As I’ve been writing all of these pieces I’ve mostly been avoiding going into much detail concerning sex and relationships. I want to be respectful of my partners, both past and present, and I want to avoid anything that could reduce the people I’ve loved to a catalogue of conquests. There’s honestly no way to tell this story without describing what was happening between me and Skadi though so I have to at least try.
If I didn’t think every experience had elements of the universal I wouldn’t be writing these pieces at all but this bit may well be particular to me. For every new partner sex has been a new language I’ve had to learn. Patterns persist but particulars change, stresses move between syllables, entire phonemes may be inexplicably absent. Sometimes it unfortunately works out that there is no shared language at all – the attraction and desire will be there but our bodies simply refuse to communicate.
I don’t think Skadi and me ever found a shared language but beneath that was a primal sense of urgency. I don’t know if it had something to do with pheromones but it felt like nature was demanding that we be coupled and joined. As if the innominate spirit of our species was determined to see our genes combined and pushing us toward this conclusion with all the force of instinct.
I couldn’t have imagined trying to fight it.
It wasn’t like this immediately but rather something we discovered with time the more we gave in to it. Like twisting a volume knob only to discover that it has no limit and as long as you continue to twist the sound becomes painfully louder. In the end we were never able to consummate – the buildup and pressure was too much.
I’m getting a bit ahead of the narrative. I flew out to New York near the end of December with my mother and older sister. After my father’s death my mother decided to go to see her own mother one last time before the progression of her multiple sclerosis might make it impossible and her mother’s dementia less rewarding. We came along to help and of course I had made plans to travel with Skadi and Etain and play a short Northeastern tour.
We met up at a big New Year’s Party in a pair of neighboring Brooklyn punk houses. Skadi and Etain had told me about how these two houses always went all out to decorate for complementary themes. This time around it was Heaven and Hell – severe lighting and construction paper flames in one house while the other was full of crosses and white balloons. I had brought along my sister who is not a natural at parties so most of my night was spent looking after her.
One or two days after the girls picked me up to drive to our first show in Baltimore. I always played at America in those days – a slowly growing West Baltimore warehouse run by a dude named Door. I didn’t include this detail in the Living Hell chapters but there’s an anecdote from that tour’s Baltimore show I’m really fond of. It would help if I explained that Door and I are both tall and were wearing lots of eye makeup circa 2007.
Anyway that night on the Living Hell tour we either didn’t play on the bus or split the show between the bus and a brick and mortar venue. Wherever it was you walked up some stairs to get to the show part and I was sitting at the bottom to collect some money for the tour. This girl came up to me:
“I thought you were that guy Door!”
Without missing a beat I replied:
“No, I’m the door guy.”
Hilarious, right?
Anyway Bleak End at Bernie’s was still a fairly new project but I had played at America once before when Rusty and Maggie Burke were doing a sibling noise project called Pandafax.
This time around the space had nearly doubled in size and we played in the newer half that was like a big loading bay. All three of us played our sets and it looks like Daren was in town to do Driphouse and Rusty had a thing called Heavy Necklace. I mostly remember hanging out after the music – the night was brutally cold and Door built a fire in the middle of the floor. He was still wearing a lot of makeup that year and either Etain or Skadi said something about me knowing “all the goths”.
He mentioned somewhere in the night that the sliding metal door behind us opened and we could even drive the car inside. Unfortunately none of us thought to take him up on it. We woke up at dawn to the distinctly personal sound of breaking glass. At the beginning of 2010 dedicated GPS units that looked like a tiny smart phone connected to the dashboard were still relatively common.
The one in Etain’s Jetta had been left so that it was visible through the window.
It was a perfectly horrible way to start the day. The window itself was probably worth more than the electronic device it had been broken to steal but most pressing was the fact that we would have to drive back to New York in below zero weather. I bought a roll of duct tape at a gas station and blocked off the window with a piece of cardboard so that the heater could warm up the inside of the car.
We rode back in awkward, defeated silence and somewhere along the way Etain told us she was done. The triangle had run it’s course – the feelings that brought her to tears in San Diego were continuing to amplify and the window was a literal breaking point. However the cross country drive without me had gone things were untenable for her now.
I had set up shows for us in Boston and Maine and Skadi still wanted to travel together and play them so she decided to drive just the two of us. It might seem like it would have made the most sense to plan out all the Northeastern dates as a couple to begin with but at the time we were all just swept up in it. It’s a testament to the power of whatever forces were pulling the three of us together that Etain was determined to see it through for as long as she was.
Things shifted when Skadi and I no longer had anyone to focus on but each other. On the road to or from Boston she took me to see the Nature Lab at RISD – her alma mater. I wrote a piece about the circumstances surrounding a show I was supposed to play in Providence a week or so later called “show” cancelled.
Boston was more or less a pit stop to pick up Ryan Riehle on the way to Maine. We played in his basement and he built a fire in his backyard that we took turns riding over on the swing he had hanging from the tallest tree. Ryan was struggling with the ancient boiler at the heart of the Alston house and only a handful of people showed up.
The Maine show was at the Waterfall Arts Center in Belfast. I suddenly got a spark of recollection that I was with Skadi when I wanted to show her a video of Taboo on YouTube and the first one to come up happened to be them making fun of me for calling the police the last time I’d been in Belfast. I wish there was some way to find that video again but a lot of the uploads I loved to watch around 2010 seem to have disappeared.
It was a night of super groups. Chris and Bonnie had a project with James Lusardi and Grace called Evil Spirits. It was pure malevolent energy channeled through dual drum kits, most likely a guitar and bass and everybody on vocals. I used to piss off a marijuana grower I worked for by talking about the concept for a dark jam band called The Hateful Dead and Evil Spirits perfectly encapsulated the way I would imagine something like that sounding. I don’t know if anything ever got recorded with them.
Ancestral Diet was also playing. I could have sworn that this early incarnation included Dan Beckmann from Uke of Space but when I looked it up it said that the band was just Clay Camaro from Caethua and Andy Neubauer from Impractical Cockpit. I remember that Amy Moon was at this show and said that the way I screamed in my music reminded her of their infant son Olai. This was the last time I saw the Uke of Space and Taboo crews together before the lifestyle changes that accompany caring for a child caused them to grow apart.
Christopher Forgues was also in town and played the show as Kites. I think he was staying at RoHeGe while we went back to Chris and Bonney’s because I didn’t see anymore of him on this trip. It was the last time me and Skadi played a show together. She probably did her cover of the Swans ballad God Damn The Sun.
I wish it had gotten recorded somewhere.
I wrote a bit more about this visit in the recent piece on Taboo’s Wheel party. Chris shot some scenes for a most likely unfinished movie with me and Ryan and we helped him drag a piece of plywood across his yard for something. He fell to one knee while carrying it and we joked about how much it looked like the scene from Passion of the Christ when Christ collapses under the cross.
Me and Skadi never had a conversation about what we were but we did meet up for a day back in New York that both of us referred to as a “date”. I met her near Columbia University and we walked through the Freedom Tunnel until we found an exit near The Natural History Museum. This was the last day that everything felt bright – made of pure potential with no cause to worry about the future.
When I went to see her in Westchester County I knew that it was our last day. The magnetism between us had not begun to wane but she made a choice not to allow herself to be pulled because she knew I wouldn’t be good for her and there was a darkness and heaviness to everything between us. Maybe it’s not accurate to call it a choice – ultimately we all want what we want and act accordingly. We don’t get to decide what we want, we look inside of ourselves for answers that are already waiting.
Most likely it was as much of a natural reaction as the moment she suddenly slammed the door when we first set eyes on each other and I pointed a fake gun at her – just happening somewhat slower over a much longer period of time.
We wanted each other physically but the weight and expectation surrounding it were too much to contend with. When it came to the moment the parts in question simply refused to fit together. Relief came not from taking the physical to it’s logical conclusion but walking away from it – accepting that the reality could never live up to the pressure of anticipation and deciding not to do it at all.
We started to watch some videos on her computer instead. I put on David Bowie’s version of Wild is the Wind and Skadi couldn’t believe that the song actually says:
“You touch me, I hear the sound of mandolins”
We started watching every possible recording – the original, Cat Power, Nina Simone – just to see how the different singers would contend with the unwieldy line. Every time the words were delivered Skadi would squirm in innocent delight:
“You kiss me, with your kiss my life begins”
I never would have argued with Skadi about her decision not to pursue things further but I did not take it well. I think I resented the fact that she had the strength to resist it. It’s one thing when feelings are unrequited but it’s something else entirely when you know the other person is feeling the exact same thing and still decides against it.
It took me back to an experience in High School when I was still almost completely romantically naive. I’d been talking to a girl named Kendall. We briefly kissed in one of the Super 8 films I was making with my friend Tim. I felt something similar – a mysterious attraction that seemed bigger and more powerful than either one of us. She said she felt the same thing but still decided not to pursue it.
It seemed unfair.
The exact way it made me feel was betrayed.
Skadi and I continued to talk but not very frequently. When my travels brought me through the East Coast she’d come by my shows. In the Summer of 2010 we stood on a roof somewhere in Brooklyn and she told me the plot of the movie Avatar because she’d just seen it and I hadn’t watched it yet. I was wearing a long synthetic braid in my hair and she kept grabbing it to explain how the characters would communicate with the different dragon things they ride.
I just remember it because she seemed excited about the movie and I was still hopeless. The mysterious thing had not released it’s grip on me. I probably saw her some time in 2011 too but what I really remember is the Trapped in Reality tour in 2012. She came by the bar we were playing in Philadelphia and the moment I set eyes on her I knew I was finally free. It was humbling.
I would see Etain around the same time but separately. In the Summer of 2012 she was working in a boat motel somewhere in Far Rockaway. Our relationship began to take on the innocence and easiness that should have been there from the beginning. She says “I love you” when we talk now sometimes. It’s not always easy for me to say it back but of course I do.
I’m married now. Etain’s married. Skadi’s practically married though I doubt she’d call it that and I don’t really know enough to say. I thought that it was important for me to tell this story because it has characters in it that change but now that I’m telling it it’s more difficult than I thought it would be. There’s so much in it that I don’t understand – so many pieces that I simply don’t have.
I wrote a song about the whole experience with Lux while we were doing the band Voiheuristick Necromorph. I vaguely based it on the fairy tale of Snow White and Rose Red where I performed my part and Lux was supposed to be a fusion of Etain and Skadi:
“I wish that I could somehow be, the beast you think I am
The dwarf is dead The Bear’s Skin’s gone, I’m just a fucking man!”
It was inaccurate enough in that nobody ever saw me as a monster but I think it was more inaccurate in continuing to view Skadi and Etain as a unit. They had been a unit and somewhere in the process of the three of us becoming a unit they stopped being a unit. Maybe there’s a metaphor somewhere in Chemistry – like an atom that binds with a molecule to cause it to separate back into individual atoms.
I don’t want to overstate my importance in this – Skadi and Etain would likely have been growing apart no matter what. I never saw both of them in the same place again after the moment Etain stopped traveling with us and I didn’t hear anything about them playing any more shows together. It was definitely a turning point and I was definitely a catalyst.
What I’m realizing now is not only do I not know either of them particularly well but maybe I never properly saw them at all. I never looked at Skadi and saw just Skadi. I never looked at Etain and saw only Etain. Whatever my relationship was to either of them at the same time I was pursuing a relationship with something that never existed at all: a chimera of two separate human women that would never set foot outside of my own personal mythology.
That leaves me. I promised at the outset of this story that it would result in its characters being permanently changed but besides the small details I’ve already mentioned the only character I’m truly qualified to comment on being changed from this experience is myself. When I first met Skadi and Etain big changes were already happening in my life – most importantly my father had just passed away.
I’ve written in other pieces about my brief and careless career with magic, usually dark, and the different ways the consequences of my hubris brought that to an end. I’ve written about losing my hat – it sounds mind numbingly trivial when I write it down but it was a clear signal from the universe that I was not immune from consequences. That I was vulnerable.
This entire experience was a far more visceral reminder of that vulnerability. When I first laid eyes on Skadi and Etain and they first laid eyes on me I was dressed as a ridiculous and decadent witch. To Aminah, the friend they were staying with, it felt like I had put them under the power of some kind of spell. The reality was that all three of us had been bewitched and my hand was not the one on the wand but I enjoyed the fiction and leaned into it as much as possible.
There was only one way that things could have reasonably gone. Skadi was a Peter Pan and I was a melodramatic foppish Captain Hook – of course I was destined to lose. What I wasn’t prepared for was the length of time that the enchantment would require before finally releasing me from its grasp. I spent two lonely years effectively on my knees and while I didn’t give up magic entirely I certainly gave up the carefree and chaotic manner I had first pursued it with.
2012 was a big year for changes. A long count Baktun of the Mayan Calendar rolled to its conclusion – marking the death of the fourth sun and the birth of our current sun: the fifth. The first man made robotic rover, the Curiosity, landed on the surface of Mars and began sending live video feeds of its explorations back to Earth. The discovery of an elementary particle called the Higgs boson revolutionized the fields of Particle and Quantum Physics.
I ended my life as a bachelor and began my new life as a married man.
Me and LaPorsha have been married nearly ten years on paper and are coming up on the eleven year anniversary of when we first considered ourselves effectively bound. This period of time has not been without strife and chaos, there was homelessness and the loss of every single object either of us had accumulated in our lives, but beneath that is a stability unlike anything I’d previously encountered.
From my current vantage point I can look back at previous periods of my life: my behavior, my creativity, my endless travels and recognize how much of it was the manifestation of my biological drive for partnership. That isn’t to say I’m not creative now, you are reading a portion of the largest artistic endeavor of my life, but rather that it has lost a sense of urgency that once was there.
It used to be nearly impossible for me to create anything: zines, music, colorful construction paper collages, unless I was on the road and traveling. Now it is nearly impossible for me to create unless I am in my house.
The force that I described experiencing three times way back at the beginning of the first chapter – I haven’t experienced it again and it seems unlikely that I ever will. There is something that feels final and satisfying about the number three, it seems to belong to youth and if it is the work of a singular entity there are other people and other lives for this entity to disrupt and change instead of those of the other people in these stories and myself.
That feeling like we were about to shake up and redirect each other’s lives the moment we laid eyes on one another? I didn’t feel that the first time I met my wife and the connection was not immediate – it took time and the intervention of outside agents. Once it did happen it felt like something I hadn’t experienced in the same way ever before.
It felt like home.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 