Saturday, April 12, 2014
My first review!
Stunning Star Shines - Great Book, April 12, 2014By David (SUMAS, WA, United States)
This review is from: The Glass Character (Paperback)
I couldn't resist turning page after page when I started reading this novel. It is as fast-paced, frenetic, frantic, as the jumpy quick movements of silent film action. To say this book captures the spirit of the silent film era, of the flashing, double-dealing, over handed and underhanded Hollywood of the 1920s and onward, is a disservice. The reader is drawn right in, involved totally with the heroine of the story. The story is about her, but it is also a thorough portrait of the great film Comedian, Harold Lloyd. He comes to life in these pages, a three dimensional fully rounded fictional character. The good, the bad, the surprising, the ugly. He is totally human and his motives and circumstances are clear.
I've read Gunning's two earlier novels, Better than Life, and Mallory. The Glass Character is far more ambitious in its depth and breadth. It is longer, more expansive than the early works. Gunning has presented her master piece, in this novel. She fully comes of age as a serious, yet entertaining writer, who displays a lovely choice of words and a often refreshing turns of phrase.
If you haven't read Gunning yet, start. If her latest novel doesn't win, or at least get nominated for the top literary prizes, there is no justice. Don't miss an engrossing, absorbing read. By the way, you'll definitely want to hit YouTube to find full length Lloyd films, outtakes, and documentaries. Don't leave yourself hanging from the clock hand, get the silent era spirit and enjoy the book!
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Friday, April 11, 2014
La Chanson des Vieux Amants ( Judy Collins )
"La Chanson De Vieux Amants" (The Song of Old Lovers)
by Jacques Brel
Of course, we have had our storms
Lovers for 20 years, it is a crazy love
A thousand times you have packed your bags
A thousand times, I have taken flight
And each piece of furniture remembers
in this room without a cradle
the claps of old thunderstorms
Nothing is the same anymore
You have even lost the taste for water
And me only the taste for conquest
But my love
My sweet, my tender, my marvelous love
from the clear dawn until the end of the day
I love you still, you know I love you
Me, I know all your sorceries
You know all my magic tricks
you have kept me safe from trap to trap
I have lost you from time to time
Of course, you have taken a few lovers
You surely have to pass the time
The body must know rapture
Finally finally
It took us a lot of talent
To become old without becoming adults
Oh my love
My sweet, my tender, my marvelous love
from the clear dawn until the end of the day
I love you still, you know I love you
And the more time marches on
The more time torments us
but isn't it the worst trap
for lovers to live in peace?
Of course you cry a little less easily
I tear myself apart a little more slowly
We protect our secrets less and less
We take fewer chances
we don't trust the stream of water
but it is always a tender war
Oh my love
My sweet, my tender, my marvelous love
from the clear dawn until the end of the day
I love you still, you know I love you
Something about this song broke me open today, left me not just weeping but sobbing, in the way that tears can open the soul, creating a kind of wonderment. Floods of pain, raw and reeling, though I can't determine whether it's the sheer pulsing beauty of the cello arrangement, the melancholy sweetness of Collins' voice, or just how I feel today, full of contradiction.
It's not true, you know, that you "get old", though the body wears down, the mind may work a little slower, and it's easy to feel that you are falling hopelessly behind and don't particularly want to catch up. I heard it said, many times, when I was younger, "oh, but you stay young inside," and I regarded those words with the special contempt I reserved for "old people". Now I find I am on a collision course with time, that the wall seems to hurtle towards me and that there is little I can do to make it stop. I certainly can't run away.
But the old woman, the "vieux amant" who spoke to me, she was right. We don't get old. Emotions only deepen, despair becomes unbearable, funny things make you feel happy and dizzy, moments of awe are heartstopping. And sex, desire, that whole province, no, it most surely does not go away. It changes. The hideous stereotype of a randy old lady putting on her army boots and chasing after repulsed young men is a lie, an insulting, life-hating lie. Because it isn't like that at all.
When I first heard this recording, I think I cried, maybe even sobbed as I did tonight, and I was only fifteen years old. God knows what I was going through then, but the terrifying thing is, much of it I am STILL going through, things I know I will never resolve. I thought the song was tender, wistful and very beautiful. I knew enough French to string together meaning: "Finalement", "tourment", "tendre", "toujours", "je t'aime" - and the rest was made evident just by phrasing, that this was an "old" couple (and in my fifteen-year-old mind, they certainly must have been old) who had been together TWENTY YEARS. I don't know how old Brel was when he wrote this - didn't he die young? - but his perceptions of age were probably similar to mine.
I've been with my vieux amant for FORTY years and counting now, twice what it says in that song, and I swear to God I do not feel "old" (though HE is an old coot, of course). Maybe it's just that sixty is the new "whatever", the new 59 or something. When I Googled the song title to look for images, what I saw just horrified me: there were all these embarrassingly whimsical pictures of toothless people in their 90s, coyly kissing or wobbling down the street together. "Old lovers". If they had been together 20 years, they must have met in the nursing home at age 75.
Time is weird, life is strange, a mixed bag for me who has a dark personality, something you really can't change, and a feeling of always being on the outside, partly by choice, but also by dislocation and a kind of chronic square-peg syndrome. I hate it, and it goes by so fast. I have thrown myself at my goals, and largely fallen short. I am bullheaded enough not to stop, don't even know how to stop, to give up. I want to. I want to let it go, forget about making any sort of mark, because if I've come this far and haven't, I won't.
So I tell myself. The war goes on. I want this! I want someone to read my story, be grabbed and moved by it. I see it slowly sinking into the quagmire it seems to have arisen from. I have no idea what to do. Fretting, emotional, I find music triggers floods of weeping, which a part of me secretly enjoys. I realize I have had bits and pieces of success, just enough to keep me writing but never enough to feel satisfied or worthy. So the battle never ends: toujours, c'est la guerre.
BLOGGER'S NOTE. OK, so I've had a few more thoughts about all this. Writers necessarily tear themselves apart in the service of their work, so I must analyze.
I think one of the reasons the song affected me so wrenchingly is that I hadn't heard it in 35 years. That's a lot of heartache, a lot of gain and loss, richness as well as periods of abject wretchedness. And golden gifts, sometimes unrecognized. Isn't that kind of like the song of the "vieux amants"? When I looked at it more closely, I realized that this was hardly a song of tragedy. It was all about a couple who are devoted to each other even after some fierce storms, including infidelity and deception (thus, all the references to trickery, sorcery, not the kind of "magic" we associate with romance).
In other words, this ain't such a bad deal. This is a couple, still passionate about each other, never indifferent, together because they still want to be. There are poignant references, almost disguised (the "room without a cradle", which implies a childlessness they may nor may not have chosen), and the casual affairs which help pass the time, but such biting sarcasm almost borders on the humorous.
I'm reminded of a Catholic priest I used to know who was ticked off because people constantly referred to the sufferings of Jesus. "He had a bad week at the end," he liked to say, "but aside from that, he had a pretty good time!". I feel this way about the old lovers (who, if they're really old, must have met when they were well into their 50s). There is a richness here that is in contrast to the tragic, sobbing tune, which seems to be talking about death rather than devotion.
I can't really listen to Brel sing his own stuff. I just made an attempt to watch him sing this on YouTube, and the problem isn't his voice. The arrangement is pure elevator music, sudsy, with those high cheesy strings I haven't heard since I threw out my old Ferrante and Teicher albums .I don't know why a legend like Brel would allow such fromage, and I will admit Collins' version is far superior, but OH is it mournful, funereal almost, whereas Brel's is just oversentimental, and a little sad.
Another thing that popped into my head: the more I listen to this tune, the more I realize it's actually a tango. Just change the tempo, the rhythm, and you can see the "vieux amants" in black silk and spangles, performing the oddly jerky eroticism of old Argentina on the dance floor.
It's all too strange for words.
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Chapters/Indigo.ca
River Deep, Wall of Sound
I picked this version of River Deep Mountain High because it's the one where she truly nails it. I spent an incredible amount of time in the early '90s, when I was dealing with agonizing sexual abuse issues in therapy, listening and listening to this song. I did know something about the surreal Phil Spector "wall of sound", the densely-packed audio that seems to have no discernible crack in it, so that you had no choice but to be deeply immersed, if not drowned. Seeing Angela Bassett in What's Love Got to Do with it only intensified my exploration, my craving to understand this incredible, almost volcanic song, the way the sexual frenzy builds and builds until Tina screams the kind of scream you might scream if you saw your mother's ghost.
The lyrics are so turgid they're ready to explode:
Cause it grows stronger, like the river flows
And it gets bigger baby, heaven knows
And it gets sweeter baby, as it grows
It just gets bigger, yeah, and stronger and sweeter as it grows, until the primordial thunderblast that shatters the world. It's a rhapsodic description of something that is, after all, physiological, in and of the body (that place we all live in - remember?).
I just listened to some (not all, as it was 40 minutes or so) audio of the sessions that led to this incredible song. Mostly it's just the chopping away, take after laborious take, directions, corrections, slower, faster, louder, softer, that you'd hear in any recording session, but this one was done back in the day, when the only special effects were echo chambers that lent a surreal quality to the sound. The studio was small and the musicians extremely tight.
We hear certain individual components: the percussion and brasses forming the thudding primal underlay, then the strings, somehow blended together into one "thing", not even stringlike any more but like an organic, horsehair-and-wood synthesizer, and then the chorus folded together and eerily blended into a sheen of song. Spector liked to work his musicians until they were so exhausted they lost their individuality and had no choice but to became overwhelmed by that immense, reverberating wall. It's a kind of musical totalitarianism, but it worked.
It's interesting to listen to Tina, who seems to be saving herself in many of these takes, singing to keep the musicians on track. She never receives a word of direction: she's Tina Turner, for God's sake, and who needs to direct Hera or Venus or Cleopatra? In the final version, full-on passion leaps forward, and we hear an emotion that is almost agonizing, no doubt shot through with violence and despair as she tries to live and work beside her humiliating sadist of a husband.
When I listened to it late at night after not having heard it for, uh, I, uh - twenty years - damn if the song didn't go and change on me, as so many things do. It was still about sex, of course, and orgasm so powerful it catapults you into another dimension, even transcending love, but it's also about the weird, underwater, distorted, echoing world I was dragged into, the Wall of Sound. It hadn't been heard before and won't be again, because no one is as crazy as Phil Spector - I don't think I have ever seen a more demented human being in my life - and those times, primitive times in a technological sense, won't come again. Tina has long since retired, and though some say Beyonce is her successor, I don't believe there will ever be one.
Tina Turner was a force of nature, rippling, muscular, fleshy, intimidating, with a voice almost as extreme as Janis Joplin's, a howl of abandonment and grief. It takes courage and mesmerizing devotion to throw yourself into that canyon, and people usually do it only because they have no other choice if they are to avoid going completely insane.
I haven't described the eeriness of the Wall of Sound, because it's like listening to overtones, the strange whistling and fluting, sometimes theramin-like sounds that can pop out of an ordinary tone: they can't be there, but there they are, and we're swimming in it, it's rippling and echoing all around us. Dreamlike, even a little nightmarish. If you try to imagine the musicians clustered around and sweating and playing, you can't, because what they've played has been transformed and transfigured and rendered almost unrecognizable. They're just the source material for Something Else that can't even be easily defined.
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Sex and arthritis
This incredible display is from a site (which I can't find now, sorry) called Sex and Arthritis. The drawings are so beautful on their own, I hesitate to sully them with my usual blatherings. I have no idea how these seven line-drawings of sexual postures, like some pen-and-ink Kama Sutra of the internet, are supposed to help people with arthritis. I don't even HAVE arthritis, or not much, maybe a couple of flareups a year, and I'll tell you, I could not manage many of these positions. Figures 3, 4 and 7 involve pillows, which is a nice idea when you're past a certain age, though I might do something else with them entirely. Figure 6, probably my favorite, depicts the male partner crushing his girl friend into a footstool: she appears to have been pressed flat to about 3" thick. (Or maybe it's a stair-step, which is even kinkier.) In Figure 7, however, it's not the poor steamrollered woman but the man who is prone (prostrate, NOT prostate) with his concerned partner leaning tenderly over him, perhaps as they wait for the ambulance to arrive.
Thursday, April 10, 2014
"Baby don't cry, it's better this way"
I get thinking about all this sometimes, about the songs of my youth. Most of the really lush '60s pop hits came out mid-decade, when I was old enough to appreciate them, and they're recorded in my brain even more indelibly than my marriage vows.
There was a whole genre of hits which I call the "I'm not good enough for you/you're not good enough for me" style of song. The gold standard of this mass of music was Billy Joe Royal's Down in the Boondocks (which for some reason my Grade 5 class loved to parody as "down in the outhouse"). This was the first time I paid attention to a lyric which told a tragic tale of inadequacy - in this case, his, as he slaves away on the docks and pines for an unattainable princess ("Ev'ry night I watch the lights from the house up on the hill/I love a little girl who lives up there and I guess I always will").
Because this fellow is a sweaty, grease-caked Neanderthal, or at least a poor guy whose lunch money has been known to be blown on reefer, he feels inadequate. Near the end of the song we learn the two of them are meeting in secret, but the question is, does she make him shower first?
The female character in this drama looks to me like a prom queen with not a hair out of place. Or perhaps she is wearing white, like a virgin at a purity ball. But you can't tell me she doesn't like to lower herself. And that's how she sees it, make no mistake. She doesn't WANT him smartening himself up like he says he will ("One fine day I'll find a way to move from this old shack/I'll hold my head up like a king and I never never will look back."). The grease and sweat and funk and penniless penury turn her on, and both of them know it. But when it comes time to marry, goodbye Billy Joe.
The amazing Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons spewed out several tunes in this genre. Dawn was one of the best, especially that dreamy intro, "Pretty as a midsummer's morn,/They call her Dawn." You either love Vallli or hate him, and I admit he does sometimes sound like a man whose shorts are too tight. But he also had a certain earnestness, and a definite tough-guy charm that came across in nearly every song (with the possible exception of Walk like a Man, which was impossible to take seriously sung in falsetto). Dawn was kind of like Boondocks, in that the fellow feels so inadequate that he sings over and over, "So go away, please go away. . . Baby don't cry, it's better this way!"
He even, incredibly, begs her to marry the rich guy: "Think what a big man he'll be. . . Now think what the future would be with a poor boy like me!" Masochism was never finer than this. The nobility here, spurning his love and sacrificing his happiness for her financial wellbeing, is, well, a bit much, but it's the gentlemanly thing to do. What he's hoping for, of course, is that she will kick over the traces and say, "I won't go away! I am the love of your life! I don't care which side of the tracks you're from! I love you! I love you! I love you!" (etc. etc.)
The flip side of all this male grovelling is Rag Doll, in which the girl isn't quite good enough for HIM, though he won't admit it. She's a secret Cinderella who deserves so much more than her shabby, shameful circumstances: "Such a pretty face should be dressed in lace." Though he insists "I love you just the way you are," he also seems determined to get her out of this mess, to smarten her up a bit so she won't draw the wrong sort of attention when they're sipping Coke floats at Pop Tate's Chock'lit Shoppe ("hey, who's the skank who's going with Frank?"). I can't help but see Rag Doll, who isn't even given a name, as sooty-eyed, skimpily-clad, with hair hanging down both sides of her face like a basset hound's ears. Is she "easy"? Well, can you guess? Rag dolls are passive, pliant, so easy to dress - and undress.
Princess in Rags by Gene Pitney (he of Town Without Pity fame) echoes most of these themes, including his determination to "work and slave, scrimp and save, to change those rags to silk and lace". "All her wealth is in her charms," the pop bard insists, "and the sweetness of her arms/How I love my poor princess in rags." Once again there's an inference of meeting on the sly, the neighborhood girl everybody knows about, the one who will "put out". Funny that rags come up more than once - don't know which song came first, but they cover similar ground, including the fairy-tale sense of an unrecognized royalty hidden from the world (but plenty seen by HIM, especially after he removes those rags).
I bogged down at Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, though they had a slew of hits in the early '70s, including one that almost fits the genre. I think their first hit was Young Girl, in which an underage siren is being told to hit the road before something illegal happens. The power inequity has more to do with age than economic status, but it's still there, and she's still being told to get lost. The subtext is that she is a nasty little Lolita who keeps pestering him. Being too young, like being too poor, lends a stigma of sluttishness, of too much makeup, the familiar sooty-eyes-and-basset-hound-hair syndrome.
Hang On Sloopy is just the opposite: don't take off, hang on! This is about a girl who lives in a very bad part of town, with obviously loose morals, but she is oh, so misunderstood: "Sloopy, I don't care what your Daddy do (janitor? Pimp? Hit man?)/'Cause you know Sloopy girl, I'm in love with you." I can't help but see the similarity between "Sloopy" and "sloppy", a sort of literal looseness, and there is even a reference to letting her hair hang down, a symbolic phrase if ever there was one. I don't know if the McCoys ever had another hit, but this one guaranteed them a place in the wrong-side-of-the-tracks hall of fame.
(A side note: for some unknown reason, references to "Daddy" abound in these songs. In Boondocks, he's the thwarted suitor's employer; in Princess in Rags, he's a pathetic, "worn-out man" who can't even put food on the table. I'm reminded of that song, whoever recorded it: "in the summertime when the weather is hot. . ": "If her Daddy's rich, take her out for a meal/If her Daddy's poor, then do what you feel": another line that reeks of unequal social status and the quasi-ownership that still shows up in wedding ceremonies when Daddy "gives the bride away").
I hesitated to include I Who Have Nothing here, as caterwauled by Tom Jones, but the lyrics are so funny I couldn't quite omit it. "He, he buys you diamonds. . . bright, sparkling diamonds. . . but believe me. . . hear what I say. . . he can buy you the world but he'll never love you the way. . . I LOVE YOU!" But I have saved the best until last.
Long before she was a superstar on her own, Cher coattailed behind a seemingly lamebrained young man with a fake-fur vest and bangs, Sonny Bono. Sonny "made" Cher in more ways than one, and even wrote some of her best songs early on, including Baby Don't Go, one of the finest pop numbers ever. At that point Cher sang in a fresh, natural alto that had real warmth, bringing out the heat in the simple, poignant lyrics. It's the only song in this category written from the girl's point of view, expressing her her hurt, her needs and desires.
"Baby Don't Go"
Baby don't go,
Pretty baby please don't go
I never had a mother,
I hardly knew my dad
I've been in town for eighteen years
You're the only boy I've had
I can't stay,
Maybe I'll be back some day
Baby don't go,
Pretty baby please don't go
I love you so,
Pretty baby please don't go
I never had no money
I bought at the second hand store
The way this old town laughs at me
I just can't take it no more
I can't stay,
I'm gonna be a lady some day
Baby don't go,
Pretty baby please don't go
I love you so,
Pretty baby please don't go
When I get to the city,
My tears will all be dry
My eyes will look so pretty
No one's gonna know I cried
Yes I'm goin' away,
Maybe I'll be back some day
Baby don't go,
Maybe I'll be back some day
Baby don't go
Pretty baby please don't go
I never had a mother,
I hardly knew my dad
I've been in town for eighteen years
You're the only boy I've had
I can't stay,
Maybe I'll be back some day
Baby don't go,
Pretty baby please don't go
I love you so,
Pretty baby please don't go
I never had no money
I bought at the second hand store
The way this old town laughs at me
I just can't take it no more
I can't stay,
I'm gonna be a lady some day
Baby don't go,
Pretty baby please don't go
I love you so,
Pretty baby please don't go
When I get to the city,
My tears will all be dry
My eyes will look so pretty
No one's gonna know I cried
Yes I'm goin' away,
Maybe I'll be back some day
Baby don't go,
Maybe I'll be back some day
Baby don't go
In this case, instead of the boyfriend making himself worthy of her, or making HER worthy of HIM, this girl is making herself worthy in her own eyes, a quest for dignity and real self-esteem. It's about the only song I can think of with those dynamics, which is what makes it so touching .Though she insists "you're the only boy I've had," there's an inference of nasty rumors, of pregnancy and having to escape to go into hiding or "get rid of it", which may or may not be true. And then there is that chorus, my God, it's incredible: it's very close, tight, dissonant harmony, the kind you don't hear in pop, its overtones suggesting a train whistle late at night, and all the longings of a girl running far away from the hell and damnation of a pitiless small town.
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Charisma to burn
I would have to call these two my favorites from Old Hollywood. They acted the stuffings out of a part while keeping it real. And they were gorgeous: the camera ate them up.
Both of them smoked too much, but Bogie fell far sooner, in an awful sort of way, consumed. He kept smoking even after contracting fatal throat cancer. Perhaps it was a "what the hell, it's coming anyway" thing. Somehow Bette was tougher, but cancer devoured her too, eventually, until she was an unrecognizable wraith.
Our heroes flare briefly. It's always brief, when you think about it. Each of us climbs only a tiny segment of the wall (just like Harold and his fake aerial sets in Safety Last). It's hard to put any of it together. I once had the thought that if you kept going back and back, and back and back and back, through the thousands and mega-thousands and millions and billions of ancestors that spread out exponentially behind you, you would eventually reach the first cell of life that winked on out of nothingness.
We all go back to the primordial ooze. There goes the neighborhood.
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Wednesday, April 9, 2014
Motor City madness: Bob Seger's East Side Story
Beneath the bare light bulb above
She gazed into the eyes of love
Bathed in the dirty neon lights
She begged him "don't go out tonight"
If we work out somehow maybe
We could find a way out baby
And he laughed and said "I got to go"
And she cried "no"
Johnny Johnny no
Oh Johnny Johnny no
His arms were warm and strong and young
"I promise I won't hurt no one"
"Oh baby when you gonna learn,
Them folks uptown got bread to burn,
When they see me flash my knife,
They'll be fearin' for their life,
They won't give me trouble this I know"
And she cried no
Oh Johnny Johnny no
Johnny Johnny no
[organ solo]
The night passed like a thousand years
The tenemant room had culled her tears
Then came a knock upon the door
Two men she'd never seen before
"Did you know Johnny Brown miss?
We hate to tell you this but
Has he a relative you know?"
And she cried no
Oh Johnny Johnny no
Oh Johnny why'd you go?
She gazed into the eyes of love
Bathed in the dirty neon lights
She begged him "don't go out tonight"
If we work out somehow maybe
We could find a way out baby
And he laughed and said "I got to go"
And she cried "no"
Johnny Johnny no
Oh Johnny Johnny no
His arms were warm and strong and young
"I promise I won't hurt no one"
"Oh baby when you gonna learn,
Them folks uptown got bread to burn,
When they see me flash my knife,
They'll be fearin' for their life,
They won't give me trouble this I know"
And she cried no
Oh Johnny Johnny no
Johnny Johnny no
[organ solo]
The night passed like a thousand years
The tenemant room had culled her tears
Then came a knock upon the door
Two men she'd never seen before
"Did you know Johnny Brown miss?
We hate to tell you this but
Has he a relative you know?"
And she cried no
Oh Johnny Johnny no
Oh Johnny why'd you go?
In posting this, I'm trying to touch something that is virtually untouchable. When I first heard this song, I was still sleeping downstairs, hadn't yet inherited my sister's room upstairs with its strange artifacts in the bureau drawers (garter belts, a rubber douche bag, rollers, several girdles, a pink angora sweater which I once wore to school, and a hair drier with a puffy plastic hat that you wore like a shower cap). I had a radio beside my bed and constantly listened to CKLW Detroit: we all did, it was just what you did when you lived in Chatham (within striking distance of Windsor, Detroit's boring younger brother). I remember Chatham days now with a kind of ecstasy, which is strange because I did not have a happy childhood. Maybe it's just the escape to something once known, or revised brilliantly, the grass made of emeralds, and the crickets sounding like something out of Handel's Messiah.
When this song came on the radio, a funny feeling came over me. Electric. It's an opera in 2 minutes, a brilliant lyric really, tightly compressed, laden. The vocals are heartbreaking, the "no, no, nooooooooo" in the slightly choked voice that squeezes all the violence and pathos out of the scene.
A funny feeling. Electric. Buzzing. I was beginning to come awake. Given that this was 1966, and that The Doors hadn't even happened yet (or not full-on: that was 2 years later), the bridge and keyboard sound remarkably Morrison-like, meaning that Jim and the gang must've been listening to Seger. But didn't all bands listen to all bands back then?
I am convinced now that the first hormones were stirring in me, and probably I wrote a story about this song because I always wrote about everything. I couldn't explain it. It wasn't just sexual feelings, though I am sure they were included. They had to be. I had been sexual ever since falling madly in love with Maynard G. Krebbs in Dobie Gillis when I was six years old. It was something else, an elevation, a lifting of the vibration of my life. An intensification of the frequency.
Johnny, Johnny, noooooo.
I had some sort of a vision of a man killing a rat with a knife. There were no rats in the song, but at about the same time I watched West Side Story on TV, and the two things may have become conflated. The guy who played Bernardo, he looked something like Johnny, tough, with his long-suffering girl friend begging him not to go. Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, no.
I knew almost nothing then, had not "had sex", not even with myself (though I think that was going to happen pretty soon). I was somehow throwing myself into the centre of the violent scene, smelling the smells, sucking it up. That raw roaring Motor City sound was primal, dangerous, wild. The music came right up out of the core of it, bursting through the scalding pavement, immensely alive, but frightening.
When there was a gang fight, it was a rumble. When there was a biker race, it was a scramble. I had also watched The Wild One, or was soon to watch it, and even though Brando was fat and lethargic and mostly slept through it, there was something about that leather. The danger.
"I promise I won't hurt no one" echoes Brando in another movie, the touchstone movie of my life, On the Waterfront. He says the same thing to Edie when he pulls out his longshoreman's hook and heads over to confront Johnny Friendly and his minions for a final showdown. "And don't worry. I ain't gonna hurt nobody."
That's not exactly what Edie or the unnamed Motor City girl were worried about.
Why was I attracted to this stuff? A shy, introverted, slightly nutty, not-very-well-liked (some things never change) girl with unremarkable looks and way too much intensity for her own good? I wanted to be with that East Side Story guy, tame him down, or else go out with him, wild, my hair like Raquel Welch's in that prehistoric movie, what was it called? A mane, a mop. I wanted to be with Terry Malloy, walk beside him, shine my light on him like Edie, change him. I wanted to bust out of dull old Chatham with its milk-horses and bread trucks and sugar beet factory and Lloyd's jute bag company and Darling's slaughterhouse that smelled like damnation on a hot day, the museum that should have been in a museum, and the medieval convent where I had to take my violin lessons. I was sick of the nighthawks with their skee-ix, skee-ix, skee-ix, and that bizarre roaring sound that I was later to learn came from air rushing through their flight feathers as they dove to the ground. All that stuff I ache for now, knowing it's gone forever. Most of those old Victorian -era houses would be ripped down, and I happen to know the house I lived in was made into a doctor's office.
My life wasn't, isn't important. Lord knows I've had that jackhammered home since joining Facebook (a handy way to top up your pain when the tank is low). I've felt out of kilter all through my life, and at my age it ain't going to change. I have been told, and I don't believe it by the way, that "most people" feel like me, feel like they don't belong or fall short in some way. Bull-hoo. All I can say in my own defense is that I have kept my aliveness; even in the midst of howling anguish, experiences you would not wish on someone you loathe, the light has not gone out, I have not opted for deadness or shrinking a size so my shoes will fit. And I can't be around anyone who has made that choice.
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