I was going to stay up for a few hours, do some work,
write a few reviews, transcribe an interview, look
over a few matters that needed my attention, consider
what I could do to better serve my community, how I
could finally make things right between myself and
that old college flame, not so that we'd get back
together but because now that we're both married, I
realize we *can* be friends even if we're not in love
any more and that love is not obsession and so on. All
that, plus starting that book about how my travels
abroad changed my ideas about what it means to be an
American, that article I wanted to write about going
to a mall for the first time after 9/11, that
stunning, beautiful short story that would make Joyce
Carol Oates, James Joyce, John Oates and Henry James
and possibly James Hetfield and Harry Dean Stanton all
weep. I downed a Red Bull, two giant cups of coffee, a
non-drowsy cold tablet and sat down at my writing
desk.
The lights burning much brighter than I'd ever noticed
before and the sound of mice dancing their way into
the bar six blocks over running through my
at-its-absolute-peak mind, I scanned a handful of CDs
to my left, looking for the right thing to fit my
mood. Damned if the at the top of the pile wasn't
Toadliquor's The Horatator's Lament, a 72-minute compilations of T's long-out-of-print 1994 LP and somerarities. Sounded like exactly the kind of thing I
needed for a night of altruistic navel gazing.
Right.
About, oh, thirty seconds into "(Opening Sections of)
Interstellar Space," I felt a weight crush down on my
shoulders, light as a macho drunk's hands on bar fight
night at the aforementioned drinking establishment
just around the corner from my place. Did it smart.
Next thing I knew, I was being walloped to and fro by
"Gnaw," "Charred," and "Fratricide: A Requiem." I
dozed under the damage of these tracks, awakened
briefly by the opening moments of "Survival is the
Fittest" before falling under again like an
alcohol-poisoned teen. (I caught these titles through
my heavy-lidded eyes and pieced together other ones
from what my neighbors, who found my curled up on the
lawn the next morning, pieced together for me,
indicating that I'd been outside screaming,
"Tatterdemalion: The Gladiators' Debasement Before
Cain" around 3 a.m. Somehow, I doubt that.)
Not believing that, I dragged myself into the shower,
washed 1,488 of my two-thousand body parts, dressed
and strolled into the office just to see what the hell
had happened to ol' Toadliquor. Sure as it's winter in
Australia when it's summer in Prague, it was there.
Only it had grown larger, thicker somehow, moved from
the stereo into my chair. It could speak and seemed
slightly immovable. I tugged and pulled and pulled and
tugged until I fell backward. The rest was silence.
When I woke a little over an hour later the CD was
gone. I haven't seen it since and I've spoken to no
one of the strange events that took place within the
walls of my office that night. Until now.
Epilogue: Sometimes, in the dead of night, when I'm
working on some half-cocked plan, trying to find a way
to drink coffee and drive, I think of The Hortator's
Lament and I swear that on the wind I hear,
"Tenderloin! Tenderloin!"
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