My Life in Heavy Metal

Josephine Byron chased me all through college. Nobody could figure this out, not her friends, not mine, nor the fratboys who watched her wag across the wide lawns of our school. She was one of those women invariably referred to as striking, a great big get-a-load-of-that: gleaming black hair, curves like a tulip. Snow White refigured, made warmer, more voluptuous. She was also utterly convinced of herself, her good taste in clothing and men, her beauty and intellect, which she unfurled in earnest, vaguely Marxist jeremiads, while the rest of us gazed at her lips.

In the dim, yeasty haze of after parties, and the stoned vistas of Hope Hill, on the cruddy avenues of our college town, Jo came to me, bearing gifts, a fresh-baked loaf of bread, a Mardi Gras necklace, bearing her sly smile and plump white breasts. She let me have my way with her, though I was never quite sure, in the end, she wasn't having her way with me. At night, she kissed my body all over and in the mornings made me omelets. It was like having Happy Birthday sung to me each day: ecstatic and deeply disquieting.

A few months after graduating, I moved to El Paso, where the daily paper needed a clerk. I lived alone, in a basement, and ate fried chicken from boxes. The shower in my place was like being spit on, so I got in the habit of showering at the YMCA, where I swam a few times a week. The lifeguard was a quiet woman who wore clunky glasses and a red Speedo one-piece with a towel wrapped around her lower body. If I stuck around long enough on Wednesdays, she took off the towel and led kiddie classes in the shallow end. She was good with the kids, teasing them in Spanish, holding their bellies while they flailed. Her face was round, bookish, somewhat drab. Even without the glasses, her eyes seemed far away. But she cut the water like a nymph.

I spent hours at work, hoping to distinguish myself. I sent Jo long, maudlin letters. I wanted her to love me again. I had been wrong to treat her with such disregard. At dusk, when the sun relented, I wandered El Paso's ragged downtown, wallowing in a sadness I considered sophisticated and insoluble. The plaza was always emptying: vendedores and day-maids trudging back to Juarez, the sweet stale scent of lard punching out from El Segundo Barrio, the thrum of swamp coolers fallen away. Later, the smelting plant would fire up its chimneys and smoke would drift over the Franklin Mountains, which shadowed the city like a row of brown shrugs. To the east, lay the trim, eerie avenues of Fort Bliss. To the West, the terraced estates of Coronado, where the swimming pools glowed like sapphires.

For seven months, I handled weddings and obits. Then the pop music critic quit, and the managing editor, lacking other recourse, allowed me to sub. El Paso was, still is, part of the vast Spandex-and-umlaut circuit that runs the length of I-10. I reviewed virtually every one of the late-Eighties hair bands at least once: Ratt, Poison, Winger, Warrant, Great White, White Snake, Kiss, Vixen, Cinderella, Queensryche, Skid Row, Def Leppard, Brittney Foxx, and Kiss without makeup. At my first concert, Metallica, the band's new bassist introduced himself to the crowd by farting into his microphone. This was the heavy metal equivalent of a bon mot.

Because we were a morning paper, I had to bang out my copy by midnight. I operated on a template involving an initial bad pun, a lengthy playlist -- adjective, adjective, song title -- and a description of lead singer's hair. The rest was your standard catalogue of puking yayas, flung undies, poignant duets with the rhythm guitarist back from rehab. I loved the velocity of the process: an event witnessed and recorded overnight. I loved the pressure, the glib improvisation; I loved seeing my byline the next day, all my pretty words, smelling of ink and newsprint.

And the truth is, I loved the shows. I remember standing in the front row as Sebastian Bach, the lead singer of Skid Row, screeched "Youth Gone Wild." Bach was the quintessence of a metal frontman, a blond mane and a pair of cheekbones. He strutted the stage like a dragqueen, while the lead guitarist yanked out an interminable solo and the drummer became a shirtless piston of flesh. It was formulaic and mercenary and a little pathetic. But when I stared down the row, I saw twenty heads banging in unison, like angry mops. These were kids lousy with the bad hormones of adolescence, humiliated by the poverty of their prospects, and this was their dance, their chance to be part of some larger phallic brotherhood; the notes lashed their ribcages, called out to their beautiful, furious wishes.

I'd spoken to the lifeguard a few times, about holiday hours, lane dividers. I imagined having sex with her constantly. I did the same thing with the news room prospects, though with the lifeguard it was always more exciting, because we were both almost naked.

Her name was Claudia, pronounced in the beautiful Spanish manner, as three distinct, rolling syllables: Cloud-i-ahh. She lived by herself, in an apartment not far from the Y.

Every couple of weeks, I took her to some show or another. The idea was that some spark would leap between us. Then we would sneak into the Y, fuck on the squeaky tile, with her bent over a stack of kickboards, or underwater. But she was impossible to read behind her glasses. Our dates were like the ones I had in tenth grade, the tense drive to the mini-golf place, the exhausting formality, the burps unburped.

She spoke in the manner of a kindergarten teacher, softly, a bit too clearly, though when she took up Spanish her lisp blossomed and the tip of her tongue danced along her teeth. I felt sure this animation was a sign of some secret life behind her reticence.

What were we, exactly? Friends, I suppose. Companions in a certain lonely, post-graduate phase. Markers of time.

Besides, there was Jo, beautiful Jo, who called me every other weekend, who seemed to be remaining, in her final year of college, faithful to me, assuredly against the counsel of her friends. And who, true to her word, did appear, just a few weeks after her own graduation, marched up the jetway in red suede boots and nearly tackled me. Everyone just stared.