Don't Suck, Don't Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt (American Music) by Hersh Kristin

Author:Hersh, Kristin [Hersh, Kristin]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2015-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

III. GO OUTSIDE AND LOOK AT THE MOON

The first time you died, I was sitting in your recording studio in Nashville, breathing in a southern breeze and talking dumb shit about night bark smelling better in the south: different and more right. “Look, I brought you a six-pack. Want a beer?” I held one out.

“Can’t, not allowed.”

“Again? Whadja do this time?”

You shrugged. Must’ve been bad. “Night bark?”

“Can I drink it? Yeah, night bark.”

You drooped a little, drained. “You want the whole six-pack?”

“No, just this one.”

“Par-tay,” you croaked. “Cuz I was adopted, I always thought I’d have some kinda, I dunno, instinctive associations of . . . elsewhere. Florida night bark never spoke to me, though.”

“Florida’s right down there,” I said, pointing. “The bark isn’t too different. Whatsa matter with your voice?”

“Cold. Been singin’ . . .”

“You coulda had roots in the Ukraine or something. Maybe you haven’t yet come across the right trees.”

You nodded. “It’d be nice to find out that at our core is not our failings.” Drowsy with maybe, cold medicine. I hoped it was cold medicine. “That we’re mostly concerned with trees. And how they smell.” Your hoarse voice made you sound exhausted, like you’d surrendered.

“’Course!” I think I might’ve sounded gleeful. Sorry. Nobody likes me gleeful, it’s annoying. “When you’re a baby, you haven’t failed yet.”

You gritted your teeth. “There has to be a song that triggers a core response.” This was painful for you.

“Mmmmmaybe.” You aren’t supposed to plan songs. I looked into your coffee cup. Ugly granules of your instant crap, floating in cold water. “You want something better to drink? I mean, I know not a beer, but they probly have tea here . . . for your cold.”

Pain, for real: “We could write a song that everybody understood, or at least anybody could understand. We could do that.”

“Don’t care about that,” I shrugged. I cared that you cared, but I didn’t care. We’d been over this and over this: you were tasked with complexity of expression, which is a big, fat bummer and we’re sorry as hell and all that, but self-parody is a sad road. “Don’t you dare imitate a watered-down version of your berserkness. I swear to god, if you suck, you might as well be dead. You’ll be dead to me, anyway.”

“We could do it together.” Mad-scientist glint in your eye. Ugly. “How are we helping if we alienate people with all this pretense of art?”

“What? Faking it is pretentious.” You knew this. “Manipulative.” You knew this. “And don’t say ‘art.’” I watched you cough. The coughs bent you over and left you that way, in sort of a wheezing posture, like a very old man. “So tell me about this song you’re recording.”

“It’s gay,” you sighed, grim.

“Please stop calling things gay.”

Bored, piercing look. “It’s a song about a poem about a painting.”

“Oh. Well . . . I’m sure it’s very nice.” I glanced into the corner of the room, where guinea pigs were gurgling and snuffling around a converted fish tank.

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