DANGERS: Break Beat

Name: Alfred Eugene Joseph Brown IV
Bands past and present: Miyagi, The Miracle Mile, DANGERS
Literary Influences: Donald Barthelme, Roald Dahl, John Fante, Denis Johnson, Amy Hempel, Lydia Davis, Gary Lutz, Aaron Cometbus
Favorite Animal: Dolphins
Favorite News Source: word of mouth or The Believer magazine
Love is shitting with the door open

Dangers- Break Beat
But enough about me already. Who needs one more love song to get them through the night? Who needs a sucker, a rich motherfucker to croon into the mic about a redhead girl with a conman’s charm? Who needs a broken heart? Who needs another Sergeant Pepper? Another tearful tune about how good she blows? Her perfume on your clothes? How it was too good to be true? Who needs desperate guys with creative minds who turn dark cloud girls into something silver-lined? Who needs string sections? Sweeping three part harmonies? Who needs a slow dance? Love at first glance? Who needs woe is me? When there’s dead mothers and friends that slit their wrist. Who needs kids like me?
Broken hearts beat just fine. Broken hearts beat just fine. And even my broken heart will be just fine. Broken hearts beat just fine.

I have not had sexual intercourse in more than two years now.  I’ve made a good habit of entering into relationships I know won’t work out and lamenting their unavoidable demise with what can only be called “gusto.”  What I know about love I have learned mostly from Zack Morris and Kelly Kapowski, Winnie Cooper and Kevin Arnold and, ashamedly, Dawson Leery and Joey Potter.  This is, perhaps, the result of paper thin walls and the healthy, multi-cultured libido of my father figure.  I can, for instance, discern with great accuracy the pleasure groans of a Puerta Riquena and Columbiana and, to a lesser extent, the details of the love act (hole, speed, position).  What I must be saying is: a revolving door is no place for a child to play.

There was a detailed plan that I concocted at the age of seventeen.  Whatever parts of me that were capable of marriage were to wed no later than age twenty-four.  The mate was to be the bourgeoning beauty I was already at that time years-deep into.  We would get tattoos instead of rings, elope like alcoholics, and spend the wedding money on a trip up Kilimanjaro.  She was to continue her painting endeavors.  I, my music.  A child was likely, certainly no later than by age twenty-six, and his name (it was to be a he) would under no circumstances be a regurgitation of my own bloodline (see also: aforementioned paper thin walls, cocaine, feelings of abandonment, etc.).  We would buy a house, small, cottage-esque, near enough to the ocean that it would sometimes smell like dead fish, and we would teach our offspring the ways of Black Flag, Dischord Records, and, above all else, John Stuart Mill.  There would be no nanny.  Sex would be often and remarkable.  Meals home-cooked.  Traveling relentless.  Money scarce.  Hearts bursting.

Now, I am twenty-seven years old.  I pay rent.  I eat out.  Or order in.  And the only two times I’ve ever had sex without a condom were ten years ago in the closet of what was, at that time, a seventeen-year-old girl.  These days, if I’m pressed for time, the recollections I have about those two times still do the heavy lifting for me.

Which isn’t to say that love doesn’t exist:

Dali and Gala.

Rene and Georgette Magritte.

Alexander and Bucephalus.

Cassius Clay and Cassius Clay.

But the only lyric about love that I have ever related to was written by Robert Smith for The Cure in the appropriately-named “Lovesong”.  I was a small child and The Cure were the summertime soundtrack to my daily drives to the beach with my sweet sixteen sister.  I remember “Boys Don’t Cry” et al fondly in a cloud of sun tan lotion and convertible Volkswagon Rabbit exhaust.  There were popsicles from Mac’s Liquor on Marine and Highland called Big Sticks and they tasted like Cactus Cooler in frozen form.  There were girls in bikinis just learning to tame their bikini line that sat watching me do karate forms in smoldering sands that had, at some point, been imported to California from Hawaii along with the palm trees and surfboards and hang loose that hung over the whole shebang.  There were Mach 4 boogie boards with the double cut-away and Mach 7 boogie boards sponsored by Mike Stewart and great joy in the fact that they weren’t yet “body boards” because I wasn’t old enough for them to be anything but “boogie boards.”

This was before Crystal Clear Pepsi.

This was before pogs.

This was before you could take funny pictures along Checkpoint Charlie.

The point is: by the time I rediscovered The Cure, and “Lovesong” in particular, I was stubbornly challenging inclement flurries of New Jersey slush in the way all Californian boys do when they are young and brash and collegiate freshmen with free health insurance: I wore cargo shorts to class and accepted frozen knee joints as a point of pride.  ”Fuck the cold,” was the motto, more or less, and the idea was to survive vis a vis steady beach-oriented daydreams of my homeland.  So that when I heard Robert Smith jump up from out of the blue on a grocery store PA and he told me about a woman that made him “feel home again,” I felt like my romantic Rosetta Stone had finally gurgled up into my lap.  To feel home again!  Without actually being home!  Or, maybe: to have have home razed and replaced, to swap Big Sticks for green eyes, sand crabs for yeast infections and midnight trips to the pharmacy, ad infinitum.  The point is: the bar was set higher as a result of my Discman and that song and maybe for all my life I am going to pay for it.

The redhead, by the way: much later, far after we had recorded that song, and far after we had played it to pimply teenagers in sweaty garages (since it’s only drums and vocals, it gives the stringed instruments a chance to tune-up without losing momentum in the set!), the redhead and I got ourselves into situations that seemed like love and often resulted in the making of love but were not, in fact, love.  It may suffice to say that I have written to her like clockwork every six months and, thus far, the response has been what can only be described as “non- existent.”

In most ways I am to blame for whatever blemishes I have left on the face of love.  People who I trust tell me that I am misogynistic.  They tell me that I am in love with the idea of love and that I have no clue what love actually is.  They tell me that i enjoy being unhappy.  For my part, I do not have a counter-argument.  I have never been to Kilimanjaro and I believe more in condoms than I do in mathematics.  What I do know is that nobody has ever made me feel home again.  And, now that I am living back in the sunny beach catastrophe I was raised in, I can say that home doesn’t even make me feel like home again.  Which means either that I’ve never been in love, or that love doesn’t exist.  Or maybe home doesn’t exist.  Or, what’s more likely is that Robert Smith and his “Lovesong” were full of platinum record bullshit.  Home is just a place.  And love is just a word.  You either have herpes or you don’t.  Love is when you wear it on our sleeve.

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Tags: Dangers