Stories:We Swam In A River Of Rust

Author: Joe Wall
We swam in a river of rust back then, caught in the currents of an endless stream of magnetized iron oxides flowing over the playback heads on our tape recorders. If music wasn't playing, over and over in that perfect way that those of us given to fits of obsessive repetition can indulge ourselves in the age of mechanical reproduction, we were recording everything, from phone conversations to the listless bursts of philosophy that become tantalizingly clear just before the consciousness fades on those frequent sleepovers.
Vygis and I had much in common, especially when we met. He wore helmet hair and the glasses of a sociopath and I'd let my own hair go until it was greasy enough that you didn't as much wash it as drain it like bacon on paper towels. He dressed in absurd nerd outfits hipsters would die for these days, and I wore corduroy and rust-colored velour v-neck tops with asymmetrical accents in yellow velour, complete with piping. We were a mess in progress, and fast friends possibly for our common lack of social graces, except for the music.
Vygis had Brahms and Vangelis and Michael Jackson and the ability to thrill with an increasingly perfect rendition of Bach's English Suite no. 2 on any handy keyboard instrument, and I had Holger Czukay and Jah Wobble and Kate Bush and Stravinsky, and we shared a love of diving into a piece of music like a deep, warm pool out in the woods somewhere, just rewinding the tape and hearing it again and again, always finding something new and rich just behind the melody. Notes and harmonies and words and sound would just coil out of our headphones in sinuous clouds of meaning, so close as to be almost tangible, a twirl of the divine rendered in compression waves propagating through a gaseous medium to the point of detail that you'd sometimes involuntarily reach out, alone in a sonic reverie, as if you could touch what you were hearing.
We swapped tapes, dubbed realities, and reveled in the easy access of our age.
He had his Toshiba, and with the first paycheck from my first wage job at Pal Jack's Pizza in Laurel, I went to Luskin's and bought a Toshiba of my own, in blue, with a FM radio adapter cassette and the luxury of dual headphone jacks. I'd long carted around my beloved bible-sized Craig mono cassette recorder with a joystick-controlled transport, but the Toshiba was a lovely, petite thing, a mechanism to reveal hidden worlds. Riding my beat-up old Schwinn on the seven mile trip from Scaggsville to Highland, I'd spend the whole time with a soundtrack to the experience of lazily pedaling along with no hands, and it taught me another way of seeing the poetry behind what seemed like an awfully humdrum world.
At my house, he'd hit the piano and it would be English Suite no. 2, over and over, and I am exactly the kind of person for whom that is not so much a problem as it is a pleasure. Sometimes, familiarity breeds contempt, but here, following the same old pathways just burned little lines and hooks and loops into my brain, and this past Saturday, when I was up late and somewhere between disbelief and anger, I put Bach's old piece on and though I have not seen Vygis in the flesh in a long, long time, he was right there. The English Suite is always there for me like a little away place where I can go back and find a long lost friend.
We were ambitious, though, and I introduced Vygis to some of the experimental musicians I loved, patching noise together into new worlds, and we decided to be composers ourselves, working in the medium of manipulated tape and found sound. We'd make long, floppy loops on my old reel-to-reel, snipping apart tape on the cutting block and taping it back together into new patterns. You'd thread the tape deck with these loops, gingerly holding them and guiding them through the capstans as the loops would play, building new layers in sound-on-sound and transcribing them onto regular cassettes that we'd open and cut up, too, until we'd build massive and almost unlistenable symphonies of noise.
It was a kind of play that is still behind the music I make now, though I've managed to make my own music a bit more palatable. I studied, I read, I practiced, and I learned, but when I just let go and play, things start to get good.
Along the way, we had the idea of going into the pirate radio business, built a small transmitter from a kit, and set it up in my locker at school with a tape recorder so we could broadcast our peculiar fever dreams into the world, and along the way, we came up with the Agnes & Agatha Show, a free-rambling confection of fake journalism, awkward disc jockeying, and philosophical conversation punctuated by the occasional lurch into Julia Child's territory with our cooking segments, all done in radio drag by two blissfully demented idiots.
“Today,” I said, in a roly-poly falsetto as the tape recorder ran in my kitchen, “We're going to be making johnnycakes!”
“Who's Johnny?” asked Vygis, in his own roly-poly falsetto.
“There's no 'who,' Agnes,” I snipped. “Johnnycakes are a thing unto themselves.”
“But there had to be a Johnny once, Agatha!” he countersnipped, setting up our classical interplay of playful disagreement, and before we knew it, I'd received a horrendous butter burn from a skillet and Vygis was on his side on the floor in gales of laughter, neither of us breaking character even as my father came in to find two teenaged boys laughing hysterically in shrieking fat lady voices, all over nothing remotely funny.
“What in Sam Hill are y'all doing in here?” he asked, and I, for one, was delighted, because we so rarely had special guest stars in our broadcasts, and my dad's disapproval was the funniest thing imaginable in that context.
“We're doing the Agnes and Agatha Show, Mr. Wall,” explained Vygis, still as Agnes.
“Yes, we're doing a cooking segment,” explained Agatha, holding ice on her burn.
“Y'all ain't right, you know that?”
“Indeed!”
My father rolled his eyes and stalked out of the room.
“Agatha? If you're meant to put butter on a burn, what do you put on a butter burn?”
“You know, I have no idea. Let's check the encyclopedia!”
The tapes rolled and rolled. The years have, too, and I lament the teen poverty that led me to reuse the tapes as we went along, because some gloriously dumb stuff disappeared into the aether without a trace. I've lately been sorting the boxes and boxes of tapes I've carefully stored and begun the project of archiving some of what I've found there as a part of that kind of futile nostalgia that strikes a person of a certain age.
I have not seen or heard Vygis in this century, but it's been such a pleasure to find recordings of phone conversation that are thirty years old and marvel both at what complete and utter dorks we both were and at the level of rapport we had, in which we'd built a language unto ourselves made of inside jokes wrapped in humorous obsessions and little pet realities.
A few weeks ago, I found one of my holy grails, though, and turned up a snippet of Agnes & Agatha on a tape I'd always skipped, on account of its being labeled “Emmylou Harris.” It's an older bit, weakly written and not played with the gusto that we'd employ once we'd truly figured out our respective characters, but Vygis plays Bach's English Suite no. 2 on the “Gretschophone” (most likely his old Lowrey Microgenie) in a stunning demonstration of how to get gain staging completely wrong. It's not very good at all, and yet I'm overjoyed to have found it.
We were fools in those days and it was absolutely, and deliriously, brilliant.
How much we lose when we start worrying too much about how we're seen by others and the world. It's just dumb luck, perhaps, when you find someone else, at least for a time, who gets it too.  Sigh.
March 22, 2013.
Category:Stories
Category:People:Joe Belknap Wall
Category:Things:The Toshiba
Category:Mythologies:Piano Playing
Category:Mythologies:English Suite No. 2
Category:Places:Highland
Category:Author:Joe Belknap Wall