Category: Life

Avast, me hearties!

Did ye know it’s Talk Like a Pirate Day? Skuttle me skippers if it ain’t! Arrrgh…

I’ve been feeling funky, and not in a good way, since the Katrina disaster.

(Click here to play background music.)

It’s none of my business, really. We all have our disasters to cope with – hurricanes, typhoons, tornadoes, floods, earthquakes, suicide attacks, not to mention our personal tragedies. Most of the time we are simply aware that shit happens, and we grieve, we deal, we move on. That’s what I do.

But there are facets of this particular mess that linger and sting past the usual spoil date, and as I go through my daily motions I have this nagging heaviness that makes everything seem off, somehow. I am too scattered to make a lot of sense of my feelings. I don’t get paid to make sense. So here’s a list of thoughts:

• A beautiful, atmospheric, historic city has been so heavily damaged that the pain has shot through our entire national nervous system, jolting even the jaded Californian, the preoccupied New Yorker and the usually sanguine midwesterner. I have not wanted to say this in public, but for therapeutic reasons I think I have to: I believe that New Orleans can never be the same. Something will be rebuilt there, for political and economic reasons, and feisty residents as well as outsiders will give it a go, but it won’t be the city of my dreams, the one I never got to see in person.
• The administration that scared the shit out of everybody and then sold itself as the only possible protector of America in the event of another huge disaster seems to be exactly as unprepared for Katrina as it was for the attacks of September 11, 2001, even though this time they were warned days in advance. Four years later they still can’t read the signs, they still have no coordinated plan, rescue personnel are still talking on different radio frequencies (that is, they are not talking to each other), and the best they can muster is a lame duck figurehead with nothing to lose “taking responsibility.”
• Twenty-eight percent of the population of New Orleans was living below the poverty line, a line the right wing cannot lower fast enough to keep people above it. Yeah, they were mostly black, but black or white, they have had to leave. I’m a middle-class guy, and I figure I could hold out maybe three months in another city before I would have to restart my life. New Orleans won’t be ready for a year, which is about 51 weeks longer than those lower-income folks can afford to wait. They will make homes and lives wherever they happen to be, and they will never return. On so many levels, that will kill the spirit of the city.
• Forgive me for focusing on New Orleans. It’s just that the city is the icon, not the Gulf coast. I am aware that this tragedy extends for many miles along that coast, and that only compounds my depression.
• Are we all criminals? People were stealing televisions.
• Wherever you go in this country, for all of our self-satisfied posturing, the black people are the poor people. But don’t worry: Soon the whackjob Right will control all the branches of government, and they will begin to create a whole bunch of poor white people, too, a new world order in which 85% of us live in poverty, 14% are unthinkably rich and one percent are untouchable.
• And speaking of controlling the entire government, could John Roberts please answer one question about how he intends to act when he is the fucking Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court for life? Any question, instead of this mannered dance he is doing with the Judiciary Committee. Based on what he has told us so far, I wouldn’t hire him to flip burgers. And yet he is a lock to be put in charge of the Court until your childrens’ 20th high school reunion. He will have no boss, he will answer to no one, and he can’t be removed except by impeachment, and yeah, that’s going to happen. For those not paying attention, he seems to want to reverse abortion rights, the Endangered Species Act, protection against the government taking your property and giving it to a corporation. He thought it was funny when he worked for the Reagan Administartion to call undocumented aliens “illegal amigos.” If anyone doubts whose pocket he is in, consider this: He was in secret meetings with the White House this summer about being nominated to the Supreme Court at the same time he was sitting in judgment on a case that named George W. Bush as a defendant, and he failed to disclose this or recuse himself.
• All the politicians touched by Katrina are acting like, well, politicians. They are all taking full blame except for the things they can’t be blamed for, which turns out to be everything. So they can’t be blamed for anything. How dare they try to score points with something like this? Is there no end to their venality? Even the new FEMA guy, despite his decades of emergency management experience, has turned into a brown-nosing toady overnight, cuddling up to the President on his recent tour of the disaster.
• Hospital patients and old people in a nursing home died because they weren’t evacuated. Hey Doc: First, do no harm, remember?

I don’t know if this is all out of my system yet. I hope it is. I want to move on. Life is precious, and so damned short. If you clicked on the “play” button at the top of this (and if your computer is capable), you’ve been listening to Paul Simon’s “Take Me to the Mardi Gras:”

C’mon take me to the mardi gras
Where the people sing and play
Where the dancing is elite
And there’s music in the street
Both night and day

Hurry take me to the mardi gras
In the city of my dreams
You can legalize your lows
You can wear your summer clothes
In New Orleans

And I will lay my burden down
Rest my head upon that shore
And when I wear that starry crown
I won’t be wanting anymore

Take your burdens to the mardi gras
Let the music wash your soul
You can mingle in the street
You can jingle to the beat of the jelly roll

As always, my heart beats only for you, the things we have lost, and those we still seek.

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The past two weeks have been a sort of gray blur.

I’ve had a huge amount of work to do both at My Crummy Job and around the house, getting ready for the huge Labor Day bash. There have also been peripheral issues, a summer cold, emotional aches and pains and, of course, Hurricane Katrina.

The destruction of New Orleans is not a sharp pain for me. I have no relatives there, no roots. And although I’ve wanted to for years, I’ve never even been there. So, not a sharp pain. But the place is part of the soul of this country, the sweaty engine room of hot jazz and rock’n’roll, a mirage of dancing, laughing, singing and partying, a magical city where the laws of gravity seem not always to apply.

And when I see the mess that has become of that city, and I read and hear, day after day, of the chaos and suffering with no realistic end in sight, it just weighs me down. I can get through the days, of course, and so can the rest of us, but it feels to me as if the whole country has been harmed and saddened by this disaster. We can still laugh and sing, but everything is dampened a little by the specter of this tremendous loss. Maybe I am only imagining this, but it seems to me that everyone is at least a little down. Anyway, I know I am.

The entire city has been deserted. It will be rebuilt, of course. That’s what we do. We stand in the face of adversity, and build an even bigger edifice, just to show who’s boss. We’ll put up new buildings, pile up higher levees, grade new roads, dedicate new schools and talk a lot about the resilience and spirit of the place and its people. And one day in the future New Orleans will be a real city again, with a genuine past. But no one today will live long enough to see this. For us, what has happened is effectively permanent. The old city will now be folded into history.

Long may its legend live.

I probably won’t be able to write much this week, due to work and social pressures.

Who am I kidding? It’s due to work. I owe my soul to the company store.

But I’ve been wondering about this: Would you like to read a novel or see a movie in which all the characters have what they want in life or are happy with what they’ve been given? In which everyone is confident that they are loved, and no bad guys are around to upset things? If the protagonist surmounts all his daily difficulties with a smile and any little hurt is smoothed away by the end of the scene? Would such a story hold your interest?

Mostly we don’t want to read or see that story, because we want to see conflict and the testing of spirit by adversity.

But are we looking for an idyllic world in our real lives? I think we think we are, and therefore we are always surprised when we – or someone we respect – goes and does something that can only lead to conflict and drama. Maybe they tell off their boss. Maybe they don’t adhere to the dress code at the country club. Maybe they pick – or choose to stay with – a bad boy/bad girl lover, one who’s sure to mistreat them, and hurt them.

Should we be surprised? Why do we do these things that lead us down the road to heartache? Do we need such pain in our hearts?

There is a moment – do you know this moment? – as you pass another, when, quite by accident, your eyes meet.

Maybe, just this once, for just an instant, because these moments are not really ours to keep, you see not just her eyes, but into her eyes, past the barrier that is always there, because we must keep it in place, we must protect our secret selves. Guile falls away like stained glass shattered and in that instant you can see worlds of hope and feel untold touches. And in that moment, too, you are revealed, your clothes and skin torn off, your fear, your need, your dark desire, even the smoldering beauty in your heart is exposed, for a moment.

You may not realize this has happened. You may mistake it for something else, a sudden chill that shakes you hard once. But for just that instant, sounds fade away and your heart, your breathing and everything else may seem to slow impossibly.

Then everything starts up again, the spinning, the chatter, the static and traffic.

Watch for this moment. It might be your chance to step from this world into another graceful galaxy. If you miss it, who knows if it will come around again?

After the merriment sparked by the previous post, I thought everybody might enjoy this unnumbered list.

• Once I carried a kitten down a spiral staircase to meet a barking dog. This may seem to some of you to be the height of stupidity, and verily, it did turn out to be that. I don’t know why I did this, and I soon wished that I hadn’t. The kitten tensed up about halfway down, but I ignored this sign and kept going. At the bottom of the staircase, the kitten went apeshit, bit all the way through the web between my left thumb and forefinger, scratched the shit out of my arm and chest, and disappeared back up the steps. My thumb and forefinger swelled up to the size of ballpark franks, and throbbed for days. Since at the time I was a working guitar player, I had to learn how to play without those two digits. In fact, I had to learn how to do it that day. The good news was that, while playing, my left hand was elevated, so it didn’t throb as much. Also, nobody much noticed the difference in my playing. But for a week or so I was able to easily make those contorted rock’n’roll faces.
• Another time I was building a recording studio, and my partners did not know that I am not allowed to use power tools. I should have been spackling the sheetrock or something, but instead I was attaching a heavy surface to a counter, a task that involved drilling some holes up through the bottom of the counter. Since the counter was not yet fastened to the floor, I placed my hand on the top of it to hold it down. While I drilled up through the bottom of it. See where this is going? Yes, I put an eighth-inch carbon steel drill bit through the palm of my left hand. Not all the way (hell, I’ve had carving forks in deeper), but quite a few revolutions of the big Makita drill went by before my sharp reflexes kicked in and I dropped the drill, thus stopping the carnage. That scar is about three quarters of an inch from where my new scar will be, from the fork incident.
• Are we having fun yet? I’ll stop after this one. This involves a single-edged razor blade, a couple of car-alarm remote controls and a plastic tie of the type the riot police use when there are so many damn protesters that they run out of real handcuffs. Some stupid person had used one of these plastic ties to attach the remotes to the windshield wiper control stalk on the steering column of a car, and I had to get them off. Don’t ask why – it’s another story. I was crabby from lack of sleep and my first thought was to just grab them and pull until they came loose. But a tentative yank showed that the stalk would break first. Remember, this is a government-issue, handcuff-quality plastic tie, not some wimpy supermarket vegetable thing. Not only that, but it was tightened pretty much all the way down, leaving almost no slack. Those remotes were fixed to that stalk like Joan of Arc to her stake. So I did the only thing a man could do under the circumstances: I went and got a single-edged razor blade, the sharpest object known to man, a blade that could disembowel you before you even felt the bite, a device with no safety mechanisms built in. For a few seconds I sawed gingerly at the plastic tie, but the environment was cramped and the tie was thick, man, so I angrily hacked at my quarry and of course, stop reading if you’re squeamish, neatly sliced most of the way through my left index finger at the first knuckle. There was no real pain, but I screamed anyway, because I was already angry and this pissed me off even more. And I have never made so much blood. It just kept spurting out. I ran and got the Universal Bandage – a piece of toilet paper – and wrapped it around my finger about thirty times. Fifteen minutes later I took it off to get back to work, and the blood was still gushing, plus the end of my finger seemed to be kind of… dangling. Somebody with a first aid kit put a real bandage on it, and I went to an emergency place. That part is a (lengthy) story in itself, so I will spare you, except to say: two hours of surgery, magnesium screws, six weeks in a hard cast, a pin that is at least three inches long, eight weeks of rehabilitation and a lifetime excuse whenever I make a mistake on the guitar.

There you go. You see how I have suffered for your many sins? How many times I have stuck metal objects into myself and spilled my blood? I only thank my father above that my right hand has been mostly spared, so that I may continue to touch myself in impure – but effective – ways.

Even though it is not officially the crucifixion season, I have poked a hole in the palm of my left hand.

I was trying to open a bottle of olive oil. Maybe it wasn’t the finest olive oil in the world, as it had a metal screw top, like a bottle of Night Train (mmmm, Night Train), but it was all I had, and the damned cap was supposed to come apart at the perforation when you turned it, and the top part becomes the removable cap while the remaining ring, having done it’s job of maintaining the integrity and security of olive oil on the store shelf, is just, the, uh, remaining ring.

But the cap didn’t separate from the ring. The perforation notwithstanding, cap and ring were bonded. I could turn the entire assembly, but I couldn’t get the top off.

Naturally I got me a big ol’ carving fork to use as a tool. The squeamish should probably skip the rest of this paragraph. The Amish, too, maybe. I jammed one tine of the big fork into the perforation and heard a satisfying sound as the two metal pieces started to separate. It felt good, so I kept poking, prodding and digging. But the cap, while it would not come off, was able to spin freely around as I dug at it, so my efforts were getting me nowhere. To stop this, while avoiding the accidental poking of the fork into my hand, I placed my hand flat on top of the cap and applied pressure to keep the cap from spinning away from my fork ministrations. I was making some headway, but in no time my hand was sweating and the cap was spinning again and I was getting frustrated with the stubborn perforation, and I wanted me some damn olive oil! So I carefully wrapped my hand around the part of the cap that I was not poking at, and held it steady. And rammed the big fork deep into the palm of my hand.

“Shit!” I yelled. But that was just anger at having slipped. A few seconds later the pain arrived. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, SHIT!!!!” I yelled, as my entire body broke into a clammy sweat and blood started gushing from the hole. I thought maybe a little piece of tin from the bottle cap might have got lodged in the hole. I stuck my hand under the cold water faucet, and the pain intensified. It was like the time that hooker pinned me to the floor with her stiletto heel that night at The Palms Motel in East Hollywood, only she weighed three hundred pounds instead of… Well, that’s another story.

Why, at moments like these, does my mind project ahead to scenes of driving to a hospital, filling out two thousand forms, sitting in pain in a waiting room for nine hours, being ridiculed and clucked at by nurses, having the wound “cleaned” by a drunken, sadistic doctor and then undergoing two hours of microsurgery to remove the piece of fork and insert a pig’s tendon and magnesium screws into my hand, and then be sent home with Tylenol “in case I need something.”? Why is that?

I don’t know, but I can tell you that if I had been the Son of God and had to die for the sins of all you evil fuckers, I would have chosen lethal injection.

So anyway, it’s going to be all right, even without the pig’s tendon. Call me a crybaby. And maybe I didn’t win absolution for all of your sins, but you know that thing you did last night, with the cat and the electrical cord? You’re forgiven.

Go in peace, my children.

August 6, 1945.

That was the first time an atomic bomb was actually used on real people. One of those people is pictured above. Incredibly, it was not the last time.

Now, three generations later, the United States and other countries are looking into new technologies to make nuclear weapons more usable on the field of battle.

To my knowledge, no one is looking into ways to make the term “field of battle” obsolete.

I sang rock’n’roll.

I sang pretty, I sang rough. I didn’t always hit the notes, but I always sold them.

I got full of myself. When I screwed up, it was always because I got outside of it, looked at myself bein’ cool, and started to think how cool I was.

Little stands in the corners of smoky rooms. Outdoor festivals. Parties in Malibu backyards. Driving for days to get to the next dive, or crammed twelve across for 18 hours in an Air Siam L1011. Don’t ask.

The funny thing is, I plowed through it all, showing off, trying to entertain, drinking heavily, making friends, making money, getting ripped off, getting ripped, and laughing at it all. But now there are some songs – a lot of songs, actually – that I can’t sing. After more shows than I can remember, putting it out for people, I find now that I often can’t even sing one good song to myself. I choke up, my voice breaks and I have to stop.

I am my main audience these days, and not a critical one. I always give myself the benefit of the doubt when I’m serenading myself. I can transpose verses, stop in the middle, change keys and start over, and there’s no pressure, it’s all good. I love to listen to me, and I love to play for me.

When I sang for crowds, maybe part of what I was doing was channeling. I was singing and playing great music by the great writers*, and the meaning, the beauty, the pain, the sorrow, the loss, the joy of that music flowed through me and out into those rooms, flooding them with those emotions, that people soaked up and used to their own ends. Dance, laugh, cry, think, hustle, no two alike, but everybody sharing in the flow, making what they could from it. I think there is a lot of power out there, and when you conjure it on a bandstand it needs a place to go.

When I play my guitar these days and sing alone, though, there’s no place for it to go. All that power, all that meaning, all that beauty, all that pain, sorrow, loss and joy strike my soul and lodge in my heart, swelling it to the breaking point. I don’t stop because I think I should, but because I physically cannot go on.

So I listen to the radio instead.

* For the record, I’ve worked with some great songwriters.

When there is music and strong drink on a Saturday night, everyone is happy.

I’d half-forgotten the buzz that surrounds these places. The places we gather – the bars, the clubs, the cafés where we drink and mingle and meet and hustle. But there it was, from the moment I walked into the little place on Fourth Street. The cumulative voice of a hundred people, all those many lives breeding all those conversations and melding into the Big Talk that goes on in bars. At any given moment, half of it is lies, and we rarely stay with it long enough to figure out which half we are hearing. I usually believe it all.

But everyone seems happy. They’re happy to be there, happy to meet you, happy to be part of the ancient ritual, happy at what could happen, eager for what might happen. I wondered if any of them knew what might happen, or if they were just hoping. Either way, the place was charged.

The woman next to me at the bar was having a hard time ordering her drink. She wanted a straight shot of tequila, but something good, not the well stuff. She didn’t know the language, or the brands, had no idea what to say, and the bartender was patient but quizzical, wanting to fill the order, but eyeing her other customers, who evidently knew what they wanted. I wanted everybody to stay happy, so I ordered her a shot of Patron Reposado, neat. The bartender looked relieved and poured a double. As an afterthought I asked for water back. The Patron is mellow, but maybe not that mellow. Jones to the rescue.

The band took a break just as I arrived, a mixed blessing. I’d have to talk to them before I knew what they sounded like. On the other hand, I’d be able to let the singer know I was there to support her. She was a woman I had known for some time not as a professional musician, but as a hairdresser, a wife, a mother. I had no idea at all that she might be musical. All I knew is that she had a sweet and gentle nature, and she smiled most of the time when she wasn’t laughing. In the short years I had known her a brother had died at his own hands and her baby was born with Downs Syndrome. She bore these pains in the mysterious way that some women have of growing stronger and more loving with each added burden. Then one day she said she had joined a band, and I knew I’d have to go and pretend to listen and think of some compliment for her. I hoped it wouldn’t be too awful, so I could flatter her without blatantly lying.

First the drummer showed up, leaning way too far over the shoulder of Tequila Girl, taking a long time ordering a glass of water, sneaking a peak down her front. I shot him a little happy talk about his playing. Musicians always believe you when you say it sounds good. They have to. They’re doing it to sound good. I found out that the band had been around, in various lineups, for at least fifteen years. So they should have been under no illusions about what they were doing and where they were going. They were already there, this little, friendly, happy place. Not a bad life, I thought. Up on the drum riser, keeping time for the comedy below, and sometimes the tragedy.

Tequila Girl took a sip and turned her bar stool around to form a triangle with us. That kept the drummer talking, maybe the half that was lies. All the places he’d worked, the people he knew, the incredible versatility of his band. He told us they could – and would – play anything, but he stumbled when trying to think of titles, eventually coming up with “Crazy,” the Willie Nelson song immortalized in 1961 by Patsy Cline. This was good enough for me, and I said so. Tequila Girl agreed that it was an excellent choice.

“You wanna hear that one?” he said, as if I had anxiously requested it. “We’ll play it for you, first thing.”

I hadn’t exactly made a formal request, but at that moment there was nothing to do but thank the man for his generosity. Since they were going to play it, I hoped my friend Peggy would be up to the task of singing it. Before I could get up to go look for her, one of the sax players stopped by, mingling with the crowd, like all good small club bands. She was a fiftyish matron in stage threads, her fine, freckled bosom proudly preceding her. She was wearing some kind of stiff satiny evening gown in gold, looking, like all stage finery, a little tawdry in the closeups. She wanted to know how it sounded. Was it too loud? Could we hear all the instruments? I had no idea, but I murmered reassurances. She gave me a look of appraisal. Maybe I passed, maybe I didn’t. We flirted without conviction for a minute before she wandered off. Before I knew it, the break was over, and I missed my chance to let Peggy know I was there for her.

I could see the drummer talking to Peggy and pointing me out at the bar, and while everyone was getting set up and tuned up, she came over to me. She was a somewhat changed Peggy. She had lost some Mommy fat since I’d last seen her, and she had a wholesome Doris Day-sexiness going on, like you’d never talk dirty to her, but if you did she’d wink and know just what you meant. She was wearing a filmy top that you couldn’t really see through, but it looked like maybe you could, and white denim pants that started out tight and then loosened up a little around her thigh, ending about half way down her calves, which were wrapped in festive ribbons from her high-heeled sandals. She was surprised and happy to see a familiar face, and she couldn’t believe I wanted to hear “Crazy.” I continued to act as if I’d requested it – it was too late to back out now.

They didn’t start with my request. They were experienced, and they knew enough not to open a set with a tearjerker. Instead, the bass player sang an upbeat old Motown hit. Peggy looked comfortable singing backup, not at all the fifth wheel some singers become when they’re not the center of attention. Her body – which I had never even thought of before – was moving almost imperceptibly with the music, her feet making a miniature dance pattern that caused a sensuous swaying of the rump. She was totally tuned in and not faking, and I appreciated the way the music turned her on.

In my mental movie of this scene, the revelers have hit the dance floor, and the Motown song ends with shouts and applause. Then the lights dim and a pin spot hits Peggy, making an angelic halo out of her blonde hair. As the first bars of her song play, she introduces it and calls everyone’s attention to me as the one who asked for it. I’m embarrassed only for a moment, before she begins to sing. It is a slower, jazzier version than Patsy’s original, and it is astonishing. There is a rush of recognition as she sings the first word, Crazy… then spellbound silence as she continues. Her voice is a sweet contralto, a little husky, with no affectation, no phony curlycues.

Crazy for feelin’ so lonely… Every note is nailed, every word drenched in real emotion. I knew you’d love me as long as you wanted, and then someday you’d leave me for somebody new… She is not copying anything she’s heard before, and I am amazed at the power she wields so calmly. She is in complete command by the time she gets to the bridge. Worry, why do I let myself worry? Wonderin’ what in the world did I do? She is motionless, in a trance as she performs this little miracle, and each of us in the room is alone with her. I realize I am holding my breath. Crazy for tryin’, crazy for cryin’, and I’m crazy… for lovin’…you.

For three minutes the chatter has stopped, the lies are on hold, there is no bullshit in the bar. What might have happened is happening. Breathless and in love, we erupt in applause and whistles, all the men and half the women.

I will be gone before the set is over. Peggy won’t need me to tell her she “sounded good.” She knows.

On the drive home I reflect on the hidden talent that exists, the myriad abilities that might never be exposed, the beauty that we may never see or hear or feel because we don’t give ourselves the chance, and the unbelievably high cost of a single shot of Patron.

It’s crazy.

_____________________________________________

Update, 8 AM next morning: I fixed the link to the song.