APRIL FOOL'S DAY
by Mike DeCapite

When I was fifteen I walked into one of the mall record stores where a harmonica was playing and looked up as though I was in church. You know how you look up by reflex?
Just like that.

The record, as it turned out, was Blood on the Tracks, and the song was “Tangled up in Blue”. The harmonica poured its heart out and the music glittered like sunlight on the spokes of a wheel or the surface of a stream. The moment was one of those recognitions of how things are and are going to be, and the simple and yet vaulting song has been like a church to me ever since.

Springtime always brings me back around to Blood on the Tracks, which is about the presence of the past as much as anything else. The bare branches down Folsom Street are pricked by a needlework of new leaves, and the blue sky is a color you can’t look at, but into. Yesterday, a Friday, I played the CD before I left the house. I took the train to work and sat outside on a bench, as I do every morning, and read for half an hour. Nearby, big magnolia blossoms were standing up in a potted tree. A guy I work with, whom I barely know, was on his way up to the office. He stopped at the bench and told me there was something different about me. I forget how he put it. But I felt like it was because those songs had put me back at the still center of who I am.

When I got home my room was cool with late-afternoon shadow. I set an ashtray on the trunk by the window, started Blood On The Tracks, put my feet up on the desk and let it roll. It was hard to take. These things get harder as you get older, maybe because you realize that they’re out of your reach. You realize how hard they were to achieve, how transparent, what a miracle they are. “Beauty walks a razor’s edge, someday I’ll make it mine.” I sat there in my small swivel chair, leaning back against the bookcase, and watched the record play out. It opened a window on my past, and before I knew it I was in that room, and it was the same room as the one I call the present. The things of the room are from the past, the same as my reasons for being here, all of which, the books, the trunk, the room, my reasons, are of the present, too. The past exists on the same plane as the present, with its wives and friends who come and go and the difficulties of communication and the permanence of impermanent relations and vice versa. A few weeks ago I had a tough conversation with my second wife, one of those conversations in which you can hear how things are and how they’re going to be. There are scenes and utterances which will be with me for the rest of my life. The guilt I’ve gotten past. What’s still standing is the minor tragedy that both of us are right. Like any structure, it’s supported by opposing tensions. These truths are hard for me in a new way because there’s no turning back. There’s no help for them, there’s no one to call to tell about them, there’s nothing much to say about them because they just are.

In an outtake, Dylan sings:
I met somebody face to face, I had to remove my hat
She’s everything I need in love but I can’t be swayed by that
It frightens me, the awful truth of how sweet life can be...

I swept and straightened the room, stacked the books neatly on the bare floor by the couch.
When the record was done I went to a get-together at Lee and Rebecca’s apartment which the warm weather had engendered as naturally as it brought forth the buds, walking quietly through the dusk, inhaling jasmine so sweet it was sour, and gardenia, and other things I couldn’t name. I didn’t want to go, I had nothing to say, I didn’t want to talk, or listen to others talk. The sky was emptying out. A bright pink contrail, which looked as permanent as a scar, had disappeared without a trace when I looked again.

At Lee and Rebecca’s, everywhere I turned there were a bottles of liquor and wine and mixers and olive spears and fruit, and everyone was mixing and sipping delicious-looking and civilized martinis in cold metal shakers and Campari-&-sodas with orange slices and bourbons on the rocks, but my momentary temptation to have a drink was an ember easily stamped out, because it’s been a long time already and I have, hopefully, a long way to go.

*

This morning I folded up the bed, made a pot of tea, and wrote all that while listening to the record again. Then I went to the racetrack.

I rode the train to the East Bay and got off at North Berkeley. There I left the station and crossed the road to the Golden Gate Fields Shuttle, which is a cab driver standing under a tree and three passengers in his taxi waiting for another. I squeezed in, he shut the door and off we went, handing money over the seat, two-fifty each, a shrunken man in an old suit and turban, the familiar silent citizen with fine slicked-back hair in a blue windbreaker and shades who rode up front, and a sizeable woman who said that if she won she was going to buy a new pair of shoes. Berkeley was a month further into spring, a few degrees warmer. We rode through streets of bungalows and yellow flowers in overgrown lawns, under the freeway to the bay.

At the curb we wished each other luck and went our separate ways. I took a Form, program, and coffee to the grandstand. Below me the layout was as fresh as the morning, with the Berkeley hills beyond. Sprinklers arced where the grass was mown in stripes. Slow tractors overturned the dark earth of the track, followed by the water trucks, which cooled it all down.

I had a bad day out there. In my first race I got shut out of a horse that won and paid $50 and then I had two out of three horses in the next five trifectas. Pete showed up and we caught a small trifecta which brought me about halfway back. On our way out he wanted to watch them come around again, so we stopped and waited by the rail. I leaned on the fence, watching a bumblebee hovering above its shadow on the dirt. Funny how quiet it is when they come around. All you hear is the horses’ breathing and now and then a whip...

*

I keep listening to Blood on the Tracks over and over. Idiot wind. Smoke pouring out of a boxcar door. One day you'll be in the ditch, flies buzzing around your eyes. Last night, for some reason, I had to read Hamlet's graveside speech before I went to sleep. Alas, poor Yorick! A fellow of infinite jest, and now abhored in my imagination, just a skull, quite chapfall'n. Near that bench at work, the blossoms have almost disappeared among the leaves.
As Don Juan says, let death be your advisor.

*

On Sunday I stood in the back door. Blazing sunlight had chosen a white flower and filled its petals with more light than they could hold before it moved on. Around 3:30 I took my laundry around the corner. The shadows were shot with sunlight and the cool air carried the sun’s warmth the way the spring carries the summer. Everyone on the street looked a little blinded by the light, like they didn’t quite know what to do with themselves and they were waiting for it to die down a little...

It’s taken me four years to see that I live on the prettiest street in San Francisco. The trees won me over, the eloquent double row of elms in both directions.

The trees hang fully-leafed now, slaves to life like everyone else.

*all lyrics copyright Ram’s Horn Music and Sony Music

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