The Sick Bag Song Page 3

  The girl turns toward me, shaking the hair out of her eyes, and nods.

  Yeah, she says. Great drumming.

  Totally, I say.

  I’ve heard everything, she says, enigmatically. Everything.

  Oh yeah? Well, it’s pretty fucking awesome, is all I can say. Shit like that is worth sticking around for.

  I wait there a moment, mesmerised by the girl standing on the barrier of the bridge, one hand clutching the suspension cable, the other gesturing curiously across the city, as if commanding it to rise.

  You take care, I say after a time, I’ve got to go, and I turn away and head back down the bridge. As I arrive at the bus, I look back, but the girl has gone.

  I climb onto the bus, my morning’s business done, and thank the band – this brotherhood of transients – for their patience, but they are encased in their own private thoughts and do not acknowledge me, and I nod to the driver and say let’s go and he pulls out into the traffic and we continue wordlessly on our way.

  •

  Maybe it was Marty, because Marty loves music, or it could’ve been Warren, who very much understands the idea of ‘occasion’, or perhaps it was Jim, always ready with a strong gesture, or was it Conway, for reasons entirely of his own, or George, maybe, who was just trying to deconstruct the eerie flamenco-like introduction, or it might’ve been Barry, although Barry doesn’t like a lot of noise in the morning; I can’t really be sure, but at some point, someone put a song on the bus’s sound system.

  Why was this particular song chosen? Maybe it was in respect of Canada Day, or that we were about to cross the Canadian border back into the USA, or perhaps it was just that we all needed something to help us through the sombre events of the morning, I can’t in all honesty say, but as the singer’s lugubrious voice filled the cabin of the bus – he was from Montreal – all the lights came down and the world withdrew, and, for a while, each of us was bound, suddenly and inextricably, together – and it helped, and it healed, and picking at a thread on my jacket sleeve, I drifted.

  •

  In two years’ time the boy standing frozen with fear on the bridge will be fourteen years old and he will walk the mile and a half to his friend’s house, under a flat, expressionless sky, the harsh Australian sun bearing down on him.

  He will feel like an insect trapped under a child’s malicious magnifying glass; the sun so fierce that it burns away all shadows and secrets and ambiguities with its interrogatory light. There is no escaping it.

  The friend’s big sister will invite him into her bedroom, an annexed weatherboard shed attached to the main house. Pieces of faded material have been stapled over the windows, so that the room is darker and cooler.

  Check this out, she will say.

  She will hand the boy a record cover, and the boy will see the mad face of a laughing man, and big block letters that say Songs of Love and Hate and he’ll know even before she puts the needle on the record that he has something of untold value in his hands.

  I stepped into an avalanche. It covered up my soul,

  Leonard Cohen will sing, and the boy will suddenly breathe, as if for the first time, and fall inside the laughing man’s voice and hide.

  The boy will grow older, and over time there will be other songs – not many – ten or maybe twenty in a lifespan, that stand apart from the rest of the music he will discover. He will realise as he grows older still, and crosses the Canadian border and drives down into Seattle, that not only are these songs holy or sacred, they are hiding songs – what the Aztec Indians call carrion songs – that deal exclusively in darkness, obfuscation, concealment and secrecy. He will realise that, for him, the purpose of these songs has been to shut off the sun, to draw a long shadow down and protect him from the corrosive glare of the world.

  •

  There are nine sons of the Dragon.

  The Chaofeng dragon that likes precipices.

  The Pulao dragon that likes to cry.

  The Qiuniu dragon that likes music.

  The Baxia dragon that likes to carry heavy objects.

  The Suanni dragon that likes to sit down.

  The Chiwen dragon that likes swallowing.

  The Bi’an dragon that likes litigation.

  The Bixi dragon that is fond of literature.

  The Yazi dragon that likes to kill.

  And so it was, we crossed the border, down to Seattle,

  And on the fire escape of the Paramount, after the show,

  I smoked and listened to the people leaving the theatre,

  And closed my eyes and dreamed I was washed up

  On a vast white stretch of your neck and when I bit

  Into it, I hardened like a coastal shelf and you shrieked

  Through the blood; shrieked and tore at me,

  And asked me where I was from. I said –

  We have come down from the mountains,

  We have crossed borders and rivers and prairies,

  We have stood silent before visions of great natural beauty,

  We have marvelled at miracles of bold engineering,

  We have travelled along vast multi-laned highways,

  We have traversed suspension bridges and keeping

  To the shadows, entered into the majestic cities

  To be with you tonight.

  We have seen all that we had loved and loathed

  And all was inside us.

  On the fire escape of the Paramount I wondered where you’d gone.

  I thought I had sole ownership of your body. I was wrong.

  I thought I had sole ownership of my body. I was also wrong.

  On the fire escape of the Paramount, I wrote this song.

  My brain is a bee

  My head is a hive

  I unfold like a flower

  The beekeeper’s wife

  The flower is a gigantic

  Oozing sump of pollen

  My head-hive splits open

  My bee-brain is swollen

  My bee-brain is swarming

  Getting wiser than wise

  A busy bee gorging on

  Other beekeeper’s hives

  Buzz! Screams the bee!

  The wide world roars!

  Beekeeper is spent

  Stinger withdraws

  I called the song The Beekeeper’s Wife. I think the song hints at growing anxiety about my wife not answering the phone.

  It also puts forward the idea that we do not have sole ownership of our dreams and that it is our right as artists to breathe freely and deeply the oxygen of ideas that engulfs the world, and to generally buzz around.

  All that aside, the song is no good. It’s dead-dragon dead. It’s a hearse of verse. It’s the sort of song that gets written when there is nothing to write about. It has been squeezed out of a dry, constricted aperture like an intestinal worm. It even looks that way on the page – pale, anorexic and half digested. I tried to make the song oval in shape, like a beehive, but check it out; it’s actually shaped like a turd.

  It appears as a headless, amputated corpse might appear or a concrete pylon that has not yet evolved into a column of light.

  Still, I love you, little shit-shaped, stillborn song! Leap into my bag of sick! Maybe Bryan Ferry can find some use for you.

  •

  When Bryan Ferry sung the desolate old English ballad ‘The Butcher Boy’ that afternoon at the South Bank Centre in London, he did so alone at the piano, with a hushed abandon that reduced me and my wife to tears.

  Was it the unearthly performance of the song? Or was it the song’s devastating lyric? Or was it a diabolic combination of the two? I cannot say, but something unaccountable and premonitory happened at that moment as if the very song took up residence inside us, possessed us, and the course of our lives together was changed forever.

  And at that moment in time, alone at the piano, Bryan Ferry became a true god, dangerously bestowing destinies, with the most beautiful voice in the world.

  •

>   From inside the sick bag I hear strange, dissonant chanting. I open the bag and discover a set of miniature deities, surrounded by their prostrated and adoring acolytes.

  Oh dear, I say and I drown them all in an old galvanised water trough, outside the Cheesecake Factory on Pine Street.

  Then through the darkened streets of downtown Seattle, I sing the ancient ballad of ‘The Butcher Boy’.

  In London town where I did dwell

  A butcher boy I loved right well

  He courted me my life away

  And now with me, he will not stay

  I went upstairs to go to bed

  And calling to my mother said

  Give me a chair ’till I sit down

  And a pen and ink ’till I write down

  At every word she dropped a tear

  And at every line cried Willie dear –

  Oh, what a foolish girl was I

  To be led astray by a butcher boy

  And on Interstate 5, on our way to Portland, I continued to sing,

  He went upstairs and the door he broke

  He found her hanging from a rope

  He took his knife and he cut her down

  And in her pocket, these words he found

  Oh, make my grave large, wide and deep

  Put a marble stone at my head and feet

  And in the middle, a turtle dove

  That the world may know that I died of love

  It’s a road-poem slash horror-story – think The Hitcher meets the Book of Psalms meets John Berryman meets a bit of Indianismo meets The Wasteland meets Cocksucker Blues meets Nosferatu meets Marilyn Monroe, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and anyone else who has drowned in their own sick, meets Planes, Trains and Automobiles meets The Curse of the Mummy meets Deepak Chopra meets – I drone,

  As I sit in the penthouse of the Nines Hotel in Portland on a conference call to London.

  The Head of Marketing cuts in – little white rubber dead dragon keyrings, decapitated celebrity heads on pencils, sick bag tote bags and retro stars-and-stripes T-shirts, with ‘Call the stewardess for bag disposal’ across the chest –

  meets Kanye West meets homespun American folk ballad meets The Book of Judith meets a bit of Greek mythology meets the SCUM Manifesto meets A Shropshire Lad meets rock ’n’ roll memoir meets Apocalypto, meets TripAdvisor meets motivational manual meets –

  We need to tease out the decapitation theme – says my editor. Didn’t Nero stab himself in the neck? And, of course, John the Baptist and fucking Jayne Mansfield, right? Didn’t she, you know, um, when she crashed her convertible –

  No, actually that was blunt force trauma, says my googling assistant –

  My publisher says – We could hire nine strippers, dress them as Muses and have them run through the Frankfurt Book Fair plucking their lyres and passing out sick bags! –

  meets Bret Easton Ellis meets the Earl of Rochester meets Japanese Death Poems meets Frederick Seidel meets Mulholland Drive meets a bit of Chinese mythology meets PornHub meets Butler’s Lives of the Saints meets The Odyssey – My editor, again – You know, Aeolus was Keeper of the Winds and he gave Odysseus a big fucking bag of wind to blow him back to Ithaca, you know, on a gentle west wind. Throw this in as a riff on the bag motif –

  How about one single book reading event at the Strand from inside a giant Delta sick bag!

  Trademark infringement, says my manager, who has hopped on the line.

  Fuck Delta then! We’ll do our own fucking sick bags!

  meets Arabian Nights meets The Ancient Mariner meets Moby Dick meets the Ramayana meets –

  •

  Tonight I wrote down this line in the alley

  Behind the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall,

  In Portland, Oregon,

  Where I smoked and sat,

  I slide my little songs out from under you

  And I was very happy with that.

  But where are you?

  •

  When my wife entered the room, she did not see me. She crossed the bedroom and stood at the tall open window, gazing down at the gardens below. The sinking sun set the windows on fire. She did not move in the orange light. When at last she turned to look at me, I drew a sudden breath, for she was as white and intricate as a snowflake. She sat on the edge of the bed and in a small, business-like voice said,

  They are coming.

  Who are coming? I asked.

  All of them. They are closing in. They want to kill me.

  Who wants to kill you?

  All of them. They are getting nearer.

  Her face seemed to disassemble in the granulated light, then reassemble as she lay down on the bed. From where I was perched, my wife looked as if she had been dropped there, out of the sky.

  Well, I said, if the past don’t get you, the fucking future sure will.

  I’m serious, she said.

  I know you are.

  I smiled and came down and sat next to her.

  Hey, no one is coming. It’s okay. I’m here.

  She traced her fingers down the contours of my face.

  Oh, baby, you’re not here, she said. You’re not here at all.

  And she pulled the sheet over her head.

  My packed bags sitting in the hall.

  •

  Ring! Ring! Said the phone as I reared up and dialled.

  Ring! Ring! Said the phone in the Nines Hotel.

  Ring! Ring! Said the obliterating train and it smiled,

  As it spun down the tracks ring! ringing! its bell.

  Then I arrived in San Francisco and got sick.

  The air was full of gas and ridiculousness.

  It was too much of Allen Ginsberg’s Grape Nuts, maybe,

  In that melancholy sick bag repository on Columbus Avenue,

  Or maybe it was one too many haunted sick bag nights,

  Or whatever killed the dragon I now got!

  But I lay on my bed in my suite at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel,

  Shallow-breathing the dragon’s same slow susurration,

  That the world may know I died of love.

  Let the world know that I died of love,

  And I called you across five thousand miles,

  And remembered what the angels said,

  We are with you but you must take the first step alone.

  It is their work to guide us through the dark,

  And in time transport us home.

  Are you there, darling? Pick, pick, pick.

  Pick up the receiver and press it to your seashell ear,

  And let the rush of angel air demand of us

  That we take the first step alone.

  My voice is speaking to you through the communication system

  Of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Nob Hill. I am in bed.

  And I am not coming home. I am not coming home.

  I am pulling the blue plastic sheet over my head.

  •

  The train thunders around the bend on the other side of the river. The track ballast rattles and shakes. The boy looks down at the dark water swirling below him. He sees the concrete pylon. He sees the branches of the tree. He looks up. The train has a huge yellow face like a sun. The boy thinks of running back down the track. The boy thinks of leaping into the river. The boy finds he can do neither and stands frozen on the tracks. His eyes fill with tears. The obliterating train shrieks and rushes toward him.

  The Nine Primary Bedevilments of Creativity are –

  Procrastination through fear.

  Procrastination through indecision.

  Procrastination through perfectionism.

  Procrastination through waiting for inspiration.

  Procrastination through chaos and misadventure.

  Procrastination through illness and tiredness.

  Procrastination through raising a family.

  Procrastination through superstition and religion.

  Procrastination through madness and suicide.

  The Nine Secondary
Bedevilments of Creativity are –

  Procrastination through the Internet working.

  Procrastination through the Internet not working.

  Procrastination through Twelve Step Programs.

  Procrastination through therapy and self-help literature.

  Procrastination through charity work and saving the planet.

  Procrastination through education and research.

  Procrastination through hobbies and outside interests.

  Procrastination through addiction.

  Procrastination through sex.

  The Nine Tertiary Bedevilments of Creativity are –

  Procrastination through HBO.

  Procrastination through dying your hair.

  Procrastination through making money.

  Procrastination through not making money.

  Procrastination through not having the right equipment.

  Procrastination through personal hygiene.

  Procrastination through shopping.

  Procrastination through decorating your workspace.

  Procrastination through making unnecessary lists.

  The Nine Quaternary Bedevilments of Creativity are –

  Procrastination through vampirism.

  Procrastination through lobotomy.

  Procrastination through manual amputation.

  Procrastination through cannibalism.

  Procrastination through bankruptcy and recession.

  Procrastination through environmental collapse.

  Procrastination through terrorist attack.

  Procrastination through apocalypse.

  Procrastination through decapitation.