#18: Palace of Dust
"All had collaborated to build this: this ruined museum, like the navel of the earth, the Delphi of celebrity. This monument, in the boundless and bare dusty darkness."
(Last time, the guys arrived at Allegria. But it wasn’t quite what they expected.)
The museum door was carved with figures of saddled dolphins and shining stars. Mickey Kent had had it made in India, it was said, and he had picked out the signs himself. The brass of the stars flashed in the sunlight as we ascended the steps. Pat was ahead of the rest of us as he reached for the handle.
And then, nothing. The door didn’t open. He pulled again. Again, nothing.
“Is it stuck?” I asked.
Pat grunted. “It feels locked.”
“Locked?” Ralph tried the door. His lips curdled into a frown.
Danny and I tried. With a hand on each handle, I could not budge the steel and brass for even a fraction of a hope.
“Excuse me?” a voice said behind me.
I turned to see a woman in an orange vest. She had shoulder-length blond hair and lines like girders around her mouth. She scrutinized us through square glasses and carried a walkie-talkie like a weapon.
“We’re here for Kentstock,” Pat said.
“Kentstock?” She drew her head back. “That’s cancelled.”
We stood in silence.
The woman leaned forward. “Because of the tornado?” At the sight of our obvious confusion, she explained that, earlier this week, a tornado had touched down near the ranch. “You didn’t see it in the news? Thank heavens it didn’t kill anyone. But it did hit us hard. So it was just not possible to host Kentstock this weekend. Mr. Kent didn’t even come back.”
“He’s not even here?” Ralph asked, like leaky punching bag.
“No no. He’s in Nantucket, visiting friends.”
“Look,” Pat said, “we came all the way from Massachusetts...”
“Well, isn’t that funny,” she said.
None of us felt like laughing.
“So the museum’s closed, too,” Danny said.
She nodded. “It is. It suffered significant damage during the tornado. We’ve taken some steps to ensure structural integrity and keep it from collapsing, but it will be months and months before it’s restored.”
“Maybe we could go inside? Wear hardhats or whatever? We’re very responsible.” Pat smiled his broadest smile, the kind that usually bent reality with its charm.
Her smile seemed almost mechanical. “That’s very nice, but, no, you can’t. Liability concerns. I’m sure you understand.”
“Can’t we just take a look inside?” Pat asked—pleaded (and his voice was unused to crawling on its knees).
“I’m sorry, but that’s just not possible. Only authorized personnel are allowed on the property.”
“But we’ve come so far—and we’re such big fans.”
“I’m sure you are, but Mr. Kent has many fans across the world. Policy is policy.”
Here, at last, was some slice of the universe completely indifferent to Pat’s will.
There was nothing left to say. The woman smiled perfunctorily, offered another rote apology for our having come so far for “nothing,” and told us to move along. Before her walkie-talkie called her away, she did say we could take a few pictures in front of the museum.
Pat said, “I can’t believe it.”
“Well, that’s our situation, whether you believe it or not,” Danny mumbled.
Pat looked around us. “I’m not giving up yet. Look, I bet no workers are out there right now. I don’t hear anything back there.” Neither did I.
Danny said, “Pat, we can’t go there.”
“Why not?”
“Because that would be trespassing,” Danny said as though that settled it. “You could get arrested.”
“Get arrested?”
“Pat—”
“Try and stop me,” Pat scoffed and ran, his gangly legs scrambling like they did in high school when was launching off of home plate.
Falling
The footage of the 1991 Kentstock wavered like the surface of a stream. The singers seemed to be warbling under water.
“I can’t believe we got this,” Pat cried and took another swig of his third—or was it fourth?—gin rickey. The tape was a copy of a copy, assembled via the national network of the Mickey Kent Fan Club. “Can you imagine what it would actually be like to be there? Not Kentstock East. But the real thing.”
Maybe that was the appeal of the tape to Pat—why he had insisted I come right by his parents’ house after it had been delivered through the Mickster channels. It wasn’t the clarity of sound—a CD would be better for that, even a cassette. It was that this grainy VHS footage was one step closer to the immediate experience of Kentstock. It was the yearning for origins that drew him on.
I stretched. “It happens every year.”
Pat launched up from the sofa and began to pace around. “Hold on hold on hold on…” He held both hands to his head, like he could barely contain his brain.
Then, his foot caught on the edge of a throw rug and he landed belly-first on the floor. His laughter echoed through the room. “Why don’t we do it?”
“Do what?”
“You. Me. The whole crew. Summer 1999. Kentstock.”
“Pat—”
“Why not? Let’s live. Seriously—what’s going to stop us? Ourselves?”
“Pat!” Danny cried and lunged after him.
I looked at Ralph, who shrugged. “I’m going to have a smoke on the steps here.”
So I took off after both of them.
Soon, mud and dirt took the place of the astroturf-green grass. The white walls disappeared in a giant hole. Warning tape wrapped around the hastily-erected fencing.
With muscles honed by baseball and years of Tuesday-night-basketball games, Pat far outpaced Danny and me. He pounced at the fence and grabbed the top of it, vaulting over with panther-like ease.
“Pat!” Danny called out in frustration. He leaped and caught himself on the fence like a stork stuck in a giant steel honeycomb. He struggled and surrendered, tumbling to the ground. “He always takes a joke too far!”
“Is that what this is—a joke?” I asked. “I thought this was Allegria.”
Danny replied, “Well, it’s a joke now. Or a ruin.”
“I’ll get him,” I said. Or at least I’d try.
The holes were wide enough that I could easily fit the tip of my sneaker in them, though my fingers burned with the effort. At the crest of the fence, I lingered for an instant. Pat had been right. The workers were gone. I saw him wandering through mud and packed dirt and piled scraps.
“Pat!”
He waved and turned away from me.
“Pat,” I muttered as I swung over the top. As I tried to descend the fence, my toe slipped out of one of the steel squares, and I crashed down.
“You okay, Charlie?” Danny asked.
The muscles of my back felt like a clenched fist, and my palms ached like a rolling pin had been dragged across them. “Yeah. Fine.”
I limped over to Pat.
“So you alone were willing to join the party,” he said.
“This isn’t much of a party, Pat, and we really shouldn’t be here.”
He looked around at the wasteland with a smirk. “No kidding.” He walked onward.
I waited a moment and then crossed the threshold into the ruined darkness. The building’s broken skeleton of steel arched above us. Furrows scarred the ground. Along parts of the wall, girders still stood like the ribs of a carcass. Boards replaced the smashed wounds of windows. Nails, strips of wood, bits of plaster, shards of glass, plastic wrapping, broken cardboard boxes, cigarette butts, and all the other refuse of a work site lay at our feet.
I stepped deeper into the darkness and brushed my hand against part of a wall that still had some of its plaster. Apparently, a display used to be there; my fingers gingerly touched its off-blue broken writing: “and so he flew.” A jagged tear in the wall cut off the rest. I turned and saw by the dim light the swarm of dust particles surrounding me. The dust invaded my mouth, too.
The hallway meandered into the glum almost-darkness. Perhaps the storm had not destroyed as much there. As I took a giant step over the crowbar by my feet, my foot fell hollow on a piece of plywood, and the dust whirled. I coughed. The echo was splintered amongst the girders and gaps.
I stood there for a few crumbling minutes. Farther in the darkness—down the littered way of refuse and fragments—more dust swirled in flecked pirouettes.
All of this was the monument to Mickey Kent. The songs that had set hearts pulsing, the voice that had conjured desire, the melody that had inspired yearning—all had collaborated to build this: this ruined museum, like the navel of the earth, the Delphi of celebrity. This monument, in the boundless and bare dusty darkness.
Pat held out his arms like a ringmaster. “Welcome to Allegria.”
“It’s different than I had imagined.” I tried to smile.
Pat laughed, his ha-ha-ha’s sounding like a machine gun’s tat-tat-tat. “Yep.” He kicked a nail in anger. It skittered into the darkness. “Do you know how much I would have loved to talk about this? I mean, not talk about going—but about being there. About being here.”
“I know.”
He swallowed and said, “Did we really come for this?”
“We came for a hope, a dream, desperation—something.”
“Something. Something stupid.” He sighed.
I said, “There’s nothing here. There’s nothing be found. It’s gone. It’s ruined.”
And we stood silent amidst the ruins.
Dust. Dust. Dust everywhere. Dust had brought me here—my fantasies of renewal, of escape, of fun. And dust was the only thing awaiting me in Seattle. I saw that now. I had made Seattle into a great, distant citadel for myself, caring about it because I had once cared. As the dust churned around me, I saw that that citadel could never be the palace of my memory—or what I thought it could have been in those earlier days, when youth had polished every yearning. We could never be what we had been, or what I hoped we could have been.
“Where to next?” Pat asked when we got back to the car.
“Home,” I said. “Home.”
Drained and dimmed, no one disagreed.
Waiting
You can waste yourself in waiting.
The forty draft pages of my thesis sat on a disk in my bedroom desk. In the top drawer of that desk, I kept a marked-up printout, a legal pad scarred with black scribbling, and a cluster of index cards. Thinking about trying to work on it was a great drama for my days—but, when I sat down, a cold steel plate dropped in front of my brain. I turned the pages. Tried to read a paragraph of Xenophon. Shuffled in the index cards. Sometimes, I would make a note in the pad—only to realize that I had made a similar note on another page. It was only a little more to write. But that little more opened up broad venues. It was too much.
A line from the beginning of Xenophon’s Symposium haunted me. I wrote it out and taped it above my desk: “It seemed to me that the things worth mentioning were not only the deeds of fine and good men done seriously, but also what was done playfully.” The playful—the Greek word paidiais—came from the Greek word for child. The playful, the kid-like, the light could have its own insights.
In my sarcophagus of lead, I saw a great, distant charm in the hope of that light learning.