Maintenance of Bad Company
She sat down in a floral chair my mom gave me when I moved out.
Smells sneaked in from the Thai restaurant below my second story apartment.
Across the street, a crack house cracked in the Portland afternoon.
She produced a cassette with legerdemain from the rear pocket of her jeans: Bad Company’s Greatest Hits.
Her top came off.
She wanted Bad Company playing loud.
She wanted to wear one of my shirts.
She said she wanted to drink whiskey from the bottle.
She said she wanted absolute control.
We repeated scenes like this, off and on, for 35 years.
Then, grievance needled inside her, festered.
We dissolved.
What is the best verb to describe what happens when you stop stuffing a Bad Company cassette in your back pocket?
Erode?
Sift?
Squander?
Drain?
Ossify?
Petrify?
Bury?
Sell?
Forget?
What is the best verb to describe avoiding the disappearance of that cassette?
Maintain as in maintenance.
Spirit, body, teeth, soul, roof, car, yard, caulk, lust, love, bridges, roads, shipyards.
The hardest thing to do in American life.
Look at all the substitutes for substantial maintenance:
Trips, gadgets, baubles, therapy, superstitions, recriminations, fads, fantasies, media, mendacity.
Did I just write the first poem in the recent history of American literature on the subject of maintenance?
There should be thousands.
Soul music has ten thousand songs about maintenance. They define the genre.
She’s still out there with that Bad Company cassette somewhere, ready for that back pocket again. I believe it.