Bermuda Shorts - James Patterson [7]
Tourists, students, older couples, young women would stroll in and approach the statue with deference. Most would be immediately embarrassed by the beauty of his total nakedness, and recover long enough to express some admiration and wonder at the fact that it is, after all, a piece of stone and not a real live naked man. I, on the other hand, would be willing to say that it is a real naked man, just not flesh and bone. I sat there and gave it a kind of life. And everyone who entered that room did too. It draws a spark from each observer, until it appears to breathe in the reflected essences projected upon it.
Now, decades later, sitting in a seedy restaurant outside of Washington, D.C, the capital of another empire, I can give voice to my misgivings over that statue. You, sir—with your flaccid stare and your leg bent in casual haughty observance, with your weak aristocratic mouth and delicate wrists, your hip pushing forward and rounded haunch, standing there without a stitch of clothing on—you may be a lot of things, my friend, but one thing I’m sure of, you aren’t slaying anyone today, or any other day, pal. Even though your sculpting is perfect right down to the print on the toe that juts out from the pedestal at eye-level height, or the wisp of hair like dissipating steam from the cauldron of your tempestuous and youthful thoughts. No, you’re no killer, nor savior, nor everyman chosen by fate. You’re just a lonesome naked man. A boy, really. Vulnerable in every way. Like any perfect thing would be in a rough-hewn wilderness. With a slingshot over your shoulder to accentuate your defenselessness.
Sculpture isn’t for young men.
Most definitely I agree. Explaining why is difficult.
I am thinking now of older men I have met, admired, or known. Folk singer Dave Van Ronk, poet Will Inman, my college philosophy teacher, the writer Henry Miller, who did his important work after the age of forty, Ferlinghetti himself, me ten to fifteen years from now, the fellow who has entered the restaurant and taken a table a few feet away.
My Caesar salad arrives and I order another wine.
Dave Van Ronk’s belly sags over his 1970s-style corduroy bell-bottoms. It’s the late 1980s and his Scandinavian hat, the vest over a tattered shirt, his yellow tobacco-stained fingernails, all contrast with his well-trimmed beard and ruddy, boyish face. Is music another vice for him? I wonder. Does degeneration, as in the degeneration of his lungs, his cigarette cough, mean that much—has he affected the voice of the characters about whom he sings for so long that it is, by now, his own? He is partially famous because Bob Dylan copped his version of “House of the Rising Sun” for Dylan’s first album. It was a naughty thing to do. But in the long run, it may have helped gain Van Ronk many new listeners. It was how I heard of him.
A group of us have been summoned to an all-hit radio station in Manhattan to perform funny songs live on an April Fool’s comedy show. Being an all-hit station, they wouldn’t be caught dead playing any of our “independent” records. We know, and they know, the wrath that would descend upon them, should they ever report playing anything other than major label product. Sure, they can have us play live, but no recordings. So we must travel from near and far to play songs live that they could otherwise just spin from our CDs. It’s an insult to be an independent artist and get invited here. More people will hear this show than will probably pay to see any one of us in a given year. No one turns them down. Dave Van Ronk, in particular, is past concerning himself with the trifling vicissitudes of the business of his craft. Van Ronk’s girlfriend, or wife, stands just taller than his waist; half his age, she kisses his hand as it rests on his tummy as he waits to go on. Peculiar, intimate, beat.
Will Inman was my poetry teacher in college. Hemingway-esque in appearance, he had heard that I loved poetry and writing, so he sought me out and invited me into his honors poetry class. This was 1970. I was eighteen and a