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... 

Somebody Loan Me a Dime

'I'm in a phone booth baby... got your number scratched on the wall...' The moment we all radio-heard Robert Cray sing those lyrics over two basic minor chords... well... it was an instant urban classic... so good even Albert King had to do a version.  I had to run out and buy that album-- not just because Robert sang those lines with authority and played like he meant it,  but because every one of us in the 1980's had had a phone-booth moment.  The vintage, 10-cent variety from the song.  

Not a few of us mourned the recent removal of the last public phone in the city.  The booth thing-- well it had been 21st-century minimized into a sort of 3-sided metal stall-- no glass, no funk, no soul. Not much privacy... not much use.  You could bet on some discarded lunch-garbage or worse on the little shelf.  You could also bet the line was dead-- cord vandalized, coin return mangled by some desperate junkie hoping to retrieve some change.  Not an appetizing thing to put the plastic receiver to your ear, especially with pandemic awareness.  In its favor, the thing was still weighty-- solid.

The very first time I made a pay-phone call I had to stand on the phonebooks to reach the dial.  Yes, there were phonebooks placed there in the old days... sometimes with chains, sometimes without. Who would steal a phone book?  They were free.  My Mom put dimes in our little penny-loafers so we could use them in an emergency.  I knew a few numbers in case she wasn't home-- there were neighbors, aunts and uncles.  You didn't call your father at work-- ever.  

The best booths were inside buildings... the train station-- airports... they had wooden sides and a little seat.  The door folded in and didn't fog up so much.  I got my first job acceptance from a phone booth...   there was even a free number you'd dial to get the exact time and still get your dime back.  Information was free.  When I ran away from home in high school I called my boyfriend and wept inside a phone booth.  I learned the sex of my baby boy from a payphone call... in Italy I learned to use gettone to wake up my secret lover six hours behind.  The studio where my first band rehearsed had no bell; you'd call from the street and they'd come and let you in.  I knew the number of the backstage phone at the Beacon theatre; the stage hands would let me in to see a show.  I sheltered from hurricane-force rain in one on Madison Avenue, collapsed there after being mugged.  I witnessed a pervert press himself against the glass while I was talking...  a girl change her entire outfit, like Superman... make-up and all... and yes, once in the UK (the best booths of all) I had sex with my husband in a phone box. 

I've personally written a small pile of songs about making calls from the street... I still don't carry a cellphone and for years have noticed the lyrical malaise of songwriting in general... the aching, the separation- the voice.  It's heartbreaking, in a way.. the things that are missing.  Hello, Baby?  Or the Muddy Waters... Sounds like a long distance call... and Here Comes my Baby flashing her new gold tooth... just to rhyme.  The Primitive Radio Gods song would never have broken hearts in this day of mobile phones.   

I, too, have written the poems-- from the Chelsea Hotel to 125th Street-- short stories and vignettes... witnessed infidelities, confided and confessed... I could have given a tour of the city from downtown to uptown with a caption for every phone booth.  I wish someone had made a film-- like Burt Lancaster in The Swimmer where he goes from pool to pool in Los Angeles.  No more.  The Colin Farrell movie remake will have to be re-staged; the next generation won't 'get it' anyway.  And when you see someone on the sidewalk you want to avoid, there is no hiding place.  

Noir films will never be the same... the streetlamp-light and the desperate tearful hang-up with the metallic ring-echo in the slam. The sound of coins dropping.  The little bucket that held your change.  One of my friends had a Twitter post... about how it was a little sad to see the last public phone be removed.   Me-- I'm deeply grieving... watched Manhattan the other night... in black and white they look especially good.  Poor old Woody Allen had his share of not just cinematic booths but undoubtedly real-life phone-drama.  And these calls were not traceable.  Drug deals were often completed... meetings set up.  People banged on the door after 3 minutes and lurked and threatened.  

When I lived in the UK a record collector asked me to get him a pay-phone from New York.  We had the whole thing shipped over and he set it up in his studio.  It cost a small fortune but he loved it.  I wonder if it's still there... if he's still alive, if that phone-box on the corner of Acton and Graham is still there-- the one where I sat up all night trying to decide whether to leave my British husband, waiting for the morning church bells and for the endless London rain to stop. 

Deborah Harry knows what it's like to be desperate in a phone booth... but maybe the all-time killer is the Fenton Robinson lyric, immortalized by Boz Scaggs among others... 'Somebody loan me a dime... I need to call my old time, used to be.'  If it were only that simple.