Dancing in the Dark

by David Donnell

  used to roll across the living room. Moebius

  is a beautiful

  word,

  & I’m not exactly sure of what it means to people

  in pure

  mathematics. We come & go, it’s traffic, I have no money,

  I love the yellow Saab my neighbour across the street has bought

  & parked in the apartment building drive

  way. Life is perfect

  in all its modular moments, I think Levi-Strauss invented

  bib

  overalls. We come & go, you make my mind the size of

  the Pacific Ocean. I make you wet & then I enter you

  & it is incorrect to say I make you come

  but I seem

  to. Night dark, you smell of fresh pine sawdust, sweat,

  fresh laundry. I cook

  2 small salmon steaks for supper.

  WICKSON’S PLUMS

  Wickson is a peculiar name – wick & son,

  it’s English & it’s eccentric,

  & plums are supposed to be natural

  & beautiful & part of God’s effortless & eternal world,

  so there,

  Professor Wickson, California, the great state,

  Stanford, I think,

  bred this particular plum.

  Bio-technology has been used for various useful things.

  I have 4 of them sitting on my kitchen window sill

  slowly ripening, showing slightly different patches of colour

  from one day to the next.

  The Ontario tomatoes are better,

  vine-ripened field tomatoes.

  I think the boys in physics should walk across the hall

  & take over Bio-tech

  & sort things out. Maybe they need

  larger blackboards in Bio-tech, maybe they need a more macro

  view of the universe & nature.

  Clarence is here,

  for supper & talk & drinks. I pick up 2 of the tomatoes

  from the window sill & begin a simple salad of tomatoes

  & green onions & parsley. Marion will be home around 6

  & we’ll talk about music. I sympathize entirely with Clarence,

  he thinks the whole emphasis on poetry & art criticism

  is sort of crazy, anything he can’t play on an alto or a tenor,

  although he likes novels & data screens,

  Saxophone really doesn’t make a lot of sense. Lounges now

  on the cane-back chair with his feet up over the table. Effortless,

  like the beginning of a great solo as the different notes

  build up to a statement of purpose.

  HARRIET & MOIRA AT STRATFORD

  They have been working since high school at a large chicken factory called Swift’s. Moira is 17. She says that it’s a big company, standing with her dress tucked into sloppy blue jeans, and rubber boots with the tops rolled down, not much point wearing running shoes, too much falling debris. “Not from plucking, stupid,” Harriet said to one of the boys who took them for dinner at the Italian place over at Blenheim, “we don’t pluck the fucken bastards, we tear them with our bare hands.” She had held up one hand in the middle of eating her vitello picato or whatever the guy with the big moustache called it. “No we don’t,” Moira had said, she was in giggles, a big plastic bag of dark insanity, the 2 suits they were with were really getting their money’s worth even though they weren’t going to get laid, although Harriet thought her guy was sort of cute, he had a dark blue suit and short-cropped sandy hair and blue eyes. Sure, that’s cute. The Co. isn’t cute. The Co. just moves chickens on a conveyor belt. The girls tear them apart. The Co. makes money. They have been late about 5 times this month. Moira is chewing gum. Juicy Fruit. Harriet is chewing gum. Beeman’s. You have to chew gum. It seems to keep the smell of fresh chicken and fresh chicken guts out of your nose. Harriet would rag her. She’d put on an accent like the Mayor’s wife and she’d say, “No, I don’t want those bloody chickens up my nasal passages.” Moira would laugh despite herself. Harriet was the active one, Moira was the laugher, Moira could laugh at almost anything. “We should be communists,” says Harriet, she’s kidding. She always comes up with wild ideas, and then she breaks up and Moira breaks up too. Moira’s standing there with a cigarette in her mouth. Not much raspberry lipstick left by 4:00 p.m. She’s plump and giggles. Harriet’s thin and dramatic with red hair. It’s a big Co. Sure. Biggest except for the Rawlins Furniture Co. And you’ll break your back in about 3 places for sure if you work over there. “They wouldn’t know what to do with us then,” she says. “They don’t know what to do with us now,” says Harriet. Moira brushes a stray bit of gizzard from the big white Co. apron you wear while you’re working on the belt. It’s stained like a county police accident blanket. “They’d piss themselves,” she says. Her lips are a little tense. She thinks she’s 6 weeks pregnant. Isn’t totally sure for a fact. Doesn’t know how the hell it happened. Tearing chickens apart since high school hasn’t done her any harm. Just spoiled a few suppers and turned her off chickens. Must have made a mistake. “They’d barf their guts out, wouldn’t they?” she says, letting her blue eyes run up and down the big wire-patterned frosted windows.

  SUCCESSFUL YOUNG TORONTO CHEF WRITES HOME TO OTTAWA

  Momma, your boy has been drinking again

  & is lost

  O yes, I am lost,

  in the darkness of this world.

  The fine yellow of the moon is strong, yes, that’s true,

  but great shifting mountains of darkness

  swirl about like large waves of the sea. I suppose

  you are going to say that if I didn’t drink like this

  I would be more successful. Okay. But it’s a

  foolish custom

  that goes back to the 1950s & my father’s time –

  you remember him, Momma,

  hopping on one leg

  with his underwear around one ankle

  & raising the bottle of Dewar’s

  up in his left hand in the middle of the kitchen;

  not exactly cucina futurisma, I must admit,

  like now, where I cook the fresh young tiger shrimp

  in a little oil & balsamic vinegar

  & serve them up with a sharp blueberry cassis

  pointed with a few tspns of inexpensive

  cognac,

  a province in France.

  Well, maybe

  you’re ½ right, Momma, but

  if I didn’t drink like this

  the darkness, my darkness which comes from my

  childhood, would pile up like hidden storm

  clouds

  & weigh me down. I know what you think.

  You think I should meet someone just like you & then

  I would not drink at all. But I would, sure.

  Daddy did, living with you, right?

  I would drink anyway.

  And she would interfere & I would hate her.

  I think my way is much better.

  I work 50 hours a week,

  I’m sleeping good & doing well. And I praise

  god for making whiskey.

  I don’t think any woman

  could allow me to relax & feel comfortable

  the way that amber flow takes me with its quick heat

  & lifts me up on the balls of my feet. Best chef

  in Toronto, Momma. Best.

  Nobody can touch my

  crayfish, Momma. Nobody can touch my pork

  loin with apricot slices & bits of pistachio nuts.

  BUSES

  Now it is dark & the magpies have gone to

  sleep

  on the green lawns of the university in Capitol City,

  Alberta, & I am ½ way through Idaho going south

  to a small town in Wyoming. Maybe

  I’ll stay in Laramie,

  or maybe I’ll move on, I don’t know. The bus isn’t all that

  comfortable

 
; but I’m not sure what I’m looking for. Call it

  something different from the East

  & more exciting than Winnipeg photography exhibitions. The bus

  rocks back & forth on the uneven road. It’s about

  2 in the morning, that’s where the hands are

  on my luminous watch. I slept after supper,

  ham on dark bread, tomatoes, instead of

  reading,

  or flirting with the girl across the aisle.

  She’s from Nebraska & was working in Calgary

  as a waitress. There’s a boyfriend in there somewhere

  but I don’t ask. “Strippers make more money,” she says,

  “but they’re usually girls on drugs, & I sure don’t

  want anything like that.” No, ma’am, not

  me. She thinks

  my books, Baudrillard’s inept America, & a novel called Ransom,

  look interesting. I like to think about the history

  of this route, but all I really want when I arrive in Laramie

  is a different kind of main street. Sounds simple, doesn’t it,

  almost simple-minded? Okay, I’m working with simple forms.

  MOST AMERICANS HAVE NEVER BEEN WEST OF THE MISSISSIPPI

  Scott MacCloud on the cover of NOW, October 6, 1994. “Hey,”

  says Dahlia

  tall & black & gorgeous

  rolling a joint in the middle of the kitchen where the copy of NOW

  is lying on the kitchen table,

  “What are these white boys into?”

  “Search me,” I say, “there are so many groups out there all you

  really need

  is not love but simply an image, a Look

  like eyes

  painted on a big Halloween pumpkin,

  a gadget,

  a gadget will do.”

  “Any gadget in a storm,” says Alec,

  he’s sitting

  over by the refrigerator finger drumming on the table

  & there’s a big blue jay

  so help me God

  sitting on an electric line outside the window. Alec’s only criticism

  is – none of these groups can play, they can’t play a melodic line,

  & they can’t handle funky time signatures or 3-part chords.

  “So what

  do they do?” says Dahlia holding up the sky blue joint. I say, “I don’t

  know, they’ve got a group called Girls Against Boys, and one of the guys

  used to work in the same Washington, D.C., pet store as one of the guys

  in that other Washington, DC., group – Fugazi.”

  “O,” she says, “wow.”

  NEW YORK JUST THINKS IT’S THE BIGGEST CITY IN AMERICA

  Tom Garrone, tall, curly dark hair, 26, was up in the blue air in the spring of 1986 in New York, tumbling, “Hey, what’s going on? Hey, what’s going on?” like a long arms, long-legged 6’3 ½” open-mouthed, tumbler pigeon.

  And then he landed on his feet in May and it all began happening the way it was supposed to happen. 26 years old. Like natural.

  Like natural, he lucked into a couple of trial songs, and then a whole album, post-punk dirges with some bright hopeful colour leaping up in the minimalist images – for a promising, going places group out of New Jersey originally called the Desperados.

  Now he can pay the rent, and actually put money in the bank, and even more amazing – direct some of his attention back to his writing. Because what Tom really wants is to be a writer, and he wants to write a novel as good as The Stranger or as good as 100 Years of Solitude.

  Now the events in his life are happening much faster than they actually do in the lives of pigeons. They have already been down to Jackson, Miss., for a weekend gig, and gotten in trouble, and they played 3 places in Georgia, coming slowly back north, and one hot 2-night blitz at a club called HOT ZONE in Washington, D.C. They’re back in New York now, with a large rented blue and white tour bus parked outside their rehearsal space warehouse, and Tom is already exhausted.

  It’s late afternoon and he’s at a store on 34th Street called Madonna. He’s buying a couple of shirts, one denim, and one white with vertical red and blue stripes, which seems like a fairly innocent thing to do on a late afternoon day. It’s New York, there are millions of people, Tom isn’t from New York, the weather outside is bucolic. And a song called “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” is going through his mind. Not for any special reason, it’s catchy, it’s a Cyndi Lauper song, he just likes the lead motif at the beginning of the song before her voice fades for a moment and the bass takes over.

  Tonight there’s a big send-off party for the Desperados before they take off tomorrow and the beginning of a midwestern tour, at least 4 or 5 weeks, he isn’t really sure, a lot of hotels with sawdust on the floor, first stop – Bloomington, Ind. Bloomington, Ind., USA.

  There’s another album in the works, and he wants to work on it, and he wants to begin his novel about 2 musicians and a young woman botanist going to Florida to rediscover a friend’s grandfather’s farm. He likes this picture, and he likes his life in New York now that things have gotten better, now that he’s not tumbling in the blue air. But he’s not really crazy about the idea of going on this tour.

  There won’t be that much for him to do anyway, just hang out, do things with Whitney. Whitney is Tom’s girlfriend, extraordinary, moody, beautiful, 24, ambivalent and quite often frustrating. Whitney is the sliding centre of Tom’s mixed-up life these days. She’s the fabulous young singer who fronts for the Desperados. She’s a big fan of Tom’s songs. But off-stage, unless they’re in bed or having a late morning breakfast together, she tends to fluctuate all over New York.

  So, he grabs a cab and heads downtown for 6th Street.

  Tom arrives at the party around 8 o’clock. Loaded with parcels, he didn’t want to bother going home first, he was coming south by cab anyway. The party started early, it’s been going for hours, some of the guys are planning to knock off early around 12, Hayden, the arranger and keyboard player, is expecting some magazine people.

  The huge main room of the loft is full of people, painters, photographers, musicians from other groups, friends, and ex-wives.

  He spots Jack from a distance. Jack said he’d meet him here, and Tom didn’t stop for supper on his way south anyway, he just stopped for a hot veal sandwich and some coffee. He waves, he can talk to Jack later. Whitney is here, although where Tom isn’t sure and doesn’t stop to think especially, Whitney can take care of herself. He puts the parcels at the far end of the improvised bar, gets a drink, a nice cold Lite beer, and sure, ok, he’ll try one Fletcher’s, a notorious southern whiskey of about 86 proof. Then he surveys the crowd.

  Whitney is wandering around, several blocks away at the far end of the enormous room. There are lots of people, wall to wall, as the saying goes, if you’re into walls. Not really Tom’s best atmosphere. Tom is conscious of Whitney wandering loose like the mythological fox his father used to tell him about who set the corn fields on fire. Maybe the fields in the story were wheat fields, Tom can’t remember all the details from his father’s stories.

  “Whitney,” he said to her, sitting in the Blue Gulf Donut Shop in Jackson, Miss., “this is all going to work. My songs, your voice, you’re great on stage, and you’ve got Susan Sarandon legs from here to Wichita.”

  A slight frown of concern had waltzed across her oval elegant face, sitting there in the Blue Gulf. “What I don’t like,” she said, and her voice was slower but more Vassar/California than usual, despite the Hawaiian tokes they had done up and away in the parking lot, Tom sprawled on the front seat, bliss, with his head in Whitney’s lap and one foot out the window, after the concert. “What I don’t like is the way that everything shifts sometimes after I sing; and the fans are applauding, and I think I’ve done something really brilliant, all the attention suddenly shifts to somebody like Mason talking about the goddamn governor of Mississippi. I d
on’t like it,” she said, “it’s not that I disagree with what they’re saying. Fuck,” she said, enjoying the word, “I’m not a smooth supperclub fox, or whatever that southerner Mason may think. But Tom, I am a lady. I’m a singer. And I think they should fucking well respect that, don’t you, Tom, think they should respect me?” It was warm, it was night, and she was troubled.

  Of course he had said yes. He loves Whitney’s voice. It sends shivers of fine blue ice and raw bird bone up and down his long back. But sometimes he isn’t sure if she sees the Desperados as a complete band, or does she see it as a black-white blues band that she gets in front of and tears up brilliant caricatures of Helen Morgan?

  Tom has a dry mouth and a visible blue vein under one huge grey eye, but the tall guy is cracking gum over the heads of about 150 friends of the Desperados in a new white cotton jacket lapels, you know, the works, big flap painter’s pockets and a bright red green & yellow Hawaiian shirt that signals every movement.

  Most but not all of the 150 people in this loft are under 30, but there is lots of diversity. There are photographers, a few painters, they’re not all music people.

  Odd things happen. New York is full of illusions. Surprises abound in every loft or bar of the city. This tall blonde girl walking past Tom is naked from the bright sash waist of her faded blue denims. She has a lovely enigmatic blue-eyed smile and she has nothing but shaving cream, or maybe shampoo, thick white open swirls, on her full perfect but rather arrogant white breasts.

  Tomorrow they leave on their western tour. To take America by storm, the America outside of New York & New Jersey, that is. This is not the night to think about abstractions like permanence, or the epistemology of purpose, or what is the true nature of true love. Ideas like that are as boring and heavy as empty biscuit boxes weighted with leadfoil. This is a good night to get drunk, to see how much it is possible for you to drink in one single sustained unbroken rush in one evening, to get laid, to make love with your honey or with someone else’s main squeeze or eternal delight, to Turkish the harem, or to Harem the turks, slap your best friends on the back repeatedly, hang out the big 1890s industrial windows looking down on East 6th; drop down paper bags of water on other friends’ heads, whatever.