The Blues, Mary

THE BLUES, MARY

Sarah Kay

Copyright 2012 by Sarah Kay. All rights reserved. Published in US by Propertius Press, Roanoke VA. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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part 1 – don't think twice it's all right

I saw daylight, last night

And dreams about my first life

Everybody's leaving so why, why wouldn't you?

I ran down Whiterock Road as fast as I could; the wind was blowing in my face, and I could feel I wasn't running down the street in a straight line. My feet had a strange echo, up to the top of the Black Mountains. This street was always empty, or half-empty. I took the habit of running there, or testing myself in this place where I knew no one would ever challenge me. On one side were tall houses that appeared vacant, covered in paintings of the dead that I tried my hardest not to notice – and on the other, a cemetery so large, you wondered if the country ever held that many live people to bury. There are probably some foreigners in there, visitors, passers-by, unfortunate one-timers, suicidal colons, who knows.

I ran down, and after a while, I wasn't carrying my weight at all any more. I felt I was being pushed down to the bottom of the road; my feet were hardly touching the ground. I saw the pavement reach closer and closer to my face, and for a minute I thought this would be it, I could never stop the momentum, I would just keep on running until I hit the wall, or struck a car, and this would be the abrupt, violent end of a race that wasn't meant to go anywhere.

You can't fly like this in New York. You roll, you drive, you walk, you run, you slide and sometimes you fall; but you can't fly. There are too many obstacles in your way, and streets are never empty. They're packed, they're overwhelming, and the constant activity makes me claustrophobic at times. I started walking there at night and running around Central Park, but I found that no one's really running there – they do it for appearance's sake, it's an art and a trade. Where I come from in Belfast, people run to flee: it's a question of freedom or shackles, and it just gets you wherever you need to be faster than anything else.

New York has developed itself without anyone's help. It has its own history of growth, of learning, of abilities, it has its own up-and-downs, and there's nothing you can really take personally. It's a perfect place if anonymity is what you've been looking for. It's the reason I came here, not a boy any more but having yet to make anything of myself as a man. I needed to find possibilities that weren't stained by my personal incapacities, insecurities, the fear that grips you and never lets you go.

No one knows about that in New York. There, I'm just a funny man with an accent. A funny man who likes to run.

I used to be scared of the Brooklyn Bridge. It was too big for me. I had been taught to dream inside a box, so I'd never be disappointed, even by my own imagination. When you walk on that bridge, the East River looks like the sea; and the bridge could contain more living people than the dead in all of Whiterock Road cemetery.

I like to sit on the bridge and watch people pass by. The flow never ends. There is always something happening there, and perhaps I should be frustrated not to be a part of it, but I find solace in the position of an observer. It somehow gives me more confidence about what I eventually decide to do. Every time someone goes somewhere I don't follow, I regain a little bit of individuality, a little bit of long-lost self. I grow from their indifference. There is no place like New York to feel lonesome in – yet it's warm, it's soothing, the hum of cars and taxis and cell phones and footsteps and yells and screams and all the city sounds, they carry you inward, like a lullaby. It's a bosom in which you can lay down to close your eyes and dream about silence.

So I'll lay a kiss on this stone,

Toss it upside your window, by the roof

Before you change your mind, Miles, bring in the cool

When I was a kid, everything amused me. Everything was new, exciting, inspiring, and brilliant. There was a wasteland near the West Circular Road where I spent most of my time after school. My parents didn't really mind, they were too busy caring about things that didn't involve their children or their coursework. In that inhospitable wilderness I would find flat tires, disjointed ovens, a lonely steering wheel. One day I even found an old transistor radio that I brought home to stare at for hours, wondering how to go about figuring out how to make it work. My mother called it a dusty pile of crap, and threatened to throw it out if I didn't find a place for it away from the necessary things. I took it to a repair shop on the Lower Springfield, hoping someone could fix it, make it work, so I could hear the voices and the music from faraway lands, making me dance, making me stop what I was doing and listen, opening my mind to things on the outside. I didn't have a penny left on me – so I had to promise something I could make good on, but I knew that working on this radio was an investment. It would teach me everything I needed to know, and I could pay them back one day. Mind you, they managed to make it work, and I don't recall feeling as much excitement and anticipation as I did the first time I turned the switch button. But all I could hear was static. There weren't any voices or melodies. It was just static. I was stuck in this room with a small window, a view of a fence and the noise of defeat.

First sound I heard in New York was WBGO, Jazz 88, yeah, Miles Davis and Chet Baker, all those artists I had never heard about before. To this day I can't believe it took me so long to become familiar with the greatest of the great, the melody makers, the gods of blues, the snake charmers. I didn't know if I could relate to it at first. I was too white, too Irish, too awkward to become a member of the club.

But the thing about jazz and blues is, it's never foreign. We are destined to give their hearts away to the haunting trumpet, the seductive bass, the rumbling voices framed by pulsing guitar. They taught me everything I needed to know about rhythm. WBGO gave me confidence, it lightened up my step a little. I didn't feel as misplaced on this side of the Hudson as I once was. They taught me about women too – whose figures I knew I'd never hold close to me, whose lips would never brush my skin. I believed that women were unapproachable, that they were evanescent, ethereal. I honestly thought they were untouchable sirens, singing and humming the downfall of mankind. They ate the apple, after all. I was only just too young to understand that it was me who alienated myself away from what I had always wanted; I was too ignorant to understand desire is a drive, not a mistake.

I can't begin to contemplate what listening to the music really did for me. More than any biological and physiological change I could have experienced, it really moulded me into a man. I don't think anyone ever told life like Miles Davis did, and I took it in and welcomed all of it. From then on I knew my life would be shades of black and blue.

I was so sick of the green and the grey. I needed to wrap the blues around me like a blanket.

I started the journey, but I'm not sure I could ever finish it. I'm not sure I want to, or am meant to. It seems to me the three stages of life – childhood, adulthood, last descent into death – are simply three stages of grief, all leaning towards the acceptance of the fact that we're all going to die. I had internalized this feeling in my early years. It had become so normal. Funerals are common on my side of the earth, this small mount of green earth and blue skies. They are sometimes heroic, often pathetic, most of the time, pointless. I remember leaning against a tree and observing the funeral of a shop owner somewhere on the Falls Road one day. The priest was struggling to utter a decent eulogy, but there was simply nothing to say. Accomplishment and achievement were considered luxuries no one could afford. I begged to differ; this is the real reason that I went to New York. I needed to have room for my ambitions, space for my big dreams. I couldn't bear to walk down the narrow lanes of a country that had nothing to offer.

Looking back on it, I am probably treating it with disdain and arrogance, but it is a simple truth that when I got there, it wasn't long before I felt much more comfortable going about my daily life. I didn't think twice about stretching my ideas, spilling my thoughts, and spreading my beliefs, which should have felt completely unnatural to me. It was a good place to be in, really. Walking out the door in a crisp March morning, putting my headphones on and absent-mindedly perusing a newspaper truly is my idea of bliss. It's