Read Radio Belly for Free Online

the man he was lying in a puddle of her pee. But before she had a chance, while she was still figuring out if it was more polite to say urine, he closed his eyes and began his confession. “Listen” he said, “there’s just a few things I gotta get off my chest...” He told her he’d been juicing too much, that he was on a bummer, that things were getting heavy and he kept falling into the space between the notes. Then he told her about the coma, about walking through the valley of the shadow of death and having to choose, having to find one reason. When she finally realized who she was talking to, she said the words just came to her, she didn’t know from where. Jerry and Laureen whispered back and forth to each other, two voices in the dark, for at least three songs. Then, near the end, something started to happen, the two of them saying the same things at the same time, as though their minds were one. It was so powerful, so tangible, neither one of them could let go of the feeling. “Meet me at the next show,” he said before crawling away to play the last song. And they did. They met at the next show and the one after that and every other show for the rest of the tour.
    â€œWhat’d you say to him? What’d he say back? Was it love? Was it magic? Was it wonderful?” I asked that first night I heard the story, and every night afterwards.
    But whatever passed between Jerry and Laureen stayed between them. All I would ever know was the trivia: that there were ten years of letters living in shoeboxes in my closet; that, in a silent nod to what had happened under the stage that summer, the band’s next album was called “In the Dark.”
    IS IT SO HARD to believe two people can become one, that a person can stop existing, just plug into someone else for a while? The Dead made a career of it, picking up cues from each other across space, changing tempo and keys, jamming seamlessly from one song to another. When they first started playing together, the two drummers used to sit shoulder to shoulder during practice. Like a two-headed monster with Shiva limbs waving, they learned to bang out rhythms with just a drumstick each, until one man’s left and another man’s right achieved total syncopation.
    Most people can’t imagine a love like this. Just like most people can’t imagine why so many reasonable people hopped on buses and criss-crossed this country in the wake of a rock band, or the way, at a really good show, energy would flow back and forth, or that the jam came from the people as much as the band, that something was always shared the way it can only be shared in a family. But trivia can’t teach you about a thing like that. It has to go through you.
    Another thing trivia won’t tell you: suicide isn’t always announced with a siren wail or the crunch-pop of pills over linoleum. It can come on slow, over a year or a lifetime. It can wear the guise of food or drink, drugs or love. And you can smell it—sickly sweet like compost or coconuts gone bad—long before you recognize it.
    Before she went, Laureen pulled me close and whispered last instructions: she wanted to be devoured; she wanted the letters made available to the family; she wanted to be worshipped—her life put to good use. She opened her eyes, said please and I love you and then she tried to say something else, something starting with J, and it may have been Jenson or Jet or even Jerry, but we’ll never know because she died with that sound barely formed on her lips. She quivered then, and shrank in my arms, her skin hanging low and loose off her body like a deflated balloon. For a moment I thought I could see the shape of the old Laureen sinking under all that flesh, and then, because I was nothing, just a ghost of a man, I was swept down and into that black hole of hers. Again a new language; I whimpered and kissed her skin while she groaned and breathed on