Man Gone Down

by Michael Thomas

  She finishes, bows her head slightly to applause and chatter. A whistle. She raises her head sharply, throws her hair back and catches it behind her head with both hands. There’s something about her face—it’s difficult to tell from this distance, over and between heads in the smoky dark—the shapes perhaps; eyes and nose don’t match, maybe it’s the nose and forehead. It’s odd but not unattractive—beautiful even. She drops her hands and her hair drops too. Craig hoots, and I snap around to face him. “All right, Rosa!” He claps methodically. Rosa doesn’t respond. She checks her tuning and leans into the microphone, “This one’s called ‘The Seagull.’”

  I wonder why she stopped her last one. This song sounds very much the same. It could’ve been, had she continued, a suite; slightly varied but linked songs, similar in melody, tone, and performance—or at least her hair. Perhaps none of us in the audience knows that it’s the reason we’re listening, because we could all just go home and put on a Joni Mitchell record rather than listen to Rosa fall short of the mark. Perhaps it’s her odd face, covered by the cascade. From where I’m standing she looks small. Perhaps it’s my distance. Maybe the guitar’s too big or the stool too tall, her hair, or the sum of all these factors. She finishes, stands, and bows. Craig is up there in the wings to congratulate her—an aborted lip kiss that morphs into a hug and a cheek-to-cheek rub.

  “Give it up for Rosa, people. Great stuff. Thank you.” He checks his clipboard. “Okay, next we have Polly. Get ready for something edgy, folks.”

  Polly jumps up on the stage then pulls a medium-size amp up, then an electric guitar. Craig asks if she needs help, and she hands him the plug for the amp. He jumps off the stage, grabs an idle extension cord, plugs the amp in, and gives her the thumbs-up. She thanks him with a nearly imperceptible nod. She stands and pushes Rosa’s stool aside. She’s tall, perhaps even taller than Craig. She readjusts the high mike stand and lowers the short one to the level of her amp. She looks fully ready to rock—an all-black Fender Stratocaster, Marshall amp, an indigo tank top one size too small and indigo leather pants, the pattern on which, I realize as she stands up there knock-kneed, form the stars and bars of the Confederate flag. She hits a chord, loud and distorted, shakes the silver bangles on her wrists out of the way, down her forearms, and hits two chords this time. Someone lets out a whoop, then there’s a whistle, finally a rebel yell, which is echoed by another.

  “How y’all doin’ out there?” She has bright red hair that even I in these conditions can tell is dyed. It’s cut short and frozen stiff by some beauty aid. Her eyes are heavily penciled—black. She stomps a motorcycle boot on the hollow plywood platform, rips off a loud lick, another chord. “How ’bout some Jimi?” The audience responds with an affirmative roar. She counts off to herself—“. . . two and . . .” Ascending notes—bom bom bomp—bom bom bomp. She sings, “Manic Depression.” Her voice is thin, but she tries to pretend that she can bark and snarl. I squeeze into the little space between the big window and the turn of the bar. Craig hasn’t returned to his post. He’s up front, sitting at the first table with Rosa. She watches Polly while he watches her, checking to see if she likes it or not—so that he can wear the appropriate face. Ed talks to Peter across the next table. I can’t see either face, but Ed’s head occasionally jumps forward. Peter nods and turns every so often to Polly, who’s now into an extended, bombastic solo. The bartender taps next to my hand. I come up out of watching.

  “Need anything, brother?”

  “I’m good, thanks.” He winks at me, takes his drink from beneath the bar, and kills it. I grab a napkin and dab at it with my pen in hopes of coming up with a song list. “Everybody Is a Star”—I cross it out.

  Polly breaks into “What a Wonderful World.” Playing it hard like the Ramones did, but she spit-snarls the lyrics, force-feeding us the irony of her performance. Perhaps she’s only heard the punked-out version and never consulted Satchmo. I go back to my doodling on the napkin. Nothing comes of it save for the growing apprehension that I’m about to make a complete ass of myself—standing up there without a damn thing to play.

  Polly hits a last chord, yanks her guitar off, and, holding it by the neck, jams it into the amp. The sound feeds back, turning from rough and low to a high wail that makes people reach for their ears. She shakes the guitar, trying to coax more wailing, but the sound fades. Craig jumps up to keep her from continuing. He unplugs the amp and lowers it onto the floor for her. She shoulders her guitar and stands grinning at the crowd—triumphant. I don’t, however, remember hearing any applause.

  “You’re up, brother,” says Mountain Man.

  “Thank you.”

  I begin to make my way to the front. Craig looks for then finds me in the crowd. He waves to me, causing people to look back. The nerves come—like I’ve swallowed several whole spastic moths washed down by too many cups of coffee. My guts are an ugly place, and I don’t want to know what goes on in them. I feel myself disassociate, lose focus on my insides and then what exists out in the bar. I blur the faces until I find myself at the bandstand trying to figure out how not to trip.

  Polly steps off the stage and gives me a pinched grin as we pass. I catch a whiff of her hair products and dense French cigarettes—maybe some BO. “Hey, darlings!” I hear them move the furniture to make way for her.

  “You need anything, man?” asks Craig, pushing the stool at me.

  I go to say, “Yes, the stool,” but all I manage to do is point weakly at it. He sets it up in front of the mikes, takes another look at me, and readjusts their positions. I keep my back to the crowd, set my case down, and open it. I expect my guitar to be grounding, but it isn’t. It looks plastic, beat, incapable of resonance. I pick it up, and it feels that way, too.

  I strum a chord. It’s out of tune.

  “Here, dude.” Craig hands me a small device that I don’t recognize. “Clip it on to your headstock.” I do. It’s a tuner. “It’s for tuning up in noisy places.” I tune up, strum a chord to check it. It sounds tinny, but in tune.

  “Thank you.”

  He beams at me like he’s never heard the expression.

  “Cool. Ready?”

  I nod. He straightens up to the mike. “Folks, we got some new blood here tonight. Please give a warm welcome to um—let’s see. Teddy Ball-en-game.” He bends to me, whispers, “I fucked up your name, huh?”

  “Close enough.”

  “Give ’em hell, dude.” He bounds off the stage, letting out another rebel yell as he does. A few in the crowd reply.

  I hang my harmonica around my neck, stand up, and turn around. I don’t have a strap. My legs start trembling, then my arms do, too. I remember the stool and try to drag it forward without dropping my guitar. I sit and the trembling stops, but the microphones are too low. Craig bounds back up, resets them. The crowd’s quiet now, watching. Someone snuck a capo onto my guitar, fifth fret. I blur my eyes again to avoid seeing their faces—to make them one big whole. Craig leans out of the mass and nods for me to begin.

  I start, a cappella, the words like a grace note—“Lord I’m . . .”—B-flat—“. . . broke, I’m hungry, ragged and dirty too.” Slide up the neck for a fill—slide down. Repeat. Then, “If I clean up sweet mama can I stay all night with you?” Fill. I look up the neck at the headstock while I play, but I don’t really see anything—not the strings or my fingers, not the frets, where my hands go on the fills and changes. Even though they’re a blur, I don’t look at the audience. “You shouldn’t mistreat me baby, because I’m young and wild.”

  When it’s over they clap—loudly—there are even scattered whistles. No bar noise. Perhaps it’s because I’m down here in the mix that it seems so much louder. Perhaps they actually like me. I still won’t look at them. I go right into the second song—“If You Want Me to Stay . . .” I drag it down, take whatever rhythm there was out, and drag it through the blues—my specific funk.

  “Seawrack” and “seatangle.” These are the blues: coinage upon contac
t with the air. Traces of hope and joy from the fusion flash in my head. I like what I hear—the wordless neologisms created with voice, guitar, and air. I don’t look up, I won’t break the spell. A glance would sever the atmosphere—“seawrack” and “seatangle.” That isn’t what comes out. Strummed chords. An inexorable internal rhythm. Not a train, but something coming down the track under its own unconscious locomotion. “Seawrack” and “seatangle”—I’ve always loved those words, never knew what they were, but they behaved in my mind like multifaceted jewels—so many illuminations—so open and so bright. There is no sorrow in this room because it is filled with song—and—“Hey, Mr. Tambourine man . . .”

  When it’s over, they clap. Craig jumps up on stage, motions for me to stand but stay there. He waves the others up. When he has us in a line, he calls out, “Who’s got the hat?”

  It gets passed up to him, a Yankee hat. It’s full of singles and change. He waves to the crowd to stop.

  “Okay, y’all. You know what to do.” He moves behind Ed and Peter and waves his hands above their heads. “What do you say?” The audience responds with loud enthusiasm. “All right.” He moves behind Rosa and does the same. She gets polite but muted approval.

  He jumps next to Polly, who, by the angry look on her face, has already predicted her defeat. The crowd doesn’t disappoint. He moves on to me.

  “Give it up for Ted.” They yell back loudly, certainly louder than they did for the two women but around the same level of support the duo received. Craig knows. He hands me the hat. They yell and clap some more.

  “Okay, people, let’s hear it. Give it up for the artists.”

  There is some more applause, the loudest by Ed and Peter, who have begun moving back to their table. Polly darts off the stage. Rosa lingers on the stage with Craig and me. She leans in to say hello. Craig stops her by speaking first.

  “That was a really cool set, man.” I look at his face again. It’s craggy. He’s not so young, a few miles past and many tequila shots down.

  “Thank you.”

  “Although that Dylan at the end threw me a bit. I thought you were going in another direction.”

  “I liked it,” she steps closer. “You did it well. There’s nothing worse than a bad Dylan cover.”

  “Except a Dylan original,” mumbles Craig like a teen.

  She slaps his arm. “Oh stop.”

  “I don’t know.” He shakes his head. “I just don’t get it about that guy.”

  “There’s nothing to get,” she snaps. “That’s the whole point.”

  “I’ve just heard he’s a jerk. He seems like one.”

  I pack up my guitar. She watches. He watches her.

  I stand, ready to go.

  “Are you going to stay for a drink?” She thumbs at Ed and Peter’s table.

  “Thank you, no. I have to be going.”

  “Teddy?” she cranes her neck and points. I nod. She straightens quickly and throws that hair behind her. “Are you gonna be around next week?”

  “I don’t think so. I’m not sure.”

  “See you around.” She holds her hand up but doesn’t wave.

  “Good night.”

  I’m drawn to the bookstore window, how the light falls on the covers. I can’t make them out from across the street, but I know what titles they are. They’ve been there all summer. And while I can honestly say that I’ve never tried to picture my own book on display, I have imagined the window with these books gone, not no books, just not these books, although I can’t picture the ones I’d want there. I’ve been inside, spent strange late morning and twilight hours when I should have been doing God knows what but something other than skimming through pages of nonfiction that read like the liner note text for cookbooks and fiction that read like lists—random and disparate images; loose, frayed metaphors used to stitch litanies of random, mundane events together written by brick-dry white people with polished syntax, sniping at dead poets, complaining that the dead folk had lived too much—tried to do too much. And the ethnics, whoring out their otherness, pretending to be true to some alleged mother tongue or pretending that the language of the brick-dry will speak true—verisimilitude via assimilation. I get confused. They all seem to be exactly right. Their stories are so clean, so free of bafflement, stink, or cosmic funk—cosmic affliction. Their words shrink the world down, down, tapering to a point, as though they’d followed the line of a table leg down through the cellar floor to its subatomic origin, then claimed—that’s enough!

  And I’ve seen the larger in the microcosmic, but that has never been the end for me. When I find the pointed end of the tapered leg in the center of the earth, I get blown out the other side into space, yanked into orbit, and then slingshot out. The cosmic affliction faces me every day. And it may be hubris to believe your own trouble has enormous weight—your trouble is another’s—but I think of the old Negro spirituals, their birth: Trouble is unavoidable, undeniable. It’s in your face and seems to stretch for as far as eyes can see. The only end to it is a dream, a song. And so when I read about flaking skin, microscopic annoyances—whose panties to pull off—I am troubled enormously. It goes on and on, the complement to the rock of my alleged soul.

  So now I prepare to enter the trance, out of which will come the incantation to dissolve this corner scene—the shrine to the hard and dry. And it’s so predictable; the asphalt ripples like a lazy, black river. The night sky responds—Amen. The plate glass shatters noiselessly. The pieces vanish before they fall—And the urbanness de-coalesced. Now the reshaping: street and slab and stars to suit me. The cars are cat-eyed and quiet as leaves riding downstream. Magic?—or just some more blah-fuckity-blah, more yip-dipity-yip. There’s a reason the sidewalk is cast in concrete.

  I count the hat money—forty-three dollars, not even bus fare these days. I realize how nervous I was, playing in the bar, the cool air makes me feel my sweat on my shirt. I put the money away, scan across the glass, and catch my reflection in the dark part. I feel compelled to speak to it. “Loser.” It surprises me, the way it comes out: a sharp hiss. I shake my head, raise a finger to my lips, and shush myself. I step out of the picture but leave the finger there, flexing and extending it slowly—my soul finger.

  I make a fist and wonder if I’m capable of vengeance—the payback of the spade. The dark fist could be useful to me, symbolically and concretely. But the wind blows through my thin coat and across my damp shirt. I shiver and my hand opens. I start to sing and shiver again, wondering if anyone I knew was in there listening. I hear my voice come back to me, not singing, not even exhorting, but whining. Me, up there on the makeshift stage, limp and slumped; big, brown, and whining, with the alms bowl going round. I’ll give you two bits if you shake your ass up there. I go to close my fist again as if to squeeze out the image, it complies grudgingly. Who can blame it? It probably wants to belong to someone who’ll swing it. I’m not up to speed—not fully evolved. There was a time when memory was an asset: which root to pick, which route to walk, where the lair of the death beast was, poisonous fruits and blossoms. Then over time, as memory became collective and things to eat were packaged, routes mapped and laminated, it became a vestige, an appendix waiting to burst and spread the horrors of the ancient world—the mammoth stomping and the saber tooth creeping through your guts. Death by spear or weapon of stone. But there weren’t the millions to kill, or the technology to do so. Now, when there is time, when we neither follow the herds nor smear their images on our walls, when we have time for real intimacy, time and ability to listen and hear the voices of the lonely—panties, blood and semen, and a blank-faced woman-girl; twenty-thousand pink slips; clipper ships; Calcutta; barren potato fields; Geronimo; panzer tanks; napalm. We pay a price to have it all somehow neatly extracted, separated, named, reduced, and thinly rendered then served back to us with a pinch of wit and trope. It seems better to just forget.

  Shake’s reflection looks at me from the window. He can appear like this, on your doorste
p after work, while you’re going down into the subway, or packing the kids into a car—the wraith of transition.

  “Why are you looking at that? There’s nothing for you there.” He dismisses the books with a sweeping wave. “Fucking trembling Anglicans, telling me about the nature of death and God.”

  I wave, more like a gesture of benediction than a greeting, “Between the idea and the reality. Between the emotion and the act falls the shadow—for life is very long.”

  He waves back. “Between my foot and your head sits your ass—for my boot is very big.” He jab-steps at me. I jump back then gather myself, embarrassed that he startled me. He doesn’t seem to have noticed any of it. We shake. He pulls his hand back, then steps away—right and forward and left then back—with an unrealized desperation, like a broken toy robot, forgotten, trapped in its last command.

  “No seriously,” he nods, still moving. “You look good, man. Real good.”

  “Thanks, Shake.” He’s wrapped his long dreads under a dirty turban. Through the graying beard, he’s very handsome—strong-jawed. His eyes are slightly sunken. His dark skin, even though wet with sweat, is a bit ashy. His lips are thin, and his eyes look out like those of someone who hasn’t completely woken up from a horrible dream. And although these aren’t necessarily signs of age, they act in concert to connote miles, experience, hardship—a great weight hauled.

  “Please don’t call me that anymore.”

  I watch him move. He’s still well muscled and looks as if he could spring up and dunk a basketball or dribble past a defender with ease, but those muscles that used to move him in such an elegant way now seem to jerk him from corner to corner of his little box.

  “Don’t mind this. It’s just the psychotropic waltz. It’s nothing.” He looks at the books in the window, pushes his chin at one. “Ain’t that your boy?”