Roommates
by MARSHALL PIOTROWSKI
by MARSHALL PIOTROWSKI
‘I guess it started about two years ago. My family and I were in D.C. for a vacation/my dad’s work, and I’d just had my application rejected by the last music conservatory I’d still been waiting to hear back from. The others rejected me too. I’d had to wrestle with knowing that professional music was maybe no longer on the table for me, at least in the way I’d always imagined. Not that I couldn’t throw myself into it and hope for the best, as we’re always told to, but it’s so much easier at a music school, with their connections and reputations; you hardly even need make a résumé if you graduate from Julliard, as far as I was concerned. So I was in D.C. and crying from the Oberlin Rejection when I first realized how close I was to finishing my official, legal childhood, how close I was to probably never again seeing so many of the people who made up the soup of my daily existence for nearly two decades. I always thought we were supposed to emerge from high school as Victors in Robes, the whole world bowing and clapping, on the knife’s edge of their tipping seats, dying and seizing to see what great things we would do next, us terribly proud of each other and ready to be done with the powerlessness and agential frustrations of childhood. I felt like a failure to myself and my parents and to generally everything, and even though my friends and family would have never seen it that way, that almost made it even worse because it just so clearly showed how little they expected of me. My music, my morning solos, were, at least in my head, sounding so wonderful that year, up to that point. I was trying my hardest to play my saxophone like I imagined Virginia Woolf and James Baldwin played a pen, imagining authors largely because I would only lose all hope and confidence if I was arrogant enough to mimic or even think I could mimic the sound, after only eight short years of near daily playing, of John Coltrane or Vi Redd or so many others, so I was channeling all the powerful literature Ms. Kendler had assigned us instead, which is kind of funny because now I try to remember how jazz sounds for my writing inspiration. I’ve been writing a lot. Mostly just personal journaling. But, two years ago, even though I was lonely in the way teenagers with many close friends but no romantic partner can feel lonely, I had at least my books, and my afternoon pottery class, and my forty-eight measures of Miles Davis’ “Four” to fill with my sonic innards five mornings a week. Those were the things I worshiped.’
‘I was still up in Minneapolis at this point, skating a bit, and reading a lot, and painting almost daily after school, and it really wasn’t until I got here that my depression began. I felt it the very first day my mom dropped me off and left to go back out east to Minnesota. I’d never felt so alone. I realized how much of a baby I still was at eighteen. Even now I feel as if I’m too young to really organically understand myself or what is going on around me. I was lucky to come out here with like six or seven other kids from my high school class, but even among them I felt like the least sure of myself, or of my decision to come here; maybe we all felt that way. That first week I went on a lot of walks, alone, to learn my way around campus, and I’d listen to the comfiest music I could think of to comfort myself with, but it was an overly desperate attempt to force myself to feel at home, and after a month and a hundred miles logged, the franticness of my search for a sense of belonging in and of itself revealed how very much I didn’t belong, and how much this place didn’t belong in any way to me. Why had I come here? Some weird TV and culture inspired Thing for this city? It was hardly an academically informed decision. Not that it’s a bad school but I could have gone many places; my grades and test scores and recommendations and extracurriculars were all great. But I think I really came here because I wanted to see what the rain had to offer me, and to prove I could go far away, but instead of finding any value or joy in it I found myself wet and homesick and depressed and lonely. My friends were still in the Midwest or on the East Coast, as was my family, as was all I’d ever known, and the darkness here, the gray, it suffocated me. That’s when my insomnia really started.’
‘And that’s how we became friends really, remember? Your insomnia had just begun but mine was longstanding, and it was mostly between the hours of 22:00 and 04:00 that we opened up and really spoke in earnest. We talked about missing our mommies, and not in any ironic, self-emasculating way: we really did miss them. That helped me not feel so alone.’
‘Yeah, it helped me too.’
‘When I was in D.C. and read the email informing me that my dreams were crushed I, within an hour, found myself sitting in a small circular room surrounded by four huge Thomas Cole paintings in the National Gallery of Art, which I had insisted on going to alone (we’d already been there that trip) while my family visited one of the Smithsonians, and I was feeling foully indignant towards everything, just royally fucking pissed off and sad, and it hit me at about the same time as my realization of legal childhood being over-ness that I was also nearing my end as a full-time present member of my family’s household, and I’d be so busy the next few months with band and jazz band and tests and final papers and junior varsity tennis and trying to be social that I got this depression-seed of a thought planted in my head that said I’d wasted all my childhood, that I’d used it all on nothing and so essentially didn’t have a real childhood, and therefore wasn’t a real person, which is actually factually impossible and a mean farce because I had and still was living my childhood, still kinda am, but this was just one of those spiney, hurtful, penetrative thoughts that settled down into my bones the way an idea only can if you first experience it while taking in some sort of true artistic masterpiece. The thought and the Cole paintings got all emulsified in my head, and my whole body stopped working as hard or as joyfully as before, like a car that can’t get out of first gear so that you spend your whole life carefully going at no more than eight miles an hour. It was his Voyage of Life series of paintings, Cole’s. I was nervously looking between Youth and Manhood, making little 90-degree scuttles back and forth, trying to figure out what happened in-between, and I was terrified of that juxtaposition, the same one I felt I was facing in real life, and I walked out of that magnificent rotundafied building lesser and lower than I’ve ever been. My improvisations tanked after that, and I often missed key changes and zoned out in the middle of songs, and worst of all I lost that quickness and wit that good jazz improv really desperately requires, and this all seemed to confirm to me that I didn’t belong anywhere near a reputable conservatory.’
‘My last months before college were joyous and exciting. My close, longstanding circle of friends and I, my girlfriend, and my friends’ partners, we drove all over the Midwest, chasing clouds that clabbered and curdled like dairy, that whispered as tragically as only dying children can, that puffed up big and tall like the nervous chests of men during some ravaging emasculatory ceremony, that raced across that middle of the continent as if they were some poor, exploited beyond belief, contracted, forced to piss in a bottle Amazon.com delivery driver, and at other times so slow they seemed to just wait in space, asking time to stop on our behalf. That was really nice of them. We’d wake up in the morning and make coffee and drive and find ourselves in the middle of Illinois or Iowa or Indiana or even as far as Ohio once, we’d find ourselves somewhere amid the great quilt of corn and soybeans and wheat and cattle and oats and cabbage and swine, and we’d pull over on the side of whatever two-lane highway, and we’d break out our easels and brushes and canvass and paints, and we’d paint what we saw, the horizon and the sky, and then we’d paint what we felt over that, and those pieces are some of my favorite I’ll ever make. Those paintings are so imbued with my happiness. I think that was my favorite summer, and it looks like it’ll remain so, probably forever.’
‘I stumbled dully through the final months of high school, decided to go to college here in Portland, to try my hand at something other than jazz or maybe music at all, and I graduated without ever finding someone to be able to later refer to as my “high school sweetheart”, and I spent a lot of that last summer by myself, reading, riding my bike down to the Boise River, right in town, to flyfish, or to read on the banks, and I found some solace in that, in being in that river which had so supported my growth over the years, its running the deep green of some fantasied hill, the trees staggeringly wise and helpful. It was those trees who spoke to me during the first half of the acid trip, the good half, and they offered me kind words of care, words about their pride in me, me being all grown, not really fully they reminded me, pointing out their much more mature, rooted bigness, but that they were proud to have played at least some small but meaningful role in my becoming a generally nice and good person over the past eighteen years, and they were right, they had watched over me and made an important impression on my sense of how important appreciating beauty is in life, how much richness this skill and willingness can add to any circumstance. I was reading a lot of Steinbeck that summer, and his words and stories are certainly beautiful, but they usually don’t fill you explicitly with joy or exciting hope, but beauty in and of itself can fill you with all that, if you let it, is what these trees were trying to teach me, and so his stories did make me feel excited despite my new depressive disorder, but of course I found a lot of beauty that summer, outside of books as well, in the trees and rivers and hills and mountains of gorgeous, troubled Idaho, and I felt I’d found every emotion I could possibly feel.’
‘We’d be camping in the yard of some farm of a relative, my friends and I, smoking cigarettes and drinking cheap beer and painting and having wonderful, uproarious conversations, all of us in love, and we each couple had our own tent. None of us mentioned what we were all compensating for, the coming eee-enn-dee END and a certain I’s moving west and a certain her’s moving east, a certain truncation of life as we’d always known and mostly enjoyed, as we’d gotten relatively comfortable with. It felt dramatic, but I guess it was, that was real life happening, as it always is, and life still feels exciting like that, in a way, and I’m only a year and a half older now, but we were right to compensate for that lack of time: something does feel definitively different; something is forever lost.’
‘I did manage to find brief, fleeting romance at the end of the summer, in the arms of Harrison Rantrala, in his face and lips and the unbelievable utterings he uttered into my heart and soul. Not to be dramatic. We spent all of five weeks together, but those weeks were uncontainable, and will burn eternal in me forever. Harrison went to school with me since middle school, and I mostly knew him from an eight grade Earth Science class. He was quiet and cute and smart, and I once saw him stand up against his friends to stop them from bullying poor Lenny Dole, a nice kid with a chronic case of bulliedism. That’s how I knew Harrison was really good, despite having horrible friends. After our sunny, secret, sleepless weeks, he moved to England, where he’d decided to go to college. Smart boy. We only talked once or twice after that. He was there during the acid journey, and so were my friends, but I was so far in my own head they may as well not have. That second half of the acid trip, at least I think it was acid, was not a warm, wise wizening from familiar trees. It was not comforting, but it was still insightful. I found myself—sometime after everyone else I was with had gone to bed and somehow to sleep, maybe at 03:00—in Thomas Cole’s paintings, on the Voyage of Life. I found myself in Childhood, a baby, on a wooden boat, with an angel, being led out of the dark, sooty canyon of nothingness, of pre-birth meaninglessness, and slowly I grew, my bones and skin and potential for being truly hurt, and we came out into the flatter world still floating on the river of conscious existence, and after maybe fourteen years in which I mostly looked at the land and flora and fauna pass me by, or me pass it by, and after I had grown some, we came upon a fantastic city of unbelievable turrets and massive rotundas and stone steps of white marble that blinded in the cloudless sun like the Taj Mahal but a hundred times the size, and it was something to truly aspire to be at and in, somewhere to have a life for yourself, and our boat remained amid luscious trees and grasses, and I had already begun to steer and maneuver the boat, and my angel bid me farewell, said she’d keep a caring watch from afar, and flew into the sky, and I spent my youth aspiring to that promised palace, the infinite wealth and good cheer and security and happiness it must surely hold within, and it was so far away that for years it continued to get closer still, always larger and more illustrious and real and within reach than it seemed the day before, and I was far from alone. There were many other young folks on the River of Life as well, aspiring to that palace, and I grew a beard, and many pubic hairs, and I became what’s often called “burley”, and as I was sure I was about to finally take out at a set of stony steps coming right out of the water, steps which led to the city’s massive marble doors, it disappeared, the whole thing, apparently some mirage, some trick to get us all to agree to sitting in these decaying boats, and the front of my own was nearly falling off as the river devolved from slow meanderings to rageful rapids, to holes and waves and whirlpools and danger and I made it much further than many of the others I had grown to know did—many couldn’t ride out the specific set of rapids they faced at their specific angles of hitting each specific hole with their specifically decayed boats and drowned—and even after all this misery and braving through the tumult the river was suddenly about to pitch off a high sheer cliff, about to form a waterfall of unsurvivable heights, of horror and sure bodily and mental trauma, just a dose of that good stuff before a sudden death, and all I could think to do was to pray, so projected from my mind to the ether was a call for help, and I suppose that’s ultimately what saved me, because I did eventually wake up, in my boat, which had held through the fall, intact, and myself now an old, old man, with nearly no hair on my head and a white beard and stiff joints, and I sobbed to have slept through nearly my whole life, and I passed through a delta estuary system and before long was at a dark seas, the would-be open skies shrouded in a dark mist reminiscent of the canyon of nothingness, and the world blinked glim, and then a hole in the brooding clouds appeared and my angel, along with another, appeared, and the one I grew to know as a child so long ago outstretched her hand in an offering to take me to what I supposed was heaven, but I was still in denial of what had happened, and refused that this was happening, and I could not accept the reality of it. The angels looked at each other and shook their heads in low, tragic sorrow, and flew back up into the quickly closing hole in the darkness, and once they were gone I was alone, all alone by myself for a while before the serpents circled, great serpents I’d seen only in primal nightmares, and the seas became agitated, and the serpents whispered violent, twisted poems into my brain and mind, poems in which they promised to put me right back into that boat, back at the mouth of the canyon, poems in which they promised to wipe my memory and all the lessons I’d ever learned into oblivion, promised to doom me to make all my same mistakes over again, and then everything resolved into a pure, sable darkness, and motherly ghosts in a light translucence of many shifting colors flew by in the visual ink, but they quickly turned more demonic, demonic translucent mothers with gnashing sharp teeth that they used to eat live babies with, and the ambivalence of their material reality mimicked Cole’s palace, the one I’d aspired to, and I screamed and cried and the trip lasted over sixteen hours, so I was still in a rough way as I watched the sad sun rise in a weak sky, and I was due to go to college and meet you and everyone else just a week later, and I realized I’d been treating conservatories especially but also all colleges and dreams of retaining my middle-class securities or even possibly some bold upper-class aspirations as I’d held that palace, and that they were all illusions, and that no matter what I did I’d still be on that same river headed for those same rapids and same gravity+great-unavoidable-heights scenario, but at least I now knew the secret to inner survival.’
‘When I left Minnesota I was real sour. I didn’t quite actually want to move, it felt like some required part of my path that I hadn’t done much to fight against. So I sulked for most of the way over the Rockies and into the rolling deserts of Nevada and Eastern Oregon, but the Cascades admittedly cheered me up, gave me something to really be excited about living in the shadow of, to be excited about the greenness and the raw size of everything present. I cried silently to myself over closing out the last chapter, even if I was only moving onto a new chapter of the book of youth. It was a different chapter, and I cried over my separation from my now ex-girlfriend, of my plunge into newness and unfamiliar discomfort.’
‘I cried at that too.’
‘And when we got here it wasn’t that I didn’t want to make friends, and I did, but it’s hard to be really present for that when you don’t even know if you want to be there long-term. I liked most of my classes, the professors and the content at least, but after a few months, and as we came back for second semester, which I was also ambivalent about, my insomnia was so bad that I couldn’t focus, even on the lessons, much less the hard and therefore more important ones, and I remember those nights when you’d be up all night long trying to finish the homework for your overloaded course schedule, and I’d be up all night too, but not for an objective like you were, and that’s when I decided to leave the college, to go back to Minneapolis and really take inventory and reevaluate what it was that I wanted from these transformative years, even as I was worried about whatever inaccurate rumors might float around about me and my reasons for fleeing. So I went back home and reconfigured, searched inside myself, and I decided the Midwest was too much my home to try to leave again, at least for a long while, and after a few spring months of mostly, sweetly spending nice time with my friends and family, I decided to move to Chicago for school, which was close enough for me to get home on a weekend if I needed to, and that felt a whole lot better to me than being two massive mountain ranges and a desert and the Great Plains away.’
‘And even then things all around the U.S. were escalating, I remember. I remember the snowstorm that froze Texas solid, and the hurricane that rolled quickly on the still grieving and thawing state right after, and the months of sustained toxic wildfire smoke I inhaled here in Portland, and the derecho that drowned most of Iowa, and the flooding in New England.’
‘And the floods in the South.’
‘And the cops caught on video that summer harassing and killing members of yet another Black family, and how they (the cops) were laughing so hard and so enjoying themselves and how they for some reason felt free to let loose a deluge of truly cruel derogatories into the camera and the mic, and the protests that followed, and the relentless beating and gassing of protesters, and I remember that one day, that summer, the day that really sticks with me even now, that day I once again donned my black bloc and hit the streets with my closest friends, I remember how that day we were in front of the Justice Center, just as the protests had five years before, during the Covid times, before I lived here, and how my heart was pounding as it always did when I went out to the streets, what with my mind and body anticipating the violence the PPB would surely bring, and that night there were tens of thousands of protesters, and we really felt that numbers equaled safety, and I remember how the Proud Boys showed up in all their old MAGA hats, their tactical combat gear, wrapped in the old blue and red Trump flags, or in the thin-blue-line flags, or the blatant Nazi flags, or the Gadsden, or the good old stars and stripes, and how the PPB let them mix in with their riot-geared ranks, and how the Proud Boys were even more armed than the heavily militarized police were, and how they all formed one huge riot line, and how my friends and I were near the front of the crowd and tried to get out once we saw that happening, but we hardly got anywhere before the violence kicked off, and it started off with the then almost familiar mundanity of flashbangs and tear gas and rubber bullets and pepper balls and pepper spray and nightsticks and the charging and the yelling and screaming, and how I wasn’t ever sure when exactly the first live round was fired, but I started seeing bodies cloaked in black quickly drop in the terrorized hordes to surely be trampled, and how I saw my very best friend in the entire world, Melissa, bless her soul, drop as well, and I remember how as I rushed to her to see if she was okay that I noticed all the blood gushing out of my forearm, which had been shot, and I remember how as I reached her body and pulled her shoulder up to get her face off the ground how her face was basically gone, how it was literally blown apart, and I remember how her bloodied, raw, former face didn’t move at all, and how I vomited as my comrades picked me up and carried me away to relative safety, and I remember being carried through a thick, evil cloud of tear gas which made me vomit even more, and a comrade vomited on me, and I remember the hoots and hollers and laughs and epithets and the pure joyousness that possessed the fascist front.’
‘And I remember how the winters hadn’t been cold enough anymore to sufficiently kill off the wasps, so that great swarms of the biting, stinging things swept across the plains like locusts, killing the crops, and how that’s what sparked the famine and the food wars, and I remember how CPD started heavily patrolling our neighborhood, how they demanded our neighbors rat out the commie scum and the queers, and how that series of five successive hurricanes brought the East Coast to its knees and triggered the Great Western Migration, and how the cops murdered my roommate and lifelong friend Jimmy on the sidewalk outside of my apartment and how at that point they were just leaving bodies where they laid, leaving morbific reminders for the rest of us, and how my mother and I fled west, and how the wasps had all formed a super-swarm somewhere over Lake Erie and also headed west, straight towards us, so that we were always moving to avoid being overtaken by it, which was hard since we were on foot, the swarm in the air, and I remember the coldness of the mountains, and how Mom caught the new virus somewhere in Wyoming after we’d taken the risk of trading for some goods we needed, blankets and coats and new socks, remember how I got it too, how I was feverish and delusional when she died, how I told myself it was just a bad dream, and how devastating coming out of that dreamy sickness was.’
‘And I remember when I stopped hearing from my parents, how I knew the fascists must have gotten them or at least driven them into hiding back in Idaho, and I always hoped they’d show up here, and how around that time President Harris fled to Geneva or Brussels or somewhere like that, abandoning the nation for the final time, and how all those tech tycoons, Zuckerberg and Bezos and Musk and all them escaped to space with their new slaves and their food and now meaningless wealth and knowledge of zero-gravity farming, and how the power went out everywhere, and how leftists were flooding into Portland, how this would be a last refuge, along with similar situations in San Francisco and Seattle, and how many thousands of dead bodies the virus and the violence were piling in the streets, how the mutual aid organizations were the only reason I was being fed and surviving, and I didn’t cry for many months, as I no longer had time for the depression that started in front of those paintings, and how one day not too long ago I finally cried for five full days without sleep, how I was dangerously low on salt after, and how the siege began right after you must have gotten here.’
‘Yeah, I finally got here, a broken man/boy/child, and I helped build the barricades, and I remember how the political moderates and some of the liberals had largely chosen the side of the right rather than the “dangerous” communists and socialists and anarchists, who knows why, not that that’s how all of them chose, but I remember how I saw one of the barricade builders get discovered as a fascist spy, and how he was thrown out of the secured walls of the city and how he was almost immediately shot by a fascist on the outside, mistaken as a lost leftist, and how not twenty minutes later after vomiting myself I ran into you on the new farm in the abandoned school yard, and how you broke the news to me that a hurricane the size of three Montanas was and still is heading straight towards us.’
‘Yeah.’
‘And, I guess all that’s left is for us to pray.’
‘Yeah.’ He paused. ‘I think that’s it. We have nowhere to go. We made it through the rapids, and we’re about to see the water fall. I’ve been getting better at prayer this past year . . . I think, I hope . . . David, do you think we’ll die by virus, weather, or fascists?’
‘Could be nukes too, but . . . isn’t it all the same thing?’
The weak fire in the ashy hole in the damp, polluted ground that the two former roommates are sitting around crackles harshly and smokes excessively. There is an awful screaming somewhere in the streets, and the snarling of big, scared dogs. The air smells wretched, smells the peppery, otherworldly, noisome, burned-chemical stench of tear gas, and trash fires, and of the far too many cremating bodies, and of recent, fresh rain.
‘I have my saxophone still. And some drumsticks and a bucket. And some pens and paper. Should we make a song?’
The sky is dark, for it is night.