well i got a job
and tried to put my money away
but i got debts
no honest man can pay
so i
drew what i had
from the central trust
and i bought us two tickets
on that coast city bus
well now
everything dies baby
that's a fact
but maybe everything that dies
someday comes back
put your make-up on
fix your hair up pretty
and meet me tonight in atlantic city
bruce springtsteen, "atlantic city"
we got into an argument, a stupid one, but it got heated: she likes david bowie, i find bowie one of the most overrated artists of the twentieth century, yeah, that difference led to a whole lot of twist and shouting, and i ran to the computer looking to listen to some tunes.
i looked down at the floor to grab the headphones. shit. one of the kids had stepped on them, the right phone laid there crushed and useless. i slipped out the back door, put my shoes on, threw on a jacket, and walked out into the night.
i jabbed my left hand into the upper corner of the jacket and fished out a cigarette and a book of matches. i don't smoke much anymore, haven't for the past few years, but every once in a while just the right combination of desperation, drunkenness, melancholy, and frustration strikes me and i inhale one or two, or, ok, for honesty's sake, let's say eight or nine.
got the smoke lit, took a deep pull on it, and stumbled down the driveway, thinking, someone in this godforsaken, goddamned, long-dead little town could sell me a pair of goddamned fucking headphones so that i could lick my wounds and sit down and listen to some songs i loved in a proper fashion.
for a small town this place used to jump, my mother met my father here on a saturday night about, well, it's close to fifty years now, my father came here for what they used to call action, he came for drinks and loud music and girls, he and some friends came up from someplace a lot bigger, and after striking out on the action front they wound up stuck at a railroad crossing at about three-thirty in the morning. my mother was stuck in the car in front of him, and the freights used to run long here back in those days, and conversations got struck up at the crossing, and anyway, here i am tonight.
&&&&
there's no life tonight, though, no action.
i walk toward the twenty-four hour supermarket, thinking they'd be the most likely place to have headphones, and i don't hear much on my way there. a few cars approach and pass. over behind mabbet street i walk by a back yard with a bonfire lit, some young couples sitting around it, they look to be somewhere in their twenties, some sort of classic rock that sounds familiar playing and then i recognize and laugh, bad company i realize, feel like makin' love...to...YOU...don-don-da! don-don-da! feel like makin'...
jesus these kids are pathetic i think. isn't there some obscure shit my outta-date ass never heard of in my best pandora fantasies you should be listening to kids, c'mon, don't make me feel hip kids, make my forty-five year old ass feel forty-five plus, for chrissakes.
they nod at me, i nod at them, i take another drag, and mosey on down. i feel haughty for a second, then i remember that my wife thinks i suck because i think bowie is sorely overrated, and i come right back down to earth again.
&&&&
there's no future marriages lurking at any railroad crossings tonight in my dirty old hometown, there's just the whoosh of the occasional car coming by, the occasional car carrying old couples on their way back home after dinner up in saratoga, the occasional car carrying drunken teenagers we can only hope won't wind up dead or pregnant before the night is through.
there's only three stores open, even now in this relatively early hour, half past ten. there's the price chopper supermarket, and the getty, and the cumberland farms.
i hit the chopper first, figuring if i can get cilantro there, and i know i can right now, i should be able to get a pair of headphones, for sure.
i wobble in, past the first eight or nine aisles, i remember vaguely where the electronics are. get over there, stare at the merchandise: no headphones.
i wobble out, take a good fifteen minute walk toward the getty and cumberland farms over on central ave. walk by a bar with an italian name, and i consider stopping in for a drink or ten, i'm in the mood for six or seven shots of so-co washed down with a coupla three pints of whatever they got on tap, but even though i'm really pissed off at the wife at the moment for taking my opinion that bowie is overrated and twisting it into a sermon that both uncle tupelo and springsteen are white-bread and at best mediocre (did she really mean it? jesu christo, did she really mean it?), i don't wanna disappear for five hours right now, we got a six-week old baby in the house and a couple of other ones to boot, let's not get crazy i think. there's only one guy at the bar, and he's kinda slumped over, so i figure this could go either way, so i keep going. i just want a pair of headhones, i just want to get home and sit down and have one last glass of wine and listen to some tunes before passing out on the couch.
&&&&
as bad luck would have it, neither the getty or the cumberland farms had headphones. the young dude in the getty walked over by the batteries'n'shit and scoured the display alongside me, certain that he'd find them; the young woman at the farms looked around, too, and she gave me her sympathies, even complained about not having any tunes to listen to herself on the third shift.
i walked out with a pint of chocolate-chip cookie dough in my right hand and a lit cigarette in my left, and i feel, well, i feel an intense frustration, bordering, i'd say, on rage.
i take a drag, and another, and then i ask myself:
what the fuck are you so frustrated about?
almost four years ago to the day, i sat down at this very keyboard, listened to this very same song, and pounded out a whole different kind of diary, one in which i discussed the night i first connected with my first wife, and my intense fear of the massive surgery, for a massive but benign brain tumor, that she faced a few days hence.
they said she'd come home in five to seven days, but she came home a month later, and she came home in a hearse.
&&&&
you'd think, after all that, after burying a wife, after watching her die, after having to get up the next morning and explain to children aged eight, three, and fourteen months that they no longer had a mother, you'd think that i'd have a little fucking perspective. you'd think i wouldn't be all in a snit because my new wife and i got into it over a difference of opinion on the relative merits of bowie (have i mentioned, seriously overrated?), uncle tupelo (relatively unknown, but sorely underrated), and springsteen (well known, but there's a reason they call him the boss). you'd think i'd know better than to be all pissed off over the fact that i couldn't fucking find a fucking pair of headphones.
but here i am, listening to "atlantic city" on permanent repeat on one half-functioning left earbud, and pissed off but good. i can barely hear the song, it's more like a tease, kind of like a lot of other things, these days. i got a job, as the song says, but it pays a shitload less than my old job. i guess you could make the case i should have stayed at my old job after my first wife died, but for chrissakes, i had two kids who'd never even been in daycare or with a babysitter outside the family: what would you do in that situation?
yeah, i'm making a lot less money, like a lot of us. the ground's shifting underneath us, isn't it? and we're not going to the places we thought we were. once upon a time i was supposedly between houses, a lot of us were, but a lot of us ain't gettin' to those houses, are we? no complainin': seriously, at the moment, i'm more pissed about the headphones than the fact that i blew my downpayment staying home with my motherless-at-the-time children. we got a place to live, and plenty to eat, and, tonight at least, plenty to drink and enough to smoke. no complainin', seriously: guess i'm just a little frustrated. i'm forty-five and relatively broke and what they used to call the american dream is long-gone; i'll never own a house again and i'll never get to retire, and that's true for millions of us. it is what it is.
i've lived through worse and come out the other side, so it's all good.
i just wish i had a pair of headphones at the moment.