The Ballad of W. C. Fields (2:20)
And so we come to my most recent song, this ballad of W. C. Fields. I sat down not to write it but to give the urgency in my breast a controlled release through my fingertips, and this song is what happened. It happened so fast I didn’t even have time for the music, just the words and the beat. And so it is in the form of a walking song, it walks me through the underworld of the dreaming masses, where this pudgy demon of truth, Mr. W. C. Fields, with his dirty top hat, his run-down elegance of manners, his drunken scrollwork of a personality, presides like the Chief Official over the technology of our souls. And the singer doesn’t want this, he doesn’t like it, and he begins the song by telling Mr. Fields to go away: Go way from my window Mr. W. C. Fields Go way from this beautiful place Go way from my window Mr. W. C. Fields You’re blocking the view with your ugly face. But the clown won’t go away, you see, for he is taking the singer by the hand and leading him through the window over the great landscape of the underworld that looks so beautiful from the window of the safe house and showing him what it really is. And he sees the bubbling sulfur pits of intentions, and the slake mountains of ideals, and great plains of gray ash as far as he can see, the ashes of innocence creased by rivers of blood. And every man he sees is blind and running around in circles and no sound from the tapping of his cane to tell him where he’s going. And a great pestilential wind suppurates the skin of the people and sears their eyes and their hair, and it is the wind of Mr. W. C. Fields ranting. But the worst thing he sees is an old couple exempt from all the misery, a beautiful fair girl and boy in their youth who have grown old together, an aged couple who have loved each other and lived in each other all their lives, in joy and comfort, and now sit chuckling, immune to their surroundings, chuckling in their awful senility. And when the singer is back behind his window and the view looks fine and good and green again, he understands who Mr. W. C. Fields is, and he says: Some day we will stop laughing at you, Mr. Fields At your bulbous nose and the pain of your distress At your thirst and your drunken pratfalls, Mr. Fields At your bitter, bumbling, saintliness. And Mr. Fields brings forth a bottle and blows the dust from two glasses and rubs them on his dirty elegant sleeve and pours us each a drink and says to me: Drink it down, drink it all down, my boy And kick the kids at Christmas I give you my crooked cue stick, Billy Cause you know what the game is
Heist
SUNDAY AFTERNOON. A PEDDLER IN A PURPLE CHORISTER’S ROBE selling watches in Battery Park. Fellow with dreadlocks, a sweet smile, sacral presence. Doing well.
Rock doves everywhere aswoop, the grit of the city in their wings. And the glare of the oil-slicked bay, and a warm-throated autumn breeze like a woman blowing in my ears.