Anger of Angels

I am not--I would like to say this from the beginning--I am not a woman who believes in ghosts.



The afterlife to me, as I think I've said before, is a logical set of possibilities, none of which particularly admits contact between the living and those who aren't. I don't rant against it, or specifically disbelieve--mostly out of respect for Debbi, my oldest friend in the world who I've known since she was 4 and I was 5 and who claims psychic powers and status as a medium. And besides, who am I to say? Who am I to disavow the existence of an afterlife, or the possibility that there are those who can communicate with people outside this realm? I can say for certain that I, myself, have never experienced any such communique from the other side; but that is ALL I can say with any certainty.



This non-belief, non-disbelief, fence-straddler status served me well throughout my teenage years. I didn't piss off my hyper-Catholic, hyper-skeptical family by believing in astrology and Tarot; I didn't piss off Debbi and my more open-to-possibilities friends by absolutely disavowing them. I had no need for belief one way or the other, to be truthful...everything that mattered to me was on this side of the curtain. Even my father's death, when I was 17, didn't make it necessary to believe; he was 58 years old, had lived a fairly-long life, and his death had been very much expected, at least for the nine months we'd known of his lung cancer, of the tumor in his brain. He had lived his life, and then like all of us would do eventually, he had come to the end of that life--sooner, perhaps, than any of us would have wanted, but in a natural and predictable way.



When JP died, of course, the circumstances were a little different.



Actually, they were "a little different" in the same way that Mt. Vesuvius is "a tiny bit warm"; in the same way that a black hole is "kinda dense". JP's death, unlike my father's, was entirely unexpected, had no reasonable explanation at all. The magnitude of coincidence involved in his death was so profound that I couldn't wrap my brain around it in the least.



What would be the odds that on that night, our regular heroin spot would be closed? What would be the odds that we would then choose--out of all the corners on the West Side--the corner we chose? Or that on that particular night--unlike all the other nights we'd bought from that spot with no ill effects--that on THAT particular night the people who'd bagged up the drugs had run out of their usual sedative filler and had to use a substitute? or that instead of any of the thousand powdery white substances they could have used, that in this case and on this night, they would have used flour?



And even with all those coincidences having been fulfilled--what would be the odds that those bags would be purchased by a person who happened to be both asthmatic and deathly allergic to wheat--particularly in the form of flour? Or that the miracle of medical science, documented so damn many times in TV shows and inspirational magazine articles, would just this one time fail? Faced with odds that staggering, wouldn't it be easier to believe in supernatural agencies instead? that the stars had just been aligned wrong, that Mercury was in retrograde, that someone had put a hex on JP--or even just that God was punishing us for our dual sins of adultery and pride??



Those were the kinds of questions I had to contend with in the days after JP died. In my dopesick, grief-sick haze, I tried to wrap some simple covering around the jagged, changing shape of my pain and incomprehension--something that would soothe me, something that would provide me with some answer to the breathless scream of WHY?. That was a voice which never seemed to allow itself to be silenced...but sometimes I could drown it out.



Music had been the center of JP's existence; it was something we'd always known we had in common. Unlike me, though, he had talent for music, and he planned on building that talent into superstardom. Kurt Cobain was his model for the lead-singer ethos; for the band itself, he structured them along the lines of Smashing Pumpkins. He would be the lead singer and guitarist. The original plan had Darius as the drummer, Rachel on second guitar, and Justin on bass; then, as our life evolved into a drowning-pool of heroin and our social circles shifted and constrained, the lineup changed: JP as lead, our roomie Lou on second guitar, me on bass, Artie the teenage neighbor-kid on drums. We spent nights and nights trading band-name suggestions; JP claimed he'd know the perfect name when he heard it.



When he died, the band still had no name.



Not that it mattered, by then. Lou was somewhere in the Southeast, getting clean on the road with another band he knew; Artie's mom had put her foot down about associating with us. JP's guitar, my bass, the four-track recorder, the distortion pedals, and both the amps were strewn across three or four pawn shops around the North Side. All we had left--all I had left, once JP was gone--were the remains of our CD collection. Though we'd sold everything we could, JP would never let us part with any of the Nirvana. "You don't sell the dream," he told me.



Through the weeks and months after JP died, that music was my solace. I remember lighting a red candle every Monday night at 11:10 PM--the day and hour of his death--and playing _Toward the Within_, by Dead Can Dance. I'd bought the CD in a happier time--just after we'd moved in together, but before heroin took over--and every time I played "American Dreaming", I remembered driving up the Dan Ryan, in our '89 Taurus, on the way back home from my second job. That was a hard song to hear once he was gone--but even so, for those moments, it lifted me out of the intolerable present.



I built up my CD library once I started back to work, and more still once I moved to Charlotte. I was very heavy on music that had meant something to us...Catherine Wheel's _Chrome_, for example, in memory of a night in June where we'd stayed up all night, calling a local indie radio station and requesting "Show Me Mary". Bettie Serveert, for a snippet of tape from 1994 where JP had recorded "Tomboy". Everything from Seattle; all our heroin music; hundreds of songs significant to us for our own reasons, reasons no one else had ever known, reasons which were mine alone to carry now.



In some corner of my mind, I think, this was my bargain with the forces that had taken JP away from me. If I collected all the music, if I could assemble some sort of key out of sound and memory, maybe I could unlock the doors and bring him back. And after years and years, when my bargaining had failed, when I couldn't make it all un-happen, the weight of that music and those memories became too much to bear. The new CD's got sold again, in the midst of a relapse; when I got back on my feet, I just never bothered to replace them.



It didn't help that I was with CR by then--CR, who used music as one of the many tools in the grand workshop of his emotional abuse. He would complain for hours about how judgemental people were towards him for his taste in music, for being a black man who loved Genesis, Humble Pie, Southern rock and roll--and in the next breath, he would mock me for listening to "pussy bands" like Smashing Pumpkins. If I dared to defend myself it would precipitate a torrent of hatefulness--against me, against females, against non-violence, against everything I ever was or loved or believed in. Avoiding these tantrums became the central goal of everything I did, and so for two years I let my music gather dust. Music joined sex in my memory as something I'd loved once, something I'd been able to enjoy, but which was now outside my reach...better to never mention it; better not to even think about it.



When CR left, it took a while to accept my freedom again. I started small, after a time; bought myself a Walkman for the train-rides home, started listening to the radio and plucking from it what little bits of solace I could. At work, I discovered iTunes (dangerous, dangerous toy!) and downloaded some songs to burn onto CDs. Old stuff, from the time with JP; older stuff, old-school hip-hop, from my end-of-college days. Some new stuff that just caught my interest, too, and songs from the spring of '03, when LJ and I were just starting out. In short, I made my peace with music again...



Well, most of it.



There are some songs I still can't hear without a stab of pain to the heart. Nirvana, for one; anything I can identify as being from the 1991-1995 era. I live in fear, each time I download something from those days, or hear them on the radio: will this be the one that finally tips me over? Will this song be the one that brings it all back, that brings it all home, the one that's unendurable? Even after nine years, I worry about that possibility--that one day I'll hear something that will sink me to the ground, weeping, and won't let me get up.



And every time I'm just flipping stations on the radio, and I hear one of those songs--especially on bad days, days like yesterday was--I wonder: is someone trying to tell me something? Even if it's just "hello"?



I still don't believe in ghosts; I only wish I did, sometimes.