I’ve known a lot of bums who claimed to have been somebody, once. And, for sure, some of them were just high. But after some living, I began to see that sometimes you need a little altitude before your fall to really get going. Gravity being the way it is, you just fall faster and faster the farther you fall. (Wind resistance notwithstanding — and, hey, can’t you see we’re trying to be metaphorical, here?)
The guy in the song below used to be somebody once. That’s who he is now. A guy who used to be somebody once. Or he thinks he was. And, really, that’s what counts.
looking for my place in the sun
ah but everything is almost gone
a bottle in a bag and a bun
now all I need is the sun
caviar and champagne are fun
limos and callgirls, the run
but those cocaine days are done
now all I need is the sun
kingdoms and palaces galore
yachts and planes for sure
diamonds and oilfields and mines
yet I traded them all for this wine
caviar and champagne are fun…
I’ve spent a thousand times what you’ll ever own
I had twenty people answerin’ my phone
You– you’d never get through… yet now
here I am drinkin’ with you
caviar and champagne are fun
limos and callgirls the run
but those cocaine days are done
now all I need is the sun
We might have been drinking in the kitchen of room 7 at the old Hussongs Motel on the beach north of Ensenada. It was stormy outside and waves crashed on the rocky beach. Inside, there was a warmth fueled by liquor.
Empty tequila bottles littered the table and it was at that point of the evening that the conversation turns to the rareified…
Someone asked me if I liked any religious music. I said sure. Everything from Bach to gospel to Sufi trance music.
He wondered what drew me to some of the music I did like.
And I said, Well, I like songs of struggle more than songs of praise — but sometimes songs of praise are paradoxically transcendant.
At which point my friend passed out and I finished off the bottle.
The song below is about the struggle to maintain faith in a troubled world. It puts that struggle in frank lyrics. (Lyrics I couldn’t quite get out correctly this time around.)
I wake up each morning
and I reach for my bible
I reach for my razor
and I reach for my gun
I reach for the dream
I was dreaming last night
but each single morning
that dream is gone
’cause it’s a big nasty world a terrible place It’s hard to stay alive and it’s hard to keep the faith
its a rotten world a grim shabby place but out of the endless depths of time
you’re here today
I’m tired of living
and I’m tired of dying too
I’m tired of tomorrow
and all the shhh that I’ve been thru
I’m tired of forever
and I’m tired of yesterday
I’m tired of never
and the man the child became
’cause it’s a big nasty world…
I used to love ya baby
and you know that’s true
I used to love God
and you know that too
I used to love myself
It was the hardest of all
I loved the whole GD world
but that was before the Fall
’cause it’s a big nasty world terrible mean place It’s hard to stay alive and it’s hard to keep the faith
its a rotten world a grim shabby place but out of the endless depths of time honey, you’re here today
Somerset’s pals would have told you she had class. And she was sexy. Mostly she was sexy.
But not in a, you know, vulgar way, like Eddie’s mom, who was nice when you got to know her — and not really very sexy at all — but who dressed like a hooker even though her husband was some kind of Wall Street West guy.
No, Somerset’s mom was beautiful, like Grace Kelly or Lana Turner. She went to a gym even back when they were kids.
He’d be over at Somerset’s house when they were, oh, 12 or 13, and Somerset’s mom would come in from the gym or tennis, sweating a little but just glowing. The time she came in from the pool unexpectedly in a filmy one piece that was wet and clinging to her was seared into his memory all the way through grad school.
[A note about this song: What’s to say? Sometimes you just get a bonehead idea stuck in your head on an evening when there are no Law & Order reruns and… well, it’s a good thing I have cable. PS… if you don’t know what a bad pun the title is, that minor ignorance is, in this case, bliss.]
I like to get out in front of trends. This first-person but happily not autobiographical song about the confusion and sense of displacement and loss of self some Alzheimer disease victims experience was written when I was about 42.
I live in my head, pretty much — or maybe on the internet.
A disease of the mind — I mean, beyond what already besets me, of course — scares the daylights out of me.
I saw my grandfather succumb to the disease — before it had aquired its current name — and it was, as I would have told you then, really f—– up. He was an extraordinarily smart man for over 80 years and then it all fell apart. He disguised the symptoms as long as he could — which is maybe why, when it hit us what was going on, it was so surprising. In retrospect, I know the disease had been chipping away at the foundation of his life for some years.
Throughout his retirement he had worked hard to keep his mind active, taking up new hobbies and enthusiasms, keeping up with advances in his professional field, chemistry, even taking Spanish language lessons because he said, when he lived in Pennsylvania’s “Dutch country” he spoke German, and when he moved to California around around 1919 with his wife and two young children, he decided he should learn to speak Spanish. I remember the day, perhaps around 5 years before he died, when he said something like, I think senility is taking over my brain faster than I can learn new things. In past years, I used to learn a few new words of Spanish every week. Now, even though I take classes, I can feel my vocabulary shrinking, slipping away…
And there was a far away look in his eyes.
But it’s not always like that. As I wrote when I posted an earlier version of this song, I became reaquainted a few years ago with a gentleman from my old neighborhood when I was a little kid. He was always an easygoing guy when I knew him and he was aproaching his disease with the same equanimity.
Maybe it was because he didn’t fight it, I don’t know.
But I think I know that, all too likely, I’ll be like my grandfather, dragged screaming and fighting into the final dark tunnel.
