Gabrielle Taylor's "Cockluck"
January 17, 2002
I drove; Auntie fooled with the mp3 player. She made a sound like a snake in the brush and tossed the player down on the seat. "Got anything else?"
"Maybe in the glove box."
She rattled it. "Locked."
I unsnapped the car key from my key ring and tossed her the bundle. She snapped open the glove box and raked a handful of tapes into her lap. She snatched one up with a triumphant laugh. "Just what I wanted."
Harmonica and piano from the year I was born sieved out of the old German speakers. She'd put on Springsteen and she was happy about it. She rolled down the windows and unpinned her hair.
"Music gives me an amazing sense of moment," she said loudly over the wind and the bass. "I'm alive, I'm going somewhere new. Every time I hear this song I'll feel this night all over again. Music! How could the Taliban outlaw music!"
"They outlawed themselves if that's where bin Laden is. If he did it. Do you think--"
"No, I don't. I don't think anything. It's awful and it was bound to happen. If you're powerful people will try to pull you down, even if you're benevolent, and how benevolent the US is is open to debate. There're a million bin Ladens at a million typewriters and the only question was who was going to finish typing first."
"Do you think it was planned here?"
"Eh? In your car?"
"In Canada!"
"Oh. Probably not. Probably just based here. Probably the Americans'll invade or otherwise drive us home." She tapped her fingers on the open glove box. "You don't have any Joe Walsh in here. That's good. It'd contaminate. It'd send me to a blue California day going up to a house in the hills, in the chaparral, with a friend who's housesitting and we're going to drink tequila until the sun goes down and then watch Logan's Run in the dark. When I hear Life's Been Good I'm in the car pulling up to a long long stop light. I'm there as much as I'm here right now. So it's best that I'm here."
"I feel here," I said impatiently. "I feel here! Really here! Like I've been electrocuted into being here!"
"If you'd been electrocuted you wouldn't be here, dearest love."
"That's not what I mean. Don't you know?"
"No," she said. "I feel just like I always do."
I turned partway, so I could see her. "You're being obtuse. I feel real! I feel really here!"
"Sweetheart," Auntie said soberly, "you were always here."
"That's not what I mean!"
"You're right, I'm being obtuse. Watch the road, darling. Let's stop soon. I'm starving."
"We'll go into Quebec City."
She flipped through the rest of the tapes, setting some aside, and clattering the others back into the glove compartment. "This Joni Mitchell is also good," she said, dropping it into the box and snapping the compartment shut. "If I listened to it I might be lost in Georgetown in a huge bronze SUV, about to drive past the Jefferson Memorial, idling time before going to the Kennedy Center..."
"What about English Boy?" I snapped.
"Dearheart, what is wrong with you? Of course it makes me think of BallLessHitlerDemon. Why would you want to go putting such a nasty thought in my curly little head?"
"I don't know. I feel responsible."
"Responsible? For what?"
"For introducing you to him."
"Oh, don't be ridiculous. You want to poke me with a stick. You want to see if I can take it. I can take it. I can take anything he can throw at me. An infection lasts until cleaned or killed and that's that. That's that. He's nothing to me anymore!"
I drove faster and said nothing.
"That aside, who knew he was such a piece of shit?"
"I knew him before. I should have known."
"Known what? That if you introduced me to him that I'd want to fuck him? Do you feel responsible for me fucking him? I did that all by myself -- with some help from him, I suppose, though I must say not as much as I would have liked. Did you know that the British are the most adulterous people in Europe?"
"They do feed cows to sheep."
"I fucked him, and I fucked him in relatively bad faith, and he was a piece of shit, and I was unexpectedly upset about him being a piece of shit. I never should have been there in the first place."
Auntie laughed like an ice machine and ejected the Springsteen tape. "Ah, Jazz Butcher Conspiracy," she said, and started yelling the names of South American countries out the window with Pat Fish. She yelled, "the Devil is my Friend reminds me of driving in Los Angeles to a Dodger game where the Expos shortstop will hit a grand slam in the second inning and the entire stadium will howl for the person that caught the ball to throw it back."
"I used to hate Springsteen," I yelled back. "I thought he was just another overrated electric folk rocker. I didn't start paying attention until this year. I was listening to internet radio and Born to Run came on and I thought it sounded familiar -- then I remembered some email I sent to Ken Layne at Tabloid years ago and he misquoted Born to Run. At the time I thought he was just romancing."
"So what about it?"
"My father listened to Bruce Springsteen. He'd have Springsteen on while he was working on his trucks, either the truck he died in, or the antique International he was rebuilding. He was crushed to death in his truck on a logging road trying not to hit an SUV that never announced it was there. When I heard Born to Run on radio.sonicnet I remembered Ken Layne misquoting it on Tabloid but then I knew that wasn't all and I remembered hearing Born to Run out of Dad's big baby blue truck. That was the first time I heard that song in almost twenty years. It's hard to go twenty years without hearing a song that popular but I did it. I think it killed me on pop culture for good. It was too risky. There was too much chance of something infecting me."