Sunday, March 15, 2009

Sort of Lost Sad Empty Useless Old Man El Paso Blues





Sort of Lost Sad Empty Useless Old Man EP Blues


It’s been a very sad and sorrowful year, and I got the blues bad.
Very bad. Sort of lost sad empty useless old man El Paso blues.
A friend, the godfather of my children, is up in Albuquerque dying
a slow death inside a coma. Like Ishmael in Moby Dick, the ship
has sunk, Ahab that bastard is dead and Ishmael is riding
his handmade coffin on the wide green sea.
But, unlike Ishmael, my friend cannot tell his story;
nor can he let go and simply sink deep into the ocean.
He lies in the hospital bed, breathing and sweating
and gasping for breath, and his wife and the rest of us
rub his body and wonder if he’s inside.

Then George Bush’s war came along and sucked buckets of hope
out of my heart. Like a martinet with a tin badge,
George strutted out naked onto the stage everyday
thinking he was wearing a brand new wardrobe.
He had to do his strutting.
So every evening I get down on my knees like Marlon Brando
in the Godfather and I whisper into my grandchildren’s ears
that the President is really wearing nothing.
He is wearing no clothes at all. I tell them to ignore
the flag he has draped around his nakedness,
I tell them to be careful of the heavy Bible
that the President carries like a loaded gun,
and I tell them that one day they will come to understand
that he is not wearing any clothes. He is naked.
He is a fool. But he is extremely well-armed
and should be considered very dangerous.

This is the stuff that lies at the heart of my lost sad empty
useless old man El Paso blues.

Used to be when I got to feeling depressed like this
I could go hang out at the Café at the Bridge Center for
Contemporary Arts and watch the people walking back and forth
outside the door. The Mexicans and the abuelitos
and the penguins and the high-heeled ladies and the Mennonites
and the niños. Inside I’d always find weird and interesting
people from all over the world. I could read books
and look at the art on the walls.

And the best part was that red-headed Maggie Herrera would
console me. She’d smile her wonderful freckle-face smile
and say, Hi, Mr. Byrd, the silver post punched into her
lower lip bobbing up and down like a cork.
She never called me Bobby.
She’d fix me a double café breve.
She’d give me a big glass of water with ice.

Maggie always wore her jeans so lowdown that I could watch her
bellybutton riding the magic of her thin and beautiful body.
Her bellybutton was a cave that opened up into the beginning
and into the end. When I was in college,
the allegory of Plato’s cave bored and confused me
with its shadows and darkness and absence of meaning,
but the cave of Maggie’s belly button has real meaning
about the sacred world in which we live.
A few minutes of drinking my coffee and contemplating
the metaphysical implications of Maggie’s bellybutton always
refreshed me. I would be ready to return to the world.
But the Bridge Café is closed.
So I got no place to drain myself
of these old man El Paso blues.

Art Lewis said a white man can’t know the blues
like a black man knows the blues.
I don’t know if Art is right or wrong, but I wish I could
talk to Art and tell him about these goddamn blues I got
right now. Art is a wise man and he would know
how to give me some relief. But Art took his sax and went back
to Houston. He’s sick. He got diabetes and a double-hernia,
the hernia from blowing on that horn without a mike
all these years. Besides, Art’s momma is fragile and old.
Rumor says she has Alzheimer’s. So Art needs to be taking care
of his mother, but I bet he wishes he could blow his horn
because he’s got some real bad troubling blues.

Once over a year ago, a few months after 9/11 and I was feeling
just like I am right now, I walked over to the Bridge Café
to drink coffee and to talk to Maggie. But Maggie was busy
with paperwork and she was sad because her boyfriend
had left her. Every one of us had some kind of lousy blues
back then after 9/11. Remember?
Maggie quickly concocted me my double-shot café breve,
gave me a glass of water with no ice and told me straight out
that she didn’t have time to talk. She told me to go downstairs
in the basement. Art Lewis was preaching to an assembly
about the gospel of music. I went downstairs.

Art was sermonizing and playing at the same time.
He tooted his horn and said, “Bobby, sit down. Take a load off.”
He had poured his lanky black body into a black suit
and a black shirt and shiny black shoes and a very nice black
porkpie hat. The man was black.
Always black. Maybe he was 60, maybe 70. I didn’t care.

Every day Art Lewis stepped into the river of his life
and prayed into his saxophone. He prayed jazz.
Improvisation was his devout way of life.
His sacred horn was always blowing away the stifling air
of fundamentalism. As far as Art was concerned,
right and wrong, innocence and guilt--they were all notes
in the same piece of music.
Playing the sax was Art Lewis’ religious practice,
and he had become a wise teacherman
by following the path the saxophone had shown him.

“Music,” he announced, “holds many of the answers to
the riddles about life and death.”

“Why doesn’t it hold all the answers?” I asked.

Art got that big wide smile on his face and said,
“Because we don’t know all the questions.”
He played a riff and added. “Besides, there aint no answers
in the boogie-woogie. No answers anywhere in the be-bop.
The jingle-jangle is so empty of answers you’d go hungry if
you got lost inside. The only answer we got is just us doing
what we are doing. Like the dogs and the fishes.
Like the homeless blowing down San Antonio Street
like afternoon trash.
That’s why I play my horn.
I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing.”

Art was wearing a long necklace of wide golden links.
A cheap necklace really, not real gold, but it was handsome
hanging around Art’s black neck.

“Art,” I asked, “where did you get that handsome necklace?”

“Oh,” he said, “a wino in the alley outside the Cincinnati Street
Bar gave it to me. He wanted me to play him some blues.
So I played him some wino alley blues.
He liked those wino alley blues. Said those blue made him feel
sad and happy at the same time. Said he didn’t have any money,
so he gave me this golden necklace.
It’s fake gold, you understand.
But it sure makes me feel good.”

Art smiled again. He didn’t have many teeth.

That night I had this strange dream.

National Public Radio announced that Osama Bin Laden’s soul,
tainted and crippled by fundamentalism, had escaped
her master’s body. The soul of Osama Bin Laden
had witnessed airplanes disappearing into glass buildings.
And dead souls floating off toward the moon. In despair
she had fled the body of Osama Bin Laden.

Art Lewis was in the alley next to the Cincinnati Club
playing saxophone to the wino, and the soul of Osama
Bin Laden appeared like a moth attracted to a candle’s flame.
She hid behind garbage cans and listened to Art play his horn.
She realized that she had never known such generosity
and compassion. She began to weep while Art played
the many riffs from his golden horn.

And she fell asleep.

In her sleep, the soul of Osama Bin Laden dreamed.
Like I was dreaming the soul of Bin Laden.
A dream within a dream. And in her dream
the soul of Bin Laden was giving birth to a child.
When she opened her legs, she found a dead baby boy.

Art Lewis sighed and with his horn he collected up
the grief and blood and afterbirth like a priest
who is preparing to give the holy sacrament.
While Art Lewis blew this sorrow
into his horn, the soul of Osama Bin Laden
and the wino buried the dead baby in a dumpster
behind Geo Geske’s. The lid clanged shut.
The alleyway smelled like urine.

Art Lewis was weeping, the big tears dripping down
his black face. He continued to blow on his horn
about the sorrows in his heart.
He said his piece was called “The Soul of Osama Bin Laden
and her Dead Baby’s Blues,”
a song so sad it made the wino weep too.
The wino’s name was John, and John wandered
away looking for some sort of God.
He left behind the golden necklace as a gift for Art.

The necklace was stolen merchandise. Art didn’t care.
He put it around his neck and played to the dark alleyway.

And the soul of Osama Bin Laden disappeared forever.

That was the end of my dream, and for what it’s worth,
the Bridge Center and Art Lewis made that dream possible.
Now the Bridge has locked up its doors,
I haven’t seen Maggie Herrera in a couple of months,
and I feel this deep emptiness in my imagination.
George Bush, meanwhile, continues to strut around on the stage
in his imaginary suit of clothes--the American flag draped
around his nakedness, the Bible dangling from his manly hand
like a smoking AK-47. My lost sad empty useless old man
El Paso blues just won’t go away.

But this I have learned--Art Lewis has put his saxophone next
to his bed in Houston where it generates a warm glow inside
his room. His mother is with him.
She is ancient. She has found memory to be of no further use.
A hopeless tool. She does not know Art’s name but she knows
that he resided in her belly.
And that was a long time ago. Now she is waiting to unlock
the door that opens into the void. She wants to step outside.
Art watches her from his bed, learning some more about
the questions that have no answers,
and he meditates upon the meaning of music without any sound.
“It’s a perfect music, exquisitely improvised,” he mumbles
to anyone who will listen.
“It’s a high pitched sound that resides inside the holiness
of our brains. We all first heard that music inside
our mother’s belly. Down in that magnificent slime
where I first saw my father’s face.
This is a strange secret.”


Bobby Byrd 2003
Linebreaks by Glenn Buttkus

Bobby's Postscript:
By the way, I wrote this essay while I was working on my book of poems White Panties, Dead Friends & Other Bits and Pieces of Love, so many of the ideas and themes here you will find in the poems and vice versa. I’ve edited it just a little bit. Re-reading the piece after these five years, I'm so glad George Bush is no longer president. His was a most dangerous presidency. Maggie Herrera, by the way, has disappeared into the dream which is Los Angeles. She's fine, I hear. So is Art Lewis. He comes back to El Paso for his famous birthday parties where the musicians all line up to jam with him. He blows his heart out and leaves us in peace.

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