by Lucien Spelman
I met Maybird In 1973. He was tall and skinny and distant, and he always smelled like a hot hair dryer.
He wasn’t super popular.
I liked him though in spite of his peculiarities. Or maybe because of them. I’ve always had a soft spot for misfits, and he mis-fit just about every situation you can imagine in that sort of careless way that war veterans or retards have. He wasn’t a war veteran or a retard, but he was deeply strange… he would turn radios off just by walking past them, and that was just the beginning. It wasn’t a trick or anything, it wasn’t even a choice, they just stopped working when he passed by.
This might not seem like much of a thing to you, but listen to me, it was High Holy Hell to kids working a pizza joint in 1970s suburban Illinois. Losing the radio in the middle of the weekend shift like that? High Holy Hell.
We became friends that summer on account of we worked together, and I was the only guy who’d sit near him or talk to him or anything, and on account of him liking weed and being truly interested in everything I had to say. After work sometimes we’d burn a joint and walk uptown while he asked me questions about everything. I mean everything too, like little rinky crap. Details about stuff. Half the time I didn’t know the answers, so I just made it up, but if he knew he didn’t seem to care.
He didn’t really talk much about himself at first, but every once in awhile he would let loose with something mind-blowing (I didn’t really believe in God, but I did kind of believe in Werner Erhard so I just figured maybe he’d been to a bunch of EST seminars or something).
Mostly though, he let me do the talking, which worked out great because I liked talking about myself and spreading fables and fabrications and such, and he liked hearing it.
We were a real team there for awhile, me and Maybird.
The first time he really opened up to me was at the end of that summer. We had a pint of rot gut we were passing back and forth behind the Eagle Food Center, where the kids would get drunk on the weekends and push the shopping carts into the river and stack rocks into chimneys and screw. On the way there we passed an electronics store and I swear to you, every television screen in that window went snowy when we walked by, but he just kept walking with his head down like he didn’t see a thing. I’d asked him about the radio thing before and he’d just change the subject or ignore me, but this was TVs… I asked him in a really quiet way while I lit a joint if he noticed it. He said he did, and was silent for a little while. When I passed him the joint he took a deep breath, and said, “Watch,” and got real still.
For a few seconds Maybird started to vibrate–not shake, vibrate–fuzzy around the edges, like the hood of a race car as it sits waiting for the flag. The wheels on one of the upside-down grocery carts started spinning. All four of them. Then three lights in the parking lot across the street exploded, sending showers of sparks down around an old lady and her granddaughter – pop, pop, pop!
Grandma scrambled, doing a cartoon exit, stage right, and left the little girl standing on the blacktop with glass in her hair and eyes like pie plates. It got colder than hell all around us for about a minute, and I could see my breath. Then Maybird closed his eyes and made sounds like he was crying or hiccuping or something and everything became still again.
“What the hell was that?” I said, trying to be cool, so he wouldn’t think I was wigging.
“That’s my composition,” he said, and handed me back the joint.
I nodded like I knew what he was talking about.
Neither one of us said anything else for awhile. I think he knew I was freaked out, and I sensed he was feeling a little self-conscience, like maybe he shouldn’t have showed me whatever he had showed me.
We finished the bottle but I stamped out the joint, and we left for our shift at the pizza place.
We didn’t say anything more about it that night.
When I got home, I thought about what he did and what he said for a long time, and thought maybe I got it. I thought maybe he was like an ESP guy like The Amazing Kreskin, but instead of using his psychic energy to throw stuff around the room or whatever, he used it to make some weird kind of art–Compositions.
And although I couldn’t really understand what he had against TVs and Radios, I did dig the statement.
Man was I off base.
* * *
The next morning he came over to say hi and have a little wake n’ bake, and he looked like a walking corpse. I didn’t ask him about the day before, because it didn’t really look like he was in the mood to discuss it, but I did I ask him what was wrong and he just said he didn’t sleep. I told him I had just the thing he needed, and opened the paper to the arts section and plopped it down in front of him. David Bowie was live in concert that night in Chicago, and I told him that if that didn’t perk him up, nothing would. His eyes lit up and he said he had never heard Bowie and let’s go.
We took the Northwest Line, and all the way he was asking me questions about where we would sit and what songs did I like, and I realized he had never been to a concert before. When I asked him about it, he said another one of those weird things that just shipwrecked itself in my mind; he said he had never been to a concert, but he had been music before and it was wonderful. He didn’t really say a lot after that, and for the rest of the trip we both just sort of stared out the window and pretended not to notice how weird it just got.
We got to the show, paid the scalper, and made our way through the haze of skunkbud to the nosebleed seats. We arrived after the opener, but before Ziggy took the stage. After a few minutes, the lights went down and the thrum of the guitar filled the stadium, followed by the keyboards, then the heartbeat of the kick drum. The tiny figure of Bowie was lowered down on a carpet by cables, and he began to fill the stadium with his signature cavernous baritone. I glance over at Maybird and he looked for all the world like an adolescent chimpanzee engrossed in a particularly delightful and distant coconut. A few joints were passed to the left and down the line, and the girl on the other side of Maybird flashed her boobs to Bowie at least three times before Maybird asked the inevitable; “Can we get closer?”
I told him security would probably try to shake us down if we didn’t look like we knew where we were going, but what the hell, it was his first concert and all…
We made our way through the throng of Ziggy wannabes–day late and dollar short, fellas–and managed to get within a few rows of the stage where Bowie was in the middle of an incomprehensible monologue; hair wild, face slack, pants tight, chameleon eyes.
After a few minutes, the band started to play again, and we noticed he was singing, but no sound was coming from his microphone, just a light static. After a few seconds a roadie came out and began to fiddle with the mic. I gotta hand it to Bowie, he kept singing the whole time. He just stepped out to the front of the stage and sang to the girls (and knowing Bowie, probably a few of the boys) in the front row. Within another few seconds the guitar stopped making noise. I glanced over to Maybird, and he looked like someone had drained all the blood from his body. Before long, the only noise coming from the stage was white noise and drums. And even those petered out after a few minutes. A stage manager came out on stage and tried to make an announcement, but no one could hear a word he was saying. A few people started to boo, and you know how that goes… the whole place went up.
Maybird pushed past me and headed for the exit like he had a plane to catch. I followed him out, and by the time we got outside we could hear a few strains of guitar starting up. Before long the whole band was at it again.
He didn’t say a word to me the whole trip back, but I knew what was eating him. I knew he didn’t have control over whatever it was he could do, and I knew he was really bummed about not being able to hear Bowie.
When we got home he tried to say goodbye, but I asked him to wait and I told him I had a way that we could listen to music that he might dig. He reluctantly followed me into the house and flopped onto the couch. I grabbed him a beer from the fridge, and gave him a book of dirty jokes to hold his attention. I disappeared into the basement, and reappeared with my grandmother’s old crank-up record player, the kind that looks like a tuba, and sat it down on the coffee table. I grabbed Hunky Dory from my record collection, cranked up the record player, and laid the record gently onto the green felt. When I put the needle down, the music poured out of the horn. It sounded like it was underwater, and it was a little fast, but I was able to make the speed mostly right by fooling with a dial next to the arm. I glanced over at Maybird, and for the first time I saw his honest smile.
“I don’t have his newest one, but you should like this,” I said.
He sat quietly listening for awhile, and it occurred to me that if he’d never thought of this before, that he might not have ever heard music before, at least not up close. The same went for TV. Christ, could he even use a telephone?
Life on Mars came on and I went to get a beer. When I came back, I saw that Maybird was crying. I pretended not to notice and sat down on the la-z-boy next to him, sipping my beer and staring at the record crank-arm go `round & `round. When the record ended with a hiss, I asked him if he wanted to hear the other side.
“I have to leave,” he said.
“I’ve got tons more beer. Wait’ll you hear The Stones, that’ll straightin’ your curlies,” I said.
“No. I’m tired. I’m losing myself here.”
“Maybird, it’s a studio apartment.” I said, trying to lighten his load a little.
“Tomorrow I’ll be gone, but I want you to know you’ve been a good friend to me and made my time very special.”
I stammered a little, but I wasn’t really sure what to say. I really thought he might be losing it.
“You’re not gonna do anything stupid,” I said, but he stopped me with a look.
“I’m gonna move on is all.” He finished his beer in a swallow and stood up, laying a hand on my shoulder.
As he passed the kitchen on the way out, my garbage disposal went on.
“Sorry,” he said, and walked out.
* * *
Maybird didn’t show up the next morning for our usual breakfast treat, so I headed out to work on my own. The previous day’s events left me feeling a little surreal, and the early morning fog and my lack of sleep didn’t help matters much. I opened the pizza joint and let the customers and slacker employees straggle in. Maybird didn’t show for his shift but nobody seemed to care much, they just cranked up the tunes and went about their business with a little bounce in their step. Around lunchtime the radio went silent. One of the guys whapped it, but it wouldn’t play.
I knew the radio wasn’t broken.
I knew it was Maybird.
I figured he was locked out or something, so I went out back to look for him. I didn’t see him there, so I lit a smoke and stood around for a few minutes.
I heard a crackling from above my head, and when I looked up I saw a square yellow light about the size of a child’s block hovering above the rooftops. I stood with my mouth open as it lowered itself down and spun in front of me, hovering. The light gave a little dip, changed color a few times, and rose to the level of the streetlights, spinning faster. It glided away from the pizza joint, and as it passed the streetlights, one by one they popped, sending graceful blue and orange showers onto the cars below. The spinning little square reached the last streetlight, gave another little dip, and shot into the sky like a reverse comet, a backwards shooting star.
No sooner had the light vanished than I heard the radio come on again. I could hear the strains of Life on Mars on the other side of the door.
“See ya’ Maybird,” I said.
I stamped out the cigarette, tied up my apron and walked back inside. Someone had the presence of mind to ask if I had seen Maybird.
I told them that Maybird had quit.
About the Author
The son of American gypsy entertainers, author Lucien E. G. Spelman was born and educated on the road, instilling in him a sense of adventure, wonder, whimsy (some may say caprice), and the driving desire to disassemble the woof and warp of the human condition. He has made his living as a flamenco guitarist, actor, stuntman, and ferry boat captain. He has always been a writer. He is a graduate of NYU Playwrights Horizon Workshop ‘88 (Full Scholarship), San Francisco/Bay Area Stuntman’s Association ‘90-’92, and The E-ville Writers Workshop ‘00. He has most recently been published in Susurrus Magazine, Apex Digest, Blood, Blade, & Thruster Magazine, The Willows Magazine, and Niteblade, with upcoming work in Champagne Shivers, and as a featured author in the upcoming Gentleman of Horror Anthology 2009. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts with his wife, son, and an exquisitely ugly little pug.
©2009 Lucien E. G. Spelman
{ 1 trackback }