Oedipussy (3 page)

The modem squealed, cracked, rushed, beeped and whooshed. The newer computer our family shared in the living room opened a connection to America Online.

"Welcome... You've got mail!"

A variety of screens came up - email, notifications of the latest news stories, notifications of the comments that had recently been made in my groups, chat rooms with conversations to catch up on, and my friends that were online.

This was now a mess of information that was no longer of any use to me. I was a slave to popular culture for so long. I remember having live discussions online with my friends from all over the country about who was going to win the MTV Music Video Awards as they aired, as if this was any indication of true art in the world. It was as if this approval was exactly what I was looking for - some sort of vindication of my tastes in the scheme of the world and the eyes of some faceless, unnamed "judges." These conversations would go on for ages, as if they mattered. As if any of it mattered.

Perhaps the best of these conversations, the only one of any substance and an approach of a global truth, was the chat we had as Dana Carvey introduced Nirvana a couple of years earlier. I wasn't on AOL yet, connecting to the internet through a dialup relay service, but the theme of the thing still echoed today.

It was splendid. At the podium, with an excitement that seemed as though Carvey couldn't even hold back his fandom (being his own celebrity nonpareil at the time), he announced, "...and now for all your lawn care needs, it's Nirvana!"

The camera cut across the stage as Carvey turned with a swipe of the finger. His smile showed, regardless of who he was, that he was going to jump up and down with excitement the second Cobain hit the first chord. Grohl and Novoselic began to play, and noting that Cobain was playing the wrong song, paused for a moment. Cobain continued, "Rape me...Rape me,-" and cut off just as he finished up and paused on his E flat down-tuned third fret G.

The crowd was ruthlessly excited, and yet something wrong happened in that moment that seemed to carry a tremendous weight in the room, and over the airwaves, and in the history of the universe in music. An electricity never experienced by mankind before and since. The notes started humming through the opening strings of Lithium, and Novoselic saluted an imaginary flag, or was it the producers in the production booth, or was it the fascist pigs that had run this country into the ground over the past fifty years of propaganda over the airwaves?

It was no matter, because this changed everything. We constantly discussed this insane series of events live over the digital interface of the internet years later. Twenty-eight-eight kbps carried a vanguard of digital words into the future, and just as we wrapped up our discussion of this seminal moment in my sixteen-year-old development, so did the walls come crumbling down on taste and the status quo. Novoselic nursed a wound from his bass slamming into his face as Cobain and Grohl deconstructed the world along with the stage in front of millions of people. All of the people.

They did not a shit give.

Neither would we.

I decided to start the online business of the thing. I clicked 'New,' 'Group,'...and the cursor blinked.

I had no idea where I was going with this, especially considering that I had only rudimentary ideas about what the name of the band would be. Five songs, no name, and a little beacon of nothingness rang through to the core of this ill-prepared crew of young musicians. There was nothing but an idea.

The idea needed some bones for the meat.

The bones were the men and the idea of a band. Name. Name. Come to this consensus by yourself in order to make it happen. What could the name be?

I grabbed my little notebook and scanned the names that I came up with. I really liked the idea of Oedipresident. Or what was the name of that snake symbol in The Neverending Story? Orin? I quickly did some poking around on WebCrawler for the name of the snake eating itself, and came up with Ouroboros.

The page I read had a mesmerizing definition - something constantly recreating itself, seen as a major archetype to the psychologist Carl Jung, and Erich Neumann analyzed the same idea as the "dawn state." What did that mean?

Could I combine Oedipus and the Orin and the Ouroboros? Oediporos. Ouroboedipus. It needed to be distinct, and easy to remember.

Triple O? OOO? Ourobots? Dawn State? Dawn Ego.

The Dawn Ego.

The Dawn Ego and our symbol would be the Ouroboros.

I typed "The Dawn Ego," and "create."

It took only moments to invite the rest of the band from my contact list into the little group, and I found an image of the Ouroboros and played around with it in my Paint program. Upload. Color scheme. After a few clicks, I was all set.

I picked up the phone to dial John. A loud static hush screamed from the earpiece, and the computer spoke to me, "goodbye." I had forgotten to disconnect, and lifting the receiver did it for me. I dialed John's number.

"Hello," John's mother answered warmly.

"Hi, it's Todd. Is John home?"

"Sorry Todd, he’s at work right now. I'll tell him you called."

"Thanks." Hanging up, I realized that this was the perfect transition to remind me that I needed to go put in my application at Kinko's.

I printed out a quick copy of my resume on my inkjet printer, and shoved it in a folder. I walked through the house and headed for the garage to get on my bicycle. Swinging through the kitchen, mom stopped me as she was making sandwiches.

"Where are you headed in such a hurry?"

"I’m off to get a job."

"Really?" There was genuine optimism in her voice. "Would you like a sandwich, or a ride at least?"

"I'm just taking my bike, thanks. I'm fine."

She looked at me with a growing half-smile, the jammy knife hovering mid-sentence. "Well, be careful."

And with a nod and a smile, I left.

As I rode my bike toward the Kinkos, I began to fantasize and plan the next two weeks. We would be all set by the time we had rehearsal on Saturday. I imagined us making the eight track recording, track by track, take by take. I imagined our first small show, and arriving with rudimentary recordings and t-shirts with my design on them for a little merch table. It would be okay if there were only a few people there, because we would look like professionals, and we would bring it like there were a thousand. It would be okay if everything happened slowly and surely. It was all finally falling into place.

I dropped my resume off at the copy store, and shook the hand of the manager before leaving. I got a coke at the pizza joint next door, and I sat and studied my lyrics and songs as dusk approached. I bought a slice, choked it down with the rest of my soda, and huffed back home.

The porch light was on outside the house when I arrived, and the windows were black. The only sound was the klacketty clack of the gear on my bike chi-chickling off the trees, and the houses, and the pavement, and the swift tickle of leaves, leaves, leaves dancing to the feet of the shadow of Jenny under the porchlight.

She was barely holding it together, as I dropped my bike mid-pedal and ran to her. I grabbed her shoulders.

"What happened?"

"Mom. Again."

I opened the door to the house, swift and sure, and walked her up to my bedroom. The house was dark and empty, and she dropped onto my bed in a whimper.

I returned from the bathroom with a glass of water, and wrapped my arm around Jenny. She had sunk to a depth of sadness and otherworldly terror, and interpreting her mother's manic episodes was always difficult. She leaned her head into me.

"I’m not good enough," she sobbed. There was no easy way through this catatonic state.

"You aren't good enough for what? What happened?"

"You. I’m not good enough for you. Maybe not now, but maybe in the future when we can move into a little house and everything is okay, but right now everything is shit and I don't know what to do. I just want out of here."

"I understand. Tell me what happened."

"Mom called the fire department again."

Jenny's mother had some issues. She had paranoid delusional schizophrenic issues. This story was one of the four main ones that recurred in the poor life of my little lover.

One of the stories was that her mother had a microphone in her ear. She would call the FBI offices in Salt Lake City or the local nine-one-one to tell them that she was on to them. The police would come, and then she would be locked up and evaluated at the hospital. The next story was that there were microphones and cameras in the smoke detectors in the ceiling. Same ending. Sometimes she would think there was drugs and poison in the water, and take the plumbing in the house apart, flooding everything. The final, and most occurring one, was the fire department. She would call, explaining the house was filling with gas, and they would come with an ambulance. She was the only one that needed the ambulance ride to the hospital, suffering through a psychotic episode in the middle of the night in the suburbs of Twin Falls.

"It seems so real to her," Jenny continued, "that there is someone out to get her."

"Is it the medication thing again?"

"Isn't it always?"

The majority of the time it was as simple as her stopping her medication because she felt well enough that she didn't need it anymore. That seemed to be the curse of the disease, silently whispering the possibility that you didn't have it anymore until you take everyone down with you.

Every time this happened, Jenny was heartbroken.

She sniffled, "and everything in my life is so broken all the time - I always wondered what life would’ve been like to have been normal, and the neighbors not constantly honing in on the drama of mom being taken away in an ambulance - being grateful that they had everything together, and think of the children! The little children next door!"

"You might have thought the same thing as them, if everything was okay."

"You're right."

Silence, and only the sound of her breathing, and she was beautiful even when she was broken. This was never the right time to tell her this - but she was beautiful.

"When I was five or so," the molasses of her voice synced with the dreariness of her demeanor, "my grandmother - mom's mom - was over watching us one time. Cathy was only one, I think. Dad was at work and mom was institutionalized at the hospital again for a couple weeks.

"It's so fucked up, but I was exploring sex a little bit. As a child I think everyone does it, but there is something about the innocence of the age and the impulsiveness of being a child that we see nothing wrong with it. I had this little inflatable dolphin in the back yard - but you know our back yard, it isn't fenced in or anything and - well, I would get on this thing and hump it. It felt good, and no one was there to tell me it was wrong.

"Until we got a visit from Social Services. They started investigating. They asked if I was being abused or something. One of the neighbors had called because they saw me humping my dolphin. From then on, social services was checking on me all the time, and no matter how much I told them that this was all a misunderstanding - well, however I could have said that at five years old - it was almost like with the world, and the neighbors, and the government watching, there really wasn't anything that I could have said."

She paused.

"I don't know why I just thought of that, but... Sometimes I think that mom is so crazy, and sometimes I think there is no wonder she does the things she does.

"I'm so upset. I wish there was something that would change things back to... But then, I don't think they were ever okay."

In times like this I had nothing to tell her. I wanted to tell her I knew what she meant, but I didn't. I wanted to tell her that everything would be ok, but that seemed empty, pointless, and self-serving. What did she want to happen out of all this?

"What can I do for you?" I wanted to do everything.

"Just be here for me, and that will be ok." She put the glass of water on the side table and nuzzled into me.  I stared at the ceiling. At this point, I would always counter her experience with a vain fantasy of our future. Some little dream that would make her feel better and that our future together would be normal and simple.

"I can't wait until our band takes off and I can get you out of here. Just us. I’ll be successful and making music and changing the world, and the only reason I could even do that is because you’re there. You are the strength behind me. Every word, every note, everything for you."

She looked up at me and her eyes brightened. A silvery half-moon of tears hung below her iris, held up by the shelf of her bottom eyelid. She was beautiful, even in this common, weekly destruction of her life.

She crawled over me and pressed me down into the bed. Lifting my shirt up, a tear dripped onto my stomach. She unbuckled my pants, and then led her mouth down, and down, and down, and lifted me up.

She sat up and took everything off, jumping on top of me and kissing me passionately. I rubbed against her, the damp dew of her sticking to my penis as she kissed and caressed and moved. This was the way of things - we would kiss, make out, and get each other off. There was something different about this time, however.

"Is this okay?" She asked the question breathy and sure, and her voice and her kisses were all the persuasion I needed.

"Yes," I whispered.

"...and what about this?" She moved lower onto me, and she barely slipped me into her. We had never done this before, with one another or anyone else.

I was somewhat reluctant to provide an answer. I wasn't sure what the correct response to the situation should be - even though I know what I wanted. I wanted everything with her.

"Yes?" I muttered it, as she sucked on my earlobe. It appeared that this was the next step for us. This was the thing that she needed to help her out of her situation and her mind. This was what the world needed.

She stayed the night, and we snuck out in the morning before mom noticed anything. If mom had seen Jenny in the house, there was no doubt that I could mention the newest grief in her house and mother would tell her she could stay as long as she needed.

The next week at school was a blur - but Jenny and I seemed to pass in the halls with a confidence and electricity and honed-in focus that made completing schoolwork as swift and clean as a razor. Our next step made the various responsibilities in our life happen with a natural swiftness.

I had the interview with the copy shop and nailed it. I handed in a class project on time without even thinking about it. I massaged out my songs on my guitar in the evenings as if I had known them my whole life, transferred down from thousands of years of oral tradition in the punk rock style.

All of these things became awash in my experience, however, as I wondered how I could sincerely look at all of the great teenage life experiences once the aperture has opened? When making a connection like that with another human being I cared so deeply for? Sure, it seemed like such big things were skipped, but in my memory the most beautiful things that have ever happened to me were a result of this new chapter of my life opening. Sex and music, music and sex, a flower not blooming, but punching open with such velocity that the rest of the garden's spring delights were easy to ignore.

It was easy for us to refocus. Our new relationship, our new place on planet earth and in our histories, and we began to spend all of our free time together.

We began a study of most influential everything in all of history. It was as if the stupid trivia game on the stupid computer in the stupid room didn't matter anymore. We went to the public library and borrowed hundreds of albums, devouring everything. The Velvet Underground and Nico, Kraftwerk, David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Brian Eno, Patti Smith, and oh, oh Patti Smith, The Stooges, The Clash, Kate Bush, and oh, oh Kate Bush!, The Ramones, U2, and more, more, more. There were almost too few hours in the day to explore and drink in the kings and queens of modernity.

To explore and drink in each other.

We also listened to the moderns that were in my own collection that deserved revisiting. Massive Attack, The Smiths, Talking Heads, REM, Nirvana - OH, NIRVANA! - and Nine Inch Nails, and we spun and we spun and understood how to become everything we wanted to be because of everything everyone was before us.

Compact Discs spun, and so our dreams of what we were and would become. Rather than making out by the glow of the old computer, we were entranced with the sound and the blur of epiphany, excitement, depression, and sage advice coming from the stereo. We would have highs and lows. Kissing, and the music, and we soared through heaven and the clouds, and then dove back to earth in rousing enthusiasm to feel one another's bodies and the hum of music, and the scent of skin, and the sensation of every little nerve ending on my lip trailing across it. We would embrace each other, kiss, cry, simmer, and stew as the waves entered the room and surrounded this period of we.

Eventually, the Kinko's call came. My employment as a tentative and dedicated employee of Kinko’s began in a week, and I would arrive with chinos, get a blue Oxford shirt, and learn how to make copies.

Easy.

So Saturday finally came around again, and the momentum Jenny and I created with our informal study of the past fifty years of music all came to a head.

In the basement. Saturday. Four men and their biggest fan. It was everything.

John and I began practice on guitar and drums with what we knew. We ran through the five songs that I presented to them a week earlier. The songs sizzled. John performed modifications that he added to his drums, and I presented my pedalwork that I hadn't added until this first run-through. We screamed the songs, and going through them twice we gave Steve and Kurt a solid concept of what the base skeleton sounded like.

Steve came in on bass. We began with "Killing Time," and ran through it a few times as he gained some footing on some preliminary decisions. The lick he was playing with was tasty and dynamic - a safe bet, but not overpowering.

Then, we asked Kurt to add his solos. It was as if he had been strategizing his moment all week. The scream of his guitar broke through everything we had been doing so far, fuzzing up and out of the depths of his being. The sound became an appendage that made itself known to the existence of all of us, an immediate and clear laser shining through the purple cloud of song. It was solid. We all felt the light and the cloud and the song in our teeth.

It was completely new and beautiful.

We ran through it one more time.

"What do you think?" Jenny got up and left up the stairs - presumably for the break to get a drink.

"That was...That was new. It was fresh," John's drumsticks were crossed on his lap as he delivered his critique. "Everything came together, like... Unreal."

"Kurt?"

"We rode that," he said, nodding. "It was nice. I think we have something."

"Yeah." Steve nodded as well, his eyes squinting with introspective delight.

Kurt uncharacteristically chimed in again, "that shit is like sex, man."

There it was. The approval of the men who would be the backbone of this outfit. We were making something happen, and the thing we were making happen was a simple and strategic team art project that would bring us fame, fortune, and no concern for making anything happen but our own successes in future endeavors. We were everything in this moment. The future expanded in front of us, perpetually cascading exponentially forward. This was all we had hoped for.

"What do we call ourselves?" Kurt asked.

"I made us a group online," I saw John nodding, so it was clear he had already found his way to the online group. "I did this whole research thing, and found some incredible images and information about starting anew, and origins, and... Anyway, the thing that struck me was the image of the Ouroboros. It is that snake that’s eating its own tail. The thing has to do with the cyclical nature of life, and rebirth, and how we all are part of this immortal cycle. Some psychologists talk about it being part of the awakening self. I threw all that together to make something simple, though, since I figured no one will probably say Ouroboros correctly.