whisperback

I can’t explain it.

It’s one of the things I keep promising myself never to say – there isn’t much point in accepting that you’re a poet, however unorthodox, and then claiming you can’t find the words for something. But one moment I was standing in the back room at Toto’s, desperately trying to channel Jim Morrison for more reasons than one. The next minute I was gripping the mike like the handlebar of a rollercoaster, hanging on for dear life as I was overpowered by my own voice, flung along into the heart of somewhere desperate and far, far below – or above, I can’t remember for certain – the place I usually lived in.

Poet. Unorthodox. Hanging on for dear life. That’s a pretty comprehensive bit, up there. That’s my life in a nutshell.

Sometimes I can’t stop from referring to myself in the third person. It’s a curious habit of mine. It’s not consistent, either. How much easier I would have made it for myself if I could tell the first half of a story that may or may not be true as: Daniel was born, his father left his home when he was six years old, he was brought up by his mother, he loved a man twenty years older than him instead of keeping his head down and being worthy of his community scholarship to New York University, he was consequently disowned and disgraced, he had to leave school and work like a slave in a perfectly deplorable MNC for three years before he made it big. That’s a simple story with a happy ending. I have made it big, after all. Bigger than my expectations, or even Brian’s. (Jan’s the real romantic among us. She’s the one who laughed at our silly dreams of living on clouds, but she believed in it the most. If it wasn’t for her, none of us would be here.)

Alternately I could tell that story in the first person, and then break off into talking about a strange man, no relation to myself, who lives in an all-white palace that has no fixed address, lingering in twilight and instability. The prince of No Man’s Land. Jan once mocked me like that. “Go ahead,” she said in one of her tempers, “Think you’re a prince in exile all you like.” Can one be banished from banishment?

But of course, there’s no way to draw a distinguishing line between my stories. I shuttle back and forth between them. It would be so easy, if only Daniel remained confined to his slightly screwed-up but on the whole educative and engaging past. What an innocent Daniel would have been. But I’m not an absolutist. Neither is Daniel. Sometimes I think I’m in one of the cosmic trial rooms of the universe, faced with mirrors on both sides of me, looking into an endless array of Daniels. Daniel Daniel Daniel Daniel Daniel. The lions in their den are no match for your armies, Daniel, Daniel, it’s just as well.

Sometimes I’m amazed at how endlessly fascinated I am with myself.

I began that night at Toto’s Rock Wednesday. Toto’s is a nice but weedy place. I’m told Lou Reed used to visit it once upon a time. (It seems like it’s destined to be a once-upon-a-time place. A good place for a story to start. In a place where Arch used to play before they made it big, Daniel Newman stood before an indifferent crowd made in equal parts of the very old and the very young, and lost his head.

I’ve never wholly got it back after that. I don’t even remember what the song was. I do remember we had a hopeful teenage set list – a bit of everyone’s favourite things. We were singing Nirvana, whose posters Brian’s parents tore down from his room because they radiated negative energy. I remember the kids in front of us went absolutely stir-crazy moshing on cue as I dropped the one-word chorus of “Lithium”. Very potent. We were putting a new spin on Jan’s old favourites, the Ramones, who I’ve frankly never liked a whole lot. Frederica Ramirez – I wonder what she’s doing these days – contributed her idea for a weird medley of the Cranberries and The Pixies, which actually worked, to the best of my recollection. And for me, Brian added, very kindly, spruced-up versions of two old Doors’ covers. I think I’ve always wanted to be Jim Morrison, in a way - to choose sides and be done with it, instead of this constant classical conflict between the forces of Dionysus and Apollo, passion and reason. It hasn’t worked so far, but I have survived my heart, my bathtub, and my twenty-seventh birthday.

No applause has ever sounded sweeter to my ears than the cheers we got after we wrapped up that set. We really made the old junkies and the weird punk kids sit up.

That was an unusually mild December by New York standards. I was twenty years old and there were all kinds of things wrong with me. I was poor, I was bored, I was listless. The turret of my dreams was struggling in its restraints; the column of my faith was in danger of crumbling. The tree of my talent was beginning to flower. I was, in one indelicate word, horny. Strange but true: I’ve never been quite as reckless, or, I must admit, eager, to hook up with random men as I was during those months Jan and I lived together. As I have said, I was twenty, and there was nothing to stop me – there was no cause to doubt myself or the other boys. It was cathartic; it made me feel connected to the world I breathed and ate and slept and slaved in. And it was fun.

Maybe. Maybe it was just the frustration about the other things that sometimes made me feel that I would burn up into nothing, like a particularly unlucky crisp tossed out of the cauldrons of my personal Hades, McDonalds Incorporated. It used to give Jan migraine, the oil and the smell of it all. No wonder we’re both thin as straws in the few photos that exist of us in that time.

Perhaps if I’d finished college at twenty-one, I’d have learnt to digress less.

Our hosts served excellent Chinese food, a fact I could never afford to confirm until that Wednesday night in December. Toto, who consisted of Tom, a fat aged hippie, and Toni, a wiry black woman with the most beautiful hair I’ve ever seen, came in person to offer us dinner on the house, along with the usual measly amount Brian managed to extract out of them. Tom, who took especial pleasure in identifying himself to other people as one of the topless curly-haired youth near the stage in the footage of the immortal Jimi Hendrix show at Woodstock ’69, provided me the pleasure of shaking his hand. Somberly, he told me that I reminded him of Joe Cocker. I’d never heard of Joe Cocker and didn’t particularly want to be identified with him (now I do less than ever) but on my adrenalin high, it felt good, being compared to a rock star, any rock star. Still, it was a bare scratch on the surface of my hypersensitive consciousness, bursting with the brilliant, sparkling awareness that I had sung. I, Daniel Newman, had sung in public. I had let go of the last thing that connected me to Mrs. Kadison’s dusty little stairwell, where I had spent my boyhood singing old, sweet, utterly useless songs for Miriam’s benefit. It was over, it was over, it was brilliant. Nothing could compare to the sweat and heat and the utter ecstasy of it all. What a heady combination of the things I love – attention, music and freedom. How could I have ever wanted to conceal this part of myself?

I only said that I was curious, Leonard Cohen had crooned into my sixteen-year old ears through borrowed headphones. I never said that I was brave. Until I left home, I always thought that was a good way of describing me. A good way to be, perhaps. And then I turned my principle on its head. Twenty and headlining a fledgling rock outfit called, of all things, Project Dare, there was nothing to it but to be brave. Life was a series of courageous things.

Miriam was the furthest thing from my mind,that night. I never expected to find myself picking up the phone and calling her, years later, simply to hear her distant hellos hurled at me down the line. I think she knew it was me. I said I wanted to hear her voice. I didn’t want to want it, but I did. Another place where the lines are a little blurred. When I was eighteen I stood on the street outside my home and thought I would never want to have anything to do with her again. I guess I’m getting on in years. Martin always said that the older he got, the more he found himself leaning towards tradition and security. Like every other younger person in the room I didn’t want to believe that I would be like that. But the older I get, the more I find myself living in the past and, to a lesser extent, the future. I’ve been thinking of going back and trying to talk Miriam around, and to make my peace with Ben. Perhaps it means I’ve gotten over my anger. Perhaps a part of me never was angry.

It’s another kind of courage altogether.