Part 9.

Broadway the Hard Way

Today I returned to the street after an absence of nearly two years. As I put my case down I look around me as if in some kind of remarkable way a butcher or a local cobbler might suddenly recognize me again. Then I remind myself that I am always the stranger in this town and I will be a stranger in so many other streets like this just as I have always been before. I have always been the most allusive member of my family and these half-empty precincts hold no welcome parties for prodigal sons. It has been in this very same spot that I have been celebrated and shamed a thousand times before. I have been blessed and cursed time and time again. I have been the friend and the enemy of everybody and nobody. I have been anointed by the enlightened and damned by the condemned. The Big Issue vendor will snarl with discontent at my return and the discontented amongst us will laugh at my statuesque act of selflessness, but in good time I will be accepted into the wiry nervous system of these threadbare pavements once again.

    The street begins to fill up with passers by and I start to play another tune. I have an old postcard with scores of these tunes scribbled on the side reserved for the addressee. I keep it tucked away in my back pocket at all times so that if I get stuck I can just whip it out and remind myself of all the solitary love songs that I have ever known. The saxophone is bright and its soprano trills make their way across the street like little darts. They weave in and out of the crowds eventually reaching distant bus stops and bicycle racks at the edges of the pedestrian zone where they ring against their metal poles before disappearing into lines of traffic. I am the witness to the ebb and the flow of the street as it crawls past and I see people appearing and vanishing along with it all. As a busker I need to keep up a stream of consciousness, an air of flamboyance, perhaps even a suffering virtuosity that will set me apart if I want to survive here at all. The tune I have been playing escapes me again but I keep on playing and inventing other angles adding to the lines of other love songs. I have always been more of an improviser and for me it’s never been simply about playing a repertoire. The way I see it spontaneity is at the heart of the profession and the busker must be adept at picking up odds and ends as he goes. Countless musical possibilities will appear in the trinkets and trash, in the urban clash of noises and chitchat and so the busker learns to clutch at straws. All manner of broken musical ornamentation’s lodge themselves far into the recesses of the busker’s memory like bits of broken china pottery and the busker will thrive on the muddy unearthing of this stuff. The opening lines to Charlie Parker’s Ornithology have a way of turning on their heels and all of a sudden it’s a made-up soundtrack for a Buster Keaton movie. I have played these tunes a thousand times but to busk them requires a certain degree of waywardness and I make an effort not to plan where I am going with the music too much. Then I take another look at my postcard and the list of songs that I have scribbled onto it. An old lady passes me by and tells me that I should be in the musicals. Yes! she is right of course and I agree with her enthusiastically. I think about the possibility of a one-man production of 42^nd Street on Broadway, a matinee for shoppers. 

    Behind me are the broad windows of Cavendish House. It’s a sleek department store that takes up almost the entire length of the street. I stand in front of its glass displays with its make up girls hurrying around back stage with powders and lip-glosses at the ready. They all wear tight black T-shirts that advertise they are the official sponsors of a celebrity pop idol show on national television. Today I have stepped into his shoes. I have finally become the celebrity of department store windows, a mannequin for the people and an enduring example of inappropriate product placements on the High Street. It’s been nearly two years and here I am again. The beggar from the Royal Bank of Scotland gets up from his spot and with impeccable neatness he folds away his big blanket. He pinches at its corners and it carefully folds into a little square under his arm. Before mooching off into another part of town he calmly declares that if I play another tune he’s going to hang himself.

© Chris Cundy 2009

4.
Dancing with the man who hates the world

There is only one man who hates the world. There can only ever be one. But if by some fluke there were ever others who considered themselves to be this man, these men could only ever hate the world on their own as long as each of them believed that they were in fact the only man who ever hated the world. Of course there have been impostors and impersonators but these men are laughable and their dubious hobbies only ever take on a hideous kind of replication compared with that of the man who hates the world. The man who hates the world was born a victim. He watched the world grow into accomplices and he knows that we will all soon enough die the perpetrators of it too. 

    I am stood at my usual spot outside the big glass windows of Cavendish House and I’m playing My Melancholy Baby over and over again. I spot the man who hates the world out of the corner of my eye and he’s coming towards me. Coughing and butting his way through the street, he shakes his victims with terrible verbal attacks: ‘This is my town, get out of my town yer bunch of gangy swines!’… And: ‘You’re all selfish, selfish bastards, you only ever think of your fucking selves don’t yer…!’

    I feel the man who hates the world edging diagonally towards where I am stood and he comes in one swift move. All of a sudden he’s lurking there right in front of me and swaying from side to side. His hands are struck deep inside big black pockets and I wonder to myself what this man must think of me? I am the busker, I am the shoppers ‘take it or leave it’ little songbird and I am merely preying on their dithering musts for my own advantage. I am equally a part of this mans baron paradox and I stand knee deep in the greying landscape that he seethes about. I too have been the victim but right now I am also the accomplice.

    Without uttering a word the man who hates the world reaches out for my hand and so I take his thick sausage-like fingers in my own for one brief moment. His eyes stay closed as a milky sediment bubbles away at the corner of his mouth. He turns and walks away, then comes back to me and fishes a ten-pound note into my left pocket. He lurches away again and carries on hating the rest of the world just as he always did before. All of this time I have been hanging on to My Melancholy Baby and I let him disappear from sight before I finally let go of the tune. I grasp for an another melody and all I can think of is Someday My Prince Will Come.

    On previous occasions when I’ve crossed paths with the man who hates the world he has told me that it all boils down to a matter of loyalty. It’s a scarce virtue that maybe only 1.00000097 per cent of the population actually practices towards his fellow brothers and sisters.

    His accuracy is unquestionable but I am possibly more selfish than a single zero in this equation. I am a singular, a busker, a one-man band, a self-publicist just like him, merely a curiosity amongst passive acquaintances but people do not see my hatred. In fact I am here to perpetuate a song and to anticipate an embrace of the world instead. In this occasion the man who hates the world has anticipated the embrace and together we go dancing in the streets of Cheltenham Spa.