33. We woke to a city transformed by snow.
We woke to a city transformed by snow. It was funny to see Grace carefully folding the brown wool suit she’d worn the night before and putting on her uniform, just for the drive home. I put on my clothes and helped brush snow off her car, then kissed her goodbye under the streetlight and watched her drive away, exhaust steam curling past the little Falcon’s taillights. Once she’d turned the corner, I went back inside, stomped the snow off my feet, and poured myself a second cup of coffee. Now I had an empty weekend before me, my last best chance to put together my dog-and-pony show about Eliot. I dialed the city library--they weren’t open yet--and sat down with the old fart’s poems, looking for sections that sounded jazzy.
What I liked about jazz was that it was democratic. What I didn’t like about early jazz was that it sounded like the Dixieland thumped out by schoolteachers in striped shirts every night at Der Loaf und Stein. The “modern” poet whose work sounded most like that kind of jazz was Edith Sitwell, not Eliot. The evolution of jazz I found a difficult topic in itself. What was there to distinguish 1900’s jazz from 1890’s ragtime, for instance? Both forms evolved side by side for a while, and both had similarities to vaudeville and minstrel-show numbers like “The Preacher and the Bear.” Jazz was likely to have influenced Eliot, all right, but my focus shifted away from likelihood and its complexities, from jazz toward the blues. “Sooner or later, you low-down alligator, I’ll catch you with your britches down,” echoed my vanishing hopes.
Vanishing because I was finding Eliot more formidable than I had thought. The snatches of human voice that glittered like verbal mirages in “The Waste Land” were not mere magpie-trophies; they were unique dramatic inventions. His references to the gramophone and to the “Shakespeherian Rag” put him two jumps ahead of me in both the music and the sarcasm departments. Toward the end of the poem I even found a flash of real emotion, his admission of “a moment’s surrender/ which an age of prudence can never retract.” Retract; now there was a verb for you. I had to smile a little. What chance did Bessie Smith have against such a lying old seducer?
But wasn’t sex the entire burden of the blues? For a prostitute, for a man with nothing but a guitar and an appetite, just off a riverboat and needing a place to get in out of the rain, seduction was the business of survival. One way to beat Eliot might be to keep it sexy. On the surface, I would try to show that Eliot’s prosody in “The Waste Land” used rhythms that he might have picked up from the blues. But by using steamy lyrics as examples, I would also subliminally contrast the blues singers’ sorrowing and hopeful voices with Eliot’s sepulchral tone. Against his prissy “moment’s surrender” I would set two centuries of body-longing and defeat, leaving it for those with active gonads to hear the difference. Anyway it was a project I could have fun with.
I got more absorbed in the reading than I intended, and when I glanced at the clock again it was ten-thirty. I flipped on the radio to see if my dealer was on duty. I bought my marijuana from a disc jockey at a downtown FM station, and I’d decided to see if he would help me get the records I wanted onto tape, to eliminate having to shuffle L.P.’s during my talk. When I heard the familiar voice, I put my coat on and went out into the snow.
Stan was one of those FM DJ’s who sounds as if he’s sucking off the microphone. His station, run by dedicated tea breathers, resembled a spaceship on autopilot ferrying drugged colonists toward some distant music-starved planet, though the owners drove Porsches, if erratically. When I pressed my newly-hairy face to the studio glass, he languidly waved me in.
“Hey, man,” he said, “what’s happening?” It always impressed me the way he could carry on conversation, some of it illegal, while the station was on the air. The tinny sound of an unamplified phonograph needle tinkled in the background.
“I was wondering if you could help me out.”
“Sure, man,” he said expansively. “How much do you need?”
“It’s not that,” I said. “I want to tape some music.”
“Hunh?”
I explained my problem as best I could--anything analytical made his eyes glaze, but I got across the idea that I wanted to play bits of music and then stop and talk--and he said he would help me get the records dubbed onto tape. Then we smoked a joint, so that by the time I headed toward the library it was a little hard to remember why I was going there. Once my head cleared, though, it helped me think of poetry as a remnant of the campfire singalongs of our thick-browed forbears, back when “sha na na” really meant something.
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