In that Last Spotlight

Suddenly I wasn’t sure of much. I stood vacant in the spotlight between songs with small feedback ringing and a group of people standing vacant in front of me all waiting for something. A song. An accident. Entertainment somewhere. I took my guitar off and let it hit the ground and it made a terrible crash through the speakers and the feedback grew and I left. Someone and then someones clapped and idiots always hide behind what they want to pass off as “art” that they “get”.
    

This wasn’t art. I wasn’t performing. I was done. I was leaving.
    

“Hey man, that was awesome,” a shadow said as I passed it.
    

“Yeah, thanks.”
    

It patted my shoulder. I drifted away from it into the black of the club. Through the sweat and bodies and people spoke and someone clapped, “getting it”, as I walked by and I left. My guitar rang shrill behind me and as I went out the door it stopped being so loud and I assumed the sound guy killed the P.A. but it still rang through my amp.
    

Eventually it would stop.
    

Eventually people would get tired of listening to it.
    

People would get tired of “getting it”.
    

I pulled my cigarettes out of my back pocket. The pack was flattened and inside the cigarettes were flattened and there were only a few left. I took one out and with the bouncing cherry I began to wander the bustling streets in July.
    

I figured I was done with music. I loved it. I loved it more than anything or anyone I had ever known. I doubted I was meant to make it. To spend my life crafting songs mediocre at best, praying and hoping that someone some day may want to listen to them. That someone may discover just one of the hundreds of thousands of songs I’ve written and maybe, just maybe, connect with it.
    

The idea was romantic and it had kept me going for decades, but somewhere in that last spotlight, in that last song, in that last moment, I understood the sheer absurdity of it all. My life’s work.
    

People brushed by me and the street lamps and shop lamps and head lights lit them and some were happy and some weren’t and in pairs and groups and alone they all carried on.
    

My life’s work. What was it all? A few hundred deteriorating cassette tapes in a closet? Some self-pressed CD-R’s in the truck of my car? A few hundred mp3 downloads? All certain to be destroyed and forgotten in a frighteningly short amount of time and I couldn’t understand the point anymore. I would never be a rock star. I would never be respected. I would never create some masterwork that somehow defined me as a man and an artist.
    

I tossed the ass of my cigarette down a storm drain and walked into a bar. It was small and dark and half filled and the floor and walls were bare wood. The tables didn’t match and looked as if they had all been stolen from various restaurants and hidden here. The bar itself was a thick slab of tree on two by sixes and I could see the bartenders legs as she walked from one end to the other. The music was loud. Seger.
    

I flagged down the bartender.
    

“What can I get you?”
    

“Whiskey double. Neat.”
    

“Six.”
   

I handed her my card.
    

“Keep it open?” she asked.
    

“Please.”
    

She nodded and took my card. Seger sang to me about how good things used to be. The weight on his soul. It must have been so tough on you, I thought, with all of those gold records.
    

The bartender handed me my drink and I took it to a booth in the corner. I could look out the window and see the tide of people. I sipped my whiskey. I don’t need to be in the air anymore. I am in the shadows. I am the shadows.
    

There I was. In the corner booth. The Great No One. The Great Nothing. The Great Never. With whiskey and the Silver Bullet Band and not a whole lot else. The Great No Chance.
    

That’s not a bad album title.

I began humming melodies.

Echoes from Some Dead Universe

It's late now. The cold has crept in and the lights are off and the television glows in my otherwise dark bedroom.

Re-runs again. I haven't seen this one though. I have the volume off so I will have to watch it again sometime. I watch for the visual tone. the silver-plate black and white and tight and uncomfortable sets and shots. All sewn together in some masterful way as to impose a vast, terrifying, nearly lovecraftian sense of hoplessness and divine malevolence onto the viewer. When I sleep my dreams are paranoid and uncomfortable and scare me. While I can't sleep, my body, for whatever reason, craves something similar. So I watch The Twilight Zone with the sound off and write in the flickering light of cursed lives and bleak endings and existences spiraling into the void.

I nearly killed us a few weeks back.

We drank and enjoyed the day and Marie passed out in the car and I drove home and it was late and raining and I don't remember much of the drive except for hitting maybe three cars and at least one telephone pole. Somehow the car got us home. I got Marie to bed and then I drove to the bar and in the parking lot I noticed how badly the car was damaged. Outside of the bar I drank the last of the wine I had with me and also inside the bar a handful of beers and I met friends and people whom I know who might be friends and maybe not. I spilled drinks on the floor. I was loud as the band played. I drank and then went outside and drank and when I couldn't stand anymore I mumbled goodbye to whoever was there and I drove home. I don't remember that drive either. I sat on my bed and I couldn't untie my boots so I left them on and fell asleep.

When I woke up Marie was already up. "Did you see the fucking car?" She was frantic.

"Yes." I was instantly awake.

"What the fuck happened? Did you hit something?"

"I don't know. I must have."

"Jesus fucking Christ! We could be dead right now! How fucking drunk were you?!"

"How fucking drunk were you? Christ."

"Don't 'Christ' me," she said. "You could have fucking killed us. Do you realize that? We could be fucking dead right now, all because you think you're some kind of fucking tough guy who can fucking drink and drive and everything will be fine! Well how the hell are we going to get that fixed? How're we going to pay for that? Huh?!"

"I don't know."

"You don't know. Well that's just fucking great. Well you just fucking lay there and fucking sleep and I'll goddamned figure it out!" She left the room and slammed the door. My head was pounding.

I didn't feel right about any of this, but I didn't feel completely in the wrong either.I didn't feel as though I were completely to blame. My feet were suffocating in my boots and I looked down at them and remembered that the rain had all but cemented the laces in place. I was too hungover and dizzy to fix them but it was all I could think about.

I had to work but there was no question that I was going to call off as soon as I had the motivation to find my phone if I hadn't left it somewhere.

A wave of guilt and shame rushed over me and I could have killed us. I remember pulling two U-turns on the interstate when I thought I had gotten lost and decided to start from the beginning. I remember stumbling in the rain back to the car for an hour as Marie stumbled next to me and I remember not knowing where I was. I remembered being on the interstate. I remembered hitting the first car plainly, and only vaguely the next two and the telephone pole. I did not remember how I found the interstate. We could have died and I was surrounded in the guilt of it. 

Marie came in and she was crying silently. Now I was only glad to see her. I stood up and maybe in some other life we did die. Or she died. Or I died and we weren't here now. We weren't okay. We weren't together anymore. I pulled her to me.

"I love you," I said and held her tight against my chest.

"The car, honey," she said under inaudible tears. "What are we going to do?"

"I love you. I'm sorry I did this. I know it doesn't fix anything, but, I'm so glad you're okay."

She rested her head on my shoulder. "We're lucky."

"We are."

She wrapped her arms around my back.

I sat in shame for weeks. My mood was crashing and dragging along behind me as it was and I think now that the total abandon of that night was the culmination of my deepening senses of emptiness and futility (the "twenty-something blues", as I like to call them). I stopped drinking. I almost stopped driving. It kept me awake. In some other universe, I had killed us.

I sit awake and watch the silent flicker of my television. I want to write but I can't scribble anything worth a goddamn. I always felt like my flame came from alcohol and my brain knows that isn't true but my fingertips don't and my heart doesn't and I can't write a single decent fucking word.

I sit awake in the night and I am heartbroken for the James without Marie, and for the Marie without James and for the world without either. I am haunted by those echoes from some dead universe. I am disgraced by my inexcusable leap into sheer and unadulterated chaos and somewhere, in some pleading and child-like corner of my mind wonder how I found the interstate that night and how I got home.

Mostly though, I am thankful.