It Might Get Messy

So. Every day now, I wake up and ask myself if I feel like I’m dying. And lately, the answer has been a consistent, in fact insistent, “no”. Which, and I know how odd this sounds, is a bit difficult for me to deal with. But before we go there, we have to touch base with the building blocks that got me this far down the unpaved sand track into the pine woods of life.

By the time I got to college, I’d learned that BB King was back on the road playing 300 or more shows a year. Which meant plenty of opportunities to see him in exchange for transit cost to Manhattan. There was one night he brought “BB King’s Blues Barn”, a traveling show of underexposed and less business-savvy musicians, to Lincoln Center. I think that night my esteemed sports-writer friend Brian H. had defaulted (again) to the Rutgers Targum comp tickets. That was the first time I ever saw do-it-all Texas blues guy Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown. He played guitar. He played saxophone. He played fiddle. And then he sat down and BB came back on.

But that wasn’t the first thing that popped into my brain when I read about King’s death. That would be the night Frank Jank and I fought our way in to the Wolman Skating Rink in Central Park, gorgeous evening, and King rocked the place. About 20 minutes ago I got Frank’s reminder email. Which also reminded me that that might have been the night I discovered Garland Jeffries, who warmed up the crowd for King (actually, neither Jank nor I are certain about the show that introduced us to Jeffries.  Frank thinks it might have been with Bonnie Raitt, I suspect it could’ve been J. Geils. My gut feeling is that it was indeed King. Forgive me for this slip in my memory. Whoever the headliner was, Jeffries played a great set. 40 minutes of really creative stuff, and I was hooked. Eventually acquired everything he had out on vinyl. Then, switching to CDs, could find nearly nothing by him until 5 or 6 years ago in Montreal, where the music shop had European releases that pretty much covered his material. A quick check on Amazon just now documents that Jeffries hasn’t stopped working in the interim, and now has tons of stuff available.

But BB King, of course, was…no, IS—so many people learned so much from him and his music that his death just means we all have to keep that ringing guitar tone in our minds and, like a character in a William Gibson novel, King will be right there, alive and playing—THE Man. 

Of course, King is so familiar to us pasty white people that we tend to forget he started out in the segregated South. One story comes to mind. After taking a few year’s break from long-range touring, King started a national tour in San Francisco in the 60s. On the way into town, the limo passed the front door of a theater where a line of long-haired, marijuana-smoking white kids snaked into the street and around the block. “Wow” King said to his manager. “Who’s playing THAT show? Who are they waiting for?” Manager got a chuckle. “They’re waiting for YOU. This is the venue!” King called “bullshit” on his manager, but did indeed play to a packed house of polite, appreciative, knowledgeable blues fans.

King changed more than music—he changed PEOPLE. And always for the better. And I think he meant so much to so many that his death, miserable as it is for those of us he’s left behind here, won’t matter one bit. His music and his life will march on, right along with us, as long as human beings inhabit this corner of the mystery universe.

Which brings us right back to my own issues with life and death. Here’s the thing. It took quite an investment of intellect, emotion, and logistics to get things teed up to where I felt I could die with a clean conscience. And it is necessary to continue to make those investments as long as I am alive. Keeping such intense psychological and emotional consequences alive and kicking requires enormous personal and professional resources. And requires that I revisit the bad things along with the good on the check sheet in my brain, with all that implies. And I must project the status of my portfolios of reading, writing, music making, drawing, painting, photographing. The commitment needed to recognize and appropriate high-value work from among the zillions of papers, books, and music CDs is difficult and challenging. But I’m afraid it’s necessary as a means to come to at least partial closure on important aspects of my pre-cancer life.

I transitioned my good clients to the best talent in the company, people who could mop the floor with my comparative skills. I got my family prepped as best I could, doing all the interlocking bits of financial and physical and personal foundations that tie us all together. I tried to do the same bridge-building with as many friends and colleagues as possible, keeping everyone as plugged-in as I could. I consulted repeatedly with my doctors, working to get each individual’s perspective on the range of medical issues, from the horrendous pounding of the treatments to when I should expect to die, and what dying would entail. In brief, I had to sort out a boatload of Leggos to build the conditions that would make it OK for me to step off this conveyor and into oblivion. It was physically and mentally very hard for me to let go.  And it was physically and emotionally very difficult and exhausting to identify and compile the physical scraps of my life—partially finished book manuscripts, pen-and-ink drawings, music and musical instruments. Hard and difficult work.

And then I DIDN’T DIE. Medical team had me pegged to cash out in late autumn, with maybe a stretch outcome over the winter. And here I am now, breathing clearer and stronger than I have in years, apparently unimpeded by cancer. The doctors mapped for me the physiological breakdowns and signs and symptoms I should expect as the last of the chemotherapy treatments was administered and I was on my own, sharing my body and mind with another being. That doppelganger with whom I share my corpus only operates in one direction: along a difficult footpath toward decline and death. Shockingly, to me and my doctors, every day I live now feels stronger, less sick, more “normal” than my life has been in the 4+ years I’ve been dealing with this. Of course, one day more-or-less soon, the lesions in my lungs and chest cavity will wake up and kick the vector of my life into the other direction—away from life and back to the rocky path of death. But until my body struggles along that path, I’m taking advantage of the circumstances to cram as much life as I can into every moment I’m alive and feeling mysteriously, impossibly, good and getting better. 

So I thank all of you from the deepest, most intense, aspect of my heart. I am absolutely certain that without you guys thinking about me, praying for intercession with the God you worship, without your visits, without your wonderful commitment to our friendships, I would indeed be dead right now.

You’ve done your part—added substantive time to the end of my life. Now it’s up to me to use that time creatively, positively, in endeavors worthy of your love and friendship. Also up to me to make certain, as best I can (perhaps by example), that I use ‘em while I got ‘em, because I know from experience that they are NOT forever. Go forth, my friends, to hone your sense of humor, your intellectual breadth and depth, your strength and clarity of thought, your commitment to building a better world, indeed a better universe. I love you all. I am deeply in your debt!