Week 100: Supreme

A few weeks ago, I left the bar to walk home, like I’ve done a thousand times. It was a bit of a walk, but it was after hours and the streets were deserted and I had a good buzz so it felt good. And don’t you know it, as soon as I start to hit my stride, a screeching of wheels, a scream and then silence again. About one second of my life. In Houston or New York City, I might have kept walking, but in my little town, these are not the sounds that lullaby us to sleep. So I raced down the cross street toward where the scream had come from and there in the middle of the street is a girl. She’s in a fetal position and as I approach I realize her shoulders don’t look quite right, it looks like they are facing the wrong direction. I am not a good medical person. I get dizzy at the sight of internal organs on the surgery channel. But somehow I gather myself enough to call 911. After I give the operator our location, she asks me to stay on the phone and follow her instructions, it’s going to be a few minutes before they can get anyone to where I am. The operator asks me if the girl is conscious. I approach her to see, and see that she is breathing and her eyes are wide open staring into the distance like she is in shock. I tell this to the operator, but I get no response. I look at my phone and notice that the batteries have run out. And that’s when I notice the pool of blood slowly forming under her head.

I talk to the girl, tell her to hang on, an ambulance is coming, but she is not hearing me. I don’t know how it was that I didn’t notice the music. She was wearing earbud headphones and the music was so loud I could hear it from where I stood. Without even thinking about it, I took one of the earbuds off. And she moves. It might have been a shiver, or an attempt to turn, I don’t know, but now she was looking at me from the side of her eyes. And she was mouthing some words. I couldn’t understand what she was saying, and she kept repeating it over and over. Then she gave a big sigh and her whole body went limp and for the first time in my life I saw a life just fly away with a breath.

I was in shock. I wanted to know what she was saying so badly, I wanted to know everything about her. I can’t remember the last time I wanted to get to know someone as much as I wanted to know this girl. She looked like maybe she was in her twenties. Like a street kid with a jean mini skirt, rubber bracelets, messy bright red hair, tattoos. Dead.

And now I could hear the sirens of several cars approaching, ambulance, police, fire truck. Without thinking, obviously, I looked in her purse looking for I don’t know what, and saw the Ipod. Don’t ask me why, but I just took it, earbuds and ipod.

The emergency response people arrived, she was loaded on a cot and covered with a sheet. The police asked me a bunch of questions, then they all left and I was alone again on the deserted street same as before, but with a new Ipod. I walked away quickly and took out her Ipod from my pocket, put on the earbuds, and looked at the display. She had been playing a playlist called the wire and the playlist only had one song. It was a Robbie Williams song. The name sounded familiar, but I thought maybe I was thinking of Robbie Robertson, then I thought I might have heard of a British raver by that name in some drug induced haze during the nineties.

I walked home listening to that song over and over. I knew that’s what she had been doing. This is the song. It is called Supreme and it’s a variation or maybe a response to Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive.

Oh it seemed forever stopped today
All the lonely hearts in London
Caught a plane and flew away
And all the best women are married
All the handsome men are gay
You feel deprived.

This wasn’t what I imagined this Robbie Williams person would sound like. It was a sad walk home. And by the time I got home I had the song memorized and was starting to feel like I knew what the girl was feeling. It’s that connection that music makes between us, giving us the illusion that we can all feel the same thing even when we each interpret a song differently.

I dreamt all night about that girl, and all night the song was the background to my dreams. When I woke up I knew who she was. I realized I had met her when I first moved to town. I was still selling records to buy cigarettes and she was living in the woods with her boyfriend. She had straight brown hair and looked a bit like a hippie girl. She told me about her painful family life, her dead brother and her abusive father. She told me about her several abortions. All this in about five minutes while we waited for the bus together. She must have been nineteen years old when I met her that time.

Later on, I got a job, and my life started to improve, I would see her once in a while on the street, and wave at her, but her life was going in the opposite direction of mine. Every time I saw her she looked skinnier and hungrier, and was soon hanging around with some questionable thugs.

At one point I talked to her again and she was happy because she was pregnant. She was cleaning her life and her boyfriend wanted her to keep the baby. That was several years before the night I didn’t recognize her laying on the street.

When there's no love in town
This new century keeps bringing you down
All the places you have been
Trying to find a love supreme.

I called in sick to my job and went downtown to find the street kids. I talked to all ten or twenty of them who live in our small town. No one knew what I was talking about or they didn’t want to talk to me about her. Then I walked by a kid that didn’t seem like a street kid at all. He was hanging out with a few thugs and rapping the rap bridge from the Robbie Williams song.

I spy with my little eye
Something beginning with (ah)
Got my back up
And now she's screaming
So I've got to turn the track up
Sit back and watch the royalties stack up
I know this girl she likes to switch teams
And I'm a fiend but I'm living for a love supreme.

I asked him about her, and he looked at me like I was a rich daddy looking for his lost daughter that he had just fucked. One of the thugs that was with him called me over and said he wanted to tell me something about her and he walked into a little park off the sidewalk. I followed him and before I knew it he had a tiny little nail clipper knife to my neck. I couldn’t believe he was threatening me with that but I felt the tiny blade digging into my neck. He shoved his other hand in my pocket and pulled out my wallet, opened it and took out the few dollars I had in it. Then he pushed me away and told me to keep walking and don’t look back. I walked away as fast as I could and past the others on the sidewalk who seemed to be laughing at me.

As I walked away I realized the thug had not taken the Ipod which was on my other pocket. I waited until I was out of sight and with shaking hands I took it out and put it on. And listening to that song I walked all the way home.

Yeah turn down the love songs that you hear
'Cause you can't avoid the sentiment
That echoes in your ear
Saying love will stop the pain
Saying love will kill the fear
Do you believe
You must believe

When I got home, I put the Ipod in the same box where I have a broken calculator and a little card with a proverb that another girl many years ago in a far away city, left on a bloody bathroom sink in my house. It was the night of a loud house party with more people that anyone could’ve expected, and it was very late into the night. Suddenly there is a girl peaking out from the bathroom asking me for some vodka. We are all out, I told her, but I can ask around see if anyone has anything stashed away. And then I noticed all the blood running down her legs and the sheer expression of fear on her face. She noticed that I had noticed and in a flurry of words that I could barely understand said something about a boyfriend, a gun, looking for her, hiding, please, I just need some alcohol to clean up. I told her to stay in the bathroom and shut the door and went outside to the front yard where there were a bunch of people milling about, talking loudly and drinking. I tried to get their attention and told them that I was going to lock the door, that they could either stay outside or come back in, but they had to choose now cause once the door was locked no one else was coming in the house.

Then, as I was saying this out on the yard, like an apparition, the girl from the bathroom walked up to me and said, I think I’d better go, and then looked at me with the love of someone that’s at the end of their rope and said thank you. And I watched her walk away into the night.

I asked everyone at the party, but no one else had seen her. But she left a sink full of blood and a little broken calculator and a card with a bible proverb on it, Trust in the lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.

Now that proverb and the calculator are sitting with the Ipod with that one song in a little box in my closet.

When there's no love in town
This new century keeps bringing you down
All the places you have been
Trying to find a love supreme
A love supreme.