NO GUITARSR SO SO SIC GUITARS

by Mary Phillips-Sandy

In the morning when I opened my eyes I lay very still for a moment, asking myself a few questions. Question: where am I? Answer: in bed. Question: whose bed? Answer: boyfriend's. Question: what time is it? Answer: I absolutely, totally, cannot deal with looking at a clock right now.

There was a large sleeping form to my left. That would be the boyfriend, still asleep. Okay. I sat up, slowly, because the room was drifting clockwise. I crawled to the edge of the bed and put my feet on the floor. My movement startled the room, which began to rotate counter-clockwise. "Stop it," I whispered. I'll show you, room. I stood up in one bold motion. Ha ha! The room thought that was funny. I sat back down. No, I thought to myself, I will not be defeated by a room, especially not by a small bedroom in a basement apartment on a nondescript street in south Brooklyn. I will stand up.

I stood up. So there.

The bathroom was very far away, but I had to make the journey, I had to, because there was water in the bathroom and water was the thing I needed most in the world. In the bathroom I had a brief negotiation with the overhead light, which would not stop being too bright for my eyes, but all was reconciled when I turned on the cold faucet and then, oh then, cool sweet water on my face and in my desert mouth and I felt like Cleopatra frolicking in the Nile, absolutely, one hundred percent, more or less.

I left the bathroom and went back to the bedroom. My shoes and coat and bag were lying in a pile on the floor. Seeing my coat made me think of being outside, and thinking of being outside reminded me that I had been outside the night before. Where had I been? I caught a whiff of a memory, a sensation of walking very fast down a dark street in some other neighborhood, then stopping at a corner and staring at an unfamiliar building. I had a vague recollection of wanting to escape something.

My brain had become a broken carousel, all its parts moving up and down in disjointed circles. I poked through my bag for my pill box with its emergency stash of pills for emergencies, and that's when I noticed my notebook was open, the spiral folded back to a left-hand page. The page was covered in a slanting scrawl that bore a minimal resemblance to my handwriting. NO GUITARSR, it said. SO SO SIC GUITARS.

Then I remembered.

I remembered leaning against a graffiti-covered wall in club in a different part of Brooklyn, some time after I had stopped keeping track of time. There had been a sink and a pile of damp paper towels, words on the walls, the walls caving in. The bathroom. I had gone into the bathroom with my notebook and the black pen that is always clipped to its side, and I had tried to tell the notebook what I was feeling at that moment, what I thought about the evening and my surroundings and the vibrating walls and everything. SO SO SIC GUITARS. Crashing around the bathroom.

I had been somewhere else. Somewhere before that. We had gone to a bar across the street, where there were one-dollar vodkas. The bartender was generous. He had handed me a juice glass. It was all coming back to me. I had been running late. My dinner had consisted of a Red Delicious apple, and then the vodka, a dollar per, in the juice glasses. We were going to see the bands play at the club. The band in which my friends and my boyfriend played. Another band with some guy who used to be in some other band that used to be kind of big. Another band that was going to be big. My friends could play and impress these other bands who had been or who were going to be big, and this could be good for them. They practiced twice a week, four hours at each rehearsal. The payoff they deserved could come. A big show meant a buzzing anticipation. They could take off and away.

I remembered reeling into the crowd in the club. There were beautiful girls with light skin and thin limbs, floating across the floor in cowboy boots. They were gazelles but I was a cheetah, goddammit, I wanted to bite their legs and bring them down, all these distant people poised for stages and imaginary photographers. A camera! I had had a camera. My boyfriend had asked me to take pictures of his band while they played. He had given me the camera and turned his back. I had watched them on the stage above us while the lights of the digital cameras flashed in their faces.

I remembered thinking, who are you?

Ordinarily when I watch my friends on the stages making their sounds I get caught up in the sense of propulsion. On most nights I take it as inspiration. Here are people who fray their fingers for this thing they love, reminding me that the point of being alive is to open our mouths and communicate. Ordinarily. A juice glass full of vodka can unleash a lot of monsters. I do not know how to stand on stage like that, making sounds that will make other people bob their heads or clap their hands. I have tried. I have failed. I have accepted this. I have chosen a performance that involves sitting alone at a desk on a Saturday night, typing and filing rejection letters. No one watches. No one claps. It is very quiet. People do not come in cowboy boots to bob their heads and yell whooooo. I grub around quietly and no one takes a picture.

The monsters unleashed, all green eyes and sharp teeth. The people gathering, looking up, lifting their hands up, the lights pouring down only on the five people before us. I remembered the applause. My friends had finished and this was the time for congratulations, but I could not stay inside, I fought back toward the door and the cool night outside. My boyfriend had followed me. He wanted something to eat, his chest damp with sweat. An excess of triumphant energy. Let's hurry, he had said. I want to get back to see that other band that's going to be big. I remembered wanting to be very still, to walk down to the river where the rats and the rocks lie dark against the shore and let the water ripple past them.

Instead he had taken my hand and led me away from the water, toward the busy streets lit with people and more people rushing to see bands, but I had wanted to go down a side street where there were no lights and no crowds, where it was quiet. Silence is not golden. It is black and it is fertile. Sounds crowd you out. Silence lets you in. Somehow I had pulled my hand free and wandered away down a side street and I had stopped to stare at a building, to gaze really intently at the bricks. This would explain the memory of being pulled back toward the busy street and the light, the light and the sounds and the people.

I had been led gently back to the club. I had been guided carefully up the stairs, past the bar, toward the stage. I had been hugged and told I was all right, but the realization had come then that I was not all right and none of this, none of it, none of it was all right either, and there was no one who would listen, because the next band had started and they were very loud. They also had ropes of Christmas lights draped across the stage and that had been the final straw, the thing that broke me, those terrible lights morphing into snakes and fireballs arcing toward people's heads.

I had excused myself to the bathroom.

What I should have written, then, in retrospect, was this: It's too loud in here; I am experiencing a temporary bout of selfish jealousy because I do not have opportunities to stand on a stage and receive praise and attention and also because lately I have been awarded several rejection letters and zero applause; I have wanted to be "cool" since I was twelve, and rightly or wrongly I have decided that making sounds in public is a lot cooler than typing alone; I am full of self-pity and also cheap vodka. Instead I had stumbled against the wall and written, at the top of a page and at the top of my lungs, NO GUITARSR SO SO SIC GUITARS. That it. That was as close as I'd gotten. Inebriation frees eloquence from some people's pens, but not, it would seem, from mine.

In the morning my manifesto looked feeble. Petulant. I was no longer drowning in a sea of noise and strangers. I was standing still with my bare feet on a cold tile floor, feeling too exposed in the light from the window, glad at least that no one would ever have to know what I had written. Or tried to write. My boyfriend turned from his left side to his right, pulled his pillow closer in his sleep. I tore the page from my notebook. The sound of the paper ripping through the silence was deafening.