Where The High Cotton Grows

I had a friend in my New York days, a street guy. He made his living recognizing innocence and harvesting it, which in most big cities is a cottage industry. Like all street guys he was hard and sharp. Always working the angles. But he had a terrible weakness. He was a real sucker for women. Divorced four times but always sure the next romance was going to be the real thing. That authentic 'take it to your grave' love. And so he was dragged over the coals regularly. The king of broken hearts. Whenever I was out with him we would end up half in the bag in some dingy closing time Brooklyn saloon. Those shot and beer joints made for Lonesome. You practically needed a lonely union card to get in past midnight. He was a bad drunk. So after another week of taking it in the teeth, like every bad drunk that has ever lived, he wanted to swing away at the world. He thought he could beat the unfairness out of it. Inevitably he'd end up in some after hours alley with some other poor bastid looking to confess his unspeakable rage in the only way he knew how…with his fists. This guy, my friend would hit on every woman in the joint. But he was about as smooth as sandpaper. And he could fill a book on all the things he didn’t know about women. Still he was relentless, straight down the line, one after another. “No …Get lost…Creep.” Until he found someone that, just like him, craved that hard to reach solace. Someone else that, if only for a few hours, needed to remember what love is supposed to feel like. Before they knew what it actually demands. I asked him once how he could do that. Hitting on them relentlessly like that. “Love and baseball.” he said. “What?” “In baseball if you strike out 70% of the time they put you in the hall of fame. I figure even if I only bat .300, I'll make it into the Canton of Love." His face filled with that unmistakable penance of Lonely. "You just got to keep swinging,” he whispered. You just got to keep swinging. I’ve been hearing him calling to me lately. Calling from decades ago. Calling from those cold pitiless streets of my youth. Writing, they don’t tell you at the start, is mostly about rejection. It’s walking up to a stranger and trying to get them to fall in love with something only you know. Some hard to reach truth that shows up only in the dark when you cannot sleep and makes you try and pour it out of yourself. So you might get to sleep through the night or maybe get to dream again. It’s trying to convince, in just a line or two, that you understand. That you can see some secret about how some stranger's heart beats, just like yours does in the dark. It’s spitting the worry and dread and hope out onto a page in ink and believing with all your might that there is some shared bond lying under the words that can chain you together. That bond promises that maybe you can see what is locked away, buried like bones in the cellar of their hearts, because you’ve felt it too. And that you've discovered a skeleton key in these words, that you send to the past and to free us all from our ghosts. It's taking a piece of your heart in hand each night and and trying to wring some ink out of it. It's forcing the bobbing light from a cursor into the dark secrets you know about living and dreaming and suffering and how it changes you. About the transformation of struggle to beauty that we all, in various speeds run from, but secretly crave. So you swirl what you know around on some paper, send it off at the speed of light and pray when it lands that it rings like it does in your ears. That it rings like some long ago love song you heard on a radio,or unforgotten hymn, that now just seems a little sad and ironic. And you try to make it toll like some broken churchbell whose ring has become sacred from the brokenness. What I know is this. If it’s to be any good at all it always hurts some to lay it down. Like spitting glass splinters. That's how you know it's got some of what’s true in it. It requires that you take the kick in the teeth, then try to sing with a busted jaw. Writers that I admire are like those stories told about slaves. How they became holy in some mysterious way. Transcending their suffering, using it to rattle the chains of places in themselves they would rather forget but can’t ever quite manage. It’s calling up the part that limps from some blow you’ve long ago forgotten but will never really forget. Where High Cotton Grows It's listening for the wisdom of old bruises you hide in yourself, because you’re sure they hide something precious beneath them. Something like a blessing made from jagged histories and splintered memories. That place is some low country. But it’s the only place I know where the high cotton grows. Most of the time you come back with an empty sack. Or some stranger shakes their MFA at you with a form letter, and offers condolences, like all you managed to do was lay dead words on a page, heel to toe. Nothing whispering, nothing wounded and dreaming. Nothing alive. Long ago I met the great American writer Alex Haley. This was after his epic Autobiography of Malcolm X and the monumental reckoning with his Roots. He told me that for years he lived in some lower east side dump, sending out story after story, waiting on the rejection letters that, along with the bills, were the only thing that ever filled his mailbox. After a time the stack became so unwieldy that he began to glue them to the wall of his flat. One after another. That year, he said, he covered every inch of the place with form letter contempt. Then he took job on a merchant ship, working the decks by day and writing alone in the hold each night. I like to think of the landlord that walked in after he turned in the keys. A museum to short sightedness. Tom Waits, the writer and crooner, famously said that he loves beautiful melodies about terrible things. I feel the same way about stories. They should make you ache with tenderness. They should cut you up then heal you. Writing should be like heart surgery. Dangerous, but your last hope to ever be saved. That's because the beauty of anything is always under trouble of it. They are inseparable. Don’t believe anyone that tries to give you all sweet or all dark. Those two are Siamese twins, born together. Indivisible. The job is to make them say their confessions together. Two for one absolution. I mention all this trying to remind myself what I know. When I was a Catholic kid the nuns taught me that the kingdom, the power and the glory came all rolled into one. But I think they lied. The kingdom might belong to book binders. But the power and the glory belongs to the pen. And the mystery to the words. WLM