Luckymuck

I just brought the dogs in from walking.

At the walking trail where I take the Sophie and Lucky some asshole kids had dumped the garbage can into the creek. I crawled halfway down the embankment and hauled the can up out of the ravine, just so I would have somewhere to dump Lucky's shit.

Lucky is the poopmeister; he lays out about three loads per walk, great big bulky handfuls of it. I say handfuls, because the best way to deal with this stuff is take a plastic bag, turn it inside out, pick up the shit with your hands, and then turn the bag inside out. This approach gives you the heft, warmth, and smell of the shit without having to squish it through your fingers.

So Lucky just by himself is a three-bag dog. Happily, Sophie is good for only one dump a walk, and she takes them back in the bushes where no one will notice, so I don't bother to pick hers up.

Lucky lays his out on sidewalk (all he's lacking is his own personal logo and brand, something like "Luckymuck" with little handcrafted signs saying "Stomp your Nikes in this pile!") and so I'm obligated to pick up after him. Then I throw the bags of shit in the garbage can, and then the kids dump the can in the creek. In East Tennessee, where I live, this is called "recycling."

The Bag o' Death

My wife has placed me in quarantine. This week I am battling a cold, and while she is perfectly willing to support the cause from afar, procuring war materiel--Puffs, antihistimines, aspirin from the grocery store--there is no way she is willing to join me on the front lines.

I understand and to some degree support her squeamishness. She works as a massage therapist, a hands-on, one-woman business that would quickly tank if her nose were dripping all over her clients on the massage table. I rely on her income as much as she does.

But it's been a lonely and comical week. When she enters the room she asks what I have touched, and promptly sprays the contaminated object--doorknob, countertop, drinking glass, cat--with Lysol. She waves cheerily at me as I drag my tired, stuffy head to my bachelor's bed each night. I carry my Puffs around with me as I move from room to room, along with a plastic sack full of used tissues she calls "The Bag o' Death."

Sneezing is discouraged, tolerated only if the sneeze is captured, successfully contained, and immediately disposed of in the BOD.

I like to think our enforced distance has brought us together. It has given us a common project, a goofy new child that we monitor constantly, a partnership of avoidance in which we both have a stake. It's an oversized ottoman in the living room around which we dance.

Slip ups are sweet. She buys a hot chocolate at Starbucks so delicious she impulsively gives me a sip. In my isolation I am never alone--I sneeze on the toilet and the door opens, a disembodied hand injects a disinfecting spritz of Lysol into the middle of the room, and quickly withdraws.

Rat Attack

Last night the PBS program Nova reported on cyclical plagues of rats in the Indian state of Mizoram, warning viewers that some of the scenes about to be shown were too graphic for the elderly, small children, and pets.

Every 48 years, it seems, a plague of rats descends on Mizoram state, a landlocked subtropical region politically part of India, but isolated from the rest of the country by its location east of Bangladesh. The rats devour the rice crop just before it is ready for harvest, leaving subsistence farmers to starve.

The last time this happened, in 1959, the distress was so dire is spawned a rebel uprising that continued for 20 years.

Well, there a were a few gross-outs. There were some shots of mother rats devouring their young, for example--evidently this is necessary because the rats themselves generally live in a state of semi-starvation, only catching a break once ever 48 years when the local bamboo goes wacko and produces a bumper crop of bamboo fruit, so much that the rats have more food than they know what to do with and reproduce at astronomical levels.

When the bamboo germinate and are no longer edible, the hordes of rats attack the rice. So there were lots of scary shots (it looked like they shot these in a studio) of rats running fast through the underbrush--representing, I guess, a particularly voracious version of rat scurrying.

The baby rats themselves were pretty disgusting, kind of pink slimy Raisinettes, and there was a great display by villagers at one point of a bag full of 300,000 stinking rat tails collected to cash in on the rat-tail bounty imposed by the government to combat the plague.

Really, the most sick-making moment was when the geeky Australian biologist Ken Alpin, the first man to connect the rat attack with the bamboo boom, was slicing over dead mother rats to count their embryos.

This guy was great--while he was out there in the fields rooting for the farmers in their battle against the rats, he also confided at one point to the camera that as a science geek, he couldn't wait to see the coming rat attack in all its horror--after all, happening once every 48 years as it does, it was a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Of course, just like Ken, that's what I was there to see myself, and what the show was selling, an opportunity to see a full force rat attack on defenseless villagers. Alas, it was not to be. Moi, the farmer whose fields we were monitoring, had by sheer luck planted his rice just early enough to get most of it in before the rats hit.

They showed up, scratched their tiny heads, and then scurried off camera to ravish the fields down the road.

And so I, too, deprived of rat disaster, switched over to the State of the Union.

Elvis Presley Died for Your Sins (the Ones You Were Too Gutless to Commit)

Every time they catch a serial killer, it seems, they talk to the minister of the church where the guy taught Sunday school and he describes how good this guy was with the children and how he was a faithful deacon and came to the 9 o’clock service every Sunday and despite the 12 bodies found buried in the guy’s basement, the minister can’t quite bring himself to judge, lest he be judged himself. His neighbors describe a nice, quiet fellow who never threw loud parties, the landlady says he paid his rent like clockwork, the girl at the Starbuck’s drive-through says he always smiled and left a tip.

Indeed, I half expect to wake up myself one morning, sniff a strange aroma rising up from under the kitchen sink, and discover that I’ve got five bodies of my own buried in the crawl space. This is the Dr.-Jekyll-and-Mr.-Hyde syndrome, a Victorian neurosis that has remarkable staying power. Like Dr. Jekyll we fear what unspeakable damage our interior Mr. Hydes may have committed when he slipped last night out of our control; like Dorian Gray we feel we must keep the true picture of our diseased inner selves hidden from public view.

When my income tax refund came in the mail several years ago, I knew what it was right away, but I couldn’t bring myself to open it. I knew it was large, dangerously large. I had withheld more than I needed to, worried that I would fall into arrears as I had the year before. I’d adjusted the withholding in the government’s favor, and increased my payments to my therapist in case the insurance company failed to cover their share of the bills. I didn’t want my accounts to slip over the line.

But now the money had come back to me and I could spend it on anything I wanted. I had my eye on a box set put out by Rhino Records called Loud, Fast, and Out of Control. It has all the big bad hits from the ‘50s, no doo-wop, no “Peggy Sue” or “All I’ve Got to Do Is Dream” or “Love Me Tender,” but the scary, disturbing, nasty songs that had undermined decent society and everything this country stood for.

It had songs with words like “Good golly, Miss Molly, you sure like to ball” and “I’ve got a tombstone hand and a graveyard mind, I’m just 22 and I don’t mind dying” and “You wear that dress, the sun comes shining through, I can’t believe my eyes, all that mess belongs to you” and “Come into this house, woman, and stop that yakkety-yak, don’t make me nervous, I’m holding a baseball bat” and “You can talk about me, say that I'm mean, but I'll blow your head off, baby, with nitroglycerine.”

I had an unsettling urge to listen to this stuff, a full four-CD collection of it, and only its $70 price tag had held me off this long.

Now I had the money and I bought it. It turned out the songs I hadn’t heard of were scarier than the songs I had. There were people like the Rock-A-Teens (“Woo-Hoo”), Dale Vaughn (“How Can You Be Mean to Me”), Janis Martin (“My Boy Elvis”), Billy Riley (“My gal is red hot,” he sings, “your gal ain’t doodly-squat”), Jimmy Dee and the Offbeats (“Henrietta”), Don and Dewey (“Koko Joe”), Big T Tyler (“King Kong”), and the Phantom (“Love Me,” at once one of the weirdest, most primitive, and ominous things I’ve ever heard). God know what people thought of these songs when they were released in the late ‘50s, because some of them bother me today.

What kind of people would make music like this? What is the human soul capable of? I had seen only one star of that era in person, Bo Diddley, at a street fair in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1984. A memorable event, if not exactly what you’d call pleasant. It wasn’t like he was playing Yankee Stadium, mind you, he was on the back of a flat bed truck, there were about 50 people standing around, it was 25 years at least since his last hit, but in spite of all that he radiated a menacing arrogance that went way beyond self-possession. As far as he was concerned he possessed himself, his band, the truck, the audience, the city of Greensboro, and all of North Carolina up to the Virginia line. It occurred to me that this was the kind of attitude it took to be who he was and do what he did, against all odds and the collected weight of proper society, in 1955.

The spectacularly vivid liner notes of the CD set (the notes say of Wanda Jackson, “while other women singers were simpering about where the boys are, Wanda always sang as if they were in her hotel room”) describe the lives these people led. Two of Jerry Lee Lewis’s wives died under questionable circumstances, perhaps by his hand. Larry Williams (“Bonie Maronie” and “Dizzy Miss Lizzie”) was a pimp and a drug dealer. Eddie Cochran (“Summertime Blues”) died in a car crash in England in 1960, Johnny Kidd (“Shakin’ All Over”) in a car crash in 1966, Little Willie John (“I’m Shakin’”) died in jail in 1968.

Vince Taylor (“Brand New Cadillac”) died of venereal disease in Switzerland in 1991. Kid Thomas (“Rockin’ This Joint Tonight”) moved from Chicago to Los Angeles, where he ran over a child in 1970 while working a day job mowing lawns in Beverly Hills. He was tried and freed, but when he walked out of the courthouse the dead boy’s father was waiting for him and gunned him down. Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper died in a plane crash in Iowa in 1959. Elvis Presley burst his intestines straining on the toilet and died in Graceland in 1977. He was 42.

Is it any wonder that they could have had second thoughts, that Little Richard dropped his career a couple of times to enter the ministry (there’s a church I’d join), that Wanda Jackson and Conway Twitty abandoned rock ‘n’ roll altogether and retreated to country and western music? They were living the lives we still both fear and hope we might slide into ourselves.

They were our Mr. Hydes, and they put a genuine taste of danger and horror into their songs, where I, 58 years old, balding, nearsighted, worried about paying for my retirement but dancing past my bedtime with my cats, can access it any night I want.

Jane Austen, the Dalai Lama, and Harry Cohn's Ass

I picked up a book of interviews with Dalai Lama at the bookstore the other night, and he was talking about the nature of compassion in an interesting way. It was a discussion of the difference between how we experience our own suffering and the way, in a state of compassion, that we experience someone else's—what the odds were that we can experience someone else's suffering at all, and to what extent.

I was struck by his idea of compassion being more essentially a state of profound awareness, of deep noticing, than an outward action. Compassion as he described it came before any action we might take, like tut-tutting over another person's problem, or telling them they're a Christian martyr, or even doing something to actually help them out of their trouble.

Not surprisingly, the Dalai Lama was more concerned with compassion as a way of existing than with the actions resulting from that state—the implication being that if you're able to reach the true state the actions will follow of their own accord.

So I realize more and more that my ability to act in any constructive way depends on my ability to get my feelers out, to turn my radio on, to notice what's really going on within me and without me.

There's a great Hollywood story about Harry Cohn, the monstrous head of Columbia Pictures. Herman Mankiewicz, the guy who wrote Citizen Kane, says that when he was a writer at Columbia he was talking to Harry Cohn one day about a story idea, and Cohn told him he could tell if a story would be a hit or not by whether it made his fanny squirm, to which Mankiewicz replied, "Imagine, the whole universe wired to Harry Cohn's ass!"

Cohn fired him, but the point of the story (in our context, at least), is that the Dalai Lama would be more likely to share Mankiewicz' perspective than Cohn's. Harry Cohn was a notorious egoist and bully and while he may have imagined that his fanny was in tune with the cosmos, what he really meant was that when it came to the dominant vibe, Harry Cohn's ass was sending and the cosmos was receiving, if it knew what was good for it.

My feeling is that a lot of people, when they try to judge what's going on around them, confuse sending and receiving just like Cohn. I grew up an enormously self-conscious young man and, as far as my perception of my influence on the world around me was concerned, very much in the same place as Harry Cohn.

It wasn't out of a bullying stance, but out of quivering meekness, that I imagined that my every action and even attitudes and thoughts were making the stars whirl through the ether. I thought my mistaken deeds and attitudes were controlling how people acted towards me, and only if I corrected these false transmissions from my error-ridden insides would I be able to get people to like me.

Self-consciousness at this level is not consciousness at all, of course, but an enormous delusion. By assuming such blanket responsibility for other people's actions and reactions, and by casting it is such a negative light, you miss the few things that really are connected to what you're putting out, like people liking you because you're a good person.

How do people get out this hole? How do you reset your receiver to pull in the True Cosmic Consciousness or NPR or the Mr. Rogers or any transmitter of bonafide sanity?

I don't know. Meditate, see a counselor, collect hard knocks in the school of experience, maybe immerse yourself in Jane Austen novels. Austen talks about these problems all the time. Every book is about people misreading social interactions, misjudging the opposite sex, and groping towards some halfway accurate state of awareness. The "good" guys turn out to be actually bad, the "bad" guys turn out to be actually good, and eventually the characters sort it all out and get married.

Austen died unmarried herself, so she surely understood the long odds of bumbling your way to consciousness. But so fetching is her dry, deadly realistic sense of humor, so clearly was she in tune with what's really going on herself, that we buy her happy endings. The essentially realistic part of the books is her characters' ability to make their way to awareness. That happens in real life, whether you end up married or not.

Auld Lang Me

Resolutions, schmesolutions. This New Year I'm relying on evolution for real change in my life. There's never been a meaningful change in my life that wasn't forced on me by circumstances at the point of gun.

My biochemistry major son would scoff at this idea. This budding scientist, know-it-all, and dedicated Darwinian has contempt not only for the creationists but the Lamarckian heretics, theorists who believe species can change in a lifetime and pass on the changes to their offspring.

This is like believing giraffes happened when a zebra ran out of grass and was forced to nibbles buds in the treetops, the boy genius scoffs. He says natural selection works nowhere near that fast.

Well, having watched this kid progress from knowing everything about his bedroom at the age of five to everything in the universe at the age of 19, I'm not so sure about that. It's like when someone breaks up with their lover and tells me, "We just grew apart," as if nothing beyond the angle of their planting caused them to cross paths in the first place, and nothing about the way they collided affected them in the slightest for good or ill.

When I married my 4'11" wife I did not immediately feel myself beginning to shrink, but my mind quickly lost the ability to bring forth the word "short" and developed an almost instantaneous predilection for "petite." For a while I would get on my knees to make eye contact, but my waddling freaked her out—she had no stomach for hot penguin love—and over time it became unnecessary. Like the zebra with his head in the treetops, my body adjusted to the demands of nature.

OK, maybe I didn't literally lose 12 inches of height. But at this time of year I do not reminisce about old times or old acquaintance as much as old long me. I'm a shape shifter, we all are, inside and out. I liked the old me, but he and all his body parts are long gone, physically, psychologically, and forever changed by time and circumstances.

Siamese twins don't become Siamese distant cousins. But you can bet they make profound individual accommodations to live with the ties that bind. Subjected to the trauma of 9/11, America quickly embraced torture and domestic surveillance; threatened by the menace of economic collapse, she voted for a black president.

The George W. Bushes of this world hold on relentlessly to their preconceived notions and existence. But throw a shoe at them after they've maintained that unremitting grip for eight long years, and you'll find that even they have learned to duck.

Runaway, Del Shannon, 1961

What's with all these questions? The old songs are full of them: Why do fools fall in love? Why must I be a teenager in love? Will you still love me tomorrow?

Sometimes there's adolescent male bravado behind the questions. "Do you love me?" screams the Contours' lead Billy Gordon, "I can really move, do you love me, I'm in the groove." Dumped earlier by the girl, now Gordon is back, he tells her, "to let you know, I can really shake 'em down." That'll show her.

Bo Diddley in "Who Do You Love?" takes the psychotic approach—he wears a cobra snake for a necktie, his chimney is made out of human skulls, and when he growls, "Take it easy, Arlene, don't give me no lip and tell me, 'Who do you love?'" what's she to answer but "You, Bo, forever."

This is the brutally male side of teenage innocence, the I-don't-care-if-you-don't-want-me-I'm-yours-right-now approach to romance.

On the female side the questions are more pathetically poignant, but just as detached from reality. "Is it in his eyes?" Betty Everett asks in "The Shoop Shoop Song," "Is it in his sighs? Oh no, if you want to know if he loves you so, it's in his kiss, that's where it is."

Sure it is. It makes you shiver to think that a generation this out to lunch had the atom bomb. The people in these songs lived in a different nation, the land of the clueless, and Del Shannon's "Runaway" was their national anthem.

Like much of the best rock 'n' roll, "Runaway" is nightmare music, rising out of dumb animal pain. I'm talking about suffering unrelieved even by an awareness of the cause of the suffering. It's bad enough to be crushed by life, but even worse to comprehend the agents of your destruction no better than road kill under the wheel understands the workings of the internal combustion engine.

Rock 'n' roll builds its myths out of this kind of suffering. The music best defines itself in moments that are mythic in their stupid, clueless, purely emotional response to life's least comprehensible, and therefore cruelest, blows.

So what's so mythic about dumb suffering? Where's the grandeur, the heroic vision, the bigger-than-life spectacle in the fate of a run-over possum?

It's in his kiss, that's where it is. If you've been run down, screwed over, cheated on, turned inside out, and hung out to dry by seven ratty guys in a row, how do you find the stomach to take a chance on number eight? You make up a myth.

You tell yourself you've got the magic love detector this time, that you can feel true love in the way his lips meet yours, that you can't possibly be fooled again because you've got the Book of Love in your hip pocket and passion in your heart.

At least that's what the poor sucker in "Runaway" told himself. And where did it get him? Well, his love affair didn't turn out that well, but that really doesn't explain exactly where he is.

He's out "a'walkin' in the rain" somewhere, and there's a tinkly cantina piano playing and this movie cowboy music swelling up like the theme from The Magnificent Seven, and when he tells his story it's like the Ancient Mariner spilling his guts to yet another complete stranger, not telling the story to anyone so much as reciting it again to himself in the darkness, like maybe if he goes over it one more time it will begin to make sense:

As I walk along I wonder

What went wrong with our love

A love that was so strong

And as I still walk on I think of

The things we done together

While our hearts were young

The story, the suffering, are transformed in the retelling into something less distinct, less particular—a hazier, dreamlike narrative—less specific in its details but more universal in its meaning. More like a myth, in other words.

This is not a hardboiled detective novel, where a relentless torrent of facts—it was a cold day in West Hollywood, the rain drifted down in a fine mist, I stopped under a drugstore awning at the corner of Sunset and LaBrea and lit a Chesterfield—drive the story down a blocked alley to an inescapable conclusion. In detective fiction the clues are all there and the cold, hard facts add up to cold, hard reality. The mystery dissolves in the wash of facts. If there are larger philosophical conclusions, they are cold, hard, tough conclusions delivered like a punch to the kidney.

"Runaway" lets the mystery be. "Runaway" lives in the moment of mystery, before anything is clarified. The storyteller in "Runaway" is up against questions of misery, loneliness, loss. He can and does tell you how that feels, but he never tells you why it must be, because he hasn't got those answers.

The song, rather than giving us an answer, itself becomes the answer. It elevates style and mood and beat into meaning, as all good rock 'n' roll does. "Don't know what I want, but I know how to get it," Johnny Rotten snarls, and in the rock 'n' roll world that's all you need to know.

So Del Shannon's voice cries out in the darkness:

I'm a'walkin' in the rain

Tears are fallin' and I feel the pain

Wishin' you were here with me

To end this misery

It becomes too much and the voice cracks in stuttering, falsetto agony;

And I wonder

I WA-WA-WA-WA WA-UN-DER

Why

WHY-WY-WY-WY-WY

She ran away

And I wonder

Where she will stay-ay-ay

My little runaway, run-run-run-run-runaway

Then the whole song is gathered up and carried away in the instrumental break, it just soars off, transported by this silly-assed, high-pitched, whining carnival calliope (actually an electric keyboard called the Musitron played by Shannon's co-writer on the song, Max Crook). It's a weird noise, like you would hear at a county fair on an unbearably hot, sticky August night in Mississippi, maybe, a sound so tacky and inspired it defies the forces of gravity and reason.

The singer comes back again, still stuttering and wailing the final chorus, but now he's riding on top of that whining keyboard line, irresistible, triumphant, and mythic in his suffering. And so he rides off into the fade-out.

I was six years old in 1956. As the great songs of that time were released they came to me unawares, over radios playing through open windows on a summer day, in snatches heard briefly as my parents turned the dial. They floated into my consciousness as if by magic, like unwritten truth absorbed through my skin. I didn't know from Lieber and Stoller; these songs could've been written by Homer, for all I knew.

Certainly now, looking back, "Runaway" strikes me as a talisman handed down from a time when myth and mystery were real and walked among us. But so the song always was, even on that day, almost a half century ago, when I first heard it and asked myself, "What was that?"