Sittin’ On Top Of The World

Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys.

He still doesn’t know what to do with the cold dead gaping lens looking at him. He was odd anyway, but you see his eyes flit around, fixing on the director, then the camera, and then he looks at the near distance and scans the place where the audience should be. Old habits die hard.

It takes a certain kind of weirdo to look at a dead black glass eye and act like anything in particular in front of it. The audience is theoretical at that point. It’s why the entertainment business is peopled with so many sociopaths now. It used to just attract freaks. But they were freaks that had some idea of what a fellow human being was. They were sitting right there in front of you. They were just facing the wrong way. Now the audience starts out theoretical. It gets worse from there.

I love the credits at the open. I picture people huddled in a converted church or apothecary or warehouse looking at the reels in the dark of a roadhouse night. The crackle wasn’t all static on their radio. Both the crackle and the static are gone now.

People were ubiquitous, and entertainment was rare and prized. We’re flipped now.

I didn’t know the Bob Wills version of that song. It’s great fun. I did know Bob Wills, because he was important, in an obscure sort of way, and he encapsulated a portion of the spinning globe at a certain time in a certain place. I could point out to you that there’s not one person in Rock music today who knows how to play the guitar as well as that fellow there.

I knew Howlin’ Wolf’s version of that song. To say it was different is to say you should wear sunglasses when you visit the sun. You Tube doesn’t have it, if it exists. This’ll have to do, to give you the general idea:

Get the picture? I did. That man is talking to me. Most people wouldn’t know who either one was, nor care to. The remainder would mostly like one, or the other. America as I picture it isn’t worth a fig without both of them in it.

Howlin’ Wolf’s dead and buried. Bob Wills lies a-mouldering in the grave. One spoke to the other, and vice versa, and they both talk to me from beyond the grave. Because they learned to look into the cold dead lens, and picture me in it.

The Same River

I’ve walked up this street so many times now. I can’t really remember how many times.

You can never put your foot in the same river twice.

Heh. High School. What do they know?

I can tick my finger through the slats on Atkin’s fence, and feel the rhythm of it in my bones. I can remember which are out of alignment enough to break the pulse of it. I know it. I painted it once for summer money.

I know when to shrug past the light pole and dodge around the mailboxes and the amount I’ve got to raise my foot to clear the curb without looking. The neighbor’s dogs don’t bark at me. They know me like I know them. I’m not the same as when I left, but I smell the same, I guess.

I like the way the rocker at 27 goes back and forth in the breeze. I could always look out the window and see how much breeze there was before I went out. There’s never a person in the chair, so it’s more useful. Funny, that.

The lawn’s gone to seed. Mom never could push that fiendish little mixer with the curling blades going swish swish and the finely shorn blades of grass cascading onto your shoes. It always made her peevish, to be so close to danger and to be expected to be disinterested in it. I could tell her a bit about that now.

Dad had to go and die on her. His back was too strong for his heart, she said. She says I got all his heart. She got the mower.

She’s alone, but not lonely, she wrote to me, because she has him and me in her heart always. She says death and the grave is nothing. Nothing but your troubles ends at the edge of the hole in the ground, she’d said while we each threw in a handful of gravel, eight summers ago. Mom cries when she reads novels but not in a boneyard.

I always put my right foot on the first step.It’s the spot already worn from dad’s boot. I wear away at the spot in his place now. Someday I’ll wear it clean through and I won’t know what to do, because the hole will be dearer to me than a religion, but how do you keep a hole? Dad will be gone in another hole.

The door has that heavy oval glass in it. I used to run my finger around the bevel, to feel the clean edge and marvel at the perfection of the curve of it. Dad said I’d be a man when I could reach all the way around without tiptoes. I showed him I could. He let me mow the lawn.

The paints peeling on the jamb, except around the doorbell, where it’s worn all away. There’s a lesson in that, but I don’t care what it is. I can see straight through the house from the stoop, the rooms opening one into another in a line. Mom’s in the kitchen, at the end of the parade. Her hair hangs in her face like it always did when she was working. A wisp on either side of her eyes. She brushes it back with the side of her hand, and her head turns, and she sees me there in the glass.

She stares at me a good long while. She leans on her hand on the tabletop, like I’ve seen her do a thousand times a thousand times when the kitchen gets too hot.

Maybe I should have wrote. Maybe I shouldn’t have worn the uniform. Maybe she don’t know me right away. Maybe I’m different now.

Prince…Isn’t…Very Good. Sorry.

Everybody comes from something. Entertainment enthusiasts make a fetish out of identifying influences. It’s fun, but eventually it becomes a snake eating itself. In the world of pawed over minutiae, where the majority of people consider themselves not just consumers of entertainment, but collectors and aesthetes, not a whole lot is really obscure any more.

Gushing about Prince on the SuperBowl is about over now. I don’t see the attraction.

If you’re tapped to entertain at the SuperBowl, you’ve jumped the shark. Old, tired things are appropriate there. It’s a kind of proof you’re old and in the way. Prince got that way without ever being important.

He’s all derivative. He doesn’t come from something. He is nothing except cut and paste rock/funk pastiche. There’s no there there. It’s all somewhere else. Being an artist often makes you odd. Just being odd doesn’t make you an artist. Pretending to be odd, trying to be mistaken for an artist, is just plain band-in-the-hotel-lounge lame. Prince is that lame.

I can watch the fellows Prince tamely copies, and it’s not like I can’t see where they got their stuff from. Hendrix would tell you all about Albert King, for instance. But great artists distill things into their own elixir. Prince is just a card table with one of everything he’s shoplifted on it. Or maybe an erector set, with all the pieces laid out on the floor, never to be assembled. The erector set – the attention– should be given to someone that knows what to do with it.

I looked at the tube last Sunday, and he was playing Proud Mary, for goshsakes. He’s not even a good wedding band; that’s too lame for any reception now.

I can’t see Prince and not see the gears turning in his head. Who am I like now?

Prince watched James Brown, and never was a patch on him. He’s not talented enough to copy him, and not artistic enough to make something in that vein of his own.

James Brown watched Joe Tex, and made James Brown out of it. That’s different. Way different.

Incantation

I can’t think of anything else.

We’re going to be out on the Banks for another week, easy. I’ve got to get it out of my mind.

I can’t. I keep rolling it around in there, like a prayer or nursery rhyme. I can’t think of any damn thing else. It’s a haunt.

How could I be so dumb? What made me do that? What was I thinking?

Chaves was talking to me. Man, that guy talks all the time. I wasn’t thinking straight. He distracted me.

Nah, it’s not Chaves fault I did it. It’s Chaves mother’s fault he’s a yammerin’ fool. It’s my fault I listened.

The easy rhythm is gone. Left foot finds the deck, in a spot the ice didn’t find yet. Plant it firm. Right hand pulls hard. Left hand guides. Spin it. Show the hoist the fist. Dump the scaly prize. Step back straight, now, and watch the roll. Ready again.

All I can think of is my hand. Who puts their hand on a frozen line without a glove on? Bring a woman on a boat for bad luck, stand in the bight of the bowline, play mumbletypeg with a blind man, but don’t take your glove off.

It’s nothing but pain. It won’t scab over until we’re back in New Beige and I have a glass under my nose. I don’t care about pain. It’s the shame of it I can’t stand. My hand is like a bad wife. It stands off to the side and reminds me how dumb I am. It never shuts up. It hasn’t got the mercy to get better or worse. It’s just the same, over and over and over until I want to kill the world with the noise in my head.

“Gangi! Pay attention, you ass, you almost put me over!”

I went forward. I took a pail of ice, and a pail of salt. I dumped the salt on the ice. I pulled my glove off and plunged my raw, bleeding hand in there.

There, that’s better.