Angela Carole Brown is the author of three published books, The Assassination of Gabriel Champion, The Kidney Journals: Memoirs of a Desperate Lifesaver, and Trading Fours, is a recipient of the Heritage/Soulword Magazine Award in poetry, and has produced several albums of music and a yoga/mindfulness CD. Bindi Girl Chronicles is her writing blog. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram & YouTube.
It seemed as though he’d been preparing for this large, looming animal his entire life, yet it had actually only been two years out of a tedious forty‑five. He was tempted to think it might change his life. He’d certainly been teased with the hype of it all: Michel Dugnac! June Steele! A book! If this all went well, then, according to his teasers, New York, London, and Marseille were virtually guaranteed.
He paced and chain-smoked through most of the day, declining brunch at the Four Seasons with Nona, Harper, and Kai, and instead awaited the eleventh-hour delivery of the art books to the gallery. There were handlers hired to take care of all that, but Daniel wouldn’t have been Daniel if he couldn’t butt his nose in everyone’s business, and he couldn’t wait until tonight, besides, to see the book.
As he ripped open one of the boxes, he lifted the handsome coffee table book out, with the piece merely labeled Untitled as its cover. It was a photographic tableau, camouflaging a nude Arthur and Nona into a portrait of his chaos of a workspace. Harper thought it would be the perfect piece for the cover, since it not only portrayed Daniel’s subjects but his studio, as well, which had always been a virtually untouchable lair, except for intimates.
“The viewer feels as though he gets the chance to be inside Daniel Cross’s private life just a bit,” had been her rationale. Daniel didn’t care. He liked this piece.
The predominant hue was cobalt, but then avalanched into a deluge of furious color and junk that seemed to swell upon Arthur and Nona, as if they were stained, bled upon, by the junk of this world; yet also, in a sense, cocooned by it. And in being cocooned, were gestated and transformed. He stared at it now, realizing just how much his thoughts on rape and loss and redemption had become a driving force in all of his recent work. Behind every expression lurked the nocturnal phenomenon of the breach. It leapt off the very cover. The two figures in this portrait weren’t even his friend and his wife any longer; they had transcended those roles. He stared at two strangers. Two abstracts. To be interpreted, and debated, and reckoned with. Naked. Literally, of course. But, as well, in a symbolic way to which he was the only one wise. In all of the thousands of works he’d created in his nearly thirty years of painting, it counted as the first that he’d been unable to title, and only now did he realize why.
When the evening finally did arrive, and as Benton’s lights shined brightly onto Rodeo Drive with their three names, everyone was in attendance. Artists, critics, philanthropists, movie stars, curators, press, intending to snack on Beluga from L’Orangerie, sip champagne from the Krug Vineyards, hobnob with their Prada-appareled brethren, and render their verdict on his life.
And none of this brouhaha, however ephemeral, was because of any weight he could claim but because Harper Levy knew how to get things done. She was in her greatest element, giving the firmest handshake in the room and feeling deservedly proud. She’d worked harder than anyone to make sure this evening would be significant.
Before Daniel had met Harper, he’d never known what it felt like to have someone believe in him. She was there for him during the co-op days, and during the days of no showings at all. She was there during the era of Chelsea, and had been on hand in the hospital when he’d tried to end his life. She’d found him living on the street as a young twenty-something, hustling people to buy his wallet-sized sketches, and she’d taken him in and encouraged him to further develop his talents. She was the one who had turned him on to Champion, and was the first person he’d excitedly told about meeting the author of that book. And tonight he watched her oversee a splendid effort.
And then there were Nona and Arthur. He was so humbled to be a part of this venture with two such remarkable individuals as his wife and his brother of the spirit. Their essence was everywhere this evening, larger than their own lives, seeping from the cracks in the walls, lurking about every room, haunting every canvas. Their prose was unequaled.
Daniel had tried hard to be worthy of them, and the effort had almost succeeded in besting him. And for just one instant he reflected on the reputation of artists: All nuts, or so it is said. Or did they merely wish to be? Were they truly incapable of connecting the dots of their sanity because they were too overloaded with resplendent fancy? Or was it just irresistibly fashionable to be so left of the middle? He was beginning to wonder if they weren’t all cons and swindlers, himself included, staging lunacies not because of any higher calling, but because of the hunger for attention. What was, after all, so alluring about being wrinkle‑browed? Besides the women he could bed?
In the past, he would approach these openings either indifferently or with his brooding cap on, wondering if that was all there was, always suspecting someone’s compliment of his work as ulterior, always doubting that there was any inherent good or beauty in anything. Always suffering. Always Hamlet.
Tonight, as he began to suspect his own breed, and which almost had a wink to it, he actually worked the room, and shook hands, and greeted, and periodically glanced up to see some labor that had begun its life in his flat, and felt unbeaten. No, it was better than that. He felt valid.
Having Nona and Arthur by his side was surely the best of it, but it was also that some of the drummers from the night before had agreed to come down, a last minute inspiration, to begin a circle right in the center of the Benton Gallery. Red Carpet meets Haight-Ashbury. Just the kind of peculiar marriage that had always fed Daniel’s temperament. All of the people he loved were here, and they were genuinely making him feel that there might actually be something inherently good or beautiful in this world.
“Hello, Daniel.”
He spun around to find Christianne Tensmith standing before him with a glass of champagne raised.
“Chris,” he practically fumbled. It had been a good two years since he’d unceremoniously exited her life.
“It’s wonderful work,” she said. “All of it. Better than ever. You’re really coming into your voice, aren’t you? There’s no pretension in it. I mean, not that there ever was, but–”
“Em–I–I–thank you. What a surprise. I–I–”
“ ‘Course, still no portrait of me anywhere,” she joked sweetly.
He laughed nervously.
“I can’t wait to show Daddy the review in tomorrow morning’s paper, which I know is going to be killer. And which might actually kill HIM.”
They both chuckled.
“So–how’ve you been?” Daniel asked. “I mean–”
“I don’t want to keep you. I just wanted to let you know that I would not have missed this for the world. Congrats, Daniel.”
She leaned up to kiss his cheek, and walked away.
He stood stunned, chest thumping. He hadn’t expected the ghosts of Daniel Past to come haunting. If Chelsea Carrier showed up, he’d have to scrounge himself up another bottle of shoe dye.
He watched Christianne walk away and wondered if he hadn’t misjudged her all of these years, chalking her up to vapidity, like the snob he could be. Tonight she was quite refined. And apparently not hating him any longer for the way he’d spinelessly cowered out of their relationship. She never even made trouble for him about staying in his flat. Wonders would never cease.
Should he run after her and apologize once more for the prick he’d been?
He decided to meet and greet instead.
Alas, cowards, as well, never cease.
After enough handshaking and photos taken to qualify him for election, which lasted a solid two hours, he finally took a moment alone to regard his canvases, to assess his life in this body of work, and to wonder if anywhere in any canvas he’d ever painted might there not be traces of his estranged mother and father. For the first time in years he wondered where they were and if they were still alive. He came frightfully close to wishing that they could see what he’d tried to do with his life.
As he pondered thoughts he hadn’t in some time, a creeping sensation began to take over him. Tonight he felt uncharacteristically sentimental. Probably just too exhausted any longer to be so perpetually and fashionably in a huff.
He couldn’t help but feel that the spirit the old man had spoken of last night had indeed entered the room and somehow blessed his work. Because for the first time in his life he didn’t despise himself, as he usually did, and he didn’t get drunk, as he usually did. Tonight he soberly relished in his burgeoning success and was just thankful no mirrors were around, as he would surely not have recognized his own face. He had Nona to thank for that one, as he watched her in the distance, shaking hands, wowing the paparazzi, loving life, eating this evening up, and apparently teaching him a few life lessons.
His wife found joy easily within every crevice that held an enticement. For a time he’d been worried. But tonight she was truly happy, he noted, as he watched her float through the space with a peaceful confidence. It was important that this night be a good one for her, too, since there’d been a history of her doubting her own worth with what he knew was a frustrating writer’s block. On this night her luminous smile lit the place up, brighter than the marquee lights of Rodeo Drive. She even threatened to sweep him up with her in that joyful tide.
With his new gleam, he geared himself for the firing squad of critics, and felt invincible. He already had a history with some of them, the ones who had traditionally found his work too bleak for their tastes, too self-indulgent, too something. Of course, they were all in attendance and were the first in line to tell him what they thought. But most, tonight, seemed to laud his portrayals of the already acclaimed Nona Childe and the soon‑to‑be acclaimed Arthur Hughes Dufresne. Not to mention, both possessed such stunning visages that could be molded and shaped into practically any perversion and still remain stunning.
Aside from the New York, Paris, and London art media, the literary world was also in attendance. They gobbled Nona up with their accolades, reminding her that she was special, a task at which he’d lately failed.
They asked her a deluge of questions on why she would indulge in such a risky art house venture, after having taken the mainstream by storm. Mainstream? They considered The Assassination of Gabriel Champion mainstream, did they?
She was exquisitely playful in her replies. When one queried, “Why this involvement with such an unstable, albeit titillating, avant‑garde, after nestling comfortably in the commercial book market?” she responded with a smile, “Why, to fix that very problem.”
*
When they questioned her involvement in this vanguard project, Nona was perplexed with all the allusions that her alliance with this show might’ve been ill-advised, until she realized it was the critics’ job to court agitation. Made good copy. They were actually eating the exhibit up, so she decided to just have fun by playing feisty.
But it was a face. A mask to wear for the headlines. In truth, she felt a part of something profound. One hundred years from now, or a thousand, in some bookstore or library, someone might dust off the ancient art book entitled Murmuration (the fleeting phenomenon of a collection of starlings was the actual definition of the word, and was how each of them reverently thought of the other) and string together the names of Daniel Cross, Nona Childe, and Arthur Hughes Dufresne. They would be immortal.
As the sun set, and she finally stopped for one moment to take a swig of champagne and a deep breath, she and Kai watched Arthur in the distance. With his signature dreadlocks an unusually majestic, lawless crown of tentacles, Arthur wore a threadbare suit jacket, a pair of pants that did not belong to the jacket, and a wrinkled, out-of-date necktie. Nothing of the ensemble was sharp, but neither was it exactly awful. It existed just somewhere in the intoxicated vicinity of romantic struggle. Nona couldn’t help but attach a trendy sartorial statement to Arthur’s utter lack of it. After tonight, all the young poets would soon start sporting their fringe-existence duds, all because the new bard of South Central had set a tone, and a new hobo chic would be born.
Arthur had started the evening off happy. This would be the night that would give him the chance to show his son what he’d accomplished. If this night was for anyone, on Arthur’s own personal agenda, it was for Lorca.
What he’d created to show his son, to show the world, was extraordinary. Nona had always felt that there was something feral and hallucinatory in Arthur’s words. She’d earlier overheard a reporter dictating into a tiny machine: “Arthur Hughes Dufresne writes poetry for a cataclysmic world, as though he is perpetually on the verge of hysteria or some quiet, warring mania, all toward a violent resuscitation of heart and lungs.” And all Nona could think at that eavesdropping was, amen.
Then there were the cloying ones.
“Mister Dufresne,” offered one reporter, with a mic stuck in Arthur’s face, “you seem to write in a manner that is at once a kind of stream‑ of‑consciousness, urban speak, while at the same time a cunning philological wordplay. A bit reminiscent of Stoppard–”
“A kind of homeboy‑from‑the‑hood Stoppard, if you will–” interrupted another, feeling droll.
No one actually gave Arthur the chance to respond, as they were much more interested in the sound of their own voices. The ingratiating nature of these admirers made Nona cringe, especially in offering their patronizations with accents on the words homeboy and hood, as if to assure that they could hang with the Blackest and street-smartest of them. She and Kai had been rolling their eyes and giggling together at the ridiculousness, and were on top of the world to be able to watch their friend being lauded and cooed over, even if it was by idiots.
Arthur could care less that he was even the topic of conversation, as he had one eye and ear cocked obligatorily to the cooing and the other searching eagerly around the room for his son’s arrival.
That the drum circle, which they’d all discovered the night before, would recreate itself on this opening was truly the ring on the finger of a long, difficult, and thrilling romance.
At various junctures in the evening, between contemplating a piece and the whispered chatter that always accompanied such, people would come and go from the circle. Some would join in, retreat. It would grow and shrink. It was a thriving animal that kept itself alive the entire evening, and was becoming as much the thing to do as the partaking of champagne and aged Brie.
The night was working, and it was all thanks to her husband. Arthur’s brilliance notwithstanding, the work that Daniel had created for this exhibit was the most powerful body of work that she could remember seeing from any contemporary artist since…well, she always instinctively went back to her beloved Basquiat. Her scope as an art lover wasn’t nearly that singular, but her affinity was directly proportional to her collectorship. There was no other “important” artist that she’d ever owned, and this work before her tonight was genuinely reminiscent of artists past who had blown onto the art scene and changed the game. Tonight people were gasping at and dissecting the colors and the textures and the breadth and the swirls and the bold flashes that were leaping off the canvases.
Daniel was being compared to the new wave of New York modernists, for attempting to turn medium on its ear. That was the very least of it, she thought. Daniel was reinventing art. On this unforgettable evening, Daniel was as close to God as any mortal force that had ever breezed past her heart.
While most of the critics tonight were jumping through hoops to claim Daniel as their own personal discovery, and to drool over his severe, exaggerated, almost tormented depictions of humanity, some found his work unappetizing. One critic observed rather coolly: “As subjects, Dufresne and Childe are being turned inside out in these pieces. The viewer isn’t being shown their souls, as much as their symbolic bowel movements.”
Wow! Did she and Arthur really seem just that naked and blemished to this uncomfortable critic? Did they make him just that fidgety in his seat? And if the answer was yes, then as far as she was concerned Daniel had done his job superbly.
“What irony, if any, are you offering with all of this darkness?” this particular critic had earlier asked Daniel, displaying quotation signs with his fingers around the word darkness.
What were the quote signs for, Nona wondered? Did he mean that Daniel played at darkness without actually achieving it? Did he mean that Daniel achieved it, and he wondered the importance of that? Was he saying that Daniel was finding trendy vogue in the darkness label?
She was annoyed, and wanted Daniel to fight back with something pithy and effortlessly smart-assed, as she’d been doing, but Daniel never answered questions like that. You were either moved by his work or you weren’t. And if you weren’t, he didn’t bother spinning his wheels trying to defend or bring you around. He would gracefully, if he could, accept your distaste for it and still agree to be your friend.
She was more in love with him and his Fuck-The-World creed tonight than ever before. It was the F-T-W of a man who cared about stimulating the world, about egging on the mind, and the heart, and the soul. And he was her husband.
For the life of her, she couldn’t get the smile off her face.
*
They were all buzzing, Daniel took notice. About him. About Nona and Arthur. Even the ones who showed their distaste seemed ecstatic to be a witness to this happening. And if they gobbled Nona up, they resolutely turned cartwheels over the undiscovered, disheveled genius, Arthur Hughes Dufresne, who could care less about them.
Arthur had become nervous and fidgety. He had started out feeling proud of this evening, even buoyant, though Daniel knew he was much more at home swilling a 40-ounce and deconstructing literary criticism or playing a hand of Bid Whist. Still, this night had been as important to Arthur as to himself. And all Daniel could see at this point in the evening was Arthur doing his best to put on a polite front, but beginning to seethe because Sonja had yet to show up with his son.
Sonja was on a fairly new jag these days of discrediting Arthur in the courts with regard to his parental rights. They had always co-parented without much incident, but she had recently made the announcement that she wanted to move back home to D.C. to get help from her family. Arthur knew he would never see his son again if that move happened, and after imploring her not to, and his pleas ignored, he decided to take her to court. And though she had promised to bring Lorca to the opening tonight, he also knew she was on a sudden warpath after the summons, maligning his name to the courts and their son, calling him a worthless father and drug addict. Drug addict, yes, unfortunately, but worthless father? There was no more dedicated or conscientious a father in the world than Arthur.
At twelve years old, Lorca was already an avid reader and a hungry learner, who would regularly challenge Arthur to some philosophical match on whether or not the ghost of Hamlet’s father really symbolized the Devil. Or whether rap was any less significant a music form than jazz. Or whether Martin and Malcolm really took opposite approaches to the Civil Rights Movement. The kid was inquisitive and wide‑eyed and amazing.
And this itchy wonder in Lorca’s head was all Arthur’s doing. Sonja barely picked up a book that wasn’t either the Bible or some Hollywood tell‑all. She was a paradoxical woman who’d gotten pregnant with Arthur’s child, though she’d been married to someone else at the time, and when asked by her sister‑ in‑law why she hadn’t used birth control, if not discretion, had answered, indignantly: “It’s against my religion!”
Daniel didn’t much like Sonja.
But tonight she’d promised to put the weapons down and bring Lorca to the opening, so that the boy could read his father’s works, and see his father respected, and take home his own copy of Murmuration with his father’s name boldly stamped on the cover. And so far this evening, she and Lorca were nowhere to be found.
Arthur never drummed once tonight, and this really should’ve been Daniel’s first clue that he was in trouble. Art was the one, above any of them, who had been the most connected to the drum circle experience. Tonight he was as disconnected from it as by any gulf Daniel had ever seen.
By the time the night was nearing its end, there still was no sign of Lorca and Sonja. The event was being considered a success – indeed they’d all felt it – yet all that could be mustered from Arthur was thinly disguised despair.
“I can’t believe she didn’t bring him,” Arthur muttered at one passing, fury low and simmering, but quickly rising. The quickly rising part worried Daniel.
A few minutes later Nona came running over, quietly panicked.
“Arthur just bolted outta here,” she whispered confused, amidst the mingling crowd. “What is going on?”
“Shit!” was all Daniel could utter.
He knew Arthur was on a hostile course, but he never imagined Arthur would choose this moment to take care of business. And knowing Arthur’s dark place as he did, Daniel felt a chill claw at his neck.
“He’s on his way to Sonja’s,” Daniel warned. “We can’t let there be a scene in front of Lorca.”
“What do we do?” Nona asked, alarmed.
“We have to go after him.”
“Right now!?”
All three artists suddenly exiting their own opening, especially one as high profile as this, was not a concept Nona was digesting well. But Daniel could give two shits about causing a scene. Arthur was in trouble, and Sonja was about to be. And he loathed his instinct –– that perhaps for all these years he actually did still see the murderer in Arthur. He suddenly felt unworthy of Arthur’s friendship.
He and Nona whispered to Harper that there was an emergency and to please buffer any possible questions of their whereabouts to the remaining guests, which, fortunately at this hour, weren’t that many. And they bolted, as Arthur had bolted.
When they arrived forty-five minutes later at Sonja’s front door in South Central, Arthur was fairly banging it down. He’d been pounding for some minutes, yelling for her to “open up, or else!” His rage was in full gear now. And there really is nothing quite so powerful and awe‑spurring as the rage of a Black man; his voice is somehow deeper, his sense of doom intrinsic, even poetic.
Before Daniel and Nona had even approached the front steps, Arthur had managed to break a window, reach in, and unlock the door, but not before bloodying his hand. They were quickly on his heels, as he stumbled into the living room to find it empty of all furniture. The sight of the naked room slapped them all in the face, as Arthur stopped dead in a stunned dawning.
“No, no, no, no, no,” he whispered in a swelling frenzy. He ran to the kitchen, the bedrooms, he flung open closet doors. Empty, all empty. Nona’s hands came up to her aghast mouth, and Daniel held her, as each knew what was unfolding before their eyes.
“GODDAMN IT!” Arthur roared, as neighbors began to spill out of their homes, in gossipy wonder.
“Noooo!!! You fucking cunt! You goddamn fucking cunt!” He put his fist through the bathroom door. Daniel tried to stop his ravings, but Arthur could only look his way in terrified disbelief.
“She took him! She took him from me!”
Arthur’s hands came up to his temples, as he squeezed his eyes shut to bear the weight of what he knew he had to face: #1) Sonja had gone. #2) She had taken his son with her. #3) They had no intentions of being found.
His breathing grew labored, and the sweat of his head poured profusely. He grabbed the wall phone, almost pulling it off the wall, and furiously punched numbers on it, not even entertaining the possibility that the service might’ve already been disconnected. Or refusing to entertain it, as that would mean the cruel reality of a plan in action for some time.
Daniel watched him cautiously to make sure he didn’t injure himself further. Nona was too afraid to advance. Instead Daniel had her walk back out to calm the approaching neighbors and to see if she could find out any information on Sonja’s and Lorca’s whereabouts.
Over his shoulder, Daniel could hear a neighbor explaining to Nona that Sonja had made her hasty escape with Lorca sometime that afternoon with the help of eight or nine muscular cousins who’d moved furniture and boxes quickly into several cars and pickups.
“She did not come here, Arthur, I swear!” pled a female voice through the receiver. Turns out, there was little consolation in there still being phone service. Everything seemed to be a symbol that carried with it the promise of great meaning, only to deliver no meaning at all.
“Then where the fuck is she!” Arthur yelled, as much to the phone itself as to Sonja’s distraught mother on the other end. “Listen, Etta, I will come there myself and END YOU, if you don’t tell me where she went with my son!”
Arthur was a dragon. Daniel was grateful Nona was outside and away from this witness, because he saw the Devil form in Arthur this night, as on one unspeakable night of twenty-eight years ago. This night, as on that one, Arthur was absolutely capable of murder. He was fully prepared to give this old woman heart failure with his threats if she didn’t cooperate, and if that failed he was just as prepared to hop a plane to D.C. to put an end to her in person.
Suddenly, amidst all the riotous confusion, there emerged a kind of defeated collapse that curtly peered out from the frenzy. It was so brief that if Daniel had blinked he’d surely have missed it. He saw Arthur’s heart fold up and begin to die. Arthur begged the old woman to tell him where they’d gone. But there was no more cock-strutting. Only desperate pleas. At this moment, Arthur must’ve felt less than a man. And only another man, Daniel thought as he watched his friend, could truly know that hollowness so intimately.
Then, in a second instant, the frantic pandemonium was back in full force. Arthur slammed the receiver onto its base, splintering the chrome and plastic. He pounded it again and again until there was nothing left of it and spurts of blood shot from his hand. His fingers would not unhinge themselves from the mangled receiver. Daniel tried to grab him and hold him still.
“Look! We can find them. We just have to put our heads together. We just have to calm down and not be rash. We can use this against her. This is kidnapping! I mean, taking a child from his father when there are still custodial rights? There’s got to be something that protects you. We’ll just…we’ll just look into it. We’ll find out what we need to.”
Arthur just kept repeating “I can’t believe she did this!” as he madly paced the empty house. He could barely focus in to listen to Daniel.
Daniel knew Arthur needed to fix, and even as much as he loathed the idea, and knew his wife would never approve, he would personally take Arthur to the deed, so that the mad dog could be tempered.
*
Why did Sonja’s have to be the only house on this block that didn’t have security bars on the windows and doors, Nona wondered, so that Arthur could’ve been dissuaded from this destructive course? Instead, here they were. Burglars officially.
As she attempted to gather information from a neighbor, another interrupted the conversation loudly.
“Who the Hell y’all think y’all is, comin’ up in’is neighborhood like some mu-fuckin’ caped crusaders, thinkin’ y’all gon’ save somebody? That niggah ain’t nut’n but a loser crackhead, and it’s ‘bout time Sonja finally got up off her ass and got the Hell outta here with that boy. Ain’t nobody cooperatin’ wit’chall! Like, y’all got a badge or sump’n. Shit, y’all better git the fuck on outta here, befo’ the REAL badges show up, cuz the police have been called!”
Nona winced to have this woman screaming in her ear, but absolutely lost it to hear sirens in the distance.
“You actually called the police?” Nona cried out, the two of them facing each other off on the wet lawn of Sonja’s abandoned house. As the Santa Ana winds started up, Nona closed Daniel’s coat even tighter around her, which he’d given her to wear when they’d made their great escape. Now she and this woman were nose to nose, surrounded by curious neighbors parked on their steps, the sidewalks, the driveway. Daniel had his battles inside with Arthur, and she had to deal with the neighborhood loudmouth.
“You have no idea what’s going on here,” said Nona.
“Oh, I don’t?” the woman spat back indignantly, as she waved her overly long fingernails in Nona’s face, reminding Nona of the Hey Babys that she and Kai used to know in high school. If you lived in Santa Monica in the early eighties, fourteen blocks inland from the Pacific, off Pico, chances are you knew the girls who pasted their hair down the side of their faces with Dippity‑Do to effect the “good hair” look, and sported a single gold tooth and ridiculous press-on nails, who hung out idly on their front porches in hot pants, midriffs, and furry slippers, smacking their gum loudly and slinging their babies on their hips at age thirteen, whom their own mamas supported. They had names like Pooky and Dimples, but Nona and Kai called them Hey Babys because “hey, baby!” is what these freaks of nature loved to yell to the guys who drove by in their low riders.
As Nona revisited that image, she realized that these were also the girls who could fight, when she never could, so that thought lodged nervously in the back of her head as this woman screamed in her face.
“Who the fuck you think you is, tellin’ me I don’t know what’s goin’ on?”
“Why are you involving yourself in this?” Nona yelled, on the verge of tears she fought to resist, lest she show her fear. But she was afraid, and that quiver in the voice was giving her away.
“I live here, bitch!”
“Don’t you have anything better to do than to get in everyone else’s business?”
“I see this shit every day!”
They screamed at each other until they had no voices left, and they roused the rest of the neighbors, who only got more excitable as the sirens got louder. The woman continued her rant, even as Nona tried to walk away, and aggressively followed behind as Nona pled for more information from others in the crowd.
“Whenever that motha‑fucka comes over here, there’s a fight,” the woman screamed from behind Nona. “Time’a day don’t matter. He would pick a fight with Sonja every fuckin’ time. And I told her, over and over again, she oughta have that niggah arrested! Cuz I will kill the motha-fucka that ever comes up in my face the way that crackhead would act with her! Lorca don’t need to be around all’at shit!”
Nona couldn’t make any sense of why she was so annoyed by this woman’s “crackhead” remarks just because Arthur’s drug of choice was not crack. Who cared about a ridiculous technicality here? Yet she found herself wincing with every utterance of it, as if one over the other was better.
When the woman started to shove at Nona, Nona gave her fear full away, and started to plead in a flight of tears, “please stop it! Stop it!” just as the police car was driving up. Two officers immediately separated them and warned them to behave, as the crowd egged them on, yelling, “It’s a fight! It’s a fight!” while others shouted that the real problem was not the catfight out here but the Hulk inside who was bashing windows and phones.
Nona couldn’t think straight in this deranging melee. She only knew that these two officers were now on their way up the front steps of Sonja’s house. Arthur’s very life had been snatched away this evening, and now he was about to be taken away in handcuffs because of nosy‑body neighbors.
“That’s right! Arrest that motha-fucka!” screamed the woman Nona loathed. “He broke into this house!”
“He did not!” Nona lied. “His son lives here,” was all she could offer to qualify it.
“Not no more!” the woman said, laughing. “And praise Jesus for that! Who knows what sick thing he mighta did with that child whenever he took him away from here.”
The rage suddenly mushroomed in Nona so phenomenally at the notion that this gossipy shrew would insinuate what she did about a man she’d only ever observed from her snoopy window, and make such an unfounded accusation, especially considering Arthur’s own childhood, about which this woman knew nothing, that before Nona knew her next thought, or better judgment, she had whirled around and cuffed the lights out of the woman. Unlike the huffy soap-opera slaps of most women, Nona’s whole raging body went into this one, as the entire left side of the woman’s head was suddenly slammed against Nona’s red palm.
The lumbering body crashed to the ground, only to bounce back with an equal furor. Frighteningly sooner than Nona was ready for, her own face felt the prickly white explosion of a fist in retaliation. The sting was so profound that it blinded her for a flash and jarred her inner ear, careening her to her knees, in a disorienting stupor. The world was sideways and rumbling. The crowd became bedlam.
She worried about her reconstructed jaw, which had never been fully strong again after the rape. Yet in an instant, that worry was gone and was replaced instead with the impenetrable hunger to make pulp out of this loud, classless, clueless, detestable BITCH!
Dumbed by rage, which obliterated her earlier fear, Nona sucked in a gulp of air, held it in her lungs, closed her eyes, and dove back in. The absurdity of the sight of these two was not lost on her: The Hey Baby in signature furry slippers, hair curlers, shorts, and overly long acrylic nails; and Nona in her splendidly wild Galliano gown, and her Louboutin shoes that she’d spent a solid week shopping for, on Rodeo Drive, just for the occasion. (Not this occasion.)
As the two wildcats tore each other to fleshy shreds, and Nona worried about her return receipt, the officers were intercepting Arthur from Daniel’s clutches. There was such a flurry of chaos that Nona could barely know where to direct her temper. At the Hey Baby? At the uniformed men who were cuffing Arthur? At Sonja? Or at God?
“What is going on here!” Daniel demanded.
“Sir, I’ll ask the questions,” remarked one officer, in that quintessentially arrogant manner of policemen. “And I’m asking you to step back. But I’m only asking once.”
Nona heard this all in the distance, but was otherwise engaged. Suddenly Daniel looked up to see her dilemma and went madly awry, running out to pry the women apart. The two officers followed on his heels with Arthur’s arms held tightly by each.
Nona was all the more confused when two arms swiftly grabbed her that were neither Daniel’s, nor the Hey Baby’s, nor the two cops. A second squad car had arrived on the scene, she realized, with many more officers in tow, and she was now being brusquely clutched at her arms, as Arthur had been, by a second pair of uniforms, and promptly handcuffed for assaulting the Madwoman of South Central.
A smug impulse leapt out of Nona suddenly as she calmed herself with the assurance that people like this woman probably never read a book in their lives, so that her anonymity in this mortifying scandal could remain intact. And she wasn’t even allowed to turn around to see if they’d cuffed the madwoman too. How many cops were even here?
“This is an outrage!” Daniel spat at the gathering of law enforcement, before Nona could beg him to shut up.
“Say one more word, asshole, and you’ll be hauled in too.”
And he was. Daniel could never shut up when shutting up was needed.
Nona could only muse to herself the ridiculous irony of this evening. Here they were, the three celebrated artists, who had, only hours ago, clinked glasses with the country’s royalty, now somewhere off Manchester being arrested as common thugs for disturbing the peace.
As this horrifying scene grew larger and uglier, one of the officers placed a hand on her head and guided it into a squad car, as her wrists burned from being bound behind her. She watched them handcuff Daniel and shove Arthur to the ground. Her mind reeled, this is not happening! Beyond the greasy glass of the squad car window – her first – she watched Arthur lying on the ground, his own hands manacled behind him, quaking and sweating from the need for a fix that would not come this night. She saw him resign from life and become passive, his will resolutely leaving his sick body and abandoning him. As they all had. Arthur’s mother and father. God. Now Sonja.
She and Daniel caught a glimpse of each other, he in one car, she in the second. Both their hearts were clearly broken, and not for their own trivial plights, but for the put-upon man who’d been fraught with so much despair already, and now lay like an animal against the asphalt, once more afflicted.
She had always thought of Arthur as one who slithered through life like so many lizards who got trampled by the boots of big men. Like a man with no Christian name, he was too low to the ground to be considered worthy of not being trampled. No one caught lizards the way they caught butterflies – to admire their beauty. Arthur only blended into the foliage like the many lizards who prayed that one more day might be theirs without being stomped or stalked for their hides. She’d often thought that perhaps that was why Arthur desecrated his own hide with so many needles. To insure that no one would want his. To insure that he might be left alone in this life.
Tonight that image became realized with the most brilliant clarity, because she watched Arthur’s colors change before her eyes to blend into the cement so that they would not find him. And though his body was theirs for the time being, his soul had dissolved from their sights. His eyes were empty. He looked Nona’s and Daniel’s way, and she clearly saw all volition gone, vaporized by the great heist of his only son.
How had the night – a night they’d all anticipated with jubilation – gone so wrong?
A Man With No Christian Name
Angela Carole Brown is the author of three published books, The Assassination of Gabriel Champion, The Kidney Journals: Memoirs of a Desperate Lifesaver, and Trading Fours, is a recipient of the Heritage/Soulword Magazine Award in poetry, and has produced several albums of music and a yoga/mindfulness CD. Bindi Girl Chronicles is her writing blog. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram & YouTube.
Angela Carole Brown is the author of three published books, The Assassination of Gabriel Champion, The Kidney Journals: Memoirs of a Desperate Lifesaver, and Trading Fours, is a recipient of the Heritage/Soulword Magazine Award in poetry, and has produced several albums of music and a yoga/mindfulness CD. Bindi Girl Chronicles is her writing blog. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram & YouTube.
We all want the same things. Happiness. Love. Health. Me, I’m a fine-tuner, a tweaker. I once read a birthday book that described January 1 people as chronic self-improvers. It’s the word chronic that has me suspecting that the inference might not have been positive. Whichever position the book was taking on it, it did nail me. That is my nature in a nutshell. When the lug nuts are loose, on my life, my soul, my character, I tighten them. The thing is, the little suckers do get loose again; that’s just the normal wear and tear of living. I can either keep my tools at the ready in order to re-tighten and keep going, or I can beat myself up for not doing the job right in the first place. Even though the definition of doing the job right – when regards a lug nut – does not guarantee that it’ll never have to be tightened again. In fact, the only thing that is guaranteed is that it will. And yet that is where I get seriously tripped up.
Let’s take today. My first completely non-agenda day in more than a week. Very stressful week prior, and I’ve been looking forward to this day, all week long, of powering-down and blissfully thinking of nothing. I’ll just give a few bullet points on how this “day off” unfolded.
I wake up this morning – no alarm clock – and instantly, instinctively, ritualistically, catch my naked form in the mirrored closet door that spans the wall’s entire length and width. Judgment. Instant. Merciless. Am I bigger than yesterday? Smaller? I do this assessment every single morning, because I’m perpetually trying to lose weight. It’s so routine, in fact, that I’m not even shattered by it anymore. What I am, though, is unhappy. I will at least give myself this much credit; I no longer talk disgustedly about my weight gain. These days, when I do speak of my desire or my efforts to lose weight, it is with a conscious gentleness. I just can’t be the one who starts a frenzy of self-loathing among my women friends of a similar age, most of whom are trying to lose their middle-aged weight too. I’ve seen it happen, and have even been the instigator of that soul-crushing domino effect of “my disgusting arms, my disgusting belly,” but no longer am I the one who starts or participates in that avalanche. Make no mistake, though; I am not happy. I wish I could let go of an idea of how I used to look, and embrace where I am today. That has been a great challenge. And where I find myself divided to points of utter hair-pulling confusion is: Do I believe in embracing self-acceptance of my present, or do I believe in going after goals? Or is there a way for both concepts to work together for the benefit of body AND soul? I actually do practice a radical self-care lifestyle. I eat whole, clean food, I hydrate like crazy, I walk and hike and do yoga, I meditate, I make certain to get some nature time in, I have therapeutic and creative outlets. I am so much healthier, and feel so much better, in this lifestyle, yet still I judge myself everyday for not looking like I used to. Such a miniscule part of the whole schematic, yet I make it larger than everything else. That particular lug nut gets loose an awful lot. I catch myself in the mirror and furiously try to dissect why my body changed the way it did. Menopause! Laziness! Depending on the day of the week or my mood, there’s a different culprit to blame. And so, the ritual of judgment. Every day. And today, my DAY OFF, is no different.
Next I check email. Brush my teeth. May not shower today since I have no obligation to leave my house. Still, a twinge of guilt hits me at this decision. I should take a shower. I don’t feel like it. I’m utterly exhausted from a busy and emotional week (a dear friend was in the hospital), and I won’t be encountering anyone today, so why should I care so much about a shower? Yet the twinge lasts. Apparently not enough to make me turn the nozzle and hop in, but just enough to make me annoyed with myself, and harshly critical at what I have decided is laziness and apathy.
I start breakfast with my second annoyance of the day already in gear and it’s barely 10 a.m. Leftover ginger soup, made with turkey bone broth, and fresh spinach tossed in. Yummy. I should walk today. That’s my mode of exercise. Vigorous walks through my lovely neighborhood, or hiking the nearby canyon. But I can’t think about that right now. Really very tired. My soup is so delicious, and I love the smells it puts in my home. I don’t smell! Why can’t I shake the shower thing? I’m home alone. Why does it matter? Mmmmm, savory ginger soup. I should really walk. Goddamn it! See?
I’m already exhausted from the ludicrous back flips my thoughts are doing, all while trying to eat my breakfast. I should sit in silence and eat my food mindfully. Uh oh, is that another should ? And if you read my blog article, Mindful Eating, you’ll know why this is even in my head. But I don’t sit in silence. I turn on the TV to Kelly & Michael. It’s my morning ritual on days when I have to go to my part-time office job two days a week. On those mornings I bop around getting cleaned and dressed, making breakfast and feeding the cat, all while Kelly’s and Michael’s sparkling repartee provides white noise. I don’t tend to do the ritual on days off. I prefer a quieter morning ritual on those days, a ritual more befitting my Mindful Eating essay. Except that today my brain is romping like crazy, so I’m looking for television’s dynamic duo to help distract my head while I sip my ginger broth. Of course the guilt arises that I am giving any amount of my morning to this vapid time-waster. So, now I am killing two birds with one stone, as I judge both the TV show and my indulgence in it. I’m on a roll. I need a day off from my day off.
I don’t need to give you the full play-by-play of the remainder of my day. You get the gist. Nothing much actually happened, which was exactly the point of the day, and yet by the end of it I was thoroughly spent from all the noise. My head was so filled with guilt, and judgment, and shoulds, and the niggling pressure to DO something, and the harshly critical indictment that I even chose to have a down day, as if it is something shameful. Because what are we, as Americans, if not putting all our value in doing and accruing, as opposed to just being? Meditation always helps. But even just getting myself to the proverbial mat is really tough when a day like this occurs. Today it was impossible.
I can’t say I don’t know where the penchant to punish comes from. I do. I have made a decent but very humble living for a long time now, all the while trying to get something of mine to burst wide open, whether it’s the music or the books. And my attempts at this have been largely futile. You don’t deserve a day off, my inner imp whines at me. You need to get in that corner and do some thinkin’, young lady, about all the missed opportunities and wasted potential. And you need to nitpick at everything. And so . . . I punish.
Take the DVD I chose to watch later on of this “day off.” Twenty Feet From Stardom deserves the Oscar it won. It’s a powerhouse movie that I’ve been excited to re-see for sometime now. It’s also a movie that takes me to a melancholy place, because of the subject matter. I’m a singer. I’ve made my living at it for a very long time. But if some of the remarkable singers in this movie are, to a certain degree, bemoaning their lot of always being the session and touring singer and never the star, I watch it bemoaning my lifelong inability to reach even THEIR heights of being the sought-after voices for some of the most iconic songs in pop history. My own history, and deeply grateful living, has been quite a ways humbler than that. Most days I’m incredibly happy with the career I’ve had, and the musicians that have given me work as well as their ardent respect. But a movie like this can, on occasion, take me to a pretty dark place. So, why would I even choose to see it a second time? The easy answer is because it’s a wonderful movie. But is it purely coincidental that I chose to watch this particular movie on my day of chilling out? Or is the pesky little deep-seated self-punishment imp deciding to hang around, brilliant saboteur that she is, and telling me that I have not accomplished enough in my life to deserve to chill? That I need, instead, to be up on my hindquarters in white-knuckle anxiety. Guess what, Miss Thing? You’re not gonna get to relax. You’re gonna exhaust yourself with all the doubts and the what-ifs and why-didn’t’cha’s that can be mustered. Because you SHOULD be further along in life, and shame on you for not being.
By the end of the movie, just as I did when I saw it in the theater, I am in tears, and standing up and applauding these women of extraordinary talent and their compelling stories (my own cousin being one of them . . . an original member of The Blossoms, who did every major vocal session in the 50’s and 60’s). I am deeply moved by these stories. I am also taken to my couch. And not in the good way, the hammock and a good book and a mason jar of lemonade kind of way that is exactly what a day off should be. Nope. I am taken to it in that crippling, fetal position way that fears life passing me by without having left the mark I’ve always felt was my calling to leave.
Likewise, I’ve managed to get nothing going with my book. I have three of them already out there, but the latest is really THE book. The one I feel is my opus. And except for a handful of dear friends and awesome moral supporters, it has gone largely unread and unknown. I keep trying to say that I’m not lazy. Hey, I produce content, baby. Six albums, as many full-length books, a one-woman show. That canon does not get produced by a slacker. I keep trying to say that something else is the reason I’ve never gotten any real shots. But after exhausting all other possibilities, and coming up with no clear answers, I think I may, after all, be lazy. I’m certainly tired. Everything I have to give goes into what I create (which, ironically, never tires me). But after all of that, there’s just nothing left over to give to hustling, and promotion, and marketing, and going out into the world, and meeting and networking, and being witty and quick and charming and all those things that seem to be what is required to get anyone to give you and your work the time of day. I don’t have it in me. It’s not in my nature. And from one day to the next, as I am on this constant road of self-examination, my tune is either that I’m genuinely at peace with my nature, and am happy with the blessed life that this nature has given me, and I clearly see the power and beauty and enlightenment in that . . . to believing . . . No. Get up. Do. Make it happen. It’s not too late. Don’t collapse now. Collapsing is giving up, and there’s nothing evolved or enlightened in that. And I am split wide open and right down the middle with trying to determine which principle I actually do align with.
The spiritual work that I have been doing has been truly transformational. But spiritual transformation is not a neat and speedy ascension to that higher place. It is a resolute road of one-step-forward-two-steps-back, filled with amazing moments of insight, daily challenges to our better angels, and THIS!!! . . . this “day off” that has just sicked Ronda Rousey on my ass. It’s also not (or at least, should never be) a tyrannical slave labor camp. And that’s where I can sometimes get stymied. My passionate embrace of radical self-care and self-inquiry is so all-encompassing that it even led me to start this blog to explore the vast landscape of that consciousness. But I think that days like this can sometimes happen because I tend to fill my life with stringent standards that I’ll beat myself up about not reaching. And if not managed with some semblance of balance and breath, the whole self-care thing can actually backfire. And by breath I mean that proverbial, symbolic inhale and exhale of not having to be perfect, not having to be in ballet-dancer-upright stance 24/7.
I think that I have given myself so many tasks towards this spiritual evolution (don’t forget to meditate, don’t forget to bless your food, don’t forget to buy organic or grow your own, don’t forget to be of service to others, ad nauseam) that I can begin to crumble under the weight of them. And with the crumbling comes the self-punishment, the why can’t you get your act together? inner talk, when the crumbling is only because of all the weight I have put on my shoulders. But the answer is not to snap the whip when those tasks are not completed. The answer is to remove, I don’t know, maybe a couple hundred of those cinder blocks that I’ve heaped on my shoulders. Because otherwise, one of two things happen. I either crumble into that fetal position, self-berating and sinking into depression in reaction to the tyrant in me, as I did today, or I implode and rebel against her. So, how do I remove the weight and heft in this journey to be a better me? How do I let go, and let gentleness prevail?
The way to it is through forgiveness. I’ve been writing about forgiveness a lot lately (read Unexpected Angels : A Perspective On Forgiveness), because it is a crucial key to stepping up a little higher on that ascension, that higher realm, and it has truly been tested in the world lately. I find it easily the most important principle to explore, to put into practice, and to understand what it truly means. And I have lately neglected putting those principles into practice on my own self.
If I were someone else talking to Angela, I’d have this wired. I would passionately grab her by the shoulders and say:
“Forgive your body for daring to evolve from young to old. Whatever society says about you because of your age is society’s flaw, not yours. Forgive your efforts for daring to be committed to art, and not marketing. Everyone can’t be everything. Forgive your talents for not getting you certain gigs. They are unique talents, and clearly didn’t belong in those boxes. Maybe there is no box yet created for your gifts. Maybe there never will be. But you keep renewing your agreement with the universe to make sacred art anyway, you keep cultivating your own unique voice, and you let the rest go. Forgive your needy, needy need to reach a certain status in order to be acceptable to society, and your human moments of faltering in the mission to elevate yourself in consciousness. Your life is so beautiful, with friends and family that rival most folks’ friends and family any day of the week. You have love in your life. You have food on your table. You have health and wellness and compassion. You have a curious brain and a heart eager to evolve in spiritual consciousness. You have a very special gift as a creator of books and music and art. You deserve a day off. To sleep in, to read your juicy book, to watch vapid TV, to walk on the beach, to surf the net, to look into the mirror and love your magnificent vessel that has carried you through fifty-five years on this earth in effortless mastery. It has even saved someone’s life! So, take that, Self-loathing Thomas (lesser known and even more deep-seated brother to Doubting)! You deserve a day off to do absolutely nothing except swing on that proverbial hammock with that mason jar of lemonade and CHILL. And to know that you are not less to do so.”
Forgiving ourselves for not being perfect specimens may be the hardest thing we ever do. We all have a wart or two, or ten, don’t we? We try to buff those warts up, better them, put a little spit shine on them. Or we try to tuck them away and pretend they aren’t there. We rationalize them, justify them, or we self-berate, as I spent an entire day off doing. But it really all comes down to this: We can transform, evolve, improve who we are, learn something new every day, open our hearts, practice compassion, and yet at the end of the day we are still not perfect specimens in 24/7 upright ballet-dancer stance. We aren’t designed to be. And so all of those rough edges, the warts, the fears and guilt and defenses that still insist on lingering there, even with all the soul work we may do – that’s where forgiveness comes in. That’s where we’re tested to see if we can love and embrace every part of ourselves. Because every part has a role to play in shaping who we are, and how we walk in the world.
As for my day off, well, it came and went, and my world didn’t crumble. It just left me a whole lot more exhausted than any day off should. But I ended it with pouring this onto paper. That’s something. A stab, always, at trying to work it out. Trying to listen to the higher voice. Trying to be understanding and patient when the lug nuts loosen. Hey, all that really means is that the tire covered a whole lot of great road. And I truly am okay as long as I’ve got my tools.
I suspect I make some uncomfortable when I write about my humanness in such a public forum. But please don’t mistake this, ever, for self-immolation. It is the voice of rigorous honesty, of getting really, really real, and coming out on the other side.
One more quick story, but it’ll tell you everything about my penchant for this kind of writing. When I was an early teen, I saw a movie where a band of ski-masked looters burst into a fancy gala, and held the entire party up with rifles, and had everyone strip down to their delicates, so that their jewels, furs, and wallets could be raided. It was a scene that mortified me, and has remained as a lodged nugget of anxiety in the back of my brain ever since. This idea of being exposed, of having all of one’s bodily flaws and secrets stripped down for everyone else in the room to judge, laugh at, and shame. Here’s the light bulb though. Everyone else in the room is in the exact same vulnerable circumstance, even if, in that instant for you, there is only you. I’ve revisited that scene so often that it’s beyond counting, and yet I can’t even recall the film itself. Telling our stories is a bit like that. If we’re honest, we expose more than what advances the agenda of being totally together. And while that idea can be terrifying, it is also brave to do so in this present culture of spin and image consciousness. And a remarkable unburdening has the chance to occur, because the world of public opinion will instantly assure us that we are not alone. And by that process, we are not only unburdened, but connected. For me, there is no greater purpose in telling our stories.
There isn’t a breakthrough in existence that isn’t accompanied by some aches and pains, but what comes out with us on that other side, always, is freedom. A freedom worth cultivating and renewing and re-tightening every single day. That’s my healing motif. The voice I’ve cultivated. I believe it can be of benefit to others too. That’s why I write.
J.M.W. Turner understood that. I saw his works at the Getty recently, and was blown away by the naked pain, and storms (as symbolic as they were literal), that he portrayed. And yet, his way with light is startling. That is the way with light, isn’t it? What does Leonard Cohen’s song Anthem say? There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.
Angela Carole Brown is the author of three published books, The Assassination of Gabriel Champion, The Kidney Journals: Memoirs of a Desperate Lifesaver, and Trading Fours, is a recipient of the Heritage/Soulword Magazine Award in poetry, and has produced several albums of music and a yoga/mindfulness CD. Bindi Girl Chronicles is her writing blog. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram & YouTube.
Ahhhh, Facebook. It’s an odd and fascinating communications platform, when you consider that the very best of it has sometimes generated important grassroots movements, and that the very worst of it, because of the safety of our own home sitting at a computer, and that we aren’t obligated to put a human face to a name and profile avatar, has bred some of the most loathsome social behavior I’ve ever witnessed. For me personally, the gold in Facebook has been the numerous long-lost friendships that, without social media, may never have been possible. On the other end, of course, is the odd stranger that we wonder why we’re Facebook friends with in the first place, and the crazy rantings that have required the socially devastating “unfriend”ing. But every once in a great while, believe it or not, an actual life lesson can be found on Facebook. Something unexpected and valuable lurking amid the sea of cute cat videos and vomit-mouth etiquette.
Here was mine, from a few weeks ago. A friend posted a most disturbing video of a woman encouraging her child to savagely beat on another child at a playground. It was shattering to watch. And of the myriad feelings I had regarding the witness, the primary one was that we lose jobs when we’re terrible at them, and parenthood should fall within those same parameters, and I just prayed Social Services got a hold of that woman.
Many people weighed in on this post, expressing their outrage, as well. One man was so outraged that he used epithets that clearly betrayed his ignorance of his audience. The N-word was bandied about pretty freely. Gee, can you guess what race the woman in the video was? I can genuinely say that what the woman’s racial or social demographic was didn’t even enter my mind for it being so overfilled with the horror of her act (which, by the way, Put-Upon White Man, happens in every race).
Before even weighing in on the contents of the video itself, my response to the post, which included the original poster’s own words “This is so shocking!” was, “Well, it looks like there’s equally shocking right here on this thread.”
I had to wonder, too, what kind of friends my friend had that this kind of blatantly racist response was even possible, until I reminded myself that I have said yes to friend requests countless times of people I don’t personally know, because as a working artist I’m always trying to expand an audience base, and, to be frank, I have “virtually” met some pretty amazing people on Facebook over the years. And so, the reality is that with such a practice also comes the risk of inviting the periodic troll to infiltrate.
Another friend, Melanie, weighed in immediately after me. Someone I actually do know personally. Someone I regard as a pretty sage woman. She’s also African-American, like me, and had clearly also seen Put-Upon White Man’s rant too, because her comment right after mine was, “I know, Angela, right???? Lord have mercy!”
A few others made similar comments. What fascinates me still, even as I reflect on this thing that happened a few weeks ago, is that most of the comments were reactions to PUWM’s rant, not the video. His own ire at the video (we all shared that!), which just HAD to go to a very nasty place, had completely overshadowed the horror on the video. Because this nastiness was right in our backyards. Who is this friend of my friend, who would rather spit in my face than shake my hand? is the shuddering subtext. That two-degrees of separation is too damned close!
I kept tuning in to see how this thread would grow, because frankly I was waiting for my friend (the original poster of the post) to get on here and condemn this man. She never did, nor ever weighed in again beyond the original posting of the video. But I’m very glad that I did keep tuning in, because of what unfolded next.
First off, after a fashion I noticed that PUWM’s original rant had been deleted. And then somewhere down the line of this thread, maybe 10 or 12 comments in, he weighed in a second time. His comment this time was an apology. And not one of those defensive apologies we’ve all had to roll our eyes at from time to time. He owned his racial outburst, iterated that he’d been so blinded by his rage over this video, which had broken his heart, but copping to it being absolutely no excuse, and ended with “Please forgive me, ladies….” addressing the myriad women who had commented on his rant, and lastly, “Lord forgive me.” And before I could even react to it, directly afterwards was my friend Melanie’s response to that: “Thank you, Mark. That is appreciated. We need to pray for that woman and her children.”
Okay, so at this point I’ll stop calling him PUWM. He has a name. It’s Mark. And yes, even Mark deserves to be called out by his Christian name, and not Put-Upon White Man, which, admittedly, has been my way of showing him zero respect, because it’s become such a cliché, and I felt like reducing him to the cliché, because, guess what? . . . I’m goddamned mad too.
I have to admit, I was stunned by Melanie’s ready acceptance of Mark’s apology. She and I share a very similar spiritual path of compassion & empathy, and consciousness-based cultivation, and we are both huge believers in forgiveness. I just hadn’t determined whether I was ready yet. But Melanie didn’t need to decide if she was ready. Melanie leapt. Melanie forgave. Melanie chose the higher road, without question, without needing to be ready.
It really did take me a minute to adjust this thinking, to wonder how she could do this so effortlessly, to have to face that my ball of fury had just had a pin pricked into it, and was deflating rapidly into a flat, self-righteous platitude. My own initial gut feeling was that Mark was only offering this apology because he got nailed on his abhorrent behavior, and that anyone who is capable of that language, and the intent and belief behind the language, will be absolutely capable of it again. Just give him another circumstance, a fresh audience, and sumpn’ else for him to be raging about. But did I know this for certain? That his apology wasn’t genuine? That he hadn’t really thought about his irresponsible and hurtful words?
What if Mark had had his heart truly opened by this exchange, had offered his amends, and then been shunned and dismissed? What, then, would that say about the sacred principle of forgiveness? Something pretty shameful, I’d say. Melanie wasn’t about to try and second-guess Mark’s intentions; her ONLY option was to put noble principle into healing practice. If Mark’s apology really wasn’t the real thing, if there was just a whole lotta bullshit goin’ on, that’s for Mark’s soul to wrestle with.
And so, while that was murky at best for me to wade through, it was as clear as a fresh spring to Melanie, my beautiful guru-mama sister-friend.
I carefully decided to say something myself. My instinctive thought was yeah, whatever, and not to respond at all. But in the spirit of my dear compassionate friend Melanie, and my own spiritual practice of forgiveness, I also offered a “thank you” to Mark, followed by, “The video broke my heart too.”
In those simple words – Melanie’s: “We need to pray for that woman and her children,” and mine: “The video broke my heart too,” – we let Mark know that the feelings about this heinous video were shared by us all, Black and White, male and female, Democrat and Republican, Christian and Atheist. Us, them. Whatever and Whatever. That there is actually more that connects us than there is that separates us, if we’re willing to see it. What an opportunity to offer healing, when my own instinct would’ve been to let the opportunity slip right through my fingers, and remain in the huff that someone else’s hate had engendered. Mark walked away changed too; that was evident in his further comments. He probably hadn’t ever thought, for a minute, that his apology would be welcomed and accepted. And if it had just been me alone out there reacting to his rant, it wouldn’t’ve been. So, thank you, Melanie, for reminding me. Yep, folks, a true spiritual practice requires rigorous renewal every single day, and unexpected angels and bodhisattvas to show us how.
In illustrating how much more connected we are than separate, a wall was torn down. It humanized everything. And that could ONLY have happened by a willingness for forgiveness. Melanie had thrown down the healing gauntlet. In a landscape of nothing but enraged hearts, how brave to be the one.
Forgiveness is a funny thing. It shouldn’t be. It should be startlingly clear. When Dylann Roof committed one of the most heinous single crimes in our recent history, the people least likely to, the families of the shooting victims, forgave. I personally was floored. It restored my lately-waning faith in humanity. But who on earth would ever think that instead of being absolutely lifted by this example, as I was, that there would be a backlash to it? Of course, there’s always going to be a militant response to such compassionate practice, people who are natural warriors, who believe morally in an eye for an eye. And I would even venture to say that most of us who aren’t militant would look at such compassion, and admire it even as we are admitting we’d never be able to do that. But the overwhelming backlash seems to be coming from the mainstream community, and not just asserting that we can’t do it but that we shouldn’t. The angle being that it finds these forgivers to be suckers, for lack of a kinder word. The charge is weakness, gullibility, and allowance of further racist behavior.
One article I found interesting and quite intelligent, in spite of the fact that I disagree with its fundamental creed, is by Stacey Patton for the Washington Post. The prevailing thought in this article is that Black America is the only culture expected to forgive its racist perpetrators. No one expects forgiveness toward al-Qaeda or ISIS. No one expects the Jews to forgive the Nazis. But Black America is pressured to forgive when the conflict is race. And when forgiveness is given, all Black America is doing is allowing more and more offenses to be made.
“Black people are not allowed to express unbridled grief or rage, even under the most horrific circumstances.”
Allowed? At least in this country, we all have the complete free will to choose how we feel, and how we will heal. And the trap to fall in is to assume that because there is a choice made to forgive, that grief or rage are not present. Even by framing the phrase “politics of forgiveness” Ms. Patton politicizes a basic tenet of grace and love. There is no politics to this. You either practice it or you don’t. It advances no agenda other than grace and love itself.
The most poignant thing Ms. Patton says is:
“. . . offering absolution to Roof is about relieving the burden of anger and pain of being victimized. In this regard, forgiveness functions as a kind of protest, a refusal to be reduced to victims. It sends the message to the killer that he may have hurt them, but they are the true victors because they have not been destroyed.”
This I passionately agree with. But she then counters it with the pronouncement that there is a demand by White America for this forgiveness. Demand? You can bet that White America was as stunned as anyone when these families chose the higher ground. Besides, how insulting to the intelligence of these compassionate soldiers Ms. Patton’s insinuation that White America is somehow their puppet-master, pulling strings.
I also challenge Ms. Patton’s claim that when Black America, especially of the Christian ilk, subscribes to the philosophy of forgiveness, it is being done out of some investment in the hereafter, a kind of E-ticket to Glory. Heaven or not, the only true salvation for this fractured present-day culture will be in cultivating that tenet for the life we are living right here, right now.
What seems not to be a part of the argument, at least in this article, is that to refuse to forgive is to keep oneself spiritually enslaved.
It’s important to know what forgiveness is. It may be even more important to know what it isn’t.
Forgiveness isn’t permission. Forgiveness isn’t forgetting. Forgiveness isn’t remotely weak. Forgiveness IS rising above. Refusing to fuel. Bringing to the table a different kind of challenge. And just possibly, changing that landscape.
There are many valid and insightful points that this article makes, and so I do urge you to read it. But while we are cautioned by Ms. Patton not to give forgiveness quite so quickly, from my own micro-example of that very dynamic, I can personally attest that when my friend Melanie gave it quickly, the entire landscape shifted from people divided to people communicating passionately together about the original problem (that horrendous video of mother and child). Healing was right in front of us. A coming together and acknowledgement of what connects us more than what divides us that would NEVER have happened had rage been met with more rage, and heads banged. Me, I was ready to put up some dukes and be a part of the fray. But it wouldn’t have been the right choice. And a golden opportunity would’ve been tragically missed.
Angela Carole Brown is the author of three published books, The Assassination of Gabriel Champion, The Kidney Journals: Memoirs of a Desperate Lifesaver, and Trading Fours, is a recipient of the Heritage/Soulword Magazine Award in poetry, and has produced several albums of music and a yoga/mindfulness CD. Bindi Girl Chronicles is her writing blog. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram & YouTube.
It has lately occurred to me that food, and one’s approach to food, even the enjoyment of it, would be greatly enhanced by looking at the whole affair from a sacred, spiritual standpoint. It’s hardly a new idea. Religions the world over have historically had rituals regarding the consumption of food. From the Holy Communion of Catholicism to the Kosher Laws of Judaism to the spiritual fasting observed by many religions, food and the consumption of food have played a pivotal role in the development of the soul.
I have struggled with food my whole life. I’ve either seriously dieted and lived in grumpy privation, or I’ve emotionally eaten and found myself in food stupors, blocking out some deep pain body, or I’ve thrown hands up, not cared, and gotten real depraved with it. Actually “not cared” isn’t exactly accurate. I’ve always cared, always been preoccupied, always been obsessed, always felt the pressure from society, boyfriends, even colleagues (because I happen to be in a business where what I look like matters greatly), to look a certain way and to maintain that, in no uncertain terms. I was pretty successful at maintaining a look and a weight for most of my adult life, but not without the help of a lot of compulsive behaviors. When menopause hit and I gained nearly 50 pounds, and then kept that on for the better part of the last ten years, making the new weight my body’s new set point, efforts to get back to where I’d mainly been my whole life were proving insurmountable, and really only succeeded in enhancing what was already a fairly dysfunctional relationship with food. I’ve never starved myself, or binged/purged; my issues surrounding food have been a lot subtler than that, making the whole panorama of eating and body dysmorphic issues much more complex and nuanced than popular media ever gives us to understand.
That’s my eating background, in a brief nutshell. Nothing devastating, just the nuanced struggles of a middle-class American girl pressured by a quintessentially middle-class American pastime – dieting. And so now to this recent dawning. I’ve been on a spiritual road for some time now, some of it documented on this blog, some of it hinted at in the various memoir I’ve put out there, some of it, as well, remaining deeply private, and all in the service of bettering who I am, healing what has ailed me, and coming closer to the divine and to an internal peace in the realm of higher consciousness. I made a recent decision to start approaching the ritual of eating from a sacred standpoint. So now, what exactly does that mean?
To begin with, the world is filled with far too many people who are without food, who would give their right arm for a bowl of porridge, and would consider that bowl sacred, because it is so rare. How can I possibly continue to live in this life where I have never once had to go without, and not value the privilege that I have been given? And so, a new commitment is beginning for me. It is my effort to heal what is sore between food and me.
I want to rise above my animal self, the hungers, the desires, that root chakra governance that is primal and is all about brute survival by any means, and instead appeal to that higher seventh chakra state of grace that is beyond the limited senses. I wonder if that isn’t what’s behind the spiritual practice of fasting. The idea of denying those base urges in us, in order to push through a veil to experience what’s on the other side. When we’re stripped of our animal nature, what’s left? What are we? What are we capable of? What are our limitations? Our possibilities? Fasting is not an easy thing to do, and this essay isn’t about that, but I think we can make that same journey by deeming the act of feeding ourselves a sacred one, like baptism or the Eucharist. It’s a wacky thought perhaps; this largely social covenant (think of the countless meals portrayed on Sex and the City) reduced to a stodgy sacramental rite. Yuck, you may be thinking. “Taking the joy right out of eating, Angela . . . gee thanks!” Well, maybe. Bear with me for a minute. Because for me, the way things have been for awhile now is that there are far more meals I consume than the number of them that I actually enjoy and have a wonderfully epicurean experience with. I am moved by this idea that the experience can be so much more, and consistently so, and at the same time achieve a transcendence in consciousness. It doesn’t have to be one or the other. And, for better or for worse, I am moved by it just as compellingly as it is also my belief that this will be incredibly difficult for me to adopt. But I’m giving it a go. Have already begun so, in fact. And I’ll let you know how it works out. Here’s the basic game plan.
I am a firm believer in food as medicine. Food can change our brains and our health, because it contains information that talks to our genes. It’s serious stuff. So, why have I lived my entire life regarding it sloppily and cavalierly at best? That’s the question I’m trying to answer even as I write this, and as I venture forward in this experiment with a new appreciation for every meal I’m blessed to partake in.
The first night that I tried shutting off the TV and the computer, and putting my phone away, and just cooking a meal . . . and then setting my table . . . and then putting on some music (actually the music was playing during the cooking . . . very peaceful evening this was), and then sitting down and eating my meal, it was a transplendent experience. I was truly in the moment. I blessed the food I was about to cook, and then I blessed it again as I sat down to eat. I took my time. I didn’t go back for seconds, because I didn’t need to. I’m accustomed to going back for seconds. Usually because I’ve shoveled my food into the trough so fast, while watching some fast-paced movie or something equally agitating online, and so the rhythm of my external stimuli would be matched and mimicked by the fork-to-mouth action, and simply wouldn’t stop. Plus I’m a musician for my living; having a 15-minute break on a gig that’s designated for the meal they offer you has borne some very gastrically-abusing habits among my musician cohorts. I learned to be a fast eater, and then the habit stuck even beyond being on a gig. This first night in this new experiment, I ate slowly. I thoroughly enjoyed the taste sensations. I relished in the art of food pairing. And I let the world and the evening go by, as I luxuriated (yes, I can actually claim luxuriating) in the experience of my dinner. I also realize that not nearly every night, nor every meal, will be that magical. There will be the occasions when my mood is terse, perhaps my day has been a challenge, and I won’t feel like cooking, or I won’t feel like gracing, and all I’ll want to do is mainline the drug that food can be with the wrong infusion, into the gullet, and numb out. But I figure, it’s a one-day-at-a-time kind of thing, like AA. Like any program that attempts to repair something that is out of spiritual alignment. It’s a mountain. And I’ll need to be prepared to climb it daily.
During the formulating of this idea, and writing about it, I’ve had to ask myself (if my creed here is truly vigilant honesty, and that’s been my claim) if all of this isn’t just a new scheme, of the gaggle of them that I’ve tried, toward trying to lose weight. And while I can’t say that isn’t a factor, the truth is I am looking for something deeper. I’m in this whole thing for a spiritual revolution. An uprising from my innards, pulling at every thread in my sight lines and my insight lines, that will help to weave me right into the tapestry of interconnected consciousness and the frequency of infinite realms and possibilities. I know, I know, I’ve gone off the reservation a bit with the flower-child rhetoric. But I assure you it isn’t without focus or substance. And it’s already happening, this personal revolution, unfolding layer by layer by layer, a tiny bit each day.
I heard an anecdote recently about some Buddhist monks who, in an effort to protect their sacred Buddha monument from Burmese soldiers, covered their beloved statue in mud, knowing that the soldiers would find no material value in a statue made of clay, when what was hiding beneath its clay cloak was a monument made of gold. And the story was told in the context of the very fitting metaphor for this idea that our true value can often be hidden beneath layers of mud, or, in our contemporary parlance, baggage. And what that parable is meant to suggest is that the spiritual journey is really more about subtraction than addition. We are already complete beneath our wounds and our fears, and through the process of shedding layer after layer to reveal our sovereign splendor, we become lighter and lighter, freer and freer.
This new eating thing? It’s just a layer.
Angela Carole Brown is the author of three published books, The Assassination of Gabriel Champion, The Kidney Journals: Memoirs of a Desperate Lifesaver, and Trading Fours, is a recipient of the Heritage/Soulword Magazine Award in poetry, and has produced several albums of music and a yoga/mindfulness CD. Bindi Girl Chronicles is her writing blog. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram & YouTube.
he stared at his blank canvas for hours.
frustrated.
couldn’t get a thing done.
finally he just doused his naked body with flat green house paint
and in a magic-mushroomed fog
threw himself against the elevator lift.
he picked himself up off the floor.
stepped back. stared. hmmm.
it was this perfectly contoured jade silhouette of his body
divided in sublime harmony and symmetry
right between two testicles by the parting of the
double steel doors.
from that day forth every time he yanked on the ropes and opened that thing to leave
he’d flash on the excruciating image of his
right nut soaring one way and his
left nut soaring the other.
was there a symbolic message somewhere in that image, he wondered?
that maybe castration was the true doorway to freedom?
as many women as there were who had messed with his head and therefore his art
he had to at least consider the possibility.
he got the hell outta there for the night and went to a neighborhood bar.
walked in and saw the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.
kinda like an angel.
reminded him o’ that old joke :
man walks into a bar. sees the beautiful woman.
tells her he wants to make sweet love to her.
Sorry i can’t, she quips, i’m on my blue period!
he downed a couple of quick shots of Old Forester.
slapped his money on the bar like a cowboy.
decided against approaching his beautiful woman.
and sulked on back home.
thought to himself :
why’d that damned Vincent have to go and cut his ear off,
and raise the bar of brilliant suffering for all the rest of us?
Angela Carole Brown is the author of three published books, The Assassination of Gabriel Champion, The Kidney Journals: Memoirs of a Desperate Lifesaver, and Trading Fours, and has produced several albums of music and a yoga/mindfulness CD. Bindi Girl Chronicles is her writing blog. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram & YouTube.
I jokingly call this the greatest love story I’ve ever written. I say it with tongue in cheek because it’s the only love story I’ve ever written. But also because it’s a seedy, salty, nasty little story, with pain, hurt, desperation, heartbreak, rage, violence, and passion as its main ingredients. But make no mistake, a love story it is. The story of Arthur and Ophelia is one that originated in my novel The Assassination of Gabriel Champion. The book is a modern fable and a meditation on violence and redemption. And Arthur’s and Ophelia’s story is only a small part of the overall landscape of the book, yet it’s a pivotal one. In writing the story, creating these characters, and then living with them over the years of refining and rewriting the book, I fell in love with them. They are the most imperfect people you could possibly conceive of, they are rich in pathos and pain, they are complicated, infuriating, and they are forever sewn to my heart.
Somewhere along the line, during the years of nursing this book into its rightful being, I was inspired to write a song about Arthur and Ophelia (not even the main characters). And of course, considering the source, the song HAD to be blues.
Wake Up Ophelia would end up debuting on my first album of original songs, Resting On the Rock, a few years later, although many years before the book itself would be published.
I thought the writing of the lyrics would be easy, because their story was already there. But in taking it on, I discovered that there were actually quite a few challenges ahead. First off, I needed to decide which angle would be the focus of the song, because Arthur and Ophelia are sort of epic within the scope of the novel, yet suddenly we’ve got 3 verses and a chorus in which to tell their story, not the luxury of an entire book. And that proved tricky. I eventually came to the conclusion that Ophelia’s death was the moment that merited a song written (yes, it’s a bit of a spoiler; but if you haven’t read the book yet, believe me nothing’s ruined . . . now, go read the book!). And so, the song would become Arthur’s plea to Ophelia after snuffing out her life. I needed to find a way to express the arc of their love, their substance addiction, their desperation for and violence upon each other, and finally the deed, all within the confines of five 4-line stanzas, two of which are a repeated chorus.
I knew that what would aid me would be to approach the whole thing as poetry. There’s a different palate for poetry than for prose. Prose begs linear detail and chronology (not always, but as a matter of standard), whereas poetry can, through the artful twist of a word or phrase, illuminate everything. For example, I think “he made his arms erupt” is all that’s really needed to capture the entire nature and scope of a man’s addiction. And I had an entire story to re-work in this way. To get it all in, within the space of few words. Poetry.
Once I was able to figure out the basic prosody of the verse, the words began to fall into place, and so next came the music. Now, like I said, it couldn’t possibly be anything other than blues. And so inevitably the thought is: What’s there to write? The blues is the blues. The form is universal. Well, the lesson I would come to learn in the years that this song came into being, grew its legs, and was eventually recorded, is that the blues ain’t jes’ one thang. And as hardheaded as I have been known to be, it took some years for that to really sink in, but we’ll get to that.
At the time I was first conceiving of Ophelia’s story as a song, I had been listening nonstop to Tito & Tarantula, the stoner rock band out of East L.A. There’s a song of theirs called The Strange Face of Love that is this enigmatic, engine-revving shuffle that cannot be stopped! And I instantly thought, “Well, that’s it! That’s what I need for my song.” But it wasn’t only the feel that struck me. It was that their song was a minor blues. That’s certainly not unheard of. It’s just not the more common dominant seventh environment that’s so familiar to our ears. Wake Up Ophelia in a minor key would lend an even further dankness to the proceedings. Done. Decision made. Song written.
I sang it around town for a few years. It never even had a chart. I would just say, “blues in A minor,” tell the musicians it’s a shuffle, count it off, and go. And while it worked perfectly alright, I can’t say I felt especially connected to the story in the song, nor did I feel that it had the emotional heft of an opus, when in truth that IS how I felt about Arthur and Ophelia’s story in book form. And honestly I don’t even think I was aware of just how unsatisfying the song was for me. I just chalked it up to being “not one of my best,” and didn’t really feel any need to do anything about it. Or so I thought.
Fast forward to the year 2000, and it was, at last, time to start writing songs for Resting On the Rock, which I had conceptualized as a project that would take its inspiration from the folk vocabulary of other cultures, including America’s roots and blues movement. Wake Up Ophelia fit that bill, so I took it into the studio with some musicians to record, with the hope that it would jump start the rest of the canon for me. And I did exactly as I had done every time I’d ever sung it on a gig. I just called the key, said it was a shuffle blues, counted it off, and sang. We did a few takes. I got quick mixes. And I took all the takes home to study, and to determine which I liked best. It was sort of ZZ Top meets saloon music. And as I listened back, there was something unsatisfying about all of it. Every take. It wasn’t the playing. Let me be very clear about that. These guys, Ken Rosser, Ross Wright, David Arana, and Chris Wabich, are some of the best I know. They played their asses off. And had the subject matter of the lyrics been anything else (my baby done left me, blah, blah, blah . . . ) perhaps I would’ve dug it as I dig everything these guys play.
But in this case, I heard my song’s meaning and power just get lost in what sounded like nothing more than a romping bar blues, the kind you get up and dance to, not the kind you shudder to hear and to witness, and are forever changed.
Forgive my hyperbole. I do have visions of wanting to change the world in whatever tiny ways my talents can achieve. So, yes, I wanted shuddering.
I lived with the recording, and listened to it a hundred times, a thousand times, realizing that I’d been singing this song, played just this way, or close enough, for years, but not until locking it into recorded history, and actually having the luxury to study it did I realize how unrepresentative it actually was of Arthur and Ophelia’s dark tale. And then to try and figure out what exactly wasn’t working. And whatever that was, this much I knew, was my fault. Because I hadn’t bothered to take the time to actually compose. That’s the tricky thing about blues. You can dismiss it without even realizing you’ve done so.
The first thought that struck me, after so many listens that I’ve lost count, was that the driving shuffle was not right. Not exactly. It was precisely what was needed on the chorus, because the chorus is the plea. The begging, imploring plea. That energy is required. But the verses are expository. The verses describe their world. And their world is a place of sadness and despair, and begs sobriety. So, I decided that the verses should be played with a half time feel, and at a tempo of about 64. Very sparse, not note-y, not chops-y, but vibe-y. And that vibe needed to be messy, crunchy, grungy, but with texture, not with busy-ness. When I thought back to the Tito & Tarantula tune, I realized that that’s exactly what they do. I’d been so hypnotized by that burning shuffle of theirs that I hadn’t really noticed what they were doing on their verses. This would give the song some actual shape and dynamics. Places to go TO, places to come FROM. A meditation, to a full-on assault, back to a meditation, back again to the assault, and so forth.
Next were the chord changes. Something about what had been played didn’t sit right. I realized that clashes were actually occurring between chords and melody, because the melody I’d written didn’t resolve to the tonic by the end of a phrase, the way blues traditionally does, but instead to the dominant, and only resolved to the tonic once we were into the next verse, as opposed to the dominant merely being used as a passing chord. So, I dropped everything, and I just listened to a LOT of blues for awhile. Now, you can never go wrong with the brilliance of a Son House, or a Big Mama Thornton, or a Howlin’ Wolf. Those singers are special stars in the firmaments. Or even contemporary folks like Chris Whitley and Jack White. Yes, I was listening to everyone I could possibly consume from every walk of blues life. But the changes, the changes, were still driving me crazy. Of course, I was able to make sure a chart would resolve the verses to the dominant; I just wasn’t especially crazy about the traditional changes. I plucked around on the piano for weeks, trying to discover something different, when I just happened to find my answer in the most unlikely yard. I ran across a Daniel Lanois track called Blue Waltz, and my mind was blown by an absolutely simple set of chord changes on what was ostensibly the blues, and which were so left of the middle that I was stopped in my tracks, and knew that this chord progression was what my song was screaming for. What’s so funny to me is that it’s only the last four bars of a 12-bar blues that he does anything even remotely twisted with. So simple, and yet so profoundly odd.
Now, I have improved somewhat over the years, but at the time my ear was pretty poor for hearing changes and being able to transcribe them; what’s called a “take down.” So I asked Ross Wright, the bass player on this song, if he would listen to the Lanois track and help me jot down the changes, because, yes, he’d already been informed that we were going to redo this song. Those four bars are a set of changes that actually yank the Lanois track right out of the blues palate altogether for just an instant, to something more squared, if that makes any sense. No real blue notes. And yet there was still the issue of how to take the establishment of those changes, whatever modal construct they came from, and resolve them to the dominant. And this was where Ross was incredibly helpful.
So, finally I was starting to have a structure that was specific and fixed, and not just a case of calling blues, describing it as a shuffle, and having everyone play what they’ve played a thousand times on a thousand gigs.
I had called up Ken Rosser shortly after our session, in the midst of my song’s identity crisis. I confessed I wasn’t happy with how we’d done the song, and that a lot of it was in the structure . . . that there was none! Because I had not fine-tuned a specific set of mechanics. But that a good deal of it, as well, maybe even more crucially, had to do with concept and interpretation, which I hadn’t bothered to relay. I guess I thought the emotion could all come from me. That I wouldn’t need to communicate it to the musicians playing it. But that is so wrong. We talked very intimately about color and mood and shade and dramatic arc. He was SO on my wave length with this! We each discovered in that conversation how much a fan we both were of ambient tone and atmospherics, texture more than notes, manipulation of sound, all in the service of emotional connection. And as much as I like to talk (and have done so several times already in this song series) about Ken and me being musical soul mates, let me say here that this moment of discussing Wake Up Ophelia was truly the breakthrough moment for us, and would firmly establish the musical relationship we’ve now had for nearly 15 years.
As far as my own part in this, I had originally, and for years, sung the song in A minor, which is a perfectly comfortable key for this old alto. But as everything in the song was being revisited and re-envisioned, I decided to lower the key to where the first notes out of my mouth (which are the lowest notes in the melody) would be at my lowest possible register. It’s not the most attractive part of my register, and with not a lot of physical power there, but it does lend a quality of something intimate and fragile, almost struggling. Plenty of room to move up to the shouting chorus, but at least in the new key of F minor it would start off with a vulnerable simmer.
One of the final things I decided on, before we went back in to re-record, was to eliminate the keyboard. David Arana is a wonderful player; I’ve done countless gigs with him, the most prevalent of those being with The Orchestre Surreal for the past 18 years. But the presence of piano on this blues most definitely gave it its saloon vibe, which I realized only afterwards that I did not want. I wanted something sonically dense, where a piano really pierces sharply through any kind of texture. Plus I didn’t feel I needed two chordal instruments. The guitar was plenty on that front. And we’re talking Ken Rosser here! Known for texture and aural layers of richness, even within one single pass. He was all I needed. In fact, it was that decision about instrumentation that would set the tone for the rest of the songs I would eventually compose for Resting On the Rock.
On the day we were scheduled to re-record, Chris Wabich wasn’t available (he, the working-est drummer in town), and so our recording engineer, who also just happens to be a drummer, offered to step in and do double-duty. Michael Kramer has been my mixing engineer on every record I’ve ever helmed, but this song goes down as the only song of mine he’s ever played on. And he was great! Running back and forth from control booth to drum booth had to take a toll on his concentration, and yet both drumming and engineering that day were stellar.
We assembled at the same studio for round two. We’re talking months later, after all the soul searching I’d had to do. I had Ross bring in his F-Bass fretless instead of the Alembic fretted bass he’d used on the prior recording. I thought the new approach, the new texture, the new mood, really called for that quality. And my only instruction to him, a man known for very note-y, virtuosic playing, was to just simplify, leave space, yet without sacrificing pulse. And I handed everyone the chart of my (finally!) structured composition.
Here’s where I’d like to mention that Ken Rosser walked into the session with a fever of 102, and was, understandably, not in the best of moods. Oh boy! But what a trooper to still show up instead of asking if we could reschedule. He set up his gear in a corner, far away from everyone else, and had little tolerance for the chatting and laughing and all the things we do in the studio between takes. I think it’s safe to say we were all kind of afraid of Ken that day :). He used the house guitar amp, which was a beat-to-shit small vintage tweed Fender combo amp with a Deluxe Reverb, and he’d brought in a cheap Danelectro guitar, where one of the switches was intermittent and it wouldn’t stay in tune, which Ken confessed was a purposeful choice that, based on our talk, he felt would be perfect for the raw, urgent vibe. That conceptual idea, for Ken, translated into cranking up the amp until it was rattling and shaking, or as he has said, “It’s Hendrix at the Fillmore West, or Neil Young in full meltdown mode . . . there’s no way to get that sound and not endanger something or someone,” and with the plan to use reverse delay effects during the verses, and three fuzz boxes chained together at the same time during the choruses and solo. I just needed one last whispered caucus with the fevered lion before we did a take, to reiterate the concept, and at this point I simply said that since it was about a woman dying I wanted the guitar to sound like a man on his last manic leg in this life, and that I wanted the solo to sound like a woman wailing, like the cries of the damned.
Well, folks, I don’t know what Ken Rosser was channeling that day, but I suspect all credit is owed to that 102° fever, and I, for one, thank God for it. It was some of the dankest, darkest, most connected, plugged in, tapping something ancestral, killer music I’ve ever heard created.
Which brings us to the ending of the song. The ending on this recording is such a far cry from that of our original. That one resolved with the typical blues tag ― the classic 12/8, triplet-y, descending, Robert Johnson turnaround sequence, that almost begs an “ohhhh yeahhhhh” on the ending fermata, with jazz hands! I know. I’m being facetious. And I truly do love Robert Johnson. It just was not the call for my song. Though in all fairness, because there are traditions, it’s what you’re likely to get when all you do is call some blues, and you haven’t bothered to architect it. The new ending was designed to be a vamp on the tonic, still in the full shuffle, and for everyone to play out in their momentum, which we would gradually fade in the mix, the dramatic metaphor being that life goes on even in the midst of death, even after “The End.” I liked the idea of a song about death having no ending.
And, on how we ended up doing it, a special note of credit needs to go out to Ross Wright.
We were recording live. No isolation booths (except for the vocals). No punching. No cutting & pasting. Yes, I did later overdub some harmonies on the chorus, and Ross did grab a Gretsch guitar off the wall after the session was officially wrapped (and Ken went home to sleep off his fever) and added a few wobbly chords at the beginning for mood. But otherwise this was live, so if we screwed up we started over. We were 98% through our first take, which was clearly a winner. And as we landed on the tonic for the ending cadence, there we were, just sizzling on the F minor, and on bar 5 of this vamp Ross suddenly went from the tonic to the sub-dominant, as if we were going back through the form changes (those wonderful Lanois-inspired changes). I had eye contact with everyone from my booth, and I shot a look at Ross, as in “No! Oh shit! You weren’t supposed to go there.” And he shot a look back at me that said, “Sorry! But now we’re here. It’s a great take. Let’s just keep going.” We all shot a look at each other ― all except for Ken, who was in this world of his own, curing the freaking common cold and uncovering the secret to eternal youth ― and we all agreed to just keep going. Well, progressing to that chord change, which Ken hadn’t expected, only propelled him into an even deeper, danker level of depth and depravity and marvel and wonder and amplifier overdrive. Even Ross had this crazy instant during that cadence of slowly sliding his fingers across the neck of his bass for this pedal-to-the-metal grunge moment that just exploded everything. And so, what had been instructed to be just this simple vamp-out became a whole second solo for Ken, with a second life, and which flung open the doors of Heaven and Hell both. MY GOD was it stunning. More hyperbole, yes. But this is how I think of Ken. He’s a transporter of souls, a deliverer. We eventually did settle on that tonic, which would be faded later in the mix, but the world was on fire by that point. And I smiled at Ross, shaking my head, who, instead of yelling “cut!” or “my bad!” had managed to remain calm and turn his little mistake into a stunning afterlife moment for all involved, and for the song. I defy you to tell me that you don’t hear Ophelia’s cries in that outro solo.
When the take was done, the general consensus was that it was a great take, “now let’s do a few more.” And my only response was “why?”
Quarter note = 64. The tempo of big, bad, tragic, Shakespearean pathos.
Click here to listen on Bandcamp
Wake up Ophelia. Don’t lay so still.
The sun’s goin’ down, and it’s time for a meal.
I’ve got the whiskey if you’ll bring the buzz,
and together, like in a story, we can fall in love.
With a tremble and a whisper he cried, I know you’re there.
I can see you hidin’ deep inside those dark eyes somewhere.
Where’s my feisty woman? Where’s my sweet honey bee?
Please, please, Ophelia, don’t leave me!
Wake up Ophelia. Don’t you dim your bright eyes.
Wake up Ophelia. Never listen to my lies.
Better get yourself away from danger, girl.
Please wake up and rise.
That man, oh how he begged. Pleadin’ hands around her throat.
“Wake up Ophelia” were the desperate words he spoke.
And he leaned into his whiskey, and he made his arms erupt,
as he begged his sweet Ophelia to please wake up.
Wake up Ophelia. Don’t you dim your bright eyes.
Wake up Ophelia. Never listen to my lies.
Better get yourself away from danger, girl.
Please wake up and rise.
Angela Carole Brown is the author of three published books, The Assassination of Gabriel Champion, The Kidney Journals: Memoirs of a Desperate Lifesaver, and Trading Fours, is a recipient of the Heritage/Soulword Magazine Award in poetry, and has produced several albums of music and a yoga/mindfulness CD. Bindi Girl Chronicles is her writing blog.
There is a song, a pop classic, actually, a signature pedal steel tune from the 1950’s, called Sleepwalk. This is not that.
I wrote MY Sleepwalk in 1994, but my original vision for it did not get recorded until 2007, when The Slow Club Quartet was assembling material for our second CD Expressionism. It wasn’t even a song we performed as a quartet, as the arrangement is for an entirely different set of instruments, but an unexpectedly fortuitous thing occurred just as we were putting the album together, and there was no way I was going to lose the opportunity.
Let’s start at the beginning. Sleepwalk is spoken word, but I had a very specific instrumental underscoring in my head for it. I was a singer and marginal songwriter at that point in my life (hell, maybe I still am). I could write a chord chart, but my only background with instruments were the years of piano lessons as a kid. Yet I heard this instrumentation in my head, had listened to enough symphonic music in my life, and decided to rise to the challenge. Henry Mancini, the 1960’s, cool jazz, all of that was the general vibe I was hoping to cop, a sort of slinky Pink Panther-esque thing to accompany the libretto, a cracked bit of flash fiction (not even a term yet in 1994) meant to be absurd and humorous. I even signed up for a semester of harmony and theory at Pasadena City College for the express purpose of getting a sense of how instruments talk to each other, and relate to each other. I got a little cheat sheet that tells you the ranges and clefs of different instruments of the orchestra. I could not have been more hanging on the edge of the ledge by my fingernails in trying to compose and orchestrate a piece that actually made sense and worked.
My new Korg synthesizer (circa early 90’s) aided me in laying down the parts, so that I could hear whether certain lines worked against each other or not. Real orchestrators will surely cringe to read this. For them it’s all about “seeing” how the parts and lines work with each other on a score.
But when all was said and done, I was tickled by the piece, composed for acoustic bass, muted trumpet, trombone, 2 flutes, drums, and voice. A very sparse piece. Lots of space and air between notes. The bass is the lead instrument. And every note is written. This isn’t the case of a chord/rhythm chart, where the rhythm section merely uses the skeleton, and they comp within and around it. There’s something very cool to me about that kind of songwriting, because each time the piece is played by a different set of players, the notes played are of a most unique, unrepeatable nature, and in that sense the song is reinvented with each playing. But with orchestrated pieces, the notes are the notes. What’s going to give each performance its unique resonance is the intention, dynamics, and emotion behind it.
So, there it was. My composed piece. My tiny little nugget. It would turn out to be years before I would ever get to hear it played by real instruments, to truly get confirmation on whether it worked.
After it was completed, it sat on the proverbial shelf for about another 4 years, until I found myself in 1998 the lead performer in the most innovative of musical projects, Elvis Schoenberg’s Orchestre Surreal. The project’s leader, composer, orchestrator, and conductor is Ross Wright, a student of the music of composers such as Arnold Schoenberg and the New Music school, as well as a devotee of Frank Zappa, and that peculiar mixture of Ross’s musical influences has most definitely shaped the vision that is the Orchestre Surreal.
In the beginning I was just a vocalist with the orchestra, singing incredibly challenging parts, and devising and developing a character (“The Fabulous Miss Thing”), in order to front this wacky, larger-than-life creation. Then one day I showed Ross my score for Sleepwalk, a piece never played. Ross is the real deal, so I can’t honestly say he looked at it with any great awe. I’m sure my little orchestrated piece was precious to him. But he liked it as a concept, thought it would fit the nutty nature of the Orchestre Surreal, and suggested that he re-orchestrate it for the 30 pieces. I was thrilled by the notion. There would be an Angela Carole Brown original as part of the illustrious Orchestre Surreal.
The first time the piece ever got played, and then for years after, of performing with the OS, it was Ross’s arrangement, a big, bad, brazen and formidable thing, that we performed.
To this day, I love what Ross did with it. It climaxes into a sort of Ornette Coleman-esque insanity. It’s been exciting to have realized, and we not only added it to the show but recorded it for the Orchestre Surreal’s debut album Air Surreal.
And yet as much as I loved this lion of an arrangement, I still yearned to hear the piece realized in the vibey little intimate and sparse way I had originally conceived of it. To know, definitively, if I actually had it in me as an orchestrator and realizor of a vision. I honestly didn’t know if there would ever come the opportunity, because I didn’t have a project of my own (The Slow Club Quartet and The Global Folk were developed some years later), and even if I did create a project of my own, it certainly wouldn’t be with the instrumentation of trumpet, trombone, flutes and bass.
Fast forward to 2007, and now I was leading my own jazz ensemble, The Slow Club Quartet. We were amassing material for our second album together, and Sleepwalk hadn’t crossed my mind in some years. Then one day during this time I was speaking with Ross Wright on the phone, and talking about the record I was about to make, and I just happened casually to mention that I wished I hadn’t lost the original score I’d written on it. That as much as I loved the Orchestre’s version of it, I still wished I’d gotten the chance to hear it the way I’d originally written it, but that I didn’t have a clue where the score was after all these years. Probably gone the way of my old, beaten up, obsolete (by this point) Korg synthesizer. And Ross promptly said, “Oh I’ve got it. I guess I didn’t realize that I never gave it back to you after I re-orchestrated it. But yeah, I still have your original score.”
I literally squealed, thanked Ross for never throwing it out (my assumption), and promptly made the executive decision to include it on The Slow Club Quartet’s Expressionism, even though the only members of the quartet who would play on it would be the bass player and drummer, and even if the likelihood of it ever getting performed live somewhere was practically nil. I found a way to squeeze in a session for trumpet, trombone, bass, 2 flutes, drums, and me, in the midst of the quartet’s recording. And my heart raced with the nervous anticipation of finally, after 13 years, getting to hear what my piece was always meant to sound like.
Craig Pilo, the Slow Club Quartet’s drummer, was producing the album and doing some of the recording in his own studio. We had to record the whole thing part by part. Craig laid down a drum track of sizzling brushes, a kind of fluid comping-and-keeping-time as one entity, as a framework for everyone else to play against, along with the SCQ’s bassist Don Kasper on upright. The bass part, being the lead instrument on this piece, is really just playing a walking bass line, but the specific “road” I wrote for it is somewhat theatrical, operating in accord with the story’s rhythmic arc. Next, we brought in trumpeter Dave Scott, a recommendation of the SCQ’s pianist Ed Czach, who lived in New York but was in town for a bit. Dave brought just the right about of “bent” to the proceedings. Even though he strictly played the notes on the page, there was an energetic edge to his playing that I absolutely loved. We brought in flutist Bill Esparza to do what had to easily be THE simplest flute parts he’s probably ever had to play in his life. And I sent the trombone part to my friend Ira Nepus, who took it into a recording studio of his own choice, laid down his part, and sent the file back to me (so modern!). And finally, lastly, my spoken word part, the story, the crazy little fiction I’d written about a doomed hermaphrodite. Theatre of the Absurd at your service.
As it came together, layer by layer, part by part, after 13 years of waiting and wondering, I could not have been more gratified with how my original vision was sounding as played by real, living, breathing, feeling musicians.
What’s truly cool is that I now have two very different versions of Sleepwalk forever documented and on two very different kinds of albums. I highly recommend checking out The Orchestre Surreal’s album Air Surreal, and their version of Sleepwalk. But for my purposes here on the Song Series, my original vision, the version found on The Slow Club Quartet’s Expressionism (the only original on an album of covers), is the one I want to share here. Because it’s my baby, my arrangement, my orchestrating, my singular example of stepping outside of my own comfort zone and abilities, and forcing myself to rise to the orchestrating occasion. Like I said, to any real symphonic composers out there in the world, this little arrangement is sure to seem precious. But I am very proud of it. It creates exactly that sense of Noir Bizarre that I was intending.
Please enjoy Sleepwalk.
click here to listen on Bandcamp
Angela Carole Brown is the author of three published books, The Assassination of Gabriel Champion, The Kidney Journals: Memoirs of a Desperate Lifesaver, and Trading Fours, and has produced several albums of music and a yoga/mindfulness CD. Bindi Girl Chronicles is her writing blog. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram & YouTube.
The anecdote that begins this piece is one I’ve told before, time and time again actually, but for the sake of this song series I can’t possibly not include it.
It’s my mystical moment in this life. If we only get one, then this is it.
The very first song I ever wrote, The Slow Club, which ultimately became the title cut of my debut jazz CD, is about a nightclub in Paris. At the time I wrote it, a young thing, I’d never been to the city of lights. A few years after writing it and performing it around town, I was singing it at an L.A. supper club one evening, and a woman came up to me afterwards. This was the exchange:
“I enjoyed your song very much. It made me think back with the fondest of memories of my days at the Slow Club.”
“I’m sorry, I think you’re thinking of a different club … this song is fiction. But thank you for the compliment.”
“Oh, no. The Slow Club in Paris, France, oui?”
“I … really don’t mean to press, but I swear to you I made it up. I’m a storyteller. And I just sort of have this fixation for Paris.
“And I am telling you, mademoiselle, that I’ve been to this place you sing about. On the Rue du Rivoli, right down the way from the Louvre. I would say that is some pretty powerful fixation.”
My jaw was officially dropped, as I continued singing this song around town, told this story, and relished in my, and my song’s, spooky allure, even though I wasn’t completely convinced that this total stranger wasn’t merely having her fun with me. Until I finally did make it to the city of my dreams for the first time ever, and looked up the Slow Club in my tourist guide book (this was before the internet was at everyone’s fingertips for instant information). And there it was, with a Rue du Rivoli address, as promised.
The first chance I got, I went to this place that I thought had been conjured in my head. But the mind-freak did not stop there. As I walked in, every single detail I describe in the lyric of the song was personified before my very eyes, from the winding staircase that takes one down into it below street level, to the smoking, blue ambiance that invited secret rendezvous on those stairs.
I promptly ordered a sloe gin (not a great-tasting cocktail, but mentioned in my lyric so I had to participate), grinned from ear to ecstatic ear at the marvels of life, the marvels of my life, and concluded that I must’ve been that Slow Club chanteuse in another lifetime, simply recalling pockets of memory from a long-dormant nether-plane.
Now, as to whether an actual spiritual reincarnation is the explanation, or merely a mischievous flight of fancy, it was that singular experience that began my journey as a musician and a writer, carrying with me at all times the mysterious wonders that art simply begets.
I’ve had people suggest to me, upon hearing the story, that perhaps I had heard of the Slow Club, forgotten that I’d heard of it, and that it had lodged itself in my subconscious, and came up when I was ready for it. Of course that’s possible, and I also do know how difficult it can be for people to suspend belief, to take leaps of fanciful fate. Except that I know it did not come to me in that way. Because the way it DID come to me is very clear in my memory. The movie Blue Velvet, a film whose story takes place somewhere in the Midwest, features a dive called the Slow Club at which the character Dorothy Valens sings. First off, I was 26 years old when I first saw this movie, and had just been initiated into my very first cinematic experience of heavy symbolism, metaphor, and creepy yet compelling depiction of life. Not your garden-variety crime story – at least up that point in 1986. I was blown away by the movie and its uneasy humor, but that’s an article for another day. I was mesmerized by this nightclub in the movie, and fancied myself as the femme fatale Dorothy Valens. Except that in my micro-managing fantasy, this alter-reality HAD to take place in Paris not the Midwest, for god’s sake. There was romance and allure to Paris. Not so much Lumberton USA. My head lived in the Parisian clouds for just about that whole decade, praying that someday I would get there. But yes, Blue Velvet is where I got the idea for my own Slow Club. Not anything subconscious bubbling up, but a markedly conscious agenda to realize a noir reverie through song.
Imagine, then, my shock and awe to discover the very real place right there in the 1st Arrondissement.
Besides the Blue Velvet / Dorothy Valens fantasy as the engine for my song, there was also the fact at the time (around 1985-86) I had begun immersing myself in jazz. An early hint of what would become a lifelong love had been given to me in teenhood, when my older sister (not even a musician!) made me listen to the likes of Pharoah Sanders and Lonnie Liston Smith, and I was hooked, even if I couldn’t make heads or tails of what exactly I was listening to. And by the time I was in my mid-twenties, a string of boyfriends, all musicians, had been instrumental in introducing me to every facet of jazz, from the virtuoso bass playing of the Jaco’s and the Stanley Clarke’s, to the Afro-Cuban and Brazilian movements, to the progressive natures of Miles and Coltrane and Jarrett and McCoy Tyner, to the ridiculous vocalise prowess of singers like Eddie Jefferson and Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, to all the new fusion guys, Metheny, Zawinul, McLaughlin, Corea, ad nauseum, as there’s no shortage of jazz movements and pioneers. I became as entranced by this challenging music as I had been by Parisian-chanteuse daydreams. So when it came time to attempt my own songwriting, and all I was armed with were the years of piano lessons in childhood, I played around on the keyboard until I found luscious cluster chords that I recognized from the harmonic vocabulary I was being saturated with, but didn’t know how to name, or even how to use in the proper theoretic way. I knew basic triads, and some bluesy 7ths. But when it came to flat nines and sharp elevens and Lydian dominants, blah, blah, blah, I was so out of my league. But I just kept playing around and discovering, and got the mentorship of the many musicians I was gigging with. And it was a genuine renaissance in my life at that time as an artist, and finding my way, my legs, and eventually my own voice as a songwriter. When I finally came up for air, The Slow Club was composed.
The first years of singing the song around town, doing the cabaret and jazz circuits in L.A., it was a brushes-on-the-snare-variety jazz ballad. And before the recording that is featured here came to fruition, the song saw several incarnations. I stuck it in my one-woman show The Purple Sleep Café, where it was segued to, from a scene where a rather disastrous audition takes place, and the message of the piece being the importance of staying true as an artist. And a singer friend who was on the same cabaret circuit as me, and loved the song and asked if he could include it in his repertoire, had a complete orchestral arrangement done of it (an arrangement I never got to hear, as he had taken his show with him to Vegas).
And then, as the years passed, and it was finally time to consider my own jazz album of originals (I’d amassed several by that point, which I’d sung around town for years), my own tastes had shifted somewhat, and I started to hear the song with a different feel. The jazz fusion genre was enjoying yet another emergence after having been originally established in the 1960’s, and the half-time-shuffle (a rhythmic feel that was starting to be labeled hip hop, as it was used extensively in hip hop music) was a prevalent feel in a lot of what was being called jazz funk. I liked the feel, thought it might work well with The Slow Club, which still kept the song a ballad, but now with a little hump to it; the kind that screams out for a muted trumpet. So, by the time I was assembling the latest incarnation of players for my ongoing jazz project (circa 2003 by this point), in the form of pianist Ed Czach, bassist Jonathan Pintoff, and drummer Craig Pilo, this was the way we were playing the tune. The only change that the composition saw, once I’d switched rhythmic gears, was that I’d added bookends of a minor chord riff into this major-chord piece. With the addition of trumpeter Ron King, doing his muted thing, we recorded the song live in a church, and The Slow Club was from that moment forth and forever documented.
It not only became the title of the album, but eventually, by the time we had a second album as a trio, the ensemble was named The Slow Club Quartet. Friends teased me about the band name. Craig Pilo, the drummer in the group and our resident comedian, would often refer to us as The Very Slow Club Quartet. But the ribbing was fine, perfectly take-able, because my own history with the song as my very first composition (my cherry-buster), and the mystical magical story that went with it, was all I needed to hold onto, to know that we couldn’t possibly have called ourselves anything else. Not if I was helming the group.
Please enjoy The Slow Club.
Click here to listen on Bandcamp
There’s an old club in Paris on the bluer side of town
It hails on the back street underground
The lady there she sings a sad song – the jazzmen live to blow
They make a kind of music we all know – so
With a slow dance and a sloe gin
Won’t you take me to that Slow Club once again
Don’t move too fast, cuz I’m in no hurry
I’d rather take it at a Paris pace
The dark behind the neon which blinks a rhythmic tune
Rather hypnotizes every face – so
With a slow dance and a sloe gin
Won’t you take me to that Slow Club once again
Listen to those brushes fondle that old drum head
Feel mister bass man snatch your soul
Watch those piano fingers bleed into the keys
As the jazz men swing it low
o many moody face – secret meetings on the stair
“S’en allez avec moi – nous ferons la cour – mon coeur”
With a slow dance and a sloe gin
Won’t you take me to that Slow Club once again
Listen to those brushes fondle that old drum head
Feel mister bass man snatch your soul
Watch those piano fingers bleed into the keys
As the jazz men swing it low
It rather hypnotizes and it makes my old heart sting
When I listen to that slow club lady sing
With her slow dance and her sloe gin
You will see her make a friend of all the men
With a slow dance and a sloe gin
Won’t you take me to that Slow Club once again
With a slow dance and a sloe gin
The neon reads forever “come on in”
Angela Carole Brown is the author of three published books, The Assassination of Gabriel Champion, The Kidney Journals: Memoirs of a Desperate Lifesaver, and Trading Fours, and has produced several albums of music and a yoga/mindfulness CD. Bindi Girl Chronicles is her writing blog. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram & YouTube.
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