Murphy's Law

I.

Listen:

When some of your best friends are people who exist elsewhere—characters in books you’ve read, musicians you’ll never meet, people from the past who died decades (even centuries) before you were born, or people you knew intimately who are no longer around—it might be time to ask some complicated questions.

Who are you?

That is, or should be, the first question, as well as the last question, and it should be asked as often as possible along the way.

You see, all men are islands. After all, no one else is inside you when you’re born, no one is going with you when you die, and between those first and last breaths, the decisions, actions and accountability are your own. All, all yours.

So: you find friends, you seek solace in yourself, you learn to discern redemption through the aimless affairs that comprise the push and pull of everyone’s existence. You realize, in short, that you are going through it alone, so you should never go through it alone.

Thoreau was quite correct about quiet desperation and the long shadow it can cast over us all, but you don’t want to run off to your own unseen island. For one thing, there are no islands anymore, except the ones you pay admission to enter; plus, it’s already been done; and above all, when Thoreau got lonely or hungry he walked home and had his mother cook dinner for him, a fact he forgot to mention in his quite convincing case for individuality. Besides, everyone is already on his or her own island. You can’t run away, and the farther you run, the closer you get to yourself. And you’re all you’ve got.

If you are fortunate enough to figure this out early on, you find friends: the ones who exist in your everyday world, and the ones who have been there all along, the ones you can always turn to, wherever or whoever you happen to be.

II.

I have visions.

As far back as I can remember anything, I remember it being there—and I’m not just talking about run of the mill malarkey like guessing who was on the phone before I answered it, or what the next song on the radio would be before it was played (although these were both common recurrences throughout the mini-visions of my formative years)—I’ve been aware of things that most, if not all, other people I know have no access to: visions.

A vision:

I was certain that I had been destined to die on my eighteenth birthday.

I was not clear on how it was going to go down, but it was definitely to be marked by dramatic and tragic overtones—it would be, in short, supremely adolescent. Not slow death by disease, or some unfortunate ailment of the elderly, but more of a movie star blaze of glory, think James Dean or Jimi Hendrix. I could see them all: friends, family, choice classmates—the ones who gathered around my locker now gathered around my casket—sobbing, singing, eulogizing. I saw it. The vision intensified when I discovered that my eighteenth birthday happened to fall on Senior Prom. At first the made-for-TV melodrama was daunting, a tad over-the-top; but then the vision accrued acumen and I got a handle on the situation: what a brilliant way to go! Either I’ll have just experienced my first—and last—blissful sexual encounter (speaking of visions), or I’ll shuttle off into the post-pubescent afterworld pristine, an unsoiled altar boy.

I have visions. I do not claim that they are always accurate.

After prom (where I failed not only to die but to murder my virginity) I awoke the next morning, more than a little astonished to have survived. Having applied to the appropriate universities, I glided through the formality of standardized tests, still not unconvinced that I would be going anywhere. I exercised less caution than the average teenage idiot, reckoning that my visions obliged me to abet—or at least tempt—fate a little bit, just on principle. Alive on arrival, I found myself at college, where I subsequently saw some things that gave my visions a run for their money. I made it through matriculation and then, the unreal world awaited.

Still alive, I had little choice but to keep on living.

III.

Listen:

To win? To lose?

What for, if the world will forget us anyway?

I didn’t write that. A poet wrote that. I’m no poet. Poets are always looking for things, like heroes. Who wants to be a hero these days? Who can afford it? The world could be—and might very well already be—full of folks who will ring changes and do their part to shake up the constricting and crazed institutions that keep us chained, bound and complacent.  There are lots of these people, I’m sure: tons and tons of them.  But the thing is, most of us are too busy trying to live.  It’s enough to just survive without seeking to pursue such lofty, such poetic propositions.

This is the new poetry: the more things stay the same, the more they change. Here is our art: haikus of horror in the cities, sonnets of sin and corruption, limericks of deregulation, free verse free trade, rhymed lines of laissez-faire, and the emboldened ghost writer, Death, forever at work on our collective life stories.

These days we look for poetry in all the wrong places. Some of us even believe we are gazing more deeply into the murky waters of existence when all we are actually seeing is our own reflections.

Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?

What he said.

 

IV.

These dreams are trying to tell me something:

I find myself back in high school. Often. At night.

The bell rings, students scurry, locker combinations are unscrambled. Except mine.

What is my fucking locker combination?

All around me doors are opening and then slamming shut, my buddies all about business, pictures of pin-ups inside their lockers replaced by pictures of their kids, my homeroom buddy with the beer gut easily fitting his briefcase into the small space, and here I am, imploding in this typical teenage crisis, attempting to be cool while the anxiety escalates on the inside: high school redux.

I’m going to be late for class—again!

And then, this: Shit! This is the math class I haven’t been to in two months (who could blame me, what with a full time job during school hours—a fact conveniently ignored in the insanity of this ceaseless scenario), more than two months, an eternity in dream years, and I’m not even sure what room it’s in. So here I am, unable to open my locker, again, realizing I’m late for the class I have already failed.

These dreams are trying to tell me something, I know. I’m just not sure what it is.

V.

License registration, no I ain’t got none,
But I got a clear conscience ‘bout the things that I done…

When you find yourself singing Bruce Springsteen lyrics in New Jersey to a state trooper in the hopes of avoiding a ticket, you might as well close your eyes, see what happens:
Maybe you could talk to the cop and explain that it was not disrespect for the rules of the road, but love of—and getting lost in—art that caused you to forget. To forget where you were and who you were, only to find yourself in the unfamiliar role of fugitive.
And maybe he would understand.
Maybe he would engage you in a discussion about music, and how it helps us, how it is always there, and occasionally compels us to do things we would not otherwise do.
And maybe, after everything was said and done, you would stop, and ask him if he was real, if this could ever actually happen.
And maybe he would wink familiarly, as if to say: This is America, ain’t it? Anything is possible.
And maybe you would believe him, even as you heard his footsteps fading away.
And by the time you opened your eyes, maybe you were still rolling down the road, the only reality being the speed and the sky, and the siren song of metal and machinery.

A vision:

Finally, his car needed fuel, he needed fuel; so he had no choice but to stop at the godforsaken rest area. Everyone, it seemed, had stopped at the same rest area: equal parts public toilet, food court and concessions stand. It was at once appalling and extraordinary; it was, in short, America.

Who were they, the people all around him? They were everyone: departing or arriving, leaving for vacation, returning to work, delighted, delirious, above all, anonymous. In New Jersey, or in any small town, or everywhere in America, there are people who find themselves lost; the people with nowhere left to go. A cliché? Sure. But clichés are made, not born. Reality, of course, is a cliché, and we have discovered that clichés—even as they are the enemy of art and authenticity—can be our friends. And so: going to church makes us sense spirituality, so we go; playing carols at Christmas facilitates a feeling of festivity, so we play; falling in love makes us feel loved, so we fall. We need all the help we can find, so we find friends and never look back.
He looked back; he looked around and in front of him, seeing the stereotypes: the ones in his mind that everything but experience had created. Or was the Cliché unfurling itself, the one that perpetuates from a particular place: experience, repetition, pattern, tradition? He saw them, he saw how he wanted to see them, he saw how they saw him, he saw how they saw him seeing them, and so on.
And who was he?
What was he all about? What had he done? Where had he been? Where was he going? Who did he think he was? Everyman? No man? Or worse: the type of person who actually asks questions like this.
Walking away, stomach full and mind clear, he saw her. He could not help noticing the forsaken sister walking in circles, seeking a corner of the room that wasn’t there. How old was she? Eighteen? Eighty? Somewhere right in between? Satisfied with a meek drink in the water fountain, she was the type of person who unthinkingly drank from public water fountains. Does anyone drink from public water fountains anymore? Do they still exist? Does anyone even notice them?
It was hard not to notice her, impossible not to notice that pain.
Pain: Dostoyevsky, disconcerted as he was with crime and punishment, saw all the suffering of the world in a prostitute’s eyes, and sobbed when he witnessed a peasant, hard-pressed with impotent anger, beating his horse to death. He opened his eyes and half expected to see this woman whipping herself while Nietzsche—knowing full well that God was dead— held his head and wept. Who was she, and what was she doing here?
A hooker, a homeless person? A mother, a case of mistaken identity? A human symbol of hope, or Hope herself—a deity deferred, paying the price for us all, all of us sinners and those sins we can scarcely describe.
She’s just like me, a voice inside attempted to say, a voice he very well may have listened to—a voice he had come dangerously close to growing into, under the shadow of the ivory tower—had he opted to make certain decisions along the way.
He walked over, ready to help: offer money, lend a hand, do whatever needed to be done, even and especially the things he had neither the ways nor means to make happen. He walked over and smiled, and she spoke, making him an offer he had no choice but to refuse.
It was enough to make one wonder if (and even wish that) the stories in the bible, and those fairy tales and myths men have made all have a foundation in fact. That the slow, ceaseless suffering some of us occasionally see is in accordance with a plan, a motion picture we have no part in producing. That it was not even personal, all this erstwhile, enigmatic madness, it was strictly business. It was enough to cause the hardest of humans to hope for a beneficent Big Guy (or Lady, but it is asking too much for God to have the decency to be a woman) upstairs, shuffling that proverbial deck. Or cutting and pasting the appropriate pieces of the puzzle, always keeping a wise eye on the endearing idiots underneath, and generally doing and saying the things that the creator of an entire universe says and does.
But how the hell are we supposed to have hope when Hope herself had been reduced to this, turning tricks at a rest stop on the Jersey Turnpike?

VI.

When the train left the station, it had two lights on behind,

Well, the blue light was my baby and the red light was my mind.

I didn’t say that.

A vision. Actually, a fantasy: Every so often I can’t help hoping that there will be a knock on my door and when I open it, who is there but my sexy soul mate, a beautiful woman who heard the blues music every time she walked by, and wondered if, according to her own fantasy, a sensitive, erudite dude had been right there all along, waiting for her, waiting for happily ever after. And after a while, she could no longer ignore the siren song escaping through the small space under the door and came knocking.

Of course, this illusion presupposes three things, in descending order of unlikelihood: one, that there are such things as soul mates; two, that my soul mate happens to live in my building; and three, that anyone actually listens to—much less enjoys—blues music.

All my love’s in vain.

What he said.

 

VII.

He waits.

He looks out the window and he waits.

He does not look at the magazine, the one on top of the others that littered the table, the one last picked up by the last person who had sat in this room.

He stands, not wanting to sit, not wanting to look down at the magazine. He looks down at the magazine, which stares up at him, defiant, disinterested, doing all that was asked of it. The magazine did not ask to be brought into this room, it did not ask to be read or ignored, to be picked up and put down, to be digested and then discarded.

He stands, knowing that if he thinks about the magazine he wishes he were not looking at, the magazine he will not read, he will not think of the things he does not want to think about.

He does not walk into the corridor to look into the room that the woman is not in.

He waits.

He understands—anyone who has been where he is understands—that you must prepare yourself to wait a long time. So you prepare, and you wait. And then, it is even longer than that, longer than you remember. Much longer. He remembers: standing, then sitting in this room, almost the exact same spot, twice already (third time is the charm, he does not say) and still cannot help being surprised at how long he has had to wait.

He waits.

No one talks to him (they know who he is and why he is here), and no one knows the story he could tell (it is the same story everyone who has stood where he is standing would tell).

He stands silently, shifting and sorting his awareness that eventually they will bring her to the room. When they bring her to the room he will see her. He will see her seeing him, then see her seeing him see her. And then she will ask him and he will have to tell her. He will try not to tell her and she will look at him and remind him that he has to tell her.

He waits.

He wishes that they would hurry up (hurry up and get it over with, he does not say) and then he hopes that they will never come so he can stand, peacefully paralyzed in this forever moment.

Eventually, he looks at the table, and the magazine that waits for him to pick it up. He does not pick it up.

He sits down and does not think about the nothingness that surrounds him, the nothingness around him and the gnawing nothingness inside him. He does not notice the plants or the paintings or the cheerfully colored curtain that does not cover the light outside. He does not allow himself to contemplate the sterile silence screaming all around him, the vacant spaces, and the odd energies of dying life. Most of all, he does not think about it: how impossibly clean people in impossibly white clothes speaking impossible to understand languages using impossibly powerful tools and technology anesthetize everything but still cannot keep it out. They are only human and they cannot disguise it, it happens no matter what they do to prevent it or ignore it.

He finds himself staring, again, at the magazine, the magazine that he had picked up without realizing it. He does not open the magazine he under no normal circumstances would have even the slightest inclination to read. He does not open it and therefore does not, among other things, learn about which foods would improve his sex drive and help him sleep more soundly, he does not find out ways to make his partner reach new levels of ecstasy every time, he does not peruse his horoscope to see what the future has in store for him, he does not discover the secret to losing ten pounds in only three days, and he does not skim the interview that explains how the fragile millionaire singer lost the chance of making millions more dollars after having a nervous breakdown while filming a commercial for a soft drink she would not otherwise endorse.

He waits.

He does not pass the time planning opportunities that could create happiness. He does not deceive himself (this time) about the possibility of forgetting the present by focusing on the past. He does not dwell on the types of things they would enjoy doing again, the things they enjoyed, once, which they never found the time or forgot to do. Again. He does not think about the ways in which you discover that the things you loved, then, become the things that bring about inexplicable sorrow: the movies, the music, the meals, the books, the board games, the photo albums, the family.

And so: he does not allow himself to think about her as she is now or how she was then. Or how he is now or how he was then. How he will be.

He looks down at the magazine, again, and picks it up, again.

He understands that the second he opens the magazine they will arrive, wheeling her down the hall like the enigmatic magicians they were trained to be. If he opens the magazine, the magic act, performed (again) before an awkward audience, will begin. So he waits.

He stands up and looks out the window, at the horizon, beginning to disappear in heavy air beneath the tops of the trees. He looks down, far below, where miniature people inside miniature cars sit in miniature rows, stoically and slowly moving forward in the directions of their miniature houses and the miniature respites that may or may not await them. The sky continues to sag, ensnaring the world in its silent sentinel. The people, and then the cars, and then the earth all slip away, leaving only lights that sigh in their electrical language. He looks down at the waning waves of lights, and these lights do not look like a thousand sets of eyes, they do not make the darkness more discernible, they do not appear as poetry. They are exactly what they are: they are progress, they are pain, they are power. They are the cold crucible of machines that control the lives of the men who made them.

He does not let himself think about these things. He has too many other things not to think about.

He does not turn around.

He will hear them, eventually, when they come.

Eventually they will come, and he will hear them, and then he will turn around.

Then, he would…

He looks down; again, at the magazine he will not read. He knows, again, that if he picks up the magazine they will come.

He sits silently and stares at the magazine. He stands and looks out the window. He does not turn around.

He waits.

VIII.

I still have hangovers, thank God.

Everyone who has known an alcoholic knows that as soon as you stop feeling the pain, it’s because you are no longer feeling the pain; you are no longer feeling much of anything.

So, I welcome the horrors of the digital cock crowing in my ear at an uncalled for hour, am grateful for the flaming phlegm in my throat, the snakes chasing their tails through my sinuses, the smoke stuck behind my eyelids, the shards of glass in my gut, and the special ring of hell circling my head. Because if it weren’t for those handful of my least favorite things, I’d know I had some serious problems.

All of us can think of a friend whose father (or mother for that matter), we came to understand, was in an entirely different league when it came to the science of cirrhosis. The man who falls asleep fully clothed with a snifter balanced over his balls, then up and out the door before sunrise—like the rest of the inverted vampires who do their dirty work during the day in three piece suits. Maybe it was a martini at lunch, or several cigarettes an hour to take the edge of. Whatever it was, whatever it took, they always made it out, and they always came back, for the family and to the refrigerator, filled with the best friends anyone can afford.

Our friends’ fathers came of age in the bad old days that fight it out, for posterity, in the pages of books, uneasy memories and the wishful thinking of TV reruns: the ‘50’s. These are men who have never opened a bottle of wine and have no use for imported beer, men who actually have rye in their liquor cabinets—who still have liquor cabinets for that matter. These are men who were raised by men that never considered church or sick-days optional, and the only thing they disliked more than strangers was their neighbors. Men who didn’t believe in diseases and didn’t drink to escape so much as to remind themselves exactly what they never had a chance to become. Theirs was an alcoholism that did not involve happy hours and karaoke contests; theirs was a sit down with the radio and a whiskey sour, a refill with dinner and one before, during and after the ballgame. Or maybe they’d mow the lawn to liven things up, tinker under the hood of a car that had decades to go before it could become a classic. Or perhaps friends would come over to play cards. Sometimes a second bottle would get broken out. This was a slow burn of similar nights: stiff upper lips, the sun setting on boys playing baseball, mothers sitting on the couch watching TVs families did not yet own, of forced smiles battling bottled tears in the bottom of a coffee mug, of amphetamines and affairs, overhead fans and undernourished kids, of evening papers and a creeping conviction that there is no God, of poets unable to make art out of the mess they’d made of their lives.

It was a hard time where people did not live happily ever after, if they ever lived at all. It was a time, in other words, not unlike our own.

IX.

(And so, (you think), a life is not unlike a novel: too often they are eager to please, predictable, safe. You think: And so, you should feel obliged to occasionally ask yourself complicated questions. Such as: What are you doing to keep things interesting? What can you do to generate momentum, keep the narrative flowing?

Memories refract reality, where we see what we’ve done, or what we wished we’d done, or what we might have done, what we should not have done, what someone else may or may not have done, and what we may or may not have done if we were someone else. Kind of like a movie, a work in progress, a motion picture in your mind.)

Fade in:

Eventually, the patio is filled with people. Not customers, necessarily, but the cast of characters who congregated at this sad café, all the people who had put in time making the place everything it was. One by one, they stroll in and sit down.

The ceaseless discussion of suffering continued in the other corner, where Nietzsche attempted to speak calmly to the ever-irascible Dostoyevsky. You’d very much like to join them, but you have work to do.

After a while, you finally approach the one table you did not know, the two people who had been waiting patiently all along.

It was a mother and her son, and it was difficult to determine if he was a young boy, or an older boy trapped in a child’s body. He could have been eight, or eighteen, maybe older, probably younger—it was impossible to tell. He smiles, not needing to say a thing as the setting sun shines off the silver spokes of his wheelchair. He sits still, body inert but head moving: he looks up, down, sideways—everywhere; it seems, but straight ahead. His head was the stimulus and response, a crucible of his contained, constricted energies.

You think about his life.

Time: the time required to do everything, any one thing, every act obliging some manner of assistance. Time: double, triple, quintuple the time. It defied comprehension when considered on simple terms.

You think about your life.

And you know what you are supposed to do, so you think good thoughts, purposefully positive thoughts. You understand yourself well enough to perceive that you should intentionally avoid the possibility, the probability of letting your thoughts go where they likely wanted to go. Where they would go, if you let them. You know if you continue to watch the little boy, you are going to contemplate all the injustice and suffering his condition entailed. Nevermind the fact that the boy appeared content, possibly even happy, and very likely unaware that he was disabled, or in any way different from all the other people in the world.

You look at the mother and think about her life. You understand, as you watch her place the straw from her son’s drink into his mouth, that it was she who bore the burden. The burden of responsibility, of memory, the affliction of knowledge. You can only imagine her anger, the fear and frustration she felt.

And yet. You are unable to detect any evidence of those feelings on her face, and nowhere in her actions, which were an instruction of patience and grace. Mostly, it was her smile. A constant, unquestionable smile; the type of smile that is perfected through practice. The sort of practice that is neither forced nor fake: it was the smile of perseverance and peace—hers was the face of faith. And you have seen this face before. You recognize it: you had seen it at a sordid rest-stop on the outskirts of the Jersey Turnpike, you had seen it lying in a hospital bed, dying as a new decade began, you saw it every day in your dreams, you see it right now, smiling defiantly in spite of everything it had seen.

You see the smile and wipe tears from your own eyes, because you understand—you finally grasp—that it was love, and it was miraculous. It was love, real human love. The type of love that involves effort and embraces life, real life: ugly, inequitable, often unaccountable. The type of love that redeems instead of retreating, the kind of love that is faith, portrayed in a mother’s face.

It was a smile. A smile. No one could afford to smile anymore. And yet, somewhere, some people still smile. Love and soul, of course. That’s all it ever takes. A smile capable of restoring your faith.

Fade out…

 

X.

A vision:

Later, he stood alone by the lake, thinking about all he had seen, about what had happened, and what was going to happen.

He thought about his life.

Silently he stood, the same child who had stepped in the shadows of the once towering buildings—before the city’s haze obscured the sky—and looked up at the stars, scattered like bread crumbs in the dark air, wondering if they really led to a kingdom beyond the clouds.

As always, he thought about his family, his friends, the heroes who had created the art that made life more worth living, the places and feelings that comprised all the pain and profundity of existence, all the questions that belonged without answers: all of this was inside him. So as long as he lived, and made himself remember, they never ceased to be.

I Talk With The Spirits.

He heard voices (Spirits? His mother? Himself?), once again reminding him that too much unpaid labor helped bring him to where he was—the sweat of history and the backs strong enough to endure pains he could not comprehend—and that all he was able to achieve helped make amends for the names and faces he never saw. It is their voices—each immigrant who helped build this country with their bare hands, who erected buildings they never set foot in, all the dispossessed souls that worked and died and never learned to write—it was those voices that clamored for utterance, waking him in the middle of the night; it was their cries that fueled his disdain; their screams that insisted on his solidarity, providing purpose to his restless, otherwise aimless indignation. These were the voices he had always heard, the voices he had been afraid to fully understand. Now, he knew he should be afraid if he didn’t hear them. He had looked for peace but was beginning to understand—and appreciate—that his peace was having a purpose, because there was too much work to be accomplished. There could be no silence, never in this lifetime. Silence is death, and defeat. Those voices spoke to him, and through him, and told him he was not alone. He would never be alone.

He looked out on the water, at his face, which reflected up amongst the buildings and air, looking down and seeing the world in itself. Then the mirror imploded as he walked forward, leaving his shirt and shoes on shore. He strode into the dark, warm water, making his way toward the middle of the lake and diving deep, not stopping until his hands touched the bottom, gripping the cold marrow of murky mud.

Moments later he emerged, sucking in the air as though he had never tasted life before, as though he was breathing for the first time.

Tchaikovsky

Corelli

Bach

John Fahey

The Who

Chuck Berry

a two-fer from Jethro Tull!

The Godfather

The Boss

Satchmo

Ella! (An embarrassment of riches here, here, and here)

 

Vince (The King)

Bob & Doug McKenzie (Eh)

As obstreperously opposed to the death penalty as I remain, it is nevertheless difficult to feel uncomplicated emotions regarding the execution of John Allen Muhammad.

I –and any individual living in or around the D.C. area– was in the line of fire, so to speak, during this disturbed man’s killing spree in the fall of 2002. I was one of the people looking over my shoulder while I pumped my gas. I was the guy debating whether or not that Home Depot run should be postponed. I was the guy who thought: as if getting killed on my morning commute was not absurd enough, I have to worry about this? I was, finally, the guy who decided that, not unlike it feels when you step onto that plane, if your number is up, your number is up. It was not defiance, and it was not any kind of bravery; it was simply a refusal to stop living my way because I was afraid of dying.

Crimes of passion are easier to analyze. Momentary lapse of reason; a boiling point reached due to betrayal or provocation. Manslaughter is a similar case (ever notice how manslaughter is also man’s laughter?). These things, however tragic or repugnant, have some sort of cause and effect, you can see where point A picked up a gun or a knife or a drunk-driving key in the ignition, and made its indelible way to point B.

But a serial killer? (And let’s not sugarcoat it. Sniper? That depiction sterilizes things too much by half. Imagine if someone you loved was the random victim of this depraved sociopath, would it not be more than a little insulting to say they were killed by a sniper? Unless you are killed in action in a war –itself a complicated and appalling scenario– it’s simply inappropriate to use the term “sniper” to describe a citizen deciding that it is, on any level, tolerable to put innocent civilians in the crosshairs).

And then there are the sociological implications. Did this killer have a terrible, tortured life? Perhaps. Is there ever a circumstance where it’s acceptable to take out random, unknowing human beings to…what? Prove a point? Strike a blow against an uncaring world? Inscribe one’s name in the permanent record? Find perverse meaning in an otherwise meaningless universe? To paradoxically feel alive by taking another person’s life? All of the above? Some? None? The answer to this question, of course, is that it is an affront to any reasonable code of conduct to declare oneself the arbiter of life and death. End of story.

And so, is it the place of society to determine, once the evidence has been counted and corroborated, that this human insect –this remorseless, yet undeniably disturbed– shell of a man deserves to die? Is it justice? Is it an Old Testament type of quid pro quo? Is it a plain matter of ensuring that he would never hit the streets and take another life? All of the above? None?

Was there any benefit, on any level, of ensuring that this man remained alive? Did he have a book to write, entreaties to make of the families he destroyed, wisdom to impart from the dark depths of his fractured heart? Had he descended to a spiritual place that obviated the possibility of redemption? More to the point, did he care? Who gains from his eradication from this planet? And more to the point, who cares? Do we require answers, or insight, when it comes to a human being who –for whatever myriad reasons– determined that his pain, or confusion, or nihilistic impulse, compelled him to kill other human beings?

Are we going to shed a tear for this psycho?

Of course not. At least not until our eyes are dry from the ceaseless drops they should shed for the friends, relatives and families of the folks killed by his hand.

Will it provide closure for any of these people? Obviously not. Just because the murderer is dead does not mean the people he murdered will return to life. And perhaps it is because his death will not restore their lives that the concept of capital punishment seems so absurd, so barbaric. But is there a refined or compassionate way to deal with a person who forfeits his claim on those conditions?

The best answer I can come up with is that there is no answer.

No answer for how to deal with an unapologetic murderer. No answer for the innocent lives he stole. No answer for where that hatred emanated from. No answer for how to handle such a monster in a lawful society. No answer for how I would feel if someone I loved had been cut down for no reason. No answer for the human condition that goes back as far as Cain slaying Abel. No answer for how we got here. No answer for where we are going. No answer other than we all must, in some fashion, hold one another accountable for what we do. No question about right and wrong.

The only remaining question is, what else can we do?

Back in 2006, I recall reading many intriguing reviews of Daniel J. Levitin’s book This Is Your Brain On Music. It’s been on my Amazon wish list ever since, and writing about music as much as I do, I occasionally have friends ask me if I’ve read it, or tell me I should read it. The latest reminder came from my good friend (and music lover, high school English teacher and soccer coach) Marc Cascio, who wrote the following email to me and a few of our mutual (music loving) friends:

In his brilliant book…Levitin relates the tale of how an elderly colleague and he used to dine every Wednesday and discuss music. During one of these dinners the colleague, an octogenarian, confessed that he did not understand rock music but wanted to be able to. He asked Levitin to choose six songs that would capture “all that was important to know about rock and roll music.” Levitin chose the following songs:

“Long Tall Sally” (Little Richard), “Roll Over Beethoven” (The Beatles), “All Along The Watchtower” (Jimi Hendrix), “Wonderful Tonight” (Eric Clapton), “Little Red Corvette” (Prince), “Anarchy in the UK” (Sex Pistols).

What would you guys choose, and why?

(Before I share Marc’s list, and my own, I’ll make a few comments about Levitin’s. It manages to underwhelm because it is at once too safe and yet also too…ambitious? Not sure if that’s the right word, but in my opinion, Levitin fell into the same inevitable trap most music aficionados will have difficulty avoiding. Trust me, once you try, you’ll see what I’m talking about. Levitin does an admirable job of trying to span time and genre: he includes the obligatory pre-Elvis rock staple; in this case, a seminal tune by Little Richard, the main who, along with Chuck Berry, arguably did more than anyone else to invent rock and roll, or at least provide the blueprint for the type of music that became rock and roll when people like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and a billion other British white boys tried their damndest to evoke and imitate that distinctive sound. Sure enough, he picks one from The Beatles, and he happens to pick one of the worst songs by the Fab Four: a rather limp cover of the great Chuck Berry. Why not just list Berry’s version? That would seem to at once to give Berry his well-warranted props and also avoid embarrassing how lame The Beatles sound by comparison…particularly when there are many dozen essential, inimitable songs The Beatles would go on to create, all of which, in their own ways, did as much to define and expand the possibilities of rock music as anyone who has ever picked up an instrument. So two issues: are we properly concerned with the stepping stones and giving adequate acknowledgment to the forefathers? After all, without their guidance the British invasion would have never made it across the pond. But if we go down that road, we would certainly be obliged to include at least a song apiece by Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bo Diddley and Fats Domino. Not to mention Jerry Lee Lewis. So, if we are trying to distinguish between the blueprints as opposed to the archetypes, shouldn’t we focus purely on the six songs –recorded by whoever, whenever– that “capture all that was important to know about rock and roll music.” Returning to Levitin’s list, his desire to include different genres is laudable, but that brings up myriad issues: he goes after punk (Sex Pistols) and synthesized pop-funk (Prince) and…well, hard to say what ground he’s covering with Clapton (mawkish soft rock?) and it’s difficult to find fault with any list that ever includes Jimi Hendrix. But what about country-rock? Or heavy metal? Or folk? Or blues, which is like the oxygen without with the primitive rock amoeba could never have oozed onto shore. Or…you get the picture. The only way I can see avoiding this dilemma is by copping out and constructing multiple lists that address the prototypes (Chuck Berry et al.), the genre-spanning mavericks (The Rolling Stones, Neil Young and Led Zeppelin, just to name a few) and the various incarnations that incorporated the fads of the time (from prog-rock to death metal). And that would be a worthwhile exercise, but the task at hand is to, as accurately and with as much integrity as possible, identify the six songs that best define rock and roll. Pretty simple, huh? Simple and impossible).

Here is Marc’s list:

“Rock and Roll Music” (Chuck Berry), “Think” (Aretha Franklin), “Eleanor Rigby” (The Beatles), “Meeting Across The River” (Bruce Springsteen), “May This Be Love” (Jimi Hendrix) and “Kashmir” (Led Zeppelin).

That is a pretty solid list. It is, in many ways, more satisfying, in my estimation, than Levitin’s. But even Marc (understandably) attempts to cover the basics (with Berry), the essential soul element (Aretha) and the heavyweights (The Beatles and Led Zeppelin, and while those are two of the more influential songs by either band, perhaps the ultimate dilemma is paring down both of those band’s catalogs to pick just one song: the best Beatles song? The most important Led Zeppelin tune? The one song by either band that most satisfactorily speaks for what rock music can be? Good luck with that).

But as anyone who has read Utopian literature can attest, (or anyone who has a favorite sports team or preferred religion, for that matter), one person’s nirvana is another person’s perdition. So perhaps any list will say more about the person making it, and the person responding to it, than the actual songs themselves. Plus, it’s not as though there is any truly objective mechanism to determine which songs signify the sine qua non of rock and roll. Plus, how rock and roll is it to agonize over what songs actually define rock and roll? Perhaps the ultimate point (at least for the types of dorks who enjoy making and comparing lists like this in the first place) is to react and respond; there is no Aristotlean list, or any type of Platonic ideal. Rock, after all, is dirty, imperfect and immutable. The only thing that counts, in the end, is authenticity.

And with that, here is my imperfect, dirty, but very authentic list:

(I can’t even begin without a caveat: my first list included John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillen”, because to me, this one has all the elements; this is the primal DNA, bringing in boogie-woogie, jazz, blues, and folk element: this is the sound so many early rockers hoped to imitate, even the ones who didn’t realize it. But anything that is not purely rock and roll simply cannot be included on this particular list…)

1. “Maybellene” (Chuck Berry)

Despite what was said above, any list of essential rock songs simply cannot fail to include Chuck Berry. End of story. Plus, of all the early Berry hits, this one brings in some serious backwoods country elements, a healthy dose of jazzed up style and the unmistakably gritty blues guitar –a signature sound, in short. Also, and importantly, the combination of cars and girls, a formula perfected by Berry, is in full effect here: this is not a rock and roll song, this is rock and roll.

2. “Fortunate Son” (Creedence Clearwater Revival)

Yeah boy. Creedence had already dragged folks and blues through the bayou and paid their obligatory dues at the altar of psychedelic inspiration, and once that was out of their system, John Fogerty locked in and began writing tight, compact, perfect rock songs. He is firing on every cylinder here: the piss and vinegar of the chorus, the sociopolitical import of the lyrics (same –and true– as it ever was, more than four decades later) and the irresistible groove: it is angry, indignant and indelible — and it’s all over in two minutes and nineteen seconds.

3. “Rocks Off” (The Rolling Stones)

It was a down-to-the-wire decision to pick this one or the runner-up, “Brown Sugar”. Either one would suffice, but this one (almost impossible when considering “Brown Sugar”) actually does rock more…and it has “rock” in its title. “Brown Sugar” is a bit dirtier (sonically and lyrically) and has one of the ultimate rock and roll riffs of all time, but “Rocks Off” has every element of what makes The Stones the consummate rock band: the whole history of music is crammed into virtually everything they recorded between ’68 and ’72, and it’s all on ugly, beautiful display here. You really could offer this one up to someone who has never listened to rock music and simply say “Here you go”. There is no guarantee that they’ll like it, but there is no question that after only one listen, they’ll get it.

4. “Thunder Road” (Bruce Springsteen)

Kind of like Beethoven emulated Bach and ended up, in many ways, being better, Bruce Springsteen wanted to sound like Roy Orbison (including name-checking him a few lines into this, the first song on his masterpiece Born To Run), and wound up transcending him. This is the complete package: the harmonica, piano, guitar and glockenspiel (!), this song is an entire lifetime in under five minutes. It also has one of the best beginnings and endings of any song, ever. And if Chuck Berry was singing to hopeful sock hoppers just getting their driver’s licenses, The Boss was talking to young adults who had already graduated but were still capable of dreaming.

5. “London Calling” (The Clash)

Punk? Please. The Clash always represented the melting pot that rock music, at its best, can be. Joe Strummer is God. The Clash was the only band that mattered. Any further questions?

6. “Tattooed Love Boys” (The Pretenders)

In part because it was impossible to pick between “My City Was Gone” and “Middle of the Road” (or “Back on the Chain Gang” for that matter…holy shit, was Learning To Crawl a fantastic album or what?), but also because of the many, many songs that kick much ass by the great Pretenders, it’s hard to top “Tattooed Love Boys”. While Chrissie Hynde was undoubtedly the baddest bitch on the block, she is also an uncommonly gifted writer and her vocals go toe-to-toe with anyone (male or female) who has ever stepped up to a mic.

Anyone who knows me can guess that I’m already disappointed with my own list. How could I not be? The inherent limitation of picking only six songs is infuriating. It also, I reckon, is the point. It would be less interesting, or perhaps less fun, to have more flexibility. And then: how much easier would this task actually be if you had ten songs? Twenty? In some ways, it might be even more difficult because then the (unavoidable) omissions would seem even more glaring. (What, no Sabbath? No Skynyrd? No Halen? No Who? No Beatles? No Doors?  No Floyd?  No Zep? No Heart? No Boys? No Neil? No Rush? No R.E.M.? No Smiths?  No Brains? No SK? No LC? I know…)

So: the only way this exercise is worthwhile is to share it. And see what other people think. I’ve shown you mine; show me yours.

Little Gun’s downtown in front of Woolworth’s tryin’ out his attitude on all the cats …

 

Oops! How could I forget Alice Cooper?

Yeah–the only thing even more American than the Boss is the Coop. And, “Generation Landslide” is one of the great ’70s songs.

The over-indulgent machines were their children
There wasn’t a way down on Earth here to cool them
‘Cause they looked just like humans
At Kresge’s and Woolworth’s

I. Personal

Remember when Born in the U.S.A. was ubiquitous? The album and the song. Bruce was already big, but he wasn’t over the top. Born in the U.S.A. put him over the top and, to a certain extent, he’s stayed there ever since. Of course, people in the know understood he was already a legend before the ‘70s ended; in the early ‘80s The River and Nebraska cemented that status, but Born in the U.S.A. ensured that no one could ever ignore The Boss.
I already owned scratchy LP copies of Born To Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, as well as original (and shitty sounding) cassette copies of the oft-overlooked but brilliant first two albums (Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, The Innocent, and the E. Street Shuffle), so by the time Born in the U.S.A. hit the market, I was admittedly wary of the frenzied and new-fangled faithful joining the party. But other, more disconcerting forces were at play: the album, as good as it was, wasn’t that good. “Dancing in the Dark”, “I’m On Fire”, “No Surrender”, “My Hometown”? Eh. “Glory Days” was pretty much an instant classic, but (as is always the case with FM-friendly tunes, and never the fault of the artist) overplay hasn’t helped its staying power. But the big hit, the title track, the song that seemed to shoot through the dial 24/7, that one was a love or hate affair. I hated it. If ever there was an arena-ready anthem, this was it. And the muscle-bound Bruce from the video? Give me the spindly Serpico clone from ’78 any day.
(Interesting coincidence: Springsteen had a difficult time getting the track to sound the way he wanted it. Indeed, it was an outtake from his stark solo effort Nebraska. This is not unlike the origins of another overplayed song from the ‘80s, The Rolling Stones’ insufferable “Start Me Up”. That one was originally cut as a reggae-ish romp, before it devolved into the over-produced, if innocuous hit it was destined to be. “Start Me Up”, to be certain, is a lark, and it was—for better or worse—fated to be recycled for eternity at sporting events. “Born in the U.S.A.”, on the other hand, is actually a serious song and, as it happens, is much better than it sounds.)
Perhaps it’s my own fault, but it took several years before I even figured out the words Bruce was singing; perhaps it’s due to his overwrought delivery—equal parts marble-mouthed and shouting. Regardless, this is quite possibly Springsteen’s most somber song—and considering the era (Nebraska) it was written, that is saying a great deal. (And for the curious, it’s well worth checking out the (far superior) demo version that didn’t make the cut for the Nebraska album.) It made all the sense in the world, then, when Springsteen hit the road for his subdued Tom Joad tour in the mid-‘90s, he made the searing, stripped-down version of this song a centerpiece of the show. His hand pounding the acoustic guitar to simulate a heart beat at the song’s coda remains one of the most quietly powerful and emotional moments I’ve ever witnessed at a concert.

II. Polemical

Check it out:

Born down in a dead man’s town
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much
Till you spend half your life just covering up

Born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.

Got in a little hometown jam
So they put a rifle in my hand
Sent me off to a foreign land
To go and kill the yellow man

(chorus)

Come back home to the refinery
Hiring man says “Son if it was up to me”
Went down to see my V.A. man
He said “Son, don’t you understand”

I had a brother at Khe Sahn fighting off the Viet Cong
They’re still there, he’s all gone

He had a woman he loved in Saigon
I got a picture of him in her arms

Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I’m ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run ain’t got nowhere to go

This song is, upon closer inspection, a staggering achievement. With few words and admirable restraint, Springsteen captures the cause and effects of the Vietnam war from the perspective of an ordinary American, the afflicted civilian. More, he moves the narrator into the here-and-now, making the uncomfortable point that the war never died for the people who managed to live. Movies like The Deer Hunter and Coming Home dealt with Vietnam’s immediate aftermath—the dead or wounded—but not many artists (certainly not enough artists) articulated the dilemma of the working poor who returned from the front line to become the unemployed, or unemployable poor. The vets who ended up in jail, or hospitals, or sleeping under bridges. Or the ones always on the edge (this was, remarkably, a time when shell shock was still a more commonly used term than Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and, as George Carlin astutely pointed out, perhaps if we still called it “shell shock” it might be less easy to ignore), the ones who, by all outside appearances, could—and should—be finding work, and contributing to society, and staying out of trouble. As politicians of a certain party confirm time and again, you cease to be especially useful once you’re no longer in the womb, or no longer wearing the uniform.
On albums like Nebraska and Darkness on the Edge of Town, Springsteen presented stories of the dirty and the desperate, the men and women straddling the line between paychecks and prison, the ones wrestling with the hope and glory inherent in the mostly mythical American Dream. All of them had a story, and many of them were archetypes from small towns and big cities all across the country. But “Born in the U.S.A.” might be the first instance where Springsteen takes a topical dilemma and wrestles with an entire demographic: the veterans with “nowhere to run (and) nowhere to go”.
Of course, in an irony that could only occur in America, none other than our PPP (proudly patriotic president), Ronald Reagan, (or, more likely, his handlers) utterly misread the song and tried to appropriate it as a feel-good anthem for his 1984 reelection campaign. Predictably, Springsteen protested. But what Reagan and his opportunistic underlings heard was, in fairness, the same interpretation so many other Americans shared. And who cares, anyway? It’s just a song after all. And yet, it is a shame that such an effective, and affecting, observation was celebrated as representing the very facile values (unthinking nationalism, unblinking pride) it calls into question. Again, Springsteen and his band deserve no small amount of artistic culpability for marrying such stark lyrics to such a buoyant, fist-pumping, car commercial sounding song. People hear those martial drums and think of John Wayne instead of Travis Bickle.

III. Political

Why bring politics into it at all, one might ask? Music can be, and certainly is, enjoyed regardless of what it was intended to inspire. If a song moves you, or manages to make sense in ways that directly contradict the artist’s design, beauty is forever in the eye of the beholder. On the other hand, as George Orwell noted, “the opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude”. Put another way, “Born in the U.S.A.” is still relevant because the issues it confronts are still relevant. We not only have (entirely too many) struggling veterans from last century’s wars, we will have no shortage of men and women who have fought (or are currently fighting) in this generation’s imbroglio. History only makes one promise, and it’s that it will ceaselessly repeat itself.
And so, even as our ill-advised adventure in Iraq reaches its inevitable endgame, we will only be in the initial stages of dealing with the veterans who need care and attention. We won’t count the ultimate cost of “mission accomplished” until we consider the lives lost and the walking wounded, tallied up alongside the untold billions of dollars. This is reason enough to be grateful for an Obama administration (the irony that a genuine war hero, had he managed to win, would have necessarily been obliged to overlook those in need of help to pacify the string-pullers in his party, was, thankfully, too outrageous even for America to make possible). The Democrats can’t create miracles, but they can continue to ensure that the people owed the most won’t get the least.
Remember this, when the ankle-biters and small-government-soundbite hyenas crawl out of their tax-payer fortified foxholes to decry liberal “big spending” programs. Remember it’s these programs that, in addition to paving roads, building schools and providing health care, attempt to secure some support and solace for our broken soldiers. And remember, in two, or four, or forty years, these same craven war pigs will once again wrap themselves in the American flag; these same armchair generals prepared to fight to the last drop of other folks’ blood will be the ones seeking to slash the programs designed to save the ones burning down the road.

Part One: Introduction (and Apology)