Excerpts from “Germ”

Colleen Burner

 THE RABBIT HOLE OF HIS  FACE

Germ looked at photographs of Him until they couldn’t recognize His face anymore. Until their eyes turned spidery pink. Until it seemed like there were no new images, that they had seen His whole career, from discovery to death, in a series of out-of-order images, the most disorienting way to witness. Eventually the face falls in and out of suppleness and slackness so much it all blurs, and there’s still no way their brain fully registers (beyond merely knowing) that the young face belongs to the old face, that they aren’t separate people, that each iteration or invention of this person is all Him, and not some mysterious troupe of twins. The photographs of Him mostly involve sunglasses, looks like just three pairs, max. The lower half of the face(s), after becoming indistinguishable, could belong to anyone, then, so after a certain point they weren’t certain they were even looking at the right image search results. What was the search for? An absorption of this famous face, that maybe the heavy lids, strong chin, straight nose might impose themselves on their un-His face, or that they might impress the face so deeply into their vision that their mind’s image of themself superimposes the famous face over their own, a real mask they might live inside of, and the attitude and confidence that might be fixed inside of it. Still, they dragged all favored images over into a file, ordered them by preference (ages 30-32, then 26-29, then 22-25, then early 50s. Every other age was discarded, avoided, pretended like they didn’t happen), so they could be returned to, and studied. Candids were favored—Him caught in jovial embrace with a bandmate, smiling and sweaty at a club, petting a dog on a couch that surely was in some innocuous basement (how did He find Himself there?), shirtless in the bathroom mirror, the photographer leaning over the sink, Him gazing at Himself—to see Him, too, studying His own image, does He also want to memorize His face? But also, certain studio shots held a unique charge. Him in an odd and of-the-time tuxedo jumpsuit with an open back, skinny from speed, being a ham for the camera, posing with a hat like His own breed of chanteuse, pulling the spandex tux down His shoulders and exposing a nipple, neck arched, Him clad in clear vinyl, hands posed around His face in wonder like it’s a newly found and foreign object. Was it an imitation of everyone else’s obsession with His image or a true wonder at it? And would there be shame in finding wonder or amazement or fascination with your own image? Could you just embrace it as a sort of vanity, a narcissism, at least on the outside so it was somehow less vulnerable, while on the inside He too is also questioning like everyone else: How do I look like this and do I really look like this and what, again, do I look like? What is it to have an appearance, to exist in a body whose exterior can only be so controlled and so much of your life is dictated or steered by this appearance, and what do I look like now? And now? And now? The same? And now?

BODY WANT

Want my muscles closer to the surface like His, want to live closer to the edge of my skin. Want my throat to somehow be throatier, like skin stretched around an apple core. Want the narrower hips extending upward into broader shoulders that look capable of swimming a channel or at least a series of backyard pools. Want the flank that sort of sucks in grotesquely just before the cushiony cheek, want the little sucked in triangle on the outside of the knee at the thigh, showing the tendon or whatever, taut. Want the boniness of hands and feet, a body that doesn’t feel designed to grow another body, that doesn’t need that softness. But don’t want the outside softness hanging between legs, seems like it would get in the way, always having it in front of you, no wonder it’s called a dog, prefer to have it tidy and held within the body itself. Want everything else about a body that can pass for androgynous in a patriarchal culture, i.e. man-aligned body, with, at the most, a confusing face. Just for a neater appearance. A woman body has so much extra stuff (we think of it in this term rather than thinking a man body has less than, a problem) and I am sorry, I don’t hate the woman body, I just want less, more utilitarian, closer to not having a body at all and therefore less to worry about. Closer to just a thinking-feeling machine and less a being-machine. I don’t know, doc, I just feel it would be better for my mental health, can you take away this body? 

STONED IN MICK’S BASEMENT

You can’t pay too much attention to your idol’s life, especially after they’re dead and all you’re left with is research to pore over. You read all the interviews and biographies and before you know it you suck all the air right out of their life. There’s a danger in sucking. Leaves no room for who they were the rest of the time. I mean, picture your idol:

•    asleep
•    reaching into the refrigerator for milk
•    buying socks and underwear in a department store
•    sick on the toilet
•    cleaning a hard to reach corner with a sponge
•    flossing after granola
•    choosing a breakfast cereal
•    the small keys-wallet-phone routine before leaving

All of the private life gets sucked out or reduced and if it’s reduced it’s still in front of a camera, so who knows if it’s true. You read the biography and it’s all doing doing doing, event to event, there’s no quiet, no thinking, no time. The things that make so much of a person, they get left out because they can’t be captured and people can’t be bothered to try to make them sound interesting, those little quiet parts. But they’re the best parts, Mick.

And they get sucked out.

It’s better to just do your own work and imagine, to project on your idol, especially after they’re dead, so you can’t be as wrong. That way you can just sort of arrange it how you want to, make them be more the person you want to be and the person you are, simultaneously, without anyone else’s projections getting in the way. You can leave out the parts that don’t suit you, like, if you don’t find your idol attractive in the ‘80s so much as the 70’s, you can just stay put in the ‘70s—the two of you can just stay there, together, happy.

Flopping

He wears sunglasses so frequently He looks naked without them, stripped face bared in photographs exposing—what? An intake of eye contact, a meeting acknowledged, an omission, a vulnerability. Of course, in the earlier years, He didn’t wear them nearly so much, heart on His sleeve not yet scabbed over. Okay to let a little more softness be read on the face rather than just discovered in the lyrics. Without sunglasses His face gestures like hands.

In the photos of Him performing without sunglasses, the connection between eyes and mouth, caught still and silenced, completely unknown what sound was coming out, if the eyes are half closed out of feeling or just downers.

Online somewhere is grainy amber tinted footage of Him in concert in Paris, and Germ can’t bring themself to watch it—fear of secondhand embarrassment, or worse, just having expectations too high. More than just “the album sounds better.” A want to see Him feel. To spill some blood on the stage and not for the gimmick.

There were other stars from His era who spilled all sorts of bodily goods on a stage, swinging to shock the back row. This was a space where Germ’s imagination fought reality, trying to maintain the ideal constructed of His images picked for their specific beauty and interest or curiosity, and tempted to witness Him in action, the actuality of what He did and how He moved and sounded. An interview was one thing—Him stone faced and barely being bothered to move His mouth while cutting down the journalist—but a performance was another creature, a mixing of posture and letting loose the hounds within, making oneself a display, a channel for the audience, the center of everything. The place where Germ imagines Him to be feeling His most Ball of Light feeling, and what if He’s just a very human mess? Not one to revel in the uncontrollable mess of another.

Similarly, but in the opposite direction, Germ abstains from reading His published poetry. Fixed on a page and written without music to weave between the words, Germ feels it lacks blood to spill on the page stage; a highly controlled mess, a poetry that lacks—from what bits Germ has allowed themself to read, at least—whatever it is that makes Him croon or hold a note or raise it up.

Perhaps, Germ thinks, it’s related to anatomy. His mouth, in that lower half, always exposed part of His face, a tool of expressing in multiple senses—aural, visual, even, in some regards, touch-wise. His mouth a thing that holds, withholds, allows, exudes, reveals (see: candid photos of the mouth kissing another mouth; the mouth shockingly wide open and smiling between two friends at a party [such naked joy]; and another moment of the lower lip sucked under His overbite, face tilting downward and eyes looking up in a moment of thought that, were the brow pinched a degree or two further, would read as “guilty”)—His mouth the gatekeeper for the voice, the crux of so much.

His hands, on the other hand, the tools that put the poetry on paper, are clumsy looking and indelicate, the fingers thick and on the short side, fingertips blunted from years of playing guitar; sometimes Germ imagines them reaching inside but this image is quickly pushed aside by picturing the mouth. The hands were sometimes brought to expression by the wrists, in gestures that perhaps revealed His certain queerness, the flicking or flopping at the joint, a slack hand flapping in emphasis or ashing a cigarette, the gesture momentarily masking the hand’s meatiness. But altogether the hand lacked a refinement and so Germ thought that transferred into His poetry, even though the poems and the lyrics carried the same grittiness. It wasn’t the same without the gesture of the voice.