Baby Dee with Swans

Baby Dee’s opening for the Swans on Saturday at the Bowery Ballroom was one of the best sets I’ve ever heard her do. She started on the accordion with an instrumental piece called “Early Spring,” and then sat down at the harp and, with Matthew Robinson on cello and Sarah Alden on violin, sang “The Robin’s Tiny Throat” (which is an excellent song to open with, because it kind of explains why she’s up there singing to begin with), “A Book of Songs for Anne Marie,” “Lilacs,” and “So Bad.” She said she had never told the story behind “So Bad” (“Jesus got my mom in there, and beat her up so bad”), but that someone in the audience had witnessed it, and she dedicated the song to me. (She didn’t tell the story, and I’m not going to either—yet. “So Bad,” oddly, is the song of Dee’s that is easiest for people to lay their own story on.)

Then she did a song that is not on any of her CDs but is on one of David Tibet’s: “Idumea.” She followed with “Set Me as a Seal on Your Heart,” which has a long, beautiful instrumental introduction. Then came a surprise: she introduced “Fresh Out of Candles” as a song about growing up in Cleveland in the fifties and early sixties. I’ve only heard this (to me) tragicomic song (it’s partly about saints who got deposed after Vatican II) with piano accompaniment, and Dee had rearranged it for the harp/cello/violin trio. She played a new song called “The Day I Died” (it will be on her next CD) and finished with one of her two slug songs, “Brother Slug and Sister Snail.” For this, Sarah created a shimmering trail of slime on violin. Matthew had a cello solo on one of the songs. And Dee is playing the harp better than ever.

This was the final concert on the Swans tour with Baby Dee. It was also my first experience in an audience for heavy-metal New York punk. I was advised to bring earplugs, and I did. The Swans are wonderful to look at: three craggy veterans and three younger musicians. One of them is a guy named Thor, who has waist-length blond hair and hammers a set of bells. After he took off his shirt, he looked like nothing so much as a sweating blacksmith. There were three guitars and a pedal steel and another percussionist, all banging away. At one point, two slide trombones joined the act, and I couldn’t even hear them (maybe it was the earplugs). I saw Michael Gira’s lips moving, but I couldn’t hear what he was singing. I am told—and I believe—that the loudness is necessary, that it is part of the point. For a while, I found a place on the balcony, right by the railing, and I could look down at the heads of the people below, standing shoulder to shoulder and vibrating. And it was kind of thrilling in a visceral way. It blows everything else out of your head.

Then I descended to the lounge level and hung out with Baby Dee and Little Annie, who are taking their act to Europe later this month, until it was time to go home. Dee’s next gig is in London, October 16th.

Detour

Spoiled by the Jewish holidays—five in a row, freeing up the entire month of September—I returned yesterday from a weekend in New England, unloaded the car, and wondered what to do with it. The Eclair now starts reliably, but she needs a new muffler. My friend’s son showed me where the exhaust pipe has come loose. At first it just rattled, but now it roars. It seemed wrong to make so much noise only in order to move the car from one side of the street to the other. I decided to go to Rockaway, check on the boat, and find a parking spot out there.

I had driven up to Massachusetts in the storm last Friday (there is some kind of leak in the well beneath the windshield wipers, and rain dripped on my toes as I drove), so the clear weather when I left for the drive back, at dawn on Sunday, reminded me why people love to drive: it was an intense pleasure just to see the road stretching ahead into the hills. I’d had an excellent weekend, replete with good food and the scratching of several modest consumer itches (a jar of honey, a bag of apples, a new flat-screen TV). I didn’t need the radio or tape-player for company: I was content, for a change, to be peacefully absorbed in the Connecticut scenery.

I planned to take the Sawmill River Parkway all the way down to the West Side Highway—I love the part where, just as you emerge from the tunnel-like toll plaza, the Hudson River opens out on your right—and in my determination I barely registered an LED highway sign that read (in red) “HENRY HUDSON PKWY CLOSED TO 54 ST.” What? Surely if this was true it would be repeated. I passed the exit that offered me a last chance to give up on the Sawmill and take the Cross County Parkway to one of the other approaches to Manhattan, and turned on the radio. Just as the cars ahead of me congealed into a long ribbon of parking lot, I learned that the West Side Highway was indeed closed for a five-borough bike ride.

Cursing all cyclists, I got off in Yonkers. I figured if I went north, I could work my way back to that crossover. Instead, I found Broadway, the old Indian trail, which at least was going in the right direction: south. Where Broadway went under the El, I saw a sign for Route 87, the Major Deegan, and made a left along Van Cortland Park in the Bronx. Soon I was in another traffic jam, but most of the cars on the Major Deegan split off for New Jersey at the junction with 95.

A few hours later, the traffic to Rockaway was light. I went directly to the marina: someone had bailed (or more likely pumped) out my boat. It was too windy to even think of going out in it. I started looking for a parking spot near the bungalow—the next alternate-side holiday isn’t until Columbus Day, next Monday—and had just come to the realization that I was going to have to ask my neighbor to move the car at least once, when suddenly I remembered George’s street: a block of newish two-story attached brick houses, with driveways and parking pads, and no street-cleaning regulations. The people who live there sweep up in front of their own houses. There was one spot left, up against a rosebush planted on the tree lawn. I had time to talk with my neighbors, notice that my passionflower vine has finally put forth a blossom, and take in a major sunset before catching the bus and train home through Brooklyn.

Ship’s Log 9/25/2010

Baby Dee came out on the boat with me last Saturday, the day before she played Joe’s Pub with Little Annie. There were several inches of water in the boat (there’d been a hurricane and a tornado since I last saw it), so I took off my sandals, climbed in, and bailed. Dee watched. So did some guys who had been sitting outside the office/trailer. For some reason, it amuses people to watch a lady bail out a boat. One of the guys was big, with a beat-up nose; his sidekick was small and dark. “You know, they sell electric pumps,” the big guy said. He told me, in all seriousness, that once I was out on the bay, with the motor going, I could pull out “that plug next to the motor” and the motor would draw out the rest of the water. What? That plug is the main thing standing between me and certain disaster! This is not a method of bailing I'm going to be testing anytime soon.

Before setting off across Jamaica Bay, I went to see the Boss, to find out what I owed him for getting the outboard fixed and also to ask exactly what had needed fixing. He was resting on the dock, with a tall glass of either iced tea or Captain Morgan’s on-the-rocks. "A hundred," he said. “My price.” (I think that means they would have charged me more.) I was ready to pay up, but he said I should wait till the end of the season, “when we’ll need the money to keep us in kibble for the winter.” He said that the pump had melted, and then he teased me about trying to go boating in sand. I’ve actually never run aground—one of the few mistakes I have NOT made in my boating career—but the awful truth is that I forgot to check for the cooling jet of water before setting off on this year's maiden voyage. When I realized it, I knew I should have turned the motor off instantly and rowed back to the marina, but I didn't. It was a relief to know that I had not completely cooked the motor, only lightly sauteed it.

Dee and I needed a destination, and I always like to go someplace I’ve never been before. I was thinking of Howard Beach. The guy with the beat-up nose recommended Vetro, a new place associated with Russo's-on-the-Bay, the big catering hall on Cross Bay Boulevard. "It's on the left as soon as you enter the channel," he said. "They got new docks and a lot of tables outside." We motored across the bay, between Broad Channel and J.F.K., concentrating on spotting the buoys and not getting swamped by the wakes of bigger boats. On the trestle bridge, an A train from Manhattan passed an A train from Far Rockaway: a pas de deux chevaux de fer. There was a good breeze, so it was a little choppy and we both got splashed. The tide was low.

We passed Bergen Basin (which you can't enter anymore, because of Homeland Security) and Hawtree Basin (which, at high tide, takes you all the way to the terminus of the Air Train at Howard Beach, through what looks like "Deliverance" country) and made a wide turn into the channel at Howard Beach. I would have liked to go up to the end of the channel, very slowly, like Cleopatra on the Nile, but the first mate wanted to go to the first place she saw, Vetro, which was exactly where our informant had said it would be. There was hardly anyone there, but whoever was there was certainly watching as I blundered around, shifting from forward to reverse and finally cutting the motor and using the oar to get the back half of the boat closer to the dock while Dee clung to a cleat from the prow. Such seamanship!

Dee had steak and wine, I had grilled octopus and beer, and the waiter admired my boat, which he called a dinghy. Yachts passed as we dined. On the return voyage, the motor started knocking in an alarming way, and I don't know what that was about. But I slowed down until it was under control, and we reached home without incident.

"Now we will return to the Isle of Manhattan," Dee said. So we went back through Howard Beach by car, and there it was again, this time on our right, our new landmark: Vetro. All in all, it was an eccentric itinerary.


(Photo pirated from Vetro's Web site.)

Rest-Area Gypsies

I calculate that I have crossed I-80 in Pennsylvania, from the Delaware Water Gap to New Castle, about eighty times since I started driving. This past weekend, I saw a few things I’d never seen before.

One was a lineup of three or four police cars on the shoulder, all with their lights flashing, while, a few yards up the road, a couple embraced. (Had they just had a narrow escape?)

I was playing leapfrog with an army convoy: I’d pass them, then stop for coffee or gas, and they would get ahead of me on the road, so I’d pass them again. At one point, the convoy and I all got off at the same truck stop (I tried not to get behind them in line at the cash register), and I overheard one of the soldiers say into his cell phone, “I can crank it up and drive it, but it’s smoking like there’s no tomorrow.”

At the same pit stop (at the sign of the giant percolator, Sapp Bros.), as I pulled off the ramp there was a van stopped at the curve, with a big plastic gas tank sitting next to it and a cardboard sign that said “Need Gas/Cash.” I stopped, thinking that I could at least drive them and their tank to the gas station and back. A man approached, and said someone had already given him gas. “We run outta cash,” he said. He and his family—he motioned to two large young people lolling near the car—were heading home to Virginia, and they had some seven hundred miles to go. I gave him twenty dollars, and said, “That’ll get you to your next pit stop, anyway.”

I filled my own tank, and as I was getting back on the highway I couldn’t help but notice that the man and his kids were still there, flagging down cars. Sap or Good Samaritan? I will never know, but the whole enterprise did have a Faulknerian flavor to it.

Then, on the way home, I was just pulling out of one of the official rest areas when a clean-cut young man, followed by a woman, waved me down. I thought he was going to tell me I’d left my wallet at the vending machines or something. “I’m really embarrassed,” he began, “but if you could spare a few dollars for gas ... We need about fifty or sixty dollars to get home." I already had my hand in my wallet and was giving him a twenty when he added, "Our parents will pay you back double.” His girlfriend, or sister, seemed very grateful.

It seemed odd that two such different kinds of people would have the same problem on opposite sides of I-80. I got to thinking: Who takes off on a trip without enough money for gas? I think I'm going to have to go with sap.

About the Battery

I wish there were a catchy saying, along the lines of “Righty-tighty, lefty-loosey,” for battery terminals. I think I have the color-coding down, thanks to lots of recent experience whipping around the jumper cables: positive = red (blood, life) and negative = black (death). But then you have to remember to hook up the red/positive before the black/negative, and that's where I get mixed up. Red (rhymes with dead) can be dangerous, and black is basic and comes before red in the dictionary. What's a girl to do?

The good news is that I was able to start the car last Thursday all by myself, using the portable charger. The bad news was that I drove straight to the mechanic and he charged me $500 to replace the battery and the alternator.

This seemed high to me. I know what a new battery costs (about eighty dollars), but I didn’t know the price of an alternator. So I asked the mechanic for a bill.

“A bill?” he said, as if the concept were new to him. “You want a bill?”

“Yes,” I said.

We were in the garage office, and he carried the form over to the car to fill it out without me watching. It said: “Replace alternator/Repair wire—$400. Replace new battery—$100.”

“That's it?" I said. "Can't you break it down? You know, an itemized bill?”

“You want itemized?” he asked.

“Yeah, you know … parts, labor.”

“That costs more,” he said.

“It costs more to have a bill?”

“Yeah. I have to use the computer.”

“Look, I’m … curious”—I was trying to avoid the word “suspicious”—“about the price of an alternator.”

So he divided the $400 into two smaller sums, somewhat arbitrarily, it seemed to me: $220 for the part, and the rest for labor. (A sign on the wall said that labor was $95 per hour.)

“Is there any guarantee?” I asked.

He shrugged and said, "Six months, a year.”

"Would you write that down?" I asked.

He scribbled something on the bill and said, “I’m not going to give you a piece of junk.”

"I know," I said. I gave him his five hundred dollars and shook his hand. At home, I Googled the car part. An alternator for a 1990 Honda Civic can be had for as little as $90. It seems that my mechanic had gone out of his way to fix me up with the finest, most expensive alternator on the East Coast.

“You got ripped off,” a friend (male) told me that night. A few days later, another friend (a female) said, “You got a deal.”

So who knows? I'm out $500, but the car starts. On Sunday, the odometer rolled over to 70,000. It happened on the road to the dump, or "Transfer Station" ("No Fish Guts"), on Kelleys Island, in Lake Erie.



Unfortunately, I don't think I can go to that mechanic again.

Dead Again

I parked my car in the first available space yesterday when I came back from Rockaway. (All last week it was in a lovely spot, observing the Jewish New Year.) For some reason, when I started it up at eight-thirty this morning to go around the block and double-park across the street, all I got was a low rumble and a few clicks. I hadn’t left the lights on … so I don’t know what is wrong or what to do.

For now, I did nothing. It’s not always easy to do nothing, but in this case it was. I could call AAA. I could shanghai a fellow-motorist and involve him with my jumper cables. I could get the portable charger out of the trunk and see if it worked. But if I succeeded in getting the car started, I would have to drive it some distance to recharge it, and all I wanted to do was get out of the way of the street sweeper and then repark.

There is an office of the Department of Sanitation on this block, and the Sanitation police had left a few cars double-parked across from it. The Broom itself was escorted by the Sanitation police. They favor a white Ford Taurus. I got out as the sanitation cop approached, shrugged theatrically, and said, “Dead battery.” The Sanitation guy said, “No problem,” and added “Sorry” as he went past. The Broom swept around me—or tried to. The Sanitation cop had stopped to ticket an untended vehicle parked ahead of me, so the Broom idled in the middle of the street. Everyone idled while the cop issued the ticket. There was no honking.

At 9:15 a woman cop came by on foot patrol. She was beautiful, black, and busty, and walked in the street with her hands in her pockets. At 9:22 a traffic-enforcement car cruised by. At 9:50 a traffic-enforcement van, full of those orange cones, went by. I had been thinking of trying a little experiment, leaving the car after the Broom went by, to see if the cops had become enlightened as to the lack of necessity for people to be sitting in their cars once the street had been swept. Good thing I thought better of it.

On Thursday, I’ll have to do something about my battery.

Tickets

Yesterday's Times carried this story about cops being expected to meet quotas for writing tickets: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/nyregion/10quotas.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
Are we surprised? We are not.