By E. Malcolm Martinez The plane took off. I was on an airplane flying from Seattle to Los Angeles. It was a Saturday morning, 11:30am, June 12th, 1999, and I was flying to Los Angeles to see Tom Waits perform at the Wiltern Theatre. Tom Waits had not toured in twelve years. He had decided that he would not tour any longer, despite the fact that his popularity had only grown in the past decade. Although he did perform the occasional one-off show in that time they were usually unannounced shows, guest appearances, collaborations. There had been no tour to promote Bone Machine in 1992, nor The Black Rider in 1993. But it was announced in 1999 that he was to perform only five shows to promote The Mule Variations, two at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland, and three at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles. And we had miraculously managed to secure eight tickets to see Tom Waits at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles on Saturday June 12th, 1999.
I first heard Tom Waits when I was in college in Milwaukee, and immediately fell in love with his music. Not only his music, but the world and the characters that he created within his songs; the lonely traveler that falls in love with the aging waitress at the all-night diner in a one-stop town. The carnival barker that beckons you to come see the freak show. The sailor on shore leave looking for adventure. The small man with big dreams. The broken woman writing to her long ago, one-time love because all hope is gone and perhaps there’s one last chance, one last shot she can take, that he may answer. The small-time gangster bleeding into his shoes from a gunshot wound but telling no one as he realizes that his life is leaving him and he has only minutes left. The pleas for God’s help in the final moments of a failed, faithless life. The banal arguments in a two-bedroom apartment between the parents of three small children, with ambulance sirens screaming through the open windows and woken neighbors pounding on thin walls demanding silence. Un Operachi Romantico. I had learned of Tom Waits while in college and carried his music, his stories, with me to the city of Seattle, where I spent my twenties, where I lived and loved and lost and sometimes learned. And his words were always there, his music always there, quietly playing from a one-speaker AM/FM radio cassette player that sat on the corner of my desk, a typewriter before me that eventually developed into a word processor, and then a Macintosh Classic and then something else as time passed and I managed to afford a better writing machine. But whatever the machine was didn’t matter because it was always his voice, and the sounds of a glockenspiel, or an accordion, or a classical Spanish guitar, or the sound of a percussionist tapping a screwdriver across the lip of a tin ashtray, as I wrote frustratingly desperate poetry for the memories that still haunted me and begged to be resolved, though I was too drunk to honestly address them. I had made the mistake of falling in love with the image of the broken writer, the lonely musician, the poet, the romantic, the heartbroken stranger up well into the night. In the city of Seattle I had made the decision, at the age of twenty-two, that I wanted to be lonely, that I wanted to be heartbroken, that I wanted alienation from all of mankind because I liked the written results of it. I sat at my desk, as dumb and as naïve as any man could be, writing rotgut words. I sat at my desk and wrote devastating poetry and haunting prose for no one but me, though I knew she would emerge eventually, the muse that I craved but had not yet met, a whiskey rocks on a coaster and a cigarette fading in the ashtray. I sat at my desk and wrote letters to old girlfriends, women that I had loved, women that I had fucked, women that I had drank with and neither loved nor fucked but that still sat in my memory as characters that had played a part. And the entire time his music played quietly at that desk and the soundtrack was the perfect hymnal choir to the loneliness that I felt was necessary in order for me to write. An image was created in the impressionable mind of a young artist and the image was followed through, and the damage was done. I was drinking and I was crying and I was fully immersed in the world of Tom Waits. The plane flew. I was on an airplane from Seattle to Los Angeles to see Tom Waits. I was with the woman that I was engaged to marry. We had been together for just over two years at the time. I had proposed to her over the phone one particularly hungover morning when she woke me with a phone call from Honduras, where she had been for the past three weeks taking Spanish and scuba diving lessons. She said yes. When she returned to Seattle we moved in together for a year before we moved to New Orleans, where she was from, to get married, before eventually moving to Los Angeles, where I was to try to make a go at it in the industry as a screenwriter. I was with my best friend, David, who would be my best man at that wedding in New Orleans six months later. I had known David since freshman year of high school in Milwaukee. We moved to Seattle in 1990, piling whatever belongings we thought mattered to us into his primer-grey Volkswagen Rabbit and drove across the country with no jobs, no friends, no plan, and barely a thousand dollars between us. We just knew we wanted to leave our hometown and find out what was going on in other parts of the world, and Seattle seemed as good a place as any to start, as we were both particularly fond of the name Seattle. He was with his girlfriend Heather, whom he had been with for almost eight years at the time. I was with my friends Joe and Stephanie, who had married a few years earlier. I had met Joe at an all-night poker game in a garage in the Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle. We both smoked Old Golds at the time and he took offense when I reached for his pack on the table, thinking it was mine, and helped myself to one of his cigarettes. We almost came to blows that night but quickly became friends over our love of poker, drinking, Old Golds, theatre and Tom Waits. He once told me that he wanted to be a father one day, to a boy, simply so that he could refer to him as Small Change. I met his wife, Stephanie, years before I met Joe, when I cast her in a play that I had written. She was from Slinger, a small town in Wisconsin, and our love of the Green Bay Packers and a shared birth date was enough to base a friendship on. The seventh person in our group on that plane was Patrick, a close friend whom I had met while acting in a film some three years earlier of which he was a crew member. One night, on location, after shooting was done for the day, he asked me if I wanted to get high. We quickly became close friends. The eighth ticket was reserved for Brian, a friend that I’d known since college who was living in Las Vegas at the time. He was to catch a Greyhound to Los Angeles and attend the show with us. The plane landed. We arrived at LAX and made our way to our rental car, David, Heather, Patrick, my fiancée and I. Joe and Stephanie were picked up by Stephanie’s brother, who lived in Los Angeles and who they were staying with. We agreed to meet in front of the Wiltern later that night at 730pm. We made our way to a non-descript motel somewhere in Hollywood that, though it was not the Tropicana Motel on Santa Monica Boulevard where Tom Waits famously lived with Rickie Lee Jones back in the 70s, looked very much the same. The Tropicana Motel had been demolished in 1987. We occupied two adjacent rooms, David and Heather, my fiancée and I. Patrick was to take the second bed in their room, Brian in ours. We ate a late lunch somewhere near the motel and I repeatedly asked my fiancée if Brian had called her newly purchased cellphone, a heavy Motorola that her mother had just bought for her. I had given Brian the cellphone number and asked him to call it when he pulled into Los Angeles so that we may drive out to pick him up from the Greyhound station. She checked. He had not called. I began to worry. By the time we met Joe and Stephanie at the Wiltern that night Brian had still not called and I accepted the likely possibility that he would never call. Stephanie’s brother, who had driven them to the theatre, bought the eighth ticket and I resolved that I would reach out to Brian once we got back to Seattle to ask what had happened, knowing full well that something had happened. We walked into the Wiltern Theatre, a 1930s Art Deco jewel in the heart of the Koreatown neighborhood of Los Angeles, walked through the ornate lobby and through a set of doors into the auditorium, down the right aisle towards our seats, Row J, and we filed into our seats. Eight seats in a row, ten rows back from the stage. They were the eight seats at the right end of Row J, and since I was the last person to file in, I sat on the right aisle. The house lights were at three quarters dim and there was music playing over the house system. We sat and talked amid the din and the anticipation of two-thousand other people for what seemed like forever before the music ceased altogether and the house went dark. The crowd erupted in a cresting cheer and stood to its feet as two spotlights shot up from either front corner of the stage. The spotlights began to revolve in a kaleidoscopic pattern over the ceiling, the walls, the stage, the crowd, before both meeting in concert at the center of the theatre ceiling and swooping down behind us on our right, uniting to form one spotlight that ended at the back of the hall, the back of the right aisle that I sat on, and the swinging doors that sat closed at the top of that aisle, the doors that we had walked through seemingly moments earlier, as the crowd stood to its feet and turned to where the spotlights had landed. The doors swung open violently, as if they had been kicked open, and Tom Waits stepped in with a megaphone to his mouth, in his classic brown wrinkled suit, cracked Stacey Adams leather wingtips shoes and feathered fedora. The crowd, myself, exploded as he paced his way down the aisle in full carnival barker mode, urging us to come down and see Harry’s Harbor Bizarre for Human Oddities, The Three-Headed Baby, Hitler’s brain, the German midget, the Dog-Faced Boy, and the Mule-Faced Woman. His backing band had taken the stage and began to play as he gesticulated his way down the aisle, the character, the voice, the oh so distinguishable voice that I had, until this moment, only heard coming from my tinny tape player many late nights as I drank myself into oblivion while writing nihilistic love letters. He made his way down the aisle, the musical and literary artist that had had the largest influence on me, an artist that I never believed I would ever have the chance to see perform in person, making his way down the aisle towards me as I clapped and hollered and felt my blood pressure rise and I took a step into the aisle, just a step, just to get a few inches closer, just to get a closer look at him as others like me had begun to do the same. And as he neared I extended my right arm out into the aisle to pat him on the back as he walked by, to thank him, in my own anonymous gesture, to thank him for all of the songs and all of the words and all of the inspiration and all of the stories, the stories, the characters that he had introduced me to. And as he paraded down the aisle and neared me and now stood two feet away from me on his way to the stage I reached out to touch him, to thank him, to pat him on the back, but at the last minute pulled my arm back, letting him pass unimpeded, letting him pass me without my thanks expressed. And he finished his way down the aisle and took the stage, ready to begin the reality that he was about to create for us, and he stepped up on the riser that was positioned at the center of the stage, set the megaphone down at his side, took the microphone in his hands while still cradled and attached to the microphone stand and stomped his foot to the wooden riser. A cloud of dust, baby-powder, I thought at the moment, rose from the riser to the stomp of his foot and surrounded him in a low-hung cloud as the band went into their first song, “The Black Rider.” Come on along with the Black Rider, we’ll have a gay old time… Lay down in the web of the black spider, I’ll drink your blood like wine… After the show we convened, at Stephanie’s brother’s suggestion, at a Koreatown bar not far from the Wiltern, the HMS Bounty; Food & Grog for the Weary Sailor is their motto. It seemed appropriate. David, Heather, Patrick, Joe, Stephanie, Stephanie’s brother, my fiancée and myself. A straight shot down Wilshire Boulevard, less than a mile away. We ordered drinks and food. I ordered a Mai Tai. While nursing that Mai Tai David said that he saw me reach out to pat Tom Waits on the back and then pull my hand back at the last minute. Why, he wanted to know, why did you pull your hand back. Why didn’t you thank him, Tom Waits, as so many others had done on his procession down the right aisle. I didn’t have to think about my answer. Because I was afraid that if I touched him…he would disappear. I would have woken up from a dream. I never thought I would see him perform in person, much less that he would be one foot away from me, much less that I could pat him on the back, that I could touch him. My fiancée and I stepped outside for a cigarette after we had ordered our second round, as California had banned smoking in bars four years earlier. I remember standing on the sidewalk, cigarettes languishly brandished, as I can only imagine Tom Waits and Rickie Lee Jones did many times on this street, and telling her that Los Angeles was where we were meant to be, that this is where we will find our place, our purpose, our fortune. This is where we will make our home, I said. Tonight, this night, is our future. I never thought that I would live in Los Angeles, she said. But after tonight I can see myself living here, with you. We eventually stubbed out our cigarettes against the HMS Bounty facade, walked back into the bar, and drank with the rest until the bar closed. It was Wednesday, August 9th, 2006. It was 84 degrees at 6pm, humid, and I was living in a studio apartment in the Uptown neighborhood on the north side of Chicago. After the five shows that were originally announced in 1999 a number of other shows were added, including one in Seattle, but we were not able to get tickets. But then he stopped touring, again only doing a handful of shows here and there. But a new tour had been announced, eight shows in cities that he hadn’t played in three decades. “We need to go to Tennessee to pick up some fireworks, and someone owes me money in Kentucky,” Waits said in a statement about his motivation for touring. And I had two tickets to see him perform at the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago that night at 8pm. I had purchased the tickets while I was dating an actress who’s name I no longer recall, but she said that she was fan and would love to attend the show with me, as she knew how much his music meant to me. She broke up with me a week before the show. I don’t remember why. It doesn’t matter why. I placed an ad on craigslist asking if anyone wanted to buy the second ticket from me for cost. My fiancée was now my ex-wife. After seeing the show in Los Angeles we returned to Seattle and six months later moved to New Orleans, where she was from. We married, remained there a while saving money, then eventually made our way back to Los Angeles. A year and a half later there was a murder in her family. She returned to New Orleans for a prolonged period to deal with the tragedy and by the time she returned to our home in Los Angeles she was a ghost of her former self. A week later she told me that she needed to go back to New Orleans to be with people who understood the grief that she was suffering. She said that she loved me but that she did not know when she would be back. I knew I would never see her again. David and I had a falling out that was never really discussed, explained, negotiated nor understood. It just happened. He broke up with Heather while we were in New Orleans, or she broke up with him, I don’t know. I asked him to tell me what happened but he never answered me. He ended up marrying a woman that he had met at work. He was working on the other side of the world while I was going through my divorce, having somehow talked his way into a well-paying job that required travel, and my drunken, late-night pleas for empathy were justifiably met with silence, and eventual condemnation. You wanted this life, he seemed to say. You wanted the stories, you wanted to live a Tom Waits song, he seemed to say. So why are you surprised when you find yourself living the life of a character from a Tom Waits song? There was nothing I could say other than ‘fuck you.” But I knew that he was right. Joe and Stephanie were married for fifteen years but eventually divorced. They had a child. It was a boy. His name is Jack. Whether Joe ever referred to him as Small Change I really do not know, but I like to imagine that he did. When I returned to Seattle I called Brian to find out why he never made it to the show, much less the city. He told me that he had gotten on a Greyhound bus in Las Vegas headed for Los Angeles but that he had been drinking and passed out in the back of the bus and when he woke up he was in San Bernadino. I don’t know if this is true. But Brian was known to go on binges where he would drink for days and it would not have been the first time that he woke up in a different city than the one that he began drinking in. Brian and I exchanged late-night drunken phone calls for another few years after I moved to Chicago but then the phone calls from him stopped altogether. I would call and leave him messages but he would not return the calls and I never heard from him again. I do not know if he is alive or dead. Patrick and I are still friends. He stood at my wedding in New Orleans and even walked my mother down the aisle after my brother was late to show. He moved from Seattle to Los Angeles when my ex-wife and I moved there and we vacated Los Angeles together after 9/11, he to his home town of Detroit, me to Milwaukee, figuring that it would be safer to be there rather than Los Angeles if another world war was about to commence. I was in Chicago and it was August and it was hot as hell. I received an overwhelming number of responses offering to buy the ticket. The show had sold out within hours of being announced and the demand, and the offers, only grew as the date of the show neared. One particular reply stood out to me, however. Her name was Emily. Emily replied to my post on craigslist and explained to me that she had been a fan of Tom Waits since the late 80s. She said that she had all of his releases on either cassette, CD or LP format. She told me that she grew up in McHenry, Illinois, a mere five miles or so from Johnsburg, where Kathleen Brennan, Tom Waits’ wife, had grown up. She told me that she had tried to get tickets for the show but that by the time she had heard about it the show had sold out. I decided that I would sell the ticket to her. We agreed to meet on the corner of Wabash and Congress on the night of the show, Wednesday, August 9th, 2006, at 7:30pm. I took the Red Line headed south from Uptown and got off at the underground Jackson stop. The sun had still not yet faded behind the horizon and the heat and humidity of a typical August Chicago night still burned. I worked up a sweat as I walked the three blocks from the Jackson stop to the corner of Wabash and Congress. I arrived at the corner and saw a woman standing there. She had long, red hair, wore a yellow sundress, black stockings, and black shoes that looked like men’s shoes. She turned her head from right to left as if she were looking for someone. She was looking for me. “Emily?” She smiled. We shook hands, and I wanted to hug her but I did not know her so thought it inappropriate. She handed me an envelope with what I assumed to be the payment for the ticket. I took the envelope and placed it in a pocket inside my sportscoat. I did not bother to check if the contents of the envelope were accurate or sufficient. I pulled another envelope out of my coat pocket that contained the tickets and handed one of the tickets to her. Needless to say, I said, the tickets are for two seats, my seat, and now your seat, and they are right next to each other. So I suppose we should just walk in together and take our seats, right next to each other. Emily smiled. I suppose we should, she said. We crossed the street and got in line to walk into the Auditorium Theatre. She told me that she was a paralegal, that she worked for a law firm in downtown Chicago, and that she had come directly from work. She thanked me for selling her the ticket. I thanked her for buying it. I explained to her that I had bought the tickets while I was dating someone but that she had broken up with me recently and that that was the reason that I had to list it on craigslist. She told me that she had gone through a breakup herself only two months ago and that she understood the loose ends that one sometimes has to tie up after a relationship ends. We made our way up to the balcony, took our seats and continued our conversation. She explained that she had grown up in McHenry, not too far from Chicago but far enough for it to not be Chicago, that she had attended law school at Loyola and now found herself living in the city that seemed as if it was the center of the world to her. I’ve been to New York, she said. I love New York. But Chicago is big enough for me right now and I can’t imagine living in New York. I’ve been to New York and I love New York as well, I said. But the garbage and the rats are a handful. She smiled. Chicago has as much to offer as New York, I said, only cheaper. She agreed. So tell me, she said. Why do you like Tom Waits? Why are you here? Her eyes were green. Her hair was red. The auditorium went black and we shifted our attention towards the stage. There was no grand entrance from the back of the hall as there was in Los Angeles seven years earlier. Tom Waits took the stage, along with his band, and the audience erupted. “Make It Rain.” She took all my money And my best friend You know the story Here it comes again Two hours later Emily and I stood to our feet, as did the rest of the four thousand or so in attendance, applauding as Tom Waits and the band left the stage. The house lights came up, as did the sound system, and we began to make our way down the stairs and out of the theatre, out into the still sweltering Chicago night. Well, it was nice to meet you, Emily said to me as we emerged from the theatre onto Congress Avenue. Thank you so much for the ticket. I have to go catch the Red Line and get home. I have to catch the Red Line too, I said. Which way are you headed? North, she said. Towards Uptown. I live in Uptown. I’m headed north, I said. I live in Uptown as well. There was a moment of awkwardness, our exchanges suspended in the humid summer air as we stood and stared at each other. Why don’t we walk towards the Jackson stop and catch the train together, I said, since we’re both headed in the same direction. I mean, we’ve come this far, I said. She smiled. Ok. Why don’t we do that. We walked towards the train station, the Jackson stop, and descended into the underground of downtown Chicago. The northbound train arrived within minutes and we boarded, took a seat beside each other as various other people who had attended the show also took their seats or stood amidst the various homeless people sleeping on the train. I asked her about her family, not knowing what else to ask, and she told me that her father worked for State Farm insurance and was literally a millionaire, which she seemed embarrassed to mention but mentioned none the less. Her mother was a grade-school teacher and had lived her entire life in McHenry. She had a younger brother, who was in school at DePaul. He wants to be an actor, she said. The train rumbled along up the tracks and I told her that I had seen Tom Waits perform once before, back in 1999, in Los Angeles. That I had been a fan of his since a teenager, same as her, and that his music and his lyrics had always been an inspiration towards my writing. Oh. You’re a writer, she asked. Yes. What do you write about. I write about people. I write about the relationships between people. I write about how difficult it can be for people to get along, even if they love each other, no matter how much they want everything to work out. I write about relationships. Relationships are difficult, I said. The human condition, she said. I suppose you could call it that. She told me that her ex, whom she had broken up with two months earlier, was also a writer. A musician. He plays in a band, she said, though they’re not very good. The train stopped at the Addison station and the car emptied seemingly three fourths of its occupants. Wrigleyville. The train resumed rumbling and she told me that the next stop, the Sheridan stop, was where she was to exit. That’s my stop as well, I said. She shot me a look, a crooked smile on her face, as if to ask if I was making this up. I shot her a look to assure her that I was not. We arrived at the Sheridan stop and both stood to exit the train. We descended from the elevated station and onto the street and we stood there, on the corner of Sheridan and Irving Park Road. I’m walking north, she said. I’m walking north as well, I replied. She smiled. So let’s walk, she said. We walked up Sheridan Road and she asked me how it came to be that I was in Chicago, or if I was a native. I told her that I had come home after getting my heart broken in Los Angeles. And that although home was in Milwaukee, ninety miles north, I felt I was at home now, here in Chicago. Been here just under two years, I said. We reached Buena Avenue and she told me that she was taking a right. I told her that I was also taking a right on Buena, on my way home, though that was not completely honest. Okay, she said. I think we live very near each other. I think we do, I said. I live on Clarendon, half a block off Montrose, she said. I live on Montrose, half a block off Clarendon. We took a left on Clarendon Avenue and walked two blocks in silence, both of us with smiles on our faces, turning now and then to look at each other and then quickly turning our heads back ahead of us when our eyes caught each other. Well, I hope that I don't fall in love with you 'Cause falling in love just makes me blue As we reached an apartment building she slowed her pace and said, ‘this is me.’ We turned to face each other. Emily, it was very nice meeting you. And I really enjoyed seeing Tom Waits with you. We stood and stared at each other. Seconds passed that seemed like hours. I wanted to kiss her but I knew that it would not be appropriate. I wanted to ask her if she wanted to meet again. But the fact that we lived a half a block away from each other, and that the only reason that we had ever met was because she wanted to see Tom Waits that night and I happened to have an extra ticket that I needed to unload was not enough to give me the courage to ask her if she would like to meet again, much less lean forward to kiss her. It was a pleasure to meet you too, she said. Thank you. Have a good night. And before I would allow another moment to develop where I ended up kissing her I turned and began to walk away, to walk the half a block or so towards my apartment. Behind me I heard her open her front door and walk into her building, the heavy front door swinging and clicking shut behind her. When I was far enough away from her to know that she could not see me any longer, when I turned the corner off of Clarendon and onto Montrose, I lit a cigarette. I knew that the reason that I did not ask her if we could see each other again, the reason that I did not dare to kiss her, was that if I did, and she said no, if she rejected me, it would have ruined the perfection of the evening that I had just spent with this stranger, a shared night listening to the music and the stories of Tom Waits. It would have ruined the story. It would have ruined the ending if she had said no. Wasted and wounded, it ain’t what the moon did Got what I paid for now….
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