Post by Robin on Jun 28, 2006 23:15:03 GMT -8
More Marty! Hooray! But it's not really Marty here. He's sort of dead. This is all Kit/Chris/Whatever his name is. But yeah him dying was the crux of the story, the point of it, so it's not like I'm giving it away, anyways. The original piece I wrote on this was the very end, when Marty was like uber dead. So there. I got nothing else to say except two and two makes four, the lights in the sky are stars, if there's blood grownups can see it as well as kids, and dead boys stay dead.
Oh, and I made a banner of this kid who looks like Marty. Instead of Hail Mary, full of grace, it's Hail MARTY, full of grace. Hahaha.
-------
Marty’s funeral was a bittersweet affair. On the one hand, it was the most brutal way possible to cement it in our minds that Marty was dead, but on the other the funeral was so unlike him that, besides its final-sounding intonations, wasn’t painful in and of itself. Most of us were non-Catholic and did not attend the Requiem Mass, but we came to the agreement amongst ourselves that it wouldn’t be taboo for us to go to the burial. So, we went. And we stood there, dreading the rain that the darkening clouds and cool, moist air threatened, dreading the moment when the coffin – I couldn’t think of it as his coffin then, and later on it was no easier – would be lowered into the ground, covered with dirt, buried six feet under. Under dirt. Under ground. But then again, the other options were just as painful. He could have been cremated and kept in a silver jar on his dad’s mantel, if they weren’t Catholic. That was almost too much to bear. So he was buried. But oh, how it hurt.
I remember standing there, my skin tingling, as the priest intoned the lines that, I suppose, every Catholic priest has said many times in their life.
“Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, for he has visited and brought redemption to his people. He has raised up a horn for our salvation within the house of David his servant, even as he promised through the mouth of his holy prophets from of old: salvation from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us, to show mercy to our fathers and to be mindful of his holy covenant and of the oath he swore to Abraham our father, and to grant us that, rescued from the hand of enemies, without fear we might worship him in holiness and righteousness before him all our days.” The words drifted like smoke from the priest’s – later I would be told his name was Bolton, Father Quinn Bolton – mouth, drifted like coarse souls in the throaty thrumming before true purring started. It was cold out, so cold that tiny white puffs appeared whenever I breathed out, and the same went for Father Bolton. At the time, I associated this smoke with the words that he was saying and, for a few delirious weeks after the funeral, during which I was both sick with the flu and my loss of Marty, I would think of him as the Devil. The Devil, the one who killed Marty. Who else could have found such a perfect vessel as a driver torn by emotional and physical turmoil, one with a recent breakup fermenting in her mind and three bottles of beer burning in her stomach? Certainly not God. God, nice guy that he was, was not good at finding vessels, I figured. His vessel for us was Marty, and He certainly didn’t know it was a bad choice until after the fact. What kind of God takes a soul like Marty’s, a harmless, pure soul, and lets so many people come to love it, to love Marty, only to let it fall away in one careless act? Apparently, our God did. He had good intentions, I was sure of it even then, even with Marty’s death so fresh in my life, but, as Jurassic Park and Roland Deschain of Gilead have taught us, good intentions aren’t the only ingredient a person needs.
And yet, that wasn’t the most painful part. No, it wasn’t the priest reciting those sterile passages that, beautiful by themselves and meaningful to all, weren’t Marty, that opened up festering sores in our hearts. It was Victor Huff, a pothead and a straight C student, who did that for us with his guitar. Marty’s family was Catholic, but not strictly so, and in this day and age funerals aren’t strictly governed in any case. And so, we were allowed to get up and say something if we wanted to, and so Victor Huff sang. He got his guitar and stood in front of the crowd of mourners, his own clothing an almost laughable attempt at seriousness; a black Pink Floyd tee-shirt under an old suit jacket that was two sizes too big for him, and black slacks. He didn’t seem to care. He got his guitar, and he played Made to Last, a Semisonic, song of course. At first, I was angry by this, thinking that the idiot had forgotten that Marty’s favorite Semisonic song wasn’t even close to Made to Last; it came an entire album later. Sunshine & Chocolate was an entire different breed of song from Made to Last. But then, I realized that Victor wasn’t playing Made to Last because it was Marty’s favorite song. He was playing it because he had to, because it described what we were all feeling, and it described Marty. And once he got started, once he got past the first verse, I had decided that it was actually all right. More than all right. It was damn fine. I was feeling strangely fine, and it was good. The performance was feeling strangely fine, even though ole Vicky hit a few sour notes and his voice nowhere neared the sound or quality of Dan Wilson’s. It was the words that mattered. The words were the Marty part, not the voice.
“Made to come alone and pair up, flash like a rolling stone, seventy-one.” His words drifted around us like smoke, too, but this was a welcome smoke, like the haze of marijuana that sometimes encased Wyatt Dreier’s basement when one of the gang managed to get a hold of some of their parent’s pot.
“One time love affair with the earth, waiting on the air for some rebirth for what it’s worth.” The longer he sang, the better he sounded. It was a crooked, keening sound, off-tune but earnestly so, and warm in pleasant in the way coffee grounds can be warm in pleasant at the bottom of your cup on a cold day. Maybe Victor was the coffee grounds at the bottom of the cup. The best part of waking up is Folgers in your cup, and Marty was Folgers, I knew it, he was just made out of coffee grounds like Victor Huff, people like Chris Stevens with his long hair and militant father, people like Carolyn Petty, martyrs like him, and people like Wyatt Dreier, who loved the martyrs. And I had loved a martyr, too, a thought that came to me while listening to Victor Huff’s knotted, twisting voice and sweet and sour notes. I had helped to create Marty. I was coffee grounds, too. It would have been corny to sing along, but, oh, how I wanted to, and I saw several other people, including Sid Boyle and Fred Bell, lick their lips restively and swallow convulsively, as if they, too, were resisting the cheesy but oh-so-desirable urge to join in.
As Victor finished up his song, and we all clapped vigorously (though the sound landed flat in the chill, moist air), and he took his place in the crowd, not teary or puffy-eyed but smiling, a part from the near end of Father Bolton’s second intonement, the Canticle of Luke, came to me unbidden, reading in my mind as clearly as Marty’s Hail Mary had, once upon a time.
“And you, child, will be called prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give his people knowledge of salvation through the forgiveness of their sins, because of the tender mercy of our God by which the daybreak from on high will visit us to shine on those who sit in darkness and death's shadow, to guide our feet into the path of peace." The words did not drift like smoke, neither devil-smoke nor warm Wyatt Dreier marijuana smoke. They drove themselves into my mind like stakes into a vampire’s chest, plunging through soft tissue as though they weren’t words but lightning bolts hurled from God – or from Marty – Himself. Because that was what Marty did, wasn’t it? In the end, it’s what it all amounted to. He guided our feet into the path of peace. He was a martyr, maybe even a gunslinger, the last one, not that one John Kennedy. Childe Marty to the Dark Tower came. I could see it. And at the end of the funeral, this fancy had propelled itself into almost a fact in my mind, and I stayed until long after everyone else was gone and the gravediggers were filling in the hole. I picked up a handful of the dirt from the grave – I still couldn’t think of it as his grave – and packed it neatly into an empty matchbox I procured from my pocket. That done, I tucked the box to its proper place and looked down at the rapidly disappearing surface of the brownish coffin.
“Hile, gunslinger,” I said, touching my fist to my forehead as a certain dinh had done a great many times in Stephen King’s monstrous brainchild. I almost smiled then. Almost.
-------
Yeah I'm not sure what the Dark Tower stuff at the end is. I probably felt like taking a dump all over King because he angers me so damn much I want to beat him over the head with the book of his that royally pissed me off (maybe taped to another book where the love of my life dies) until he's good and woozy, then push him into oncoming traffic in front of a big, big truck, or maybe in front of a speeding train. Then he'll know how my boy felt.
Oh, and I made a banner of this kid who looks like Marty. Instead of Hail Mary, full of grace, it's Hail MARTY, full of grace. Hahaha.
-------
Marty’s funeral was a bittersweet affair. On the one hand, it was the most brutal way possible to cement it in our minds that Marty was dead, but on the other the funeral was so unlike him that, besides its final-sounding intonations, wasn’t painful in and of itself. Most of us were non-Catholic and did not attend the Requiem Mass, but we came to the agreement amongst ourselves that it wouldn’t be taboo for us to go to the burial. So, we went. And we stood there, dreading the rain that the darkening clouds and cool, moist air threatened, dreading the moment when the coffin – I couldn’t think of it as his coffin then, and later on it was no easier – would be lowered into the ground, covered with dirt, buried six feet under. Under dirt. Under ground. But then again, the other options were just as painful. He could have been cremated and kept in a silver jar on his dad’s mantel, if they weren’t Catholic. That was almost too much to bear. So he was buried. But oh, how it hurt.
I remember standing there, my skin tingling, as the priest intoned the lines that, I suppose, every Catholic priest has said many times in their life.
“Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, for he has visited and brought redemption to his people. He has raised up a horn for our salvation within the house of David his servant, even as he promised through the mouth of his holy prophets from of old: salvation from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us, to show mercy to our fathers and to be mindful of his holy covenant and of the oath he swore to Abraham our father, and to grant us that, rescued from the hand of enemies, without fear we might worship him in holiness and righteousness before him all our days.” The words drifted like smoke from the priest’s – later I would be told his name was Bolton, Father Quinn Bolton – mouth, drifted like coarse souls in the throaty thrumming before true purring started. It was cold out, so cold that tiny white puffs appeared whenever I breathed out, and the same went for Father Bolton. At the time, I associated this smoke with the words that he was saying and, for a few delirious weeks after the funeral, during which I was both sick with the flu and my loss of Marty, I would think of him as the Devil. The Devil, the one who killed Marty. Who else could have found such a perfect vessel as a driver torn by emotional and physical turmoil, one with a recent breakup fermenting in her mind and three bottles of beer burning in her stomach? Certainly not God. God, nice guy that he was, was not good at finding vessels, I figured. His vessel for us was Marty, and He certainly didn’t know it was a bad choice until after the fact. What kind of God takes a soul like Marty’s, a harmless, pure soul, and lets so many people come to love it, to love Marty, only to let it fall away in one careless act? Apparently, our God did. He had good intentions, I was sure of it even then, even with Marty’s death so fresh in my life, but, as Jurassic Park and Roland Deschain of Gilead have taught us, good intentions aren’t the only ingredient a person needs.
And yet, that wasn’t the most painful part. No, it wasn’t the priest reciting those sterile passages that, beautiful by themselves and meaningful to all, weren’t Marty, that opened up festering sores in our hearts. It was Victor Huff, a pothead and a straight C student, who did that for us with his guitar. Marty’s family was Catholic, but not strictly so, and in this day and age funerals aren’t strictly governed in any case. And so, we were allowed to get up and say something if we wanted to, and so Victor Huff sang. He got his guitar and stood in front of the crowd of mourners, his own clothing an almost laughable attempt at seriousness; a black Pink Floyd tee-shirt under an old suit jacket that was two sizes too big for him, and black slacks. He didn’t seem to care. He got his guitar, and he played Made to Last, a Semisonic, song of course. At first, I was angry by this, thinking that the idiot had forgotten that Marty’s favorite Semisonic song wasn’t even close to Made to Last; it came an entire album later. Sunshine & Chocolate was an entire different breed of song from Made to Last. But then, I realized that Victor wasn’t playing Made to Last because it was Marty’s favorite song. He was playing it because he had to, because it described what we were all feeling, and it described Marty. And once he got started, once he got past the first verse, I had decided that it was actually all right. More than all right. It was damn fine. I was feeling strangely fine, and it was good. The performance was feeling strangely fine, even though ole Vicky hit a few sour notes and his voice nowhere neared the sound or quality of Dan Wilson’s. It was the words that mattered. The words were the Marty part, not the voice.
“Made to come alone and pair up, flash like a rolling stone, seventy-one.” His words drifted around us like smoke, too, but this was a welcome smoke, like the haze of marijuana that sometimes encased Wyatt Dreier’s basement when one of the gang managed to get a hold of some of their parent’s pot.
“One time love affair with the earth, waiting on the air for some rebirth for what it’s worth.” The longer he sang, the better he sounded. It was a crooked, keening sound, off-tune but earnestly so, and warm in pleasant in the way coffee grounds can be warm in pleasant at the bottom of your cup on a cold day. Maybe Victor was the coffee grounds at the bottom of the cup. The best part of waking up is Folgers in your cup, and Marty was Folgers, I knew it, he was just made out of coffee grounds like Victor Huff, people like Chris Stevens with his long hair and militant father, people like Carolyn Petty, martyrs like him, and people like Wyatt Dreier, who loved the martyrs. And I had loved a martyr, too, a thought that came to me while listening to Victor Huff’s knotted, twisting voice and sweet and sour notes. I had helped to create Marty. I was coffee grounds, too. It would have been corny to sing along, but, oh, how I wanted to, and I saw several other people, including Sid Boyle and Fred Bell, lick their lips restively and swallow convulsively, as if they, too, were resisting the cheesy but oh-so-desirable urge to join in.
As Victor finished up his song, and we all clapped vigorously (though the sound landed flat in the chill, moist air), and he took his place in the crowd, not teary or puffy-eyed but smiling, a part from the near end of Father Bolton’s second intonement, the Canticle of Luke, came to me unbidden, reading in my mind as clearly as Marty’s Hail Mary had, once upon a time.
“And you, child, will be called prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give his people knowledge of salvation through the forgiveness of their sins, because of the tender mercy of our God by which the daybreak from on high will visit us to shine on those who sit in darkness and death's shadow, to guide our feet into the path of peace." The words did not drift like smoke, neither devil-smoke nor warm Wyatt Dreier marijuana smoke. They drove themselves into my mind like stakes into a vampire’s chest, plunging through soft tissue as though they weren’t words but lightning bolts hurled from God – or from Marty – Himself. Because that was what Marty did, wasn’t it? In the end, it’s what it all amounted to. He guided our feet into the path of peace. He was a martyr, maybe even a gunslinger, the last one, not that one John Kennedy. Childe Marty to the Dark Tower came. I could see it. And at the end of the funeral, this fancy had propelled itself into almost a fact in my mind, and I stayed until long after everyone else was gone and the gravediggers were filling in the hole. I picked up a handful of the dirt from the grave – I still couldn’t think of it as his grave – and packed it neatly into an empty matchbox I procured from my pocket. That done, I tucked the box to its proper place and looked down at the rapidly disappearing surface of the brownish coffin.
“Hile, gunslinger,” I said, touching my fist to my forehead as a certain dinh had done a great many times in Stephen King’s monstrous brainchild. I almost smiled then. Almost.
-------
Yeah I'm not sure what the Dark Tower stuff at the end is. I probably felt like taking a dump all over King because he angers me so damn much I want to beat him over the head with the book of his that royally pissed me off (maybe taped to another book where the love of my life dies) until he's good and woozy, then push him into oncoming traffic in front of a big, big truck, or maybe in front of a speeding train. Then he'll know how my boy felt.
