When it’s over, they clap. Craig jumps up on stage, motions for me to stand but stay there. He waves the others up. When he has us in a line, he calls out, “Who’s got the hat?”
It gets passed up to him, a Yankee hat. It’s full of singles and change. He waves to the crowd to stop.
“Okay, y’all. You know what to do.” He moves behind Ed and Peter and waves his hands above their heads. “What do you say?” The audience responds with loud enthusiasm. “All right.” He moves behind Rosa and does the same. She gets polite but muted approval.
He jumps next to Polly, who, by the angry look on her face, has already predicted her defeat. The crowd doesn’t disappoint. He moves on to me.
“Give it up for Ted.” They yell back loudly, certainly louder than they did for the two women but around the same level of support the duo received. Craig knows. He hands me the hat. They yell and clap some more.
“Okay, people, let’s hear it. Give it up for the artists.”
There is some more applause, the loudest by Ed and Peter, who have begun moving back to their table. Polly darts off the stage. Rosa lingers on the stage with Craig and me. She leans in to say hello. Craig stops her by speaking first.
“That was a really cool set, man.” I look at his face again. It’s craggy. He’s not so young, a few miles past and many tequila shots down.
“Thank you.”
“Although that Dylan at the end threw me a bit. I thought you were going in another direction.”
“I liked it,” she steps closer. “You did it well. There’s nothing worse than a bad Dylan cover.”
“Except a Dylan original,” mumbles Craig like a teen.
She slaps his arm. “Oh stop.”
“I don’t know.” He shakes his head. “I just don’t get it about that guy.”
“There’s nothing to get,” she snaps. “That’s the whole point.”
“I’ve just heard he’s a jerk. He seems like one.”
I pack up my guitar. She watches. He watches her.
I stand, ready to go.
“Are you going to stay for a drink?” She thumbs at Ed and Peter’s table.
“Thank you, no. I have to be going.”
“Teddy?” she cranes her neck and points. I nod. She straightens quickly and throws that hair behind her. “Are you gonna be around next week?”
“I don’t think so. I’m not sure.”
“See you around.” She holds her hand up but doesn’t wave.
“Good night.”
I’m drawn to the bookstore window, how the light falls on the covers. I can’t make them out from across the street, but I know what titles they are. They’ve been there all summer. And while I can honestly say that I’ve never tried to picture my own book on display, I have imagined the window with these books gone, not no books, just not these books, although I can’t picture the ones I’d want there. I’ve been inside, spent strange late morning and twilight hours when I should have been doing God knows what but something other than skimming through pages of nonfiction that read like the liner note text for cookbooks and fiction that read like lists — random and disparate images; loose, frayed metaphors used to stitch litanies of random, mundane events together written by brick-dry white people with polished syntax, sniping at dead poets, complaining that the dead folk had lived too much — tried to do too much. And the ethnics, whoring out their otherness, pretending to be true to some alleged mother tongue or pretending that the language of the brick-dry will speak true — verisimilitude via assimilation. I get confused. They all seem to be exactly right. Their stories are so clean, so free of bafflement, stink, or cosmic funk — cosmic affliction. Their words shrink the world down, down, tapering to a point, as though they’d followed the line of a table leg down through the cellar floor to its subatomic origin, then claimed—that’s enough!
And I’ve seen the larger in the microcosmic, but that has never been the end for me. When I find the pointed end of the tapered leg in the center of the earth, I get blown out the other side into space, yanked into orbit, and then slingshot out. The cosmic affliction faces me every day. And it may be hubris to believe your own trouble has enormous weight — your trouble is another’s — but I think of the old Negro spirituals, their birth: Trouble is unavoidable, undeniable. It’s in your face and seems to stretch for as far as eyes can see. The only end to it is a dream, a song. And so when I read about flaking skin, microscopic annoyances — whose panties to pull off — I am troubled enormously. It goes on and on, the complement to the rock of my alleged soul.
So now I prepare to enter the trance, out of which will come the incantation to dissolve this corner scene — the shrine to the hard and dry. And it’s so predictable; the asphalt ripples like a lazy, black river. The night sky responds—Amen. The plate glass shatters noiselessly. The pieces vanish before they fall—And the urbanness de-coalesced. Now the reshaping: street and slab and stars to suit me. The cars are cat-eyed and quiet as leaves riding downstream. Magic? — or just some more blah-fuckity-blah, more yip-dipity-yip. There’s a reason the sidewalk is cast in concrete.
I count the hat money — forty-three dollars, not even bus fare these days. I realize how nervous I was, playing in the bar, the cool air makes me feel my sweat on my shirt. I put the money away, scan across the glass, and catch my reflection in the dark part. I feel compelled to speak to it. “Loser.” It surprises me, the way it comes out: a sharp hiss. I shake my head, raise a finger to my lips, and shush myself. I step out of the picture but leave the finger there, flexing and extending it slowly — my soul finger.
I make a fist and wonder if I’m capable of vengeance — the payback of the spade. The dark fist could be useful to me, symbolically and concretely. But the wind blows through my thin coat and across my damp shirt. I shiver and my hand opens. I start to sing and shiver again, wondering if anyone I knew was in there listening. I hear my voice come back to me, not singing, not even exhorting, but whining. Me, up there on the makeshift stage, limp and slumped; big, brown, and whining, with the alms bowl going round. I’ll give you two bits if you shake your ass up there. I go to close my fist again as if to squeeze out the image, it complies grudgingly. Who can blame it? It probably wants to belong to someone who’ll swing it. I’m not up to speed — not fully evolved. There was a time when memory was an asset: which root to pick, which route to walk, where the lair of the death beast was, poisonous fruits and blossoms. Then over time, as memory became collective and things to eat were packaged, routes mapped and laminated, it became a vestige, an appendix waiting to burst and spread the horrors of the ancient world — the mammoth stomping and the saber tooth creeping through your guts. Death by spear or weapon of stone. But there weren’t the millions to kill, or the technology to do so. Now, when there is time, when we neither follow the herds nor smear their images on our walls, when we have time for real intimacy, time and ability to listen and hear the voices of the lonely — panties, blood and semen, and a blank-faced woman-girl; twenty-thousand pink slips; clipper ships; Calcutta; barren potato fields; Geronimo; panzer tanks; napalm. We pay a price to have it all somehow neatly extracted, separated, named, reduced, and thinly rendered then served back to us with a pinch of wit and trope. It seems better to just forget.
Shake’s reflection looks at me from the window. He can appear like this, on your doorstep after work, while you’re going down into the subway, or packing the kids into a car — the wraith of transition.