#20: The Song through the Gale
"I had to change."
(Last time, the guys spent all day driving homeward and then slept in the car.)
A mustachioed policeman knocked on our window a little after five in the sun-tinged morning. “This isn’t a hotel, folks, so let’s move it along.”
When we pulled into a fast-food place down the road and got out, my body protested at being wrenched from its contorted mold. Jerkily, like a zombie, I followed my three friends into the building. My head throbbed as I sipped thawed orange juice and chewed deep-fried Styrofoam branded as hash browns.
Danny took the wheel after we left the restaurant. I should have been able to slip into sleep, but I was numbed past the point of exhaustion.
The eye-scouring sun rose, and so did the temperature.
“Even this shirt’s wasted,” Ralph mumbled.
“What?” Pat asked.
I twisted my neck to see Ralph point at the Verse for Wear t-shirt he had bought from the Electric Cafe. “This used to be a bright red. Now, it’s, ah, plum. Pale, faded plum. And the writing’s chipped, too. I can’t believe one wash could do this.”
“Oh,” Pat countered, “one good wash is sometimes all you need. All the color—gone.” He snapped his fingers at that quick erasure. Yet even if bright colors could fade, some stains could endure. Some went too deep, perhaps, and could not be dissolved, for all the shocks and spins and sudden elations of the washing machine.
Ralph sighed. “Well, maybe it wasn’t that bright to begin with.”
“Maybe it wasn’t very well made,” Danny added.
“It’s hard to remember those things after the fact,” I said. “Maybe it was. Maybe it’s all gone. But maybe it never was—you just thought wrong.”
What, barely a week ago, had been bright new verse was now revealed to be a tired ditty—slept-in and mussed.
It had seemed, then, like so much. The winds had been touched with glory, like dancing bright streamers. Yet those happy gusts wilted, and the streamers fell apart like spiderweb tendrils. The thrill passes, and even—especially—the brightest colors fade.
Ring ring ring—reality called again. Even Pat’s work bravado seemed brittle. “Oh hey, Frank….I’ll call the boss about it….How’s the trip been? Well, it’s been unexpected, let’s just say that…”
We drove past cities jammed with cars and noise. We drove past towns, shells of factories, and vacant lots. The car trolled through the waving cornstalks that hinted at the fruition to come—the sudden surprise of joy, of gold pouring out from the green stalk. And the great spinning machines would come by and rip them up, and the gold might be corroded with bugs or disease or over-ripe or too-soon plucked. The wheels of the car rolled through the flat miles. Everything passed through the windows of the car in a succession of flat images. They fled, frame by frame.
I slumped in my seat. My shoulder pressed against the door’s hard plastic. The heat fell like a thick blanket. My face ground against the hot glass. I slipped my hand in my pocket and rubbed her bandana’s fabric with my fingers. At a corner, a seam had come loose.
“What is it?” Danny asked.
I shrugged, my finger still feeling the edge of the handkerchief. “I don’t know. I’m just thinking.”
What could I even say to her? How could I begin? How could I step across the gulf of time and hurt?
It was sunny. The wheels turned. We hit a patch of rain clouds, streaks of lightning tearing down the horizon. The wheels turned. The sky was blue and clear, the sun like some golden pendant. The wheels turned. The clouds frothed, a yellow bubble peeking through. The wheels turned. The clouds rolled like the plains around us. The wheels turned. They poured like black smoke in the air. The wheels turned.
We drove. The road endured. It reached behind us, spanning the hours, the days, the night, the thousands of miles.
“I’m tired,” Ralph said.
“What a surprise,” Pat said.
“Well, I am.”
The hours of that Kentucky summer had been edged with excitement. And I had been able to dive into the suddenness. And maybe, as my lips ran along that shimmering, wet surface, I had gotten some taste of air.
Night fell. We got provisions at a gas station’s convenience store. In the car, Pat guzzled soda from a giant bottle. Ralph had purchased some packaged cotton candy. As I sat next to him in the back, he ripped it open. A sugary smell, light like faint pink carnation petals, rode on the air. It lingered for a moment as Ralph gobbled a cloud. And then it was gone.
We at last made it back to Ralph’s luxury cabin in the Adirondacks. It was the same as when we had left. Two half-drunk beer cans still stood sentry next to the sink.
“Home stagnant home,” Ralph said as he went to turn on the air conditioning. There was some organic pizza in the freezer.
“Organic—what does that even mean?” Pat asked.
“It means it’s healthy, I think,” Ralph said. “Non-processed.”
Pat looked at the orange price tag. “It means it’s for suckers.”
“There are worse things to be a fool for,” I said.
After dinner, Ralph and Pat went out to the front porch to savor the Mello Mello, just like they had done when we were setting out on this errand. Danny found a Star Trek: The Next Generation rerun on cable TV. I called my parents, got their answering machine, and left a message saying that I’d be coming home—that Kentstock was a bust.
As the sound of laughter and far-off space explorations played off in the distance, I rolled out my sleeping bag like a cloth coffin in the loft. I gazed at the bedroom ceiling. The grand canopy of the sky had been replaced by the foam of a popcorn ceiling. The stars were lost in that swirl.
The darkness fell heavier. The sounds faded. The eye gets so tired of twilight. It’s tired of being tired.
I knew I couldn’t keep living this way.
The Shadows of Heroes
My brothers excelled.
Both were tall and strong, and they both had chosen the martial life: Hank in the Marines, and Jimmy in the Navy by way of the Academy.
In high school, I sometimes stayed late to watch my brother Hank at practice. He pushed and pushed and pushed his teammates—fusing challenge and encouragement. It seemed to me that duty was to him not an impediment but an incitement. He liked the satisfaction that rules gave. He didn’t understand, he sometimes said, games without rules.
Jimmy preferred the lonely sport of solo running. He liked “running along the crack of dawn,” as he put it, so he rose every morning before everyone else to chase across the gray pavement. A master of time and subduing it with purpose, he once told me that a runner needed to know how to wait—how to wait for the finish line, how to wait from one step to the next, how to wait through the burn. The waiting gave him a severe strength—my mother’s resilience edged in steel. Jimmy, however, in his unguarded moments, could break that stern facade with a radiant smile. He was in love, and I sometimes wondered if those same people who saw his face so hard on the track or in formation would recognize him getting out of the car with Claire.
I once did a road race with Jimmy. He was in the top three and did a few dozen jumping jacks afterwards. I fought through every mile. The sweat, which should have evaporated since my flesh felt so hot, ran down my face, arms, chest, and legs. I could barely see or hear anything as I stumbled over the finish line, but I did, stumbling, finish. I then collapsed into bed and could barely get out of it the next day.
I endured.
I had to face the morning.
It was dawn’s twilight, when darkness had begun to dissolve. I had to change.
I pulled on my pants and stepped outside. The heat had broken, and the morning air had the crispness I associated with early fall.
So I began to walk. Each step ran zig-zags up my neck. I felt the bend of my knee, the knot of ligaments like corroded elastic bands. I felt the spiky song of my birthright in my blood. Every step was hard.
Light squiggled upon the firmament, a pane of smoldering red and orange. I kept following the weaving course of the road. I staggered up the crest of hills and down into the troughs. The road was broken and cracked. Green and brown weeds reached up through the scratches.
Clouds foamed above me. Bobbing in a sea of purple, the cratered white mask of the moon cast a few glints of silver like spiderthreads downward.
So I sank lower and lower into that deepening dawn. I walked, and the memories rose—of kisses and tears, of midnight yearnings and daybreak disappointments, of sudden cuts and leaps.
There, in Kentucky, there had been something. The notes had risen, scoring the sky as the wind blew through her hair. Maybe not an air-brushed facade of paradise, nor a glib utopia of endless pizza—but something? Something human and flawed and maybe wonderful?
I marched over the splintered road. My shoes crunched on sand and crushed the splinters of broken glass lining the way. I walked amid shattered bottles and crushed cans, depleted reminders of drunken joy. I stepped on cardboard husks, faded and scorched by the cycle of rain and sun. The dimness made the frozen waves of the road even more turgid. Every stumble was another step, every step a stumble.
A car raced up behind me, and it sent my shadow ahead—shade piled on stretched shade. The chasing particles of the car’s wake tugged at my fingers, my arm, my toes, my legs. Yet my foot pressed on.
I walked. I followed every step down to its base—down to the soles of my shoes, down to the dark scales of the pavement.
A burning haze whirled out from my brain. It collected in drops and slid down the sides of my skull.
I don’t know how long I walked. I don’t know how many times my foot fell flat on the pavement.
It was just the road. It was just my feet. My lips burned with the kisses of shadows; my fingers raked through the settling darkness. It was just myself.
A fog licked my heels. The white mist swept like teasing fetters at my ankles, and every step was only a taunting renewal of the shackle’s click. It seemed spun of air, yet water trembled on its threads. The water—the thousand atomic tears—clung to my pant legs. The tiny drops quivered at the tips of my eyelashes.
I walked.
I walked.
I walked.
A crack of gold opened in the sky. A hundred million miles away, the spitting sphere of the sun cast its glaze on our sky through the vacuum of vast space. Its fire splashed the air and seared my face and lip and eye. The gold returned. And the sky erupted in a riot of colors.
In the rising dawn, I heard a clarion call, like a bird’s song through the gale, like the arching notes of a violin. I stood still. It could be borne. After all this, there was still life. There was still the air upon my face. I could not stay in the crypt anymore. A faith had returned, like a creed that had gained anew the heart’s conviction. There were true mountain tops. There were peaks within, real spires of spirit. And the true adventure was to strive for them. Love was more than blind spurts in the darkness. Love could haul us through our moments of agony, want, and joy into something further and truer. Love could fulfill the thirst of our yearnings if we had the courage to yearn truly.
A resolution grew within me, a golden rocket shooting to the sky. I could meet the world, for all its sufferings, all its losses, all its pains. I could—I would meet life with an open hand. Let worldly wounds accumulate like barnacles, let scornful time whip my body bloody, let the knives cut—as they would cut!—through the thousand disappointments! I would still meet life.
I would meet it with its sweet and sour. I would meet it with its hurt and horror. I would meet it with its grace and gladness. I would face life, even in the broken road. I would try again.
“I’m Back”
From Mickey Kent, 61st Street Sessions (1977)
So they say I’ve been gone for too long. And they say I don’t know my way around. Things have changed—people, too. What now is gray used to be blue. And it’s long and it’s gone and right is now wrong, And where I used to live now I don’t belong, And it’s gone and it’s gone and a song can’t be found To untie the knots that have everything bound. And it’s gone and it’s gone and it’s gone. And they say I don’t know my way around. But now the dreamer’s back and he’s on his way The dreamer’s back and he’s here to say— Stomping down the street— Oh, the sun is fine! Everything I greet Seems like fruit on the vine. With the streetlights and the car horns And the streetfights and the popcorn I’m back! and the sky is blue again! So sun light up the world, And wind tousle and swirl, I’ll take the world for all in all, Midnight and high noon, Now and then, later and soon— I’ll get up when I fall. Let the music play, And reclaim the day, Let the music play, And I’ll go my way. Stomping down the street— Oh, my life is mine! Everything I greet Seems like fruit on the vine. With the streetlights and the car horns And the gumdrops and the popcorn With the happy and the careworn— I’m back! I’m back! I’m back! I’m back! I’m back! I’m back! So world, here I am! So world, this is the song! So world, here I am!