TV Husbandry

For a time in my life I thought I'd marry a scientist.  This of course after the phase where I longed to marry a fisherman... a woodcutter... a machinist... to simplify, become a wife in the true sense... to fulfill some biological mandate, cut out the subterfuge and intellectual noise and strip down to what really mattered.  To wake at dawn, fry herring and eggs and pack a hearty lunchpail.. To taste the oceanous salt on my husband's skin, cook his wares and share the damp sheets of his sea-worn exhaustion... inhale the ropy, woody scent of whomever.  

I think it was the Tom Verlaine thing that drew me in like campfire smoke.  The Scientist Writes a Letter, on which Andy Newmark plays the most devastatingly minimal drum-fill.  'I find I have no other lines,' he writes.  Magnetized, I was... over and over I played this track-- the vinyl.  'We men of science---' the confession... and suddenly I understood poetry-- from the mind of someone who could create a universe every time he dreams. The way he would invent-- postulate, discover, turn over brain matter... a man who sleeps with his eyes open, staring through phantom windows, who sees galaxies in a rock. I could hand him something I pick up on the street-- he would explain... he would find me.

For a while I hung around with this research doctor I'd grown up with. He was a narcissistic music fan who held court at gigs and briefly charmed my bandmates with his wide-eyed jargon and exaggerated hand-gestures. They quickly tired of his MO.  He played jazz piano and annoyed his neighbors.  Real musicians do not do this; we are quiet offstage. But he introduced me once.  Where are the scientists, I'd begged?  In their labs... sleeping... dreaming of ways.. of theorems, of methodology. I failed again... Besides, I postulated, In the Beginning was the Word.  That was everything.  I went back to my books and spoke in silent tongues.  

At your highest point, the Devil comes for you.  Fuck the damn Academy awards... and the Grammies.  I cannot get this out of my head... maybe because the Devil is everywhere. In the Procul Harum song, he came from Kansas. He elects himself, he positions and even submits when he must, to re-emerge like smoke.  He is in your bed some nights.  You come for him, try to convince him that even among the wicked, there can be kindnesses.

When a man opens to you-- truly opens-- this is a rare and terrifying thing.  In my father's day, this happened only among the weak, and on battlefields or operating theaters.  In my lifetime, I have had a man pour himself into me as though I were a glass.  These phonographic moments, as I designate them, remain in my architecture like a wedding.  If I monetized them, they might be worth something.  After all, some of these people were important-- from a time when names like Chevrolet stood out-- designations on which you could hang ornaments.  When music mattered-- when the man who turned himself inside out-- well, he was good-- good enough, the way things no longer seem to be.  He met a terrible end-- no one could predict, but his sorrow seemed prescient. 

Time does not heal; it makes things worse. We learn things before we are able to understand and by the time we begin to understand, it's too late.  First there is Church, then Belief.  By that moment, all of us have sinned, and in a secular life this counts. In versions, love becomes pain.  Some pain is unbearable. 

Last week I watched the Anthony Bourdain documentary-- the one which apparently his family did not embrace.  Yes, in between the farmers and typesetters, there were the chefs.  The gentle, doughy ones.  Not Bourdain who was much closer to the husband versions who failed me... but like all tragic figures who come for the Devil first, who beat him at his game, even love was a terrible bloody battle.  This man of knives who could butcher a giant alligator could not manage his heart and took himself down. 

It occurs to me now-- maybe rather than a wife, I have become husbandly... maybe a little tougher, a little wiser (whyser).  Or maybe, like the inevitable theoretical melding of yin and yang, I have become my own 'couple'.  Having failed at the science of husbands, I've become a sort of husband of science myself... the Verlaine version-- writing a sad letter of farewell to myself, perhaps-- confessing regretfully how attractive (in the magnetic sense) indifference can be. 

Mama Don't Take My Kodachrome...

When I was a girl, and my Mom moved us to the suburbs so we could grow up like the wholesome girls she'd always wanted to be-- sisters-- with pink and blue sailor dresses and ribbons and a maypole in our backyard, I still swore I could see the city skyline on a clear day.  It was the already-printed backdrop of everything I thought and did-- the buildings-- like a crooked lego profile behind the clouds and the blue sky.  Through my classroom windows--- the massive glass panes of 19th-century schoolhouse walls, above the clanky radiators and below the suspended fluorescent ceiling fixtures like circus equipment threatening to smash us, I daydreamed and listened for the traffic buzz and the sirens, the rumbling of trains and the bus horns.  And it emerged-- like a distant mirage--- my Emerald City where I'd left a tiny heart and a future.

There's a famous photo of Marilyn Monroe at a lunch counter somewhere in Harlem-- maybe by the Meer where I go so often these days.  It dates from around the same time I was sitting in my first grade class looking left toward the outside.  She's eating a hotdog-- nothing more innocent, she is nearly saying, but knowing somehow this too will be sensationalized, sexualized by her male audience.  You can almost put yourself in the scene-- it's so candid and palpable... and so nostalgic... it feels like you-- or me...

One of my early New York City friends in my 20's was a model.  She was more beautiful than even she knew... and she struggled with this, the way models do... because everyone wants them-- to possess them, to date them... but most of the men who claim them are fickle and shallow, or ambitious conquerors; they chew them up and spit them out for the next course.  Anyway, she was marrying a musician-- typical story-- he was tall and narcissistic and she was mad for him.  He was one of those romantic troubadour types who carry a torch for some old love-- or they convince themselves of some such myth, because it suits their tormented-songwriter image.  The night before the wedding, he was drunk and begging me to sleep with him.  Not my thing.. but it didn't feel right or funny or bachelor-party cool.  So cut to the next day-- they were married... and she eventually had babies... and they lived pretty unhappily and mismatched until there was a divorce...  and he drank and cried in his beer at bars to leggy models and dancers, none of whom came anywhere close to his wife who had a brilliant sense of irony and fun... but there it was-- the overlooked bird in the hand.

Anyway, sometime before the unraveling, she had to have her appendix out--  in that huge black hospital overlooking Central Park... and she somehow, against my recommendation, charmed the surgeon into giving her a boob job, which was not nearly as common as it is now.  Yes, models were not super well endowed, and we went up to see her-- the troubadour and I, after a night of surely drying his crocodile tears in someone else's sheets... and there she was, my beautiful friend, with her surgically altered silhouette-- gauze bandages around her chest in that pathetic polka-dot hospital gown, standing by her IV apparatus like a microphone, singing in a whisper 'Happy Birthday Mr. President....'

Well..  I laughed and cried and it was like a box of mean tricks had been opened, and I caught a glimpse of the sad, sad future-- with the city skyline across the park-- no mirage-- and the place where poor dead Marilyn had finished off that hot-dog just yards away in her summer dress with her hair blowing around her... and then another photo came to me-- one of Marilyn and Arthur Miller standing by while she ate her dog on the street somewhere-- everyone staring except he looks away as he often did-- stern and judgmental.  You could read the future in his face-- the turning away,  the sweet desperation of her smile despite the shadow of the death-of-love, which is the prime murder suspect in all suicides.  The Anthony Bourdains, Kate Spades, L'Wren Scotts,  Sylvia Plaths, Marilyns... on and on they go... sad, fragile victims of the turning of the fickle tide.

What is the moral of this little anecdote?  I am recording a Birthday Song--  it is dark and fractured, and I thought of my old friend whom I see little of these days when I look out my window and see what I see; the walls and the present and the future are blocky, but the past-- like those old nostalgic photos-- is now the mirage of skyline, and the dreams of love-- well, they are filmy and blurring like old polaroids we cannot restore.  The surgery--well, it is stock and standard, and love-- well, love... is what it is... sad and distant or urgent and lethal... but it will not be tamed, or explained, and it is mortally dependent-- even if we can't have it, we can see it, or miss it, or watch it drive away down an old road, and wonder late at night whether what we hear is the rumble of trains or thunder, and the rain will come anyway... long after all Birthdays are gone...