John Domini - Talking Heads - 77

[ no joke, no smile ]

Chapter Three: All Alone by the Skele-tone . Judging from the dimensions of the pelvis (squares H-2 through H-5), and the proportions of shoulders to head (3:1, see illustration), as well as the overall size of the remains (est. height, alive: 6’ 2”; est. weight: 180), we would conclude that the subject was a mature male of Scandinavian type, not yet 30 at the time of death. The ID we found helps too.

Chapter Four: He Died With His Boots On . L.L. Beans, in fact.

Chapter Five: He Died With His Boots On, Part II . Look there! The pockets of his disgusting coat are bulging! Your coat pocket of today is constructed so as to contain a variety of materiél, such as sammiches and weaponry and folding cash, and these yield an illuminating fossil record.

The attorney arranged to have a paralegal run over to the waterfront station. Popkin himself had no time till after five. Kit, nursing fresh aches and pains, a deep new remorse — Kit was just as happy to put off seeing the man.

I needed this cold stony city. I needed the city to show me — nowadays words get in the way, if you want to be a winner.

[ no joke, no smile ]

I was heading for the MTA, for my office. [ upright at mike, a talking head ] I had a list of the Monsod contractors in my office, a list my lawyer needed to see. And I had other reasons for heading that way, instead of for instance heading home, but I won’t go into them here.

[ shake head, smile ] If I went into every last little reason I did anything, you see, I’d go back to being a loser. If I wasted my time with every last shadow of motive and personality, I’d still be caught up in words words words.

[ shake head ] No, never mind my grubby little handful of motives. What matters is — then I saw the record store.

Your coat pocket of today is constructed so as to contain even sammiches, hero sammiches. It yields an illuminating fossil record. Why, look there — a stupid Press card! “Alternative” Press! And there — a worm on his back! Not your ordinary worm, either, just a-lookin’ for a home; rather a creature far more insidious — the worm of doubt! Good Lord, I know who this is.

Oh, my old moles. There were secrets to be gleaned here, dark secrets. But if you jump to conclusions — well, don’t. The darkest secret here turned out to be Madame Z’s. My own. A dark spell, cast by the dirty dead.

I knew the guy, my guerrilleros. I mean, for starters

… I knew this fossil. He was none other than our Pseudo, our week’s worth of contempt: the tourist.

Though of course Popkin needed to go over Kit’s own testimony, the attorney was even more interested in any “neutral documents.” He wanted to see corroboration.

“Do you have anything to back up your story?” Popkin asked, in plain English. “A memo? Even a business card?”

Kit thought of the contractors list Rick DeMirris had put together, still on his desk at the office. He thought of the card from Croftall’s aide. Between those two however there was another thought knocking, some connection to Bette.

*

The record store, that’s what I needed. [ close to mike, intimate ] A store in the middle of a square. A vivid full-window display, just across from the T stop. [ intimate, switching to present tense ]

It’s a display of a single LP: THIS JUST IN. Copy after copy of a single album checkers the window, glossy 12x12 covers strung up corner to corner, an inch or so behind the glass. [ gesture to clarify ] A grid.

The LP isn’t particularly bright — a deep red, except the title — but the day is. Winter sun blasts the display, the metal and glass Boston surfaces. [ example: hold award to light ] A sheen of cold lies over the square. And at the center of this square, this freezing turnaround under a distant sun, there’s the repeated red cover of the LP reflected in the back of its broad storefront window, reflected too in the facing windows, in the sheen of the sign for the T stop, in the windows of passing cars and trolleys, even in the glasses and visors of bundled riders and pedestrians. [ w/ award under light, flash at faces nearby ]

The tourist. I’d know that jacket anywhere. And even with brown rotten-apple skin, even with hair like strands of bomb wreckage — even so, there could be no mistaking that wolf’s jaw, that fadeaway forehead.

Pseudo Bowie, check. Right down to his Bean waffle stompers. All our man lacked was his sidekick, the mysterioso “Garrison.” The ghost guard never showed. Never; our tourist had put one haunt to rest at least. And I mean, we were sitting in the middle of a haunted harbor.

See, this time, my mad bombers — this time maybe I was the ghost. Madame Z, maybe. See, I didn’t just know who the guy was, I also knew where he was. I knew where he’d gone when he died. I mean, in his pockets he had Pompeii, and all of a sudden I could read Latin. I found myself going into every last little reason he had for being there.

Every shadow of a motive.

Without end it multiplies, this cover. This blank bright sheet pasted over cardboard. It multiplies and soon there’s no telling which is LP, which is the city, its carriers or passersby. A grid without end [ flash award in new face w/each rep]: Talking Heads: 77. Talking Heads: 77. Talking Heads: 77. Talking Heads: 77.

[ pause, lower award ]

So I had my vision. I saw my new medium.

Where do we go when we die?Well, how about the MTA? So help me. Our Scandie had a pass — hey, there’s a clue — though the name on it was a woman’s. “Elizabeth,” that’s all. Last names had been erased, some kind of selective erosion, over centuries of shuffle time. See, that’s what we’re talking about here, shuffle time. Our loser of the moment (dilettante ’77) was also a tourist of the future (I mean, this is a station under excavation ) and the past (I mean, his pocket was Pompeii ). Shuffle time and deal again.

Kit would have expected the downtown holding cell to shake him up more. Would’ve expected some bass-heavy resonance: Your turn, tourist. But from the mucky dig site to the cell, then from the police station’s T stop to his office stairwell, Kit’s surroundings faded into sameness, into nothing. Only once was he jarred out of himself. Only as he walked towards the station’s T stop, as he paused outside a record store. The display in the window rocked him somehow. The checkerboard glare of a hot new LP.

Talking Heads: 77. That was my vision.

[ CUT TO HERE — resume HERE, if trustees want — ADJUST as needed ]

I rejected the old layout & pasteup. [ hold up whatever printed matter available: menu? ] I rejected the old grid, a grid built of words words words; every last one of them a vacillating Hamlet. [ CHECK TRUSTEES; explain reference? ] Every word’s a ham actor, emoting wildly first through one meaning and then another — then through a third, a fourth, a fifth. But that’s not our media [ gesture, take in crowd ]. That’s not the news, these days. That’s not news, it’s anarchy.

Shuffle time and deal again. It’s a subtle business, when you get a look at it. Shuffle time captures the thousand thousand faint shadings and shifts in how any one of us might look, seized in the moment. Seized in transit amid past/present/ future, with names fudged and expressions frozen. With all our shadings and shifts — subtle — that’s how these bones speak. That’s what they put me through.

Oh, my weird os. If only this were a historical novel. If only I’d just reached into his pocket and pulled out a diary, a calendar, a last, long letter to the beloved. Every hero’s got his letter, right? But no sooner did I get into his pocket (no smirking, please) than … no smirking. No joke. I got my hand in his pocket, on his fossil papers, and with that I saw the heads. Heads drifting past, talking heads. Heads in trolley car windows, drifting past. I mean, the song on the soundtrack should be “Charlie on the MTA”—yeah, toss in the ‘50s, too: Hootenanny! — because with my hand in the tourist’s pocket, all of a sudden I was with him in shuffle time, in the musty G-forces of a trolley between stations. Soundtrack: He may ride forever ‘neath the streets of Boston (a lame song, totally). And drifting past the other way, in other cars, are the heads.