Gabrielle Taylor's "Cockluck"
February 07, 2002
Auntie came home in the small hours and found me sitting on the living room futon staring blankly at infomercials in the dark.
"How was work?"
"It let out early, so I went on a date."
"A date? Already? Who with?"
She shrugged and turned off the teevee. "JB Dixon. I think he's a journalist. Why are you up?"
"Couldn't stay asleep. How was your date?"
"Brief. He has to kill again in the morning. Why couldn't you stay asleep?"
"Got up."
"Watched infomercials?"
"I guess."
"What is this, a game show?" Auntie said impatiently.
She said, "What kept you from staying asleep?"
"My father."
"Again?"
"Yes."
"What?"
"What what?"
"Are we going to sit here all night with you fooling around like you don't want to talk about it? What were you thinking about that got you so upset you couldn't sleep?"
"It's not easy for me to talk about, you know!"
"So you're going to get better at it by not doing it?"
We went into the kitchen -- worn white enamel and silver chrome in a large room with a crossed window over the sink and a small window over the round-cornered white lock-handle fridge. I took out a cold jug of spring water and filled my small white plastic electric kettle and put licorice spice teabags in a fat, ugly orange-brown pot.
We took the tea and two tall thin china cups lumpy with sugar and a bag of ginger snaps back into the living room. Auntie put on Bob Dylan's "Love and Theft".
I poured the tea and drank a little.
"My father died when I was fairly young," I said. "I remember him well enough, but it's all impressions from a kid's perspective. I didn't notice the kinds of things I wish I knew now. Nobody who knew him talks to me about him. I don't even know what to ask."
"So now there's this song that whenever I hear it, there's a moment crushed into it. When I hear it I see myself sitting at my computer, and I see what I saw in my work space at home, then Born to Run comes out of the little black Yamaha speakers and I don't even recognize it, even though it has a really strong riff, because I've banned Bruce Springsteen from my mind. And I hear him say "it's a death trap, it's a suicide rap, we've got to get out while we're young". It sounds familiar so I look at some archives and find this quote from the Tabloid mailbag.
"It's a long song so I have time to have older flashes, of Dad working on the truck, and I had to go past the garage to feed my pony, and let me say that a pony is not all it's cracked up to be, this was a fat bitchy white Shetland pony. Probably the only pony in the world with a link to Bruce Springsteen. Every time I hear the song I think of that damn pony! And my dad working on his truck, and the Tabloid mailbag, and that shitty little apartment where I heard the song again.
"Music can overwhelm me. Like I've just stepped into a greenhouse. I started thinking about what that song must be like for Springsteen -- obviously it can't hit him the same way it hits me. It's totally subjective and personal. Maybe he remembers what inspired it, or the first time he recorded it, or the first time he played it live, or maybe a collage -- or maybe he doesn't even like it, it's just another way to put steak in the freezer.
"I am the only person that that song affects in this specific way -- and it's so random, it could be any song. It could be anything. Anything could get its teeth right into me, it could be that the lilacs were blooming on a day when I failed a test and every time I smell lilacs I feel like a failure.
"Except in this case there are other people involved that are totally uninvolved. It's a strictly one-way link. Springsteen and Tabloid and my pony all took on a total significance for me that they will never be able to identify with. Because it isn't really them. It is, but it isn't. It's... It's like I saw someone, across a crowded room as it were, and the way the light struck his hair and the flash of his smile as he told the waiter to keep the change even though he was obviously broke and he was carrying maybe a copy of Stand on Zanzibar and some Henry Miller and a Stones album and then he left, and he NEVER SAW ME, and I was so stunned I couldn't move and then I ran after him and he was gone, and nobody in the restaurant knew his name, and I loved him until I died. But maybe if he'd turned around I would've seen he had a big fat barcode tattooed on his forehead and gold front teeth."
I suddenly felt unbearably tired.
Auntie said, "I have a John Lee Hooker album I've never listened to. Blues Legend. I was walking around a little port town with a French boy I met playing chess, and he bought me the music. This was just after the business with BallLessHitlerDemon. We made a date for the next day and I walked up the hill and he walked down toward the trees and called up, "we'll listen to our Hookers tonight and I'll see you tomorrow". Well, naturally, I cut the date. Then every time I saw that damn album I felt guilty. I did a mean thing to that poor boy for no good reason, no matter how quickly he forgot it."
"On the other hand, maybe he forgot to listen to the Hooker, forgot he had a date, and you caused no impression on him at all. So every time you pass over Blues Legend, which is a great album, you're committing more penance than the sin required."
"Nonsense," she said, and laughed.
"It's not just that," I said. "It's not just that something common can come at me with no warning, and impose itself on me. Sometimes I'm grateful to feel anything. But does it have to be something some huge corporation owns -- does it have to be something I can't even pretend is personal? Can't I have anything of my own?"