Nineteen
NOW I REALLY FEEL RICH. Gene sent me an email to tell me that the University of Somewhere Far Away With a Big Football Team had ordered two hundred more copies of Only Rhyme for the fall term. “I thought you’d like to know,” he wrote. He wants to encourage me. So much of what an editor does is encouragement, flattery, and acts of kindness. They’re such good people. I’ve never had a bad experience with an editor. And now they must grope their way through the ebook revolution, squabbling with Amazon, trying to figure out how to make money. They believe in what they do. Some of them must have secret doubts. Another memoir this month, another set of blurbs to solicit, another mailing of bound galleys to people like me who don’t read them. I have guilty stacks of them in my office, each with an enthusiastic letter tucked in the front. Wave after wave of unread words. Blah, guilt!
After I made the circuit of the upper-body machines at Planet F, I sat in the car, parked in a tiny patch of shade in back near a self-seeded oak tree, and I said aloud, “What have we given to the world?” We in the United States, I meant. What do we have to be proud of? Warfarin and Risperdal and Effexor and Abilify and Hellfire missiles and supermax prisons and the revenge killing of Osama bin Laden — and the Staple Singers. Music. I’d give anything to sing like the Staple Singers. Anything I have. “Undertaker, please drive slow.” The Staple Singers is what we’ve given to the world.
I drove past the trendy pizza place where a girl with a beautiful mouth used to work. She rarely smiled. She just tucked in the corners of the pizza boxes and handed them over the counter to people with twenty-dollar bills. She didn’t have to smile. She doesn’t work there anymore, but I was shocked all over again at the memory of how lovely she was. Just a pizza girl. Now she’s off somewhere, living life, paying off her college loans, giving other people the benefit of her selfless amazing mouth.
Today I watched Coal Miner’s Daughter, with Sissy Spacek. See what I mean? Small actress, big mouth. What stunned me about the movie is that Sissy Spacek, whom I’ve never understood before because she has such a tiny nose, did all the singing in the movie. None of it was overdubbed by Loretta Lynn. It’s all Spacek’s own singing. She spent days and days with Loretta Lynn — a year together, said Loretta in the bonus video — practicing Loretta’s songs. Loretta taught Sissy all her nuances and tricks. She, Loretta, said she can’t watch the movie because it was too painful and too true. It was a larger-than-life version of her life, including all the screwed-up wrongs done by her husband, Dew — if that was his name, played by Tommy Lee Jones in dyed reddish-blond hair and eyebrows — all his drinking and carousing and philandering.
Another thing that got my attention in the movie — this was revealed in an interview that the director, Michael Apted, did with Loretta Lynn — was that Loretta wrote her songs while driving in the car to Nashville. That’s the important truth that we don’t learn anywhere in the movie but we do learn from what she tells us in the extras. She drove in her fancy Lincoln or Cadillac and she rhymed up her setbacks and her heartaches, and it all happened in her car.
I took the long way home, like Supertramp, and in the gloaming I saw a sign at a roadside farm stand. I used it in a song:
Native peaches
Fresh tomatoes
Lots and lots of corn
Hot blueberries
Cold chicken
And ridiculous amounts of porn
Then I stopped my Kia, my precious Korean Kia with one hundred and twenty-three thousand miles on it, on the road by a lumpy enormous green field. One spreading tree was left unfelled in the middle, as if in a painting by Constable. I could imagine the farmer resting his plow horse there in the shade on a hot day. Rounded shouldery boulders of last year’s hay wrapped in white plastic were stacked off to one side. Every so often someone drove by in a red Subaru or a gray pickup with a lid over the back.
Tim said there isn’t a good anti-drone song. I thought of trying to write it from the presidential point of view. I’d have President Obama sing something like “Today is Tuesday and I’m the warrior in chief. My people come into the office and we go down the list. I like to know who’s going to die next. And I like the world to know that I’m a no-nonsense killer man who keeps us safe with robot planes. I like to go out afterward and have a smoke knowing I’ve decided which of my enemies I should kill. Sometimes little children are killed as well, and I’m sorry about that, but that’s what happens, and I can’t comment because it’s classified security information. Today is Tuesday and I’m the warrior in chief.”
But I know that would make for a terrible song — too on-the-nose. Too hard. Too angry. Too ungrieving. Griefs, not grievances, are what we need, said Robert Frost.
• • •
THERE’S AN INDUSTRIAL MACHINE made by the Sturtevant company called a Simpactor. I had a roommate long ago who had an internship at Sturtevant, and he talked about it in detail — interestingly, he was a big Talking Heads fan. He said there are several ways to grind things up fine: you can crush them between rollers or you can send them through an old-fashioned stone grinder, as in a flour mill, or — he lifted a finger — there’s a machine called a Simpactor with a horizontal plate that spins. The coarse chunks fall onto the middle of the plate, where they are flung out toward a set of steel pins around the edge. Some of the pins are fixed and some are attached to the plate and move, and when the pins intersect they gnash and crush the crumbs of substance until it’s just the right consistency. The Simpactor is useful for the pharmaceutical industry, my roommate said, because you need things ground very fine in order for them to be absorbed by the body. “That’s fascinating,” I said, “I had no idea.” He didn’t seem full of wonder at the Simpactor, though — he was much more interested in the Talking Heads concert that was coming up.
Tracy Chapman puts me through a moral Simpactor, breaking me into tiny pieces of uniform diameter so that I can absorb my own inadequacy. I think Tim may be wrong—“Change” may be the greatest protest song ever written. It’s good partly because it offers no specific event or action. It’s not protesting anything by name. It leaves it all up to you. It’s just a series of questions. It asks these questions and prompts you to try to answer them, just as the Quakers ask questions. They have a list of questions called the Queries. Sometimes a woman reads one at Kittery Friends Meeting. One of the queries goes something like: Are you acting with love toward others? And I have to say, No, I’m not. Often I’m not. When I say catty things about Picasso or Ezra Pound, that psychotic, hateful fraud, I’m not bathed with generous feelings. When I imagine sneery songs about Barack Obama, I’m not a loving person at all.
I was making a second deviled-ham sandwich, using what remained in the can, and thinking about the importance of the inductive method, with “Change” on auto-repeat, when I heard some odd loud popping sounds. At first I thought they were something in the song that I hadn’t noticed before, and then I realized that they were from outside the house. They seemed to be coming from the barn. I stopped the music and listened. I heard two loud explosions and then a sort of rolling thunder accompanied by an awful wooden twisting noise that didn’t bode well at all. The dog was barking furiously. I went outside in time to see a large cloud of what looked like smoke ploofing out from the undercroft of the barn, down where I stored the canoe and my father’s collection of plastic packaging.