Song to the Leaders of the World (3:26)
I stopped singing like other people after I stopped singing other people’s songs. I became myself early. And who comes after me will be himself earlier. The RPMs get faster. But when I began to sing my own songs I thought that since they were mine no one else could sing them. And then there came one summer’s night to the big Festival, someone no one had ever heard of, and sang my song to the leaders of the world. Now I do that one slow over a fast beat, and I do it looking up from the gutter. I spit it out. But Missy stood with her arms straight at her sides, and looking over everyone’s head she sang it a cappella, full of sorrow and stately warning like the purest most harrowing sermon in church history: with that voice. Remember the fire that chills the sun Remember the light that turns a man to stone Remember the one who rang the world like a bell Remember how his blood ran out and boiled away in Hell. Everything Missy ever had was working for her by the end of that song: straight, pure, uncanny straight pure singing by a pure straight plainly frocked girl with straight hair so blond it was almost white. The try of it was the thing — as always with Missy, till her dying day — a song was a try, not a performance. And that was there in the song, trying it and making it. And her voice. It was saying I know who I am, and now you know who I am. And to all those stunned and dazzled people in the park I was not a major attraction that summer but she had added a dimension to my presence. And when I walked out on the stage they were ready for me. The disquiet of her voice, and her mystery, were still in that park, and so I had to take her, make them forget her, and I moved into a realm where I had never been before, and in that long big-time night of work only two things happened, Missy and young Bathgate. I would not learn to resent her feat for a long long time. You stand in the blinding light and the approval splits your eardrums. At the end of the evening, with everyone onstage for the farewell, I found myself taking her hand, and that triggered the biggest roar of all. And then we milled off and when she got to the side she sat down on a chair she was shaking so, trying to hold her face with her shaking hands. She was ice cold and small, smaller than I expected, a thin smaller girl than showed in the lights with her knees together and the bluewhite skin of her small thin hands holding that face in its fall of goldwhite hair. And she couldn’t stop her frail shoulders trembling, and I said something to her but she couldn’t look up. I took a stance like a cop, feeling this was the place to stand and protect this girl, and suddenly Mr. John Malcolm is beside us, he is holding the neck of his guitar in his big beefy blueblack hand, and his old blueblack face with all the lights is sad and puzzled, and in that deep gentle voice that sings like water when he talks John Malcolm says I got sixty-one years on me and I know where I come from, I come from the fields. What I don’t know is where you come from, where is it you kids come from so fast I never even seen you coming.
Even and Odd in the Garden of Adding (5:15)
But for those of you who follow great tales of true love, like my institutional mothers stirring the soup pots while the radio played them their favorite daytime stories, I just want to remind you that’s how we met, Missy and me, on a stage, in front of twenty thousand people, and we each heard the other’s performance before we ever said hello. There is something we live with, like another sense, or like another dimension added to all our senses, and it is merely the knowledge that if we choose to be somewhere at a certain time then others will choose to be there too. That is power, and it is a strange kick, weird and possessive, it is like an imposition on your being that adumbrates the edges. How to stand in relationship to it was Missy’s constant struggle, and so I made it mine too. See, you can choose to be somewhere for free, for instance, because it’s worthy and small and shabby and nobody expects you. And doing that reduces your market value, except that since history is riding in you everything you do turns out to be right, even what you do to diminish yourself. So then you are accused of sanctimony — as she often was — and the next time when something worthy small shabby and self-diminishing comes along, the position you take must be just a shade more defined, sharpened, in its responsibility. It is a nerve-shredding bag when history makes you a gift of the world. I live with it by believing you put the song out and move on. I hid this from her because I was engrossed in the touch of her cheek on my fingers like the skin of a flower. And her hair falling to her shoulders, and the down like penciled sunlight on the curve of her back. But I had to talk integrity to her round gray serious clear eyes, because conversation was important. Everything was important — sitting on a park bench, as well as making love, reading a book as well as singing to a stadium of people. The first time she began to realize the profound differences in our natures she called me lazy. It was a march just too damn far away from where I happened to be at the moment. She took her acolytes and went alone without me, thinking perhaps in that long ride just what lazy meant, like if you probe a sore tooth with your tongue the pain will finally occupy the entire world. But I was way ahead of her: once we were in London, having a good time in Soho with our English brothers, and it was down in this Italian cellar-restaurant, and we were drinking red wine and eating fettuccine and receiving all these famous people who we didn’t know but had heard of their books or seen their flicks calling us by our familiar names (for it doesn’t matter how you get there, you are all in the same club and share the same worldwide unlisted telephone number), and maybe it was the self-satisfied laughter, the inanity that exists at the top of the world, or maybe it was the color of the walls, but she suddenly said to me, Billy I’ve got to get home. I called a cab, but by home she meant all the way, so we flew to New York, but in New York she meant all the way, so I got us a car and drove through the night to Columbus, Ohio. Now I had never been in that town before but have since played it and it is a state capital where in the restaurants they serve a side dish of fruit salad on lettuce with a topping of mayonnaise. I stopped at seven thirty in the morning at a tract house with a small green lawn in front and a chrome sprinkler lying at rest in the dew. Carrie Mae was waiting in her apron at the open door and the moment she and I looked at each other began our life of enmity as the slim fair girl slipped past us both into the house. Carrie Momma, Missy said from inside, this is
the Billy Bathgate — he drove me all the way home all night, what energy! Billy, this is Mrs. Carrie Mae Wilson who is like a momma to me. I think he’s hungry for breakfast, Carrie Momma. And inside was a small neat house with wall-to-wall bluegreen carpeting and shiny maple furniture, Van Gogh reproductions on the wall, the kind with the computer paint strokes, a gilt mirror with a gilt American eagle set over the fireplace, and on a shiny cobbler’s bench next to the Morris chair was a low stack of National Geographic magazines. Missy’s growing-up home, all you cats. I washed up in the guest bathroom and sat in the cozynook off the kitchen while Carrie Mae angrily whipped up the pancake batter. She kept looking at my lace-up boots, my buckskin jacket. Upstairs a shower ran. Carrie Mae knew I was listening so she began to talk to me and I learned that her anger was not worry, because she knew her baby and her baby could take care of herself, but simple personal displeasure at my appearance and the selfishness of its pretense. She was a wise old Negro lady, and my automatic enemy. She knew before Missy that it could never be. I learned there was a father, that he was a public works engineer who sank water lines and sewage pipes into the ground and was away weeks at a time, and that he was a fine man and good father who loved his daughter and was proud of her. And then Carrie Mae grew still. Because there was singing upstairs and I thought for a moment it was Missy and realized then it was her record player and one of those operatic sopranos was singing something wild, like Richard Strauss, something soaring, some fierce Kraut thing. And then I corrected myself for it was her after all, singing along, matching that chesty record note for note. With a little bit extra amplification of what I would call love for the music. This purely slim chick with breasts of small fruit and a rib cage you could crack with your two hands. She came down a few minutes later and the warm breakfast smells had made me drowsy and my aspirin had worn off and she came in dressed for bed like a barefoot high school girl in her round-collared nightdress, and she sat down to her fresh orange juice and her pancakes and her glass of milk and smiled at me such a fair fine peaceful smile of recognition that I have never forgotten it and never will; it was the lovely smile of no tricks and no secrets, of the profound and gentle courtesy in her tough heart. You see when it was bad for Missy she had someplace she could go anytime, day or night, summer or winter, and she knew someone would be there to serve her a meal and turn back her bed. That was the difference between us right there. Then what happened was we cut a record she and I. The song is not unknown, “The Single-Bullet-Theory Blues,” and it was one of the few times we got together in our professional travels and the only time to sing on the same record; and we sang many takes, and tried many ways, and finally stood at the same mike and held hands and closed our eyes and sang, as if closeness would make our voices match. But they didn’t. Our voices didn’t belong next to each other. So I knew that as a sign. Missy’s talking voice was an ordinary girl’s talking voice with no suggestion of how large it could sing. But my talking voice becomes my singing voice with just a slight heightening of attitude. And in our different relationships to our performing voices I had read the future. But I remember things about her that don’t harden up. That, for instance, I thought for a while her singing voice was accountable to her fear; she was always so scared of being up there, the tremolo in the large, witchy voice was the sound of her fear. But I was wrong. That she was physically delicate and had to rest herself every day, strong in nerve and soul and in the clearness of her mind and determination, but just a slim girl in her bones and with a scarf for her throat on a warm song day of mild breezes. That she saw no contradiction in her practical commonsense decency recipes for the fucked-up world and her private belief in mystical presences, nameless powers who inhabited pebbles and stones, the clouds in the sky, and sometimes the face in her mirror. That she loved to bet I couldn’t make her laugh, and always lost. That she was happy for all the money she made but worried that it compromised her. That she enjoyed the way we made it in our own style, cool and concessionless. That she liked big-beat dancing. That people sent her books they had written — which she never read. That, for a while, while I was writing the songs she liked, she revered me. That maybe I am wrong in thinking I was way ahead of her in the knowledge of us, for perhaps what she called lazy was her glimpse down the tunnel of my eyes to the deep seabed of my murky soul where my songs waited like electric fishes. And one other thing is true: after she caught up to me and neither of us had a secret left, and we were done; after she knew there was nothing I would not try and no road I would not go down; I called her once or twice and she came. When I’d had it with all the clanking machinery of being Billy, with everybody and everything lining up on me — not just the managers and accountants, not just the armies of hacks and flacks and makers of sweatshirts who live off you because they live off the idea of success, but the very iron filings of historical fashion loading themselves on my outlines. And when it was this bad she came and went away with me to my hideout and let me persuade her that we were the only two people alive on the earth. And let us find some air to breathe and breathe it. And let us make up the names of grasses we found and bushes and berries. And love each other’s face in the different lights of morning and afternoon. And eat crackers and canned fruit and go to bed early. And it was Even and Odd in the Garden of Adding And we ate all the fruit we could find From apples persimmons peaches and plums To the sour green watermelon rind And me and my lady we did what was shady And we tried to add up for our kind But Odds add up Even and Even’s in Heaven And God has gone out of his mind