Across the Great Divide

I Hear Johnny Fournote for the First Time.

Johnny Fournote sits near the door I attend, plunking on his guitar. We don't allow canned music to be played inside the Day Center because it fills up a space already overflowing with sound.

There's more tolerance for a human voice singing quietly, or a well-played guitar. In fact, we have several available to use. But if the music's too loud, we send them to the patio or vestibule.

Folks have different tastes, of course, and imposing your music on someone is the same as putting unwanted voices in their heads. Especially here.

Johnny isn't playing a song or even a riff. He's practicing a simple pattern, over and over. [For the musicians reading, it's two pairs of fifths. DDddDDddAD/CCccCCccGC/DDdd... Over and over and over...] 

He played the same thing last time I saw him.

It bugged me then and it's starting to bug me now—in part, because it's so monotonous, and in part, because his picking doesn't swing or express feeling. It's just rote tapping: DDddDDdd...

But nobody else seems bothered, and Johnny is a big guy with a bit of temper, so why provoke him by asking him to go outside when he's calm? Why is the musician in me more important than the demons in him?

And with that question come memories of sitting alone in a basement, playing chord progressions over and over, letting the strings ring out, as if I were swimming stroke after stroke through a circle of sound, hoping to summon an emotion or quiet the one ripping through me so it can be distilled into a song but right now it just comes out as hums and grunts and nonsense scat chasing a melody through the thicket of the chords until I scare loose a line and maybe that flushes out another and still I am thrashing, no idea where I'm going except away from the fugal blackness that brought me here, and now I turn on the recorder in case anything good happens, in case some decent lyrics appear out of nowhere—that way I won't have to stop to write them down and risk breaking the spell—but even if it turns into nothing except good vibrations, I'll be further away from the dark. 

Johnny's playing hasn't changed. It hasn't improved. But my listening has. He's off on a mind-body journey that has nothing to do with me or anyone else within earshot. 

No, nothing to do with me at all.

Haircuts Don't Make the Man.

Last Wednesday, I laid hands on the heads of five men. 

One seeks me out when he hears the clippers. He is bound for court, and his public defender had told him he was looking a little scruffy. To me, he looks normal. Then he takes off the shirt he has borrowed for the hearing and his skin reveals a history of bad decisions.

I give him a high-and-tight military cut as his girlfriend watches to make sure I get the fade just right.

Another I have known for years. He is intelligent, but his heavy medication flattens his affect. He moves as if walking through waist-deep water. 

He is looking for a job. He knows the odds are long because his resume has big gaps, and he tells the truth in interviews. About why he hasn't worked since the '90s and those four years in prison. 

We'll call you, they tell him.

A guy my age, his nose half-collapsed, comes back for another trim. He's been stopping by the library to read one of my books, a few chapters at a time. (When you're in a shelter, it's risky to check out a book. They are too easy to lose.) 

His brother just got a lifetime achievement award for writing a series of Michigan state histories. He wishes he'd pursued a commercial art career instead of mechanics, but now he gives his drawings away.

A younger man I know has long been tripped up by anger issues and alcohol use. Usually, he's restless, but now in the chair he allows himself a period of sobriety-fueled reflection. Housing is no longer a hurdle for him; it's the lack of another person in his life and a beloved step child he no longer sees. I spend extra time with the scissors, listening, getting the cut perfect. 

Jose just needs a trim from his winter growth to a summer circle beard. He's a handsome man, but weathered, and he wears the telltale too many clothes for the temperature.

I do something for each to bring out his best, but I cannot blot the tattoos or erase the ink from their records. We revisit years of regret, of lost promise and broken relationships, but cannot walk them back. 

To a man, they are thoughtful, gentle, and full of appreciation. But they missed a turn somewhere. They lacked a mentor, a parent, a coach, a buddy, a lover, a partner, a brain chemical. They did not plan to become what they are.

They step out onto the street, invisible in their fresh haircuts.