The last time I quit music I decided to make a clean break. I’d get out of town, turn over a new leaf.
“Quit obsessing about sounds. It hasn’t been good to you.” It really hadn’t.
I moved to London to be with a girl there. She had a place.
I gave up my rent-stabilized place in Brooklyn, but realized upon arrival that as a foreigner my work options were busboy or bicycle messenger.
“OK then, I’ll put in some hard miles on a fixie over London streets. In winter. Might help me clear my head and help me see what’s next.”
Maybe I should be a plumber! (Those guys get paid…)
So I hit the road from nine to six every day, waiting for that moment of clarity.
It came in the form of a cement truck. Out of nowhere it knocked me down. My bike was flattened, and my foot disappeared under the wheel.
Ambulance, medics, hospital, morphine, Treated and Released. Crutches.
I’d always been a biking fiend. Now I couldn’t even walk.
I was still mostly unharmed though.
Yes I’d just gotten run over by a cement truck, but only my foot.
Said foot had been encased in a hard plastic cycling shoe, with a cleat on the bottom. This shoe absorbed most of the truck’s weight which would have otherwise turned me into jam.
Weird. At the hospital I was FREAKING OUT! I thought I’d never walk again. The pain was excruciating, it felt like I’d lose the foot. Then we looked at the X-rays and saw that there was only a hairline fracture on the outside of my heel, nothing else.
I had a giant bruise that went all through my foot, which was purple and twice its normal size, but they told me I’d be walking in 2 months. And they were right. “You were lucky, mate! Coulda been killed easy…”
I stayed home. Took the pain as medicine. Enjoyed a taste of post-traumatic stress (I hallucinated that truck over and over, flattening me every which way about 20 times an hour.) A week went by. I had time to think.
—-
At some point the next week I wobbled into dispatch to say hi to the guys. They’d all been heroes and had sped to the scene as soon as my accident was called in over the radio.
I arrived to see a poster for a memorial service. A courier named Seb had been killed by a truck a week ago and everybody was going to the funeral the next day.
I’d never met Seb, but I knew who they were talking about.
Some couriers in every city have everybody’s respect. They are ninjas on the streets, gliding unseen through the rush of cars and delivering job after job like nothing. Some of these guys love the ride, but there’s no glory in the job of a courier. Most of them are young punks, or not young and hanging on to scraps. Recovering addicts, social outcasts or illegals like me.
Seb was from Poland. He’d been a London courier for three years. A ninja.
His accident was almost exactly the same as mine, only his body went where my bike went. He died instantly, the day after my own wreck. There was no good reason why I shouldn’t have been in his place.
So I took my crutches to that funeral.
I got there late. There were bikes everywhere – chained to everything on the block in pairs, threes and fours.
The Polish church, full of lean couriers in gore tex and tights, was just letting out. A few friends greeted me solemnly and then a long line of fixed-wheels slowly made its way down to the biker pub on Clerkenwell.
I’ll never forget that day. I’m not in with them – I didnt belong.
Getting home, taking meds, trying in vain to wash dishes (foot had to be constantly elevated), I started to pay attention to the sound that was still humming away inside me.
I’d just come as close as I ever wanted to dying.
I was regularly convulsing with flashbacks of my accident – traumatized, yet I knew these flashbacks were not even a tiny fraction of what soldiers bring back from wars. I couldn’t even imagine…
I guess we can die anytime, without warning and maybe not for any reason. I don’t obsess about it, but I’ll try to make good use of my time here.
—-
Starting then, I devoted my remaining life to that which always meant the most to me. Music. No more compromises.
Someone gave me a dirty old cello and I started to plumb it for clues.
I played with beats on a laptop. I used it to score somebody’s documentary.
I grooved out, and began to sing again. Not songs, not even words. Just sound.
I started letting my sound out. Finally, for real. Physical sound, reminding me that I’m still alive and that there’s still time.