Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas

and a slice of toast short. They all fell asleep. All except Claire. I’d lain beside her, hand in the air, not touching her. I talked and talked until she told me to put my hand down on her hip. I did.
    â€œHow’s writing going?”
    â€œFine.”
    â€œWhat are you working on?”
    â€œA book.”
    â€œWho’s your agent?”
    â€œI don’t have one now.”
    She finds the energy to raise her eyebrows. My last agent had told me that I needed to do some serious editing, that it didn’t seem
urban
enough, but that mostly, somewhere in the philosophy, I’d lost the story and, therefore, the emotional core. It had reminded me of what William Lloyd Garrison said to Frederick Douglass, that Douglass should tell the story and leave the philosophy to him. Which would mean, if Garrison was correct, then there was nothing beyond the simple narrative—no context. Or that everyone understood the context, that the context was available for all to decipher and that they all had the scope and the willingness to do so. Perhaps it was me. Perhaps I had only disconnected thoughts and anecdotes flaring up in me like bouts of gastritis.
“By the rivers of Babylon
. . .” Perhaps I have no narrative. Perhaps I have no song.
    â€œTell me a story.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œYou’re a storyteller.”
    â€œAbout what?”
    â€œYou’re a storyteller.”
    She smiles—too sexually for her to be interested in art or arcs. She seems to have a great deal invested in my story, as though if it was good enough she could get naked for me without guilt or reservation. That was what a good narrative was supposed to do, be naked and make naked.
    The tart’s boomerang flies at the camera and the screen goes white. There’s an aerial shot of a dusty road. Someone strikes a chord on an acoustic guitar. The camera moves and pushes in on a crossroads tableau. The camera levels out, parallel with the ground. Someone’s sitting on a tree stump. It’s a white kid wearing a porkpie hat. He’s strumming an old Cherry Sunburst jumbo. It’s too big for him. He plays awkwardly on the clichéd Rubenesque form. He looks like he’strying to choke a chicken-necked fat girl with one hand and caress her with the other.
    A pedal steel slides in, but it sounds more Hawaii than Mississippi. In the music track he’s already singing, but in the video I’m watching the camera pan across a field and into the sky. Now he’s singing, walking along a railroad line. The following frames are filled by sorrowful images: black and white faces; toothless, broken men; hardened women; and filthy children. A drum program marks the beat. If the sound and image were in sync, it would tap out his cadence in the gravel along the tracks. He opens his mouth and sings. His voice is somewhere between tenor and baritone and sounds like he’s in some adolescent purgatory bemoaning his stasis.
    â€œWhite boy blues.” She shakes her head. “Greg likes this shit. Do you?”
    â€œI haven’t heard this.”
    â€œBut do you like it?” She’s fully alert now.
    â€œI had this friend in high school . . .”
    â€œYeah?”
    â€œWell, I went to school just west of Boston—Newton.”
    â€œI knew you came from money.”
    â€œNo, I wasn’t wealthy. Sometime before then Massachusetts passed legislation that made it mandatory for all cities and towns to have public housing.”
    â€œSuburban projects? Ridiculous.”
    â€œWell, kind of. Anyway, my mother got on the waiting list and moved us in.”
    â€œSingle mom?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œShe must be something.”
    â€œYes, well, she’s dead. Anyway, Gavin and me are seniors and we’re at a party. Do you know Boston?”
    â€œA little bit.”
    â€œDo you know Commonwealth Avenue?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œIt runs west out of downtown.