Lost Joy

by Camden Joy

  CALL OFF THE FATWA

  WHEN I WAS A WEE SPROUT in Fresno, dirt and fog capital of the world, we walked the new-tilled soil in Walkman headphones, kicking furrows barefoot, tamping down dirtclods, and chanting along to Freedy Johnston’s first cassette. How we heard this back then, I scarcely can figure; apparently few in New York yet knew Freedy (who had only just arrived from the Midwest) but somehow all in Fresno did (were we some test audience, the other Kansas in Freedy’s marketing heart?).

  We particularly adored the song “Fun Ride,” his loose, bouncy tribute to both a delirious carnival and a complicated relationship, a recklessly whooshing song yet handily controlled. It formed the everything of our love for him. “Pull the plug on that thing,” Freedy says, commanding his girl to turn off the television for how it can’t compare to the upcoming “Fun Ride”: “It won’t lift you fifty feet.” This particular observation, this liberating contempt, became our anthem, the voice of our gang of Fresno toughs.

  A short time later, Freedy passed through on tour. By then his second cassette had dropped on us out of the drought-dead skies, a far, far greater wonder than his first, falling on our ears generous and splendid like some Marshall Plan or a Gods Must Be Crazy Coke. Elsewhere Freedy was still nobody, but in Fresno he sold out the college football stadium. My friend Melvin Toff and I made over $1,327.18 on bootleg tee shirts we silk-screened in the campus parking lot and sold to the ticket-less thousands who were turned away. “Place your faith in Freedy,” our shirts read. “He will lift you fifty feet.”

  And we built something for the state fair called “Fun Ride.” We worked, in constructing our “Fun Ride,” to render his carefully careless song inhabitable. Every egress would, as per the song, demonstrate what it celebrated. Every I-beam would contain the locked-in dynamism audible in the tumbling chorus, every structural cable would reference Freedy’s ingenious arrangement.

  Our “Fun Ride” was a huge hit. People enjoyed going on it, and they learned a lot. We garnered the red ribbon at state level but were edged out in the nationals by “Keep Punching Joe,” a vintage 17th century pugilist masque produced—no!—by our long-standing rivals, the Daniel Johnstons.

  People lately have asked why a man of my advanced years, frequently faint and sallow, stooped in gait and almost hard of hearing, and now—at long last—too old to vote, called for the killing of Freedy. Yet I ask those early Freedy fans who endured the muzak puke that comprised his last release, can you blame me? Why, that other Johnston—Daniel Johnston—he was never this bad, would never sing something that didn’t hang in his lungs for a time, would never thrive on sweets. The conclusion was inescapable: we had backed the wrong Johnston. The feigned David Gates-isms of this new Freedy! That unrocking rock! The public and press all appeared to appreciate it, but this was wrong.

  And so in slippers I slowly set out from my Stuyvesant Town nursing home in brisk November, 1995, trailing an IV and carrying a pail of wheatpaste, to remind the world that Freedy used to be better. Strangers spat invectives at the sickly old man and telephoned at all hours, yet still I persevered! I glued up street manifestos—I did this! Yes!—which tried in their tiny way to ask what happened to the long ago Fresno Freedy we wore on our chests, who sang with such subtle verve and appeared incapable of letting us down.

  The staff here have since corrected my meds. The voices are gone and my vision less blurry. My family, when they visit, speak to me as if I have years left, though this too is some sick joke. Recently my dew-lipped niece Deborah brought me the next Freedy CD, Never Home. As it played on the hospital’s bedside boombox, she perched lightly upon the arm of the divan just as you’d expect, watching the inconstant beeps and blinks on the panels of my electronic monitors as if to read some response, desperate to be able to convey my sincere apologies to the world. And . . .

  The CD wasn’t so bad, really. It still sounded like the type of stuff listened to by candlelit women in slinky bed apparel as they sip chilled wine from tall stemware, shaking their heads over those louses they always seem to date. Okay, so no one was lifted fifty feet or encouraged to miss work. But time and again Freedy casually picked a graceful detail—“leaving just enough for the weekly rent, plus a little change”—and abruptly carried it into the spirit of a character—“taking the long way to anyplace, in the frozen rain.” Or he’d tell several stories at once, as when a klepto’s case study in “On the Way Out” also supplies guilty dialogue with a girlfriend.

  And there are still displays of singing brilliance, in the way he treasures a throwaway line like “now it’s been two months,” starting enraged and closing in pieces, and the stirring manner in which he slows his syllables singing, “I loved you or . . . something like that, anyway.”

  At last, making sounds which best belong under the rolling credits of a film of heartland romance, Never Home concluded. I waved a hand with difficulty. “Well,” I croaked. “Let him live.”

  “Oh!” dewy-eyed Deborah bounded about, clapping her dewclaws delightedly and moving as if to kiss me. “You won’t be sorry, Uncle. I promise! You won’t!”

  He is trying, after all. I think maybe you can almost possibly hear it in “Seventies Girl,” when the band timidly leans into the picture of the song, Freedy’s entire presence aglow with delicate ache, and you hear it in the ambitious writing of songs like “Gone to See the Fire” (in which a couple split over arson)—you hear him working to reconnect with the Freedy who broke my friends free from those unshod yesterdays of Central California, when all we possessed was fallow soil and truly our future was fog.

  THE GREATEST RECORD ALBUM BAND THAT EVER WAS

  IT’S GETTING DARK earlier and earlier. So days cool off. Traffic clogs with thieves, slipping from the city center with billfolds fat. Even insects head on home. All the brake lights smeary in the fog make my evening into this red haze, a fire streak, an exit sign. Drivers use the slowdown to lower their $375 windows and spit, exhale their $5 cigarettes, wave various $2,000 limbs to insult the topography. Laid down here beside the freeway, bare, buzzed and finely longing, I hear someone in what sounds to be a BMW complaining hotly about a co-worker, she didn’t bother with the depo summary until well past the designated deadline. Some carpooler in what I imagine is a crowded Tercel is describing her date. Their stories travel into the evening, sway the stringy leaves of my weedy barkwood and shake down dew onto me. I catch fan-belt noise, loose beauty rings, cylinders misfiring. I pretend to diagnose their cars’ various difficulties, but that was my good friend Guy, not me, who was the mechanic. I was just his apprentice. Someone in a Taurus gently addresses a loved one through a carphone. Someone slows down with a horrible squeal. “Need your back brakes checked,” I holler without getting up to look. It hurts my jaw to yell, I wasn’t even thinking. Ouch. More loose dew splashes down on me.

  Guy will come by later, very soon. I wish he would still correct me regarding car parts, address me as mechanic to apprentice, but will he?—no, he won’t, won’t bother pointing out that I heard the disc not drum brakes. He’ll come by tonight like he does every night now, like a robot, and he’ll talk endlessly about one thing: the greatest record album band that ever was. That’s it, that’s the show, that’s all he does anymore. You’d think a band gone for nearly forever wouldn’t stir up so much passion. You’d be wrong. He’ll swing his arms in a circular motion until he sops up the gravy of the world with this band. I kept thinking his visits were meant to be sweet but like how apples go bad from the inside out, like how someone takes your shoes while you’re asleep, that’s how I realized it’s not at all sweet in any way. It’s a curse.

  That said, when a motorcycle cuts down between the cars, moving way too fast and watched all the while in rear-view mirrors by nervous drivers who admire the balls this guy has, and as he takes his life in his hands, suited up in a full armor of leather and a dark helmet, slaloming through and around these halted heaps of painted $37,500 scrap metal, I get, like I always used to, all choked up with
pride. He’s doing it. Risking it. “What good is a song that is not speeding, a dance that cannot be rushed, gambling without raising stakes, life that will not be risked, a dare not taken? Why bother awakening if not to glimpse terror? Is there growth without challenge? Of course not! There is no point to any of it but risk.” His words float up to me from when I was thirteen or fourteen, maybe twelve, and Guy was nineteen, twenty.

  “That’s it, brother!” I yell into the night. Ouch, the jaw again. The dew patters down in large drops, in my hair, on my sleeping bag. “That’s my Guy!” Because initially, yeah, I’m still stirred by his visits, okay.

  It’s like Guy admitted a few nights ago, “Sine frater, sine amicus: spe carens.”

  I agreed, yeah. Without brothers, without friends: hopeless. It’s all about friends, isn’t it, really? Isn’t it? Or as Guy might once have said, “Coming in from the heat, your face burnt from the peril and hazard of it all to find your welcoming warm friends—that’s pretty much life, can we not agree?”

  But that’s not what he means anymore, of course. I’m not ever directly in his concerns as he speaks now. “This Latin epistle,” Guy declares, “confirmed from the most base of sources: the story of the musical rock band Creedence Clearwater Revival (comprised of the brothers Fogerty—Tommy and J.C.—backed by Stu Cook and Doug Clifford) which formed in junior high.”

  “A story,” I interject, though why bother, it’s as if I’m talking to a television, “which attracts ironies like a magnet.” He’s prerecorded, I’m nowhere near at all.

  “For ten years the brothers led without incident an obscure party band—such faith, to play that long without recognition, such complete confidence and familiarity with one another—and the brothers could have probably kept playing together for eternity had not something atrocious occurred—”

  “And that was . . .”

  “Fame descended with all its attendant griefs and arduous inequities! Which is to say that once you and I entered the process, we ruined them.”

  It’s not even worth meeting his look. His eyes don’t track. He never used to talk this way, I don’t think. He was sent here by an intergalactic hovercraft, by the State Council of Pesticide Manufacturers (SCPM), by the hypnotic advisory board of the advertocracy. “After Creedence began to record their own material, a mean toll was taken—brother against brother as if at Shiloh the Fogertys began to fight—the brothers began to bicker and ultimately the brothers parted and that spelled ‘T-H-E E-N-D’ for Creedence—ten years of unceasing struggle for three measly years of arguable recognition.

  “Perhaps,” he continues, collecting his cues from every pompous orator I have ever observed, “you might argue their recognition is not ‘arguable’—”

  “Me?”

  “But I argue no accolade is too big for these brothers’ britches.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “For even though Tommy never penned any Creedence tunes, never sang lead vocals, only played the simplest (most replace-able) instrument (rhythm guitar?! even to call his parts ‘the least memorable in every song’ is perhaps to go not far enough) yet still this meddlesome brother was in some way indispensable.”

  “Because . . .”

  “Before they renamed themselves Creedence they were known as ‘Tommy Fogerty and the Blue Velvets’ and younger brother J.C. was merely one more Blue Velvet star.”

  “Blue Velvet, hunh.”

  “What came of all this brotherly strife, you ask—great creative productive times?—You may as well inquire as to the good of Shiloh! Without Tommy, Creedence managed to complete only one more record album before splitting. J.C. made two bad solo albums then met a prolonged writer’s block—”

  “Were you sleeping, brother John?”

  “Tommy—”

  “The old fogey of the Fogertys.”

  “Made a bad solo record album, caught tuberculosis, and hacked himself to death. Tommy’s death took ten years. J.C.’s writer’s block took the same. Just as J.C. emerged with a hit record album, Tommy went into the ground.”

  “Aw, shut up, Guy,” I snap, nowhere close to polite. I bury my face in a crumpled-up jacket. “I’m napping.”

  “Behind the flow of what robes and garments have they hidden the Creedence Churches? Where are the endless TV tributes? Why have we taken this great band so for granted? Honor CCR for how they mistrusted the demeaning junkie sex primitive draw of flash and slogans that made crowds roar for the Stones and Doors! A Bronx huzzah for how completely they lacked that stiff respect for elders which made bookish sorts drool over Dylan and the Band! Gift CCR with an avalanche of pastries for side-stepping the obscure mood pieces, the too-hip gutter praise that made audiences scratch themselves confusedly while watching the Velvet Underground and Stooges—”

  “Okay, I have a thought or two about that—”

  “CCR’s problem, it seemed, was they cared too much about the songs and respected too much the people that heard them to accept a cheap PA and superficial sloganeering. You do realize that the last words in Twilight Zone: The Movie—”

  “That literal killer of a film.”

  “Were ‘I love Creedence!’”

  “Well, I may not have realized that,” I admit. “No.”

  “But alas, having assumed Creedence was lost to us forever—”

  “But you were wrong. Creedence lives.”

  “Such ecstatic happiness descends on me in finding I am completely wrong—yes! I am wrong, they live—”

  “That’s better.” The traffic has picked up again. Cars make loud wagh-wagh-wagh sounds as they shoot by, always managing to just miss each other, a miracle a minute.

  “For Science tells us Creedence lives forever in that every signal that has ever been beamed or broadcast about planet Earth—be it military transmission or satellite photograph or television picture—comes both into our home and simultaneously hurtles away from here at speeds invisible to the naked eye, easing ’cross the universe at 299,792.8 km per second.”

  Guy paces nervously at the head of my sleeping bag in the near-blackness. I imagine his features, his expressions, I conjure him up.

  “You can picture an individual far away on Mars receiving all our TV and radio broadcasts approximately four and two-fifths minutes late—”

  “Given,” I concur, “their distance.”

  “Being always four and two-fifths minutes behind planet Earth in everything, fashion, real estate, geography, everything, and another individual farther away on Pluto also receiving everything but being more like five and a quarter hours behind the times—our radio past lives forever in deep space and therefore the more a band made it on the radio in the past the more forever they live—and one can imagine oneself rocketing away from planet Earth at the speed of light, at 299,792.8 km per second, at the speed—in short—of radio and one would be sailing in sync with the radio transmissions, riding on the same day in electronics history for eternity, like rocketing away at 299,792.8 km per second on Fifteen August of 1969 you’d be inescapably locked into hearing 8/15/69 for eternity—”

  “As long as your speed kept up.”

  Guy actually appears to acknowledge me with a rare pause, but maybe he’s just thinking. “Which would be a good day: the radio filled with ‘Green River’ b/w ‘Commotion’ the new double-sided CCR single—such brilliant 7″ Creedence vinyl record discs were being frisbee’d out of the factory once a month in those days—and out the rocket window as the solar system fell away and all that is familiar disappeared from view you’d still have the oddly nostalgic twenty-five-year-old Fogerty—according to Science, he’d always and only be oddly nostalgic and twenty-five—telling you: Take me back down where cool water flows. Let me remember things I love: stoppin’ at the log where catfish bite, walkin’ along the river road at night, barefoot girls dancin’ in the moonlight.”

  “You’re not gonna recite the whole song now, are you?”

  “I can hear the bullfrog callin’ me; wonder if my ro
pe’s still hangin’ to the tree.”

  “You are.”

  “Love to kick my feet ’way down in shallow water. Shoefly, dragonfly, get back t’your mother. Pick up a flat rock, skip it across Green River.”

  “Point taken, plenty said.”

  “Up at Cody’s camp I spent my days with flat-car riders and cross-tie walkers. Old Cody Junior took me over, said, ‘You’re gonna find the world is smold’rin’—if you get lost come on home to Green River.’”

  When I was thirteen, fourteen, maybe twelve, I went to summer camp in the bug-filled, boiling mountains. Each night, after supper in the mess hall, a bus painted flat, battleship grey took us into town. We were given free license to wander about the skee-ball arcades. I followed the lit alcohol ads going blinky-blink out the back exit and across the alley. Hearing the music of the saloon addressing me from within, I inquired of the gatekeeper, “How old do you have to be to get in here?” I pretended I could not make sense of the sign which clearly said NO ONE UNDER 21 ADMITTED. She pressed a nostril shut with one finger and blew a wild spurt of snot out the other. She hacked a few sputumy hacks into a cocktail napkin, glared up and down the alley, glared up and down at me. Then she barked her answer: “Two dollars and fifty cents.”