The New Age Overcoats

By Zenas Upputuru

OLD OVERCOATS, 19^th jan \25

As any true veteran of atheism knows, the old wounds aren’t only sore in winter. All of these ancient scars and unforgotten bruises can smart and sting easily enough on sunny days chockfull of butterflies. Phantom limbs of faith, I call them, when nostalgia hits like novocaine.

It’s worse for gods. The days really were better then, and you did really respect your betters. Our home team always won.

On these long, cynical purple days where I hiss and grumble at every blindly accepted truth written in graffiti or marble, I refuse fashionable solitude. I either seek comfort in the cliched bottom of a bottle, or I search like a wading bird for my fellow unacceptably miserable souls.

Today it’s both winter and sunny so I give up on the dangerous small talk of day-drinkers. I, conscious of my heavy leaden blobs of feet, start up the ricketiest fire-escape in Downtown. Godforsaken metal and glass and wire-blooded city, I snarl at the red-rusted nuts and bolts holding me together, don’t be bitter enough to let me die sober.

I’m not actually bitter and rotten from the core and out again, sometimes I just pretend to complain to save me from the sin of silence. I remember a very long time ago, packing sweet lunches for early Tuesday school mornings and a tug on my sweater and nicknames of Grouch, Grump, and Grinch.

I shake it off, the bleeding memories and the cold fire escape growls at my uneasy movements. I freeze. Dying, as it is wont to do, metamorphizes from the abstract to the very, very, easily defined. Chock full of cessations.  

I hold very tight to the icy black railing, as it sways lazily. Very tight as though onto a child’s tiny fist when the lights go out. My overcoat is like a bear skin and built for the medieval cold of smallpox times, it drowns me in my own fear-sweat. It could kill a woman, a policewoman with long red lips and dark smoking eyes, says in my grey labyrinth mind. I try to make some kind of plan for this sinking vertical stairwell iron ship. Must be some puked-up memory from a movie, I think, from back when they made movies with policewomen who had long red lips and dark smoking eyes who said things like “ It could kill a woman.”  

These things happen, these many creatures which just aren’t hallucinations that loom in front of me like dolls in the light. Eye-contact I made decades ago, a touch initiated by my long-dead bondmate, and yes, the itch of crumbs of extra peanut-butter sandwiches I cut for my dead daughter on Tuesdays when she went to school an hour earlier for her-

Music classes. Alone.

Shadows from the labyrinth, the flash of bronze threatens to kill me before the collapse of iron, right now iron. I’m me. I’m the Minotaur and I’m Da*, and I’m on a shaking, poor staircase and it can collapse under me anytime if I don’t bloody knock on the bloody door.

I’m soaked in the cheesy smell of my anxiety-sweat like I took a dip in a pool of wartime tension. I “bloody” knock on the “bloody” door. It retreats from my hand, its already open and I’d compose a lyrical lecture on the dangers of city-living if I thought she’d listen.

I take one leap from the metal structural deathwish and I’m on the ledge, the studio isn’t much warmer than outside, but she’s in the Box, in her muscle shirts, denim and boxers as she bends over her bass. I can count all the freckles on her wing-bones, the pale\deep orange tan strips on her shoulders from the last time she escaped.

Her bushy eyebrows furrowed as her short hair topples into her eyes. She’s alive and her over-knobbly fingers are poised just over the fretboard like she’s running a stimulation of all the vibrations she could ever make.  I don’t know if she’s recording, so I take off my coat on the other side of the low-ceiling room and take an uncomfortable seat. The entire vinyl-panelled place’s deep darkness is only lightly brushed by the recording Box’s yellow fairy-lights she stole from some Deepavali party somewhere. There isn’t any other lamp on, just a window half open to battle in cold cloud-covered lights. The sun has stayed on the other side of town, with the churches.

The roads and homes are too narrow over here.

Weak coffee and her exposed sweat-beaded dark back are the only warmth in the studio, and the remnants of white-hot fear cool slowly from my overcoat. I use it as a cushion for my long, oxidised ornate park bench, one of the many things that I have no idea how she smuggled up here. It gives some warmth to my upper thighs and behind, but completely betrays my knees. My calves freeze under the corduroy and long stockings. I found the stockings one day behind my smallest couch, I washed them and now I drag the nets over my too-thick thighs nearly every day.

She never remembers to switch on the heating, the studio is a wood-floored fridge because she has too many pyro nightmares to ever dare forgetting to switch it off. Are you beginning to follow what I said about the fearfully unattractive unaccountable? Souls and spirits and phantom limbs?

Anyway, all these jutting unfixable (We don’t use the word br*ken in this part of town, yes, the B word)  jigsaws, and these missing pieces puzzles, are far better company than nervous bartenders and divorcees milling around an uncomfortably- for them- sunlit bar on Sunday afternoons. So it’s always cold, but it’s there.

Unlike the death-facade of the grey armour in these city buildings, all cement empty moth-eaten snake skins, the woman has shrugged back the too big muscle-shirt of whoever she’s sleeping with these days and pushes back her tiny Rajasthani-elephant carved stool into a corner. She shifts the weight of the bass and gestures me to the console opposite the cramped recording box. I tied the bearskin around my waist and forget to adjust my cap as I begin to make sense of the two laptops perched precariously on the small city of a mixing station. A couple years ago, I’d call them gadgets, and cursed the million mathematical tabs open on the comps. They have thick screens like centenarians have bottle-thick glasses.

She shifts the bass’s weight again. The neck crosses her chest in half, headstock then shoulder to her hip. Her left arm nearly hugs the body so she doesn’t bruise the guitar when she bends to pick up a piece of cardboard. In spiky nailpolish ,

PICK TRACK 7. I TOLD YOU HOW TO DO IT LAST TIME. I’M FIXING UP THE GHOST ONE.  In a smaller thinner script, probably eyeliner or an arterial wound. THE DRUMS AND RHYTHM IS THERE, AND SOME ISOLATED VOCALS, BASS GOT-

I don’t read the rest because she knocks irritably against the glass. I don’t forget the RECORD this time. So strange, I live in a collapsed building of history until I exist in a sequence of buttons.

I sit back. I don’t worry as to how she knew I was going to be there today. It’s pretty lonely to be a one-man band and pretty lonely to smell a future.

She shifts to the intro of the drum and her shoulders manage to dance. Her dark fingers move and the rhythms start. She sets it carefully and keeps it going, some changes in the progression and well, I just ran around in a maze under a king’s island and took care of a kid, I don’t know anything about beats and how you make people move together. All I know is that the bass is simple and the pattern, or progression, or whatever my daughter was trying to teach me before she got hit by my neighbours car, the pattern repeats and shifts in ways only known to the secret gods of bass and treble.

And Silence.

By Zenas Upputuru