By Unpopular’s Texas Correspondent William Crain

The sound of a body falling down a flight of stairs. Followed by a space in which reverberates a history of wrong roads taken. Then the full on sensation of something new and not altogether welcome. Mystery shadows the long knife which sits cold and shiny on the table next to the provolone and olives. There’s a film where these urchins are caught taking a shit in the backyard of a French actress while she speaks nostalgically to the camera of her wonderful time spent there as a child. The delinquents are chased off, falling and laughing as they climb over the stone wall that lines the backyard. It’s filmed by actor Jean-Pierre Leaud as part of the film inside the film.

It’s not a very good movie. But that small fragment stayed with me. I woke up with it in my head as if it was something I had dreamed and it took quite a while to lock down the source. No one remembers this scene or talks about it – it’s all about Brando and the butter. But maybe it’s the secret heart of the film? Lost under the awkward improvised dialogue and ugly sex. After all it’s what the indifferent universe tends to do with cherished childhood memories- take a dump on them. Or maybe it’s proof that the universe is more perverse than indifferent.

Once she said to me in a slightly mocking tone “Why not throw a rope down to save me. Pull me up and greet me with a kiss. I’ve been underground with the mole men for too long. I revel in the light and can still remember when it sparked inside of me. But it’s lonely when your parents are gone and you have no children, and truth be told, no friends. You are no longer the center of anyone’s universe, you are at very best just a side note in someone else’s story. A bit player, lost in the background, so you lapse into a silent acceptance that is not death but something akin. You can no longer feel the spirit down in your soul like that song Delroy Wilson sang, remember?”

And I’d just sit there defiantly staring hard at the clock knowing it can’t be beat. Your cock can still get hard but you know it won’t come. And those friends you have left seem to always stand outside of the frame, observing and commenting with one hand on their chin. You want to pull them into the picture yet they remain outside, observant but distant. “Might help if you put your cock away” she’d laugh.

After you reach a certain age you hear yourself saying I guess I will see you at the next funeral. Which reminds me of the last time Carmen overdosed- the cops that showed up were funny and almost likeable. The EMS people of course were doing the heavy lifting so the cops were basically just standing around with nothing to do, eventually they started peeking around her house. And they saw the room where her media was overflowing all over the place. Damn room is an actual hazard with books and CD’s, records and magazines stacked all over the floor. A hazard that she had more than once fallen over into, knocking everything out of whatever loose order it might have been in and banging herself up a bit in the process. One thing about corporeal music that is rarely mentioned is that it can physically hurt you, it’s got sharp edges. And she had the cuts and bruises to prove it.

Carmen used to joke that one day we would find her buried underneath all her “cool stuff”. But anyway these cops that showed up were excited about her record collection. She kept one of her heavily medicated eyes on them while answering the paramedics endless questions. It was funny, these guys were probably about her age maybe a little younger-some might deem their actions inappropriate at the site of a potential suicide, but she found it almost touching and she felt a fondness towards them for their interest in her cherished possessions. So many people don’t care anymore. It went down in her book as the best experience she had had with the police. Who wants to die when you’ve still got some boys in blue with good taste in music and cool enough to get excited about it. Maybe the world isn’t a total shit fest after all.

But poor Carmen she was forever lost, floating between this world and the next. Trapped in the past that her house contained. It’s where her parents lived too before they disappeared. She was always falling thru the rooms there, playing with shadows and times of the day, never able to hold a line steady enough to make a connection with the outside world. I would drop in to see her every once in a while and she would tell me wide eyed (she had the largest brown eyes) about her experiences with floating balls of light, landscapes that appeared in mirrors, blood on prayer cards, and the owl in the backyard that stared at her for hours the night before her mother’s death.

I loved being with her as she exuded an aura and an insight which I could neither deny nor confirm but that I could feel radiating off her like an ecstatic. In another time she might have been a saint, or banished from the village for witchcraft. Maybe she was just balancing on the edge of crazy. Or maybe she was mining some twilight place and bringing back reports of what she found there. But after a few hours I always had to leave so as not to get sucked into the shadow life that seemed to hold her there. Too many memories, ghosts and saints stacked up in that house, it was dense with spirits. Before I’d leave she’d always ask me to put a record on. She’d say don’t play me any more of that hippie crap put on Leonard Cohen. So I’d cue up ‘Songs of Love and Hate’ and tip out the door.

I was always half in love with her, maybe more than half, too much so to casually lure her out of her world into the here and now or whatever we call it. Carmen could have used a friend like Hoagy Carmichael. Listen to Hoagy sing ‘Two Sleepy People’ the nonchalant way he drowsily draws his companion in. I like him more and more the older I get, his songs, his voice even the piano playing. Carmen didn’t need a savior coming on strong, pronouncing his undying love and devotion she just needed a companion keeping things dreamy and casual. Someone to float thru life with. I wish it could have been me, but I wanted to save her. I wanted it too much. And maybe there was nothing to save her from anyway.

William Crain. 2023.