A Room with a View

I’ve got a copy of the new Hank Vegas CD and you don’t! I gloat because it’s good, and because a couple of the songs evoke our old hangout, The Hummingbird, down to the last splinter. Every social group has a clubhouse, a gathering spot or watering hole where they meet and ours was the Hummingbird Stage and Taproom, where we saw endless bands, drank endless Jim-Beam-and-Diet-Cokes and talked endless shit into the late hours of endless nights. In some ways I miss it, in some ways I don’t.

Margaret Atwood’s protagonist in The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred, talks about rooms she’s inhabited with her married lover, whom she later weds. She says that she was “careless” about those rooms, that she “wasted” them. In the same way, I wasted those rooms at the ‘Bird (as we affectionately called it). Now that I haven’t been in there in a month, I can tell that I did. Once I knew every board, plank, ashtray and poster by heart but was always waiting for something else to happen. I’d sometimes got so bored that I’d fold the cocktail napkins into origami swans or get drunk and cover them with bad poetry. I felt a couple of days ago, listening to the new Hank Vegas, that I’d break my heart with nostalgia for it and fill my lungs with wanting for cigarette smoke and the smell of whiskey.

Today, I don’t care again. I’ll probably go back and forth like this for the rest of my life. A remembrance of things past vying for affection with the almost primordial, visceral thrum of love, joy, longing and terror I feel whenever I hold my new baby boy. Still, sometimes I want to stride down Cherry Street with the wind in my hair and a pack of friends at my back, walk into the place like I own it, order a whiskey, light a cigarette and jabber until the wee hours when Jeff, the bartender, kicks us out and makes us take our caffeine and booze addled heads home to sleep off the damage.

I bring up The Handmaid’s Tale because I was looking for the line in the book about wasted rooms the other day and realized that I couldn’t find my copy anywhere. When I met Dan, we each had a copy. I checked in the American section of our bookshelves (Yes, I’m a lit professor, I have an “American” section of my books). I pawed through the dusty for-fun paperbacks upstairs and rattled through the overflow shelf behind the DVD’s, but didn’t find it anywhere. I like to think I loaned it to someone. It’s an odd thing to lose. When I bought my copy, it was for a Women’s Lit class back in ’89. Of course if you had a Women’s Lit class anytime during the late 80’s or early 90’s you read The Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood’s dystopic novel features a biblically based society recently gone childless with rampant victimization of both men and women in the name of all that is righteous and holy. At the time I read it, I was living in Texas during the height of Bush Sr.’s “Family Values” campaign, hearing Republican gubernatorial candidate Clayton Williams declare that “rape is like rain, so long as you know it’s coming, you may as well lay back and enjoy it.” Now I’m not a fearful person, but Atwood’s book seemed not that far off what the Bushs might have planned for us liberal feminists if they could just catch us with our Roe v. Wade down. It was shortly after that I realized that I was still struggling against the second-wave feminists (my mom’s generations of “no-I-will-not-make-the-coffee-and-where’s the-other-35%-of-my-paycheck, ERA-NOW, divorce-rate-at-51%, grumpy, no-sense-of-humor, drop-that-Playboy-magazine!” school of feminists). At first I agreed that women had gotten the very short end of the stick and yet was tired of hearing the same goddamn thing all the time. Not to mention, I was young and randy and liked a little erotica now and then. Had a bit of black lingerie and some not-so-savory fantasies myself. I almost joined the “I’m not a feminist, but” crusade against feminism. I then realized that I was still a feminist but merely a very different kind of feminist. Some referred to us as Third Wave or Riot Girrrls. I rather liked the latter, and I’m sure we looked like it with our khaki or camoflage pants, tank tops and combat boots. We probably looked like we were at war, and in a way I guess we were. Warriors drink what and where they want and so did we. We also shot a mean game of pool and smoked endless cigarettes, wooed and dumped boyfriends, bitched about our mom’s not understanding our generation and tried to get through school and find decent jobs. Hundreds of Rosie the Riveters met the Tank Girls for a smoke and a snort of whisky on a regular basis before getting down to the serious business of getting life together.

That Riot Girrrl’s still in me still ready to wage war, kick ass, but maybe with a better understanding of collateral damage, how hard heroes are on the neighborhood, and the diminishing returns of one too many dim-overs and hangovers. Yeah, I miss the ‘Bird and all the shows sometimes, but I suspect they’ll be there when I get back.