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| Photo by Gerard Malanga |
My Buddy
He would call me late in the night from somewhere on the road, a
ghost town in Texas, a rest stop near Pittsburgh, or from Santa Fe, where he
was parked in the desert, listening to the coyotes howling. But most often he
would call from his place in Kentucky, on a cold, still night, when one could
hear the stars breathing. Just a late-night phone call out of a blue, as
startling as a canvas by Yves Klein; a blue to get lost in, a blue that might
lead anywhere. I’d happily awake, stir up some Nescafé and we’d talk about
anything. About the emeralds of Cortez, or the white crosses in Flanders
Fields, about our kids, or the history of the Kentucky Derby. But mostly we talked
about writers and their books. Latin writers. Rudy Wurlitzer. Nabokov. Bruno
Schulz.
“Gogol was Ukrainian,” he once said, seemingly out of nowhere.
Only not just any nowhere, but a sliver of a many-faceted nowhere that, when
lifted in a certain light, became a somewhere. I’d pick up the thread, and we’d
improvise into dawn, like two beat-up tenor saxophones, exchanging riffs.
He sent a message from the mountains of Bolivia, where Mateo Gil
was shooting “Blackthorn.” The air was thin up there in the Andes, but he
navigated it fine, outlasting, and surely outriding, the younger fellows,
saddling up no fewer than five different horses. He said that he would bring me
back a serape, a black one with rust-colored stripes. He sang in those
mountains by a bonfire, old songs written by broken men in love with their own
vanishing nature. Wrapped in blankets, he slept under the stars, adrift on
Magellanic Clouds.
Sam liked being on the move. He’d throw a fishing rod or an old
acoustic guitar in the back seat of his truck, maybe take a dog, but for sure a
notebook, and a pen, and a pile of books. He liked packing up and leaving just
like that, going west. He liked getting a role that would take him somewhere he
really didn’t want to be, but where he would wind up taking in its strangeness;
lonely fodder for future work.
In the winter of 2012, we met up in Dublin, where he received an
Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Trinity College. He was often embarrassed by
accolades but embraced this one, coming from the same institution where Samuel
Beckett walked and studied. He loved Beckett, and had a few pieces of writing,
in Beckett’s own hand, framed in the kitchen, along with pictures of his kids.
That day, we saw the typewriter of John Millington Synge and James Joyce’s
spectacles, and, in the night, we joined musicians at Sam’s favorite local pub,
the Cobblestone, on the other side of the river. As we playfully staggered
across the bridge, he recited reams of Beckett off the top of his head.
Sam promised me that one day he’d show me the landscape of the
Southwest, for though well-travelled, I’d not seen much of our own country. But
Sam was dealt a whole other hand, stricken with a debilitating affliction. He
eventually stopped picking up and leaving. From then on, I visited him, and we
read and talked, but mostly we worked. Laboring over his last manuscript, he
courageously summoned a reservoir of mental stamina, facing each challenge that
fate apportioned him. His hand, with a crescent moon tattooed between his thumb
and forefinger, rested on the table before him. The tattoo was a souvenir from
our younger days, mine a lightning bolt on the left knee.
Going over a passage describing the Western landscape, he suddenly
looked up and said, “I’m sorry I can’t take you there.” I just smiled, for
somehow he had already done just that. Without a word, eyes closed, we tramped
through the American desert that rolled out a carpet of many colors—saffron
dust, then russet, even the color of green glass, golden greens, and then, suddenly,
an almost inhuman blue. Blue sand, I said, filled with wonder. Blue everything,
he said, and the songs we sang had a color of their own.
We had our routine: Awake. Prepare for the day. Have coffee, a
little grub. Set to work, writing. Then a break, outside, to sit in the
Adirondack chairs and look at the land. We didn’t have to talk then, and that
is real friendship. Never uncomfortable with silence, which, in its welcome
form, is yet an extension of conversation. We knew each other for such a long time.
Our ways could not be defined or dismissed with a few words describing a
careless youth. We were friends; good or bad, we were just ourselves. The
passing of time did nothing but strengthen that. Challenges escalated, but we
kept going and he finished his work on the manuscript. It was sitting on the
table. Nothing was left unsaid. When I departed, Sam was reading Proust.
Long, slow days passed. It was a Kentucky evening filled with the
darting light of fireflies, and the sound of the crickets and choruses of
bullfrogs. Sam walked to his bed and lay down and went to sleep, a stoic, noble
sleep. A sleep that led to an unwitnessed moment, as love surrounded him and breathed
the same air. The rain fell when he took his last breath, quietly, just as he
would have wished. Sam was a private man. I know something of such men. You
have to let them dictate how things go, even to the end. The rain fell,
obscuring tears. His children, Jesse, Walker, and Hannah, said goodbye to their
father. His sisters Roxanne and Sandy said goodbye to their brother.
I was far away, standing in the rain before the sleeping lion of
Lucerne, a colossal, noble, stoic lion carved from the rock of a low cliff. The
rain fell, obscuring tears. I knew that I would see Sam again somewhere in the
landscape of dream, but at that moment I imagined I was back in Kentucky, with
the rolling fields and the creek that widens into a small river. I pictured
Sam’s books lining the shelves, his boots lined against the wall, beneath the
window where he would watch the horses grazing by the wooden fence. I pictured
myself sitting at the kitchen table, reaching for that tattooed hand.
A long time ago, Sam sent me a letter. A long one, where he told
me of a dream that he had hoped would never end. “He dreams of horses,” I told
the lion. “Fix it for him, will you? Have Big Red waiting for him, a true
champion. He won’t need a saddle, he won’t need anything.” I headed to the
French border, a crescent moon rising in the black sky. I said goodbye to my
buddy, calling to him, in the dead of night.
(published in the New Yorker)
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/my-buddy-sam-shepard
Sam
Shepard (November 1943 – July 2017)
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| (Sam's) Kitchen window - photo by Patti Smith © 2019 'Year of the Monkey' |
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© 2017 Sam Shepard 'The One Inside'
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| Photo by Patti Smith (back of jacket 'The One Inside') |
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| (Sam's) Adirondack chairs - photo by Patti Smith © 2019 'Year of the Monkey' |
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| Photo by David Gahr |
“The cowpoke in M Train is really Sam Shepard
and Sam and I talk about writing all of the time. I had this dream about him
and then I just decided to see if I could sit day after day writin’ about
nothing, no plot or anything, you know, just writin’, to see what happened.” (2017)
Ballad of a Bad Boy
Oh I was bad
didn’t do what I should
mama catch me with a lickin’
and tell me to be good
when I was bad twice times
she showed me in a hole
and cut off all my fingers
and laid them in a finger bowl
My mama killed me
my papa grieved for me
my little sister Annalea
wept under the almond tree
Oh I loved a car, car
and when I was feelin’ sad
I lay down on my daddy’s Ford
and I’d feel good
and you know that I got bad
robbed hubcaps from the men
and sold them to the women
and stole them back again
and I got me a car
a Hudson Hornet car
and rolled the pretty ladies
and often went too far
I went to Chicago
I went to Kalamazoo
I went to Nashville
the highways I flew
I went to Salinas
I rode to the sea
and the people all scolded
and pointed to me
they said there’s a bad boy
I was so bad boy
they gathered their daughters
I heard what they said
steer away from him, honey
‘cause that boy is bad
and tho’ he’s hung good
and flashes that loot
don’t slide by his side
he rides a wrong route
‘cause he’s a bad boy
I was so bad boy
my mama killed me
my papa grieved for me
my little sister Annalea
wept under the almond tree
And I wept on a stock car
I captured the junkyards
and I sped thu the canyons
though I never went far
from the wreckers mechanics
I worshipped these men
but they laughed at me, man
they called me mama’s boy
mama mama mama mama
Monday at midnight
Tuesday at two
drunk on tequila
thinking of you, ma
I drove my car on, ma
wrecking cars was my art
I held a picture of you, ma
close to my heart
I rode closed windows
it was ninety degrees
the crowd it was screaming
it was screaming for me
they said I was nonsense
true diver chicken driver
no sense
but I couldn’t hear them
I couldn’t see
fenders hot as angels
blazed inside me
I sped on raged in steam heat
I cracked up and rolled at your feet
I rose in flames and rolled in a pit
where you caught me with a tire iron
and covered me in shit
and I coulda got up
but the crowd it screamed no
that boy is evil
too bad for parole
so bad his ma cut off all his fingers
and laid ‘em in a finger bowl
His mama killed him
his papa grieved for him
his little sister Annalea
wept under the almond tree
Oh I was bad
didn’t do what I should
mama catch me with a lickin’
and she tell me
You be good
- for Sam Shepard
[from FIRST SONGS AND PERFORMANCE PIECES
published in Collected Lyrics 1970-2015]
http://aprilfoolsdreamoflife.blogspot.ie/2014/08/ghost-dance.html
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| Photo by Judy Linn |
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| - photo by Patti Smith © 2019 'Year of the Monkey' |
More about Patti and Sam in 2017 in her book 'Year of the Monkey'
http://aprilfoolsdreamoflife.blogspot.com/p/year-of-dream-inn.html
