quicksand

When I was a boy, the hero often stumbled into some quicksand. If they were alone, they had to grab at some roots and branches, suddenly weighing as much as a grand piano, as the faceless mud tugged them down. Or maybe they had a sidekick, someone that ran for help or threw some terribly convenient coil of rope at them, missing once, as the music climbed, until our hero finally grasped at it, already hidden from the neck down, a few inches from gasping for breath. The lesson in all of this - that quicksand is everywhere, lurking, waiting to trap the good, the bad and everything in-between, slurping it all down to some hidden grave - that without roots to hold on to, or a lifeline, we will sink, every single one of us.

Now tell me the last time you saw quicksand in any film or tv show, or book. Did all of the quicksand dry up? Did it turn into a parking lot? Maybe there never was actual quicksand in the world, and it was just a perfectly believable metaphor for danger, a palatable lie that went down so easy.

all photos by the author

I have been gnawing on the same bone for some time now - the stinking question that hangs like a cloud in the living room over guitars, over certain camera plans, over microphones, and screenplays shoved to the back of drawers. Three years ago I understood the kitchen in the pursuit of masterpieces was closed for the foreseeable future. The lights were clicked off, the bills were paid, but no fire was switched on the stove, no click and that whoosh of blue gas lighting up, no banging of trusty skillets. I still struggle to understand where up and down are these days. It all went sideways, like eating a sloppy burger that has too much lettuce in it, more skiing than eating, and half of it landing on the floor. There are bad tastes at every turn, and on some nights it feels like the city is secretly on fire, a slow stinking smell of rubber and plastic and oil swirling into the dark sky and finding me. So little makes sense, but there is nothing special or new about that.

But somehow, my next book is written session by session and I do not know how or why this lonely pursuit is immune to the headlines and the secret stories and the innocent people in jail, impervious to bombs flying and cities leveled to ash, to lies and horseshit being the norm, and all the rest we are spoonfed hour by hour, day by day, year by year. I am 35,000 words in now, well past halfway - tiptoeing towards the home stretch. There is a scene in a strip club, not like the ones in the Sopranos with the fake boobs and the epic and impressive pole dancing, not like the glossy, brassy Hollywood ones either, no just a terribly sad little bar with free franks and beans on a steam table in the back, a lowkey place that was called Billy’s Topless, where you got in free and bought a few overpriced beers and pretended you were just there for some odd reason, as if the topless girls were unexpected, some kind of Thursday night performance art, heavy on the glitter and fake eyelashes, some good old Motown pumping from the speakers, as wholesome and un-weird as a strip club could be in 90s Manhattan. It was a different time then, and I did not know “strippers” - instead, I knew women that stripped on a whim or for kicks when they had the mood, and were not “just a stripper” more a magnificent human that did all sorts of nutty things because it was a hoot, and sure, the money went towards rent and their drinks were free and most of the audience were their oddball friends, not creepy strangers with their hands deep in their pockets. It was simple something you did in your twenties, and pretended you were cooler than you actually were. It was like playing house, without a shirt on.

Decades later, fatter, paler, so much less fabulous and with children that run around like race car drivers, we live very different lives. Small, so small and tiny, so very not famous - but still laughing on a good day, still with that piss and vinegar in our shoes, but tired and all too often defeated, the last analog generation, the punks who eventually went acoustic, now with stretch marks and grey hairs sprouting from the oddest places, not stuck in the past, not living pathetic lives on the fumes of raucous memories, still looking ahead but unable to see anything in the dark, no Xray specs in our pockets, no walking double slice from Five Roses on 1st Avenue in our stomachs to keep us going, just the sense that one foot goes in front of the next, never ever believing the hype, and in theory, quite capable of saving ourselves from any quicksand we may stumble into. We know where the branches are under all that dreck and we still have friends that carry rope around.