LISTEN to this story on The American Friend. By the speaking half of the songwriting team of Fairall and Danz. It's about a certain place on MacDougal…
“There’s only one
me, and I’m stuck with him.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
NOBODY ELSE. JUST ME.
The man
was huge, a behemoth. He had a whopping imponderable face like a sledgehammer
jammed onto a thickset steel beam inexplicably melted from the heat of the crowd.
When the man turned, ever so slightly and sweating profusely, his complexion
caught glassy bourbon washed light from the bar. Then, he looked like meat.
Van
Terry shrank from the big man’s glare and stepped further from the perimeter of
the actor’s implied barricade to a safer distance at the opposite end of the
bar. Onscreen, the guy personified ferocious in many guises: comedic, dramatic,
evil, cartoon. No one approached him. Those who noticed his bullying girth in
the dimly lit room averted their eyes, turned away or looked past him. For
once, living embodiment surpassed fiction.
Van was
no match. He was not tall, but average height, and what some might call
nondescript. Still, he slouched through life with a body suited to shouldering
a guitar, much like he’d seen in snapshots of his grandfather. His hands were
smaller than most guitar players. He was fair-haired and at the first sign of
premature thinning he’d shed the ponytail and let the rest curl gingerly above
his shirt collar. Bluish grey eyes cast more of a sideways glance, unlike the
piercing frown of the actor easily twice his age who stared witheringly but
acknowledged no one, not even the winsome bartender. Van watched as he gestured
wordlessly to an empty glass and then knocked back the shot like he was
swallowing a pill.
Van
played a regular set midweek at the Lamplight’s open mic. It was home to a
single-minded collective of singer-songwriters. Van’s skill at the mixing desk
and being in possession of a decent mic had earned him a feature spot. There
were regulars who appeared every week, some with songs so overplayed Van knew
them by heart. Van braved a new one now and again, reading from the lyric sheet
if he had to. He flexed the song in front of a live audience, gave it a pulse.
Performers who came and went played out a couple of songs where they stood
rinsed under a tarnished spot light on the small stage to the left of the front
door.
It was
run by a nonchalant old folkie with an illustrious past. A well-seasoned
newsboy cap bested the spotlight and shaded deep-set eyes rueful and tender at
the same time. War and romance had been won and lost. Mostly lost. The
underground compere’s closing set ended with a pint lifted to dissipated memory
and departed friends. He told stories like a shipwrecked sailor who had made it
back to shore and now had all the time in the world. Housed in a coal cellar,
long since disused as such, sunk below well-trodden pavement on MacDougal
Street, the Lamplight’s air shafts had served as conduits for thunderous
applause that blasted into the tenants’ apartments above. He’d chuckle and snap
his fingers. “When the cops showed up the clapping stopped.” He rejected the
honorarium his much younger acolytes insisted on him. He was not a living
legend. Nor was he the madcap godfather of folk. He was, he’d argued, an
historical monument.
Hip Hop
had wandered in like a cocksure stranger to the neighborhood and for a while
had found a late night home at the Lamplight when the acoustic open mic ended.
Van had an easy rapport with the guy who took over the mixing desk. “One of
these nights,” Van had promised, “I’ll hang around to hear what you’re doing.”
The neighborhood community board hadn’t considered that and, before long, Hip Hop
at The Lamplight was history.
It was
Saturday night, not the usual crowd at the Lamplight. That there was a crowd at
all was significant. Unlike most nights there was a meaningful buzz in the room.
The featured singer—the one who had packed the house—had a starring role in a
new film about another old folkie, the famously unsung Mayor of MacDougal
Street. The gig was sold out. Van read Dave Van Ronk’s behind-the-scenes
memoir, which had, in fact, got him to the Lamplight in the first place.
That
first night—and every week thereafter—the old folkie played for free. They all
did. More often the artists outnumbered the audience. He banned the tip bucket,
but encouraged the crew to tip the bartender well. Why should they be paying
each other to make music when the owners won’t pay for the entertainment? He
passed out drink tickets to the performers, more to the regulars. It was
something at least. The Lamplight seemed a good fit for Van.
But from
the sound of it the Mayor of MacDougal Street who trail blazed for the likes of
Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell wasn’t getting his real name up in
lights any time soon. The Brothers Auteur had directed a fanciful
account; a fictional name would appear on the marquee.
The
Lamplight still boasted a vivid, if half-forgotten, history. Van craned his neck
and searched the amiable, laid-back crowd gathered under a low timbered
ceiling. Rough-hewn walls recalled that coal cellar but as Van’s grandmother
quipped the first time she came to see him play: “There’s no smell to the place
anymore.”
The bar
was booked for the production crew’s wrap party and tickets had been sold to
the public to beef up the numbers. They were there to see and hear the man who
wasn’t Dave Van Ronk, but had an uncanny style reminiscent of the guy. No other
actors beside the big man at the bar were present. Unless disguised, Justin
Timberlake was not in the house. The filmmakers were nowhere to be seen. The
big man—a regular in their films—sent as a consolation prize. Van had been
asked to do the sound. Everything was under control; he just needed to turn up.
He was given the closing set, another consolation. Van knew this. He didn’t
care. He just wanted to play.
Earlier,
on his way to the gig, he’d detoured through Washington Square Park to West 4th
Street. Students elbowed tourists. Tourists gawked at the musicians and
comedians who still busked in Washington Square Park where city control freaks
had moved the fountain at great expense because it was deemed slightly off
center. Van pressed into a divergent crowd of onlookers momentarily distracted
from the uptown traffic on 6th Avenue by a basketball game still in progress.
He’d cheered silently as he followed the action from behind a chain link fence.
Teenagers in blue uniforms, the other team in purple. Girls, all black, earnest
and unaware of the fence hangers street side. None from the neighborhood, he
guessed. He’d seen some fierce games played out among older guys. The strip of
fenced in concrete was known as The Cage. He’d nodded to a few familiar faces
before making his way back to MacDougal.
The
neighborhood had weathered fluctuating economic indicators in the past. The
needle hovered around gentrification now. A bloated university complex—what
Van’s grandmother called that stinking pile of entitlement—grew like a
meningioma in Greenwich Village. Outwardly there were only cosmetic changes,
but inwardly the neighborhood was being strangled with each growth spurt of
that insidious tumor. The personality of a charmingly irascible neighborhood of
serviceable shops that served impractical artists with as much prickly
affection as it did families deep-rooted in neighboring tenements was altered,
becoming unbalanced, its vision blurred. Seasonally employed actors, artists
and musicians gave way to über celebs and investment bankers that never worried
about seasons except what to pack. Shopkeepers who knew every kid on the block
were gone. Van never saw any kids unless they were tethered to tourists.
In the
last eight or nine months since he’d been playing at the Lamplight the changes
on the street, especially on Bleecker, were tidal. There were a lot of signs—economic
weather forecasts—on every block: Under new management, space available, store
closing. New, soulless facades appeared blending one into the other in heedless
triumph. Bleecker Bob’s waved from its jumbled sea of oldies but goodies and
would soon drown. Kenny’s would be another castaway in the fall.
MacDougal
was still a collection of colorful shops, a fictitious international ragtag.
Vendors still hawked the hats and sunglasses that changed style with the trend,
and would appear—as if by some underground command—on the heads of nearly
everyone who coveted cool. A trilby magically affected everything about its
wearer, sliding posture into a theatrical hipster stance, a gateway drug to a
tattoo habit. Even that was changing. Beanies clung to heads like knitted
tongues these days. Little signs appeared in tenants’ windows along MacDougal: “Don’t smoke under the window.” Passersby were warned not to sit on the front
steps of red brick buildings laced with iron grillwork. “Private property! Keep
out!” An angry merchants’ organization stamped its initials on ubiquitous yellow flyers taped to front doors. But Van
thought the merchants were losing the battle to an ever-longer reach of a
university’s tentacles. New were electronic cigarettes, a challenge to those no
smoking signs. A lone dry cleaner had survived the alterations, a thin thread
of proof that this was once a village neighborhood.
Customers
still queued patiently outside a fist of a cave called Mamoun’s and left
gripping paper bags steamed with falafel-stuffed pitas. Halal and Ethiopian
cafes, hookah bars and curry takeout kept the street smelling sweet. You could
still get a slice. Like the cockroach, pizza would survive long after the
planet had been decimated. Diehards like Caffe Reggio and Monte’s dug in, but
for how long? Van’s grandmother had bent her elbow at the Minetta Tavern when
it didn’t have a doorman and designer blinds drawn to the riff raff on the
street, before the parade of Escalades drew the trendy behind tinted windows to
its corner entrance.
Bars
opened to the street in warmer weather. Bone crunching rock music
spilled from a few like a busted tap, but comedy clubs featured stand
up comedians. They were the rock stars now. One night after the open mic at the
Lamplight, Van had tripped down the stairs to the Ale House and immediately
confronted his visceral reaction to the frat house mood of a sports bar and
strode right back up to the street. Another murky entrance to a dank cellar bar
further up the block had not yet been breached. Even with the promise of craft
beer advertised above the doorway it was still a black hole signed with the
image of a glowering white rabbit with pink eye.
Like the
Lamplight, music venues mentioned in Van Ronk’s memoir survived on MacDougal
though it was a shell game to guess which one housed the authentic spirit
of folk music. The Fat Black Pussycat sprang to life at another location down
the street after a Mexican restaurant displaced it. Jack Kerouac’s ghost
adjusted his inebriated ramble to Christopher Street where the Kettle of Fish,
which used to live above the Lamplight, had bumped the old Lion’s Head from its
home of thirty years.
The
ghost of Gerde’s Folk City haunted the basement of the Village Underground,
rarely venturing to the street, unwilling to confront what had been lost. Even
a ghost has memories of the great performers on the street like Randy Burns,
Doc Watson, Eric Anderson, John Lee Hooker, Richie Havens, Joan Baez, Roger
McGuinn, Buffy St. Marie and the Rev. Gary Davis. Even ghosts mourn talent and the
folk rock craze that had had plenty of that and destiny once.
Those
were the days when bohemian meant only one thing—that revolution could still be
detected on social breezes when stirred by political debate—and the Village
meant only one place, Greenwich Village.
Van
signaled the bartender. Her name was Luna and everyone called her Lu. The first
time Van performed at The Lamplight he noticed her. He never stopped noticing
her.
“You
okay?” Luna draped over the bar, tanned arms outstretched, an elegant appeal.
“Same again?”
Lu was
an actor, both stage and screen. She was also a writer of offbeat plays and
poetry that snuck up on you like a misplaced desire. Her thought process at
work was not her own. It belonged to everyone who was mesmerized by her, who
watched as she periodically removed herself from the clamor of patrons bellied
up to the bar. No one rushed her. When she perched on a stool behind the bar,
head bent over a notebook or a script, a customer—even a first time
visitor—waited until acknowledged and then was grateful. Everyone, men and
women alike, noticed lustrous hair tremble her shoulders like an inky waterfall.
Her expression was impenetrable for that split second before the irresistible
invitation to her lightness returned.
She’d
tell you hippies raised her in the same way another would say they’d been
reared by wolves. She softened the edge of urban argot with an actor’s
attention to pronunciation. She missed the beaches of southern California yet
had never ventured to Coney Island.
Luna had
a soft spot for rescued fawns pictured cradled in the paws of noble Labradors.
She was disappointed when Van said tigers don’t actually suckle piglets,
that she could not trust everything on the Internet. She was classic, utterly
timeless. Luna networked like everyone else but she had still not crossed over
to Timeline. “They’ll have to come and get me,” she said. Her favorite artists
were her friends. When politics lit the alcohol-saturated air in the bar, Luna
wondered aloud what people her age could possibly do to change things.
“Go on,”
Van told her. “Hit me.” But she had already poured an unbiased measure of Knob
Creek. Neat. Ice, she knew, just got in the way. “On me,” she said. “Cheers,”
he returned.
“She’s
so far up his ass she’ll need a flashlight to find her way out.”
Luna
laughed like she’d been pinched and they both turned to face a couple of
dressed down, candid, middle-aged men behind them, regulars at open mic night
and close friends of Mike Portnoy, the Lamplight’s hard working impresario. Van
chided them good-naturedly. “You still going on about her?” Usually they kept
their earnest conversations to politics. Both had been pressing Van to get
onboard with the Occupy Wall Street movement. “I love how she plays the shy
card,” the silver-haired ponytail grunted. “Like a shark,” his bearded, bearish
companion retorted. “Her new one? Heroin and Apple Pie?” Together they warbled
comically off key: “And today I saw hope in the eyes of a child.” Luna laughed
again, unable to help herself. “Be nice, guys. It takes all kinds.”
“Where
is this joker?” Van grumbled. “He should have been on an hour ago.” “Portnoy’s
looking for a mic,” Lu said. She lifted her resolute chin and scanned the room
like a radar detector. “Another one went missing last night,” she said,
narrowing her vision. Van was incredulous. “At the poetry jam?” “Nothing’s
sacred,” Lu sighed.
Portnoy
appeared edging through the crowd. He handed Van a recognizable brown paper
bag. “Here you go buddy. Thought you might be hungry.” Van took the bag. It was
going to be a while. He asked: “What’s happen—?” Portnoy poked his friends in an
affable, careless rush. “Be right back. Got to call….” He fumbled with his cell
phone. “Listen, take me a minute. Erik has one, just running next door.” Apart
from when Van was behind the desk at the open mic, they scrambled for a working
microphone on most nights. Tonight was no different. “Have a drink on me
guys.” He leaned into Van: “There’s something for you in the bag. I
appreciate you waiting around.” The smell of falafel and pot trailed Portnoy
like a shadow.
Luna
shrugged, poured another shot. “Go. Eat,” she said. Van grabbed his drink and
settled on a cushioned bench in the quiet of the back room where performers
tuned their guitars, though a lot of them preferred to do that on stage,
wasting time, irritating Van who believed a muso should be mic ready.
He’d
wolfed down the falafel and contemplated the joint Mike had slipped in the bag
when Van heard a beep. A quick glance told him it was his grandmother. She
never used abbreviations for textese. He loved to think of her laboriously
pecking away at perfect spelling and grammar. “No,” he texted, “not on yet.
Still time. Come on over.”
His
grandmother, Lee Terry, was a night owl. She was an upright painter, a romantic
with anarchic leanings. She was also his roommate. Until he’d heard: “Dude, you
live with your grandma? What’s that like?” he’d not given it a second thought.
A first thought, yes, but rationalizing had never brought him to that second
thought. She’d insisted on being called Lee since he was a kid and that made it
easier in the long run, that and his relative freedom to pursue the muse.
Van’s
parents, Alice and Donald Lotz, were normal people. She edited a small nature
conservancy magazine and he worked in insurance. They’d raised Van in West
Hartford. Connecticut was a state his grandmother abhorred. Alice swore a
peripatetic childhood would not be her only son’s life. Mother and daughter
abided reciprocal confusion. Van suspected there had been some acrimony before
he was born. He also had a gut feeling that his mother had suffered for love,
long before Van came along. There was certainly history.
Van had
majored in philosophy but left UConn for an ever-widening gap year until the
crevasse was too wide to backtrack. “What do you actually care about?” his
father asked. It was a question increasingly put to him. Van didn’t know, he
didn’t know even after the hundredth time he’d been asked. Nothing made sense
to him, especially the jarring differences between Lee and his mother.
Shouldn’t the child be the rebellious one? His grandmother railed, while Alice
and David calmly ignored her protestations and stuck to their idea of what a
progressive liberal was and would not be swayed from voting for the incumbent.
“The lesser of two evils is still evil,” Lee warned.
His
grandmother never asked what he cared about. He moved into her rent controlled
flat on East Ninth Street. His mother radiated control, but she’d raised her
voice, so out of character, and warned he was too much like his grandfather;
that Lee was making a mistake by taking him in. “He’s got potential,” Lee said.
“And an interesting voice.” “Over my dead body,” his mother cried. “Ah, yes,”
Lee replied. “The scenic route.”
Van had
always played the guitar, encouraged by Lee and tolerated by his parents. He
got serious about songwriting and he took his grandmother’s surname. His father
grudgingly accepted that Terry was a better stage name than Van Lotz. His
mother was in no position to protest, though she did. Her given name was
Morning. When she turned 21 she’d changed it to Alice. Van once asked her why
she’d been named Morning. “Because it was the only time dad was sober,” she
said. Alice seemed to accept that a lifelong crusade to levigate elements of
her past had failed. She had still not seen her son perform.
“He’s
found a mic.” Luna appeared under pin lights that marked the room like
fireflies. She offered Van a pint glass of ice water. “No rush though, the
guy’s held up at some press event.” She looked at him, cocked her head and
asked: “You okay?” Van smiled reassuringly and held up his cell phone. “Lee’s
on her way over.” “Great!” Lu answered. “The guys will love that. They’re on a
roll out there.” Van took the glass from Luna and gulped thirstily. “How’s it
going with the crowd?” She grinned and it was like a light had come on. “We’re
throwing drinks at them. It’s all good.”
Lee knew
the guys at the bar. His grandmother seemed to know everyone. The first time
she walked in to the Lamplight on open mic night the old folkie lit up with
recognition. “Still fighting the fight?” he asked. “Still fighting the fight,”
she’d replied. She’d been to every protest, every demonstration and never
flagged. Her friends were younger than Van and they were her age, some older,
and all were dogged in their determination to bring a voice to the movement
known as Occupy Wall Street. One couple, George and Sue, would come around to
the flat, and, sunk into worn chairs surrounded by paintings in progress, would
talk politics over endless cups of coffee during the day and generous rounds of
beer and wine in the evenings. They were both retired, she from teaching in
public school and he from a union job with the MTA. Their stamina impressed
Van. They never tired of trading stories: acts of radical heroism and the shame
of the morally neutral rich. George had been arrested numerous times. Van suspected
Lee had at least one arrest in her past but it was never brought up in his
presence. They honestly believed in the power of passive resistance, at least
as a starting point.
Politics.
Van gave a fuck about absolutely none of it. Killed his grandfather, anyway,
from what he could tell. Walking home across Bleecker one night from a late
supper at the Cornelia Street Café Van and Lee passed a construction site that
was once a home to Phil Ochs. The destruction of everything else in the Village
infuriated her. It was a personal affront when her block was overrun with film
crew, recreating a Lamplight that wasn’t the Lamplight on a MacDougal that was
really East Ninth Street. Van thought the cars and the fashions of the early
60s were cool. Lee did not. “What’s the fucking point when it still exists,”
she’d carped.
His
grandmother’s shrug of resignation when they’d spied the building site was a
surprise. “You’re grandfather had the Ochs gene,” she’d said wistfully, devoid
of rancor. No one talked about his grandfather when Van was a kid except for
passing references or ambiguous answers to his pointed questions when he was
older. His name was Able—Amblin’ Abe. Able had it, meaning the suicide gene. He
wrote songs of protest. Lee spoke of him more since Van was living with her.
“Your grandfather suffered from honesty,” she’d told him. He was a socialist,
what they called the president now. Which couldn’t be right, thought Van. When
he sometimes asked about her freewheeling youth she’d tell him stories but
often replied with less enthusiasm. “Don’t stand on the delicate bones of the
past,” she’d say. “They will never hold up under the pressure. Stay in the
moment.”
“You
either live long enough, or you don’t,” she’d sighed as they saluted the ghost
of Phil Ochs that night. “Who said that?” asked Van. “Vince Martin,” she’d
replied. “Old friend. Haven’t seen him in a long time, wonder if…” “Who?” Van
pressed. “He had a massive hit back in the late 50s.” She sang a few bars:
“Cindy, oh, Cindy…” “Nope” he’d said, “Never heard of it.” “I forget how young
you really are,” she’d said and stroked his hair. He recalled shivering, as if
someone had walked on his grave.
Nobody
was riding the rails but some of them still wrote songs about it. They wrote
songs about skinning rabbits, too. Who did that? He was more enamored of the
plaintive appeal of Antony and the Johnsons, darkly volant love songs. He loved
the music and the lyrics of strong women like Lucinda Williams, a gravel-voiced
ball buster with the proverbial heart of gold. He didn’t really connect with
folk, the songs of heroic bums and political royalty. Who said hoboes anyway?
He wrote love songs. Which was funny because he was single, shy and not very
adventurous in love. His grandmother said it was more like he was channeling
the kinds of love songs her husband wrote for her; painful, full of longing,
faced with decisions he hated to make and then did.
The
girls who hung around the performers who wore overalls and flat caps—guys who
sported the full beard he’d never been able to raise—did not tempt him. Those
girls had bodies like gentle serpents, with the sweet curvature of an unformed
woman. They wore their hair in plaits and their slender shoulders poked from
the fragile nightgowns they wore as dresses. It was play shabby. “The Fake
Depression” Lee called it. “Walker Evans with a credit card.” They weren’t
seductive to Van, more like reconstructed.
He heard
Lee’s voice above a lull in the crowd. “That fucking flame is everywhere,” she
said, unbothered at being overheard. Van waved to her from the mixing desk.
Silver-haired ponytail countered: “Those law students will be defending you
when you’re arrested, Lee.” A split second later they were shouting gleefully,
“Not!”
Van took
in her uniform as she called it: sturdy sandals, baggy linen trousers and a
black t-shirt. This one had Unarmed Civilian emblazoned on it. Essentially Van
was just like his grandmother; sandals, cutoffs, t-shirt, only his was lacking
any slogan. “We’re alike,” she’d say. “We notice the flaws.”
A
commotion at the entrance signaled the singer’s arrival. Van was relieved to
see there would be only one other performer, a backing guitar. He brushed off
the singer’s brusque tone—of course Van looked like he knew what he was
doing—and they went ahead without a sound check.
The guy
did a mean impersonation of Van Ronk’s voice. Van was lulled into a
pleasant space, deep inside him when he jerked up from the shock of memory. It
was a Joni Mitchell song. He heard Van Ronk, the real Van Ronk, in his head and
he was suddenly a small boy, listening to his mother sing along with that
singular growl:
I've looked at love from both sides now
From give and take, and still somehow
It’s love’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know love at all
The
energy in the room stiffened and the crowd rent a seam to let the big man
through. He leapt to the stage with surprising grace, dwarfing the featured
singer. After one bluesy duet, the actor left the stage to thunderous applause
and hustled out the front door. Lee sidled up to Van. “Is that it?” Van nodded,
“Looks like it.” She rolled her eyes and quipped: “Cripes he’s like a fish
outta water. He sings like a girl!”
“Hey
Lee,” Portnoy hollered above the applause. “Van, get up there, okay?” Van knew
he was there to keep the punters from emptying the place. He grabbed his guitar
and made his way to the stage but the herd had already thinned, searching for a
fresh watering hole.
“I
couldn’t hear you at all,” his grandmother said when the place had emptied.
“People are so rude nowadays.” Still at the bar were the two friends of Mike
Portnoy, but they were heading out. Even Mike had packed it in. Lu slid a fresh
shot across the bar to Van. “I’ve gotta lock up,” she said, “But I can do that
anytime.” Her suggestion that Van give his grandmother a command performance
was met with delighted handclapping from Lee.
Van
closed the set with his love song to Coney Island. Lee hugged him to her, hard.
“I love that song,” she said. Lu switched off the last light and shepherded
them to the door. “Wonder Wheel, right? I love it, too.” “Can’t remember the
last time I was out there,” Lee mused. “I’ve never been there,” Lu said. She
was off from the bar the next day, why not go out there? “I’m always off,” Lee
laughed, “I’ll go if you go.”
Van
stood with Lee in a starless night on MacDougal as Luna climbed the stairs to
the street. He’d seen her away from the bar in the daylight only once, in the
park, and her smile had ricocheted off the sun. The fountain in Washington
Square Park was, after all that fuss and bother, still off center. Van was fine
off center. Rain or shine, tomorrow would be a good day.
NOBODY ELSE.
JUST ME is an original short story by Linda Danz.
STORIES ON THE
AMERICAN FRIEND Writers Guild of America, East #R28299
This is a work
of fiction. Names, characters, business organizations, places, and incidents
are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. The
use of names of actual persons, places, and events is incidental to the plot,
and is not intended to change the entirely fictional character of the work. ©
September 2012.
The story title: Nobody Else.
Just Me, comes from the title of Dave Van Ronk’s album, Somebody Else,
Not Me. On it he returns to basic blues, folk and jazz. It was released in
1999. Originally it was to be released in late 1970’s.
http://soundcloud.com/the-american-friend/nobody-else-just-me
