it.
“Rae,” he said after another moment.
“Ray?”
“Rae, R-a-e. Rae Morgenson.”
“My mom was a big Van Morrison fan. Both my moms were.”
“Yeah, well, everyone was,” Wade said.
“Not everyone,” I said.
“I would rather you not question the universality of the white hippie experience.”
I laughed. Then, “Do you consider yourself white?”
“I consider myself blue.”
It was a cool day, but the car’s heater worked surprisingly well (and still does). I shimmied off my L.A. Kings starter jacket. “So what kind of crap did she listen to when she wasn’t listening to Mingus or Van?” I asked.
“I just told you I don’t like to think about that.”
“Yeah, but—”
“I don’t know. Commercial stuff, phony head music: the Other Knee, the Cryan’ Shames, Iron Butterfly, Wind Shadows, Vanilla Fudge, the Eggs of Misconception, the Ghosts of Electricity. A lot of questionable shit. She’d dated the drummer from the Other Knee. Frog, he called himself. I think he was the one who gave her the Mingus album. She liked Mingus’s music purely, you know. She didn’t like it ’cause it was cool or sophisticated, ’cause it might intrigue someone who called on the phone and heard it blasting in the background, she having turned it up before answering. She just liked it.”
“What did Ellington say? ‘If it sounds good, it is good.’”
“But I couldn’t figure out why Mingus sounded good to her, because as I say most of what she liked was garbage. I tried to listen to her music with new ears, you know, thinking maybe she was hearing things I couldn’t hear, me being too much the yeasayer of prevailing critical opinion. Didn’t work, though. I’ve always been mystified by people like that, the sporadically, randomly tasteful. My problem isn’t indiscrimination, it’s that I have such a painful sense of where my discrimination gives out. Hank Adams said he knew his inferiority in taste just like he would’ve known it in smell, had he been hard of smelling.”
I grunted.
“A lot of times I’ve felt too smart for my life, but too dumb for another one. You’ll probably find that too.”
I didn’t like the sound of that, and we drove without talking for a few minutes. Then he told me about some of his other girlfriends. He said he’d had a “soap-bubble affair” with Mollie Katzen, the beautiful author of The Moosewood Cookbook and The Enchanted Broccoli Forest, and that he’d spent one night with Bolling Greene’s ex-wife, the singer and one-hit-wonder Penny Sakes (’77’s For Heaven’s … holds up pretty well). Also he’d loved a woman whose great-great-grandmother may have been the model for Courbet’s The Origin of the World. “I’m a bit of a starfucker,” he said. He’d also gone out with an artist who believed in “booksong,” the idea that one could develop a “mystic’s ear” for which book to read next. He’d dated a court reporter who was into bondage and discipline and some sadomasochism, he said, and from her he’d picked up a mild taste for that sort of thing. He’d grown equally comfortable as top or bottom. One of his favorite things was to be punched in the eye while coming, he said, but the court reporter didn’t always get the timing right—apt, he said, since she was also a not fully competent percussionist in a folk-rock band. Desire, Wade told me, wants nothing more than to destroy itself, as the Trammps had more or less maintained. He said he’d had a lot of girlfriends and had loved them all, but none as much as my mother. “She was a real connoisseur of coffee on book leaf,” he said, as if that were her defining trait. “Probably still is. She loved to stare at the stains and wonder over the words they’d landed on. She was deliberately careless with her cup. Your mother appreciates things, you know: blackbirds on white skies, raindrops on sidewalk gingko leaves. She would never explicitly point those things out, but …
“Rae,” he said after another moment.
“Ray?”
“Rae, R-a-e. Rae Morgenson.”
“My mom was a big Van Morrison fan. Both my moms were.”
“Yeah, well, everyone was,” Wade said.
“Not everyone,” I said.
“I would rather you not question the universality of the white hippie experience.”
I laughed. Then, “Do you consider yourself white?”
“I consider myself blue.”
It was a cool day, but the car’s heater worked surprisingly well (and still does). I shimmied off my L.A. Kings starter jacket. “So what kind of crap did she listen to when she wasn’t listening to Mingus or Van?” I asked.
“I just told you I don’t like to think about that.”
“Yeah, but—”
“I don’t know. Commercial stuff, phony head music: the Other Knee, the Cryan’ Shames, Iron Butterfly, Wind Shadows, Vanilla Fudge, the Eggs of Misconception, the Ghosts of Electricity. A lot of questionable shit. She’d dated the drummer from the Other Knee. Frog, he called himself. I think he was the one who gave her the Mingus album. She liked Mingus’s music purely, you know. She didn’t like it ’cause it was cool or sophisticated, ’cause it might intrigue someone who called on the phone and heard it blasting in the background, she having turned it up before answering. She just liked it.”
“What did Ellington say? ‘If it sounds good, it is good.’”
“But I couldn’t figure out why Mingus sounded good to her, because as I say most of what she liked was garbage. I tried to listen to her music with new ears, you know, thinking maybe she was hearing things I couldn’t hear, me being too much the yeasayer of prevailing critical opinion. Didn’t work, though. I’ve always been mystified by people like that, the sporadically, randomly tasteful. My problem isn’t indiscrimination, it’s that I have such a painful sense of where my discrimination gives out. Hank Adams said he knew his inferiority in taste just like he would’ve known it in smell, had he been hard of smelling.”
I grunted.
“A lot of times I’ve felt too smart for my life, but too dumb for another one. You’ll probably find that too.”
I didn’t like the sound of that, and we drove without talking for a few minutes. Then he told me about some of his other girlfriends. He said he’d had a “soap-bubble affair” with Mollie Katzen, the beautiful author of The Moosewood Cookbook and The Enchanted Broccoli Forest, and that he’d spent one night with Bolling Greene’s ex-wife, the singer and one-hit-wonder Penny Sakes (’77’s For Heaven’s … holds up pretty well). Also he’d loved a woman whose great-great-grandmother may have been the model for Courbet’s The Origin of the World. “I’m a bit of a starfucker,” he said. He’d also gone out with an artist who believed in “booksong,” the idea that one could develop a “mystic’s ear” for which book to read next. He’d dated a court reporter who was into bondage and discipline and some sadomasochism, he said, and from her he’d picked up a mild taste for that sort of thing. He’d grown equally comfortable as top or bottom. One of his favorite things was to be punched in the eye while coming, he said, but the court reporter didn’t always get the timing right—apt, he said, since she was also a not fully competent percussionist in a folk-rock band. Desire, Wade told me, wants nothing more than to destroy itself, as the Trammps had more or less maintained. He said he’d had a lot of girlfriends and had loved them all, but none as much as my mother. “She was a real connoisseur of coffee on book leaf,” he said, as if that were her defining trait. “Probably still is. She loved to stare at the stains and wonder over the words they’d landed on. She was deliberately careless with her cup. Your mother appreciates things, you know: blackbirds on white skies, raindrops on sidewalk gingko leaves. She would never explicitly point those things out, but …
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