Who Asked Me?

all the merry little elves
can go hang themselves
my faith is as cold as can be

If it’s Thursday it must be Dylan. This Thursday, anyway, up in Harlem. I can’t seem to string too much together these days that’s worth remembering, but I keep listening to Bob. Why? I could only take him in small doses before, and usually had to go back to John Wesley Harding. (Which is kind of funny, because I thought it had something to do with his voice – but looking back on it, he could sing back then.) Not that anyone cares, but for a solid year now his last three have been in my ever-shrinking rotation – Modern Times, Tell Tale Signs, and Together Through Life.  And of these three, Disc One of Tell Tale spins over and over again. An argument could be made that there’s not much new there, as the tunes are all alternates, demos, or unreleased versions of previous work. But I guess the same argument could be made about life – and who’s making the rules here, anyway?

People often look for hidden meaning in the guy’s songs and talk frequently about “reinvention.”  But after reading the memoir Chronicles – Volume One,  I concluded that he’s just rather adept at blending truth with fiction, concentrating on the corners, and substituting metaphor and myth for what really happened. He’s got this “iconic” thing going for him, but it’s more a label bestowed by aging, less infamous peers, looking for something to hang their increasingly ragged hats on. He doesn’t seem to revel in it as much as he uses it for what it’s worth – kind of like Chris Farley did his size. How else could you explain a Christmas album, for goodness sake, or this recent video for Must Be Santa ? When he was stopped recently by a young female cop who didn’t recognize him, and asked what he was doing strolling aimlessly through an affluent Jersey suburb, the answer came back : “I’m on a big tour.”  Don’t tell me this guy isn’t having fun.

Still, all of this – while entertaining – wouldn’t be quite enough if there wasn’t something there. What is it then, for example, about these rehashed efforts on Disc One of Tell Tale Signs ? If he’s not revisiting Christianity or forecasting an apocalyptic hard rain falling in glowing drops from the sky, then what’s he getting at? Lost love maybe, and how that carried weight weighs on you through the years. Getting older and never thinking you’d make it this far. Seen James Dean in a picture once / comin’ in from the cold / said “geez I hope I look that good / if I get to be that old. Broken idols, broken heroes. Pushing on and hoping that maybe someone is there with you when the deal goes down. How the heck would I know?

His voice itself is on the verge of broken these days, and yet he pushes its impending collapse through this never-ending tour. When Jack Nicholson handed him a “Lifetime Achievement” Grammy in ’91, praising him for a “constant state of restlessness” that had allowed him to “seek ‘new’ and ‘better’ ways of ‘expressing the human condition’ with ‘words and music,’ ” Dylan obliged, pacing uncomfortably and looking restless enough to flee his own person. He started to walk away with the award before realizing that he should say a few words, if only to appease audience expectation and adulation. “My daddy, he didn’t leave me too much,” Bob began. “He was a very simple man. But what he did tell me was this.  He said ‘Son …’ ” There was a long pause here, as the gathered crowd anticipated what might follow. “You know,” Dylan concluded impishly, “he said so many things ..”

I’m on the Sixth Avenue Local, sometimes called the F, trying not to spill my lukewarm coffee and staring at a poster for the new Courteney Cox vehicle Cougar Town, a TV program with the tag line “40 is the new 20.” Yeah, sure it is. Just like fat is the new thin, bondage the new freedom, and Mad Men the new Sopranos. The stops pass in familiar succession – East Broadway, Delancey, 2nd Avenue – as they did at first and hundreds of times since. The haunted eyes and fat ankles of the woman opposite me look familiar; we may have had a blind date back in ’04.  She remains locked on her book, spooked peepers refusing to acknowledge me . I’m wearing roughly the same outfit as I was back then, but am five years older and unshaven. Still, it wouldn’t be impossible to fish me out of a lineup.  I rise to exit at 42nd and she gives me a good once-over, head to toe, in sync with the opening doors.

My parents, still kicking admirably and capable of withstanding the Times Square circus better than I, visited last week. We dropped Mom off at Bloomingdale’s one afternoon, and I worried momentarily about her finding a cab back.  I set aside concern, reasoning that of all places this represented the greatest concentration of seventy-year-old women looking to get home safely.  “She lived in London for three years,” Dad assured as we walked away. “She’s a lot better at this stuff than I am.”

We pressed on and up to the park, shot the shit about cheap people and bicycle accidents, then pointed ourselves back toward the Marriott Marquis where we got stuck inside one of their high-speed glass elevators. If you’re going to get stuck in an elevator, a glass one with only two occupants is probably the way to go. The old man held it together admirably for the fifteen minutes it took to get a serviceman up there to remedy the situation. We exited on the thirty-second floor deciding not to trust another lift to forty-two. Instead we hoofed it up ten flights, Dad pleased to demonstrate his ageless Italian-Swiss pegs, sturdier than those of most half his age. Meanwhile, Mom had scored two new outfits, but indeed failed in her quest to hail a return cab, even after engaging the assistance of a store doorman. Instead she hopped the N-R-W subway line at Lexington, using her language skills from Perth Academy to chat up the French woman next to her and ascertain the correct stop. Before surfacing, she’d also befriended a fellow countryman from Glasgow and an African American woman who thanked her for shopping Bloomingdale’s and pointed her in the right direction.

In a week they’d come and gone, beginning with driving rain and an early-season nor’easter and ending with temperatures hovering in the seventies. We dined at an overpriced, revolving restaurant one night and shared a pizza and the impressive view from their room the next. We watched an episode of  House with Mom providing running, insightful commentary in her Scottish accent ( “oooh – he’s a clever wee thing ..”)  They said they had a great time and I believed them.

A few days after their visit, I notice a typically premature, stoop-side holiday display on DeGraw featuring a sign with changeable numbers. Only 61 Days Until Christmas it boasts, in oblivious pre-Halloween cheer. A half block on I catch this piece of a conversation between two neighborhood gentlemen: “After that shit, I don’t pass no judgment no more on nobody.” I attempt to do the double-negative math, and decipher whether this guy’s just professed to pass judgment on everyone, constantly – but I give up and walk on. Brooklyn. New York City. October, 2009.

“Don’t sweat the little things, and remember that everything is a little thing.”

This advice was doled out by a girlfriend’s mother a long while back, when I was going through a relatively rocky stretch. She wasn’t trying to pass it off as original; she’d heard someone say it on a talk show. The first part is as old as the hills, and the second just a clever addendum that doesn’t really pass close inspection. It’s the type of thing Dr. Phil puts in hardcover every three months to add a new wing to his joint in Palm Beach. On a certain level everything is a little thing. But sometimes the little things are the big things.

I got kicked off the roof of my building twice this weekend by a woman who’d installed a motion detector on her private deck just below. It had never happened before – there’s an official “curfew” posted in the lobby, but no one had ever enforced it, and it was only twenty minutes past this time. What was more distressing, though, was her manner. She was abrupt, authoritative, and unresponsive to my attempts to apologize and better understand why the situation had changed. She even waited behind until I’d left, like a warden at lockdown. I considered confronting her more forcefully, but something in her way made me think that this wasn’t a good idea.

On the surface, this incident falls squarely between the boundaries of the little things. You take people as they come, and let water roll off your back. I’ve been chastised for not letting things go in the past, but I’ve dismissed much larger deals with apt aplomb. Maybe it’s because I’ve really enjoyed that roof. I’ve been thinking of looking for a new place lately – given the shifting economy, I’m probably paying too much rent. But the view from up there is spectacular, and you can see most of Brooklyn, the Statue of Liberty, and all the way to midtown Manhattan. I’ve enjoyed going up there later in the evening, just for a quiet breath of fresh air. All the shit that doesn’t fit together during the day can seem irrelevant in those few minutes, and the world spread out in almost manageable order. Just a little thing.

My buddy Scott who was out here last weekend once noted that “you wouldn’t want to know the real number of people who are just hanging to a thread out there.” The comment stuck with me for some time, and I’d like to think that it caused me to walk a little more gently since. Sometimes it feels like you can just see it in someone’s eyes; like they might fall apart or explode if you make one wrong step in either direction. I don’t figure I’ve been there myself too often, and for this I’m thankful. I’m also thankful for all the great views I’ve had in my life – despite the many blessings I’ve taken for granted, this hasn’t been one.

The weather broke in New York City yesterday and a two week span of ninety degree days shifted in to something cooler and more palatable. This morning’s light rain and upper sixties temperatures felt like San Francisco – with an added boost of perspective, coming on the heels of everything that a Big Apple August can imply : stagnation, suffocation, and the kind of sweat you scrape off your body with the dull edge of a credit card.

I made a pasta meal Wednesday night for my long-time east coast acquaintance and Boom Operator To The Stars, Kelly. After dinner we went on a short digestion-facilitating walk that blossomed into an eight-mile test of endurance and included the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg bridges, an almost militantly separatist Hasidic neighborhood, and Steiner Studios by the Brooklyn Navy Yard.  Upon reaching the film lot, I queried Kelly as to whether he knew the guard at the front gate, and he responded in his always-caffeinated and nicotine tempered Mickey Rourke baritone “No! But I’m a card-carrying member of Local 52, and rest assured we will be acquainted in short order ..” Kelly has a kettle-drum quality to his vocal accentuation that makes his chosen vocation as boom operator more than appropriate. Sure enough, in no time we were traversing the cavernous, deserted enclave at one in the morning as he barked out a wandering narrative with violent emphasis on particular words: “Studio Six ! That’s where I boomed Flight of the Conchords ! ..”

Though he claimed that it was just an “average night’s walk” for him, and really no different from sitting in front of the TV, by the time we crossed Bushwick Ave he was more than amiable to my offer to buy him a cold drink, and we hoofed it another several miles from there, Gatorade and Lemonade in hand, to the Williamsburg G Train and back to my neighborhood. Kelly’s pointing himself in the direction of California soon, both for film work and a medicinal marijuana card to address some chronic pain issues. ( And, I suspect, to remain consistently and astronomically high. ) He appears and disappears at different points on my horizon, often punctuating some unconscious shift in my own mental and physical landscape.

As the cooler weather marks yet another September transition, my buddies Tom Myers and Scott Miller will be visiting in a few weeks. Scott changed his name to “Coleman” several years back, to better distinguish himself from the legions of Scott Millers out there keeping celluloid relevant in an experimental manner. He celebrated a significant birthday last month, and Tom and I purchased him a Wrigley Field seat back, autographed by the greatest of Cubs, Ernie Banks. Miller seemed appreciative, and noted that the seat came with a “letter of authentication” signed personally by Mr. Cub. “I was thinkin’ about those letters of authentication,” he remarked to me, “and wouldn’t it seem right that they’d come with a letter of authentication themselves? I mean, doesn’t a letter of authentication need a letter of authentication to be worth anything? And where does the cycle end ?”  I didn’t have an answer for him, but the speculation was pure Scott Miller, and nothing that anyone named Coleman could ever come up with.

I’m hot
and when I’m not
I’m cold as ice – Young, Young & Scott

Pervasive summer fog punctuates another longish San Francisco stay, and by trip’s end I find my condition mirroring the area’s meteorological state: low, even, and not letting up any time soon. The flight is always shorter west-east, and thankfully so. A late life first time father sitting across from me takes advantage of his infant son’s only non-screeching in-flight interval to pick the kid up and make raspberry sounds on his forehead. In seconds, Junior is again wailing and I’m about to deck a sexagenarian. But I restrain myself admirably, endure the rest of my air time, and am soon cabbing it home from Kennedy. My place is clean, left so by my landlord who was renting it back for a mid-summer stay. A warm, boxed slice awaits me, the air conditioning is on, and my eyes and brain readjust once more to the readjustment. Except this time the blur hangs a little longer and something in my brain feels funny – even funnier than usual. I chalk it up to geographical ambivalence, renter’s instability, barometric fluctuation, Eastern Daylight Time and thoughts of loved ones. Chalk it up to too many things to chalk it up to.

Wednesday rolls in – high eighties, sweaty and charcoal dark by mid afternoon. Foreboding skies eclipse threatening to the point of no return. An uneasy, day-long pressure builds inside of me and lodges in my chest with each held breath like a thumb over a cranked garden hose. A few large splatters of rain hit the window and a cold blue chunk of forked lighting touches down only blocks away, so close that I hear its throbbing, charged electric buzz a half second before a slam of punishing thunder sets off a half dozen car alarms. Soon the water is slashing down in vertical sheets, hard enough to pull leaves from branches and stinging the paved street on contact. As I observe, something inside of me adjusts accordingly and the thumb pops off the nozzle.

Friday night I’m waiting in an exceptionally long line at Penn Station, hundreds winding back from a ticket machine spitting passes for a new rail line to Jersey. There’s at least a dozen equally long lines twisting and stemming from identical machines, and I figure I’m screwed – won’t be getting to where I’m going ’til midnight. But things tend to move faster in this city, and people generally know what they’re doing when they get there. I make remarkable time to the front of the line and purchase a ticket to Secaucus where I and most of these folks will catch an adjunct rail to the Meadowlands and Giants Stadium. I’ve received birthday tickets for hard rocking, boogie-woogie madmen AC-DC, and seeing them here is akin to some sort of last chance rite of passage. Sure, I’m too old for this shit, but the irrelevance of this observation is staggering. I find myself shoulder to shoulder in a passenger car with an equal number of fans both twenty years my senior and junior. “Ladies and Gentleman,” the conductor’s voice cracks over speaker, tongue planted firmly in cheek, “welcome to the AC-DC rock ‘n’ roll train ..” Mayhem.

It’s ten pm, skies have parted and rain stopped, and there’s Angus Young, all fifty-four years and five foot one inches of him, selling it in his schoolboy uniform like there’s no tomorrow; jerking and kicking around the massive stage and hundred yard catwalk like an epileptic Red Bull pitchman on an especially jittery day. The young couple in front of me are ecstatic – he bolting for the aisle to join a Jersey muffler shop day worker, playing Beavis to the older dude’s Butthead with horned fingers thrust and heads thrashing in crazed syncopation to an anchored, driving backbeat. She hangs back above their seats, dancing purposefully and fluidly with her beautiful self, a pole-less untouchable stripper shattering the adage that youth is wasted on the young. And it occurs to me, the thing about this band – they’ve never taken themselves too seriously. The show rages on with relentless pace amid a stage decked with two huge, horned, inflatable schoolboy hats with capital “A’s” up front. A massive, wrecked, still-smoking locomotive protrudes above the drum kit, the numerals 666 across its nose. Hell has never been some serious, spooky metalhead stance for these dudes; just a metaphor for no tomorrow. Fireworks explode in rapid-fire succession after the midnight encore, spectacularly anticlimactic when held next to what Angus has left on stage: four gallons of sweat, two pints of blood, and every bit of himself. Rarely does one feel so compensated, putting down twenty-nine fifty on a ticket. House lights come on and a thick cloud of smoke hangs over the Jersey night. Another New York day ends.