what time is it, quentin?!
Thursday 29 June 2006 | I like a cookie
The above is a, um, quotation from an experimental band once fronted by the Brujo and his dysthymic best friend (now an Ivy League philosophy professor…why do all the depressed young men become philosophy professors?); they and half-a-dozen other students called themselves Les Frères Subtils, because, of course, they were neither brothers nor were they in the least subtle. In fact they displayed a kind of barely trammelled male adolescent libido of the kind one more normally sees behind iron bars.
The Subtle Brothers primarily seemed to consist of the Brujo hitting things furiously with sticks (in the mode to which he refers as “drums-as-pure-rage”), other people “playing” their “instruments” (baritone sax, electric bass, beer cans, rocks, seminar chairs) which they pointedly, extravagantly don’t know how to play (and rotating at random, as one or another of them gets restless and hands over his chosen implement to someone else), with other people shouting “lyrics” which primarily consist of phrases inspired by whatever Great Book they happened to be suffering through at the moment. Par ejemplar:
- “Four people! Four people! Do I hear five? Who’ll give me six?!” [ref. Freud’s dictum that whenever two people are in bed together, there are their parents in the midst of them];
- “Civilized people need a beverage center!” [this may have had something to do with just such an offending center having been installed in the college’s dining hall—which, at this particular college, looks like someplace where a Continental Congress might have been held and certainly not like a place where Pepsi should be on tap];
- one in which the Brujo and his friend repeatedly exchange the furious phrase “DON’T get out of my way!” and finally distort it to a mournful “I can’t get out of my way….”;
- and finally, the Faulkner-inspired lyric which also contributed the title to this post: “What time is it, QUENTIN?! Quentin, what TIME is it?!” [hollered derisively, like schoolyard mockery]
The Subtle Brothers perhaps reached their acme with something called “The Chair Jam,” which little number, the Brujo confessed, somehow made its way outside the basement where it was recorded to become a weird staple at keg parties. The future philosophy professor is violently scraping a seminar chair across the concrete when suddenly the guy who’s playing the bass gets a little slap-groove going, the Brujo simmers down to contribute a funky pocket of his own, et voilà: “The Chair Jam,” sounding like a mysterious, errant fragment of James Brown, extremely out of place in the oldest college in the United States as oversexed and underlaid white guys hurl things around a basement, screaming at the List.
Weird to think that the B. and I have both played the same Bösendorfer, hidden behind velvet curtains in the Francis Scott Key auditorium—me as an anxiety-racked prospective in 1987, him as an angsty, enraged animus between 1981 and 1985. I clearly remember playing Rachmaninoff; his repertoire by then was almost certainly—different.
The philosopher, interestingly enough, would later go berserk with canon rage one evening, run out of the formal event he was emceeing and completely destroy one of the despised seminar chairs, raving articulately and smashing whilst the Brujo looked on alarmed. The B. himself would go on to behold two tutors practically in a fistfight, one maintaining that jazz wasn’t music and was fit only for animals; and then, abruptly ravaged by the implications of King Lear and tortured by the depravity of the Genet play in which his girlfriend Ghislaine was starring (I made him say “Ghislaine was in a Jean Genet play” about three times, just for the absurd pleasure of it), run wildly through the campus at three a.m. shouting dialogue from Shakespeare which proved, nay, PROVED the hideous extent of man’s inhumanity to man, skid for a long distance on the pebbled, gravelly pathways and be found there weeping and bleeding by his irritated girlfriend (whose play he had fled precipitously) and the solicitous future philosophy professor. Thank God the Brujo is a novelist, because material like this just shouldn’t be wasted.
I have had a very mentally interesting three days of it, and don’t know how to account for them—premenstruality; a veritable spate of overcast afternoons coupled with the belief that I should chain myself to my desk until I produce copy and thus too much time indoors; very little to no venlafaxine? I don’t know. The B. came over yesterday afternoon and helped me “transplant” all the wildflower seedlings from the front into the back, on account of my landlord and his handyman having dug a PIT the size of which is NOT TO BE BELIEVED in my front flower bed under the grapevine and all along the sidewalk.
From that moment on I was grudgingly, temporarily, restored from my pessimistic Quentinesque stance in which I dourly maintained that it was impossible for anything good ever to happen. (Reminding me, in my more ironic and humor-inclined moments, of Mandarin saying brightly to the Umbrella, “Well, do you feel relieved?” in anatomizing whether what he felt was enlightenment or just scribbled neurotransmitters.) My own neurotransmitters scrambled faster than insomniac fighter pilots, and the phalanxes of weevils triumphantly marched back in to the tune of “Let’s go to Wal-mart and buy a handgun,” “There’s no point in anything,” and “Your relationships are all doomed, doomed I tell you!” And then I couldn’t sleep and was up until FIVE one night which hasn’t happened in MONTHS. Spontaneous disregulation clearly the result of biochemical happenings.
Must go to therapy now—then bodywork at 2 pm to unknot my tortured left shoulder, laundry and dinner with the recovering Zen priestess; she has already moved into her new apartment and is gunning for a high-end retail/commission job to pay the rent while she works on college applications and has been to Pride and a ton of women’s dances and events, discovering, to her surprise and mine, a vital, active young lesbian community with plenty of women of color (”…and you know how we always wonder where the African-American and Native women are? I found them!”). So there is hope even when our lovers piss on other trees and we are unable, in our Neanderthal brains, to accept the polyamorousness of it all. I have the Dying Book in my car and am driving around with it, as an alternative to sitting here inside with it and falling back on my melatonin production.
And now I am taking my strawberry KOMBUCHA and going to THERAPY because dear God I NEED it.
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