Idiot’s Tale: a Chronicle of Nonevents 

Bern Nix
May 2016

He decided to catch up on his reading. Most of his life has been about trying to catch up on his reading. The Voice has a cover story on a young black comic who does catchy post-modern material on race. Evidently race still does matter but how? Back in the sixties, it was quite different. The New York Review of Books contains an article on Saul Bellow. He read the article even though he could never read the work of a Noble Laureate like Bellow. Over in the corner a young couple was having an intense discussion. Are they arguing? They look like they might possibly be addicts. A waiting room in a large public hospital is really an object lesson in democracy. Various races, classes and types commingle with one another. Everyone is eager to get it over with. Waiting to see a doctor can seem like having a preliminary encounter with the grim reaper. Life itself at times seems like an ailment: the nausea of it all can engulf you at the damnedest moment. The physician has a beard along with an aloof yet concerned manner. It is possible for the doctor to feel like a mechanic or harried cobbler with one pair of shoes too many to contend with. The patient’s withered sexagenarian nuts could be a pair of leathery high-top shoes from another time.  Any..? No. There..? No. Are you..? Yes. A man-child in his mid-sixties who never really figured anything out about much other than music. By now he knew the five lines and four spaces well enough to understand that meaning has arbitrary distinction determined by history and happenstance. Was happenstance the right word? Watching Nick Lucas sing and then banter with Liberace on Youtube made him even more conscious of how varied musical expression can be. Albert Ayler drowned in the deep blue sea of his own despair. Why? Nobody wanted to tipetoe through his tulips. Chet Baker fell from a window in the Netherlands. This was probably due to the fact he liked poppies more than tulips. Is your narrator being too arch? Self-conscious attempts at cleverness can be disastrous.  The more things change, the harder they are to change. Whether you march or not a rose is still a rose, a raisin is still a raisin painfully burnished by the heat of a hostile sun. A proclamation of freedom is often a matter of sonorous rhetoric at variance with the painful reality of a complicated liberty blurred by the narcotic haze of Madison ave, a place where fantasy glazes existence with a sugar corn syrup-like veneer that’s potent and incrementally virulent. All the talk about the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington made him think that way. In ’63 he was an adolescent dreamer who thought about the future. In some ways, he was quite fortunate; he had been able to realize his dream of having a go at a career in music. He had just come to consciousness. The Fall atmosphere only adds to his desire to sleep. Where does the time go? So much of his life has been spent in earnest pursuit of a dream that seems less viable with each passing year.  Back in ’75 when he came to NYC as a socially awkward young musician fresh out of music school, the bankrupt city seemed like a place where anything could happen. Dreams could be realized; it was a matter of persistence; hard work and dedication were bound to be rewarded or so he thought. How do you make a narrative out of it all? Living it was hard enough. Someone once said NYC was a city filled with stories. While running around the neighborhood on errands he ran into the now former wife of one of his musical colleagues. She spent nearly an hour describing the agony of divorce. For years she had played the role of musician’s wife; she was the one with regular employment that generated financial security. Her husband pursued the haphazard life of a musician; one day a hit record was bound to happen. Her daughter started to intimate that after twenty years or so of marriage Daddy had acquired a girlfriend. No this couldn’t be true. Daddy and I are trying to make it all work. We’re even seeing a therapist. The relationship means a lot to both of us. Daughter dearest turned out to be right despite all of Mommy’s protestations to the contrary. Often it had occurred to him that trying to write anything was like endeavoring to rewrite Madam Bovary on the head of a pin with his own blood. Could it be that he was just another neurotic narcissistic perfectionist with unrealistic standards? By now it was obvious he was nowhere near the likes of a Flaubert or for that matter Mr. Prufrock. Agonizing over artistic aspiration, vocational unworthiness, and other matters was part of an elaborate effort on his part to avoid looking at the truth about his squalid little bug infested room of a life.