White Knuckles

In spring, some pretty boy singer shot up on smack and blew his head off. I’d been keeping this VHS that I taped various news segments onto. I started doing it years back after Budd Dwyer stuck a .357 Magnum in his mouth and blew his brains out on live television. Sledgehammers to the Berlin Wall, Tanks piled up in Red Square during the August Coup, Ruby Ridge, the ’93 World Trade Center bombing, Waco, and I especially got a real kick outta watching news footage last October of Yeltsin’s tanks shelling the Russian Parliament, so onto the tape that went, and I decided to add Kurt Loder announcing another Kurt’s death on MTV.

“Again?”

“Yeah, you hear?”

“I’m so fucking devastated.”

She was dead inside. Kat’s wardrobe is basically a really bad Tank Girl cosplay, and I fucking hate her for it. She dangles a set of keys and I’m afraid to ask, so I save myelf the effort.

She prattles about how the drumer she’s sleeping with who looks like Tommy Lee, but most certainly isn’t Tommy Lee, offered her his beach house on Long Island while he’s touring this summer. Six whole weeks. I inquire no further.

Her Chevy’s been through a few demolition derbies and after almost forty years is on it’s last fucking leg. Plus, I’m pretty sure it’s the car from Two-Lane Blacktop.

“‘Just color me gone!’ Remember that one?”

“That was the GTO, not the Beatniks in the Chevy.”

Either way, Warren Oates was the fucking man.

I mention this because the whole hour-and-a-half drive to the East Hamptons, in between jokingly stirring up sexual tension by reviving our usual When Harry Met Sally routine, I’m constantly picturing the damn thing breaking down on route 27 before we can pull over onto the shoulder, but like a Frankenstein made in a Chinese sweatshop, it barely held together.

I can’t stand Don Henley and when “Boys of Summer” comes on, I switch off the radio. When I switch it back on the Lemonheads cover of “Mrs. Robinson” plays and we both breathe a sigh of relief.

The place on Georgica Beach is almost exactly Eric Clapton’s house on the cover of 461 Ocean Blvd., ’cept this one’s three stories instead of two. On the way, we pass this place that looks familiar, but I don’t place it immediately.  

The house had a tennis court with chewed-up balls, an empty swimmin’ pool we’d throw empty bottles into, watching them smash against the bottom, pool room with missing 8-Ball and warped cues, guest house, greenhouse where all dead plants have been spray-painted green, eleven bedrooms each with walk-in closet, half a them empty, TV’s, various sizes, in almost every alcove, two wall-to-wall glass cases, one with VHS tapes, the other, CD’s, the latest stereo equipment from Japan, attached or welded to almost every electronic. With the exception of marble kitchen and bathrooms, every other surface is bleeding fucking chrome.

There’s a Walkman in most every other bedroom nightstand, and I swipe one.

I hop onto the bed in the master bedroom, Doc Martins still on, fumble for the remote and switch on the box. Kat flops down next to me and for a while we watch Ms. 45. I get a kick outta the scene where Zoë Lund tries to blow a dude’s head off with a .45 on a bench, but she forgets to cock the hammer and he grabs it from her, only to cock it and top himself instead.

I leave her on the bed and go downstairs to paw thru the glass cabinet with all the CD’s.

I’m surprised to find this toolshed, who has a complete Elvis Costello collection, also has New York Dolls and Millions of Dead Cops. I grab a Bikini Kill CD and give it to Kat as a present. I grab a Dead Kennedys disc for myself.

I also find a case of cassette tapes, and pocket ‘Superfuzz Bigmuff’ to go with the Walkman.

We slept in the master bedroom. It rained most of the day and we kept inside, drinking Schlitz, Pabst, or battery acid for all it mattered, on a screened-off porch, sometimes glancing into the room behind us where Project A Part II was flickering on a TV. I don’t read. She only reads Kathy Acker. I dream of arson in Hell’s Kitchen. She dreams of California forest fires. She romanticizes Heroin. I romanticize spousal abuse and Ninja Turtles.

We ran down to the beach and hocked wet clumps at each other. Some sand got in her eye and she ran inside. A while later I go in. The house is empty and I look out at the driveway:

Whenever she gets mad at me, she runs out, starts up her car and pulls the only cassette she has from her glovebox, pops in Killer Pussy and blares “Teenage Enema Nurses in Bondage”. I’m about to end it all, when I get this “oh shit” moment, and nearly have a goddam heart attack when I realize we’re just down the lane from Grey Gardens. That’s the joint we passed, I didn’t even realize.

I slip on wet paving-stones hauling ass down the driveway and onto West End Road.

Grey fucking Gardens is my favorite movie. When Little Edie sold the house ’bout 15 years ago to that chump from the Washington Post, my nine year old self wrote threatening letters to Mr. Bradlee at least once a week, which my mother failed to sent, a fact she only told me years later.

I stand in a light drizzle, across from the joint, and hear INXS’ “Never Tear Us Apart”, like the end of bad rom-com where the hapless loser finally has closure, before noticing Kat idling next to me, having chucked Killer Pussy and put on some blessed DJ, who, despite what Morrissey said, does play music that speaks to me about my life.

I stand in that puddle a long time, until Ben Bradlee comes out. I flip him off, duck into the idling Chevy and Kat U-turns us outta there.

We made a Beer run for Stroh’s. Fuckin’ Stroh’s. Over two six-packs, I let her down most a them.

I wander the house that night and listen to CD’s and sit on the tennis court, drink what’s left.

I pop in a VHS of Manhunter, and sit there with the TV muted, a U2 CD plays instead and when it gets to “Stay”, I think, what it boils down to is this: here I am, in a huge, empty mansion on Long Island, and the only other person here is so shit-faced I had to flip her on her side so she doesn’t John Bonham herself, and this had to be what the first white man who landed here must’ve seen, and marvelled at, the promise of a new continent, sports and blonde bimbos, full-proof Mercantilism that wouldn’ end until that pesky Adam Smith came along, and the sky over the beach mere yards away so empty you can see the whole solar system and, I’d like to think, Cthulhu, any goddam moment now, splashing over the Atlantic rim, come to grace us forever and ever.

The beach at night reminded me of this sci-fi movie I’d fast-forwarded thru in a drunken stupor, a Commie flick ’bout these two guys who get transported to a desert planet and later, there’s this scene where they land on another planet and it’s night, pitch-fucking-dark and the only thing illuminated is the sand around the spaceship, and the characters hop out and sit in the sand in the blue glow of the ship. As I sit there in damp sand, just short of the water-line, shoveling handfuls of sand in my mouth because I want to take this moment with me, I scramble to my feet and run into the house and some minutes later I’m puking the sand up on the grass in the backyard and The Church’s “Under the Milkyway” blares out the jacked-up soundsystem thru the wide-open French doors behind me.

When I came back in she was downstairs, shit-faced and dangerous, and suggested that we go swimming, but it was too cold and dark, so we sat in the bottom of the empty pool and chucked liquor bottles into the deep end.

We drove into town and bought food and cigarettes. We bought a case of champagne. We’d open a bottle in the morning before we went out to the beach, and we’d either jog on the empty shore or try to swim in the rough surf, and when the water turned colder, raging, Kat would sit by herself on a deck overlooking the ocean and spot boats in the afternoon fog and I’d hear the boats moan and creak, and Kat would down the rest of the champagne while I watched from the living room.

Soon the champagne ran out, and by the end of our time there, all we did was watch television and drink six-packs of Tabs and we'd go to bed sometime before dawn, wake up midafternoon, and then we’d crack open another one.

Sometime around late August we go to see the new Oliver Stone movie, think it was written by that weird guy who directed Reservoir Dogs. Not bad. It was basically balls-to-the-wall Badlands on steroids.

Driving back to Georgica that night, Joni Mitchell comes on the radio. I stare out the window at nothing much in particular, then close my eyes as Kat murmers along. We sit in the driveway, still listening to “A Case of You”; I get out and slam the door as the song winds down.

The next morning, slumped back in a lawn chair, smoking a damp cigarette I fished out of a crushed carton found buried in the sand, I suggest going back to Brooklyn. She nods.