Bernard

There is apparently some disagreement between my hosts and myself about the purpose of this narrative, and after considerable debate I have decided to leave the issue to the side for the moment. Whether or not I am some poor deranged lunatic or the wrongfully captured star of a prog-rock band -- I assign us to that genre because it is the least offensive to our intellectual sensibilities, although in truth we have been called punk, garage, grunge and dance, as well as, in a Rotterdam scene-zine, a Beatles tribute act -- whether our band is a critical darling on the rise, just signed to play a series of European dates in support of our masterpiece or just the figment of my imagination, I will leave to the side for the moment. Of course, I know the truth. Genius is judged (and judges) by its own standard. I know that Embully and Lora, Mike the drummer, are already in Brussels on holiday (Lora no doubt dragging Embully on a tour of local guilds, trying as always via her endless speechifying and gymnastic blowjobs to bend his music toward some social issue). They will be expecting me aboard a flight no later than next week, so I do have a few days to humor these good people, to demonstrate my perfect composure, my sanity and rationality.

However I think my readers will find it difficult to distinguish between the confessions of a madman and the compulsory episodes in a rock and roll biography; I know well these stories of triumph and tragedy, of white-hot talent meeting opportunity, of practice sessions and drunkenness, of blood-soaked voodoo rags, of drugged withdrawal from the world, of dangerous spirals, final triumph before an adoring crowd, the apotheosis of commercial and artistic success rendering moot all judgments moral and psychological. Oh, how I devoured these biographies as a child, perched on my mother's chaise lounge in the little parlor off her room, a swollen white bookworm gorging himself volume by pulpy volume. The Beatles, the Stones, Iggy Pop, Sex Pistols, Roxy Music, Bowie, Zappa, Zepplin, the Who (the account of Keith Moon driving his car into the pool of our local Holiday Inn was a turning point. The gods of fame and fortune had visited our little town! I felt a dizzying double consciousness take hold as I looked down from fame's divine dirigible, below which the world lay open like a feast, in which one was endlessly served with mind-expanding drugs and sex, in which the heavy riffs and crushing drums made golden eardrums ring like church bells, I looked down and saw silent moldering Flint pass below while simultaneously I looked up to see the stately shadow of my imagined future pass before the sun. These two worlds, corporeal Flint and the iridescent bubble of my dreams, were passing so close that I felt time and space might collapse. A few years later, during one of my darker episodes I would try to recapture that rapture via a pilgrimage to that fabled pool, but the hotel, adjacent a failed factory, had been turned into a Days Inn and the pool was infested with screaming children and inflatable animals wearing painted expressions of mindless joy.), I have read them all.

And so I have no fear of revealing my life in all its details, both savory and otherwise, for the surpassing brightness which I eventually produced will more than offset any mild pangs of revulsion one might experience on reading these pages. If a little madness appears here and there, well, I won't hold it back. A tincture of madness only serves to dignify the artistic struggle, to give it weight, to rescue if from parody, propaganda, and delusion. Madness lurks in the grand parade of every artist's story, it juggles with the clowns, it feeds peppercorns to the sneezing elephants, it slips onto the stately floats and gropes the sequined beauty queens, but it is ultimately harmless, a stranger with whose vortical orbits are revealed on closer inspection to be a pair of novelty glasses.

I will start then with Formative Experiences, those moments of early promise and portent, and will move then without undue hesitation through the account of the band's origins and our early struggles. When I am finished I will have told my truth. So I will write it. I will write it, fear not. Even this experience, potentially humiliating, I will turn to account! I will have this manuscript bound (featuring the band on the cover, shoulder to shoulder, lean colored silhouettes), I will bound onto Oprah's stage with the hardcover in my hand, it will become a minor classic and its composition under duress in a certain Central Florida psychiatric institution will become part of its legend and in turn part of the greater legend of my life, which will continue to unfold in an endless chain of trancendences. I am only molting, my white-coated friends. I cannot be long restrained by your narrow attention to certain inconsistencies in my memory. Any moment I may shed this heavy skin and take to the sky. Do not be surprised to wake and find me gone, vanished, leaving behind only a faint sensation of melody and light.

Mine was not a typical childhood (but ours was not a typical band – as the reader will soon see). I was not poor although at regular intervals my father would be so overcome with self-loathing over having married money that he would be unable to sleep and could drink only cold coffee from a mug etched with a green spark plug. During these intervals he pored frantically over the biographies of military and business leaders and was excessively grim and gaunt. At dinnertime he would stand at the kitchen table, scapulae projecting through his suit coat, and subject mother and I to windy discourses on Order and Ethics while his mind cautiously revolved about, and sporadically illuminated, his utopian plan for a Culture of Accountability. It was important for every man and woman to find their Purpose, he said. They must heed their Calling. The must make their Mark. My mother listened with bright encouraging nods and wags, accompanying father’s most vehement outbursts with a few hummed bars of a Beatles song. Eventually father would exhaust himself and go haggard and miserable, his mania for order unsatisfied, to bed.

These episodes always culminated in some spectacular feat of austerity on my father’s part (cutting down every tree on our property, a four hundred page letter to the editor of the Flint Journal, a dehydrated collapse at the local police station) and the pedagogic imposition of manual labors upon my easeful childhood. Ergo, when I was in the fifth grade I found myself helping one Richie Moore, son of a company foreman, deliver newspapers. Richie had a sensitive face under a mop of russet hair and his couch-potato thighs were perpetually encased in designer denim. Prior to embarking on our route, we folded and rubber-banded the papers on the sunset shag of his living room floor. The console television was always tuned to MTV. After a few weeks in the Moore milieu my brain was a-whirl with the eyeliner whining of Duran Duran and my hands stained with news ink.

These manual labors were a terrible strain. I suffered from a certain mechanical defect that had driven me on occasion to near madness, and which turned any physical task into a labor of hercules. Now, the defect I am about to reveal is by no means the only flaw in my physique but it stands as the cornerstone of my suffering, it brought into being directly or indirectly all my other maladies and shortcomings. My forearms are excessively short. They are excessively short, these forearms. It is a structural defect passed down from my mother's side of the family, something carried over from snowy and gray-green Scandinavia, and it was only my ancestors' compensatory talent for acquiring and managing money that kept our line from dying out. The dwarven radial, the stubby ulna, these prevent one's musculature from forming correctly and so make it nearly impossible to sustain any task that involves gripping or manipulating. Farming, building, and fishing were all out of the question. Anything that involves what was once called “close work”, that is, any sustained digital manipulation, was impossible. Computer or piano keys, guitar strings, the three coquettish valves atop a trumpet, these mocked me, they lured me into worlds of pain and despair. Oh, I tried! You can only imagine how I tried, how I wrestled like a young lunatic with my toy pianos and xylophones, how I gripped and banged and howled, my toddler's head thrown back in outrage, the clotted muscles below my wrists twitching and cramping. Anyone who has ever struggled with a handicap knows that acceptance comes not all at once but results from the gradual accretion of failure in the mind. And yet, despite all the evidence, some part of one's brain goes on believing in a solution, one is constantly lured into ambushes of ineptitude and frustration. I could list here an endless procession of such moments, an massive collage of Bernard massaging his poor brachioradialis, recoiling from the jumprope, the belt sander, the breakfast spoon, as if from a hot flame. I could show you the present scene, where as I type this narrative I pause every few minutes to rest the flippers, contemplating that therapeutic plume of pressurized water that hovers above the stagnant pond outside.

In addition to the immediate complications which my membership in this short-armed and long-shinned tribe introduced, there were more subtle and more harmful effects which only revealed themselves in my teens, but I will have more to say on that later. For now picture me, a young boy, white and doughy from my sedentary and sportless life, conscious of my body, carrying about my father's opinion of me as a shirker, struggling against my own knotted forearms, my long and ironically elegant hands aching with each twist of the rubber band.

Richie and his family noticed nothing of this, and I betrayed nothing. I planned to do my time in this clapboard gulag and leave it behind me for good, however, as I represented the death of their American dreamlet, Richie’s family attempted to secure my goodwill via endless offers of Twinkies and bottles of Faygo cola on the presumption that all boys were keen, like Richie, to drive themselves to the brink of diabetes. Although I politely demurred, I was touched by their solicitude and I did fall half in love with that hot, cluttered house. Here there was no pressure to perform, no standard of excellence casting its shadows over one's hours. It was a carnival of kitsch in all its manifestations, torrents of schmaltz poured from televisions, pap oozed from radios, confections tumbled from the cupboards, and Riche’s father smoked voluminously, tamping his cigarettes into a little beanbag ashtray. These lurid stimuli glowed in my body while Ideas, nascent and malformed, flared and died in my brain. I felt emboldened in that house, possessed of vague powers. When I told Richie’s sister I was going to be a famous musician, that I was going to create works of nearly impossible difficulty and unutterable complexity, she laughed and rolled her eyes, biting back what was surely a scathing put-down for the sake of her father’s job. Later, however, as I was staggering under the weight of those accursed newspapers, she offered to help me raise my leg over the crossbar of my bicycle and in the process slipped a hand into my crotch where she gave my tender tripartite genitalia a bawdy squeeze.

When did I first know music as my destiny? Even I, with my prodigious mental powers, find it difficult to trace the thread of causality back to its origin; my cortices groan under the load of arranging in logical order the data which memory scatters though the electromagnetic wasteland of the brain, but perhaps it was always there, always within me, wired directly into the motherboard of my Bernardity.