Afterwords: Liner Notes
There was a guy who kept hundreds of reptiles in his apartment. Cages everywhere. Iguanas in sock drawers, hairy spiders under black lights, and glass aquariums with mice farmed for the boas.
The story in full here. Miscellaneous notes and spoilers below.
Liner Notes spun out of an urban legend. There was this guy who kept hundreds of reptiles in his apartment. Cages everywhere. He had iguanas in the sock drawers, hairy spiders under black lights, glass aquariums with mice being farmed for the boas. Until—one day—the guy came home, and as he was putting his key in the front door, he abruptly imagined his “favorite” boa constrictor wrapped around the staircase handrail. Out of its cage. Tickling the air with his tongue. He got so gripped by terror he couldn’t step through his own front door. Animal control had to come and clear the place of every last scaly creature.
Okay, so then there was another guy... This guy had a massive jazz collection, and one day an internal light bulb went off, and the guy realized he didn’t like jazz. At all. Turns out he hated jazz. Couldn’t hear one more Mixolydian boo-biddity-boo-boo-be-biddity-boo.
And the last guy: this one’s a dentist at the office, poking away at gums, gently clicking teeth with his little round mirrors, looking down at his patients gagging up at him, their mouths stretched wide with plastic hammocks of blue rubber, their tongues lolling about. Suctioned food particles in the jowls. Bloody wisdom tooth sockets. Uprooted molars on the dental tray. Plaque scraping. Bleeding, unflossed gums.
And this guy, just like the reptile guy, has a “breakthrough,” you might call it. He realizes he hates dentistry and hates his office’s pastel pink and blue commercial artwork, and out of nowhere he has an unassailable, profound Life Realization. He stops cold, stops drilling, stops poking around some woman’s mouth, maybe leaves a kid biting down on a painful plastic X-ray insert. And that dentist walks out of his office a free man, free from a personal deception.
Believe me: I was so, so, so going to write about Dentist Guy #3.
But then there was still one more, last guy. This guy I personally knew…
This one last guy was who I needed for my story. He was a roommate for a summer in college, and a DJ hosting an after-hours music show at the university radio station. His room was walled off from mine by a thin plywood divider, under-engineered by fraternity brothers. Inside his curtained-off space, he had milk crate after milk crate of vinyl esoterica. Nothing was too obscure: Zimbabwean drum solos. Vashti Bunyan. Here. Roscoe Holcomb. Dock Boggs. Israeli Kazoos. Recorder quartets. John Cage intermissions. Early Philip Glass. I lived next door to the Smithsonian Archive of Folk Culture. Every record was more unlikely than the last, which irritated me to no end, especially from over on the other side of the divider, where I’m six inches two millimeters tall cranking David Lee Roth’s Skyscraper, swinging one-handed from Steve Vai’s tremolo bar, blue spark harmonics flying out from under my fingernails. Just Like Living in Paradise here.
I lost my way. I’m back. Where was I?
Yes.
The roommate.
I’m sure his music was just fine, but irritating because… because… because… he never played any of his records. He only talked about them. I snuck into his room once when he was away, and I went through his records. I realize that sounds a little creepy, especially if you’ve read Backgammon, Story #1, but I needed to find one song on one album that might have traces of something recognizably musical that I might have played myself. We must have had a single record intersection. Leadelly? Dave Van Ronk? Later Philip Glass? Dr. John Gris-Gris? Something?
And deep into the deepest tracks in his milk crates, I discovered…
That he owned…
Dramatic pause...
John Coltrane’s Ascension.
I can’t keep asking you all to listen to it, so I’ll just tell you that it is the most unlistenable piece of music ever written. Fifteen musicians got together in a New Jersey recording studio, and each of them played whatever they wanted for
four minutes and thirty-three secondsforty minutes. This is some tough aural sledding.And so my character Laszlo would be the one guy that actually listened to Ascension. Somebody had to be. In fact, he was a guy who decided it needed to be explained. Probably the only guy.
And he was also the guy a girl from Ohio fell in love with, a guy even more difficult to fall in love with than, say, the junior psychopharmacologist listening to David Lee Roth and Steve Vai at thunderous volumes on 113th street that summer (leading small-party, guided tours through his roommate’s milk crates.)
And for a long time, when Liner Notes was simply a long, chronological list of curated quotations, it was a story about a man hitting the moment his wife discovered he was a total fraud and hated Ascension.
And then, early one 5:30 morning, I realized the curated quotes could be part of a letter, an addendum after a bitter, acrimonious relationship and divorce... and the quotes would be songs and the songs would be part of the times of their life together… and the letter would be the liner notes, and the character’s curation and notes would all be both tragic and damning.
Into the living room I went… “Bingo, Melanie. I got it. Form meets function.”
There will be a “golden meta moment,” I explained, almost like I’d been asked, when the reader discovers the curated quotes aren’t something arbitrarily artistic or experimental by the writer, but a legitimate, epistolary artifact that made structural sense! See! I can both tease and simultaneously kill off accusations of pretentious nonsense in one fell swoop! Or rescue myself from it since I didn’t actually have that letter postscript idea in the first place.
Imagine!
And that’s the subconscious jambalaya that led to Liner Notes, Story XX.
“The medium is the message. Melanie? Where did you go? Honey?”
It looks, some twenty-some stories in on my hundred story journey here, that I’m definitely interested in characters that lie to themselves or have profound misunderstandings of what their motivations are. Every single one of these stories are influenced by Remains of the Day.
Evidence:
Backgammon had a fucked-up teenager who broke into people’s houses and went through their stuff, got in a relationship with a girl who lived in one of those houses, fell in love and had no idea he had fallen in love! (The butler Stevens anyone?)
Philadelphia Freedom had a girl who’s been assaulted struggling for a year to convince herself the relationship was consensual, even romantic—to the point she’s writing herself letters…
And with Howl had a child ghost that can’t reconcile himself to his mother’s decision to let him drown.
Solomio had a bully retelling the story of an adolescent cruelty to an outcast teacher.
And now Liner Notes. Laszlo has no idea the information he’s revealing in his quotation list, or how damning it is, but for all that, for the record, I feel for him. And her. And Etta. I hope you did, too with at least a hint of compassion.
Next month’s story — ICELAND — will have a throuple traveling together on vacation and the end of a marriage of two of them. Who doesn’t like a story about a miserable threesome in a ménage-a-trois told by an unreliable narrator?
So trust me, I love unreliable narrators.
And not because the reader jumps up from the couch after the final paragraph and yells into the other room “OMG! The narrator is the murderer, Melanie!”
I like them because there’s something satisfying about getting so deep inside a character’s fun-house mirror echo chamber they can’t see or hear themselves.
Who hasn’t had a friend recounting a conflict with a girlfriend or a parent where they didn’t start to think, “I might actually agree with your mom?”
Isn’t that all of us telling each other our sad little stories?
Worse: our happy little stories?
Is it even possible to have a reliable narrator?
Can a storyteller be trusted?
Ever?
About anything?
I never listened to Skyscraper or went through anyone’s milk crates when they weren’t around.
I’m not even sure I had a roommate.
Till next Sunday, 9:00am.
A narrator can never be trusted! But we lean in anyway because neither can the listener. Love how you reverse engineer your madness for us.
“…or experimental by the writer, but a legitimate, epistolary artifact that made structural sense! See! I can both tease and simultaneously kill off accusations of pretentious nonsense in one fell swoop! Or rescue myself from it since I didn’t actually have that letter postscript idea in the first place.”
Just one of the many reasons I stick around to,“Feel Something”.
Coltrane’s Ascension, I did listen to it. Once, in my own home, the second time, cuz you asked me to. Twice is enough for one lifetime . And if I am not in the room when you ask again, you’ll find me downstairs in the kitchen with Melanie, talking about you. Me saying to her,“ It all makes perfect sense“(Roger Waters, Perfect Sense; Amused to Death).