A Field Guide to Getting Lost Page 7

  What is a ruin, after all? It is a human construction abandoned to nature, and one of the allures of ruins in the city is that of wilderness: a place full of the promise of the unknown with all its epiphanies and dangers. Cities are built by men (and to a lesser extent, women), but they decay by nature, from earthquakes and hurricanes to the incremental processes of rot, erosion, rust, the microbial breakdown of concrete, stone, wood, and brick, the return of plants and animals making their own complex order that further dismantles the simple order of men. This nature is allowed to take over when, for economic or political reasons, maintenance is withdrawn. Ruins are also created by the vandalism, arson, and war in which humans run wild. Cities in Europe and the American South have been consciously ruined by war, but this country’s North and West have fallen into ruin only for other reasons. Ruins were the symbolic home of much of the art of the time, some photography and painting, much music, the science fiction movies of the time, even the backdrops for rock videos and fashion photographs, for clothes that looked ancient, worn, combat and cobweb stuff. They were landscapes of abandon, the abandon of neglect and violence that came first and the abandon of passion that moved into the ruins.

  A city is built to resemble a conscious mind, a network that can calculate, administrate, manufacture. Ruins become the unconscious of a city, its memory, unknown, darkness, lost lands, and in this truly bring it to life. With ruins a city springs free of its plans into something as intricate as life, something that can be explored but perhaps not mapped. This is the same transmutation spoken of in fairy tales when statues and toys and animals become human, though they come to life and with ruin a city comes to death, but a generative death like the corpse that feeds flowers. An urban ruin is a place that has fallen outside the economic life of the city, and it is in some way an ideal home for the art that also falls outside the ordinary production and consumption of the city.

  Punk rock had burst into my life with the force of revelation, though I cannot now call the revelation much more than a tempo and an insurrectionary intensity that matched the explosive pressure in my psyche. I was fifteen, and when I picture myself then, I see flames shooting up, see myself falling off the edge of the world, and am amazed I survived not the outside world but the inside one. Before and afterward, landscapes rural and wild would be the places that resonated most powerfully for me, but for the decade that started with my discovery of punk it was cities. The social I’ve often called a layer of baloney sandwiched between the bread of the physical and the spiritual, but that is only the most reductive form of the social, one that defines human possibility within narrow and predictable terms. Punk with its slam dancing and getting wasted and stage diving and standing in front of speakers that made your bones vibrate, with its political indignation and impulse to incite and express extreme states, was in collective revolt against this social. Like ruins, the social can become a wilderness in which the soul too becomes wild, seeking beyond itself, beyond its imagination. And there is a specific kind of wildness, having to do with the erotic, the intoxicating, the transgressive, that is more easily located in cities than in wilderness. It has a time too, the time of youth, and of night.

  I wonder now about Demeter and Persephone. Maybe Persephone was glad to run off with the king of death to his underground realm, maybe it was the only way she could break away from her mother, maybe Demeter was a bad parent the way that Lear was a bad parent, denying nature, including the nature of children to leave their parents. Maybe Persephone thought Hades was the infinitely cool older man who held the knowledge she sought, maybe she loved the darkness, the six months of winter, the sharp taste of pomegranates, the freedom from her mother, maybe she knew that to be truly alive death had to be part of the picture just as winter must. It was as the queen of hell that she became an adult and came into power. Hades’s realm is called the underworld, and so are the urban realms of everything outside the law. And as in Hopi creation myths, where humans and other beings emerge from underground, so it’s from the underground that culture emerges in this civilization.

  In idyllic small towns I sometimes see teenagers looking out of place in their garb of desperation, the leftover tatters and stains and slashes of the fashion of my youth. For this phase of their life, the underworld is their true home, and in the grit and underbelly of a city they could find something that approximates it. Even the internal clock of adolescents changes, making them nocturnal creatures for at least a few years. All through childhood you grow toward life and then in adolescence, at the height of life, you begin to grow toward death. This fatality is felt as an enlargement to be welcomed and embraced, for the young in this culture enter adulthood as a prison, and death reassures them that there are exits. “I have been half in love with easeful death,” said Keats who died at twenty-six and so were we, though the death we were in love with was only an idea then.

  The title I gave our movie in the abandoned hospital was A Cure for Living. Not long before we began, I dreamed I was one of a long row of women on low beds in a stark, high-ceilinged vast room, more like a train station than a bedroom. The place was a military brothel. I think the premise must have been prompted in part by the band Joy Division, which pioneered a kind of melancholic dirge in the style of music that would be called industrial, but only issued a few albums before its lyricist and lead singer, Ian Curtis, hanged himself. A “joy division” was the Nazi term for a military brothel staffed by slaves. In my dream, the sexual labor was never explicit. All that happened is that, while I was in that long row, a man came up to me and handed me some small token. With that freely given gift I understood I was free to escape, as though some simple equation had been formed, that by dint of possession of that object I became distinct from the others, that because a choice had been made other choices could be made. In that dream, I started off, and the movie was to spin out that escape.

  We never filmed that scene in the brothel, though we did make the gift, a ribbon he inscribed and I embroidered with an absurdist proverb from a novel my aunt had given me a few birthdays before, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. It declared, “The lost glove is happy.” Perhaps the whole film was a gift that the filmmaker gave me, an encouragement to write my own escape, and the film too a ribbon as long as the thread with which Theseus traced his way out of the labyrinth in Crete. The hospital covered an entire city block with five stories of corridors and chambers. It was surrounded by one of those iron fences like a row of joined spears we’d scale before entering one of the cellar windows broken by squatters and explorers whose traces we occasionally found. Its intricate vastness reminded me of all those Borges tales about labyrinths and endless libraries, and part of the premise of my story line was that the hospital was thought to be infinite, an interior without an outside. It was a metaphor for an existential malady and an excuse for our heroine—me in an old white nightshirt—to keep wandering those decrepit corridors with their dusty light for our film. And it was an era of cinematic chases in the ruins and squalor of cities—Road Warrior, Terminator, Blade Runner all came out around this time.

  One of the chief events of my escape that we filmed was an abduction by a mad doctor. The doctor believed that the soul had a physical location in the human body and kept performing fatal exploratory surgeries in search of it. I wrote him a long ranting monologue that could be taped and matched casually to the silent movie, thanks to the fact that the doctor wore a surgeon’s mask. The character was partly borrowed from Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood, another gift from the same aunt, and though Nightwood has never been part of the corpus of adolescence, in its description of erotic anguish and extreme states it could be. It’s the garrulous cross-dressing garret dweller Doctor Matthew O’Connor I had in mind, who in answer to a heartbroken protagonist holds forth on love and on night for the length of a whole chapter in sentences even more pearl-encrusted than those of the rest of the book.

  The moviemaker and I would find how and where to put our abilities to use in the comi
ng years, but the film was only an excuse to linger with a sense of purpose in those exquisitely decrepit spaces. There was a morgue with rusted drawers the size of bodies and an operating theater with a tiled catwalk for overhead observation and ramps for gurneys and piles of old medical records telling of the ailments and cures of people long gone and strange rusty devices, but above all there was light filtered through dusty glass slanting into abandoned rooms and hallways. We used various friends in the movie, most of whom were as amateurish as we were. Only one of us was already an artist, Marine. She appeared in a vignette playing her cello while crouched on an iron bedframe strewn with sheet music, and from among that music she pulled the map that would take me out of the infinite hospital I had invented, a map the filmmaker had drawn.

  The last time I saw Marine, the summer night we went out nightclubbing and made so many plans, we talked about the first time we saw each other. It had been just over seven years before, when she was nearly seventeen and I was not quite twenty-one, a few months before that movie. I saw her first, walking toward the suburban garage where her band was going to practice that spring afternoon, in her gray leather jacket with bass hefted in one hand, looking from a distance older and surer than she ever was. She and her succession of basses always seemed out of proportion to each other, and that she controlled something so imposing seemed as great a feat as, say, the girl acrobats atop their broad-backed horses in the circus. She had fingers like birthday candles, and she was proud of their calluses and of playing until they bled. She had moved to electric bass from cello, so outsize instruments were nothing new to her. She used to dream, she told me one of the first times we got together after that day in the garage, that her cello was a boat on which she was rowing away from her family. I didn’t realize then how much the cello continued to figure in her life, how her violinist mother would cajole her into playing at the church services she herself played at every Sunday, though I did once go see Marine, her mother, and her haughty cocaine dealer friend play during midnight Mass at the Catholic church I used to linger at as a child, yearning for ritual and belonging.

  Three things define her for me, her beauty, her talent, and her mercurial disposition—a natural evasive-ness that tormented those who wanted to possess her and for me meant continual surprises and an inability to keep track of her. Marine was a delicate tomboy, sultry and pale, with the soft perfect skin of a child and fierce dark eyes better described as long than large. I remember a furtive look she had, of a cornered animal, and how elegant she’d become that last night. People wanted to capture her, like a wild thing, and take care of her, like a child. Beauty is often spoken of as though it only stirs lust or admiration, but the most beautiful people are so in a way that makes them look like destiny or fate or meaning, the heroes of a remarkable story. Desire for them is in part a desire for a noble destiny, and beauty can seem like a door to meaning as well as to pleasure. And yet such people are often nothing extraordinary except in their effect on others. Exceptional beauty and charm are among those gifts given by the sinister fairy at the christening. They give the bearer considerable sway over others, which can keep them so busy being a sort of siren on the rocks where others shipwreck that they forget that they themselves need to figure out where they are going. Marine had this quality of living in a story one might want to live in too, but she had ability, application, and boldness as well as beauty.

  During the first few years after we met, we were close friends moving in similar circles, and she lived with me for a few months after moving out from a speed dealer’s around the corner. Then she began to rove farther afield and I was swallowed up by other realms. Since I stayed in the same place throughout it all, she was always the one to call up with a new phone number or the news that she’d moved in with her mother and grandmother after another ménage or job fell through. The last time around, however, I knocked on her family’s apartment door on a whim, found her just back from signing a record contract in L.A., and we picked up where we’d left off. That was early May. For the next few weeks we spoke regularly. In June Marine decided that she wanted to spend a Saturday night going around with me, and so we had an outing in which we mutually admired, rehashed the past, and made many plans for the future.

  Marine had for me the glamour of a turbulent world I was never quite part of, of a talent utterly alien to me. Writing is the most disembodied art, and reading and writing are largely private and solitary experiences, so music and dance have always enchanted me as arts in which the body of the performer communicates directly to the audience, welding a kind of communion writers rarely experience. Some music has words, and rock had words that at times aspired to poetry, but the words were always sounds first, spoken to the body before the mind. Marine was too interested in being a musician to be a real three-chord punk rocker, so she gravitated toward the more ornate and less ideological realms of rock and roll proper. She had a surprising knowledge of obscure cultural things, not only the classical music that had been part of her family’s life since a great-grandfather hung out with great composers. She’d suddenly describe someone as having a beard like De Sade’s, employ an obscure term, wax sarcastic about the baroque era or Saint Anthony’s temptations. I remember the delight she took in the profusely illustrated Audubon insect guide she acquired when she was living in Santa Monica, her fascination with the exotic species crawling around that subtropical global crossroads.

  Perhaps rather than describe her as three characteristics, I could describe her as three places: the suburbs that made us and that we scorned and fled, the urban night she made into a home of sorts, and the pastoral world of a lyrical European culture and maybe of the hills past our childhood backyards. She never met her father, a musician her mother had an affair with while studying at a European conservatory, and she was named after the mistress of a composer. Her mother had been very young when Marine was born, and afterward they spent most of Marine’s life with her grandparents. So she grew up with a mother who hadn’t quite left home and with grandparents whose own musicianship had faded into sequestration and fret, with three people who didn’t seem to work and didn’t quite know what to do with a child. Her grandmother’s screaming usually filled the house when I was in it—“the fishwife,” Marine called her, and “the household furies doing their Verdi chorus.” The scream was relentless, a litany of dangers and treacheries and savage reminders about hours and warm clothes, an interminable yowl about the barbarism of youth and viciousness of this one, a chant without a pause, a single wrathful sentence that must have gone on for at least a decade. It would raise up when Marine showed signs of leaving, break into telephone conversations, follow us down the stairs and out the door. Probably it had its origins in protective urges, but it had gone sour long ago.

  Every time I heard from her, the situation was different—she’d be living with a different person, in or out of another band, employed, unemployed, on the verge of glory, on the mend from disaster, and somewhere around the end of her teens she mostly switched from male to female lovers, though there too nothing seemed certain. I don’t know if stability and security bored her, if her plunges into chaos were part of the recklessness of the desultorily self-destructive, or if the dangers were simply accoutrements of the alluring—of drugs, adventures, music making, the incessant socializing of the drug-saturated music underworld. She had the nonchalance and style that mean so much to adolescents, who are urgently constructing a persona to meet the world, and this achievement is the antithesis of the openness that might make clear to self and others what one wants and needs. The currents of emotion that buffeted us were still invisible and unnamed.

  When she was a teenager she did spectacular things with eye shadows, with azures and pinks and golds and other startling colors that made her eyes Byzantine mosaics; later she wore less and less eye makeup, and that last night she wasn’t wearing any at all—it made her look old, she said. She was twenty-four. She had dyed her brown hair black, and with her pale, pale olive skin
and fine bones she seemed almost to be dissolving into a photograph of herself, a perfect fleeting image. A gesture from that night: lifting her chin and, with closed eyes, pushing the strands of her hair from her forehead back with weary self-consciousness. We were both wearing black jeans and black T-shirts and boots and leather jackets. When we stopped at my house to listen to her demo tape and heft the manuscript of my first book, we preened in front of my mirror, and we danced together there and in the clubs. The man she was with, an older musician in her current band, watched indulgently. The night ended in a biker bar, where she lured the bar’s big cat over to her lap while we drank our last round.

  She looked radiant, and I believed her when she told me she was off drugs. We were out on a Saturday, and she was meeting a woman on Thursday; she wanted me and her male companion to come too. She was more insistent about this date than usual, and she called me up that Tuesday, partly to see if she’d left her shirt and sweater in my car and partly to confirm that she’d call me Thursday morning at ten to set up our rendezvous. Such clarity and commitment were unusual, and so when she didn’t call, I called her band’s house, the house she’d been living at the last few weeks. Marine had died Tuesday night, the older musician said, and he was broken up over it. “Little Marine,” he said, “I can’t believe it.”