In the winter we get relentless blizzards, in the summer we get lake-effect humidity that creeps in from the shore and hangs on the air like a wet wool sweater, like now, first heat wave of the year. There’s no AC in our house and my parents have their ridiculous cooling method. Around eleven a.m., or earlier some days, they close every window to a crack, draw the blinds and turn on three or four strategically placed fans. I seek relief at the East-Towne 5, a crumbling make-out palace out on Gull Road. Had my first real kiss there. Nora Reperton, beautiful times. Now the East-Towne shows second-run dollar movies and I’ve been known to see two a day during the hot weather. But no movies today, no nothing. Today I have band practice.
My band is called the Judy Lumpers.
I drive shirtless through the miserable early afternoon, WQXC on the radio good times and great oldies he digs soul she goes for rock and roll pow! quicksee one-oh-one point nine. It’s stifling, even speeding, with all four windows down, and every song is a comment on the weather.
Hot town summer in the city back of my neck feelin just like a heat wave burnin in my heart ’cause there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues.
Wheeler’s driveway is empty. I walk through the garage and into the kitchen, where a girl I’ve never seen before looks up at me from a book. She’s at the small table, bathed in thick hot light and swirling dust and, fuck, I’m shirtless, skinny white chest and three or four long black hairs sprouting from each nipple. Before saying a single word, I run to the car and grab a T-shirt, already damp under the arms by the time I return.
“I’m Vim,” I say.
“Helene,” she says.
And our conversation ends.
Her face so pale you could touch it and make a ripple, shoulder-length brown hair parted in the middle, green tank top, faded cords, red low-top Converse, great name, great voice. Her eyes so light blue and calm they make me feel like I’ve been talking too loud my whole life. Down the hall the toilet flushes and a second later Wheeler appears.
Wheeler’s been into some shit lately. In the spring he showed up at school wearing a dress and got suspended. He fought back and the next thing you know he’s on the front page of the Kalamazoo Gazette, posing in a flowery thrift-store dress on the Gull Lake High School lawn. There’s a church about every eight feet here and the Christians went apeshit. Wheeler got called every name in the book by dudes with necks like stacks of tires and even in subtle ways by a couple of the more god-fearing teachers. The controversy blew over but he never returned to school. His dad, the lone parent, tried for a while, made him watch a series of tapes called Where There’s a Will There’s an A. But Wheeler had lost the will. These days he sleeps till noon and designs tattoos, one of which is on his body, an elaborate dragon creature with a tail that goes up his back and curls around his neck.
“Hey Vim,” he says, “meet Helene. She’s kinda my girlfriend.”
His nose is all red and inflamed and I see he’s got a nose ring, a gold hoop in the middle, like a bull. “When did you get that?” I say.
“What?”
“The fucking thing in your nose.” Why am I suddenly angry?
“This? Yesterday. What do you think?”
Wheeler walks over and Helene puts her arms around his legs and that’s when I notice her scars. I lean against the sink and try to see other things but there’s only so much to see. A couple minutes pass and I’m just here, stupidly hearing their love whispers, until finally Jake shows up, carrying his bass.
“Thank god,” I say.
“What’s happening?”
“Just this.” I point at the lovers. “Jake, meet Helene.”
“Who?”
“Wheeler’s kinda girlfriend.”
Helene waves. More scars on her forearm. “Oh no, more than kinda,” Wheeler says. “I’m just going by what you said, Wheeler. You said kinda.”
“That was then. Now we’re full throttle.”
“Since when?”
“Since this,” snapping his fingers, “right this second.”
“No, this second,” she says.
“No, this second.”
On and on and then they giggle, actually fucking giggle, like we’re ten years old and this is recess. I hate these idiotic displays of new love.
“Nice nose, Wheeler,” Jake says.
“Thank you. I did it myself.”
Then he kisses Helene and the tiny wet smack reverberates like a gunshot. “This is all very great,” I say, “but are we practicing?”
THE BASEMENT IS OUR UNIVERSE. Drums, amps and four-track on one end, shredded couch on the other. Almost no light. A lot of the ceiling tiles got busted out the night we had a show here and this repressed minister’s son went crazy with his two hours of freedom and pogo’d his head through all of them. There’s a single poster on the wall, Marc Bolan coming at you with a Les Paul.
We do our set, then dink around on some new stuff. Jake borrows my guitar and plays a weird dissonant octave chord high up on the neck. Wheeler kicks in with a heavy backbeat. I shrug. “It’s okay.”
“What do you got?”
“Not much. I’m working on a few things.”
“So let’s try this.”
I sit on the couch and listen for a minute. The song evolves into kind of a Sonic Youth rip, spacy verse bursting into a random, sludgy chorus. It’d be tough to find a vocal pattern for it unless I aped Thurston Moore’s awful hipster poetry.
I’ve got no new songs. I’m trying to get past just ripping off J Mascis but it’s tough. Early Judy Lumpers was Dinosaur Jr Jr, me whining in couplets under a three-chord wall of noise with an over-the-top solo at the end. In a way I can’t help it. You’re Living All Over Me is a biblical artifact on a par with Nevermind or Doolittle. I listened to it so much it went into my bones and blood. And plus I’ve got the setup for maximum fuzz and volume, the Strat, the ’72 Twin Reverb, the Rat pedal, all on permanent loan from my Uncle Bro.
The jam stretches out, Jake and Wheeler fully into it now, nodding at each other before the changes. I get up casually, pretend to look in my guitar case for something, pretend to not find it. Then I go upstairs.
HELENE, STILL AT THE TABLE, STILL READING. I pour a glass of blue Kool-Aid and sit across from her. The kitchen floor vibrates with guitar and drums.
“Hey. Why aren’t you playing?” she says.
“Sometimes they get into their thing and I have to take a break.”
I look at her arms, the scars, some fat and purple, some thin and almost grayish-looking. My first thought was suicide but now I see that none are on her wrists, which for some reason makes me take them less seriously.
“So what are you reading?”
She holds up the cover. Naked Lunch.
Ah the Beat Phase, I’m thinking. Mine came freshman year, when I learned that young Jim Morrison had been a fan of On the Road. I smoked a lot of pot in those days, dropped acid in physical science class. I pledged allegiance to the road by occasionally walking home from school. Then my poems, long stream-of-consciousness meditations on sex, death and revolution.
“I read that,” I say.
“Yeah I’ve read it a few times now,” she says. “Wow. There aren’t too many books I’ve read more than once. Maybe No One Here Gets Out Alive.”
“I read this one pretty much daily.” She puts the book down, twirls a lock of hair around her index finger. “It’s my bible,” she says.
Her what? Bible? Junkies? Anuses, jissom, dripping cunts?
“I feel a religious connection to every page,” she says.
“What about every paragraph? I would think that’d be the true test of a spiritual work. If you don’t feel a religious connection to every paragraph, you’re probably being short-changed.”
“Oh yeah? And what are you probably being, funny?”
My cheeks and neck are instantly aflame. She’s silent then, staring with those blue eyes, and the silence is heavy for some reason and I have to keep talking or drown so I say: “I wasn’t going for some hilarious zinger, if that’s what you mean.”
“Well then what were you going for?”
“Maybe just a halfhearted grin, out of pity. Something.”
This creates the tiniest of smiles, which I devour. Her face opens up through the curtain of hair in new and beautiful ways. Something is happening here.
“You’re not from Gull Lake.”
“No, I go to Loy Norrix.”
“So how do you know what’s his name?” I point at the floor.
“You mean Bixby? We met at the park.”
She means Bronson Park, downtown Kalamazoo, where the punks, skaters and rejects from all the different schools in the area commune. You see them in droves, after school or on weekends, doing railslides in the parking lot or sprawled on the lawns in stoned, angry heaps.
I lean in and stare down her scars, no shame, like if I just stare long enough they’ll open like little mouths and say how they got there.
Scars with voices telling their funny tales of mutilation.
Please baby, tell me what happened.
Let our scars have a conversation.
The basement jam drones on. I take a thousand baby sips of Kool-Aid just to have something to do. Helene looks back at her “bible.” I look too. There’s writing in the margins, whole passages starred and underlined, a note in large print across the top of pages 156 and 157. I Was Just Saying I Love You. Not Saying Any Longer. I Am.
The heat is unreal, like the heat of all summers forever in this one room. Thinking makes me sweat. Skin like flypaper. Looking at Helene makes me sweat.
I see a drop of sweat at the top of her cleavage and wait for it to drip.
If it won’t drip, if it won’t fall, I’ll walk out in the yard and throw rocks at my heart. I’ll fucking get in my car and smash into a tree.
And god must really care, even though he doesn’t exist, because the drop falls, it disappears between the tits, and a door in my mind kicks open so loud it almost makes a sound in the real world.
She glances up, catches me staring, and smiles.
And just like that I’m saying her name over and over and dreaming of stealing a kiss, a quick one, and the inside of my head is all painted with visions. Helene and I ascend through clouds into atheist heaven on a water bed with angel wings.