The Nutcracker Buck Sessions

The First Coming of Buck

Every once in awhile when I open Outlook a box appears asking if I want to archive my old emails now.  It’s not one of those meek, apologetic little gray boxes that pops up like it hates to be a bother (“Are you sure you want to send this item to the Recycling Bin?  Oh, okay.  I’ll do that then.  I’ll go away now.  I’m sorry.”)  This is a big, bullying box that takes up the whole middle of the screen, and the thing seems to be buzzing.   It stands there with its hands on its hips, looking like it’s wearing a toolbelt and has a crew ready to spring out of the goddamn truck if only you, the fatass owner, would sign off on the paperwork.  I always hit NO as fast as I can.  It’s humiliating to admit to your own computer that you’re a coward, but if there were a “Hell No” option, I’d hit that one.

I just don’t know where those “old items” would go.  I’m not sure I’d agree with my computer on what constitutes an “old item.”  I’m sure the computer knows what it’s doing, but I don’t know what it’s doing. Anytime I download something and leave it up to the computer to file it (and sometimes the computer doesn’t give you an option), the computer always selects a folder I’d never dream of picking.  I’m sure it’s the “right” folder, but it’s not where I’d look.   The reason this site still looks like a kindergarten project is because all the cool Word Press templates and plug-ins, etc., that I’ve downloaded are in some directory that I can’t locate.   And I do wish WordPress would refrain from converting all my em-dashes to en-dashes.

I bring that up because I’ve noticed, now that I’ve turned the corner on 40, that your memory doesn’t give you a little pop-up box before archiving stuff.  You’re out of room, and you have no choice-the crew is in there working whether you sign off on the paperwork or not, and they’re going to put that stuff wherever it looks like it should go.  And they make choices you might not have made.

So it’s interesting to see when that stuff gets retrieved and where it gets retrieved from.  One of the joys and horrors of Facebook, for example, is seeing all these people you filed away in various places (high school/freshman year/football two-a-days/shower/shampoo bottle/illicit act/busted) turn out to be somebody else entirely-a real person who grew up and did grownup things and is still alive today, alive for real and alive in your past.  Learning that that is the case shakes the dust off the archives and reorganizes the past in a way that, I think, is healthy.  But we’ll see.

It doesn’t necessarily take Facebook to set that process in motion, and sometimes the archiving is in flux anyway.  With some people, your brain has never really figured out where to put them.  I have a friend named John Hennessy, for example, who won’t stay in any particular place in the archive.  John and I have a complicated history that involves, among other things, being in grad school together twice in two different states (grad school with anyone in any state, even once, is enough to guarantee a complicated history.)  Our grad school(s) relationship gave way to a post-grad-school relationship when John married Sabina and moved back to Austin, where I was also living (again).  I spent a lot of time at their house hanging out with them drinking wine and taking turns holding their baby boy, Nicholas.  Then the relationship took on another complexion when Janet came to Austin, and the four of us hung out together, drinking wine and taking turns holding Nicholas.

In 1999 John and Sabina and Nicholas moved to Massachusetts (by way of New Jersey and Maine) and had Gabriel, and Janet and I wound up in Houston, joined eventually by Thomas and Rona.  Except for a trip I took alone to Austin a year and a half ago to see John read from his poetry collection, Bridge and Tunnel, none of us has seen each other in ten years.  We’re all in our forties with young kids and live a few thousand miles from each other.  We might not ever see each other again.

How I knew John first, though, was in the fall of 1991, when we were both living in Hyde Park in Austin.  I was 24, John a couple of years older.  We drank a lot (I was working in a liquor store) and talked a lot about books, in the middle of the day, in the middle of the night, whenever; it was grad school.  John was all New Jersey-urban, cigarettes, Doc Martens, bands-I’ve-never-heard-of, busking in Amsterdam, getting heartbroken by daughters of poets.  I was, well, whatever this is, but younger.  But regardless of our backgrounds, we seemed to share some fundamental aesthetic, and that’s what connected us and what kept us connected through some misunderstandings and realignments in the years that followed, until finally, I think, the aesthetic became irrelevant, and time and the past itself have irresolutely tenured us to each other. 

John’s girlfriend back then, Lisa, had some strange audio tape recorder that could also record a few jerky seconds of black and white video.  We were up very late one night playing with it in their apartment off Duval, recording each other, when I took a beat-up Beefeater nutcracker doll from their kitchen counter and, because the way the lower jaw moved reminded me of how Buck Owens laughed, named the nutcracker doll Buck.  We took videos of Buck approaching the camera in a menacing fashion and doing his Buck Owens laugh.  John’s a poet, Sabina is a novelist and screenwriter, and they both teach at UMass.  I don’t know where Lisa is or what she’s doing.  I’m a lawyer in Houston, still playing with nutcracker dolls.

OCCASIONAL REJOICING

The Song.  John and I used to gripe about Ivy Leaguers who play that coy game of making you tease the name of their college out of them.  The inference they want you to draw is that they don’t want to show off or to intimidate you by telling you they went to Harvard or Yale (hell, John went to Princeton), when in fact that is precisely what they are doing when they insist on turning a simple question and answer exchange into a five-minute guessing game before the answer is revealed.

This song sounds pretty similar to last week’s, I realize.  (All my songs sound alike, I realize.)  That’s just the way it happened.

The Performance.  This is probably the best sounding one yet, recording-wise; it’s one of the few times I’ve been able to make the acoustic guitar sound like an acoustic guitar, which is discouraging, because it’s  one of the earliest ones I recorded.  Buck does pretty good on the high lonesome sound, I think.  And the guitar sounds kind of old-timey and spooky, right?

The Video.  This one’s been in the vault since the beginning, and it’s the last of the videos with the doorbell-ring opening (and the last of the videos period right now.  I got nothing video-wise for next week.) The photographs are mostly grandpas on my side of the family.  Still not sure who that haunted looking old man is.  

I’m not making gravy in those kitchen shots–I’m making pancakes.  I thought of the song while I was cooking some deer meat and thinking about making gravy, but the only cooking footage I had was pancakes.  (Yes, strangely enough, that video was not shot for this song–one day last fall I just decided I needed some shots of myself making pancakes.)  

That’s my friend Tom and his daughter Katie in the middle of the video, in a picture taken about five years ago.  It was around Christmas time and I’d just bought a mandolin and was outside on the porch playing it, like a hillbilly.  Tom lives in a different part of town but was in the neighborhood for some reason that day and just happened to drive by.  He and Katie came in, and we took this picture, and I decided to put it into the video for no reason at all, except that Tom went to Vanderbilt, which is one of the Harvards of the South, but if you ask Tom where he went to college, he’ll just say “Vanderbilt,” like any normal person would.

The video is supposed to be spooky at the end, in a kind of late sixties sci-fi way.  

Dedication.  Well, the title of the song is “Grandpa, Don’t Eat the Gravy (John Hennessy’s Blues)”, so I guess it’s for John.

Next Week.  For week 10 I’ll do a wrap-up and some thoughts on what the next ten weeks might have in store.  I don’t have a video made yet and don’t know what song I’ll use, but I’ll probably dump one of the bottom-of-the-barrel ones on you next week [“You mean this has been the quality stuff?”  Are you kidding?  I have a song about a guy who gives his family to a homeless person named Ray.]