from a poem by Robert Creeley about the darkness that wafts across
the highways of life
great billows of it, well, okay, her 12-year-old
son Jesse was sitting in the living room propped up against the wall
one afternoon reading volume 1 of The Memoirs Of Emma
Goldman, notes from the 1920s, & I said, Okay, that’s cool.
Anyway the t-shirt, it gets a lot of attention, it says, IF I CAN’T DANCE
I DON’T WANT TO
BE PART OF YOUR REVOLUTION. Her picture in large
black solids is in the middle of the slogan. People have to bend over
on the street to pick out exactly who she is – steel-rim glasses
& beautiful, & of course she’s all in black on the t-shirt, she looks
as if she should be carrying an umbrella walking along some beach
in Germany in the 1890s. It’s a good shirt, & I thought I’d write
you a note & say thanks for it.
I’m very widely read
but I’m more of a Tom Stoppard Edward Said social anarchist now
& I don’t usually carry a black umbrella. But you know what they
say – “Anarchists come in different forms.” And when you look
into my face you can see it all very clearly.
It’s a loose
comfortable shirt & I wear it casually like a young rock&roll kid
wearing a t-shirt that says N I R V A N A.
I GUESS IF YOU’VE GOT 1000 SKINHEADS YOU HAVE TO CODIFY THEM
The white
skins
are the white skinheads, shaven clean as a baseball,
you’ve seen them around, also
called pinheads. The
red skins
are the socialists, they’re the ones who came first,
same height & weight etc. but they have red shoe laces
in their boots – black military highcuts,
that’s what they all wear,
very much like std US military
combat issue. It’s confusing as hell, isn’t it? And then
over here we’ve got ska heads
& the occasional artist
or Park Avenue photographer
who decides to shave his head. I guess they’re all working
class youth who like tavern culture & this is a fad. Some
of them are unemployed, probably none of the white skinheads
like Tangerine Dream
or Uta Lempur very much, or Brecht,
for example, no, Brecht wouldn’t be very popular. The red
skinheads probably don’t read Brecht either, various brands
of Löwenbrau are popular or unpopular but the red skinheads
defend the rights of Turkish guestarbeiters,
& the white
skinheads seem to like fire bombs.
SINATRA
I can see him travelling by bus
with the orchestra
from Toronto to the Muskokas
to entertain vacationers & summer residents. My friend
Colin Simpson’s parents heard him at a lake resort
somewhere east of Parry Sound in the early 40s. The war
was on, Colin’s father,
a major stockholder
in Massey-Harris [tractors, combines, threshers],
was drunk, the mood of the evening was lively
according to Colin’s memory. Hamilton,
Windsor [across from Detroit],
but mostly the Muskokas &, of course, Toronto – Palais Royale,
the Imperial Room at the Royal York Hotel,
places like that. Granted, he went Hollywood,
& granted, he only does concerts now, & he can’t sing any more
anyway. But “Full Moon, Empty Arms” [he was quite young then],
now that’s an Ontario song.
“My Foolish Heart” – that’s mature
Frank Sinatra, better than the young crooner,
but he’s still got his chops, sharp articulation, dramatic interpretation
some of those neat tricks like singing ½ a beat off.
He was good before he turned 41,
or 42,
he had moves,
& then he moved further south & he stopped doing the bars.
It was nothing but concert tours, & The Sands Hotel in Las Vegas.
Let me tell you something – I liked him in Man With the Golden
Arm. He was good,
playing the thin, intense, pale musician
[definitely an east Ontario guy] coming off heroin,
& the scene where Kim Novak wearing a sweater I can only describe
as risqué by its very intention
lying on top of him
with a blanket to keep him warm, he’s going cold turkey,
he hasn’t had a shot for days & he’s got the chills,
boy, that was a great scene. Even now,
standing in Ontario,
looking as far south as Texas [where they have been having
a lot of trouble – Killeen, Tex., where the guy drove his truck
through the window of the restaurant & shot 23 people; Waco, Tex.,
where the ATF laid seige to the compound of the Branch Davidians
& approx. 63 people were killed, that’s trouble],
even now,
I like “I’ve Got the World on a String,” the bravura
of the upbeat is like wild ducks flying across Point Pelee, Ont.
MORNINGSIDE DRIVE
He said, “I’ve been trying to keep the baby
Jesus
out of my mind for years.”
I’m in the back seat,
don’t look at me, I’m not the baby Jesus.
I’m about 20, we’re all about 20,
I’m drinking coffee out of a red plastic thermos cup.
I think,
Funny, I’ve never thought of Jack
as a Christian kind of guy, certainly not a holy roller.
We’re working at Kelvinator for a few weeks.
I’m reading the Toronto Star in the back seat
& Morris says, with that woodchuck chuck in his voice,
“Well he won’t help you win any money at the races.”
And that’s true, I think to myself.
The baby Jesus won’t bring Sailor’s Rest into the wire ahead of the field.
I’m not really thinking at all very much, I’m tired.
Overtime last night but they gave it to someone else tonight.
Jack & Morris haven’t had any all this week.
Had a couple of drinks after lunch,
we were working on big white door assemblies. They began to look
like images from the Apollo flights. I could see Armstrong walking
on the moon and carrying a door assembly on his shoulder.
I smack Morris on the back of the head with my newspaper.
“Jesus is all about love,” I tell him.
Dead skunk by the shoulder as we exit from the 401
and drop down a couple of streets to get onto Morningside
Drive. It was hot, what was a skunk doing on the 401 anyway? There
were small insects, hot delicate dark
gnats squashed across the dusty blue windshield.
AVANTI, AVANTI
“Avanti, avanti,” she says, pushing the little
boy in the blue cap,
he looks about 9 ½ or 10,
up the scuffed dusty marble steps of Union Station
onto the cement platform
where the Toronto Express
to Buffalo is about to leave. There are
giant orange&blue weather balloons moving at a slow
northeasterly pace over Pickering,
a small community
airport some 34 miles away. Avanti. She has a suitcase in one
hand & a big 1940s purse & a laundry bag bulging wit
h
I don’t know what in her left hand. There are different trains in America.
The designs change from time to time. This is one of the great CP trains.
Some are classics & some aren’t. “Avanti,
avanti,” she says,
& cuffs him on the ear. He
is straining up on his toes with the huge suitcase
as the train comes in. When she cuffs him he laughs
& leans back in her direction as if she were a large tree
in dark blue sweaters and a rumpled black skirt suit
with black stockings.
OCTOBER
October explodes in this (wooded) hilly & potato rich enclave at the northern end of the Niagara escarpment. Alliston, on the Nottawasaga, & other towns west to Orangeville are warm & soft & gusty this Friday, 7:35 a.m. Orange and blue umbrellas on front porches, rain slickers out on the farms. Everywhere you look the trees have gone as berserk as a loon’s hypothalamus with riots of orange yellow red pale vermilion savagely oversweet turned on itself crimson dark. There is a fine October rain coming down, so fine that you can hardly see it, almost a mist, it barely wets your face. 16°. A few 40 mph ducks skim the tops of distant lush wet trees. Geese crossing in loose Vs down by the bridge. This is western Ontario but continentally almost as far south as Massachusetts, Point Pelee, or Frank Lloyd Wrights Chicago. The air is full of oxygen. The dense rich colours swim in this air like Matisse nudes, blue knees & elbows, magenta buttocks. Warm thick air gives a tremendous lift to your motion. I seem to fly above the pale dark grey early morning towns of soft hills & steeples almost like Chagall’s crazy mystical Rabbi fiddling over the scant roofs of pre ww 1 Minsk. (1000s of miles north of where Babel wrote about Itzak the gangster. Where Gurdjieff sold the barrel of bad herring and put the money into fresh animal skins.) Water trickles gently along the curbs into the cosy black gratings of innumerable sewers. It’s warm & wet & gorgeous. My Rockports squelch on the gravel. I lift my face up to the sky. I open my black umbrella. I wave to you happily my friends across the shimmering slopes of the western escarpment.
WINTER BOOKS TO READ IN NEW YORK, CORN CHOWDER, AN EMPTY ROOM, CHORIZO SAUSAGES
I said
[it was about 7:30
& there was a pool of darkness at 34th & Avenue B]
[there was a yellow taxi, I had said the corn chowder needed more
chicken stock]
to my friend Adam Gopnik
who is, for sure, no average GOP kind of guy, “You stay in New
York & write for the New Yorker. And I will go back to Toronto,
that big sprawling city on the north shore of Lake Ontario,
& I will have a huge empty white room & corn chowder with chorizo
sausages
& I will move Tom (Bass) from chapter 7 to chapter 9,
& I will write a Matisse blue spotlight song
& you will be in the song, wearing an old sweat with ‘Williams’
across the grey front,
writing about Matisse.” “How can you compare Murray Schafer
to Philip Glass?” “You can’t, they’re too different. I like
Schafer’s ‘Northern String Quartets,’ but there’s not very much loon
in them.” New York is a dying city. But I really like the way
people shoot each other in Sam Peckinpah films. You might as well
write a short history of sound poetry in which you say they all seem
to have been influenced by television dubs. But not me. I would
rather go home & listen to African boat songs & think
about that slow hot butter soft sun & paddling down a river
of infinity.
POSTMODERNS
Postmoderns like things to be laid out calmly
& precisely like design components on a large drawing board.
Like Robert Smithson’s Earthworks, for example. Earth & works –
postmodernism is gutsier than people think. Mississippi
earth is swampy as you get south of Oxford down to the gulf.
I don’t like F’s Absalom, Absalom! very much. I don’t like the way
it begins with the runaway slave. F himself is very present,
but in a confused sort of way – splashes of author colour come
through but seem disparate. It’s like a camera falling
through the narrative & it doesn’t work. The characters don’t tell their
own stories
explicitly or implicitly.
Ask any of your friends about their favourite Faulkner
characters and they’ll probably say, Popeye,
Temple Drake, Jason, Caddy, the barn-burning father. Claes Oldenburg’s
giant hamburgers take us back to the 50s. Faulkner was young
in the 20s. And was then smacked in the face
with the 30s & the Depression. I’m probably being unfair
to this book. I’m reading in a sunny room and listening
to Wynton Marsalis’s solos on a CD with Kathleen Battle
who is singing up a rich dark storm & Wynton, it’s Handel, is
right there as if he had written the music himself. Sure
there is probably a point of view from which you could enjoy
Absalom, Absalom! I don’t know, I sort of like the title.
But not as much as Light in August or the story of Jason & Caddy.
Marsalis goes up into C & I toss the book over on the couch
& watch the small English sparrows & the grey squirrel
outside my front windows on this cool blue May afternoon. The
title’s interesting, isn’t it? Absalom, Absalom! It sounds
too biblical for the 1930s of Huey Long.
MISSISSIPPIANS
I have a green & yellow plastic Tonka dump
truck
on the left side of my double sink in the kitchen.
Imagine that? An adult white male writer who studies
Wittgenstein
& he’s got
a child’s toy
that he keeps in his kitchen sink.
Her name was Mayonnaise Dutton
& Tom loved her
& he lusted after her panties. Her panties
were cute
& she was pretty goddamn cute herself. But she didn’t give a shit
about Tom.
When I look into the wide open cavity of my mouth
in the large hallway mirror it looks like a caricature
of Baudelaire’s abyss. Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean
I have a whale in my mouth. No Jungian references to Melville.
I just mean it’s so huge & pink & clean & wholesome. And innocent.
I’m an American outlaw & I have my whims. Lots of Hathaway shirts,
no Kenzo ties.
I don’t have a lot of money. I’m actually quite
aggressive at times. I like to run water over the truck
in the morning while I do a few dishes, make coffee,
listen to the morning arts news
before I sit down to write for the day.
O HEY, HE’S TALL, BUT HE’S TOO YOUNG TO DRINK BOURBON
Hayden Washington Jones, 6’5”, close-cropped hair, chocolate satiny skin, quiet, at times almost mordant. A tall guy, for sure, taller than Tom Garrone, and blocky, not tall and thin like Tom. In addition to which Hayden had an immeasurably greater knowledge of music than Tom possessed, and had never been even faintly tempted to write stories (although Hayden had stories, but he was a quiet amused kind of guy in regard to conversation) in the manner, although he had lived in Paris for a while and had driven a little Peugeot minor, of some French guy like Albert Camus.
Hayden had been an A student at Jefferson High School in Brooklyn, a scholarship student, music obsessive, tight end distinguished for broken field play at Yale in the late 60s, a music compulsive, Juilliard in New York, and then Paris in 1974.
His mother was a school teacher and a regular churchwoman. His older sister Dahlia was the neighbourhood beauty in their part of Brooklyn, and a bit of a sass and also a bit of a snoot, she could look down her nose at a school teacher or a bank manager with equal ease. But she sang in the church choir and when she sang she was a somewhat different kind of sister.
Anyway, first song, as in first love, first sex, first time bareback, first time driving home from Jones Beach, not that his family owned it, nobody owns Jones Beach, although it isn’t really public property either. Hayden Jones wrote his first song when he was about 11 years old. It wasn’t a bad song. It was a song about playing tag with his brother. It was a 4-bar blues. And who knows, maybe it was about his sister. It wasn’t about his mother, and it wasn’t about Jesus. His mother said it was a good song. His father didn’t say anything. His father was at the race track in Detroit, Dee/troite, hanging out with Fox & Masters & Wilberson & Lapointe. It was a pretty good song for a boy who was already 5’10”, handsome enough to be noticed on the street, LaFayette & Lancaster, and hadn’t started showing any interest in girls as yet. It was a pretty good song with his own melody and he did the harmonic himself both vocally and on the family living room piano. But he didn’t write another song or even think about writing songs again until he was about 27. He was a little older than the rest of the Desperados, the black / white blues band he helped to form after coming back from Paris, where he knew Tom Garrone from, where he knew Stash and the others. He was about 4 years older, and as far as music was concerned he was a lot smarter, but he didn’t go around saying so. Hayden was a composer, blues-based and a Bartok obsessive, and unlike most composers he was hooked up with a hard line, flat out band that was about to take America by storm, if they would listen to him, that is. He wasn’t, when Tom Garrone met him, walking around in a loft whistling scores to himself, although he sometimes did that as well.
Juilliard followed Yale. Hayden had been playing with groups and arranging, becoming an arranger as well as a brilliant keyboards player, but arranging was definitely his first and greatest love supreme, and had been since he was around 15.
It was amazing that he never worried about his hands when he played football. First at Jefferson, then at Yale. At Yale more seriously, because it was more serious; for example, these guys at Yale were tough, really tough. They were nothing like Yale boys doing their M.A.s in philosophy and having a sandwich and a beer at Cookie’s, a familiar sandwich place for lunch, booths and all, in New Haven. Uh, uh. They were tough.
Dancing in the Dark Page 6
