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 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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