Going Down the Road Feeling Bad
A Report on the Health of Amerikan Spine
by Todd Brendan Fahey
illustrations by David Dawson
“What is the price of Experience do men buy it for a song
Of all that a man hath his house his wife his children
Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy
And in the witherd field where the farmer plows for bread in vain
It is an easy thing to triumph in the summers sun
And in the vintage & to sing on the waggon loaded with corn
It is an easy thing to talk of patience to the afflicted
To speak the laws of prudence to the houseless wanderer
To listen to the hungry ravens cry in a wintry season
When the red blood is filld with wine & with the marrow of lambs
It is an easy thing to laugh at wrathful elements
To hear the dog howl at the wintry door, the ox in the slaughterhouse moan
To see a god on every wind & a blessing on every blast
To hear sounds of love in the thunder storm that destroys our enemies house
To rejoice in the blight that covers his field, & the sickness that cuts off his children
While our olive & vine sing & laugh round our door & our children bring fruits & flowers
Then the groan & the dolor are quite forgotten & the slave grinding at the mill
And the captive in chains & the poor in the prison, & the soldier in the field
When the shatterd bone hath laid him groaning among the happier dead
It is an easy thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity
Thus could I sing & thus rejoice, but it is not so with me!”
-William Blake
The Four Zoas: Night the Second
I was about to start laying that ballad on the lady in line in front of me, but, as happens generously in hypertensive moments such as these, Fate saved me from an even awfuler deed.
The line was long and getting ever longer, in this superclean Exxon station, down here in de bayou… and all courtesy of an orange-haired gal, of mebbe 72, who was having trouble choosing from amongst the several bins of Lotto tickets that are offered to the impulse-buyer with yr average fill-up.
“What’s about the Daily Dollop!? What you t’ink de odds on dat one be?”
Instead, I managed to growl out something like, “Not long enough, baby.” …which succeeded in giving her a good old-fashioned start.
A few seconds earlier, I’d noticed Gordo eyeing the woman’s new “do”- the full fried, carcinogen-caked brite tangerine hairswirl: an $88 job, were there ever such a pixie (and I’ve seen plenty… Memories… granny’s CAT-scan-like sit-down hair-dryer as a very bored youngster in Coalinga, CalifornIA… But that is a heavy, Freudian trip I will have to tackle in another narrative…)
When Gordo actually began to approach the fine Creole matron, with hands outstretched, as if in prayer (or, like unto a George A. Romero film), I had to wonder…
What have I wrought here? And not just in this gas station. No. I am ready here to grapple with the All of it. Finally. I feel like Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life… only, the totality of the Toddmonster’s existence is not quite the sunny thing that was Mr. Whateverhisnamewas in the 1948 b&w weepy. Ten solid years of hard-scrabble drug-taking and clawing for The Basics has rendered me kinda prickly, I’m afraid.
Yes, that is the long and short of it. It seems I have become, in the final analysis, a right thorny bastard – or, to be fair to myself, I’ve developed the uncanny ability to sprout quills aplenty, and virtually at will. …and so, it came as no surprise to my own ears that I suddenly found it necessary to make open insult to the Society Queen before us, who was fumbling, at the time and expense of mine and about thirteen other patrons’, for the best odds in the Louisiana Lotto racket.
I had had enough. Enough, goddammit! I am also like Peter Finch, in Network:
“The twenty-first century awaits us, Ma’am. Please be so kind as to give way: NOW.”
I was treated to a scarified once-over, her saggy jowls drawn back now in considerable disdain… clackers exposed… the eyeliner-eyebrows arched agonizingly… “I……Well!”
At which point Gordo was given to pat-pat her dermal soufflé. “Eeeee. It is crispy.”
“Why!…” she groaned.
There were a few moments of muttering and queasy embarrassment, which were difficult to endure, no doubt, but that was to be expected… Thankfully, for all of us, her latent survival instincts kicked in, and she shuffled off, and without calling the police, to a shinywhite 1995 Cadillac El Dorado, then away!, to the familiar, cozy mausoleum on West Bayou Parkway.
“Technically, you’re guilty of battery,” I said, finally, to the hirsute drummer among us, whose beard was very greasy and sculpted in the fashion of the Amish.
“I suppose,” was his reply. He added a pack of Camel lights and a jumbo bag of gummy bears to the pile of junk-food that I had laid on the counter, and which would have to nourish our ragged krewe until we landed in Atlanta.
Aunt Jemima behind the cash register cast us a long, skeptical gaze, over groovy three-dollar shades. Then she chuckled. “Heeh. I ain’t gon’ call no po lice on yuz. Sheeee. Like to take that gal fo’ ev ah.”
…which was enough to give the thirteen in line a generous belly-laugh, and we were on our way:
FURTHUR
It’s like rain on your wedding day/
a free ride, when you’re already there/
it’s the good advice that you just didn’t take/
and who would have thought it figgers”
-A. Morissette
“Spaceboy
I miss you/
spinning around
my head”
-B. Corgan
Indeed. We live amidst Giants. Here, in the present tense. Currently.
Used to be, a guy needed the right kind of ears to bear witness to Prophecy: screw it back, chop up a husky one, gnaw mindlessly on that small slice of Mr. Natural, so restless between the cheek ‘n gum:
TSANGA!
Or that’s how I’d thought I had to get me head, lo so many epochs ago, beachside Santa Barbara, when I decided to see if I could make a paying gig of this intractable substance abuse of mine….
But that is before we had Alanis & young Wm. Corgan.
Uh huh.
Today (or so I am now positing) all that is required is a bad car stereo & a population of 75,000 somewhere within ear-shot.
Titans. Seers. Revelators. That is who we have speaking to and for us, today. But don’t believe me: Check it out for yourself:
Place a lyric-sheet of any of, say, Journey’s stuff, or that of Styx… (I was gonna say Kansas, but their message was pretty esoteric, there, for a few LPs)… Go ahead: Compare the radio fodder of today against that of mine formative years…
You will find what I did, mebbe 18 months ago, when I gave up the bottle & began swilling ye old Robitussin whenever the cravings got too bad… (Oops! Uh… I hadn’t meant to let that one out, at least not this early into the narrative… Hm… To slam down on the
“backspace” key or to let it all hang out?) This is a quandary…
O, well, sheeit. I guess now is as good a time as any to ‘fess up: To make known my Phoenix-like rise from the years’-long dirge that was mine “hell bottled up.” But I will have to make it speedy. I’ve not the time nor the inclination (nor the strength, and probably not the constitution) to get all hung up on those daze.
So. How to begin…?
Okay, here it is. Gather ’round, younguns. Toddmonster has a story to tell you:
Yes, there was a time, in a land far, far away, when a young man in So. Cal could land a willing corporate sponsor in Sandoz Laboratories… Back in the days of blissful ignorance, before Netscape; back when “Groom Lake” and “Area 51” were known only to serious freakouts – ex-Company personnel and other happy folk, on the 13th Floor of St. Elizabeth’s…
I’m here to tell you Timothy McVeigh isn’t exactly an alien… Sure the implants are real (can anybody doubt it?)… Lee Harvey, Jim Jones: It was all MK-ULTRA, I tell you. How do I know this, you ask? [Are they buying it? You think? Naww. Probably not. And, anyway, I might confuse the more nitwitted among them. Abandon schtick while you can, Toddman.] ho ho …that was good for a few seconds of relief. Yes, I feel much better. Norman Cousins was right. One can never overrate the power of good ol’ home-brewed endorphins.
Nearly a decade of bad-drinking had made me forget that the brain is an organ… and that organs are people, too, capable of dressing themselves and steppin’ out. And so, about three months after having taken me last drink, and – funny thing! – three months into a deep and daily admiration for dextromethorphan, I… began…
TO WAKE UP
and it would require more leg-room than probably Lollipop will allow me; but the low-down is this: My brain had been “dumbed down” by booze; and synchronistically, somehow, in the cessation of imbibing that fifth of Wild Turkey ever’ darn day, and in the course of ingesting several ounces of sticky-sweet syrup from the corner A&P
SOMETHING HAPPENED
Hunter likes to say that he’s “a Road man, for the lords of karma.” With that, I can identify.
But there is another side to TBF. Aside from the Student, or the Professor, or the Writer, even. One that I had lost feeling for, utterly, in nine or ten years of trying to drown mySelf. Kesey has called it “the tiller.” I think it was George Bernard Shaw who termed it “the Life Force” (tho at half-past midnight, I find myself too lazy to chase down the reference). The “inner child,” the “samadhi,” call it what you will. I had lost mine.
It has a lot to do with personal integrity. And dignity. And there was a day, last year (yes, and with a little help from my friends) that I found it again.
These days, I try to stay one step ahead of the fray. Marijuana puts me to sleep. And I tune my nasty car radio to something other than Klassic Rock. That is how I know about Alanis and young William the Conqueror.
Many of you are Listening, too.
The hymnal of our Bards and Poets is no longer to be found solely in black ink on wood pulp. The airwaves are rife with wisdom (tho, I’d kill my television again, if I still owned one…).
We are on the cusp of a Great Awakening
All of which is not to say that Great Knowing was kept from the American airwaves prior to 1996 or ’97. But I will maintain that the general quality of music, and certainly of its lyric content, is more profound today than ever before.
FM radio has never been accused of being the harbinger of rock-as-intellect. But, again, do your own brain-scan:
When was the last time – aside from the freakish 3:00-5:00 am
commercial-less “pirate” radio show – you heard a cut off of Eno’s Here Come the Warm Jets, or of Frank Zappa’s Apostrophe (yes, why the fuck don’t DJs play “Cosmik Debris”?…), or anything from Bowie’s great triumvirate Low/”Heroes”/Lodger… or anything at all by Captain Beefheart or Happy the Man…?
Why, goddamnit is it that when one hears a Roxy Music cut, it’s always “Love is the Drug”? Why is this? It’s enough to get yr armchair conspiracy theorist incensed, I tell you. And there are at least ten tracks from The Smashing Pumpkins’Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness that are eminently more listenable, more dramatic in every way, than “1979” (which, btw, I suggest must have been tossed in by young William as an afterthought – sort of a “Well, y’know, this one will get picked up as a Miller Beer commercial in 2003, so why not?”)…
IT MAKES
ME SEETHE
But there are moments… Nearly every cut off of Jagged Little Pill has been played and overplayed, which can only be a good thing, since Ms. Morissette is the purveyor of the most stinging Pop since Donald Fagen (of Steely Dan fame… I forget sometimes… forgive me…), that NY wit, retired as a major songwriting force.
Once in a while, it happens. Steely Dan was played quite sufficiently, this is true. It helped that not many of their tunes weighed in at over 5:03 (…and, for that reason, you’ll never hear the title cut off
The Royal Scam, which is an evil shame, as it contains a good bit of social-engineering that is hard to argue with…).
Same with Van Morrison, tho. Fucking radio stations: so predictable: “Brown-Eyed Girl”/”Moondance” (when, even from the Moondance album, so as to avoid subjecting The Listening Audience to anything really weird, “Glad Tidings” and “Caravan” would be such a wrenching experience in 7:45am traffic).
Yes, that is what I would do: Were I a record-spinner, I would play only that which would unhinge and unnerve the Amerikan populace. One wouldn’t even need resort to punk or GWAR, or anything even halfway seedy.
Can you imagine, listening to your an station, during the morning hour, for sixty minutes, with no commercial interruptions, and hearing exactly four tunes? I can.
[Fahey laying head back now in the Writing Chair, pondering…]
Yes, it would go like this:
“In Every Dream Home a Heartache,” (from Roxy Music’s incredible Second Album)… which wd begin the journey nicely, like a stroll, blind-folded, down a long staircase…
then: “Dogs” (from Floyd’s Animals), which duz tend to gnaw…
followed by “The Cinema Show/Aisle of Plenty” medley (what I wouldn’t give for a clean video recording of a Genesis concert, circa 1974, when Peter Gabriel wrapped himself around the world like the original King Cobra)… from Selling England by the Pound; whereupon the signal is given to tug severely on the cathedral bells, Ladies & Gentlemen, please be seated, before the Holy of Holies…(this line of discourse would make him puke, I know): “Summertime in England,” from Van’s extremely neglected 1980 album,Common One.
Amerika: Can I Be Your DJ?
Them’s tame pickin’s, folks. Imagine what one could do with an eager programming director. The mind reels.
…and, yes, we are pretty far away from our Original Premise. But I’ve had fun. And I deserve to have fun, once in a while. Not every day can be spent chewing the insides of my cheeks to a bloody mass. (Or wincing, as the telephone begins to ring after the 5:00pm hour… Which can only mean one thing, and it all spells
U-N-H-A-P-P-Y-C-R-E-D-I-T-O-R-S…)
To be continued.
Todd Brendan Fahey is author of Wisdom’s Maw: The Acid Novel.
