A Common Pornography_ A Memoir - Kevin Sampsell [50]
The three of us drove to the Oregon coast, down Highway 101 to San Francisco, then to Las Vegas, Arizona, Texas, New Orleans, Memphis, and, finally, Fort Smith, Arkansas. Stephen wouldn’t do acid but Vince and I dosed a few times on the trip.
When we arrived in Fort Smith, Stephen and Vince dropped me off at Paul’s house. I hadn’t seen him since broadcasting school and he had since gotten married to a girl in our class he’d been going out with. I always thought they were a weird couple. She was a hyperactive New Waver and he was a tobacco-chewing oaf who made fun of the other students even though he could barely speak into a mic without twisting his tongue. When they moved to Arkansas, he dropped out of radio to pursue a window-washing business while she did news at a low-ranking AM station. He’d gotten her pregnant and she had developed this unhealthy infatuation with Reba McEntire. There were posters of her everywhere and cassettes played constantly throughout the day while I tried to read Camus or Dostoyevsky or whatever I was reading back then. Sylvia Plath probably. She also owned a collection of Reba T-shirts.
I soon found out that the radio job I thought had been offered to me wasn’t going to happen and I had to find other work. I stayed with my ex-classmates in their trailer home and rationed myself a couple of dollars a day before I became officially broke. Most of that money seemed to be spent at a cheap bakery I found that sold glazed doughnuts for fifteen cents a piece. Eventually I got a job at a factory assembling baby cribs and I was able to move into my own place. That job lasted a month before I became a busboy at a Mexican restaurant called El Chico in Central Mall.
In the meantime, I had bought a used ten-speed and would cruise the small downtown area in search of any kind of youth culture. When I lived in Spokane I went out every other night and I was anxious to find a social life in my new city. I was starting to wonder if moving to Arkansas was a mistake. When I asked people about fun places to go, they’d always say Tulsa or Dallas.
I found out about a place called the 700 Club, a warehouse-type space where local punk and alternative bands played. They had an open mic night coming up and I was eager to go. When I got there that night, it turned out that whoever had the keys to the place hadn’t show up. So one of the club regulars put the tailgate of his truck down and made that the stage. It was a humid late-summer night and unlike the Spokane open mics, most of the people who came to the 700 Club (or at least its parking lot) were there with acoustic guitars. It was more like a punk hootenanny.
There wasn’t any kind of sign-up list. After someone played a few songs they’d just ask the couple dozen people there who wanted to be next. I watched three or four people strum and sing before I felt like I could get up there. I stood in the bed of the truck and read a few poems. At the time, I was heavily influenced by a Seattle writer named Jesse Bernstein, who wrote violent and funny stories and read them in a crazed scratchy panic. I did my best to imitate Bernstein’s voice as I read my own attempts at dark humor. I prefaced my reading by telling everyone that I had just moved there from Washington State. Afterward, a few people talked to me, mostly to ask about the Northwest. Apparently, the video for Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” had debuted just the night before and a couple of the kids at the open mic couldn’t stop talking about it. They couldn’t believe it when I told them I saw Nirvana play once in a parking garage.
One of the girls there was what I always envisioned a sweet Southern girl would be like. She was warm and pixielike, with dark hair, dark eyes, and a face that glowed with honesty and hope. The only thing missing was the Southern accent. I talked with a few of the guys there and they all acted like they wanted to date her. She had gotten out of a long relationship recently and they were just