first round
(6) Grateful Dead, “Touch of Grey”
BOXED UP
(11) Living in a Box, “Living in a Box”
245-146
AND WILL PLAY IN THE SECOND ROUND
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/7/23.
Every Silver Lining: Steven Church on “touch of grey”
Cloud
Shoreline Amphitheater
Mountain View, CA
5/23–5/25, 1992
It’s just before dusk on the western edge of the continent and, as the sun slowly sinks, I am rising. One-hundred-and-fifty feet in the air above the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California. To my west spreads one stage out wide, the Pacific Ocean, and not far from my perch, the other where the Grateful Dead are doing a soundcheck for their first of a three-show residency. And perhaps there is a thin veil of clouds, something poetic and perfect, a landscape tinged with purple and orange, the kind of setting that looks like an album cover, so perfect it must be fake or at least imagined or enhanced by other substances. And beneath me in every other direction spreads an undulating sea of Dead Heads swathed in tie-dye and Guatemalan print, all of them gathered and settled and swaying for the night before they and the band pack up like a traveling circus and head to Las Vegas for another round of shows.
I am rising now, lifting high above the masses, floating in a metal basket suspended from a large red construction crane. Beneath me, growing smaller by the second, is an oversized bean-bag laid out on the asphalt parking lot. This is my landing pad. I am strapped into something like a climbing harness with an enormous elastic bungee cord tied to my feet.
I am rising still, even if one week ago, my younger brother was killed in a car accident at the age of eighteen. I am rising even if three days ago, I attended his funeral in Kansas. Because right now, in this moment, I’m only thinking about the ground beneath me and the way everyone seems so small from this distance. Somewhere down there, my girlfriend waits for me to leap. Somewhere else, my parents wait for me to come home. Somewhere in the near future we will wait for the Grateful Dead to perform because we have tickets to the show. Everyone has a ticket to the show. Everyone is searching and waiting for something.
One-hundred-fifty feet is roughly the height of a fifteen-story building and, when the crane reaches the top, the guy in the basket with me, my guide for this experience, opens the waist-high metal door and points to a small metal step barely big enough for my feet. He smiles and gestures for me to move. Behind him, the ocean stretches out endlessly.
I ease out onto the step and he shuts the gate behind me, giving me a hearty two thumbs up sign. The basket sways a bit from my weight. Beneath me, the sea of Dead undulates. The bean bag has all but disappeared into the crowd and the parking lot. And the countdown begins. No warning. No pep-talk or other preparation. He just starts counting from ten. And when he reaches zero, I do the only thing I know to do.
I jump.
I am, in this suspended moment—though it will not last—what was called a “Touch Head.” That is, I am a fan of the band, the Grateful Dead, who began listening to them and obsessing over their music AFTER their only top-ten hit, the 1987 release of, “Touch of Grey.”
Though the band was a pretty big part of my life for a few years, it’s safe to say that I merely dipped my toe into the vast ocean that is Grateful Dead fandom. I’ve been to maybe a dozen shows, most of them during that summer of 1992 when my brother was killed in a car accident. But for a true Dead Head, a dozen shows are not even worth talking about. The true Old Head has been to hundreds of shows, has lived their life around the band not just for a few convenient months between semesters of college but for years on the road, living out of cars or vans or buses.
They’ve carved their identity out and found their community with the merry tribe of misfits who follow the Dead like they are prophets. These people saw themselves as part of a community that valued freedom, peace, and transcendence through music, a community that understood how enlightenment can emerge from the mess of life much like a song could emerge from an extended improvisational jam, or how an essay can eventually emerge from a lot of noodling around on the page.
In the middle of May, 1992, my girlfriend and I had set off to follow the Grateful Dead for the Western leg of their Summer tour. We wanted to be part of this community, even if only for a couple of months in between our regular lives. We were visiting my old friend from junior high, Ben in Utah when I got the call from my father. My younger brother, Matt had been killed when he lost control of his car and slammed into a tree in Indianapolis. He died of massive head trauma on the side of a road.
We left the next morning from Salt Lake City and flew back to my hometown in Kansas. The funeral was held on May 20 at two-o-clock in the afternoon. There was a balloon arch that, when released, lifted up into the sky and folded into a heart shape. Or at least that’s what I remember. That and the line of people queued up to pay their respects to my parents and the weary look on my mother’s face as she received them all.
I don’t really remember much else of that day, though I’m pretty sure my Dad had somehow managed to get Matt’s bikes, our Kawasaki Jet-Ski, and a motorcycle into the Church lobby. I don’t remember the church service or the graveside service or much else from that day, honestly. Everything is a blur of fragments like a slide-show on fast forward. I just know that the next day, I packed up my stuff again and we flew back out to Utah, where we picked up my car and just kept moving, running west, running far away from home and all the loss and grief.
I still feel guilty for that run. I still feel like I should’ve stayed and that it was fundamentally selfish for me to be chasing the Dead in search of solace. I know my parents told me to go, wanted me to go, but sometimes I imagine the fear they must have felt knowing that I would be living on the road, out of my car, and driving hundreds of miles to follow a band called the Grateful Dead when their only other son had just been buried.
As I stepped out from the cage with that bungee cord tied to my ankles and gazed down at the scene below me, I was thankful the magic mushrooms I’d eaten hadn’t really started to kick in yet because when they did, eventually, they would render me nearly catatonic and lost in my own mind, unable to comprehend much of anything that was happening around me, including the performance by this weird band of guys older than my parents who just seemed to be fucking around on stage for three hours.
But in that moment, as I jumped from the crane and plunged through the California air at the end of a bungee cord, bouncing once and twice and three times, nothing else mattered except the unmitigated rush of joy that shot through my body. Nothing mattered as I screamed as loud as I possibly could, “FUCK YES!,” and believed I was affirming something more than the moment, something about life itself in the face of immeasurable loss. Dangling at the end of my rope, I still believed then in the possibility of happiness, even if only in such fleeting moments.
Silver Lining
The Sam Boyd Silver Bowl
Las Vegas, NV
5/29–5/31, 1992
We didn’t expect the water cannons. But we did expect to meet up with Ben again. He’d told us that he and a couple of friends were driving down for the Vegas shows. We didn’t know when and we weren’t sure how we’d find him, but somehow, we found them. Like magic. This was, of course, in the days before smart phones and gps and text messages. We just ran into them in the parking lot amidst the thousands of others. Things like that just happened at Dead shows. Ben and I both wore Guatemalan print shorts, the kind that were so popular in those days. We were both already impossibly stoned and just beginning to roll on LSD. We were both also just incredibly happy to see each other. It had been years it seemed since he’d handed the phone to me in Utah, my father waiting on the other end.
The Grateful Dead never really cared about being rock stars—and certainly never looked the part—nor did they even care much about recording studio albums. And for a long time, it seemed they didn’t care about money or the material trappings of success. They thought of themselves as freaks living on the fringes of society and American values. They just wanted to make music, man. They were, at least initially, kinda punk rock—fiercely independent with a DIY spirit that extended to their fans. They were, in fact, one of the first bands to fight Ticketmaster’s inevitable ascension; and they considered their loyal fans to be like family. The Dead were counter-culture icons, flag bearers for the freaks and misfits.
So, it was with some understandable consternation and existential ennui for everyone close to the band when upon its release in 1987, “Touch of Grey” shot up the charts and suddenly everything changed. Suddenly they were rich and famous rock stars. They were mainstream. Lead guitarist and vocalist, Jerry Garcia is reported to have called the success of the song “appalling.”
The truth remains, however, that if the average music listener has heard anything from the band besides, “Truckin’” or “Casey Jones,” it is most definitely, “Touch of Grey.” For many die-hard Dead Heads, this song was known, when it was (rarely) performed live, as the “commercial break.” It is, after all, the only song for which the band produced a music video (that was not just live concert footage) intended for wide-release on MTV.
The “Touch of Grey” video is not a good music video but it was, in large part, responsible for a whole new era of the band, the era into which I was introduced. Sure, I could talk about the symbolism in the video of the skeleton puppets and the obvious strings and how it’s a critique of capitalism and the corrupting influence of the big record labels; but we also have to admit that the band released this song and this video and it became a massive money-making machine for them. It was also a fulcrum for the band, a tipping point, a welcome mat for a new generation and new kind of Grateful Dead fan who would pay a lot of money to sit in a massive stadium and watch fuzzy grey dots on stage playing their songs in front of 50,000 other people, hoping and praying that they would play THAT song, the MTV song, the hit song, the song that would allow them to really let loose and belt out the lyrics along with the band, all 50,000 of you screaming triumphantly together, “I WILL SURVIVE.”
If you look up “Touch of Grey,” on YouTube, you’ll find that the vast majority of the comments are actually stories about the commenter’s own loss or trauma or just hard times and how the song was inspirational to them, how they, too, found the strength to just survive even if that silver lining still has a touch of grey.
It's just all so sentimental—especially for a song that may or may not have been written about coming down from a massive cocaine binge. The story goes that Robert Hunter, a frequent collaborator with Jerry Garcia, had overindulged in the drug after a long bout of sobriety and had awakened in a state of regret and self-hatred. So, he wrote a song about it.
For me, at least, one of the most interesting things about the song, and the band itself, is the cognitive dissonance at the heart of it all. What I like about “Touch of Grey” is what it doesn’t sound like. Though it sounds happy and optimistic, like an anthem for survival, the song is, fundamentally, a weirdly dystopian, sort of sad song that you can’t help but sing along to.
This should perhaps come as no surprise since the band itself, like many bluegrass or folk artists, fundamentally, is a sad cynical and darkly dystopian band that often SOUNDS happy and optimistic. Take a song like “Dire Wolf,” a deeply dark story about a giant wolf gobbling up humans that is punctuated by a plaintive sing-along and harmonized chorus, “Don’t murder me. Ple-ease don’t murder me.” This is a band that, like many others, has made a living off the peculiar slight-of-hand that music allows, where before you realize it, you are singing along with murder and mayhem, you’re harmonizing over trauma.
But this isn’t the whole story. As a friend who knows much more about music theory explained to me, Jerry Garcia plays most often in what is known as the mixolydian mode, a way of playing the guitar influenced by folk and traditional music that is often described as having a bittersweet or melancholic sound.
Meanwhile, Bob Weir, the rhythm guitarist plays a style of guitar heavily influenced by jazz and, in particular, the improvisational playing of McCoy Tyner, the piano player for John Coltrane’s band. This, my friend tells me, accounts for the inherent tension in the Dead’s music. Jerry and Bob are always, intentionally and artistically, somewhat at odds with each other. They’re always sort of pushing against, bouncing off of one another.
We didn’t expect the water cannons when we dropped the acid. But we didn’t necessarily mind them. I’d purchased some liquid LSD in the parking lot of our campground at Andrew Molera State Park on the coast of California the day after the last Shoreline show. Dropped into two sugar cubes that I squirreled away in a zip-loc baggie, it was probably the purest acid I’d ever had. We’d popped the sugar cubes in our mouths in the parking lot in Vegas and, by the time we’d found Ben and were seated beneath the desert sun, the water cannons raining down on us, we were all rolling hard and deep in the waves of trip. The heat baked down on us and the Steve Miller Band was just cranking up on stage and none of it really mattered because everything radiated the energy of the moment, vacillating between extremes of hot and cold.
We didn’t expect the water cannons. And we didn’t expect The Steve Miller Band to suck so bad. Or maybe we did we expect it but hoped our expectations would be dashed and proven wrong by the virtuosity of the music. They were not. But it didn’t really matter. There was a dude in yellow spandex pants just shredding the guitar. There were all the hits. And Steve Miller . . . who was, well, Steve Miller and about as exciting as his name. So much of it didn’t make sense. So much of it was still somehow fun.
We especially didn’t expect the way the water cannons would soak our unwashed Guatemalan print shorts until the fabric dye leaked down onto our legs, turning them various shades of purple, or how this would seem to us, in the moment, somehow miraculous and wonderous in ways that escaped the capabilities of language. Or how we’d look at each other, point down and say, “Dude, your legs are purple,” and, “Dude, yours, too!” and how this would seem exceptionally funny and strange and also undeniably fucking magical.
You never expect silver linings. They arrive in moments, darting in and out of your vision like the colorful beach balls that bounced lazily around the crowd that day, until you realize something close to happiness has inhabited your body in way you can feel but not describe with language, a way that can perhaps only be expressed physically, through the body and the way it moves to the music beneath the cycle of showers, the waves of cold and heat that settle over you in the land of sand and grief. It arrives late that night after the Dead played a lot of songs I don’t remember, after we’d gotten past our purple legs, and we return to the KOA campground where we’ve reserved a spot for the night, a campground in the middle of the city, it seemed, but still far removed from the noise and light. It arrives when—still rolling on acid—I dipped my body into the heated swimming pool at the KOA and felt myself floating finally and thought maybe I can survive after all.
Touch of Grey
Deer Creek, Indiana
June 28 and 29, 1992
On our way to Deer Creek Amphitheater to see the Grateful Dead, we stopped in West Lafayette, Indiana home of Purdue, University and site for the first and only Matt Church Memorial Jam. Matt was a sophomore at Purdue studying mechanical engineering when he was killed. His dream was to build cars. Or to design robots that build cars. It had been just a little over a month since he died in his car in Indianapolis, and here we were attending a concert in his honor. Life is weird, especially after death. We were here because one of his friends, a girl whose name is lost to me, a girl who was not his girlfriend, but who clearly cared for him, had decided to put together the show and somehow she pulled it off in a matter of weeks. She was different than a lot of Matt’s friends and I think I loved her immediately. She was like me, a Dead Head, a hippy who wore tie-dyed clothes and Birkenstock sandals and could probably hold her own in a wicked sesh of hackey-sack. She was not an English major or a sorority girl. She was a freak like me.
I don’t really remember much at all about that night. “Mustang Sally,” is pretty much the only song I remember, perhaps because my mother’s name is “Sally,” or because the band that played it seemed to really be trying hard and I appreciated earnest effort. There is a photo somewhere of me and my girlfriend and a few of Matt’s friends on the grand lobby staircase of the old theater where the concert was being held, but I don’t know where to find that photo today. I’m pretty sure I’m wearing overalls in it. I do know, though, that at the back of my t-shirt drawer, rolled up loosely, is the Matt Church Memorial Jam shirt I got that day. I don’t wear it. But it has stayed with me all these years.
I think Matt would’ve appreciated the music in his honor. For him, music had for a long time been something he performed and perfected. I don’t know how much he enjoyed it, though. Matt played the baritone horn in the high school band and won first in the state a couple of years in a row. He practiced music but I wasn’t sure he ever really listened to and loved it. He’d only just started becoming a fan of music, a consumer of sounds, in the years before he died. He was even, reluctantly, drifting into appreciation for some of the same bands I liked. I don’t know that he would’ve ever become a fan of the Dead. But I could imagine us, sometime in the future we never had, enjoying a concert together, watching someone like the Red Hot Chili Peppers on stage and feeling like maybe we were finally growing closer after all that time.
“Touch of Grey” is a song that gets darker, weirder, and more dystopian as it goes, so much so that near the end, things are worse they appear, our protagonist is struggling, the rent is in arrears, the dog has not been fed in years, and to top it off, his cows are giving kerosene instead of milk and his son can’t even read at seventeen. And when the boy does talk, the words he knows are all obscene. It’s an unpleasant picture to say the least, a family drama that would, in my estimation, not be easy to survive. It’s hard to look around you and think that we will get by. This is the late 80’s in America.
By the time we reached Deer Creek, something had shifted inside me. Something cracked and a darkness began to seep out. I was having trouble feeling happy, even in small moments. We rolled up to the venue the day before the show but the parking lot was closed, so we kept driving down the road. The venue was outside of Noblesville, Indiana, what I gathered was a suburb of Indianapolis. At the time it was surrounded by farm fields, cows, and a whole lot of nothing else. Though my brother had died in Indianapolis, his car wrapped around a tree, I did not visit the city or the site, preferring to remain in the suburbs of grief.
About a mile or so from Deer Creek we passed a junkyard with a sign out front that read, “Camping $10. Water. Ice. Toilets,” so we pulled into the lot. We had no other place to stay. The venue lot was closed to campers and we didn’t budget for a hotel. We’d planned to sleep in the car if necessary. At the back of the lot, a man in a tow truck was dragging wrecked cars around, clearing campsites. A row of port-a-potties were lined up on one side of the yard. We paid our money and parked. The ground was littered with those small jagged fragments of broken safety glass, but we managed to clear a site for our tent. When we drifted off to sleep that night, there were maybe a few dozen other Dead Heads camping with us and you could hear their voices mixing with music and the crackling of campfires, and it seemed kind of nice, even oddly quaint like something you’d tell a funny story about later. Remember that one time we camped in a junkyard?
That was crazy, huh?
Yeah, totally.
When we woke up the next morning and emerged from our tent it wasn’t so quaint any longer. There were now hundreds of people packed into the junkyard, campers crammed into every space possible, pressed up against the perimeter of stacked cars. Dead Heads milled around, cooking over open fires, strumming instruments or kicking a hackey-sack. Later that afternoon, we walked the mile or so down the road to the concert venue, planning to spend a few hours in the parking lot scene before heading into the show.
It all looked different now, though. I’d been home for a few weeks between the Vegas shows and our trip to Indiana, and I think part of me understood the shift in my mental health while another part of me thought the problem was home and that I needed to be back out here on the road, following the Dead. But as we strolled into the vast carnival of Heads and humanity at Deer Creek, I knew I’d made a mistake.
These weren’t my people. Everywhere I looked it seemed someone was selling something or trying to scam me out of something. All around me were dreadlocked white kids driving Range Rovers and wearing Guatemalan print pants and tie-dyed t-shirts. Half of them selling veggie burritos. The other half selling grilled cheese sandwiches. Frat boys and rich kids kicking hackey-sacks or tossing frisbees outnumbered the old heads, the wharf rats, and the spinners wearing white. And I suddenly, viscerally, hated all of them—even as I understood that I was one of them. While I might have been driving a 1981 Subaru wagon, I was no less white and no less privileged, no less foolish. I guess I was just starting to confront that part of myself.
Just three years from this moment, in 1995, Deer Creek would be the site of perhaps the worst Grateful Dead concert in history, when thousands of drunken fans stormed the gates, tore down the fences and rushed the stage. Death threats had been made against the band, specifically Jerry Garcia, by a father whose daughter had left home to follow the Dead. The 2nd show was cancelled, a first in the history of the band, and everyone seemed to agree that things had crossed a line. There was no going back to the past, to life before “Touch of Grey.”
I remember sitting in the crowd at Deer Creek, mostly sober—or at least not on LSD—and looking around me at all the people listening to this band of old hippies noodling around on their guitars and thinking, “What the fuck am I doing here?” Even then in the summer of 1992, there was an edge to everything. The air shimmered with bad vibes. And when we returned to the junkyard, we returned to tire fires burning amidst the wreckage, acrid black smoke curling into the sky. Two friends who’d parked just outside the gates of the junkyard had their car broken into, windows smashed in, and everything they owned stolen.
Inside the gates, the toilets were full, the ice was gone, and the workers were drunk and angry. The owners had gone home, leaving the inmates in charge. One of them stalked around the campground with a pistol strapped to his hip, yelling at people as if he was enforcing some invisible order. I watched him pick up a burning tire off a fire and toss it to the side, where it continued to smolder in the grass, and I thought that it was entirely possible that someone might get hurt that night.
As it turned out, after those shows at Deer Creek, I would never again attend another Grateful Dead concert, not out of some principled stance or concern for my safety but just because I lost that connection, that investment in the band. And I lost connection with that side of myself if I’m being honest. Some days I think I’m always trying to get back there, to find that Dead self again. But he’s been gone a long time.
*
When we meet them, five-year-old, Susan is in High Kindergarten and three-year-old, Michael is chewing on an electrical cord. He’s already started one fire. Susan is wearing white lipstick and reading a comic book. Her favorite member of the Grateful Dead is Bobby. The adults in Michael’s life aren’t paying attention because they’re trying to recover some really good hash from a crack in the floor. It’s morning in the late 60’s and Susan is already rolling on a tab of LSD and Michael seems doomed to injury and abandonment.
You may remember these children from the ending to Joan Didion’s seminal expose on the ugly and absurd side of the 60’s counter-culture in San Francisco, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” The two tableaus are rendered in Didion’s trademark oblique and razor-sharp voice. Poor simple Susan, the situation, and doomed Michael, the inevitable emblems of all that is wrong. The children become vessels, urns in which Didion can burn the whole drug-fueled and misguided scene to the ground.
I felt sorry for Susan and Michael. They were me. Or close to my generation. Or that’s what I see in that essay. Growing up in this fucked up country. Just a child chewing on extension cords. And while my parents never dosed me with LSD, I was dosed daily during the 70’s and 80’s with the American myth of superiority, prosperity and conformity, arguably a much heavier, more corrosive drug than acid. And it was this drug that many in my generation rejected in favor of the ideals the Dead have always represented—peace, love, acceptance and personal freedom, a life lived on the fringes of the status quo. It was the drug of conformity and capitalism we believed we were saying no to and instead choosing the counter-culture represented by the Grateful Dead.
Susan and Michael were born at the end of the Baby Boomer generation and the beginning of another, Generation X, and like the rest of us, they didn’t end in the suspended animation of that room in that house in San Francisco. They lived on in a generation’s rebellion against the strait-laced life of conformity, authority, judgment and elitism. The very things that Didion critiques in the essay are many of the things Generation X actively sought after—peace and kindness, acceptance of individuality and the multiplicity of identity, or simply unencumbered ignorant fun. We were born and raised and swaddled in the American absurd. We thought High Kindergarten sounded like a grand idea because, honestly, why the fuck not?
Nothing else mattered. Nothing our country had built since then was worth a shit. None of our institutions could be trusted. We would never do better than our parents. Most of us grew up believing we would all be immolated in a global nuclear war before we even reached adulthood. That does something to your brain. That does something to your sense of hope or of what is right or wrong in the world.
And twenty-five years later, after I dropped from that crane and bounced above the parking lot, I like to imagine that Susan, a little older and wiser, might have been standing next to me at that Shoreline show, swaying in a long dress, watching a band that never stopped playing, still hopelessly in love with Bobby and everything the Dead promised.
Steven Church is the author of several books of nonfiction and a founding editor for The Normal School. His essays are forthcoming this spring from Under the Sun and Fourth Genre. He teaches in the MFA Program at Fresno State.
michael credico: Eponymity, or from the song “Living in a Box” by the band Living in a Box from the album Living in a Box (1987)
[wakes up this morning closed in on all sides] You are small in the top bunk of the bunk bed you share with your brothers. You sleep in a sleeping bag and overnight you have tossed and turned yourself the wrong way. Your head is where your feet should be. You panic. You cannot breathe. Though you are breathing, and the sleeping bag is breathing, probably it is not meant for the outdoors, where thankfully you are not. Still, it is dark, and you cannot remember darker.
[nothing doing] You are drunk at the lake in the dark on beer you bought from a guy you know sells beer to the underage because he has nothing to do and nobody to do it with and so will sell beer to the underage on the condition he is invited where you are going, to do what you are doing, which is being underage and drunk at the lake in the dark listening to the water crash against dolosse, not yet knowing the term for what those things are is dolosse. You call them jacks and they are spilled along the shoreline like crosshatching. When you listen to the water, you are really listening for bodies in the water washing up on the shoreline because bodies in the water must sound different than no bodies in the water because a body can be any one of you and the water is just the water.
[feels resistance] You are temporary. For a duration not to exceed three months you are a wax injection machine operator. You must complete the wax injection machine operator training in a couple hours or else be returned to the temporary agency. You will be removed by the temporary agency from its list of potential temporaries. You will have squandered this opportunity and others like it. You stand before the wax injection machine ready to operate it. You slide into the wax injection machine’s jaws a steel wax mold. You align the hole in the mold with the wax injection machine’s injection nozzle. You press simultaneously two black buttons. The jaws clamp down on the mold. The injection nozzle enters the hole in the mold and fills it with hot wax. If the mold is misaligned with the injection nozzle the hot wax will explode messily all over the wax injection machine. You must immediately press the red button located between the two black buttons to stop the flow of hot wax and to unclamp the jaws from the mold. Begin cleanup. Valuable time is lost to cleanup. There is a set number of times a temporary can misalign the mold with the injection nozzle before you are returned to the temporary agency. You are not told how many times. Other temporaries tell you if you do not want to get caught having misaligned the mold with the injection nozzle then do not press the red button. The red button alerts the supervisors. The red button is how the number of times a temporary has misaligned the mold with the injection nozzle is calculated. However, if the supervisors discover you are not immediately pressing the red button when the mold is misaligned with the injection nozzle, you will be returned to the temporary agency.
[as you open your eyes someone’s fooling] You hear a horse. You look out the window for a horse. There is a horse in the apartment building parking lot. A bride is on the horse. A groom is leading by its reigns the horse. People in the apartment building parking lot cheer the bride, the groom, and the horse—people who park in the apartment building parking lot, who live in the apartment building. Does the bride or the groom live in the apartment building? Or will they now, together? Will they park the horse in the apartment building parking lot? Where are they going? Around here is nowhere to go. From here it is difficult to get anywhere. Though you have never tried by horse. You are not afraid of horses. You are afraid of falling off horses. You were asleep. The bed is uncomfortable. An exposed coil rubs the small of your back. It is cheaper to form a callous than purchase a new mattress. Is this possible? A back is not a hand or a foot. But then the bride, the groom, and the horse must have gone somewhere.
[finds a way to break through this cellophane line] You remove the cellophane from the cigarette box. You stuff variously into the cellophane ______, ______, ______, or ______. You melt the cellophane opening with a lighter to form a seal. You call this sweating. Sweated cellophane stuffed variously full of ______, ______, ______, or ______ between your car seats or secret pockets in your jeans or your backpack, though your jeans and backpack were advertised as jeans and a backpack containing secret pockets. This is why you purchased them. Some of the secret pockets are small and can contain nothing more than a couple coins or a house key. Some of them are large and extend down the length of your leg. You can fit in them a carton of cigarettes, but the cigarettes will be mangled when you sit.
[knows what’s going on in own mind] …
[am I living in a box?] Summers sleeping in one room. The living room. In the living room the only air conditioner, a window air conditioner. You sleep on wicker and are young enough that this will not hurt you. You sleep in front of the window air conditioner. Your eustachian tubes block up and sometimes you lose your balance when you stand up. On the living room floor an air mattress where your father sleeps. You fall onto the air mattress. The air mattress is plasticky, like an inflatable pool toy. You cannot swim. Your mother fills a bucket for you to dip your toes into. There are dampened sheets in the freezer. The living room is blocked off with blankets to keep the cool air from escaping.
[am I living in a cardboard box?] You say glue factory. Your supervisors say adhesives manufacturer. Your supervisors say adhesives plant. This old glass-top warehouse used to be for a corrugated box company. Through the many broken glass panes, the birds watch you snack. But I am a college graduate! one of you complains. He is eating potato chips and he says he can eat all the empty calories he wants. He misses his mouth with the potato chips. Crumbs on the floor. The birds are not so brave to swoop down while you snack. The birds are waiting until you are done snacking. You do not stop snacking. You work on a continuous line in twelve-hour shifts and so to pass the time you snack, and you smoke. You skin breaks out and you gain a genuine gut, and you are coughing. Every shift one of you tells a version of the horse joke. The horse joke is where are all the horses?
[am I living in a box] How many hours into a twelve-hour shift do you begin to taste ______, ______, ______, or ______ in your postnasal drip? And you can feel it?
[life goes in circles] In the studio apartment you block off the bed/dining/living room from the kitchen with blankets to keep the cold air from escaping. In the kitchen you cannot cook without becoming heat exhausted. You peek your head through the blankets, into the cooler air of the bed/dining/living room. You have a bed and a coffee table. You smoke inside crouched in front of a cracked open window, staining the wall with your knees. And there are stains on the wall where your bed is from sitting up in bed because you have no headboard. You have sweated yourself into these walls and do not expect your security deposit back.
[around and around] In the house you cannot close the bedroom door because the cat needs to be able to get inside the bedroom to cool down in front of the window air conditioner but also he needs to be able to get out of the bedroom to do whatever he does at night or else he will not let you sleep the few hours he lets you sleep so you block off the bedroom with a blanket so he can push in and out of the bedroom at his convenience.
[circulating] …
[what is moving underground] Stacks of cardboard boxes and nostalgia for when cardboard boxes were not so excessively used and everywhere. When you took home cardboard boxes from work. When you took them from tree lawns. If even you had nothing to put in the cardboard boxes, you kept them. Inevitably, you would have to move. You were always moving. The next place would have less room and so you needed more cardboard boxes. But then purchasing everything online the cardboard boxes accumulate, and you still are not used to throwing them out. You ask around but nobody needs anymore cardboard boxes. You should recycle the cardboard boxes and you thought you were but then it is revealed the city recycling trucks that collect the recycling dump the recycling with the regular trash.
[escaping] …
[finds a way to break through this cellophane line] You say the last thing you will quit is cigarettes and when you do there are so many other things.
[knowing] Another version of the horse joke goes you are the horses.
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[am I? am I? am I?] …
[am I? am I? am I?] …
Michael Credico lives in Cleveland.