I was first aware of the power of words as simply words, when as a teenager, I heard Bernie Taupin's opening lyrics to Elton John's "We All Fall in Love Sometimes":
Wise men say
It looks like rain today
It crackled on the speakers
And trickled down the sleepy subway trains
For heavy eyes could hardly hold us
Aching legs that often told us
It's all worth it
We all fall in love sometimes. (John)
Wow. The sounds. "Wise men say." Stop. "It looks like rain today." The movement. From the abstract--"Wise men say / It looks like rain today"--to the hyper-concrete, if not surreal: "It crackled on the speakers." You get a popping image. A cracking sound. A ping. Something short and quick. Then you slide into the slick, watery image of "And trickled down the sleepy subway trains." Oh how that rain mingles with the chrome and stainless steel of the subway train. Then you return to dead weight. "For heavy eyes could hardly hold us" Whose eyes? Why? And then that weight is given tactile reality. "Aching legs often told us." It was so serenely beautiful, in an achingly heavy sort of way, like failed love.
I didn't realize it at the time, but that is the moment I became a poet, a worshiper of words and their power to elicit and communicate that which is beyond everyday language. I realized that day looking out the rain-specked sliding-glass door of my dad's house in Reno on a cold day at the end of May, clouds hanging low on Peavine Peak, that words in reality are instruments, and one could play them in different ways, creating different moods and tones, perhaps even layering them up like a symphony, depending on how you used them.
And so I wish to open this number with a borrowed note, a heavy but steady feeling, of longing, of yearning--a subconscious water that bubbles up rich and black, full of bits of decayed wood and other organic shit. Life-strong. Felt, but not easily described.
It comes from a song. "A Rainy Night in Georgia" by Brook Benton. It starts off so slow. A gentle mist. Slick streets. Heat and heavy humid skies. Then the steady beat of a heavy downpour, neon lights streaked and swirled in street gutters, water everywhere, mixed with light, going great guns.
Only this is a rainy night in Decatur, Texas. I'm driving. The wipers are going. Going and going. They must be worn out, for they leave a heavy streak behind. I can't see where I'm going. I can't drive at night under the best of conditions. I broke my glasses and haven't replaced them. At some point, we pull over, and Marci takes over. We're headed east on U.S. 380 toward Denton. This is now familiar territory, heavy with history.
Writing, good writing, the type worth composing, the type worth remembering, drips density like heavy Spanish moss on a soggy southern night. In good writing, you can't thank someone without being honest, and you can't be honest without digging in the muck. You've got to get at the slick, torn, layers of magazines you pull from the mud and glue to the canvass. It's an exaggerated process, hyper-focused on a moment or feeling. And for some reason, it works better if the images haven't been accessed for a long time.
In a writer's life, he may be 100% committed to now: his current marriage, his children, his work--simply all that matters to him in the present. Yet, the good writing is still deeply connected to his past. It has to be. There is something about the story getting buried in the subconscious and stewing down there with other stories, other images, and then bubbling up to the surface. Time is the essential ingredient. The image must be removed in space and time from today.
Therefore, when a writer writes, he lives in the past. At that moment, past loves, past heartaches, past encounters with food, sunlight, an ant crawling over some broken glass in a crumbly crack in a sidewalk--they all take on more significance than anything current. It's not that the past was better, just that it was buried--mucked up and distorted by the mind seeking to make semblance. Creative writers, unlike so much of the population, are keenly aware how inaccurate memory is and how personal everyone's story is, even between people witnessing the same events. We don't mind. In fact, we thrive on it. It is a feeling we're after, like a jazz musician. We're not after historical accuracy, nor a propaganda-slant. The aim is simply to transfer an honest emotion to the reader produced by a given set of images at that moment. In another moment, we may look at the same set of images, and come up with something completely different.
So, if you marry a writer, be prepared to live with their past loves--at least in their writing. It's not that your spouse is constantly thinking about old flings. It's just that is where the material is. If it makes it easier, know that when your spouse is writing, he or she is also spending a lot of time watching condensation bead on a cold Pepsi on a hot summer's day or noticing the pearly black-green head of a fly as it lands on a fresh dog turd. It's not a particular part of the buried past that we're after. It's all of it. Old loves just happen to be part that.
Anyway, in this story Marci is driving. I am next to her. That's how it should be. I have two lives--one where despite the good people around me, I was astonishingly unhappy. And the current one, where I am generally a happy man. As much as I alter both the past and present in my writing to suit my artistic purpose, that fact is unequivocally unalterable. There is a before. There is an after. Meeting Marci is that pivot point. She is that fulcrum between sorrow and joy. But she wasn't my first love, nor my second, nor my third, and she wasn't who I was thinking about on that rainy night between Decatur and Denton. How could she be? This was my terrain, not hers.
And so, as Marci dealt with the rain, I dealt with memories of an old friend who at the time I desperately wanted to be more than just my friend. I was in love. Or at least I thought I was. I'm not sure now. Can desperation ever truly be love? Probably not. By the time I met Marci, I had been through enough, that I was finally willing to deal with me, and know who I was. That made love a little easier. But if desire isn't love, I at least definitely desired. And it was a one-way street.
Here's where it gets messy. The girl was Andrea. She is now married to Marsh, one of my best friends, as is she. This blog, which I hope will someday be a book, is meant as a series of Thank-You postcards sent out to those who shaped my life in Texas.
Marsh is still my good friend. Other than as a friend, I no longer have any feelings for Andrea. When they got married, I was happy for them, even though my own life at the time was a mess. My trouble had more to do with my relationship with God than it had to do with any human relationship gone bad and even then I held no hard feelings towards Andrea. Now, after finding Marci, as well as finding my way back to God, I feel nothing but warmth for the two of them. But, I get the sense Andrea avoids me. Perhaps she feels guilt, perhaps she thinks she hurt me. She did, but it was unavoidable. Perhaps she wonders why one day I just disappeared--a friendship, temporarily, evaporated. All I've got in my defense is self-survival. Perhaps, she doesn't think about it all. If she feels any guilt, she shouldn't. She did what she had to do. I did what I had to do. What remains is that we were good friends.
It was her I was thinking about while looking out at the slick, black Texas landscape, lightning flashing on the horizon.
It made me think of another night, long ago, at Drop Creek.
That too was a rainy night. Heat and steam. Big, black swaying trees down by the creek. The slow trickle of water over the concrete where the road formed a dam. Behind it was a swimming hole. We skipped stones and she told me about going skinny dipping with a guy. Perhaps she told me this. The mind has its way of creating its own narratives. There was a rope swing. I remember feeling longing, feeling jealousy.
North Central Texas is a place in my mind between Denton and Decatur. I seldom think about it now, but when I do, it usually involves two lonely people driving around in a maroon Plymouth Reliant without air-conditioning. One is running from a breakup with her boyfriend. The other is hoping to be loved by somebody, anybody, and noticing the girl sitting beside him isn't bad looking, decides to fall in love. She has wonderful, warm eyes and cute dimples when she laughs. She has a cute, little laugh that she half-stifles. She likes to sing in empty grain silos. One day we stop the car in the middle of a long, straight dirt road, as a tarantula crosses. We get out and look at it. She likes Drop Creek, as do I. We go there sometimes. I'm lonely and she doesn't have anything to do back at her apartment other than to put on her ice skates and slide across the linoleum floor of the small kitchen and dream of winter in Minnesota and simpler times. She has her own stories there, just like she has her own stories at Drop Creek, at clubs, at stadiums. They always involve other guys. Usually Jim, also my friend. I don't like her stories much, not because they're not good, but because they don't involve me. She shares them with me anyway, and I listen because I'm lonely and Drop Creek is always beautiful: that big, leafy green tree; that rope swing; the deep green water, with bugs skimming the surface in the early morning sunlight. Heat, humidity, electricity. Alright, it's true, I was in love. Young love--the type that never asks why. The type of love more concerned about the self than the other. But, it is, without question, love.
One morning, in Dallas, after she's moved in with her mom, I pick her up to go to Denny's for breakfast. We're in the car, driving down Mockingbird Lane, sunlight bouncing off the back windows of the line of cars in front, the concrete as glossy as a river. It must have been winter. There was a tiny bit of melting frost on the pansies at her mother's house when I picked her up. Anyway, she tells me she had a dream. She says Marsh was in it. She says she saw his feet in the dream. That was it. The dream was over. She says she noticed how beautiful his feet are. That's all she says, but I know then, that unlike us, the two of them will someday be more than friends. The good person in me wants to tell her what her dream is telling her. The bad person in me doesn't. I let the bad person take over. Not that it matters. Everyone knows their own dreams. She found her way to him eventually. But, perhaps she might have found her way to him sooner had I said something. Perhaps it is me who should apologize. She had some hard living after I vanished.
Writing this now, I hear another song. "Sweet Melissa" by the Allman Brothers. I'm not sure why. But I'm sure it's there for a reason. Black waters bubble rich, full-bodied.
So, here's my first official Great Texas Road-Trip Thank-You. I send it out to Andrea. I'll send Marsh his later.
It's not clean. There's muck and dark matter all over it. There usually is. Life is complete, which means it's complex. But it's also sweet. Andrea, thanks for the drives around North Central Texas. I'm glad both our lives sucked enough we didn't have anything better to do than drive around and look at grain silos. Marsh, I hope you understand. You are the man, and Andrea could not have ended up with anyone better. To both of you, and your children, and their children. Friends always, into the eternities.
References
John, Elton. "We All Fall in Love
Sometimes." Captain Fantastic and the Little Dirt Brown Cowboys.
By Elton John and Bernie Taupin. LP, 1975.
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