The Cruelest Month

To my mind, Tuesday is the worst day of the week.

On Monday, your body is still recovering from whatever flavor of debauchery you chose to overindulge in Friday night,
Saturday and Sunday; hence, your body never really wakes up to the fact that it's back at work, doing the usual bump-and-grind. By Tuesday, though, body and mind have not only recovered enough from the weekend to realize that the weekend has, in fact, ended, but that the next weekend is little more than a speck on the horizon, no more than a pinpoint of light at the end of an seemingly interminable tunnel.

I feel the same way about April. For the first quarter of the year, a slight hangover from the holidays, in concert with the numbness of winter, prevails. By April, though, the holidays have worn off, there's enough of a hint of warmth in the air to fool you into thinking that winter is finally, completely, entirely over (ha), and the passage of time becomes alarmingly apparent: "What the fuck do you mean it's fucking April al-fucking-ready?"

April is a lot of things--most of them bad.

It's when one day warms up to 70, only to drop to 40 the next day (as it did the morning of the day I'm writing this). It's when when the trees begin to bud and the green grass tries to force its way through the brown (and as dry as this past winter was, there's plenty of brown to go around). It's when what's left of the "too, too sallied" mounds snow at the edges of parking lots have melted, leaving the residue of dark gray behind as a reminder of the least pleasant memories of months--not days or merely weeks, but months--now past.

April is the month that my own personal childhood cat--a medium-sized gray girl forever known as "Gray Cat" because she was certified by a competent veteranarian as a male and named "Smokey Junior" (after Smokey, a handsome Russian Blue and the finest rat catcher I've ever known, though I wish he hadn't been so proficient because he loved bringing, er, "trophies" home to show his appreciation and affection for us) until she went into heat and the testicles the vet thought she'd seen turned out to be tiny twin mirages--finally had to be put to sleep.

Gray Cat lived to be 20--an amazing span of time for a feline, to be sure, spanning from elementary school through college and into my so-called "adult" life. And most of that 20 years was spent in remarkably good health, except for a bout with a burst blood vessel in her left ear, which looked more like a potato chip than an ear for her remaining years.

But seven years ago (was it really that long ago? Damn...) in the middle of April, she started having trouble walking, then started staggering, then...you know where this is going, don't you? Gray Cat lived with Mom after I moved out of the house (since Mom and my brother were home more than I was and could take better care of her), and one April day Mom called me at work to say that she'd made "the appointment" with the vet--Gray Cat had tipped over over in the litter pan and couldn't stand back up again. The time had come.

As "work" at that point was a evil publishing company in one of Chicago's northern suburbs, getting to Mom's in time to go with Gray Cat seemed an impossibility shy of a sudden genetic mutation that would cause arms to fall off and allow wings to grow in their place.

But then, a coworker volunteered to drive me down to Mom's (said coworker had endured a similar situation with her beloved dog and felt I should be there for he old girl) and our department head, a pet owner herself, gave her blessing.

I made it.

When I came into the living room, Gray Cat rose with effort and tried to cross the couch to come to me one last time. I caught her before she fell, held her against my chest and whispered over and over that it was all right, everything was all right. I held her the whole way to the vet, through the procedure (tearfully apologizing to her the whole time for having to do what had to be done) and all the way back to Mom's house, where she was laid to rest in the backyard and had a yellow rose bush planted over the spot--a yellow rose bush that blooms every spring, sometimes even in April.

(Side note: Yes, she should have had a more formal, more fitting name than "Gray Cat," but I freely admit to having no talent whatsoever for naming pets: our first family dog, a female black lab, was, I'm told, named "Hey, You!" because I continually yelled this at the poor animal and each time I did, she came to me. So the name stuck. Poor old pup. Good thing Lottie and Ms. Christopher were already named when they came to me.)

April is when baseball season begins in earnest. And when the pain begins in Chicago.

April is when Christ was crucified. (Okay, he came back from the dead a couple of days later, but still...)

And this April will be the first full month of the current war in Iraq. And yes, I think it'll last through the month, making April more literally cruel than usual, and it may last for many months to come.

I don't suppose we could just skip April altogether and head straight into May, could we?

Just Killing Time

I know my feet are still there. I can see them from all the way up here--ridiculous boats launching out of the ends of improbably long, skinny legs. Tonight they wear faux bowling shoes, the right of which has a gouge in it left over from a New Year's Eve party spent shuttling up and down steep concrete steps between a crowded, frosty basement where bands were to play and a dark, muddy rectangle of yard where a crowd five deep surrounds a defenseless keg and the chain-link fence is lined with drunken young men taking a group whiz.

I know my feet are still there. I can see them from way up here. I just can't feel them.

My own fault, really. I could have gone straight home from work, surfing the serpentine Brown Line past projects soon to be razed and stations soon to be rehabbed to my stop, then walked the few blocks to the apartment formerly known as "La Casa del Terror," now just called "that place where I sometimes sleep." Could have stopped by my local Pallid Poultry for a gallon of skim milk, a pint of Ben & Jerry's Mint Chocolate Cookie and a gander at the recently hired cute alternachick behind the counter. Could have been warm by now.

But no. Hardly ever go straight home anymore. Too quiet there. Too much time to do nothing but think. Usually wander around downtown shops to kill time, occupy mind. Sometimes Borders. Sometimes Virgin Megastore. Tonight, I went local. Laurie's Planet of Sound. Cool little record shop in Lincoln Square, with an eclectic music selection, from Dido to Dennis Wilson to the Damned. Also sells DVDs (that copy of Can't Stop the Music still calls to me) and obscure videos (the idea of watching Jackie Gleason take LSD in Skidoo appeals to me; the idea of watching Carol Channing seduce Frankie Avalon does not). Tonight, I hit their used video section, buy a couple cheap horror films: The Valley of Gwangi (a Ray Harryhausen-animated T-Rex stomps Mexico) and Island of Terror (Peter Cushing vs. tentacled creatures that suck your bones out). The collection grows. Spreads. Makes the time at home less quiet.

Could also just walk home from here rather than waiting for the notoriously slow Montrose bus. Done it before. Not that far. "Just a good stretch of the legs," as both John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara say in The Quiet Man. (Mmmmm...Maureen O'Hara...) Instead, I stare east. Then straight ahead, playing the game of counting the number of drivers talking on cell phones. (Once saw a driver on a cell phone nearly run down a pedestrian on a cell phone at this very corner.) Then down. The feet are still there. Then back east again. And wait. Wait. Wait some more.

Do buses still run on this street? Did CTA cancel the route and forget to take down the signs? The five other travelers, all packed into the bus shelter, all craning their respective necks east as if taking turns, appear to be thinking the same thing. What. The. Fuck.

A bright yellow moving light cuts the darkness. Finally. A bus is coming. Slowly. Struggling up Montrose against late rush-hour gridlock. And, Pavlovian predictable, I can suddenly feel my feet again. Not the best thing. They hurt now. Like they've been pounded with bricks. Or cartoonishly large mallets. Ow. Ow. Ow.

And still the yellow light grows brighter. Closer. An inch at a time. Closer. To me. To them. To home.

Hitting the Books

Most of the toys have been put away in La Casa del Terror in a vain attempt to make my apartment look less like a teenage boy's bedroom circa 1975. (Maybe now, girls will like me!!! Or, um, not). Not all of the toys have been put away, of course--I'm not sure I have room in my closets for all of my toys, and I just don't have the heart to shove my Mego Supergirl, my Sean Connery James Bond or my Christopher Lee Count Dooku figures into a box--and all the monster toys will crawl back out of their respective graves come Halloween.

The lack of action figures, however, has created a lot of extra space for books, an alarming number of which relate to bad movies, which would explain how I know so much about the likes of Plan 9 from Outer Space, Robot Monster and Can't Stop the Music.

Here, then, is a sampling of reading materials from your humble correspondent's less toy-intensive shelves:

The Golden Turkey Awards and Son of Golden Turkey by Harry and Michael Medved. Most people don't remember these books because they've been out of print for some time, but the original Golden Turkey Awards may have been the single most infuential text in the history of the appreciation of so-bad-it's-good cinema and may have been the first book to declare Plan 9 to be "The Worst Movie Ever Made" and its director, the immortal Edward D. Wood, Jr., to be "Worst Director." I recently landed a copy of this after years of trying (eBay is my friend), but I'd read it cover to cover years before while freelancing as a proofreader at an audio/visual company that made 35mm slides for corporate presentations. (Such freelancing was necessary after I quit my first job out of college because "I didn't like it" without having another job lined up, right on the cusp of a recession--yes, I was young and dumb.) And while waiting to read slide after slide of boring corporate earnings (or lack thereof), The Golden Turkey Awards gave me hours of entertainment. And please don't hold it against the book that one of the authors is Michael Medved, co-host of the excruciatingly lame Sneak Previews (after Siskel & Ebert left to go do At the Movies, which they left later to go do Siskel & Ebert & the Movies, which Siskel left because...well, because he died, which made it hard for him to see new movies and thus review them).

Classics of the Horror Film and More Classics of the Horror Film by William K. Everson. To be honest, Everson's more than a bit of a tight ass, turning his nose up at modern classics like The Exorcist ("a cheap and shoddy picture") and The Wicker Man ("overrated"). But without his first book, which I read over and over again during study period at Lane Tech instead of doing actual homework, I'd never have sought out the likes of James Whale's Brilliant black comedy The Old Dark House or Carl Dreyer's strangely hypnotic Vampyr or The Ghoul, a Boris Karloff flick that's neither brilliant nor hypnotic--just good old creepy fun.

Graven Images by Ronald V. Borst. Not only is this book filled with gorgeous horror film posters from the silent era through the '60s, but it also has lots of tasty tidbits of trivia: Did you know that Bela Lugosi was the first choice to play "The Monster" in Frankenstein, but turned the role down because it wasn't a speaking part, even though he didn't speak English and had to memorize his lines for Dracula phonetically? Or that H.G. Wells hated both Island of Lost Souls and Metropolis? Neither did I.

Nightmare of Ecstasy by Rudolph Grey. Ed Wood may have been talentless--at least his movies don't betray any discernable gift for telling stories, writing dialogue or even being able to tell night from day--but he was, first and foremost, a dreamer who worked his angora-clad ass off to make those dreams come true. And, to a certain extent, he succeeded: while other, better directors have long since been forgotten, Ed Wood's name is instantly recognizable to damn near every movie fan. Gray interviews many of Wood's close associates--his wife, his friends, actors and drinking buddies--and uses Wood's own words to paint as compele a picture of an artist as you're ever likely to see, even if it's not a pretty picture.

The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film and The Psychotronic Video Guide by Michael Weldon. Throw these two books together and what do you get? More than 6,000 reviews of weird, wild, wonderful movies--from Abbott & Costello Go to Mars to Zontar, the Thing from Venus and lots and lots of strange shit in between. Weldon introduced my mind to benders like The Manster, in which a man grows an extra head (not too Freudian) and Soul Vengeance, in which a convict takes revenge on those he blames for putting him behind bars by sleeping with their wives and then strangling the men with his dick (no, I'm not kidding). Both books celebrate the great, the bad and the just plain odd. And I love 'em all.

Bad Movies We Love by Edward Margulies and Stephan Rebello. It's remerkably easy (and fun!) to kick around below zero-budget celluloid trainwrecks like Plan 9 and Robot Monster, but these guys go after people with actual talent--Oscar-winning actors like Gene Hackman, Bette Davis and Al Pacino, and lauded directors like Otto Premminger, John Huston and Douglas Sirk (whose color-saturated, hyper-melodramatic style Todd Haynes so ably imitated in his Oscar-nominated Far from Heaven)--who just happen to have made some really shitty movies. Most of their choices are high camp trash like Mommy Dearest ("Tina--bring me the axe!") and Valley of the Dolls ("You've got to climb Mount Everest to reach the Valley of the Dolls"), but they also love disaster movies with lots o' stars (The Towering Inferno), needless sequels (King Kong Lives, Staying Alive) and terrible musicals (Xanadu). And any book that gives an extra kick to Exorcist II: The Heretic is required reading for me.

Then again, all of these books qualify as "required reading" for me. Any one of them can be found at my bedside at any given time, and all of them are heartily recommended, though some of them are out of print and might be a bit hard to find. They've taught me a hell of a lot about good movies, bad movies and "what the fuck was that?" movies. And they've taught me that even the most miserable losers can be loved.

There's always hope, then. Always.

Home

I knew you when we were both
something like younger, Chicago.
Big urban brawler pock-marked
but proud, muscular electric
Downtown spinning "You don't fuck
with me, I don't fuck with you"
through fine-ground S-curves and
Why avenues where Algren and
Sandburg spat off curbs and
Mayors Richard the First and
the Second reigned, past corner
dime stores and bungalows face
to sagging face remembering
the Maketown they had known--
The Stockyards, street cars,
Riverview Park and strip bars,
World Series bunting, Black Sox
and Blue Cubs, blood-soaked
Twenties, gin-soaked Thirties,
acceptable wars before TV flicker,
Blackhawk and Airboy all over
the newsstands, Betty Grable and
Bettie Page on gas station walls,
sandlot players swinging cracked
bats wrapped back together with
electrical tape in neighborhoods
where everybody on the block
knew everybody on the block and
Suburbia was no more than a myth.


All gone. Like all the movie
houses speckling the city's
decaying downtown doughnut hole.
The United Artists. The Woods.
McVickers. Michael Todd. State-Lake,
Roosevelt, Loop, Monroe--all gone
but for the one named after you,
Winded City, and even that solid
old marquee was just barely spared
the lick of the wrecker's ball
and doesn't show flicks anymore.
The dead mice in the lobbies
have been swept away along with
the popcorn, Milk Duds stuck
to the bottoms of creaking seats
pushed all the way back to catch
black action bombs and kung-fu
comedies, the marble staircases
scrubbed for tidy Disney crowds
and the walls somewhat thicker
than the paint covering them.


Gone. The Oak. Family theater
in Mom's childhood. Porno house
in mine. Drive-thru bank now across
the street from Margie's Candies
where the Fab Four ate sundaes
before plying old Comiskey Park,
now a parking lot with a marble
plate staining the spot where
Nellie, Little Louie and Big Klu
rounded the bases on steaming
afternoons, picked it and gunned
on Autumn nights, played their
souls raw in the last baseball
championship chance you've had,
former Hog Butcher, long before
the modern know-betters tore
down the Baseball Palace of
the World and propped its shiny
stiff successor up across the way
on 35th Street. Not that long
before Pat and Bud brought up
their baby in the tenements
hugging part of Superior Street
where a golden-domed Ukrainian
Orthodox church now stands.


Not that all you are, ever were,
ever will be is mortar and
memories, old dear. It's just
harder to find a pulse, a thrust,
a trust in a place slapped onto
deep reaches of swampland,
drilled into the curve of a
a finger-shaped lake. City on
the Fake. A space massacred
by the native landlords, burned
down, snowed in, flooded out,
full of doubt that there is any
honor for the past, any prayer
for the future, anything in
the present to glare at through
rosy haze and even mistake for
hope, when what little we can
make out are silhouetted empty
evening porches, morning sidewalks,
mourning parents not warmed by
memories of the Good Ol' Days
when Bugsy Moran and Scarface Al
never accidentally whacked kids,
dads, husbands or friends--they
delivered lead presents in the name
of St. Valentine and sculpted fine
widows and orphans from perfectly
formed families and blunted streets.


The patterns repeat. Old is new
is old again, but still the beat,
the jarring heat of your sometimes
staining breaths, my love, goes
on across miles, changing styles
of words and music and quality
of light and life in and out
of subway stations freshly
tattooed and redecorated with
gradiated spray-paint murals,
of parkland just muscled enough
with softball diamonds and
tubular benches to beat back
the seaweed and prairie grass
they replaced way before
they became Playlands for
the dealers and deadmakers,
of neighborhoods patchworking
the whole damn quilt together
till down go the lights, the lives,
the eyes that can't stop tapping
through tears and breeze and
straining stained forearms and backs
till up go the cracking chants
of Chinatown and Little Italy,
Ravenswood and Englewood,
Back of the Yards and Bucktown,
Canaryville and Streeterville,
Logan Square and Lincoln Square,
Rogers Park, Humbolt Park,
Hyde Park, Albany and Wicker Park,
Grant Park on so sweet June afternoons...


Oh no. You are none of these.
You are all of these. Your head
lowered not in shame or pain but
weariness cuts on through southbound
rain, night-spark train cradled
on rust-flaked creasing palms ever
opening. Fisting. Fighting on as
always. Hoping. Always knowing for
absolute certain that you're phantasm
and fantasy and a city that turns
to grin and wince and shrug and
wink just enough every once in
a God-great while to let me
be a believer. A Lover. Alive.

Three Poems about Valentine's Day

I started writing poetry when I was in sixth grade. In the intervening years, I've scribbled verse about damn near every woman I ever wanted to go out with. But I've said precious little about St. Valentine's Day itself, most likely because I've had little reason to celebrate it; I usually just take the day off of work and hide until it goes away.

Here are three poems that relate to the holiday in one way or another, whether they're directly about the day or not. I can't say that they're the most cheerful words that've ever dripped out of my blue ballpoint Parker pen. (Yes, I still write these things longhand--got a problem with that?) But I'm hopeful that someday I'll write a flat-out happy poem about V-Day; I imagine that would feel quite nice. In the meantime, however, I'll be under this rock over in the corner if you need me...

ONE
Let's not even pretend that
the approach of The Day of
the Winged Child doesn't
set me off, doesn't get me
pimpled head to clenching toe
and ready to duck and cover.
The telephone will be flipped
off, the answering machine
unplugged, the brilliant box in
the living room unelectrified,
my overhung body unhugged.
Oh fuck, I'm rhyming and
bobbing my head to the beat
of bent meter, to the tickle
of long-haired cats rolling
at my feet whenever I read or
shit, to the attention of dawn
near--anything except what's
going on around me, in me,
through me from the time
the gunshots fade to echoes
on early New Year's Day to
the Ides of February when
the pressure's off again.


TWO
Every morning,
a cardinal
perches atop
the maple tree
beside the alley
beside the
Francisco
CTA station
and lets loose
his call into
the a.m. air.
This morning,
his call was
answered.


THREE
Don't get me started on
why I ignore raw nerve
endings mined all over
my scape which tend

to thrum on chilled
drizzerable mornings
like this, when the why
of the Go-from-Point-A-

to-Pointed-B-to-Pointless-
C just doesn't get to
me, doesn't drop-kick
the faith I had back in

the inchworm days of
playground baseball
afternoons, tunes bounded
off unlevel backyard

patio brick where Dad
raised worms for fishing
and I flattened his empty
Old Milwaukee cans

until my All Stars split
--back before all I had
saved up to offer any
interested in accepting

are organized erections,
puppies in therapy,
cardiac kisses to the
eyes and mind and deep

that unclench emotional
toes, slip on boots made
for talkin' and dance
a slow, close, swaying

fray that takes only
decades to unfurl but,
once the colors are
bright and stiffened in

the northeasterly breeze
a silence thick enough to
spread on crackers will
liquefy and slide through

the grate, end the obnoxious
weight and all will be me,
I will be we, we will be won.
Tip over the glass. It's done.

Cash On Demand

My dad was originally from a small town near Birmingham, Alabama. he moved to Chicago sometime around 1960 and spent the rest of his life here. He changed quite a bit in that time--his Deep-South drawl softened; his attitudes toward minorities did a complete 180, to the point where, in the end, he counted some of his African-American and Hispanic co-workers among his closest friends; and he eventually gave up drinking and smoking, though too late to reverse the damage he'd done to his body.

Some aspects of his upbringing, though, never did go away. He liked pan gravy and biscuits. He put Louisiana Hot Sauce on everything, from scrambled eggs to perch to the aforementioned biscuits and gravy. He wore increasingly brightly colored floppy hats so that Mom could find him in a crowd. He enjoyed fishing, even if it was just spin-casting off of the then-abandoned Navy Pier with a transistor radio hooked to his belt and at least one of his young sons at his side. And that transistor radio was usually dialed to one of the local country/western stations, thus increasing the odds substantially that he would hear a Johnny Cash song.

Dad liked many C&W players, from Willie Nelson to Loretta Lynn to Hank Williams (Senior, NOT Junior), but he loved Johnny Cash. The only LPs I can recall him owning were discs like Live from Fulsom Prison. And when he got a CD player for Christmas, I bought him a collection of Johnny Cash's greatest hits (re-recorded in the 1980s, a curiously common practice then, but still close in tone to the original recordings), which he played more than any of the other C&W CDs he received afterward.

Dad's love of "The Man in Black" was not unconditional, though. In 1994, the year before Dad died, Cash and producer Rick Rubin collaborated on American Recordings, an album that featured songs (some originals, but mostly covers of other artists' songs) stripped down to the very basics: An acoustic guitar and JC's baritone and that's about all. Most of the songs were recorded in Rubin's living room and Cash's cabin, with a couple of entries taped live at the Viper Room in LA. The result? A collection of spare, darker-than-dark recordings that packed an extraordinary emotional punch capable of blindsiding the casual listener expecting good-ol'-boy country-fried sentiment. I bought the CD as soon as it came out, gave it a listen or two, liked what I heard, for the most part (though Cash's cover of Louden Wainwright III's "The Man Who Couldn't Cry" is a lousy way to end the album, if only because the song itself is so annoying), and passed it along to Dad, with the proviso that if he enjoyed it he could keep it for his own.

The next day, he handed the CD back to me, shaking his head. He hated it.

It wasn't that he hated Cash's singing or Rubin's production. It was the nature of the songs themselves, which focus so acutely on anger, sadness and violence that Dad just got worn out by the downbeat tone of the whole project. I understood what he meant, as did others: When the video for "Delia's Gone" was shown on Bevis & Butthead, one of them asked, "Is this Gangsta Rap?"

I can't help but wonder how Dad would have felt about Johnny Cash's more recent album's, though. I never bought or borrowed American Recordings II: Unchained, so I can't speak to its quality or lack thereof. However, I do own his last two albums--American III: Solitary Man and American IV: The Man Comes Around--and each has moments that can pry open the floodgates and reduce me to heaves and sobs (not as difficult a trick as it used to be, but still...).

Cash has suffered through numerous health crises the past few years: he was misdiagnosed as having Shy-Dager Syndrome, a neurological disease akin to Parkinson's; he's had multiple bouts of pneumonia, one of which dropped him in a coma for eight days; and he suffers from diabetes, glaucoma and asthma. All of these physical difficulties have informed his last couple of albums, making them thematically more meditative, reflective and, at times, downright angry--as if he knows that each album might be his last. His voice has also changed with age and illness: What once was a booming baritone how falters and wavers with regularity. Rather than detracting from the music, though, his vocal strain almost seems to enhance it, make it more emotional, more sorrowful. It sounds more often than not like either he's on the verge of tears or he's trying to get the listener on the verge--and, for the most part, he succeeds.

American III: Solitary Man, which was released in 2000, is an oddball mix of Cash originals, traditional hymns and covers of other artists' songs: He opens the album on a note of defiance with Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down" (with Petty himself singing backup). Cash also borrows from Neil Diamond's songbook for the title cut and damn near takes ownership of U2's "One" and Nick Cave's "The Mercy Seat." That latter song is what got me to buy American III in the first place: It's laced with pain, resignation, acceptance of fate, hope for redemption. Other titles--"I See a Darkness," "I'm Leavin' Now"--would suggest that, if this had indeed been Cash's last album, he was ready, if not entirely willing, to accept that.

Just before this past Thanksgiving, though, the Cash and Rubin team presented their latest gift to the music world, American IV: The Man Comes Around. Like its predecessor, American IV is a grab bag of new Cash songs, like the apocalyptic title tune and the sweet, sad "Give My Love to Rose," traditional ballads like "Danny Boy" and "Streets of Laredo," and more recent pop fare. Some choices work better than others. Cash's voice is almost too weak to do proper justice to the Beatles' "In My Life," cover of Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus" (one of my all-time favorite songs) just doesn't translate to Cash's country/folk style, even if it does fit thematically with the rest of the album, which touches on religion, redemption and passage from one state of being into another more than a few times.

Other choices, however, blindside you with their power. It might seem mad for Cash to cover Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt," but as you listen to it you realize that Cash's voice lends move validity to the pain, regret and frustration expressed than even Trent Reznor did. His baritone is just right for "Danny Boy" and Streets of Laredo," giving each song the right mournful pitch. His duet with Nick Cave on Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I could Cry" is a great meshing of two rough-edged voices, and closing the album with "We'll Meet Again" implies hope, at least on the surface. (Cash could just as easily have been making sly reference to Stanley Kubrick's use of the song at conclusion of Dr. Strangelove, thus giving American IV apocalyptic bookends of two very different kinds.)

But the song that gets to me the most here is one that's always been able to get to me anyway: "Bridge Over Troubled Water." Cash and Rubin take the Simon & Garfunkel classic and transform it into something closer to a hynm, Cash's voice lending uncanny authority to the sentiment expressed--who would know more about "troubled water" than someone who'd sailed on it so many times and survived? Cash is joined here by, of all people, Fiona Apple, whose breathy, almost ethereal backing vocals don't seem right at first, but blend better upon repeated listens; the two dissimilar vocal styles manage to complement and support one another like the emotional support offered in the song. The pairing also fits the thread of passage that runs through American IV: A music rebel from one generation passing a sonic baton to another

I'm not sure what Dad would have thought of either of these albums; he may have been too turned off by the first American Recordings to give the subsequent albums in the series a try. I do think, though, that he would have found things to like here. Dad spent many of the years after he quit drinking and joined Alcoholics Anonymous trying to make up for what he'd done or hadn't done for or to his family in the years before. His regrets, his experience, his pain--they all informed his journey to redemption, acceptance and forgiveness. When he died, he and I were at peace with one another, even if neither of us talked about it much and neither of us wanted him to go as soon as he did. And I believe Johnny Cash is at peace with himself and his kin now, too, though he doesn't sound like he's ready or willing to go just yet.

Today would have been Dad's 68th birthday. So I'm going to play American IV: The Man Comes Around sometime tonight, and Dad can listen in from whatever vantage point he'd be listening from. And maybe, when Johnny Cash gets to "Bridge Over Troubled Water," we can all have a good, hard cry together once more.

A Christmas Casa

There's always an annual self-debate within the walls of La Casa del Terror: to decorate for Christmas, or not to decorate? That is the question. Do I lug out the storage container full of ornaments, garlands and figurines, or do I spare myself the bother? After all, I live alone and don't get many visitors (at least not after the Halloween Movie Bash), so the only person who will see these festive knickknacks will be me and the Girlish Girls, who could not possibly care less--unless I roll the tree in catnip, they'll not be roused to action.

But then I take a walk around my neighborhood, and the debate rapidly ends.

There are a lot of single-family homes in my hood, and many of the owners go all out at Christmastime. From sequential lights rimming the rooftops to inflatable snowmen tucked onto too-small front porches to life-sized illuminated figures of Jesus, Joseph and the Virgin Mary, these homeowners charge into the holiday season with admirable, even enviable vigor. If they can go all out like that, can't I spare a minute or three to dig in my closet and set up a tree? Especially since no one else in my particular apartment building seems to have decorated at all?

So the debate, then, boils down not to whether or not to decorate for Christmas, but the degree to which I decorate: shall I dust off the artificial pine, or will some vintage figurines suffice? Last year, the latter was the case. I set up a small display in the living room, smiled at it occasionally and dismantled it before the sun had set on New Year's Day. But this year, when I could sincerely use some extra cheer and would rather spend the whole season in bed? It would have been easy to blow off decorating entirely. Really, it would have. And it wouldn't have been a network television first, either.

Instead, on Thanksgiving Day, when I was home alone for the first time ever (because Mom's employers, in their eternal wisdom, scheduled her to work both Wednesday second shift and Thursday first shift, thus delaying any cooking till Thanksgiving evening--and don't even ask me why I didn't cook for her: she really enjoys making holiday meals for her sons and likely wouldn't touch any poultry I roasted for her benefit), I lugged out the three-foot-tall wire tree (still haven't upgraded to an antique aluminum tree), popped the top off the clay-green storage container with the Christmas decorations and popped on appropriate holiday music--A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector, in this instance. And, over the course of a couple of hours, I transformed La Casa del Terror into a winter wonderland.

Okay, so my apartment isn't quite ready for a presidential visit or scrutiny by Martha Stewart--unless Martha is really into The Nightmare Before Christmas or Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, in which case she might actually dig it. Under the lamp in the living room, Jack Skellington and Sally dolls keep watch over Clarice, Yukon Cornelius and King Moonracer figurines. In the kitchen, a blue-and-silver garland with gifts evenly spaced dangles over the windows while the resin bass ornament (given to me by Mom to remind me of Dad, as if I could forget him) guards the doorway and an angel in gold lame watches from atop the fridge and the Frankenstein Monster, resplendent in a Santa cap, holds down the microwave.

And then there's the bookcase in the southeast corner of the living room, which is currently covered, from left to right and left again, with holiday cards from friends near and far, with animals decorating a pine tree, a Victorian girl writing Santa, purple and silver snowflakes, a pair of imposing nutcrackers, a serene waterfall, a collection of festive puppies, shining deer, a bow from a "Bettie Page in Bondage" alarm clock (which now resides atop my SuperDisk drive, quietly ticking away the time), and lots and lots of snowmen (can one ever have enough?).

And on the top shelf of this bookcase, where Mom's tin dollhouse can usually be found, stands the Christmas tree, such as it is. There are many little figures surrounding it, from hand-painted Santas to elves to Mom's favorite childhood toy, Molly the Dolly. But the tree itself is small--only three feet tall--so I usually have many more ornaments than I have branches. A couple of themes, then, must be selected from the assortment in the storage container. Carousel horses? Cartoon characters? Kittens? Nothing more than shiny balls? All have been past choices, and all served me well. This year, though, I went with an eclectic selection of superheroes (Batman, Wonder Woman, the Tick), personal faves (a holiday unicorn, a chrome-plated Kris Kringle) and a new addition or two (Bettie Page in a leopard-print bikini).

Oh. And angels. Lots and lots of angels.

I've always liked angels, and my Christmas trees have always reflected that--from small porcelain angels found in department stores to angels way too big for this little tree but too pretty to keep in storage to tiny gold cherubs to a cookie-colored angel, cradling a dove in her delicate hands, that had been intended to be given as a gift to a woman I thought I loved at the time, but which wound up staying with me anyway. (Time has healed that, if not all, wounds.)

The most special angel on my tree, though, is also arguably the cheapest: a small cardboard girl, covered in what looks like silver chain mail and holding a tiny candle in each of her pipe-cleaner hands. She's not the largest angel on my tree, nor the most beautiful, nor in the best of shape, her wings held on by Scotch tape. But this humble girl, Angelique by name, always gets the center spot on the front of the tree in those years when I bother to put a tree up, because she was found in a tin can in the wreckage of Grandma's house after it had burned to the ground on a cold February morning. The can contained many decorations that make the tree every year, and more than one angel.

But Angelique is a dead ringer for the angel my parents put on their tree every year--an angel purchased at Jules Five & Dime on Milwaukee Avenue, where Mom had worked as a teen and which is still in business just down the street from the Congress Theatre and just up the street from White Castle. Angelique was a sister to my parents' angel. She was family and deserved to be honored as such. And so she is.

I may be the only person who sees my holiday decorations this year, it's true. But as light my pine-scented candles from Walgreen's (best to be found, I tell you) and go through my demented collection of Christmas programs, from the recent Saturday Night Live clip show to Mr. Krueger's Christmas, a strange half-hour sponsored by the Mormon Church and starring Jimmy Stewart (he has a cat named George--get it?), to the joyfully painful experience that is The Star Wars Holiday Special (if you ever want to feel better about your life, watch this show and be glad you had nothing to do with it), I'll look up from time to time and check out my surroundings, if only momentarily. The tree. The angels. And, for those moments, at least, I'll smile and give myself a damn break. And if this is as good as my life gets, though I certainly hope for more and for better, I don't have too much to complain about. So I won't. For a change. My gift to you. And to myself.

Peace to you and yours this holiday season.