It Can Be Love Enough

She loved Show Tunes.

Broadway, preferably from the 50's and 60's, but she knew everything.  Said it was part of Theater 101, whatever that meant.  She argued that since some of his old stuff was in the same category as Show Tunes ("Heck ,TV counts as a show!"), he should consider expanding his own repertoire.

He refused.

To rile him, one of her favorite songs was one of unbridled optimism.  There was a dark turn to it as well, for dramatic overtones. He could never tell if it was a way of her making fun of him or not.  HIs old music as junk food or bubblegum. Versus the vitamins he was playing now.  Blues, the Important Stuff. The stuff that he could barely get a mention of, the LONG profiles of him, focusing on a 3 year stint in his entire long (LONG) life.  What he had for breakfast when he was 25, and incidentally, high out of his mind.

He wished he had a way to tell all those young kids what it was like.  What FAME actually meant.  On the spectrum, his life was pretty good, not quite the evil tinge of Monica Lewinsky (although there were plenty of sexual indiscretions-some of which he probably should have been arrested for, most of which he regretted.  Of the ones he could remember clearly)

When she sang to him, she played with sounding miserable, slightly off-key, but not quite. She was best at comedic timing, which made her cartoon voice tolerable.  And the glory notes in the song, made her shine like the sun as she turned towards him.  Those were the moments when he got a glimmering of what his fans felt.

In those moments, he was her groupie.  Undying love.

"Sing Happy" from "Flora, the Red Menace"

Tomorrow He's A Turnip

After one of their fights, and after a few too many, he found himself in the lobby listening to her caterwauling in the empty theater.

She did it out of a passive-aggressive need to have her voice heard.  And he imagined, how she was already living in a future where she hated him for being gone.  Rather than an ugly present where he imagined she hated him for being present.

She wasn't enough of a drama queen to actually do it in front of an audience, and force everyone to watch her perform her pain.  He actually admired her for that.  For all the things about her that were the opposite of him.

People came up to him, trying to start a conversation.  But at the end of the evening, all his charm had worn off, and, he suspected, all his glamour.  The people who came up now were the groupies of the groupies, the boyfriends who wanted a broken memory. Of him, tired and old at the end of the night.  An emasculated dragon, a drunken defanged demon.  The joke about him being the only exception to their rule of fidelity.  ("My girlfriend wouldn't want him, except as a pity fuck")

He stood (or sat) guard outside the door, until she was done.  The stagehands had struck and she only had her headphones.  Next time he should bribe the stagehands to let her into the soundbooth after hours.  He'd rather Judy's voice was blasted in the room, and the poor girl would scream to drown her out.  It would be an easier ride home if she were the one who didn't have a voice, instead of him.  Sometimes silence was better.






"The Man That Got Away"

The Dearest Things I Know

That night, what would turn out to be their last night, in more ways than one, although neither of them could know it for sure, was beautiful.

He asked for a silly lullaby.  He hadn't heard her sing in 10 years. She hadn't sung in all that time, except when thinking about him. It sentimental evenings alone, when she was in love with anyone else who wasn't him.  Other drunks, other egotists, the ones she got tired of. Or woke up to, when the dream was over.

"All the things you are", he cued up.  Before she could say no. A whispersing, she approached the lyrics tenderly, like they would disappear like fog, like a ghost, like they might wake the both of them.

It always used to soften her, make her laugh. Better than sex. And he knew every honest compliment had hit home already. It was an old theater trick, pretend and then it's suddenly real,

He got her to say the lyrics, as if she meant them. And then she did.

And when she looked into his eyes, they both began to cry. At how much they had always treasured each other. For him, it was the regret of never proposing, for her, even with his complete absence for a decade, how she still loved him, every day.  Tears, simple, filling up her eyes until they spilled onto him, his rolling back along the crows feet of the map of his face.

She climbed into the hospital bed in the dining room during the bridge of the song. He opened his arms to her. She snuggled in, them kissing each other lightly on the cheeks. 

How they had meant everything to each other. Waiting around for perfection, the time on the road was their grand romance.

And now, they embraced at the end of their lives, a sudden rush of emotion.   Telling each other how much love still and always existed. 50 and 70, not a Romeo & juliet by any means.

They would awake the next morning, more at peace with their past than they had ever been.

Ready for their new future.

Buffalo and Springfield

WPOM

He was a little late for everything until the time when he finally caught up with fate.  You only need the once.

The Greenwich Village Scene was over by the time he arrived.  Left to the tourists and businessmen in suits looking for the next Dylan or the next lay.  Beatlemania had left all the folkies and their empty passing-the-hats more cynical & thundercloud shadowed than the mushroom cloud.

The ride across the country landed them in LA a little late.

His first wife was beautiful.  And frankly, not interested in him.  He wasn’t very ambitious, except when it came to the ladies.  He went after what he wanted; trouble was, he never could tell when to stop.  Until he found his wife in bed with the Comic from the group.  And then with the Cute One.  And by the time she was interested in the Mysterious Cowboy, he had stopped trying.  Stopped trying, but hadn’t stopped caring.  He had been living off a steady diet of a new drink every night, a new woman every week, a new drug every month, and a new mansion every year (he kept it up for 2 years, so it amounted to 2 houses in the Hollywood Hills after crashing with his friend on living on his porch for 6 months.  Laurel Canyon days seemed like living in dog years. 1 year there was like 7 anywhere else.  Burn out was all too common.

The same for the second, who was more than happy to give into a man who seemed so happy to be in love.  One day she told him, Sometimes that’s the gift you give to another human. You let them play out their love on you.  Maybe it makes you a better person, maybe it encourages you to open up.  I never opened.  I’m sorry.

He was drunk permanently at that point.  When he thought about that period in his later life, his stomach would clench.  Same thing with taxes, he didn’t want to ever account for time he couldn’t recall.

In his later years, he dreamed of the feeling of being late.  Again and again, he was wandering the streets of a dream NYC, a village where the side streets ran in a circle, there were no corners.  When he went into buildings, there were only stairs and never any exits.

His dreams of California were similar, not the endless sunset highways which he thought of in his daydreams, but dark traffic nights.  He’d be blocked in, somehow. stuck against a building on one side and a cliff on the other and traffic both in front and in back of him.  Even if it were a convertible, he couldn’t climb out.

Meanwhile, all the other men in America that lived parallel yet alternate versions of his life dreamed of his one perfect moment of timing.  If only they had cut their teeth in Greenwich Village and then gone to LA and walked into the agent’s office on cue.  The right place at the right time.  They’d be superstars, with women falling all over them, as many drugs and drinks as you could handle.  More.  What was the difference between him and them?  Not much, they reasoned.  If only I had been at the right place at the right time.

Not even his own perfect timing, it was a lot of knocking on doors, 3 years in hat-passing clubs and 6 months of dish-washering.  And in the end, it was his friend’s lucky break.  a friend, or a friend of a friend.  A doppleganger.  “Hey, you’re the guy who’s supposed to look like me,”  they would echo when they found each other on 12th street.  They joked about performing as a duo, like brothers, who would insult each other.  It was an idea which would resurface with actual brothers

Of walking into the agent’s office, as if on cue, “Where can we get a cute young boy who can play guitar like that?  You, except handsomer.”

NOTES

6:09pm, 4/4/15, Sat

Listening to Mixed Bag

Brina/Brian Wilson

Life goes on and on/like your favorite song (Beautiful Day)

What ever happened?

On the island (with Zoe Deschanel)

(Like Kokomo-Hollywood, California, couch potato heaven, beer belly heaven

Dickie-Do, My Stomach Sticks out further than my Dickie Do)

Grabbed book: For What its Worth about Buffalo Springfield

(at the BOX Hotel, fancy!! Had seen it from the bridge the first times I visited the hood, and crossed the bridge, LOOKING at the neighborhood from a different perspective, going in the direction of the Lobster Claw)

Reading about black hearse going one way, and a white van going the other

UTurn in heavy traffic, they caught each other

4/5ths of Buffalo Springfield

Neil Young (Hollywood Indian) and Stephen Stills (impatient cowboy) best of NYC & Canada

Boy Next Door, COmic, Dark one who played with his back to the audience (druggie)

Richie Havens doing Dylan’s “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”, starts out instrumental (“Sooner or later, love is gonna get ya”)