An attempt at sketching in prose what goes through my mind when Robyn Hitchcock begins to ramble in that engagingly undrunken monotone about the Isle of Wight before starting to contort a guitar in his own unmistakable, beautifully ugly idiom.
I don’t like to point at someone and say, hey, that person right there, that’s my best friend, but looking back, I’m starting to think maybe Kim was my best friend in college, for most of it. Easily as tall as me and big, a black belt in aikido—the first time I ever met her sister was when I agreed to take Kim to a Moody Blues show in Cleveland, because Zak was out of town and Kim’s mother really thought it best that a man should accompany Kim to the concert, you know, for safety, and geeze, I felt safer with her around, and that was what was so funny, see? (I met her sister then because, you see, Annemarie was going to the concert too, with her boyfriend at the time, but let’s not get sidetracked. This isn’t about Annemarie.)
There was the night we were hanging out on the Memorial Bandstand thingie, the atrocious affront to undergraduate sensibilities put up my freshman year that Rob had the brilliant idea to hang a Fotomat sign off of in a prank that misfired at the last minute. (Would I have been caught by Security, had I gone that night, like that guy who was too stupid to do anything but run when it went down bad? —Who cares?) Me and Zak and Kim, and Zak had a theatrical rapier, light and flimsy, just the thing for wearing under your cloak on a cool autumn night when you’re a romantic college student (strike that; let’s go with Romantic, instead); I had the cane that had been an integral part of the costume (there is no other word for it: tails, top hat, white gloves, cane) that I’d worn to my senior prom and still carried from time to time as an affectation (I’d also worn zero-prescription stage glasses the first couple of weeks at college, because I don’t need glasses, but they’re cool to play with—until a friend who did need glasses gently pointed out it was kind of, you know, dorky) and Kim had nothing at all but her bare hands and, well, her aikido; anyway. We staged this mock running sparring Erroll Flynn donnybrook up and down that stupid pomo gazebo, all for none and your ass is mine: rapier on staff, click clack, and Kim reaching in every now and then to grab a hand or an arm or something and twist and send one or the other of us scuttle-rolling across the floor. Enormous fun.
There was the night, and this one I’m having trouble placing, because it took place in one of those gorgeous upstairs lounges in Asia House, and I didn’t live in Asia House until my disastrous third year (second-and-a-half, really), and by that point Zak and Kim were married and living in Kent, or maybe it was one of the towns near the place where Kent State is, I dunno. —Annemarie and I saw The Mountains of the Moon in a theater there—or was it Kim and I? And Zak? (All I really remember about the damn thing is when Speke kissed Burton.) So I’m thinking this pretty much couldn’t have happened that year, the year—semester, really—I was living in Asia House. But I’m hard-pressed to explain exactly how we came to be there otherwise, or why. But there we were, me and Kim and a boom box and a tape of the soundtrack to The Mission, and for whatever reason—whenever it was, my second year, or my second-and-a-half, there was stress and to spare—we were, well, dancing. Not together; not even to the music, per se. The music was a catalyst—that oboe, the chanting, those drums; the movement was, well, something else. But we did it. And never really spoke of it. (Did it have to do with Zak? Liz? Not Annemarie, no, not then, which would place it in my second year, and it doesn’t really matter why, really, not so long after the fact; whatever it was we were upset over or worried about is long gone, and all that’s left is the memory of what we did about it, which was striking and inexplicable and oddly haunting. And I still have no idea why we were in Asia House that night.)
The odd games she ran, the uncategorizable intersections of role playing, improvisational theatre, performance art and encounter group—geeze, that makes them sound terrible, which they weren’t. Chas, Zak, Liz, me, her: I’m thinking, say, of her vision of Eden: the room was dark, and Bach was playing, terribly loudly (organ fugues, but it could have been a Goldberg; my memory is lousy, ask anyone), and she as God was pelting us all with stuffed animals and fig newtons. Zak (Leviathan) sat in a closet and said things I couldn’t hear, and Chas (the Serpent) kept tempting Liz (Eve), but I (Adam) wasn’t following any of that; I was taking up the stuffed animals and naming them, pretty much. Just focussing on my job, what I’d been told to do, and when the whole thing went down bad it took me desperately by surprise. The music, the darkness, the animals, the food—all gone, and why? Why? —An image of Adam (it’s far from the only one, of course) I’d never have found myself, and always liked. (What of Eve? The Serpent? Leviathan? God? I don’t really know. Thus, the inherent limitations of the medium.) (In Boston, there was a Greek myth, with [sort of] masks; but that’s more complicated, much, and I don’t want to get sidetracked.)
I can still see her, in my mind’s eye, for all that it’s been years since: almost a parody of the Teutonic milkmaid, a Valkyrie in muddy boots, big blue eyes and ruddy cheeks (yes: ruddy) and a disarming handful of childlike expressions—fierce determination, glum disappointment, gleeful wonder—that could cross her face in alarmingly sophisticated ways, and all I have to do to smile is think of her tossing back her head and belting out “Ja, ja, ja, ja!” like Madeline Kahn. I can hear her still, too—not so much her voice exactly as the music of it: the pitch, the timbre. The rhythm. (Zak is harder to hear. Chas is here in town, so. Liz? Almost gone—a faint hint, the flavor of it, yes, but I told you: my memory is lousy. Annemarie—but no.) —We only ever slept together the one time, but it wasn’t like that, not at all: we were both trying to be fair to other people. Thinking back I can’t say for sure that this was the first time she’d ever slept with someone she didn’t love, didn’t long for, yearn for, need, but it was the first time I ever had, and it was—fun. Relaxed. We laughed a lot.
But it was Eva, not Kim, who gave me Hitchcock. “You’ve got to listen to this,” she said, and played me “Heaven,” and then the whole of fegMANIA!, start to finish. Eva, whom I took to my senior prom: me in that get-up, tails and top hat, white gloves and cane, and her in a white creation of lace and satin and silk, and white fishnets underneath. (I can see her easily enough, and hear her, too: she had an adorably goofy laugh, like Jenn does. Kim, too. Which is not to say Liz didn’t, per se.) Eva’s LPs I taped: fegMANIA! and Black Snake Dîamond Röle and Element of Light and I Often Dream of Trains and Invisible Hitchcock and Groovy Decoy or Decay or whatever it was called and yes, I found my own copies later and bought them all, and more besides, which is something the record companies claim they just don’t understand. Eva who was hunting for a copy of “Bones in the Ground” off the impossible-to-find Bells of Rhymney EP. (It was later included in a reissue of I Often Dream of Trains that I have on the shelf, over there.) And it was Eva I was trying to conjure up that achingly lonely night in my dorm room freshman year, the corner room I shared with Kevin in the cornerstone dorm of the main campus, and the windows were open and I had Element of Light in the tape deck cranked up high (Kevin was out) and when “Bass” stumbles to a halt, it’s then that the backwards guitar starts crawling out of the speakers and lofting up suddenly swooping into the sky with the drums and bass clattering after it, oh—
—and when it’s over, I look over at the door and there’s Kim, whom I’ve met maybe once before (Zak introduced us; there’s a whole story about how they got together, but I’d get it wrong, and anyway, I don’t want to go into it). It’s Kim leaning there on the jamb and that gleeful grin is lighting up her face, and I’m standing there blinking, slow on the uptake me.
“I heard the music,” she said, “and I thought it might be you. And then I looked up and saw the top hat bobbing around in the window and knew it.”
—Liz never liked Robyn. Jenn doesn’t much, either, but it’s more like she’s never really acquired the taste; Liz actively disliked him. (Still: the one time I saw him in concert—with Kim, and Zak, and Chas, and Annemarie and her boyfriend at the time were there, too, weren’t they—I bought a T-shirt [“One Long Pair of Eyes”] and when later that summer I bussed out to see Liz [Cleveland to Philadelphia over the Pine Barrens to Atlantic City and down the coast to Toms River] I gave it to her, which says a lot about how little I knew of what I was doing, then.) But that isn’t really why last week when I stuck my head into Movie Madness and poked around until I found Storefront Hitchcock I waited until a day when Jenn was at work and I wasn’t to pop the tape into the VCR and sit down and watch it.
But that is why—all of it, mind, every bit, and the stuff I’ve left out, too—that’s why when he started to talk about the Isle of Wight, I felt the floor drop out from under my feet, and I hung there, shivering, waiting—
“Every year I can walk along that beach,” he said, or something like it, “a little bit grayer, a little bit fatter, just walking through the same pools. And the thing is, the sand erodes, the soil is very soft there, it crumbles away; every year a few meters of that beach is just lost into the sea. So you can imagine that where people walked three centuries ago is now far out to sea, and their ghosts are literally walking over the sand dunes.”
And then, oh God, that guitar—
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