Few hours before the flight. Didn´t quite duck the whole winter but spring´s around the corner and Vancouver wears it like a dress. All the highrises across the bridge just lego---after-dinner-mint pastels of green and blue until the sun sets and and paints their windows molten. On a clear afternoon maybe the sail boats blowing off out to sea like dandilion confetti gonged to the horizon. Empty
tankers stewing in the habor like a herd of Eeyors beside the blue mountains changing blues with distance in some paint by number childish portrait of them but it just happens to be
real.
No news reports indictaing Fidel croaked. I was thinking about him on the walk at 5am over here. What a strange melody that guy has with these people---maybe the catchiest one I can think of. Like George Washington molested by Napoleon or something---but really it´s his own deal. Like he took over this place on the craziest fucking dare anybody ever came up with.
It gets you thinking tho, what´s your melody with people? When you leave a room or enter it. Is it nicer if somebody knows you or better if they don´t?
Fidel just reminds too much of Orpheus. All Orpheus had to get his girl back from Hades was a melody. Ever wonder what it would sound like? What he played to make Sysephus take a break from pushing that
rock so he could strain to listen?
Was it sad or happy? Powerful or soft? About the past or the future? A girl he was with, or being away from her. Something he saw as a kid or something he made up?
They sent something into space, a capsule of sorts, called the Voyager Probe in the late 70´s. Partly it was a picnic basket for aliens to find about us, and partly it was meant as a defense of us. Here's what we've done. Here's the best we can do. Here's the best reason we're worth something. Here's the best reason not to rub us out. Beethoven´s the first thing on there on a gold record. Of all the things to protect us if something hostile latches onto that probe, it´s just a melody.
Yeah, so. I´ve been asked about 2000 times whether or not I need girls over here---always GIRLS, never the singular---and god knows I DO need a girl but I always have to say no. I´ve never verfied it, but I´ve been pretty sure they can´t supply the one I want. So I arranged halfway along this trip to go back and see her.
And last night I couldn´t sleep and walked up an alley and saw some little kids playing, faces like they had the world on a string, and I didn´t feel so nervous about this girl having my number. People come swing by where you live here all the time offering stuff. Bread, fruit---biscotti for fucksake. Door to door stuff. And sometimes the frustrating shit about here makes me really confused how nobody goes Grand Theft Auto. And I can leave. But at night all the stars come out, all over the place---not just the sky but with the sounds, faces, even the smells from homes cooking for people they look forward to seeing.
Fidel was penciled in to bat cleanup for this place in the baseball game of people´s lives. They risked getting tortured or murdered to see him do it. But they´ve mainlined that rush of playing long odds when you get that first tingle that you might´ve pulled it off. Like all of them double-dared Fidel to walk up to the country as if it were a girl he´d never met in his life and make her fall in love with him, and he´d be the last kiss she ever had... and with so many people they don´t regret it. I had a grandpa who lived 96 years with one woman he kissed his whole life. There was something a little cocky about the way he grinned mentioning it, maybe the way he did when he first came up with the idea in his head. I dunno.
But it´s done. And tonight all over Havana you´d hear groups of friends together pulling up chairs in the darkness, just a little street light gleam glazing their faces. Bite off an opening of a juicebox full of rum and they´d set up for dominoes and start talking and laughing and throw down some pieces and smoke and their women might come over and hastle everybody or do their own things, kids might race by in the street chasing something, the zombie dogs will go on limping and scratch in conspicuous obscurity---and the more I try to duck the things I miss about this place the more I feel like every evasion is a confession. What the hell´s the difference between a suicide note and love letter anyway in terms of the content? Sum some kinda bullshit up. Same notes really. Trying for them, anyway. So what´s anything you have to say about here? You never get to dance but you can watch them do it.
It´s their last song. Not mine. Even tho it just keeps playing and playing...
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