How is it that we never completely comprehend our love for someone until they’re gone?
-Patti Smith, M Train
Magic comes to me in fits and starts. Yesterday, out front Tops Grocery, I heard the crow first, looked up and waited. Another appeared. There are always more and of course there is always the shadow of crow, there on the ground in front of me but looking up again see one flying just overhead. That made 3, from none, that I first heard, and one. Something else catches my eye. The boy in orange crocks, looking up too, at the same crow, watching. Later that night, after swatting the horseflies from my face and belting out the lyrics to a new song in the driveway of the cabin, a woman came from out of the brush with the boy beside her. His name was Remi and he played drums and guitar and bass. Remi is 8 years old.
In the kitchen I show him open D and teach him Mona, the Bo Diddley song perhaps better known as Who Do You Love? It’s a simple 2-chord vamp and Remi picks it up instantly. He teaches me No Sleep Till Brooklyn while refusing several offers of cold seltzer and philosophizing how he’s only concerned with being alive and what could kill him. The scrapes on his shin, the scratches and bite marks on his hands (from Bandit the Maine Coon), his poison ivy-they don’t worry him.
“Only if I die and that I’m alive,” he offers not sagely but just like a boy.
He shows me some drum patterns. Tells me how he fell off the stage but climbed right back up behind the drums in time for the solo. Talking and interacting with him is unassuming, simple, and factual but enthusiastic. Mentions that he’s been here for a long time. His mother wraps it up with Blair on the screen porch. They leave and me and Blair part ways.
I’m sitting out front of Cafe Sarah in North Creek, at an impossibly small, aqua-colored garden table. I can’t see the bugs but can feel them biting me. I haven’t caught anyone staring at me but can feel it acutely. The family just to my right give off a toxic, American vibe. Whatever charm there is on these streets is bled out, the bitter rasp of smokers’ laughs never puncturing the heavy meanness. I’d do much better at the beer garden up the street, or even Laura’s, but I don’t drink and I don’t want to spend any dollars anywhere up here, only to have to fight for my psychic place all over again. They think I’m a golem and that’s fine. I’m a man and I mask my sadness masterfully by only shining back anger.
I finished Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl, by Carrie Brownstein, and am just about through M Train. Brownstein put me back in the 90s, the last time it meant anything anywhere. The detrimental rigors she suffered on tour with Sleater Kinney were all but ignored by me-I was going for the glory and read on as, unsurprisingly, Brother Vedder rose from the pages to affirm the power of rock and roll, like only he can again and again. Patti Smith understands better than anyone that to be a poet is to stake your claim in the magic of the world. Her existence is shamanic. Her inner life informs her outer life, and her outer life always becomes manifest.
Guess you could say I’m out here in the territory. North Creek sadly feels like the end of America, and it just might be. My inner life is populated with legend. My outer life is having to fend for myself psychically, with the flags flowing and thousands of miles travelled and thousands to get back. I’m off hitch here-disconnected. My only way out is in a greasy barn with a ping-pong table, up the hill from the cabin where Ben, Blair and I bunk like untoward and swoll dorm mates, away from home and girlfriends at University. I talked with Jill this morning, who I adore. She’s 86, out there cutting back the long leaves and talking about the effect of sobriety on Art. She’s twice my age and if I had a wish beyond this ordinary, cold water phase, it’d be to have her faculties, at her age, and drink chilled vodka in a squat glass while smoking Camel straights.
The road was fine-exhausting as it always is, like a Goddess, an event of endurance. Seems fucked that this is the prize-at this cafe with the chiggers and Americans, but it’s nice by the lake and I heard my first loon call, late yesterday afternoon. I’ve got some things turning in my mind, aspirations that sprung up and surprised me, and, despite my road and ageworn body, I should do wise to take note and make these seeds sprout and make happen. What else is there but the idea and its manifestation? I never fit in anywhere, let alone upstate where it seems like all anyone ever does in America is wait around to die.
Ab irato,
Trainer
North Creek, NY
Going for the Throat 