The Fargo Kantrowitz'z Literary Campsite

Outcast-Jed

There is something that I know now but didn’t know most my whole life. You’ve got to control, to some degree, where you let your mind go. I remember the time when we were living in San Francisco and Moxy kicked me out of the house until I got clean. I was using so hard I wasn’t even thinking about what it was doing to Moxy.  I just stood there and it seemed like right out of the blue Moxy is mad at me in a way that was really important I recognize. I’d gone on and off of heroin and other hard drugs since I was fifteen years old. We’d been a band for almost two years by this time. She wasn’t no angel. She did a lot of coke on the road, but she always knew how to say no. What got her this time was the way I was handling myself around the women on the tour. I swore a thousand times to her that I would never cheat on her, but one time after a show there were these two girls. I didn’t know they were only sixteen. They looked about 26. We’re at the party afterward and these girls are hanging all over me the way they do when one of them, I guess it was a dare by the other one, rips off her shirt and pushes her tits right into my mouth. That’s a strange predicament to be in. When a man has got a nice pair of tits actually pushed into his mouth there is a big moment there for contemplation. A tit tastes good no matter whose chest they’re connnected to. I can’t say that I wasn’t pleasantly surprised, but I was just as much irritated because what if Moxy was looking. She wouldn’t understand. Which she didn’t. That girl just kept pressing her tits in my face and then tried to roll on top of me. I was like a rag doll. I didn’t know how to stop it. My first thought was that this wasn’t necessarily something that needed to be stopped because, like I said, it was quite nice.  But I got to my senses after a second or two. Maybe it was more like fifteen. I don’t think that I licked them at all, although I can’t be quite sure. Anyway, Moxy did see it all and I found out about it in the limo back to the hotel. She didn’t say a word to me until we got back to the hotel. She took a shower and got ready for bed. Then I did the same and was about to get into bed when she threw the pillow at me and just told me to go, that she didn’t want to see my tit-sucking face. Then she threw the alarm clock at me, but it was connected to the wall so it just fell to the ground. Next, since she wasn’t going to allow herself to fall victim to the same mistake again, she jumped out of bed and unplugged the lamp and chucked it at me. It would have hit me in the head had I not deflected it with my arm. She says “Go do your smack. Go suck some more titties. I don’t want to see you anymore.” I tried to reason with her, but it was impossible.

Everybody must have gone through that empty feeling when you think that you have blown the best thing of your life. It’s like the only feeling you’ve got, the only blood you’ve got in your body is just about an ounce and it’s sitting down there at the pit of your stomach.  I kept thinking “what did I do? What did I do?” I kept thinking that over and over again, going over and over what happened with that little slutty girl backstage. But it was too late. I was released. Cut free.  When I walked out of that hotel room I was in shock. Bewildered. I sat in the lobby waiting for a car rental for a half hour.  When I got it, a blue Mercury Topaz, I just started driving. It was two a.m. It was just me and the California coast and that’s the way it was for the next two weeks. Just me, my heroin, and later, an acoustic guitar bought in Santa Cruz.

This little trip was different than the second time that Moxy kicked me out of the house, many years later when we lived in the Village.  These two weeks were spent in a despair that I realize now went deeper than just Moxy kicking me out for an accident. I knew in my heart of hearts that she would come to understand the nature of my sexual accident if that’s what you can call it.  Whereas the second time I knew that the bullshit was over, that I’d gone too far in my insanity and my unbelief that Moxy would ever really leave me. That time she really did. To her core she did. This California trek was the journey of a man who didn’t know what hit him, a man in shock who believed that the end was at hand with the only girl he really ever loved. Yet, it was too unbelievable that these years would be negated by such a cause. But it seemed to be the case. For two weeks I wrestled with whether or not it was truly the case. When I believed it I would sink down into the recesses of my mind.  I sought refuge in the stupidest things. I let myself go crazy. I followed every thread of thought and allowed it to be the truth when in fact it was the wriggly nerve endings of a mind too fucked up over many years to know that a mind has its fair amount of peripheral bullshit.

I lost my cool. I built fantasies out of the stuff of my life. I freaked on colors. I had musical epiphanies. I spent three days outside of Santa Barbara singing into a long tunnel that went under the freeway.  There was not a single minute where I was not stoned. I went into bars with good music.  I’d sit there and look at the band and the girls, but they may as well have been elephants. The thought of a woman other than Moxy made me sadder than I already was. It was really just a shit time.

But the original point is that all of those whacked out thoughts along the coast pointed more to hell than heaven. If I hadn’t allowed hell into me through the needle I’m sure that I could have rested out Moxy’s anger at a Holiday Inn somewhere.  Instead, I let my fantasies take me down. I let it. I realized you’ve got to control your mind.

It’s just that when the only girl you love leaves you you feel like you are dead. The eyes don’t work. They see, but they do not care about anything that they see. It’s the same with your breath. You breathe, but it seems like bullshit too. Eating sucks too. The only thing that matters is flying away on those dreams which ultimately all point down. Ronnie James Dio was right.  When a woman becomes a witch you must hail her.  Moxy’s wrath was that of a woman with great strength, the darker side of Moxy’s persona that is hinted at, but never fully exposed.  Ultimately, her power is in leaving you knowing that she is the reason for everything good in your life. She becomes the embodiment of the good aspect that the witch inside of her now controls.  You have been banished. You may never, never, ever go home. The only way is down. Yeah, Dio was right.

One day I called her and she apologized, saying she overreacted. Have you ever had your life handed back to you?