Tag: miscarriage

Writing all of this stuff out has done wonders for my memory. There is a borderline magical concept in the book Little Big by John Crowley called a “memory mansion”. The idea is that if you visualize your memories as an imaginary structure of some kind it will help you retain memories, make hitherto unseen connections, bring back forgotten details and even do a bit of divination – like if two walls are actual memories but the corner where they meet is something you’ve never experienced or been aware of you will acquire a sense of this thing because there needs to be a corner there.

I’ve never consciously attempted this but I did read the novel very young and several more times in the intervening years. I think my memory just kind of works in a similar fashion naturally – maybe everybody’s does, I’ve never lived in another person’s head. I’ll be looking for some music to play on a road trip and suddenly remember seeing an ad for the Lida Husik album Fly Stereophonic in this free electronica and rave culture magazine called Sweater way back in High School. We didn’t end up actually liking that album for that drive right then but her earlier one Bozo turned out to complement the empty Northern California streets perfectly.

Anyway in one of my earlier pieces I only vaguely recalled the timeline of when I started drinking alcohol but after spending so much time focusing on that era it has returned in perfect focus. It was Summer of 1999 and me and Francois had just driven to Chicago with this guy Andy Robillard we met in the Balboa Park pickup soccer games arranged by Rafter Roberts and Pall Jenkins from Three Mile Pilot. We had moved into an empty room with Brandi and her goth roommate at the time Kelly.

This girl Shana who lived on the other side of the brick building was having a Rock Star themed party. Her apartment was accessed through a different door and staircase from California Avenue but around the back by the El tracks the wooden porches were all connected. I had a huge crush on Shana and didn’t bother to hide it to the chagrin of her boyfriend who made enhanced CD multimedia content for bands like Cheap Trick and gave me my first stick and poke tattoo. It’s a bad habit of mine – at least I’m married now so whatever little flirting I still do has a safety on it.

I decided that this party would be my first time getting drunk. Francois put on loose camo pants and did heavy makeup to go as Maxim Reality from the Prodigy Breathe video. I was Iggy Pop – I had one of those platinum blonde ‘80s rocker wigs and was super proud that I could squeeze into Kelly’s black vinyl pants. She had a medical condition that prevented her from developing any real fat or muscle tissue and weighed less than a hundred pounds. I had gone through a patch of manorexia – I weighed 150 pounds when I was 14 and always wanted to get back to that number (I never actually did) and shaved all my body hair for a bit. I guess most guys look forward to puberty but I wasn’t having it.

I think I probably ended up drinking Bacardi and Coke but the more memorable part was that I ended up making out with a girl called Fashion Julie who went to the Art Institute. Outside of a brief relationship (2 months 14 days) when I was 15 romance had been a dead end for me. I was too socially awkward and didn’t have the confidence to ever make a move. I noticed immediately that alcohol seemed to solve that problem although it wasn’t exactly reliable.

She told me that she was into the rave scene. I invited her on a date to go see either Physics or Aspects of Physics at the Fireside, I thought the music would be somewhat similar to what she was into but it wasn’t at all. She invited me to a Rave at a closed down Roller Rink on the Far South Side. Delta 9 was performing with a trumpet player and looped projections of exploding robots from Sci-Fi movies. She started making out with some guy who gave her ecstasy. He was going to give her a ride back to her dorm in the Loop, I tried to get her to convince him to drop me off at the Blue Line on the way but he wasn’t having it. The rave ended and I walked the streets until the trains I needed started up again.

Anyway the fact that I was no longer a complete teetotaler shaped my experience back in San Diego for the Summer of 2000 in numerous ways. First off there was a girl in town who had had a crush on me for several years but I always insisted was too young – a glasses and pixie bob, solve mysteries and babysit type. She had just graduated from High School and I wasn’t twenty yet so I decided the age gap was doable now and started seeing her. I shouldn’t have – I wasn’t totally comfortable with her youth so I refused to remove any clothes while we were making out. We always ended up in a reverse John and Yoko – she was naked but I’d be fully clothed.

Eventually I noticed that this guy in the indie pop circuit seemed like he was actually in love with her so I told him that they should be together instead. He got mad and told me that that was disrespectful, I popped a switchblade on him and made vague threats because I thought it was funny. She broke up with me over the phone when I got to Chicago and they’ve been pretty much married ever since and have kids. My instincts seem to have been more or less correct but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t being an asshole and shouldn’t have played with her heart like that.

I also started spending a lot of time and generally behaving like a pirate with my friends Badger and Ben Jovi. They were into a thing they called “Chicken Burrito Madness” where they would shoplift an entire shopping cart full of fancy food and expensive liquor. I was supposed to run distraction most of the time – Badger told me to drop a giant jar of pickles but I found that asking for help finding obscure vegetarian or ethnic products seemed to do the trick better. We would get drunk, cook fancy steaks poorly and end up sword fighting on an almost daily basis. I remember going to visit my teenage girlfriend at a friend’s house and them insisting that they hose me down before I could come inside – I was covered in dirt and blood.

Badger had been dating this girl named Martina for a few years. Leather hat, summer dresses and pickup truck with a dog kind of girl; she looked like the sort of woman that Lee Hazlewood would record an album in Scandinavia with. She had this “I’ve always relied on the kindness of strangers” kind of vibe where she would play up being small and helpless to get men to help her with things. Or maybe that was specific to me and my friend Paul – I never did see her doing it with anyone else.

Anyhow she’d somehow ended up owning a tiny houseboat in the Point Loma Marina and convinced me and Paul to help row her out to it. She didn’t actually own a dinghy but she seemed extremely confident that nobody would mind if we borrowed one from the spot where everybody kept their dinghies. Me and Paul were less convinced but she could be very persuasive so we bent our backs and rowed her out to her slip.

There were four abnormally large dried out sea horses sitting on her boat when we got there. She said they hadn’t been there the last time she’d stepped aboard so we figured maybe a cormorant or other aquatic bird species had dropped them. Like they grab the sea horses when they see a flash of movement but realize it’s an unappetizing, ridgey mess of bone or cartilage once they get out of the water and drop it. I don’t know though – they looked like the kind of thing you would buy at a beachcomber’s shells and souvenirs store and they seemed so much bigger than they should have been.

Boats are weird – there’s nothing really at deck level and you have to go kind of down and in to get to the part you would usually live in. Martina lit a candle and I looked around a little bit, it seemed to only really be big enough to fit a mattress into. I’m really tall also, 6 feet and 5 inches so it’s not the kind of space I can ever really be comfortable in. We heard a bit of commotion above decks and had to come out to figure out what was going on.

Apparently somebody had tried to go home to his houseboat only to discover that some unknown ne’er-do-wells had absconded with his only dinghy, effectively trapping him onshore. The man had found a neighbor to take him around to all the different slips to discover who had made off with his property. Martina maintained that it was no big deal which, believe it or not, did very little to placate him. He had the beard and bald spot hairstyle of Will Oldham but it wasn’t red and he was a bit on the older side. He made a few thinly veiled threats:

“Your boat could come untied and drift into someone else’s creating a lot of damage that you would be liable for legally. These things happen out here!”

Him and his less irritated neighbor talked about tipping us over or just leaving us stranded on Martina’s boat but the other guy’s demeanor pretty much gave away that none of that would be actually happening. They deposited us back on the docks because anything else could become another headache for them later and rowed away with a stern warning to not be helping ourselves to anymore unlocked dinghies. I don’t think Martina lived out there for very much longer – the boat was in pretty bad shape anyway. She stopped renting it or sold it to somebody else or it just sunk and she walked away from it.

A little bit later her and Badger were living in Encanto – a hilly low income and mostly Black neighborhood along the 94, the then youngest of San Diego’s freeways. One day she asked me if I would dig a hole for her and I actually love digging holes. She drove us in her pickup truck to a bit of no-man’s-land where I dug a decent one at the base of a gigantic white and black eucalyptus tree. She deposited a small red velvet pouch and I asked her what was in it and she said “Badger’s Soul”.

I figured that it was probably drugs or an old love poem he had written or some other kind of sentimental knick-knack. I was musing about the question aloud in the presence of Lil Four one day and she stared at me in shocked disbelief:

“You don’t know what was in there!? Everybody knows what was in there! It’s Martina’s fucking miscarried fetus! She was keeping it in the freezer and talking to it and shit!”

The revelation changed me. Ever since I’ve felt naturally drawn to some kind of combined psychopomp and gravedigger role. On some level I am just okay with people dying. When both of my parents passed I felt like it was my responsibility out of all my siblings to give them permission, to tell them it was okay and that nobody has to live forever. In my father’s case I had moved back in for a few months to help out as a caregiver and explicitly asked him if he had any fears or regrets the night before his final morning:

“No, I’ve had a pretty good life and I’m all paid up for a bed burning.”

That last bit means that he had already contracted somebody for cremation services and paid in advance so we wouldn’t have to figure that out in the midst of mourning. He was thoughtful like that.

There’s a Tom Waits song where he says “and I sleep with my shovel and my leather gloves” and a noise track called Shoveler’s Void on a cassette album by an outfit called Wretched Worst – those two do a decent job of summing up how I feel about the whole thing. I think it was part of my temperament and destiny even before this incident. In High School English class I animated the entire gravedigger scene from Hamlet and provided all of the voices.

I’m not sure if I’ve gone into it too much in any of these stories but I’m a rapper. I started in sixth grade when I wrote a rap song for my classes D.A.R.E. presentation but a super religious girl went home and told her parents about it who called the school and said they weren’t comfortable with their daughter rapping so my class had to do something else. This is the sort of thing I can barely believe actually happened but it did. The song was extremely wholesome:

“Each day on the streets another life is ended. This could be stopped if these people were defended. If they knew what to do in this kind of situation. That’s why there’s Drug Abuse Resistance Education!”

Now that it’s all typed up I’m sort of bitter about it. It’s super catchy and extremely earnest sounding – my class should have blown away the assembly audience and then gone on to perform my piece at other schools and national conferences. I’m sure that would have happened if not for that girl’s rap hating parents.

Anyway I was in a couple of ‘80s style party rap groups with two other women both times. I entered a Freestyle Rap Battle at City College and got second place but it actually wasn’t fair because the tagger crew that worked at Pokez started beefing with a rival crew during my last heat and knocked over a lemonade cart giving my opponent almost 15 minutes to compose his riposte. Even though I was in second place they put a full color photo of me on the cover of the next City College newspaper and a tiny black & white one of the kid who beat me on page 8. The caption said “Nope! It’s not a protest!” because I guess I didn’t look how rappers were expected to look like in 2005.

Some people think Bleak End at Bernie’s is rap but it’s not. It’s Industrial.

So it’s Summer of 2000 and I’m at a party with Badger and Ben Jovi. It was at this kid Jon’s house who went to my High School and his parents were well-to-do College Professors and had a nice place by SDSU. I can’t remember his last name but I think it was hyphenated. Him and his best friend Ramon were really into The Beastie Boys and skateboarding and that sort of thing. There was a very classic DJ setup that Jon was spinning from – “two turntables and a microphone” like the popular Beck song.

Badger was trying to get me to rap all night, I guess you could say he was “badgering” me. I was getting progressively more drunk, not like blackout territory because I still remember this very clearly. Spicy. Mean spirited. Vindictive. Jon started laying down a rap beat for me and I started ripping into Badger about the fact that I had buried his unborn baby in rhyme:

“I put that baby where the sun don’t shine.

I’m glad that child was no son of mine.

I put your baby underneath the earth.

I buried your baby what the fuck you worth?”

There was quite a bit more but I don’t clearly remember it. There might have been the odd slant rhyme and I wasn’t using a lot of polysyllabic words or doing the thing where there’s rhymes inside the lines instead of just at the end but it was all essentially sound. There were little slow parts toward the wind down where I’d go up to different girls in the audience and kind of take their hands and go:

“Girl, if you miscarry it I’ll bury it!”

Sort of in the style of like a romantic slow dance sort of rap track. Badger was, I don’t know exactly what to call it, sort of thunderstruck or dumbfounded I suppose. I’d imagine he was feeling some mixture of admiration, shame and a kind of “press a button get a cookie” feeling surrounding having pressured me to grab the mic and start rapping in the first place. I don’t think we had talked about this topic before and I’m not sure if Martina had told him anything or not.

It’s extremely unlikely but I like to think he was reflecting on the parable of Jupiter and the frogs.

When I wrote about feeling comfortable as a psychopomp and gravedigger I’m sure I made the whole thing sound very healthy and well adjusted. And at this stage it pretty much is but there was definitely some darkness in learning that I had been an unwitting participant in the internment of human remains. I exorcised and unloaded that darkness onto Badger during the freestyle rap session, not because I thought he should have been the one to dig that particular hole but because it had to go somewhere.

There was a point earlier that summer or maybe even before that when Badger and Ben Jovi were hanging out at a coffee shop in Hillcrest. There was a girl there who had just come back from Norway because she was addicted to heroin and her parents thought that would get her off of it. I guess my friends thought she and I were vibing. I was pretty oblivious to that sort of thing but I remember Ben Jovi making knowing eyebrows at me.

We all ended up back at her and her roommate’s apartment. Her roommate had constructed this crazy glass multi-chambered device for smoking marijuana that kind of looked like the play zones that people build for their hamsters and gerbils. Everyone else was smoking a little bit of weed somebody had but I didn’t do that yet. This new kind of gum with fresh breath crystals had been released that supposedly made visible sparks if you chewed it in the dark. Me and the girl went in the bathroom and turned off the lights to try it. I don’t remember seeing sparks or whether or not we kissed.

She showed me a copy of Emperor’s first demo tape that she had brought back from her time in Norway. The one with a many headed alchemical dragon illustration on the cover. The timeline seems a little off as it was released around 1991 but it looked legit enough. I was into Mortiis by then but hadn’t listened to any Black Metal yet and wasn’t aware of the connection.

She didn’t put it on. Ben Jovi disparagingly said that Emperor “sounds like a guitar and wind”. I really like their stuff now especially Anthems to the Welkins at Dusk.

When we ended up in her bedroom she told me that she had just had a baby but had to give it up for adoption and didn’t know how to feel about it. She put on a CD of the Belle and Sebastian Dog on Wheels EP and turned it up really loud and set it to loop. She undressed completely and laid down in her bed. Her body was covered with scars from injecting like mine is now. She told me to take off all my clothes and get in bed with her so I did.

She laid perfectly rigid, our bodies just touching at the calf and shoulder. She fell asleep like that and I laid awake all night listening to those four songs on repeat. By morning I knew all the words to every one of them and really liked the band. It’s been almost a mark of shame ever since – that I’m a Belle and Sebastian fan. A lot of people will probably look at this and think that she wanted me to initiate sex but I don’t think she did. I think she didn’t want to be alone.

I would run into her on the street sometimes when I started using the same drugs. She had lost a lot of weight. I heard that something was wrong with her heart and a doctor had told her that if she didn’t stop injecting cocaine she was going to die.

She didn’t stop injecting cocaine.