i.m. Tim Dwight, 1958–1994
Not a mea culpa, not an apology, but an admission:
there are three minutes in the middle of “Sweet Child O’ Mine”
that still, for all the chopped cotton of the passing years,
for all the muddled victories and defeats of a lifetime,
for all the grief and madness and idiocy of our days,
slay me, just slay me. They sound like how it felt to be alive
at that instant, how it was to walk the streets of Manhattan
in that era of caviar and kill-hungry feedback,
the Big Apple so candy-coated with moral slush and easy money
even the corporate heavyweights could fashion no defense
against decay, all the homeless encamped over cold coffee
at Dunkin’ Donuts on upper Broadway, even McDonald’s
become a refugee camp for victims of the unacknowledged war
fought beneath the giddy banners of corporatization
as the decade spun down its drain of self-delusion. Where
do we go, where do we go, where do we go
now? What a glorious passage, a shimmering bridge
embodying everything rock and roll aspires to be,
heroic and violent and joyous and juvenile
and throbbing with self-importance and percolating
with melodrama and thrilled and scared by
its own anthemic power, by the kid-on-a-scooter freedom
and the hill a lot steeper than it seemed at first glance,
what the hell, rust never sleeps, live and let die, etc., etc.
And whenever I hear that song, become, now,
a classic of the genre, even as it suffuses me with nostalgia
for those days of malt liquor and BBQ chips,
it gives me cause to think of Axl Rose in his purgatory
self-assembled from paranoia and Malibu chaparral,
wrestling exotic demons, kickboxing with Jesus,
binding and gagging his women with duct tape in the closet,
much the way the heavy metal mentality of the times
seized and militarized his music, sonic warriors
blasting “Paradise City” at the Panamanian dictator,
“Welcome to the Jungle” for the Waco cultists,
Slash and Axl circling the globe, leveling ancient civilizations
with power chords and teenage emotions,
from the Halls of Mentholyptus to the Shores of MTV.
And if Axl appears almost Nixonian in his anguish,
at least he is not Kurt Cobain, forsaken and baby-faced
as J. Michael Pollard in the episode of Lost in Space
where Penny goes through the mirror to a realm
of demoniacal toys and that metaphysical bear-monster,
cousin to the troglodytes that chased Raquel Welch
up the cavern tree in One Million Years B.C.,
death in its many B-movie guises, so much gaudier
than the killers that walked the streets among us,
the needle and the dollar, the gun and the rose,
and the last time we saw Tim, at Bruce’s place
in the Hollywood hills, he recalled the first time
we’d all hung out together in New York, Halloween, 1985,
provincial immigrants tossing back bourbon and tequila,
Tim holding a bundle of Ecstasy for some dealer—
a drug I’d never even heard of—which instead of trying to market
he handed around with cavalier generosity,
packets of powder doused in the tall cans of Colt 45
we drank as we walked the streets of the Village
amid the disintegrating drifts and dregs of the parade,
and finally a midnight show at the Ritz, some L.A. bands
the girls adored done up in black-light fluorescents,
dancing and stage-diving, jubilant and hallucinatory,
getting home somehow on a subway serviced
by orange-vested trolls before waking to cold sweat
and hangover candy and a day of recuperation and the desire
to do it all again. Because there was plenty of time,
we knew, or thought we knew, or were simply too stupid
not to know we didn’t know at all, time to waste or kill
before the crashes and commitments that would doom or save
or cast us back into the tide pools of the westering continent.
Tim was still laughing, hauntingly frail, but what I thought
looking out across the canyon was how badly
Los Angeles had aged, wanton and careworn,
like a faded child star sickled with cosmetic surgery scars
still dreaming of a comeback, still scheming and groveling,
as if to prove that nothing really dies in America
but is merely removed from the shelves for repackaging,
coming back crisper and crunchier, cholesterol-free,
as even Axl Rose is coming back with Tommy Stinson on bass
and a sideman wearing a KFC bucket like a Spartan helmet,
and I wish that I could lay the blame for Axl’s fucked-up life
on the feral orphanhood of the Pax Atomica,
the alienation of lives begun with no expectation of completion,
it would be simpler that way, for all of us,
but the world did not end in a vortex of toxic fire,
the flying fortresses have returned from the stratosphere
and the missiles endure their nightmares mutely in dark silos
and we have no excuse but the arrogance of power for our narcissism
and no solace but the merciless amplitude of our din.
And that was it, the moment had passed,
another gem or tear for the cut-glass diadem of passing years.
Someone cranked the music up, someone made a toast
to the pool lights and glitter. And then the Pixies
begin some riff-rife, fully surfable rifle shot of a theme song
announcing the ironic revival of our childhood
swaggering like Tony the Tiger atop a station wagon
at an Esso station in 1964, Tony the Tiger
back from the dead, eldritch and transcendent—
rise, the immortals!—
rise to grasp the silver handles
of the casket in procession before us, Ultraman
and Astroboy and Mr. Clean and the Man from Glad
and Josie and the Pussycats
on the Rose Bowl float with their God
Bless America batons atwirl
and then—
huh—
cue the horns,
take it down, break it all apart
and start from nothing to garb our nakedness
with sheets of beaten gold,
cozen us with grieving blossoms,
anoint us with honey in the dry riverbed,
and tell me,
O great devourer,
O master of thorns and ashes,
where do we go
now?