That Which Holds Us, For Which We Have No Name
The years. I write as a friend from many, many years ago. I’ll probably ramble. Some sort of weird premonition tonight got me listening to some THE THE tunes—like the band, THE THE—from, like, 1983, Uncertain Smile, maybe, from years ago when I lived up near Greenbelt, Maryland, and I sort of dropped down the rabbit hole as can happen in the Age Of Google and I found myself wondering what happened to a few people from years and years passed; a lifetime ago, really. I have no idea why I thought of the name Brandi Burdette—I mean I’m not superstitious or spiritual much, but I suppose a personality like hers never leaves you alone, like, ever, for your whole life—though I couldn’t quite remember how she spelled it—with the name and personality of Melanie always close by, which helped clue me in to this Memorial. It seems that the friendship continued. That and pictures of the ski-slope nose from the mid-eighties. She looks like she got more beautiful with age. And I thought: THE Brandi Burdette? The one and only? I have no idea why I thought of her this evening, such a short few weeks after her death. Why now? Why remember? I suppose we are all of us connected.
So but then in the end I never spoke to Brandi as an adult. Should I even be writing? Never spoke to her again, really, except maybe down a scratchy phone line, back when phones were attached to walls, or a whispered conversation late at night, after we made that mad dash across the United States, three kids breaking bad against the whole world, a mad dash across the country, in a van that didn’t technically belong to us, because her presence was somehow so magical, so hypnotic, that somehow those days you just had to get by. And a lifetime away, on the other side of age and wonder, kids and careers and the drifting away of all your superheroes, you somehow and for whatever reason get taken back to those stories. You hear the songs and remember the names. Maybe too late. Maybe at just the right time. Even if the story was short. Short, intense, full of that energy and idealism reserved for youth: where does one begin to write about such things that have no name in an otherwise long life, no place? What was it really? A brief semester of skipping school. Riding the train to Georgetown. Sitting on the narrow stairs. Being young. The exchange of common dreams. The Violent Femmes. Huddled under the Salvation Army blanket in the shivering cold or drifting into a gas station in Missouri with a dying battery and broken belt. Driving through the mountains in a snowstorm. Rolling down into Hollywood with one eye always looking over your shoulder because, I mean, Hollywood. Bullets like rain. Creating those pockets of color the likes of which you will never forget. The threads with which you will stitch the rest of your life together. And then always the places where we clear our heads of each other. Shake everything off, especially the meaningless. Move off and disappear into the mundane.
I don’t know. Those were the stitches of a life that I am even now, however, and so many years later, remembering so fondly. I was sorry to read of her death. I can only piece her life since then together from the photos and stories, but she appears to have had a rich one. I can only hope a good one.
As for me, I have never forgotten the brief time we spent together. Never forgotten Brandi, or Melanie, or that mad dash across the states before any of us even knew how to drive, knew how to think or feel, with bullets flying around us like rain. Right? It was magical, in the way youth can always feel magical, and eternal, in the way stars drift always toward an elusive meridian, and of course life-changing and free, like Brandi herself, and the path she must have taken, and the pixie dust she was always leaving in her wake.