For Dexys Midnight Runners
One day after school, on a sidewalk in Northern Kentucky, three hicks beat me up. Earlier, in the lunchroom, a cheerleader named Dawn asked me to smell a jar of Noxzema. When I bent to sniff, she shoved it in my face. Noxzema went up my nose and into my eyes. Unbeknownst to her and to me, the vice principal was watching, and he pulled us into his office. He lectured her while she cried and apologized and I repeatedly told him and her it was no big deal, I was fine. Almost immediately a rumor started that I’d gotten Dawn, the most popular girl in junior high, kicked off the cheer squad, and the sidewalk beatdown was based on that rumor—which wasn’t true: the captain of the cheerleaders doesn’t get in serious trouble for torturing a nobody. A week later I changed schools. Every morning for two and a half years thereafter I walked a mile of sidewalk along Alexandria Pike to a bus stop in an A&P parking lot and rode a public bus to a school in a different district. On weekends I made the same walk and rode the same bus over the Ohio and wandered Cincinnati sidewalks leading to Soul Train Fashions, which reeked of incense, to the optician on Fountain Square where I tried on Wayfarers I could not afford, to the record store where I bought cassettes—including Dexys Midnight Runners’ Too-Rye-Ay.
MTV was added to my family’s cable channels in late 1983, around my fifteenth birthday. I remember going to my new school and talking excitedly to my friends about our shared discovery. I didn’t listen to the radio, so MTV was my introduction to pop music. The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” the first video shown on MTV, was still in regular rotation, along with others from the network’s early days: “Brass in Pocket,” “Rapture,” “A Message to You Rudy.” But what I remember most clearly is “Come on Eileen.”
The video opens with historical context—what looks like newsreel footage of Johnny Ray, an American singer hugely popular in the early ’50s in the UK, greeting crowd of adoring fans—context that frames a backstory shown in black and white snapshots—the narrator’s parents, his mother holding what we assume is him as an infant, the narrator and Eileen as kids and then as childhood sweethearts—that sets up a very 1980s present: young love, nagging boy who admits to a girl wearing nothing under her denim overalls that his thoughts about her “verge on dirty” (he wasn’t the only one). In some scenes Eileen’s friend pushes a toddler in a stroller along the sidewalk, the dangers of giving in to such nagging—but Eileen does appear to give in, and she and the narrator walk off down the sidewalk into the night. The narrative was—and still is—exciting.
Of course I wanted to wear cool clothes like the people in MTV videos wore, do my hair like they did their hair, dance like they danced, suffer heartbreak and ecstasy like they did—oh, Eileen—but I’ve come to recognize the detail that most connected me to “Come On Eileen” was where the action took place. Like me, the people in the video walked and ran and danced and yearned on the sidewalk. Maybe if I’d been even a couple of years older the videos that would’ve hooked me would’ve been the ones that involved driving—“Ghost Town,” “Life in a Northern Town”—but I was barely 14. I didn’t even have a learner’s permit. I was an exurban flâneur. The sidewalk was my territory.
~
For DJ Scott LaRock & Jasper Johns
When DJ Scott LaRock samples Fat Albert asking “What can we get for sixty-three cents?” on BDP’s “Illegal Business,” he’s paying homage to a TV show that in 1988 was a shared part of the just-completed childhoods of many of those of us listening to By All Means Necessary, and he’s juxtaposing our knowledge of that innocent TV show against KRS-One’s claims that “Cocaine business controls America / Ganja business controls America / KRS-One come to start some hysteria / Illegal business controls America.” (Three decades-plus later there’s the additional juxtaposing of Fat Albert-era Cosby against rapist-era Cosby.) I came to contemporary art via Boogie Down Productions, Public Enemy, Run-DMC, Eric B. & Rakim. My high school girlfriend was a volunteer docent at the National Gallery, where I would go on weekend afternoons to meet her after her shift and she would lead me through exhibitions. It didn’t take long before I started coming early to roam alone before I picked her up. It was during that roaming that I saw Jasper Johns, et al were doing something akin to what DJ Scott LaRock, et al were doing—mixing, remixing, layering, heading Johns’ advice to Take an object / Do something to it / Do something else to it. [Repeat]—saw that Flag and “Illegal Business” are both a very complex set of corrections.
~
For Roland Barthes
Quiet Riot’s biggest hits were a decade old when they showed up in Baton Rouge at the live music venue where I worked as a doorman and bouncer. I knew the band and their songs from early-’80s MTV, back when they toured with Black Sabbath and played stadiums, rather than headlining Wednesday shows at small clubs in college towns. At load-in, I helped a roadie get a huge, battered wardrobe case off the bus and into the green room, where he proudly opened it to show me rows and rows of Polaroids of women’s crotches neatly taped to the inside of the case’s door. Each of the many dozens of snapshots had been framed so that the picture began just below the belly button and ended just above the knees. Beneath every woman was a motel bedspread. I wish I could say I was shocked by the groupies’ nudity. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes explains to me that my blasé response is an example of studium, “a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment” to the subjects of certain categories of photographs (war, porn) that “derives from an average affect, almost from a certain training.” I reply that the bedspreads are the punctum, the element that “will break (or punctuate) the studium,” the element “which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me.” I remind him that a “photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).” “Nothing more homogeneous than a pornographic photograph,” he harumphs, quoting himself. I can quote too: “Mapplethorpe shifts his close-up of genitalia from the pornographic to the erotic by photographing the fabric of underwear at very close range: the photograph is no longer unary, since I am interested in the texture of the material.” You mean the bedspreads? Barthes asks. Yes, I answer, and the fact that every Polaroid includes a bedspread. Repetition and reiteration both studium and punctum: “sting, speck, cut, little hole—and also cast of the dice.” Nudity that so amused the roadie I remember in the washed-out hues of an old Polaroid (probably because I want my long-delayed guilt over saying nothing, doing nothing, feeling almost nothing to fade similarly) while the patterned bedspreads are forever bright and weird.
~
For Elvis
My oncologist told me he’d run a test to see if I had Lynch Syndrome, an inherited disorder that greatly increases the risk of colon and rectal cancer. Mainly this would be to see if my daughter was in danger. Is it a blood test? I asked. We test the tumor, he explained. I was confused. The tumor was gone from me. You have the tumor? He nodded. It’s in the archive. I should’ve asked for details about the tumor archive. Instead, I imagined something like a vault in the hospital’s basement.
After World War II and into the Cold War, many kinds of music were banned in Russia. Decadent Western songs, of course—jazz, mambo, rock and roll—but also Russian folk music, including songs from the gulags. Smuggling in LPs was dangerous, and though there were record lathes—German, spoils of war—vinyl, shellack, and lacquer were hard to buy unless you were producing recordings of Stalin’s speeches. Then someone figured out discarded X‑ray film could be used as a substitute. Trace a circle using a plate, cut it out with a pair of scissors, burn a hole into the middle with a cigarette. Onto images of broken wrists, rib cages, and skulls bootleggers recorded songs by Ella Fitzgerald, W.C. Handy, Bill Haley & His Comets, Elvis.
My oncologist told me the CT scan showed a spot the size a BB on my lung and “flecks” on my liver. When I asked to see the scans, he looked surprised. I’m not a radiologist, he said. I just read the report. I pushed, and his PA told us we had to go to another exam room, one with a computer that could access the images. We followed her across the hall, and after much clicking, I saw my insides in gray and black. I’d expected something like an X‑ray, a single picture of my torso taken as I lay supine, but a CT scan is a series of horizontal slices viewed as if the patient is standing and you’re looking down from above. My lungs were black ovals that changed shape slightly in each slide. When he reached the point where the report noted the BB-sized spot, he looked for a second and said You probably had a bad cold when you were a kid. He clicked to the image of my liver that was supposed to show “flecks,” squinted, took of his glasses, put his face near the screen, shook his head. Do you see anything? he asked me.
It’s hard to tell if the murky image onto which “Heartbreak Hotel” is recorded is of a heart. I can see ribs and what look like veins. The original, released in January 1956, is two minutes and eight seconds long, the undated version on the X‑ray one minute and fifty-four seconds. Fourteen seconds lost. The staticky bootleg begins and ends in medias res, almost like a door opens to a room where a forbidden record is playing—it’s down at the end of Lonely Street—then closes before the tune ends: Well, they’re so lone—
~
Josh Russell’s King of the Animals (LSU Press, 2021) was longlisted for The Story Prize. His essays and stories have appeared recently in Epoch, Subtropics, Seneca Review, DIAGRAM, and New World Writing Quarterly, and are forthcoming in Northwest Review and Centaur.