The Polly Song
My horses ain’t hungry, they won’t eat
your hay
so fare you well, Polly, I’m going away
My sister Polly and I used to fight all the time. I was
two and a half years older, obviously born to rule, and it
exasperated me that Polly was so selfish and unreasonable as
to believe that we should be something like equals. In fact,
though, we did grow up more or less evenly matched in our
disaffection, and our sibling rivalry hardened into the
classic Freudian stand-off. I was Mom’s favorite — her
first-born, her son, named for her beloved father — while
Dad had always wanted girls, and had saved his own name,
Paul, for her, his first daughter.
Polly and I fought about everything:
whether to watch “Gilligan’s Island” or “The Beverly
Hillbillies” on TV, who had snuck into whose room and messed
everything up, whose turn it was to do the dishes, who had
done what to whom when Mom was at the beauty shop, and, a
related matter, who was a “tattle-tell.” We loved to snitch
on each other. Polly and I were competing for parental
approval and attention and all that, of course — all kids
do — but there was something especially bitter about the
way we grew to detest each other, about the way we
undermined each other and rejoiced in each other’s failures.
One time I got a spanking because I laughed when Polly got a
spanking, and I don’t doubt that my punishment made her own
spanking almost worth it for her. Schadenfreude Haus.
My parents, of course, hated the
constant discord. Instead of adjudicating one way or the
other in the “he started it”/“she started it” debates, they
would raise their eyes in weary exasperation and invoke two
fictional characters whom I came to loathe. One was The Big
Brother. Ours was not a literary household, and this Big
Brother had nothing to do with Orwell’s nightmare of the
all-pervasive state. No, this Big Brother was the Platonic
ideal of the older sibling. He was gentle, protective, and
solicitous — nothing less than a hero. Less sharply
defined, but logically inferable, was The Little Sister’s
presumed role: demure, adoring, obedient. Big Brother gladly
took on Little Sister’s battles.
Well, fat chance — Polly was my
battle, and her resistance to any such model of sibling
concord was even fiercer than mine. She was becoming “the
competitive one” and there was no sweeter pleasure for her
than defeating her enemy. For my part, there was little
glory in prevailing over a younger sister; I simply wanted
to live in a world unburdened by the existence of such a
pest. All my parents’ pieties about the Big Brother and the
Little Sister blew away like the fluff from the cottonwood
trees in the back yard.
That left just one ironclad rule to
govern our relations: Boys Don’t Hit Girls. Mainly I
observed the letter of the law and learned to resist most of
Polly’s attempts to bait me into violence. We fought mainly
with constant needling and belittling and every kind of
emotional subterfuge that enemies can devise.
As the years went by, the open warfare
of childhood curdled into years of sullen passive
aggression. We tended naturally toward paths that didn’t
cross. By the time we were teenagers, no one would have
guessed that we were even from the same family. I was a nerd
and a bookworm and a woolgatherer, into all kinds of arcane,
solitary hobbies like rocketry and model-ship building. I
liked sports, of course, and worshipped Willy Mays and
Johnny Unitas, but I was just too puny to win much more
glory than “Well . . . the kid does try.”
Polly disdained any of the academic
trails I had blazed, and instead became a star jock —
exactly the term a girl will take upon herself, if she’s
good enough and knows it. We had started tennis together,
way back when, but I’d given up just as soon as she was good
enough to beat me (what greater shame for a 12-year-old boy,
after all, than to fall to his 10-year-old sister). She
joined something called the Poison Spider Track Club, and
was soon breaking records in the 440, wearing spiked shoes
that I secretly thought were pretty cool. But I never did go
out to the track to cheer her on.
In fact, in all those years of her
athletic stardom, I recall only one time attending a game,
and was dazzled and disturbed by the sight of my pesky
little sister blazing up and down the basketball court,
stealing the ball from her befuddled opponents, dribbling
and passing with effortless precision, scoring at will — on
fire with an intensity of purpose and will to win that I’d
only seen directed at me. And that was still grade school.
When she was a sophomore sensation at Natrona County High
School, immediately elevated to varsity in volleyball and
basketball, I was a senior and much too preoccupied to find
out what the fuss was about. She didn’t come to see me ace
calculus exams; why should I have to watch her play ball? At
about the time I was graduating, she entered a tennis
tournament sponsored by Seventeen magazine, and when
the last point was scored she was Wyoming State Women’s
Singles Champion. But I wasn’t there to see.
I must have been doing something else.
* * *
Throughout the time we were emotionally frozen to each
other, we were only dimly aware that we liked a lot of the
same things. Chief among these was music. Ours was a very
musical household because Dad was an amateur in the purest
sense of that word: he loved it. He loved playing his flute
in the Casper City Band and the Casper Orchestra; he loved
singing in the St. Anthony’s choir and was often called to
sub at both St. Pat’s and Our Lady of Fatima; he loved
landing a major role every year in the local Gilbert and
Sullivan production. The only way to spend a lot of time
with Dad was to tag along to rehearsals of every kind, and
that gave Polly and me one more thing to squabble over —
whose turn is it? Mine! No, mine!
Almost entirely absent from our house,
though, was pop music. As Dad went through the house he was
always singing or whistling from his weird grab-bag of
favorites — things like “The Chocolate Soldier” and “Little
Hula Hands” when he played with Baby Polly (and, later, with
Baby Jane). As far as I knew, Dad’s taste in music mainly
stopped at about 1910. In the living room, a room in which
we rarely did any actual living, we had an old ’50s hi-fi
that was more furniture than fidelity, full of vacuum tubes
that looked like Martian spacecraft. We never listened to
the radio — never. When I was very little, Mom would
sometimes put a weepy old ballad called “Turn Around” on the
heavy green-velvet turntable, and when she was feeling a bit
frisky she might play her old Harry Belafonte records from
the early ’50s, but I don’t think she ever listened to
another record after the death of JFK. The only records that
Polly and I played in all our childhood were Christmas
albums; I don’t remember it seeming odd at the time that
they all came from tire companies — Firestone and Goodyear.
(There’s a dissertation right there for any grad student in
“contemporary studies” who might be up to the job.)
When she was ten, Polly showed her
uncanny and thoroughly hatable knack for currying Dad’s
favor by submitting to the yoke of piano lessons. Soon an
old spinet crowded the front hallway, before being banished
to the basement. I don’t remember ever flirting with the
idea of learning the piano in those days, but lessons were
certainly out of the question for me if they were going to
be Polly’s thing. Her teacher, Monte, was the leader of the local Gilbert
and Sullivan troupe, and I’m sure that only a prodigy could
ever have blossomed from the flinty soil of his instruction.
Chopin etudes, Hanon scales — not really the stuff for
someone with ten-year-old fingers, to say nothing of
ten-year-old taste. Polly was no prodigy, and nothing about
the forced-march practice schedule, with sessions often
preceded by screaming fits, or her struggles with classical
music that was way over her head, induced in me the
slightest interest or jealousy. This was the price she had
to pay for being Dad’s favorite; it served her right.
Polly discovered pop music in the early
’70s — here again, she beat me to the punch. (I was only
about thirteen, and still at the stage of hating anything
she liked. By definition.) Polly never ever discussed music
with me, but this much I do know: there was one certain
Bread album, and one certain Carpenters album, and one
certain Simon and Garfunkel album, that she played over and
over on the crummy little Kmart stereo she had in her room,
and she had a four-record boxed anthology, ordered off a TV
ad, called Rock’s Greatest Hits, things like “Tears
of a Clown” and “Bang a Gong” and “The Year of the Witch”
and “I Can See Clearly Now.” Amazing that 1971 should have
spawned nearly all of rock’s greatest hits, but there it was
right on the cover: Rock’s Greatest Hits.
Around that time I was my junior-high
class’ Homeroom Representative. The only duty I can recall
is having to take a poll every week for KATI Radio, 1400 on
your AM dial — “Tears of a Clown” won week after week, and
was finally unseated by “Rubber Band Man” and then “Brandy.”
I made a point of listening to the Top 14 KATI Kountdown every
Monday evening, but only because of my political involvement
in the process. (I didn’t buy records and I didn’t give two
shits one way or the other about who did.) KATI’s music was
for the town kids, who, without exception, adopted the local
prejudice against country music — that was for the
goatropers and shitkickers out on the ranches, who listened
to Top-Gun-in-Casper KVOC and had to be bused into school
every morning from places with weird names like Poison
Spider Creek and the Hat Six Ranch and the Goose Egg Road.
Uncool.
When Christmas 1972 came along, I had
to get Polly something, so I figured I’d get her a record of
some kind. No way was I going to bring any more Bread or
Carpenters stuff into the house — I had to live there too,
and besides, Polly probably had all theirs already. Some god
or devil whispered in my ear and told me to get her one of
the Beatles collections that had just come out — the blue
one, 1967-1970. I’d been living on the Planet Earth
throughout the ’60s so of course I’d heard most of
those songs, and liked them . . . in that
don’t-much-care way: “I like them but I wouldn’t want
to marry them.”
But now I was fourteen years old, and
by the end of Christmas Day I was obsessed with the Beatles,
an obsession that never abated. By the time Polly got her
record back I’d damn near worn clear through it with the
ten-ton tone-arm on the phonograph, and I only gave it back
because I was methodically collecting every record the
Beatles had ever made, even rarities like their German
version of the “I Want to Hold Your Hand” single: “Komm,
gibt mir deine Hand,” backed with “Sie liebt dich.” Ja ja
ja. Before long I’d saved up my money for a stereo of my
own, a cheap all-in-one unit like Polly’s but mine was
better: quad.
It was my Beatles worship, much more
consciously and passionately than Dad’s or Polly’s example,
that made me want to be a musician too. By now I was a
teenager, and it didn’t escape my notice that chicks dug
musicians, man. Since nearly everybody I knew daydreamed of
being a high-decibel, electro-crunch guitarist, I would be
different and develop some kind of splashy approach to
keyboards, like Elton John, my main non-Beatle hero of the
day. We already had that crappy old piano in the basement,
but lessons could be had only at an unexpected price. My dad
had played the flute all his life and was
uncharacteristically adamant that I learn piano in
conjunction with a real band instrument of some kind — my
choice. OK, I thought . . . forget the flute,
that’s Dad’s deal . . . in fact, forget
woodwinds in general — too hard . . . and
forget percussion, that’s for blockheads
. . . that leaves brass. Fine: Dad, I’ll try
the trumpet. A nice manly instrument, loud, portable, and
just three valves so how hard can it be?
The director of the band at my high
school was an old friend of my dad’s; we drove over to his
house one evening to set me up with a trumpet and lessons.
(I would become the new Elton John sort of on the side.) Mr.
Alexander said, “So this young man thinks he wants to play
the trumpet, eh?” and then he grabbed the lower part of my
face, kneading the muscles around my mouth to check out the
raw material that I would have to turn into an embouchure,
and finally he pronounced: “Young man, with a big puss like
that you’ll never play the trumpet. You’re a trombone
player.”
Well, bummer. The trombone had always
seemed a pretty fucking ridiculous instrument to me, but
here I was, stuck with a situation I’d created myself,
finally in a position to do something that would make Dad
proud of me. All right, then — trombone. Mr. Alexander
fixed me up with a bashed-in old sludgepump of a horn,
stinky with the gallons of other kids’ spit that had been
blown through it over the years. Soon I was bleating out
emphysemic renditions of Sousa marches down in the basement
after school, and then, on the piano, lurching my way
through a book of Beatles songs. Polly couldn’t believe her
good fortune; she didn’t know whether to be theatrically
affronted with the godawful noise, or theatrically delighted
with the vast new possibilities of ridicule she could heap
on me. A good deal for her either way.
Polly’s piano lessons with Monte had
never really taken, and for several years she’d hardly
played at all. Ever the competitive one, though, she
couldn’t bear the thought that I might excel at something
she had tried without much success, so she insisted that she
would resume her music career . . . and to
our mutual chagrin, we found ourselves having to share an
hour a week of piano instruction, first a half hour of me,
then a half hour of Polly. The teacher, Jeannie Hammonds,
was much cooler than Monte, though. Her first question to us
was, “Well, what do you want to learn?” Wow, we could
choose! I immediately went out and got a Beatles book, of
course; Polly surprised me by going for show tunes.
Why is it that we never squabbled over
practice time, not once that I can remember? Maybe I finally
had the upper hand in something: rock breaks scissors, and
obsession trumps envy. I spent hundreds of hours in the
basement, trying to get “Let It Be” and “Michelle” and “Sgt
Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” note-perfect — a damn
lousy way, I now realize, to try to learn pop music, and
most of this was, in fact, guitar music anyway. I
never really got to be any good, but when I got stuck I did
figure out a somewhat shameful workaround that has served me
a lot better in the long run: I learned how to make chords
and how to fake my way through by looking at the guitar
symbols rather than the piano notation. I didn’t sound too
awful.
Just bad.
* * *
I went off to college 2000 miles away, where I stuck with
the trombone, but only barely: I was in the marching band,
an only slightly humiliating concession I thought I was
making to my father, to soften his humiliation that
his effete son had gone off to a goddamn east-coast snob
school. Dad didn’t need to know, I calculated, that these
schools have ironic bands.
Marching band meant just two practices
a week, one inside to learn the music for the next half-time
show, and then a marching practice outside to work out all
the zany, wacky, madcap, goofy, cut-up, nutty, kooky, and
above all ironic formations that we’d make while an
announcer’s voice filled the stadium with bad puns, lame
sexual innuendoes, and cracks about that week’s football
rival. Home games had us getting drunk, marching around the
campus for an hour, playing clowny versions of the school
fight songs, marching onto the gridiron for a pregame show
consisting of slightly more disciplined versions of the same
songs, sneaking down into the bowels of the stadium to get
stoned, and marching out again for the zany, wacky, etc.
half-time show. Other than that, all we had to do was sit in
the stands and play fight songs whenever our guys (none of
whom I ever met, incidentally, not in class or in the dorms
or anywhere) made a touchdown. I’ll bet I thus performed at
around forty intercollegiate football games; I actually
watched a total of maybe less than one hour of the athletic
proceedings down on the field. I just didn’t give a shit. At
the end of every game we stood and played a slow, reverent
version of the school hymn while the gray-headed Old Boys
doffed their caps and sang the time-honored drivel: “Three
cheers for Old Nassau, my boys — hurrah! hurrah! hurrah!”
Away games were pretty much the same,
except that on the Friday afternoons before the games we had
to take two buses to the rival campus, and then sleep on the
floors of the dorm rooms of that school’s band members. One
bus — the hard-core bus — was always a big rolling party,
often with a keg or two, and flasks full of cheap vodka,
cheap gin, cheap brandy, cheap scotch — we were very big on
flasks. One time I made the mistake of partying (that is,
drinking) pretty hard before we set off, and then somehow
losing my seat on the hard-core bus, which had a toilet.
That meant I was stuck on the soft-core bus with the nerds,
sleepers, freaks, foreigners, and such-like social outcasts
(pretty much my kind of people anyway) — and no toilet.
It was a long trip up to New Hampshire,
and even before we hit the Mass Turnpike I had to pee worse
than I’d ever had to pee in my life. I tried every mental
strategy, every Zen trick that my pickled brain could
conjure, until I finally couldn’t stand it anymore and
pigeon-toed my way up to the driver to tell him that he just
had to stop, and right now. No, he said, we weren’t
scheduled to stop for another hour. OK then, I told him, I’m
gonna unzip my britches right here and piss in your ear. We
stopped, and a half dozen of my fellow travelers rushed out
to the roadside, almost as relieved as I was.
The musical standards of this
particular organization were not particularly high. Passing
the audition mainly required a willingness to attend the
practices and the ability to honk your way through a b-flat
major scale. Good enough, you’re in. As middling and
uninspired a player as I was, I became, more or less by
default, lead trombone by my senior year. Since trombones
have to lead the parade (you can’t have the damn slides
goosing the clarinet players), it was my job to lead the
band behind the goose-stepping drum major and, during our
standard pregame show, to make a sharp ninety-degree turn
the moment my left foot hit the forty-yardline. One time I
missed it — just too stoned — and the whole band sort of
trainwrecked its way into a concert formation while the drum
major flailed his baton and blasted his whistle and glowered
at me. Goddamn effete east-coast snob schools being what
they are, it was supposed to be ever so droll that we made a
big point of calling ourselves a precision marching
band. Get it? Ha ha. Let those lame-ohs at Ohio State and
Penn State and Oklahoma State and all those States jerk
around like machine units, like military zomboids bent on
world domination; we were above all that. We were
irony, we were camp, we were zany, wacky, etc.
It was the late ’70s, after all.
* * *
While I was away at college, the strangest thing
happened: I became a cowboy. Not a real one, of course —
not a spittin’ an’ ropin’ an’ ridin’ an’ range-roamin’
cowboy — but the kind of “cowboy” who is one simply by
virtue of being from Wyoming. It was an identity that was
foisted on me, and at first I resisted. I tried to tell my
classmates from Boston and New York and Washington that I
was a townie, that my dad was a dentist, for
God’s sake . . . but the difference between a
Wyoming town kid and a Wyoming ranch kid was as meaningless
to them as the difference between Exeter and Choate was
meaningless to me.
All right, then, I would be a cowboy.
This turned out to be the easiest thing in the world. All I
had to do was: nothing — just be myself, and when people
asked me where I was from, just say “Wyoming” and count on
them to have exactly one mental slot for me: “cowboy.”
“Cowboy” to them meant ignorant and dull witted, of course,
but it also meant tough and laconic and seasoned and
outdoorsy. It meant never having to wear anything but ragged
jeans and the old pearl-buttoned shirts I could get second
hand from Canal Street Jeans in New York. I didn’t have to
do anything dangerous like wrestle steers, or anything
disgusting like lop the testicles off calves to make steers
of them. I didn’t have to chew tobacco (though I would have
scored many points if I had). It was great — I was much too
far from Wyoming for people to know the truth.
My piano career fizzled out soon after
I got to college. It was a hassle to book rehearsal time in
the stuffy little practice rooms in the basement of the
music department, and I had no rapport with my teacher, Mr.
Diele, an old futz whose pedagogy was not to help me learn
songs (there went the Beatles) but, with a much more
global sense of theory and technique, to teach me
music. He said myoo-zick in a creepy way that
made it plain: we are not of one mind here. I was
recapitulating Polly’s old torments — études and
Hanon scales — and I wasn’t enjoying it any more than she
had at age ten. I quit.
My best pal that year was a doleful,
thick-bearded seventeen-year-old New Yorker named Josh
Kornbluth (who would much later go on to become semi-famous
in a field that astounded me — stand-up comedy). He had
been an oboe prodigy, but he was restless in his affections
and enthusiasms, and was now was into folk guitar. He turned
me on to Tom Waits and David Bromberg, and he let me fool
around with his guitar a little. It felt good. I
loved hunching my body over the thing, I loved the way you
fondle the neck with your left hand and flail at the strings
with your right, I loved feeling the vibrations run through
my belly. Best of all, given my newfound cowboy status, I
had found a perfect prop, much more portable than a horse,
much less dangerous than a six-shooter.
Josh took me to Manhattan to see a guy
who played, repaired, bought, and sold guitars. He could
make me a great deal on a good guitar, a real Gibson. (I was
just starting to learn that New Yorkers love nothing more
than great deals, especially if they involve insider
knowledge of some kind, all that friend-of-a-friend stuff.)
I found the idea of buying a used guitar from a stranger who
worked out of his apartment quite dubious. The place was a
small, cluttered nightmare of tools and sawdust and
busted-up instruments, and when he reached into the mess and
triumphantly withdrew the guitar he had in mind for me, my
heart sank. It was filthy, it was as old as I was
(eighteen), it had no strings, no pickguard — clearly a
piece of junk. The guy dilated on its virtues, concluding:
“And it’s a Gibson.” He could have it all ready for
me the very next day; in fact, if I didn’t pick it up the
next day, he had somebody else in mind who was dying for
this guitar. I said I’d think about it. A hundred and fifty
dollars seemed like a lot of money, and the Gibson name
meant nothing to me, though of course I couldn’t admit that
to him.
I’d like to think that something more
than Josh’s enthusiasm — “C’mon, it’s a deal” —
made me decide, What the hell, I’ll take it. I’d like to
think that more than a kid’s impatience was at work here.
I’d like to think that something within my soul had stirred
when that guy pulled the guitar out of the clutter,
something like the Lady of the Lake presenting Excalibur to
young King Arthur, who heard the angels singing and saw that
this sword was his destiny. All I really remember, though,
was feeling rather relieved when I forked over the three
fifty-dollar bills and was handed an instrument complete
with strings and a pickguard. At least now it was clean and
looked like a guitar. Josh then took me to a
one-block stretch of music stores where the salesmen say
things like “So what d’ya want, I don’t have all day,” and I
got a case that more or less fit the guitar. “So what did
you pay for that thing?” the clerk wanted to know, and when
I told him, he cocked his head from side to side a little,
and said, “I probably coulda got you a better deal.” When we
got back out on the sidewalk, Josh, who loved being my New
York mentor, explained that the salesman had obviously been
mightily impressed with my horse-trading skills, because he
would have ridiculed and insulted me otherwise. I had
scored.
Now I was in business. I quickly set to
learning the fingerings on the chord diagrams above the
standard notation in my Beatles book; I stuck with it every
day until my fingertips were sore, sometimes even bleeding.
Eventually I had the calluses that are as necessary to a
string player as an embouchure is to a wind player. I
learned to strum my way through some of the easier Beatles
songs and a few of the folk songs I was starting to listen
to, things I remembered from grade-school singalongs: “Oh
Susannah” and “John Henry” and “Wabash Cannonball.” It was
much easier, I soon discovered, for a rank beginner
to make acceptable-sounding music on a guitar than on a
piano. For most simple songs, three chords in the left hand
and a steady rhythm in the right are all you need. To be
sure, barre chords seemed impossible, and figuring out
melodic lines on the guitar was tricky because the notes
weren’t arrayed tidily before me, the way they were on the
piano . . . but those were trifles to me. At
last I felt like I was making music, really feeling
something and not just thinking about getting notes right,
as I’d done on the piano and was still doing on the
trombone.
With my new guitar obsession and the
new cowboy mantle that was starting to settle more
comfortably on my shoulders, it was natural that I should
take a step that would have been unthinkable for a townie
back in Casper: I began to listen to country music, to
goatroper music, for God’s sake, and worse yet, I
began to like it. I got Willy Nelson’s Red-Headed
Stranger album, the one with “Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the
Rain,” and made it my anthem — I was the Red-Headed
Stranger, the dusty rambler far from home, strumming songs
that were simple and pure and true. I learned “Git Along
Little Dogies” and “I Ride an Old Paint” and of course “Home
on the Range,” all of which we’d been made to sing in grade
school when we studied Wyoming history. But they were
completely different to me now. I really did miss the
mountains and plains, the deer and the antelope (which my
father the hunter shot and my mother the housewife cooked
into burgers and tacos and lasagna). Townie or no, I really
was from Wyoming; only now was I beginning to realize how
wonderful that was. I sang those songs from the heart, and I
almost forgot what a fraud I was.
* * *
Polly and I never exchanged a single card or letter for
many years after I left home. All the time I was away at
college I called home every week or two, and I don’t recall
that I once asked about her. Mom and Polly were at war then,
and Mom didn’t tell me much more than a few of the
highlights of Polly’s athletic career. She was All-State in
volleyball and basketball, completely dominant, nothing new
there. . . . Outside of sports, though, she
had no discipline for anything. She drank and smoked and
stayed out all night and screamed curses at my mother and
got involved with a series of unsavory boyfriends. She
barely made it through high school, and when she was offered
a tennis scholarship to Arizona State University, she
declined it after being blown out at her first national
tournament. She was traumatized — she’d never lost before.
Instead of college, Polly somehow got
into mortgage banking (not the worst possible job for smart,
competitive, uneducated people, I suppose), and because
she’s smart she wound up becoming a mortgage loan officer
with a lot of responsibility: a salary rather than wages, a
staff of twelve working under her, business trips on the
bank’s tab — the works. By the early ’80s all that teenage
rebellion was long behind her. No more all-night benders
with the gals. When she was about twenty-two she got married
to a fellow I really liked, a carpenter named Brian.
I blew into town for the wedding from
Lord knows where, and for the first time in our lives Polly
and I really hit it off as friends. She had worked her way
up to my level of responsibility and self-discipline, and I
had worked my way down to hers. We traded our amazingly
different versions of family legends and howled with
laughter at the treacheries we’d committed against each
other throughout our childhood. Almost instantly, she became
one of my best friends. Who else knows what I know? Who else
can get all my jokes?
The years of bitter estrangement were
finally over, and at last I could say, without a bit of
irony or reserve: I love my sister.
* * *
Several years ago Polly got herself a
new stereo at long last — a real ’90s piece of work with a
CD player instead of a turntable. She missed her old
favorite records, though, and at the end of one of my visits
to Wyoming she asked me to put a half-dozen of them onto
cassettes for her, so that she could listen to them while
driving around in her Bronco. There was no big hurry —
after all, she hadn’t listened to most of them in years.
Fair enough. I had the technology. Off I went “home” to
California, and over the next several months, whenever I got
around to it, I’d put on a side of Supertramp, or Head East,
or Rock’s Greatest Hits, and relive the early ’70s. I
can live without the Supertramp and most of that other
overinflated high-concept stuff, but it was great to
reconnect with songs like “Bang a Gong” and “I Can See
Clearly Now.” Take it from one old codger: the music of 1971
has gotten a bad rap. It ain’t all Bread. Trust me.
At the end of each side of each tape,
there would be a little bit left over, just a couple of
minutes usually. I filled these up by recording myself
singing folk songs and playing the guitar. On the cassette
boxes, I made no notation of these additions, or else I
attributed them to “Dr. Lemuel Fetta” or “Vivian Darkbloom”
or something just as silly. I hardly even remember. I
wrapped the cassettes in colored paper and gave them to
Polly the next time I spent Christmas in Casper.
And then I forgot all about them.
* * *
One day, many months later, I got home from work and
checked my answering machine. There was Polly’s voice,
hushed and dire: “Mike — this is Polly, please call me as
soon as you can, please. . . .” This sounded
horribly like the call I’d been dreading all my life, the
announcement that Mom had died of a cigarette-induced heart
attack, or Dad had died of the prostate cancer that was even
then wrenching him into old age. Please, God,
no. . . .
We played phone tag for a couple of
days, and I got more and more frantic. Maybe Mom and Dad had
both died. Maybe something was wrong with my nephew.
At last we managed to connect. “Oh
Mike! Thank God! I’m so scared. You know those tapes you
made for me? Do you know ’The Polly Song’?”
Of course I remembered the tapes, but
“The Polly Song”? What on earth was she talking about? I had
no idea, and I told her so.
“Then it must be Bruce — it has to be.
Oh my God, he’s back. I’m so scared. I never thought he’d
come back. . . . Oh my God.”
I tried to think: who the hell was
Bruce? Then I remembered: oh, that Bruce. Way back
when, during Polly’s wild years when I was forgetting to
turn left on the forty-yardline and forgetting all about my
baby sister Polly, she had taken up with a trainee cop of
some kind — Bruce, whose real dream was to be a
country-western star and sing to the whole world his story
of being born on a John Deere tractor in Torrington,
Wyoming. He’d been in Vietnam and was dishonorably
discharged for peddling drugs. He was unpredictable and
wrote cryptic little poems — what more could a
seventeen-year-old girl want? Polly moved in with him when
he was twenty-eight and she was fresh out of high school,
much to the horror of my father, a pious, God-fearing
Catholic, and much to the disgust of my mother, a staunch
upholder of middle-class mores. What would people think,
Young Lady! No way would they even let that shifty-eyed,
worthless creepo into their house. We’re not white trash!
In any case, Polly’s arrangement with
Bruce didn’t last all that long. He turned out to be not
only a hard drinker but a dangerous psychotic as well. I
knew very little of the story then, but my mother told me
this much: one night Bruce was drunk and enraged, which was
apparently business as usual for him, and then he pulled a
gun on Polly and told her he was going to kill her, and he
proceeded to pistol-whip her, beating the shit out of her
and scaring her so badly that she fled to Reno to get out of
harm’s way.
Now, years later, her worst fears were
confirmed. If I didn’t have anything to do with The Polly
Song, then Bruce had indeed come back to Casper, back from
prison or the Marines or hell or Denver or wherever such
people go, and he was after Polly. How did she know? Well,
it seems that the devious son of a bitch had evidently
broken into her truck, stolen her cassettes, including the
ones I had made for her, and actually recorded himself, in
the spaces at the end of several of the tapes, singing and
playing some country songs. Then he’d somehow gotten back
into the truck and replaced the tapes, and was waiting for
Polly to hear him, waiting for her to react. The devious
bastard had even recorded a song about her, for God’s
sake — “The Polly Song”! She knew that voice and that
guitar style anywhere, even after all these years. She even
called up one of Bruce’s best friends, and when she played
him the tape he confirmed it: “Yup, that’s him all right.”
Yes, it was him, he was trying to mess with her mind,
and he was succeeding better than he could have hoped. Lord
knows what he had in store next. Polly hadn’t been this
scared since she ran away to Reno.
Uh-oh. . . . “Polly,” I
asked, “how does this ’Polly Song’ go?”
“Something about horses, and ’I’m going
away’ . . . and there’s this part about your
lover will lead you to the grave — when I heard that, I
knew he was coming back. Mike, I think he’s gonna try and
kill me again!” Her voice was filling with hysteria.
“Polly,” I said, “does ’The Polly Song’
go: ’My horses ain’t hungry, they won’t eat your hay — ’”
“Yes!”
“’ — so fare you well Polly, I’m going
away — ’”
“Yes!”
“Polly, that wasn’t Bruce, that was me
— I put ’The Polly Song’ on that tape. It’s just an
old folk song called ’My Horses Ain’t Hungry.’ It’s my
favorite song to play. There was some room on the tape so I
just stuck it on there.”
“Oh my God. . . .” Her
voice seemed to recede into deep space. “That was
you? Oh my God . . . you sound exactly
like Bruce. Exactly. Mike, he used to write these
country songs and sing them and play guitar and make tapes
and stuff. I never knew you did that
too. . . . How could I know? You never told
me.”
Her voice echoed through all those
terrible empty years of fighting and then silence, all the
lost music we never shared, never sang, never played
together, all the wasted, withered love withheld between
brother and sister.
“The Polly Song” is the saddest song I
know. I sing it all the time.
My horses ain’t hungry, they won’t eat
your hay
so fare you well, Polly, I’m going away
Your parents don’t like me, they say I’m too poor
they say I’m not worthy to come through your door
My horses ain’t hungry, they won’t eat your hay
so fare you well, Polly, I’m going away
My parents don’t like you, you’re poor I am told
but it’s your love I’m wanting, not silver or gold
Then come with me, Polly, we’ll ride till we come
to some little cabin, we’ll call it our home
My horses ain’t hungry, they won’t eat your hay
so fare you well, Polly, I’m going away
Sparking is pleasure, but parting is
grief,
and a false-hearted lover is worse than a thief
A thief will just rob you and take what you have,
but a false-hearted lover will lead you to the
grave
My horses ain’t hungry, they won’t eat your hay
so fare you well, Polly, I’m going away
© Michael Fleming
Sweet Briar, Virginia
January, 1998
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