That night in April, Carl fell into shadows.<\/p>\n
Before that night, Carl lived a relatively simple life.\u00c2\u00a0 He had a wife, Lisa, who cared for him as much as he cared for her, which is to say a great deal.\u00c2\u00a0 They\u2019d gone to the same college, but didn\u2019t meet until three years later.\u00c2\u00a0 Carl worked a day job and a night job.\u00c2\u00a0 By day, he played with numbers and spreadsheets for some governmental agency or other.\u00c2\u00a0 By night, he played guitar.\u00c2\u00a0 Lisa was his greatest fan.<\/p>\n
After that night, Carl\u2019s life turned inside out.\u00c2\u00a0 Lisa disappeared.\u00c2\u00a0 He got a postcard from Phoenix three weeks later saying she\u2019d left him for a travelling snake oil salesman with an unopened Bible in the back of his car for show.<\/p>\n
After that night, the governor signed a bill that made Carl redundant, and he was forced to answer phones for some billing agency or other instead, where people would constantly call and ask why they were being billed but couldn\u2019t read account number off those bills.\u00c2\u00a0 He didn\u2019t last very long.<\/p>\n
The night he fell into shadows, you and I were both in the audience.\u00c2\u00a0 It was a hard drinking night for everyone involved.\u00c2\u00a0 And Carl, he played guitar as though the city burned around him, as though the earth was cracking at its core, as though there was a god of mischief watching him and crying.\u00c2\u00a0 The night he fell into shadows, Carl was at the top of his game, and there was someone else in the audience, a woman in a black suit with a red tie, with a wickedly fast smile, with flashing eyes and excessively long hair.<\/p>\n
The night he fell into shadows, Carl let the woman make suggestions and overtures and promises, the kind that gestating rock stars required.\u00c2\u00a0 There was nothing sexual about it.\u00c2\u00a0 I was close enough to hear.\u00c2\u00a0 Private jets, jetted tubs, sponsorships and tour buses and incredibly expensive JBL speakers.<\/p>\n
The night he fell into shadows, Carl had already been waiting, had long since been ready, and was more than willing.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t remember, were you there the next night, when the woman in the red tie took over the microphone and sang her glorious little heart out?\u00c2\u00a0 Did you hear Carl\u2019s heart break?\u00c2\u00a0 I heard it, even over the chords.\u00c2\u00a0 I tipped back a cool one in his honor.\u00c2\u00a0 That was probably the night his wife bought her first bottle of snake oil.<\/p>\n
After he fell into shadows, Carl shaved less and drank more and wore dark sunglasses at night.\u00c2\u00a0 He cried in the dressing room, reading and re-reading that postcard from Phoenix.<\/p>\n
After he fell into shadows, Carl gave up the day job and went on tour.\u00c2\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t remarkable.\u00c2\u00a0 It was rather sad, actually.\u00c2\u00a0 The drummer, I can\u2019t remember his name, went back to grad school, became a paleontologist or something.\u00c2\u00a0 The girl on the cello, the beautiful girl who always wore dark blue silk and had opal earrings and moist eyes, she didn\u2019t even bother sending a postcard.\u00c2\u00a0 I like to think she found the partner she\u2019d been looking for, male or female I don\u2019t care, the person she needed to support her and to support, with whom to share melancholic poetry, and moved to Key West for an attitude adjustment.<\/p>\n
Before he fell into shadows, Carl perfected his song, his ear, his fingers.\u00c2\u00a0 He picked and plucked and strummed and burned the struts and snapped the strings and bled his fingers and made that damned instrument cry out to heaven.<\/p>\n
The band she made, that woman with the red tie and black suit, Mad Shadows I think it was called, never amounted to much.\u00c2\u00a0 They toured, not in a bus but in a van.\u00c2\u00a0 They scraped together beer money.\u00c2\u00a0 They went through drummers like water.\u00c2\u00a0 After the shadows, Carl and the woman became lovers, I\u2019m sure of it, though I don\u2019t really know.\u00c2\u00a0 But they never played Arizona.<\/p>\n
After the shadows, after the Mad Shadows, Carl didn\u2019t want to play anymore.\u00c2\u00a0 He didn\u2019t want to do much of anything.\u00c2\u00a0 He got another day job, data entry I think, something that required fast fingers.\u00c2\u00a0 His fingers were fast.\u00c2\u00a0 They were just tired.\u00c2\u00a0 After the shadows, he had little dreams, nothing big anymore, nothing dangerous, nothing ambitious.<\/p>\n
After the shadows, the woman in the black suit and red tie left Carl with nothing, not even a guitar.\u00c2\u00a0 She sold it in a Vegas pawn shop for a hundred and fifty bucks, not quite enough for a bus back to New York.<\/p>\n
After the shadows, Carl managed to get back to the city and stayed, for a while, with his mom out on the Island.\u00c2\u00a0 He traded his rock and roll for jazz, and listened to the best of them, the worst of them, and eventually started seeking out the bars where they played.<\/p>\n
After the shadows, he saved up enough money to get another guitar, nothing spectacular, just an axe in need of a grind, and he went back to work.\u00c2\u00a0 His calluses returned in full force, and he tamed that slightly-dinged Gibson into something smooth, something mellow, something angelic.<\/p>\n
After the shadows, after taming the Gibson, Carl found a woman in red, with a black scarf–or was it a tie?\u00c2\u00a0 She had a voice, and an ear, and a small ambition, and a guy who brushed his drums, and they started playing, and they started touring, and they\u2019re coming around our town this weekend, they are.\u00c2\u00a0 So I was wondering, though it\u2019s been a while, you and me, what do you think of the idea of catching old Carl in a new set Saturday night?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
That night in April, Carl fell into shadows. Before that night, Carl lived a relatively simple life.\u00c2\u00a0 He had a wife, Lisa, who cared for […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12,6,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}