"We asked you write a speech for the ceremony because you're a good speaker."
"You got mixed up," I said. "I'm a terrible speaker. I just write good."
* * *
I'd been watching for signs, and nothing augured well.
The frozen rehearsal, the 11th hour whiskey.
The night before, I asked a gray-haired woman in a blue-and-black plaid Carhartt if she'd be going to work on Monday, the idea being, if she had won the lottery, there would be no reason to return to the factory or clothing department or sandwich line, wherever she worked.
"Couple bucks. Not much," she said, clutching a fistful of scratch-offs, wanting to be done with the half-cocked idiot in the Sunoco on Main Street.
"Celebrate!" I said, and stepped out the door. A block later, walking toward the hotel, I remembered: Monday would be Memorial Day. A lot of people wouldn't be going to work.
Idiot.
* * *
Somewhere I've still got an old McDonald's Grimace figurine; a purple, petrified marshmallow Peep; and a black-and-white portrait of some dude, printed on a home computer, the words "pagina #5" written on the verso in blue ink. These were gifts from the bride-to-be, back when we were kids. Once upon a time I may or may not have known what the hell any of these things meant. It doesn't matter now, because these are the inscrutable artifacts of another time: strangely articulate Greek machines no one knows the purpose of anymore, but we keep them around because they're fascinating - records of nothing, if not the past.
I've also got a burned CD: on one side it reads "SmartBuy/CDR 32X 80min/700mb," followed by a list of songs in neat, red marker.
The track listing starts with "Sweet Marie," by the Anniversary, and hits on everything from the Descendents to Cheap Trick, Pedro the Lion to "BANANA!!!" (whatever that is), and finishes with Sigur Rós.
On the other side is a language of peaks and valleys that only the bright eye of a laser can understand, but which translates into a clear and uncanny meter that makes a kind of electric sense to one or two snaking coils of my own brain: the crux and throne of the protector of whiskey drinkers and beer guzzlers, guide to the dead and gamblers, liars, and cheats.
I swear to God, there's nothing like the opening organ on that Sigur Rós track.
I've spent some of the loneliest moments of my life listening to it.
* * *
Everyone has a song, or two, or whole albums, that, when those songs play, they hit the air just right, a cant calling forth a deity, or a devil, or both.
There's nothing like the lost sounds of a favorite album tearing through a rainstorm on the way to Erie, PA, your first date with what seems to be the red-headed weirdo of your dreams, she, finally begging you to turn it off because, "I don't wanna die - not here."
There's nothing like listening to that same album the night a best friend gets cracked in the back of the skull and left for dead at the bottom of a stairwell. You'll never forget the song you were listening to when his mom calls. She asks when's the last time you've seen him, and all you can say is you'll be at the hospital as soon as you can, and he's going to be all right.
Right?
And you'll never forget the song playing while the Red Haired Girl lay on the gurney, succumbing to labor, the weather outside "crisp, with a bit of sunshine," the way it says in his baby book.
"Velouria," you wanted to teach him. You're still working on it.
* * *
I spent the night hunched over the closed up toilet seat, chiseling words into a notebook I'd bought just for this purpose, timing the speech again and again, revising, rehearsing, drinking. And by the time it was finished, it's all buzz and swirl, no longer words, but the noises of life, shut up in a hotel bathroom, so as not to wake the baby.
The last note says "1:44." I guess that means I'd finished writing at eleven of.
It was a windy afternoon when that unexpected and familiar organ howled out and hurled off the sides of the houses, caromed through the air and then up into the sky like some burnt offering to the gods, that they might hold off the rain and wind and cold for something so small as a wedding in this place at the end of so many wine-dark seas. The moment was so perfect and elemental that it was already a part of the air. It was like words spoken by a blind prophet in robes, staff in hand, speaking weird truths about the world that you could only listen to with the string that connects your brain to your guts, and to really hear it you'd have to forget, for a moment, that you'd ever learned to say anything.
This moment wasn't mine to begin with.
I stepped up, head buzzing, closed my eyes, and spoke.
Great piece! Really enjoyed it.