A Perfect Blindness

Looking back, it all seems so obvious. That makes me angry. But it makes me sad more than anything. There was so much pointless pain. We were making the same mistakes over and over, never grasping that the stories we kept telling to ourselves were only what we wanted to be true—not what was true. For this I’m sorry—for all of us.

While each of our stories ends differently, they all begin on that first trip to Chicago, three years ago, the first Saturday of May 1988.

Scott and I came only to visit a couple of friends, Tanya and Randal. We were to go to a party at their place, crash on their couch, and then head back to Columbus the next day. It was to be one night—nothing life changing. Certainly nothing for anyone to die over.

From the back of the bar, the tattoo of a drum emerges. It curls around me and turns my head as a thick, throbbing rhythm bellows across the room.

I take off toward the doorway, whence the Revolting Cocks’ “Attack Ships on Fire” calls. A voice cries out above the pummeling beat. Barely human—like that of a man trapped inside a machine—it cries out, “Time and time again, freezing and hurting, another bad dream.” I feel the beat, lashing like a whip—a drum machine hammering out 150 beats a minute—while other, nameless machines, pummeling unknown parts, stamp out a steady, implacable time, like infinite marching. The inhuman voice pleads, “Someone, somewhere wake me up.”

This voice and these machine sounds crawl through the relentless beat of the drum, the simple, brutal hammering filling the room. My body follows this battering signature across the dance floor. I lose myself to it. My head rolls the way the machines roll; my legs and arms thrash the way the machines keep the beat. The sound compresses me, winding me like a gigantic spring being tightened in some obscure factory, tighter and tighter and tighter, and the only way I can keep from flying into pieces is to expel this energy through my lashing head, my flaying hair, the jerking of my arms, and the spin of my body this way, then that way, until my eyes sting from the sweat, which tastes salty, like sex—like ecstasy.