Chapter One—Maimed by Rock and Roll
Thanks, you early adopters! Enjoy this early draft of a chapter from my next unpublished manuscript.
September 2017
When my toe made contact with the concrete parking bumper, I didn't consider how my body was going to make impact, save for the flash of fear I always had when I fell, that all of my teeth would be knocked out. I didn't consider my knees as they slammed, prayer-like, onto the asphalt, or my jostled organs. The ample padding of my belly and breasts would protect them.
I didn't think about how delicate the human head is, with just its holey layer of bone and cartilage protecting the one thing that separates humans from earthworms.
When I fell, I thought about the box in my arms, filled with the worst combination of items to slam onto the hard parking lot: three glass jars of Morello cherries, five cans of Dr. Pepper, and two cans of propane. I braced for the Molotov cocktail of glass, sugar, and fire, but the carnage was limited to one broken jar and a soda spewing from a pinhole. I jumped up, grabbed the can, and with my thumb over the hole, ran it into the kitchen to catch the liquid in a stainless steel bowl. That Dr. Pepper was a limited edition made with real Texas cane sugar, ordered at a premium from a distributor in Texas, the only place it was available. The soda saved, I went outside to clean up the broken glass, shards in a drying blood-red stain that soaked into the sun-soaked pavement like an artifact of a wound.
Instinct told me to kneel, but I stopped myself. Broken glass would grind into my bare knees where the red speckles of my broken blood vessels made their constellation. My knees, so fat and round and already full of scars. A seam down the middle of the right one—the scrotal remnant from a childhood running-with-scissors incident. Above that, the ghost indentations of a bite mark, my teenage self-harm method of choice.
In college, before the hospitality industry got me, I worked in an art gallery with a lithe
blonde wisp who dated a Mizzou football player. His mother flew into a rage when this little brothers' horseplay encroached on the girl's flawless legs, leaving her with the first small scrape she'd ever suffered. Twenty-year-old legs with skin as fresh as when she left the womb.
I looked at my own legs, seeing the raised flesh on the front of my ankle from the time I rode my bike too close to a culvert when I was ten, falling against the sharp edge of a new drainage pipe. I didn't consider what a coddled and dull childhood she'd had. I only saw the disgusting map of my own.
And I was still adding to it. Burn and knife scars on my hands were badges of honor awarded for my life in the kitchen. A cleave in my right thumb from a slip of a knife that slipped while slicing juicy plums. Hatch marks on my arms from brushing against hot skillets. "Don't do this. You still have nerve endings in your fingers," I'd tell my students, the middle-class ladies who'd spend an evening watching me prepare their dinner, or learning how to preserve pickles and jam, lowering the jars with my hands into the popping boiling water instead of wasting class time with the jar-lifting tool. I was accustomed to the stinging smack of steam.
Just as I was accustomed to the creak of my knees after impact from being thrown down by wet kitchen floors, or toppling off-balance with my arms full of food or cherries, propane, and Dr. Pepper.
The glass gone, I went into the kitchen and baked thirty Texas sheet cakes, fudgy and dense, topped with pecans. The chocolate meat of the cake spiced with a tang that diners couldn't quite place, the combination of the special Dr. Pepper and cherry juice.
Thirty cakes, baked alone in a friend's borrowed bakery, sold to raise $1,000 for the Houston Food Bank after Hurricane Harvey. A city I had never visited in a state I'd only passed through. That night, when people picked up the cakes they'd bought, friends made me sit down. My massage therapist scheduled me for a free appointment. I told her I'd need it, having jangled my bones in the fall I'd taken, laughing it off like all my other falls, harmless save for the scabs forming on my knees that would surely heal into freckled scars as I continued working through the next week and a half: driving an hour to roast a 100-pound suckling pig on a 95-degree day on the banks of the Missouri River, another hour-long drive to teach a dinner party how to make chicken thighs studded with pomegranate seeds, a three-hour drive to my hometown with my surly teen to cook a five-course meal for thirty with my grandparents as the guests of honor while my mother haggled with the host for free tickets.
My reward: a three-day solo trip to Memphis to see Wilco.
Tom Petty died two days before the show. Suffering the constant pain of a broken hip, he ingested a combination of painkillers. Some prescribed and legal, some not. Oxycodone, Fentanyl, acetyl fentanyl, despropionyl fentanyl, Restoril, and Xanax combined to send him into multi-organ failure.
Driving south from Belleville, I skipped I-55 in favor of the chunks of Highway 61 that wound along the curves of the Mississippi River, listening to Tom and his band backing Johnny Cash, who sang of a sea of heartbreak, how he'd been everywhere.
The next night Wilco would tear into Petty's "The Waiting" for their second encore in the opulence of the Orpheum Theater, a few blocks from Beale Street that pulsed with mid-week tourists under the full moon. And I danced, no longer caring about the drunk behind me who'd spilled his beer into my purse. Or the woman with him who drawled apologies on his behalf. "Quit apologizing for your man," I'd snapped. "He can apologize for himself." I didn't notice if they were still there as I bounced, ignoring the electric jolts in my knees while I sang along about taking it on faith, taking it to heart, my voice just one of a thousand screaming along:
"Yeah yeah! Yeah yeah! Yeah yeah yeah yeah!"
After a one-beat pause Glenn Kotche beat the drums solid into the tale of Choo Choo Charlie in "Monday," and I jumped harder, screamed louder through the song played with the bright urgency of a new adult getting out of town because he had better places to be, like the song's protagonist. With a manic flash of the stage lights against the dappled tree backdrop, the band didn't pause, going straight into "Outtasite (Outtamind)" with the same punk tempo. A triple-guitar melody sing-songing that I know you don't love me but you've still been thinking of me oh oh alright. And I jumped harder, faster, shaking my sweaty curls and scream-singing myself hoarse, bleeding out the toxins of two weeks of kitchen stress, two weeks of panic attacks over my cat's mystery illness and the 14-year-old stranger-child I'd birthed, pogoing through layers of exhaustion that had made me doze off in the big sunny window at Outerlands Coffee that afternoon. Bouncing over agony itself to yell, "Look out! Here I come again and I'm bringing my friends! Okay alright okay alright!" in this social group of beloved strangers in this big room while Pat Sansone strutted like Jagger, windmilled like Townsend, and John Stiratt leapt like Eddie Van Halen, the leaders of the cool kids who'd never been cool until we grew into our forties and fifties, ceased being able to give fucks about fitting in with anyone other than the other others, our soul mates who knew what it was like to be so misunderstood.
Breathless and light, I closed my eyes against the shine of the house lights as they came up, the rest of the crowd walking out. I moved against the flow to the gathering spot for afterparty guests. We were led backstage to the bare room where a flock of men stood dazed and happy, despite being used to rock stars from their jobs at Ardent Studio. They clustered around the drummer, rapt. The bass player sat at a table, catching up with relatives in town from Louisiana. I grabbed a beer from the melting ice in a cooler, my knee wanting one of the chairs at his table, my mind too shy to ask for one.
Jeff never joined the group, but guitarist Nels Cline said hello and asked if I'd met the local blues legend he'd brought as his special guest. I shook hands with the man who was still dressed in his pre-show janitor uniform. He was going to sit in at a club on Beale in a bit, and Nels invited me to join them as the theater staff began shooing us out.
Knowing my legs would be sore if I made the walk to the club, I got my car from the parking garage as it was closing, but when I drove the cross-streets, parked, and walked to the few open clubs, not only didn't I see familiar faces, I saw few faces at all despite looming midnight. Beale Street had already rolled up for the night.
So I took myself to Main Street, balanced myself on a barstool at Earnestine and Hazel's, uninterested in their whorehouse ghosts and the young man who wanted to buy me a drink. I only wanted a flat-top-grilled burger, some thin and greasy potato chips, and a Miller Lite to hopefully help me sleep.
I was less than three weeks from turning 45, too old for midnight offers of drinks, chasing rock stars around Memphis.
Months earlier, on her 48th birthday, a friend said she didn't know what 48 felt like. I told her that it was too soon to tell, that you have to live most of that year before you know what it feels like.
The day after Wilco in Memphis, while shopping for Tennessee-made bacon, I caught myself using my shopping cart as a walker. I looked at my right knee, its heft peeking out from the hem of my skirt, a dimpled melon twice its normal size.
That night during the 230-mile drive home on the interstate, not Bob Dylan's meandering road, I realized what 44 felt like. It felt like deep appreciation for cruise control. For lifting a leg heavy with blood and fluid away from the fuel pedal, hitting a button, and being taken where I needed to be.
I know some relish the rest, but all I felt was my control over my freedom slipping away.