Reckoning/Reveling – Ani Difranco
The writing bug first bit me in 11th grade. I was taking a Journalism class, and for our final exam my teacher gave me two options: interview the gym teacher about the track-and-field team, or write a short story. I had no idea what went into writing a short story, but interviewing the gym teacher about the track-and-field team sounded about as enticing as getting kicked in the nuts by every member of the track-and-field team. So I picked the story. Besides, when she said short story I heard only short. How hard could it be? For two nights after school I sat on the end of my bed, my word processor on a TV stand in front of me, Sportscenter on the television behind it, and I wrote. The story was about a perfect nuclear family with a nuclear bomb for a father. There was nothing memorable about the plot, and the characters were all cookie cutter, but writing it was exciting, getting in the heads of people that I’d created. The last day, when the teacher handed the story back, on the back page she wrote, “You show a lot of promise. You should take creative writing!” So I did. When you’re fifteen it doesn’t take much to convince you to do anything; someone says, “You should eat seventeen rolls of Bubble Tape at the same time” or “You should take creative writing” and it sounds like the best idea ever.
In creative writing, we focused mainly on poetry. I didn’t care much for reading poetry, and until my teacher explained that music—at least good music; he was the one who introduced me to Bob Dylan—was poetry, I didn’t care much for listening to it either. But poetry seemed easy enough to write. It was short—again, I was the type of person that could get down with short—and a lot of the time it rhymed. Girls, the few that I shared what I wrote with, seemed to like my poetry, what I had to say. At that age that was the only validation I needed; if something I wrote could get me closer to someone I wanted to get close to, that’s a hormonal trifecta; I was off to the races.
I wrote bad poetry for a solid six or seven years before the burden of writing bad poetry for six or seven years finally wore on my psyche; I was both uninspired and unconvinced in my ability. Though I declared my major as English-Writing when I moved away to college, it was more me being hopeful that I’d get back to the place where writing was exciting than it was me being realistic; how do you justify your major area of study being something that you don’t do anymore? I don’t know; I didn’t have the answer, but I did it anyway. My first semester, I took Creative Writing college style, and don’t you know it, the main focus was poetry. Right before class began one day I started and finished my assignment. It was supposed to be a love poem—aren’t they all?—and I remember throwing in some line about Milton and Paradise Lost; “Hey Milton, Paradise found me.” When I read the poem aloud that line got a chuckle; my teacher even went out of her way to say she liked it. As class ended, and I was packing up my things, a girl walked over to me and said, “I really liked your poem. We should hang out sometime.” I was twenty-two now, but sitting in that chair, the insides of my eyes a television watching myself time travel back to when I was fifteen; “Sounds great,” I said, shit-eating grin obvious to anyone looking. My sense of validation apparently hadn’t changed much over the years. Sure, I knew I was doomed; it’s like winning the lottery the first time you play it, or having the best steak of your life the first time you eat one; you get spoiled, your expectations can only go down. A few weeks later someone else in that class wrote a better poem than I had and that girl was saying, “I really liked your poem, we should hang out sometime” to them, and I was right back where I started, a Writing major who couldn’t be inspired to write.
The first time I heard Ani Difranco she was opening in concert for Bob Dylan. When she walked out on stage, I remember either saying to myself or aloud, “Who the hell is?” this girl with purple hair and Duct-taped nails. Her guitar made her tiny frame look even smaller, but when she started playing, she had this massive sound; it was as if she was unleashing all Holy Hell on the world. She was good, damn good, but that night I wasn’t in the frame of mind to get her. Years later, single and miserable, I came across “Untouchable Face” and Ani’s music suddenly made sense to me.
My second semester, a major conference focusing on the writing of Chuck Palahniuk was coming to campus. I was new to Palahniuk’s work; we’d read Fight Club and Survivor for my Modern Fiction class, and my teacher/conference organizer gave me her advance copy of his soon-to-be-released novel Choke, which I read in one, all-night sitting. As part of the conference, and a requirement for class, I had to write a paper on some theme of Palahniuk’s work, and then I had to do a presentation on my paper. I chose to write about the nihilistic tendencies of Palahniuk’s characters; the whole when everything is lost, that’s when you start to find who you are thing. That weekend of the conference, I had also planned a trip to New York City with Natalie. Myself, along with two other people I was grouped with who had similar nihilistic themes, lead off the first day of presentations at the conference. The night prior to me writing my paper, to help get me rolling, a bunch of us were sitting around my dorm and we started talking about Fight Club the movie, and before long the discussion turned hypothetical; if you wanted to really hurt the US, would you aim for Wall Street (money), the White House (leadership), or the Pentagon (force). In my discussion at the conference, I made this dorm room hypothetical a big part of what I said. After I was done a few people, including Palahniuk, came up and we discussed what I had said a bit more. Hurried for time—truth be told, I had ass, not Armageddon, on my mind—I handed Palahniuk my book to sign. “Nothingness is the best place to start every time,” was what he wrote. After he handed me the book, we shook hands, and he thanked me for my presentation, I walked back over to the dorm, loaded up the car, and we were on our way to New York City.
In the CD player was Ani Difranco’s new release, the double-disk Revelling/Reckoning. The album was more jazz-oriented than the Difranco I was used to, but just as introspective; the perfect album for a six-hour car ride through the nothingness that is central Pennsylvania. The opening song of the Revelling disk, “Ain’t That The Way” ends with the line, “Love makes me feel so dumb,” and that was my state of mind; not the Gomer Pyle definition of dumb, but where you’re constantly looking for the right thing to say, and that right way seems forever fleeting; the cat’s always got your damn tongue and its not giving it back. On the ride Natalie and I talked about what we had to see once we got to the city, what type of food we had to eat. It was stuff we’d talked about for weeks, but now that it was about to be a reality, it seemed more urgent to sort out details. Long before the first time I stepped foot on the cracked concrete of Broadway, New York City was like my Atlantis; some mythical place where one day I’d arrive and it’d feel like I’d finally arrived. On that trip, the transition to night almost complete, as the bright lights of the skyline came into view, it felt like walking onto a Hollywood set, script in hand, to make a movie starring us, Natalie and I, that was sure to be box office gold. We’d been seeing each other for two months and so far our boundaries weren’t concrete. We’d said a lot of things to each other but, “I love you” wasn’t one of them. At night, when I’d walk downstairs from her dorm room to mine, I wondered if it would be. As I reached across the center console and took a hold of her hand I felt the electricity that the city and her were giving off. This weekend was going to be magic; if ever we were going to share those three words with each other it was going to come now.
I’m a good kisser
And you’re a fast learner
And that kinda thing could float us
For a pretty long time.
“Marrow” was the first song I fell in love with from the Revelling disk; perfectly serene, it’s the shining example of music as poetry, the way my teacher so many years before tried to convince a class that it could be. We took all of the typical tourist sites that NYC had to offer: the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the Twin Towers, Times Square, all the way down to Canal Street. We devoured too many slices of pizza, ate too much street meet. Our feet hurt and our wallets were empty. We took a rest on some bench in Central Park and looked back on it all. She asked me what it was that first attracted me to her and I said that line from, “Marrow.” It wasn’t the first thing that attracted me to her—that was her eyes—but I was too wrapped in the moment to state the obvious. She smiled at my response, her eyes a sparkling sheen on par with the majesty of city lights around us; that was all the validation I needed.
The night we got back from NYC, not too long after I’d finished unpacking, she called me up to her room. So wrapped up in the revelry of the weekend I’d missed the fact the we forgot the formality of saying, “I love you.” When I got upstairs, she told me to sit down. She grabbed my hand. We looked at each for a minute but the silence was overwhelming. “I love you too,” I said. I waited a minute before I really looked into her eyes. They were distant; focused somewhere beyond me. Her hand was cold, felt like bacon when you first pull it out of the package. “My ex-boyfriend is coming up this week,” she said, “He’s staying with me.” I don’t know how long it took me to stand up from her bed but it couldn’t have been too far off the World Record pace. She tried her best to pull me back but it didn’t work; I was down the stairs, in my car, and halfway to nowhere before she could say, “Wait.”
That night, the miles were covered in molasses. Every inch brought on another metaphor that somehow I’d missed; the streets were full of signs: caution signs, detour signs, the sort of signs you miss when you’re looking beyond what you can see in the two eyes in front of you, and for two months that’s just what I’d been doing. Natalie didn’t tell me that she loved me because she didn’t love me. Or even if she did feel something close to love, however you wanted to define the word, it wasn’t what I wanted it to be, what I thought it would be.
But as bad as I am
I’m proud of the fact
That I’m worse than I seem.
From the moment I heard that line I wanted it inscribed on my tombstone. “Grey” was one of those songs that any sad bastard could appreciate; an anthem if you were looking for the autonomy of a brooding night alone. After that talk, at least her part in the sixteen-word conversation, I told myself that I was in for countless brooding nights alone; I needed them. I’d sacrificed a lot for this girl, a lot more monetarily than I had to give, and worse yet, I started sacrificing my opportunities. Instead of spending a weekend amongst people with the same interests and ambitions as I had, I passed over a major conference that was a few hundred yards from where I lived for a pipedream an eternity away. As much as I wanted to be able to say, “This isn’t me” it was me; this is who I let myself become. I needed to find a mirror, one that told the truth, not one of those carnival mirrors towards the end of Mask that made Rocky Dennis look normal. Things weren’t normal; they were ugly; they felt closer to a verse in “Tamburitza Lingua.”
and everything seems to have gone terribly wrong that can
but one breath at a time is an acceptable plan
she tells herself
and the air is still there
and this morning it’s even breathable
and for a second the relief is unbelievable
and she’s a heavy sack of flour sifted
her burden lifted
she’s full of clean wind for one lean moment
and then she’s trapped again
reverted
caged and contorted
with no way to get free
and she’s getting plenty of little kisses
but nobody’s slippin’ her the key
I’d been waiting two months on the other side of a door for Natalie to slip me some key and let me in. I had let her in on everything, I gave her the roadmap to exactly who I was, and how I got here, and for as much time as we spent in the car, I assumed we were taking in the miles together, seeing the same things, breathing the same air, with the same destination in sight. But that wasn’t the case. I could see the key wasn’t the problem. It was the asshole standing at the door.
As I pulled into the parking lot in front of my dorm I took a deep breath, trying my best to ignore the sight of Natalie, who was smoking a cigarette outside. I could see that she’d seen me, and I considered putting the car in reverse and taking off again. But in one quick motion I parked the car, grabbed the keys, sped-walk to the side door, ignoring Natalie’s call to me, I climbed the two flights of stairs, made my way down the hallway, walked through my open door, passed in front of the television and the group of friends playing Madden football, walked over to my closet, opened it, grabbed the bottle of Absolut Citron vodka, twisted the top off, and chugged a quarter of its contents. I savored the first alcoholic drink of my life, expecting it in an instant to get me drunk enough to forget everything, everyone behind me. But it didn’t. So I took another swig. And another. It could have been minutes before I realized the room was completely silent save the blow of a video game whistle. I turned around and five of my closest college friends, people who didn’t know half about me, let alone what Natalie did, were staring, eyes-wide, mouths open, at me. “Holy fucking shit,” my roommate said. Yes, holy fucking shit. I don’t remember if I smiled at their collective cheer, one aimed at my crossover to, as they put it, “the dark side.” But I felt better. Or at least calm enough to reveal the happenings of the previous couple of hours. I started to tell the tale of what had gone on with Natalie but my friends stopped me long enough to load up on a laundry basket full of Old German 40 oz. beers. For the first time the group of us shared an alcoholic moment together. In a ceremonial sort of way, more people starting gathering into the room once they’d been told that I had finally relented on my promise to never drink. As I finally started to feel the effects of the alcohol, my face warm, my cheeks sore from smiling, I looked out the front window and saw Natalie staring up at me. Reality sank deep into my gut like an oversized burrito. She was waving me down, and though the window was closed and semi-fogged from the cold, I could read from her lips that she wanted to talk. And as much as I wanted to, in spite of every vile thing I had just said about her, none of which I really meant, I couldn’t let myself lose what little I had left of myself that night. I walked away from the window and played the best smiling clown that I could muster until all of the alcohol was gone and the crowd retreated for the night. When it was finally time to sleep I put in the Reckoning disk and listened to the title song:
we thought we left possession behind
but truth is i was yours and you weren’t mine
and now i’ve replayed a thousand times
exactly what was said
cuz nothing is as it appears
in the funhouse mirrors of your fears
on the roller coaster of all these years
with your hands above your head
Drunk, angry, and heartbroken as I was, I could still hear clearly. My friends did their best to cheer me up, and I appreciated that. But sometimes nothing short of anything can do the trick; sometimes misery is a pool worth wallowing in. That night I had company, and though it wasn’t the company that I wanted, that I was in love with, it was brutally honest and sincere, the best friend that I could ask for. And so I had failed myself. Again. So what. So I had nothing. For the first time in a long time I could feel that beautiful urge coming on; the urge to write. At least that gave me a place to start. I saw that I was going to have to go slowly; I would need to learn everything all over again.
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