Slow Fade

The wood shop at the theater always smells of oil, sawdust, and varnish. You’d think that would be enough to kill someone, but it’s not. Trust me. I’ve spent a ton of time here and the worst that’s happened is a crazy killer headache that made me wretch for a half hour, but that’s it.
Maybe the New York City cocktail of exhaust, piss, and sweat has made me immune to death by toxins. It’s hard for me to believe it’s been just over a decade since I came here in 1980 to attend NYU for acting — all hell-bent to conquer and full of certainty. I had Broadway and Hollywood clearly mapped out in my head.
A lot can happen in ten years. Or not happen, as the case may be, as this city is ruthless and random in deciding who rises to the top of the glass towers and who is relegated to dragging along the curb. There is no in between here. You are royalty or peasant.
I am not royalty.
The crew left about an hour ago, but I stayed behind to finish the decorative header for the king’s throne for Hamlet. I also told Beckett I’d meet him here before we head over to the club. Beckett is a drummer for a punk band and they snagged themselves a pre-opening band opener gig at CBGBs. No small feat.
I’ve got this new band, Nirvana, cranking on the tape player which overrides the headache I’ve got going beneath my cropped, bleached platinum hair as I sand down the edges of the throne. Sounds counterintuitive, I know, but life is counterintuitive. Who would knowingly participate in a game where the only thing you are guaranteed is heartache and struggle, and which ends in death? But here we are. And while Nirvana is new, raw, rough it feels as real as the dirt and promise all around me every day.
“Hey! Good thing someone else was here to let me in! You didn’t hear the buzzer!”
Becket is behind me, his hand against the small of my back before I know he’s there. His other hand turns the volume down on the player.
I lurch, thankful I was only hand-sanding and not something more injury-worthy.
“Shit! Beckett — you scared the crap out of me.” My heart is somewhere in my sinuses and I drop the sand block to the table. I didn’t realize it was that late.
He smiles and rubs his hands over his buzz cut. He’s in his Ramones t-shirt under a biker jacket with spikes in the epaulets. He wears jeans impossibly skinny and creepers rockabilly shoes with a plaid inlay and two side buckles. Because I’m not a girly-girly, we are often dressed very similar, save for the fact that I tend to wear cowboy boot shoes, and rather than spikes, my leather jacket has a hand-painted, bleeding gothic cross on the back. More than once we’ve heard people whisper as they stare at us walking by, wondering if we are “somebody”.
But I told you, we aren’t royalty, we are peasants.
After kissing me hello, Beckett heads right to the scale in the back of the room on a work table. I don’t even know why there’s a table scale in here. I think it’s a prop from something.
He sits on a stool and opens his messenger bag, pulling out a small baggie of white powder. Beckett has started selling some of the coke we get for ourselves and he needs to cut it and weigh it. I’m sure he’s already got buyers lined up at the club tonight.
I watch as he works, scooping out a small amount, dumping in a mixer of crappy speed and checking the scale. With the music turned down, my headache is coming back.
“He’s gonna be a member of the twenty-seven club,” Beckett suddenly says while hunched over the scale, scooping the small mixed pile into a new baggie.
“What?” I put the sander down and decide I’m not worried about finishing the throne tonight. I move toward Beckett, carefully putting my arms around his waist from behind and laying my head on his back.
“Cobain. He’s not gonna make it. I predict the twenty-seven club for him.” He finishes what he’s doing and cleans off the scale. I feel him breathing. Hear his heartbeat. I wish I could dissolve into him. He says things like this a lot.
“Well that’s a rather bleak outlook. How do you get that from someone’s first album?”
He sits up and turns toward me, his arms encircling my waist, his gaze dumping into mine.
“Because I can hear it. Listen…”
I don’t want to. I don’t want to think about how you can hear that someone will be dead in three years. For a while I thought that might be me, but I’m already a year past the twenty-seven club. Beckett has a year to go. Sometimes I’m not so sure about him.
I’m not so sure about any of us, really. But who wants to spend their days thinking about that?
Beckett gestures over his shoulder where he’s laid out a handful of lines for each of us on a sheet of paper. I takes the straw and inhale my three then pass it to him. Then the paper is folded up and put back into his bag and I grab my bleeding-cross jacket as we head for the door.
When we reach the sidewalk my body is humming, my headache gone, and I reach for Beckett to kiss him, hard. He smiles and grabs my hand in his as we make our way to the subway and the club. There, I’ll sit in the dark — a groupie — and watch him hammer out his insides until the show is over and the lights slowly fade to black.
