He seemed to enjoy the movie. He laughed loudly and said very kind and smart things about it after. As I walked him out, he grabbed his bottle off the porch floor, said good-bye, and got into his cab.
The New York Times pulled back their front page to put Hitch’s obituary on it. The Times sent out an alert that I got on my phone, breaking news—Hitch was dead. I’m old enough that my friends die, but it’s not often I find out from the paper of record. I was walking out of some theater show in Vegas (yes, we do have theater in Vegas, thank you very much) with my wife. She had gone to the restroom and I was alone in the parking lot, so I turned on my phone to look at my messages, and Christopher Hitchens was dead. Just like that. You can read any obituary you want of Hitch, and it’ll talk about his genius, his bravery, his courage. He did not go quietly into that dark night. Geniuses wrote about his genius even on his deathbed. Listen, cancer, if you’re picking a fight with Hitchens, you might win, but he’ll get in his licks. Everything Hitch did, including dying, was inspiring. I was lucky he came to my home with a bottle in his hand.
Tommy Ardolino, my friend, the wonderful drummer for NRBQ (New Rhythm and Blues Quartet), also got an obit in The New York Times. They didn’t stop the presses, but they recorded the great rocker’s death a few days after he was gone. I found out about Tommy by a tweet of condolence from someone who knows I love him. Tommy didn’t die a brave and strong death. Death didn’t get beat up by Tommy. Tommy didn’t humiliate death. Death owned Tommy’s ass way before it took him.
Tommy liked to listen to records. I like to listen to records. Some of my closest friendships with people were made in playing records for each other. I talk a lot, but I think I can tell you more about myself by sitting you down and playing the records that mean the most to me. I have bunches of goofy records that no one has heard. Really rare stuff. I have a nutty and wonderful record collection. It’s hard to find rarity of any kind anymore. You can find anything on the big World Wide InnerTube. My whole collection is out there somewhere, sitting on hundreds of goofy websites. The music is there, but you won’t find it. Someone has to lead you to it. Tommy led us to a lot.
Tommy spent a lot of time in record stores and finding used records wherever they could be found. He picked through Salvation Army stores, and yard sales. There was a category of record that mystified him for a while. Turned out, he was finding song poem records, before anyone I knew knew what they were. Tommy led me to song poems.
Song sharks put advertisements in the back of cheesy magazines looking for songwriters. “Put your poems to music.” The unknown poet would read the ad, send in a poem, and no matter what the poem was, the song shark wrote back that the fish had talent. For a bunch of monthly payments, the naïve poet would have his or her songs put to music, performed, recorded on a record and then, the scam made the fish believe, the new songwriting team could start the journey to getting the songs on the Billboard charts. The song sharks never really tried to sell the songs. Their money was made from the poet’s investment. They got several hundred dollars (plus financing fees from the payment plans) to bang out a quick musical chart for whatever poem was sent in. They’d get a bunch of jaded musicians to do one take on each song and record dozens in one afternoon. They would make an album’s worth of these song poems, record them, press enough for everyone whose poem was recorded, and send them off to the marks. For a few hundred dollars, you got your poem set to music and you had a professional recording of it. You also had some hopes and dreams. In some people’s minds, you were also a fool. It’s like that with hopes and dreams.
Some of the vinyl never made it back to the lyricists. Song sharks pressed too many, or they bounced from the address, or maybe they miscounted or got a bulk rate, I don’t know, but these song-poem records were dumped into used record bins for a nickel apiece or something. Who would buy these mysterious unknown records? Tommy Ardolino. I have Tommy’s collection in my home now. There are a lot of them to wade through and Tommy waded with glee. Most of the songs are about Jesus or a president, but some of them have a purity you’re never going to get out of any other kind of music. The collision of the naïve and the cynical at the speed of CERN. Musicians who don’t care at all performing hack music around words that are nothing but passion. Here is the poem that was turned into Tommy’s favorite song poem. I urge you to take a moment and find it on the Web and hear the music. Hear the singer struggle with the meter and the rhyme that doesn’t rhyme without the writer’s exact dialect (“route” and “foot”). This would never be a real song, but why not? If music is communication of the heart, this sure is that. All that’s wrong with these lyrics is the juggling. The magic is perfect.
Do You Know the Difference Between Big Wood and Brush? (Louise I. Oliver, 1974) as recorded by Gary Roberts & The Satellites
Do you know the difference between big wood and brush?
Do you know the difference between big wood and brush?
Some men when going through the change
Don’t seem to patch things [up] at home and remain
Some men stay with their wives for many years
Keep pushin’ forward, tryin’ to conquer their fears
Brush sometimes seems to get into their way
Causes them to want to get out and play
Brush has a tendency to get in their way
Comes along and drives them astray
Do you know the difference between big wood and brush?
Do you know the difference between big wood and brush?
You may think this is hearsay, and I don’t know what I’m talkin’ about
But hear this story about my sister, and you will soon find out
Her husband dropped her at the hospital, as he had always done
She got [up] to leave and waited for her husband to return
She went over and called home on the phone
But he did not answer, he was not at home
He had been fairly punctual in the past
Then she looked and saw him through the window glass
Do you know the difference between big wood and brush?
Do you know the difference between big wood and brush?
He said he was late ’cause he’d run over a woman’s foot
This was the beginning of his search for another route
He had been accusing her of holding him back
He went out to meet that woman, he’d thought he was on the right track
As time went on she thought that things were going along good
But he said things were bad between them as they stood
His other woman had called the house several times on the phone
But June came along, he slipped into the house, got his clothes and was gone
Do you know the difference between big wood and brush?
Do you know the difference between big wood and brush?
Then one year and five months later
Her life could not be any greater
He called on Thanksgiving night
Said he was coming home to get things right
Brush always seems to burn out, but big wood keeps burnin’ on
That’s why he turned around and came back home
Do you know the difference between big wood and brush?
Do you know the difference between big wood and brush?
I judge people by how they react when I play them Tommy’s favorite song poems. Everyone laughs, but I judge them by the quality of their laughter. Maybe it’s all in my head. My analysis is probably just an extension of how I already feel about the potential new friend. The laughter is a place to project my unconscious thoughts, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like I can hear differences. I want the laughter to be pure. Laughter about all human hearts and not at some dipshit buying his dreams in the back of the National Enquirer. I laugh, not because the songs are stupid, but because the songs are too true. Lady Gaga is protected by skill. She’s good and good makes her bulletproof. The pe
ople who write song poems don’t have any armor at all. They are running around naked wearing antlers and we all have fully automatic weapons with laser sites. There is something about a cynical person singing sloppy truth that makes me need to hug my children. That might make you laugh, but if you laugh the wrong way, I may not want to play you any more of my records.
Tommy’s death was a tragedy, but he had a kind of charmed life. Tommy’s working-class mom and dad got him a drum set as a child and he banged to his swinging records all the time. His favorite band in the world was NRBQ (he shared that with Bonnie Raitt, Elvis Costello, Paul McCartney and a bunch of other wicked famous music people). He wrote a letter to NRBQ’s keyboard player, Terry Adams, and somehow, with parental consent, at fifteen years old, Terry let Tommy come on the road with the NRBQ. When their real drummer left before the encore one night, Tommy was there. He had never played drums with live musicians before. His first loose, swinging, snare explosion in front of anyone was in back of NRBQ. It was a couple years later that he was a full-time member of the Q. With Joey Spampinato on bass, Ardolino/Spampinato became NRBQ’s “Ravioli Rhythm Section.” Tommy bagged groceries for one day, but other than that, Tommy never had a real job. Never did a second real day’s work in his too short life. Tommy was two months older than me.
Tommy and NRBQ went along together for over thirty years. Tommy held his left drumstick between his index and fuck-you fingers. It was neither a jazz grip nor a rock grip. It was Tommy’s grip. It gave a fierce snap to the snare. Play me beat 2 and 4 from any one measure of an NRBQ record, and I’ll recognize Tommy’s snare pop right away. Tommy played so hard and so often (NRBQ did over two hundred live dates every year), that he developed calluses on the inside of his fingers just a bit smaller than half Ping-Pong balls. It looked really creepy. Tommy couldn’t put those two fingers together. He was forced by his altered biology to always be flashing a peace sign. Mohawk punks do body modifications in piercing parlors. Tommy did his body mod banging rhythm and blues.
Tommy played drums and he played records for people. He had long, unfashionable curly hair (look who’s talking) and he was too fat for rock and roll (look who’s talking). He had a smile that kept people guessing. I talked to Tommy a lot, and we loved each other, but we didn’t really connect on a verbal level. I never knew what he was talking about. When I talked, he smiled and loved me, but never gave a really appropriate response. I’d compliment his performance and Tommy would meow like a cat and rub against me. Or he’d puff up his cheeks and make weird sounds like he was a little man trapped in a box. The last time I saw him he said, “Penn, what’s going to happen to us?” over and over. When he sent me some song poem records, he had written on the box, “What’s going to happen to us?” I think it was one of those simple questions and Tommy was waiting for an answer.
The answer was we’re all going to die. We’re all going to be gone and leave behind nothing but memories and love, and Tommy left a lot of that. Tommy didn’t fight like Hitch against death. He begged death to come to him.
First, throat cancer came to Terry, the Thelonious Monk/Jerry Lee Lewis/Chico Marx keyboard player of NRBQ. It looked like Terry might not survive, and the dying of their leader was enough to break up NRBQ. They all stopped working while Terry fought cancer. Big Al (I’m bigger than Big Al. I know Big Dave and I’m bigger than he; I met Big Mike, and I’m bigger than he; if I didn’t have a stupid name, I would have “Big” in front of it) had been replaced in NRBQ when he started getting songs recorded by Nashville cats. I think Joey, the bass player, started working as a house painter. Tommy got right to work on dying. He’d lost his band. His parents were dead. His wife divorced him. He lived in his parents’ house in Springfield, Massachusetts (right down Route 91 from my hometown), until the house went into foreclosure. A loving friend of the band bought the house at auction and allowed Tommy to stay there. He stayed there. He did nothing but stay there. He bought food for his cats and alcohol for himself. He was offered gigs with lots of bands, real bands, good bands, but he didn’t take them. He stopped taking care of himself. Maybe he’d never taken care of himself; maybe others always had. He ate only what friendly neighbors brought to him. They’d bring a big plate of pasta to last him awhile, he’d eat it all at once, and then eat nothing. When there was a big power outage in western Mass he sat in the cold dark until Terry, having beaten cancer and started another NRBQ, thought of Tommy and sent someone to check on him. Tommy went from the couch to the hospital. He was treated for all his neglect, liver problems and diabetes for a couple months, but it was all palliative. Tommy died.
Hitch fought for life and Tommy seduced death. Hitch owned every room he walked into. Tommy wasn’t much noticed without a trap set and a band around him. I loved them both and they’re both dead.
I have friends, older than I, who are concerned about their legacies. They are thinking about how they will be remembered. They are making sure their notebooks are in order for posterity. These are friends who have brought a lot of influence and joy to a lot of people. Now they want to make sure they keep doing that after they’re dead. It seems nutty to me.
I’m slowly reading Arguably by Hitchens. It’s the last book he published during his lifetime, but unless I die wicked soon, it won’t be the last Hitch book I read. I’m playing a lot of NRBQ, listening to Tommy bang those drums. I’m thinking about how much joy they both brought me and how much they changed my life. I’ll be dead soon too. I don’t know whether it’ll be a few dozen years, a few hundred years, or thousands of years, but Hitch and Tommy will eventually be forgotten. All legacy is temporary. Nothing matters. In several generations even our bequeathed DNA will be diluted to a general human blend. None of our individual traits will be recognizable.
There is no way to cheat. Everyone and everything will be completely forgotten. That’s true, but I’m a nutty optimist and I can’t just leave it there. I have to add that maybe the singularity will happen and there will be a forever for at least some intents and purposes. I just got to laughing. I’m worried that something I’ve written here could be proven wrong and shortsighted in a hundred years. As I write about there being no legacy and Hitch and Tommy being forgotten, I’m worried about how these words will look in the future, long after I’m dead. I’m such an asshole. That’s my point.
During a debate with some rabbi, Hitch was asked, “Do you believe in free will?” Hitch responded, “I believe we have no choice.” I don’t know how much Hitch was referencing Isaac Bashevis Singer in that quotation, and that answer is also written by Vonnegut, sung in a very high pitch by Rush, and it all builds on Sartre, though Jean-Paul wasn’t the first. A while ago, I could have fired an e-mail off to Hitch and got that quotation’s provenance, but now Hitch is dead. Hitch and Tommy will be forgotten, but it doesn’t feel that way. Their lives feel like they mattered. Nothing but the feeling of mattering matters. That feeling is life. I can no longer get wisdom directly from Hitch. Tommy can no longer play records. The future where they are forgotten doesn’t exist, and yet in our hearts’ imagined futures they are remembered forever.
Listening to: “Immortal for a While”—NRBQ
Tommy and me.
MY FIRST FATHER’S DAY CARD
I WILL NEVER EXPERIENCE SENDING AND RECEIVING a Father’s Day card on the same day. I don’t get to feel the chain of life that allows me to look up and look down at the same time. I’ll never have a day where I talk to both my father and my son. That makes me cry every time I think about it, and I think about it all the time. I cry a lot. The difference between joyous crying and sad crying is only for the young. With my parents dead and my children alive, I can never tell why I’m crying. The sadness of my parents’ death is the joy of my children’s lives. Those feelings are the same. That’s life, motherfucker. I’m old enough to know that I’ll never again really know why I’m crying.
My mom and dad never met our children. They never met my wife. Mom and Dad were dead before my children were bor
n and before I met my wife. Worse, my parents knew exactly what they were missing, even though I didn’t. They watched me piss away the shared joy of my future family. My parents knew they would never meet my children. We all knew I’d have children. They knew I’d meet someone to love and share my life with. My parents knew exactly what they were missing and they missed it. It was a hole in their hearts that’s now a hole in my heart. Mom and Dad knew that I wanted to be successful professionally first and that was going to take more time then we would have together. They saw plenty of the fame. My mom and dad were at both of Penn & Teller’s Broadway openings. They made the paperboy watch me on SNL. They were extras in the movie that Teller and I wrote and starred in. It’s the Mexican restaurant scene and my dad is right behind me. I can’t see him and he can’t see me, but we’re fiddling with our silverware in exactly the same way. Nature or nurture? Many times they mentioned gently to me that they would like to meet their grandchildren before they died, but I wanted time to go on the fucking Letterman show. What the fuck was wrong with me? My excuse now is that I hadn’t met the mother of their grandchildren. That’s more than an excuse; that’s my real reason. I wasn’t willing to settle for someone less than Emily. I wanted perfect. I wasn’t looking for a wife. I was looking for Emily and she found me. Mom and Dad would have loved our family, their family, with a pure love as hot as the sun, or one of those other suns a zillion light years away that’s way hotter than our little pussy sun. My parents could love. Fuck, could they love.
Every Day is an Atheist Holiday! Page 20