I suppose you think it’s funny, that my friends call me Madman, or you think I’m going to be funny, or do crazy things, or belong on “Jackass” or blow something up or, I don’t know. Maybe you don’t think that. I just know this about myself. I was a skinny kid and I didn’t have friends until eighth grade when I began to sing out loud in public besides that, I grew ten inches and began the bulking up process that guys go through, and grew my hair longer than anyone else’s in our school (which was easy to do, since they all had crew-cuts or whatever you call short hair) and then I had friends.
Which is to say, people stopped making fun of me and began to like me. First for my voice and, second, the girls liked my looks, too. And maybe some boys too, I have sort of feminine features so who knows? Someone compared me to Johnny Depp but that’s far-fetched, the only thing is that we both have fine bones and big eyes and that is not enough to make me Johnny Depp, but let me tell you that I’m a lot taller than he is, and I don’t know if he can sing, but I sure as hell can.
Think I talk too much? I do when I’m nervous and I am nervous because I just got kicked out of UCLA, cause I sort of forgot to attend classes and I only made it one and a half years, and I had bet my dad that I could make it through two full years, so he won, but I don’t talk to him anyway. That’s not why I’m nervous. I am nervous because I am sitting here in this auditorium and about to go on stage to sing for a band whose lead singer died three years ago (okay, died is a euphemism. He committed suicide by combining alcohol, drugs, his car and a cliff. Might as well have thrown a gun in there, too.) and now they are looking for a replacement and every singer in L.A. is here trying out. There must be three hundred people here.
I’ve been watching and listening. Some are really good, but they have a blues edge, or a soul sound, or an r&b thing that is better suited to pop music and these guys are this outgrowth of grunge/punk, but newer in the way that has yet to be defined by Rolling Stone magazine or anybody else. Past emo, past screamo, not even nu-metal. I just know it fits my voice and I like their songs and I think my songs can fit into their niche but they won’t know that if I don’t get up there and sing.
There’s no real order here. You sit in the audience and when you feel ready, you go up and hand this incredibly ice-cold beautiful woman your registration sheet and line up to go on stage. A lot of us sit and wait; a lot go up. The doors opened at around 2 p.m. and now it’s nearly six and I don’t know how much longer they will go on, so I have to make my move.
But I can’t. Not yet.
Some girls are trying out too. Some are really great, I would pay to hear them sing somewhere, the Key Club, the Knitting Factory, even House of Blues prices wouldn’t put me off some of them. There have been three guys today who I think could be in this band, but I’m trying hard not to think about them and to get my mind together to stand up and make the walk down the aisle to that woman. Maybe it’s her. Maybe she’s the one keeping me from the stage.
I don’t have good luck with women, that’s for sure. Listen. My first girlfriend, Suzanne, wanted me to take her virginity and I wouldn’t do it, because I was still a virgin and too scared, so she convinced my close friend, Jeremy, to do it which he did (a virgin too), and then they both told me all about it in great detail. It’s not just about sex, though. I did finally lose my virginity and things have been okay since, but I don’t seem to be very good at being a boyfriend.
I almost married Tabitha, even with her totally weird name that came from really weird parents. She loved to hear me sing, had me sing to her in the shower, in bed, while she made dinner, all kinds of times. I started to feel she was a vampire, she was draining me of my voice and my energy; I spent it all singing for her and when I went to gigs (I had gigs in background vocals) I often lost it, went hoarse, couldn’t hold a note or stay on pitch.
She sucked me nearly dry of my one and only talent, so I dumped her while she was making wedding plans and putting deposits on caterers and photographers and gazebos.
No one talked to me after that, no one in her family or my family.
So that’s when I moved back into the dorms and threw myself into dorm life (except for the schoolwork part of it) and met lots of girls, and made new friends among guys, and guest-sang in a myriad of garage bands that were mostly horrible, but when I sang with them, an audience came and people had a good time.
This is boring. My life is boring. Don’t get me started. Or, I guess I am started, but make me stop. This is all because I am nervous about going on stage, which is ridiculous, I can do this. It’s just that I actually want it, more than whatever else I wanted before.
My girlfriend offered to come with me. Yes, I do have one, and her name is Suze and I’m not scared of her, in fact, I really like being with her and I’m comfortable with her. And she’s pretty but doesn’t think so. She’s not super-skinny like the girls around campus, or the girls here on stage. Or the ice queen down there. Suze is not in the least fat but by these stupid modern fashion standards, she could be described as baby-fat cute. I could give a shit. She is beautiful. We even went through this really bad time, we almost broke up even though the thing that happened was out of our control – neither of us could do anything about it – but we survived and this is something I find like really amazing. But
Tashi, if she came with me today, I would be even more self-conscious.
A guy stands up in near the front row, and I realize it’s one of the band members, the bass player. He turns to those of us left in the audience and, in a really loud voice (shouldn’t he be the singer?) he yells out, “Don’t any of you have passion?”
Fuck, maybe not. I have passion for sex and for Suze. I have passion for music. People tell me I am really involved in music when I sing, they say I embody it, but I don’t really know what they mean. I feel it, yes, and I love it and love singing and don’t want to stop once I am started, but hell, more than half the people I just watched on stage sing with that kind of passion. Does he want something else? Does he want more?
A half a dozen people leave quietly, slipping out the back door. Not even enough passion to believe they can still have a shot. No one else moves.
The ice queen looks at the band members and I recognize her signals to mean, should we end this now?
No, they can’t. I leap up, a bit too ungainly, and trip my way over the feet of people whose faces look up at me with suspicion and awe. Is he really going to go on stage after that? I am not going to let them shut down auditions without having even tried so I am loping down the long aisle to the ice queen, barely acknowledging her presence and then I am up on stage. I feel like someone who has just won a Grammy award and now I should thank everyone who helped me get this far.
But I am not that far. I am on stage. The lights are bright and I can barely make out the band members in the front row, can’t see if their faces are intrigued or disgusted or bored. The singing is a capella, there is no one to wait for, I can start whenever I am ready.
There was this really bad time. Suze’s friend had died in a cruel incident. It was kinda suicide and kinda murder and completely horrible and Suze and I both were witnesses. We moved in together after that. We held each other a lot and for a while didn’t even have sex.
Suze works at Starbucks and she almost lost her job ‘cause she couldn’t bring herself to go to work. I don’t even like to think about this but it has an odd way of slipping into my thoughts and suddenly exploding like goddamn fireworks at the wrong times. And all times are the wrong times.
Suze suggested therapy. She said we have post-traumatic stress.
“That’s for Vietnam vets,” I said, “Iraqi war vets.”
“It’s for victims of crimes and terrible accidents and tragic losses. It’s for us.” She showed me a corner torn from the L.A. Weekly. An ad for a clinic in Silver Lake that listed, among its other services, group therapy for post traumatic stress disorder.
“Please,” said Suze. So I went, figuring that while it probably wouldn’t help me, it wouldn’t hurt either.
We parked on Silver Lake Boulevard and walked two blocks to a small bright green storefront. The windows were sealed from window-shopping view by what looked like furniture pads, making it a sort of black hole among all the furniture and décor shops around it. I was not eager to go in. Just as we stood there, the door opened and a tiny Asian man stepped out. He looked up at us, smiled like the sun had just come from behind a cloud and beckoned us inside.
“Please come,” he said, in limited English. “Doctor is good, very good.”
Then he left and we were standing in the dim interior of a waiting room, the furniture pads being the primary decoration in a room that otherwise held seven metal folding chairs and a water dispenser sans water. We shuffled around together, whispering. (Me whispering, “let’s go” and she whispering, “No.”)
A woman came through a door. I do not believe I can describe her in any way that would do her justice. She was tall, a little over six feet. Husky in a Midwestern sort of body.
She had grey hair pulled into a ponytail that went down her back to her waist except for the multitude of stray hairs that spun out of control around her head and arms. Her eyes were dark and the skin under them saggy like a basset hound. She wore several layers of what I took to be Guatemalan dresses and skirts. When she waved us into an interior room, it was all I could do to keep from running the other direction. Only Tashi’s strong grip on my hand kept me moving toward this woman and her mysterious room.
Her office was one step better than the waiting room. She sat in a padded folding chair and there were more of the metal ones scattered around the room. Files and books and papers lined up on the floor along one wall. This doctor had great need of a desk and bookshelves and some decent seating.
“Is this the whole group?” Suze asked. “I thought it was group therapy, I imagined more people.”
“Not right now,” the woman said with a voice that informed us not to mess with her.
“So, what do we do?” asked Suze. She is so sweet, she wanted to do whatever this woman thought would be appropriate.
“Names?” the woman demanded.
“Suze,” said Suze, “and Madman, er, Mattais.”
“Madman?”
“A nickname. Just for fun,” I added. She stared at me, and I waited for some diatribe about the inappropriateness of the nickname, or a deep psychological interpretation or just some obtuse thing. I really disliked her. And she didn’t tell us her name.
“What was so traumatic?”
“Uh,” stammered Suze, “um, uh, my friend, um died.”
“Lots of friends die.”
“She died in a fire,” said Suze. I sat back and watched. Would this story come out one sentence at a time, with a judgment on each sentence, and then the next sentence trying to reconcile the judgment with the emotion?
“Lots of people die in fires, too.”
“We saw her die,” explained Suze.
“Wait,” I said. “And lots of people have seen people die in fires, right?”
“Hostility is not welcome here,” the woman said.
“Only polite people can get therapy?” I answered. Suze took her hand away from mine, distancing herself. I thought, I won’t forget that, babe. I will remember that.
“You will have to leave if you cannot be civil.”
“Listen. Our friend, Moira, joined a religious cult. They built a bonfire, she stepped into it and even when she wanted to get out, they pushed her back in. We watched, we tried to get to her, to help her, but they held us back. We watched her die a long slow burning death. Now,” I sat back in my creaking chair, “is that typical of lots of people?”
I was dismissed. I waited in the stupid waiting room on a stupid folding chair and listened to unintelligible murmurs from behind the closed door. When Suze came out she was crying but also smiling. I never saw the woman, she did not enter the waiting room.
“I wish you had stayed,” Suze said.
“I wish we had both left,” I said.
“Fuck you.” Suze turned to me and hit my shoulder. “You and your big male ego couldn’t just listen to her, to hear what she had to say. She helped a lot, Madman. She helped me a lot.”
“Yeah, well thanks a lot for pulling away from me, for letting me just hang there, for letting me leave, for not coming with me. Fuck you. I’m taking a walk.”
We parted there on the sidewalk. Suze drove home. I walked around Silver Lake for a time, had some coffee, walked through a video store and a clothing store, not looking at anything. I walked up to Sunset and stared at a bus stop sign for a long time until a smiling Hispanic woman asked if I needed information.
“I need to get to Santa Monica,” I said. And she efficiently wrote down the three buses I needed to take from that very corner to the very corner of Wilshire and 14th Street, four blocks from the apartment. She even made change for my five-dollar bill. I could have kissed her feet. I wanted to ask what she knew about post-traumatic stress because I was certain she could be very helpful in that matter, too.
Long bus rides are useful. This is how: By the time I walked the four blocks to our apartment, after more than two hours on three buses, I was ready to apologize. I hoped Suze was ready to let me. When I went in, she tackled me, crying and sobbing and soaking my shirt and telling me how she was sure she would never see me again. I said sorry, she said sorry and we made love for the first time in months. Oh, yeah, that helps a lot and things got better and better.
“But let me tell you one thing the doctor said that helped,” said Suze as we lay coiled together, our sweaty bodies cooling off with the breeze coming in the window.
“Okay, I can take it,” I laughed.
“She had me deconstruct the incident.”
“Um, like Foucault or Derrida? French literary deconstruction theory? You took it apart?”
“Well, whatever that is. First I told her the entire story. Then we talked about all different parts of it, focusing on the dancing, the singing, the fire itself. I had to describe in detail the moment Moira stepped into the fire. And in detail what it was like to run toward her, to be grabbed and held by the other people. And last, I told her the story completely backwards, so that Moira stepped out of the fire, danced backward around it and went back to her room.”
I listened and I understood. Better than Suze, who said, “I feel better but I’m not sure why.”
“You lessened its power,” I explained. “You took away the one narrative and all of its power and pain, and you examined the parts and felt each one of them fully, then like they are little gems or something, you put them down. And then you played the whole thing backward which means you control the narrative and it doesn’t control you.”
She glared at me. “How do you know that?”
“College, babe. A course in postmodern theory, the deconstructionists, the way we looked at literature. It’s the same thing. Take power away from the text and the author, and give it to the reader.”
Suze curled her head up against my chest and I stroked her back. I was glad she felt so much better. I was glad to be back in our apartment and not wandering the streets on foot or bus. And I was glad that, no matter what, I was not going to see that doctor again. I would deconstruct Moira’s death on my own, if that was the cure.
“What are you going to sing?” asks a face from the dark front row.
“I was going to sing one of your songs,” I reply. “I was going to sing, ‘No Reality.’ But I changed my mind. I’m going to sing ‘The Country Where No One Knows the Language.’”
“Whose song is that?” comes the voice.
“Mine. I wrote it.” And without waiting, I launch into the song and I sing it with all the passion I had written it with, I sing it with my fear, and with my certainty. I wrote it for Moira and I sing it better than I ever have before.
It is silent after I sing. The ice queen is busy talking to someone in dark clothes who I cannot see; I await her official words to leave the stage. I wait. The remaining singers wait. Someone in the front row stands up. The guy with the booming voice.
“Good on you, bloke.”
The ice queen calls, “Next,” and as I pass her on the steps, she puts her hand on my arm. Her hand is warm and soft against my cool sweaty skin.
“You can go. But expect a call-back.” She smiles at me, pleasantly.
I don’t know what comes next. I just know that there were odd bits of Los Angeles that went into whatever success this is: wackos who immolate their true believers, a wiry-haired doctor who heals with Derrida, and a sweetheart of a woman who knows the bus system and can impart her knowledge to a suffering fool when needed.
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