Dancing in the Dark

by David Donnell

  I can pretend I’m a writer like Thos. Wolfe or somebody.

  So,

  where do I meet somebody who plays a mean bass oboe

  or a violin,

  or maybe a French horn would be good

  for an afternoon reading in Central Park?”

  AFTER MANY STAFF DISCUSSIONS, THE NEW NEW YORKER

  I’m over at Jack Forbes’ 2 ½ storey 6’ skylights

  on the west side

  house on Chestnut Park Road in northeast

  Rosedale. Jack’s out,

  his wife Carol is home

  & there’s a copy of the New Yorker

  with a fairly good R. Crumb cover in about 9 different colours

  lying on the coffee table. She says she thinks the New Yorker

  is still good,

  just because it gives you the taste of New York.

  Atmosphere is what she means, I guess, hints & flash cards.

  But I’m not sure if a taste is much good when you want supper,

  you know,

  when you want a couple of gin&tonics with lime & ice first,

  & then a bowl of black bean soup

  followed by a plate of fettuccine

  with those small Italian sausages & 1 or 2 cold Heinekens

  to wash it down. You know

  what I mean? More walk arounds

  in different areas of New York, more input from young artists,

  put Tom Stoppard on the cover and a 4-page essay on Bill Clinton;

  but of course they haven’t done this & now it’s just another

  version of the Atlantic or Harper’s –

  but they’ve got an R. Crumb cover & Richard Avedon photos of Dinkins

  & colourful New York lead-in pages with a nice magenta

  poster of Eartha Kitt.

  AT HOME, APPROACHING WINTER

  He calls his sister Bones,

  because she’s 5’10 ½”

  & as slim as a bright green stalk of west Florida asparagus. “Hey,

  Bones,” he says, or

  “Turn down the football game, Bones, I’m on

  the phone

  in the kitchen.” And she takes it gracefully. She’s sprawled

  on the living room 4-part couch,

  watching,

  long legs in snug new Levi’s, feet bright in orange & yellow socks,

  skimpy t-shirt just a piece of cotton.

  The B.C. Lions destroy

  Baltimore. She has short curly dark honey blond hair, she

  is in 4th year English Lang

  & Lit. It’s 9:00 p.m., darkness

  has settled

  over the huge city of Toronto, the wind outside is about 50 mph,

  the huge lake at the south end of the city must have 10’ waves,

  nothing like a tsunami but big,

  & the television set full of colour

  shows the B.C. fans in t-shirts the cheerleaders in short skirts

  & Austin has just thrown a big long one for about 65 yards. “Pizza”

  he says, “B.C. wins, I pay.” He hates football, loves computers

  & basketball, is working now, good quality dark green corduroys,

  makes a big paycheque for 25. “Anchovies,” she says; “No,” he says;

  “You’re cruel,” she says, & Passaglia kicks the big one

  that wins the game, & the B.C. crowd goes wild.

  TOM & SLACKER COMING HOME AT 4 O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING

  Night in the city

  splash of burnt mauve

  across the end of an alleyway,

  must be old paint. Slacker

  aka Alec

  Harrison & Tom, walking home from the BamBoo Club

  up Beverley & over to Huron, named after the Hurons

  who lived in Ontario

  before there was a Ford Motor Company

  of the World

  or those old General Electric red brick buildings

  along Dupont west of Yonge Street. “What do you think, Tom,”

  Alec says, “what

  do you think of the city?” “Great, man,

  just

  fucking great.” Tom is drunk, stumbling slightly, steel rims

  in his jacket pocket

  he has a long pink t-shirt on

  & the t-shirt says N I R V A N A. “So,”

  says Alec, aka Slacker, “what do you think of the scene,

  the cool

  Lauras & Harolds,

  at the Left Bank & the BamBoo?”

  “Hey,” says Tom, “Slackers with expense accounts

  & cordless telephones, fettuccine with eggplant & Italian sausages.”

  “No,

  no,” says Slacker, aka Alec Harrison, “Slackers with nose rings

  & exposed underwear

  defying gravity.” “Yeah,” says Tom, “gravity, man, gravity.”

  SLACKER DUMPS ON CUSHY ROCK LYRICS

  Tom & Slacker live together for about 3 months

  – it’s a 2nd floor over an appliance store

  on Broadview

  in the east end. 2 guys, both in their 20s,

  they get along very well. Tom’s philosophy books are piled up

  beside his armchair

  in the living room,

  which has a view of Broadview. Slacker’s tapes are piled up

  on top of an orange crate bookcase

  at the far end of the room. They have separate beds,

  in case you were curious,

  1 bedroom & 2 beds. They both shower quickly,

  Slacker is neat,

  they split laundry duty on a weekly basis,

  & their eating habits are fairly similar –

  hamburgers,

  pizza, take out hot&sour soup from Bo Bo’s,

  Chef Boyardee spaghetti. Slacker wears work pants,

  Tom wears corduroys. They argue about music, that is

  Slacker

  says, “Okay, the Mahler stuff, I don’t disagree

  with it. But you’ve got really bad taste in rock lyrics.

  Like all intellectuals, you don’t get the point. You like

  Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith too much. Post punk new

  wave isn’t supposed to make semantic sense. It’s free form because

  free form makes me relaxed,

  and it has to have irrational bursts

  of senseless bass violence

  because I’ve got aggressive circuitry in my left occipital zone.

  I agree I listen to too much of it,

  Okay, Tom,

  Okay?”

  SAM & A CIRCLE OF FRIENDS

  We were sitting up on the roof a few nights ago, it was about 2 o’clock in the morning, it was hot, we were eating crackers and some pale yellow Kraft cheese from the 7-11 and demolishing 2 or 3 litres of cheap white Spanish wine. I guess there were about 7 or 8 of us. It was late and it was casual. You could hear faint traffic sounds coming down from Queen Street in the dark air.

  We’re all musicians except for Karen, Scott’s girlfriend, who was sitting with her legs stretched out in a long line and her back against the low brick & tar wall of the roof with her beautiful short-cropped pale brown head asleep against Scott’s shoulder. These guys are all about my age, I’m 23, and mostly from Toronto, although I’m from Manitoba, Dick is from New York, and Paul used to play with a couple of groups after school in Halifax. Halifax is in Nova Scotia.

  Ned was talking about music, and how important it is, guys playing in bands, changing the world or something, and how we all want to be famous, but we’re only going to be famous for about 15 minutes.

  I didn’t say anything. It was late, it had been a long day, the air was just starting to get lovely and cool. And I’m usually a fairly quiet guy. I hold myself in. I’m a hot bassist, that’s what I play, that’s what I do in life, dude, I play bass, people have been saying I’m pretty hot; but if you come from a town south of Great Slave Lake, just a bit north of the Dakota border
, and you’re in a city like Toronto, with all these different groups, or New York, then I think it’s sort of dumb to come on mouthy whenever you get the chance. I’d rather be just easy-going reflexive, take my time and give myself time to think about some of the ideas that people like Ned rap down. It always comes together for me a few days or a few weeks later, and I’ll say, O yeah, I see what I think about that. Whether it’s music, or maybe art, or something to do with economics, how the Japanese are buying into the entertainment industry or something like that, or, perhaps, something to do with fame. Like, what is it, what does it mean?

  I’m 23. I haven’t lived in Toronto for very long. Well, about 11 months. Manitoba is sort of classical. Toronto is an incredible hodgepodge. I think a lot of that goes into people’s music.

  Anyway I’m not a punk. Not since I was about 12. Before I began playing and took up bass in high school. None of these people sitting around eating fake Kraft yellow cheese and listening to Ned trying to act like a talk show host or a media guru or something like that are punks either. I don’t look like that or dress like that. As for the playing, well, that’s different. I like songs that seem to be about an issue of some kind. I like people like this guy Adrian who has started hanging around a lot who can write songs that are really sort of “in your face.” That’s a term, it just means, direct, challenging. But I’m more interested in the bass lines of a song, and how the bass lines can take over the song and make it into something really incredible. What went wrong with Johnny Rotten? He didn’t understand the idea that bass is more important than lead, that’s what went wrong, so all his stuff with PiL sounds incomplete and sort of tinny, like not quite whatever it’s supposed to be.

  There’s a girl here with the same name I have, almost. Her name’s Samantha. She’s sitting on a little flat car cushion of some kind, in the circle, across from Karen, and she has one of those really light frilly around the shoulders pink & print summer dresses on. Sounds frilly but she seems to be a really ballsy girl, super pretty, with a ton of honey blond hair. She’s talking to Paul about some of the young kids who come into the store, a trendy brass fittings place just off Queen Street West, where she works, and she says, “They’re just a bunch of high school kids who like Duran Duran.” and Paul laughs. That’s how people communicate. We’d be lost if we didn’t have these 1000s of different groups to use as designations for what we’re talking about. A teacher I had in Tremlo, Grade 12, I think, said it was sort of like the Greeks and Greek mythology. The Greeks had a lot of Goddesses like Diana and Hecate.

  I’d like to say something to her, start a little rub of some kind, but I’m too tired. Now she’s talking about buses plunging off cliffs in Peru. Lebanese rebels blowing up embassies with car bombs. Somebody says something about children being given heart transplants in Utah. This is wild, isn’t it, or maybe it’s what you talk about all the time over 6 o’clock dinner.

  “Books never stay around,” Ned says to somebody who has said something about books. It’s dark and I’m lying almost flat on my back with my head resting against an old pillow with some sort of cover around it.

  Samantha says, “The Great Books stay around.” She must be a reader, maybe she’s a student, and she just works part time at the little brass fittings store. That sure is an attractive pink dress, with big splashes of green print you can hardly see, even with a moon, up here on the roof, in the dark. But, I think to myself, we’re not in the dark. We’re in the light, or maybe we are the light. What the fuck. Who can say we’re not?

  I’m going out with a girl right now, Alice, who works in the UofT library, knits macramé, that’s something she does, okay? and smokes some very good dope. She has lovely breasts. We take showers together. She seems to like Mozart a great deal, but we get along and she seems to like the guys I hang around with fairly well.

  Punk is very kicksy. Very trendy. But it’s also very principled. Punk concentrates almost entirely on immediate attitudes. Punk songs are deemed successful if they do a good job of simply making a hook – take a single word, sometimes a phrase, and then play it with this catchy sound mix that sort of completes a basic take on that one attitude. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the philosophy courses at UofM when I went there, but I think what I’m describing here is a fairly complete aesthetic. It’s complete, but the bass is all-important, that’s where I come in, and I’m hot right now, 2 or 3 groups have come on to me in the last month, I’m a bit of a star. And according to Ned, or what he was talking about 5 minutes ago, of course, and this is an interesting comment on people who say, O so&so is just going to be famous for 15 minutes, that, itself, was 5 minutes ago, and his remarks have sort of passed, like cigarette smoke, gone up in air, they’re drifting off into the dark night air above Richmond south of Queen.

  What makes Alice so attractive to me, I think, the librarian with the wonderful breasts, is that she’s not a punk, she’s this beautiful, easy-going, everything more or less in order … librarian. Which is comfortable. We don’t have any problems.

  “Well, it’s like dope,” Ned says, “what does dope do for you? It makes you feel relaxed.” I think every social area has guys like Ned, who have to define and over-define the different things that are going on, without necessarily really understanding them very well. But sure, that’s what dope does, generally, for most people.

  But what the bass does is sort of similar and almost opposite. Bass opens up the whole body to a simple idea – an idea which the singer has to be in command of, and which he, or she, I’m crazy about this girl Mary Margaret O’Hara, for example, is responsible for getting across. But when a good bass does that – it has to be a hell of a lot more than just an extension of percussion, it has to be playing some wild and complex lead notes down at the level of percussive rhythm, and sort of flirting with the back-beat, or maybe, in some cases, doing away with it altogether, but anyway, all at the same time.

  You need to know something about language, melodies, engineering terms, different kinds of sounds.

  Maybe we will be famous for 15 minutes. Or maybe we’ve already changed a number of attitudes – to things like body language, or dope, or what certain attitudes mean. A lot of kids are just going to wind up on the street, you know, wearing those silly red bandannas over their heads, or funny haircuts, the whole head cropped grey & stubbly and just a patch, like a big pool of ink, like a scalp, floating on top of their dome. Sure, but that happens with every social change. I think Ned’s trying to talk about Thailand now. He probably doesn’t even know where it is. I think it’s next door to Vietnam or Cambodia. I’m just going to close my eyes and drift for half an hour, nod off, half-closed eyes, watching this beautiful girl in the pink&greensplash print dress moving her legs back and forth like a stationary dancer in the dark, car sounds, Paul talking about raspberry pie with ice cream, sounds good. I’m not going to wind up on any street corner, or hanging out at some dick bar or coffeehouse; I’m going to get behind the best singers that come along, the best singers, with the best songs, I’m going to put down bass lines that they can move around, dance, sing, for hours.

  DARK PIGMENTATION & LIGHTLY COLOURED AMERICANS

  I have a copy of Dany Laferrière’s An Aroma of Coffee

  sitting at the far end of the long table

  where I sit & work

  in the morning. This is a clear & blue morning

  about -10° with some random patches of white snow. The kind

  of January day I like although I’d probably rather be in St. Kitts

  or the rural market-gardening west side of Florida. I’m trying to think

  about what dark pigmentation has to do with anything

  except that it’s a colour. Okay, different people have curly black

  hair,

  or blue eyes, or blond hair, or grey eyes, or hazel eyes. And

  I think, it’s simply a tradition of colour coding – practised by various

  dark pigmentation & lightly coloured Americans. Charlier />
  Parker was a genius, period, I don’t see him as a black musician.

  Mike Tyson is a boxer, that’s what he does. Nina Simone is a singer.

  I’m not crazy about Billie Holiday at times because

  she doesn’t state the pain & then rise above the pain. Laferrière’s

  book is an extraordinary novel because it’s so clear

  & so evocative. You can just read it one sentence at a time

  & it’s simple, but it adds up to a complex image

  & it’s perfect. It’s a book about a place, Haiti, in this case,

  where he was born before he came to Montreal & then to Miami,

  & also

  a period in your life when sometimes you’re a child

  & sometimes you’re letting go of childhood – & then of course

  you’ll probably have to send a postcard from a different city,

  Miami, & you’ll say things are good here, & you’ll probably say

  it in French, always in large distinctive writing,

  not black but simply

  the writing of a person with a great visual sense of detail

  & a very clear mind.

  I think Dany Laferrière

  & Wynton Marsalis are both dark pigmentation Americans.

  I would describe myself as a lightly coloured American. Not

  as a “white.”

  Actually Dany’s postcard arrived in dark blue

  Pentel,

  blue is a contemplative colour

  & it’s his story as he sees it now from Miami.

  GREAT DANES IN AUTUMN

  I call the largest of the 2 Great Danes

  Alice,

  he’s the largest of the 2, & 3 months older. The female

  is William,

  because Gertrude Stein loved William James,

  the author of Pragmatism,

  for his quirky and generally exact intelligence.

  This is

  Laura speaking, she