Will We Float Away Like Dead Rock Stars

--This is where Jeff Buckley died, she said, not really to me.

There was an enormous annoying hum coming out of one of the parking lot lights and all kinds of moth-bugs flopping around in the air and all kinds of sweat oozing out of the pores in my face. The bugs would flutter haphazardly into my wet skin and lose their wings, plastered with the sweat of my skin. I picked them off with my fingers and flung them down at the asphalt. It was too fucking hot. Hotter than the world had a right to be, Memphis, Tennessee. My skin had disappeared, I had lost my soul to sweat. It overcame my shirt, stank like beer, unruly pheremones for wandering spirits.

Carol was dry, a damp creekbed at the small of her back. She was here for the tomb of a dead rock star; she was here for the Mississippi River mud, the frivolous come; here for all the dirty things you could goad and caress the world into flinging at you, draw up ambiguous eddies swirling at your feet and sink down into. I was here because she needed my car.

She was facing away from me silently, much within herself , her arms folded. This was the way she had acted since our little motel room incident. I wasn’t sure if it was coincidence. I pulled another beer out of the cooler in the back seat. She kept staring across the parking lot towards the river. I looked off in the same direction, but I don’t think I was seeing the same things.

--This is great, I said. So what’s next, Fats Domino’s house or something?

--Fats is from New Orleans, she said, brushing her hand at me like I was a fly.

She started off towards the river. I pulled two more bottles out of the cooler, slid one into each front pocket of my pants, and followed her. She walked past the Tennessee welcome center and along the railing that overlooked the river, really staring out into the overgrowth that crowded the bank. When she came to the first generously open area she climbed the railing and began picking her way down to the river. I finished off my beer as fast as I could, set the bottle on a picnic table, and followed her. It was dark as hell but I thought I could see the bank on the other side. I always thought the Mississippi was a lot bigger.

Halfway down one of the bottles slipped out of my hand as I pulled it out of my pocket and shattered on the rocks, spattering foam across my shoes. When I finally made it down to the water’s edge, Carol was just standing very placid.

--Want the last beer? I asked.

She didn’t answer.

Bored, tired of standing, I sat down in my sweat, opened the last beer.

--Very impressive, I said. What now, light a candle or something?

She sat down on rock and started taking off her boots, carefully unlacing them halfway down, grunting as she tugged to get her foot out, tucking the laces inside the boot to keep them out of the mud. I found this action absolutely fascinating, and also, there were many beads of sweat clinging to the side of my bottle. Then she stood, undid the buttons on her jeans and yanked each of her legs out of them one by one.

--What the hell are you doing? I said.

She looked straight at me for the first time in, like, five hours. She looked at me like I was a big stale bag of potato chips that had been gone over with dirty hands.

--I’m going for a swim, she said.

--In that water?

--Yeah, I’m a little bit hot.

She began to wade into the big muddy area directly in front of the water, sucking up craters behind her as she stepped.

--You’re going to step on a bottle or something and cut the hell out of your foot, I said.

--Then I guess I’ll bleed.

She was now ankle deep in the water.

--Hey, doesn’t it seem kind of stupid to go swimming where some guy already drowned?

She turned and looked at me, standing in at her knees.

--Yes, she said, but he was a rock star, and every body knows that rock stars are immortal. Anyway, I don’t think he knew the breast stroke..

I dug a damp handkerchief out of my pocket and raked it across my forehead. I twisted the cloth in my hands to wring the sweat out of it, then spread it out on a rock to dry.

--I’m not even sure you know the breast stroke, I said. Why don’t you come out of the water?

Her fingers ambled and flitted along the bottom of her tee-shirt, and the way she stared at me made me feel like I was a big disappointment.

--Why do you have to be so fucking careful all the time? How much good stuff is going to float by you while you sit on your ass and watch?

--What good stuff? I said. You? Are you good stuff? Is that what I’m supposed to hear because--

--Just forget it. Forget I said anything. Sit there and drink your beer.

She turned away from me and sat down in the water, which tried to get at her armpits. She let her palms float around her sides, slowly churning the water. She started talking again, but I could hardly hear her the way she faced away from me, so I had to lean in closer.

--I’m sick of being so good to myself. I’m tired of feeling guilty for things I’ve never done, and having to live with decisions other people have made about my life.

I yawned and looked at my watch, then politely asked her if we could go back to the hotel now.

She stood up and turned on me, flinging water. She had stirred up the mud, and there were little sworls moving around in her eyes.

--You can do whatever the hell you want to, she said, but I’m not through here. I want mud in my hair, I want my baptism taken off of me. I want to go back home smelling like a river bottom.

--I think there are plenty of ways to do that without actually drowning yourself.

A river barge was rumbling by out on the river, and Carol cocked her head to listen, as if it was telling her what to say.

--Do you ever wish you hadn’t been circumcised?

I wasn’t quite sure how she expected me to react to that, so I didn’t say anything.

--Because there are some kinds of damage that can never be repaired, you can only stop giving them the right to affect your life.

She stared at me for a minute or so, the light from the park above aggravating the dark sheen in her hair, throwing shadows across the pale glow of her forearms and thighs. Then taking a few steps, she plunged out into the water. She really had it all wrong. You couldn’t reverse a baptism swimming in dirty water, you just had to sweat, which is what I was doing. I felt like I must have been making a puddle of it all around me. I started thinking that maybe if I sweated enough, I could drown her in it, and then I could go back home.

--Sean. Get up. Come on, we’re going.

Shove of foot in boot leather. Cigarette ash and stale coffee table leftovers.

--Huhn? Whatsa whuzzut?

--Wake up, come on. You’re taking a trip with me.

Nauseous morning sunlight leaking in through the torn shade. Peach fuzz brain. Don’t wake up don’t sit up. Find out what time it is.

--What the hell time is it? Carol what the fuck are you doing here?

Must not have locked the back door. Don’t even remember everyone leaving. Three AM? Four? What the fuck is she doing here in my house kicking me with her foot jesus christ I’m laying on the living room floor please tell me I didn’t puke somewhere kicking me with her shoe at what time? what time now?

--It’s 8:15. We have to hurry or we’ll be driving all day, she said. I already packed some of your stuff in a bag, clothes and stuff. All you have to do is go get in your car and give me the keys because I’m driving.

I tried opening my eyes all the way. Something inside my frontal lobe twisted like a dishrag. I heard Carol bustling around the room, scraping change off the dressers, pulling food out of cabinets. This was the first time I’d seen her in over a month. She really knew how to make a person feel needed.

--Get a move on, she said. I would have just taken your car and left you a note but if I got pulled over or something they might think I stole it. Besides, I bet you could use a change of scenery. You never leave town for anything.

Leave town? I sat up quite unfortunately. I tried to give her the most dissatisfied look possible as I watched her drop my loaf of bread, my mustard, ketchup and pickles, and my last two beers into a brown paper sack. It looked like she had died her hair jet black and her bangs hung slightly crooked over her same old eyes, angry and green and bright like a late how do you do card -- a great fat sorry I missed your happy best wishes hope you get well but if you don’t I won’t be waiting around to see it card. I always thought she was undeniably gorgeous but she was really too much for my hangover.

--All right, I said, where the hell are we going?

I had to ask because otherwise she wouldn’t tell me until after we’d already been there.

--We’re going to Memphis. Now get up off the floor and quit wasting time.

--Memphis?

--Yes.

--Tennessee?

--Yes.

I really needed a mirror to see if the hole in my head was as big as I thought it was, because almost certainly there was some sort of gray brain-matter oozing down around the lobe of my left ear to soak into the carpet with the ashes and beer. Carol stood across the room with a bag of my groceries in her hands, twitching and glaring, popping her foot, checking her watch, impatiently, impatiently.

--WELL, come on!

--Okay. Can’t I shave and change clothes first?

--Absolutely not, no. I’ll stop at a rest area in a few hours. You can just sleep until then.

--Well, I said, I have to at least go to the bathroom, I think I’m probably going to vomit.

--Just be quick about it.

--You can grab some of my tapes if you want.

--Your music sucks. I brought my own. Meet me in the driveway.

Once she was outside it was much easier to vomit. Once I had vomited it was much easier to go outside. She was busy putting my cooler in the back seat. Too bad I didn’t have any cokes we could take. I always like a cold coke when my stomach is upset.

--Memphis, huh? I said, climbing into the passenger side. Jesus, that’s going to take us, like... all day.

--Very good, G-love. How much cash do you have on you?

--I don’t know. Wouldn’t you rather go someplace closer? Like Dayton? Oooh, that sounds like fun. Let’s go to Dayton.

--No thank you, she said, throwing the car into reverse. Dayton has cancer.

The drive down was all right, I slept most of the way. Late afternoon, we crossed the river into West Memphis because Carol said the motel rooms were cheaper in Arkansas. We got some hamburgers and checked into a Holiday Inn. I cranked the air conditioner up as high as it would go and sat down in front of it with my shirt open. Carol immediately plugged in her portable stereo.

--Please no more Motown, I said.

She had listened to Motown for almost the whole drive and wouldn’t turn it off no matter how much I begged. Now she turned and went rifling through her bag of tapes.

--You know, she said, one of the reasons you can’t ever get any dates is probably because that mid-eighties punk rock you listen to doesn’t offer much in the way of romance.

--It suits me fine, I said.

--Ooooh, fugazi. You make me feel like a woman. Take me right now you beast.

She started rolling around the bed with one of the pillows, just giddy as hell from the long car drive. My headache was returning. I walked over and kicked her in the shin.

--Oww! you shit. Seriously, come here and sit down, you have to hear something. Don’t be afraid, I’ll talk you through it so you don’t get confused.

She jumped up and popped one of her tapes into the deck. I sat there a while looking at my hamburger, and then threw it away. After a couple of minutes of fast forwarding and stopping and rewinding, she turned the volume up and sat down on the bed next to me.

--Okay, this is Funkadelic, she said, and it’s good that you’re sitting down because I wouldn’t want you to get completely blown away.

--Oooooh.

--Listen to how dark and sweaty it is, that bass line, just real slow and raunchy. Hear the way the guitar floats right on top of it, like it’s making love to that bass line? Almost like people screwing way down in a bayou somewhere.

--I’m pretty sure I know how to screw, I said.

--Yeah, you just don’t get any practice.

She sat on the opposite corner of the bed, staring at me too intently

--It feels so raw and sweaty, the way it just plods along... don’t you think it’s cool?

--Yeah. Great.

She reached across and grabbed my face, cradling my jaw between her palms. Then with a decisive lunge she forced her face up against mine, kissing me roughly, dropping me back onto the bed still holding my head in her hands. The shock of this stirred my nausea up from the depths of my stomach, and I stared at a stain on the ceiling until it passed. I didn’t know what else to do, so I just let her go at it, figuring she would quit in a minute and I could get away from her. But then she loosened my belt buckle and ran her hand down the front of my pants. I lay frozen, staring at the ceiling stain. She was certainly one of the last people I would ever have expected to be rubbing my cock in an Arkansas motel room. Suddenly the music seemed much more inviting to listen to.

A chorus of voices were now chanting like some warped congregation, the power of their voices rising and falling, very hypnotic. Carol’s watch got hung on the top of my pants, so she unfastened the pants button and pulled it gently aside. The voices were shouting out.

She was right; there was something very sexy about it, but I just wasn’t feeling it. Those voices seemed to be testifying to something that went deeper than sex, deeper than religion, even deeper than the laws and rules that haunt them. It was a spirituality that thrived on the dirt it could roll in, that seemed to relish how low to the ground it could sink.

--Uh oh. I think you dropped something.

--What?

I looked down at a large wet stain across the inside of my jeans. I hadn’t even felt it. I slid out from under her and backed along the wall into the bathroom. I threw my pants into the sink and sat down on the tile with my back against the closed door. I think I must have cried for a couple of minutes. Finally Carol yelled through the door that she was going out to find a liquor store, and to meet her outside when I was ready to go

She was still swimming around long after I had finished my beer. I was still sweating. I could just barely make out the glimmer of her movement out on the black water. It made me kind of mad that she wouldn’t come in to the shore, so instead of sitting around to watch her drown, I decided to take a walk down the river bank. I was afraid that I would run into some crazy bum or something; Carol had told me that the Memphis transients camped out down here on the river. I didn’t care though. I didn’t even care if I got mugged, just so I didn’t have to watch Carol and her splashing around. I half expected that if I waited long enough downriver somewhere, I could just catch her body as it floated up on shore, smelling like a fish, empty sockets for eyes. I decided I’d better go back and talk her out of the water.

I couldn’t even see her when I got back to where we’d been sitting, but she answered when I called her name. I waded out into the water with my shoes on.

--Carol, if you don’t come out of the water right now, I’m coming in after you.

A crumpled foam cup bumped against my knee, got caught in a back eddy and sucked in to the bank. I sat down in the muddy water and splashed my face with it. It really was a lot cooler in the water. Carol waded up from the perilous depths. She stopped right in front of me, looking down.

--I’m sorry about the motel room, I said.

--What do you have to be sorry about?

I stared at her knees.

--I’m sorry I didn’t like your song, I said.

She laughed and swished water in my face.

--Just don’t tell George Clinton, she said. He might have something to say about that.

I hooked my arm around her knees and pushed her backward into the water. She came up laughing and cursing, slinging water at me. I made her sit down next to me and scooped up some mud, smearing it into the sides of her face with my palms. Little brown rivulets ran between my fingers and down the sides of her neck.

--I wish you would give me some advance notice the next time you plan one of these trips, I said.

She smiled and nodded her head. The wind picked up her bangs and made them spread across her forehead like a curtain. I began to wade out of the shallows.

I turned when I reached the bank, and saw her fooling around with something under water near her foot. She came up to me with a silver bracelet embedded with several turquoise stones. She polished the muck off with the hem of her shirt.

--Here, she said, souvenir.

Back in the car she told me to dig her tape case out from under the seat.

--Get out the one that says Sam Cooke, she said, pointing. I was going to introduce you to the girl groups, but you’re obviously not ready for that yet.

She headed us back toward the interstate, climbing the ramp that took us up above the city to the bridge. As we slid across in silence, I looked out over the guard wall at the river. We had left the lights behind us in the city, and everything around us was darkness.