Worthy Of This Great City Read online

  Some additional points:

  The fact that I’m describing known events does not make this an interactive project. Don’t email me your brilliant personal theories, political or otherwise, even if you know someone involved. I’m not interested in promoting your shirttail aspirations. Seriously.

  As this is not a new investigation it’s also not a whodunit, so obviously don’t expect any bombshell revelations - or lascivious details for that matter, all you literary voyeurs out there. Any information I have I acquired while responsibly pursuing my profession.

  Now, when I describe this work as a “reinterpretation,” I mean that it’s the only correct interpretation, the truth, and I use the word “truth” in neither an objective nor relative sense, but simply to signify what we all understand when we say something isn’t a lie. Such an understanding, presented with simplicity and elegance if I may be so presumptuous, is able to stand on its own without benefit of theory. What sickens me, if I haven’t yet made this clear, is today’s evolving entitlement to democratically determined truth.

  As to the specific events under discussion, unlike some other commentators I have an informed opinion: you’ll see that I had a decent amount of access. But even so I remain utterly ignorant about so much that undoubtedly matters. To take the most glaring example, I had no entrée into the heart of the Askew marriage: the smell of shit in the bathroom, the despair of boredom - or the ongoing ecstasy, for that matter. All that urgent information is still folded up in their conjugal memory, packed away in some bottom dresser drawer. Maybe they got home and screamed profanity while holding satanic rituals; I wouldn’t know. As to some others described here, of course I speculate: probably I’ve created illegitimate characters who don’t exist in reality, except they exist now, don’t they? You see, even today I have more questions than most people, because most people have bought into one of the current municipal myths, but at least I have the central facts straight, and I’ll give you this much: I do agree contend that there was an “it,” meaning a single series of causes and effects, with no significant coincidences.

  Finally as to me, you can forget any of the obvious tabloid suspicions about me being gay or obsessed or vengeful. Please realize that I can almost certainly outthink you, even regarding myself. And another thing: I consider the truth a gift that everyone should just graciously accept. Everything I share here I give lovingly and with respect.

  Of necessity I skim some hoary old issues in philosophy but I refuse to openly engage; it’s relevant but you’re basically on your own. I’ve lost patience with all the learned pundits and their belligerent, self-defeating worldview, the one where we’ve reached the limits of conceptual thought, cleverly enlightened ourselves out of our own minds and into an endless whimpering compromise with no further possibility of real movement, not even a rumor of joyful anarchy to vitalize the depressed present. Except that’s what always does happen, everything wallowing in despair until some disobedient idea lands in an undiscovered corner, random quantum jitters to put an end to the apparent end of philosophy, one compelling thought to disturb the complacent pseudo-religions and redirect all that gleeful academic venom. You know it’s got to happen eventually. Or anyway I know it.

  Ruth thought she’d found the answer. Still does, for all she’s gone coy now, concealing the grandiosity. She’s essentially uneducated, of course, but she managed to bestow a thoroughly enjoyable fillip to the towering zeitgeist, to those dedicated professional thinkers and their clever reasoning against life. Visualizing herself on some cloud-wrapped mountaintop, some unique edge high above all us pedestrian sheep.

  And the beauty, the confounding slipperiness of it! That by the very logic of the argument she didn’t even have to be right! So what if her thesis was wrong, therefore it remained perfectly valid! The most ingenious defense possible, this indissoluble theory extracted from ill-defined notions of virtue and truth. Precise definitions weren’t worth bothering about for the Ruth who operated, so she often claimed, on instinct and grace, delivering breathless revelations to the adoring masses.

  “You have to break through the wall you never knew was there.” Very eager and excited, with a metaphoric encouraging hand on my shoulder. And I suppose when people are in this state, happy to explain the universe to you, the best you can wish for them is a spectacular failure.

  A very sharp recollection even now: a dozen rows of folding chairs blocking a city sidewalk, a contradictory ambience combining funereal solemnity and official celebration, with a familiar face painted huge on a city wall, transmuted into an artifact.

  If you’re from the Philadelphia area you undoubtedly know the basics and are reasonably familiar with our local politicos and our mafia relicts and the more recent City Hall scandals. Looking at it prosaically, which is to say assuming money carries final authority, the plot revolves around the endlessly contested question of development along the Delaware waterfront at Penn’s Landing. Maybe that’s something to do with history and destiny: centuries ago our first settlers huddled in caves above that same riverbank, warming themselves on the seemingly infinite potential.

  Ruth, who started it all with one lunatic outburst and kept right on spouting more illogical crap, ultimately talked too freely about everything except herself. That’s a strange reversal for an age mesmerized by the personal yet terrified of profundity. As it happened I had the advantage of an affectionate acquaintance with Councilman-At-Large Thom Askew, and when I offered to do a profile of his wife, secretly a risky if purportedly inadvertent expose, he was cautious but amenable, while of course she was nothing short of ecstatic. So during those months she was an occasional theme through my life, and I sacrificed a few days recording her practiced spiel. This character who envisioned herself a figure of great genius and extraordinary courage, who walked like Joan of Arc. Blithely inserting universal dictums into inappropriate conversations, haphazard shards of philosophy gleaned from the great books and reassembled into a grotesque whole without benefit of formal argument. Scorning reason not as impossible but as pedestrian, as a dull, archaic methodology.

  Therefore joyfully embracing her own lack of erudition: “What people consider a good education leaches any originality right out of you. It’s literally teaching you what not to think, narrowing your possibilities. It bullies.”

  I figured this for academic envy. “You’ve read Foucault?”

  “Some.”

  Then there was the confusion over politics, the partisan rush to interpret what happened as evidencing some extremist political position when in fact this was only incidentally the case; in fact the whole political thing was largely unimportant and none of it’s going the way you think anyway. The real issues were much more fundamental and everyone sensed that. We were only surprised because Ruth was obviously an enlightened woman.

  Now about what finally did happen.

  First, understand the Philadelphia Folk Festival as a forthright exercise in Liberal musical theatre as much as a celebration of peoples and their endurance and joys. Taking place, as might be expected, in an aesthetically pure venue, typically under a blazing sun on drying August fields embraced by unremarkable trees, and featuring lots of suburbanites absolutely behaving themselves.

  When there came Ruth Askew, taking that venerable stage to address that staunchly progressive audience. Standing rigid there, thin and broad-shouldered, a pale, unfathomable giantess on the twin Jumbotron screens.

  That night was odd from the start. Behind the bright box of the stage those generic trees formed a black stockade against a threatening universe, and endless tattered, shit-colored clouds streamed past a gibbous yellow moon with exceptional speed. A shitting sky but no one really noticed.

  I suspect Ruth walked out onto that stage in a rage of frustrated arrogance. For one endless minute she simply stood behind the microphone and stared out at us, the thousand dark humps under blankets, the bouncing neon glow sticks, the luminous haze at the line of food concessions, the smokers t
apping off ash by the Porta Potties, and the awkward, restless shadows moving up and down the roped-off aisles or carefully stepping over the confusion of tarps and blankets.

  Then she spat at us.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Earlier that day, I lay in the shade with only my bare toes exposed to the vicious sun, part of a modest audience similarly disposed beneath the modest fringe of trees surrounding the field. Light fell down through the foliage, thick victorious beams that described powerful angles in their descent inside the usual breathtaking green cathedral. Around me the grass was withered and compressed into a flattened mat over ground still saturated from the previous night’s thunderstorms; everything smelled of baking wet earth, sunscreen, and greasy event food. I don’t remember any intrusive insects or even visible birds except for a couple of extremely distant hawks, dull specks in the otherwise empty sky.

  Another respectable scattering of spectators occupied the baking field, most sprawled directly in front of the small Camp Stage, true fans eagerly upright despite the merciless heat. So just as expected, one of those perfectly innocent afternoons you buy with the ticket, monotonous while deeply nourishing, readily absorbed through the whole skin like childhood summers.

  I didn’t know about the witches yet, but they were out in force. Yeah, it’s a silly description but I don’t know how else to capture the awful effect of those damn women. So they were witches who’d been summoned by a highly demanding assembly of affluent suburbanites, people accustomed to commanding natural forces. And while arguably these were all benevolent females who only meant well, with witches you never know how it’s going to turn out.

  Every August for more than a decade I’ve headed out to Schwenksville for this dependable throwback party. And not precisely to enjoy the music, because although it commands my absolute respect I find it too intense for everyday entertainment. It’s a kind of church music, an unashamed church of humanity: pure sound, plaintive and honest, twanging and rambunctious, dulcimer gentle. Fitting, then, for this late-summer pagan rite in honor of righteousness, and I immerse myself in it to perform a spiritual cleansing of sorts, processing across the fields from one rustic venue to another, affirming a succession of bluegrass pickers and ballad wailers and theatrical tellers of old tales. And it’s a mildly uncomfortable ritual in another sense, but that’s because of the mostly undamaged people, the one’s who wholeheartedly enjoy everything and applaud too often.

  As with anything religious, there are incredibly subversive undercurrents longing to manifest, easy to exploit by those portending witches. Two of them performed that day, one with such tragic skill and clarity it unintentionally aroused huge amounts of self-loathing and subsequently resentment, at least in me. The second inspired a joy vigorous enough to move the plot. And the third exerted an indirect but equally damning influence courtesy of her own celebrity, her mere idea inciting a shaming nostalgia. In fact it was dangerously stupid to speak her name aloud. All three arrived wearing absolute certainty.

  This current festival setting, the Old Pool Farm, is perfectly suited to the occasion. There are wide fields to accommodate the generous crowds, a nicely crisp and sparkly creek, and the requisite gates and groves, all at a situation remote enough to evoke a wholly separate culture despite easy proximity to the city. Although that’s not difficult, because even today you only have to poke your nose outside the nearer suburbs to spot a rusty silo on some decrepit farm with another of those filthy black-and-white, diarrhea-spewing dairy cows leaning against a sagging wire fence, its pelvis practically poking through its muddy hide. Peeling paint and hay bales directly across the road from another mushrooming pretentious development, a slum of dull, identical cheapjack townhouses. So despite the fervent country claptrap the festival is essentially a metropolitan scene, drawing a sophisticated crowd, and therefore in one sense condescending, an insult.

  Murmurs of anticipation brought me up on my elbows to discover Hannah Lynch already onstage, a typically modest entrance. I sat up and paid attention, catching sight of her inside an amiable circle of probable musicians, a glimpse of her face and one thin shoulder between competent-looking backs in cowboy or cotton work shirts, all of them endlessly conversing there in surprisingly gentle voices.

  Until finally they broke apart and here she came gliding towards the front of the tiny platform, moving within a reputation so illustrious it made her physical presence unlikely and you had to struggle for it. A tiny bird of a woman, an elderly, fragile sparrow with fine gray hair and hazel eyes and translucent skin, nodding to us and smiling nicely with small unremarkable teeth while seating herself on a wooden folding chair. She was dressed like good people, like a decent Christian farmwife in a faded print skirt and cotton blouse of mixed pastels, pink and beige and blue. Only with dangling silver jewelry to be noticed, since after all she was a major star.

  With this one unshakable article of faith: that her famously quavering soprano was entirely unrelated to her own ordinary self, more of an imposition or a trust, an undeserved gift from God that in no way merited personal praise. So she has stated. And accordingly she exuded genuine empathy with all of us waiting out there for her, straining forward to better capture the spirit and stamina investing each word. A curve of laughter lit her face, and there was grief there too, but nothing to diminish that serene spirit.

  Beside me Crystal, blatantly artificial trendoid in that audience of cosmopolitan pseudo-naturals, for once had the good sense to keep her mouth shut. Crystal, please note, was present only because she suspected this event mattered to me and meant to chain herself to it in my memory. She was an unashamed criminal, and really sweet, and I admired her.

  Lynch sat there looking at us and hugging her guitar, once giving it a surreptitious pat like a favorite pet before launching into one of those unexpectedly piercing old songs, a rather shocking rush of raw bitterness and despair - nothing silvered there - railing rather than mourning yet cleanly tragic because without any confusion of entitlement or excuse, in fact totally untainted by melodrama, an expression of rightful fury to upend your sensibilities and make you cringe inside your pampered, complacent soul.

  And onward, commanding that summer hour with a repertoire of futile longing, black misery, true love, unalloyed injustice, and journeying away as only the truly dispossessed can journey. How inadequate we were by comparison, what undeserved good fortune to be sitting there vicariously sharing the infinite human endurance of those former generations, thus beatified now. Sharing a deep pride in our good taste and our faultless fundamental values.

  And that’s how this festival always goes for me: a fusion of rapture and fleeting realization, of purging and rebirth I suppose. We avid celebrants being served by true vicars, unassuming conduits of grace because essentially craftspeople evincing the unquestioning self-respect of their kind, therefore automatically accepting us as equals and worthy of their respect, refusing to cater. That’s how Lynch and her ilk deliver their deadly blows, how they incite our reckless, self-destructive impulses.

  Because the problem is, nothing is enough and never can be, not in any case. And in addition to that, this particular event carries an impossible burden of triumphant civil rights baggage. A weight of expectation, purest gold and just as heavy, presses down on those fields like an approaching storm, flattening the trees, placing an unbearable strain on our moral muscles, making even the most authentic and engaged participant stagger for reasons most often never identified.

  You see there’s no battle here anymore, a situation as frustrating as it is pathetic. I mean, what’s so pitiable as striving mightily to wage a war already won, or achieve a moral victory already popularly embraced? Like you’re on some lone and dangerous crusade instead of enjoying a mere reenactment, an amusement park ride. As if any real social hazard or physical extremity ever threatened most of these initiates. As if they could face the real front line today. Come to that, what in the world ever sprang from this placid piece of Pennsylvania countryside anyw
ay, or even its nearby metropolis, so far from the bloody front lines of decades past? What justifies this hallowed ambience? Everyone knows the real struggle was over in another state, in the deep South or New York or California, all that televised passion and pain. Yet here’s a similar legacy, an undeserved renown.

  Seriously, you have to consider this heritage of the sixties, that era of righteousness and innocence and victory, you have to ponder the connection to the contemporary lives and events I’m describing here. Resurrect that intoxicating scent of possibility. Realize how strong it is, what it can do. Watch any old news film and it’s literally like viewing creatures from another planet, those young people are so alien, their gestures and expressions so certain and strident, an entire new world in their angry, accusatory eyes. What can any of that mean in this age of spent possibility?

  So today the Folk Fest is largely a masturbatory farce of self-congratulation, courtesy of this pushy, upscale audience basking in its accustomed sunshine, displaying that forceful amiability that means money, smiling too brightly over bare freckled shoulders. Uniformly pale people displaying their ease on this bucolic faux battlefield, all aggressively self-aware. And meanwhile a barely perceptible, slightly demented energy flutters along at grass level, an intrepid narcissism bent on having a significant experience and more than a little desperate to measure up to itself.