The Inner Track

Saxophone is playing in a trilling descent. Chimes jingle so softly, as if the slightest of breezes has arisen moving the thin metal against metal without a human hand involved. Somewhere in the background a very muted electric bass plays a soft bottom end. A trifling riff off an electric piano floats in and out of the soundscape. 

A large green candle burns. Me, I always opted for the bulky candles, the two- or three-inch round cylinders kind.  Big candles will not tip over easily on top of my poverty bookcase. Four cinder blocks and two of the cheapest pine boards hold an avocado plant, the candle, an acrylic cube called the rainbow box because of the tinted triangles of color inside. 

Aside the bookshelves sits a small squat table with a Marantz 30-watt tube amplifier and a Phillips turntable, wires stretch out to a decent pair of speakers. On the poverty bookshelves are also about 200 long playing records; classic jazz and jam bands-the music of heads and hipsters. A cheap green carpet covers most of the linoleum flower. As my candle burns, as the amplifier gives off its blue light and as the turntable spins round the jazz music moves the room from the mundane into a haven. How simple and yet so complicated a moment. 

Outside the leaded paned windows are the cold wind and slight snow that falls in late February here. The old windows are useless shields against the north wind. The old steam radiator also does not do much to deflect the brunt of the chill away from the space. It is either off or on, there is no middle ground. Still the life I live contained within these six planes, roof, floor and four walls, is special. So simple yes but so very complicated. 

[Today, I am sitting at a white Formica table using a white plastic chair. I have Bluetooth headphones on playing this music that is now forty years old. The music separates me from the reality of this cold coffee shop on this cold February day. It seems that the world has changed, and that room is clearly and permanently locked away from reality but will always exist in my mind.  

The room of candlelight and jazz might have disappeared yesterday when I talked to the man who oversees the building where the corporeal room once was.  He manages the place right now. He gently told me the room was ripped out during a renovation and is now part of a larger room, a laundry. Or maybe it is events conspiring to show me that I lost the battle to keep that part of my spirit alive. One false step and away it went.] 

Richard Brautigan wrote a book called “In Watermelon Sugar”. The only thing I remember about it is a line that goes, “...my deeds are done, and done again, as all my deeds are done, in watermelon sugar.” The line, the lyric without a song, takes me to a space of youth when the greatest of treats was a sweet ripe watermelon. There was a time when the mere scent of watermelon could set my sense a tingle. If only I have lived my life with the joy and delight of anticipating and then tasting a dark green watermelon, and it only the joy of that scent had been able to keep my joy of living alive, I would be a human being in full. 

I am sorry for the person I am. I am sorry for not being the person I should have been. 

Soft jazz plays on taking me back to the space where I would sit at my student desk and watch the candle burn. I would have to flip the record at some point, but I would watch the candle flicker in the cool breeze seeping in through the window. The shadows of the avocado plant would dance upon the wall. Lost in that shadow world I would pull my jacket a little tighter and just be. Time to close that space perhaps forever and be the person I wanted to be but never became. And the candle burns out. The track ends with the skrit, skrrit sound of the needle on the inner track. I take my headphones off and walk into today’s light.