Tired and sick? Perhaps sick and tired. Mostly tired. A little sick.
I could feel myself coming down with it Saturday morning. I’d stayed out all night and played (played what you may ask?!!? Uno and Monopoly, of course!) and run amok and really just sort of rambled. And I knew I was going to pay for it. I could feel the drippings, the leavings, the makings of nasal incontinence and heady stuffiness, but I pushed on nonetheless. I was just having too good a time to let a little thing like my nose stop me.
Saturday morning I could feel the scratchiness and so I took some cold medicine and went back to bed.
Upon gaining consciousness Saturday afternoon I went on over to Rowan’s place, dusted him off, shoved him in my car and carted him over to the College Perk to celebrate his first and last 30th birthday.
I feared for his survival, knowing that he would be playing allllll night, and that for the first third he’d be at the whim of Sharif (who gets a mic for IO’s performances) and that for the last third he’d be at the mercy of a man Under the Influence (of whatever possibly expired cold medicines my mom happened to have in the closet that day). All in all, I had a lot of sympathy for him. In a dazed and semi-coherent kind of way.
The show itself was awesome. . We’ve been playing really, really well together and the Perk was packed. It felt really good to have such a happy, happy audience. Though Iwas afraid I was a little off, a lot of people commented that even the banter was on. I was told I was very funny. Makes me feeeel good. I actually felt a little bit patchy – I guess there are moments on stage when I feel there are certain stories to tell. Maybe just because I know they haven’t been told in a long, long time.
I just finished a new song which takes a step back from all this folk bullshit writing I’ve been around for the last couple of years. I took a step back in to my incoherence and my cross-draw from different stories and different parts of myself. Maybe it’s not “right”, but I sure feel comfortable there. It’s a good song, and more helpful than other recent writings. I thought I was writing about one thing, it turned out to be something else…
In any case, Steel was a song like that, moreso than most. I wrote about a woman, a woman who Lived far away from me and who I was to sacrifice an awful lot to be with… and crossed it with a car crash I witnessed while working security in Baltimore. Of course, the tongue-in-cheek version goes something like “yeah, wrote a song about a car crash and compared it to my relationship” (hahahaha) – but in truth, there’s no comparison in Steel – merely temporal context. The things happened at the same time and finish a picture for me.
Steel was written shortly after a car (yes, I know the song says “truck” – that sounded better) lost control on North Avenue behind the Commons. The car had come off of route 83 and was travelling West on North Avenue. It hit the curb and spun on all axes, clipping lamp post and wiping out part of a brick wall. As the car spun it caught a pedestrian with the twisted metal of its bumper, gashing her from the base of her belly toher collar bone. She was pregnant.
The car came down, half-on and half-off the curb, facing back the way it had came. The woman landed on the hood and the lamp post slammed down on top of her. Our school security reached the scene as I was calling the ambulances. One kid came back as I was coordinating communications and he was covered in green oil paint. He kept repeating “I had my hands in her stomach! I had my hands in her fucking stomach!!!” My head flipped, I realized it was red….
He saved her Life. He didn’t save her baby. I can’t imagine anyone else remembers her anymore except the people who were on duty that night and maybe the kids in the car. I remember one pacing back and forth yelling about how he was only going 20mph and the other guy sitting with his head in his hands, shaking his head and waiting on the curb for whatever else was going to happen.
I told that story in mangled form on stage Saturday night. I told it poorly and people were quiet. Then we went on with the song. I think that all of our music should be accompanied with silence, and all of the stories should be followed with laughter… and once or twice during every set, the audience should fall into an uncomfortable silence.
