This
is a continuation of a six-part series presenting the songs - and a lost
manuscript - of a musician friend of mine named Zak Jourek.
The
songs posted can be found
here.
Brief re-cap:
I met Zak while working in a dining
hall at a small university in Iowa and then we both ended up in Boulder,
Colorado at the end of the nineties. I got a package in the mail last January
from one of his old girlfriends with an old manuscript of his and a demo
cassette tape of his songs. As far as I can tell, he disappeared without a
trace about thirteen years ago. Did he wander up into the Rockies? Is he
homeless and mumbling, going through dumpsters in Portland? Did he become a
juniper in the desert, charred by lightning? I have no clue.
I leave you with section four of his
manuscript and two of his poem-songs: a goofy piece called I am the Bodhisattva Who Saves the People on
this Bus from the Smell of my Feet and one inspired by Gershwin’s
Summertime, Summertime (poem in the key
of Gershwin).
4.
The Watermelon Pickup
We
passed a rusted pickup full of watermelons on the shoulder of highway 17, south
of Charleston, heading north. My card was almost maxed and we were trying to
make it to Philadelphia, crash at my mother’s house, before the credit ran out.
I’ve been caught up in a particular
hamster wheel for the last ten years: long, crap-bar tours, at the end of which
I inevitably run out of money, and then I reluctantly high-tail-it back to my
mother’s house and present myself on her doorstep, with nothing to show for
another long absence. She lets me in as if I’ve been out for the weekend,
though sometimes it’s been as long as three years. We drink some wine, and she
inevitably begins one of her drunken tirades, then passes out at the kitchen
table. I leave her there, the way I did my entire childhood, and crawl off into
the darkness to find a place to sleep. The endless round. But this time, I
thought, I’d be bringing someone home with me. Would that change things?
“There was a watermelon truck in the
gas station where our car had been towed,” Liv suddenly said. She started stories
that way, as if they revolved in the air around her, like moths on the moon’s
currents, and then she’d reach out, grabbing blind, and bring whatever she
found into her mouth, start from there.
Maybe it was her form of
cave-painting.
“The boys in the truck eyed my
sisters,” she said, “chopped up a couple of melons and came over to our station
wagon, offered it to everyone. My father was in the garage waiting on the
mechanics, who were busy ignoring him, playing at making the Yankee wait...”
We passed a row of
sharecropper-shacks, surrounded by thick-trunked oaks, and a sign for barbeque
(Loudon’s Bar-B-Q Satisfy Testify No
lie). Two children kicked dust into shafts of light falling through a canopy of
live oaks. Liv turned, watched the children grow smaller, disappear, then
continued, telling me how her folks piled their seven kids into the station
wagon and drove from Chicago to a rented cottage on Pawley’s Island in South
Carolina every other summer. Liv was the youngest so she spent those twenty
hours wedged in the well of the backseat, leaning against her sister’s legs. It
wasn’t until she was ten years old and two of her sisters had left home that
she finally saw the peaks of the Smoky Mountains.
“The mechanics ended up taking three
days to get to the car,” Liv said. “We were all together in one room at a motel
run by a sister of one of the mechanics – a fat woman in a yellow and aqua
bathrobe. The yellow parts were butterflies...”
We passed two men in a yard of
junked cars, holding cans of beer, staring down into the engine of a stripped
grey Chevy pickup. “There was nothing to do in that town but sit around at the
gas station,” Liv said. “That’s when Kendall and Shannon, the two oldest, started
the game of making up stories about the people who came and went.”
White sheets hung slack off a
clothesline behind a small green clapboard house. A woman’s face appeared – for
a moment – from a small window framed by trumpet vines. She looked like my
mother – probably because I was dreading the moment when I would have to ask my
mother, once again, for shelter from the storm.
“On the second day there weren’t any
other cars in the lot and the fucking mechanics still wouldn’t touch the car.”
“What did your father do?” I asked.
“There was nothing he could do,” she said. “It was Kendall
that got us out of there. The second night Kendall and Shannon were hanging out
down by the creek behind the motel and they ran into one of the watermelon
boys. They started flirting. He was this skinny kid, blonde crew cut, freckles,
a little awkward, and happened to be the son of one of the mechanics. I’m not
sure what happened, but I remember Kendall from that time, and whatever she did
with him was probably pretty overpowering. She was merciless.”
Liv laughed. “Shannon came back to
the motel room alone around ten. Kendall didn’t show until around midnight. Her
t-shirt and shorts were soaked. I remember she had this baby blue bra – she
loved it – and you could see it through the shirt. My father was furious.
Whenever he got mad his glasses would fog...it was hilarious. Still, when we
went down to the garage the next day, the mechanics were working on the car.”
“Did you ever ask Kendall what she
did with the kid?”
“Why?” she said. “Even my father
knew that Kendall was responsible for the car being fixed. They were always
arguing when I was a kid, especially on vacations, but when we left that town
he let her drive the car all the way to Pawley’s. He sat in the back with the
rest of us.”
As we passed another group of
shacks, tin roofs burning orange in the sunset, I looked over at Liv. She
flashed me a smile. “It’s a song,” she said. “Don’t you think?”
I wondered: does she want me to
write a song about it? Even after she’s heard my seven or eight different
drunken versions of the music-as-cave-painting speech?
I said nothing.
She squinted into the sunset. “It’s
a country song,” she said. “I can hear it.”
(End of Part 4)
(click on title to
hear song)
My shoes are rotten on
the inside from rain
the dark shined grooves
the toes made
and the divot curved
into the once-thick foam heel
are the possum body left
dead on the summernoon street
when I pull my feet from
my shoes
Two days on the bus San
Francisco to Des Moines
listening to my feet
crackle and burn
whispering temptation
into my busdrone ears
praying and screaming
'air', cajoling 'air'
while I stare out the
window through Nebraska's rain
coming on for hundreds
of miles - darker and darker -
strips of grey from
heaven to wheatearth
(and the gasps of the
passengers from back east
when the balls of white
hairl begin clattering the bus sides
covering the highway in
crushed white marble).
My feet burn to be free
listening to the hail
jump ecstatic off the roof
Free from the rot
leather and rubber gone bad
in the Oregon rain
I may be discovered here
on the bus
by the woman who dangled
her bare feet in the aisle
reading Danielle Steele
when the juts of
cragrock behind her
slowly turned away from
the sun
as we rounded a bend in
the road above Salt Lake.
How can she do
that? Is she my demon?
And the vultures with
their turkey red faces fly
dangerously close to the
bus
tempted down by the
invisible strings that bind them
to the rot of the earth.
I can see an invisible
string from their beaks to my feet.
If I take them off
everyone'll know who I am
the last man who owns
only one pair of shoes
sneaking along the
streets in the rain with only one pair
BUT I AM GUILTY OF
NOTHING!
Beneath these shoes my
feet are the same as anyone's
I declare all feet on
this bus must be free!
FREE THE FEET! FREE MY FEET!
(I am the revolutionary
with ulterior motives...)
In Ogallalla the
pasengers pile out at a rest stop
One by one, weary,
hair-tousled, mung-mouthed,
getting out to wash and
purify themselves
and I think 'This is
it! Time for the revolution to begin!'
Let the air on this bus
circulate the truth!
Let is circulate the
hidden meaning of America!
Let it circulate the
smell of no job!
Let it circulate the
funk of the one-pair-of-shoes-man!
But I can't do it.
I must realize my higher
calling.
I must turn my back on
utopia.
I must turn back from
Nirvana.
I must return forever on
this bus
for I am the Bodhisattva
who saves the people on this bus
from the smell of my
feet
Vowing not to take off
my shoes
Vowing not to take off
my shoes
Vowing not to take off
my shoes
until all other feet
have attained
the truth
Notes:
A Bodhisattva is someone who, after death, chooses not to leave the wheel of birth and death, but return in another incarnation to help all other beings attain enlightenment. Zak wrote this after spending a summer busking up and down the Oregon coast. It rained the whole time and his shoes got a bit soggy. The situation is his bus ride back to Des Moines with nasty, soggy shoes. Michaela and I were around for this recording. We're the ones in the background screaming 'Free the Feet!'
(click on title to
hear song)
Trains couple, disengage in the railyard. The scrape of metal shakes sleeping questions
from open window, stalks the bliss of roof shadows cutting pink
streetlight. The slow-dance of freight cars
echoes inside distances carried by dark rain down a corridor of steel petals.
Leona Martinez parts her curtain. She has an open space in her front teeth
where 700 sighs have escaped in the last hour.
Her hands are questions, asking ‘Why?’
Art Harris switches on his bedroom light, still dreaming,
and searches his apartment for the sound of water running down a canyon of
glass. His ears are questions, asking ‘How?’
And Samson the Joker smells perfume riding the rain. And
Samson the Joker rushes to his window, catching two women in skin-tight black leather
skirts turning the corner at the end of his block. And Samson shouts, ‘Hey! Who are you?’ And
Samson shouts, ‘Hey, I love you.’
The scrape of high heels, brakes. Voices in the labyrinths
of a steel rose.
Trains find each other in the dark. Old lovers trying to
remember what the other felt like – in the rain – in the dark, in the rain – in
the dark, in the rain – all questions left unanswered.
Rivulets of street water hunt the elusive moon, enthusiastic
as the first time thief.
Notes:
This came from a time when Zak lived near the Des Moines railyard, listening to the trains couple and disengage all night long.
********
Next Time:
Parts 5 & 6
of Zak's Manuscript
& More Songs
Bopa-Lalla!
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