Joey Cloudy online

The Last Time I Saw Type O Negative:

An Historical Little Epic of Empyrean
for T. W.
by JD Cloudy

“Loving you was like loving the dead”

-Type O Negative

The last time I saw Type O Negative was in early 2001-2002. I can’t remember the name of the venue; it was the same place where we watched the Pink Floyd “The Wall” laser light show, so I have never been there sober.

Some guys walk down the street with a pit bull, and the path down the sidewalk parts like the Red Sea. I walk down the street beside the tall girl here with dark hair and a steely-eyed stare standing beside me; she’s an Israeli-born lawyer. She’s not my lawyer—I ain’t Hunter S. Thompson. This beautiful beast standing beside me is Tavah; she’s just another friend of mine who happens to be a lawyer. And yes, we are both on drugs, the good ones.

What kind of a weirdo goes to a theater in downtown Dallas at midnight to watch a movie play on the screen in a 100-year-old Art Deco building straight? The screen is half obscured by the shadows of inflatable props on the stage, while practical effects left over from a mid-tier 1970s rock show ignite as a gigantic dirigible slowly floats across the weed-smoke-filled sky. Laser lights flash and strobe to a soundtrack that seems to have absolutely nothing to do with the music of Pink Floyd or the movie The Wall.

If you are here and you are not on drugs, I contend that there is certainly something clinically disturbed about you as a human being. In all likelihood, you’re a serial killer on the hunt for easy prey. Everybody in here except you is completely wasted; you could pull out a chainsaw and cut off the head of someone in the audience, and we would all simply applaud. Like I said, the drugs are the good kind—or maybe you’re just a narc. Serial killers are better company; at least they have ethics. Either way, I do not want to stand too near you or your kind while I am here; you are fuckin’ up my high.

Tavah and I don’t date—not that we didn’t try at first, but we have instant brother-sister love, not get-naked-and-hump love. But we do have a “don’t ditch me to hook up” rule when we go out. Tavah will choose violence if she perceives disrespect of any kind, like the time she slapped me across the back of my head for staring at a pretty girl too long in Deep Ellum as we bar-hopped. According to the rules of friendship, I was in clear violation because the girl did not know that we were not a couple; she was flagrantly flirting with what appeared to be a man walking by with his girlfriend.

Now, I’m not saying she was right, but that smack to the back of my skull stung like hell. She intuitively struck me in the exact same manner that my mother would strike me for misbehaving, and that gave her a serious psychological advantage in this particular instance. Afterwards, I made it a point to “admire but don’t look too long” as we traveled together. “Don’t ditch me to hook up” and “Don’t fuck my friends” were the only rules we had, as I recall.

We seemed to always end up in Deep Ellum, no matter where the evening began. Somehow, we decided to take a Cowboy Cab, the DART train, or my old faded blue Subaru schlep-car to the edge of downtown Dallas. Tavah is fascinated by my process; I don’t take notes or outline. I just flow, and then I have this tiny poem that is also a little story.

Her lawyer brain sees this as a sort of urbane sorcery; it is not something that she does. She used to date a lot of musicians back when she was in college. She digs watching the act of creation, art being born in front of her astonished eyes; she likes my writing. Maybe I’m just flattered that a pretty, big-city girl from New York likes my poems—I never thought of myself as being susceptible to flattery. Maybe she just has good taste in poetry…

I take the bus downtown after work instead of taking the train to Mockingbird Station. I hike over from the West End Station to the Old Santa Fe Trails building behind the federal building, where she has worked as a clerk for the last eight months since graduating from City College and moving down here from Brooklyn, where she lived since her family moved there when she was in high school.

We normally start out at her 8th-floor studio apartment. She’s a gracious host, and I’m a starving artist, so I always enjoy the food as much as the company. I forget how beautiful she is; I take her for granted in the best way. I hang out with her because she makes me laugh, and since she is new to the city, it’s fun spending time together while she explores the area.

I never think about things like the School Book Depository, but whenever I meet a traveler from the EU, they all seem to view us Americans as poor, gullible, naive children. We pretend not to understand the true nature of our own politics and its consequences. The ones from Germany seem to look at us and shake their heads in disbelief and eyes filled with sorrow as we continue the long march toward fascism. You know things are bad when the Germans feel sorry for you.

We go out to eat in Deep Ellum, drink in bars, and hang out in clubs. We don’t date; we just like to kill time together. I don’t like it when she scores dope on her own. I tell her, “Let me take care of that,” because if I get busted, it doesn’t matter; I’m an artiste. It helps my career to have a brush with the law over possession of weed. But you are clerking for a federal judge; if you get busted, it could ruin your career, having a drug charge on your record.

Tavah is stubborn; she travels around the world on vacations with only two carry-on bags, alone, absolutely fearless, but even her legal mind can’t deny my logic, so she lets me take care of getting the party favors—mostly weed from old friends in the northern suburbs of the city. Later, after Dion got busted, I started scoring from kinfolk on the south side. Eventually, she met the bartender, and he became her hook up until she moved on to her next gig.

Tonight, we are here to see one of our favorite bands, Type O Negative. One of the reasons we are such good friends is music; we have a lot of crossover in the music that we like, and we both love goth, punk, and metal as much as we do pop and hip-hop. We have seen Depeche Mode and Poe, and we took the train over the 4th of July weekend to Austin to see Bob Schneider when he was dating a Hollywood A-list actress and for a moment was almost famous.

She’s dragged me through every museum in the metroplex for multiple art exhibits, she is fond of the Impressionist works of Gaugin, while I can’t stop flapping my lips about the Georgia O’Keefe’s. She had me house-sit for her when she flew to New York to check on family and friends and see what she could do to help after 9/11.

Tavah is, at heart, a girl scout—a true believer unspoiled by the system’s failings, “which are deep and many.” She fights the good fight. People these days are cynical; they have given up hope and believe there are no good guys left, but they haven’t met my friend Tavah. You know when it goes down, she’s got your back. The fact that she spent the mid to late ‘90s in the mosh pits of the metal scene in New York lets you know she can brawl with the best of them.

We are all in black leather, black boots, and black, black, black, black number one hair. We are right in the middle of the packed theater. The only two blondes in the audience are a pair of 6-foot-4-inch Swedes. One notices me behind them, headbanging away, whipping my dreads like a good headbanger does at these things, singing along because I have their CDs ripped at home. The blonde on the left spots me, nudges the one on the right; they both look at us surprised to see my black face, smile, give us the thumbs up, and make space between them so that we can have an unobstructed view of the show.

Peter Steele was his usual awesome, smart-alecky, sarcastic, sexy self. They did the bit where they play a few chords or verses of a classic R&B song, then halfway through quit, pretending they don’t know the rest of the song. It might have been the opening chords of “Summer Breeze.” I’m not sure… it’s been over 20 years—I’ll have to consult with my attorney…

[notes] Every word of the poem is true, the name of my not a giant Samoan lawyer has been changed to maintain her her anonymity and preserve T. W. professional reputation discretion by the author was utilized. [Black No. 1 (Little Miss Scare-All)

Song by Type O Negative

She’s not big on religion, As for me I’m a recovering Baptist, when I wanna talk to god I dial his personal line and write a poem

-jdc