Divorce is a sound that is born in clip.
I remember these girls (and guy) opening for REO Speedwagon in 86 at the Topanga Valley Convention Center. I think it was the “What would JCPenny Do?” tour, but then again it could have been some sort of Sub-Humane Society benefit. I don’t know, I just remember seeing one of them collapse from the heat during “Joanie’s Sorry (and Chachi cried)” before falling asleep on my Aunt Bakie’s blanket.
I remember my tiny sunburned belly full of homemade apple juice, and the slow doping affect of Oscar Mayall (organic varient) bologna hugged between two sugary slices of rainbow family walnut bread. I nearly choked on the smell of Californian sweat wafting from my Uncle Harold’s armpits. It smelled of sandalwood and alfalfa, and was the push to sleep, the push to forget.
Thanks to the band for providing my young guardians the stage and poetic preamble to the dissent that would later become a two year divorce. They had their divorce, and of course I began mine. I divorced my family and I divorced the twin boys I used to ride bikes with down Strawberry Lane in the depressed ‘burb I was born in four miles outside of town.
How can you be in love with two sets of plain brown eyes? The eyes you know are open when your feet accidentally touch during a sleep over. How can you not weep with joy after the hand connected to those eyes brashly jumps across the table to smear jelly across your face only to be tasted itself by tremulant lips? How can you not remember the light red crease in the olive skin set in the waist by elastic shorts. A crease you might get a peek at everytime you jumped on the trampoline together. I divorced those boys, because the twinness of my gender and my feelings pushed the sound of my beating heart into clip.
That summer, that show, those three marginally coordinated girls and the facetious absent meanderings of the “Teens” keyboardist, foggily bound my memory. A memory of divorce, a memory of the kind of separation that would never end for me.
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