Hubcap City’s re-arranged a bunch of  Smoke songs for the live score of “The Passion of Joan of Arc.”  We made instrumentals out of “Clean White Bed,”  “Midnight to Breakfast,” “Trust,” “Curtains,” “Five Red Roses,” “Hole,” “Dirt,” and a few others. The music works well with the film, but the absence of Ben’s voice frequently bums me out. 

Another thing: I fear I’ve grown to close to the movie.  Every time I watch “The Passion of Joan of Arc” I hope that maybe this time, Joan will get away, not burn to death at the stake as the Church militia beats the angry villagers with sticks and chains.  But, the movie always ends the same way—the flames rise higher, Joan sinks lower and is eventually lost in a sea of swirling grey smoke.  

The inevitability of the film’s conclusion has got me thinking of other endings, endings that repeat endlessly in my memory. 

One afternoon, near his own particular end, I visited Ben.  He was living in Cabbagetown on Gaskill Street in a two-story house with a wide front porch.  Long ago, the house had been painted white.  But as time passed, the paint had worn away and the house was now mostly bare wood, bleached bone white by an unforgiving sun.

Ben was happy to see me.  I knew because he covered his mouth to hide his smile, or maybe he was a little embarrassed about the bloody sores on his chin.  Yeah, he looked like your typical condemned man—shaved head, sunken chest, beaten down shoulders, and his eyes had sunken deep into his skull and were rimmed by a blackness that did come from too much eyeliner.   But, his eyes were bright too, like his body could decay and fail him, but he, he was ready to fight to the end.  I was glad to see him too.  

The inside of the house was a mess.   Plastic bags full of trash had been stacked up like sandbags at a levee before a flood.  Big empty jugs of soda lay on a desktop.  For some reason there was a twenty-foot tree limb in the middle of the living room.  The leaves had been stripped away from the dry branches and since the living room was only about 12 feet wide, the tree limb extended through a hole someone had smashed through the window.  The bark was dark brown and deeply furrowed.  Must have been oak. 

Ben sat down at the desk and pulled out a plastic box with about a dozen little doors on it.  “My pills,” he said.  He opened each little trap door to reveal a different kind of medication—some sparkled like rubies, others had the dull flat finish of a car that’s spent too much time outside, some were as big as a quarter (made my throat hurt, just looking at these) a few looked like the candy you buy before a movie.  “Keeping up with the schedule will wear you down,” he said, looking off at a piece of paper on the other side of the table.  The paper had a typed column of numbers and a list of what I guessed were drug names. 

“I got something for you,” he said.  Oh, no, I thought, he’s gonna make me take one of the quarter-sized pills as a test of band loyalty.   He gave me an album.  “La Traviata” by Giuseppe Verdi.  The cover was faded and stained with watermarks and mold, but you could still faintly see the image of a slender woman in a blue gown waltzing with a rich dude in a fancy suit.

“Thanks” I said, feeling lame. I had brought nothing for him.

He burped.  A dank smell of basement crawl space filled the atmosphere between us.

“I found it in the trash last night on Carol Street,” he said.  Another burp.  Another cloud of dug-up earth came between us.

I never listened to the album.  I didn’t have a record player at the time.  But, I’ve got a record player now.  I’m gonna play “La Traviata” tonight, in the parking lot before the movie.