| Turn it on. Turn it up. I turned around and he looked me in the eye and he said to me, ‘Jazz is not dead,’ and I said ‘okay,’ then he said, ‘tha’s right! It jus’ smells funny.’ And I didn’t know what to say then so I walked away and out of the store. He followed me for a little way shouting more crazy stuff and whistling snatches of tunes I might’ve known had I been as crazy as him. It’s the stuff of my life and I am some kind of cosmic magnet for all the wierdos in the world and all the deadbeats and all the rock and roll guitar players that dream of blowing the bassoon. Believe me they exist and hell yes I’ve met more than one of them at the same place at the same time. I’ve not yet met a jazz bassoonist that dreams of whacking a guitar but there’s a place for one someplace and I know I’ll be there when the confession comes out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know I could make a good musician blush with what I’ve seen and heard but there’s an end to the jobs I want to do and one of them ain’t working for the news. I turned around at the end of the block and this guy that was just standing there, right there like he’d been told to stand there for all time, and he looked me up and down and then he looked me in the eye and said, ‘information is not knowledge,’ and I said ‘okay,’ and then he said, ‘knowledge is not wisdom,’ then I said ‘hold it right there buddy,’ and I crossed the street. This was some crazy fool of a town thing that I had to live in with a roll call of such grand lunatics that it would turn your hair green before you could get to the end of it. Like the Mayor. No. Like the Mayor? No. Not many do. He is married but there are rumours that she hates him too. And me. Where was I going? Right then? I was on my lunch break and I’m looking for something. A record. A flat black plastic disc that hides music in its ploughed surface. The sort of thing that holds enough electricity to tickle the hairs on your face into standing. But not just any old shiny black disc. The one I want is old, very old. I owned one once. It got stolen. That happens a lot to me too. There was one time I could lend stuff and get it back. Then times and friends changed and stuff got lost. I nearly killed a man once. It would have been an accident of course. The store I wanted to visit was closed. It has strange opening times and shuts for lunch on unpredictable days. I had to go back. If you stand and stare at something long enough it can end up looking like anything you want it to. I had a girlfriend like that. Not! No! I don’t mean that if you looked at her long enough she might get pretty or look like a jar of raspberry jam or something or become a tree or a trashcan or something. No. She would stand like that guy at the side of the street, you know the guy, the one that got told to stand there for all time and say crazy stuff to fools like me that got in earshot. Shit! Yeah. Right. She would stand there like that and she would just look and stare and I would say stuff to her like, ‘hey sugar. What choo lost in back of the cupboard?’ and she would say back, ‘don’t the sea look beautiful from here?’ and I wouldn’t know what to say to that because unless she could see over the hills and far away around the curvature of the very Earth herself then she certainly could not be seeing any sea and no, she had her eyes wide open all of the time. Man I come up against some specimens in my time. And so then I thought, ‘I don’t know what to do’, the store was closed so where should I go? Did I want to see that crazy guy again? Did I have a choice? Hell no I’m right there already and he’s fixing me with that old look of his and I find myself wondering whether I look like the sea or the Virgin Mary or the Mayor of this Goddam town, ‘wisdom is not truth,’ at the top of his voice! Shit! Shout louder do please ass-hole I think, then I say, ‘I know!’ as loud as I can without being full on mister confrontation. Know what I mean? No. I’m not one to provoke but then he comes right back with, ‘truth is not beauty’. I can’t help it I just called right back at him, ‘do you know what anything is? Can you only tell me what things are not?’ and that shut him up and I felt good. I still think about the girl that could see the sea in the back of a kitchen cupboard when all I could see was old crackers for cream cheese and some strange black crumbs that looked like incinerated roaches. If that was the sea to her then was that her truth? I think she could stare any old scene out and make it what she wanted. She couldn’t do it with people though, couldn’t change me by simply standing and staring. Maybe that was her life, her truth, her whatever; she changed the scenery, maybe took some favourite pieces with her and kept them in the backs of cupboards. Maybe the crackers were rocks and the dried insect dust was, was, hell! Anything! ‘Beauty is not love,’ I wanted to hit him but he was massive, had to stand on a street corner so people could find a way around him, had to squeeze his vast butt onto a windowsill to make enough room for the street sweeper’s cart, had to stand up on the tips of his toes to let women with children go by, and still he stood there and I wanted to speak to him like a person who was cool with spontaneous street conversation, go blah blah blah like a man. I wanted to know whether he had to stand there because about the only place he could squeeze into was the railway station. But you know that the people you see every day on your lunch break do have another life don’t you? Maybe the standing statement guy gets there a minute before I do and likes saying crazy stuff to fools like me for a hobby and when he sees me gone he goes too? That would make the world a regular place right? The world ain’t a regular place okay? Got that? Good! Stare at it for long enough and it might just begin to look like something you can understand but if your gaze ever falters then you need something else to make your mind think that you’re still going on right ahead with your staring. That something else is music. Music from flat black ploughed plastic discs with enough electricity to tickle the hairs on your face into standing is the best kind of music for me. It works for me and I’ve been staring for a while now. ‘Love is not music,’ well okay I know that already and so does the rest of the world don’t they? ‘Music is the best!’ I yelled as loud as him. ‘Music is the Goddam best! Yeah?’ and then he looked me up and down and cracked his massive stone face with a smile as wide as an ocean wave ‘You got it buddy,’ he said, ‘there ain’t nothin’ like that stuff you find on a flat black ploughed plastic disc with all that static jangling your beard when you go to give it a kiss, it ain’t love and all that stuff but man you can’t get any closer than that even on the best of summer days.’ Amen. All Rights Reserved www.millionstories.net |
Son Of Mr Grene Genes
Simon Million
Simon Million
| We like this story because: It is a strange but clear stream of consciousness that tackles the big questions of knowledge, truth and beauty. |
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