Monday, December 14, 2015

Mysterious Package: Songs of Zak Jourek (Part 5)



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. 


Part 1gives a more in-depth introduction to Zak and can be found here



The songs posted can be found

 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 sections five and six of his manuscript. This time, two more songs with lyrics posted below: The Nothing Song and Twilight Time.


5. Playing Hide and Seek with the Sea



The car blew a rod just north of the North Carolina state line. Liv immediately pulled her bags out of the trunk and stuck out her thumb. I wasn’t sure if she was intending to hitch solo or was thumbing for the both of us. I never asked. That’s when Bobby came rolling by in his red ‘66 Lincoln Continental Convertible and picked us both up, drove us to his place near Myrtle Beach.



We lived with Bobby for several weeks. Well, I lived at his place for several weeks. I have no idea how long Liv stayed. For all I know, she might still be there now. We were his pets; his strange little artist creatures. Liv loved playing the role. Bobby had a Cajun chef in the kitchen, an endless supply of booze, and a view of the sea.



My last night at Bobby’s place there was a huge party. There were always parties, every night, but this one was bigger than most. I spent some of the evening watching Bobby stand just outside the light cast by the Tiki torches at the edge of the veranda, drink in hand, watching Liv mingle with his guests. The air smelled of lemon juice, suntan lotion, gin, blackened redfish, and the sea, the sea, the wine-dark sea.

           

“Have you ever heard about King Cousin Blue?” Liv said to one of the men encircling her. Bobby sipped his drink, eyes on Liv. Liv once told me about King Cousin Blue: a twenty five pound crab that lived beneath the Pawley’s Island Bridge when she was a kid. Illusive, mythic. Pawley’s Moby Dick.

           

“I almost had it once, but it snapped right through the netting,” she said to the men. “And he only had one claw! I told everyone in my family I’d almost gotten him and no one ever believed me. You believe me, don’t you?”



The men laughed. Liv had netted them. She continued: “The crab was named by some local who spent every summer on the bridge in a beach chair, fishing for the beast with a cane pole. He had this biblical name…” She snapped her fingers, pretending to search for the name. “Jelalayah? Something like that.”

           

The men all frowned, trying to come up with the right name. “Jedediah?” one offered.

           

“That’s it!” Liv shouted. Everyone laughed again. “They’re both still out there somewhere,” Liv added. She pointed down the coast, towards Pawley’s Island.  All the men looked in the direction she was pointing, into the dark.

           

I wandered into the living room. Football was playing on a huge plasma screen. The news scrolling beneath the game announced another city in Iraq taken by the jihadist group ISIS.

           

“I heard from Bobby that you’re a song writer?”

           

I turned, looked into the face of a woman in a tight black dress. She was another one of Bobby’s pets. Last year’s variety.

           

“Yes,” I said, and left it at that.

           

“Do I know any of your songs?” she asked.

           

I’d had a few drinks, so I started to tell her the epic story of how EMI stole my music. Her eyes almost immediately went blank – too many words – so I wrapped it up quickly with “I had to leave the music business,”  just in case she wanted to attach herself to my rising star the way Liv had.

           

She was obviously confused. “So you’re trying to keep your art pure from all the buying and selling,” she said.

           

I’m not sure if it was a question or a statement. It was my turn to be confused. Keep my art pure? 

           

I retreated down to the water’s edge. A solitary boat light moved across the night surface. Clouds hid the stars. Sand shifted across sand, sounding like half-finished sentences, ghost-talk.

           

I have a memory of my father on a beach. It is the only memory I have. It is a false memory because he went missing in Vietnam while I was still in utero. It comes from some night when I was four or five, my mother sitting at the kitchen table, shit-faced, telling me about a wonderful day she remembered when all three of us were at the Jersey Shore together.

           

The beautiful lies that came out of her mouth…that still come out of her mouth…

           

Still, whenever I’m on a beach, I feel as if I’m missing something, that there’s something hiding out there in the dark water, behind the curl of a wave, or down a crab hole, under a grain of sand.

           

Absence, absence.

           

I had a childhood friend, Bruce, whose father died in Vietnam, too. He was drawn to the absence of his father so much he joined the marines out of high school, made a career of it. He’s probably retired and working for some private security firm in Iraq or Afghanistan right now. I know he definitely was in Kuwait during the first Gulf War. Me, I never think much about my father. But we’re both playing hide and seek with our fathers in our own way. There’s probably a song out there somewhere about all that absence, but I’ve never found it.
           

It doesn’t matter now. We’ve got new wars. It’s the new that counts. It’s the new, the young, what’s fresh off the conveyor belt, that draws the audience in. “Make it new,” is the terrorizing and terrorized shout from everyone, everywhere. The war my father died in is ancient news, long ago tossed onto the dust bin of history. Too many movies were made about it and so there was a universal acknowledgment that we’ve all been there, done that. Move on.

           

What’s funny is that it’s not just about new wars and old wars. I know now that whatever I sing about, because of my age, because I’m no longer young, before it even leaves my mouth it is yesterday’s news…

           

I heard a couple making love in the dunes, not far from where I was standing. More of Bobby’s pets, I assumed, who had escaped from the cage for a few minutes. I looked back at the lights falling across the sand from Bobby’s house and knew that Liv was already gone. She’d started her new adventure.

           

Well, god bless her.

           

What was I going to say to my mother when she opened her door in that grim little brick row house in Northeast Philly? The same thing I always said.

6. Can dolphins outrun their fate?



I woke on the beach, hungover, half-clothed, sand in my mouth. The waves were high. There were dark clouds on the horizon. I looked at the woman lying next to me, the one who’d asked me if I wanted to keep my art pure, and couldn’t remember her name. I don’t think she ever gave it to me. I nudged her awake, pointed at the waves. “Looks like a storm.”

           

She opened her eyes, squinted at me through her dyed blonde bangs, then squinted out at the ocean and grinned. “You ever been body surfing during a storm?”

           

We rode the waves, catching them high, plunging into the fall, tossed head over heels, bouncing off the sand floor, cart wheeling in the switchbacks and whirlpools. After a while I started to play shark, hunted her legs, grabbed her for a second, then swam off. 

           

“Was that you?” she cried above the sound of the waves.

            
Lightning shattered the horizon.

           

“Me what?” 

           

Then she started playing the same game. I felt a light brush against my ankle. I looked around. The woman-who-shall-forever-remain-nameless surfaced to my right, faced the storm.           

 “Was that you?” I called out.

           

“Me what?”

            
I slipped under again, swam towards her, tapped her leg. When I surfaced several yards off, I turned to face the waves and out of the corner of my eye I saw her sink out of sight. She pushed against my legs, but this time knocked me off my feet. When I rose out of the water, she was far off.           

“Did you do that?” I yelled.

           

She pointed to her ear, shook her head. Thunder burrowed into my skull.

           

I turned back to the waves. One more ride before the storm hit. I wondered where Liv was right then, waking up next to one of Bobby’s guests in one of his many bedrooms? Or maybe waking up next to Bobby?

           

Bobby and his red convertible. Bobby and his mysterious millions. Bobby who owned the world. He probably owned all of my old songs. I could feel his long fingers slipping inside me, trying to find the new ones…

           

The woman-who-shall-forever-remain-nameless bumped me again. A long brush of rough skin. That didn’t seem right. I looked around, frantic. She was standing knee deep in the water fifteen feet in front of me, pulling her hair away from her face. “Did you...?” But I knew. Something knocked against me again, another long scrape of rough skin.
           

“There’s something out here!” I screamed, thrashing through the water towards her. She laughed until I was almost on top of her, saw the terror in my eyes, and then we were both scrambling through the waves, slipping under, gulping salt water, coming back up, sucking air, half-running, half-swimming, heading for shore.

           

We stumbled onto wet sand, out of the water, and fell on all fours, coughing. When we turned to look back we saw eight dolphin fins rising and falling in the shallows – a pod, heading south down the coast. For a moment I had the insane idea that if I wandered back into the water, grabbed a fin, they would accept me, take me with them. The woman-with-no-name began laughing and I laughed with her. What made her laugh, I’ll never know. I didn’t ask.

           

Rain wandered the dunes.


(end of sections 5 & 6)


(click on title to hear song)

Blue, green and gold
Through Venetian blinds
Shadows in the mirror
It's twilight time

Light through water, the fish are candles
Moving candles, chasing shadows
Shadows in the mirror
It’s twilight time

Fish swim blind, don’t know day from night
Fading light, through Venetian blinds
In their chamber, glint of silver
Fading sooner, sooner or later
Shadows in the mirror
It’s twilight time

Bodies darting, looking for a door
Hole in water, is what they’re looking for
Dark mouth smiling, green braids flowing
She chases shadows, a dark mouth closing
Shadows in the mirror
It's twilight time

Fish swim blind, don’t know day from night
Fading light, through Venetian blinds
Know what they want, seen her before
Dripping hair, behind the door
Shadows in the mirror
It’s twilight time

Blue, green and gold
Through Venetian blinds



Notes:

Zak told me that he wrote this song in an upstairs room at his then-girlfriend’s house outside Chicago. Instead of going down and hanging out with the family the first night, he spent it up in her old room. As the sun went down the only light in the room was from the aquarium. This was during a period when he thought he was going crazy (hearing voices, hallucinating, even thinking that Medusa was always hiding behind his bathroom door, waiting to turn him into stone). So, it was just him and the fish trapped behind glass. At the end of the song he launches into a poem of mine called “Crows Cross The Moon.”



(click on title to hear song)

It’s a face seen
Through a glove of dew
Some say that’s nothing

It’s a hand waving
From a shadowed room
Some say that’s nothing

It’s a siren praying
With your bones
Some say that’s nothing

It’s the moon tapping
On your skull window
Some say that’s nothing

Some say from nothing something comes
But where does nothing go?
I don’t know.

It’s a kiss
Shaped like a vase
Some say that’s nothing

It’s a kiss
From a haunted candle flame
Some say that’s nothing

It’s the silence from your
Lost lover’s mouth
Some say that’s nothing

It’s a night
When there’s no one around
Some say that’s nothing

Some say from nothing something comes
But where does nothing go?

It’s a mirror waiting
In the grass
Some say that’s nothing

It’s the time after
All time has passed
Some say that’s nothing

It’s the rain sounding
Like a burning bush
Some say that’s nothing

It’s a door when you’re
Least expecting one
Some say that’s nothing

I know
From nothing something comes
But where does nothing…

It’s a flame
Reflected in your eye
It’s a flame
Reflected in your eye
It’s a flame
Reflected in your eye

It’s a hawk
Sailing out of sight…


Notes:
I remember that Zak thought that the concept that the entire universe came from nothing was hysterically funny. Sometimes he would repeat to me Heidegger’s phrase: “Why is there something instead of nothing?” and then begin laughing, as if he’d cracked a great joke. It IS funny. I think this song has something to do with that. And his disdain for people who ignored the small things in the world – a globe of dew, a flame reflected in the eye.

***********
 Next Time:

Zak’s entire manuscript,
including the final section






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