Carson was always going for it all. All that he could have, which wasn’t anything at all. At least to some. He didn’t have a car, and he lived in the hilliest part of town, exerting all his effort navigating those hills that flanked empty buildings and beehives.
And then when winter came, the skeletons of the beehives glowed there under the aura of reduced radio music, the world’s attempt at propagating a race on a polluted, doomed planet.
I’d see old ladies giving him food sometimes, and then other times I’d see him at the neighborhood center, sitting with usually a bunch of old ladies his age, the only other dude sitting over in the corner and smoking a pipe. He’d always seem to notice me whenever I was biking by, on my way to work. That’s all I ever seemed to do, just work. It was like I’d already lived my life, when I was young, discovering the joy of getting drunk and chewing tobacco, the significance of my existence seemingly behooved by my ability to be arbitrarily told that I couldn’t do things. And then, eventually, I really couldn’t.
I’d once read in a Vonnegut book about a kid he’d admired, who, he said, didn’t smile very often, and so as a result beamed with an especial effervescence when he chose, saw fit, or found himself, to indeed do so. I decided to never have a profession that caused me to deliberately smile, such as waiting tables or any customer service, but also among my race I found that opposites attract, which is the very definition of a hazard. Not to mention beholding bounding 19 year old girls with bright eyes, my happiness would spawn vengeance, like how that one time you’re burrowing at home alone in your own corner, somebody will always talk to you, saying something totally meaningless.
In smiling I’d meet those without that privilege over and over, but Carson would always give me his, if I didn’t have one. It was like that overarching, sunny African-American truth that all us whites know exists, harping bounty across America upon otherwise sunny days, when fat men in suits sneer at profit bottom lines, addressing peoples. My town was the kind of place where you had to always be moving. That’s what they’d tell me at my job, too, You gotta move. Up there, on the tallest building in town, was a scratched out bank name. I made it longer than that bank, I thought to myself. That was something to be proud of. And I wasn’t a library cop. That was another thing to be proud of. When you find out how much those guys make, that explains SO much.
Carson would emerge out of moments, when the giant steeples, cathedrals and phallic piles of expressionism would insist that there was something ideological going on. He’d see beauty in all the wrong places – dusty little nooks that once housed raves, techno parties, glowing, loud and disorderly. Now the disorder emerged more stealthily – herd mentality. Or maybe that’s just what I want to think.
Maybe the disorder was me myself, I’m sure we all get to feeling like that.
The way that people communicate is generally with white noise, with disorder, the desire for anything that will pull them out of the tedium of the feeling of a useless life, sitting in an office and fulfilling a role they know is repetitive and meaningless. Nothing brings more satisfaction that palpable, physical achievement, and when this isn’t an option, it’s always noise. Me, I liked silence, the way the frozen river looked when I envisioned a bunch of dead fish there, stuck in the eyes. It was like an inferno of treasure to me, just knowing that my father was somewhere asleep, as the days elongated ever so gradually, one phase of winter beaming into another. Being required to talk was a problem for me, I was a quiet person, just hoping things would work out. The problem in life is when you start ascribing things to yourself, instead of just living in the moment. And if you hate every moment in which you ever find yourself, not because you’re bad, but just because you’re in the flatlands of America, where the only thing that ever reaches you is a least common denominator corporation paradigm of violence and lust, where quality doesn’t matter, only quantity, until finally there is no quality, of any kind, the bank name gets scratched out of the largest building in town, you get to wondering things to where language is no longer useful, and you really notice miracles with an added vividness.
I saw Carson passing me by one day on my way to work, and as usual, he looked like someone else, not really himself. His aura seemed to transcend race, the way even white female musicians will appear black from a distance, like that girl in High Fidelity who says that sex is an inalienable right, but nonetheless sounds chic in doing so. Carson seemed to be working things out in his head, almost as if he had a side board of dials within his cranium, like one of those old “car phones.” He’d see me and challenge me, but my mission would really be the same as it always was, I’d just be assured that despite the rampage of gilded iconography pervading my town, there was nothing really ideological going on, that nothing had taken shape to be truly fixated to the point of warranting dogma. The human mind can’t help but delve at truth, to try to mesh the ego on those snowy nights with some indoctrination of lasting behaviors. In transition, everything is possible, but nothing is defined. Everybody has intrinsic good in them, irrespective of politics, irrespective of aesthetics, because people PERCEIVE possibility like if land itself, were hydrating. It’s those moments of cloister, when we get too up close to ourselves, packed in, that problems arise, we start seeing teeth, gnashing, death, remembering that that’s what we’d wanted all along, sitting there in the centrally heated house we’d always wanted and just feeling hate, the feeling of the noise of others.
Ancient Greek society was founded on movement, on gait. Roman was founded on the stationary, which is why they held those binge-and-purge things where they’d sit around all day eating and then throw it up. See, here I am harping on the ancient Romans. I highly recommend it in social situations.
Carson hung out in the places technology evaded. In general, the Midwest was pretty spare on the whole people talking on cell phones in public thing. I remember being horrified at the amount of this out in Colorado, not to mention people talking fast and acting all important, in a general sort of way. I remember being like, You know you’re out in the desert, right? The only vegetation in Colorado was bagged marijuana in plastic bags.
We were juxtaposed in the valleys, us low-waged workers. Avoiding eye contact was not a rare phenomenon, it was generally my mode of doing things. Like an idiot, I thought that clocking in and getting to the end of a shift was a victory. Really, having more time would have been, time to paint murals on walls, or just to stand and talk to people, to organically get to the ends of interactions, which mind you could be frenetic fragments of victories over advantageous hegemonies. You can learn a lot from rich people sometimes. Rich people will always have something to say. I come from rich people, actually, but somewhere we slipped, my dad got out of the scientific fields, and for some reason I followed him into the ennui-addled arts, hippy-ish and reticent. White people never spawned musical genres, we just criticized them when they represented something possible, rather than impossible. When they signified simply a linear human being attempting something, we cast them off, we needed them to do them impossible like fuse an infantile striving with a hitherto unbeknownst juxtaposition of opposites. Things had to be understandable and simple, but also to shirk the general feeling of malaise – yeah, they had to have joy in them, or we wouldn’t want them. We had no joy, that’s why we brought black people over from Europe and made them slaves. And now, hell, you could find yourself down that narrow vestibule of juxtaposed contradictions, where the most fertile, impossible of joys emerges out of nowhere like a black guy saying hi to you, like a rose of brightness growing in the middle of Chicago. Nobody would ever choose it though, and it only exists for the fact that at first you can’t see it.
Everywhere, constantly, evidence of our own human, imperfect qualities were glaring and obvious, and sometimes it seemed it was the best people who paid the littlest attention of others – as if in a constant state of self-consciousness, or OTHERS-consciousness, as it were. I remember seeing Carson after he’d won at cards. He was stumbling out of the pizzeria with a gang, and it was constant banter, chatter that didn’t seem to stop. One of them lit a smoke, but they walked past the parking lot, not to anyone’s car, they must have been a gang of rowdy old dogs on the way to one of the downtown dance clubs, where you could smoke and feel some mellower type of music from the campus clubs, more of a stoned atmosphere. Carson caught my eye, and I gave him the quickest smile I could, and then looked down, going about my little trip to the overlook. That was the first time I heard it, he was singing “Up on the Housetop,” and it was February. Somehow I just knew it. It didn’t fit in, it was like a square peg in a round hole. But what would have, could have, been more appropriate? There where the only lit buildings were the hospitals, where the Apollonian endeavor of positivity was simply to evade your default mind state through intoxicant substances… I mean it’s not like he PLANNED to go into a rendition of “Up on the Housetop,” it just sort of happened. And those other friends were only hanging out with him because he had money that night, they were snake, I could tell. I would have hung out with Carson on the average night, hell, found SOMETHING, hitting golf balls against the building or something, but I could tell he didn’t want it. All things in their place, he thought, I thought.
The money had made him mad. The next time I saw him, he yelled at me, louder than usual. Again, it’s hard to know why. I’d come into some money myself, hell. I’d make more trips to Chicago, all the randy girls there making an impression, little chess boards adoring bars where you could find people from Pittsburgh or wherever, jovial businessmen just in for a craft brew, TV’s subservient to people, imagine that!
There was a giant TV in Carson’s neighborhood center, but he usually hung out in his room. The guard walked in and found him there one time. How come you’ve been hanging out in your room so much. The guard had heard about a rape that had happened in Virginia. I-o know, said Carson. Mr. Adamson, said the guard, I think we’re going to have to call you in for some tests. Ok, he said. It was a dark and rainy night, all the sports teams had fired their coaches for no reason, and the rats ate the dust spewed out by the heat vents on odd numbered streets and even. Carson busted into it on the way to the tests, “Up on the house top reindeer paws / Down comes good old Santa Clause / Down through the chimneys with lots of toys / All of the little ones Christmas joys.” An attractive clerical worker named Tina heard Carsons singing the Christmas song and laughed, touched by it. This only pi**ed off the guard, and he went to consult his book of theories, as the security guard of the neighborhood center, wide-shouldered and courageous, went in, to do what nobody else could have done.