November 22, 2009
There is beauty in this world. I know it. I’ve seen it. I’ve held it in my hand and spent days simply staring, drinking it in. I’ve made beauty through my music, music that sounded like an angel’s song and pleased the maker as much as any other angel’s song could.
I was an angel. I made beauty.
And then the adoration started. There was beauty in that, too. Beauty in their faces as they looked at me, worshipping me as they’d worship a real angel. Beauty in their awe, their respect, their need to be around me.
I stopped feeling like an angel and felt like a god, instead.
It came with a price. A bigger price than simply making music had brought. That had been easy. The price was the need to make more music, to sing higher, louder, more and more. To let my guitar say all those things I never could. To forget about food and people and everything but the music.
I had people who took care of me. There was beauty in them, too. Beauty in the way they cared. In the way they did everything so I didn’t have to. “C’mon, Soul, you need a shower,” they’d say, and they’d take the guitar out of my hands.
They were beautiful. I loved them.
They went away, pushed away by the fans. The fans who took my guitar and handed me a bottle. At first, there was beauty there. Beauty in the things I saw, things I’d never see when it was me and the Oracle.
The beauty turned ugly. And here I am, stuck. I set fire to my guitar, to my precious Oracle every night. I can’t bear the noise it makes now, when once it made music. But it comes back, again and again, my Oracle. Looking for more. Looking for me. It wants to sing the songs of angels again.
I try. I try and try. But the song has left me.
And there’s no more beauty in my world.
***
For more beauty, check out this week’s Sunday Scribblings.
June 3, 2009
For something I’m working on behind the scenes, I needed to create a new character. Here he is, about 13 paragraphs or so. Let me know what you think.
Soul Bendorff
Born Saul Bendorff, Soul’s name was changed for him by the kids at school. No real reason other than it was an easy way to try to get under the guy’s skin.
It didn’t work.
Soul’s got dark, dark hair. Almost black. It’s straight. Pretty thin. He wears it chin-length, lets it hang. It can’t cover up the massive acne scarring on both cheeks that leaves him pitted and almost disfigured, but it also sets off his very high cheekbones. Think Eastern European aristocracy. He’s got very dark, dark blue eyes, too.
Soul picked up a guitar in the sixties. Started bending strings and doing things with reverb that no one had thought about doing, let alone had tested to see if it was possible. For a lot of the wanna-bes, it wasn’t possible. But that was Soul. He had a gift.
He was also grouchy as hell when he was drunk, which was most of the time. He discovered fast that if he set his guitar on fire at the end of the show, that meant he didn’t have to play an encore.
Soul went through a lot of guitars that way.
Fortunately for him, the company who made his favorite guitar liked the way he stretched its boundaries. They made him custom guitars. Kept him well stocked for his bonfires.
Those bonfires and that noise-called-music he made fueled him into the public eye at a time when rockers were truly bad boys. (we’re talking late sixties, hippie revolution, Woodstock, Altamont… you get the idea). He became the poster boy for the rock revolution. And Soul embraced it. Lived the life. Never appeared in public without his dark glasses, bottle of bourbon, and a pretty, lithe blonde draped on him. He wore dark blue suede fringe vests, jeans with bell bottoms and custom embroidery. All the flies buttoned; he wouldn’t wear pants with zippers. Skin-tight pull-ons (the precursors to spandex?) in polyester were his favorites.
And tennis shoes. Everyone else wore mod boots. Soul wore tennis shoes. Grungy dark blue Chuck Taylors.
Dark blue was Soul’s color. It matched his eyes. Or so people said; with those dark glasses, no one could get close enough to see his eyes.
Not even his blondes. Apparently, Soul kept the glasses on at all times.
He was wearing a pair when he was found dead. Alcohol poisoning. Or maybe his heart gave out while busy with a blonde. Maybe she poisoned him. The authorities found traces of her. They knew she’d been there when he died.
No one ever knew who she was. No one ever found her. She’s the only one who knows what happened to Soul Bendorff.
Dead at 25.
***
Be sure to visit the other Thursday Thirteeners and see what’s going on in their worlds.