Before I reformed my wicked ways, I plied the dark alleys of the
fourth estate. Touring through my back pages, I intend to report here on some
of those bits and pieces.
Neil Young
When I was Lord Night Wind, I met Neil Young in the Mexican
desert. He was drifting over sand and rock like a hawk’s shadow. It was three
days after Cortez made the proud Moctezuma a puppet of the white man. These
things happen. I asked Neil for his destination. He pointed north.
“Don’t go,” I warned. “In the north you’ll find the dog
people. And beyond them, more miserable dog people. No one has ever gone
further north, but I once met a dog person who said that the most dreadful dog
people of all live north of the big river. These dogs eat your flesh and chew
up your soul.
Neil twitched me a smile and headed north.
•
A few hundred years passed and I saw Neil Young again at an
Exxon station in Cupertino, California.
“This where they have all those computer bodegas?” he asked
me as I filled the tank of his Ford pick-up with twenty bucks unleaded.
“That’s why they call her Computertino.”
He didn’t even leave me a tip and drove north to all those
computer bodegas.
•
When Neil Young switched on his screen, he didn’t expect to
find me, but there I was. “Is it strange I should change?” I asked him,
chuckling.
“I’m busy,” he said.
“I warned you about the most dreadful dog people. Their
machines rip your flesh, capture your soul in a microchip.”
“If the machines capture our souls, then our souls are in
the machines,” he said.
•
The walk up to Neil Young’s house is treacherous. It’s on a
steep mountain jutting out of the California coastline like a thorn off a vine.
Below me, the moonstruck ocean made love to the shore, a lot of wet heaving.
Neil was fast asleep on an old sofa. He had his arms
wrapped around his guitar’s hips like she was the most beautiful woman in the
world. I helped myself to a Coor’s and sat against the wall, staring at him.
Whenever I see him sing, his voice obscures his face. Asleep,
he looked young like a boy who just saw his first science fiction film, and old
like a drunk coming out of a Memphis bar at seven in the morning.
A few ghosts remained in the room, the kind that stay at
parties too long. Roadies, old black and white TV stars, Edgar Allen Poe. A pretty
Dairy Queen princess, needle marks in the inner crease of her elbow, popping
M&Ms, asked me, “What’s he look at when his eyes are closed?”
When Neil began to stir, his ghosts returned to the coffins
in his mind.
•
Orbiting the planet Cassandra in a space ship called Broken
Arrow, I found Old Neil playing chess with a computer named Crazy Horse.
I pumped him some Vulcan Fire Water straight up.
“Here we are, a million miles from nowhere, light years
from when we first met in the Mexican desert.”
“I thought you only bother people on Earth,” he snapped,
icy as outer space.
“I go where people go. I go where you go.”
“Where am I?”
“North.”
Grinning like Huckleberry Finn, he rotated away from me in
zero-gravity.
I pointed to the chessboard. “Crazy Horse could have forced
mate by taking your queen’s knight, but didn’t. Why?”
“She likes to keep the game going,” he answered. “That’s
called love in some places.”
“You’re the heartbeat of a robot?”
“The current, the force, the chi, the mojo, the groove. It
drives. Music, sex, DNA twists, gravitational tangos, the song Mother Nature
sings, the song we hear before we’re born, after we die. It’s all frequencies
and it’s all in the fine tuning.”
I keyed the board, inputting what I knew about Neil Young.
He looked over my shoulder and laughed, then pressed Enter.
•
No comments:
Post a Comment