Secret Origin of Mack the Knife, Part One

I'm questioning my own wisdom on this, but my head's a mess, I want to post something and I just don't feel that my critical facilities are at their strongest. So this is a fiction piece I've started working on, which is about music, so it counts. I want to write about the Piano Creeps and the next dance party, but for now, here's this. It's completely unedited and rough. The rest will show up as it gets finished. Hope you can stomach it.

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Eddie stared over the turkey and across the small table in the Zirkowitz's kitchen at his grandmother and silently catalogued the things that were going wrong with his body. His teeth would barely pull apart wide enough to chew, the molars locked together staunchly. Even when he managed to get something chewed, his throat was attempting to refuse entry. His parents were talking like a tennis match on either side of him but his eyes stayed fixed on his grandmother, her head down as she picked at peas, carrots, mashed potatoes.

This, thought Eddie, whose emotions normally ranged from enthusiasm to mild embarassment, is what it feels like to hate someone. Remembering almost as a footnote the violent throngs of kids his age he'd seen crashing into one another at the feet of concert stages on teevee, he thought, this is what music can do. Music can prepare you to hate.

The first song Eddie really listened to was the last song the Zirkowitzes ever listened to at the dinner table. The classic rock station was a constant in their tiny split-level, at least when the teevee wasn't on. Of course, the content varied, but only within a certain range and Eddie, when he thought about it at all, considererd the radio his father's influence on the house, the echo and complement to his mother's obsession with lamps. Not a week went by that the lighting situation in the cramped living room didn't undergo some change, since Eddie's mother couldn't drive past a Salvation Army or thrift store without stopping in to peruse the lamp selection. Finding one or two she liked, usually for less than ten dollars a pair, she'd cycle some currently in use into the basement, which had once been his father's workspace but was now nearly overrun with lamps past. Even the most unloved was never actually discarded since in proper combination it might complete some ideal form of a living room that existed purely in Eddie's mother's mind. Lamps would be redeployed after exile in the basement, just as some would arrive in the house and be immediately relegated there. Eddie accepted this flux as standard operating procedure, just as he accepted that coming home from school he would be greeted by the sound of electric guitars before hellos. But just as he'd never taken the time to evaluate any of his mother's individual lamp choices, he never paid attention to the individual songs that filled the house in four minute spans.

The dinner in question, eaten as usual before Eddie had begun to feel remotely hungry, was porkchops and the drive time show. The deejay, deep and buttery voice, talked more than Eddie or either of his parents, although his mother ran he and his father through the usual catechism of how was your day questions. Eddie, scrawny, sat between his heavyset parents, thinking primarily of schoolwork and how he should have picked up that copy of the next Stephen King book at the library that afternoon, since he'd more than likely finish his current one before he went to bed. During an unusually long pause in this ritual, Eddie looked up to see his mother glowering at his father, chewing with a slow determination. His father, as was usually the case, seemed oblivious. Swallowing a bit of green beans down, Eddie ventured,

"Mom, what's wrong?"

"Ask your father," his mother snapped. Eddie turned to his father, who fit a hunk of porkchop between his expansive beard and walrusine mustache and shrugged almost imperceptably. Eddie turned back to his mother, who was apparently not feeling as reticent as she had a second before.

"Your father," she declared, holding her fork in the air officiously, "once wrote some ˆchoiceˆlyrics from this song in a letter to me." And with that, she hoisted herself from her chair, stalked across the room and shut off the radio, as she would do the moment she started cooking dinner from that night on. The three of them ate the rest of the meal in silence.

After dinner, his father took up his usual post on the recliner six feet in front of the teevee. His mother retreated upstairs complaining of a vague unwellness while Eddie washed the dishes. Running down the list of his friends and evaluating each of them on the basis of how much help they'd be in this particular situation, Eddie decided on Owen and called his apartment after the last dish was set in the drying rack. He worried momentarily that Owen's roommate Julie might answer; she had a way of looking at Eddie that made him uneasy, like she knew something about him he didn't know about himself. Luckily, it was Owen who picked up.

"Eds!" exclaimed Owen. "To what do I owe?"

"I had a question," said Eddie.

"Fire away, Eds."

"Do you know this song, it's like a classic rock song? Something about a rose in the thrift store gloves?"

There was a pause on the other end of the line and Eddie imagined he could hear Owen running his hand thoughtfully over his stubble.

"Wait," Owen asked, "was it 'fisted'?"

"Was what?"

"The glove. A rose in the fisted glove?"

"Could be."

"And the eagle flies with the dove?"

"I think."

"Yeah, that's Manassas. Kind of a shitty song, to be honest. Why do you ask?"

"Do you have it?"

"Naw, Stills is pretty much dead to me after the Springfield." Owen might as well have been speaking Greek.

"Um. Okay. Well, I sort of need it. That song."

"Huh. Shouldn't be a problem. Can probly pick it up on the cheap downtown. What're you up to tomorrow?"

The next day, Owen picked Eddie up after school, his baby blue Dodge Dart idling loudly out front waitinf for Eddie to jump in. Past a row of yellow buses, the Dart eased and sputtered itself away from the school towards downtown with Owen prattling about the collapse of the LA music scene at the end of the sixties. Eddie listened attentively, unsure what any of it had to do with the rose, the glove and the eagle, not to mention his parents' argument at dinner.

Nimbly piloting the boatlike car, Owen parallel parked right out front of Transmission Records, on the lower level of an Fredtown house on Stephen Street. The store's logo, a charcoal sketched mock up of the RKO Pictures radio tower hung above the door and between the windows of the upstairs windows like a nose, giving the housefront the vaguely anthropomorphic look of three prong outlets and clocks at certain hours of the day. A step behind Owen, Eddie walked into the store's mouth.

"My good man," proclaimed Owen broadly to the room as the door shut behind Eddie. A handful of the shop's patrons looked up from their browsing, but for the most part, the click-click-click or CDs being flipped didn't stop. Tom the clerk simply rolled his eyes a little, having dealt with this particular eighteen-year-old before.

"My friend here," Owen announced, clapping Eddie on the shoulder," would like to purchase a Manassas album."

Tom arched his eyebrows, someone nearby snickered and Eddie realized a shibboleth had been spoken and had marked him an outsider. He felt the need to loudly explain about the fight at dinner, about the fisted glove, and he wished Owen had not made this announcement.

"Dollar bin," said Tom, motioning with his eyes before returning to the magazine he'd been thumbing through. Owen made a little bow and led Eddie to the dollar bin.

"Last refuge of the damned," Owen explained. "Castoffs and cutouts. These ones were so small, the culture at large threw them back."

"So the album we're looking for isn't any good?" asked Eddie, still eying his fellow patrons as if they might turn on him at any moment.

"No, Eds, I'm afraid it isn't. One last attempt to catch a spark on wet kindling. The problem with a musician who's been well-fed," Owen said, pulling the Manassas album out of the dollar bin and pointing at the paunched image of the man on the cover, "is they can no longer sound hungry."

Ed had no idea what the advantage of sounding hungry was, but as Owen flipped the album over to scan the song titles, his confusion deepened. Why had the song been worth arguing over if it wasn't even any good?

"Wait a minute," said Owen. "Hey Tom, what the fuck?"

"What's the trouble?" Tom asked.

"This album," Owen said, brandishing it in the air, "doesn't have the love the one you're with song."

"Love the One You're With's not Manassas," explained Tom. "It's on Stephen Stills Stephen Stills."

"What the hell right does Stephen Stills have putting out an album doesn't have Love the One You're With on it?" Owen asked incredulously. "That's like Big Country putting out an album without In a Big Country."

"Actually, the second Big Country album is pretty good," offered a smartly dressed patron in the Brit Pop section.

"What're you, Scottish or something?" interrogated Owen, turning on the patron, who jumped back from Pulp to Blur.

"Hey relax," said Tom. "I guarantee there's a Stephen Stills Stephen Stills in the dollar bin." Owen pointed a threatening finger at the boy in Brit Pop, who quickly looked back down at the Charlatans UK. Owen returned to the dollar bin and quickly extracted the album with a little "aHA!" With a flourish and another little bow, he placed the album on the counter and stepped aside so Eddie could pay. Feeling smaller than he could remember ever having felt, Eddie paid quickly and greatfully accepted a bag to hide the album in.

More to come...