Robots vs. Fairies(94)

I’ve been around. I was there when grunge was born, midwifing that poor howling thing, screaming on the floor of some crap room in Seattle. I was there when it died, Cobain on the same floor, bleeding it out like he was killing a religion. I was there for part of punk rock, for Fugazi and King Missile, for Bad Religion, I was there for Public Enemy, I was there for clubs in places like Boise, Idaho, where all the kids had shaved their jack-Mormon mullets into Mohawks. I’ve been writing these pages for years, in a state of despair, feeling like a biologist diagramming a decline. Rock is dead, I’ve been writing, like God is dead, like love is dead, like butterflies are dead. Like polar bears are dead. Like the Great Barrier Reef is dead. Like all the dead things are dead.

I wasn’t expecting a band like Akercock.

I’m going on record now, readers, saying fuck that. I was wrong. I thought rock & roll was rotting. I thought it was so dead it was a bone sculpture in the desert, and then?

Then there was Akercock. People of America, I take it back, all the things I said about burying the dead.

Rock & roll is resurrected.

I’m so wired, so on, that I dial Tania. Is she even my wife anymore? My son picks up and calls me Daddy, and I remember better days before we all went crazy. I’m picturing him, looking at me, his strange, feral little face. I’m trying to tell him I love him, when Tania picks up and asks me if I know what time it is.

“No,” I tell her, and make an attempt at humor. “Later than you think?”

I met Tania at her own show, when she appeared onstage in a bright red dress, this brown-skinned woman with a twisted tangle of hair, eyes the color of an oil spill, and a mouth full of curses. She didn’t sing rock. She sang a twisted rhyming course like the rapids of a river, spitting it out syllable by syllable, a skittering indictment of everyone who’d ruined the corners of the earth, a history of America in geologic time, and then in leaders of fools. She named them all in a frenzy that scanned, from Pilgrims to preachers to power-mongers.

“You can be saved,” she sang, and called each person in the audience by name. Some kind of crazy trick, but it was a beautiful one.

Standing in the crowd, unnamed, apparently I wanted her to name me, too, and name me as her man.

I proceeded to fall at her feet and tell her I’d do anything to help her, and she looked down at me, put a boot on my back, and said sure, she’d stick around awhile, she’d just left a band anyway and had time to kill.

“Yes,” I said.

“Just so you know, I have a kid,” she said.

“Are you married?”

“Divorced. His dad’s not in the picture,” she told me, turned around, and I saw my son for the first time, in a sling on her back. He was sleeping there like his mother hadn’t been singing loud enough to wake the dead. He opened iridescent eyes and smiled a toothless smile at me, and I was done for. I adopted him the moment we got married.

That was right before the world fell apart.

Now, I tell Tania I’m heading off on tour, and Tania tells me to fuck right off. I sympathize with her, I do. She’s a rocker too. You can’t have two of those in a marriage, and she’s more than I am.

Before this band, Tania was the only thing I ever saw that made me wonder if the world was bigger than I thought.

“Should we go back?” I said once. “For a visit? Don’t you miss your family?”

“You can’t go back,” she told me. “Not once you come here. They don’t let you go if you’re from where I’m from. I made a big mess when I left. I wasn’t supposed to go, and there was a price.”

This was the only time I ever saw her sad. I assumed some things about where she’d come from. I figured it was another continent, judging by her accent from everywhere at once, but when I asked, she looked at me, told me I was an asshole, and said, “There are countries there, you know, and they’re not the same country. It’s not just one big heap of same.”

“Is that where you’re from?” I asked, offended that she assumed my whiteness meant I didn’t know anything about anything. “I know what Africa is.”

“No,” she said. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a work shirt, and she looked almost—I caught myself thinking the word “human,” which was the wrong word. She didn’t look human. She looked like the queen of the coast.

She was breastfeeding our son, and he was singing to himself as he nursed. I could see plants growing in my peripheral vision.

“Adriftica, maybe,” she said. “Call it that. Call it somewhere you can’t get to unless they want you to get to it. I left my band, and I left my country, and I don’t want you to try to fix it. It was a bloody breakup. Now I’m trying to clean up the mess it made. I thought I could fix it, but no one wants to listen. You’ve never been married before. You don’t know what it’s like when you leave. You don’t know how it feels.”

She looked up at me, and the tears in her eyes reflected light in a way I’ve never seen any other tears reflect. She was like a prism.

“The world isn’t ending because of you,” I told her.

“He’s tipping it over,” she said. “But I had to leave him. You don’t know.”

The last time I heard any band play like Akercock, it was Tania alone in front of a half-empty room, wearing a torn red dress, with thorns in her hair, looking like she was in the middle of running away from something. A baby on her back, bare feet, singing something that made the room shake. People were looking at her like she was magic, but no one was doing anything about what she was singing. She was trying to get people to stop doing all the things that make money for millionaires, and make water dry up in towns where no millionaires live. She was a revolutionary, I guess, and that’s what made me crazy for her, but then things took a steep slide, and everyone put their hands over their eyes and ears. The world went wooden roller coaster.