Thu, 19 May 2005

The Ballad Of Pamela Bambelam
Pamela Bambelam thinks she may have inadvertently sold her soul at some point in the past year. She’s generally not the sort of person to do something so foolish, but she’s been in a haze, a kind of stupor for the past couple years, since the bottom fell out of the life she had planned and she entered freefall. She draws small lines in the winter-dry skin on her arm and stares out the window. Maybe she’s looking for her soul. Only I get the feeling that even if she saw her soul, it’d look different, the way a cow that’s been cut and dressed and cleaned doesn’t really look much like a cow anymore. But everyone tells me I’m a cynic. Maybe it’ll come floating to her in the breeze, a severed kite, a balloon with little chocolate fingerprints all over the bottom of the string. Maybe. I do still pray, at night, when I can’t sleep, and this is one of those things I pray for, my suppositions, quiet petitions. It’s questionable.

Pamela comes from a place where you can see the rusted skeletons of old Chevys out in the river, out where ex-bikers with missing fingers spend the money they got for their Harleys and the rest of the mortgage on meth labs and shotguns, where rope-swings hang over the ice and the shore and the ice-fishing shacks. It’s probably a lot like where you come from. Camaros with putty in the DUI-dents all along the front end, chest-bruises that ache when you breathe, that dry-stuffed skull feeling when you’re still getting used to the tricyclics. I’d been kindasorta pretending I was a writer for a while, staying up and working out my little windup revenges for imagined faults and betrayals I couldn’t even pick out of a lineup today, and I was convinced that this process gave me some small modicum of what other people refer to as wisdom. Now the last thing Pamela needed from me was any of this claptrap, but I was alternating between bad crystal and Cornhusker vodka and skipping all my classes at UNI around this time and just fucking rambled off at the mouth every single time I had an opportunity. I won’t bug you with what I actually said, mostly because I’m embarrassed to admit it and partially because I don’t completely remember what it was I said. What I wish I had said, what I’d say if she were still around to go driving all night out by the factories and train depots and tell me all her dreams, what I’d tell her is that all the problems and shitty parts and bad days and days when you’re a mess and can’t talk to anyone and keep thinking you’re a complete fucking loon, that’s your soul. It’d be nice if it wasn’t, if you could take these pieces and put them in a box and keep them in the backyard and only have the good parts available for public display and private reassurance. When I was younger I thought maybe this was about being proud of things like that, and so I spent a lot of time doing really stupid things so I’d have lots of stupid ugly things to be proud of, but after a while I started thinking that my ugly parts are really not interesting. They’re not bad, or good, and spending all this time dealing with them in any fashion was time lost forever. So now I drive around and get in adventures, and Pamela stares out the window, getting ready to leave my life again.

I’d been in town for about half a year before I bumped into Pamela Bambelam, who’d married this guy who designed parts for an injection molding system, which is apparently a pretty solid gig, according to Pamela, who was still giddy with the new familial structure her nuptials had afforded her. “We had to get one of these suburban utility assault vans just to get the stuff moved into the new house, and for the baby” she said, and smiled.

She asked me what I was up to, and normally in these situations I tell an extended string of elaborate lies, mostly for the entertainment value, but strange things had been happening to me lately and I opted to be honest. We unspokenly agreed that no good would come of any further discussion of the empty spaces in my life and instead shifted back to her giddy-nervous bliss, the meta quality she used to talk about domestics shopping, the “I can’t believe how corny this is but it’s really wonderful” thing that smears newlyweds around my age who are still unsure if getting married means they can’t go dancing to bad local bands anymore. When I bump into her in a couple months she’ll want to go out drinking, wanna get high in the back of the Suburban Assault Vehicle, wanna wear something tight enough to bounce in, certain that being a wife doesn’t mean she’s, y’know, a wife. Maybe after the first baby we can smoke crack in the garage and fuck viciously against the toolbench, but most likely she’ll be done with the nostalgia I afford, all the shine rubbed off college hijinx, no purpose left in the non-threatening flirting we’d been using as a filler for the uncomfortable silences for so many years now.

There’s a word for it, an Italian word, for the leftover echo of feelings for someone you once loved. Razbliuto. I tried to remember how to spell that word as I watched her walk away.

Pamela has never known this much darkness. Not in her childhood bedroom, fearful of other world inside the closet. Not when her friends and her drove around on Wednesday night, out in some small outlying town, when the electric cables froze and cracked, all the lights gone out, the empty spaces behind all the windows swallowed up and gone. Not when she turned from the screen, the heels of her hands holding the hollows of her eyes, thinking up horrors infinitely worse and endlessly more personal than the wash of corn syrup and latex up on the screen. Not when the doctor put her under, trying so hard to hold onto consciousness, to see what they were going to do to her, wanting to be there when her body changed, as curious as when she was in high school, keeping a log of her fecal and menstrual characteristics. These were all darknesses smeared with a muddied light, peeking in from cracks and corners, coming out of her skin. This is something else entirely.

In college, Pamela was somewhat smitten with a girl named Rissa, who had set up the International Blindfold Chess Championship Pro-Team, consisting primarily of games played by herself in a sub-level hinter-access wing of the Union, back where obsolete dumb terminals and splintered desks fill the tunnels and troublesome student radicals chained to broken boiler-parts ask if Jimi’s new album is out yet. Figuring this was, at heart, a ploy to meet new and experimentation-friendly others, Pamela decided to check it out after Chem, finding the G bank of elevators, getting a pass key from an off-looking janitor with facial scars and the scent of beeswax, taking a side-hallway where someone had drawn cross-sections of insects and genitalia on the blackboards, down a metal spiral staircase to what must once have been an indoor training room for the track team, barely ducking into a janitor’s closet in to to avoid being run down by a pack of dogs (or, at least, what looked like dogs), before finally reaching a freshly-scrubbed room containing a table, two chairs, a chessboard with handmade pieces, and a girl who said, before so much as hello, “Everything you think you know about chess: forget it! All that weak-ass strategy and tactics your little woodpushin’ friends were impressed with is all shit! You must first climb out of the hole of knowledge before you can ascend the escalator of wisdom!” “I don’t really know anything about—”

“Then you must forget what you don’t know!”

“What?”

“Ahhhh, you know perfectly well what I’m talking about. You’re a hustler! You silly freshman tart, you think you can hustle me?”

“Maybe. In a different way.”

Which is how Pamela met Rissa. Pamela still doesn’t know anything about chess, including blindfold chess, and isn’t entirely convinced Rissa’s “circular strategy” style is actually legitimate, though she’d never dare tell her to her face. Rissa can be a bit intimidating, at times. Which is why Pamela is down here, in the blackness.

I was at Pamela’s house visiting her father, who was stopping through town on some nature of business. Such an ideal father-daughter relationship! How absolutely miraculous it must be to spend time with a beautiful woman who loves you very much without the inevitable ensnarements and sunken terrors of sexual attraction! Having a daughter must be a wonderful thing! All these years of celibacy and naysaying; what was I thinking?

“We’re gonna get some ice cream at that new place. You coming or you gonna pilfer more books out of the basement?”

“I’m not pilfering, I’m borrowing. I’m nothing if not thoughtful of the proper home of belongings. Your dad seems cool with it.”

“Help yourself. Shit, bring a truck. I’ll never read any of that crap again.”

“What do you want with old advertising magazines from the sixties anyway? Are you up to something?”

“Pamela. You have to stop thinking I’m always up to something. I’m done with all that now. I’m a model citizen.”

“Look at him, Dad. Look at the way his eyes dart around when he lies.”

“Weren’t we getting ice cream?”

“Yes! Come on, boys, there’s yummy milkfat to be had!”

How utterly charming it must be! How overly and ludicrously sentimental I’ve become over a seemingly simple thing! I need to have me a child immediately!

Pamela had a few months when she didn’t sleep much. She wasn’t paranoid, or busy, or out of her mind on dope and speed more than usual; it was just something she half-decided not to do anymore, the way you sometimes drive home on different streets than usual. She wasn’t really talking to people at the time, but the few conversations she did have seemed willfully obscure and difficult. She wrote a number of letters to people she hadn’t spoken to in years, some of whom were dead. After a while she wasn’t really awake, and she wasn’t really asleep, and it was all she could do to not do anything, to sit, to maintain flight speed. Pamela had a nervous tic of tapping her pen point-down on the top of her desk, leaving a circle of dots whose density could be used to gauge that day’s nervousness, at least until she was in the midst of a furious phone call to the money-people in Toronto (of all places) when she jabbed the pen into her right calf, absolutely terrifying the money people who were convinced another disgruntled American nut was shooting up the office, so while Pamela waited for the ambulance (everybody biked or walked or bussed to work, it was that kind of office) the private-sector security force sweeped the office and nearly ended the short life of one of the new phone support kids who was walking briskly with scissors, forbidden by contract and resulting in a zero-tolerance dismissal policy. One of the production people called one of the security guards a “fascist” and soon enough the two of them were slap-fighting out in the hallway, knocking over plastic plants and faux-outsider assemblages. During this time no actual work was being accomplished, as the money people could tell from their elaborate real-time productivity metering software, and thus they came to the logical conclusion that the entire staff had been killed by the lone gunman, thus taking the entire office offline, rerouting phones and mail to feeder offices and checking to make sure the automated employee funeral FTD script was still running. Since the power was still on (the money people had offices throughout the entire building, and could not shut down specific areas exclusively), the employees (including a bandaged Pamela, what a trooper) came back to work to find a delightfully slow day at the office.

This went of for years, the employees growing tired of waiting for work and forming an interoffice encounter group to talk of their lingering traumas over “the incident”, even bringing in the security guard in question to facilitate a renegotiation on personal accountability issues, ending in a tearful group hug, interrupted when the money people pulled their last office out of the building and had it nuked from orbit.

So I got into this party by convincing the kid at the door that I was Einstein’s great-grandson, which no one in their right mind should have believed but it was already one and everybody had been drinking since noon, and besides my good friend Pamela Bambelam was with me, and it’s not like any clown is gonna not invite in Pamela no matter how suspect her entourage (that’s me) may be. Now I had been all depressed because I had been convinced I made everybody else depressed both in the shit I write and in my general presence and this had convinced me that I was evil, which sounds kinda over-the-top, but that’s how I felt, and so Pamela convinced me we should sneak into some shitty suburb party as that would make me feel better, and what the fuck, I’d go to a rhubarb convention so long as it got me out of the house. Pamela is an attention magnet, which has its downsides, but it’s always been interesting for me, as the attention people pay Pamela is attention they don’t pay me, which allows me to watch from a distance, to observe people in the presence of someone who intoxicates and confuses them, which is always good for laughs. At this party, however, the storehouse of attention had been wiped clean by too many days spent holding onto the last bit of spring break, which had ended days before, but would not officially be over until these people slept, and it was clear no one was going to sleep until the bodies collapsed. I realized instantly that these people, lost weight and hair and hope, needed a leader who could promise the abolishment of tomorrow for an everpresent today, an immortality formed from a barricading against the sunlight, against the slouching of the rough beast known as the waking world, and heartsick as I was of the endless compromise and apology my life had become there was no other option but to make my last stand and my paradise on earth in the basement of some collegiate group-home just off campus among those who had seen the big lie of the fast-falling future. Pamela, who knows me better than any god or government, immediately knew her plan had gone awry, and had already slammed her third drink by the time I started my speech.
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #