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Struck Bell / Pocketknife

from My Big Break - volume 1 by Ben Seretan

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about

Dick Dale - the surf rock guitar legend - died this week and I heard a great story about him once. Maybe I’m forgetting the details, but the story as I’ll tell it to you is so note-perfect that whether or not its true doesn’t matter. That is to say that it’s more true than if it was accurate. But anyway. Buddy of mine was going to the movies when we were both in high school. The movie theater was a big one, lots of screens, big and flashy with lots of neon and stairs and escalators, across the street from the fancy high end outdoor shopping mall we all used to hang out at (Fashion Island, which at one point had a set of the world’s largest wind chimes). I wish I could remember what movie he was seeing. He takes the escalator down and right outside the theater he’s going to he sees - unmistakably, in all black and a black headband, looking for all the world like the perfect summary of a ninja, a wizard, a surfer, and a cowboy - Dick Dale. Just standing in the lobby. My buddy goes up to him and says hi, hey, you’re Dick Dale, you’re the coolest. And Dick says hey man nice to meet you, thanks, but hey, listen. I’m not supposed to be here. No one knows I’m stateside, no one knows I’m in California. Matter of fact, I’m living illegally for the time being on my little sailboat docked down at the marina. So don’t tell anyone you saw Dick Dale at the movies on a Friday night, okay? But then he says well also kid listen I’m playing at the Galaxy theater for New Year’s with this band the 5,6,7,8s, they’re wild, they were in “Kill Bill,” come party and rock with Dick Dale if you’re free. Of course my friend told me immediately about seeing Dick Dale when I saw him at school. And my friend went and had a blast, he has a polaroid somewhere of him with the ladies from the band.

This past weekend I found myself (I am always “finding myself” doing things, as if I don’t will these types of situations into being, haha) editing black-and-white 8mm film footage of the last person I lived with dancing and drinking and generally having a great time in a college dorm room when she must have been 19 years old. I would not meet her for another 5 years or so. In the footage her face is rounder, her hair falls differently, there is an absence of tattoos (although one, in its earliest draft, is there on the back of her arm). In another clip she is toying with a large pocket knife with her back turned to the camera. In another clip she is folding laundry, backlit and silhouetted, kneeling in front of a white window and a white radiator. All things my friend - one of the people who introduced us - shot when he himself was a starry-eyed college first year. It’s not just that they’re dancing (and that when I was first getting to know this person, I saw her square-dancing with unbridled enthusiasm through the window in the door of a bar, leaping through the air her arms outspread, an image I’ll always remember). It’s that the two women in the clip are getting wasted, they pause in the middle of dancing to do shots with a suddenly stiff, mechanical mannerism, down the shot and sip the beer chaser as quickly as possible, resume dancing to the YouTube video you can briefly see them pulling up in the footage. It’s silent and, because of the transfer from film to digital file, the time doesn’t quite look right, like it’s either in slow-motion or in a dream, it’s not hard to imagine a string section swelling behind her as her and her friend throw their arms in the air. My friend asks me to cut out these particular scenes for him from the rest of the footage (which includes his mom talking, driving by a graveyard, a child’s birthday party). I’ve named the file "her name dancing," and when FinalCut prompts me to export it the auto-generated description of the video comes out as “This video is about her name dancing.” For whatever reason, that weird robot sentence is the thing that pushes me over and that’s when the tears come.

There were many dark turning points between us that I failed to see for what they were while they were happening. What I mean is, for instance, once we went on a weekend away to the very town where this person went to college, the town where this footage of her drinking and dancing and toying with a pocketknife was shot. We went to see her old haunts, to drive around in my friend’s borrowed car and, not that I knew we were doing it, try and relive some fun and formative experiences in her life, things that I’d guess she felt she no longer had access to, meaning she could not feel as free as she once did, drinking wasn’t doing the trick anymore. It was mostly fun and fine, going to places she liked to eat, places she liked to drink, walking around and looking at used books, a pretty nice time in the Berkshires overall. But when we finally got to the motel where we were staying she had gotten determined to get really fucked up - a determination, I see now, to feel as free and as buoyant as she did when she was 19, getting fucked up in dorm rooms away from home for the first time, feeling the incredible rush of agency that punishing your body and blotting out your own thoughts can bring. She wanted me to get fucked up with her, and so we did, listening to music on our phones and drinking a huge handle of whiskey straight from the bottle. I don’t remember it, really, but there are some goofy photos from that night that I don't care to look at right now. We got fucked up, we went to sleep, and a few hours later I spent the rest of the night throwing up in the bathroom, just sick from all of it, something I hadn’t done in years, puking my guts out absolutely. I could have realized then, maybe, that we did not grant each other the freedom we needed, that the terrifying and incredible feeling of being swept up in the world that existed between us, no matter how wonderful, was fleeting, that it was in fact brought on by and deeply intwined with getting fucked up, and that with each other we would never would know peace or rest, only getting fucked up, that being with each other was in fact a long con game of fucking each other up. And in the morning we went for a hike, it was a beautiful time, we reached a peak and took photos of each other, I was wearing her scarf, and there were reds and oranges spilling out beneath us in the rolling Connecticut hills, a hangover ringing out like a struck bell between my eyeballs.

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from My Big Break - volume 1, released July 16, 2020

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Ben Seretan Climax, New York

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