These Rooms

‘These rooms,’ they said.

These rooms, I say, the ones I’ve spent the last week in.

Those rooms were what they were, they were sober places and it’s what spirited them.

These rooms now across the country are different and exactly the same.

It’s the spirit still.

In 1999, freshly and painfully sober, those rooms were on fucking fire. The energy and the loss and the desperation, it was mostly the spinning desperation. We were mostly sober, everyone, for the first time and the stories and the tears and the stories and the reveals and the crying and the whining, not in a bad way, it needed to get out. People died and people cheated and stole things and weren’t to be trusted but suddenly were and that didn’t sit well, the burden of being trusted was way too much to handle, we overflowed with pain and the pain, it was vocalized, It was so loud, we heard it amongst ourselves. Our skin was cracking and breaking with the need to be felt. Being heard. The actual volume of the voices, the way in which the voices carried up to the ceiling, so loud, the the walls and even beyond so that if you were late to a meeting and came upon it you’d hear it as you got close to the door, the sheer pitch of humanity struggling and screaming as a clan.

‘These rooms.’

So many times we’d repeat that phrase. 'The voices in these rooms,’ or ‘you in these rooms for the first time,’ or ‘the honesty you feel in these rooms.’ These rooms. Those rooms.

The folding chairs, the collapsing tables with store bought cookies, the big thermal’d vats of coffee or hot water, the trash can at the side of that with that overlapping trash bag, the coffee stirrers fresh and used, styrofoam, all of it disposable and ugly and so revered, a huddle around it until things started. The walls and the things on them. Those walls, rec-rooms generally, multi purposed in so many ways, kids were in them earlier, rolling around or playing basketball, after that, women doing yoga, and that dichotomy, the freshness and innocence of youth and learners mere hours before and now us, speaking of pain, the torture, the want and the need and the recovery. The recovery, the pain of all of it, the pain is the spirit, and the spirit bleeds. The air and the aura and the blood of all of us, it bled into the room and the room absorbed it. These rooms. Those rooms, they were of us but they were of our stories, they held them and they breathed them like we breathed them. The walls took us in, the ceilings soaked us up and that was those rooms. They became cathedrals and keepsakes of our pain.

I think about theaters in Times Square. Physical spaces all of them and the history of those rooms. The emoting, there can be no denying. What it takes to make people believe, the conviction, so many hearts on so many sleeves on so many stages, it is a potion of passion, so potent, so concentrated, so powerful. The actors, bless their profundity, bless their craft, bless their work, it bleeds off those stages and the audience absorbs in return but think on it please. Consider. It’s absolutely naive to assume that energy stops there. Or to assume that energy as it plunders from the stage would dissipate. It doesn’t. It stays and it’s thick and it’s physical like the actual chairs.

Those rooms.

I’ve been in homes where people have died. Those rooms are dank and stuck and committed to the death they’ve held. You’ve felt it, have you? ‘Someone died here,’ it’s said, I’ve said it. ‘I can feel it.’ We all feel it. Intuition is cheap, not cheap so much, but rampant is what I mean to say. it’s a sense we all hold, don’t say you don’t. You can smell it, can you? You can feel it, can you? I can.

I bought drugs in a room on the second floor of a hotel looking building in Sydney in the centre of town, I’d been sick and there was an adjoining parlor where we were allowed to shoot up in. That room. There were cushions on the floor and a couch that was two colors, half of it dark navy and half a stained yellow. The death in that room was outstanding. The room was loud with death, screaming with it, hurting my ears it was so loud, literally I put my hands to my ears to make it stop and looked around incredulously and asked with no words, ‘Are you hearing this?’ And a junkie skater boy too young to be in that room, looking for a vein on a cushion by the door, he’d flopped down immediately near the door to make himself better, we made eye contact, I saw his eyes behind his bangs and he looked into mine. Nothing needed to be said, he heard it too. In the physical space of death and disparity.

Think of the hospitals and the haunt of those. Can you even? Think of actual churches, no don’t, I don’t trust that haunt but the all of them is most definitely in the walls.

The rooms of punk rock, don’t get me started. Where we are as a youth, as a celebration, as a rebel in our lives at the pinnacle of what matters, politically, protesting, being together and the sheer volume of the music as it comes off the stage, the pits, the shine of those shows, the drunk dumbness of becoming who we. become and the strength of that.

These rooms I’ve been in this past week, though. They are literally screaming. It’s a passion of a people who need more. I’m talking of the bookstores I’ve been visiting. That’s been the reward. Getting to those rooms and addressing us as a grieving nation. We are all in grief, all of us. I am, the people in the chairs are, the moderators are, we are all crying on the inside. Some of us show it and most of us don’t. We’ve been taught and coached to be stoic but the women are honest. The artists also are more giving in their reveals. The men more precious with their conceals, the gays more generous also. It’s best when we’re able to share amongst ourselves what we’re going through but god damn it’s hard. We all are going through it. In that way the rooms, the book stores have become havens. They’ve been well attended and I’ve tried to time my arrival to the tee. Mostly it’s been that way, and it’s perfect when it happens this way. I get there and the seats are filled and I cheer and people cheer back and it starts. That’s the beginning of the share and the bleed of spirit. The ease with which we aim for release and evoke. So much pain. Every day is something new, and not just the politics and the ICE and the fire and the struggle of making it work but the constant belittlement of our standards, the ridicule of who we are, the sweeping away of democracy and care and purpose of ourselves, it physically hurts. That pain in these rooms is apparent.

I show up and boom, it starts, not to herald myself as anything more than a man who’s been through hell and is sharing it. And ok I wrote a book about it. It’s not so phenomenal, that, but as a pinnacle or a weather vane of what’s been and what’s now and what’s ahead, a person in a chair in front of others can be that. A person with a microphone. I’m owning it and I’m leading with it. I’m so grateful for these rooms. They’ve been overwhelmingly resonant and institutes of strength in this. The store in Baltimore. Atomic Books. I was a half hour late and so stressed out, the train just stopped on my way there. Stopped on the tracks and didn’t move for so long. I hate to be late, I’m that person, I can’t stand it and it was eating me, and then, finally, after 30 minutes the train went forward.

It was the day of the nation wide blackout in terms of commerce and to comply with that I paid for and made a gift of my books to all the sweet people at Atomic. It was a powerful and strong crowd which at first I didn’t see. I got to the store with my suitcase and my purse and the big front window of the store was well lit and I could see into the store and it was empty. I faltered and said out loud, ‘is this it?’ After all that, the announcement of my book giveaway, the train, my sweat and getting there…. and then the woman at the door as I opened it and walked in said, ‘they’re all in the back,’ and oh wow. They were all in the back and I couldn’t help but scream when I saw them, it was a room full of people in pain but people on the eve of a powerful day, all huddled and wrapped up, it was absolutely freezing out, scarves and coats and gloves and fogged glasses, they screamed back, we all whooped and put our hands in the air. It was such victory on our part. Good on us. We were all in that room. Together in that room with our feelings and our need to be heard. Kenn made the announcement that I’d be buying them all the books, they kind of knew this already, but he followed that up with the promise to buy all their drinks at the bar in the back of the store. This was glory, this was resurrection, this was church, this was sanctity. The talk, Rahne Alexander, who spoke with me, her volume and spirit, the return of the audience, the Q&A, what we shared that night, what we spoke of, what we promised, what we lived, indefinable, soaking into the space and making the room more of what it was.

All of the rooms have been that, they’ve soaked up the passion of us as we get through this. And not to toot my own horn but fuckin TOOT TOOT. It is what it is, yes, I’m a conduit, a mere conduit but ok, sometimes that’s all it takes. In this volatile fragile world, we only maybe need a person in a chair with a microphone to stir that on. This time around it happens to be me.

I’m on break, back in NYC for four days. I finished in Cambridge. The history of that room spoke. A man I’d seen before, big and tattooed, spoke of being an altar boy and wanting sex. Another man, a writer, spoke of living in the margins. I talked about that time that we shared our stage with Pussy Riot, how that decision was hard because our crew was certain they’d not be allowed back in Russia if we let it happen, the promoter let us know we as a band would certainly not be allowed back into the country. And we did it. That conviction, that promise to the world, that belief in what was right. That might have been the last thing we spoke of in that room in Cambridge. That truth, that passion was soaked into the walls, I felt and I believe we all did. That room, an inevitable result of us, who we were and are two nights ago, that doesn’t go away.

On my knees and bowing and grateful to Atomic Books in Baltimore, Politics & Prose in DC, Moore Books in Havertown, Odyssey Books in South Hadley and Porter Square Books in Cambridge. Those rooms, they opened themselves to us.

Sunday I start again. In Providence with sweet Amra, a special union itself. Then Chicago, then Portland, then Seattle, then Atlanta, then Nashville, then Birmingham. Please, do us all a favor and show up and we can grieve and heal and pray together in the way that we do. Like minded smart people who read and who emote and who feel things the way we do. It’s passionate and it’s political. We are all one and I am so grateful. The world, even America, is a precious space and we are all one.

Love you,

Roddy