tattoos,” he said.
Eleven
I went in for rock posters in a big way back in the ninth grade, which is obviously the last time I redecorated my bedroom. Above the pine Workbench dresser in the corner hangs an enlarged poster of the painted girl from the cover of Duran Duran’s Rio album. Beside the window, which looks out over the front door, is a poster of The Cure. On the far wall, above my bed, there was room for both Elvis Costello, peering inquisitively over his Buddy Holly glasses, and Howard Jones, relaxed and smiling under his hair spray, photographed sometime in the five minutes before synthesizer pop was laughed off the music scene. I seem to recall having had edgier taste in music, but I suppose that’s just one more adjustment I’ll have to make to my compromised memories.
The young, bearded Springsteen sweating over his guitar on my bathroom door cheers me up for a second, even though I probably hung it there more for credibility than anything else.
On the door to my room, held up by thumbtacks, its white border ragged and torn in countless places from random human contact, is a Star Wars poster, just like in the song by Everclear. I hum the words softly to myself. “I want the things that I had before / like a Star Wars poster on my bedroom door.”
You have to question the originality of your life when it can be captured perfectly in the lyrics of a rock song.
Sitting on top of the dresser is my old Fisher stereo. I press the large silver power button, and the console lights up with an amplified squawk. I watch in awe as the phonograph arm rises automatically and swings over to the turntable, upon which spins an old 45. There is no reason it shouldn’t work, and yet I’m surprised when it does. It’s plugged in behind the dresser, and I remember struggling with the dresser to move it out far enough so that I could reach the outlet. It seems unbelievable to me that something the kid who would grow into me had done back then has remained intact until now, as if waiting for me to return. We are suddenly connected, he and I, as if by some cosmic warp in the time continuum, and I see him with perfect clarity, can feel his fears and thoughts suddenly running through my brain, his younger humors flowing through my veins, and for the briefest instant, through some act of molecular recall, I am him again. My thigh muscles falter and I sit down quickly on the bed. My bed. Through the speakers comes a scratchy rendition of Peter Gabriel singing “In Your Eyes,” and I have to smile.
I use the hall bathroom, and my hand remembers that the flusher must be yanked up before being depressed, a plumb-ing quirk that has not been repaired since my childhood, because with my father living alone in the house, the hall toilet has basically gone unused. For a moment, I try to imagine a set of circumstances that might have led my father to use the hall toilet, but I cannot. Between the downstairs powder room and his own master bathroom, he’d have had no reason to come down this way, and Arthur Goffman is not the sort of man inclined toward whimsical changes of scenery when it comes to taking a dump.
I return to my room and walk over to the double windows that overlook the front yard, absently fingering the white plastic grille. My father had installed the grille because the pigeons kept mistaking the large window for open air and crashing into it. I can vividly recall the nauseating sound of those bone-jarring collisions jolting me out of my sleep in the early-morning hours. I would creep hesitantly to the window and look down to see the bird on our front stairs, dazed and shivering from the sudden, inexplicable crash.
Usually they recovered after a few minutes and took to the air again on an erratic flight path, shaken and none the wiser for their bruising experience, left only with the vague and uncomfortable notion that the air will occasionally coagulate without warning and knock them out of the sky. Every so
Eleven
I went in for rock posters in a big way back in the ninth grade, which is obviously the last time I redecorated my bedroom. Above the pine Workbench dresser in the corner hangs an enlarged poster of the painted girl from the cover of Duran Duran’s Rio album. Beside the window, which looks out over the front door, is a poster of The Cure. On the far wall, above my bed, there was room for both Elvis Costello, peering inquisitively over his Buddy Holly glasses, and Howard Jones, relaxed and smiling under his hair spray, photographed sometime in the five minutes before synthesizer pop was laughed off the music scene. I seem to recall having had edgier taste in music, but I suppose that’s just one more adjustment I’ll have to make to my compromised memories.
The young, bearded Springsteen sweating over his guitar on my bathroom door cheers me up for a second, even though I probably hung it there more for credibility than anything else.
On the door to my room, held up by thumbtacks, its white border ragged and torn in countless places from random human contact, is a Star Wars poster, just like in the song by Everclear. I hum the words softly to myself. “I want the things that I had before / like a Star Wars poster on my bedroom door.”
You have to question the originality of your life when it can be captured perfectly in the lyrics of a rock song.
Sitting on top of the dresser is my old Fisher stereo. I press the large silver power button, and the console lights up with an amplified squawk. I watch in awe as the phonograph arm rises automatically and swings over to the turntable, upon which spins an old 45. There is no reason it shouldn’t work, and yet I’m surprised when it does. It’s plugged in behind the dresser, and I remember struggling with the dresser to move it out far enough so that I could reach the outlet. It seems unbelievable to me that something the kid who would grow into me had done back then has remained intact until now, as if waiting for me to return. We are suddenly connected, he and I, as if by some cosmic warp in the time continuum, and I see him with perfect clarity, can feel his fears and thoughts suddenly running through my brain, his younger humors flowing through my veins, and for the briefest instant, through some act of molecular recall, I am him again. My thigh muscles falter and I sit down quickly on the bed. My bed. Through the speakers comes a scratchy rendition of Peter Gabriel singing “In Your Eyes,” and I have to smile.
I use the hall bathroom, and my hand remembers that the flusher must be yanked up before being depressed, a plumb-ing quirk that has not been repaired since my childhood, because with my father living alone in the house, the hall toilet has basically gone unused. For a moment, I try to imagine a set of circumstances that might have led my father to use the hall toilet, but I cannot. Between the downstairs powder room and his own master bathroom, he’d have had no reason to come down this way, and Arthur Goffman is not the sort of man inclined toward whimsical changes of scenery when it comes to taking a dump.
I return to my room and walk over to the double windows that overlook the front yard, absently fingering the white plastic grille. My father had installed the grille because the pigeons kept mistaking the large window for open air and crashing into it. I can vividly recall the nauseating sound of those bone-jarring collisions jolting me out of my sleep in the early-morning hours. I would creep hesitantly to the window and look down to see the bird on our front stairs, dazed and shivering from the sudden, inexplicable crash.
Usually they recovered after a few minutes and took to the air again on an erratic flight path, shaken and none the wiser for their bruising experience, left only with the vague and uncomfortable notion that the air will occasionally coagulate without warning and knock them out of the sky. Every so
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