driving and singing and singing and singing (saved)

(Re-publishing this now. It was taken down for some incredible, stupid, selfish reasons. It had nothing to do with Salinger - but it had everything to do with everything else. Viz. life)

The trip is over. It was finished about two months ago. The same time, my father died. Today, instead of poems and Millers, I am feeling my heart crush under things such as law school and communications and the future. I was in the boat in the middle of the Baltic sea when I saw my ghost. I told you about her, the black haired French woman. Well I saw her today and she walked by me without saying anything: no moans, no smoke, no nothing. I feel abandoned by myself. The big bang, the big trip is over. Is over.

The trip is over, might as well come out and say it. And this blog has been a complete failure. [edit- delete]. I am driving into the firey pits of the Mississippi and the purple and yellow smoke, and the purple and yellow smo...

I was walking today and there was one hawk flying high above the tennis courts, and then there was another hawk, and the two predators they danced and loved each other, even as they were awe-shaking and terrible from below - and I thought of my first love, a girl I loved very much, and I thought of this eagle that flew me across the country once - not literally of course - but I saw an eagle and then I knew it, I had to leave. And then I saw a frozen eagle in the Indian chief's freezer, stored and kept with the hamburger ...

And even today! Today I told you: I decided to become a) a lawyer b) an English prof and c) a poet. And I became very, very angry that life is like this. That life is hard.

And so let me please finish this blog with a little bit of dignity. And perhaps with a promise and a request.

But first a note, one more, just one more, of observation. I will never be happy unless I can manage to forget my ego. But until then, I will firmly believe, that the only suitable thing to do in life is change people (with your art, with your science, with your law, with your bare, bleeding hands). I believe that change is the important thing.

And yet souls are stone, are diamonds. The most hard, awful things in the world, the most stubborn, are souls. And so art must be tough, and must be tougher. This is my aesthetic anyhow, and it is the reason I feel such a let down; for I am a softy.

I know that I won't be sharp enough with out a good chance to practice, and yet I just waste I waste I waste: (for proof, read the last three or four entries. For proof read anything from me. I do not focus. I need focus).

This whole thing has been the diary of an egomaniac.

***

One more thing about my beautiful dad.

When I was in Grade 5, I came home from school, and out on the lawn he had collected about 6 large sofas, 3 of those old-time oversized radio-recordplayer combos, and a random and vast collection of junk.

I first saw all of this from about two blocks away, as I was getting off my school bus. For the next minute, walking to my front door, I had burst into tears: Dad was really losing it. There was no more denying it.

There was another time, and it is very likely that it was the same day or week of the mad sofa collecting, but there was one day where I came home and when I got to the basement, there Dad had assembled another mad, manic collection of stuff. This time, however, Dad bought about three guitars - one of them was a black and white Fender Squire Strat, and the other two were sort of Epiphones, shaped like violins - and about four large, silver-screened and black amplifiers. All this wonderful, strange and alien equipment had been plugged in. And later that night, maybe it was a Friday, Dad had his buddies over and they were smoking weed and drinking whiskey.

And he gave me the Fender, and I plugged it into one of the big amps, and played my first guitar for the first time.

(Now, this part is distracting, however it happened so let me get it out of the way: the amp was not grounded, and was wired all wrong - Dad had bought a junk heap - and within a few seconds a current of electricity was shot from amp, to guitar strings, to my tiny little fingers, and I was fried for about 3 seconds, unable to move in what seemed like an eterinty of intense, horrible and dull pain).

And just this last week I opened up the crazy play that had occupied my father's last 10 years of his life: from writing it in his most manic, gambling fueled rampages, to selling it and republishing it later while he was melting away in a retirement home. The page I opened it to had a stage direction at this crucial part of the play - which is a kind of an epic Rock opera starring Mick Jagger - that Toby, me, and Paul, an old band buddy, would play their "Blues Dues song."

Now I haven't really cried all that much since he's dead, but this got to me.

Last night I dreamt of Dad and he could drive, and he could drive and smoke at the same time, and we cruised down a highway in his classic old sports car - which he destroyed in the bad years - and he was smacking the steering wheel singing along, and I could sing with him. And I could hear him playing guitar as we drove, perfectly, just powerful, unlike anything he could ever do in sickness. And we just drove down the road, full speed, with the windows down, enjoying life, singing and singing and singing.

Interlude: Second Letter and Brief Sketch of the Girl.

Dear Mr. Salinger,

I am so lonely. There is a south facing window in my bedroom and the air comes in and it feels cold. I have never felt so terrible in all my life. I wanted to begin my letter differently, but these are simply the compelling things on my mind right now.

What does it take to do complex, beautiful things? You have lived a a strange dissected life and the little I know of it only makes me lonelier and more depressed. I've always wanted to be a journalist, and to tell stories as you do. I wonder if I am foolish to want a man's life who seems so angry and alone. Even more foolish of me - I imagine I would feel better if I did. What is writing but the desire to be elsewhere - that thing which doesn't exist.

You should know I realize how spoiled I must sound. Or would sound if you knew the facts. I do have great parents, and two unspeakably intelligent and beautiful sibilings. I have been many places and experienced so much genius that others can barely believe I am only seventeen years old. But it's there. This terrible loneliness, repeating itself - even in times when I feel simply whole and happy. And there are many of those times too.

There were 34 letters between Valentina and Salinger. At first I found it impossible to write as her. After some time, this became easier. Since history is everything, I gave her history. Too much of it sometimes. I envisioned her lovers, her terrors, her questioning. This part was exhausting, but she gave me everything in return. His words, his attention.

I grew up in a small town, and was lucky to escape with a few good books in my head. She grew up in Paris and played the piano. Her parents were magicians and musicians - mine: teachers, gamblers, maniacs. She knew more of the Giants of Modernism than I ever will. She spoke wildly of art, philosophy, science. I simply craved, desperately, to cope with art - to be large, to be friend and confidant to the one giant who still lived. I was a Gollum and thirsty for what ever. Valentina was only strong, not afraid of men or change.

Each week, Valentina sent a new letter, sealed every time in a bright red envelope. Each letter composed by hand, with enormous effort, in the most loopy, girlish style I could. That part was exhausting, too.

It took ten weeks to get Salinger to respond.

"Dear Mr. Salinger," began the tenth letter, as did the others before and after. "In less than one week I shall graduate from school. I am writing for your advice this time."

***

I am publishing this now because I am feeling hostile. This story has not evolved in nearly two months now and I feel as if if I don't set some things down it might just evaporate. This is not how I pictured you receiving any of this story. It feels atrophic but necessary to go on this way. I have no patience or time.

My promise: More letters soon and an ending, eventually.

I was the last person who interviewed Salinger: Part 1

Salinger is dead. He mattered most to people like me - young American men, who recommend books to girls they want to impress. But he was a master, whose passing everyone should mourn. He changed the poetry of American short stories - the rhythm of everything we read. He invented italics and emphasis. He ruled dialogue and detail.

He was, for the last forty years, a recluse. We know little about his work since he went into open hiding. The hope I have - and I am sure thousands of others also - is that he really did continue to write and that we will one day, soon, see what he's been creating.

My advice for everyone: read Catcher in the Rye again. Read his short stories. Read Franny and Zooey. These books change you more than any other fiction I know. This sounds silly, pretentious - and I am sure will draw scoffs and loathing. But trust me - I am no Salinger absolutist. His work isn't perfect. I hate much of it, most of the time. But there's something in it - magic - and it is powerful. It is sad, and wonderful and huge.

Just after my dad died, last summer, I began writing to JD Salinger. I am not sure if this was missplaced longing for the mysterious artist man in my life I had just lost, or some striking new ambition which I knew I needed to chase. But it sure felt like destiny. For weeks, I tortured over how to write the first letter. I had hundreds of drafts and ideas. And nothing felt like anything he'd want to read.

Ultimately I came up with a crazy idea. Anyone who reads JD's work knows he's into little girls. This is undeniable. (Up for debate is whether this desire is sexual, or simply envy and adoration of innocence. That the young women he displays so affectionately - seductively - are icons of his longing for things lost).

I became consumed with this idea, and I convinced myself the only way to reach him was to exploit Salinger's dark side.

I began writing him love letters under guise of a young Italian-American girl named Valentina. Raven haired, tall and clumsy, precocious. She was the archetype Salinger Doll. To him, I sent her love, her wonder, her guessing games.

"Dear Mr. Salinger - thank you for your lovely letter. I have told my mother about my penpal and she is very curious about you. I shall never tell her the stupendous truth of course - it would not seem right to give you away. Not just yet, anyway. [...] By the way, I was curious the other night: What exactly is a bananafish? [...]"

And months later, this last fall, I received a letter from Salinger and his legal handlers. A stamped-envelope from a Manhattan legal firm, addressed to my Valentina. An invitation to come visit him in Cornish, N.H. His home, "to meet each other and chat."

I don't want to spend much more words here, or time. I am presently producing the documentary of my trip to meet Salinger. I brought with me two cameras, a 1st edition Catcher in the Rye and a friend of mine - a 20-something Jewish girl, who was tall and petite enough to pass as the Valentina, and I met the man who no one else could in nearly half a decade.

I want to say simply that I feel awful for the deceit, that I have no feelings of pride or happiness about my conquest. And I fear with a tender, submerged heart, that as Salinger faded away this morning, the last words escaping from his broken-hearted lips were whispers. "Valentina. Valentina."

R.I.P

- Tobin Dalrymple

To be continued

Go moan for man

Paris, latin quarter, June 2009.

A small, peach-shaped fist crashing into the keys of an old, chipped piano. This is how the story begins: Clang clang clang.

Valentina is sitting at the old upright Steinway. Eyes closed and humming along with the imaginary melodies, dancing with her mind like children, as the hands they react violently and inept, at what ever violence is felt in not-knowing the right chords, and all of that.

She is wearing nothing but a cigarette in her sharp soft mouth, and I am sleeping, or was just, as the morning sun is striking the catapulted dots of dust and ash that fly and escape the piano's cold vibrating wood and the tin, cold ashtray.

On the floor is a collection of poems - half of them handwritten, half ripped from anthologies, with underlined passages and enthusiastic, blue ink - a wine bottle, red and drained to its syrupy, ash-laden botton - books, paper back Millers and Doestoevskies - and scattered remains of the violence and fucking, love making, from nights before: a pair of scissors, bloodied from when the police came and nearly arrested us both, used condoms and rappers, three packs of cigarettes, Marlboro Gold.

Here I am, here, here I am, clang, her tiny fruit shaped hands proclaim, hands which I know smell like cigarettes and perfume and semen and her pussy; and I rub my head and block out the sun, and I can smell her on my hands too: "Good morning, Bella, good evening," cigarettes and her sex. And my throat is sore, so I stay silent waiting for a response, which I will not receive.

And she is whistling an opera, and laughing like a child in between, whistle and laugh, rage and laughter and whistling. The neighbours will soon start up, it is Sunday.

I take some easy first exploratory steps, and the wood floor feels cold against my feet. The sunlight fills the room after I draw wide the heavy tweed curtains, which had hung half closed, and now that I am at the window I light a cigarette and run my fingers along my chest and yawning I examine the street below. Two ladies are sitting with a lap dog each and they are smoking, sitting at a table of the cafe, on the patio stones.

Over to the piano, as I walk Valentina is still barking, but I see her now and she is lit like gold, and her breasts glow softly and she is exactly, exactly beautiful; "Do you have to do this?" I ask, not thinking, sitting next to her on the wooden bench. I rest a hand on her shoulder but she puffs and with rage she smacks my hand away.

"Fuck you, you pig." And her blue eyes seem grey and are wide with rage. And she plays louder, and smacks down each fist in long extended stone webs, burstingly. And the neighbours have now started shouting something from above, but it is muffled and impossible to understand. And outside the dogs start to bark.

Suddenly she halts completely. She now just rests there, head over her own breasts, hands perched on keys, ready to strike, but calm and gentle, like ten lionesses, her fingers.

Just as I am about to start to play the piano myself, I think better of it and stand up, putting on my jeans. "I am making coffee, do you want some?"

"No. Yes. I will need more cigarettes."

"And you want me to get them?"

She says yes.

tic

The last thing I wrote about had something to do with a piano teacher and a little girl, the same little girl in Paris who I saw catching sparrows with tiny shoe-lace nooses.

The piano teacher falls in love - sort of - with his little student, mainly because she is a genius on the keys, delicate and sad and inpiring. But also, it should be said, because he is despicable and lonely, and although very handsome, he is aged, widowed and peniless.

The affair begins with a postcard he sends to her ( a post card I really found in a garage sale up in Montmartre). He is always calling her 'his little friend' and with each lesson they have he falls madder and madder in love - wreslting all night with images of her perfect piano playing, her hands on the keys, etc and so on.

One day she kisses him on the cheek just as her mother picks her up from the lesson.

And then I was thinking of pretty much ending the story right there.

(However there's a chance that somethign entriely differnet would happen - ill explain in a second - but it's a little fantastical and I don't much know what kind of stuff I would rather be writing: little empty vignettes, saying nothing really; or obvious little stories saying something, but not much.

He would, after the little kiss, stay up all night feverishly writing a beautiful beautiful piece. He would play mad and marvelously. And since he used to be a prodigy himself, it would be as if he were young again, and life was good again, and all the right music, it just comes to him, and through him, like a sieve of light - no a sieve for light. Playing piano like how he used to - before years and marriage and death and life drained him and his talent of potential or success.

Anyway, he stays up all night and the next day, he keeps on playing the piano. He just can't stop. He goes all through the weekend, day and night. Only pausing to scribble some notes, have a cigarette, or a coffee. Complete mania - but really really genius, extravagant mania.

The little girl comes back the next week for her lesson; and he is no longer - he discovers, with only slight surprise - at all inspired or touched by her presence. In fact, he can't even stand to listen to her play anymore. Before the lesson is over, she is kicked out,, crying and even admiting she adores him, begging for him to not be so cruel, but the piano teacher - unwashed, unshaven, but crazy happy - - sits down to continue with his work.

A few hours later, as the sun is setting, outside on the street two neighbours talk between eachother. They have been out on their front lawns, maybe watering the garden, or washing their cars or something, and they start to chat. They can hear him playing, the sweet and sad and wonderful melodies coming through the windows, and they say just how beautiful it all sounds.

***

This is more the kind of thing I want to be doing here . I cringe that I made a promise to end a stupid wornout travel blog in a four-parter, and I am only halfway done.

I am drinking scotch and recently I thought of an old friend and some older, deader, poet friends (who(m?) I never met).

The next two parts will come soon to the conclusion. But I can tell you right now they are entirely fictional.

There's the two weeks I will spend living in a Paris hotel with a girl I met in a hostel. I can't see that being too interestign or beautiful, however, I just really want to try out a scene or two and see how that goes. (I will probably throw in a few scenes from Buenos Aires too. There was a few things - again that never really happenned - that I've been dying to tell you all about.

And the final part is going to be a gigantic explosion of fireworks and will be limited by words but not by emotion or vision. It's going to mean absolutely nothing to me, except for the fact that it's all over and time to find a new place to get really excited about. By place I mean this website stuff. I've told a few of my friends how important it is to me to write online; otherwise I can't write at all anymore. I think perhaps if I got a typewriter . . .

that's enough for now.

this wasn't anything.

Part Two: how I became a kid pushing his own stroller

. . . and so, there I was, in Helsinki, surrounded by five, maybe six, beautiful, blonde Finnish girls."

At a backyard party in Toronto, with about 30 local hipsters, and fresh off a plane from Paris, I am speaking to an exgirlfriend, telling her this story.

"Uh uh," she says, smoking with arms crossed, one hand extended to her lips, her eyes scanning everywhere, in flits.

"I mean really fucking beautiful," I say, I go on. "Can't really even believe it, you know. Oh! And they are all, like, 18! 18 years old, anyway ..."

"Right... um hmm, figures," she jokes, briefly making eye contact, discerning, scrunchy eyes, understanding and emmitting a sense of history, there.

"And so ... well I was with them because there was no fucking way I was going to spend my last night in Helsinki smoking and drinking gin and tonics, you know, just watching these people in these horrible clubs, so I went up to a few girls and we started talking. Next thing I know there's five of them, and it's one of the girls' birthday's, and before you know it I'm acting like I know this one Finnish MTV host, and since I speak English, I go up to him and we start to talk, and I like become an immediate hero..."

"Right, amazing, umm, do you want one of these?" Handing me a cigarette; three or four noisy people around us, and just as many conversations.

"And we are all having an amazing time now. And we're walking towards this kareoke club which they all know, and really want to go to, and then all of a sudden a guy comes down the street, racing down this cobble stone-paved hill, and I don't see it, but you hear a big like thump, and then a smack. And there's a crowd of people around him. . . "

She's not really listening.

"... and so when I get closer, we see he's laying there in the pavement, and not moving, and there's this line of blood coming from his head, trickling down through the cobble stone street. And he is fucking dead."

"What! He dies?"

"Yeah he dies... for a while he kind of opened his yes I guess, but then he just fucking faded, and people were freaking out, calling the cops, and everything."

"That is so awful. This is an awful awful story."

"It was horrible. It was horrible but wait," she doesn't seem to want to hear more. "There's somethign so beautiful about to happen . . . it seemed like minutes later, but his girlfriend comes riding up from behind, and she just jumps off her bike and lets it go riding away down the street, and she gets down in the street, getting his blood all over her, and she just weeps and holds his head in her hands."

"That is awful awful, I don't like this story."

"Wait wait wait. It get's better."

***

After we left the crowd, it was about 11 p.m. and the sun was casting a weird grey-blue haze, like cloudy daytime, across the city. We have already forgotten about the dead man, mostly, and we are drinking and shouting and making jokes in the mostly empty streets.

We arrive at the kareoke bar and it is fantastic. I don't remember all the names, but something like Annie, Neah, Kay, sort of simple and pseudo-biblical I guess. A very kind man is pleased to meet me at the bar and we talk about Toronto for a little bit. He's shy and dressed all in black, and sweaty, and going bald already, although I would say he's just only 24. I buy him a beer and shake his hand and wish him a nice night. He's fantasticaly excited and hugs me and buys me a shot before I leave the bar to join my lady friends.

The joy and laughter we experience, I mostly just watching, after we all sit down and the performances start. . . it's like I'm at the centre of that giant spinning thing the poets talk about, a giant spinning wheel or world (or whirl), where people are laughing and the "bolts they coming loose;" it's that phenomenal sense of rebellion in the face of chaos, the little but divine thing it is to be happy in such a world, falling apart for ever.

This foggy vision I have, of the whole room spinning, there's a clown on the stage, barely singing to the Finnish rock song, and his friends are watching and cheering; and the birthday girl (Julia?), she has black hair - the only one - and black eyes, and a truly cherubic but electric glow, like bacchus baby angels, drinking, and all our feet tangled together in some astounding, joyous knot.

On the dance floor there's this one model-looking short-skirt girl. Tall, beautiful, and dancing with her ugly girl friend. I'm not sure exactly, I know I wasn't trying any pick up lines, but all of a sudden she is yelling at me, and telling me to "just fucking go! Just go."

I decide to stick around, since I'm insulted she would think that I was beign some creep, when really I was just trying to have a good time, and dance a bit, to ride this feeling of joy I had. But she's insistent, and obviously getting very upset with me.

"Look, your not that hot," I say to her, trying to imply my non-interest.

"Yes I am, you fuckign asshole. Fuck. Just leave!"

I tell her I plan on using the dancefloor, too, and indicate with a circle motion around me the area I plan on staying, but she doesn't relent, and finally (I was wonderign what was taking so long), her male friend, or boyfriend - a thin, but wiry, finn - comes up to me: look, I better just fucking leave right now, no problems, or else there's going to be fuckign serious problems.

I tell him to fuck him self and he, with one fast, hulk-like swing, punches me in the gut. As I'm stepping back a bit, wondering in some confusion what to do, my little bald friend materializes from behind, like some guardian gargoyle. He has flung him self on my attackers back, biting his neck, I can see the blood drip from his teeth, as he wails and scratches on the guy's kidneys with his fists. The brute falls to the floor, and my balding friend is now kicking his face in, looking up at me and smiling, through a giant, bloody grin.

***

I can't remember her name. She was one of the five Finns and she walked me nearly all the way home. The sun by this time was out in full, but it was four a.m., and we were both very drunk. I left her when we got to the dock yard, deciding not to kiss her goodnight, and walked away without looking back.

I looked with affection at all the tall ships, quietly rocking, and all the rusted old ice breakers, as I walked along the catwalk of the old city marina, headed back to spend my last night on the sail boat.

This sail boat was supposed to take me through the Baltic - we know. But I am walking and wondering and wondering. And the ships are so slowly rocking and it is all so peaceful and wonderful wonderful. In my pocket is a ferry ticket and the next day I was supposed to board a ship and head to Tallinn, and then to Riga.

Suddenly it strikes me I have no interest in going to either of these places. It strikes me like a church bell breaking the quiet of an early morning.

All of a sudden I am sure that there's one place I should go to. It is like a million tiny bells now, ringing inside of me, I am so excited, for this is the place I have meant to go to all along, and isn't so wonderful that I didn't even really plan on going there, that it was all some huge accident, all some quiet drunk walk home from a Helsinki kareoke bar? And the man who died. . . Isn't Paris, well, isn't that the best way to go ... not planning it ... and so in the rapture and laughter of a death and a kareoke bar, I called the airport and made a reservation for the next flight.

I stayed up for the next few hours, and hung around the dock yards to watch my ferry leave for Tallinn. I lifted my hat, since I was wearing an old beaten up traveler's hat, and saluted my ferry as it left me behind at the dock. And after some coffee and some jam pastries near the fish markets, I stumbled onto a plane, and left.

...

...

leaving the kareoke bar with four finnish girls, we heard a loud crack