Through the Walls

When I was doing my MFA thing I lived in a shitty little tenement apartment in Harlem with Victor Lavalle, there we both finished the first books that would get our careers off the ground. The place was mouse infested, falling apart, and loud, but for a while it was home and a place to hide from the rest of the city in. At night though, usually at about 10pm or so, I would hear this sound through the living room walls. Somewhere in the next building over, at full volume an old record player would drop its needle down and after a few loops of scratches a melancholy song would come on that would start out sorrowful and then slowly build to agony. Even through the walls it was clearly the most beautiful thing, and the most heartbreaking. And then at the end of the song, the needle would pick up, and there would be silence for about two seconds, and then the needle would drop back at the beginning, and the song would play all over again. This audio cycle would continue until 6:30 in the following morning.

Some older man came home and drank his sorry black ass to the point where he could wallow in his own loss and misery, and then he put on that song so he could wallow some more. And then he passed out, I assume, the sound of his ruin repeating endlessly beyond him. This is what I decided. When the music stopped a few months later, I decided as well that the man (and I assumed it to be a man) had either been gentrified out of Harlem or had finally died. But I didn't know. Part of me didn't want to know. Whatever his loss, whatever wrong turn he had taken in his life, it seemed like if you knew of it the weight it would crush you as well. It was enough to imagine him reeking of Colt 45 and English Leather in his 1960s polyester thrift shop clothes, his hair dyed and greasy and showing its grey roots against too black ends, waking up to his urine stained pants in the morning in a room decorated in stained photos of flair suited men and woman with big glasses, both standing besides Lincolns and Cadillacs. But what I did wonder was, What the hell is that song?

After that, I forgot about it for a while. One time, years later, I was watching a documentary about the Stax record label, and instantly I recognized the basic sound of the band and knew my mystery song had to be a Stax song. There is a line in Drop about the music through the wall, where I cannibalized this experience for some ambient description. But besides that, there seemed nothing more to learn about it.

Then one day about two years ago I was traveling through an airport for some literati thing, just trying to make my connection, and I heard the song. I hadn't heard or thought about the thing in years but I heard that bop-bop-bop-bop beat and instantly it all came back to me. I stopped what I was doing and headed into the Starbucks it was coming out of. The woman behind the counter looked at me like I was nuts when I asked desperately for the song's name pointing me towards the cd basket. The song still playing, going into its last screaming throws, I searched through their pre-packaged compilation trying to find it, but nothing there was even close. In desperation, I turned to the long line and said loudly over the airport bustle, "Does anybody know what song this is?" Most people seemed to have another answer on their minds, specifically to the question "Is this dude crazy?" One guy in the back, seeing that I was standing there waiting for an answer, said, "I think it's Otis Redding." Others agreed, although I think they would have agreed to anything to keep the line moving.

After that I went through iTunes entire Otis Redding catalog trying to find the song. I figured it was an obscure b-side, so went through everything but the greatest hits album to find it. I'm glad I did this, not because it was faster (it turned out the song was #1 of the "Best of" album), but because I fell in love with Otis Redding's music utterly and completely in that brief time.

This is the song, Otis Redding's "These Arms of Mine":



If this was a fair universe, all men would be able to sing like Otis Redding when they wanted to, when they needed to. Not to diss Marvin Gaye, or Teddy Pendergrass or whatever brother is your favorite crooner, but Otis Redding sang like a man. Utterly strong but completely vulnerable, smooth without affectation, without restraint but still like he could carry the world in his big brown hands. Sensitive and heartfelt and masculine all at the same time.



Fuck Elvis, I want to impersonate this man.