Art of Noise, Peter Gunn is playing, and I am transported back to when I was a Friday night barback at Maxwell’s with Declan and Martha. Over 40 years ago. I remember Declan digging the Art of Noise cover featuring Duane Eddy. Those were happy, innocent days. I barbacked for about a year; eventually, my back was telling me it was time to stop.
The last time I saw Christine Kincaid was when I barbacked. She grew up down Riverview Avenue from me. Her father had quite a handsome Marlboro man friend who I could not stop looking at growing up. How I wanted to make love to him, me being 14 and him being in his 30s.
Christine loved Peter Frampton and saw him at Madison Square Garden the night before I did. She also saw the Sgt Pepper movie, which I still have never gotten around to. I have to admit I was embarrassed to be merely washing glasses and was stocking beers and was slightly relieved when she left with who I guessed was her boyfriend. Christine died shortly thereafter from ovarian cancer, I believe.
I enjoyed working with Declan and Martha and though it didn’t start there, my predilection for putting white powder up my nose, snowballed at that time. I had a crush on Martha. So beautiful and strong it seemed to me. I loved it when a customer would ask for a Coors beer, and Martha would reply that they do not serve fascist beer there.
As I said, my barback time was limited. I eventually worked more in the backroom as a DJ and a doorman. My brother Frank asked both Steve and Mary Fallon to keep an eye on me so that I wouldn’t misbehave or get into trouble. Little did he know…
My first night working at Maxwell’s, Mary Fallon sliced open her hand when cutting open a roll from Marie’s Bakery. That was my introduction. Eventually I became part of the family, collapsing in a heap after the bands had packed up and customers thrown onto the street. I was part of two separate sections, the front room and the back room. 40 years ago…
So Mike called me up yesterday. He was not around this weekend due to his new parole officer telling him to remain where he was. We texted and talked on the phone instead. Yesterday he called me after waking up from a nap. He was near tears after a dream that he had.
In the dream it was Mike and me and someone that wasn’t Bill. The other guy was black. In the dream I started singing angrily and fully ‘I Want to Know What Love Is’ by Foreigner. According to Mike, a woman started shouting I was going viral, a man told me he understood where I was coming from.
The viral woman was maternal and gave me a hug only a mother could give. I spent a few years at Right Track Recording with the gold record of Foreigner for I Want to Know What Love Is behind me. I knew it was there, but I only saw it when the day started. I rarely turned around to look at the wall. Now the disc, the wall, and Right Track Recording are gone.
Meanwhile at the fruit stand, with Marcus’ departure, a void is created. It’s odd him not being here. Jimmy Chile has been telling me tales out of school, how this one needs to be watched and not to trust that one while I am at it.
I’ve been here for a little over a year at the fruit stand. I am comfortable and perhaps I have forgotten that it can all be taken away from me in the blink of an eye. It seems a few of us received notes from Mark as he did his Irish Exit. I don’t know what other people’s notes have said and I choose to read Mark’s note to me as encouraging and a heads up of sorts.
The Google Gemini rewrite as a Mark Twain essay
It is a peculiar property of music that a few struck notes can set a man adrift upon forty years of vanished time. The other afternoon, the strains of the Art of Noise playing their rendition of “Peter Gunn” came over the airwaves, and straightway I was no longer a fellow in the present day, but a lad once more, hauling ice and slinging glass on a Friday night at Maxwell’s.
Declan was there, I recall, taking an immense shine to the guitar work of Duane Eddy on that track. Martha was there, too—a creature so handsome and fiercely resolute that she could shrink a man’s pride with a single glance. When some unsuspecting tavern-goer would saunter up and demand a bottle of Coors, Martha would fix him with an iron gaze and inform him, in no uncertain terms, that we did not purvey fascist beer in these premises. I was thoroughly smitten with her. Those were bright, uncorrupted days, though my spine—being made of ordinary human bone and not forged iron—gave out after a year of back-breaking tavern labor, forcing me to surrender the apron.
It was during that same tenure behind the plank that I last laid eyes upon Christine Kincaid, who had grown up just down Riverview Avenue from my childhood home. (Her father had possessed a friend of the classic Marlboro-Man variety, an individual of such striking countenance that my fourteen-year-old self could scarcely look away, harbor longings far too precocious for a boy of those years.) When Christine stopped into Maxwell’s, she spoke of remembering having seen Peter Frampton at the Garden—a night ahead of my own attendance—and of having viewed the *Sgt. Pepper* picture, a piece of cinema I have to this day successfully avoided. I felt a sharp pang of youth’s foolish humiliation, standing there up to my elbows in suds and beer cases, and was secretly relieved when she departed alongside a fellow who bore the air of a sweetheart. Poor Christine was taken by ovarian cancer not long after.
Eventually, I migrated from the front room to the back, trying my hand as doorman and disc jockey. My brother Frank, harboring a naive faith in human nature, had solemnly tasked Steve and Mary Fallon with keeping a watchful eye over me, lest I tumble into mischief. Little did the good man suspect how far the horse had already bolted from the barn. My very first evening on the job had been christened when Mary sliced her hand wide open on a bread roll from Marie’s Bakery; from that bloody initiation, I was gradually admitted into the inner sanctuary of the place, routinely collapsing in a broken heap alongside the rest of the crew after the bands had packed their gear and the patrons had been ejected into the night. It was a good life, though it was also during this period that I developed an unfortunate and escalating appetite for that white, powdery dust which so effectively ruins a man’s senses and bank account.
Forty years, gone like a puff of smoke.
Yesterday, my friend Mike called me up on the telephone, having been detained over the weekend by the sudden decree of a new parole officer. He had lately awoken from a midday slumber, near tears over a dream of extraordinary vividness. In this vision, Mike and I were accompanied by a fellow who was distinctly not our friend Bill—a Black gentleman—and I had thrown back my head and begun to sing, with great fury and wholehearted conviction, that old Foreigner ballad, “I Want to Know What Love Is.” In the dream, a woman shouted that I was going viral, a man offered me his profound understanding, and a maternal figure bestowed upon me an embrace of true motherly tenderness.
Hearing this brought back my own years at Right Track Recording, where a gold record for that very same Foreigner anthem hung on the wall directly behind my chair. I knew it was there, of course, though after the morning arrived I rarely turned around to contemplate it. Now the record, the wall, and the studio itself have all vanished into history.
Presently, my days are spent at the fruit stand, where the sudden departure of Marcus has left a noticeable void. Jimmy Chile has taken to dropping quiet warnings in my ear—telling tales out of school, as they say—advising me as to which characters require watching and which ought not to be trusted for a moment. Having occupied this post for a little over a year, I am comfortable enough, which is usually the precise moment a man forgets how easily his living can be swept away in a single eyelash-flutter. Mark, it seems, executed a fine Irish exit, leaving a scatter of notes behind him. What he wrote to the others I cannot say, but I choose to read my own missive as a word of quiet encouragement, and a timely nod to keep my eyes open.