Yesterday on the later side of the evening, I was sitting in the back door listening to Billie Holiday. I had no booze in me and none in a glass. I had eaten a bunch of cheeseburger quesadillas I made for the kids and I was feeling like a statue. I needed to sit down with my art. The evening was half decent/ warm, I guess/ but it could have stormed. Things were sunny and gray at the same time. Sometimes the sky is both. Sometimes I’m both, too.
The Billie Holiday I know probably isn’t the same one you might. She was reborn larger than life when she died, as happens sometimes. That mystique of death is atrociously hard to navigate when you’re an entertainer, of course, because all of your influence flies away from you. Everything you were (or thought you were) goes sandlot pigeons. Gone in a scurried huff. Dusty flapping angel convulsion. But in 1959, when Holiday died in a New York City hospital bed of heart failure and cirrhosis and whatever else she might have been dealing with, she was nudged by unseen forces of a universe that could care less about patterns or faith or any of that jazz. Instead, Billie was rolled off of that mattress in the city and landed down on a fucking train that carried her out the window, down Broadway or wherever, and out over Jersey City smoking in the night, to track on and on and on.
Someday it will stop, I know.
Someday the world will by and large let her mist out and slip away. At that point her music- heard less and less- will wither and dry. Then no one will listen to it anymore. And don’t bitch about it because that’s how shit rolls out. Even this last big run/ from the hour of her organs failing until last night/ me and my bluetooth out back with the Spotify/ it was more than she probably ever thought possible. I don’t suppose she would know what to make of Starbucks. I don’t think Billie would have ever daydreamed that someday her ship would come in like it has. Out in the alleys behind the churning macchiato machines, she smokes her sad cigarettes by a neon’d puddle, begging with her eyes, purring Lucky Strike breath.
Hush now, child, and listen.
Hear her all around you?
Now you flash your Apple Pay.
To say I have struggled with love at times would be an abuse of comical restraint. Fact is, some people have what it takes to go the distance with another, to persevere with fine-tuned adulting and the kind of thought-out economy that it takes to captain the old tall ship of togetherness. Other people, like me, we seem to have deficiencies. Blind spots on the mental windshield that keep me hitting hard curbs/ driving through liquor store windows. I can’t ever get it all just right. Love, it seems to me, was designed to enchant me/ intoxicate me/ and then pull off the hood. Here I am then, check me out. I’m standing dazed in some vacant lot. Who dropped me off here? Is that my wallet on the ground by a clump of pitbull shit? Where am I?
Then along comes a person. And along comes a situation in the kitchen or the yard or driving down the road towards Walmart or whatever. I don’t know. What is this? I get rattled. What are you saying?, I say. Why is it me all the time?
This is not to say that I haven’t been partnered with some humdingers either, don’t get me wrong. The notion I’m peddling here isn’t this simple one that explains everything by me full-on confessing to being some kind of monster, because frankly that is probably not the truth. I can’t say for absolute certainty, but I’ve come far enough to know that if I was: I’d walk into the ocean and never walk out. This complicates things because if I can’t take all the blame for love gone south then I might need some other people to assume some as well, you know? Or, at the very least, I might need to be able to come to terms with the idea that everything that happened… it’s just water under the bridge now. Let it go. Forgive and forget.
Take a knee.
Take a fucking knee, fool.
Billie Holiday wrote some of her songs. She also co-wrote a bunch more. And many others she sang, they were written by other people altogether. The problem with that though is the fact that not only was Billie always able to sing all of the songs as if she wrote them herself, but she also was able to wear the songs like some musky nightclub mink shawl that was organically attached to her skin with stitches made of soul. I know that is one of the worst sentences ever written, too, but try to hang with me here. Because I am trying like hell to get to the bottom of this thing and I don’t even know where to begin.
Do you?
It’s tough, isn’t it?
Like you, I have spent so much time listening to singers sing songs in this life. I have heard most of the so-called greats. I have allowed myself the vulnerable option of believing a singer when it’s just me and them. Some hit me hard. Others, not so much. Trying to have faith in the voice of another human being is a long shot to start with. Especially for me, at 53, white guy dad bod life of privilege blah, blah, blah. How the fuck do I know at this point what I was right about and where I was wrong when it comes to vocal stylings?
There is no end to the confusion but there is also little to no credence to anything I deem as the way it is when it comes to all this. I believed Shane MacGowan to the core of my gut. But guess what? I didn’t believe Tom Waits. At all. Ever. I still don’t. I’m sorry but there’s something missing/ something off/ something very fucking fishy about his whole thing. Don’t tell me I’m wrong about that either! I already know I’m wrong about it! That’s my whole point here, Einstein. I’m a ragingly unqualified judge of this lovely universe sighing. I’m an agent of madness in this town. When it comes to love or music or making money, man, I’m Edgar Allan Poe on his last election day. Down in the gutter, inebriated. Or poisoned. Drifting in and out of consciousness/ back and forth across the foggy bridge between right and wrong/ between good and evil/ between loved and loving.
Do you understand any of this? Does me saying this strike some nerve in you that lights a match in the eternal darkness? Or are you raising an eyebrow, still hung up on the Tom Waits thing?
I first heard Billie Holiday when I was in the womb. My mother would play her records softly, delicately placing the needle down on the album so that the first sounds I’d hear in my night nest just inches away wouldn’t be the hiss and scratch of a careless spinner. I remember, so distinctly, my mom chomping on carrot sticks and onion dip while I swam in her sea, the music washing over me first. And then that voice. That uncertain deeply moving voice that sounded like Baltimore night ships. Like Mississippi morning hogs. Like Carolina road dust. Like Philadelphia Sundays, wintery and pale, with two fingers of flu.
I heard the voice and then I saw the woman. I saw what I saw. There in the darkness of the inside of my mother’s life, I watched as Billie emerged from the shadows. She was wearing a leopard coat and holding a grocery bag with a baguette poking out of it and a bottle of red wine. She had a warm hat on her head although I can’t recall what kind. I was pre-birth, a few weeks out, but now I was encountering something. Sounds and visions. Billie was warm, smiling as she rounded a corner of ribs like it was 7th Avenue. Snowflakes were falling softly and I remember the tender sounds of her singing as she stopped when she saw me, held me tight with her eyes.
“Dreaming
I was only dreaming
I wake and I find you
Asleep in the deep
Of my heart, dear
“Darling, I hope that my dream
Never haunted you
My heart is telling you
How much I wanted you
Gloomy Sunday.”
The sound of the traffic moving by was my mother’s blood. Taxis honking, men yelling. Hot peanuts! Daily News! I found myself staring calmly into the eyes of a woman walking home with groceries. A lady singing to me in the canyons of such flesh and bone. I felt her reach down and touch the side of my face. My little white boy face. She didn’t mind. She did not care. She grazed my cheek and her fingers were merciful and smelled like stale cigarettes. Afternoon tap rooms streaked with fallen girders of light from the sky. Her touch was frail sunshine. She war-painted me with honeyed jazz.
When I was being born, she reappeared once more.
She walked behind me as I moved through the Holland Tunnel.
The ceiling was dripping and there were no trucks or cars.
I was scared. Anyone would be. But I felt her back there. I felt her palm on my shoulder, the bird skeleton sadness. It’s OK now, I recall her saying. You almost there and you are doing just fine.
I walked that tunnel, seemed like forever, until the dot became a circle and the circle became a door. At the illuminated end, she turned back, singing now.
“I’ll be seeing you
In all the old familiar places.”
I stood shaking as she left me.
“That this heart of mine embraces
All day through.”
Her voice trailing slowly, I watched her now, retreating back to where we’d once both been. I felt some grand feeling of closeness with her then, as if we’d both always been together in dark spaces, wandering, letting one go off to live a life, then meeting one another again, over and over, someday, back down in the subterranean tunnels beneath my mother’s haunted Christmas streets.
“In that small cafe
The park across the way
The children’s carousel
The chestnut trees
The wishing well.”
I began to weep.
“I’ll be seeing you
In every lovely summer’s day
In everything that’s light and gay
I’ll always think of you that way.”
Her last line barely audible, I turned and shuffled forward. Into the light.
Into this world.
Hello.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
