Our routine: she comes into the shed, sits on the beach chair, and reads a spy novel. I work on the spaceship. It runs in a loop, over and over, even as I am in space itself, watching the stars manifest from pure daylight. That was what I wanted back. The plans are leftover from the space race, a design unpicked, rescued from an attic. Morgan sips her beer. Eventually, she stands, meets me by the workbench. We kiss, hands as neutral as possible on each other’s hips. We say nothing of consequence, and return to our respective stations. Later, Darla slips into bed beside me, and we have sex, passionately, tenderly, the missing colors slipped to me earlier from her sister’s lips. This happened, more or less, for five months.
The colors were always there for her. At first, when she was a girl, they were just spots. “Almost like pets,” she said. “Like, milk was neon green. A cartoon frog that followed me around until the taste was gone.” As she got older, it was whole rooms. When we lived together, I would sometimes discover her standing in some corner, as if in rapture. “Hey,” she would say when I took her hand, breathy and sexy. It is funny now, almost, that I cannot recall when I found out Dr. Strommler, Morgan’s husband, was studying Darla, whether it was before or after Morgan and I first kissed. It was not an important reason why I allowed it to happen. From every other girl I’d been with — Karen and Seiko and Darla, all — I wanted everything, lives together, love in constant renewal. From Morgan, I only wanted a small, specific something.
We honeymooned in the Caribbean, Darla and I, at a pink, three-story hotel by the ocean. All night, we listened to the murmur of the tide: softer as it went out, harsher as it came in, spitting up over the curve of the sand, long and low. The blinds were open, the stars visible. In our half-sleep after sex, she told me about the colors. A light outside shined on the pool patio, muted by palm trees, and occasionally illuminated the room when the wind blew the fronds aside. Her face, when she said this in the dark, looked like Karen, my high school girlfriend and Seiko, a girl I slept with once in college: all cheekbones. She also looked like herself. “It’s blue and gold,” she said. “That’s what I feel, when I come. Blue and gold.” Which is what I saw when I touched her cheeks the next time we had sex, and what I saw when the capsule peaked and tipped towards the Gulf.
So long as I fixed a toaster once in a while, nobody much bothered me in the shed. Still, I could not figure out a way to test the launchpad without making somebody, maybe Darla, ask what I was doing. There was no shame: I knew how to build a spaceship. But it was also an uncomfortable knowledge to possess, like I’d broken something but couldn’t tell my mother. I kept the parts tucked across the room. When Morgan came over that first afternoon, to see if I couldn’t unjam E.T. from the VCR, her eyes paused on the exposed circuitry on the workbench. Her husband, Jacob, a doctor, had been working late, so she was alone most evenings, too. “Like a menagerie in here,” she smiled, looking at the shelf of bulbs and plugs, and from then on co-existed with it. I looked past her, next to the Astros calendar, at the first sketch of the booster. Even going up, I knew the capsule would hit the apex too soon.
Darla and Morgan, brown-haired and blue-eyed both, were variations on the same family code, though Darla came out prettier. Where Darla’s lips were slim, Morgan’s were puffy. Darla’s clear eyes were perpetually wide with awe, Morgan’s were dopey. And Darla’s voice was bell-like when she yawped in ecstasy, Morgan’s flat and nasal and tired. I saw her, Morgan, a flash of her freckled shoulder, as the capsule launched from the backyard. I was aware of the Chrysler door slamming, but didn’t look up. It was like jumping a car, really, to get it hot enough to launch. She had found Darla’s note with an awful quickness, perhaps with not even enough time for Darla herself to gain any distance.
Back then, everybody tinkered. It is not as if it was a lifelong ambition to build a spaceship, or even be an astronaut. Believe me, that’s not my personality. Installing a new car radio, putting together a kitchen table, those are closer to my areas of expertise. Sure, I watched the moon landing. I didn’t give much thought to it, though. Not like that, anyway. The decision was gradual, something to do during the cool evenings when Darla worked late. I thought of this as I grasped the oxygen tube between my lips, my hands desperately clenched in the side straps. As I rose, a half-dozen balls of sweat emerged from my cheeks, fell, and froze instantly into silver airborne droplets.
Between looking at Texas from outer space and looking at outer space from Texas, I would take the latter, and not out of any great love for Texas. Anyplace you look, I figure, half of what you see is in your head, what you want to see. So, up there, pressed against the glass from my father’s Ford, all I could see were Darla’s cheekbones, the night glow of the gas station, and the cat. Darla’s sister, Morgan, had come in the middle of the afternoon, her white Chrysler extra-bleached as it rounded the corner in slow motion, like the Kennedy motorcade turning onto Dealey Plaza. And so it was afternoon when I took off, no other choice, and it rushed beside me for a minute, a faithful dog, before the blue deepened.
“Sometimes A Pony Gets Depressed” – Silver Jews (download) (buy)
from Tanglewood Numbers (2005)
released by Drag City
(file expires August 21st)
“That guy’s a better songwriter than Bob Dylan,” my friend, an aggressive and renowned contrarian, once said of the Silver Jews’ David Berman. “I bet you didn’t know that, did you?”
“No,” I admitted. “I didn’t.” And, even having been informed, I’m still not sure if I do. Nonetheless, it’s something to consider. The argument is not to take anything away from Dylan, or — for that matter — to even say that Berman is the greatest songwriter of his generation. If it is not about standing on the shoulders of giants and all that (which it might be), then it is at least about how pop audiences have evolved over the years and what they are prepared to accept in a song.
Berman might be a more interesting formal songwriter than Dylan, but an artist is only as exciting as the limits he’s transcending. Again, not to take anything away from Berman, but it’s all about context. “Sometimes A Pony Get Depressed” is in no ways a revolutionary song. But it’s great, and I can see what my friend was getting at: Berman is simply a more modern songwriter, unencumbered by the properties of music grounded in folk and blues.
An argument about David Berman being a better songwriter than Bob Dylan is stupid if one expects to come up with a victor. If one just wants it to use it as a crowbar into a discussion of songwriters’ trickbags then I’ll bite: David Berman is a better songwriter than Bob Dylan.
A fine meditation on the slowness of the dog days, originally published in Harper’s, via Baseball: A Literary Anthology:
Everywhere, from Portland to Pawtucket, baseball’s the same slow, sometimes stately, sometimes tedious game governed by extensive, complexly arbitrary rules, and practiced according to arcane, informal mores and runic vocabularies which compel that almost every act of play be routine. Even the great smashes, the balletic defensive turns, and the unparalleled pitching performances — by being so formally anticipated, so contemplated and longed-for by the fans — become ritual, even foregone. It’s a Platonic game in this way, with all visible excellence (and even unexcellence) ratified by a prior scheme of invisible excellence which is the game itself.
