The last time I quit music I decided to make a clean break, get out of town, turn over a new leaf.
I moved to London to be with a girl there. She had a place.
Having given up my rent-stabilized place in Brooklyn, I realized upon arrival that as a foreigner my work options were either busboy or bicycle messenger.
So I hit the road from nine to six every day, waiting for that moment of clarity, which 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, though I was still mostly unharmed.
I’d just gotten run over by a cement truck, yes, but only my foot. The hard plastic cycling shoe had absorbed most of the truck’s weight, which would have otherwise turned me into jam.
The pain was excruciating, it felt like I’d lose the foot. At the hospital I was freaking out until we looked at the X-rays and saw that there was only a hairline fracture on the outside of my heel, nothing else.
My foot was purple and twice its normal size, but they told me I’d be walking in 2 months. “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 from every angle about 20 times an hour.) A week went by.
—-
Next week I hobbled into dispatch to say hi to the guys. They’d all been heroes and sped to the scene when I called my accident in over the radio.
On the wall hung 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 have everybody’s respect. They are ninjas on the streets, gliding unseen through the rush of cars and delivering job after job like it’s nothing.
Some love the ride, but there’s no glory in the job of a courier. Most are young punks, or not young and clinging to scraps, recovering addicts, or illegals like me.
Seb was young and from Poland. He’d been a London courier for three years. He was a ninja.
His accident was exactly like mine, only his body went where my bike went. He died instantly, one day after my own wreck, and there was no good reason why I shouldn’t have been in his place.
So I took my crutches to that funeral.
Slow on my purple foot, I got there late. I saw bikes chained to everything on the block.
The Polish church, full of lean riders 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 thought. I don’t belong, and this is nothing new.
Getting home, taking meds, trying in vain to wash dishes (foot had to be constantly elevated), I started to hear music again.
Convulsing with flashbacks, yet nothing like what soldiers bring back from wars. Death had spared me for now, so I wouldn’t waste the chance.
I could die whenever, without warning and maybe not for any reason. I don’t obsess about it, I’ll just make use of the remaining time.
—-
Now there is only Music. No more compromises.
Someone gave me a dirty old cello and I started to plumb it for clues.
I began to sing. No songs, no words. Just sound.
My sound.