the last parade of ray
Every other Sunday I offer you a story. The Last Parade of Ray is what I wrote for today. Scroll down to read it.
My new song “Meet Me at the End of the World” has been out for almost two weeks. We are overwhelmed with the results! Thank you everyone for streaming, listening, playlisting. A thrill for our whole family. Click here to listen while you read the rest of this newsletter.
More coming: the lyric video for Meet Me at the End of the World drops this Tuesday, the official video in a few weeks. Plus some surprises. To you. To me they’ve been planned all along. That said maybe there are surprises coming for me too. Who knows really.
A couple things I’d like to share:
The above photo is from a taping I did for a new podcast filmed at Carter Vintage Guitars here in Nashville. It’s called Playback and it’s hosted by Spencer Handley. Other guests include Critter Eldridge and Noah Levine, Noah Kahan’s guitarist. It will launch soon. I was on to discuss how one might sustain a creative career across time and through multiple pivots. They gave me a T Shirt from Carter which Randa immediately stole.
If you haven’t listened to our latest Morse Code Podcast episode with WNXP host Celia Gregory, check it out.
Celia Gregory on the Future of Radio, Music Curation & Building Community | Morse Code Podcast #221
We discuss, among other things, the importance of human-curated culture in today’s algorithm everything. Also I figured out how to embed video directly into the spotify platform, so that’s awesome. While I put out this new music, with the cascade of content required to promote it, we are now releasing new episodes of the MCP every other week. That way I can make art and still have time to hold my baby girl.
Best for last? I was a guest on a very unique pod with my friend Ryan Rado. His is called the Make it Perfect Show, and in it we paint together (he paints, I do something approximating painting) and discuss frailties visions aspirations reasons while doing so. Ryan is what you call a beautiful soul. I have never met anyone with such a lack of judginess and reciprocally, such a wide open spirit. He makes you comfortable and then he hits you with uncomfortable questions. Makes for great TV.
Speaking of stories, here’s one I posted on IG about Zuzu “The Asteroid” and my new song.
the last parade of ray
It was the cough. The sound had changed, had moved from the upper crust of his bodily planet into a deeper place where no light was. The word tomb applied. Quiet as a tomb. A deep place indifferent to the disturbances rolling along the surface. A depth of ocean, currentness, immutable.
Only, no longer. Once a fissure, now tectonic. He felt another cough coming. He waited, tensing the muscles in his chest. This was how the fight expressed itself now, a useless contraction, a show.
The sound buzzed and hissed and cackled and his body twisted in its soft bed, resisting what it released. He felt the spittle chill his upper lip and no longer wished for someone to wipe it away.
Ray was glad he was alone. It was a dignity to do it this way, hidden from the world, from his enemies, from the people who loved him, from the legion of souls that would persist in his absence, indifferent in death as they were in life.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw the half lit face of the on duty nurse appear in the doorway and hesitate. She looked down in that way people do when their powers of concentration are vested wholly in the ear. She listened, frowning, and withdrew.
His name was Raymond Bean. And these were the closing minutes of the Raymond Bean movie starring Raymond Bean. The theater was empty and so there he was, alone with his popcorn, seated in center of the front row, looking up at the flicker on the screen, waiting for it to be over.
At 62 years the movie was a little short, but it was a quantity over quality thing, perhaps. His was a life of plenty by the usual metrics. Plenty of money, a few choice women and plenty of the other kind, a degree of renown that, while not ubiquitous, was enough at least to afford him regular appearances in box seats at Titans games and even the occasional autograph when chance found him on a bender at Robert’s or Layla’s.
He shifted, the bed pan needed changing. God it was all so embarrassing, dying.
Suddenly it occurred to Ray this thing, whatever it was — the half-awake processional through which the stations of his life had provided markers if not meaning — was leading up to this moment, the moment of his leaving life.
He’d been preparing, or mostly — he noted with a pinch of discomfort — not preparing for this particular juncture on the celestial odyssey since his initial appearance on the scene those years ago. Not thinking about it. Death. In fact, thinking about anything but that.
From a certain perspective the parade of Ray was an exercise in the unexceptional. He had never filled an arena, figuratively or otherwise. But nor was he a Prufrock measuring out the coffee spoons. Oh no! He had dared, had aspired to something, though what exactly that was was hard to articulate now with the cough interrupting him and the sensation of piss leaking from his formerly proud pecker.
He had aspired to, to what? To himself, goddamnit.
He had loved, a little at least; he had fucked a lot. He thought of his women. Of course Jessica was the first to appear, the fairest of them all. Dear Jessica with her freckles that floated up from her cheeks into the irises of her green eyes and her mouth wide an unused crayon. Oh what a beauty, gone some forty years, not gone, alive somewhere, probably, just, somewhere else… and then his wife Nell, ex-wife, also gone, divorced again since their own ugly seperation. When he thought of that snap in his branch what came to his mind was the house, the beautiful home with its shady yard and its marble porch cracked since before they’d bought it and that one car garage from a period of American domesticity when only one car was needed. Yep that house too, gone gone gone.
Suddenly Ray sat up, desperate. He wanted a mirror. He wanted to see himself. Rather, he wanted to see if could see himself. For what he was. It occurred to him that when he thought of himself now, in these memories and vignettes, he was handsome, about forty, a tad sallow in the eye but with no grey hair whatsoever. It was part of his gift, his strategy of conquest, to see himself in the best possible light. Everyone knows the prospect of success is always — if not assured — made a damn sight easier its the protagonist is handsome.
He propped himself up with his forearms, pleased at their strength. A wide mirror hung on the wall opposite, reflecting in this dim afternoon light the spartan efficiency of an upscale hospital room, and now, the tiny head of an old man squinting out from a billow of white blankets.
It was disgusting. He was disgusting.
The skin was all wrong. Yellow around the eyes and forehead, desaturating to the grey he knew would soon envelop him whole. The hair, the proud silver pompadour, was matted and thin, the individual hairs deserting him like passengers on a sinking ship. The mouth festered with brown teeth, and though he couldn’t smell it, he knew his breath was sour with impending death.
But it was his eyes he hated most. Eyes he’d known his whole life. The eyes that sparkled and accused and even, if only occasionally, laughed, were now waxy and flat. He would have thought he was looking at a dead person’s eyes but for the fact that they were his own, and he was not dead.
He sat back and sighed and the sigh summoned another cough. What a terrible sound. He got through it and was still and in the stillness he considered for the first time in his life what it actually meant to be alive. That he’d never considered before was no real surprise. No one he knew — from his ex to his girlfriends to the guy who cut his grass (God what was his name? Fuego?) — had ever considered it, at least not openly. Polite conversation forbids what it cannot facilitate and besides, what a terrible and unpleasant subject, life, because it implies its yellow grey opposite.
Ray lay quietly in his bed in this room where no one was and listened to his breath, thick with the phlegm he was drowning in. There was no mistaking the sound.
That’s why they call it a rattle! He thought this little thought and then he was sad that it was probably the last surprise he would ever know.
And what next? What was going to happen now?
And yet, even through this portentous threshold he would not dare peek. He couldn’t. He would not allow himself to wonder at the mouth that now gaped. It was too frightening. It was coming either way, whatever words he put toward it, or fear.
He was afraid. But as he stepped gently upon the fear as though to test it like a sheet of ice, he felt the old pride coming back. Pride that had for his whole life steeled his mind and blinkered his heart.
Suddenly he had a second surprise. Pride was not, as he’d innocently assumed, his faithful servant. Pride was his master. And in this closing moment he would serve it as he always had. It would protect him in death as it had protected him from life.
Ray closed his eyes and listened to the ticking sound — a hot pipe, a clock hand, his own heart — his breath slowed and his thoughts slowed, and into the space between the thoughts a little light flickered, an early movie from the era of silent films, so old the image was dusty and scratched and the movements of the actors jerked like puppets.
It was his mother. She was carrying him. Where?
Her long and lovely arms. The feeling. Safety, her arms long and slender and lovely and then his own arms swollen with babyfat like sausages tied with string. He waved his little hand and the puppet pulled the string and the hand opened.
It was like flying, the green grass moving beneath as she carried him through the yard, his mother, up and over the neighbor’s picket fence and her cotton dress swishing in the grass and she moving easily and he feeling her power and love and safety and the two of them flying, flying to the place she’d intended all along. In the distance but moving closer, closer, coming into focus first the red swipes of paint on a canvas and then. Tulips. The tulips in the neighbor’s yard, red velvet cups, thrown into the cradling April breeze.
“Do you see?” she sang, and reached out her hand.
Killer story! Can I say that? Korby, Your writing is like some stew from the old country. Estonian….Gristle and bone and earth. Kosher salt. Thanks!