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innerspace #11 - Gone For Good
by Carol Wade - caw39@columbia.eduI'm in an office building, a dismal, International Style-variety human warehouse of souls, chained to desks, spending all their hours subservient to the unseen machinations of the thing they call Industry. I'm dressed like a real dish; I can feel the tautness of the light, black wool skirt across my thighs, there's a weight casting a jaunty asymmetry across the crown of my head. Squinting through a Gilliamesque swirl of official detritus, a welter of shorn trees like a blizzard, I spy through the commotion a face. Drawn yet benevolent, a cool emanation radiates from the smoky tones of the head, torso, and rest, lost behind a corrugated steel desk, imitation woodgrain, square chrome legs, lats of glass and black steel vaulting in the window behind him...
Dark-rimmed eyes smothering like coals, idly buoyant and tremoring jester's fringe, oddly clad in super-straight white shirt and J Edgar tie he beckoned casually with a thin finger. His teeth are like tiny moons, dusky and pearly, the lips reedy and a violety crimson, twitching in the most beguiling smile you'd ever dare admit to having seen...he is my Father, my Dream Father...not my real father, but another, signaling to me for steady entrance into the quizzical realm, elongated like a shadow over time, but first you must locate the door, somehow...
Closer still, I see his face fully now, and his hand lowers, as he relaxes and regards me. I'd seen it before.
(A letter written via e-mail to Morphine, 15 March, 1997)
Hello smooth-rocking fellows...
I wanted to commend you. A fine, short shock to the system brought the rain back into my eyes...an evening of falling water and impending Spring, and a giant flame-orange lily. The only band with fresh flowers.
I'll cease being cryptic. I wanted to drivel, revel...Tower Records NYC, 3-14-97. I was the weird be-dredlock'd girl with the insane dance, and the evasive peripheral stare. And the lilies.
Autographs: strange relics. I told Mark, "sign very small, as if you were signing a check..." He slid me a cool trillion...but I opened my mouth and in a second, the mire of nervousness made some floss trip out of my lips...I hope he can forgive me. Maybe at Webster Hall, I will keep my trap shut. When staring at a dark star (in the purely astronomical sense) one cannot help but become unhinged.
Never such close fire has rolled off a space...lucky seven song hitting like a flash, electroflective lightning slow simplicity, distortive rage, refractive like...water. Rain. So much swimming, eyes closed.
Tour on.
I tried to reach out and touch my Dream Father, like I'd always want to when he and his caravan of associate purveyors of shaded, premonitory laughter, echo, dramatic encryption and The Voice of Your Unconscious, would come into town. But, with the chaos behind me suddenly falling calm, in a still, endlessly somnambulent moment, worldlessly operatic, he just sort of rose into the air, detaching from his workaday husk, the guise slumping in a mound on the office chair. I stood, alone amidst a ton of fallen papers, gazing into the translucent ceiling, where my Dream Father bade me farewell, billowing blouse of dark, rose-colored silk and outlaw-booted feet dangling from faded black clad legs.
I wouldn't have ever dared think to attempt a Morphine tour, although I had as much of a chance to see them in many places, as with any band I've also been thinking about in the past five years. To me, they epitomized the city of my birth, and whenever they'd show up, the presence they carried bespoke sorrow and intersticies and intimate knowledge of that which is most moist and intractable. In the Summer, they simmered. In the Winter, they howled. In the Spring, the damp grime of city rain turned to insolent nectar on the breeze, to be drank of by initiates of that which utters sultry syllables of timeless depth. In the Fall, they rocked with the rhythms of the heavens turning lazily on its axis, futures past and yesterdays stacked agains a cosmos-high wall, smoke shimmering as stars, all mundane hopes and aspirations gone up in lurid intraterrestrial blue-flame.
A man for all seasons, the passage of time for Mark Sandman had become trivial, traded in instead for frequent sorties across the arched blackness of space and orbits, the rasping coil of low-tuned string a massage to gravity to back the fuck up, because here comes death defiance. When I read the obituary in the 6 July 1999 New York Times, I stared at the picture, one I had gazed quite foolishly and adoringly into, admiring the contour of my alien patriarch's face, the charcoal eyes, the quixotic mouth. Laying on my back in a small, wood-paneled room in Oswego, NY (which was my college home for four years), I must have been to drunk, or experiencing some kind of very consuming panic attack, when my ace Philosophy friend, Jay, said, in his own Cheshire-cat-obscure manner, "Hey...come here. I've got something for you to listen to." I laid on the bed and closed my eyes, and Jay lit a candle and crept out. As the first strains of "Dawna" came to light, I was standing in a cornfield, the flattest place on Earth, in the middle of the night, my face and open mouth to the sky, my tongue outstretched to catch a firefly.
"Something tells me you can read my mind..."
"Buena", the first full song on Morphines' second album, "Cure For Pain" burst into the melancholy in my life ike coffee through a handkerchief, a musty seep grinding towards concenctricity, the gears of a machine escaped by those who dream of the eyes and the fringe. Mr. Sandman was gin-voiced singer, 2-string slide bass player, and main songwriter for the Boston band, Morphine, who died practically onstage, as it should be, in the beginning of this sweltering month of July. It was just minutes shy of Midnight, Rome time, Independence Day, but we all know he took his time getting to where he was going. He still is. I never looked at pictures of Mark Sandman and wondered how old he was. He seemed so old, time couldn't lick his python-boot if it had a thirteen-foot tongue. I've listened to most of the Morphine I've listened to completely sober. But drugged. Dragged. The music is like a cure-all for the afflictions that plague us all, here in these times, living three deep in cities and smelling, aging, moving, sweating, wanting...the thinking about the everyday, the then, the later, all turned geegaws somehow by the turn of The Sandman's dark horn and phrase. Like a perfectly arched black high-heeled shoe, he made agony become the subject of eloquence, elegance...his Bette Davis eyes toyed with the notions of gender, of strength in the face of unnavigable tsunamis of thirst and cravings, even if only for one more note, one more long, tremoring low note...
I stagger into my new tiny bedroom, tears runnelling down my face, and, despite the 90-degree temperature in my new Manhattan sixth-floor walk-up, my body has gone completely cold. "All Wrong" blares at an almost unbearable volume through the walls and doors, and I stoop before my CDs, bellowing. I reach towards my autographed copy of "Like Swimming". It was 1997, the band had just played a quick, six or seven-song set, mostly tunes from the then-new album. The subterranean scrutiny of his eyes examined me, sheets of rain freckling the windows Tower Records at Broadway and Third Street with a curtain of jewelry. More velvet memories; the full moon wavering over South Street Seaport, mingling with his subaquatic smile the first time I witnessed Morphine live in Summer 1996. The sway of Webster Hall in Early Spring, the dust and heated crackle of Pharaoh Sanders, followed by Morphine, at Central Park SummerStage. The throb of the Bowery Ballroom, where I saw them, I know now, for what would be the last time, this past Spring. It was another heady, dismal and bereftly stormy night. I stood outside with the bouncer for two hours and missed the first few songs of the set, without my ticket and lost from my friends and love, burning at the heart. I was clad in red and black, sights set on climbing a waterslide to the sky. Finally, I slipped into the fray and ordered my gin and tonic, and regarded the whole crowd undulating like corridors of pure desire, the wet outside beckoning...
"I crossed into a valley, a valley so dark, that when I looked back, I can't see where I began. I can't see my hands, I don't even know if my eyes are open. In the morning, I was by the sea, and I swam out, as far as I could swim...until I was too tired to swim anymore, and floated...and tried to get my strength back..."
Consumed buy love and the Mariana Trench and the water, shores of forgetfulness, the desire to forget, the endless report of waves eroding the sense and so-called quantity of time, "the shadows, half in the husky moonlight, and half-insane, just a sound in the night."
I hope that the Sandman's box gets to the heaven's just in time. Morosely, my co-worker Charles reminded me, lodged amids papers and books and White-out in my office chair, that if there is a Rock 'n' Roll Heaven, they've sure got one hell of a band. It's too soon to comprehend any of it, but I'll still keep an ear on the sky.
Carol A. Wade is a library clerk, freelance writer, and an artist. She gets really depressed when members of her favorite bands die. Cheer her up with a note of empathy, sent to: caw39@columbia.edu.
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