Other dead-a.m. sounds push me further offshore from home. The couple next door are at it again, their voices warring timbres with registers of love and hate in blooded confusion. That damn sax player is hawking and splatting riffs which suggest long encrustation, a keel too rusty to cleanly part waters any more. Their New Year’s party still cruising along, a ship of fools under the wash of jackal moon.
My antilife, or -lives, indigo negatives of my loves. Of marriage I will say nothing here -- I can’t, not at this precipitous hour, where many other sober men and women have cried Aw Fuck It and wandered out. But I will comment on that time when I gave up playing music years ago, sold off my electric guitars, bartered my amp stack for track recording system I had meant to try spoken word over jazz, during that overheated summer in Orlando before I met Jan.
I was living in a small second-floor apartment on just off tiny Lake Cherokee on the near south side of town, trying to dry out over the months before the courts made me attend my first AA meeting. A summer of high-90’s swelt, puffs of midmorning cloud coalescing and building through the afternoon into towering ziggaurat of storm, thrashing the city streets with a whiteout of rain, every surface washed clean, remaining in the far early evening sky like black armadas, their bellies charged with naked leys of heat lightning, flashes which echoed on the black glass surface of Lake Cherokee like a congregation’s amen, the streets still humid, steam hovering about the temples of early night with vicious viscous lust ... And no booze I would drink, no deeper night I could turn to, not after all that had been lost ...
For it was a midzone season, surfacing and diving in different ways. The big night music was sinking away from me, my guitar’s sacred identity in loud pounding nights of stage-side frenzy in smoky bars reeking of beer and soppy lust dulled to profanes, a weight which deadened that guitar, made it fall too, hauling with it that deadended creature of abandonment to the louder nature of things I had become.
I was losing or forsaking an identity that had worked for ten years of my misspent youth, separating from me like flesh from bone, ripping away the bandolier of big night songs I worshiped and tried to write, each song a cruel and cunning high-caliber bullet fashioned to shatter ever armor that stands in the way of desire. How else shall I say it? The loss of the big night music felt like a great hand indifferently tearing from my neck the trophy necklace I had assembled, heavy with wolf canines and big-cat sabres and teeth ripped from the violated mouths of employers and cops, critical girlfriends and pissed-off fathers, all of whom barred the true doors to night with their worlds-puncturing No ...
Songs like wickedly sharp swords that had been killed a hundred times in the magma knots of the earth all the way down at its core,tempered till they gleamed with their own light, a self-shrill steel whose edge slashed the entire night’s course between ecstasy and doom ,,, Only rarely can a band at mid-set offer up the song which thunders and hooves all the way to our naked source, pent on a perilous and razor-precise road -- thin as a blade, sharp and hot as struck flint -- hammering all the way into the furious heart beating out, that hot palp of welcome which appoints a lucky night to bliss.
A killer song plunges right into the abyss to cleave love clean through, marrying desire’s ends by the cruellest of means, locating the Grail castle in the center of an unspeakably banal waste partying on past the last border of night, if only for one song, for one night, finding if for only one time in a life the full amplitude of the big night music’s pagan DNA coiled around tensioned strings and taut skins.
Of that welcome which shrieks at our extreme, that Other waiting just off the map at a Cape beyond the ends of the singable, drummable, howled-at-full volume world, well, you take a song to its Wagnerian extreme and it bloats, it can’t swim any longer at its chill depths, it lifts the beast gasping toward the ceiling of the brine cathedral in fatal, fin de siecle cool ... I dunno, maybe that big night music proved itself to high or deep a power for my talent and balls; my belief in my ability to stay aboard its perilous coracle faded after so many nights of getting upended and dumped in with the night’s brine, just another bit of flotsam to add to the trash tide. The edge grew fainter, harder to find, its ledge under my feet more unforgiving, keener, the falloff more precipitous.
Maybe I was just getting too old for that shit. As it happened I slowly lost interest; whatever fuse in me that leapt toward those sources spluttered and doused. No new songs came up from the well, and the playing grew sterile, going over the same old riffs, noodling where structures of futurity should have been rising. Bandmates moved in with girlfriends or got heavy into coke or shipped off for better gigs. One blew his brains out with a shotgun, and I hear another is waiting for his second liver transplant, his face horribly ballooned from the meds he takes trying to keep the first asshole’s liver working in his puke body.
Without out a cause the drinking just became a curse, an upside-down manifesto, bereft even of any excuse I believed ... And the bands played on, triumphant, mocking, the guitar players and singers casually picking off the barmaids and fresh-of-age pretties at closing time, leaving the rest of us to bite at the glass necks of our tallboys, eyes red and wild.
I still dutifully practiced every day for some months, but the insides of my power chords were fading like the surf of a shore growing indistinct in fog, droning faint and fainter. A year or two further was devoted and lost to this zombie state of dead songs animated by mere habit, the sense of duty to so much time devoted to something now lost. The licks like Latin disappearing from the tongue, a language or culture dying in my ear, drying on my hands. Eventually skill became useless, even criminal, and articulation moot.
Of course the big night music strolled on, finding a fresh tribe of young bucks pent on fame’s immolation, a fresh tide of sperm and sweat and driving hooves to lavish with dreams of infinite pussy and wholly squander come first light. The big night music didn’t even smile as it passed me over, its old news, spent wad, the outre, 80’s man boy who’s overdue for real work, doubtful and crabby where the song needed blue sass and hotsauce. My guitar stayed in its case for more than a day, then three, then a week then a month, popping back out on rare occasions when I flayed my fingertips playing the old war songs, like a geezer pulling his uniform out of a musty chest in the closet to count the ribbons and stars. And then it was gone. I haven’t picked it up for twenty years now.
Somewhere back then, as it was becoming clear that my nights of playing the big night music were over, I thought I heard a deeper voice in its place, up from a different zone of the heart. Whether it was father or son of that music, who knows, but I packed my guitar pick into the blue velour pocket of my guitar case and left it there, my fingers hungry for the heft of something else, which proved a pen. Cold steel in my hand as I write, the ink which spoors across the page up from squid-depths, an ichor close to those regions where I believed the sword of song was forged, where my guitar now floated ... did one birth the other? And what else was there to say, with that big night music now gone from the surface of my life?
Gone, but not lost. Almost thirty years after I stood on a stage in claptrap barroom in Spokane Washington roaring out Foreigner’s “Dirty White Boy” and “God Save the Queen” by the Sex Pistols, I found as I began to write that sound still roaring in my deep ear, casked in a chest down in Davy Jones’ rock ‘n’ roll locker at the bottom of the sea, atop a huge boulder thrown in the primordial sea by a Titan who trying to conk his mother the moon and missed.
That big night music sure has a huge backside to it, a monster riptide. Was that the end of the next years of writing -- trying to get it all down? Were the poems that flooded out the afterburn of all those song-ended downsweeps of the guitar, exult’s exile to silence, a ringing harrow in the bones ghostly in ambition and ghastly to remember, much less romance ... I’ll probably never lift a guitar again, but the feral raw wire of hot chops at full volume lords this abyss I here write through, a sea that has proved perilous close to the one pounding real shores of a night I can’t yet fall back to sleep in. My drowned guitar is both rudder and water-level of this boat of a bed on the bridge of the worlds; my ears still hear it rocking subliminally away, entranced, terrified, and I don’t know if that sound is behind or ahead, under or over all that I here say.
