Mad Shadows

That night in April, Carl fell into shadows.

Before that night, Carl lived a relatively simple life.  He had a wife, Lisa, who cared for him as much as he cared for her, which is to say a great deal.  They’d gone to the same college, but didn’t meet until three years later.  Carl worked a day job and a night job.  By day, he played with numbers and spreadsheets for some governmental agency or other.  By night, he played guitar.  Lisa was his greatest fan.

After that night, Carl’s life turned inside out.  Lisa disappeared.  He got a postcard from Phoenix three weeks later saying she’d left him for a travelling snake oil salesman with an unopened Bible in the back of his car for show.

After that night, the governor signed a bill that made Carl redundant, and he was forced to answer phones for some billing agency or other instead, where people would constantly call and ask why they were being billed but couldn’t read account number off those bills.  He didn’t last very long.

The night he fell into shadows, you and I were both in the audience.  It was a hard drinking night for everyone involved.  And Carl, he played guitar as though the city burned around him, as though the earth was cracking at its core, as though there was a god of mischief watching him and crying.  The night he fell into shadows, Carl was at the top of his game, and there was someone else in the audience, a woman in a black suit with a red tie, with a wickedly fast smile, with flashing eyes and excessively long hair.

The night he fell into shadows, Carl let the woman make suggestions and overtures and promises, the kind that gestating rock stars required.  There was nothing sexual about it.  I was close enough to hear.  Private jets, jetted tubs, sponsorships and tour buses and incredibly expensive JBL speakers.

The night he fell into shadows, Carl had already been waiting, had long since been ready, and was more than willing.

I don’t remember, were you there the next night, when the woman in the red tie took over the microphone and sang her glorious little heart out?  Did you hear Carl’s heart break?  I heard it, even over the chords.  I tipped back a cool one in his honor.  That was probably the night his wife bought her first bottle of snake oil.

After he fell into shadows, Carl shaved less and drank more and wore dark sunglasses at night.  He cried in the dressing room, reading and re-reading that postcard from Phoenix.

After he fell into shadows, Carl gave up the day job and went on tour.  It wasn’t remarkable.  It was rather sad, actually.  The drummer, I can’t remember his name, went back to grad school, became a paleontologist or something.  The girl on the cello, the beautiful girl who always wore dark blue silk and had opal earrings and moist eyes, she didn’t even bother sending a postcard.  I like to think she found the partner she’d been looking for, male or female I don’t care, the person she needed to support her and to support, with whom to share melancholic poetry, and moved to Key West for an attitude adjustment.

Before he fell into shadows, Carl perfected his song, his ear, his fingers.  He picked and plucked and strummed and burned the struts and snapped the strings and bled his fingers and made that damned instrument cry out to heaven.

The band she made, that woman with the red tie and black suit, Mad Shadows I think it was called, never amounted to much.  They toured, not in a bus but in a van.  They scraped together beer money.  They went through drummers like water.  After the shadows, Carl and the woman became lovers, I’m sure of it, though I don’t really know.  But they never played Arizona.

After the shadows, after the Mad Shadows, Carl didn’t want to play anymore.  He didn’t want to do much of anything.  He got another day job, data entry I think, something that required fast fingers.  His fingers were fast.  They were just tired.  After the shadows, he had little dreams, nothing big anymore, nothing dangerous, nothing ambitious.

After the shadows, the woman in the black suit and red tie left Carl with nothing, not even a guitar.  She sold it in a Vegas pawn shop for a hundred and fifty bucks, not quite enough for a bus back to New York.

After the shadows, Carl managed to get back to the city and stayed, for a while, with his mom out on the Island.  He traded his rock and roll for jazz, and listened to the best of them, the worst of them, and eventually started seeking out the bars where they played.

After the shadows, he saved up enough money to get another guitar, nothing spectacular, just an axe in need of a grind, and he went back to work.  His calluses returned in full force, and he tamed that slightly-dinged Gibson into something smooth, something mellow, something angelic.

After the shadows, after taming the Gibson, Carl found a woman in red, with a black scarf–or was it a tie?  She had a voice, and an ear, and a small ambition, and a guy who brushed his drums, and they started playing, and they started touring, and they’re coming around our town this weekend, they are.  So I was wondering, though it’s been a while, you and me, what do you think of the idea of catching old Carl in a new set Saturday night?