Mixtape

 Audio / Video files of songs mentioned in this story

Above me in the clear night sky, the moon, Earth’s mad companion, is belting out show tunes. A Rodgers and Hart medley, this is, including “Where or When.” The moon has a good baritone voice. No: someone from down the block has an audio system on. Apparently I am still quite sleepy and disoriented. The moon, it seems, is not singing after all.

“It could have been worse,” he informs me. “A toad has dignity.” 

He looks around. Then he breaks into song.

The Clever Men at Oxford
Know all that there is to be knowed
But they none of them know one half as much
As intelligent Mr. Toad.

I had never heard her sing before. I didn’t know she could sing. I don’t think she knew that she could sing. She had a small, a very small, but a sweet voice, and in this small sweet voice she sang two songs, I guess the only ones she could think of at that moment, very slow and sultry, “You Are My Sunshine “ and Stairway to Heaven.”

Then in bed, later, she sang the Michigan fight song, “Hail to the Victors.” Softly and slowed down, in my ear. As a love song. You know: the way you sing to a winner. 

Because after all, I had won her, somehow.

Just then the song she had ordered came on. It was Springsteen’s “Jersey Girl.”

“This song is going out to Kathryn from Jenny,” Jenny whispered. 

She smiled her mischievous smile.

Bradley sat with me in the front seat all the way down to Ann Arbor. I drove the legal limit. It isn’t every day that a toad can free up a dog. We listened to the jazz station from Detroit, and when he stood on his four legs on the passenger side, he smiled at me with his big dopey face, as friendly and as unsubtle as a billboard. His tail wagged, but not in time to the music. Lets not get sentimental. 

That dog never had an ear for jazz

The multimillionaire lawyers and doctors and engineers—

how did they get into the university in the first place?—live here among us in their, 

to quote Cole Porter, stinking pink palazzos, and motor about in their lustrous sleek cars.

Typically on weekends I would go down to the basement and start with the brushes and the canvases. I had a battery-operated radio propped up on top of the water heater and tuned to the FM station, and some masterpiece from the repertoire would come on, let’s say Brahms, one of the symphonies, and I’d be alright until I started to listen. Since I’m visual, I converted everything audible into a visual, and while I was listening to this heavy Brahmsian music —it sounded like excited lamentation to me —I’d imagine a leaf being blown across a field, and then I saw myself as that same leaf being windswept on a drift of snow, and then I’d see a dry creek bed and people at a party at dawn wandering home and feeling hungover and sick in the key of D major, and I’d think: This isn’t about good emotional hygiene, this is about me. I don’t want to be a leaf, I’m Bradley W. Smith, and I’d snap off the music.

Sounds of the crickets came into the room, and the music from the CD player, Coltrane’s 

“A Love Supreme,” and the occasional car passing by on the street.

You should be strutting around arm in arm with him. You should be nestled with him, 

listening to those Mingus albums of yours.

In the living room, the CD player, rotating its carousel selections, had gotten to the Miles Davis we had carefully timed for background to postcoital murmuring, Sketches of Spain.

Back in my study I wrote a brief note to my son, asking for . . . asking for what? For his assurance that he would spend it wisely? We were beyond such tender father-son messages. 

A maddening tune was going through my head, “Twentieth-Century Blues.”

Meanwhile, country-western, moron music if you ask me, Tricia Yearwood or somebody, your cheatin’ -this-and-your-cheatin’-that, is playing off some staticky AM radio in the back.

I turned the radio on, thinking it would help, but the radio was tuned to an oldies station, and the first line out of the speaker was, “Well I would not give you false hope, on this strange and mournful day . . . “ and of course Diana reached down and snapped off that song.

You drive across across this expanse of peculiarity as all the radio stations fade, all of them, Brahms and the Ronettes and Toad the Wet Sprocket and Hank Williams, 

and you start to wonder what got into you, that brought your new wife up here, 

the goddess whose scary wondrous beauty put you on trial.

Janey, she was pretty in a predatory way, like that pianist, Liberace, 

but without the clothes he wore to keep you confused and off the scent.

It doesn’t matter the least little bit that you can’t really pass poison ivy back and forth. 

She thought you could. So they had an opportunistic fight, which resolved matters. 

Remember the song? It became our song.

You’re gonna need an ocean
Of calamine lotion.

When it was finally too dark to play, he joined me, I stood up, and Chloe, Oscar’s fiancé, who was sitting on the other bench after jogging around in her Joy Division tee-shirt and 

whom I had sort of befriended, well, she stood up, too.

Late in the summer I was walking around town with Bradley. I wasn’t feeling too bad. This song, “My Funny Valentine,” as sung by Ella Fitzgerald was going through my head as I walked. I always liked her; I liked it that she sang jazz while wearing glasses.

Anyway, I found myself driving to Jackson’s one tourist attraction, the Jackson Cascades.

Water gubbles out at the top, where it’s been pumped, and it flows down these ten or so artificially built cascades, like a display in a hotel lobby in Las Vegas, and you sit in the chairs they have, having paid your four dollars, while computer-controlled lights play over these cascades —it only opens after dark —and the speakers they’ve attached to telephone poles play Mantovani and Neil Diamond and the 101 Strings. 

This is where I decided to go to collect my thoughts.

Neil Diamond’s Song Sung Blue” was blaring over these internment-camp speakers, and I was sitting there with my head in my hands wondering what I was doing in Jackson, Michigan.

Thus encumbered, I taught Chloe to waltz on her wedding day, 

humming to her tunes from Die Fledermaus.

A small band of musicians is tuning up, a trio of vagabond string players enjoying the outdoors, intending to perform Rossini.

I listen to Schubert on the phonograph. Next to my family, Schubert is the love of my life.

. . . what’s amazing is how often you see people sitting on the front stoop 

staring off into space.

They’re humming their love songs, for example as sung by Frank Sinatra or the Beatles or Madonna—did she ever sing one? a love song, I mean, and not just sex and money?