Shadowbahn(42)
just believe in
After this, it will take her a while, days or maybe weeks, to realize the strange sensation that increasingly comes over her every time she looks at her gynecologist husband, Scott, somehow is related to the sight that September morning of the airliners barely missing the Towers. After this, her husband seems a shadow to her; sometimes she has this funny, funny feeling that he’s vanishing by the moment. Eventually she believes he isn’t there at all. In the mornings on her way uptown to Macy’s, where she works in human resources, Pamela will suddenly stop and turn southwest with the funny, funny feeling that somehow the Towers will be gone too. She barely remembers a British man who worked in the Trade Center for a risk management firm, whatever that is, with whom she once nearly had a moment but for a song that they never heard or danced to, in a time and place where and when no one sang it.
? ? ?
In the twilight that falls and the neon that rises around him, in the growing rush of people beginning to return home from work and brushing past him on their way to the West Fourth Street subway, Jesse stops frozen on the sidewalk. “I got me,” he can only mutter out loud, “a funny, funny feeling,” waiting for it to pass.
New York City 1968–73
Half a minute he stands immobile there on West Fourth, waiting for the feeling to pass. Then he returns to the corner trash can from where he snatches—as he did from the shop countertop—the record in the plain white sleeve that Winston gave him. He returns to his hotel room where, on the only small table that Jesse has, lies the 45 to which he pays no attention that day or the next, or the next week or the week after.
? ? ?
Not a single time that Jesse passes the 45 sitting on his small table does he bring himself to look at it. But he always knows it’s there; months go by. When he moves rooms in his hotel, he packs the 45 in the plain white sleeve with whatever other possessions he has, and when he unpacks the 45, he places it on a shelf facing him that he continues not to look at. A year goes by in New York City and then another.
moon (sun)
The 45 is as constant as the dream from which Jesse wakes, the dream of the Tower rooftop and the insurgent night. There isn’t a sleeping moment when he isn’t returned to the roof, there isn’t a dreaming moment that isn’t a leap into frosted light a hundred ten stories off the ground. He always wakes in hope that the 45 sitting on the shelf will be gone; he always has a funny feeling when he opens his eyes and the 45 is still there. The years pass and New York is caught in an endless autumn when, one evening, there comes a knock on Jesse’s door. He hasn’t seen her in a long time. “Hello, darling,” Candy says when he answers, “may I die here please?”
? ? ?
“I have a twin,” she murmurs on her last night, resolved to expire beautifully with roses on the sheets and twilight in the window, “just like you, cowpoke.” Jesse pretends he doesn’t hear. She says, “Did you hear me?”
“I surely heard you, darlin’,” Jesse at her bedside murmurs back.
“Named Jimmy,” but they both figure that her twin isn’t like his twin. “My twin isn’t like yours,” she sighs from the gorgeous glisten of her lymphoma, the makeup that’s been so carefully applied pouring off her to reveal the twin beneath, “I am my own twin,” to which Jesse answers so quietly that he can’t hear himself over the clamor of Village traffic outside, “What makes you think I’m not?” When she’s gone, he sits a long time staring below her corpse’s waist, deciding whether to finally raise the sheet and look. “What’s been down in them parts of you all this time,” he asks, still in a whisper so as not to disturb her demise, “Candy or Jimmy?” and then, rather than finally uncover the secret once and for all, he rises from his chair, walks over, and takes the 45 from the shelf. He pulls the single from the sleeve. On the label, the company is listed, just above the hole in the center, as Luna Recording. There is no designated “A” or “B” side, just two titles and the artist’s name.
“O Souverain” / “Oh Shenandoah”
Elvis Presley
four
desamor
tracks 13 and 14:
“Night Train” and “People Get Ready”
The first song begins in the early forties as “That’s the Blues, Old Man,” recorded by an alto sax player nicknamed Jeep with the purest tone anyone ever played on the instrument. By the early fifties, the riff is converted into a modest hit, and twenty years after the original, the definitive version is made by one of the two or three most important artists in the history of rhythm and blues, the “hardest-working man in show business” and “godfather of soul,” designations self-invented and beyond dispute anyway. All aboard! calls the song over more or less Jeep’s same riff, punctuating an itinerary—Miami, Atlanta, Raleigh, DC, Richmond, and don’t forget New Orleans, home of the blues, until, finally, carry me home—for every train in American music: the mystery train and the midnight train to Georgia, but most of all the train that’s coming so people get ready. This is the train that rolls out of black churches into white radios. This is the train of deliverance but also the one where there’s nowhere to hide, the train that every American takes to the end of the line, the same shadow-railroad of history that moved black Southern slaves to the free North in the first half of the nineteenth century. The second song’s composer, one of rhythm and blues’ finest guitarists, feels commanded by God to write the song, and for his sacred effort God rewards him by dropping a lighting rig on him at a concert one summer evening in Brooklyn. He never walks or plays again, singing this song for the rest of his life lying flat on his back on the studio floor.