21- Frampton Comes Alive

            I spent an afternoon in the city today, just walking around and looking at tall buildings, and I was getting a latte I could barely afford in a little coffee shop in the Village called Cafe con Leche, waiting for Hot Pink when I spotted Peter Frampton.  He was wearing a tight-fitting knit shirt and leather pants but gone was that hair he was famous for as a teen idol rocker.  Acres and acres of heavily styled curls now gave way to receding hairline and a high forehead, over a wrinkled, middle-aged face.

            He was handsome, I thought.  He looked like a lawyer or an agent.  He’d look like an adult.

            Frampton bought a mocha latte and signed an autograph or two.  When he finally sat down, he was sitting at the table next to mine, reading a copy of Spin.  I could have talked to him.  I didn’t.  I could have asked for an autograph. 

I didn’t.

Someone came by and sat down next to him, a friend.  They talked.  This isn’t what they said…but it’s close.

“Were you waiting long?” asked the friend.

Frampton said, “There is some great tail in this town, Bobby.  I mean classy fucking women, man.”

“Yeah,” said the friend.  “It’s a nice town.  How was your flight?

“Look at the ass on that girl over there.  Look at it.”

“Our meeting with the record company is at two.”  Frampton’s eyes were still firmly fixed upon a young posterior.  The friend held a pair of fingers up in Frampton’s face as a reminder.  “Two, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Dude, two o’clock.  You can’t be late.”

“Man,” Frampton said, with a loud sniffle.  “Back in the day I could have nailed any chick in this room.”

He had to be fifty by now, probably older, and there he was, stuck in 1974.

It made me an awful kind of sad. He here was Peter fucking Frampton, bragging about pussy. Stuck in a time-frame of thought, that realistically completely sucked. Just like his music. Stuck frozen in time. This guy, a bullshit teen idol, from a million years ago, couldn’t take his mind, off stray gash.

He kept bragging. I kept drinking my overpriced coffee. I kept thinking about how completely frozen in time this asshole was, staring at him. Until I was watching his mouth move, but there weren’t any words coming out. It was just repetitive facial motions. Over and over- stuck in a loop in time. Over and over, his mouth up and down; his jaw creasing the same way, over and over. It was Frampton’s frozen motion, like a fish out of water gasping for air, until it stopped nearly completely.

I saw Peter Frampton stuck in this loop. It looked like Frampton on pause on some shitty VHS recording where the image would jump and bump around the frame, but stagnated in resonance. The last of any motion struggling to propel, to, well, move to complete the full range.

I turned my gaze to the people on the street. And they were all stopped, too. Frozen in whatever motion was their last. Like shitty VHS on pause. Some, holding their last step from the ground, other’s talking. Drinking. Eating. Living on pause within the moment. The patrons; all stuck on pause. The sound in the room- warped and gone. Everything on pause.

Except me. I was in full range of motion. I was the only moving thing in the “frame”. I sipped my coffee, shook my head. Still, I was the only thing with any animated range of motion within the entire place. Everything on pause- except me. Everything shaky and bumping around the room, staccato’d, not completely still, but stuck in small jutting erratic still ness. As if everyone was a tuning fork struck to that near still vibration barely visible, but in a way still perpetuating.

I closed my eyes, opened them, blinked in a cartoonish way. Still- everything on pause.

I closed my eyes again, flexed my jaw to the point where the pressure of the up and down of my mandible was audible within my ears- a stressed flex. Still- everything on pause when I opened my eyes.

One more time I closed my eyes.

I kept them shut for some time. I held my coffee, felt the heat on the palm of my hand. I took inventory of myself. I felt my torso with my coffee-less hand. I sent my thoughts to the tips of my extremities. Felt my heart beating and squeezed my eyes tight until the black behind my eyelids was sprinkled with those little spritely dots and lines of stressful close-ed-ness. I inhaled through my nose one giant breath. And gregariously, eyes still closed, exhaled that breath. And I consciously made the effort to keep my eyes closed to the beat of a three count.

1

2

3

Eyes opened.

And the world; this VHS on pause world, filled with jutting staccato’d everything. (And Peter Frampton) had taken on a hue, a filter, as if I was looking out from the inside of a bottle of 7-Up. Green colored transparency, with bubbles floating from the bottom to the top, in front of my eyes, through my longitudinal line of sight, disappearing at the top of my field of vision.

And the sound of nothing except the stress of the pressure of my jaw muscles, audible within my head as the room bent fish-eye lens style. Green still. Bubbling still. A view of a VHS world on pause though an emerald something.

Oh my God. I’m having a fucking stroke. I thought quickly. This is what it feels like.

But that wasn’t it. I just knew it wasn’t. It wasn’t a stroke. It wasn’t the drugs I may or may not have been on, or had leftover in my system. I wasn’t tripping another trip off anything that may or may not have been stored up in my spinal fluid. I was literally existing like this. This was real, and it was happening.

And through the sound of my stressed muscular jaw, within it actually, in a tiny spot in the crook of that sound. Were the words, the phrases:

You are the gateway.

We need to know how you did it.

Who gave you this information?

And then instant extraction from the moment laced by those phrases and back to a world where time was normal and motion was clean and nothing was anything other than the color it needed to be and my expensive coffee was cold, and I was pissed and holy shit that was a rush. And I don’t know shit about what I just heard though the sound in my head.

I sat down and Frampton and his business partner were leaving, Pink arrived, wearing a long, gray fur coat and an impossibly short, pink skirt.  She sat down across from me, smoking a Newport, even though this was a no smoking establishment, and crossed her legs.  Her lipstick was all over her face and her eye-shadow was runny.  “Get me a decaf mocha-latte right now or I’m going to fucking scream,” she called out to no one in particular.

And I sat in focused silence.

            She, ashed her cigarette under the table, and looked at me and said, “Laird, baby, I think I just saw Peter Frampton.”

            “You did,” I said, “I could tell you about what I just saw. But I’m still digesting it.”

            Pink just shook her head in that huh? kind of way and skipped over what I was saying completely.  “Baby, there is no way he should be wearing those leather pants unless he’s willing to put more work into tread climbing. You know what I’m saying?”

           I said I did. And I felt focus nearing capacity within myself.

            She let out a long sigh.  “I guess I’d fuck him anyway.  Just for the sport of it.”

            “In case of emergency,” I said to her.

            “What?”

            “Nothing,” I said.  “I didn’t say anything.”