“I swagger the injury shield cloak, a flock of hummingbirds circle the same place I spoke.”
-Yak Ballz of the Weathermen
It’s after midnight in a mid-November moment and your roommates are not around – perfect time to do a little dance and we venture out with high hopes of increased intoxication, loud music, a wooden floor, and a disco ball. We speed down the highway in dark blue steel, singing to radio eighties tunes thumping through the speakers. After arriving in Montclair I race you to the door in heels but we are rejected because you are outfitted in a baggy white tee and beige boots. The next stop is a downscale last resort inside a Holiday Inn where we are permitted not to worry about the clothes we wear. There is a wedding party tipping like glasses on the dance floor where you and me add four feet to the festivities. At a safe distance, dripping sweat and electric we dance like the ghosts of lovers.
Your drunkard roommate, my lover, who does not dance increases our party to three next time. Blue steel rolls the wrong way down a patch of one-way asphalt to a destination in South Jersey where you and me stand still, as close as can be without touching. We lean against a wall erected to enclose nude femininity, climbing up to slide slowly down smooth silver poles. Your roommate is instantly captivated by sinusoidal lines and she leads him into a more private darkness. You tip your cap to shade your eyes and whisper into my ear for hours, shielding the pain of reality.
The injury shield cloak becomes worn as you carry the weight of recklessness through time. You are hit by a car every year but assure me that you will not die in this manner, that you are invincible. On the side of the highway you are struck by a van while changing a flat tire on a winter night. Your chest plate is fractured and when you have difficulty breathing you do not complain, instead you drink prescription vodka straight from the bottle to numb your pain. You and me go for a drive not knowing where to go and end up strolling through the closest place to home you have ever known. In frozen winter darkness you reminisce about being hit by a car while riding your childhood bicycle down a steep incline and through an intersection just beyond the chainlink fence enclosing tombstones. You reveal two more stories, one of robbing a convenience store with a childhood friend and another of orchestrating a mugging. You say that your life is devoid of meaning and emotion but that you have become a vessel, allowing others to live through you.
Through the slightly grimy window of a moving Barcelona taxicab I recognize you in graffiti and later at the bar I order a glass of sangria using the only Spanish phrase I know. In the opening sentence of her memoir, Written On the Body, Jeanette Winterson asks, “Why is the measure of love loss” (9)? I pose the same question and you answer, “The measure of love is loss because once it’s taken from you, you realize the depth with which you actually felt.” Within memories of a trip to Barcelona are messages from you, “a couple of hours after you left I smelled your perfume on my coat and frowned….” Prior to my departure you warn me about a Nazi presence in certain areas of the city, most certainly if the smell of soap is detectable on the streets. I believe your claim to be silly until I sight a red swastika spray-painted onto a wall in lush gardens overlooking the Mediterranean, even though I smell no soap.
Back in Jersey during a State of Emergency I venture out to pretend I am a rally racecar driver on virgin white sparkling back roads. I scoop you up and shift blue steel to an abandoned parking lot. Right foot heavy on the gas pedal in first gear I slam the steering wheel hard left while pulling the e-brake – you shield your eyes and scream. Quickly sliding rubber tires under the weight of steel, force the flash of a low white storm, falling softly to form violated little piles in the shape of a figure eight – you tell me that you love me.
Another one of your roommates is addicted to crack and you express excruciating pain due to your inability to help him, but what about your life? It is one thing to be a friend but you can only do so much for a person before accepting that each person is individually responsible to take or not to take action. “People think what I do is a joke, or what I’m about is a joke… well recently I’ve gotten back into the studio, and whoever feels it or doesn’t can suck my dick. I’ve taken a new approach to life and it involves me not givin’ a what about opinions. You’ve been right… do you… here’s an example,” and there is one track on an underground rap album where your voice remains.
I notice you walking across the street as I lounge on your now ex-roommate’s porch but I offer no goodbye and you pass by silently. Days later on ghastly Monday afternoon blue steel creeps by three police cars parked outside of your house, lights flashing red, hyper-white, and blue voices choking on tears. By the end of the week I am hugging your mother and she recognizes my name though we have never met. If you had been dressed that way the night we danced we would not have been rejected at the first door. It does not look like you.
In my mind you shine, wearing the brightest smile, brilliant and kind like no other. Take cover under your hood, six feet under in wood. Boots and baggy beige, white tee underneath – Layers – you shine in my mind, you smile like no other, and in my mind you’re mine.
Works Cited
Cage. Hell’s Winter. Track 11, Left it to Us (with El-P, Aesop Rock, Tame 1, and Yak
Ballz of the Weathermen). Brooklyn, New York: Definitive Jux Recordings: 2005.
Winterson, Jeanette. Written on the Body. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.
