Tonight you've got a flower of a different kind.
- Run Westy Run
None of what follows is true.
One night Max and Elliot and I
set out from Max’s apartment and took a walk around the neighborhood. Only, we
didn’t really intend to do so. I mean, it wasn’t a plan – nobody said “Hey
guys, let’s take a walk.” We were just hanging around outside his apartment
talking when we suddenly found ourselves walking down the street. As if some unseen
force nudged us out onto the road.
It was one of those deep summer
nights. The kind where the air is clear and warm and the sky is full of stars
and it just seems to go on and on and up and up into forever. “An azure sky of
deepest summer,” as Alex DeLarge would have it.
We got lost. As these things
do, it happened gradually, without us noticing what was going on. One minute
we’re talking, laughing, the next we realize we’ve taken a couple turns too
many and can’t remember quite how to retrace our steps.
No problem, we’ll figure it
out. We haven’t been out here long enough to be too far away from where we
started. But of course, between the three of us, we couldn’t settle on an
agreement as to which direction we should proceed in. So we just kept walking,
hoping that we might see something recognizable around the next corner. But the
next corner kept turning up darkness and unfamiliarity.
At some point, a weirdly
comical sense of hysteria crept in. We imagined we might never be getting back.
Like maybe we were going to end up walking into a whole new city, into whole new lives, completely distinct from what had come before.
In a sense, something like that
might have really been the case, because that night represents to me the
tipping point of 1988. It’s the fulcrum around which all the other events of that
time revolve. That night, being lost in that maze of dark roads, was somehow
emblematic of the feeling of the whole time – a mixture of fun and panic, vaguely
exciting, vaguely menacing.
The sky was lit up with the
moon and stars and still somehow the roads seemed to get darker the further we
walked. The air was clear and we were enjoying ourselves, as always grasping
for some kind of strange fun, but we were also a little worried. I mean,
seriously, where the hell are we?
It’s a moment of perfect
disorientation; you will never be more lost – the future is dangerously close,
bearing down in the form of the mixed-up roads ahead, filling you with a dread
that you can barely comprehend. And you will never be more found – you’re here
with friends, practically brothers, facing up to the unknown with wit, sarcasm
and pure teenage nerve, as you have become accustomed to doing. Who knows how
long it will last, this carefree feeling? You better damn well enjoy it.
One of the albums in regular
rotation around this time was Hardly, Not Even by the Minneapolis band Run Westy Run. I associate
that album (cassette, really) with this memory partly because the cover seems to illustrate some
of the feeling of being lost out there in that maze. It’s a cartoon cityscape,
jumbled with shadows and angles and weird faces. The music, though…
There’s a short mirage of a
tune buried deep on the second side of this mostly forgotten album, it’s titled
“Bye Love”, but maybe the original title was “Flower” if the video of the band
performing the song on YouTube (in a version that is much louder and more raw
than the whispered recorded version) is any indication. (And if you take the time to watch that, be sure to also check out the amazing footage of the band performing "Heck House", from the same album.) It’s a simple song,
softly played guitar and voice tracing a haunted melody. The song is hardly
there. Long gone and yet to arrive. It’s like being in a desert at night and
hearing a couple of lonely campers (or Manson and his family out in Death
Valley, maybe?) singing softly, mournfully, in the far distance. “Bye love, bye
love…”
Earlier in 1988 one of my
favorite songs had been “Indian Summer” by The Doors. That song, eerie and
quiet, a fading ember, could be a spiritual precursor to Run Westy Run’s “Bye
Love”. Both of them are wistful, gentle, and both emanate from some other plane
of existence. Beyond. At once far away and vivid. Listen to the sound too
closely and it's not there anymore.
“Bye Love” could be a lament
for good times passed. Or it could be a warning from the future, a future fit
for wasting, called in on some scratchy, barely-there long-distance line.
All these years I’ve had this memory of being lost on those dark roads and I hear this song accompanying it – “bye love, bye love” - and I’ve always assumed it was a song about departure, a lover moving on. So I was startled when I listened to the song again while writing this and noticed for the first time that it is actually a song about murder – “Murdered man rises and wipes off his gun / a target is drawn and the work it is done.”
No one was murdered on the
night of the maze. But that summer, in our little town, two murders did happen.
The resulting fear and paranoia covered that whole time in a black fog. This is likely the reason why this song and so many of the other personal/cultural
touchstones of the year 1988 (Sid & Nancy, the televised Manson interview) have
continued to resonate so strongly in my memory through the years, consciously
or subconsciously. Violent death was an unfortunate truth of the time.
Regardless, “Bye Love” to me
feels like it’s about something else, something less sinister; open (if
very dark) roads, quiet (if bizarre) dreams. Intoxication.
Whatever the song is about,
whatever the song is saying, it sounds incredibly right, and it’s wrapped up
seamlessly now with this moment, with the air and the streets in this maze, out
under a sky lit bright with darkness, the way only summer can make happen.
It’s a moment of perfect
disorientation, and you’re sort of hoping that you never figure your way out of
it. You want to stay lost and listening for on and on and into every
everywhere, every nowhere.
The horrible truth, though, is
that you still need shelter and food. Damn. Why does reality always demand that
you wake up? So, really, there’s a little panic going on here at this
crossroads. And a little bickering as we decide which direction to take.
Somehow we found our way out,
or a way out found us. We ended up approaching Max’s apartment from the direction opposite where we had left it, as though we had traveled in a circle. After all that, we emerged out of the darkness unscathed.
Or not. It actually felt as
though we had gone through something, gone through some kind of change. But we
were the same, I guess.
Maybe we did go to some other
side and we just don’t remember. Like in an alien abduction.
Nah, we just got lost. Simple.
Nothing really happened. Does anything ever?
Yet that memory has begged to
be explained for all these years. It lingers so vividly, and so faintly.
Huge chunks of the experience seem to be erased. Missing. But that’s probably
just the way memory works isn’t it? You remember the feeling more than the
specifics.
I go back and forth. I want it
explained, and then I just want to be lost again.
Maybe there
is some alternate reality in which we never got out of there. Science fiction
author Philip K. Dick, who knew a thing or two about alternate realities,
theorized (or, more accurately, came to believe) that time is an illusion, that
it doesn’t actually exist, that everything that has ever happened or will ever
happen occurs all at once, forever.
So maybe we are still out
there, under that limitless sky, searching, walking in circles. It’s dark, and
we don’t know where the hell we are. Disorientation. Mild panic. Out there in the deep part of summer, walking. (Bye love, bye love.) A change is
coming, but it isn’t really a change, because we were always that way anyway.
You’re always the same person.
All of the above is true.
