Every alien, every angel, every crown prince in disguise, every escapee, every condemned man on the lose — or, for that matter, every soon-to-be-ascended avatar — must go through that moment of realization, a moment when he knows just what he’s leaving behind when he’s called home. (In my songs, often as not, it’s a moment of realization that comes in a rundown, roadside motel.)
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.
He never realized he was going to leave until one night when he left.
They’d been together forever, through most of high school, after. She took some classes at a local college, he picked up construction work. And it was all ok with him. But he knew she wanted more. She wouldn’t say it. She wouldn’t ask. But he knew. And he wouldn’t give it.
He couldn’t.
That’s what he believed and that’s what he planned on believing his whole life.
He left a message on his boss’s machine, threw some clothes in a duffle bag and told his mom to pick up his last check. And he took off.
It was probably a year and a half before he’d let himself come home to visit his mother — and then only when she had a health scare.
He’d been traveling, picking up work, bumming around. He was out of the habits of society. He visited his mother for a few days until he was convinced his little brother had things under control and his mother was getting better and then he headed back out to a pipeline construction project he had a line on. A guy could make enough in two months to travel for a year, if he played it right.
Then his mom did get sick and he went home. His little brother was falling apart, trying to work and take care of mom. He stowed his duffle in a closet and took over his mother’s care, patiently nursing her back toward a health she would never completely reclaim.
He stayed around the house most of the day, seldom going out, but, later, when his brother was home, often after everyone else had gone to sleep, he would go out, walking through the darkened, now strangely unfamiliar streets of his hometown.
One afternoon his mother needed a change of medicine. He took the bus to a pharmacy far away from his neighborhood. It was in the new subdivisions where the soy fields used to be. He hoped that by going there he would be avoiding old memories — and the possibility of a chance encounter.
But he read somewhere that we’re drawn irresistably, mysteriously toward that which we fear most.
He was sipping bitter coffee in front of a chain coffee shop when he saw her.
He really felt like his heart stopped.
She was loading a couple of kids in an older, white Volve. She looked only a few moments older but the kids were maybe two and three; he was no good with kids, guessing ages, that kind of thing. They made him nervous and apprehensive. But these kids were different. They were beautiful. He felt instantly protective, as though he was a distant, but all-seeing guardian angel.
And she… she was so hearbreakingly lovely. The sunlight came through tall, crooked rows of eucalyptus and lit her hair.
He sipped the coffee, its cool, acrid rasp on the back of his throat. He pulled his head down a little bit. But he knew he didn’t have to. He knew he was already invisible.
Last time I saw her a couple years ago
she was shovin a couple of kids in a white volvo
the sun came down through the eucalyptus trees
it made her hair just glow like it always used to be
just then I wish I could have said the words
that I could never say
cause if I’d told her baby I’ll be yours
she’d be mine today
the pool house the beach house the boat house by the lake
I’ll be damned if I can remember a thing
yet everytime I think about holding hands in school
my heart just pounds like it always used to do
right now I wish I could have said the words…
sometimes when I sleep I call her name
a thousand girls have told me so
I threw it all awaly and now I want it back
and I know it can never be so
[I know it can never be so]
and right now I wish I could have said the words
that I could never say
cause if I’d told her baby I’ll be yours
she’d be mine today
He was so bored in the room. The others had gone out to an afterhours but he was sick of clubs and music. He tried to write a letter to his ex-wife but he couldn’t think of what to say after he asked about the kids. The movies on cable were always the same.
He went down to the bar and ordered Scotch. He buried himself in shadow in a corner booth but soon he looked up to see a woman of thirty wearing teenager’s clothes and too much makeup.
“Aren’t you…” she began.
His first impulse was to be rude, to just send this poor creature away. There she was, her waste cinched in with a department store “fashion” belt, her breasts on display thanks to some engineering miracle of a brasiere, her hair somehow inflated… she looked like a flower ready to blossom… or simply explode. But he could never be cruel.
Sadly, he thought to himself, he could never be strong either.
“Maybe,” he said in answer to her partial question. “I might be. After, all, according to the entertainment section, I am in town.”
She looked confused but hopeful.
“Why don’t you sit down, love? You seem quite young to be one of my fans…”
A STAR IS BORED
A star is bored
prowling empty hotel hallways
He’s never alone
so how come he’s always lonely
Nothing gets him down
it’s all just the same
saying “If you think you’re bored,
then you should see me!”
Down in the bar
leaning into a smokey corner
trying not to catch her eye:
“Say, cowboy, why you dressed like that?”
And it always seems to
go down about the same
It kills a couple of hours
but it don’t kill the pain
Tell him a story
make it long, make it lonely
Lots of starstruck summer nights
and the moon’s reflection on the river that runs through
everything
Nothing makes much sense
but he guesses that’s just life
Ya play a few songs
and then they turn out the lights
Yeah, nothing makes much sense
and he guesses that’s just life
You have a couple of laughs
and then you call it a night
