Main St. Blues, Pt.4

After or before practice (a spiritual trance, really), we eat and hang out at KFC a lot. That’s where we discuss our musical ideas and plans. Not your friendly-neighborhood Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken KFC. It’s Katherine Fried Chicken, a dystopic little shack with bulletproof windows protecting the counter, a simulacrum of inner-city violence transplanted onto Main St. Southampton. Run reputedly by Afghan Americans and shady overseas networks, they don’t serve Fried Chicken, but META CHICKEN. It’s because the last time they changed frying oil was probably a decade ago, and now chicken is being fried in residual chicken fat. Does this remind anyone of how the bone marrows of cows are being processed and fed to their ilk? Mad cow disease, the ultimate metaphor of the human capability to stand nature on its head. I remember the chicken tasting thicker and sturdier throughout my teens, steadily and uncannily, like aged whiskey. It just gets heavier and heavier. All the growth hormones and grease eternally sifting about in that cesspool of black oil: in goes the chicken, greeted by its atomized brethren, zzzt, zzzt, ZZZT! Named aptly after the Russian empress Katherine the Great, who had an insatiable appetite for lovers, the chicken here boosts your testosterone and estrogen better than Viagra. Outside KFC, the famous Southampton street dancer, nicknamed “Cowboy Man” was giving a spontaneous, free performance while waiting for his bus. Check out Youtube, you’ll find him. He speaks to no one and everyone, nothing and everything; he doesn’t even seem to age. Local legend says that he’s a divine agent in disguise, dealing retribution to those bathing in the hubris of their success. They will fall from grace, swiftly. What about those who are enjoying relative success, like me? The answer didn’t come until much later. Cowboy Man’s fury knows no bounds.

Often after we ate at KFC, we’d have a gig to play. With the nuclear chicken in our stomachs conjuring carcinogens and spreading hormones, the shows radiated with vivacity. Despite the venues being small local bars and cafes, we were satisfied and the audience was too. Energy. Entropy. Chaos. Our queen’s mandibles keeping everything in pace. It was unreal. The Sodomizers’ brand of pseudo aggro-progressive bluesy art-rock was too; why did the crowd enjoy it? It was neither the commonplace bluesgrass rock n’ roll nor the youthful, testosterone-filled hardcore punk popular in our town. But they loved it, anyways, as if Jill’s temporary metamorphosis awakened something in their spirit, like it did in ours. But nothing glamorous lasts forever, and it left as swiftly as it came. But then, to say that our revolution was a “joke” does not do justice to its evanescence. I’d rather call it something that just “happened” – like a random gust of wind, mixed with moldy moisture that carried scents capable of invoking nostalgia towards his or her childhood. The Southern Tier Sodomizers were unreal. 3+1 = infinity. But that never prevented 4 – 1 from happening. Individually, as I said, we were all too real.

Glurk. My tightened right fist collides with Benson’s French fry of a nose. He stumbles backward, but struggles to regain balance, and poses to strike me again. Before he could lunge at me, I served him on the cheeks once more, courtesy of my rocket-like left fist. Forgetting why he punched me in the first place, Gavin’s bloodied, cowering figure, in the corner of the table, huddled upon his own knees reminded me why. I think the three of us all loved Jill in a different manner. Benson worshipped her, like a muse, his source of divine inspiration. Carnality and secular love was out of the question, she was his Mother Mary, Joan of Arc and Madonna. Gavin however, saw Jill as what she fleetingly was: a worker-turned ant queen, flowing with nectar and nutrients. A mother, a source of nourishment: Gavin wanted to incorporate her into his world, to feed off her boundless energy. It’s still different from carnal desire, though I don’t know how to put it. I loved her by not loving her at all, by being warmly indifferent. Not the kind of indifference and fatigue towards my Ex, but a respect for what she was doing and what she is. Just letting her be. Letting the voices emerging from her mouth guide my hands and head, being receptive and reactive. It was ultimately Gavin’s love that vanquished her, stole her from the rest of us.

The night before a show with a music label agent, Gavin and Jill were found in Jill’s apartment, both unconscious. An overdose. An overdose from a bad mixture of drugs – cannabis, milk, honey and one hard chemical I cannot remember – took them to the moon. When Benson and I hurried there, we saw Gavin carried out from the building still breathing, but on another trolley, a ghostly sheet of white cloth covered what resembled Jill underneath. Gavin returned from space, like the astronauts from fucking Apollo 13, but Jill stayed there, like the mythical female protagonist (whose name I can’t pronounce) of the Chinese Autumn Festival. She took two pills, defied gravity and flew gently to the moon. But she had a rabbit companion, whereas Jill’s probably there all alone: cold, solitary, eternally gazing outwards towards the stars, with no Jack Daniel’s or mooncakes to relieve the sight of the harrowing cosmos. Black, littered with stars, suns, supernovas, milky ways born long ago – But at least away from this dump. She has become a true queen – flown away, in search of a new nesting ground. In a sense, I do think she’s out there, since neither Benson nor I saw her remains. Funny, on that rainy day of her funeral, we carried her coffin and felt that it was too light, far too light – did she pull a trick like Bruce Wayne, in the graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns? But Gavin’s absence from the funeral confirmed her departure. He never contacted us after his recovery, and vanished from our social circle. Therefore as unreal as it started, 3 + 1 = The Sodomizers ended on a fantastic note, but viewed in our tragically individual 1, 1 and 1, it was all too real. Putting a wreath on the coffin, I involuntarily looked outside: outside the gates of Coral cemetery, Cowboy Man was dancing – waiting for the route 15 Bus.

Benson flies backward and crashes into another table, breaking bottles, shattering glasses. I spit sideways before I sneeze hard, blood spurting from my nose. After so many years later, here, in The Selmer, the beginning of the end of the beginning of all, Gavin decided to appear once again. I was a little glad to know that he was still alive, yet not without pangs of bitterness. But for Gavin It was really bad timing, since Benson was already mean drunk, and the memories of anger, loss, deprivation, coupled with vows of retribution came back to him the instance we saw Gavin, timidly drinking a glass of Jack Daniel’s in the corner. Benson went over, grabbed him by his collars, and without exchange, began pounding him with a beer bottle. Gavin looked sad, defeated and penitent – he didn’t beg for mercy nor did he scream “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”. He just took the blows. Whunk. Whunk. Whaaakkk. The bottle broke, but Benson didn’t care. I grabbed his bottle-holding arm before he could drive that killing-machine into Gavin’s abdomen. Obstructing his vengeance, that’s when I got slugged, and that’s why I slugged him. Benson, – that son of a bitch sprawled on the floor now – seemingly unhurt by the shrapnel, covers his face and starts weeping, no, bawling. Hard. As if he was a newborn baby. I turn to Gavin and saw nothing but defeat, indignity in his eyes – he too, is gently weeping. I’m just standing, trying to let that familiar indifference lock the beast back into its cage. I’m just standing, like the still lives in this town. Standing.