The other day I found that I was not able to write anything at all; the blank screen was piling up points and the morning writing time was dwindling. I fell back upon an old writer’s trick and started rereading some of my older published pieces for the confidence they might inspire. I came upon “Ol’ Blue Eyes: Music of Broken Dreams” and found myself starting to rewrite from top to bottom. I realized that the words were coming, and as any writer does when “it’s working,” I kept on going. Later that day, I sat down to write some more and I was delighted to find that the old trick had worked. Whatever it takes to get the work done is what is necessary that day. The piece that follows is what came out of that day.
A friend and I were having dinner in the kitchen when we heard the news on public radio that Frank Sinatra had died earlier that day.
She said something about how she never got it, the Sinatra thing. That her mother always went on about him, sang his songs on car trips and like that. We ate and drank a little, talked about the day. I told her that I used to listen to Make Believe Ballroom every Saturday morning, a radio show from Philadelphia. “Learnin’ The Blues” was a big hit that year. And even now when I hear his voice, I imagine that I can smell dinner on the stove and I know that my father is on the way home. My mother is singing softly, “It’s a quarter to three, there’s no one in the place… .” It was like that every day for years. “It was a safe place and it was mine,” I said.
I told her that I had seen Frank Sinatra in black and white movies on the Dumont TV in the dining room. From Here to Eternity, The Man with The Golden Arm, High Society. He was…cool. And, it turns out, everything I thought I wanted to be. I knew that there was sadness inside his voice, even in his more popular AM radio hits that played all day long. I couldn’t have said that at the time. What I did know was that his voice told me a lot about who I thought I was.
I went into the other room to put a disc on the player. Without much thinking about it I pulled “In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning,” a complete rendering of the end of things, the end of his love affair, likely with Ava Gardner, heart breaking. It seemed like the right way to remember. The CD, with its Hopper-like illustration on the case, pictured Sinatra leaning sad against a lamp post a block away from the Boulevard of Broken Dreams. It looked like it always had to me, evocative, always a mirror image of how I wanted to see myself and often did. I put it on and went back to the kitchen and an unusually quiet dinner.
A bit later she asked where I was, meaning, I guess, that I had drifted away from the conversation. I told her that the music had reminded me of a movie I once saw when I was maybe eight or nine years old. I told her about watching A Walk in the Sun, starring Dana Andrews, directed by Lewis Millstone. I told her I had seen it many times since then and that while it had aged, as had I, it still had the power to remind me of the young boy I had been and what I had thought I would become. When I grew up. I mostly remembered that the narrator referred to a letter he was trying to compose in his head. He returned to it at several different points during the film, which was really a very simple story about an American army platoon hiking up a road in Sicily with orders to take a farmhouse which was a German gun emplacement.
“Dear Frances…,” he says several times, his voice trailing off. The platoon arrives at the farmhouse; the men are hidden behind a centuries-old stone wall. The sun gets higher and higher. They go over the wall. The farmhouse is taken and it is not yet noon.
“Dear Frances….” Andrew’s voice comes over the scene of the bodies lying in the sun, characters we have come to know during their long walk in this foreign place. The survivors gather up and get ready to move on. That’s what men did. They went to war, they didn’t say much about what they had just seen and done, they took care of business and they got on with things.
“Dear Frances,” he says, with weariness, as the camera pulls up and back, looking over the bodies in the sun. “We took a farmhouse today. It was easy.” Only “it” hadn’t been easy, and it’s never what it seems to be. Even I could see that.
I told her about my 14-year-old pill-popping amphetamine-addict life, about how I was filled with images of lost highways and dead-end midnight dreams, of frantic phone calls from mysterious, faraway places, all black and white, with fog on the tarmac. I always imagined I saw a single horn player with a battered leather case, shuffling slowly to the plane through the fog swirling on the runway, pulling me along to somewhere unknown, a place just beyond my reach. Elvis and Benny King were in my head. It seemed that everything was far off, waiting for me, magical, a “rose in Spanish Harlem,” glimpsed but never taken, that life was elsewhere. I couldn’t wait. The music spoke of broken dreams and lost love and sex, and every word seemed meant only for me. Get on with it, Michael, it seemed to say; time’s winged chariot ain’t waitin’ at no station.
Nearly every night for most of my late teens and early 20s, Vietnam was a central fact of life for me as it was for all of us. I had dreams of a battlefield grave, a rifle bayonet in the ground with dog tags and an empty helmet hanging down from the rifle stock. There was a single horn playing Taps. I always woke up in a cold sweat, cotton-mouthed and resigned. I woke up before I was close enough to read the name on the tags.
When my mother died I was in another country, on another coast. When I went home for the funeral with my own 10-year-old son, the classical music station of my mother’s kitchen was off and the door to the study where my dad spent most evenings working on his lectures, papers, on the life of a university professor, was still closed.
I no longer wonder what happened to my childhood’s lonesome highway, to the bloodied heroes and the feverishly imagined manhood where the bars are still open at a quarter to three and morning is a distant fire streaked across the sky. Where the neon in the darkness offers drifting promise that shit will turn to gold and the door will open and my Dad and I will talk together.
Cocaine and whiskey have taught me what I needed to know. Taught me that it isn’t easy and that it never happens that way.
Sinatra’s voice cuts across our wee hours from the other room. He is still walking the floor, she is still gone, whoever she was.
Two nows, 40 years apart. My friend and I (we are new) dance slow and close, keeping time together. Under a cold spring moon our shadows play across the kitchen wall.
Image Credit
Photo by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.
Even lovelier the second time around.
Thank you John