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Wasted
and Wounded: Narrative in Tom Waits' Songs
He knew many
people resented a child who wouldn't sleep. They'd read simple
lines of a story in an increasingly frustrated voice, their pace
becoming more rapid, their fingers tapping on the page beside
where rabbits and teddy bears rose from the paper for the child's
attention. They would debate who should be the one to put the
kid to bed, raising the unresolved from years earlier in order
to be the one downstairs while the hapless one read the book a
second time. Their victory would be a wineglass and when that
grew dull, they would creep upstairs, their feet conscious of
the creaking fourth step, trying to get close enough to the room
that they might hear the repeated story, hear the high voice and
its questions, hear what they'd excluded and what the wine had
not replaced.
For him, the
child's view was magical. In the view out the window, the crumbling
tenement and rusted fire escape became a forest where the trees
had slanted forms, the man rooting in the garbage can became an
ogre, or a neglected prince who'd lost his dreams and only needed
the labour with his hands to remind him how to return to the palace.
The buildings reared out of fog or poked up through soft blankets,
the hobo stepped into the light and his fine clothes reflected
the traffic signals, a glancing of red cycled through yellow and
green.
Tom imagined
himself shushing the crying girl, pointing out the window and
telling her they'd stay to watch the sun come up. He said aloud
that he'd stay beside her until the rooster was done, until the
frost of early March had left the leaves. He thought of wiping
her tears with his thumbs, pushing them to the side of her face
where they would mat her hair. He would point out the moon shining
dew on the windowsill, the magical world just beyond that which
had always inhabited his own vision and which he wanted in her
dreams. He knew her head would turn on the pillow to track the
moon on the blankets, her eyes would struggle open against the
weight of her eyelashes, and her hair would spill like copper
pennies from a lockbox.
He imagined
how her head would nod, how she would fight to remain awake so
that she could see how the dawn looked from the other side. His
voice would drop until it could barely be heard, a gravel truck
driving over flannel and each pebble wrapped in soft down. She
would jerk awake, her arms shifting as she fought the drifting
in the fog that came before the dreams were launched, then she
would settle again, her neck softening and her face growing still
as deep sighs lifted the blankets.
He would keep
talking, he knew, asking her to imagine other countries, tropical
islands, birds floating on the breeze above white sand like a
slash against the brilliant blue of the sea. He would tell her
of livid greens, brilliant parrots clattering in the trees, their
meaningless racket a slumberous background to the wellspring of
tropical life. He would build squat stone buildings and lowing
cattle, slow moving sheep on wet grass in the summer morning.
As he imagined he could tell of rolling hills, clouds overhead
like pillows that were so light they had floated into the sky
through windows left open to catch a catspaw of air on still humid
nights.
The dreams
were open doors and windows before the sash became swollen with
rain and the hinges rusted shut. They were the handle on a tool
that allowed the discerning eye to split the rail, to drive the
spike, and in other ways increase the force that conscious living
allowed. Dreams were small houses built between busy intersections
and along the on-ramps to highways. Still places in the rush of
to and fro. They allowed a breakfast to be cooked over split cedar
kindling, and the pine knot to aroma the air and the food. Dreams
meant that every moment was magical and that memory would have
something to retain when the despair of the workday trudge kept
worn shoes scraping on hard concrete instead of stepping onto
the shorn grass of the park.
He could imagine
how her breathing would deepen. He would sit in the wide-armed
chair and watch, her face pouting with the force of the air that
kept her alive, her fingers twitching on the keyboard while the
house settled into quiet. He would wait for her dreams to carry
her to the far-off lands, to bring her to where children played
when they left their bodies behind at night.
He would think
about how many years later she would remember the night when he
tucked her in, when he brushed away the hair before he kissed
her forehead, when he talked about the windowsill and the moon,
when he spoke of dreams before they woke and took her away. She
would remember the magic, when she was a hundred and he was dust,
when her voice cracked with age and his had been forgotten. She'd
remember then the night she'd had hours to sleep, hours to talk
about the magic of the ordinary world, the twisted steel opposite
her window and the voice that told her stories.
She would
sit before a window much like her own and promise an endless night
of story and vision. She would tell of eggshell houses and endless
summer days where crickets played with spoons dropped by accident
in the yard. And while she spoke she'd remember how her dreams
had been lit as though from within, the world outside her window
moon-shining shadow puppets on a crisp white wall.
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