FLAME GAME

Born into a hick town, flirting with the pretty boy cross town, the tough with a heart of gold, the wise ass striking like a snake. Low and sneaky. A fascination, maybe taboo but titillating. A pursuit, a dangerous conquest and confusion. They fall in love inside a deep secret. Smiling smartly with eachother, sometimes with a touch of venom across the classroom, across the field. Secret rendezvous. Then of course it all breaks apart in a climax all messy and wet and stinky. With shame a yellow piss stain down the back. Made to feel to be a mockery of life. The game ends and its always a good time to get away from the abuse at home. The drunkenness and forgetfulness. There’s always a kindness in the anger and an anger in the kindness.

Big city life with no money is no picnic in the woods. A sharp young man finds a job or two, finds a good cush job copying files for lawyers, battling away on the paper you’re copying. The bosses are mostly nice and take you for the goofball that you are. They let you play publishing with the xerox machine, and you create leaflets. Shows. Performances.

You come home from work and you’re with your friends dressing up and making up. A stud walks in and you hover. Out on the street you perform. Conversations of amazing banality, of soap operas and rock stars and movie stars. Each story twisted with a little drama performed to the audience of passers- by. Bible stories of the unredeemed, of the players in the house of the stars. Ancient Icarus myths of great falls from grace. What grace? The grace of the great unwashed, the customer contributing a dime or a dollar to the great one, the media darling, the siren for lost shores of thought, shores teaming with the attraction of the golden boy, the golden girl. You make a bad Marilyn in kind of a good way. Not every man’s dreams or every woman’s discouraging comparison . Maybe more the wit and wisdom of Marilyn, the dark and tragic and doomed vision of Marilyn, meaning the vision she had of who she is and what she wasn’t. That drama but dumbed down, hidden in a shock of blonde. A striking stare astonishingly and tantalizingly innocent. Beautifully innocent. Restrained. All the mean and crazy years burning inside restrained. In Marilyn but not in you. You are too restrained in the cold and vampire killing light of day. No more restraints at night. With all the makeup and wigs and crepe covering you you are yourself. Those daytime money grabbing moments are the disguise you have to throw on when you hang your balls in slacks.

But things just aren’t enough in Atlanta, and you fly off with Prince Charming to London. Your outrageousness is sought deep within the artistic community, the underground. Your street theatre escalates. It makes fashion statements! You are the Queen of the Nile, but the Prince is a bag of shit. A sloth stuck in one groove with the needle. A traveling band of crazies from Connecticut and New Jersey and Long Island all claiming to be from Manhattan are putting on wild shows conceived by a mad genius. You are smitten with it and put in your big bodied and wigged self to quite an effect. A star is born. Other stars are jealous and the madness of the conceiver creates just a tad bit too much confusion to keep any art work together. Even though it should it doesn’t last. But there are contacts made because the work had drawn interest from a star trying to exploit the underground for fresh ideas to turn us all on and into fans. You do your drag Elvis and your Gene Vincent. The star’s wife flirts with you, a sort of Lesbianism that’s not lesbianism. It’s the old three way scene some pornographic perversion. Out of it pops a contract. You are very excited and decide a change of scenery is in order, it’s time to conquer New York.

In New York you play the grotesque cabaret scene with old friends as a welcome home, a quick explosion. You participate in the Stonewall riot. But your interest is in the tight pants of the guitar man. You enter his band through the back street and into the back door. He enters you similarly. You are in love with this crazy man, and he’s a damn good player too. He slugs out some brilliant blues based rocknroll. He slugs in some hefty drugs too, beer and what ever else may be at hand. But it’s a good platform from which to perform. Some wacky songs of the bluest sort. But hard and rocking and spirited and twisted and fun. The guitar man is a terror and in private a sensitive young man of great feeling, mostly an angry feeling and a bitter feeling but also a gentle hopefulness and a generous caring. Inside the frantic and sometimes threatening exterior is the poet and philosopher, too gentle to stay sane. Is this the true nature of the man? Is it your true nature? Probably not. But it’s there. Attempts made to be out there in the public, on Lp racks and such, promised by this the manipulative Brit chameleon who garnered you a contract for stealing your ideas is hollow. No contract really, just a promissory note written in a pretty pink ink that disappears when dried. The man was a trickster after all, a cold and calculating commercial trickster who took you in to use you then tore you out of his life and success, wadded you up, ate you to disguise your presence and shit you down into some deeply buried sewage. A lesson learned, you slug away with your lover at the pace and level you are at, small clubs, 45’s, that sort of thing. And around you, around those clubs, builds groups of bands full of outrage and fast loud hard rocknroll. Like you borrowed Marilyn’s glam, you borrow the hits of the 50s and 60s to give the music a subversive hook. You and these other new bands look to Spector and Leiber and Stoller to find tight little butts of beauty, beautiful riffs. Some give it less than two minutes to pop out a song like top 40 hitmakers but of course hits are strictly underground. Others, and sometimes you, too, being stuck down deep in the musical river, flowing in underground currents springing forth in dark, thick walled caves, are empowered to go out on improvisatory limbs of language and music, pushing against the walls of musical and verbal talent like some darkly foreboding art rock with the visions only close to Lautremont or Rimbaud or, more contemporary, Burroughs. Bands are starting to band together. They locate themselves around CBGBs or Max’s Kansas City. You’re not the favorite band. You annoy many who come to see other bands. Thus again it is a new status quo for which you stick up your flaming finger.

London is echoing the goings on in New York. You join a small cavalcade of crazy new bands and fly back across the Atlantic to reconquer that island nation. In tour, in a bus full of rockers all young and childish and silly and hopeless, things fall apart. A political statement made against the Queen by a British punk (as you are now known) band cuts away at the available venues, they shut their doors in your face when you arrive. And your tight pants guitar man is turning into the monster he has always promised to be. He starts acting out disgust. He wants no part of his relationship and finds a British girl to concentrate his affection on. He breaks away and the band breaks apart. You gather together some other players, but it doesn’t hold for long. Time for another new life.

Alone this time you depart for Berlin, for some injections of transformative drugs for your transsexual lifestyle. There you return to that oldest professions, finding clubs catering to clients searching for you and your new German friends. You bury yourself in the scene, living a life in a house of ill-repute. Access to the knife is now near at hand and is tempting you with its cutting siren’s song. You tie yourself down to hear it, but it doesn’t sound right in the end, and the ties hold, and you continue your life of two genders, the apparent girl Jayne, and beneath the panties in restraints the physical boy Wayne. Your whole life now is a play. A performance staged with fake interiors. It is play and it is fun and it gets old though the friends you make continually entertain. It is what they have wrought, the playwrights. You take what you can stand. The boys are all men there, all johns, old and weak and mostly unattractive. The most attractive wants to play you for a fool. It is all too weak. Time to go home. Home. I guess NYC is home.

You return to form a band again. An oldies circuit of some demented kind, like you are an old established queen of punk or something. But you just want the rocknroll, and that’s what you give and the audience, perhaps knowing you only by a vague reputation, jump to it. It is almost as if you have found in your age an establishment. A frightening thought. But with your womanly wiles and your dead on crude ways, you take the wind right out of the safety sack of nostalgia. You got stature enough, an audience, to put out a CD or two. Meanwhile out on the streets of New York are the remnants of your wild life. People you have loved and lost are lost in their tendencies to self-destruct. Young men are old beyond their years. The guitar man can no longer fill his pants. They sag on him as he sags along, a junkie unredeemed, lost in his ways, dying, pale and thin a pustules laden face. The young royal beauty who brought you like a prize game to London is old and fat. Fat in the sense of bloated. Age surrounds him with a dull yellow gray aura. A cynicism he so proudly displayed deeply creases his fat face so beautifully lean before. You are saddened yet strengthened. You find an even tempered man who is full of cheery laughs and an occasional barb to show his smarts and marry him and have lots of kids. Just kidding.

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