Dancing in the Dark

by David Donnell

  from a poem by Robert Creeley about the darkness that wafts across

  the highways of life

  great billows of it, well, okay, her 12-year-old

  son Jesse was sitting in the living room propped up against the wall

  one afternoon reading volume 1 of The Memoirs Of Emma

  Goldman, notes from the 1920s, & I said, Okay, that’s cool.

  Anyway the t-shirt, it gets a lot of attention, it says, IF I CAN’T DANCE

  I DON’T WANT TO

  BE PART OF YOUR REVOLUTION. Her picture in large

  black solids is in the middle of the slogan. People have to bend over

  on the street to pick out exactly who she is – steel-rim glasses

  & beautiful, & of course she’s all in black on the t-shirt, she looks

  as if she should be carrying an umbrella walking along some beach

  in Germany in the 1890s. It’s a good shirt, & I thought I’d write

  you a note & say thanks for it.

  I’m very widely read

  but I’m more of a Tom Stoppard Edward Said social anarchist now

  & I don’t usually carry a black umbrella. But you know what they

  say – “Anarchists come in different forms.” And when you look

  into my face you can see it all very clearly.

  It’s a loose

  comfortable shirt & I wear it casually like a young rock&roll kid

  wearing a t-shirt that says N I R V A N A.

  I GUESS IF YOU’VE GOT 1000 SKINHEADS YOU HAVE TO CODIFY THEM

  The white

  skins

  are the white skinheads, shaven clean as a baseball,

  you’ve seen them around, also

  called pinheads. The

  red skins

  are the socialists, they’re the ones who came first,

  same height & weight etc. but they have red shoe laces

  in their boots – black military highcuts,

  that’s what they all wear,

  very much like std US military

  combat issue. It’s confusing as hell, isn’t it? And then

  over here we’ve got ska heads

  & the occasional artist

  or Park Avenue photographer

  who decides to shave his head. I guess they’re all working

  class youth who like tavern culture & this is a fad. Some

  of them are unemployed, probably none of the white skinheads

  like Tangerine Dream

  or Uta Lempur very much, or Brecht,

  for example, no, Brecht wouldn’t be very popular. The red

  skinheads probably don’t read Brecht either, various brands

  of Löwenbrau are popular or unpopular but the red skinheads

  defend the rights of Turkish guestarbeiters,

  & the white

  skinheads seem to like fire bombs.

  SINATRA

  I can see him travelling by bus

  with the orchestra

  from Toronto to the Muskokas

  to entertain vacationers & summer residents. My friend

  Colin Simpson’s parents heard him at a lake resort

  somewhere east of Parry Sound in the early 40s. The war

  was on, Colin’s father,

  a major stockholder

  in Massey-Harris [tractors, combines, threshers],

  was drunk, the mood of the evening was lively

  according to Colin’s memory. Hamilton,

  Windsor [across from Detroit],

  but mostly the Muskokas &, of course, Toronto – Palais Royale,

  the Imperial Room at the Royal York Hotel,

  places like that. Granted, he went Hollywood,

  & granted, he only does concerts now, & he can’t sing any more

  anyway. But “Full Moon, Empty Arms” [he was quite young then],

  now that’s an Ontario song.

  “My Foolish Heart” – that’s mature

  Frank Sinatra, better than the young crooner,

  but he’s still got his chops, sharp articulation, dramatic interpretation

  some of those neat tricks like singing ½ a beat off.

  He was good before he turned 41,

  or 42,

  he had moves,

  & then he moved further south & he stopped doing the bars.

  It was nothing but concert tours, & The Sands Hotel in Las Vegas.

  Let me tell you something – I liked him in Man With the Golden

  Arm. He was good,

  playing the thin, intense, pale musician

  [definitely an east Ontario guy] coming off heroin,

  & the scene where Kim Novak wearing a sweater I can only describe

  as risqué by its very intention

  lying on top of him

  with a blanket to keep him warm, he’s going cold turkey,

  he hasn’t had a shot for days & he’s got the chills,

  boy, that was a great scene. Even now,

  standing in Ontario,

  looking as far south as Texas [where they have been having

  a lot of trouble – Killeen, Tex., where the guy drove his truck

  through the window of the restaurant & shot 23 people; Waco, Tex.,

  where the ATF laid seige to the compound of the Branch Davidians

  & approx. 63 people were killed, that’s trouble],

  even now,

  I like “I’ve Got the World on a String,” the bravura

  of the upbeat is like wild ducks flying across Point Pelee, Ont.

  MORNINGSIDE DRIVE

  He said, “I’ve been trying to keep the baby

  Jesus

  out of my mind for years.”

  I’m in the back seat,

  don’t look at me, I’m not the baby Jesus.

  I’m about 20, we’re all about 20,

  I’m drinking coffee out of a red plastic thermos cup.

  I think,

  Funny, I’ve never thought of Jack

  as a Christian kind of guy, certainly not a holy roller.

  We’re working at Kelvinator for a few weeks.

  I’m reading the Toronto Star in the back seat

  & Morris says, with that woodchuck chuck in his voice,

  “Well he won’t help you win any money at the races.”

  And that’s true, I think to myself.

  The baby Jesus won’t bring Sailor’s Rest into the wire ahead of the field.

  I’m not really thinking at all very much, I’m tired.

  Overtime last night but they gave it to someone else tonight.

  Jack & Morris haven’t had any all this week.

  Had a couple of drinks after lunch,

  we were working on big white door assemblies. They began to look

  like images from the Apollo flights. I could see Armstrong walking

  on the moon and carrying a door assembly on his shoulder.

  I smack Morris on the back of the head with my newspaper.

  “Jesus is all about love,” I tell him.

  Dead skunk by the shoulder as we exit from the 401

  and drop down a couple of streets to get onto Morningside

  Drive. It was hot, what was a skunk doing on the 401 anyway? There

  were small insects, hot delicate dark

  gnats squashed across the dusty blue windshield.

  AVANTI, AVANTI

  “Avanti, avanti,” she says, pushing the little

  boy in the blue cap,

  he looks about 9 ½ or 10,

  up the scuffed dusty marble steps of Union Station

  onto the cement platform

  where the Toronto Express

  to Buffalo is about to leave. There are

  giant orange&blue weather balloons moving at a slow

  northeasterly pace over Pickering,

  a small community

  airport some 34 miles away. Avanti. She has a suitcase in one

  hand & a big 1940s purse & a laundry bag bulging wit
h

  I don’t know what in her left hand. There are different trains in America.

  The designs change from time to time. This is one of the great CP trains.

  Some are classics & some aren’t. “Avanti,

  avanti,” she says,

  & cuffs him on the ear. He

  is straining up on his toes with the huge suitcase

  as the train comes in. When she cuffs him he laughs

  & leans back in her direction as if she were a large tree

  in dark blue sweaters and a rumpled black skirt suit

  with black stockings.

  OCTOBER

  October explodes in this (wooded) hilly & potato rich enclave at the northern end of the Niagara escarpment. Alliston, on the Nottawasaga, & other towns west to Orangeville are warm & soft & gusty this Friday, 7:35 a.m. Orange and blue umbrellas on front porches, rain slickers out on the farms. Everywhere you look the trees have gone as berserk as a loon’s hypothalamus with riots of orange yellow red pale vermilion savagely oversweet turned on itself crimson dark. There is a fine October rain coming down, so fine that you can hardly see it, almost a mist, it barely wets your face. 16°. A few 40 mph ducks skim the tops of distant lush wet trees. Geese crossing in loose Vs down by the bridge. This is western Ontario but continentally almost as far south as Massachusetts, Point Pelee, or Frank Lloyd Wrights Chicago. The air is full of oxygen. The dense rich colours swim in this air like Matisse nudes, blue knees & elbows, magenta buttocks. Warm thick air gives a tremendous lift to your motion. I seem to fly above the pale dark grey early morning towns of soft hills & steeples almost like Chagall’s crazy mystical Rabbi fiddling over the scant roofs of pre ww 1 Minsk. (1000s of miles north of where Babel wrote about Itzak the gangster. Where Gurdjieff sold the barrel of bad herring and put the money into fresh animal skins.) Water trickles gently along the curbs into the cosy black gratings of innumerable sewers. It’s warm & wet & gorgeous. My Rockports squelch on the gravel. I lift my face up to the sky. I open my black umbrella. I wave to you happily my friends across the shimmering slopes of the western escarpment.

  WINTER BOOKS TO READ IN NEW YORK, CORN CHOWDER, AN EMPTY ROOM, CHORIZO SAUSAGES

  I said

  [it was about 7:30

  & there was a pool of darkness at 34th & Avenue B]

  [there was a yellow taxi, I had said the corn chowder needed more

  chicken stock]

  to my friend Adam Gopnik

  who is, for sure, no average GOP kind of guy, “You stay in New

  York & write for the New Yorker. And I will go back to Toronto,

  that big sprawling city on the north shore of Lake Ontario,

  & I will have a huge empty white room & corn chowder with chorizo

  sausages

  & I will move Tom (Bass) from chapter 7 to chapter 9,

  & I will write a Matisse blue spotlight song

  & you will be in the song, wearing an old sweat with ‘Williams’

  across the grey front,

  writing about Matisse.” “How can you compare Murray Schafer

  to Philip Glass?” “You can’t, they’re too different. I like

  Schafer’s ‘Northern String Quartets,’ but there’s not very much loon

  in them.” New York is a dying city. But I really like the way

  people shoot each other in Sam Peckinpah films. You might as well

  write a short history of sound poetry in which you say they all seem

  to have been influenced by television dubs. But not me. I would

  rather go home & listen to African boat songs & think

  about that slow hot butter soft sun & paddling down a river

  of infinity.

  POSTMODERNS

  Postmoderns like things to be laid out calmly

  & precisely like design components on a large drawing board.

  Like Robert Smithson’s Earthworks, for example. Earth & works –

  postmodernism is gutsier than people think. Mississippi

  earth is swampy as you get south of Oxford down to the gulf.

  I don’t like F’s Absalom, Absalom! very much. I don’t like the way

  it begins with the runaway slave. F himself is very present,

  but in a confused sort of way – splashes of author colour come

  through but seem disparate. It’s like a camera falling

  through the narrative & it doesn’t work. The characters don’t tell their

  own stories

  explicitly or implicitly.

  Ask any of your friends about their favourite Faulkner

  characters and they’ll probably say, Popeye,

  Temple Drake, Jason, Caddy, the barn-burning father. Claes Oldenburg’s

  giant hamburgers take us back to the 50s. Faulkner was young

  in the 20s. And was then smacked in the face

  with the 30s & the Depression. I’m probably being unfair

  to this book. I’m reading in a sunny room and listening

  to Wynton Marsalis’s solos on a CD with Kathleen Battle

  who is singing up a rich dark storm & Wynton, it’s Handel, is

  right there as if he had written the music himself. Sure

  there is probably a point of view from which you could enjoy

  Absalom, Absalom! I don’t know, I sort of like the title.

  But not as much as Light in August or the story of Jason & Caddy.

  Marsalis goes up into C & I toss the book over on the couch

  & watch the small English sparrows & the grey squirrel

  outside my front windows on this cool blue May afternoon. The

  title’s interesting, isn’t it? Absalom, Absalom! It sounds

  too biblical for the 1930s of Huey Long.

  MISSISSIPPIANS

  I have a green & yellow plastic Tonka dump

  truck

  on the left side of my double sink in the kitchen.

  Imagine that? An adult white male writer who studies

  Wittgenstein

  & he’s got

  a child’s toy

  that he keeps in his kitchen sink.

  Her name was Mayonnaise Dutton

  & Tom loved her

  & he lusted after her panties. Her panties

  were cute

  & she was pretty goddamn cute herself. But she didn’t give a shit

  about Tom.

  When I look into the wide open cavity of my mouth

  in the large hallway mirror it looks like a caricature

  of Baudelaire’s abyss. Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean

  I have a whale in my mouth. No Jungian references to Melville.

  I just mean it’s so huge & pink & clean & wholesome. And innocent.

  I’m an American outlaw & I have my whims. Lots of Hathaway shirts,

  no Kenzo ties.

  I don’t have a lot of money. I’m actually quite

  aggressive at times. I like to run water over the truck

  in the morning while I do a few dishes, make coffee,

  listen to the morning arts news

  before I sit down to write for the day.

  O HEY, HE’S TALL, BUT HE’S TOO YOUNG TO DRINK BOURBON

  Hayden Washington Jones, 6’5”, close-cropped hair, chocolate satiny skin, quiet, at times almost mordant. A tall guy, for sure, taller than Tom Garrone, and blocky, not tall and thin like Tom. In addition to which Hayden had an immeasurably greater knowledge of music than Tom possessed, and had never been even faintly tempted to write stories (although Hayden had stories, but he was a quiet amused kind of guy in regard to conversation) in the manner, although he had lived in Paris for a while and had driven a little Peugeot minor, of some French guy like Albert Camus.

  Hayden had been an A student at Jefferson High School in Brooklyn, a scholarship student, music obsessive, tight end distinguished for broken field play at Yale in the late 60s, a music compulsive, Juilliard in New York, and then Paris in 1974.

 
His mother was a school teacher and a regular churchwoman. His older sister Dahlia was the neighbourhood beauty in their part of Brooklyn, and a bit of a sass and also a bit of a snoot, she could look down her nose at a school teacher or a bank manager with equal ease. But she sang in the church choir and when she sang she was a somewhat different kind of sister.

  Anyway, first song, as in first love, first sex, first time bareback, first time driving home from Jones Beach, not that his family owned it, nobody owns Jones Beach, although it isn’t really public property either. Hayden Jones wrote his first song when he was about 11 years old. It wasn’t a bad song. It was a song about playing tag with his brother. It was a 4-bar blues. And who knows, maybe it was about his sister. It wasn’t about his mother, and it wasn’t about Jesus. His mother said it was a good song. His father didn’t say anything. His father was at the race track in Detroit, Dee/troite, hanging out with Fox & Masters & Wilberson & Lapointe. It was a pretty good song for a boy who was already 5’10”, handsome enough to be noticed on the street, LaFayette & Lancaster, and hadn’t started showing any interest in girls as yet. It was a pretty good song with his own melody and he did the harmonic himself both vocally and on the family living room piano. But he didn’t write another song or even think about writing songs again until he was about 27. He was a little older than the rest of the Desperados, the black / white blues band he helped to form after coming back from Paris, where he knew Tom Garrone from, where he knew Stash and the others. He was about 4 years older, and as far as music was concerned he was a lot smarter, but he didn’t go around saying so. Hayden was a composer, blues-based and a Bartok obsessive, and unlike most composers he was hooked up with a hard line, flat out band that was about to take America by storm, if they would listen to him, that is. He wasn’t, when Tom Garrone met him, walking around in a loft whistling scores to himself, although he sometimes did that as well.

  Juilliard followed Yale. Hayden had been playing with groups and arranging, becoming an arranger as well as a brilliant keyboards player, but arranging was definitely his first and greatest love supreme, and had been since he was around 15.

  It was amazing that he never worried about his hands when he played football. First at Jefferson, then at Yale. At Yale more seriously, because it was more serious; for example, these guys at Yale were tough, really tough. They were nothing like Yale boys doing their M.A.s in philosophy and having a sandwich and a beer at Cookie’s, a familiar sandwich place for lunch, booths and all, in New Haven. Uh, uh. They were tough.