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!