We’ve all lived through some hard times in our lives. Mine is below. First, the poem that kick-started this story… a poem by Charles Bukowski –
Young In New Orleans
sitting up in my bed the lights out,
hearing the outside sounds,
lifting my cheap bottle of wine,
letting the warmth of the grape enter me
as I heard the rats moving about the room,
I preferred them to humans.
being lost, being crazy maybe is not so bad
if you can be that way:
undisturbed.
New Orleans gave me that.
nobody ever called my name.
no telephone,
no car,
no job,
no anything.
me and the rats
and my youth,
one time,
that time
I knew
even through the nothingness,
it was a celebration of something not to do
but only know.
~ Charles Bukowski
I’ve never cared much for Bukowski, but it is his last line here,
“even through the nothingness,
it was a celebration of something not to do
but only know.”
My brain lit up on that one! He had described exactly how I felt and what I kind of thought back in Boston so many years ago. Somehow he has defined and brought to light a thing I have known, yet could never put into words. Bukowski has done it so, well, not eloquently, maybe so starkly. He has explained something, through poetry, some almost undefinable thing that motivated me, even drove me to take on life challenges I never dreamed I could achieve. For I could not imagine life always being as it was for a short time back then.
Hard Days In Boston
Yes. In those dark, difficult days of February-March of 1966, I knew, if only subconsciously, that these days of my life were days I never wanted to visit or experience again.
Hard days? Yeah, hard enough that I had shut my brain off to who and where I was, and concentrate only on my music classes at Berklee and eating occasionally. When one is so lost they have no idea of what to do to get out of that horrible vortex, one blindly moves on to only the next step… that next step to complete, that next step that will hopefully suggest the next step after that. For in that next step, and only there, lies a hidden hope… a hope for something better, for a possible escape from what is right now.
I had been playing out, had a few gigs, but not enough right then to sustain me. I had just paid for the Spring semester, and was now broke. Plus, my roomie had quit school and left Boston, forcing me to look for another place. I found one, on the wrong side of the tracks. Another Berklee student was living there… sort of. He had a girl friend who had a nice apartment, and he’d been spending most of his time with her, leaving me basically alone in an empty pad located in an unsafe part of town.
It now became a 30-minute walk to school every day, and it wasn’t a pretty walk. For the first time in my life I had to watch my back, and every so often had to nearly step over drunks and derelicts who were passed out or sleeping on the sidewalk.
My little bedroom was a bare, 8X12 with a single mattress on the floor. There was a poster of a skier on the near wall, where I could see it when I first woke up in the morning. Nothing else in there but for my bathroom kit, a small pile of clothes in the corner and the satchel for my school work. I remember thinking I was finally at the bottom of the barrel, even hoping that it was the bottom of the barrel, for I was usually hungry and depressed. This was a rare, unfamiliar and unsettling feeling for me, as I was almost never depressed by anything. I remember it felt like a huge, frigid hand of an alternate reality had grabbed me and was pulling me into its dark dimension… for what reason, I had no clue.
With my last 50 cents I bought, for some demented reason, a bag of cheese popcorn on Tuesday, put it in the fridge and finally ate it Friday night as a mini celebration for getting through the week. In hindsight, I could have written a poem that week that would surely have rivaled Bukowski’s.
But what the hell. I’ll take a crack at it, just from memory.
Lost
Lost in the vortex of a bleak despair
Lost and alone
Hungry and afraid
Afraid to know
How bad this place was
That he had found himself in
How did he get here?
How could he get out?
There was no path
Except to another day
Of the same
Please, not another day
Of this
Not another knowing
That no change could be seen
No promise of a different day
Only the same sick, tortured feeling
That now lived
In the pit of his stomach
And tore at his heart
The reason for enduring it
Had long left him
For now he needed food and sleep
And had little to none of either
Except for that morning in the coffee shop
When he spent his last dollar
On a toasted English and coffee regular
For a moment there, the conversation
In the little shop, bright, loud and positive
Hinting that life could still be normal
He thought maybe it would all be okay
After all
Back out on the cold, bitter street
His reality hit him harder than ever
And he walked toward school
One heavy step after another,
Driven only by his love of music
And the tiny hope for a better day
Maybe not tomorrow
But someday
It turned out to be a fairly short, memorable and very motivating time of my life. Toward the end of that semester I met my dear drummer friend, Craig Herndon. We found a two-bedroom apartment on Symphony Road, better part of town and much closer to school. By late June there were four of us, and we often had weekend guests as well. The dark days were mercifully over.
Graduation in Boston, May ’67 – Steve, Jon, Craig
I would remember those days from time to time, but it finally ceased to be a motivation, as the excitement from my new successes easily drove me to continue to work harder, to improve. For the rewards were now great, and only occasionally would I take time to remember, and be grateful for where I had come from… for how I had gotten there, and for how I got out.
“even through the nothingness,
it was a celebration of something not to do
but only know.”
All this came rushing back to me about 38 years later, when I composed and recorded the score to a short film noir, “The Devil To Pay.” Some of the lonely, implied meaningless of life is, to me, essential in many film noirs, and I wanted to access that emotion, which composers of film noirs have done for at least 80 years now. With that intention came the memories of those desperate Boston days, and whammo… we were off to the races.
Life can be so strange, so totally unpredictable. Those hard Boston days, my growth as a composer and recorder, plus my love for all things Henry Mancini, all came together then, giving me the ideas and direction for this little film. It turned out to be the last score I did in Atlanta.
Here is the credits music for that film. It holds the main theme, and the overall emotion of it… and of that short, bleak time in Boston. So you know, it was done entirely on the computer in my studio, except for the lead sax, played magnificently by Skip Lane. Here it is –
Along with the reminder to never get that far down again, was the memory of that Friday night. It’s so fine when one can smile at the memory of the grim, painful events of his life, and realize he’ll never have to eat cheese popcorn again.
Steve Hulse
