I tried listening to the Beatles because I thought they could change my life. All I’d ever heard, in lieu of an actual album, were people raving about this music that could do something to you. Music in a world where only other people could do something to you. Music that could change your life. Music that would make you a fan; a believer; a follower; a devotee; a preacher; a lover of beetles.
I stripped naked every morning after I got dressed and went to work. I served old women hot tea with my plump jiggling breasts bumping against the saucers. I looked strangers in the eye waiting in the cold at bus stops and offered them rides. I let everyone look at me completely naked and totally unshaped like a model through the frosty shield of my grey on the outside and grey on the inside car.
My CD player broke years ago and I never tried to get it fixed. I started listening to radio stations with other people. I started keeping the music alive that was the synthetic nightmare chasing children down the hallways and scaring them into being cool, self-righteous, apathetic, licorice-tongued teen-agers who see me and everyone else over twenty-five as sexless, money hungry, youth deprived, washed up members of the adult militia.
I ate every last crumb from the corners inside the cobwebs of my kitchen. Then I let the baby spiders crawl all over my body; pinching me; biting me; infecting me with racism, hate, blood-thirst, and a reptilian vengence I’d feared was the devil my whole childhood and one day became the creased skinned woman I saw in the mirror. I took bubble baths with Jacuzzi jets with all of my detractors and hummed a tune for their story sewing. I ate live snails; I bit into them whole and crunched down on the shells until my gums split, my jaw ached, and I could feel her babies wiggling down my throat believing they were coming to life for the first time. Little did they know of the pit of acid; their imminent demise.
I picked flowers from the hands of children and carved my name into a thousand trees. Their wounds spouted blood each time, but I went on, knife in raw hand, in search of a syrup filled trunk. Carrying my paper plate full of pancakes I’d left behind for wolves or squirrels or lonely souls lost in the forest. I looked down and saw that my plate was empty and held tight, because the illusion was heavier than the soft, white and orange discus of dough mounted by siblings and cousins.
I stood at the edge of my mother’s grave and dropped M&M’s and pennies into the full plot because the only dirt around was my whole body and I couldn’t bear to throw myself on top of her like that. I couldn’t bear to make a mockery of her life like that. So, instead, I offered her departed soul candy and money, the only things that had ever interested me in this life. Even in all of my ignominious stupidity I could still smell the smoke coming from the neighbors chimney at night and I could hear the words that sweetness uttered. Love and bliss and treasures like that weren’t of this earth. If you just read the lyrics, there wasn’t anything that special about a Beatles song. It was just something in the music, I suppose, something people needed so badly they collectively decided could exist there wherever the Beatles took their guitars. Instead of in a church or in their grandparents’ backyard. Somewhere better, somewhere for everyone. Somewhere in the music.
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