James Brown

I remember sitting in darkened theatres, thirteen year old white boy with glasses, watching the band file on stage in the dark while the movie finished up on the screen over their heads. Then the screen would go dark and roll up and the lights would come up and the bandleader would step up to the mike in his white tie and tails and speak those magic words, "Ladies and gentlemen, it is star time. Are you ready for star time? Please welcome the hardest working man in show business, Soul Brother Number One, James Brown!" Then the magic began. First his backup singers, The Famous Flames, would come onstage, three men in matching suits with lace shirts and pompadours. Then the curtains would part upstage and The Man Himself would enter, dancing steps that seemed impossible for an ordinary man, wearing a suit of a color that existed only in fantasies and he and the band would become one in a way I've never seen before or since.

Girls screaming and flashbulbs popping while he opened with Signed, Sealed And Delivered or Poppa's Got A Brand New Bag. But the second song always brought the house down, always a ballad like Try Me. Girls in ecstacy while he always managed to bring it all together before he came to the end of the songlist.

Didn't matter where or when. Could have been the Apollo in 1962, or the Brevoort, under the el on Fulton Street, in 1964, or the Garden in 1967. To this day I've never seen any show as purely exciting as his.

The last time I saw him was in Battery Park in 2003. He did a concert on monday of Memorial Day weekend. It was my 54th birthday, his 70th, but you never could have told that from the show that night. He played more than two hours before about twenty thousand people, most of whom hadn't been born when he first played the Apollo. We'll never see his like again.

 

Bethlehem

The baby lay in the manger sleeping, while Mozart played him a lullabye on the harpsichord. John Coltrane picked up his sax and played a harmony that made the stars weep, it was so beautiful. Buddha sat on a bale of hay in the corner and laughed as he watched Picasso furiously painting the scene. Mary held the baby's hand and grooved to the music, trying to stay in the moment and not think about what the future would bring. Joseph stood in the doorway with King Arthur, the two of them smoking cigars stamped with "It's a boy!"Everyone raised their wineskins in a toast when the three wise men entered. King Caspar bowed low and gave the baby a pennywhistle, King Melchior gave him a copy of The Essential Leonard Cohen and a stereo to play it on and King Balthazar pointed toward the west and put a pair of purple sunglasses over the baby's eyes, so he could watch the sunset and not get burned.

Coltrane finished his solo and Glen Miller climbed up on the stand and led the band in Moonlight Serenade. Mary tucked the blanket up to the baby's chin and walked over to the doorway and took Joseph by the hand. "Dance with me, Daddy!"she whispered as she wrapped her arm around his waist. And they spun across the stable floor, lost in each others' eyes.

Tara

She goes walking on the ridge line, through the pines under the November moon. She carries a tin pail, to bring home any shooting stars that fall to earth. She walks through the snow and leaves no footprints behind. She's older than Mohammed, older than Jesus, but she's barely sixteen. She wears a friendship bracelet on her wrist, Shakespeare gave it to her after the premiere of Romeo and Juliet. Of course she played the lead. Isis is her best friend, sometimes they go clubbing together. One night at the Limelight they kissed in the old choir loft, and ever since, Isis looks at Osiris a little differently.

The Ghost By The Schoolyard

I saw her through the window on Sunday afternoon, walking past the schoolyard. Maybe fourteen years old, a little tall, a little thin. Dressed in a black t shirt, blue denim pedal pushers and Keds high tops that looked brand new. Brown hair in a pony tail. Too much eye liner, and a cigarette between the fingers of her left hand. She stopped by the tree directly across from my window, bent down and took a handful of dirt and rubbed it across the rubber toes of her sneakers. The last time I saw someone do that I wasn't much older than her.

I knew right away she wasn't alive. Just a reflection of someone who used to be. I thought of the world her eyes were seeing, a world where Ike was president and tv was black and white. A world where she lay in her bed at night with her white plastic transistor radio under her pillow, listening to Allan Freed and Murray The K on WINS 1010. A world where the corner candy store sold Lucy's for two cents apiece, either Marlboro or Newport. A world where music came on 45 singles, one song on each side. Where kids took the A Train to Rockaway Beach and danced in the sand to Connie Francis and Sandra Dee.

I don't know who you are or why you're here, girl. But trust me, go to the light, right now. This minute, this second. If you came back now you'd be my age, with aches and pains and disappointments that you just don't need. Go now and be happy, darlin'.

The Ghost Of Fort Tryon

Fort Tryon Park on a Sunday afternoon in October, the light's all blue and gold through the trees. The sun is setting over the Palisades, bathing the stones of the old fort and the even older monastery in autumn light. The Medieval Festival ended an hour ago but people are still hanging around, playing fiddle and bodhran and pipes in pickup bands while couples dance to the reels and morrises, dancing steps that were already old when the Druids first came to Ireland. The merchants are slowly taking down their stands, still making sales of tapestries and cotton candy, beer and amulets to those who are having too much fun to let the day end. I make my last pass around the fairgrounds and decide to head for home.

There are two ways to go to the subway from here. There's the elevator at 190th Street that almost everybody uses, riding about twelve stories down through the mountain to the platform. After the fair the line is endless and platform is jammed. Which is why I always walk north. I take the little stone staircase across the plaza from the main entrance to the Cloisters, and follow the narrow path down the north slope. This leads to the Dyckman Street station,  the next-to-last stop on the line.   Here you can stand with the few other people who come this way and watch the train come rolling down from the terminal at 207th Street. And you can get a seat before the mob gets on at 190th.

By now it's nearly totally night time, but I'm stopping at each hairpin turn on the path to shoot pictures. Pictures of the river, the trees, the lamp posts lighting up along the trail. It's eerie but it's also magical. That was when I saw her.

Now here you might expect to see a ghost. I mean, here is the fort that General Washington defended against the British in 1776. Here is the stone monument on the cliff to Margaret Corbin, the first woman to take up arms to defend the infant United States. Her husband was a captain in the artillery and when he was killed she took up his position and commanded his cannon. And here is The Cloisters, a real medieval monastery transplanted brick by brick to this park on top of the mountain. Parts of it date from the twelfth century, parts from later on, into the Renaissance. Monks knelt in this apse to receive communion three hundred years before Shakespeare was born. American soldiers walked these bastions, watching for British ships in the Hudson River more than two hundred years ago.  You might expect to see a ghost.

But what I saw was not some knight in armor, nor some man in a blue, or red, coat with a musket on his shoulder. What I saw was a girl in her late twenties wearing jeans and a blazer. Not quite pretty, but definitely cute. She had long brown hair and glasses, and the sunniest smile I've seen in forever.

The thought of a ghost never entered my mind when she walked up behind me after I'd passed the first hairpin turn. She smiled at me and said, "So, did you have a good time?" I laughed and said, "Yeah, totally wonderful!" She told me she lived nearby, but she hadn't known today was the festival, so it was a nice surprise for her. I told her I lived in Brooklyn but that I come every year for this event.

She said I should come sometime when it isn't so crowded, because it's a totally different world. I told her my favorite time to come is the dead of winter. She lowered her eyes to the ground and in a small voice said, "But in winter everything is so dead." I told her I liked the atmosphere then, that it's easy to feel like you've slipped into the Middle Ages. She lit up and smiled at that.

We talked on about the fair, and what we most liked about it, all the way to the bottom of the mountain. There was no flirtation, no trying to pick up. Just two people who'd shared an experience, talking about what it meant to them.

The path from the top to the street is about half a mile long, and we weren't walking fast at all because we were both enjoying each other's company so much. When we got to the bottom we stopped briefly at a crossroads. One path lead straight out to the street and that was mine, from there to turn left and walk a block to the subway entrance.  The other turned south, at right angles to my road. I asked her where she lived and she said, "Oh, over by Bennett Avenue." But she looked kind of vague and a little confused when she said it. I just chalked it up to not wanting to tell a total stranger where she lived. At the crossroads I told her to to have a good evening, and she wished me the same. Then she turned south on the path and walked into the evening.

I stood and watched her walk away, not with any thought of following her or seeing her again, but only because talking with her had left me feeling so good. She had lifted a weight from my heart that I didn't even know was there til she'd taken it away, and I felt light and airy and peaceful.

She hadn't walked more than fifty feet away from me when she began to fade.

Now I know, it was nearly dark. And there were only a few streetlights along her path. But that path ran straight south through a flat and even lawn, about twenty feet inside the stone wall that surrounds the park. There were no turnoffs from the path, and it was at least a hundred feet west to the first of the trees that covered the hill. There was no place for her to disappear to, but disappear she did. Right in front of my amazed eyes.

I stood there at the crossroads a few minutes, then walked out of the park and up the street to the subway, thankful for gift I'd been given.

A Prayer For October

Please keep the days long, for as long as you can. Please keep the nights warm, we don't want to stay in. Please keep the stars bright, let the full moon shine gold. Please let me go home, before I'm too old. Om Shanti.

September 29th

Walking south on lower Broadway on a Sunday afternoon. The sunbeams are still warm but in the shade there's a cool that we hadn't thought about since last spring. As we passed Trinity churchyard I put my arm across your shoulder, so scared you might pull away. But you wrapped your arm around my waist and pulled me closer to you. God what a high!

You were wearing that grey cardigan that I liked so much, over a white t shirt and blue bell bottoms. You slipped your hand down from my waist and into the hip pocket of my jeans. At Exchange Place the light and the traffic were against us and we stood like hopeful immigrants.

When the light changed we crossed the narrow street and stood on that little plaza of tile and concrete and shiny stainless steel.

And I don't care what you said later, you kissed me first!

Late September Night

Feeling sunblasted, surprised to be still alive. Like the soul of a dinosaur fossil in the desert. Imagine it, opening its eyes, wondering what happened to the ocean and the ferns and the mud, and why the stars look so different.

Summer's Walking Away Down The Road

It always ends like this, sunny, barren and dry.  The river sinking into the warm sand til there's not even the memory of a seashell left behind. The cactus by the riverbed is lost in a reverie, remembering when rapids boiled over these dry boulders sleeping in the sun. The boulders are feeling the desert breeze and dreaming of rain. The rain gave up on this place long ago.

The Night Before

Five years ago tonight I was in the top floor gallery at Barnes & Noble on Union Square to hear Garrison Keillor read from his new novel, "Lake Wobegone Summer 1956." It was the biggest crowd I've ever seen at a book signing. Heavy thunderstorms were passing across Manhattan, high winds blowing and lightning flashing. More than once Garrison had to pause in his reading for an especially long and loud roll of thunder to pass.

The gallery windows face south, across Union Square and down to the Village, Soho, Chinatown and Lower Manhattan. The twin towers shimmered in the pounding rain, all those fluorescent lights seeming dim each time a fork of lightning struck the buildings. I'd probably seen thousands of lightning bolts hit those buildings over the years. How could we know that we were seeing it happen for the last time?

After the reading Garrison signed copies of his books. He stood on the stage at the front of the room and the crowd formed a line going up the right side aisle. A woman who worked for Barnes & Noble went down the line writing each person's name on a Post-It and sticking it to the book cover. This is common at large readings, it makes it easier for the person signing hundreds of books to get the inscription right.

In all my life there were two  celebrities I was terrified to meet, Leonard Cohen and Garrison Keillor. In each case I'd been a fan for so long, idolized their work, read and listened to everything I could get my hands on, that the thought of finding out either one was a jerk would have been more than I could handle. I met Cohen about twenty years ago and he was a gentle, charming, awe inspiring man. This night I found out that Keillor was kind, soft spoken, funny, genuinely interested in his fans. He asked me where I was from, he said I sounded midwestern. I told him I came from Bed Stuy and now live in Brookyn Heights. He told me I must be doing something right and I said that it was really just a series of happy accidents. He laughed and said, "Jim, my entire career has been a series of happy accidents!" He inscribed the book to me, writing that I was true Brooklyn, and dated it September 10, 2001. We shook hands and I left the stage.

By now it was about ten thirty, half an hour past the store's official closing. It seemed surreal, walking down the still escalators past three dim empty floors to where a lone cashier was working late checking out the people coming from the reading.  A security guard unlocked the door and I walked out into Union Square with a few other people heading for the subway. The rain had stopped and the last clouds were blowing away. The air felt fresh and cool, and the stars were shining. Putting my precious book in my backpack, I went down the stairs to the subway.

When I got home I put the book, still in its bag, on my dining table and took Casey out for his walk. The twin towers loomed over the end of my street, such a constant that I barely noticed the glowing windows, the television mast illuminated against the cool and drying sky. I was thinking about how I would take the book out of its bag tomorrow after work and spend a long peaceful evening of reading.

The next morning I was walking Casey at the end of my street overlooking the harbor at 8:46am.

When I finally took the book out of its bag about three weeks had passed. I opened it and looked at that date, September 10, 2001. When Garrison wrote that date neither of us could have imagined that it was the last day of a world that's gone now. I couldn't help wishing I'd cherished that world more.

Warm Night Sky

Went out to walk Casey tonight and saw the Tribute In Light rising above the end of my street; they're lighting it up again from now through Monday night. Through the anniversary. Two towers of blue-white light so tall and clean, so quiet and untouchable. Ghost beams from a world gone by, a world that gets harder to remember every day. I don't know why, but seeing them there puts a little peace in my heart.

September Night

The sand filled the cracks between the stones, and her sandals tamped it down when she walked out the door. Warm stones, warm sand, in the California sun, and her angry sandals sending shock waves through the seams. She had no idea how hard she stamped when she was pissed at an untrue love. It was the last full moon of summer, and the moonlight was blue where it ran down her cheeks, mixed with her tears.

Labor Day 1969

She was wearing my favorite jacket when I picked her up, the black denim one with the dolphin embroidered on the back. He was an impossible shade of blue, leaping out of a multicolored ocean under a psychedelic sunset. Black t-shirt, bell bottoms, white sneakers, she looked even younger than her sixteen years. Her long brown hair was tied in a pony tail that snaked over her left shoulder and down to her breast. She had a red cotton bandana around her neck like an outlaw's daughter. We walked to the subway holding hands, both hands in the pocket of my jacket. There was more of a chill than usual for a Labor Day morning.

At the pier we boarded the old sidewheeler steamboat and laughed at all the people running forward to try to be the first person in the bow. We strolled aft to the fantail and up to the third deck, where the sun was warming the folding chairs. An ocean liner passed downstream in the river channel and her wake set the steamboat to rocking gently.

At the stroke of ten the captain sounded the steam whistle and edged out of the slip. "Whistle" is such an inadequate word for that brass throated guardian angel, warning all other ships out of our path. Seconds later the echo bounced off the skyscrapers in midtown and rolled back to us, now out in the channel.

She lay her head on my shoulder and we shared a cigarette as the towns rolled by along the river shore. The sun tried to be warm, but there was no mistaking the color of autumn in its beams. We buttoned our jackets against the September cool.

I kissed her under the Bear Mountain Bridge, as the boat heeled hard to starboard to return to the city. While the boat lay broadside to the wash a stray wave slapped her and she rolled hard, jamming the girl's teeth into my gum. The kiss tasted of blood but we kissed anyway. The want was that strong.

Back at the dock that evening the old steamer eased gratefully into her slip. We stepped from ship to shore as the captain rang down "Finished With Engines" on the telegraph. We stood waiting to cross Twelfth Avenue, amazed at how short the days had become.

It was already dark when I brought her home.

Labor Day Weekend

Rain making rivers in the gutters, little whitecaps bubbling up around the tires of the sleeping cars. Raindrops making craters in the sand, til the beach looks like the lonely side of the moon. Rain combing the dead branches from the trees, brushing their green hair before they go to sleep. One glance and you know, it's the first rain of autumn.

The Mirrors

On the other side of the mirror the sky is made of water and the rivers are made of air. You can walk through the dry sand at the bottom of the East River and look up at the watery sky floating over your head. The towers of the Brooklyn Bridge rise out of the sand like eternity's doorstop; I carved my initials on one of the granite blocks right where it passed below the sand. It made me sad to think of all the tons of stonework down there under the sand, that never get to see the light of day.

I walked across the harbor bottom to the ferry terminal at the Battery and looked up at the ferry boats floating above my head in the sky. Somewhere in the sand under the ferry slip there's a souvenir badge from the Bronx Zoo. I dropped it there when I was about seven years old. In the real world it rusted away to nothing years ago, but on the other side of the mirror it's dry and warm, and just as shiny as the day I dropped it.

I decided to walk out to Brighton Beach. About a million years ago on a winter Sunday afternoon when the sun shone yellow and the wind smelled like Thanksgiving I walked this beach with a brown eyed girl with her hair in a pony tail. Her daughter, age six, was playing with the dogs people brought to run on the beach. We took a stick of driftwood and wrote, "I will love you forever." in the sand and signed our names underneath. She told me that when the tide came in and the waves washed this off the beach they would carry it forever through all the oceans of the world. Well, now it's thirty years later and I wondered if she was right.

Sure enough, there was our love letter, lying on the sand, our names on the bottom. The waves broke over my head, air and water rolling together in some hopelessly upside down surf. Her daughter is older today than we were when we wrote that letter in the sand. I hope her mom is happy, 'cos I am.

Somewhere North Of Montreal

Will I climb the mast, just because she asks me? Up the rope ladders one after another, sail, topsail, topgallant, royal, skysail, moonraker? Just to taste the night wind, feel the canvas rough in my hands? Will the wind blow the stars out of the sky, their light dripping from my fingers? Will I taste the salt spray on my tongue, and wonder if it's really her tears? Will she love me too, when Polaris is floating over the white line in the middle of the highway? God, I hope so!

Summer's Almost Gone

The sky was a little different yesterday, the light a little more white, a little more blue. It was still summer, warm and humid, but the color of the air was September. Most people won't see it for a while but it's there. When I saw it I thought of a day in 1982, swimming with Mindy at Brighton Beach. It was a week after Labor Day and the lifeguards were gone for the year, but we were out in the deep water, the water so warm and buoyant. It must have been around six when we headed for shore. As soon as my feet hit the bottom and I stood upright I could feel it, that little chill in the breeze that raised gooosebumps on my skin. As I walked out of the ocean I said goodbye for now, because I knew I wouldn't wade back there again until Columbus Day had passed, and Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Years and Valentines Day and Easter and so many chapters of life lived on dry land. It made me sad but it made me grateful.

Pickled

Today was my father's 89th birthday, except that he drank himself to death at 72. So I guess it doesn't count for much, does it? Two days ago my sister turned 61, I wonder if she was sober enough to remember. I have no idea since I haven't spoken to her in about two years. My other sister will turn 55 in October, but she won't be celebrating because she drank herself to death at 51. Is it just me, or is this totally stupid?

Tracks

I left my muse in tears in Grand Central Station on a thursday morning. It broke my heart to see her like that, eyeshadow smeared with tears, her lip trembling under the black lipstick. The wings on her shoulders hung like prayer flags in the rain. Her fishnets were torn and her boots were scuffed, and she was tearing pages out of her copy of the Tao and setting them on fire with a pocket lighter. She was trying so hard to look bored and jaded, but it just made her look even younger than she was. A train whistle wailing across the plains in the deepest dead of night, moving always farther away, that's what her sorrow was like.

I didn't mean for it to be like that, it's just that when I get anywhere near train tracks I get hungry for leaving. The last thing I ever wanted to do was make her cry. But I think too much when I'm in her arms, and tonight I just wanted to hear the rails sing. I just wanted to chase the sunset. I know when I get where I'm going she'll be there waiting.

The First Warm Night Of Spring

Lamplight shining through the trees, the buds are opening. Moonlight through soft clouds. Candle light on the tables, smoke and hunger in the air. They all want, and their want makes the old heartbeat, that never quite goes away, drum a little faster.

They think they invented the want, they don't know it's built into their blood. Their hands are amazed when they hold it, they wonder how anything could make them so proud and so scared all at the same time. It makes them feel even younger than they are. They don't know it's been there since Stonehenge, since Thebes, since Nineveh. Since Ice Age, since Olduvai. But they feel it in the river of their blood like the breath of a goddess.

They move with slow reverence, with the weight of all the ancestors watching. He takes her hand.