Thanksgiving in Worcester
Last month I was in Worcester. Mike and I decided that, as sixteen-year-old boyish men, we are entitled to a degree of selfishness employed on the pretence of audacity. We plan on meeting two girls a friend of Mike’s knows in Mechanics Hall on Wednesday afternoon. We don’t know their names. They’re as old as we are. From what Mike’s friend has told them about us, they are interested in meeting us. We are as well.
I made breakfast on a Teflon-coated pan. It was enchanting in its smoothness. I admired it. What a place we have come to, to coat pans with non-sticky stuff. What brilliance is in this brain of mine, to stick not-sticky stuff to a pan and sell it to me for one hundred dollars at Sharper Image. Egg no longer sticks to the pan; neither does meat or muscle or bone stick to a slug. What a testament to human ingenuity to realize that Teflon can coat a bullet as well as it can coat a pan.
Mike’s father was outside in a Celica, a tragic car. I got in on the driver’s side to the back seat of the old beast. I was chewing gum. There were no places to put your gum in. There wasn’t a groove on the inside of the door for me to put my gum in. There was a tear in the upholstery right in back of the driver’s seat. There was cheap leather coating my seat, Mike’s seat, Mike’s father’s torn-upholstered seat. A second look told me it wasn’t really cheap leather. It was rubber cement. I wanted to laugh. I wanted to cry more than I wanted to laugh.
Mike’s father asked us several questions.
He said we shouldn’t expect him back till around five or six in the evening.
It was ten in the morning.
He said he had a couple bucks if we needed some extra money.
We had fifty dollars combined.
He said we could borrow his cell phone for the day but not to lose it.
We had quarters for a payphone.
The drive was comically tragic, or tragically comical. There were hobos, there were kids late for school and taking their time getting there. There were kids in suit jackets and chinos running to St. John’s. There were people hanging around the Greendale Mall looking for something worthwhile to do that wasn’t in Higgin’s Armory. The city was walking from one parking lot to the other. It went along with one Holy Cross kid. It was walking like the vagrants walk, pointless, and so many places to go. It was walking like a hundred thousand people in one place had nothing better to do than to walk. I didn’t know if it was dead or alive but it was walking.
Outside the car you can see your reflection by the polished black buildings. The wind tosses your hair around and you can just imagine some city dream of a woman turning the corner and making that early winter wind’s biting breath into a kiss. You can barely see in the not-mind of your mind that clear noon walk north up Main Street with some pleasant anybody with her hand on your arm, feeling the sun on your face, warm despite the cold, feeling the calm religion of the poetry in her heart and not knowing to question that secret smudge on yours.
Mechanics Hall is a relic of a distant past. It used to be that people could name two things about Worcester: Mechanics Hall and the Antiquarian Society. Now, you’ll be lucky to find many things happening there from day to day, and this concert we’re supposed to be seeing is something of a rarity in this city.
This is the last call for jazz around here. Jazz is an industry that defies defining. Jazz is beautiful. Jazz is beautiful without defying the fact that there is nothing new under the sun. Jazz is a pretty and unique snowflake without being pretty or unique and, being from New Orleans, it’s anything but a snowflake. The Worcester Jazz Orchestra never plays any more. I know the piano guy. He does research at UMASS. He is researching external radiation therapy. He spends hours a day putting mice in front of X-ray machines. He spends hours a day in front of X-ray machines. What little time he has left over from fretting about cysts and fretting about his research, he plays his piano, is filled with soul and poetry, is applauded, and is not paid.
This one time he played me a brilliant song. His hands stretched thirteen keys wide, his mind bent around the piano and wrapped up the strings and pulled and twisted and wrenched and wrung it out over the cold wood floor. Something radiant escaped. He told me I had to forget I ever heard it.
I asked him why.
He said, ’cause of what it means.
I said, what does it mean?
It means I will never be rich.
We met up with the girls inside. They had their boots on. They had tight jeans on. They had old ski jackets hung on the backs of their chairs. They had their hair down. They had elastic bands all along their wrists. They worried about this concert for a while. You could tell by the way they kissed that they were in a real hurry.
I said hello to the girls. One of them gave me a pair of the brightest eyes in the world. In this haze of red and gold, they looked like liars. In the hot reflection of jazz, they looked like the backstabbing bottoms of two tall glasses of rye. They started to strike up the band, and suddenly there was soul again, there was that flutter of new, that taste of colour, that single savoury glimpse of youth. There was sound that shook your belly and rattled the verse pulling through your veins. There was one hour of this. Then they put their instruments back in their cases and decided it was about time to call it a show. The old folks in the audience died a little. The young folks died a lot.
We left without protest. The next day there was scheduled a jazz tribute band. This band would lay a wreath at the corpse of the good pianist, sing a few bars and, defeated, leave in the same mood I leave them now. The body in the room is still warm. Go back in and you can lift its hand and watch it fall and wonder what it is that separates the word of God through a six-piece set from this dead heap of inspiration. Go back inside, and you can lose your mind.
I am a note, I decided, I am a single quiver of a string and a breath of air through the bell of a curving river of brass. I am a bullet aimed from the barrel of an alto sax to the bull’s eye drawn on our hearts. I am a finger on the hand that tipped the living river of time down the hill. I am, and I know I am, because you know you are.
Pushover girl talked to me a while. She is fifteen years old. She has to be somewhere sometime. She says she’s cold. I say I’m too cosmic for her universe. She says I’m full of shit, and in a couple of ways I am.
It was four o’clock and Mike and the girls and I had decided to go somewhere free and warm. There was a mall a mile off. We walked that way.
The old outlets stood up there on a hill. It waited for us. The fashion outlets were abandoned a year ago by any kind of a customer. What remains is this – a wounded animal. Old elephants hobble off into the hills to die. Old shopping malls don’t have that kind of humility. They have to stay there, to remind you what a valuable mistake you’ve made.
Once upon a time, there were businesses in these great glass skeletons, these empty rooms and desolate strips of purple carpet; staircases were once escalators; the security booth was somewhere little kids once dared each other to go, to see if the guard was really watching and if there really was a safe under the counter. It was unguarded, with a telephone book open and mouse tracks torn into it. The safe was broken. Nothing is left in the place. The world moved on.
The mall never got what it deserved because it never got anything at all. The Fashion Outlets is the corpse of a beast, white bones left over from what was only ever a mediocre organism. There once was a thriving neighbourhood where that shopping mall is, a thriving, breathing city which didn’t worry for you any more than it pretended to, which you didn’t care for either; a place with energy and motion, with such soul coming out of every brick as you could never imagine. Now what is it but a crater in a dying place, the focal point of a multibillion-dollar Teflon-coated bullet to the heart of the city. This, from the businesses and sound and fury of the days before the Outlets, when insensitivity was its own kind of love, when the air was so full of poetry you could kiss it. This suffering place will be dust on the air in a matter of years, like it was always meant to be, like all towers the world builds up are ever meant to be. Civilization is crumbling.
We got out of there before the sun fell. That place isn’t meant for eyes to see at night. Those nightmares aren’t for anybody to face. That place is a lonely place when the sun goes down, because all the people in the city know to avoid it; because the worst kind of nightmare is a dream deferred.
I saw Mike’s dad’s car pull up around the corner and it occurred to me that we might not make it home alive.
