There’s the thought, maybe I should grow out of my MacGowan loving phase anyway… for my own good. Grow up, as my brother tells me sometimes.
This is about living, and open mic nights, and playing “Rainy Night in Soho.” Not knowing when the song will end, or what lies next…
Wednesday night, after changing mom for the second time, always a protest, an insult, a scoff, a sarcasm, “you’re such a prince…” huff, a mumble as I leave her room, I got down to the open mic night. It’s a straight shot down the road. I’ve had one beer. Have eaten earlier. It’s a straight shot, except for two corners close to the house, streets for driving 25 mph, quiet. I’m not even going to play anything. But I’ll bring the guitar, putting it in the back corner of the large banquet room of Bridie Manor overlooking the wide churning Oswego river, dark in the night like motor oil reflecting the streetlamps of the bridge.
I’ve had a hit of Chuck’s homegrown, so I feel a little loosened up by that, in order to slip right in. There’s Steve. I haven’t played here in a long time, and one of the last times I walked, having had a few beers, and just wanted to get a little bit happy. Not the best performance, not sure of which song to play. The last time it was again, last minute, the last one to get up, what should I play Steve, whatever you want. But that was another time falling flat. I’ve hit a few of them okay, just sort of had it, but… you never know anyway. Steve tells me to get up and play a song, so I grab the guitar quick and get up on stage, plug in, and there’s three guys to play with, and it’s excellent…
The next day, when I get up, after hanging out, as a friend would, with the open mic dudes, I look at my iPhone. It’s about 11. Gotta get up and face the day, the Meals on Wheels deliver, the making of tea. The text. Is that how I found out, or was it from Facebook? It doesn’t register. It doesn’t even begin to exist in the emotional world. I turn on the Bose radio, as I think of what to get mom to eat to start her off, no appointments today, catch the quick blurb at the noontime news summary. Figures. They brought him home from the hospital a week before. What does this mean, you ask yourself. And it will take days, to begin the sinking in, and then the days of dealing with, trying to find little possible occasions to open up to some of that inner emotion, and this is not always easy, no, but necessary.
But this night it’s terrible. I’m sitting behind my friend Michael, retired fine arts professor and painter, with his gal, whose name I fucked up on the way in. And the sign-up sheet is up to fifteen by the time I get in and put my name on it reluctantly. How long is this going to be. I don’t have anything to drink with me besides a can of soda water, and its precious tedious here, after the first guy, the host, who starts it off with Guy Clark’s “L.A. Freeway,” then a John Hiatt song, then a Robert Earl Keen, songs I’ve enjoyed before. Too much up and down. Time dragging. Too much technical skill, enough to intimidate, big time. Slink into a corner, wait your miserable turn, and when I get up, I can’t hear anything, and my guitar is sounding like the strings have paper clips on them or something, is it the capo? And I offer at the mic a little story, the lights too bright for me to see anyone, of how the Buddhists see the things that happen when a person’s soul or consciousness leaves the body. I mention seeing the Pogues back in ’86 down the road from the college I went to, but there’s a bored silence. I don’t tell them how I was at the bar there at Pearl Street and out they come with the overcoats, pinched smirks on their faces from holding the great sound of the talent, of a band playing really well together now, effortlessly, to go out and prep further for the show. Should have followed them. He had a hat on, I think. They stuck out, I was stupid.
My heart is amped up anyway, past the level of comfort, and the pranayama I attempted didn’t help as much as the classic simple local pizza slice the guy over there encouraged me to take a slice of on a paper plate. I find myself unable to control anything, not with consistency, not the guitar or its strings, not my voice, nor the angle of my head as I address the microphone before me in the darkness beneath the lights shining up the stage. Not the tempo, just bits of the tune, found here and there, embarrassing as the fact of awkward existence in the world itself…
Little brother, not big brother. Unable to make a single decision that won’t be criticized, inwardly as well as outwardly. Mom bitching at me. The checks that arrive in silence, necessary to existence as I’ve known it these last three years after Covid 19 and mom’s condition brought a conclusion to my years, thirty, more, behind the bar back in DC…
While there might be some genetic similarity because of my mother’s side, County Mayo, and visit when I was five or six to Connemara and other places in Ireland, Yeats’ grave under Ben Bulben, cliffs, stone walled roads and green fields and ancient monastery crumpled remnants, I don’t really look the part, Shane MacGowan. Too clean cut. Effeminately fine almost. Joyce, by the way, was a fine tenor. He got the ladies that way. I might try as hard as I can, but I’m not nor will ever be “lived in” like Shane. Nor with the teeth, that began their fall from original beauty and order by a fall off a moped and then English dentistry from the free clinic, the front teeth filed down by a student, perhaps more for the learning than the treatment of the patient, to be capped, and the caps of course not lasting long at all, the jagged top front teeth in turn falling out with the years of 365 days of touring that had their inevitable conclusion for the patient, the pain killer, the opiate, heroin.
I’ve played any number of The Pogues repertoire over and over a thousand times it seems, and so there is no logical comment to make anymore. My own time to suffer has come, is that it? My own time to be real… My own times of NW3 brought to life. “In the filth and piss they lived in, they would sometimes hum an air, or talk in tongues of madness, keeping time upon a chair…” Dirty Old Town. Indeed. And no one to talk to, really, not family anymore at least, “because you’ve made your decisions, and those are yours you made on your own, and their are, naturally, consequences, as everyone knows, and deals with too, so don’t think you’re special.”
It’s a slight condolence that playing with a pretty good sounding impromptu jam band with guys you’ve never played with, and “Rainy Night in Soho” coming together, loud, as it should be played, was being played at the time near his death, reported to be 3, or 3:30, Dublin time, Thursday morning, which was about 10pm EST, here, and a soul consciousness can travel freely and occupy space time miraculously. Imagine hovering over the world for a moment and looking down on Earth, as it were, and hearing your songs played, not by any great band, so to speak, but by drunken locals with a buzz on maybe, in different keys and tempos. but played, with some form of heart in it, not trying to be good, just trying to be real.
Does it mark an end of an era, his passing… An end of rural places as in Ireland, where people could gather in a farmhouse and play, because they knew each other, related by blood or marriage, or neighborliness, all night long into their pints and the last shine of stars before the dawn’s light of obliteration of view. Time to go to bed. The places he grew up in, no running water, no electricity, the only stove to cook being the hearth. All of that to be replaced by subtle but pervasive disapproval… Can’t you get along? Can’t you figure it out, Figure It Out. Can’t you figure out how to keep things up and running, maintain a functioning phone or laptop or driver’s license.
Put the old crone away, place her, in a home, in a room.
And of course it comes down to that. The very crisis of the planet. That whose body you were formed in and occupied enough to be part of, not that I like to think about it, showing the signs of wear and the devastation. On which side of that can one be on?
No more songwriting and carrying on in bars for you, my friend. Gone bye-bye to the habit of just writing something that seems to capture some shard piece of beauty, and let it then, if it lives, go on to live a life on its own, being interpreted by and in the minds and bodies and foot-tapping and inner swoons of people, of humanity, as if in Jungian mysterious fashion, like one might sit in front in some flashing understanding of a miracle, even while thinking miracles do not, can not, happen in real life, as we all well know.
For some, maybe it’s a blessing. No one can live like that, like he did. As he said, in one of the two principal documentaries of his life, “we thought we could beat the system, you can’t beat the system.” The old system itself has been beaten. And it takes a lot of courage now, surprisingly, or not surprisingly, to get up and play the songs of the old one and the one before that one, even older. But what else do you turn to? Or you have nothing, and nothing left of it. Go get a job, a career, in the Microchip plant that’s coming, while you’re still able to work and make any sort of a salary…
Go face changing the bed. Moving mom downstairs to the couch next to the sleeping cat, where she’ll babble on into the night. Try to bring little moments back of the time past into some form of focus, even while, occupying, as much as you can, the present moment of life. Here now. And now no longer with Shane MacGowan present in the world, to see the things you yourself see, the lit decorations around simple basic houses for Christmastime. Stars of colored lights, and Santas, Northpole canes of inflated plastic to glow in the night, next to shrubs with their lights too, clear eternal light in this prism world.