Birds and Beatles

by Rick Bailey

     I’m reading a New Yorker article about Paul McCartney at the breakfast table one morning. At the top of the page there’s a black and white photo of him and John Lennon, circa 1965. It’s the year, the caption tells us, of Help! and Rubber Soul.

     My wife and I are leaving for Italy in a week. I’ve been downloading stuff to my Kindle to read while we’re away. I’ve got enough to last me quite a while, some novels (a few trashy ones, a few edifying ones), Clive James’ Poetry Notebook, a bunch of articles from the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and the New Republic. (I guess I’m keeping it New this spring.) When language fatigue sets in over there, and I know it will, with the constant strain of trying to listen very fast to decode flights of Italian, it’s a pleasure to lie down in silence and read in my own language.

     “Photo by David Bailey,” I say to my wife. Our son’s name. “How about that?”

     “What?”

     “This article about Paul McCartney. It has a photo by David Bailey.”

     Hmmm.

     I give her a minute, then ask, “Who’s your favorite Beatle?” 

     “Don’t start.” 

      She’s reading a book called Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the Sixteenth Century Mediterranean World. The bibliography is forty pages. Good lord.

     “Are you taking that thing on the plane?”

     “Maybe.” She pushes a small taste of eggs onto her espresso spoon.

     “It’s a brick.”

     “Jesuits,” she says. “I love the Jesuits.”

     I hum a few bars of “When I’m Sixty-Four.” Two pals and I turn sixty-four within a few months of each other this year. I’ve suggested, more than a few times, that we should have a “when I’m sixty-four party” sometime this summer, to celebrate ourselves.

     Later this day I will drive ninety minutes north to visit my old friend Brian. His caretaker Sheila has told me he’s not quite himself. Listening to music in the car, piped from my iPhone into the radio, I make a mental note of oldies I’d like to play for him. “I’ve Got Friday on My Mind,” by the Easybeats; Cyrcle’s “It’s a Turn Down Day”; The Beatles’ “Dr. Robert,” so we can hear that scratchy guitar and lush chorus. I’d like to see him react to the organ solo in Bonnie Raitt’s “We Used to Rule the World.” In the car I play the music loud, today even louder than usual. I know I probably shouldn’t. My wife and kids tell me I’m getting a little deaf. (A little?) These days the car and treadmill are the only places I listen to music. I can’t help myself. I want it loud.

     He’ll be sitting in his wheelchair at the kitchen table, his back to the doorway I walk through. I rehearse the scene in the mind. “Remember this?” Sitting across from him, I’ll play part of a song. I’ll wait to see the look of recognition, watch him travel back in time. “How about this?”  When my mother was sick and I made this drive, I listened to podcasts, for reflection and for laughs. For these visits, I want bang and bash. I want nostalgia.

     We bought every Beatle album as soon as it hit the store. This was, of course, back in the vinyl days. The first three or four lps, in mono, cost less than five dollars. We took them home, put them on the turntable, and sat down to listen. It was “close listening,” almost like the close reading of a poem advocated by the New Critics. In the front bedroom of Brian’s house on 3^rd Street, we sat on the floor and played the records over and over, holding the album covers, like holy objects, in our laps. There was a photo or two to look at; on the back, a song list. You listened, and you looked. “Meet the Beatles,” headshots of four young guys in partial shadow; twelve songs, the longest of which was “I Saw Her Standing There” (2:50), the shortest, incredibly short by today’s standards, “Little Child” (1:46), produced by George Martin, for Capitol Records.

     Years later, my kids went totally digital. They bought CDs and queued up the songs they wanted to hear. On some CDs they listened to only one or two songs; that was it. Back in the vinyl days, we listened to the whole album, every track all the way through, even the songs we didn’t particularly like. Ringo singing “Act Naturally.” Really? To lift the needle, move it to the song you liked, and set it down, aiming for the barely visible gap between tracks, was to risk scratching the record.

     A scratch would last forever. That was the thing about vinyl.

     And now it’s back.

     I have purist friends who could explain why vinyl is better: the sound profiles you get in analog are richer, far superior to the sterile precision of digital. I guess I get that. I’m still kind of an analog guy. I look at the clock and say “a quarter to” and “a little after,” it bothers me that soon kids will no longer be able to decode the face of a clock and tell time, the way many of them will never learn to write in cursive. I remember moving the needle to tune in an AM radio station in the car. I like a speedometer needle. I go about seventy mph (not sixty-seven) when I drive up to visit Brian.

     I should ask him, What do you think about the vinyl craze these days?

     I know what he would say.

     Who gives a fuck?   

     He’s sitting in his wheelchair with his back to the door. The dogs bark when I walk in. There are seven of them. It takes a minute to calm them down. Brian gives me a crooked smile and says, “How the hell are you?” It’s his usual greeting. He has a full beard, a lot more salt than pepper, and he’s wearing a hat. It occurs to me that in all the recent pictures of him I’ve seen, he has that hat on. When I ask him how the hell he’s doing, he turns his head and points to his hair, slate gray, wisps of what’s left of it hanging down. It’s the radiation, he says.

     I figure we’ll get a few basics out of the way, before getting down to basics.

     Sleep?

     He says he sleeps just fine.

     Appetite?

     He says he’s an eating machine.

     Pain?

     Not even a headache. If the doctor didn’t tell him he was sick, he wouldn’t even know it.

     I ask if he’s ever had a beard before.

     Couple times.

     He’s sixty-four years old, a September birthday, a year older than me. Three months ago Sheila organized a benefit. It went from noon to nine at the Elks Club bar in Bay City, all music all the time, played by over forty years of musician friends in the area. Brian packed the place.

     I tell him I’m thinking about a “when I’m sixty-four party” for me and a few pals this summer. What does he think?
     Yup.

     Next to the kitchen table, a tv set displays weekday afternoon programming. He watches it while I ask more questions, about his sister, son, nephew, a pal we call Easy Eddie. I’m thinking about my song list when he wonders, Hey, what’re we going to eat?

     In this New Yorker article, published in 2007, Paul McCartney confesses to dyeing his hair. He also confesses to being freaked out about actually being sixty-four. “The thought is somewhat horrifying,” he tells the interviewer. “It’s like ‘Well, no, this can’t be me.’” The article is contemporaneous with the release of an album called “Memory Almost Full,” which the interviewer describes as “up-tempo rock songs … tinged with melancholy.” I know the album. When it came out, I listened to thirty seconds of each track at the iTunes Store, bought one song, “Dance Tonight,” for $1.29, and downloaded it. It’s a jaunty piece with a kazoo solo in the bridge.

     The writer mentions the famous deaths: Lennon, Harrison, Linda.

     McCartney, I learn, was sixteen when he wrote “When I’m Sixty-Four.”

     When Brian and I were that age, we had begun to realize we were not going to be the next Lennon and McCartney. We had written exactly one song together, called “If I Could Dream,” which some years later he managed to get recorded with a band he was in, graciously crediting “Bailey and Bennett” in parentheses beneath the song title as the composers.

    

      I come back from Mulligans with two bar burgers, mushrooms and mayo on his, and French fries. The dogs bark. Four or five of them eventually settle under the table. We eat our burgers, watch a little more tv, and I think again about my song list. Maybe I won’t play the songs after all. Who wants to listen music on a phone, anyway? In the kitchen it will sound like a cheap transistor radio.

      I say, “Hey, remember ‘It’s a Turn Down Day’”?

      He looks at the tv for a bit, then turns my way. “The Cyrcle,” he says. “They were a good band.”

     The show we’re listening to is called The Doctor. It’s talk. Two men, two women. One of the men is dressed like a doctor. They’re discussing castration as a way of punishing rapists. Or maybe it’s a preventative measure. The man dressed as a doctor explains that there is both surgical and chemical castration. The two women agree that, either way, it’s an extreme measure. They are both against it.

     I try another one: “Remember ‘I’ve Got Friday on My Mind’”?

     It takes a minute. He turns away from the tv and gives me a partial crooked smile and a nod. “Good song,” he says.

     I know the nod.

     Sheila says, “Getting tired, Brian?”

     It’s for me. Well, okay, I think, that’s enough.

     We sit together for a while longer, through the rest of my fries. Brian takes a bite or two from his burger, gazes at the tv. Before going to commercial, the doctor previews the next segment of the show. They’re going to talk about a woman’s cancer treatment. The woman on screen looks familiar.

     “Is that Bruce Jenner?” I say.

     Sheila says it’s not Bruce Jenner. It’s a real woman.

     “Goddam,” Brian says.

     We watch a few more minutes in silence. I get up to go. The dogs rouse and congregate around my feet. I tell Brian see you in a month or so, shake his hand, and lean down for a long hug. “You hang in there now,” I say. “I’ll be back the middle of next month.”

     He nods, says thanks for coming, Richard.

     “See you, right?”

     He nods. I’m pretty sure he nods.

     About the time I get to the freeway, which takes ten minutes or so, my iPhone shuffles to a favorite Beatle song. I play it loud and sing along: “You say you’ve seen certain wonders, and your bird can sing.” That would be another song to mention, on another visit.

     A few days later, my wife and I are upstairs packing. It’s mid morning. I’m tossing power cords for my phone and Kindle and laptop into a carry-on when I realize I’m not wearing any pants. What happened to my pants?

     “Have you seen my black sweater?” my wife says.

     When did I take off my pants? For a while now I’ve been walking into rooms only to find I can’t remember why I’m there. I’m used to that. Like tinnitus, it comes with age. Losing my pants is new.

     “Did you hear me?” my wife says.

     “I heard you.” I look around the room, feeling mild panic. No pants, anywhere. “Which black sweater?”  

     I stand there, marveling at this altered state. Then I remember: I took them off in the other room, in front of the closet, so I could try on another pair I had fitted a while back.

     “I’m losing it,” she says.

      There they are, the pants I tried on, in the carry-on. So the other ones are over there?

     “Can you hear anything I’m saying?” she says.

     “I hear you fine.”

     We’re all losing it.

     One of these days I’ll have to get my hearing checked. I sort of don’t want to know. I think about my parents growing old, my father and all his hearing aids. There were owls in the woods a half a mile away from their house. My parents almost always slept with a window open. For years they said they heard owls all night. One day my wife and I were up for a visit. When I asked about them, my mother said yes, the owls were still there. Then she added, “Your dad can’t hear them any more.” I think he took it in stride. What choice did he have? Still, it broke my heart.

     One day it will happen to me. I’ll wake up, look for my pants, and I won’t be able to hear the birds and the Beatles. I’ll have to remember to consider myself lucky.

Rick Bailey writes about family, food, travel, current events, what he reads and what he remembers. The University of Nebraska Press will publish a collection of his essays, American English, Italian Chocolate in summer 2017. He and his wife divide their time between Michigan and the Republic of San Marino.

Ghost Story

by Rick Bailey

She follows me back to my office. Her name is Donna.

She wears jeans like all the other girls. Only hers are the baggy kind, the comfortable fit for a woman in her thirties. She sits in the front row, one leg crossed over the other. It bounces, this leg, like she's a piece of machinery that's idling. It's the sixth week of class, and I know this about her: She hasn't been to college in fourteen years. She has two boys. She has a husband whom she has left but who refuses to leave her. Whatever we read in class she reads as if her life depended on it. This week it's Ibsen. To most students, reading “Ghosts” is like swallowing a horse tranquillizer. To her, the play is like liquid light, and she chugs it. Sitting there in class, two students over from my desk, she is a presence.  

I unlock my office door and let myself in. "What's up?" I say, dropping my books on the desk.

"I just wanted to tell you I may have to miss class." She leans against the door frame and tells me what I was afraid of. It's the husband. He's hanging around. She's fears he is going to take her kids. She's afraid.

"It shouldn't be a problem," I say, "if you have to miss." I tell her I can work with her.

"It's just that I'm enjoying this so much."

I tell her we're glad to have her in class. "That Paster Manders," she says, referring to the Ibsen. "When he tells Mrs. Alving: "'We're not put on this earth to be happy.' How can he say that to her?" She shakes her head. "Those people are so miserable."

"Just wait," I say.

She laughs. "I saw ‘Ghosts’ on the syllabus, you know what I thought of?"

It's my turn to laugh. "Patrick Swayze?"

"In school, like in ninth grade, we did this thing called levitation." She gives me an embarrassed look. "Did you ever levitate?"

Did I ever.

#

My first time was tenth grade. I was at Sandra Bremer's house. I guess it was a party, boys and girls together on a Saturday night, not couples, just six or seven unattached kids together, and someone said we should play "Let's pick him up." 

"You lie on the floor," Sandra said, "and everyone gathers around the person. You say these words together, and then, using just your fingertips, you can pick the person up."

We moved furniture out of the way. Someone shut off the lights. Then we took turns volunteering to lie on the floor, pretending we were dead, while the others gathered around, looking down at the dark form on the floor. It was a very solemn ceremony.

The first person said, He is dead. One after another, going around the circle, we took turns repeating that line and those that followed.

        Gone from the earth.

        Stiff as a board.

         Light as a feather. At this point we bent down and slipped two fingers of each hand under the person's body.

        The leader said, Let's pick him up.

        And we did.

        It worked every time. The dead person, no matter how big, would practically fly up to the ceiling, where we held him for a split second, before lowering him back down to the floor. We would gasp and scream for a minute or two, terrified and amazed by this mystery in the dark, then ask for another volunteer. No one tried to understand what was happening. We didn't want to understand it. It pure joy. It was like direct contact with the supernatural.

        When there were no more volunteers, we switched the lights back on, put the furniture back in place, and turned on Cat Stevens. If there was a scary movie on TV, we'd watch that.      

#

There's a reference to levitation as a party trick in The Magician's Own Book, or the Whole Art of Conjuring by Arnold George & Frank Cahill, published in 1862. The authors describe it as "one of the most remarkable and inexplicable experiments relative to the strength of the human frame." In their description, they emphasize that it is a "heavy man" who is lifted when his lungs and the lungs of those lifting are fully inflated with air. The authors trace this magic back to an American Navy captain doing a demonstration in Venice. The critical detail, according to George and Cahill, is the breathing: "On several occasions [we] have observed that when one of the bearers performs his part ill, by making the inhalation out of time, the part of the body which he tries to raise is left, as it were, behind."

        Two centuries earlier, Samuel Pepys refers to levitation in his diary entry on July 31, 1665. He provides an account of leaving London to attend a wedding, noting in that week alone, some 1700 or 1800 people had died of plague (one tenth of the London population died that year). Pepys and his party arrive too late for the ceremony, but in time for dinner, cards, talk, and prayers. After helping put the newlyweds to bed ("I kissed the bride in bed, and so the curtaines drawne with the greatest gravity that could be, and so good night..."), he goes to a bed which, consistent with customs of the time, he shares with another guest.

Before sleep, the two men have a chat. "We did here all get good beds, and I lay in the same I did before with Mr. Brisband, who is a good scholler and sober man; and we lay in bed, getting him to give me an account of home, which is the most delightfull talke a man can have of any traveller." In the course of their conversation, Mr. Brisband speaks of "enchantments and spells" he has recently witnessed in Bourdeaux, France: "He saw four little girles," Pepys writes, "very young ones, all kneeling, each of them, upon one knee; and one begun the first line, whispering in the eare of the next, and the second to the third, and the third to the fourth, and she to the first." They whisper these words:

Voyci un Corps mort (Behold, a dead body)

Roy comme un Baston (Still as a stone)

Froid comme Marbre (Cold as marble)

Leger comme un esprit (Light as a spirit)

Levons te au nom de Jesus Christ (We lift you in the name of     Jesus Christ).

With one finger each, they raise the boy as high as they can reach. Brisband is "afeard to see it," and disbelieving, calls for the cook to come, "a very lusty fellow," meaning large, and, in like manner, they lift him as well.

#

For a while, every time that group of friends got together, at Sandra Bremer's or wherever, we shut off the lights and played dead, picking each other up. We reveled in the mystery of levitation. Like those little French girls, what we were enjoying was essentially child's play, like telling ghost stories, though, in our case, we didn't have bubonic plague adding spice to the experience. Looking back now, I marvel at the fact that we never dropped anyone. What were the chances? But no one banged his head on an end table. No one fell and broke an arm. I'm pretty sure my preferred role in the game was the dead guy. Lying on the floor, eyes closed, listening to the chant, then feeling myself lifted into the air was a rush, not so much out of body as an in-the-body experience. Some nights, along with levitation, there was talk of séances and hypnosis. I remember seeing kids bent over a Ouija board. Wouldn't it be freaky, someone said, to see into the future?

        Sure, but what if you had to see all of it?

        If there's any wisdom in becoming an adult, it's knowing that you don't want to know. We grow up. We marry and have children. We divorce and find ourselves alone again. In search of ourselves we fly off to faraway places and then come back home, still searching. Our parents, spouses, and friends, sometimes even our children, sicken and die. Between these events, there are the levitations, moments of genuine sweetness and mystery you share with other people. Lying in bed with Mr. Brisband, Pepys observes, "I have spent the greatest part of my life with abundance of joy, and honour, and pleasant journeys, and brave entertainments," thinking of the wedding, the time with friends, as "greatest glut of content that ever I had; only under some difficulty because of the plague."  

#

Seeing Donna in class, reading and thinking and sharing, was like witnessing a levitation.

        A week passed before I heard from her. She called me to apologize for missing class. She was in a shelter. She said she couldn't talk long.  She said he didn't know where she was and that her safety, and the safety of her children, depended on keeping her whereabouts a secret. I told her to take care of herself, we were just finishing “Ghosts”, she could come back anytime, write the paper, pick up where she left off. 

        When we hung up, I knew I would never see her again. A week passed, then another. Nothing. That was it.

Rick Bailey's essays have appeared in The Writer's Workshop Review, Drunk Monkeys, Ragazine.cc, and Defenestration. He lives in Detroit and teaches writing at a local community college.