// creative //
May 18, 2015
National Guard stands
Graham Johnson
1.
America was a strange place now. There had been the man I’d met on that craggy, rock-strewn coastline, fifty miles from a town or telephone. He’d seemed uncomfortable with his Person- ness. When he walked, he shuffled uncomfortably; when he talked, he delivered uncomfortably, pausing in the wrong spots and tumbling head first over others, self-conscious and guarded. Rough-hewn.
He’d left his job as a janitor shortly after Reagan was elected; it was something out of a film. I remember, when I’d asked what that is like, to live out there, alone, since 1983, he had focused on the immediate things of his life: the occasional company, the stillness of the sand at night and the way your soles toughen to accommodate rock. Really I had wanted to ask: What is Reagan to you now that you’ve fled? And is nine and eleven just a set of numbers in your mind? It was a strange place now. A century which should have had yielded utopia had not delivered on its promises, and its first decade was turning out to be the darkest in a long while. There was that period where the country was under threat that lent an urgency and a compulsion to the national character, but which was then followed by increased aimlessness or self-immolation.
2.
The irony of the tour was mentioned by almost everyone he told about it, and the rock singer soon began finding everyone dull in their presumptions of originality. One friend had been legitimately, seriously disappointed, but most of the rest agreed that he was supporting struggling men, not the war itself. Lou Reed had just last year done the “The Iraq War Is Wrong and We Know It” set, and the rock singer was okay with being the anti-Lou, just so long as the person saying it wasn’t serious.
He’d also imagined himself in some mess hall and made terms with it and the idea had actually started to grow on him, because always his defense of his career as altruistic had seemed tenuous; it had always seemed and felt selfish, self-indulgent; this was an opportunity to confess and be exonerated.
3.
On a Saturday morning I order a coffee; I do not usually drink coffee. The sky is slate. The waitress walks towards our table in an apron and navy collar to pour steaming coffee into my cheap plastic coffee cup and ask me if I want sugar or cream, and I freeze because I do in fact want sugar and cream, but Decker and Max drink it black and I am not usually a coffee drinker and I know I will get shit, and anyways there is something ruggedly masculine about an unadulterated, unsweetened drink and so I pause for a minute and then say ‘no... no; now, no’ as if I do not in fact want it and why would you ask me that? and then I say to Max, I could write something about that moment right there and he asks me what I’m talking about.
Vocals today have too much compression, Max had said, like putting twelve packets of sugar in a cup of coffee—so sweet you’ll gag on it. Decker was actually drinking his coffee at the time (packet-less) instead of just talking about it, and he is not amused and wants no part in our conversation because he has heard enough of it the last twelve months and it goes on and on and never really gets anywhere. Max says, if a song is coffee it ought to be black: gritty and real, not sweet and artificial. “I say, you’re just nostalgic for a past that didn’t exist. Embrace the future.” And Max says, you know it’s an established fact what I’m talking about. They compress music a lot more nowadays than they used to. “Damn, back in the olden days, huh” I say.
America was a strange place now. There had been the man I’d met on that craggy, rock-strewn coastline, fifty miles from a town or telephone. He’d seemed uncomfortable with his Person- ness. When he walked, he shuffled uncomfortably; when he talked, he delivered uncomfortably, pausing in the wrong spots and tumbling head first over others, self-conscious and guarded. Rough-hewn.
He’d left his job as a janitor shortly after Reagan was elected; it was something out of a film. I remember, when I’d asked what that is like, to live out there, alone, since 1983, he had focused on the immediate things of his life: the occasional company, the stillness of the sand at night and the way your soles toughen to accommodate rock. Really I had wanted to ask: What is Reagan to you now that you’ve fled? And is nine and eleven just a set of numbers in your mind? It was a strange place now. A century which should have had yielded utopia had not delivered on its promises, and its first decade was turning out to be the darkest in a long while. There was that period where the country was under threat that lent an urgency and a compulsion to the national character, but which was then followed by increased aimlessness or self-immolation.
2.
The irony of the tour was mentioned by almost everyone he told about it, and the rock singer soon began finding everyone dull in their presumptions of originality. One friend had been legitimately, seriously disappointed, but most of the rest agreed that he was supporting struggling men, not the war itself. Lou Reed had just last year done the “The Iraq War Is Wrong and We Know It” set, and the rock singer was okay with being the anti-Lou, just so long as the person saying it wasn’t serious.
He’d also imagined himself in some mess hall and made terms with it and the idea had actually started to grow on him, because always his defense of his career as altruistic had seemed tenuous; it had always seemed and felt selfish, self-indulgent; this was an opportunity to confess and be exonerated.
3.
On a Saturday morning I order a coffee; I do not usually drink coffee. The sky is slate. The waitress walks towards our table in an apron and navy collar to pour steaming coffee into my cheap plastic coffee cup and ask me if I want sugar or cream, and I freeze because I do in fact want sugar and cream, but Decker and Max drink it black and I am not usually a coffee drinker and I know I will get shit, and anyways there is something ruggedly masculine about an unadulterated, unsweetened drink and so I pause for a minute and then say ‘no... no; now, no’ as if I do not in fact want it and why would you ask me that? and then I say to Max, I could write something about that moment right there and he asks me what I’m talking about.
Vocals today have too much compression, Max had said, like putting twelve packets of sugar in a cup of coffee—so sweet you’ll gag on it. Decker was actually drinking his coffee at the time (packet-less) instead of just talking about it, and he is not amused and wants no part in our conversation because he has heard enough of it the last twelve months and it goes on and on and never really gets anywhere. Max says, if a song is coffee it ought to be black: gritty and real, not sweet and artificial. “I say, you’re just nostalgic for a past that didn’t exist. Embrace the future.” And Max says, you know it’s an established fact what I’m talking about. They compress music a lot more nowadays than they used to. “Damn, back in the olden days, huh” I say.
5.
There is a party thrown for the rock singer the night before he leaves. There are a lot of people he knows and more he doesn’t but he isn’t the one throwing it, and it was a good-hearted gesture, and he can’t complain.
6.
Jim and I, we walk through fog across the June twilight. It is altogether strange for this weather so late in the year, though winter has stayed late recently. There is such a stillness to this weather too, when the wind is not present to clear out the vapor, and the far off distance is just a dull gray, with undertones of stone blue. The actual stones, the thick marble slabs are all melting together on the walls of the buildings, and the vehicles are soft and gentle when they drive down the wettened streets.
One of the finest photographs ever taken is of a man in front of a flag. He is black, and he is homeless, and he is eating in a Vets hall. The stars and stripes are in the background and yet command the viewer’s eye. There is a burger on his styrofoam tray.
His hands are clasped together and his eyes are closed, and there are slight seams between his dark fingers. Behind his head, next to the flag, is a portrait of the Last Supper, but the glare from a sun-facing window has caught the glass and whited-out half the illustration. The wall is wood and white.
7.
From a review of the rock singer’s debut record, ten-year anniversary reissue:
“There was something rather adolescent and quaintly naive about the rock singers of the late 20th. The pop singers were the real cynics, saying: “this is how the world is and embracing its inherent phoniness with autotune and arpeggiators. But the blues revivalists and the gravel-voiced fingerpickers were a different breed altogether. They were the modern Holden Caulfields, pointing their fingers at everyone else never themselves, convinced of an honesty in the world, via their art, which could be held apart from the rest.”
8.
Across the river, the Amherst brothers and some friends are all centered around a glass table. They’d bought five grams of coke a few weeks earlier, but it was mostly gone right now. The Amherst brothers and their friends liked to go out. The older one was standing with his back a little slouched and his knee crooked and his hands on his hip, figuring out how best to go about it.
Doing coke when the supply is limited is a little like helicoptering through a narrow tunnel. To stretch it over the course of a long night, uppings and re-uppings have to be closely monitored. Too little and the drug is wasted, falling below baseline of effects, and each successive line— cocaine lasts a relatively short time—wears off rather than accumulating. Too much though and the helicopter hits the ceiling, where every redose beyond that upper threshold will either contribute negligibly to the high or else make you feel worse altogether.
There is a party thrown for the rock singer the night before he leaves. There are a lot of people he knows and more he doesn’t but he isn’t the one throwing it, and it was a good-hearted gesture, and he can’t complain.
6.
Jim and I, we walk through fog across the June twilight. It is altogether strange for this weather so late in the year, though winter has stayed late recently. There is such a stillness to this weather too, when the wind is not present to clear out the vapor, and the far off distance is just a dull gray, with undertones of stone blue. The actual stones, the thick marble slabs are all melting together on the walls of the buildings, and the vehicles are soft and gentle when they drive down the wettened streets.
One of the finest photographs ever taken is of a man in front of a flag. He is black, and he is homeless, and he is eating in a Vets hall. The stars and stripes are in the background and yet command the viewer’s eye. There is a burger on his styrofoam tray.
His hands are clasped together and his eyes are closed, and there are slight seams between his dark fingers. Behind his head, next to the flag, is a portrait of the Last Supper, but the glare from a sun-facing window has caught the glass and whited-out half the illustration. The wall is wood and white.
7.
From a review of the rock singer’s debut record, ten-year anniversary reissue:
“There was something rather adolescent and quaintly naive about the rock singers of the late 20th. The pop singers were the real cynics, saying: “this is how the world is and embracing its inherent phoniness with autotune and arpeggiators. But the blues revivalists and the gravel-voiced fingerpickers were a different breed altogether. They were the modern Holden Caulfields, pointing their fingers at everyone else never themselves, convinced of an honesty in the world, via their art, which could be held apart from the rest.”
8.
Across the river, the Amherst brothers and some friends are all centered around a glass table. They’d bought five grams of coke a few weeks earlier, but it was mostly gone right now. The Amherst brothers and their friends liked to go out. The older one was standing with his back a little slouched and his knee crooked and his hands on his hip, figuring out how best to go about it.
Doing coke when the supply is limited is a little like helicoptering through a narrow tunnel. To stretch it over the course of a long night, uppings and re-uppings have to be closely monitored. Too little and the drug is wasted, falling below baseline of effects, and each successive line— cocaine lasts a relatively short time—wears off rather than accumulating. Too much though and the helicopter hits the ceiling, where every redose beyond that upper threshold will either contribute negligibly to the high or else make you feel worse altogether.
9.
“Jim, there’s a fucking black hole at the bottom of Manhattan. You can’t not do anything.”
10.
There was a man at the party the rock singer had seen before at some earlier thing at this apartment or somewhere. He had never talked to him though. He had a soft camel-toned sweater and sophisticated glasses. There was something about him out of place with the apartment. And yet the circle around him is absorbed, and he is saying: “The American people—and that is all of us, we are all guilty, myself included—cannot see what is happening out there. The so- called moral institutions, the starving, the oppressed, the Oil Men, Congress, are all part of the same system. And that system relies on money. If we revolutionize, if we rid the country of cash and gold and financial transactions, so too go the stock brokers and the financiers, the investors and the corruption. What the country needs is a communist-model central government, with a strong emphasis on bartering.”
The way he speaks is slow and deliberate, except when one of the four holding drinks and listening asks him about an issue, and then he is trite and dismissive. Logistics are not the critical issue, he says, morality is.
11.
It was actually at that same apartment—an earlier party—where I had met Jane, haggard around the eyes and constantly in conflict with her mother. It was then that she’d told him all about the fucked-upedness of government oil investment abroad, the blood money of gasoline, in between snorting short lines of coke deep up inside her nose. He had asked her: you do know where coke comes from. You do know who you’re financially supporting with every purchase and every line. If it had been now instead of then, if it had been just half a decade later, and if he had been feeling especially brutal, he could have said: You do know it’s only been a few weeks since the forty three school children were discovered, bodies charred in a Cocula dump so beyond recognition that they needed a forensics team to identify them for their own parents.
12.
The rock singer was saying, I don’t know, I don’t know. What is patriotism except taking pride in your team while sitting on the bench, and that team is just a lot of people I don’t know and will never meet, who I’m associated with only through birthright.
13.
When the city finally begins to quiet down, and the taxis are occasional rather than constant; when the security guards are finally starting to get anxious and pace at their posts, that’s when Decker and I finally set out.
There is a cornerstore that is open all hours.
The coffee ends up being $1.09 and I don’t carry coins on me, just cash, and so the cashier gives me back $3.91 back in two ones and a stack of coins—it always seems like so much less back, to give five for a ninety-nine cent purchase and get three bills in return—with a receipt tucked on the bottom, all in a stack, and then with my wallet in my left hand, pulled out of my back right pocket, I’ve got to sort them all out again, taking apart this stack she so carefully made for me because it is impractical and useless, since each item has a different receptacle on or off my person—bills first slipped in the wallet, tugging them first with two finger from my right hand to my walleted left hand, clenching the receipt and coins into my fist so I can switch the bills back into my right hand to be slipped into the wallet’s leather canyon, then dropping the coins from my clenched fist into my right pocket while catching the receipt to keep it from falling in as well, to ball it up and drop it in the trash on my way out.
14.
There are still a few blocks to go and it has been silent most of the walk and so he says to Decker as they walk: “They’ve sent a fucking man to the moon and they can’t even make non-itchy wool.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ve got this scarf, it’s a great scarf, real warm, but it’s just too itchy. I tried washing it with conditioner once because I read on the internet that it works.” Man on the moon and my neck has to itch whenever it gets cold out.
“Jim, there’s a fucking black hole at the bottom of Manhattan. You can’t not do anything.”
10.
There was a man at the party the rock singer had seen before at some earlier thing at this apartment or somewhere. He had never talked to him though. He had a soft camel-toned sweater and sophisticated glasses. There was something about him out of place with the apartment. And yet the circle around him is absorbed, and he is saying: “The American people—and that is all of us, we are all guilty, myself included—cannot see what is happening out there. The so- called moral institutions, the starving, the oppressed, the Oil Men, Congress, are all part of the same system. And that system relies on money. If we revolutionize, if we rid the country of cash and gold and financial transactions, so too go the stock brokers and the financiers, the investors and the corruption. What the country needs is a communist-model central government, with a strong emphasis on bartering.”
The way he speaks is slow and deliberate, except when one of the four holding drinks and listening asks him about an issue, and then he is trite and dismissive. Logistics are not the critical issue, he says, morality is.
11.
It was actually at that same apartment—an earlier party—where I had met Jane, haggard around the eyes and constantly in conflict with her mother. It was then that she’d told him all about the fucked-upedness of government oil investment abroad, the blood money of gasoline, in between snorting short lines of coke deep up inside her nose. He had asked her: you do know where coke comes from. You do know who you’re financially supporting with every purchase and every line. If it had been now instead of then, if it had been just half a decade later, and if he had been feeling especially brutal, he could have said: You do know it’s only been a few weeks since the forty three school children were discovered, bodies charred in a Cocula dump so beyond recognition that they needed a forensics team to identify them for their own parents.
12.
The rock singer was saying, I don’t know, I don’t know. What is patriotism except taking pride in your team while sitting on the bench, and that team is just a lot of people I don’t know and will never meet, who I’m associated with only through birthright.
13.
When the city finally begins to quiet down, and the taxis are occasional rather than constant; when the security guards are finally starting to get anxious and pace at their posts, that’s when Decker and I finally set out.
There is a cornerstore that is open all hours.
The coffee ends up being $1.09 and I don’t carry coins on me, just cash, and so the cashier gives me back $3.91 back in two ones and a stack of coins—it always seems like so much less back, to give five for a ninety-nine cent purchase and get three bills in return—with a receipt tucked on the bottom, all in a stack, and then with my wallet in my left hand, pulled out of my back right pocket, I’ve got to sort them all out again, taking apart this stack she so carefully made for me because it is impractical and useless, since each item has a different receptacle on or off my person—bills first slipped in the wallet, tugging them first with two finger from my right hand to my walleted left hand, clenching the receipt and coins into my fist so I can switch the bills back into my right hand to be slipped into the wallet’s leather canyon, then dropping the coins from my clenched fist into my right pocket while catching the receipt to keep it from falling in as well, to ball it up and drop it in the trash on my way out.
14.
There are still a few blocks to go and it has been silent most of the walk and so he says to Decker as they walk: “They’ve sent a fucking man to the moon and they can’t even make non-itchy wool.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ve got this scarf, it’s a great scarf, real warm, but it’s just too itchy. I tried washing it with conditioner once because I read on the internet that it works.” Man on the moon and my neck has to itch whenever it gets cold out.
// GRAHAM JOHNSON is a Sophomore in Columbia College. He can be reached at gdj2106@columbia.edu. Photos courtesy of Graham Johnson.