A Common Pornography_ A Memoir - Kevin Sampsell [48]
The dentist returned and patted me on the shoulder. I could see him under the bottom of the goggles. I grunted a little. “You want me to turn up your headphones?” the assistant asked. I lifted my hand slightly and pointed down. “Turn it down?” I nodded as much as I could and the volume went low enough that I could hear the Motown show playing on a small speaker somewhere else. The dentist was singing along again. This time with the Four Tops. I tried to drift off. I closed my eyes and concentrated on Joyce DeWitt. I had always liked Joyce DeWitt more than the others. The rubber thing stretching across my mouth and cheeks was wet with my numb gum slobber. I was almost queasy. George Michael was singing a blue-eyed soul version of “Tears of a Clown.” I opened my eyes a little and noticed that he was wearing sunglasses too. “That George Michael can sure sing, can’t he?” the dentist commented to himself. “Hhmmph,” said the assistant.
Spokane Girls
At my worst, I was seeing three different girls, with my eyes on a fourth.
First there was a sad and mysterious redhead named Ingrid, who gave me a ride home once and later began sneaking me into her basement bedroom, with her parents sleeping above us. The only social thing we did was go to her friend Molly’s apartment to drink beer. There would be the three of us plus Molly’s boyfriend and some army guy who was always trying to scam on Ingrid. They’d sit around and talk about their favorite local bands and listen to Operation Ivy.
Only a day or two after I started seeing Ingrid, I got together with Lisa, whom I was infatuated with because she looked like Sherilyn Fenn. I walked her home one night and nervously held her hand. I knew she was going out with a really dumb bass player and I tried to convince her that writers made better boyfriends. She said she had a secret dream of being a children’s book author. It was a romantic notion, but ultimately sad. She didn’t even know who Maurice Sendak was.
The third victim of this triangle was Laura, who was the only real poet I met in Spokane. She worked as a nurse, and I met her one night at a club where I was preparing to do a poetry reading. She wore stretch pants with skeletons on them and said her favorite bands were T. Rex and the Stone Roses. I wasn’t physically attracted to her, but her personality intrigued me more than the others and she had a round face that made me want to cup it and kiss it softly. During my reading that night I played a cassette deck on the stage with the mixed sounds of industrial scrapings and an audience laugh track. I turned this up loud and stripped down to my boxers. I went out the side door of the Big Dipper and walked around the block like that. When I reentered two minutes later, I had a bag of candy and passed it out to the audience. Then, back onstage, I put my clothes back on. During that time, before I even began to read from my erratic pile of rants and poems, Laura said she fell in love with me.
Of course, there’s always an outside disruption, something, someone, that will not let you rest easy, will not let your loins settle down and concentrate on just one (or two or three) person(s). But Sarah, a punk girl who walked tall along the downtown sidewalks, with the high black leather boots and short spiky blond hair and perfect European model lips, would not take me seriously.
Sarah was young, independent, smart, and somewhat aloof with the popular boys in the band scene. Everyone knew she was unique and maybe the sexiest girl in town, but she seemed to be holding out for someone special. Not your usual Spokane dude—a Rainier-swigging, pot-smoking tattooed boy—but someone different. And sure, Spokane had its group of weirdo “other” artist types—guys who turned their warehouse apartments into Goth-rock haunted mazes for Halloween, that tall Asian-looking