We Are All Together (eBook)

Richard Fulco (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2022 | 1. Auflage
238 Seiten
Wampus Multimedia (Verlag)
979-8-9850353-3-9 (ISBN)

Infos

It's 1967, the Summer of Love. When twenty-one-year-old guitarist Stephen Cane's promising band falls apart, he is forced to move back home to Topeka with his Christian mother. Unwilling to give up on his rock and roll dreams, he moves to New York to patch things up with his former friend and bandmate, Dylan John, a pioneer of psychedelic rock whose band, Red Afternoon, is on the verge of making it big. When Dylan unexpectedly quits the band to be a civil rights activist, Stephen is handed the opportunity of a lifetime to replace his brilliant friend and prove to himself and his alcoholic father that he is a great man. Against the backdrop of a nation in turmoil, Stephen takes a journey deeper into himself, questioning his dreams, his quest for greatness, his parents' conflicting advice, his inability to choose wisely in love, and his racial bias. We Are All Together addresses a nation struggling with its mythological past and the effects it has had on the integrity of the individual. Does the artist owe the world anything? Does the ailing world need another rock star?

Richard Fulco received an MFA in playwriting from Brooklyn College, where he was the recipient of a MacArthur Scholarship. His plays have been either presented or developed at The New York International Fringe Festival, The Playwrights' Center, The Flea, Here Arts Center, Chicago Dramatists and The Dramatists Guild. His one-act play Swedish Fish was published by Heuer Publishing, and his stories, poetry, interviews, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Failbetter, Across the Margin, Fiction Writers Review, Gargoyle, The Daily Vault, and American Songwriter. For six years, he wrote about music on his blog, Riffraf. He teaches creative writing and English at an independent school in New Jersey and interviews writers for his '5 Questions' series at his web site. His debut novel, There Is No End to This Slope, was published by Wampus Multimedia in 2014. We Are All Together is his second novel.

Textauszug

Two

May 1967

I was busking for my next meal in front of a diner on the busy corner of Sixth Avenue and Waverly Place in New York City when a girl with hair so outrageously blonde it was practically white tossed a dime onto the heap of change in my guitar case. I cut “Summertime Blues” short and launched into a half-written tune of my own, one I had abandoned years before when I hooked up with Arthur. It’s about a guitar player who steals his best friend’s girl: “This next number is for the foxy babe with the really fab hair that falls just above her really fab bippy.” She removed her lemon-yellow shades that were far too big for her narrow, porcelain face and knocked me dead with the most mesmerizing green eyes I had ever seen. She searched for loose change at the bottom of her purple handbag, tossed a handful, but entirely missed the guitar case. Despite having a receptive audience shouting out requests for songs like “Groovin’,” “Respect,” and “Somebody to Love,” I helped her pick up the coins that were scattered on the sidewalk and in the gutter. I stuffed a dollar bill into the front pocket of my dungarees, shoved the rest of my earnings into my duffle bag, and packed up my guitar. We grabbed a window booth in the Waverly Diner where we split a black and white milkshake and watched as a steady stream of pedestrians dashed by, eager to get cooking on Memorial Day weekend.

– How old are you, Stephen?

– Twenty-one. And how old are you…um–

– Emily. Nice to meet you. I’m old enough to know that like me you’ve escaped the confines of Midwestern life.

– How do you know that?

– I’m from Iowa. I bet you’re from someplace like Kansas.

– Right again, Emily. What tipped you off?

– You’re wearing a plaid, button down shirt and a sweater vest.

Emily was excited to show me some sketches she had been working on, so I paid the bill, but skipped out on the tip ’cause I was kind of broke. I took hold of her gentle hand, and we strolled across town, down East 9th Street to her basement apartment between First Avenue and Avenue A in the East Village. Emily set fire to countless candles throughout the dingy room and lit incense to quell the stench of turpentine. Then she lit a nifty handmade Navajo pipe with a red candle in the shape of a penis, passed the pipe to me, and showed me her collection of charcoal drawings entitled “Urban Decay.” Broken down tenements, empty lots, drug pushers, prostitutes, and junkies. Art has never really been my thing. I just can’t wrap my brain around it. But I was blown away by the detail in the veiny hands and feet of a homeless negro sprawled out on a sidewalk on the Bowery. Although Emily had never formally studied art, she was an expert at her craft. At least from what I could tell. I know greatness when I see it, and this girl in purple hip huggers was the real McCoy.

The young artist, who couldn’t have been a day older than sixteen, cracked open a shiny, new black book and began sketching me, but she didn’t get too far before making a wisecrack about my clothes: “Have you looked at yourself? You look more like a New York Jew than a musician.” Her remark rubbed me the wrong way: “What does that even mean?” Emily ignored my question, threw down her pencil and book, tore off my sweater and shirt, and tossed a strand of love beads over my head: “Far out.” Then she started nodding, digging my vibe – long blond hair, beard, and bare chest – while she attempted to capture the streetlight’s reflection off my Wayfarers. She was in her own world, working. I was hanging loose in a red beanbag chair, toking on the Navajo pipe, and checking out the paintings of gray faces inside black triangles that were scattered across the floor and propped up against the walls of her pad. After a while, Emily threw her pencil and book down again, pulled a sewing needle from a coffee can filled with spools of thread and colorful buttons, and licked it a few times.

– What are you gonna do with that?

– I’m going to reinvent you, Stephen. Isn’t that why you’re in New York? To be something you’re not?

– And what am I trying to be, Emily?

– A rock star.

Emily poked the needle through my right ear, removed her copper and leather hoop earring, and stuck it through my bloody earlobe: “I made these earrings myself.” She was so delighted with herself that she squealed with joy. I didn’t want to ruin her good mood or come across like a dork, so I bit my tongue and didn’t make a big stink. But it hurt like hell. “You know what? You’d look really fab if both ears were pierced.” She went at it again, licking then poking then sticking her other copper and leather hoop earring through my bloody left earlobe. She put both hands on her hips and rejoiced: “Now you’re my rock and roll Jesus.”

After I finished smoking all of Emily’s choice hash, I put down the pipe, crawled onto a frayed Oriental rug, and squatted in front of a lava lamp. I got off on the swirling rainbow clouds that floated to the top of the oval glass, split apart, and drifted back down.

– Hey, I wasn’t finished yet, Stephen. Come back here.

– Let’s take a look at what you’ve done so far.

– Do ya like?

– Is that the way you see me?

– Yep.

– Far out. Look at me. I kinda look like Jim Morrison.

– You’re a rock and roll Jesus.

I plopped back down in front of the lava lamp, while Emily pulled a book from the middle of a heaping pile sitting next to the twin mattress on the floor and read aloud: “From the small, crossed window of his room above the stable in the brickyard, Yakov Bok saw people in their long overcoats running somewhere early that morning, everybody in the same direction.” Emily paused for my response, but the swirling rainbow clouds were such a blast that not even a Pulitzer Prize winning novel could hold a candle to them. She tossed The Fixer back onto the pile and crawled into my lap like a little girl looking for her father’s attention. It kind of freaked me out, and if I hadn’t been trying to get over my band’s recent breakup, I would have taken off and been spared a whole lot of trouble. I jumped to my feet and asked, “Okay, what do you say we play some music and get this party started?”

I went searching through a stack of records that were organized alphabetically inside an old-fashioned bathtub in the middle of the room. I spun the new, trippy single by my old compadre Dylan John and his band, Red Afternoon. Even though I had grooved to the pulsating organ in “Alice Loon” about a million times back in Topeka, it was as if I were listening to it for the very first time. Goose bumps on both forearms. Alone in my world. Playing air guitar and just doing my thing.

I was trying to groove to the song, but Emily just wouldn’t stop yapping: “Like the characters in The Fixer, we’re all running toward something, whether it’s God or love or peace or nirvana. We think we have a personal calling and feel obligated to fulfill our destiny. But there is no such thing as destiny or a calling. When you think about it, we’re all just grasping at illusions, hoping that they’ll provide us with direction. But we’re too afraid to veer off course, too afraid to abandon the herd. Ya dig? We all crave the same things, and yet we find it impossible to obtain them. That’s ’cause we’re blind or we choose to ignore the things that are really holding us back. We must detach ourselves from our earthly possessions and attach ourselves to a life of what I like to call ‘nomadic wondering.’ It’s an endless wandering of the mind without having any purpose or goal, just an overwhelming curiosity and an intense desire to be present, to be in the moment. We need to stop running in circles, sit still and listen to our breath. In and out. Out and in. In and out. Don’t you agree? Stephen? Stephen?”

I was as high as a kite and totally hypnotized by Dylan’s psychedelic tune about the first female President of the United States who erased poverty, struck down abortion laws, and threw wild parties on the White House lawn before she was assassinated at the Capitol Building. I would have hacked off my right arm to have written something so funky and thought-provoking.

– Have you ever seen Red Afternoon live, Stephen?

– I haven’t been so lucky.

– They’re about to make a really big splash. The band’s lead singer and guitarist, Dylan John, is a flippin’ genius. I was at The Scene when he layered his hair with Brylcreem. Under the stage lights, he was transformed into a hallucinogenic candle.

– Dylan is a good friend of mine from the old neighborhood. I knew him when he was Arthur Devane. In fact, I’m friends with Seth and Billy too.

– Really? What’s Dylan like? I’ve been trying to rap with him, but he doesn’t hang out after the shows like the rest of the band.

– Dylan is Dylan. There’s nobody else like him.

I told Emily...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 29.11.2022
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Musik
• ISBN-13: 979-8-9850353-3-9 / 9798985035339