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Mmmm?
I talked to Keith Richards on the phone today.
Ben was looking at his iPhone. Either he didn’t hear her or her incredibly
interesting lead-in that any normal cool person in the world would have cared
about had been upstaged.
Lindsay just texted me! he exclaimed, She’s crying!
Sam sat alone in the cell phone waiting lot and listened to Happy by the Rolling
Stones on her iPod plugged into the iPod jack. It was her third- or fourth-favourite
Rolling Stones song; she loved it in the same way she loved Don’t Let Me Down by
the Beatles: as an unapologetic ode to co-dependence. She would listen to either or
both of them when she wanted to feel validated in her belief that she was nothing if
not conjoined to the idea of a man who existed in her head.
This Keith thing wasn’t wasted on her. She loved that sixties rock and roll, it made
her feel like she could do things. The Beatles were as big as the day, and the Rolling
Stones were like the night. Gimme Shelter, in particular, was like night. Every song
by either band corresponded to a moment or memory from her life, even if that
memory was just of a time she listened to the song and felt motivated by it. Those
songs were also those moments; they were the two together. She was the Jude in Hey Jude.
Amazed and in awe of the world maybe being the right place after all, in awe of the
right thing happening to the right person, in awe of her own finally being that right
person, she cranked the volume and played Happy a second time, but it stopped
working. All the songs had stopped working about three months ago, but then Keith
Richards called and it came back for that first listen, she’d had it again only once
but while she had it she thought she’d have it back forever, but she was wrong. She’d
shifted. These men were nothing like her. They got rich and famous early and never
worked a hard day s night in their lives. The words were wrong.
She thought the lyric went Always burn a hole in my pants, not Always burned a
hole in my pants, and she hadn’t realized it connected to the preceding lyric, Never
kept a dollar past sunset. Sam had never really kept a dollar past sunset either, but
she had so many less dollars it wasn’t even worth comparing, it made her feel sick,
and she wanted it all to go back to the way it was before, before she’d Googled the
lyrics to Happy, when she thought he always burned the hole in his pants with his
cigarette, being scrappy and uncoordinated now that she would have related to!
Next he sang: Didn’t want to get me no trade, Never want to be like Papa, workin’
for the boss every night and day, and she was annoyed by the phrasing of get me
no trade. Why did he talk like that? He was not a poor Southern American, it was
disingenuous. And how patronizing, The last thing I need is the guitar player of the
Rolling Stones judging me for having a trade and a boss. How dare Keith Richards
sing songs like this mean crap when he couldn’t have known she had no other option?
Did he see it as weakness in others, all us weak-willed people lacking the chops
and sturdiness it takes to become the guitar player of the Rolling Stones?
And then he said he never got a lift out of Lear jets and you’re supposed to feel
proud of him because he didn’t buy into the glitz and glamour of being the guitar
player from the Rolling Stones. But maybe that was genuine and she could like it.
Everyone wants everyone else to be so proud of them. For loving the park, for not
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