Song to the Leaders of the World (3:26)
I stopped singing like other people after I stopped singing other people’s songs. I became myself early. And who comes after me will be himself earlier. The RPMs get faster. But when I began to sing my own songs I thought that since they were mine no one else could sing them. And then there came one summer’s night to the big Festival, someone no one had ever heard of, and sang my song to the leaders of the world. Now I do that one slow over a fast beat, and I do it looking up from the gutter. I spit it out. But Missy stood with her arms straight at her sides, and looking over everyone’s head she sang it a cappella, full of sorrow and stately warning like the purest most harrowing sermon in church history: with that voice. Remember the fire that chills the sun Remember the light that turns a man to stone Remember the one who rang the world like a bell Remember how his blood ran out and boiled away in Hell. Everything Missy ever had was working for her by the end of that song: straight, pure, uncanny straight pure singing by a pure straight plainly frocked girl with straight hair so blond it was almost white. The try of it was the thing—as always with Missy, till her dying day—a song was a try, not a performance. And that was there in the song, trying it and making it. And her voice. It was saying I know who I am, and now you know who I am. And to all those stunned and dazzled people in the park I was not a major attraction that summer but she had added a dimension to my presence. And when I walked out on the stage they were ready for me. The disquiet of her voice, and her mystery, were still in that park, and so I had to take her, make them forget her, and I moved into a realm where I had never been before, and in that long big-time night of work only two things happened, Missy and young Bathgate. I would not learn to resent her feat for a long long time. You stand in the blinding light and the approval splits your eardrums. At the end of the evening, with everyone onstage for the farewell, I found myself taking her hand, and that triggered the biggest roar of all. And then we milled off and when she got to the side she sat down on a chair she was shaking so, trying to hold her face with her shaking hands. She was ice cold and small, smaller than I expected, a thin smaller girl than showed in the lights with her knees together and the bluewhite skin of her small thin hands holding that face in its fall of goldwhite hair. And she couldn’t stop her frail shoulders trembling, and I said something to her but she couldn’t look up. I took a stance like a cop, feeling this was the place to stand and protect this girl, and suddenly Mr. John Malcolm is beside us, he is holding the neck of his guitar in his big beefy blueblack hand, and his old blueblack face with all the lights is sad and puzzled, and in that deep gentle voice that sings like water when he talks John Malcolm says I got sixty-one years on me and I know where I come from, I come from the fields. What I don’t know is where you come from, where is it you kids come from so fast I never even seen you coming.
Even and Odd in the Garden of Adding (5:15)
But for those of you who follow great tales of true love, like my institutional mothers stirring the soup pots while the radio played them their favorite daytime stories, I just want to remind you that’s how we met, Missy and me, on a stage, in front of twenty thousand people, and we each heard the other’s performance before we ever said hello. There is something we live with, like another sense, or like another dimension added to all our senses, and it is merely the knowledge that if we choose to be somewhere at a certain time then others will choose to be there too. That is power, and it is a strange kick, weird and possessive, it is like an imposition on your being that adumbrates the edges. How to stand in relationship to it was Missy’s constant struggle, and so I made it mine too. See, you can choose to be somewhere for free, for instance, because it’s worthy and small and shabby and nobody expects you. And doing that reduces your market value, except that since history is riding in you everything you do turns out to be right, even what you do to diminish yourself. So then you are accused of sanctimony—as she often was—and the next time when something worthy small shabby and self-diminishing comes along, the position you take must be just a shade more defined, sharpened, in its responsibility. It is a nerve-shredding bag when history makes you a gift of the world. I live with it by believing you put the song out and move on. I hid this from her because I was engrossed in the touch of her cheek on my fingers like the skin of a flower. And her hair falling to her shoulders, and the down like penciled sunlight on the curve of her back. But I had to talk integrity to her round gray serious clear eyes, because conversation was important. Everything was important—sitting on a park bench, as well as making love, reading a book as well as singing to a stadium of people. The first time she began to realize the profound differences in our natures she called me lazy. It was a march just too damn far away from where I happened to be at the moment. She took her acolytes and went alone without me, thinking perhaps in that long ride just what lazy meant, like if you probe a sore tooth with your tongue the pain will finally occupy the entire world. But I was way ahead of her: once we were in London, having a good time in Soho with our English brothers, and it was down in this Italian cellar-restaurant, and we were drinking red wine and eating fettuccine and receiving all these famous people who we didn’t know but had heard of their books or seen their flicks calling us by our familiar names (for it doesn’t matter how you get there, you are all in the same club and share the same worldwide unlisted telephone number), and maybe it was the self-satisfied laughter, the inanity that exists at the top of the world, or maybe it was the color of the walls, but she suddenly said to me, Billy I’ve got to get home. I called a cab, but by home she meant all the way, so we flew to New York, but in New York she meant all the way, so I got us a car and drove through the night to Columbus, Ohio. Now I had never been in that town before but have since played it and it is a state capital where in the restaurants they serve a side dish of fruit salad on lettuce with a topping of mayonnaise. I stopped at seven thirty in the morning at a tract house with a small green lawn in front and a chrome sprinkler lying at rest in the dew. Carrie Mae was waiting in her apron at the open door and the moment she and I looked at each other began our life of enmity as the slim fair girl slipped past us both into the house. Carrie Momma, Missy said from inside, this is the Billy Bathgate—he drove me all the way home all night, what energy! Billy, this is Mrs. Carrie Mae Wilson who is like a momma to me. I think he’s hungry for breakfast, Carrie Momma. And inside was a small neat house with wall-to-wall bluegreen carpeting and shiny maple furniture, Van Gogh reproductions on the wall, the kind with the computer paint strokes, a gilt mirror with a gilt American eagle set over the fireplace, and on a shiny cobbler’s bench next to the Morris chair was a low stack of National Geographic magazines. Missy’s growing-up home, all you cats. I washed up in the guest bathroom and sat in the cozynook off the kitchen while Carrie Mae angrily whipped up the pancake batter. She kept looking at my lace-up boots, my buckskin jacket. Upstairs a shower ran. Carrie Mae knew I was listening so she began to talk to me and I learned that her anger was not worry, because she knew her baby and her baby could take care of herself, but simple personal displeasure at my appearance and the selfishness of its pretense. She was a wise old Negro lady, and my automatic enemy. She knew before Missy that it could never be. I learned there was a father, that he was a public works engineer who sank water lines and sewage pipes into the ground and was away weeks at a time, and that he was a fine man and good father who loved his daughter and was proud of her. And then Carrie Mae grew still. Because there was singing upstairs and I thought for a moment it was Missy and realized then it was her record player and one of those operatic sopranos was singing something wild, like Richard Strauss, something soaring, some fierce Kraut thing. And then I corrected myself for it was her after all, singing along, matching that chesty record note for note. With a little bit extra amplification of what I would call love for the music. This purely slim chick with breasts of small fruit and a rib cage you could crack with your two hands. She came down a few minutes later an
d the warm breakfast smells had made me drowsy and my aspirin had worn off and she came in dressed for bed like a barefoot high school girl in her round-collared nightdress, and she sat down to her fresh orange juice and her pancakes and her glass of milk and smiled at me such a fair fine peaceful smile of recognition that I have never forgotten it and never will; it was the lovely smile of no tricks and no secrets, of the profound and gentle courtesy in her tough heart. You see when it was bad for Missy she had someplace she could go anytime, day or night, summer or winter, and she knew someone would be there to serve her a meal and turn back her bed. That was the difference between us right there. Then what happened was we cut a record she and I. The song is not unknown, “The Single-Bullet-Theory Blues,” and it was one of the few times we got together in our professional travels and the only time to sing on the same record; and we sang many takes, and tried many ways, and finally stood at the same mike and held hands and closed our eyes and sang, as if closeness would make our voices match. But they didn’t. Our voices didn’t belong next to each other. So I knew that as a sign. Missy’s talking voice was an ordinary girl’s talking voice with no suggestion of how large it could sing. But my talking voice becomes my singing voice with just a slight heightening of attitude. And in our different relationships to our performing voices I had read the future. But I remember things about her that don’t harden up. That, for instance, I thought for a while her singing voice was accountable to her fear; she was always so scared of being up there, the tremolo in the large, witchy voice was the sound of her fear. But I was wrong. That she was physically delicate and had to rest herself every day, strong in nerve and soul and in the clearness of her mind and determination, but just a slim girl in her bones and with a scarf for her throat on a warm song day of mild breezes. That she saw no contradiction in her practical commonsense decency recipes for the fucked-up world and her private belief in mystical presences, nameless powers who inhabited pebbles and stones, the clouds in the sky, and sometimes the face in her mirror. That she loved to bet I couldn’t make her laugh, and always lost. That she was happy for all the money she made but worried that it compromised her. That she enjoyed the way we made it in our own style, cool and concessionless. That she liked big-beat dancing. That people sent her books they had written—which she never read. That, for a while, while I was writing the songs she liked, she revered me. That maybe I am wrong in thinking I was way ahead of her in the knowledge of us, for perhaps what she called lazy was her glimpse down the tunnel of my eyes to the deep seabed of my murky soul where my songs waited like electric fishes. And one other thing is true: after she caught up to me and neither of us had a secret left, and we were done; after she knew there was nothing I would not try and no road I would not go down; I called her once or twice and she came. When I’d had it with all the clanking machinery of being Billy, with everybody and everything lining up on me—not just the managers and accountants, not just the armies of hacks and flacks and makers of sweatshirts who live off you because they live off the idea of success, but the very iron filings of historical fashion loading themselves on my outlines. And when it was this bad she came and went away with me to my hideout and let me persuade her that we were the only two people alive on the earth. And let us find some air to breathe and breathe it. And let us make up the names of grasses we found and bushes and berries. And love each other’s face in the different lights of morning and afternoon. And eat crackers and canned fruit and go to bed early. And it was Even and Odd in the Garden of Adding And we ate all the fruit we could find From apples persimmons peaches and plums To the sour green watermelon rind And me and my lady we did what was shady And we tried to add up for our kind But Odds add up Even and Even’s in Heaven And God has gone out of his mind
Billy’s Dream of a Dead Friend (3:40)
When you take away a man’s sensations he will make up his own: take away his seeing and his hearing and let him smell nothing and let nothing touch him, he will see and hear and smell and feel what his mind makes up. And what does that prove but the loneliness we are born into, that we are born hungry for the world and lonesome in our hunger, and that the heart floods its banks of loneliness and runs over the earth, and is soaked away till there is no more blood of the lonely heart’s spring and our river runs dry. And my dream is of the pale-bled heart of Missy having run its courses and the last drops of its blood sifting into the sands of that southern beach; and the wind of my waking hours cleanses and dries the sands, but each night those darkening stains spread out again, just where they were before. Because my dream is made of facts and the facts can’t be dreamed away. Nobody over thirty in the whole country believed her the times she spoke out. But I knew that she never lied—that was not when she lied. She didn’t lie when she showed up on TV in the country where we were at war, she didn’t lie when she mourned for the three murdered men in Mississippi, she didn’t lie at the church in Birmingham or on the Mall in Washington, D.C. So one day the police come upon her as she’s out for a stroll down this country road with an old Negro lady. And they stop their car to investigate. And she says, We’re going to the beach. We’re looking to find a breath of fresh air. And all the grown-up liberals said she might be a sanctimonious fake and a phony, but she is a shrewd genius for that line; imagine saying that to that cop a good hundred and ten miles from the nearest ocean. The age of marches was over but a new age is begun and we will have a march to the sea for that old Negro lady. But the truth is she meant what she said, the words themselves, for when she said it that became her intention. And that old Negro lady was Carrie Mae, who sang to her in the cradle all the blues she sang; who grew her up in Columbus, Ohio; and who’d gone back to her home in South Carolina to live before she died. And Missy went down to see Carrie Mae and that was how they were taking a walk down the country road, the old woman in a fine black dress from Saks Fifth Avenue and a sun parasol on her shoulder and forty-five-dollar orthopedic shoes on her feet, arm in arm with Missy in her shirt and jeans and sandals and shades, the two of them out for a stroll on this hot dusty road where the police car is what kicked up the dust. And Missy says in front of the deputies, Momma Carrie how fine it will be when we smell the ocean breeze and can sit down on the cool wet sand and bathe our feet in that cool, absolving, never-ending ocean. And breathe air that has some breath in it. And the old woman, who knows her Missy from birth, from the moment she pushed out of real, soon-to-be-dead Momma, she smiles and says, All right. And pretends with her and believes with her at that moment that that is just what they’ll do. For it is a hot day, and the air is bad for breathing, as Carrie Mae knows because she has asthma, a bad, lifelong asthma. And the deputies hear that, and see them smiling at each other, old Carrie Mae and this famous troublemaker white girl, smiling in their love for each other, and they take offense. And when they radio the sheriff it becomes an infraction and when the AP stringer drives up he puts it on the wire and it becomes a news story, and by the next morning when the women get out of the jailhouse and stand before the judge, a wish to ease an old woman’s breathing has become a categorical truth for Missy, for nobody was ever more stubborn with the stubborn soul of a saint. She took a County Cab back to the old woman’s redbrick ranch house and packed a pull-string laundry bag and came back to town and the two of them walked east out of that town arm in arm for a summer if they wanted of walking free together wherever they wanted. But it wasn’t a march till the next morning when twenty-five seminarians from Columbia, S.C., stepped out of their bus and followed along. And it wasn’t a demonstration till the kids begin to pour down from the west and north. And it wasn’t a riot till days later when five thousand of them pushed their way gently and firmly through the patriots drinking their beers and throwing the bottles. And one was thrown back. Which is what the police with their helmets, shades, and carbines had been waiting for. And because I wasn’t there, what I see is myself walking up to Missy who faces the ocean like Venus about to go back into the sea, and I gently touch her shoulder a
nd she turns and smiles at me her lovely smile of recognition and whispers words of a song I write for her in our minds: What do you believe, Billy? Tell me what you believe, Billy And I raise my hand, which is the signal for the carbine bullet to slam into her throat, and fell her, and spill her voice into the sand except for that portion of it that reddens the white surf and washes back into the blue ocean. And that is my dream-song of a dead friend. In life her life was whole major chords—nothing diminished, nothing flatted, nothing minor, nothing pushed a half tone off center. What kind of music was that? It was music for the bright and early morning. It sounds all right until those shadows of night begin to creep around the earth like the big dark hands of God, like the dark hands of God around your throat, children. And when you feel those hands is when you sing. When God is squeezing the breath out of you is the time to sing. So hear what I’m saying: when she spoke she represented herself truthfully. It was when she sang that she lied. And her lying is what gave her that voice, that truest purest voice in the whole amazed world, that uncanny voice stronger and sweeter than Christ’s Himself. Listen: it is so truly perfect it is raw it is so pure. And doesn’t she sing sad? And doesn’t she sing those Baptist blues hymns bluer and deeper blue than anyone? Well that blue is night blue, the blue of the shadow of God, and that was when Missy lied, because she never allowed that His shadow was in her being.
All the Time in the World: New and Selected Stories Page 8
