JERSEY CITY, NJ-

My final night in Manhattan, October 2001. Autumn in New York, which should have been wonderful as fall usually is, perhaps without the beauty of quick-changing leaves but with all the excitement of holidays to come. Usually there’s a somewhat breathless anticipation to the City at that time, but I didn’t feel it that year.

I was feeling a lot of things then, but breathless anticipation wasn’t one of them. The World Trade Center had fallen six weeks before, and the City had suddenly begun to feel bigger and scarier and more intimidating than I had realized, so I planned to leave for my parents’ house in South Jersey. I had planned to take a few weeks to gather my thoughts, to reflect, and then to begin again, to find work personal training or substitute teaching (or both).

Did Lennon say life is what happens when you’re making other plans, or that plans are the surest way to make God laugh at you? I feel like he said one of the two, and I think he should have if he didn’t. Both seem like very John Lennon sort of things to say.

***

While I remember that specific Tuesday in vivid enough detail that telling its story can take me several pages, such a highlight seems to muddle memories surrounding it. It’s like the World Trade Center buildings that still remain; in any other setting, they would tower and loom and people would goggle at them as marvels of architecture and design, but it’s struck me they are so often taken for granted. Used to be because they stood in the shadow of the Twin Towers; now they stand in the shadow of the memory of those Towers, which may in fact loom larger and taller and longer.

I feel the same way about that autumn; so much of the time after that day feels like a blur. I don’t remember that Friday at the office. I don’t even remember if I went home that weekend. I only vaguely remember how I felt then, but only parts of those feelings were because of that day. Anxious, even, yes, scared, that it wasn’t over yet, that there might come another. I remember contemplating whether one would actually feel or see a nuclear blast or whether everything would just go instantaneously and mercifully black.

I felt restless, too, but that wasn’t the result of that day, only catalyzed by it. For most of the previous year and a half, I had split my weekends pretty evenly between writing in my crummy little Jersey City apartment and watching my friends’ cover/original band play in South Jersey, and to be candid, that split had begun to take its toll on me long before that Tuesday, which made me sit down and attempt to figure some things out, as I’m sure it caused many other people to do. There were a lot of evaluations and reevaluations at that time, and my own led me to believe I might be better off at home for a while. There may have been hope for a girl involved (of this I cannot be sure, and no longer completely recall), but I remember I wanted to be closer to those friends whose gigs I had been going to for so long.

Thing was, barring a few handsful of months between springs and falls, I had lived in Jersey City all through college, and then for fully a year and a half afterward. South Jersey seemed less like home than it had just a half-dozen years before, and I was well into adulthood, so I thought it only appropriate to ask my father if he’d have me back before I made any real plans. I was walking home from work, down 5th Avenue, when I first floated to him the idea of coming back.

I’m sure I expected him to be supportive, but I’m not sure I wanted him to be. Looking back, I wonder if I hoped that, when I called, he would say, sure, you’re welcome to come home, but why don’t you give it a few months, first? Maybe he would have if not for that day. Maybe he would have said, you know, I get that it’s tough, but you’re an adult now and you can handle it.

He didn’t say any of those things. He said come home, and so I began to make preparations to do so. I’d tell you how I felt about it, that there was some combination of relief and shame, of hope and embarrassment, and if I ever figure it out myself, maybe I will.

***

Preparations to do so involved informing affected parties (roommates, colleagues, bosses, etc.) of my departure, as well as trying to get in touch with friends to see them before I left. I had five or six weeks to do so, and so I was, for the most part, successful.

On that final night, which may as likely have been a Friday or a Saturday, I went to a bar just off Times Square. I had gotten an e-mail from a music producer I had worked with, letting me know he was playing one night at Caroline’s, which I believe is famous for its dueling pianos. I invited another friend, a girl I could describe or simply tell you she looked sorta like Janet Jackson, and we met up at Virgin Megastore before we cut sideways to the bar.

I always think nights like that should etch like acid into our DNA. Why can I remember so much about that Tuesday but not about that other night? Why can I remember what I saw and heard and smelled that September afternoon, but not nearly as much as I would like about that bar and those pianos? I remember my friend and I had wine at the bar upstairs before we headed downstairs (I think) to the piano stages, and that parenthetical aside is to note I’m fairly certain stairs were involved. She drank red, too. I remember that.

Memory is a funny thing. You can probably help me by substituting your own imagery here. Keep the room dim but consistently illuminated by electric sconces. Note the long, huge, brown micro-fiber sectional sofa just inside the entrance, but note also that you’re only pretty sure it’s brown; might be lack of better light. Two grand pianos either faced each other or were angled away from each other, though I’m fairly sure it was the former if only because the story is so much better with two pianists shooting confused glances at each other over their keys. You can probably also predict the setlist: Billy Joel and Elton John being the most obvious two, and I am nearly certain they worked Jerry Lee Lewis in (because how could you not?).

Nights like that change on us. Maybe that’s why it’s so mutable, so elusive in memory; what began as a night out to a piano bar with a friend slowly began to morph into a date, and there I sat with a beautiful girl, listening to fantastic music that introduced the Rob Gordon/Nick Hornby Uncertainty Principle: do we listen to sad music when we’re melancholy, or does sad music make us melancholy? I wish I had a setlist of that evening for various reasons; that I could have listened to it while writing about it, that I could share it with you and you could decide for yourself, that I had it to play when I needed it. Because need it I think I did.

I needed that night. I needed that music, and those songs. In music there is some healing, some community.

I guess that’s why I requested “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”

I know, I know. But look, good piano-based music? Amazing tune-age? Not to mention the fact that I had begun to study ballet back then and we had been dancing to Meatloaf’s “I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That),” which is only tangentially related to the Bonnie Tyler hit and solely because people tend to mistake the guy’s voice for Meatloaf’s (it’s not. ‘Nother dude). Plus, keep in mind I’m probably one of the few people in the world who don’t understand the Rickrolling phenomenon because, well, I love Rick Astley. “Together Forever” (and ever too far/together forever witchzoo . . .)? Rock on. Finally, I’m fairly sure that was about when a dance version of Tyler’s song (performed by Nikki French) became popular, and hell, I ain’t ashamed to admit I love that song.

(the above paragraph finally, completely, and unabashedly destroys any future music credibility I might have had. I fear now that every time I recommend Roger Clyne or Butch Walker or . . . well, anyone, someone will say, “Yeah, but you like ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart.’” For which I will have no substantive argument)

So I got it into my head I wanted to hear Bonnie Tyler as performed on not one but two pianos (and I figured, with two pianists, it was perfect, since there are two vocal parts. It is also worth mentioning I was not sober at this point, though I will not blame my awesome taste in bad music on inebriation), and I put my five bucks into the oversized brandy glass and wrote the title on the request sheet and then returned to my seat and my date, where I waited.

And waited.

And waited.

They played everything but. Now, I wonder if the guy reading the request list saw it and skipped it deliberately. I might have had I been him. But they got up to the very last song of the evening, which they announced as the very last song of the evening, and when they named it, it was not “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”

And I stood, and went to my buddy at his piano, and I said, “But wait, I requested—,” and I pointed to my request. My buddy conferred briefly with his counterpart, who might have rolled his eyes but definitely asked the audience, “Where do you guys come up with these songs?”

As it turned out, neither man knew the song. They knew the notes, sure, mainly because there are only, like, seven, probably, but neither knew the words (of which there are barely more than seven, because, like, every line begins “Every now and then.”).

But the bar took over. We all took up the singing in the sort of deliriously glorious chorus that can only be achieved when absolutely tanked, and we crowded the words and chucked the notes straight out the window to . . . well, I don’t know if we carried it through to the end. Somewhere in the neighborhood, I would guess. The song probably lived on the same block as what we managed to sing, and I know we managed many of the important lines:

“Every now and then I get a little bit nervous that the best of all the years have gone by.”

“Every now and then I feel a little bit restless and I dream of something wild.”

I don’t remember how it finished; I think we stumbled around and knocked a few choruses over before the pianists just up and decided to tell us that was the end of the song because we wouldn’t have known any better, anyway. Kind of like “Tiny Dancer,” which has no words, really, just a bunch of people demanding to be held closer. The lights came up, and we all went home, the night bright with neon and glare. I held that girl’s hand all the way back to the subway and then went home myself.

***

The following morning, my father drove up and helped me move out of my crummy little Jersey City apartment. I hurt my back lifting a night table and have had infrequent bouts with sciatica ever since. I didn’t find work quickly, and didn’t return to Manhattan, even to visit, for probably more than a year.

I’d been thinking a lot about that final night recently, especially since I’ve just this past month returned to Jersey City. And, of course, Manhattan. Like it’s my backyard.

“Every now and then I know there’s nothing any better.”

Tags: 9/11, Bonnie Tyler, Manhattan, new york, September 11th

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 at 7:30 am and is filed under Friends, Memory, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.