Chapter 31: Siouxsie and the Banshees

February 9, 1989, Albany, New York

I'd left Chicago very early on Thursday morning, disappointing Jacquelyn, as I wasn't able to run with her. The thirteen-hour drive meant that I needed to leave at 4:00am to arrive in Albany around 6:00pm. Indiana turned into Ohio, which turned into Pennsylvania, and then New York. As the miles disappeared behind me, I thought about how I'd talk to Jessica about everything that happened, about the things I'd discovered, and how we might move forward.

I checked my map for the fourth time in five minutes, navigating through the Albany suburbs, trying to find the bed-and-breakfast that Barney had booked for me. I finally found the right street, and then the large Victorian house that bore the correct address. I parked in the street, grabbed my bag, and went up to the front door and rang the bell.

"Good evening," a woman that looked to be in her mid-40s said when she opened the door.

"Steve Adams," I said. "I have a room booked for the night."

"Yes, of course. Come in! I'm Julie. My husband Larry and I are your hosts."

I walked into the house as she led me up a wide, sweeping staircase, and I saw several people sitting in a large room with a fireplace. She led me to a room at the end of the hall and I dropped my bag on the bed.

"Shared bathroom is the door at the end of the hall," she said, pointing. "Breakfast will be available between 6:30am and 8:30am. You're a bit late for dinner, but the agent who booked you let us know you might be late. Abbie will get you something to eat if you go downstairs."

"Thanks very much," I said.

I'd been a bit surprised when Barney had told me that this 'bed-and-breakfast' also served dinner, but he'd explained they were experimenting with ways to draw more guests. As for breakfast, I was going to get up and be ready to eat at 6:30am because I had a five-hour drive to Lewiston and couldn't get Jessica before 1:00pm. I wanted to get there right at 1:00pm so that she and I could get on the road to Syracuse, where we'd stay in a bed-and-breakfast overnight before heading back to Chicago. I'd cleared the plan with Jessica, just to make sure she'd be OK with an eight or nine-hour drive.

I used the bathroom and went down to the dining room. A girl came into the room and I couldn't help but stare. Her face was pale, seemingly devoid of color. She was dressed all in black, had long black hair, black lipstick, black eyeliner and eyeshadow, two black bracelets, and a black choker. Even her fingernails were painted black. Her black skirt nearly touched the floor, and her blouse had sleeves that came to her wrists. My rough guess was that she was seventeen or eighteen.

"Hi," she said. "I'm Abbie. We have fried chicken, cornbread, buttered corn, and salad."

"Sounds good," I said. "I'm Steve. Thanks."

"You can put your eyes back in your head," she snipped and went through some doors to what I thought was most likely a kitchen.

About five minutes later, she brought a plate of food from the kitchen and set it before me.

"Drink?" she asked.

"7-Up or Sprite, please. And I'm sorry."

"Whatever," she said dismissively.

She disappeared and returned with a 7-Up. She set it before me on the table.

"Honestly, I am sorry," I said. "I didn't mean to stare. It's just that I haven't seen your unique style before."

"How the hell can you be in your mid-twenties and not know what 'goth' is?" she asked, sitting down at the table.

"Call me sheltered, I guess. Upper-middle-class kid from the Cincinnati suburbs who went to an ultra-conservative university and lives in an upper-class section of Chicago. I guess I don't get out much!"

"I guess not."

"I'll listen if you want to tell me. Is it just the way you dress? Or is there more to it? I'm truly curious."

"Curious about why I dress this way, or curious if you can get into my panties?" she asked tersely.

"That thought never crossed my mind!" I protested.

"I'm not sure if I should be offended or relieved. Anyway, it's more than just how I dress. Have you ever heard of the British group Siouxsie and the Banshees?"

I shook my head as I took a bite of cornbread.

"REO Speedwagon, Chicago, and Journey, I bet," she said with a laugh.

I nodded, "And ABBA. Especially ABBA."

"Ugh!" she grunted, with an expression of disgust. "Siouxsie and the Banshees play really cool experimental music. I got turned on to them by this kid from London who went to our school. I was a Freshman, and he was a Senior, so it was like four years ago. He dressed sort of like I do now and everyone thought he was weird. I thought he was cool, so I got to talking to him. He'd been into punk rock when he was in whatever they call elementary school over in England, but got into this group, Siouxsie and the Banshees, around 1980, I guess."

"So this band is why you dress that way?"

"It kind of all goes together. Have you read Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice?"

"No," I said.

"There are other bands, like The Cure, and other writers, but all of it focuses on dark stuff. There's a lot about death and dying, but also romance. The books kind of scare you, but it's a kind of 'cool scary'. Maybe a rich kid from Chicago knows Edgar Allan Poe? Or Dracula, by Bram Stoker? Or maybe you saw Beetlejuice?"

I chuckled, "Poe, yes, of course. And I know the Dracula legend, though I haven't read that book. And I didn't see the movie."

"If you've read Poe, then you know he wrote really macabre stuff. Did you know he married his thirteen-year-old cousin when he was twenty-six and she died when she was twenty-four after being sick for a few years? That kind of sent him into depression, I guess, and he wrote about stuff like death and dying."

"I see a recurring theme here. It sounds kind of morbid."

"The world is morbid! Everything dies or decays. The only end is death."

I nodded and sighed, "I've concluded that myself. So what's with the clothes?"

"They're kind of dark, Victorian-era stuff, like the books I read. In England, there's a huge subculture which dresses like this. It matches the themes of the books, movies, and music."

"I'm guessing people at your school think you're the weird one now?"

She nodded, "I get called a freak and stuff like that, but I just hang out with other people like me. Most of them are older, though, you know, out of High School."

"You're a Senior?" I asked, taking a few more bites of my food.

"Yeah. I have one friend in school who's into goth, but her parents stop her from dressing like I do at school. She has to sneak when we go out."

"I suspect there aren't a lot of people like you around here, are there?"

She shook her head, "No. Mostly, we sneak down to New York and go to clubs to see bands. They never card, so it's no problem for us to get in."

"What's your parents' take on all this?" I asked.

"We fought about it at first, but then they let it go when they decided I wasn't going to kill myself or do drugs. They don't mind if I drink and smoke."

"How did you decide that all there is in the world is death and decay?"

"Just look around! Have you known anyone who died?"

"I have. When I was fifteen, my girlfriend died. My mentor, an older guy I was really close to, died about three-and-half-years ago. Then about a year-and-a-half ago, a very, very close friend died."

"So you really understand, then? There is no god. There isn't anything. Just death."

I put down my fork and took a drink of my 7-Up.

"It's not that simple," I said. "It appears to me that you've accepted it, but I'm fighting it. Opposite responses. I don't know if there is one god, or many gods, or no gods. I'm searching for answers, and I think there are some out there."

"You aren't a Christian?"

"I don't know what I am. I've studied Eastern philosophy and Eastern religions, and the thing I'm most attracted to is Russian Orthodox Christianity. But more from a worldview than as a 'believer'. I take it you're an atheist?"

"What kind of god would create this world? And if he did, would he really be a god you would worship?"

"I suppose it all depends on your viewpoint. I don't see everything as negative and bad. There is good in the world and that's what I look for."

"You're going to be disappointed."

"Maybe," I said. "But I'm not ready to give up."

"I haven't given up," Abbie protested. "I've accepted reality and that makes me free to live the way I want and to do what I want and not worry about what the rest of the world thinks. Or about some cosmic importance to my actions."

I smiled, "I think the same way, though I do think about the importance of what I do or don't do. It's interesting. We've reached opposite conclusions but have more or less the same view of how to live our life."

"What do you do for work?" she asked.

"I run a small computer business in Chicago. My friends and I started it when we graduated from college. What are you going to do when you graduate?"

"Move to New York. Beyond that? I don't know yet. But I need to get out of Albany."

I had been trying to eat while we talked, but I hadn't made much progress. I decided to simply eat as quickly as possible, then finish the conversation. Abbie sat and watched and less than ten minutes later, I was done and she took the plates away. I finished my bottle of 7-Up and got up from the table just as she came out of the kitchen.

"Want to hear some of the music?" she asked.

"Sure."

"I'll get my boombox and a couple of CDs and bring them to your room. Guests aren't allowed on the third floor where my room is."

"What about your parents?" I asked.

"They won't care. We have an understanding from when they caught me in bed with that English guy when I was fourteen. Besides, I was only talking about music!"

"Me too, but parents can be difficult."

"Mine aren't. I guess yours were?"

"My mom, especially. Let's just say she'd think you needed to be locked in a mental ward."

Abbie sighed, "She and most of the other adults around. I'll be up in fifteen minutes. I need to clean up the kitchen. Did my mom tell you breakfast was at 6:30am?"

"She did. I'll see you upstairs."

I went up to my room and pulled out A Brief History of Time. I was reading through it a second time, trying to get my head completely around the concepts that Hawking presented. I sat down in a comfortable chair in the corner and started reading. About twenty minutes later, there was a knock at the door and I called out for Abbie to come in. She had her boombox and two CDs. She set it on the table next to the chair I was sitting in and plugged it in. She put in a CD and pressed play.

"This is Kaleidoscope, by Siouxsie and the Banshees. You can't see it from the cover art, but Siouxsie wears black lipstick and eyeliner."

She sat down on the edge of the bed near the chair.

"So guys dress the same?" I asked.

"Yes. This first song is called Happy House," she said as synthesizer music wafted from the speakers.

"Uhm, this is sarcastic, right?" I asked as I listened to the words.

"Obviously. The world isn't a happy place."

"I'm curious, then. What is it that motivates you to get out of bed every day? I mean, I've read Jean-Paul Sartre, and I kind of understand existentialism, but I don't buy it. My biggest argument with him is that I think essence comes before existence. I'm more or less Platonic in my thought. My reason for living is to discover myself and improve myself. What's yours?"

"I guess it's centered around the music. That's the core. I'd die without music that spoke to me."

"So, going to school? A job? A family?"

"That's all just part of existing in the world. All those things go away. Music is eternal."

"Pythagoras and his 'Music of the Spheres'," I said.

"What's that?" Abbie asked.

"He's the one who discovered that the pitch of a musical note had a mathematical relationship to the length of the string on the instrument, and that harmony is based on numerical ratios between notes. He proposed that the entire universe had its own resonant frequencies. He called it the Harmony of the Spheres and that the quality of our life here depended on those inaudible resonances. Plato later put astronomy and music together as, basically, mathematics for the eyes and ears, respectively."

"I never knew that," she said. "I suppose I need to make a trip to the library."

"It gets deeper, really, and I guess maybe I see where you're coming from. There was a Greek philosopher named Aristoxenus who said that music was used to purify our souls just like medicine was used to cure our body of illness."

"Yes! That's exactly it! What was his name again?"

"Aristoxenus. He was a pupil of Aristotle, but we don't know a lot about him. Almost all of his writing was lost, but you'll be happy to know that the only work of his that we do have is Elements of Harmony, a treatise on music. I don't know a lot about music, but he supposedly came up with the idea of diatonic and chromatic scales."

"If you listen to ABBA, I am SURE you don't know much about music!"

"This music you have on is REALLY different from what I listen to," I observed.

"It's not The Beatles or the Rolling Stones, either. You didn't mention them."

"They don't get much play on the station I listen to," I replied.

"Then you need to listen to something else. Buy yourself a copy of this album, or the other one I have here called A Kiss in the Dreamhouse. You can see some dark makeup on the album art, but they have on red lipstick. Some goths do that. I don't, obviously. If you like this second album, there may be hope for you yet, despite being a boring, white, middle-class kid."

"Boring? Really?"

"Sorry, you seem to be able to think, but I bet your life is boring. Work, family, exercise, repeat."

She had a point. Penny had been telling me THAT for YEARS!

"You may have a point. A very close friend of mine has been telling me for the past four years that I'm not any fun anymore."