The timer’s marimba went off again and I didn’t bother to reset it. There was, I recall, a beautiful long empty beach on Crete with a rusty wrecked ship on its side a few hundred feet from shore. I swam out to it with my new facemask on and saw the ribs of the wreck through the bright blue water. It was entirely covered with pale yellow seaweeds about the size of Lay’s potato chips that moved gently in the currents. I felt a fear of the empty blue water and the yellow weedy wreck and I swam back to shore.
And then we went to a small island—I think it was Mykonos—with many white houses on steep streets that led down to the water. “You need some fins,” my grandmother said. She went into a tourist shop and bought me a pair of black swim fins and a snorkel. The fins were difficult to walk in, but they propelled you through the water with remarkable speed. The beach was in a cove, with high rocks around, and I swam out to the deepest part, breathing through my gurgly new snorkel. It had little rubber flanges you could bite on to hold it in your mouth. I stared down at the green-black weeds and the lumpy rocks. I sucked in air and upended myself and dove, and I got about halfway down and then turned back. The water was deeper than the YMCA pool. It was darker, too. The light angled into it like light coming through venetian blinds. I thought I saw something moving down there, something oddly furry, like a hedgehog. Perhaps it was a sea cucumber. I took a breath and bit down on the now useless snorkel and began my descent, trying to swim like the scuba people in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, with my arms at my sides.
The fins helped me go deep fast. The facemask pushed hard against my upper lip and around my eyes. I kept going. And then the daylight dimmed and I felt currents of cold water touching me like arms.
I reached out toward the mysterious woolly sea cucumber, if that’s what it was, but there were black seaweeds all around it and my fear was growing. I saw a spiny sea urchin next to it. I thought, I’m in an element that doesn’t want me here. Don’t go this deep. I turned and kicked my fins and swam upward. I flailed through into air and light and breathed.
So that is what Pat Pattison helped me remember. Is there a song in all that? I don’t think so. Maybe if I were John Mayer there would be, or Gillian Welch. Who is Gillian Welch? I’ll have to check her out.
Eighteen
I’LL TELL YOU ONE THING. Two things. First, I like wind. It blows things around and it blows the cigar smoke away. I’ve only smoked about half of an Arturo Fuente Gran Reserva and I’m already feeling subjected to an unusual force of gravity. The world has gotten larger and more massive, with more liquefied rock in it, and it’s pulling me down toward its center, into the car seat, where I’m sitting. The second thing is, when you smoke a big, bad cigar first thing in the morning, it makes you need to go to the bathroom. You’d better be at home or parked near a bathroom when you smoke that cigar. It’s almost uncontrollable.
I’m back from the Chicago gig. They gave me a gorgeous blue check for a thousand dollars. I stayed in the guest room of an English professor and his charming and funny wife who had not dyed her hair. I always like women who don’t dye their hair. The guest room was in the attic and I had my own bathroom. Before the event I lay on the bed moaning, “Why am I here?” and trying to figure out what to say about the future of poetry, and then I “boweled down,” as Roz used to say. Of course the toilet clogged. It was inevitable. I flushed a few times with no results and then the chain broke. Shit. You know the scene in Anger Management when John Turturro says, “I took a dump on his porch”? That’s what I thought of. I felt no anger, though, only fatalistic acceptance. The professor was out meeting another panelist at the airport and I didn’t want to ask the charming, funny woman for a plunger. I took the back lid off, taking care not to clank it, and tinkered in the tank for a while, and then I took a rash chance and forced it to flush manually by lifting the slimy rubber stopper. Miraculously, the toilet conceded. What a beautiful sight to see that horrorshow of embarrassment swirl away. I put on my lucky tie—it’s one of my father’s narrow paisley ties.
At the symposium the consensus was that poetry had a rosy future. Lots of interesting work was being done in out-of-the-way places like Stockton, California, and new means of distribution were bringing imaginary gardens with real toads in them to poem-starved folk in the hinterlands and innerlands who’d never heard of Marianne Moore. I said how much I liked getting a poem of the day by email from the Poetry Foundation and that I’d rediscovered Thomas Hardy that way. There was a young panelist from Harvard named Somebody Abel who made the point that we think that people were reading poetry aloud to each other every evening by the fireside a hundred years ago, reciting Tennyson for giggles, and it simply isn’t true. He read from a piece written by George Gissing in which Gissing said that in his experience among common folk nobody had the slightest interest in or reverence for poetry and nobody knew a line of it. Abel said it’s always been that way and it always will be that way and the whole push to teach the Great Books is just a way of making students miserable. I thought that was refreshing, but another panelist got huffy. Afterward we all went out for a long dinner with some MFA students at a noisy “bistro” where we had to shout and scream and sample fancy wines while all the while pretending we were talking in normal voices. I was somewhat tipsy and wiped out when we got back, and I went to sleep and had a nightmare about having to serve slices of cold brain to rich people in a black-and-white movie, and I woke up at three a.m. I wrote Roz a note on a postcard of the Sears Tower, now called the Willis Tower: “Newscrawl, five Chicago panelists agree American poetry has a future. I miss your delightful scarved self. -P.” I still couldn’t sleep, so I pulled out my new twenty-five-key keyboard and hooked it up to my computer and made a song fragment called “Marry Me,” using the computer’s tinny microphone. I think maybe it’s the best thing I’ve done so far. The end goes:
There’s lots to do
Plenty to see
And that’s why you
Should get married to me
In the morning, when the charming wife was gone, I told the professor that the attic toilet had gone hors de service, but that I thought I’d fixed it. He said, “Oh, I’m so sorry, yes, that toilet is very delicate.”
An MFA student, a poet, had been assigned the job of driving me to the airport. She played me her favorite song, which was a live performance of “In the Gloaming,” done by Jonatha Brooke in a cappella harmony with another woman. “Will you think of me and love me,” Jonatha Brooke sings, “As you did once long ago?” The MFA student and I drove up the ramp to the airport drop-off doing our best not to cry our eyes out. She closed the trunk and I thanked her and flew home.
• • •
I’VE FINISHED SEASON TWO of Downton Abbey and burned out on episodes of The Office—Dwight is simply intolerable. Instead today I watched a little of John Cusack’s movie War, Inc., and then I watched him and Minnie Driver in Grosse Pointe Blank. Minnie Driver plays a woman with a radio show in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and John Cusack plays a disillusioned hit man, formerly employed by the CIA.
People believe that the CIA is forever—that it’s an immovable fixture of American government, like Congress or the Supreme Court—but it was begun with an executive order by a president and it could be ended just as easily. It exists by presidential whim. Obama could shut it down tomorrow, but he doesn’t want to. People believe wars are inevitable, that human nature can’t change, but think of capital punishment. In England people were once disemboweled and castrated in front of a cheering crowd, with their heads put on spikes for viewing. In India they executed criminals by dragging them through the streets and having an elephant step on their heads. Now most countries have outlawed capital punishment. Or think of dueling. Ben Jonson killed a man in a duel. Manet dueled an art critic and wounded him with a sword. Pushkin, who fought dozens of duels, died of a bullet wound to the abdomen. Abraham Lincoln almost fought a duel. Nobody duels now. It’s inconceivable. It isn’t
basic to anything. Centuries of patrician tradition, absurd rituals, faces slapped, gauntlets stiffly thrown, times appointed, companions holding out pistols in velvet cases in the park at dawn, the iron laws of honor—we know now it’s all hokum. Progress is possible. Drones on autopilot are not inevitable.
Although she’s British, Minnie Driver can do a remarkably good American accent. She’s got a good ear. She can sing, too, I just found out. She’s got a song about how she wants to be taken out into the deeper water. I like it and I like her big mouth and her big jaw. She’s a bigmouthed babe. She had a fling with the man who starred in The Bourne Identity. It ended badly, as I remember. Matt Damon. He broke up with her on Oprah, which doesn’t seem like something Jason Bourne would do. Another actress who can really sing is Scarlett Johansson. She hums and wails and whispers in a song by J. Ralph called “One Whole Hour.” “I know just what it’s like,” she says, “to wait for a voice inside.” The music makes the words fit. Did Scarlett go out with Matt Damon, too? No, but he starred with her in a family movie called We Bought a Zoo. No elephants step on criminals’ heads in that movie. It’s just not done anymore.
• • •
THE BOURNE IDENTITY has one of the best movie scores ever written. It’s by John Powell, a British composer. It begins with a big bassoon solo, sailing in over a long chord in the strings. Think of that, beginning a spy movie with a bassoon. I first saw The Bourne Identity in a hotel room in Washington, D.C. I had just been in a march against the Iraq War, which was imminent. It’s the only protest march I’ve ever been in. We took to the streets and we walked around neighborhoods in Washington shouting crude rhymes: “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your oil war.” My sign said: THIS WAR WILL DO NO GOOD. The march didn’t do much good, either, unfortunately. We’re still waiting on the world to change.
Roz was with me, and when we went up to the hotel room our feet hurt from marching all day. We took off our shoes and ordered a pizza and watched The Bourne Identity and loved it, and I thought, This is about the best movie score I’ve ever heard, and I want to hear it again. So I bought it. For the percussion section, Powell uses crazy camera-shutter sounds, huge flabby drums, shakers, rattling sheets of what sounds like fiberglass or plywood, and sixty-megahertz electrical feedback hums. There’s a touch of Batucada Fantástica in it, but it’s its own thing—and there’s not a cheesy passage in the whole score. I’d give anything to have written that music. Composers have ripped off Powell’s Bourne score many times since then. You’ll suddenly hear it in a fight scene or a chase scene. I wonder whether Powell is upset at being strip-mined that way—maybe not. The movie score business has a low opinion of itself, and its leading lights seem unconcerned by everyone’s habit of adaptive reuse. Powell worked for a while with Hans Zimmer, and Hans Zimmer is one of the biggest and cheerfullest ripper-offers of them all, to the point where the Holst Foundation brought suit against him for stealing music note for note from The Planets. One of Powell’s colleagues in the Zimmer atelier was Harry Gregson-Williams. Listen to the Bourne Identity soundtrack and then watch Déjà Vu, with Denzel Washington—score by Harry Gregson-Williams. You’ll gasp at the audacity in places. It isn’t plagiarism—no spot is precisely the same—and yet it’s a theft of almost everything good about Powell’s score, harmonies, percussion, slow solos, mood builds. It’s worse than the endless classical music recyclings by John Williams, who has rifled every late Romantic pocket, and James Horner of Titanic fame. And yet Powell and Gregson-Williams were colleagues and friends under Zimmer. Maybe Powell gave his permission, I don’t know. I’d like to know. I think about this a lot.
Debussy was stolen from constantly during his lifetime, not just by Stravinsky but by everyone. His originality was smothered in a wave of second-tier Debussyism. It depressed him. In 1915 he told a friend that the Debussyists were killing him. No, as a matter of fact, tobacco was killing him.
Nineteen
NOW I REALLY FEEL RICH. Gene sent me an email to tell me that the University of Somewhere Far Away With a Big Football Team had ordered two hundred more copies of Only Rhyme for the fall term. “I thought you’d like to know,” he wrote. He wants to encourage me. So much of what an editor does is encouragement, flattery, and acts of kindness. They’re such good people. I’ve never had a bad experience with an editor. And now they must grope their way through the ebook revolution, squabbling with Amazon, trying to figure out how to make money. They believe in what they do. Some of them must have secret doubts. Another memoir this month, another set of blurbs to solicit, another mailing of bound galleys to people like me who don’t read them. I have guilty stacks of them in my office, each with an enthusiastic letter tucked in the front. Wave after wave of unread words. Blah, guilt!
After I made the circuit of the upper-body machines at Planet F, I sat in the car, parked in a tiny patch of shade in back near a self-seeded oak tree, and I said aloud, “What have we given to the world?” We in the United States, I meant. What do we have to be proud of? Warfarin and Risperdal and Effexor and Abilify and Hellfire missiles and supermax prisons and the revenge killing of Osama bin Laden—and the Staple Singers. Music. I’d give anything to sing like the Staple Singers. Anything I have. “Undertaker, please drive slow.” The Staple Singers is what we’ve given to the world.
I drove past the trendy pizza place where a girl with a beautiful mouth used to work. She rarely smiled. She just tucked in the corners of the pizza boxes and handed them over the counter to people with twenty-dollar bills. She didn’t have to smile. She doesn’t work there anymore, but I was shocked all over again at the memory of how lovely she was. Just a pizza girl. Now she’s off somewhere, living life, paying off her college loans, giving other people the benefit of her selfless amazing mouth.
Today I watched Coal Miner’s Daughter, with Sissy Spacek. See what I mean? Small actress, big mouth. What stunned me about the movie is that Sissy Spacek, whom I’ve never understood before because she has such a tiny nose, did all the singing in the movie. None of it was overdubbed by Loretta Lynn. It’s all Spacek’s own singing. She spent days and days with Loretta Lynn—a year together, said Loretta in the bonus video—practicing Loretta’s songs. Loretta taught Sissy all her nuances and tricks. She, Loretta, said she can’t watch the movie because it was too painful and too true. It was a larger-than-life version of her life, including all the screwed-up wrongs done by her husband, Dew—if that was his name, played by Tommy Lee Jones in dyed reddish-blond hair and eyebrows—all his drinking and carousing and philandering.
Another thing that got my attention in the movie—this was revealed in an interview that the director, Michael Apted, did with Loretta Lynn—was that Loretta wrote her songs while driving in the car to Nashville. That’s the important truth that we don’t learn anywhere in the movie but we do learn from what she tells us in the extras. She drove in her fancy Lincoln or Cadillac and she rhymed up her setbacks and her heartaches, and it all happened in her car.
I took the long way home, like Supertramp, and in the gloaming I saw a sign at a roadside farm stand. I used it in a song:
Native peaches
Fresh tomatoes
Lots and lots of corn
Hot blueberries
Cold chicken
And ridiculous amounts of porn
Then I stopped my Kia, my precious Korean Kia with one hundred and twenty-three thousand miles on it, on the road by a lumpy enormous green field. One spreading tree was left unfelled in the middle, as if in a painting by Constable. I could imagine the farmer resting his plow horse there in the shade on a hot day. Rounded shouldery boulders of last year’s hay wrapped in white plastic were stacked off to one side. Every so often someone drove by in a red Subaru or a gray pickup with a lid over the back.
Tim said there isn’t a good anti-drone song. I thought of trying to write it from the presidential point of view. I’d have President Obama sing something like “Today is Tue
sday and I’m the warrior in chief. My people come into the office and we go down the list. I like to know who’s going to die next. And I like the world to know that I’m a no-nonsense killer man who keeps us safe with robot planes. I like to go out afterward and have a smoke knowing I’ve decided which of my enemies I should kill. Sometimes little children are killed as well, and I’m sorry about that, but that’s what happens, and I can’t comment because it’s classified security information. Today is Tuesday and I’m the warrior in chief.”
But I know that would make for a terrible song—too on-the-nose. Too hard. Too angry. Too ungrieving. Griefs, not grievances, are what we need, said Robert Frost.
• • •
THERE’S AN INDUSTRIAL MACHINE made by the Sturtevant company called a Simpactor. I had a roommate long ago who had an internship at Sturtevant, and he talked about it in detail—interestingly, he was a big Talking Heads fan. He said there are several ways to grind things up fine: you can crush them between rollers or you can send them through an old-fashioned stone grinder, as in a flour mill, or—he lifted a finger—there’s a machine called a Simpactor with a horizontal plate that spins. The coarse chunks fall onto the middle of the plate, where they are flung out toward a set of steel pins around the edge. Some of the pins are fixed and some are attached to the plate and move, and when the pins intersect they gnash and crush the crumbs of substance until it’s just the right consistency. The Simpactor is useful for the pharmaceutical industry, my roommate said, because you need things ground very fine in order for them to be absorbed by the body. “That’s fascinating,” I said, “I had no idea.” He didn’t seem full of wonder at the Simpactor, though—he was much more interested in the Talking Heads concert that was coming up.
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