“phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust…”

Feeling decidedly old, insecure, passe, and uncool these days, I’ve decided to become as angry as the young Elvis Costello. To wit: have you seen the new iPhone commercial yet? The one where the Strat-wielding dork asks his phone how to play “London Calling?” (doesn’t anyone play by ear anymore?) It’s in Em, idiot wind. Play it in the cowboy chord formation for all I care. And pick up a Tele while yer at it. That’s what Strum played it on.

I suppose that part of me is angry that the music of the Clash is being used to sell offshore-manufactured hardware, even though the song itself is conspicuous in its absence (permission denied to use the actual song, I hopefully assume). After all, I feel very protective of my bands; I always have. And these days I’m feeling very protective of the Clash.

the ice age is coming, the sun’s zooming in
meltdown expected, the wheat is growing thin
engines stop running but I have no fear
cause London’s burning and I live by the river

I bought London Calling, the album, as soon as I could locate a copy; I was only fifteen and otherwise much too young to know. If you must know, it wasn’t all that easy then. I lived in a very small town, fresh vinyl was scarce, and I couldn’t exactly order it from Amazon or whatever. I was amazed to find it, actually. And I’ve been living in those grooves for the last thirty-two years.

kick over the wall, ’cause government’s to fall
how can you refuse it?
let fury have the hour, anger can be power
do you know that you can use it?

I texted some Clash lyrics to my sons a few days ago; no reply. This happened once before…I shouldn’t have been surprised. But I wanted to share some music–and a band—that I love and care about so much. I suppose I simply wanted to share something with them. My oldest has always, to his great credit, loved the Clash. I thought at least I would receive a brief acknowledgment from him. But…nothing. I’m sure he was busy. Yes, that must have been it. He’s very busy and I’m becoming more irrelevant with each passing day.

I’ve been beat up
I’ve been thrown out
but I’m not down
no, I’m not down

Well, part of it is true, anyway. Or as Hemingway wrote at the end of The Sun Also Rises: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

meditations from A Moveable Feast

Perhaps it’s common, perhaps it’s not, but I dream a lot of my ex-wife, despite the fact that we shared a volatile relationship which erupted quite frequently into violence both physical and emotional. After all, I’ve now known her for thirty-one years, decades that make it difficult–if not impossible–to banish her entirely from my life.

When I dream, it’s never of the bad times (of which, unfortunately, there were plenty). I dream of the youthful part of us that wanted to build a life together, and how we became parents at a very young age.I dream of houses we built together, of watching them grow over the few months of construction. Most of all, I dream of a house of two small children, their laughter, their joy at learning new things, and above all, their innocence. I dream, I must say, of the father that I used to be.

Although I know it must be true, sometimes I refuse to believe that I am no longer that person, no longer a father who could be counted on, for example to play baseball or basketball right after work. Sometimes I refuse to believe that my two sons have grown and no longer need that kind of father; figuring out the kind of father they do want and need is one of the most important challenges of my life as I know it today.

Perhaps it is only nostalgia, an inability to move on from that part of my life in which I was needed like no other. It’s not, as I know, that simple. But this, as Hemingway wrote, is how it was “in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.” Sometimes I lay awake at night and find myself wishing: if only we were that poor and that young again.

“straight into darkness”

For one summer–one lovely, all too brief summer–I truly loved her. She was eighteen then, and I…I was only a few years older. For those few months she was the woman I thought she could be, while I was the person I was and am still becoming.

There was nothing but joy then when she called, or visited, or we hung out, or when we made love. There was a creek we swam in that summer; I remember holding her in the part where the water began to run deep, her bathing suit off, her body wrapped around mine. I remember the kiss of sunlight on my face; I remember her lips on mine. It was the kind of summer Fitzgerald might have written about, the one with “blonde Northern girls and the tall young men from the farms lying out beside the wheat, under the moon.”*

And then there was the day she told me she was pregnant. I was, to be that young, ecstatic. I had never thought much about becoming a father, but none of that mattered now. If she could have stayed that young and happy forever, and I was going to have all that and be a father also, then that was all right with me. The rest of my college would take care of itself; it was almost over, anyway. I wanted her. I wanted the baby. I wanted to be married.

But she, who so often talked of marriage and of becoming a mother, became truculent and withdrawn. I quickly realized what she planned to do, even before she told me, and the day after it was over the feeling just died.

we went straight into darkness
out over the line
straight into darkness
straight into night**

Every January or thereabouts I wonder about the child who never was. Some years–though by no means all–I’ve also cried. And I can’t help but wonder if things would have different between us, if in the realm of alternate possibilities I would love her still today. Impossible questions, impossible to answer. But I still grieve for our child; I still grieve over what might have been.

I’ve never written of this before, not even in a journal. I’ve never even talked about it, to anyone. Anyone at all. We all live with our silent grief, one way or another. I can’t say with certainty that this is what led to all to the vehemence and hatred later. But one day she told me that I never treated her better than during that summer when she was first pregnant. I hope, someday, that’s the way she’ll remember me. And I will leave the darkness for good.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Absolution”
Tom Petty, “Straight Into Darkness (copyright 1982, Gone Gator Music)

“when the train left the station…”

“I’m nobody,” Emily Dickinson wrote. “Are you–nobody–too?” I like to quote that brief phrase sometimes when I’m lonely, frightened, or otherwise confused. I’ve learned enough by now to know that we all ask ourselves that question, even if only in the darkest hours of our nights. When you realize that, sometimes you don’t feel so all alone.

My darkest hours seem to arrive between midnight and four A.M., the time I used to look forward to when my kids were young because then the house was quiet and I could write, play music and guitar, and refresh my muse, as Hemingway said, “from the springs that fed it.” The nights and years have been so lonely since those times, so very lonely, like the times in the middle of the night when the bedroom door would open and a little boy (or two) would crawl into bed with me while his mother worked. “This bed is empty,” goes the Stones song; I’m not sure it’s something you ever get used to.

Love in vain, love in vain; and all is vanity, even the person I believed I once was.

Well, its hard to tell, its hard to tell, but all your love’s in vain
Well, I felt so sad and lonesome that I could not help but cry

It’s okay. No matter what I once believed when I was young and arrogant, I knew I couldn’t live a charmed life forever. It was always so…precarious…even then. And now the worst times are over, finally, and once again I live a life of seeing and possibility. I sometimes joke about the Fitzgerald line that “there are no second acts in American lives.” It wasn’t so long ago that I believed it completely. But I no longer believe it anymore.

Cormac McCarthy’s “world entire”

What would you do  if I died?
If you died I would want to die too.
So you could be with me?
Yes. So I could be with you.
Okay. 

Perhaps not since Hemingway has an American writer been so visible on the big screen (I know…what about William Faulkner? Faulkner is different; he found lucrative work as a screenwriter).       

There’s something of an industry these days for making movies based on the novels of, arguably, the greatest living American novelist, Cormac McCarthy: No Country For Old Men, All The Pretty Horses, and soon, The Road.

I first read The Road three years ago during a particularly difficult time: I was losing the closeness I had always enjoyed with my sons, and for the life of me I don’t know why (and I’m not sure that I ever will). The Road, with its description of a love between father and son so strong that each was the other’s “world entire” affected me to the depths of my soul; it was a love that I knew and lived for my entire adult life. That’s what made the tears flow so easily as I read: I know the sort of love where a parent feels that life has no meaning without children. I know: you can’t protect them forever. But still you feel the responsibility to prevent or bear any hurt. And so I wonder…will that feeling ever go away? I think not. Somehow, I think not.

So I bought a copy for my youngest son, the one who had seemingly withdrawn from me the most. I wanted him to read between the lines. I wanted him to know that as a father I wasn’t that much different from the man in the novel…that my love was deep enough to assume any sacrifice. I wanted him to know that, if I had to, I could learn to live without his love and respect. But I could not abide a world in which he no longer lived. The Road, as you may know, is a sort of “post-apocalyptic” novel in which the world has been burned over (apparently the result of nuclear war) and covered with ash that, years later, still swirls like snow. All food sources destroyed, the survivors are either scavengers or cannibals–good guys and bad guys, in the view of the boy, who struggles to understand why the pair can’t share their very limited supply of food with the few sympathetic people they encounter. They can’t, of course, because doing so means that they would die.

He looked at the boy but the boy had turned away and lay staring out at the river.
There’s nothing we could have done.
He didn’t answer.
He’s going to die. We can’t share what we have or we’ll die, too.
I know.
So when are you going to talk to me again?
I’m talking now.
Are you sure?
Yes.
Okay.
Okay.

So they constantly, and cautiously, search for food and supplies as they make their way south, toward the sea. They find a significant cache at one point in an underground shelter, but the man knows they can’t stay more than a night or two because others are looking as well–and for reasons both practical and sometimes sinister, aren’t willing to share either. After all, this is a world without life save for the nomads who wander the land. This is a world where some people have resorted to cannibalism, while others would kill for the sake of a few cans of food.

The Road, although filled with terror and tension, is at its core a love story: a love story of the best kind, that between a father and his son. And just like the man in the book, I’ll spend the rest of my life offering my love, whether it’s accepted or not. Just like him, I’ll spend the rest of my life “carrying the fire.”

Babylon Revisited

“There are no second acts in American lives,” Scott Fitzgerald wrote. Who can actually vouch for the accuracy of that statement, though? At the time of his death from a heart attack at age 44 (in 1940), Fitzgerald was said to be working on what could have been the best novel of his career, The Last Tycoon. The manuscript as he left it does indeed show flashes of the old brilliance; it might not have been Gatsby, but perhaps, with further work, it would have been close enough.

Reinvention, though, is the basis for continuing American celebrity. New looks, new sounds, new influences–these are the currencies of American celebrity. As one in need of reinvention, I still hold out hope that the same rules are true for the rest of us mere mortals as well. In this I look to Fitzgerald’s best short story, “Babylon Revisited,” in which a flawed but deeply loving parent attempts to earn passage back into his young daughter’s life.

And I should know, living apart from two teenage sons for five years now, long enough for them to become adults and begin new lives and decide that they don’t need their father in quite the same way as they used to. It’s normal, I know, and part of me should be greatly proud. But even though I know better, it mostly makes me sad.

I miss the closeness, the closeness between parents and children which Cormac McCarthy described in The Road as the state of being each other’s “world entire.” That world is gone, forever, for reasons of both nature and circumstance. But still I often awake in tears, torn from a dream in which I’m caring for two little boys, boys who still believe their father can do no wrong. And I don’t know which brings me more tears: the fact that they no longer believe it, or the fact that they may be right. And the fact that their mother now detests me only makes matters worse.

circa age twelve

Perhaps, though, love will see me through, as Fitzgerald wrote:

He would come back some day; they couldn’t make him pay forever. But he wanted his child, and nothing was much good now, beside that fact. He wasn’t young any more, with a lot of nice thoughts and dreams to have by himself. He was absolutely sure Helen wouldn’t have wanted him to be so alone.