A note before this one.
This is a Wandering Wondering Star piece, not an UNDERTOW. That’s two in two weeks. Last week I said the other thing would be back this week, and it isn’t. Next week, probably.
For a year I couldn’t get any of this down. Now it’s arriving weekly. They’re getting closer.
This one started with someone I’ve never met saying something generous online, and me agreeing with it much too fast. It’s about a song, and then it isn’t.
Three of them in the chart at once, that’s the thing I can’t get over. December 2008, England, a girl who has just won a singing show on television goes to number one at Christmas with Hallelujah, and the boy who sang it in 1994 and drowned three summers later is at number two, and the man who wrote it, seventy-four years old, alive, on tour, enters the chart at number thirty-six. Below the cover. Below the cover of the cover. I keep picturing him being told this on the tour bus and I can’t decide whether he laughed, and I think the not being able to decide is the whole point of him.
Because here’s the part that’s actually funny-sad. The record company didn’t want it. He recorded the song in 1984 and Columbia declined to put the album out in America, said something like we know you’re great but we don’t know if you’re any good, and for seven years the song sat there, a thing he had spent five years writing, a thing he had written eighty verses for, or a hundred and fifty, depending on which interview he was in and how tired he was of the question. Then John Cale, who had seen him sing it in New York, asked for the words. And Cohen faxed him fifteen pages.
I fucking love that it was a fax. I love that one of the most covered songs of my lifetime went out of the building on thermal paper, curling, fifteen pages of verses almost no one had heard, and that the man receiving them just... picked. Cale said later he chose the cheeky ones. He left the biblical verses on the page. Then a kid named Jeff Buckley heard Cale’s version on a tribute record, Cale’s, not Cohen’s, and slowed it down and sang it like there was no one else in the room, and that is the song. That’s the one you know. One man’s selection in another man’s throat, and then a girl on television, and then the songwriter at number thirty-six, being covered by his own song.
An internet friend shared this week that every friend brings a different colour of attention, and I said yes, much too fast, the way you agree with things that flatter you, in five years it’s a different story because it’s a different room. I have friends for the rare, dormant, fun version of me, and friends for the version that changes its mind halfway through a sentence, and friends who only want the stories with a useful lesson in them, and one friend who asks for nothing but always seems to get the story about the neighbour’s goat, which is the true one. I thought this was generous of the friends. Different rooms, different colours. Lovely.
I said yes, much too fast, the way you agree with things that flatter you
Except the covers were never tributes. I had it wrong. Cale didn’t honour the song, he cut it. He took fifteen pages and kept the verses he could use in his room, and Buckley took Cale’s verses and kept the tempo he could use in his, and the girl on television took Buckley’s and kept the key change, and every one of those people loved the song, that isn’t in question, love was the instrument they cut with. A room doesn’t take the story. It takes the verses it can use and leaves the rest on the fax. And after enough rooms you start faxing the short version. You start sending the cheeky verses because those are the ones that get sung back. The biblical ones, the ones about the cold and the broken and the not understanding, you stop putting in, not because anyone told you to, because the rooms didn’t ask for them, or asked in the wrong voice, and you are a person, not a vault, and you would like to be covered.
A room doesn’t take the story. It takes the verses it can use and leaves the rest on the fax.
The first time I told it I was maybe fifteen and it was funny. My oldest sister, Pia, taught me to whistle through a blade of grass the summer before they left, the last summer the four of us lived in one apartment. One night that summer we had each snuck out late, separately, and run into each other by accident in the playground of the university’s married student housing. You hold the blade flat between your thumbs, she said, and you don’t blow at it, you blow past it, and if you do it right it screams. I couldn’t do it that night, or that week. She stood there doing it over and over while I spat on my hands. It took until past Labor Day, and then it finally screamed, and I screamed, and she laughed so hard she sat down and got sand all over her. That was the story. We told it at what we called a sleepover, which was the four of us in one room, before they all left the country, and it ended on her sitting down covered in cheap playground sand, because that was the funny part.
The second time was in a hired van in the rain in Phuket, at a family reunion where we chose a country to meet up in, one of the five or six times I had seen Pia since I was a child, and it was about the leaving. I had never mentioned the leaving in the room with the four of us. It hadn’t seemed like part of it. In the van it was all leaving: the K-mart suitcases, the see you at Christmas, the yard after they’d gone, me trying to make it scream and not being able to, and going inside. Nobody held my hand. In that van it was a sad story. I let it be that. In that room it was.
She died last year, suddenly. 2025, year of the damn snake, and it shed everything I thought would last a lifetime. I couldn’t fly back. I made do with FaceTime, the phone propped against the chain-link fence around the rubbish-covered, astroturfed soccer pitch in Bushwick where I used to take the dog to play fetch, and afterward I told my youngest sister the story, the van version. She let me get as far as the yard. Then she said, no, that’s not how Pia would tell that story. And she told it back to me.
She said Pia told it every summer, to them, then to her boys, then to the kids of the neighbours in the subdivision, and in her version I got it on the first try. She said Pia would hold the grass up and say, my brother did this before I finished explaining it, and then she’d try and it wouldn’t scream, and everyone would laugh because she couldn’t do it and her brother in America could. That was the joke for thirty years. That she was the one who couldn’t do it.
She said Pia kept a blade of grass in her wallet. Not the same one, obviously. She’d replace it. My youngest sister found it when they were going through the wallet for the ID, a dry green thing pressed behind the photo of her kids, and thought it was rubbish, and nearly threw it out, and then remembered, and didn’t.
She said, I thought you knew. Everyone here knew. We thought it was the one thing you had.
I had not known. Salt and pepper hair now and I had not known that the story went on after I went inside. That she had kept telling it in rooms I was never in, in a country I have been back to five times, and that in her version I was the one who could do it. She had faxed me fifteen pages and I had kept the funny verse.
Cohen got to hear it, is the thing. His own recording, the one Columbia didn’t want, reached the American chart for the first time the week after he died. Seventy-four on the tour bus, then eighty-two, and the room that finally took the original was the funeral.
On Labor Day weekend I was walking back late at night from picking up duck-fat fried chicken from under a Chinatown bridge, and there was grass along the curb. I hadn’t tried in thirty years and it took me most of a minute, standing in the middle of a median, and it did not scream, exactly, it made a thin high sound that could have been anything on that street.