There Is A Light That Never Goes Out

When I was a sophomore in high school, I hated my English class. My teacher was young and cool and didn't wear those sad black clogs that so many of the others did, but I still hated it. Each week we would have quizzes on different Latin roots, and very rarely was I valiant or victorious, and I certainly didn't greet those "beneficial" words with benevolence. And what's worse, we had to read Romeo and Juliet from old yellow textbooks that smelled of wilted cabbage and glue. It wasn't very romantic.

And then one day we got to the poetry section of our textbooks. And to be relevant to our class, my teacher made the astute observation that music is like poetry, and that for our first assignment, we were to take one of our favorite songs and analyze it for the class.

I had to do this once before in the eighth grade for my humanities class; it didn't go over well. "Seven Nation Army" by the White Stripes was apparently a bit inaccessible; all my teacher could say at the end was "Wow, that bass part is like a mantra." She was a lesbian and enjoyed eastern philosophy and fair trade coffee. No one else knew what that meant. But I also choreographed a dance to Pink Floyd's "Money," so I don't know why my classmates were so surprised at my musical selection.

Anyway, I wanted this one to be better. But, given my 15 year old status, my musical repertoire certainly was limited. I raced home and poured through my CD collection. The Beatles were too typical, Led Zeppelin were too sexy, and Green Day were too stupid. I tried to listen to the radio for help, but wasn't fond of anything there, either. It was all about "fucked" in all of its forms: getting, being (+ "up").

And then, for whatever reason, I picked up The Smiths. I'd never particularly cared for them; Morrissey always seemed a bit self-absorbed for my tastes. And anyway, he was just another annoying vegetarian. But then I started to listen to some of the lyrics, and things began to make sense.



It was my turn to go next. Katie had just finished presenting Shania Twain's simultaneously empowering and demeaning hit, "I Feel Like a Woman," and it went really well with the class. My teacher liked how Katie used poetic devices in her explanation of the song, but told her that just because Shania said she felt "like" a woman doesn't mean that it is a simile. But she clapped anyway and drew a red check plus next to her name. "Savannah," she said, "you're up."

My hands were shaking as I smoothed my pants and retied my pale yellow ribbon belt. I adjusted my pearls. "Hello," I said (why did I say that?), "I will be playing The Smiths' 'There Is A Light That Never Goes Out.'"

And I played all four minutes and five seconds of it. Images began to swirl about in my mind as Morrissey's voice entered my ears, and I remembered my first date when a boy, an older boy, came to my house in his car (and not just any car, but a yellow Xterra), and took me with him to see a comedy show. I remembered how I laughed at things I didn't think were funny, just because from the corner of my eye, I could see his teeth glittering like jewels as the comedian told jokes about penises. And it worked; after it was over he hugged my shoulder, the "C" his hand made fit my shoulder perfectly. He said it looked like I had a good time, we should do it again soon.

(We should do it again soon!)

And then on the next date, we went to eat and then to his older friend's house in his car, and I squinted my eyes so all of the street lights would become soft and fuzzy and round like when you look into a kaleidoscope. And I smiled brightly because I felt like I was in a dream. He was a boy who was smart and funny attractive and older than me and he liked me! Me, the girl who, after he came over to the house for the first time, had to blow dry the forest green pit stains out from her lime green shirt. And besides, he was playing Radiohead in the car. I felt like a woman.

"Driving in your car, I never never want to go home"

We got to the house before everyone else did, and all was dark in the car. We sat in an anxious silence; my heartbeat was faster than that of a jackhammer and I knew he had to hear it. But then he turned on "Farmhouse" by Phish. I couldn't move, I couldn't speak, so I just breathed his scent. He smoked cloves and I thought that was exotic. And I looked at his eyes; they reminded me of the green traffic lights I saw when I squinted. And more than anything, I wanted to "Go!" but I couldn't.

"Oh God, my chance has come at last (but then a strange fear gripped me and I just couldn't ask)"

The guitar solo was halfway finished; I knew I had to move soon. But all of a sudden, two headlights illuminated us, and they never went out. His friends were here. And I looked down to my hands in disappointment, and saw his resting nervously atop mine. I didn't feel their weight until now. Scared, and growing brighter and brighter by the minute, I withdrew them. "I guess we'd better go now," I said.

The song was over.

My classmates didn't notice that the song had finished. No one said anything. They didn't know the words, and they were completely bored. Paul began to play on his Nokia. And I was offended--they weren't disrespecting me, they were pissing on Morrissey and my memories. I couldn't stand it; my cheeks grew hot and pink with impatience and I thought about my sweaty and paralyzed hands, and how stupid I felt after I tried to get close to him at the Belle & Sebastian concert when they played "Dress Up In You." He thought they were weird; I thought they were delightfully absurd. I thought about how, even after being tossed aside, his eyes were still more vibrant and vivacious than a green light that would never never go out, no matter how badly I wanted them to turn ugly and red. I would always remember Phish, and cloves and the sparkle of his teeth as they danced in a smoky blue haze, and most importantly, for the first time (not necessarily because of him), I felt alive and sexy and free.

"There is a light and it never goes out
There is a light and it never goes out
There is a light and it never goes out"

My teacher asked if I was OK. Luke was copying his neighbor's Algebra II homework, and Paul had begun to flirt with Julie. Clay asked for the bathroom pass. They all seemed OK. I shook my head.

"I may not know many things, but if after listening to this song and these words, you decide to keep playing 'Snake' on your phone, you're not human."

I stared at Paul. He wasn't listening to me; Julie was massaging his fat shoulders with her small hands. They reminded me of dung beetles feeding on elephant feces.

"You people are all going to be happy, and it's not fair."

Paul closed his simple brown eyes and rolled his head back onto Julie's desk. She kept eating his shit up.

I lost it.

"You don't care about anything; not words, not love, not poetry, so you don't deserve any of it. I'm not going to explain this song to you because you'll never understand."

I didn't receive a check plus.

I took the bathroom pass from Clay, and ran out of the room. Then I took off my pearls. I stopped listening to Radiohead, and started reading real poetry. I also promised myself I would never smoke again. Later that day, I listened to my copy of "Farmhouse" and cried, and then I threw it away. Tried to throw away my memories too, but I couldn't. But why would I want to, anyway?

"There is a light and it never goes out."

the end of ostrich syndrome

In the moment, I'm dancing and
my legs are burning and
my blood is pumping and
I can taste the wind as it enters and exits my mouth like
a soft pink ribbon.
It's slightly sweet and
it lingers for a few moments on my lips.

I'm making it, I cry!
I'm making the wind!

But then I turn with too much vigor and I fall violently to the floor, and I'm hammered with the cold, hardwood fact that I'm just some girl alone in a white bloodless room, dancing pathetically to songs she doesn't even like.
And my lips are stained red; the dry heat of the room made them chapped and raw.

I have no partner, and no rhythm, just thin clumsy feet that trip on my:
knobby knees and
bony ankles that
look like those of an ostrich.

And then I pick myself up off the floor and turn off the noise, just to
bury my head in the sand. And
I feel so fucking stupid for thinking I could ever really dance to begin with.
A tiny red globule falls from my lips and onto my pale and worthless feet, and
I hate them and feel so heavy and so bound.

The word "good bye" exits my body with almost too much ease and
the soft and bloody 'b' evaporates quickly into the ether, punctuated by the gentle click of the white door. It's a pretty sound, and
delicate and
almost
brightly hopeless

and that light final click is the start of a new, more honest song.

work in progress

She gets her thoughts on love from the worn appendix in the back of her chemistry book and her wisdom from a raw throated, frizzy haired woman banging away at minor seventh chords on a dusty piano. In the mornings and regardless of the weather, she wears her mother’s tattered navy moccasins (which are a size too big). They have old red and turquoise beads hanging from them that don’t go with anything in her closet. And each night, she dreams of sweet smelling plantations, shiny ringlets of honey colored hair, and finding her true love in the science fiction section of the local library. The girl should not be trusted.

She never feels quite at home in her house. Her mother likes to use expressions like “Well idn’t that the pits” when she sees something sad on the local evening news, like on Tuesday, when a man choked on an acrylic fingernail in his burger basket, and on Wednesday, when there was a five car pileup on the highway. The girl never knows what the “pit” is, or for that matter, how there could be more than one. Her father, well, he likes to sit in his pea green recliner and read his newspaper and he likes to drink gin and tonics while doing so. He is almost always reading the newspaper. For a while she wondered if he even had a face anymore, for it is always hidden by newsprint and the occasional colored advertisement about discount pantsuits or clearance lampshades. Her brother, Neil, has a girlfriend and wears school jackets with letters on them and smelled like cigarettes and Aqua Velva. Neil is never around. Her dad calls Neil a “cut up” and when he comes home late with red eyes and a dizzy stride, her mom shakes her head disapprovingly and says, “Now, you don’t see that from a galloping horse.” The girl never understood what a horse, let alone a galloping one, had to do with her brother getting home past curfew.

So, the girl spends most of her time in her room. Her room is covered in hand drawn posters of weird, scientific things, like the Krebs cycle, the Periodic Table, the Loch Ness Monster, and then, staring down to her bed, there is a poster of Clark Gable from “Gone With the Wind.” She loves his moustache and the tip of his nose because it reminds her of a happy little mushroom her class studied once in Biology. Her mom always jokes to her friends about the fact that her sixteen-year-old daughter has a poster of Clark Gable hanging above her bed. She says that she doesn’t know why, but he makes her daughter “as happy as a pig in slop.” Her mother prefers Jimmy Smits. The girl doesn’t like being called a pig, and she thinks that Clark is much too classy to ever be referred to as “slop.” She sighs whenever her mother does this. At least she looks at a man who will look at back at her, the girl thinks. That’s more than her mother can say.

In addition to the posters, her room is a veritable jungle of plastic plants that occasionally gather dust if she does not care for them. But they do not die, even if they happen to grow a thick grayish film around every leaf. To the girl, this is excellent news. When she was little she had a traumatic experience with her rose garden: one day, for no apparent reason, they just wilted and shriveled and fell pathetically to the ground. The petals reminded her of dehydrated cat tongues. Since then, all plants have been plastic, and whenever Alvy, her cat, meows, she has to look away.

Each night, while her parents eat dinner on their TV trays, watching the local news and talking about The Pits and The Stocks, the girl takes her plate upstairs to her room and studies chemistry. Textbooks cover her bed, and eventually her hand begins to cramp because she’s been balancing equations for almost an hour. And then she smells her food and is disgusted by the hardened gravy on her mashed potatoes. They look like hardened plaster and are the color of her lab gloves after an experiment involving iodine. Alvy starts licking at the plate with his tongue and she gets upset and throws the plate to the floor, getting gravy gunk on her equations. And then she gets frustrated, because now her homework will smell like her lousy dinner and she can’t stop thinking about her dead rose garden. But then she looks up to Clark, smiling as handsome as can be, and decides to continue adding protons to her potassium atom.

The truth is that she understands most everything about science and mathematics. She can do logarithmic functions, and she can determine the velocity of X given its time T, and she can balance equations, and she can identify every part of the human heart. But, after sixteen years of daily study, she just doesn’t understand the force that attracts her mother and father together, and how covalent bonds can exist among humans, and she doesn’t know what acted as a catalyst to make Neil turn his potential feelings for a girl into kinetic ones, and she doesn’t understand how neither of these things have set times T and set velocities X. That is what she wants to know most. And that, the girl has decided, is the next problem she is going to solve.

In the meantime, she has finished balancing her final equation. She takes the now dull pencil from her thin fingers, sharpens it, and gingerly, purposefully, scribes her name at the top of the page in cursive: Grace.




The next morning as Grace rode the bus to school, she thought more about love, and why she had never experienced it. She started by thinking about Scarlett O’Hara, and how even though she could have had it with Rhett, she was hopelessly stuck on Ashley. Grace never understood that. She could only surmise that Scarlett only ever wanted what she couldn’t have. That didn’t help Grace, because she wanted no one, and no one wanted her. Then she thought about her brother, and his girlfriend, Rachel. Rachel was very pretty and thin, and had strawberry blonde hair that smelled like pineapple. When Rachel twirled her hair, she liked to bite her lip and giggle into her hand, and Grace found that very sexy. So did Neil. Sometimes Grace would try to emulate it in the mirror, but she would always end up licking her hair on accident and coughing.

And then she would look into the mirror and feel like a failure. It wasn’t that Grace was ugly, she had shiny medium brown hair that fell to her waist, and pale skin with bright green eyes, but she just felt plain. All the time. Grace never wore makeup; she tried to use an eyelash curler of her mother’s once but pressed so hard that for a week her eyelashes looked like crispy uppercase L’s.

Sometimes, when she got out of the shower, she would stare at her body in the mirror. She saw scrawny little legs that, even when her ankles were together, a quarter could fit easily between her thighs. And she saw ribs that looked like the gills of a fish, and on top of that, two small breasts that reminded her of the Hostess Snowballs that her mother liked to eat in secret. She didn’t see anything special, and she didn’t know why men bothered to buy magazines to see something so plain. Grace would think about the popular girls at school, with their grapefruit chests and rounded butts and how they would wear tight clothes that looked like they were spray-painted on, and how their glittery belt buckles would say “baby” or “angel.” Grace thought it was silly for them to have a belt anyway, as if that light stretch denim would ever fall short of their hip bones.


And then she hit her head on the dirty vinyl seat back in front of her. The bus came to a screeching halt as an old black Oldsmobile skidded past them on the right. From her seat, Grace could see the plate “GLMRUS” fade into the distance. It was only 7:47 and she already had a headache.

details

An obnoxious and overperfumed brunette with a tacky flower barrette pushes past me at the book store. she barely squeezes into a faded black sweater and there is mauve lipstick that slowly seeps into the paperthin lines above her lips like an hourglass in reverse. Some is beginning to stick to her front teeth, which are slightly yellow due to years of smoking virginia slims, or so we must presume. Someone recommends aldous huxley. She chews her gum, lightly spraying "brave new world" with berry mint flavored spittle. She drops the book. thoroughly disenchanted. She looks to the clerk, chewing her gum like a bullfrog does as it relishes its fly. "so where is the romance section?"

and then she is gone, whisked away to exotic Cyprus, where her tan Greek lover doesn't care about the deep red lines that her l'eggs pantyhose with control top leaves on her slightly flabby stomach, and he doesn't ask about the man who she loved when her stomach was flat and her teeth were white, and he certainly doesn't ask about the man who left her while she slept, leaving nothing but an old barrette between the sheets of their bed with a long blonde hair hanging from it like a stubborn loose tooth (she found it the next week when waking; it molded itself overnight to her side as a cold, brittle truth). Her lover only cares about her, and her now, and he loves her crafty flower barrettes and he lives for her berry mint and menthol flavored kisses. And she is happy and safe and loved and warm when she leaves; she feels like that's what good books should do for people. Who is Allen Huxby, anyway, and what does he know about being brave?