Jeff Bridges as Bad Blake in Scott Cooper's Crazy Heart

Neither instant classic nor pillar of the genre, the movie (adapted from novelist’s Thomas Cobb’s 1987 book of the same name), isn’t strikingly original either. The fact that it succeeds, even manages to create an imprint, falls squarely on the slumped shoulders of Jeff Bridges, long one of our more under-appreciated American actors, delivering a full-scale performance with graceful aplomb, and ultimately creating one of the signature big screen turns of 2009. It’s an effortless portrayal, filled with guile and propelled by instinct, one that is weighted with authenticity and totally devoid of blandishments.

                First-time director Cooper, who, by all accounts, stuck closely to Cobb’s novelistic intentions, brings a similar authentic feel to his under-the-radar directorial style. This is an actor’s movie, the sort that a Hal Ashby or Robert Altman would have once been drawn to, although in Cooper’s hands it is a purposefully straightforward film, lacking the extended complications or the multiple sources of conflict that the aforementioned filmmakers would have utilized to greater effect. Cooper does acknowledge the movie’s antecedents, with overt allusions to genre milestones like A Face in the Crowd (1957), Payday (1973), or Tender Mercies (1983).

                Crazy Heart’s well-traveled tale concerns itself with Bad Blake (Bridges), yet another country and western macho poet with a fistful of magical songs, heartsick and stumbling towards oblivion with a lungful of cigarette smoke and gut full of bourbon. Blake bounces from Bowling Alley stage to straight-up saloon gig, often puking mid-song, piloting himself with laid back charm or churlishness, almost broken with regret, yet nursing dreams about reversing his showbiz status. His shaky encounters with a trio of antagonists set the stage for an admirably unforced and neatly ambiguous tale of redemption. Colin Farrell is surprisingly competent in the part of Tommy Sweet, Bad’s protégé turned superstar pop commodity, while Robert Duvall (who mined much of this same territory when he starred in Tender Mercies) brings some down-to-earth vigor to his few scenes as Bad’s now sober pal and father figure, Wayne. The typically incandescent Maggie Gyllenhaal rounds out the triumvirate as a young single mom and journalist with (you knew it) with a misbegotten penchant for bad boys.

                The seemingly infallible T. Bone Burnett (partnering here with the late Stephen Bruton) once again delivers a soundtrack with acumen__ a batch of songs that seem realistically poised between classic outlaw C&W and the peculiar wryness of those leftfielders from the Townes Van Zandt school. Attitude-wise, the point-of- view is cut from the Kris Kristofferson prototype (physically, Bridges could be the guy’s younger brother), the guy with the long hair and cowboy hat, submerging his intellect behind the drawl and the drink, one of those guys who buys right into pop cult diviner Nick Tosches theory of straight up C&W music: “And ultimately there’s something about the depths of the human soul expressed within the confines of a rhinestone-embroidered puce suit—something not only of innocence and demonology but of proper perspective as well—that can’t be found elsewhere in this garbage heap that we call culture. ”

                Crazy Heart acutely digs into the mysterious songwriting process, albeit one that demythologizes at the same time, hinting strongly hints that dues paying is a central part of that process.

                The same simple but sage methodology might apply to Bridges career. Since Crazy Heart comes up a little short in a variety of ways, its true strengths emanate directly from Jeff Bridges. Any movie-movie barroom chitchat would be promptly elongated if a debate ever sprung up over the actors best moments in a career filled with highlights and good choices. A quick, extremely partial (and highly personal) list: The Last Picture Show (’71), Fat City (’72), Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (’74), Rancho Deluxe (’75), Stay Hungry (’76), Cutter’s Way (’81), Starman (’84), Tucker: The Man and His Dream (’88), The Fisher King (’91), American Heart (’92), Fearless (’94), The Big Lebowski (’98), The Door in the Floor (’04); all in all a potent delineation of superb choices and exemplary execution from an absolute American big screen acting treasure.

                Bridges, replete with unfettered belt and charmingly slurred voice (it’s actual rhythms established through chain-smoking and perpetual drinking), is another middle-aged American male somehow cast adrift, captivatingly lost between bad intentions and good expectations-a species Bridges does well— a still likable loser, weak, yet imbued with fierce pride. The performance is scented with melancholy and all the more effective for it, adding a redemptive tone to the overall proceedings that doesn’t delve into heart tugs or corn. 

(Suggestion: Put your cash on Bridges walking away with the Best Actor Oscar. It’s a done deal.)  

Scott Duhamel writes about film for The Providence Monthly, all things pop for PopKrazy (www.popcrazy.com)  his own blog, (http://culturevulturetime.blogspot.com/), and to our great fortune, shaking like a mountain.

Read the shaking interview with Crazy Heart author, Thomas Cobb (http://shakinglikeamountain.com/shaking/2010/01/15/shaking-talks-to-novelist-thomas-cobb-about-crazy-heart/)

cartoon by Arsenio Orteza

He left behind the frozen landscape
and empty mines of his Midwestern home
to head east, for New York
where he heard it was all happening.
At every stop along the way to the Port Authority
he jumped out to grab a smoke
and check on the heavy battered Gibson
riding in the luggage compartment
beside his big suitcase. In between
he took in the fields and crossroads
of the vast country.

When he landed in the city
he walked happily down Eighth Avenue
through smells of pickles and pizza
to locate himself in a railroad flat
on the sixth floor of a walkup
where he peed on the rats
in the bathroom in the hall.
Days he made the rounds
of the folk clubs in the Village
singing for owners in his rough voice
the songs he had written on the backs
of invoices from his father’s store.
Nights when he wasn’t singing somewhere
he spent soaking in the tub
in his kitchen and dreaming of the future.

But the gigs got shorter and came less often
and he started getting to parties
after the important people had left.
The record company stopped returning his calls
and one day a club owner told him, “Look,
I’ve seen it all, and you just don’t have it,”
just as his money ran out
and rather than ask his father for more
he took the A train back uptown
but not before leaving his guitar at the Salvation Army
on Spring Street at the corner of Lafayette
and twisting his harmonica rig
into the shape of the state of Minnesota
and dropping it in a trash holder on the street.
He jumped on a Greyhound back to the north country
where he learned how to cook
or at least defrost and reheat fish
at the Red Lobster in Duluth.

He gave up listening to music at all
though occasionally lyrics formed
unbidden in his head
while he stood over the big stove
turning flounders that smelled of butter.
He hummed these secret tunes to himself
growing old behind the cries of the servers
clamoring for their orders.

Donald Levin teaches English and chairs the English and Modern Language Department at Marygrove College in Detroit, Michigan. He is the author of two poetry books, New Year’s Tangerine (Pudding House, 2007), and In Praise of Old Photographs (Little Poem Press, 2005); a novel, The House of Grins (Sewickley Press, 1992); and poetry and fiction in numerous print and electronic journals. Samples of his guitar work are on YouTube at RivrRidr902’s channel.

Mark Cutler sings/plays/shakes the mountain/2-27

Last Saturday night, fifty-plus hearty spirits crowded the Mediator Fellowship Hall in Providence, RI, braving the churlish end-of-February weather for a night of shiny music, shimmering poetry and shaking prose. It was shaking’s maiden voyage public-wise, a shakingdown cruise so to speak. Everyone survived. Yea, I dare say even flourished__ to the delight of the writers and presenters (Jericho Brown, Marita Andrade, Jo-Ann Reid, R.A. Stovetop Lawson, Liz Carter, Scott Duhamel and shaking editor Mr. Don), and a trio of fine singer/ songwriters (Mark Cutler, Chris Monti and Anthony Loffredio).

[View with PicLens]

That’s not very hip, we’re just saying—the editors

Just Kids

By Patti Smith

Illustrated. 279 pages

Harper Collins

Another writer once proclaimed Patti Smith to be the “Godmother of Punk,” and it would be tricky to dispute that she doesn’t deserve the title. Her 1975 debut album, the seminal Horses, uses an effective blend of well-crafted poetry and three chord guitar rock with beautifully placed feedback to set a standard for a generation of rockers. Bands such as R.E.M. and The Smiths, which fielded influential musicians of their own, have remarked on the impact of Smith’s music on their own development.

It could be argued that all good art, at its core, is no more than the amalgamation of the personal coming together in beautiful harmony with the vast world of technique and perspective that preceded it. Art is also a search for new ways to express our experience as humans. Success in artistic endeavors often relies on chance encounters and serendipitous intersections of lives coming together. It is this philosophy, in part, that Smith shared with the controversial photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe, who looms as an important and reassuring presence throughout Smith’s early career.

When she was barely twenty years old, Smith embraced the notion that dedication to one’s craft was essential to success. While her early material isn’t overly topical, history must play a role in the creative act; art happens in a particular time and place, in this instance New York City. Smith’s arrival to the New York art scene of the early 1970’s could not have been better timed and gave her access to a unique set of experiences. Perhaps, her integrity as a performer remains unquestioned because of her strict devotion to artistic values learned at the beginning of her development. While Smith’s success can be traced to a committed work ethic, she was able also to recognize important opportunities for growth as they happened. These factors allowed her career to culminate in a perfect storm with her first record, Horses, which propelled the poet/punker into the realm of serious artist where she remains today.

Smith’s recently released memoir, Just Kids, does a beautiful job of connecting the dots of her early career. The book walks us through her arrival and development as a hungry artist in New York City. It’s a familiar tale as she struggles with money and jobs. She has moments of clarity and doubt about her work. She meets lots of people, some already famous, some on their way to being so.

What may set Just Kids apart, however, from so many other memoirs and tell-all biographies is that Smith made a conscious effort to be frank about those early years in NYC, while forgoing the cheap confessional aspects that typify the genre. Just Kids isn’t concerned with the dysfunctional lives that may have been swirling about Smith at this time. Instead, it seeks something nobler than peddling gossip about the scene’s heyday. It wants to set the record straight about her development as a musician and to breathe new perspective into Mapplethorpe’s often misunderstood artistic vision.

While the agenda of Just Kids is to illuminate those heady days and to rehabilitate Mapplethorpe’s reputation as an important artist of that era, it reads as a valentine to the struggles she endured before earning her success. Indeed, it’s those struggles that Smith uses to define her life; it’s as if she sees herself wedded to Mapplethorpe as a newcomer to NYC’s established art scene, where Warhol looms large. Warhol’s achievements set the commercial bar at a ridiculously high level, his art worth millions, while starving artists like Mapplethorpe and Smith can barely scrape up the money to get one of them into MoMA.

There are many such anecdotes in Just Kids. The reader learns how Smith fed her imagination from a young age when she developed a voracious appetite for books. Her family, poor but thoughtful people, live in New Jersey, from where, through a stroke of luck, she is able to escape by bus to the Big Apple after being asked to leave the teacher’s college she was attending. In one of the more shocking moments of Just Kids, the reader learns that the move followed an unplanned teen pregnancy, where the child was brought to term and then given up for adoption.

She is still in a fragile state and desperate to make something of herself when she arrives in New York. She has vague ideas of staying with friends who have since moved, so she sleeps in the park and in doorways until she meets Robert Mapplethorpe. He helps extract her from a sticky situation and they eventually find a place to live together.

They draw, write and paint together and the reader gets a picture of domestic tranquility. They develop a strong bond and pledge to make it together as artists in a town at the epicenter of high culture. This bond, forged in the depths of poverty, forms the crux of the story told in Just Kids. And it’s a story about gratitude, a willingness to sacrifice creature comforts for the sake of art and a dedication to watch each other’s back.

Smith has chosen an interesting way to tell her story by detailing as much about Mapplethorpe’s evolution as an artist as her own. It’s the picture of the time she spends with him that makes Just Kids revealing— stories that don’t shock, but move with emotion instead. A great example is her account of their days in the Chelsea Hotel, which seems to have happened at a fortuitous time in their development as both people and artists.

At the Chelsea she begins to come out of her creative shell and find her poetic voice. Surrounded by influential writers and artists, she begins to gain confidence in her own talents. She befriends Gregory Corso, who becomes something of a poetic mentor to her. She writes a song for Janis Joplin, hails cabs for a drunken William S. Burroughs and is mistaken for a boy by Allen Ginsberg on the prowl. During this period at the Chelsea, it’s easy to see how her confidence would grow, being able to share her work and life among cultural icons

Mapplethorpe was an important guide to Smith. In a note she wrote to him before he died of AIDS in 1989, she sums up his presence in her life: “You drew me from the darkest period of my young life, sharing with me the sacred mystery of what it is to be an artist. I learned to see through you and never compose a line or draw a curve that does not come from the knowledge I derived in our precious time together.”

Smith also tries to shed some light on the often misunderstood art Mapplethorpe created in his short life. As a much-maligned target of right-wing fanatics like Jesse Helms, Mapplethorpe’s work became a symbol of all that was wrong with publicly-funded art in the 1980’s. While many of his photos dealt with homosexuality and tried to put a face on those who would become afflicted with the scourge of AIDS, he was branded a pornographer and worse by many conservatives looking to make a name for themselves in the culture wars. Smith humanizes the man as a tender, thoughtful friend and an inspiration to her own work.

Smith’s willingness to share the poverty of these early NYC years with the reader is palpable. Smith and Mapplethorpe’s constant lack of food seems to work as a metaphor for the hunger necessary to make it as an artist or musician in NYC. The description, while meaningful and detailed, left my stomach rumbling as I wished I could get them both a sandwich to tide them over. It was an aspect of the memoir that certainly had a visceral effect on me, no matter how romanticized.

Of course, to anyone interested in reading a rocker’s memoir, the famous figures mentioned in the pages are what give a book like this its cultural cachet. Just Kids doesn’t disappoint in this regard. The reader gets to mingle with famous Beat writers and drag queens, rock n’ rollers not long for this life and wealthy patrons that ease the burden of trying to create art without a steady income. The reader also gets a steady stream of Smith’s reading list of favorite authors that she uses to illuminate certain aspects of the life she has chosen to live. Arthur Rimbaud and Jean Genet are frequently referred to in the text and, at one point, she visits Rimbaud’s French birthplace.

Reading Just Kids, it is easy to think of both Smith and Mapplethorpe as outliers and rebels. As a writer, I am envious of their persistence in creating without self-doubt, without looking for the kind of immediate payoff that measures success most days. They pay their dues and Smith seems to relish the idea of transcending the poverty that she implies was a necessary component to developing her craft.

The memoir seems to be a way for Smith to express her appreciation for a life that was shaped not only by her talent and will, but the harsh reality of NYC and all the characters that come with the territory. When she quotes other writers, we get the impression that she is walking in the aesthetic footprints of those who came before her and embody the tradition of the creative outsider.

Smith clearly relishes the role of the quiet, artistic rebel, a throwback to another time. She regards the pursuit of art with a romanticized view, arguing that art and artists are necessary to society, if only out on its fringes. She’s after an ideal, something that happens on the edges of society where craft is perfected and moments of beauty occur before commoditization. Mainstream audiences won’t care about the poems or sketchbooks, won’t be impressed with altars or necklaces assembled from the cheap and the found. However, Smith wants the readers to better understand the artistic impulse that she and Mapplethorpe were working from, an attempt to find truth.

The epigraph to Just Kids concerns itself with this idea nicely. Here, Smith writes of Mapplethorpe, saying: “In the end, truth will be found in his work, the corporeal body of the artist. It will not fall away. Man cannot judge it. For art sings of God, and ultimately belongs to him.” Smith wants the reader to understand that trying to see “God” in the common experience is what makes art so worthwhile. Early in his artistic development, Mapplethorpe had success using found items to make new things from an open-eyed discovery of his surroundings.

Reading the memoir, it was easy to see how she could appreciate the artistic progeny she helped to influence, but could loathe the ruinous lifestyle of someone as talented as Kurt Cobain. His biography, Heavier Than Heaven, seems to have some parallels with Just Kids, as Cobain overcame his poverty through a single-minded approach to crafting songs and making music that felt both raw and polished. But Smith apparently feels that creativity should be a buffer against dependence, imbalance and emotional turmoil, for she is not satisfied merely to assess her ideals for an audience but rather seeks to show how she lived them. No poser or slacker, her dedication to imagination was the road less traveled. Towards the end of the book she discloses the fact that she knew well before the age of 30 that she would never have to punch another time-clock. That seems credible, especially for an artist who would go on to exert such influence and create such culture-shifting output.

1. Michael Jackson

PYT (Pretty Young Thing)

Hearing a breathless Michael Jackson whisper his way under somebody’s clothes in this intro is almost as much fun as knowing that LaToya and Janet are doing the call and response background vocals. By time he commands, ”Pretty young things, repeat after me,” you can’t help but think he’s singing directly to you.

2. Donna Summer

Bad Girls

Come on, there are actual police whistles in this song, and the guitar is relentless to say the least. “Toot-toot, hey, beep-beep” is probably one of the best lyrics of all time.

3. Rufus featuring Chaka Khan

Tell Me Something Good

If this song doesn’t reek of sensuality, then Chaka Khan can’t sing. Check out the brothers in the band responding to each verse with the best grunts the tribe could utter.

4. King Floyd

Groove Me

The slightly off-key groans that happen at completely unexpected moments in this song land it firmly in the realm of perfection. And the laziness of the horns makes you want to dance lying down.

5. Marvin Gaye

Got to Give it Up

Who are all these people having such a good time in the background of this song before Gaye even starts to sing? I’ve got to invite them to my next party.

6. Prince

I Wanna Be Your Lover

Let me get this right. This man gets away with telling a woman that he’s broke and doesn’t want to pressure her, but if she’s at all interested, he wants to be the only one to make her come….ahem…running. Oh the wonders of an impenetrable falsetto!

7. Aretha Franklin

Jump to It

Aside from one of the loveliest wars between a lead and her background singers that I’ve ever heard, this song includes Franklin scatting her way through the bridge and imitating the synthesizers on the track.

8. Maze featuring Frankie Beverly

Before I Let Go

If you don’t already love this song, if you are not swept toward glee by Beverly’s opening call to whomever may hear, if you can listen to his impassioned lead into the band’s focused bridge without singing along, then you are not a human being.

9. Teddy Pendergrass

I Don’t Love You Anymore

At some point in the studio, Pendergrass gets downright tired of singing and just starts to half yell to the woman, “Maybe someday when we get our heads together…” And these horns don’t even bother to feel sorry for the poor guy. You would think that the man who was so good at making us make love wouldn’t be able to walk out on anybody as mad as he is here. RIP, Teddy P.

learn more about jericho brown here

suddenly so sad I couldn’t speak…

You turned on some jazz,
slow round notes
the saxophone mellow as sunshine.

This is what you do
to my life: turn the dial
and music
snakes its way,
inexorably through every dendrite and follicle

until beauty
lights up the tired brake lights
of cars creeping through the storm in front of us,
the lace-iron struts
of the heaving beaten bridge,
and even the gleaming green and black puddles…

Alison Luterman

Alison Luterman’s two books of poetry are The Largest Possible Life (Cleveland State University Press) and See How We Almost Fly (Pearl Editions.)  She also writes essays and plays, and performs with the improvisational dance theatre troupe Wing It!  Her blog is www.seehowwealmostfly.blogspot.com.  She teaches through The Writing Salon in the San Francisco Bay Area.

by R.m. Cresser

When does it dawn on you that you want to play the piano? When your mother keeps dragging you off to see her best friend, Dame Myra Hess? When the toy piano you got for your fourth birthday is the only thing you managed to save from the earthquake? Or is it when you pass a musical instruments store, suddenly begin trembling, go inside, sit down at the first bench, and, without knowing how, spin off what the astounded salesman identifies as Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue?

 None of these things happened to me, and yet I wanted to play the piano. More precisely, I wanted to play jazz piano. There were three problems with this. The first was I was so unmusical that even in elementary school I belonged to that half of the class briskly defined by the music teacher Mrs. Fleming as “non-singers,” meaning I drew a lot of scales while the hearty of tone were practicing “Amazing Grace.” The second problem was that the closest I’d ever come to a piano was my record collection. And third, this desire for the keyboard didn’t come over me at some Mozartian five or Lisztian nine, but at 17, when most prodigies were already washed up and most teenagers had other kinds of boogies and blues distracting them.

On the other hand, there were encouragements to my ambition. One, I wanted to play jazz piano. Two, I wanted to play jazz piano. Three, I wanted to play jazz piano. And then there was Andrew Kobel, the neighborhood piano instructor. For years I had been looking across the street at the sign in his first-floor apartment window — ANDREW KOBEL, PIANO TEACHER, TRADITIONAL, JAZZ, MODERN — without feeling any personal tug. More than that, Kobel himself had made sure his public appearances were exercises in antipathy. When he wasn’t leaning out the window to chase ball-playing kids away from his apartment building, he was stomping down to the candy store or the deli with visions of the tone-deaf he might trap underfoot. This was no minor specter since his left foot was on an elevated stand, as though a leg deformity had left him with little choice but to act like the display case of a shoe store. Needless to say, this accessory branded him on some tongues as The Crip, while others saw more than a passing resemblance in his gait and Bela Lugosi’s Igor in the Frankenstein movies. For me, though, Kobel’s real eeriness was found in some apparently divine ability to listen to the same hammer blows on his piano morning after morning, afternoon after afternoon, few of them producing anything as complex as “Three Blind Mice.” Where had he gotten so much patience? Or, the baleful version of the same question, what made him satisfied with so little?

Instead of coming up with an answer to those questions, I crossed the street to find another reason for asking them. Sitting in his dark, over-furnished living room, Kobel heard out my aspirations as though they weren’t the most preposterous thing he’d ever heard but would need a few extra minutes to recall what exactly had been. In the meantime we exchanged pledges of good faith — $25 for a half-hour of learning what the ivory and ebony things were supposed to do. It seemed reassuring to think that Thelonius Monk had started this way too.

Kobel never asked why jazz, in particular. I attributed this to several things. First, there was his total lack of interest. I was 7-8 Tuesday evenings and 11-12 alternate Saturday mornings, over and out. If I wanted to squeeze in a few hours of practice on his spare piano during the week, that was free and fine. Then there was his conviction, more than visible after a few lessons, that it didn’t matter if I wanted to play bebop jazz or Javanese folk songs, I was never going to get there, that both of us would have already accomplished a great deal if I managed to remember after a few years that Every Good Boy Does Fine. No question, both these attitudes were discouraging, did nothing at all to exemplify that positive reinforcement we like to discern in inspiring teachers. But — and this was another reason he didn’t care about jazz ambitions — Kobel had never longed to be inspiring. On the contrary, his few remarks not having to do with half-notes and quarter-notes had to do with the foul fates that had given him synovitis at an early age (“and made me The Crip, as they say around here”) and forced him to make a living teaching six-and seven-year-olds. Putting aside the niceties, he simply didn’t like his pupils, resenting their siege on hours he had once planned to devote to the concert hall.

So I labored on without understanding, sympathy — or much of a taste for practice between Tuesday lessons. This, of course, was hardly conducive to mastering my instrument On the other hand, not showing up at Jack’s luncheonette or Marty’s drug store wouldn’t have been conducive to getting weekend dates, pool hall partners, or lines on temporary jobs, so the dilemma was acute. It became more gnarled when the person showing up at Jack’s and Marty’s instead of going to Kobel’s rehearsal piano started being called the Jazz Piano Player. Clearly, I had stumbled into a variation on that old agony about not being able to have one’s cake and eat it, too — an expression that, before then, I had never truly understood. But in fact wielding a cake fork with the utmost aplomb had been the reason behind wanting to be a jazz pianist in the first place.

What it seemed to come down to was this: jazz pianists were smart, cool, and imaginative all in the same package. Cops could be smart and gangsters could be cool, but neither was especially imaginative. Classical musicians could be imaginative and even smart, but hardly cool. Rockers could be imaginative and cool, but who had ever accused them of being smart? Within jazz itself there also seemed to be a hierarchy. The saxes weren’t smart, the drummers weren’t cool, and the bassists weren’t strikingly imaginative. Besides, I had neither the wind for reeds, the money for drums, nor the strength for basses. But the pianists, on the other hand, they were not only laying the foundation for others and getting their own moments on stage, they also were the ones who had seen the world and, wearily or not, had opinions on what they had seen. They were the composer Monk, the expatriate Bud Powell, the virtuoso Art Tatum. At their most banal they were still Dooley Wilson and Hoagy Carmichael, who had hung around with Humphrey Bogart, spies, and traitors. Jazz pianists had it all covered, and that’s how I wanted my time to go by, too.

And Andrew Kobel played along for a few months. Why shouldn’t he have? Not only was he getting paid for pointing out little more than where the C was, but, as I soon grasped, he was close to appreciating me as an exception to his usually taciturn misanthropy __ with me he let it flow more freely. Was it because I was significantly older than most of his students? Because the musical situation was so obviously hopeless, he needed other themes for our time together? Because I triggered thoughts of his own frustrated ambitions? Whatever the reason, I heard all about his synovitis, his fury at having been willy-nilly incorporated into the city’s educational system (“they come here at eight o’clock because they have to be in school at nine”), and his growing impatience with his wife Gladys (“she likes the small kids, treats them like they should be ours”). In his own way he was a supreme artist because there was nothing he couldn‘t disdain if he applied his concentration to it long enough. The only thing he found right about firemen was that they got to work off their guts sliding down poles. The only thing legitimate about lawyers was that they wanted to be governors and senators like all the other crooks. The only thing wrong with people you read about in the papers — Adlai Stevenson, Albert Einstein, Elvis Presley, Salvation Army generals, Prospect Park muggers — was that they were still breathing. And don’t get him started on classical musicians. The only thing classical about them was that you needed to organize an archeological dig to find their brains.

Not that Kobel didn’t have his soft side. Gladys, for instance, might have liked the child pupils more than he did, but she turned into Uriah Heep when they missed their lessons, insisting they still owed their money. Kobel didn’t want to hear about it. “They got these parents pushing them to be Arthur Rubinstein geniuses,” he said, waving her quiet at the start of one of my lessons, “and all the kids want to be geniuses at is cowboys and indians. Bad enough we take their money under false pretenses when they show up, we don’t have to take it when they don’t, too.”

He also had a fondness for Kools smokers like himself, deciding that both an upstairs neighbor and one of the owners of the deli around the corner were “all right because they don’t listen to that crap they’re always saying about Kools.” For historical purposes, “that crap” wasn’t about how smoking might be bad for you, but about how a menthol brand like Kools raised questions about the masculinity of the men smoking it.  And then there was his deepest of all vulnerabilities — a grandfather who had apparently been the one who had driven him to the Steinway every morning with Biblical admonitions of what might happen to the whole family if he didn’t put in the necessary exercises. Whenever the subject was anything remotely bearing on practice or regimens or dedication, “the old son of a bitch” (the only name I ever heard) came in for commemoration as the ultimate standard for seriousness and sense of mission. I didn’t think of it as a stretch to infer that the synovitis hadn’t gone over too well with “the old son of a bitch”, and that Kobel had been limping through the years hauling cauldrons of guilt and bitterness with his grandfather bobbing up and down inside. He just hadn’t lived up to expectations.

Either had the Jazz Piano Player. It suddenly became an awkward necessity to avoid any place (living room, bar, hall) where a piano might be found; Smart, Cool, and Imaginative didn’t need any lynch mob demand to sit down and demonstrate what they had learned at Kobel’s crippled knee. It didn’t help, either, that Jerry Lee Lewis was showing more staying power than John Lewis and Fats Domino more than Fats Waller. And all those expert opinions about who was a great-great-great player, a great-great player, and simply a great player — what were they worth when all of them could run off complex riffs before Kobel had finished lowering himself into the leather chair next to the piano and asking where we were? Where we were, it had become evident, was with the illiterate who made his living selling old books — a laudable enterprise in itself and a testament to the resolve of the handicapped, but maybe also just a teensy-weensy unmeasured for attaining happiness or any of its sugarless substitutes.

Kobel beat me to the punch. Arriving for one of our alternate Saturday morning sessions, I found him already drawn up at the piano in his chair and adding to the five or six Kools butts he had already left in his glass ashtray. He had a question: What the hell did I think we were doing? Somewhere in the middle of my stammered answer came the word music, and that was enough to make him stomp the floor with his elevated shoe. Music? Music? When he turned on the radio, he heard music. When he played a record, he heard music. Even when he went to a goddam parade, it was theoretically possible to hear music. But what he had been hearing over months of Tuesdays and Saturdays was somebody trying to learn scales and apparently bent on unlearning them as fast as he learned them. There was more music in the upstairs neighbor banging the pipes for heat in January. He knew radiators more gifted than I.

I understood he was trying to make a point. And I appreciated his concern so much that I wanted to tell him he didn’t have to go on, that I would pack up my exercise books, and disappear from his life forever then and there. But he had another lesson in mind, and it had to do with more than clef signs. Taking a long drag on his Kool, he studied the ash he had produced, then slowly, deliberately tapped it down on the back of his other hand. I saw the wince, but not much else.

“Hear that?” he asked. When I seemed to convey the thought that the only thing I’d heard was a marble or two rolling around in his head, he repeated the demonstration, right down to the silent wince. “This time?”

What can I say? Maybe I was already busy thinking about moving on from the Jazz Piano Player to the Lion Tamer or the Caliph of Baghdad. He had to spell it out. The ash on his hand had been painful, but he hadn‘t cried out. The same way the piano hurt when it was abused by somebody like me, but had to keep it inside. I didn‘t believe in inanimate objects having a capacity for pain? What the hell did I know?

The moral wasn’t exactly Aesopian in its ramifications, but it was enough to get on with — and get out of Kobel’s apartment with — that day. Every once in awhile after that I pictured him shutting himself into his studio, away from his pupils and Gladys and “the old son of a bitch,” lighting up a Kool, and asking the piano whether or not it was in pain. And if he got the wrong answer, giving it a kick on the pedals with his elevated shoe.

Donald Dewey has published 27 books of fiction, nonfiction, and drama. His biographies of actors Marcello Mastroianni and James Stewart have been widely translated, his sports books have gone through several editions, and he has won awards for both his fiction and his drama. He has had some 30 plays staged in the United States and Europe.

He gave me two hours to pack my things.

Told me he doesn’t want to be near the place while I’m moving out of it. I don’t know where he is now. Probably walking around the lake or in the woods or wherever. His truck’s still here. Can’t have gone far, but he’ll keep his word. Two hours.

Where to start? I hardly recognize the place. This old barn used to be our spot, our sanctuary, he called it—now this loft’s a hermit’s hideout. Empty whiskey bottles litter the shabby green rag rug where Freya used to crawl, mud-soaked clothes hang from the roof beams, crumpled papers surround his guitar. Resist the urge to tidy up. Don’t want to leave any trace of being here. At least he put a coaster under the dirty coffee cup on the piano top. Shows what he cares about.

Photos of Freya here too. Here’s us all naked under the big old quilt right after she was born. Her, potbellied, goose-bumped, shivering in her swimsuit on a too-cold day by the lake. My favorite one—her whirling wildly through the field out back, face embracing the sun, arms flung wide, white skirt encircling her like a halo as she spins. All these memories of joy, surrounded by dulled pencils and more of those crumpled papers.

How can I resist unfolding one? I need clues, need to know what he’s been doing out here these past months, what exactly he’s been doing while I’ve been paying the bills, cooking the dinners, answering the phone calls, trying to clear my mind enough to do more than just survive. Meanwhile him out here— a recluse, refusing to see our family, to go to counseling, to do or say anything beyond what’s absolutely required. It’s like I have two ghosts in that drafty old farmhouse instead of just one.

Just jots and words on wrinkled paper, not even anything resembling a complete thought. That’s like him. Unable to answer me when I’ve confronted him directly, just opening his mouth till he thinks better of it, walking away. People tell me that men grieve differently, but I don’t buy it. Seems to me that my grief is worth more than his, since I’ve been dealing with it—and with the world—while he’s been hiding away out here, refusing to face up to any of it. I’m the one who’s heard them whispering at the market, seen old friends take their own toddlers by the hand, turning away when they don’t know how to talk to me, while he’s been out here—what? Scribbling nonsense.

The piano bench feels the same—still worn, well-loved. How many times did we sit together here for whole days, improvising harmonies, figuring out how to make our verses rhyme?

This is new. I don’t know this one . . .

This is good. Really good. Nice to see I can still pick out a tune when I haven’t touched a piano in nine months. He can still write a hell of a melody, can’t he, the kind that gets stuck in people’s heads but they don’t really mind, the kind that makes people want to write their own songs or give up in despair that theirs will never be as good. This song’s about ghosts—ghosts with tangled blond curls and saggy diapers, ghosts who hide in laundry baskets and inside kitchen cupboards, who pop out giggling and, even though they startle you, make you laugh, too.

This song’s about Freya.

Are there more? Here, inside the piano bench. Two piles, neatly stacked. My God–are they all about her? Must be a hundred or more here. Don’t think he’s written this many songs in all the years I’ve known him.

It’s all here. Some just cryptic phrases, the hints of lyrics, but some nearly complete, with harmonies, parts for strings, backup singers, the whole gang. And Freya’s here, too, in nearly every word. All those small moments that destroy me now. First exuberant “love yous,” first steps that quickly became runs and dances, first bath.

                                                 She slipped away into the night

                                                That’s what the papers say

                                               I couldn’t clasp her tight enough

                                              I worked to hold her head above water

                                             She was always slipping away

I didn’t know he had even read that obituary. Thought he had walled himself out here away from all the papers, the indie rock bloggers, the endless tributes on the band’s MySpace page. Answering or ignoring those was my job, too, even the ones who called us bad parents for taking her with us on tour, for sleeping with her in our bed, for raising her up here in the middle of nowhere, Wisconsin. The ones who refused to believe the official reports that we were blameless. The ones who made up their own answers when there are none.

So many songs, some so raw, like he was bleeding words onto the paper. Some bitter—provoking other parents at an imaginary graduation, reminding them that their little boys and girls are long-gone now, have died in a way, too. Some anguished—waking to find that our own little girl is lifeless in bed between us, the horror of having our warm haven in this frozen country turn cold and barren.

I imagine him bent over, scribbling, picture him plunking out melodies on his guitar or that tinny old piano, inventing harmonies, generating modulations and countermelodies and descants, building each song layer by layer, the way we built our lives together. Imagine his jaw clenched the way he does when he’s angry or scared or just thinking hard, when he’s about to say or do something that might show him vulnerable. He set his chin like that before he held our bundled baby for the first time, scared to drop her or to love her too much.

What the hell. I’m here, too. Maybe he was paying attention after all. Here I am, “hero girl,” tackling all the world’s problems while he’s frozen like a prince under an evil spell. Here he is, trying to speak, to tell what’s in his heart, but feeling like his mouth is stuffed with cotton balls. Explaining to himself—and to me?—that these words, this music, are the only way to get the sorrow out of his soul and into the world. Hope here too—he writes of becoming an alchemist, of picking up the rocks life’s thrown at us, turning them into gold.

Maybe his grief isn’t cheaper than mine—maybe it’s just different. At least he’s doing something, creating something. All I’ve made in the last nine months is the bed, on a good day. Meantime, while I’ve been just trying to keep my edges from unraveling, he’s been turning her life—our lives—into something golden, something to show the world how much Freya was loved. Have I done that? Or have I just been showing off how well I can get by?

Shit. He’s coming. Boots knock off snow outside. Time slips away in this chilly old barn. Steps heavy on those squeaky stairs, more a ladder really; we always meant to fix those so Freya wouldn’t fall through the rungs and hurt herself. Not so important anymore.

What will he see? Me, cross-legged on this worn old rug, guitar cradled, dozens of papers spun out in a circle around me, like a white skirt twirling against a bright green meadow. Too late to clean up now. He’ll know what I’ve done.

Here now. Feel like I’m seeing him for the first time in nine months. He stands there, stooping a little under the roof beams, snow still sticking like sugar to the bottoms of his jeans. Nose pink with the cold. Jaw clenched, taking me in. Never knew what that look meant, still don’t. Could mean a thousand things, from fury to forgiveness. I do the only thing I can now. Time for me to fit myself back into our real life. Stand up, pick up a stack of songs, and make my way to my side of the piano bench, waiting for him to follow.

Norah Piehl is  a professional writer, editor, and book reviewer. Her work has
been featured in several print anthologies and in print and online
magazines, as well as on National Public Radio.

A Call to Action!

shaking wants to let you know about EBibliotekos, a new publisher of anthologies (based in Brooklyn, New York) that is currently calling for work on the theme of IMMIGRATION — including INTERNATIONAL ADOPTION — to be published in an anthology, entitled COMMON BOUNDARY. The deadline is March 30.
Go to http://sites.google.com/site/ebibliotekos/calls for details; you will note that they are also soliciting work for other anthologies, as well.

jared ward

Chris was sober.

It was an accident, and he planned to never let it happen again, but there you go.  Sunday afternoon in Normal, Illinois is not the time or place.

He was sober and it was an accident.

There was a place, though, a place where he knew they’d have beer.  Or whiskey.  And not the liquor store, because of course they had beer, but he needed free beer.  Last he checked the liquor store didn’t have free beer.  Or whiskey.

Last he checked he didn’t have money.

So he went to the Free Beer Place at the time he was sober, and he walked because even though he was sober didn’t mean he had any more money for gas than for beer, and if he’d had money he sure as hell wouldn’t have spent it on gas, which meant he would have been walking either way.

So either way the young couple would have looked at him like he was drunk, would have drifted to the other side of the sidewalk and pretended to look at the other side of the world, the side where he wasn’t.  And even though he was sober, in fact, maybe because he was sober, he wanted to see what was so interesting about their side of the world, and he looked and you’d have to say it was mainly because he’d been drunk on and off since he was thirteen that he fell right into them.

People thought he started drinking when his mom left.  High School Counselor People.  Principal and Teacher People.  Thought he was troubled and hurting and crying for help.  Or something.  People thought a lot.

And sure, he missed her sometimes, but the beer got him in with the guys with guitars, the girls who liked the guys with guitars.  Girls like Michelle, who he met when he was nineteen and illegal drunk on stage at McCovey’s.  She liked drinking, she liked guys with guitars, and she liked Chris drunk with his guitar.

Now he was sober, but still falling over because alcohol’s bad for you and it really does kill brain cells and those are what help you do things like walk straight when you look to the side, and he bumped right into the girl and it was an accident.  All of it, and her boyfriend said, “What the fuck?”

“What the fuck?”

He looked at the boyfriend and felt bad.  “Michelle,” he said, and wondered why the guy hadn’t punched him, because if he was the guy, he would have wanted to punch him.

And the boyfriend said, “What?”

“She’s with the band,” Chris said.

The girlfriend curled into the boyfriend’s shoulder, his arm around her.  But she didn’t look scared.  Confused maybe.  Could’ve used a translator.  But not scared.

When the boyfriend shook his head and said, “Jesus,” when they walked back to their side, Chris saw the short blond hair of the boyfriend, saw it styled and sprayed.  He saw the tucked in shirt with the nice belt and jeans and the brown penny loafers.  He saw the girl’s yellow blouse, beige pants, and when she glanced back, he saw brown eyes under dishwater hair.  She blinked and almost smiled before turning away.

In his room, after the first time they had sex, they drank together.  He was naked, she wore his guitar strapped to her neck, its flat back crushing her flat chest.  She played an A minor, then E minor.  Sad chords, back and forth, rhythmless strumming.

“Where would you live, if you could live anywhere?” Michelle asked.

He ran his fingers through his matted, oily black hair.  “Could be anywhere?”

She drank and went back to strumming.  “Anywhere.”

“Would I have money?”

“Sure.”

“Could I go back in time?” he asked.  “Or into the future?”

She started laughing.  “Where would you live, if you could live anywhere, anytime, with as much money as you’d need to be happy?”

Chris watched her pale arm moving lazily.  Her thin legs opening and closing in time.  Connecting.

“Would you be there?” he asked, and she stopped strumming, eyes wide, words choked, and nodded.

He crawled up between her legs, looped the strap over her head, laid it beside them in bed.
“Then I’m already there,” he said.

Inside the Free Beer Place they were talking.  Laughing.  It sounded like a good time, like a good place to be.  Which is, ideally, what a Free Beer Place should be.  In fact, the more Chris thought about it, he wasn’t sure he wanted anything to do with a Free Beer Place that wasn’t a good time, free beer or not.  He rubbed his nose with the back of his hand and wiped it on his jeans and frowned because he knew damn well he’d go wherever the beer was free.

Luckily, this Free Beer Place was a good place. And it sounded like a good time inside.

Chris wasn’t inside, though.  He’d been standing on the front porch for a few minutes since his first knock.  Not wanting to be rude, he waited.  They were the ones with the free beer after all.  So he stood in front of the screen door and listened to the good time inside.

They were talking.  Laughing, and he couldn’t make out many words.  He recognized voices, though, worked with most of them at Steak-n-Shake, where he’d washed dishes for six years.  His dad was the night manager, got him the job in high school.  Said, “You’re lucky.  Mexicans got the busboy market pretty much cornered.”  Chris smiled but wasn’t sure what he meant, maybe his dad wanted him to be Mexican. It didn’t matter though, he got the job and within the first week all the managers told him individually that maybe it was best if he let the servers bring the dishes and he could just wait in the back for them.

“Beer anyone?” he heard from inside.

He pushed the doorbell.

In his room, after the first time he locked up onstage, they drank hard.  He was crumpling cans as he drained them, squeezing the last drops from each.  She looked at his guitar propped at the wall, at the clothes piled in the corner, at the cds scattered next to the clothes.  Took a drink, looked around, took a drink, looked around.  At anything but him.

It had caught him offguard, how the strings disappeared from his fingers.  He couldn’t feel them.  He’d been playing along, coughing like he had been for a week, and then he saw Michelle angling towards the stage and he lost it.  The touch.  The feel.  It just disappeared, and she looked like she’d cry.

Now in the room her knee bounced in a nervous electrified twitch, matching the bounce of her gaze, and his tongue felt thick and heavy and useless.  He reached out and touched her and the bouncing stopped as her knee settled and her gaze locked onto the far side of the room.

“Where are you?” is what he wanted to ask, but his dumb tongue wouldn’t budge, and it didn’t matter because what he really wanted to know was how he could get there.  She drank and stared at the wall, and drank, and drank, and drank.  He turned up his can, crunched it, and let it fall to the floor.

He stood and walked to the guitar.  Looped the strap over his neck.

“Baby?” she asked, and he turned to her, saw hope in her eyes and started to play.  “Oh baby,” she said, and swallowed hard on her beer, tossed it next his pile, crawled towards him on her knees.  “I’m here,” she said looking up, and he closed his eyes, felt her fumble for his zipper while he played and played and played.

Fat Nice Guy was rolling a joint.  Chris had forgotten, it also happened to be Free Weed place, but that wasn’t really his thing.  It was Fat Nice Guy’s thing, though.  Fat Nice Guy lived there with Skinny Nice Guy, who handed Chris a Free Beer and sat on the couch.

Chris looked at his Free Beer.  Pabst Blue Ribbon.

“Don’t have any Bud, do you?” he asked.

Skinny laughed.  “Sorry, man,” he said, and Chris shrugged, clawed the tab and pulled.  That was the only problem with Free Beer, he thought, chugging a third of the can in one breath.

The joint skipped over his shaking head, and Fat asked, “How’s Michelle?”

“Good,” Chris said.  “She’s with the band.”  He finished his beer.  “Got anymore?”

“In the fridge,” said Skinny, and Chris wandered into the kitchen.  Inside the refrigerator was beer.  On every shelf.  And an empty bottle of ketchup in the door next to something in tin foil.  He drank three.  Opening a new one, he stood in the doorway of the kitchen and living room and watched the group.  Skinny was a waiter, pulling in more tips than anyone except the pretty girl that worked a couple evenings a week, and Fat was a cook who always slid plates of food to Chris while he worked.  They sat on their couch, surrounded by co-workers he knew and friends of theirs he didn’t, under a purple hippie tapestry from Mother Murphy’s, in front of a coffee table littered with PBR cans, crumpled Zig-Zags, and a frisbee loaded with weed.

He finished his beer, grabbed another and sat on the floor in the living room.

“She’s good,” he said to Skinny, who stopped in the middle of a conversation with the little blonde waitress to look at him.

“What’s that?”

Chris took a drink.  “Band’s getting ready for practice,” he said.  “She’s there.”

Skinny nodded slowly.  “Michelle?”

“We’re doing new stuff,” he said, and he wished she were there.  He always wished she was there.  She liked to talk about places they’d go when the band hit it big.  Europe and England and Asia.  How happy they’d be when they met new people in new places.

He finished his beer and felt Skinny’s hand on his hip when he stood and almost fell over.  Felt himself balanced, heard Skinny ask if he had it, and went for a piss and more beer.  It was like the last time he’d been there, only that time he’d fallen, smashed into the coffee table and broke the bong.  He smelled like dirty bongwater for days until his dad asked him to take a shower and change clothes.

That wasn’t really his fault, though.  It was the coughing, knocked him right off his feet.  Been coughing for a week, ever since he’d fallen downstairs at practice.  He rubbed his side where the knot still tugged at his ribcage, and couldn’t remember which had hurt worse, the coughing or falling.  Landing, he decided, but it was sleeping in the rain that made him sick in the first place.

Michelle could do that to him sometimes.

When he sat back in the living room, Fat and Skinny were playing guitar.  Skinny played bad and knew it, but everyone liked him.  Fat had his Martin D-35 in his lap, not the black Johnny Cash version, but still with mahogany blocks and a dovetail neck joint.  Fat could play.

His back to the couch, Chris tuned out the music and everyone laughing.  Focused on his beer.  It was his eleventh or twelfth, and he’d gotten used to the cheap PBR.  Wasn’t slowing him down as much.

“Chris,” said Skinny, and he looked up.  “There’s something wrong with my guitar, can you fix it?”

Always something.  He just came for Free Beer.

“What’s wrong?”

“It sounds like shit,” said Skinny, and everyone laughed.  Skinny held the guitar towards him, black Epiphone with its yellow-orange sunburst.  “Can you help?”

A joke, a joke, there was nothing to fix but a joke.  Cold in his hand, Free Beer, all he wanted and now they wanted something which meant the beer wasn’t free it just didn’t cost money.  They wanted him to play and he wanted to drink and not listen to their music or everyone laughing.

“Sure,” he said, and turned up the bottom of the beer in his hand.

“Need another?” asked Fat, and Chris shook his head, snagged one of the three stashed next to the couch.

Taking the guitar from Skinny, he remembered the first time he’d heard them play.  Skinny said something about having figured out how to play Wish You Were Here, the opening part where dude’s playing along with the radio, and Chris would’ve cringed if he hadn’t wanted more beer.  “That’s good,” he said when Skinny was done.  “Not like some I’ve heard,” and Skinny laughed and agreed, no, it probably wasn’t.

Now, with a room of people watching and a shelf of Free Beer waiting, he had to play.  Something.  He never knew what to play.  That was Michelle’s job.  She picked the song and he played it, or she made him smile and he played what her words sounded like in his head, or she made him cry and he fell down the stairs on his way in to practice and slept in the rain and coughed for two weeks until his dad saw the blood he spit in the driveway and made him get pills from the doctor.

So he played that.

And the room stopped talking.  The people in the room.  And they quit drinking, and Chris held a note with his left hand and rubbed his closed eyes with his right hand, and if he could have seen himself he would have agreed he looked like a monkey.  Not with the hair and the thick rubber-like skin, but the way his monkey hand curled and rubbed at his monkey eyes, and if he’d seen himself he would have thought it fit because to pay for his beer he performed like a monkey.

All he could see was Michelle, and his right hand came down, picking and strumming and he twisted and felt the knot tug at his ribcage.  It hurt and and no one was talking or laughing.  He closed his eyes and saw Michelle, one of only two people on his side of the world, knelt over Brad, the fucking lead singer, giving him head.  He played that, his left hand scrambling over the ebony fingerboard with his eyes closed, felt the rain drip, drip, dripping on his face, felt the cough for weeks, heard Michelle telling him it didn’t mean anything, she was his girl.

He played quicksilver notes to replace what he hadn’t said when he took her back in his arms and smiled and tried not to cry and said it was fine, he forgave her.  Because he didn’t forgive her, but he couldn’t leave her because while she may have wanted to go to Europe or England or Asia to meet all the new people, he’d never wanted any of that.  She was his fingers on strings.  She was the places he wanted to go, the people he wanted to know.

He stopped, grabbed his beer and swallowed until he hit bottom.

“Jesus,” he heard, a girl voice from over there somewhere.

“She’s with the band,” he said, and handed the sunbursted Epiphone to the kid sitting nearest.  Reached around the couch, grabbed the two Free Beers, and stood.

“Got practice,” he said.  He turned to Skinny, “Could I have some roadies?”

Skinny came out of the kitchen with two Free Beers and walked him to the door.  “You good?”

He nodded, double-stacked and double-fisted, gave a monkey look at his hands and held out his left.

Skinny reached over and cracked the top can.

“Michelle,” Chris said, and Skinny smiled, opened the door.

“I know,” he said, and Chris walked in her direction.

Jared Ward has had work accepted at West Branch, Evansville Review, New Delta Review, The Dos Passos Review, Zone 3, and others.  He is currently in the University of Arkansas MFA program, and is prose editor for decomP.