Death of the Cool

Long ago in the city I had a chaste affair with a client of the art gallery where I worked.  It was sponsored and encouraged by my boss and ended when he went back to Greece. He left me a tasteful Tiffany bracelet the value of which far exceeded the sum total of all my possessions at the time.  So I returned it-- and with the proceeds I bought a great raincoat and a Husqvarna Sewing Machine-- absolute top-of-the-line with a set of fancy stitch cams and multiple accessories.  It was white metal, weighed a ton; at the time I made things and this was like the Porsche of equipment. I sewed quilts galore... wedding presents and baby gifts-- pillow, comforters... I cut up childhood dresses and patched them together; I amassed Liberty handkerchiefs and thrift-shop scrap bags. It was my companion... it welcomed me after work and kept me company through the nights I waited up for whichever musician I was living with at the time. I couldn't wait to get home to it.

Like any well-made machinery, it required maintenance.  When I took up rock and roll in earnest, I neglected it. Decades. At some point after 9/11 I discovered it was self-oiling and failed from lack of use, so I frantically searched repairs. Of course the obvious shops were not in my budget.  I instead went exploring the fashion district and came upon a tiny sliver of a storefront chock full of old machines. One had to sidestep inside down a narrow hallway to reach a worktable/counter behind which was a high wall of shelving stacked with hundreds of machines-- tagged, untagged-- all varieties.  A small, elderly Chinese man with little English greeted me and when I wrote out the brand name, he lit up.  $30, he said. Favorite. Two week.  So I lugged the thing on three subways to 27th Street and confidently left it in what I was sure were his competent hands.

You're crazy, said my boyfriend at the time.  The guy is a mechanical disaster. No, no, I insisted.  He is a genius. He has psychic diagnostic powers and magical hands. Two weeks later I called the number he wrote down on a crumpled scrap of Chinese newsprint and after about twenty rings he picked up, told me he needed a part and it would be another two weeks-- maybe another $20.  This went on... I was in and out of town; I let it go.  I prayed to the Swedish and Chinese gods.

Eight months later, I collected it, paid $60 cash, got it home to find it only sewed in reverse. Well... my Swedish neighbor upstairs was so overjoyed to see his own country's brand, he borrowed it and swore he'd get it going. I left it up there for years.  He actually fixed my black raincoat-pocket and other things.  He died several years ago; it sits now in my closet, waiting-- neglected. The Chinese repair shop is now a luxury high-rise. 

Yesterday someone posted photos of me at a glam rock show wearing a purple satin blouse. I remember how Alan begged me to dress for this one performance where I unfortunately discovered that guitar straps slip right off of satin; it was a rough gig. I'd gone to my friend Jayme's on the UWS to borrow it.. she had closets filled with vintage great clothing and things she'd remade.  It's perfect, she insisted.  No returns... I'd traded her some vinyl, fair and square. I don't know enough about fashion but I took it to a resale place and it sold in one day for a very decent price.  Wow.  Jayme.

So yesterday thinking about her...I stopped at her apartment building on the UWS.  I can't remember when I'd seen her last... years... the pandemic widened these gaps... but she called me every once in a while; we both raised sons on our own... had intimacies to share. The doorman told me she'd moved in with her brother, out of town. I was open-mouthed... she was one of those truly bohemian city fixtures.  Her apartment was old but she created this exotic and homey vibe with purple velvet and just great 'stuff'. She had excellent taste in music, too. Old Stones, Kinks, Faces...  she could tell a cool new band from a poser in a second. She was brusque but also quiet and soft-- formerly sexy and sought-after by rock and roll elite.  One of those lithe women you see among the crowds at Monterrey or Woodstock. Cameras loved her low-slung jeans and hippy tops... her great haircuts. Even when she was broke, people comped her-- her hairdresser, her doctor, her dentist.  It was uncanny. 

Apparently she'd not just left the building.  Late last night, after a deep-search for her brother, I found her three-line obituary, from June. She'd been privately and quietly cremated. I was devastated. No one seemed to know about it... as though she slipped out of a back door when we weren't looking.  She'd done this once at my Thanksgiving dinner; my friends overwhelmed her and she went into the bathroom, maybe got high, and disappeared.  She cared little for food and socializing.  Her magical husband had died young and I think she never moved on from the perfect tantric sex and bohemian heaven he provided. She did come to gigs although she often left early-- quietly.  She was also a valued and an astute critic of my work.  

I'm reading Dawn Powell; following her vintage characters through the post-war version of Greenwich Village is a trip. The apartments-- the fashion-- the wild parties and rituals of entertaining. Aside from the changes technology has imposed on dating, we're fundamentally not all that different.  Just the details-- the interiors-- the materiality.  It's another, much more desirable world. The one I could count on in Jayme's place-- the vinyl, the occult and Goth books, the exotic textiles and the layers of personality. Someone who valued her fostered animals over her own livelihood, and who would not consider life without a paintbox and a sewing machine.

I heard a young woman comment the other day 'Mid-century style is over. No one wants it'.  I took it a little personally. And yes, we Baby Boomers are beginning to outlive our utility. The 1980's and 90's have much more appeal to current generations than the women of Dawn Powell. My apartment is stocked with library, vinyl, instruments, art and tiny memories. Odd trinkets in drawers and old rock-and-roll T-shirts that are losing value. Who will recognize the stained glass heart earrings my college boyfriend made me for our anniversary fifty-five years ago... the leather bracelets I got in Berlin before the wall came down-- the Camden market coat with metal trim...?  Will my son know my Pleaides editions of Proust bought in 1970's Paris or my fifty-three Trollope novels all collected from sundry used bookshops? 

Most days we city dwellers pass thousands of people on the street... and only the few we 'know' will light us up like human candles. The recognition of our trinkets, like old fossils, do the same.  But maybe, like my old sewing machine, they no longer serve.  It occurs to me that Jayme spared us the sentimentality of death and the post-mortem inventorying and distribution. I miss her terribly today and am still recovering from the disbelief of no farewell or phonecall.  No notification, no address, no ceremony, no grave, no tree planting or charity directive. We older people have the illusion that we are what we leave behind... but in truth we have likely outlived our usefulness-- our valued possessions have little meaning to the next generation and while I can hear the endless melodies that spill out from my bookshelves and collections, they will eventually be as mute as the resonant final lesson of Jayme.

With Your Eyes

On Inauguration Day, the cold air like a knife seemed to split the country in half-- those who celebrated, and those who tried to concentrate on the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. It was like a warning or a judgment-- for those of us who were anxious and upset, the arctic air was not reassuring. 

Unable to sleep, I watched an old film called Crisis-- a documentary featuring President Kennedy and his brother Robert handling a civil rights crisis.  It was another version of America... our leaders, presented in black and white like a home movie... having breakfast with their families-- fathers, credible men... going to work to challenge unlawful segregation traditions.  They were leaders... taking the country from prejudice and injustice into some kind of better future. It felt not just right but righteous.

The confirmation of POTUS 47 felt to me like a TV show-- from what I watched, apparently a badly produced tragic comedy of errors and mistakes, but a show above all-- and the installation of a version of America that feels eerily like the death of Hope. The promises feel like threats, and the concept of justice feels like a kind of volley back and forth between oddly distorted principles.

Seeing our 1963 Attorney General at his desk, waiting for a call... there was a solidity-- the desk, the room.  It was human-scaled.  No one had make-up or airbrushing... there was sweat, there was conversation in real time.  For me it went beyond nostalgia; it underscored this new sense of defeat I have shared with close friends.  We are betrayed, we are slipping somehow. The news is everywhere and overwhelming; the media-- rather than the message-- accompanies our life and we, it.

Continuing my interviews by telephone, I miss the heavy black instrument with the rotary dial... it somehow felt like truth. I speak to these enthusiastic and slightly nervous students and occasionally feel I am selling them a dream-- I am describing things that no longer exist, explaining realities that have evaporated into digital screens. They will never know the version of a woman who misses closing herself into a phone booth in a dive bar and making a romantic call-- a confession, an intimacy.

I've been reading Cesare Pavese. His novels are surprisingly colloquial, although one feels the tensions of fascism, of the German occupation, and the scars of WWII.  I look at maps of northwest Italy... at pictures of Turin... his places, too, perhaps no longer exist. I am listening to and absorbing the author's version of his nostalgia. Pavese suicided at the age of 41, just after he was acknowledged for his writing. Among his best poems is one (translated) line 'Death will come with your eyes'.  It haunts me. His disappointment, his sorrow, his obsession in one novella with a suicidal character-- his empathy.

My friend Elizabeth died very early Monday morning, in the dark.  In her hospice room it was surely lit, as medical rooms are.  She had not been herself for several weeks now. During her illness of five years, we became friends... she called me nearly every night for a year or two... and we gossiped, we laughed, we became intimates over the telephone.  I have a landline, still; it's necessary for this kind of communication. We'd had little in common before, but we grew together.  I miss her terribly; what we created, together, is completely gone. She deteriorated, over the years, but she was brave and never tried to escape her fate.  She was incredibly sympathetic when I had my accident; she joked that I'd ruined my arm just to experience her parallel paralysis.  We laughed and talked about men. It was like an affair... and now it's done.

For months now, I pick up my 12-string at night and play a few songs... the one that comes, every night, is the Free song, Soon I Will Be Gone.  In the year before Alan's death, at one of our back-to-back solo gigs, Alan sang this.  It was withering. I wept. Do not sing this, Alan, I warned him... and he answered me... it is a prediction, with this rare dark look in his eyes that were usually laughing.  But I've taken it up-- it's become my personal anthem that I sing every night in the dark, at 4 or 5 AM. It binds me to him, maybe.  

Tonight brought a fatal plane crash. We who will be gone sooner rather than later are shaken by this kind of news.  We are heartbroken for the fire victims, for the children of Gaza, for the undocumented Mexicans in East Harlem who are afraid to pick up their pantry items because they might be arrested. One mother told me she is keeping her children home from school, from fear they will be somehow seized.

Last night I walked home from a gig in Harlem.  An insane man on 113th and Lenox grabbed me... Read the signs, he kept yelling, with his sour breath. At last he let me go.  Shaken-not-stirred, I'd heard at the bar; it became my mantra for the last 20 blocks. There are people in this city who do not go out in the sun; they are pale and many wear black. It's sort of an unspoken cult-- some are women who with vanity preserve their skin; many are writers and musicians. Some wear sunglasses at night.  When I walk home late, I imagine they are at their sills, looking out-- blessing the dark empty streets and keeping me safe, like black angels... my witnesses.

I am glad to be home. Elizabeth will no longer phone me at 3 AM and I will no longer sit on the floor in the dark trading stories until her drugs put her to sleep. But tonight I will pick up my guitar and like a sort of trance I will sing the song... the dark anthem, the funeral hymn, the Inauguration song... 

Trespassers

I was just derailed by the image of the winning World Press photo of the year-- a human Pietà, faceless Palestinian mother holding the lifeless shrouded body of presumably a child-- not an infant, but a person. Processing these human tragedies on the massive scale is impossible; yet the singular image of grief is shattering-- choking. Here it has become almost beautiful in its absolute clarity... it is somehow horrifying and familiar to us all, just weeks from Easter.  

Being one of those people connected intimately to some form of belief, I often find myself silently reciting the Lord's Prayer, the Hail Mary.  Criminals perhaps do this... churchgoers and pedestrians... most of them begging for celestial forgiveness, for we are all fallible and flawed and even the best-hearted among us is uncharitable and occasionally mean.  While we ask perpetually for mercy and grace-- we are not always good at giving it. 

At this very moment a memorial service is being held for someone I knew-- not well, but enough to chat on the street.  I was shocked by her unexpected obituary... thought about attending the chapel... and some mischievous memory came up like a small jolt.  This person had cheated me, years ago, when I was selling art honestly, in earnest.  I found out completely randomly-- met the ultimate buyer and was a little shocked. I never said a word... duly noted, is the expression one uses.  But some years later, I tiptoed back-- presented another project to her. Again, I learned, she'd neither informed me of the outcome nor paid me my commission.  When I actually wrote her, she sent me some token small check with a roundabout and inadequate explanation.  Fool me once, is the appropriate comment here...  So with these tiny resentments in my normally good heart, I decided not to taint the service with ambivalence.  I am a little sad, but still find myself uncomfortably unable to cremate these thoughts.

Several years ago, I went to Japan with Alan Merrill.  He'd been celebrated and revered there in the 1970's and our reception was unlike anything I'd experienced in the US.  A young family who'd been tourists at a show in New York even traveled hours by train to come see us. They were overjoyed... the daughter presented me with a traditional doll as a gift.  The whole audience was so gracious and enthusiastic.  Afterward, we were starving and a journalist took us to one of those tiny great bars in Shinjuku which seat about five people. It was past midnight on a weekday-- kitchens closed, but he spoke to the owners-- a family of which the grandmother-- maybe 80-ish (the Japanese are so well-kept it's difficult to 'age' them) was in traditional dress. After some coaxing and negotiating by Alan and the journalist, they seated us on straw mats on the small floor area toward the back and brought a few varieties of saki and some snacks. While the small savory dishes were like things I'd never experienced, I was still starving.  Then for some reason, the journalist explained, the grandmother was taking an uncharacteristic liking to me-- the aging rock and roller.. and began to cook. Bowing, she brought out dish after dish of exotic noodles, mushroom and vegetable creations-- sea animals and sauces and soups like nothing I'd ever seen or tasted. We left at dawn... stuffed and slightly drunk and the kimono'd grandma and I hugging and wiping tears. Nights like this-- part of the magic of being with Alan. 

In downtown Tokyo--galleries and shops-- generally the popular culture was a strange mixture of the very childlike and the highly sophisticated-- of soft-spoken and then edgy... sweetness and noise. I stayed awake for three days inhaling what I could... the traditional and the novel.  It was a revelation.  I went home and read Shiga Naoya... Murakami... I put my volume of Genji on a table; it beckons.

This last week or two, I've been reading some of the reactions to the showing of Oppenheimer in Japan-- fully eight months after the US release. The reception has been mixed.  Personally I feel sheepish and ashamed.  The unprecedented horror of Hiroshima, and the subsequent perhaps not-necessary Nagasaki  attack-- we have read the accounts, more disturbing than any science fiction or disaster film. I have watched The Thin Red Line recently-- my own father fought and was decorated for his bravery in the Pacific.  It is so hard to reconcile this violence with the gentleness and cordiality of the people I met.

Watching the Middle East simmering as it is-- the eruptions and outbursts-- the long, long-seated resentments and hostilities... it is hard to imagine how the Japanese seemed to forgive us, in this century-- how they became our ally, how our sympathies and innovations mutually interchanged.  It seems like a kind of audacity to release this film there... and yet... it is part of our culture; a few of the comments empathized with Oppenheimer's ambivalence and difficulty.  Still... there is nothing in our history that compares to the wound we left in Japan.

My father, in the late 1950's and 60's, traveled there often.  He developed friends and did much business there.  He brought back souvenirs; our living room was nearly entirely furnished with hand-carved tables and antiques-- a lovely huge screen, all of which he'd had shipped.  Today we are Japan's staunch ally.  The cross-pollination of culture post-war is obvious.  Major institutions feature exhibitions; art auctions are filled with highly prized Japanese collectibles. In the 1970's and 80's, when I worked at galleries, large Japanese corporations were filling their spaces with European and American art.  They loved Warhol-- Jasper Johns-- even the symbols of American capitalism and aggression were understood and collected.

Not the narrative in the rest of the world; there are tribal differences and deep resentments. Killings, kidnappings-- the Palestinian displacement and starvation... massive destruction.  We ask every day for divine forgiveness, and yet-- try as I might,  I am unable to forget a petty little offense by a woman who has now passed away.  Do I forgive?  I do, but not entirely.  These things haunt my dreams-- cumulative unacknowledged sins and white lies still give me a little shiver.  Some of them may be unintentional... like stepping on someone's foot on the street, or failing to help someone.  

Yesterday an older woman was struggling to get into a taxi on my corner. She'd managed to get her upper body onto the seat but her swollen legs were helplessly stuck on the curb.  Me with my bad arm... I lifted one at a  time into the car... and Thank you, she said... embarrassed and awkward.  Like a faux pas, I blurted out-- 'Forgive me'... to this woman.  For what? For perhaps adding to the pain her disability obviously represented?  In general? Like a Hail Mary?  I'm not sure.  But I've repeated it all day-- where it doesn't belong.  It does. It belongs.  Reciprocal mercy... we are all guilty, the Bible tells us... we repeat these little sins and insults. We perpetually ask for forgiveness and despite the recitation of the Lord's Prayer, we fail to forgive; I do, anyway.  Forgive me.

Leap of Faith

I've always been a 29 sort of person.  After all, it's the first two slashes of my birth date... and if you add up all the digits, including year, it's what you get-- sort of a secret numerical surname.  Plenty of babies were born today... although mothers will celebrate most years on the 1st of March-- a misdeed, in my book.  I mean, technically one is born on the day after 28, but February has a totally unique profile.  And its oddity, its fluidity... well, it's calendar architecture-- like the mistake woven intentionally into Amish quilts, to remind of the fallibility of all things human. 

For those who obsessively wish their Facebook friends a happy birthday, there was a bit of relief; only two names came up in my reminders, neither of which seemed familiar.  My 'Memories' notifications brought back the previous February 29th activities-- gigs with my beloved Alan who just four sun-cycles ago, one leap year, was still vital and singing his damn heart out in the dive bars of downtown.

When I was young, I chose to see the 29th as a sort of holiday-- a temporal snow day-- the gift of extra time we only perceive on the arbitrary fall close of Daylight Saving Time... that odd hour I've always treated with a kind of reverence, even though it's taken back in the spring. 

I spent much of the day returning phone calls, speaking to friends, finishing up a Brassai biography of Henry Miller complete with photos.  For all the nostalgia this generation seems to have for our city in the 70's and 60's... it pales compared with the bohemians of New York in the 1930's.  No one more punk and passionate than our Henry who lived a life on both continents.  The edge.  

Many of my friends seem stuck.  Life since the pandemic has yet to return to normal... but there is no longer 'that' normal.  It occurs to me that 'normal' is a hindsight kind of thing.  I overheard my downstairs neighbor discussing with her 5-year old their 'new normal'.  Like everything in this culture, the moments are shortened-- the eras are temporary, the semesters are eras, fashion is passé nearly before it emerges; the world is reborn in an instagram blink.

And yet I carry with me some sense of solidity... like one of those black-and-white photos of a wiry musician, half-starved, wearing a wifebeater, walking maybe a New Orleans street with his horn tucked under his arm-- no case.  I can almost whistle the music in his head-- no cheap soundtrack: this is the real deal here, and it comforts me like a kind of visual rosary.

My niece is struggling.  We endlessly discuss suicide-- not as an act, but a kind of boundary.  It's bantered around so cheaply these days, and the ease of overdosing has made it constant conversation.  Even Flaco the owl-- who's to say he didn't simply have enough? Tired of being an instagram sensation, tired of having his every move photographed and documented, of being stalked by birders in Central Park.  He couldn't even enjoy a solitary meal.  All things must pass.  Besides, death changes everything. The dead Beatles will always be the more sacred for me. 

Of all the visual poetics in my city, the bridges are perhaps my favorite... all of them... including the Hells Gate whose very name frightens.  I love to walk across the East River and look down, between the slats... and wonder at the engineering challenge of past centuries-- these literal and conceptual linkages.  Yet-- they have become symbols of another kind of leap-- the one without faith, the one of despair.  These jumper dramas-- the narratives--  have become part of the lore... the river, the piles and the girders-- the soaring arcs-- the height, the distance.. the approach... the symbolisms. What we humans make of what we have made...

The way I see things, we all have a sort of room-- our solitary confinement.  We leave, we travel, we love, we mess around-- but the proverbial room is our least common denominator-- our reset.  for some it is the size of a closet, but this is delusion.  Anyway, in one corner is the past-- which begins to hog space, to encroach.  In another are the regrets and hauntings. Maybe another-- for my niece-- the appeal of drugs-- of escape-- the ultimate 'free' but that, too, is another closet-- a dead end, quite literally. And somewhere, when one throws open the curtains, is the window of suicide... the false window, actually, because the light is made of reflection-- not sunlight or even starlight but a kind of thick, stale, smoky yellow. 

And then there is you... you are the room, with the possibilities and tools waiting in the most inviting corner, the one beneath the suicide window you will not use because you prefer risks and fear and passionate love... and a door that opens onto a house of dreams, in a world of your own design, where it matters less that you belong, than that you simply existed, and left your unique footprint, maybe even a multiple of 29.

Crossing Delancey

Convalescence, as frustrating as it is, brings with it a few perks.  No guilt about lying around watching films on occasional nights, and there is something truly innocent about any New York movies made pre-1990's.  Especially the 70's-- the Woody Allens, the Elliot Goulds and Scorceses-- anything that gives us a glimpse of our city before it was 'glammed'.  Apartments were human-scaled, not massive and blingy.  People made phone calls from a booth, or waited home for a message.

At 3 AM the other night I watched Crossing Delancey-- something I'd probably shunned at the time, in my  post-college snobbery.  But there was Amy Irving-- Mrs. Spielberg, at the time, working in a bookshop-- navigating life as a single woman-- relatable, fallible.  It occurred to me I'm now closer to the age of her Bubby, lol.  And how I married the British writer asshole/flirt she was lucky enough to escape.  The LES-- populated by pickle stores and shops in the days before even Dean & DeLuca...  the bars, women waiting at tables... women sitting home eating Chinese take-out watching television. Does anything work out? She was Mrs. Spielberg, and then she wasn't. It must have hurt.  The last time I crossed Delancey I was on my way home from an Alan Merrill gig-- exactly four years ago-- his birthday, I think;  it seems like yesterday.

These associations have become permanent emotional fixtures... the way 2024 will be the year of the Taylor Swift Super Bowl.  She has done much for football, especially among young teenage girls who will not remember the winning touchdown but the color lipstick Taylor wore.  Tonight I remembered going to MOMA as a schoolgirl to look at the Jackson Pollocks.  In those days, museums were fairly uncrowded.  On that afternoon Joni Mitchell came in with Graham Nash.. they were dating, wearing sheepskin coats and furry boots... looking buoyant and in love and the three of us studying the paintings... it stayed with me.  A perfect cultural collision. 

The novel Septology is forever entwined with my January mishap, the way Saramago's The Gospel According to Jesus Christ helped me process the post-9/11 sorrow. How I tried hard last week to get into Lucy Ellman's Ducks,Newburyport but realized the voyeurism innate in following her personal associations, however close they are to mine-- was just excessive.  I have my own.  Time is limited and one must weigh carefully available literary projects. 

There was a night I had food poisoning and watched a Tarkovsky film.  I will forever associate the visuals with vomiting; somehow I think Tarkovsky would have approved.  And a boy named Billy who pulled me out of a bathroom at a screening of Warhol's Trash which was a little much for my teenage sensibilities.  He called me a hypocrite and it stuck... I swore I'd fight my failure to accommodate things that were difficult... 

I remember the store where I bought my first Henry James novel-- The American-- 60 cents for which there is no longer a character on my laptop.  But the smell of the place-- the paperback display, the style of the covers... and the feel of the pages as I read.  I was simply entranced.  Professor Lange reading Goethe to us... how sacred these moments... the associations and relationships, in a time now where influencers will link themselves with pretty much anything that will pay them a fortune.   The greed-- the athletes and their branding-- the endless commercials, the ruthless marketing of vaccines and reverse mortgages by familiar faces which may not even be the people they represent.

Trump will surely bail himself out of debt with his golden sneakers... I wonder who made this suggestion-- which of his smarmy children or associates came up with yet another get-rich-quick scheme, and extort from people who can little afford these things.  Contrast the effort it takes for someone like me to sell a single book.. it's just baffling. 

And yet the rest of us-- we seem to spend so much effort running away from ourselves, styling a persona we think is presentable or desirable.. even desperate hipsters painting themselves with signs and attitudes. Are we not enough? 

Navalny.  The closest to a hero in these times-- a true hero who was unafraid and committed... I've been obsessed with the documentaries and the daily reports... there are few epic films, besides the Christ stories.. the martyrs and POWs... to rival his story.  The fact that Taylor Swift has many more followers than Navalny.  

The near future feels a little bleak, and I have come to know the deep comfort of a kind of pain.  Jon Fosse reminds me that the winter is like a lover you know you must leave, that God is somewhere in these February chills. Fuck the groundhog-- we are wrapped in the God of winter, Whose hidden-ness is what we know. The clanking radiators remind me I am here, and perhaps God abandons us because His absence is sacred.  The devil in the details, but God, in His absolute loneliness, in the shadows.  Amen.

Past Imperfect

It's the time of year when I start interviewing prospective Freshmen for my alma mater.  As I get older, the age gap grows.  I am aware that turning the 'page' of another year means a great deal more when you're 17.  

I just came uptown from the last 2023 gig on a crowded 6 train. There were two very young couples next to me-- at that age where kids are 'turning' from young teens to old teens-- hormones raging, and they've not quite mastered their 'personae'.  Maybe their first time out without chaperones... it made me a little more sympathetic to these eager students that try so hard to make themselves memorable in a one-hour conversation-- on the brink of so many things, these kids.

We musicians so often worked on New Year's Eves...  were paid decent money for the most part to celebrate with packed rooms of drunk customers.  We made them dance, forget their problems... and by the time we packed up and went home, the page had already turned for us.  We didn't have to plan, consider, arrange... and then suffer the disappointments and hangovers that plague so many partiers on this night. 

Tonight I miss my mother-- her well-wishes for her children, our annual ritual of the last call of the year.  And the ones I've crossed off my list-- each December we take inventory and find more names in the 'missing' column. Most of the 21st century parties were all about Alan Merrill-- the ultimate singer of classics, R&B-- a partying and soulful bandmate whose Pogues-esque version of Auld Lang Syne was incomparable and now, besides YouTube clips, a thing of memory only. 

One of the kids I interviewed told me he's writing his autobiography. At 17, I can't imagine how this will end... or if it will... and then I remember Jackson Browne's 'These Days' written at 15 or 16... and think again about judging the wisdom of a teenager.

I've seen New Year's Eve fireworks and sunrises in tropical countries-- the Northern Lights from an airplane and heard revelers from inside the walls of a hospital Emergency Room with a sick child. When I was in the 6th grade, I got to sleep over in the attic room of the Hoffmann family behind our house.  Three sisters and I blanketed in a double bed beneath a skylight where the winter starlight seemed to promise us every possible miracle.  I had a crush on a Judge's son who'd gone to Las Vegas for Christmas and brought me a matchbook signed by Frank Sinatra.  We giggled and confessed and the night air in those days smelled crisp and starry with the faintest hint of woodsmoke and hot chocolate.

Teenagers were always inclined to keep diaries-- journals-- a place to confide one's dreams and safely keep secrets.  It was useful-- especially during those difficult weepy nights when we'd page back and reassure ourselves we could survive our sorrows and failures. Lists were equally useful-- things we needed, songs we loved, boys (in descending order), books, TV shows, movies, bands. 

The internet has disturbed the quiet solace of diaries; it also affects memory.  My son often forgets his preschool teachers or friends; I remember all of this-- not just mine but his-- although there is surely coming a day when I won't. 

It occurred to me today the blessing of this night is memory-- the lists and sequences and growing pile of these through which I can leaf and uncover... the sadnesses and joys, the popping cork injuries and the mistakes-- the bad weather and the bandstands... the tuxedos and dresses, the masked balls and the sloppy punk dive bars.  The various nights that were, that weren't, that have been and should have been-- the past perfect, the pluperfect, and my favorite-- the past imperfect.  That grammatical term for me has always opened doors and windows of poetry-- like the translation of some Proustian chapter or the unclaimed title of my unwritten autobiography-- my life as a reel, as an unedited mass of tangled film... what remains, perhaps, eventually, to be forgotten.  

Credit Karma

Years ago, when I was an emerging bassist with a passion for eighth-note pulse-rock, I was flown to London for a unique opportunity.  The gig was to replace a weak album track for a well-known, high-charting band whose bassist was apparently struggling with issues.  At the time, digital instruments were not common, machine-generated instruments were obvious and the management decided to 'fly in' another player.  For the biggest paycheck I'd ever received, I was to lay down a simple, basic, eighth-note, pocket-heavy part, on what was to be a chart-topping single.  I got to play along to a band whose music I paid for on vinyl, in those days.  The catch was, I had to sign serious documents swearing I would never disclose my identity.  

Of course I was told that my work only 'might' be used on the recording, although the authorship would be attributed to the regular band members.  I signed, received a fat 4-figure check, a taxi back to Gatwick where I boarded a prepaid Virgin flight home. Not even an overnight stay.  In New York City, the music scene for sidemen was pretty male-dominated.  I felt like bragging but I couldn't.  I'd sworn away my rights and I take these things seriously.  So while I banked the check, I was stripped of the notch in my musical belt--the credit, the album listing-- things which musicians crave and hoard like trophies. Still, it gave me some personal swagger.  I felt 'heard' if not seen.  

Some years later, when Bill Wyman quit The Rolling Stones, bassists world-over were salivating to audition for the gig.  I was a young single mother playing mostly bars in the city, unable to tour.  One amazing Saturday night, at a well-known dive bar in the east Village, Bobby Keys came to drink and sit in with our band.  He ended up playing an entire 7-hour marathon night-- insisting, during breaks, that I was going to be the next bassist for the Stones.  I've heard a lot of alcohol-fueled talk in my day, and every single deserving career-bassist in New York was gunning for this miracle opportunity. Meanwhile, a sober Bobby called me during the week-- left messages on my voicemail.  He'd talked to Keith, he said... and sure enough the management called me to schedule. But I declined.  They called again.  I declined again-- I had a young child-- that was my priority. Again, they offered babysitters... other kids were on the road.  Just come... play... Well, I knew I'd be a sideman, not a band member... and did I want the larger-than-life thing? Me-- in a semi-glorified studio apartment with my little boy, my books and my 8-track tape machine?  I was happy. And I couldn't really fathom Mick Jagger welcoming a woman as anything but a back-up singer.  Bobby called back; again and again I declined.  I also knew the shortlisted guys and they were my heroes... it was a place for which I didn't want to compete, nor did I really belong in their company. I mean-- Darryl Jones played with Miles. I worshipped him, saw him every chance I got.

A couple of weeks later I was on 48th Street and one of the store clerks actually noticed me... Hey, he remarked, I read you were on the Stones' shortlist.  Not me, I answered.  But from that moment on, I was given the retail-respect most players were used to.  So while I didn't share, divulge or brag... there were some perks.

In and out of college, it's a thing... people ask.. will I get credit? It seems to make all the difference. I once judged one of those King of the Blues contests at Guitar Center alongside the late Bill Sims and the also late incomparable Hugh McCracken.  Before the judging we had to fill out a form with our 'credits'.  Hugh kept peeking at my pathetic sheet and asked me what he should put down.  He played rhythm on BB King's The Thrill is Gone.  Doesn't that just about knock us all out of the park?  What a humble, quiet genius he was. Credit? Plenty.  

But how about all those amazing pocket-players who graced the old records that made our hearts jump and our feet tap as kids?  Some of them remain uncompensated, unnamed.  I think about them-- about the great talents who died penniless or under-acknowledged while instagram celebrities of this culture are regaled and overpaid for nothing but popularity contracts... hype.  It's hard to even know what these airbrushed people actually look like, let alone sound like, in the naked dark.  

I wake up to my old clock-radio alarm and there's often some ironic reminder of my past.  I Love Rock and Roll.. my dear best friend and bandmate Alan Merrill who struggled and strained for credit for his hit song.  On a morning two weeks ago, 'my' song came on.  Even with the plastic old speaker, I could recognize my bass fingers in a heartbeat.  The song will live; the credit will die.  It gave me a little jolt for about a minute-- me the aging old songwriter/poet whose anonymity is almost ensured.  

Some of us get credit for what we didn't do... taking the rap for a friend.  All those writers who claim they are responsible for anything we find in their poems or work. After a while, resonance is built-in-- a signature... a voice.  I've been reading Javier Marias... he often played with the concept of authorship... in Tomorrow in the Battle..' he ghostwrites for a ghostwriter, shows up with the imposter's identity at a government office.  It gets complicated. 

Didn't you play with Patti Smith, a medical person asked me this week as I got up from his chair? No, I didn't, I replied. Browsing the shelves in Barnes and Noble, she has her own little section.  Kind of amazing. The irony of life-- of fame, of random success or failure... the luck of some draw.  My ex-husband, the poster child of under-acknowledged rock players, was once asked, as we sat down to eat in a restaurant, 'Aren't you famous?'  He looked at me, looked at the flirtatious waitress, and replied... I'm hungry, pointing to the menu.  

To the unacknowledged, undercredited greats, I salute you, my heroes... Heaven stands still.

UNCOMMON SCENTS

The cusp of April/May in New York City is seasoned by foliage... in the parks, on the most unexpected streets where gutters are stalked by rats and vermin, garbage spillage is a constant... the breathtaking arcades of pink and white could be staging a coronation.  Central Park is at its gala-finest... And then, the pink and white rain of petals. But summer is coming... 

My country friends send me photos of their blooming lilac bushes. This seems sort of a Mother's Day reminder; while mine loved the color yellow, lilacs surrounded our house, grew in profusion without coaxing to touch the second-story and enter through open windows. Their sweetness was almost overpowering... they brought wasps and bees... the cuttings downstairs were overkill.  

I've always thought children, like dogs, have incredibly sensitive noses.  Young teenagers are beginning to discover scents-- their own, their peers', the kind that comes in a bottle.  Home memories are so often olfactory... people's houses had a characteristic scent-- our kitchen, the faintest buttery ghost of piecrust and cinnamon... it permeated the house, like perfume.  

My mother rarely wore perfume, although she had a collection of seductive bottles on her vanity-- for some reason they had to be French: Chanel, Arpège, Givenchy, Guerlain.  I've written before about playing with these... the exotic bottles in their boxes and velvet casings... the prisms from the lamp-crystals making rainbows on the ceiling.  I experimented by pouring them together, mixing them.  I was banished to my room for weeks.

My older sister who had precocious boy-experience wore Shalimar. We'd lie on the bed on spring nights like tonight, when we shared a room, and the scent of lilacs mixed with her perfume is as vivid a memory as her fascinating stories about boys-- their hair, their bodies and their faces.  Boys in middle school smelled like Old Spice and Canoe-- English Leather.  It was awful to me.  Some of them put stuff in their hair... 

In 1970 I thought I fell in love with an older boy.  I was 16; he was 23 and had been to Vietnam.  His body was ripped and tan, his hair was long and streaked with what looked like gold.  His eyes were blue and his teeth were crooked.  He was bad; he flirted with my mother and she warned me.  I was a toy, she said;  he'll chew you up and spit out the bones... but that only made it worse.  I lost sleep, I fantasized... I played Van Morrison over and over... Astral Weeks... Free... we went to concerts... he drove a Karmann Ghia that smelled of patchouli and hash. 

Patchouli.  All through the 1970's; I can almost smell it on old photographs.  My great young loves all used it like an aphrodisiac. Patchouli and leather, carseats, grassy lawns, bedsheets and sleeping bags... 

The first sign of Covid for me was the anosmia.  I had a bottle of bleach, was trying to disinfect my guitar and equipment I'd had on a crowded, infected pre-quarantine subway and realized I could stick my nose in the bottle... and smell nothing.  Even my doctor, mid-March 2020, was baffled.  It went on.. and on... for weeks and weeks.  Nothing.  Food was strange, coffee was terrible.  I thought I could taste grapes, or I imagined I could... but everything else was dull and wooden.  After several months bad smells-- rotting garbage, burned food-- began to process as this strange ginger-cookie scent.  It was weird.  I was grieving, losing friend after friend-- isolated.  I walked in the park... no lilacs, no roses, no spring rain moist-earth grassy fragrance.  Nothing.  Mother's Day was without joy.

My 12-string guitar, as if in pandemic sympathy, imploded.  In early summer I borrowed Alan's Taylor... I carried it home with the broken handle I knew so well... it was heavy, that case... it took a few days for me to have the courage to open it... and when I did, there it was... the scent of Alan-- absolute and vivid, in the room.. like a genie from a bottle.  I cried.  I took it out and played Walk Away Renée, the way he used to... in D.  After I played for a while, I put it back in the case... but the scent was on me... the sense of Alan.  

For many months I had this souvenir.  I took it out at 3 AM nearly every night; I wrote songs, I remembered, I cried sometimes... I talked to him.  At a certain time, it lost its magic.  My 12-string was repaired and I returned the Taylor which traveled to Virginia in a car. I began to recover my olfactory sense, but like my life, things were not the same.  My coffee still doesn't resonate, try as I do to sample different beans and roasts.  But I can smell my neighbor's brew at 6 AM when I am still awake playing my restored 12-string.  I'm not sure which neighbor it is but I am sure they are awake and brewing.  

As for me, I can now smell the lilacs both in the park and in my mind. Today I was in a shop and I heard 'Me and Mrs. Jones', my mother's favorite song from the 1970's, when men still flirted with her and her dreams went beyond kitchen narratives. Today I am so much older than she was at that moment in time... when I bought her the record so she could play it over and over.  I could not stop the tears.  While I have been a mother for thirty-three years, it will always be her holiday and it will always smell of lilacs.

You Say You Want a Resolution

The year is one week old.  If it were a newborn, it would be home from the hospital by now, adjusting to the quiet of a room, bonding with a mother, trying out its voice and perhaps discovering its own tiny hands. As a segment of time, it has already grown familiar and we forget to light candles or say prayers and simply let the hours accommodate football and leftovers and bad habits.  Work.  We are as we were, most of us, carrying our resolutions in our pockets or wearing them like bracelets, or setting them free like balloons in the unseasonably warm January wind.

Digitally speaking, or relating to photography, resolution has to do with clarity of image-- the distinction of objects against a background.  New Year' s Day for me seems sharp... it is deceptively new and manageable and stands out.  I usually hoard alone-time, visit the same bookshop or church... I walk in the evening clarity and replay things.  It occurred to me this year that my memories are vertical-- they stack, by date or event... and while distant recalls are blurry-- I can flip through past December 31sts like a box of postcards.  The early ones-- middle school and teenage nights--- I'd tag along with my older sister to a movie... or we'd be grouped in some neighbor's home-- whoever had a live-in babysitter or nanny... while our parents went out en masse and celebrated or got drunk. But as we grew older-- this night was well-planned and meaningful. We anticipated it.  I had a dress-- an early Betsey Johnson slinky black thing-- I wore it year after year... I felt tall and grown up and sexy and photographable.  Boys wrapped me in their arms and danced... spilled champagne on it... I closed my eyes and held the moment.  

In college I often traveled during Christmas break and ended up in El Salvador watching beach-fireworks or in Stockholm with the Auroras and explosions against the freezing black Scandinavian sky. My first year in Manhattan after graduation, I partied at an apartment on the Upper West side... it belonged to some preppy drug dealer and it was fantastically crowded with all kinds of bohemians and art students and the sound of classic soul blasting through a spectacular stereo system.  Someone popped a champagne cork in their eye... after an ER visit some of us ended up at the Corso on East 86th Street, dancing to Tito Puente until past noon on the 1st.  We all vowed we would spend every New Year's Eve together--- forever. I never saw most of those people again, despite the best intentions... 

Once I became a musician there were the gigs-- many, many- -some in dive bars, some in fancy venues and hotels... Chinese restaurants, the Tribeca Grill with Hiram Bullock, a Led Zeppelin tribute set once with some society orchestra... one at Caroline's, many at BB King's... and I would wheel equipment home in the early hours, my pockets stuffed with cash which seemed all wrong, because it was I who'd had the fun.  Or I'd take a subway with wilting revelers, exhausted waitresses and bus-boys... way past all closing time, watching new couples succumbing to passion among the drunks and vomiters...  At home there would be either a sleeping child or quiet rooms to welcome me-- maybe a message from my mother, and I indulged in what I perceived as the religion of January 1-- the resolution of day from year.  It seemed sacred and fragile.

In Sweden on New Year's Day, the whole country in unison watches Walt Disney.  Huddled and hungover under blankets, you can see in every candled window the television sets in synch.  Rituals. Breakfasts-- special pastries in Italy, and fish courses.  

This year, as the last two, I missed Alan Merrill.  Not only were we bandmates and spectators at our own revelry, but we were like brother and sister... we could wink or blink and the other would understand.  I saluted him as I stacked the vertical layers of the holiday one on top of the other, and things bled out.  The 'odds', the tiny movies of our lives which escape but remain at these moments-- they come back like fairy smoke and deceive us with their narcotic aura.  Modeling, as a child in a frock on some runway in the Catskills... or wearing a narrow skirt and a tank top later in a photo session, realizing I am not a model...  I don't belong here.  The perfect romance I had once in an elevator trip in the old music building at 3 AM... the laundry room at college one magical night... these deviations or vacations from our life-narrative that we have neither integrated nor fully dismissed.  Like an 8-ball, these moments enter the glass octagon window of our vision with a kind of clarity, and then disappear.  

I read a definition of music as "an art of sound in time that expresses ideas and emotions in significant forms through the elements of rhythm, melody, harmony, and color."  It made sense to me... what I do needs to have some kind of idea, or emotion.  How to use 'music' in a sentence?  One cannot.  I remember when I arrived in the UK, with my pop-hooks and predictable lyrics... realizing it was all useless and meaningless.  I talked with Lou Reed, I watched young bands smash one another until they bled... I slept with punks, I tore my clothes-- I smoked and used a plectrum.  I read, I dismantled myself and examined the pieces by the neon light of a pub across from my London flat.  

Gradually I began to become who I am.  My bass playing was characterized not by the way I struck the strings but the way I released them.  Music wrapped itself around my limbs like a lover.  It bled.  

I realize I am aging but I am still becoming.  I stack the movies of my days-- the lyrics and the pictures... like vertical chapters of some continuum that relentlessly goes forward.  One week-- like a thin slice of layer cake, the rest of which will be devoured, while it sags and grows stale and the icing melts and discolors.  Memories occupy more space than my present or my future... I wander among these columns of my life... I visit scenes of passion-- of birth, of pain, of joy... most of all the tiny narratives that were discarded from the essential manuscript but seem to have special 'resolution' among the privileged moments of one's life.  As we accumulate time, we peel off as well... the irony of gaining days and losing time.  

Once again I enter the third year without Alan, the sixth without my mother, the 28th without my baby girl; the losses mount as we gather a dwindling future.  We grow old and cannot make new life; we cannot replace. Someone at this ungodly hour is composing, someone is painting, someone is inventing.  These things go on in the city-- beneath the digital webs and networks-- the texts and signals... we are human, we are wounded and vulnerable.  We weep and we love, we mourn and we pray.  I am determined to discover something this year, even if it is myself in yet a new decade, should I be so lucky. I will leave some poetry and some music as defined and hope it will resolve into a life beyond mine, that it will find resolution.  

Scarecrow

When I lived in Mexico, I envied the people their special relationship with Santa Muerte.  I could never warm up to a holiday where there was grave-dancing and celebration.  Death was fearsome for me;  Edgar Allen Poe and Edward Gorey gave me nightmares.  I had no living grandparents (well, none we were allowed to acknowledge) and little intimacy with the elderly.  There was a white bridal gown in a box in our old attic that my sister insisted was used by the spirit of our deceased Grandma on the occasions she visited.  I shivered.  

The first actual death in my young life was my best friend's mother.  She died during the summer-- of cancer.  I could not imagine losing my own Mom-- the thought absolutely terrified me, although I often wished my father would disappear and leave her eligible to couple with some random prince or even a kind carpenter or fisherman.  My friend's Mom had these downturned eyes and permanently worried brows.  I felt safe in her home-- sleeping over, on little trips; she was the leader of our Brownie troop and she was kind and soft-spoken.  I was devastated by the news of her death; her daughter had to leave the summer program where they'd put us to distract from the fallout of her advanced illness.  I had to stay behind where I wept and tried to process the concept of 'gone-ness' in my 8-year old world.  I offered to lend my own mother-- to trade places.

Not long afterward the widowed husband remarried a woman with three children.  The new mixed family was buoyant and festive.  He seemed to blossom with a new wife... and that was that.  But I carried my friend's mother's memory like a badge-- like a missing tooth when I smiled.  No one seems to notice, and it's inappropriate to be weeping daily like a drama princess when the immediate family has made great effort to recover.  It put a wedge between me and my best friend; I missed her Mom when I slept over-- the milk and cookies, the way she braided my hair so it wouldn't pull... her soft sing-y voice calling Good night, girls! when we were up past midnight whispering and giggling.

I'm not the poster child for Life Goes On.  The losses and griefs take their toll.  Besides Jesus, there is a litany of saints and angels in my nightly recitations-- all of whom are conspicuously missing from my life.  The past year or two has had its own version of pain; the fact that the world seems to be grieving does not comfort much.  I remember my aging Mom complaining there were so few left of her acquaintance-world-- crossing out in red the date-book names that no longer required birthday cards.  Her Christmas list was down to single digits.  

October has always been a sad month for many reasons... I also dread the ambivalent celebration of Halloween.  I've never been a costume-enthusiast... and while I appreciate the parade, the souls of the departed give me no incentive to party.  Thirty-two years ago I went into false labor on October 31st and prayed I would not be giving orange and black birthday parties for years to come.  As it happened, my son waited a full week, for which I am grateful.  Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater my mother used to recite as we carved teeth on our Jack-o-Lanterns; she was a late October baby.  

A week ago I walked back from Harlem along the East River... for a while I was shadowed by a man who pulled out a knife and asked me for money.  As it was, I had none-- food stamps, which I offered... he blinked his red-rimmed eyes and decided not to hurt me.  Was there a guardian angel behind us? It occurred to me that I was not even frightened. A few blocks later,  the sun set and produced a vivid double rainbow which truly merited the 'arc-en-ciel' nomenclature... I can't recall ever seeing anything that compared in New York City.  The Hunter's Moon this week-- has had an exceptional performance-- a soloist among choruses of clouds.  

Late last night-- almost dawn... I took out my guitar, as is my habit... and the lights in my living room began to blink.  That would be Alan, I said out loud.  Spirits.  Ghosts... I am approaching a point where absent friends will soon exceed the ones who are here.  The pandemic has whittled down my circle of intimates to a very few.  It is a kind of limbo... I feel more connected to those who have passed.  We speak, we exchange.  I sing to them.  My own daughter walks among them.  

I haven't visited my mother's grave for nearly three years; she'd have turned 97 this week... this seems uncanny.  I celebrate her pumpkin-carving hands when they were still manicured and elegant-- me, in my uncostumed non-finery, like an old scarecrow with arms extended,  ghosts and spirits perching.  

Counting

I used to love the number 29.  It splices my birthday integers-- a prime number...  indivisible-- a lovely sort of odd symmetry.  I'd been dreading this day, the 3-month anniversary of Alan's death, as though it would establish some boundary-- a negotiable distance.  It would also have been my father's 101st birthday, as though we are still counting, 4 years after his death.

Since the quarantine I've begun this habit of running in the park. I head north to circle the Harlem Meer, follow the Great Hill back down to the reservoir where the El Dorado towers at sunset provide a daily anodyne.  It's become a habit-- not a chore... I miss it when I skip.   I've begun to recognize small natural landmarks-- rocks, graffiti tags on lamposts-- other runners who do not acknowledge me  but seem solemn and immersed in their ritual.  I remind myself-- most of these people have music-- phones, ear-pieces; very few run in silence as I do-- logging sirens, the progress of walking babies, the rising temperatures and lengthening days... Still, even without masks, laughter is rare.  There is solace among the Meer fisherman, the bench-sitters and bicyclists-- but little joy here.

For some odd reason-- maybe my son's obsession with 10,000 daily steps-- I count.  It's become part of the meditation, I suppose-- a distraction-- a kind of poem or verse in my head-- the numbers I can do while thinking of other things-- keeping the log of hundreds with my fingers, starting again at each 1000... Our hands are so perfectly designed to do these things-- an abacus at our fingertips.  Everything makes sense.

Although I vary my route in ways, I generally know precisely where I'l be at 2000 or 3000.   I used to meet my egret at 1000, although she has flown the proverbial coop or changed her schedule.  I miss her.  For a time she discovered a tiny rock island in the reservoir, but she's ghosted me since May.  Her absence reminds me that my world has grown smaller since the pandemic began.  This is a foreshadowing of age; one's global circumference shrinks.  Old poets begin to abandon tormenting passion and desire for ruminations on nature-- things in their garden... insect visitors and leaf-shedding.

When my son was small, we counted.  Waiting for trains, for elevators-- on lines, looking out windows and in the park.  We counted dogs on the sidewalk, our steps, cars, steam shovels... the floors of tall buildings... boats along the East River.  He was so good at counting his nursery school called me in to observe the way he added dominos with skill and speed.  He is still good at numbers-- sports statistics and odds, distance and money.  He has a fit-bit and apps on his phone which do most of the calculating; I'm sure when he runs he listens to Hip-hop music with his bluetooth.  On Father's Day, our special holiday, I visited his new apartment where I found he has no measuring device or even a ruler... I suppose one's laptop has a fixed dimension and he could flip this over... but the difference in our personal cultures seemed poignant.  Me, with the multiple tape measures and cloth ribbons-- yardsticks with long-gone hardware-store logos and school rulers-- steel quilting edges for sewing.

Tonight after my run I walked a bit; I counted homeless men on the sidewalk, glad the rain had stopped and the air had cooled into a reasonable night for sleeping.  There was a man lying on his side reading in the shaft of LED light which bleeds out at the bottom of the new Bank of America building which has replaced God knows how many retail landmarks on the corner of 86th and Lexington.  I did not disturb him to ascertain the book title; if I carried a phone, it would have made a perfect photo of American economic irony-- and perhaps the only example of urban institutional charity available after 9 PM.

I've always preferred odds to evens; it could have something to do with the 'Loves Me, Loves Me Not' sequencing... sometimes I'll stand and wait until the odd comes along, so I can go home with a sense of luck, of hopefulness.  Writing here on my computer, I rarely note that it keeps a running total for me; I generally spill out more than necessary and choose not to look.

There's a man who often rests on the library stoop; occasionally people leave books here, though the building has been shut for months.  There is an installation of three steel chairs bolted into the sidewalk where he also sits; the armrests prevent sleeping or napping (city planners are so cruel).  Anyway, he often leafs through the books... we've talked about this.  He cannot read, he told me.  He never learned.  Last night he seemed absorbed in a page, running his finger along lines.  I looked at him with curiosity.  Oh, Baby, he said-- I can't read but I'm counting the words.  I can count real good, and he grinned with a kind of pride.

One of the homeless people I counted tonight was chanting; it sounded like Nike, Echelon, Grace.  Nike, Echelon, Grace... like a kind of verbal tonic.  Lately when I lie down, missing Alan as I do in early mornings, I say the Lord's Prayer-- I count the parts, the way I count steps when I run-- like a deconstructed poem, it comforts me-- distracts me.

The last homeless man I logged-- the 'odd'--  was asleep on his back,  hands folded neatly, one finger pointing up at the sky.  It was not accusatory-- more like a gesture-- something deliberate-- as though he'd fallen asleep mid-sentence.... Oh, Lord, let me count the ways...   It occurred to me as I reached my door that I can count on one finger the people I can count on; maybe that's what he meant.

The Color of Blood

Over and over I hear myself repeat-- to no one in particular-- Forgive me, I have fallen in love with solitude.  As though I am unfaithful, ungrateful... and not unaware of the kindnesses that have graced me recently, the way a thin blanket of spring snow unexpectedly coats the world with a soft muting of color and sound...

My calendar is white; my schedule is the timetable of grief.  Relief comes occasionally with digressions into other universes... imagination, listening to music, writing.. those meaningful phonecalls from my 'family' of friends who reach out and exchange sad moments the way we musicians trade eights.

My son, as always, is so positive. This is his 'role' in the passion play of life.  He looks ahead-- fully subscribes to the promise of future and tolerates the present with a cheerful stoicism.  Mom, he says,
when I speak of my suffering friends-- these people are not your problem-- don't enlist.  I am grateful that his DNA somehow balances mine-- he is the counterpoint to my dark melody.  I am the strings-- I dream in 'cello' I remarked in a note to someone last night, who surely knows what I mean.

What I do not say to my son, who may have had his young heart broken or threatened at a sensitive time when his little soul decided pragmatism was far preferable to melancholy, is  Oh, but they are my problem.  Early this morning-- the 'end' of another of my unregimented days, I watched the painful testimony of George Floyd's brother on national news, against new footage of fires burning in Minneapolis.  For those who grew up in the 1960's, these scenes are all too familiar... the urban manifestation of anger and horror at atrocities inflicted for centuries now, in the name of racism.

It baffles me that even within a single family unit some people grow up with prejudices, hatreds, resentments-- downright meanness.  I spent years trying to unravel harsh criminal riddles... it seemed there had to be a reason for cruelty and violence-- a reaction-- like a scientific principle of physics... but this only applies to a small fraction.  This morning I found myself weeping with the CNN journalist at the frustration and sorrow of a man whose brother had virtually been executed on national television-- all justice denied, humanity at its very lowest and worst claiming a life for absolutely no reason-- the misled cruel child holding a kitten underwater, torturing animals for entertainment.

It is not only one of the most disturbing pieces of video we've seen in a long time, but deeply provocative and infuriating.  I was ashamed of what it seems to mean to be a white American, and tormented with guilt for our helplessness here.  As though we have had not had enough death and suffering, had our lives frozen in the face of a tiny biological enemy who can take the breath away from grown men; here we watched a uniformed man purporting to represent authority and law violate and render powerless a strong un-uniformed individual-- the audacity, the lack of respect and humanity-- the sick twisted miscarriage of authority and justice.  There is no greater crime than to deprive a human being of life.  What have we become?  What have we been?

I'm not sure if anger tempers sorrow somehow; at least it has a correlative action.  I know that justice is a balm but cannot compensate for life lost.  Hate crimes, for most of us, are unthinkable... what makes people behave in this way?  Our earliest literature and art caricatures and personifies human vices and sins, as though these are a 'given'.  Most of us are less familiar with the virtues.  The current America is not just sick with a global pandemic, but the pre-existing condition of epidemic greed and
economic disparity.  By far the majority of virus deaths occurred in the zip codes of the poorest communities.  My friend and musical partner who died was eulogized and celebrated internationally; not so most of the quiet victims.  The NY Times listed them, but we all saw how tiny the figure-- how brief the description.

Today I am sad for my America which when I grew up I personified as a handsome boy-- on the edge of possibility. Now I see my country as a ruined, stooped man with a cane, bleeding dollars from stuffed pockets, blind and deaf to misery and inequality, myopic and small-minded, drinking from the fountain of greed, drunk with selfish misconception.  From my heart George Floyd, I  am so sorry.  To every black man I pass in the park at dusk who waves to me, as if to reassure me-- I am 'safe'-- I apologize.  To the cashier in Harlem who no longer packs groceries with gloves because, he tells me-- they protect me but not you-- I could kiss him.

And to my first husband-- for his utter colorblindness and courage to play with white musicians when few black players were doing so... I learned so much about the world from you who had scarcely read a book when we met, but could speak bass like no one else from stage.  What a rich life you gave me in those few years-- opening my ears to things I'd not understood,  crossing boundaries and defying conventions... it is to you and the greater understanding and love of music I owe part of this debt of solitude... may you be happy and safe and steadfast in your refusal to be tainted by the ignorance of unfortunate haters and traitors.  We bleed the same color, you used to assure me... you who even then was surely more evolved and compassionate than most of us will ever be...
Amen.

Memes

A friend sent me a meme the other day of a beat-up old telecaster; crayon-scrawled on the body roughly and without finesse as though in an alcohol-fueled or museless funk the message: SONGS INSIDE FIND THEM.  It could have been a self portrait.  The songstress scarecrow that is me these days-- the hollow-man with the heart hanging from a string, the tear-tracks I literally feel like tattoos-- me the living girl-with-guitar sad emoji-- a smeary red smile graffiti'd onto a blue surgical mask which (has anyone else noticed?) conceals sorrow.

My symptoms have subsided... the tsunami of late March drama has ebbed a bit and the sun is out in spades, the cherry blossoms are in full bloom-- the dogwoods, the pink gibbous moon spread the evening curtain Tuesday to reveal herself between buildings like a taunting spotlit showgirl.  The evil wave took so many with it;  I was spared, clinging to an old leafless tree like a baffled and wounded survivor.  We all knew April was the cruelest month, but many of us did not believe.

Walking through Central Park, past the eerie tent city where so many hearts lie beating tenuously while loved ones wring their hands at home... the meadow grass is uncut and long... those without the virus can smell the green spring.  Crocuses and narcissi have poked through and a few robins are hopping over the gates.  The playgrounds are empty-- vacant swings like camera-shots in a kidnapping horror-film.  This is an R-rated place.

After 10 PM I can walk up the east side of Fifth Avenue without a mask; the streets are quite deserted except the ambulance activity, hospital personnel crossing from building to building.  The huge mobile-aid semis have put down metal roots along the west side of the street.  We see only the 'closed' side with the huge ominous signs that advertise not carnivals or circuses but Billy Graham.. Samaritans... these billion-dollar charities whose presence is linked to disasters and death.  The oversized cabs of these trucks are parked along the street.  They are shiny and buffed--- beautiful in a way, like gigantic luxurious and expensive accessories separated from their purpose.  Inside the tents we know is some chaos-- exhaustion, anxiety, medical expertise mixed with despair and frustration-- a kind of battleground complete with the structures which have grown weedlike across the meadow and remind us of wartime.  Gates and blue tape surround the area, keeping the public at a distance, warning that there is an infestation within.  Death breathes from the compromised chests of patients.  I heard it when I last spoke to Alan, hours before he passed away.

I feel guilty for my restored health-- for the clear air I breathed today on the way uptown-- for the minutes I have gained since he left the world, for the fact that despite my grief-- I am not even blood. Family members of the thousands of victims of this pandemic have reserved this right and privilege of grieving.  I am just a poor mourner at the window, looking in.

The city, as we all know is unrecognizable-- a skeleton of its former robust self.  It's like one of those ant farm toys where the ants have all died.  Empty corridors and unused pathways.  Halls and monuments without witnesses and participants.  I am some strange animal whose habitat has been profoundly disturbed-- a frog with no water, stranded on a rock somewhere in the midst of plague-- an urban dinosaur fossil dying of cultural and social deprivation  If a painting hangs in an unlit room, how does it exist?

'Widow' always struck me as a beautiful word; it is the title of the opening poem of my latest poetry collection...  a sequence of letters sadly missing the 'n' in the third place.  I have lost before.... a mother, a daughter, my greatest love... but here I am again-- much older, less solid.  I am made of glass-- sympathetic and transparent, reflective, breakable, scored and cracked-- trying to believe in a future, trying to believe in the darkness.

Earlier today I stood on a grocery line on Lenox Avenue, trying to sense some pedestrian normalcy amidst the relentless sirens.  The sun, the car radios, the boomboxes are still there... the people like me waiting to spend a bit more of their food stamps on overpriced stock.  I buy one thing at a time-- as though life is so fragile I cannot see my way into next week.   Much hip-hop noise from the street.. someone practicing saxophone... still the panhandlers out with no protection; they are long accustomed to the precariousness of life.  From 116th Street I heard Marvin Gaye's 'Sexual Healing'.  Not so much of that going on... and at this point in my life, it does not seem plausible.

When my turn came to enter the store, I headed for produce to see what I could afford.  Irony of ironies... Joan Jett came on the system, singing--what else?--  I Love Rock and Roll.  A message?  It taunted me.  I had to leave.  What's up, Mami, the security asked me... you no like? I tried to smile.  Walking home blinded again by teary eyes... the mask condemning us all to this faceless urban anonymity... I love rock and roll, I thought.  It is a no-brainer.  I sacrificed everything in my life for this passion.

Rest in Peace Alan Merrill, my friend of friends, who sang his heart out for this damned city, as though his life depended on it-- and it did.  Audience or no audience, he was the quintessential working man with the voice of a dark angel, another hero in the halls of remembered fame, another urn on the mantel of memory... taking another little piece of my heart and life with you.  I am nothing more than a cliché here, a human meme.  Do we not all love rock and roll? Of course we do.  It is just so rare that it loves us back.

Losing my Religion

When I was small and sick with one of those textbook childhood illnesses, the prospect of days in bed was a true delight.  There would be toast and jam and meal trays in bed... an opportunity to study my Robert Louis Stevenson and copy out my A. A. Milne into a book where I could draw my own pictures.  I could lift the quilts into a sort of tent and pretend I was an Inuit princess trapped for the winter in my house of ice while the arctic winds raged outside.

The novelty of this quarantine is wearing off.  My reading is piled up-- yes, and my projects sit before me... but I am less productive and a little more restless.  My body is telling me it's spring and just outside my window the dogwoods and cherry blossoms are doing their teasing best to tempt us before that magic moment when the soft pink carpet of petals covers the sidewalks and gutters for the briefest anti-urban blessing, and then turns to paleberry slush.  The crocuses and daffodils are blooming and the Park Avenue malls will be decked out... and we are stuck here in our cubicles, noses in our technology, binging on television, taking occasional breaks for a walk in the park or a trip to the supermarket.

Over the last few days I've had plenty of those mass-messaged Facebook posts suggesting 'tips' on defeating the Coronavirus.  Bad jokes, cartoons, sillinesses and distractions... personally, I am losing my urban religion.  I've had enough of film-watching and listening to the silence in my building hallways.  I have had a welcome few voicemails from old friends-- relatives-- people who worry about solitary people like me, checking in... making sure I am still here.

One of these was the beautifully resonant message from an older poet who lives in my neighborhood--  one of those old-fashioned voices made for reading aloud on vinyl recordings... for recitation and declamation...   wondering if I'm alright, this man, who once introduced Pablo Neruda to New York and appeared alongside John Ashbery on panels.  He has supported and read my work in the past.   We met on the crosstown bus, late-- he keeps his old Columbia University studio apartment on the west side where he writes overnight for the last 60 years, simply because he doesn't want to disturb his sleeping wife.  He and I would often meet on my way home from work; occasionally he would share with me... he wrote in longhand.

His wife passed away from cancer several years ago, but he continues his crosstown habit as though she were alive... so it touched me especially that he thought of checking in on me because I have not recently been bussing back and forth.  I watched him the other day; he rarely wears a coat, like an old Englishman... but is always impeccably dressed with a jacket and trousers, a button-down shirt and his hair combed gracefully in an old-style pompadour. He walks with hands clasped behind him like a distracted professor, looking down at the sidewalk.  He is always alone.  His fierce allegiance to this habit-- inspiration or none, rain or snow-- somehow touched me in this crisis... the loneliness and the solitary duality of two empty spaces suddenly seemed so poignant.

When I began this post I was sad and distracted-- less-than-inspired... but now in the past day I have suffered the terrific loss of my best friend and bandmate of years.  I am beyond devastated-- violated..
as though the cruelest wind came through and removed my favorite things from the city.  How do we go on from deaths, from loss?  My poet friend is teaching me something, I know.  Where is God, I want to ask him?  I am looking.

My friend was the kindest, most generous, most fun-loving, stage-gracing human.  He performed with exquisite musicality and dignity even in the worst venues, with the worst equipment.  His very presence was a poem for me... our stage and personal intimacy was like an award.  One whole day has finished without his gracious persona on this earth and I am waiting for some kind of choral requiem from the heavens-- a bucket of seawater on every street, a falling star exploding rooftops... Tonight I don't how to honor his memory nor celebrate his accomplishments.  I just want him to come back, to pick me up for the next gig and stand beside me while he sings like the godamn soul angel he always was until the old pre-Coronavirus sun rises over the east river.

I have cried a thousand tears and have nothing to show, nothing to trade, nothing to bargain.  Death is the tie that binds us all; it waves its hideous flag of warning over my lovely city and has banished so many of us to our lonely quarters like prisoners.  I feel like a solitary wooden ship left behind with no sail, an old poet traveling back and forth between lonely rooms with his blank notepad, reciting old verses memorized in another century.   Where is God, each one finishes, like a refrain:  we are looking.