My Rider In the Dark

I often wake during the night and browse the news on an iPad my son gave me.  Somehow the technology offers a variety of platforms I would not normally see.  Yesterday, among the dismal global disarray and haunting obituaries was an odd story about a horse which had run off with a pack of wild mustangs and returned, 8 years later-- some pounds thinner-- but somehow, like a Jack London novella, he'd made his way back home.  Of course, unlike the novella, we know nothing of his wanderings-- like a teenager kidnapped by a cult or a runaway gang-- he'd had a life... and somehow decided it wasn't for him.

So I had a stray dog, years ago; he passed me on a street in Harlem, and we both looked back at the same instant, like star-crossed lovers.  He followed me; I fed him.  A few days later I had to go 'on the road' for a gig-weekend, left him with a friend who tied him outside the Broome Street bar while he had a beer.  The dog broke loose, returned to my apartment several miles uptown.  It was extraordinary.  He had some strange habits... God only knew from whence he came, and what had formed his canine version of urban-wild. He was unpredictable.  I made up stories and songs... he was moody-- sometimes affectionate and obedient, but most of the time he was wild and callow and kept a perpetual eye on the door or open window. 

My mother's father left her mother, with two children... never to return.  It warped her, surely, and prompted her to marry a strong man with straight edges-- a war-hero with a certain chip on his shoulder-- my father.  She worshipped him, never criticized.  Her Mom, my Grandma, passed away at a very young age, in her so-called prime.  Did she grieve his absence? I never met her, but I think not. In highschool my Mom's estranged father (presumably my Grandfather) phoned- invited her to his 80th birthday.  She'd not seen him for at least 35-40 years, and declined, with a cold edgy voice (I listened in, as you could do in those old days).  Shortly thereafter he died, and while I begged, she would not let me accompany her to the funeral.  It upset her... after all these years, and in those days, when I was 15 or so and she was still a beautiful woman, she occasionally confided in me.  At the service, her obstetrician.. who had delivered her, was there-- took her aside and assured her there was not a drop of her alleged father's blood in her.  She related this to me, confidentially.  I was an imaginative teenager who wrote stories.  I invented all sorts of scenarios... who were we, after all?   

At Christmastime that year this obstetrician phoned and invited her and her daughters (us) to his grand home somewhere upstate.  She declined.  I begged and pleaded...  but in the end she buried this bit of information and never spoke again of her father.  I don't even think I'd seen a photo of him; there were few enough of my beautiful Grandma and they were snatched up by various cousins.  I mean-- he was a bad father... why was it that she refused to abandon the original narrative?  I don't know...

When I was about 17, an English man approached me and told me he was my real Grandfather.  It seemed plausible... and on my roguish post-college discovery path, it was a kind of fairy-tale.  It appealed. I listened and accepted... he took me all sorts of places and introduced me to Chinese literature and writers I'd not known about (William Gaddis, John Gardner).  He painted, spoke all kinds of languages... told me my Grandma had been a great beauty and he was a boy at the time.  It's unlikely but I believed.  I visited him; he affectionately called me his little mouse or his monkey. Unlike my father he praised my little original songs and was first on line at the London Virgin Megastore to buy my album.  You're right in front of Madonna, he rejoiced (alphabetically only).  He felt like a Grandfather.. and besides, it engendered all sorts of identity odysseys.  

I remember once I came home early after school and the gardener's truck was parked in the driveway.  The house was wide open, with the fragrance of freshly-baked pie. My poor oppressed but still beautiful mother, ditto the gardener, were nowhere to be seen.  I started to climb the staircase to the bedrooms, my heart pounding... but turned around and left the house-- came back hours later, loudly announcing my arrival.  My mother's favorite song was Me and Mrs. Jones.  We watched Billy Paul on Soul Train.  She had the record-- we played it over and over and she sang it.  It gave me joy to see her eyes tear up... we sang together.  

But it occurs to me-- especially in the pre and early post-war years-- that there were all kinds of secrets.  Every family has them.  I have them.  My women friends in successful marriages often tell me the secret to this success is precisely in what remains hidden.  Why confound their spouse when they can reminisce with me about old affairs and crushes? You're only as sick as your secrets I learned at an Alanon meeting.  I did not understand what this meant. I did once tell my son-- it's okay to have secrets as long as someone knows each one... you spread them around, you do not harbor them.  It's healthier.  One of my character flaws is I generally preferred the narratives of my affairs and mistakes; they felt familiar and exciting. 

The literary market is flooded with memoir-- some good, some bad, some fictional.  How can one reveal secrets without conscripting unwilling acquaintances? Or like Proust or Kerouac, do we rape our lives for material? Water it down, romanticize it?  Tonight I watched Interview with the Vampire. I don't normally like Vampire stories but I'd read this one on a plane so long ago. During one of the interview sections which punctuate the episodes, the writer asks 'Is this reality or is this performance?' Even vampires have secrets... maybe especially vampires.  Why would we expect truth from an immortal? Why would he be capable of love, or inclined to tell his truth? 

In the Ethicist column of the Times today there was a query from someone wondering whether she should tell her neighbor's child that her husband is his real father (they'd had an affair).  There are days when I wonder whether I am my father's child.  Certainly not by personality or temperament.  Besides, I am the dark daughter. Neither of my parents had the black hair and eyes-- they were fairer. I am taller than my sister who has the curvy body of my father's family.  My mother called me often her dark horse... which brings us back to Mongo the runaway stallion who surely knows more than he reveals.  My hero of the day.  I've been walking around with the Led Zeppelin vision of Traveling Riverside Blues in my head-- every time they or Robert Johnson mention 'my rider' I get a little chill.  It opens me, as music does, sometimes... especially when it cuts right to the chase, and finds those buried horse-hearts.  

The Man Who Sold the World

Now that I've seen so many, I  begin the new year with trepidation-- with reluctance.  It's not that I hate to leave the old behind, but the acceleration of loss in my life is tipping the balance sheet to the dark side.  Even Wall Street is following the pattern.  But the deaths-- the illnesses, the shocks-- the accidents… January is already a bit of a black hole and the downhill track seems to have taken root in only 12 days.

A couple of my friends have already ended relationships... Damage control? Some kind of prescient avoidance of rockier paths ahead?  Who knows?  Maybe the unseasonably warm December cooled their winter passion prematurely.  There was something disconcerting and ominous about a balmy New York Christmas Eve-- a sense that we would be punished for the weather oasis.   I did my New Year's Eve gig--- put on my proverbial red shoes and danced the blues-- had a couple of friends over for second-shift pre-dawn champagne toasts, and was so concerned with other people's drama that I forgot to make a resolution.  I mean, my own expectations are fairly realistic at this point; besides promising I'll do a solo gig or release an album,  I don't overcommit.  2015 was a rough year for goodbyes and memorials; I have a little more respect for fate at this age, and a sense of fragility I didn't have years ago.

The post-New Year's sidewalks of Manhattan are lined with deceased Christmas trees, some in some state of greenery, some quite dead.  The irony of having seen these same trees vertical, healthy-- freshly cut and ready to shine for a family just a few weeks ago makes this seem a bit sadder--- they are now horizontal-- end-to-end, like a funeral procession of firs, sadly waiting to be turned to mulch and maybe returned to the ground from whence they came.  The sheer number is a little staggering-- an imported urban forest graveyard.

Dismantling my tree is a solitary and ceremonious task for me.  I always put on some mood music to make the tedium of putting away ornaments and lights just a little easier.  It brings back so many deja-vu Christmas denouements-- my son's first Christmas when I could scarcely afford a small scrawny tree and sat up for 3 nights with my feverish infant while he suffered through his first life crisis.  I was terrified and alone; my gift was his recovery.  Sometimes it's Beethoven or Bach; sometimes it's the Stones or Game Theory.  The Christmas just after Jeff Buckley had died,  I played his Grace and really 'heard' the Hallelujah for the first time.  It seems there's often a late-December death among my friends-- as though someone just can't quite cross over into the next year and succumbs.  I've always thought it's not quite as bad to die in the cold--- in the snow.  The white blessing seems to soften the blackness of death.  We all dread the New Year if we're smart.  From what I've seen, the future has yet to hold a candle to the past.

Saturday night I was already sad.  I put on the remastered Led Zeppelin which has so many associations it is relatively non-sentimental.  I got up on my ladder and managed to get the job done 

before the second cd had finished.  I took a walk up to Harlem at around 11 to shake my blues and buy a few groceries and on 110th Street, I ran into a prophetic figure.  She was tall, with heavy dreadlocks and a sort of black cape-- softly weeping until I passed her, when she began to wail.  What, I asked her… but it seemed the love of her life had just passed away; she'd left the hospital, was blindly walking toward some non-future, and she grabbed onto me.  She was desperate and I was madly searching my brain-bank for anything I could offer someone in urgent grief.  He was loved, I told her--- he was surrounded by the sense of love as he crossed over… how many of us have this joy?  Most of us shuffle from day to day alone and under-appreciated… but in a moment like this everything is a drop of water to a parched country--- it is nothing.  She wept and howled, blew her nose in my pocket-napkins, and tugged at my now-wet coat (the rain had begun-- even the sky was crying) as she sank to her knees and screamed for help.  I won't leave you, I promised.  And I kneeled with her, while the reality of what had happened replaced shock with some kind of violent emotional retching.  Finally we began to walk.  I was beginning to feel exhausted and trapped, in a way, in a well of sadness which had no bottom.  I tried to distract myself with thoughts… of course I'd had the very same loss-- the one human I knew as my great love-- who had suffered and died-- the one who told me he'd never leave-- he'd left me to grapple with lesser versions of love, failed attempts at marriage and family-- a story I could never relive and a dark shadow which followed me in and out of every single year.  

At least you won't witness the first night your husband turns his back to you--  the first infidelity or indiscretion-- the wounds and injuries that punctuate a lifetime of love, I wanted to tell her… but I didn't.  Finally I walked her to a friend's home and handed her off.  We exchanged first names only; we'd shared a moment of unbearable intimacy; I was covered in her tears and secretions, and I would most likely never see her again.  But I knew this was a sign.  I was about to get some terrible phone call; the next loss of the year had been foreshadowed.  I returned home and listened again to the new Bowie release which I'd heard the night before.  It was even darker now that I began to absorb its meaning.  Sorrow, I kept thinking-- ironically went to my computer to watch the great video version of Bowie and Amanda Lear… it distracted and took me into a world I'd once lived in.  The devil's daughter, I thought, as I processed my bizarre encounter on 110th Street…. I'd lived, though.  Twenty-four hours later I received the news that shook our musical foundations-- the loss of losses, for some of us.  Our Genie, our Hero, our Enchantor… 

The phenomenon of public grief is a little easier than private.  The fact that the music of someone like Bowie has rooted in our hearts at various moments of our life-- has taken us from teenage into near-golden years…. is something that may not happen in this new world.  I can't imagine my son and his friends grieving over a fallen rapper the way this death feels so universally catastrophic and sad.  What I do know, especially after the last week--- is that loss and grief are here to stay, in my life… whether I befriend or fear them, the only escape now is my own death, which is inevitable and closer with each tree that I lay quietly on the curb with its memories and sense of past finery.  Whether we are good or bad, kind and loving or cruel and cold, we can create-- we can produce, we can try to make something of this life, but nothing, as our sadly departed Muse understood long ago-- no, nothing will keep us together.