Friday, 5/30/97 Falling up CHANGE: Hard to look beyond routine
life, yet hope for the future perseveres
"From the bottom, it (life) looks like a steep incline From the
top, another downhill slope of mine But I know, the equilibrium’s
there." – Faith No More When I was a seventh grader, I remember one
particular occasion walking up a hill to the bus stop on a chilly
morning. I can remember the taste of the dew hovering about me,
covering the empty street with a gaudy grey. I heard the red beast
before I saw it. It was due for an appointment with the scrap yard,
and its gears made no qualms about verbalizing its pain. The
automobile turned onto the street I occupied, and it parted the
grey with a paint job from hell. Above the sound of the car’s din I
heard something else. In the cavity of the front right wheel I saw
the body of a red and white cat, who had the misfortune of getting
his head wedged in the beast’s maw. The thing was still alive too.
His body was pounded to the ground with each rotation of the wheel,
and his limbs flashed about in all directions as it tried to
dislodge itself. To no avail. He was screeching like a kamikaze
banshee, as if he were embroiled in a back alley cat fight. And the
car was accelerating. Soon they were out of sight, over the hill;
then the sounds of their dueling pain faded away as well. It was
not until later in my life that the surreal image coalesced into
reality, and I realized that the cat was an acquaintance of mine,
falling. Warren Craig and I seemed to accidentally run into each
other on a quarterly basis. He revealed his true "identity" to me
in a conversation we had some time early 1996. I was coming out of
lab and he was coming from an office hour in the Molecular Biology
Institute. We walked out onto one of the top floor balconies
overlooking the court of sciences where we could see the backpacks
atop busybodies scurrying about the court. Warren lit up.
Typically, I opened the conversation with our common passion,
music. But my raving was greeted with a despondent nod. "I can’t
play guitar anymore," he said solemnly. I asked him what was up,
and our conversation shifted to a minor key. I asked him if he was
still with Megan, remembering from the quarter before, the last
time we spoke, that he had felt the relationship was in jeopardy.
At the time, my first response was to tell him, straight up, to
either break up, or, at the very least, back off from the
relationship a little. I always thought Warren had a knack for
sticking his head into imagination’s crevices to feed his creative
mind, he would dive into sadness or hopelessness for extended
periods of time to experience the rapture of overcoming them. But
who was I to judge him or tell him how to live his life, my
instincts were hardly trustworthy. They were still together, he
told me. He told me what had happened with that angel-girl and how
ever since then he couldn’t bear to hear himself play music
anymore. He was sick of being stuck in what he called a "routine."
"Lectures, exams, lab work … what is all this shit for?" he asked
angrily, "after we graduate, what then? More exams, more work to do
in grad school, med school, law school, at a job or whatever, more
weeks, more months, more years gone by that are not our own. "When
I graduate in a few months, what then? I’ll just be another in a
crowd of people, handed a piece of paper rewarding me for carrying
a book-crammed bag for four years, shown the door, rolled out on
the conveyor belt from this mass-production institution that is
UCLA. I’ll be like those people down there when seen from afar, a
nondescript face," surveying the scurrying backpacks. "What then? A
life that is not my own." He paused momentarily, his brow furling
as he took a drag from the cigarette. Then his facial expression
relaxed somewhat as he continued to look over the court and began
speaking again. "They say when you die in your dreams, you’ve died
in your sleep. The other night I dreamt I was sitting at a
stoplight behind the wheel of some red pickup. My elbow was hanging
out the open window. A car pulls up beside me, on my left, and
inside are two men. I turn to look at them. The passenger
recognizes me, pulls out a gun, and shoots me in the head. A warm
numbing sensation diffuses through my body and the blood seeps over
my eyes and I go blind." He took another drag on his cigarette and
had no intention of saying more. His facial expression was
disturbingly calm. Silence. His long black hair was thrown about by
the wind, obstructing the sun from my view. The cig hung from his
mouth as he leaned over the ledge. A sudden fear gripped me, an
image on board the random-thought express passing through, as he
leaned further over the edge. I saw him at the foot of some
30-story building with his concrete-lover blood making pretty
brush-like dash marks where the bodies intersected. I felt mortal
and powerless, and my mind was sent racing to find a reason for his
and my being. Given the melancholic tone that I’ve infused my
previous columns with, one might think me to be the least likely of
advocates of the "life is grand" party, but there I was, rambling
incoherently to him about the other night … The other night, last
Wednesday, when I was walking up Strathmore to campus, the full
moon was rising, elegant, unwavering, lyrical. Elegant as Hope with
her silly, beautiful smile, silly because it somehow makes
everything all right. Unwavering, like friendships of my formative
years. My companions are still with me, if not in the same room, in
the same spirit. And if we are headed in different directions, so
be it. Lyrical, like the music that once emanated from the guitar
amplifier, that is silent now but will return, without question.
Yes, sometimes we may get our heads stuck in the gears, stuck in
the wheel of a time machine that does not discriminate, mercilessly
destroying the places we once knew, picking off the people we once
were in random drive-bys. Though we may adamantly insist that life
is cruel, in the spaces between seconds, in between rounds of back
alley street fights, over the hill where the sounds of dueling pain
faded, something wonderful may just slip through the cracks, and it
is our station to honor them and commit them to memory. On cue, the
wind snapped and died down. The sky began to darken, scurrying
backpacks no longer saturating the court below. The world fell
still to observe the sun as it lowered itself gently beneath the
clouds, under its blanket horizon. Warren righted himself, turning
to watch also. Colors – gold, orange, red – streaked out across the
sky, reflecting off the dirty Boelter Hall windows. Darker and
darker the colors grew until the sky became a cigar violet. Warren
was the first to move, after we had stood immobile up on that
balcony for several minutes. He turned, and an uncharacteristically
warm half-smile cracked across his face. He murmured, "I think
things will be all right." We left the precipice to meet again on
another day. Dave Yu Yu is a fourth-year microbiology student.