The Republic of Thoronia

Have you ever had a memory of your childhood when you are pretty sure you owned something, but can’t pinpoint any firm grounding in reality that makes the instance for sure, definitely real and concrete? I seem to recall when I was a youngster I owned a little turntable; it was white and had a picture of Michael Jackson on it. This turntable also came with a floppy 45 of “Thriller,” if my memory – which I’ve learned to distrust – serves me right.

So, here I am, trying to remember myself singing into the microphone (yes, I remember there being a microphone in which you could sing along with the record), probably decked out in whitey tighties and a dinosaur t-shirt, singing “Thriller” at the top of my lungs. But it’s not there; that memory isn’t there. It should be, or at least I think it should – I distinctly remember that record player existing, Michael was wearing a yellow suit with a yellow bow tie, and his name was inscribed in that silly ’80s style fake script font you see on garage sale flyers and poorly put-together neighborhood newsletters.

But what if that didn’t happen? What if that record player never existed, or I never owned it? Then what? Do I trust my mother’s picture-perfect memory of my childhood – the one where I am an excelling youngster, bound for glory as I exceed all of the other children my age in a great search for knowledge? Or do I trust my father’s memory, with me being mostly on my own as a kid, the same sort of perfect child, but this time with a few hints of corruption my mother always leaves out? Could either of them remember this little record player? They don’t remember the McDonald’s Transformers toys I had and lost, something that made me nearly cry when I realized it, as I searched the house, the car, everything.

Perhaps this was a dream I had as a kid – I’ll admit, like most kids my age, Michael Jackson was the sort of pop star I was looking for. On top of his pop-sensibility, he also had that movie where he turned into a robot and a video game where you danced to kill bad guys and saved the kids…and turned into a robot. Maybe I loved Michael so much that I wanted to have this record player I saw in a JCPenney catalog. I could have been sitting there, looking through the catalog (like I did around Christmas time every year) and I saw it, and then dreamed I had it. Now, I remember having it, even though it was nothing more than a dream.

So what does that say for dreams? Perhaps dreams can become reality – you just have to wait 15 years for it to happen, and by that point whether or not you owned the thing doesn’t even matter. If you remember some good times, it doesn’t matter if they really happened or not.

At one point in my life I was at an age when I was capable of distinguishing between what I liked and disliked concerning music, but wasn’t able to search and find things on my own. I was sure that I liked songs that told stories, and I was sure that I could get away with anything I wanted. Those were the two things I was absolutely sure of. That and the fact that dragons were real, unicorns were fake and wizards lived in my backyard. When it comes to songs that tell a story, there is no man better than Marty Robbins, and no song better than “Big Iron.”

Crooning is an ability few are capable of achieving. Elvis did it, Buck Owens did it, but Marty Robbins did it best. It takes quite a bit to gain complete attention from a growing young man, but when Robbins has a story to tell, he does it in a fashion that erases any sign of distraction and draws the listener into such complete attention it’s impossible to let your mind drift away. “Big Iron” tells the story of a stranger coming to town where the outlaw Texas Red (thought to be an insinuated Billy the Kid) is holding up. Texas Red calls him out to the street for a showdown. The time is 11:20 (forget about high noon, it’s too damn hot) when the two face each other.

The first time I remember hearing “Big Iron” was approximately 15 minutes after my first experience with looting. I’d walked out of a mom and pop shop in Estes Park with a California Raisin toy, unpaid for and unscathed. I was free. When my mother noticed me playing with it in the back seat (why I thought I’d get away with it while sitting a mere two feet away from her is still a mystery to me) she grabbed my arm and interrogated me. Suddenly, freedom was looking like a far-off place, and the only discernable future I could see myself in involved a small western town, a bottle of whiskey, and a stranger coming to town to shoot me down.

As my mother began to scold me and my father turned the car around, Robbins crooned on, “20 men had tried to take him/ 20 men had made a slip/ 21 would be the ranger/ with the big iron on his hip.”

My mind was racing so fast I wasn’t paying attention to my mother yelling. Could I become the outlaw that Robbins spoke of? Was it possible that little old me, stealing California Raisins, would someday become an Arizona ranger’s prime target? Is it possible I could kill 20 men?

In the end the ranger kills Texas Red, and his gunslinger speed is still talked about to this day. I have yet to make it out to the old west, and after returning the raisin and apologizing for my actions, I was once again returned to freedom. What the future holds at this point is still questionable, but with Texas Red out of the way and Calfornia Raisins still locked in 1992, it would be a difficult task for me to end up an outlaw in Mariposa County.

“The machine was open. No kidding, just sitting there, wide open on a Sunday, a hundred quarters just sitting there.” My pulse was beating hard when I spoke these words to my friend Andy over the phone, “And I got a free issue of the Sunday Rocky Mountain News.”

“Enough of the Rocky,” he said to me, “how much did you get?”

It was a wide-open change box of the Rocky Mountain News newspaper box that enabled me to purchase my first Sonic Youth album, 1995’s Washing Machine. Living in a small town the box probably wasn’t cleaned out too often; in fact, it seems like we only received the Sunday edition of the Rocky, they never bothered bringing us the news during the week. In this open box was 140 quarters, probably all from that day alone.  So there I was, $35 right in front me, faced with a decision that, I’ll be honest, wasn’t too difficult to make. I packed the quarters into my backpack and biked home. My parents were gone for the day, so I dumped the money out all over the bed and began to count. That’s when I called my friend Andy. He’d just picked up Washing Machine and was listening to it while I talked to him.

“What is that?” I asked.

“It’s Sonic Youth. It’s amazing,” he said.

I was hearing, I found out later, the last track “Diamond Sea,” a 19-minute freakout that would later blow my mind with face-melting noise riffs that I can honestly say I never thought I’d hear in my life.

So I went out with my quarters and bought the album. The clerk, a face that I’d learn to know over the next few years, congratulated me on purchase, but looked at me with a distinct air of annoyance as I plopped down the $15 worth of quarters.

“You give up collecting them or something?” the clerk said to me.

Startled at someone questioning the origin of the quarters, I muttered something about a crazy aunt or uncle and ran out of the store.

I popped it in my Aiwa CD player when I got home. “Becuz” kicked in and my brain felt like it was about to hemorrhage. “What is this?” I thought to myself. “This can’t be music, this is, this is something else all together.”

Then the nine-minute title track hit me in the face. My eyes opened wide, the feeling of panic hit me, and for whatever reason, I began to feel guilty about my recent treasure hunt. Thurston Moore seemed to be yelling at me, Kim Gordon slapped me in the face, Gordon sang, “it’s a woman’s face/ and she threw a quarter down at me and she said / ‘honey, here’s a quarter go put it in the washing machine.’” The rock continued to pummel me in the face, and the words echoed over and over in my head, “here’s a quarter.” They knew. I don’t know how, but Sonic Youth knew I bought their album with quarters that weren’t rightfully mine.

I took the CD off, sat down on my bed and stared at the backpack filled with quarters. I never mentioned it again, I never bought anything larger than a soda or some candy with Blackbeard’s stolen change. I even bought a few copies of the Rocky each week to pay them back. As far as I was concerned, I owed them the $35 that I stole. I think I still owe them about $25, but after they went out of business I realized it probably doesn’t matter much anymore.

It’s common I assume, for people who work in kitchens to sing songs that they know and love when the radio has come to be too much of a hassle. It is, I have to admit, a little awkward to remember this very thing happening to the tune of several grown men, Hispanic and white, metal and punk, gay and straight, to the jingle “Part of Your World,” from the Little Mermaid soundtrack.

I would go to work and sling pizza dust into the air three or four days a week. Conversations generally revolved around what we considered to be humorous phallic symbols or using the word “gay” in ways that would make us chuckle with unbridled P.C. abhorrence. It wasn’t like we were speaking to each other about William Faulkner or Maurice Blanchott; we were speaking like William Shatner and ogling Kate Blanchett. We were making fart jokes, trying to keep our minds intact in a muggy kitchen with orders stacked everywhere. The song was remarkably apropos for the environment we were in.

It seemed to come out of nowhere. One of the longhaired metal head line cooks with camouflage pants chimed in first, with, “Look at all this stuff/isn’t it neat?/Wouldn’t you think my collection’s complete?” I think he was staring at a slab of pork rear. Most of us looked on in bemused stares. It was coming back, that song, to each and every one of us at different moments. The Hispanic dishwasher joined in at, “How many wonders can one cavern hold?” I took a little bit longer to remember the song, coming in at the chorus, “I’ve got gadgets and gizmos aplenty/I’ve got whozits and whatzits galore/(You want thingamabobs? I got 20)/But who cares?/No big deal/I want more.” With this final line of the chorus, we all erupted into a near scream, undoubtedly alarming several, if not all, of the patrons of the restaurant.

Lightning had struck, and we were stuck with this sick and depraved, tired and bored, young and old version of a Disney song. We were all a little startled by the song’s consistent unraveling as each person would remember different sections of the song in, sometimes a reverse order of the original intention. It was happening right then, sporadically, in a restaurant, just like in the movies. We burst into song, pulling up some kind of collective unconscious from our youth of watching cartoons, the words floating from the heavens, through our mouths in a moment that marked the beginning of a new childhood. It’s true, the musical is true and it is possible for a group of people to burst into song without warning.

The song tricked me though. It wasn’t what it seemed. After careful consideration, I noticed the intrinsic and profound sadness of the tune. Little Mermaid was speaking to me, about me. I took record of my own life. I had gadgets, gizmos and thingamabobs aplenty too, but I didn’t care, I wanted more. Not more things, something more; I wanted to experience a touch, just as the mermaid girl wanted to live on land, to feel the sun, I wanted to see the ocean, to travel the world, to learn about things I didn’t comprehend.

I’m still living under the sea, I’m still wondering “what happens when a fire (what’s that word?) burns?” I’m still trying to be/part of that world.

           In 1995 I was a very confused kid. I’m not going to lie, I’ve gone through a lot of bad stages in my life, but ’95 was the worst. Somehow, and if you ask me to explain, I can’t, I took three steps; starting the year with Deion Sanders, ending it with the Smashing Pumpkins and sandwiched in-between a hearty does of Eazy-E.

            Deion and Eazy were relief finds for me, I was transitional, looking for a way out of my father’s rock ‘n roll catalogue, I thought that the only way out of those records was rap, and what I got was the terrible rap-sports combo of Deion Sanders’ Prime Time and Eazy-E’s Str8 Off tha Street’s of Motherphukkin Compton. Deion was a quick in and a quick out, after I got past the, what I then though to be cool, idea of a sports player rapping about sports, I tossed the album out and moved on to the next tier, gangster rap.

            Being young, white, and living in the ultra small confines of a mountain town, I was a little unclear about what gangster rap was. Hell, my mom though the title was Straight off the Street’s of Pumpkin Compton... I’m not joking. I thought about Eazy-E was saying, and I soon decided that not only did I not really care, I most definitely did not understand. So out went the Eazy-E and, for the time being, out went the rap.

            I’m not sure what prompted me to move from the whitebread rap of Deion Sanders to the ghetto rhymes of Eazy-E to the blatantly suburban rock of Smashing Pumpkins, but in October of 1995 I became one of the happiest little rock kids around as I would run through the hall’s of my school with “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” rocking in my head. Gone were the super baggy pants of the beginning of the year, in turn I replaced them with my real favorite, cargo pants, and a plaid coat, likely inherited from my dad because I vaguely remember the scent of wood chips and peppermint.

            It was the Smashing Pumpkins that gave me the incentive to climb the mountain behind my house. My neighbor friend had moved on to high school at this point, and had abandoned me for being too childish, which I was. I was childish enough to take my Sony Discman, climb the mountain behind our house and roll rocks and boulders down the mountain while listening to the Smashing Pumpkins. It all made sense to me at the time, the smashing of trees seemed to correlate nicely with the smashing of pumpkins and even more so with the idea that the world was a vampire. That was the only time in my life when that line made any sense to me, nowadays I can only interpret that as the simple fact that the world kind of sucks sometimes. You know, vampires, sucking, the world, I’m pretty smart when I put my mind to stuff.