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?"

Annie Spayed

Annie had been in heat for about a week, writhing on the rug in front of Puss Merlin, our big king tom cat, who would look at her (like Elvis regarding an over-excited, underaged fan) as if to say, "Darlin,' don't you think you're a bit young for this?"

 

The smallest cat in the household, Annie is a tiny, Halloweenish-looking thing, dusty black, fluffy coat with splotches of orange all over, including an orange line running down her forehead, between her eyes, down her chin to her neck and chest.

 

She would follow Puss around the house, batting at him, rubbing against him, rolling around on the rug in his absence, half-mewing, half-moaning and clearly in immediate need of relief. No doubt she had no clue what had hit her, but it was pretty obvious to us, so we called the vet and booked the earliest date available for spaying.

 

Everything went fine. She came home groggy the same day and we put her in a big cage to keep her from being jumped on by Ritz, her over-affectionate and boisterous litter mate. Ritz ended up spending the night curled up on top of Annie's cage.

 

I used to think I was allergic to cats, before I married my wife and moved into this menagerie. We have two inside dogs, an outside cat, and five inside cats. Ritz and Annie we found abandoned in the woods on the road up to our place about four months ago; Puss Merlin and Mimi, the outside cat, also came to us more or less on their own.

 

I believe there's an emergency hotline for abandoned cats listing every easy-touch human within a 50-mile radius, and my wife is at the top of the list.

 

We keep the animals out of our bedroom and, while my head stops up periodically, the allergic reactions to cats and dogs that plagued me in my childhood, and that I imagined I would still suffer if living with indoor animals, did not materialize when I moved in with MaryElizabeth. All I can figure is that love trumps immune dysfunction.

 

The other revelation I experienced on moving in was what a community of unspoken connection and caring I had joined. My Aunt Ethel used to take in stray dogs. She had what seemed to be 40 of them, nearly all of them obviously mistreated in their former lives, trusting only my aunt and uncle, and snarling threateningly at all visitors to the household, including myself.

 

As a kid, I couldn't understand why anyone would surround themselves with these nutty, apparently dangerous animals, and I certainly couldn't understand how my aunt could relate to these snappish critters as a mother doting on wayward adopted children.

 

When I first met my wife, I reacted to her detailed descriptions of the pets' activities each day as I used to react to Aunt Ethel's—"Come on, these are only animals!"

 

But as I spent time in the household, I began to notice that the animals showed themselves remarkably sensitive to the ups and downs of my moods, gathering around me when I was upset, figuring out what was going on with me emotionally before I had even explained my mood to MaryElizabeth.

 

This was different than watching Lassie do doggie-charades to tell the humans that Timmy had fallen down the well. It wasn't that the animals could communicate as well as humans. It's that they are often better than humans in sensing my emotions, and more reliably responsive to them.

 

Even more interesting and moving is their sensitivity and responsiveness to each other's suffering. The way that Annie's brother Ritz keeps watch over her recuperating in her protective cage, the way that the cats gathered around one of the dogs when he was suffering from hot spots and licked his toes (even though this is the same dog that regularly growls at the cats if they get too close to him), those are the things that get my attention.

 

I'm not expecting them to take care of me in my old age, or pay for my prostate surgery. I'm the one getting them fixed and buying the cat litter, not the other way around. But I don't feel like I'm these animals' keeper or landlord, I feel like I've joined an interspecies community of kindred souls.

Toot Is Dying

Barack Obama's white grandmother, Toot, as he calls her, is seriously ill, so ill that Obama is taking a day and a half out of the home stretch of a two-year presidential run to go to Hawaii and be with her.

The man loves his grandmother, obviously, and so do a lot of us, but this man is universally regarded by traditional American standards (one drop of black blood makes you black), as African American, and his grandmother is white.

That fact has given rise to a number of complications in Obama's complicated personal history, including the now famous incident in which his grandmother was afraid to take the bus to work because of a panhandler who had accosted her at the bus stop. Her husband, Obama's grandfather, was furious with her, and the young Obama couldn't figure out why.

"'It's probably a little scary for her,'" Obama recalls telling his grandfather in the autobiography Dreams from My Father, "'seeing some big man block her way. It's really no big deal.'"

"'It is a big deal to me,'" the grandfather answers, "'You know why she's so scared this time? I'll tell you why. Before you came in, she told me the fella was black.'"

"Gramps slumped into a chair in the living room and said he was sorry he had told me," Obama writes. "Before my eyes, he grew small and old and very sad."

Such are the sad and complicated consequences of America's sad and complicated experience with race. But to our potentially great benefit, Obama turns out to have been the kind of person who, when handed a lemon, makes lemonade. 

Something about his own struggle with racial identity lit a fire in Obama that has driven him all the way to the door of the White House. He discovered that his own story had the power to give people in our sometimes hopeless country great reason to hope.

By personifying the real connections between people in an atmosphere in which people are constantly at each others' throats, by having a white grandmother that he loves enough to set aside his ambitions at a critical moment, he demonstrates the possibility of connection, reconciliation, and reconstruction in America at large. 

I think that's why he's surging in the polls right now.

People are realizing that he's not a "Muslim;" he's not a "terrorist;" he's not a "socialist;" he's not the feared Other, he's one of us. People are realizing that the boundary between "Real America" and that other frightening shadowland is not only completing open and porous, but that maybe it's OK that it is that way.

For 200 years we've whispered about Thomas Jefferson and his hidden half-black offspring; for the first time people are beginning to realize that the ties of blood and community that stick all of us together in the same teeming soup may not be a national shame or scandal or disaster, but one of our saving strengths.

Drowning the Cat

My wife tells me I have tickets to see Randy Newman next Wednesday, the 15th. I just realized that means I will miss the final debate between Obama and McCain.

The surprise is that I find myself relieved at the prospect. Right now this election has come down to drowning the cat, and it's not going to be a pleasant spectacle. The continuing market meltdown (minus three hundred points in the Dow Jones today) and the increasingly bad news in the economy in general (E-Bay is laying people off!) put the McCain campaign in terminal jeopardy.

You don't have to watch McCain too long to realize that gracious loser is not a role he will play comfortably. Mr. Anger clearly expected this to be his year and in the last debate seemed to be astonished that people were making him stand next to this weenie Negro for an hour and a half and actually have to explain why we should hand the War Hero the scepter that he'd earned in the North Vietnam prison.

Consider the fact that McCain wants this so badly he forced himself through the public humiliation of hugging the miserable draft dodger President who stole the office from him in 2000 by claiming he had fathered a black baby. That's how bad he wanted to win this thing.

Now all we can do is watch this bitter coot writhe, scream, spit, bite, and gasp for air as his ill-conceived and spastic campaign is mercifully held beneath the water in the toilet until it finally ceases to be.

It's not going to be pretty. So I'm going to see Randy Newman, for a helping of healthy bile. 

Go to Final Check-Out

I am now the former grocery store critic for the Knoxville, Tennessee, alternative paper, Metro Pulse. For roughly 10 months I have pursued the truth about Knoxville in its supermarket aisles. Though I believe the truth is still to be found in these stores—in produce perhaps, or inadvertently buried in a bin on the bargain aisle—the press of more urgent and lucrative business pulls me away. I admit that at times it has seemed to me that this column, like Seinfeld, was about nothing at all. Few places feel more empty of meaning than a grocery store at mid-afternoon with nothing going on.

One of the things I learned in grocery stores, though, is that if nothing is happening in front of your eyes, stuff starts happening in the grey matter behind them. A trick that Alfred Hitchcock used in his movies was to hold an establishing shot of a building just a little bit longer than usual. As the viewer stares at this house he begins to wonder why he's looking at it, and then he wonders what's going on inside it, and before long he begins to wonder where the bodies are buried in it.

Grocery stores were like that for me. (I would watch the butchers emerge from the back room with the meat and wondered where it came from and why they wouldn't let me watch it being prepared. People in the deli department have nothing to hide, so what was it with these meat cutters?) In the way they seemed to operate off screen, below the radar, on autopilot, the stores seemed to me like mini-Knoxvilles. Nothing was happening, but that was just on the surface, because underneath everything is going on.

This town, like all towns, has a secret history, a secret past, and a hidden present full of subconscious fears, desires, resentments, ecstasies. Stare down that empty aisle long enough and the linoleum begins to shimmer strangely and you hear suppressed whispers and invisible footsteps.

In some stores those glimmers of truth manifested themselves clearly enough for me to believe I knew what was going on from the minute I walked in the door. Other places I knew about from experience as a longtime customer.

I was keenly aware from talking to owners and operators of these stores and from my experience with family members in the business that it takes a lot of hard work to make money in groceries, particularly in a small, family-owned store. Those small stores often had the most vivid atmosphere and personality about them, and I did my best to do them justice.

Even the supposedly faceless chain stores spoke to me with distinctive voices, and I know I wasn't the only one who heard them. In a couple of instances people reacted strongly to what I had written, in some cases angrily. It was clear that these stores meant something to these readers—they were not "just grocery stores" at all, but places they felt strongly about, almost as strongly as they felt about their own homes, their own neighborhoods.

I have enjoyed writing about these places that people care about, because it has given me a greater appreciation for my own feelings about Knoxville. I arrived here 25 years ago with no personal connection or history in this place. Now I periodically see someone on the street or visit a location in town that I haven't seen in years, and I remember how my life was going and how I felt at that time and I feel happy or sad or angry at the thought of it.

The place has developed meaning for me, and I think that's what makes a town a community. The sum of all its peoples' memories and experiences of the place, its ghosts and its schools and its grocery stores, creates a spiritual feel that, for better or worse, defines our hometowns in our hearts.

Big Lie, Little Facts, Bigger Truths

I feel isolated by my problem with lies. No one seems to care about lies, particularly lies by politicians. People expect lies from politicans, and fall back on reliance on what John Feehery, a Republican strategist, recently referred to as "the bigger truths."

Quoted in the Washington Post, Feeherty said, "The more the New York Times and the Washington Post go after Sarah Palin, the better off she is, because there's a bigger truth out there and the bigger truths are she's new, she's popular in Alaska, and she is an insurgent. As long as those are out there, these little facts don't really matter."

The bigger truths outweigh the little facts, particularly when they will put your candidate in office. 

Of course, bigger truths in most people's moral universe are arrived at by examining all "those little facts" closely and arriving at conclusions based on those facts.

For example, since most people had never heard of Sarah Palin three weeks ago, most people conclude, as Feeherty does, that she is new. Similarly, when we look at Alaskan opinion polls with high ratings of Palin's performance as governor, most of us also agree that she is popular in Alaska.

When, however, we look at the fact that she did not, as the Republicans claimed, stop the Bridge to Nowhere, and that rather than battling such projects she was an avid promoter of $200 million in earmarked pork for Alaska, most of us would not agree with Feeherty that she could by any contortion of the truth be called an "insurgent."

In the matter of Palin's "insurgency," the Republicans respected the traditional connection between little facts and big truth only so far as they realized that they would have to make all the little facts lead to the bigger truth they desired to put in the heads of the voters.

So they made them up.

But obviously, for  Feeherty and for McCain and for the vast majority of most Republicans in the country this election season,  a "big truth" is not actually certified on the basis of the little facts, but by how far and wide you can disseminate it before the fact checkers get to it.

Spread the big truth wide enough fast enough, and the little facts become irrelevant. Once you get the desired big truth "out there," as Feeherty explains, the case is closed. To hell with the little facts.

Obviously, the big truth is simply the flip side of Goebbels' big lie. 

Most people in print are even more squeamish about comparing Republicans to Nazis than they are about calling them liars.

Maybe they're right to be squeamish. These people are only doing what politicians commonly do to get elected.

When you consider how many people have died for fairy tales like the weapons of mass destruction, though, you start to miss the application of morals to politics.

Food Club on the Parkway

The Parkway in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, wears me out. This is the road to Dolly Parton's amusement mecca Dollywood, the road to Gatlinburg and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. As you drive south towards it out of Knoxville there are hints of what is to come--billboards for the Elvis Museum and the Ripley's Believe It or Not museum, which features a disconcerting face with what appears to be three irises per eyeball.

Driving down the Parkway in Pigeon Forge is not like curling up with a good book. It's not like mindfulness meditation. It's not like Vivaldi or cool jazz. Parts of it are like "Surfer Bird" by the Trashmen, but "Surfer Bird" makes a more compelling, unified statement.

The Parkway takes bad taste and then filters out the intelligence. It's more like Soupy Sales than Jerry Lewis, Freddie and the Dreamers than Herman's Hermits, a chicken with its head cut off than a penguin. Gatlinburg is just as tacky, but is nestled charmingly in the mountains. The Parkway in Pigeon Forge is a relentless, garish strip, an eternal traffic jam, with no redeeming geography.

It aspires more to the grand gesture than it used to. As you enter the Endless Drag from the north you now catch glimpses of enormous commercial developments on your left, big concrete entertainment venues the size of Lenin's Tomb with exotic names ("Cirque de Chine"), and blocks and blocks of brand-new pastel-colored shops.

Before you know it, though, you are in the midst of the flying pigs, looming plastic dinosaurs, and hideously grinning sharks that line the Parkway proper. A lot of new stuff has popped up here as well since my last visit (1987). Adventure Quest's castle looks as if it was built with Legos, and I like the upside-down WonderWorks building. You can do it all in Pigeon Forge—drive 40-mile-an-hour go-carts, do indoor skydiving, get married at more than one site, play miniature golf at what seems like dozens.

You can even buy groceries.

Penetrate far enough into garishness and you start running into artifacts of vacations past—old-time souvenir shops, fudge and funnel cake shops, and stores after store selling products "As Seen on TV."

That's the section of the Parkway where the Pigeon Forge Food Club sits, right before Dollywood, between the Sevier County Bank and Pigeon Forge Traders Gift Shop (offering knives, swimwear, leather, plastic bears, and huge Support Our Troops lawn sculpture).

Like the surrounding stores, the Food City is a period piece. Its logo is displayed on a broad band of 1962-vintage corrugated plastic that runs the length of the store. Inside the door is a full rack of tourist brochures and three grab-the-prize-with-the-pinchers arcade games. The bargain products on the wall as you enter feature charcoal, fire starters, cook-out implements, and camping supplies.

There are similar displays at least two other places in the store, as well as bins of bargain rods and reels, swim gear, ice coolers, and a display of board games for killing time by the campfire. Along with the outdoors products there is also a definite party theme at work here, with a well-stocked specialty beer section and hard coolers like Smirnoff Ice Green Apple Bite and Mike's Hard Pomegranate Lemonade.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Pigeon Forge Food City, though, is how unremarkable it is. Outside the store it's Female Elvis Mud Wrestling, inside it's a quiet store in the country. You get the impression that aside from the tourists from Michigan there are plenty of regular people living in the surrounding hills who come into the Food City to stock their cabinets and refrigerators.

Prices are moderate. The store is large with rather low ceilings, but clean and pleasant with the usual amenities, reasonable produce and meat departments, attractive deli and bakery, and an operating pharmacy.

Where's a guy supposed to get a tattoo? Down the Parkway at American Rebel Tattoos Studio. Can I experience a 65-mile-an-hour hurricane here? No, visit WonderWork's Hurricane Hole simulator. Have you got anything on the dawn of Creation? No, but you can check it out onstage at the Biblical epic The Miracle. How about world-famous racing pigs? Go to Dixie Stampede.

But where are the people with the extra eyeballs that I saw on the billboard driving down here?

I'm sorry, sir, our shoppers all have just one per socket. Would you care for some grapes?