El Paso Redux

April 28, 2018 marilyn jaye lewis 2 Comments

Recently, a much younger friend mentioned he was learning the lyrics to the old Marty Robbins classic, El Paso, because he was going to sing it at a local Karaoke bar.

I don’t know if he knows the original Marty Robbins version, or if he knows a more current cover of that song, but, wow, gang. For some reason, that really astounded me. That a guy so young would sing such an old song that was such a huge part of my childhood, and at a Karaoke bar, no less!

I mean, it’s a good thing. But the older you get, the harder it is to process certain things. Like: he’s so young, how can he possibly know that song? Or: I’m so old!! Jeepers, how did that happen?? Things like that…

When he said this, about trying to learn the lyrics to El Paso, I instantly flashed-back to being an 11-year-old girl, sitting at the record player in my bedroom, trying really hard to scribble down all the lyrics to El Paso as the record played. I would have to keep picking up the needle, catch up with the lyrics, then carefully try to drop the needle back down in the right place and then scribble some more, etc., etc. This went on until the entire (really wordy and long song) was fully captured by my scribbles.

I really, really, REALLY loved this song, gang, and I needed to be able to sing along with Marty. Even though I played guitar by the time I was 11 (and violin, and piano), my skills were nowhere near accomplished enough to tackle a song like El Paso. It was thrilling enough for me to simply sing the song . I eventually had the song completely memorized.

I loved many of Marty Robbins’ songs — he had such a beautiful voice — including Devil Woman, A White Sport Coat, Ribbon of Darkness, The Hanging Tree. Actually, the list goes on & on. But there was never a song that struck me quite like El Paso.

Then, of course, when I was older and finally got to meet Don, my birth father, Marty Robbins became part of my intense but brief relationship with Don. Marty Robbins was already dead by this time, but Don (my father) was a big fan of Marty Robbins, and had even known him because Don’s late wife had been lifelong friends with Marty, having grown up with him in Arizona . (Also, some Ohio musicians had played with Marty Robbins on his last record — I believe it was The Allen Brothers. And my Uncle Ralph, Don’s brother, was a professional Country singer down in Nashville and also knew and/or played with the Allen Brothers.)

Anyway, my first trip out to Nevada to meet Don, he played the Marty Robbins Greatest Hits album on his record player — the same album I had back at home and knew by heart. Me and my birth father (who played guitar and wrote songs, as I did) turned out to be extremely connected through music. He was only 15 years older than I was, so we had a lot of cultural things in common by then. (We met when I was 28 years old.)

My birth father died 10 years later, from a type of cancer that we believe was caused by his exposure to Agent Orange during his many years of active duty as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam. My brief relationship with my birth father was intense, amazing, staggering, heartbreaking, and, above all, memorable. And Marty Robbins provided much of the soundtrack for it.

I wrote a highly biographical, and controversial, novella about that first trip out to Nevada to meet Don, titled Ribbon of Darkness (after the above-mentioned Marty Robbins song), that my dear colleague Michael Hemmingson published in his anthology, Short and Sweet: Original Novellas by Erotica’s Hottest Writers. The book is now out of print; it was published 12 years ago. Even Michael Hemmingson is dead now and has been for 4 years. (These are some of the things I mean when I say it’s hard to process getting OLD, practically overnight!! Where does the time go??)

Even considering everything I’ve just written about above, the thing that strikes me most profoundly about the song El Paso, can be found within the lyrics of another great Marty Robbins song from the mid-1970s called, El Paso City.

If you’re not familiar with the song, El Paso City, give it a listen (linked above). In it, Marty gradually reveals that he believes the reason the lyrics to El Paso came to him so quickly, so vividly, and so completely –within the space of a few hours— back in 1959, is because he thinks that the whole story about Feleena and the murder in the cantina actually happened to him in a previous life. He believed he was the one who killed the cowboy and then was hunted down by a posse and killed, as well. How cool is that, gang? That song became his first #1 hit and affected a whole heck of a lot of people.

Now that I’m finally in my new house and all my music is unpacked and back in my life, I came across my Marty Robbins’ Greatest Hits CD the other day and took it along with me in my car. Wow. El Paso sure does hold up well, gang. It still gave me chills, and I still knew every word to the song. I was driving alone, on a pitch-dark highway in the middle of nowhere, listening to it, quietly singing along as I drove, and it suddenly struck me as really amusing that an 11-year-old girl, sitting alone in her room, was so desperate to know every word to such a gun-and-death-ridden song!

And it’s so cool that a guy whose parents might even be younger than me, is learning the lyrics to that song 50 years after it was a hit on the AM radio. Life does indeed go on (and maybe the same lives come back and go on…) We’ll find out.

I love this crazy town!

April 25, 2018 marilyn jaye lewis Leave a comment

One of the things that I really love about this town (est. out here in the Hinterlands in 1828), is how they just let the ghosts stick around. It is too cool.

By that, I mean that when buildings around here get old (and I mean really old) they just leave them sit and build something new right next to it. Or — in the case of the Methodist Church — right across the street from it. (The original old Methodist church, made from wood and painted white, is still standing and is too cool, while right across the street from it is the “new” church, made of brick and built many, many years ago.)

However, older still and just up the block from the church… the pool hall, and a couple other buildings, built maybe late 1890s, based on the architecture, are also still standing, looking as if you could maybe just walk right in, but they are absolutely 100% closed and I don’t know for how long they’ve been that way.

The old pool hall is 2nd from the right. This is right around the corner from me.

There are plenty of houses on this street, where people are still living. The volunteer fire department, the city hall (a store front) and the police department (wedged between the city hall and the diner) are all on this street. There’s an old bar across from these buildings (above) that is also closed, but the sign out front of it makes it seem like you can just walk right in and order a beer.

Yet you cannot! It’s abandoned.

This old farm house (below) is not to be believed. It is right outside the corporate limit, where the speed limit changes from 35 mph to 55 mph and the road becomes a highway with farms on either side for miles. I drive past this old farmhouse a couple of times a day.

I don’t know who took this photo, but the farmhouse is already several years older now, and even more deteriorated, if you can even imagine that. I wish I could get a good picture of it, but it’s on private property. There are new barns right next to it. The farmhouse is set off on a hill, with 2 big trees in front of it, and — and I love this part — someone planted a ton of daffodils in the “front yard” and they are all in bloom right now! It is awesome.

On this same road, there are quite a number of houses, barns, and even a church, that are in this same deteriorated condition, with new barns, and houses that people live in, right on the same properties. (The old barn with the Mail Pouch Tobacco sign painted on it, that I posted below somewhere, is on this same road. The barn photo was photo-shopped, though. It doesn’t look nearly that good in real life.)

Right down the street from me, just over the railroad tracks, where portions of the original brick sidewalks can be glimpsed here and there as you walk along, is an old hardware store that looks like you can knock it over with a whisper. It looks like it’s from the early 1900s. It’s behind those buildings where the old pool hall is. And people live right next door to it — the hardware store, I mean.

Speaking of the old train tracks, I found this old postcard online. The train depot that used to be here in my town!

I’ll have to follow the train tracks sometime, to get an idea of where this depot was, but I’m thinking it was over by where the Dairy Queen is now, in the “center” of town. For all I know, the “depot” is still there, but being used as something else. The post office, perhaps? That’s along the train tracks…

And I found this photo of my house online, taken at some point when all the trees around had leaves. That hasn’t happened yet this year…

That is my kitchen porch, at the side there, and my horse & buggy barn way at the end of the fence.

And speaking of my new (very old) house… It has one of those unfinished basements, made of exposed stone and dirt. And it still has its old coal shoot, although it’s nailed closed and now vinyl siding is over the outside of it. However, I noticed just the other day, when i was down in the basement, changing the filter on the furnace, that the coal bin is still mostly there, under the stairs! It’s falling apart, but it’s still there. No one, in all this time, thought about dismantling it and removing it. They just worked around it, instead.

I get the best, most amazing, happy vibes living here, folks. I feel like the guy who first built the house, back in 1901, is probably still around in spirit. I keep wondering, if I got a Ouija board who would I contact? Probably way more spirits than I would know what to do with! So I don’t think I’ll go there…

All righty. On that happy note… Have a great Wednesday out there, gang, wherever you are in the world (physical or spiritual!!) I gotta get crackin’ around here. We’re putting up my new shower curtain rod today! Yay. Okay. Thanks for visiting. See ya!

The Robin

April 18, 2018 marilyn jaye lewis Leave a comment

A few days ago, I posted here about a robin building her nest in the huge old maple tree outside my bedroom windows.

Here are 2 photos. One, a long view — you can see the houses along Basin Street and the hills in the background (also note, once again, how extremely close the front of my house is to the railroad tracks!):

The robin in her nest, just below the cable line running through the branches…

And now a close-up of the robin!

I try not to make her paranoid, but I do look at her all the time!

Born again, again!

April 17, 2018 marilyn jaye lewis 1 Comment

I have finally settled in enough in the new house to get down to a daily writing schedule. It feels incredible. Not just the “writing again” part, but having ready access to everything I’ve ever written, published and unpublished, throughout the course of my career.

And not just my fiction, but also dream notebooks I kept over the years, where I kept track of my dreams at night, and spiral bound notebooks filled with song lyrics I wrote over 30 years ago (for those new to my blog, I was a singer/songwriter in NYC in the late 1970s into the early 1990s, when I switched to fiction-writing, exclusively).

I mentioned in a previous post, that even though all my “stuff” was in storage for about 2 years, it’s really been closer to 15 years that I not only had ready access to all my stuff, but was in the frame of mind to relate to it all. These many years that I’ve been back in Ohio have not been happy ones for me, and I had often deeply regretted moving back here. I had really come to feel like one of the walking dead, but without the zombie-like features. ha ha.

But, first, the move into the Hinterlands in 2016, into a rental house, followed by a move deeper into the Hinterlands and into a new (really old) house that I bought this past March, has made me finally feel alive again.

I’ve titled this post “Born again, again” because in the space of 12 months (2016-2017), I nearly died 3 times (car accident, lightning, accidental overdose of aspirin). My life was so unhappy during that whole era, that, spiritually, I could have easily chosen to just die and move on to the next plateau. But I didn’t. I constantly fought to stick around. To stick it out. (And long-time readers know that my teen years were filled with awfulness: 2 rapes, constant abuse, drug & alcohol problems, confinement to a mental hospital, arrests, tragic deaths of people I loved. I survived 2 suicide attempts in those years and it was because, again, even though life felt unbearable, I really wanted to stick it out until it could finally get good.)

So now, when I wake up in the morning, in love with life, with my house, with my new tiny town in the middle of lovely nowhere, I truly mean it: I am happy.

Here’s a shot of my kitchen table from a few minutes ago. It feels so great to be able to really spread my work out again. It’s been since the days on E. 12th Street, in NYC (over 30 years ago), that I’ve had a kitchen big enough to have a kitchen table I could really spread out at while I worked:

Working on the stage adaptation of my Helen LaFrance script

I was going through an old dream notebook from 1986 this afternoon (I’ve recently started keeping track of my dreams again) and a poem I wrote about James Dean was stuck in there.

It was typed on my old IBM typewriter. It had some pencil marks, where I had edited it. And there was still tape on the corners of the paper, where I had taped it to my bedroom wall (I often did that with poems back then that I wanted to look at , study, and then revise). I had completely forgotten having ever written a poem about James Dean, although I did really used to adore him.

For readers too young to know who James Dean was, he was a movie star in the 1950s, who died really young. He was from a small town in Indiana, and went to NYC to study acting. He appeared in early TV shows, some stage work, but then went out to L.A. and became famous almost overnight. He only made 3 movies before he died tragically in a car accident in northern California. And his third movie, Giant, wasn’t even released until after he died. He was buried back home in Indiana, close to his family. His casket was shipped back home on a train. He was a guy who always wanted to be really, really famous, and I often thought that if he hadn’t died so young, on the precipice of real fame, he would not have become a Hollywood Legend. Meaning, that spiritually, dying young and tragically was part of the whole “legendary fame” package, which I believe that on some level, he subscribed to hook, line & sinker.

Here’s a still of James Dean in his final movie, Giant (a terrific movie about racism, btw, that you must see if you haven’t already), followed by my newly re-discovered poem!

JAMES DEAN'S PLAN
I went to L.A. to die,
not in one grand leap, mind you, but in frames.
I knew I could muster
the sullenness,
make the necessary toss of
a cigarette butt
and the careless flash of a
shy smile.
Then I'd arc my life
up the Northern Coast
in a dashing trajectory of vision;
collide with
my tragic partner
in a slow-motion splatter
to timelessness,
then resume a more somber
parade
with my pine box shipped east, marked
Indiana's Own
but my ticket stamped
Hollywood's Heaven.
--MJL 1987

Great Days!

April 6, 2018 marilyn jaye lewis Leave a comment

Things are just moving along swimmingly, as they say!

I’m basically done with the inside of the new house, for now. Except for the upstairs bathroom, which is a decorator’s nightmare. It looks as if a 10-year-old was given free-rein in expressing his or her devotion to Mickey Mouse, literally.

But other than the upstairs bathroom, which needs a re-do from top to bottom, I’m happy with the inside of the house and will turn my focus to the outside, as soon as the weather gets nice and stays nice (i.e., we’re still getting occasional days of snow!).

I just bought this for my family room:

It is called a: “Baxton Studio Sorrento Mid-Century Retro Modern Faux Leather Upholstered Wooden Lounge Chair, Brown”.

However, I call it, simply, my new chair. I love my new chair!!! It is the final thing I’m buying, for now. But this means people can come visit and not have to sit side-by-side on the sofa, or sit at the kitchen table. (It’s exciting, isn’t it? Imagine — coming to visit me! You would be sitting in that luxurious Baxton Studio Sorrento Mid-Century Retro Modern Faux Leather Upholstered Wooden Lounge Chair, Brown!!!! Yay!! And the conversation alone would no doubt be intoxicating!)

Another cool thing that’s going on out here in my humble abode in the Hinterlands is that a robin is building her nest in the enormous old maple tree outside my bedroom window. Most of the windows in this house are really long — 65 inches long, in fact. And that’s just the window itself, it doesn’t count the window casing, window sill, etc. Anyway, I can lay in my bed and easily watch her build her nest. (It still amazes me, just how good they are at building nests.)

The other cool thing is that we have a new logline for the Cleveland’s Burning TV Pilot. It goes like this:

[Short version]: Two African American brothers, raised in the church, choose different paths in pursuit of racial and social equality in 1960’s Cleveland.

[Slightly longer version]: Two African American brothers, raised in the church, choose different paths in pursuit of racial and social equality in 1960’s Cleveland: one, the nonviolent philosophies of Dr. King, and the younger, the ideology of the more radical Black Power movement.

And speaking of the church…in the evening on Easter Sunday, two really delightful young Mormon missionaries came by — 2 young women, which surprised me because Mormon women never used to travel and do mission work without men. They were so sweet and it was Easter, so of course I invited them in. We sat at the kitchen table and discussed their gospel of Jesus Christ for over an hour. Frankly, it was fascinating. And I enjoyed every minute of their conversation. It was a really nice way to spend an otherwise uneventful Easter (which is usually a very important holiday for me).

All righty.

I hope you have a terrific weekend planned, wherever you are in the world! I plan on spending it visualizing all the exciting people who will be coming to visit me in the Hinterlands and sitting in my brand new Baxton Studio Sorrento Mid-Century Retro Modern Faux Leather Upholstered Wooden Lounge Chair, Brown!

And this means YOU! Yippee ki yi yay!