddenly on what, during the most honest moments of a denial-filled day, might register as his main complaint: “When you let me live my life, you didn’t do it completely.” It’s badly put but we know what he means. He is reminded of other impossible things he could stand to have back—“Like the year I spent comparing me to you; please return it.” How would he like these things returned? Swept dutifully from sight; “Like a servant, like a sewer. Please return it. Please return it.”
The song assures no return of anything, no definition of what’s being asked, no trust gained. The song regrets the bother and embarrassment of its own existence. Which is pretty much where—following an inadequate attempt to convince us there’s an upside, there has to be an upside—Stringfellow leaves us, in a prison of shyness and discomfort, after around two and a half minutes of music.
What had I learned? For several days I listened and waited. I gauged the window to be too narrow. But I discovered the ceiling panels could be pushed aside, and once above them I plummeted down a vertical air shaft and rolled free at the base of a tree. It was the tree outside my window. The plastic bag, still tangled on the treetop, was now frayed and tense, a limp remnant. It flopped resignedly. I waved up at my window, up at the emotionally trapped song I’d left behind in that cell, then headed down the hill to Berlin . . . to return to the land of Bazooka Joe.