Motel Arizona

My eyes strained, bleached as the Arizona ground around me, following the stretch of highway out to the horizon, where the top of the blacktop met the bottom of the rose dusk sky. I knew it was time to pull over and find a place to sleep for the night, to rest my weary eyes, and to ease my clenched fingers that had gripped the steering wheel of the rented beige Impala (with the key surprise, discovered in the desert, a faulty air conditioner). These tight vices grasped the molded vinyl wheel ever since I had left Santa Monica that morning. Priority number one was to find some way to escape the oppression of July’s desert heat, still tyrannizing even though the sun was making its last call, dipping behind the mountains.

I exited Interstate 40, and found my way back to Route 66, the mother road. There I found a stretch of generic motorist hotels, familiar cousins of any stretch of motels off any interstate. Super 8. Motel 6. Comfort Inn. I coasted past these until there appeared exactly what I had set out to see – the soft, humming, bright like a circus smile, neon sign of the old Route 66. It read: Motel Arizona. Vacancy. Pool. Perfect.

I pulled into the near empty parking lot and found the t-shirt in the back seat I had abandoned somewhere around Barstow. I procured the room for the night from an elderly woman in the tiny, outdated clerk’s office. $20. Quality. I could tell she wanted me to respond with more than one word answers to her colloquial questions, but I didn’t have the verbal strength. I had not spoken one word since embarking on my trip ten hours earlier, now was not the time to start. Instead, I set myself on cruise control. Destination – the swimming pool.

The pool was silent, the whole area empty. It was after 10:00 pm. The pool had been closed for over an hour, according to the stained sign hanging from the gate. From above, moonlight reflected off the surface of the water. From below, dim pool lights lined the aqua-blue plaster walls. Dotting the water top were hundreds of tiny black dots, the remains of flies, poisoned by the chemicals meant to clean, floating. I dove in from the pool’s edge, headfirst, piercing past the flies, touching the bottom and let buoyancy slowly bring me back up. Night swimming deserves a quiet night, alone. The cool caress of the water was the rush of pure refreshment I had craved throughout the day spent in the sweat-soaked driver’s seat. There are few things in life as simple and wonderful as a swimming pool. Floating on my back across the water. Tiny waves produced from my feet treading, staring up at the low moon. I let the stress of driving nonstop sink away into the chlorine-scented water.

          At some point, I crossed the street to the 24-hour AMPM and bought an imitation pork-rib sandwich (a guilty pleasure) and a six-pack of Heineken and took them back to the pool area. With my feet dangling into the water from the pool’s edge, I devoured my gas station dinner and contemplated what the next day of driving held for me and if I would be lucky enough to find myself ending the day, solitary and swimming.   

Attack On Memory

 Are you going to turn into a weirdo?

An important question, no doubt, proposed by my mom to me, aged 14, on the way home from the Temecula library after picking up a reserved copy of Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. I suppose that the answer would be Yes. Only a very “weird” 14 year old would ask that our middle-of-nowhere library specially request a copy of an abstruse piece of literature from Riverside County’s central branch. I did not respond to my mom’s question and, looking back 18 years now, I do not think she expected an answer. In the passenger seat of our family minivan, I strapped on my seatbelt and cracked open the clear plastic-sleeved, massive hardcover novel. I never completed Gravity’s Rainbow. Not even close. I think I got 15 pages into the 760-page total (I would make a second attempt to dive into it again, later in life. I think I may have gotten 30 pages in). Pynchon’s 1973 so-called masterpiece was just a bit too weird for me. All I can remember from the book is something about professors, missile diagrams and bananas. Although, the bananas could be from Ulysses, another novel that despite two well-intentioned attempts to read, at two very different points in life, kicked my ass and sent me packing. Just like Gravity’s Rainbow. Should I try to read it again? Wise men say that the third time is a charm. But wise men can be pretentious idiots.

         
The only thing weirder than Gravity’s Rainbow could be the reason why I wanted to read that thing in the first place. An article in a music magazine claimed that supposedly Kurt Cobain might have been reading Gravity’s Rainbow while writing the song “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” That seems pretty far-fetched now. I cannot make the connection between the two. But the point is that I can remember trying, in futility, to find this mystical connection then.  

          
On April 8, 1994, the news broke. Kurt Cobain committed suicide. An electrician who was at Cobain’s Seattle home discovered his body. He had been dead for three days already. My memory of the moment I heard the news is still vivid. I had turned on the radio in my bedroom and the final minute of “All Apologies,” the final track from what would be Nirvana’s final album, In Utero, was playing. The song ended and the somber voice of the invisible DJ living in the speakers almost whispered, “His music always sounded sad to me, but today, and from now on, it will sound much sadder. We here at the station have just received news that Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain is dead from an apparent suicide.” Then everything went silent. I think. The DJ with the ubiquitous DJ voice said nothing else. Maybe the music started again. Or maybe, for just a few minutes, nothing happened anywhere in the world, and I sat on my bed in disbelief and silence, everything else around me on pause. Like that scene in The Graduate when Dustin Hoffman is sitting at the bottom of the swimming pool, utterly silent underwater, until the gentle plucking of a guitar’s pure isolated notes begin, the intro to Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence.” Or I could be remembering everything wrong.

          Nirvana was the band that made me fall in love with music. Everything changed after April 8, 1994. Now I wanted to read everything I could about Kurt Cobain and the suicide. I wanted to track down everything Nirvana ever recorded. My hair grew longer. Nirvana t-shirts and thrift store cardigans dominated my wardrobe, emulating Kurt Cobain. Nirvana became something to study. I tore through Michael Azerrad’s Come As You Are, and bought every magazine that had Kurt Cobain on the cover. I spent all of my allowance on used CDs, records and cassettes of any band connected to Nirvana, especially any listed as an influence. I checked out Gravity’s Rainbow and returned it on time, defeated. This was my first, but not the last, instance of hero worship.

In the beginning of this year, Cloud Nothings, a Cleveland indie rock band released their third album, Attack on Memory. At first listen, it seemed like more than memory was under attack. Gone was the indie power pop sound of their releases from last year. It was replaced by a wall of angry guitars, layered with distortion. While many indie bands are playing with more electronic sounds and sensibilities, bands like Cloud Nothings are skewing more to the sounds of the 1990s. Some songs are short, compact bursts of raw energy. Some songs drone on and on, endless sonic barrages. However, on every song, Dylan Baldi’s voice is the same. His howling “I Thought! I Would! Be More! Than This!” on “Wasted Days” infiltrated my memory. It is a rasp of desperation tearing through the music. I had heard this rant of angst before. Only Kurt Cobain wailed like that. It made sense to learn that Steve Albini, the producer of Nirvana’s In Utero, produced this album, a bridge to discover, leading the way back to the 14 year old me.


Psychologists declare that memory is the process that encodes, stores and retrieves information. In the third process, retrieval, we must locate our memories and return them to our consciousness. Music has always been my strongest stimulus for involuntary memory retrieval. Others say that smell is their strongest sensory cue. That has never been the case for me. Probably because I have a deviated septum. Through music, moments thought forgotten manifest themselves. 

Memory is persistent, or at least so says, Salvador Dali. The Cloud Nothings may desire to attack memory, but that is useless. Memory lies back, awaiting the call of stimuli to attack us. I very rarely listen to Nirvana anymore, but thanks to the yowling of Attack on Memory I am transported back to my bedroom, sitting cross-legged on the carpet. Cradling my guitar, head turned at an odd angle to better hear the stereo, as my clumsy fingers fall over the frets in an offbeat imitation. I do appreciate the new Cloud Nothing’s album for its own merits – it is a solid album. I also appreciate it for the way it cuts through linear time and space, and I’m 14 and 32 all at once. Paging Dr. Freud. I’m holding Gravity’s Rainbow, I’m trying to wrap my mind around the suicide of an idol, and I’m trying to make sense of how songs summon memories. Memory strikes back. And I’m forced to write about it.