Nocturne
by J. Wasserman

When driving after dark you must be sure to have the proper soundtrack. On weekdays, coming home from work or classes, you want something pretty mellow but upbeat. Something with a driving beat played with brushes, perhaps, and a Caribbean-tinged voice dropping rhymes about friends and music. Or some 50s or 60s jazz, a small combo, muted trumpet and raspy saxophone billowing over rattling cymbals and walking bass. The idea is to relax, let the workday flow out of you as the sounds flow out of your car's speakers, through the open window (if it is about freezing outside) and into the inky blackness of the suburban roads, punctuated only occasionally by other cars and the soft yellow glow of lamps behind home windows. This music is to prepare you to enter your house and eat dinner and change clothes, get your belongings together for the next day's tasks, and fall asleep reading a paperback with a smooth cover. You wake up at about 1:30 with your bedside lamp still blazing, your head resting on a creased novel, your legs and arms in an improbable position.

If it's a Friday, the above is invalidated. Fridays, driving home, you need something to get you going, to give you momentum into what could be a very long weekend of smoky bars at bowling alleys, girls with big hair who might actually be boys, the flashing red and blue lights of your town's Finest (of course it's not you they're pulling over, it's that poor bastard a couple blocks ahead of you who's been all over the road like a maniac that gets stopped by two cruisers and a third on the way), fruitless excursions to new places in previously-ignored towns, new places that are tastefully lit and full of tasteful people drinking tasteful and colorful things out of tasteful glasses, leaving without a new bed buddy but with your ever-stalwart comrades in varying states of sobriety, stinking up your car with the cigarette smoke that clings to their clothing, music on the car stereo mixing with their giggles when you miss a turn.

The music for that kind of a Friday trip home from work, then, needs to be like this: If you think, for some reason, that the weekend will be full of furtive conversations in dark corners of bars, batted eyelashes, exotic underthings, and the gathering of new nicknames for yourself, you put in something with a rudely wah-wah'd guitar, perhaps some midnight bongos, pulsating bass and railroading drums. Strings from nowhere, menacing beds of violins and cellos.

If, however, your weekend is going to be spent in broken-stooled jukeboxing sticky-floored dives full of leather-clad bikers and surly old men, where the waitress's name is, apparently, Sweetass, and everything's served in brown and green bottles, you'll want different music. Try something with distorted guitars like walls of screams, picked electric bass, pounding drums with as many cymbals as possible. Driving home from a night's action calls for specific music. Chill-out music. Music to have on in the background while you and your friends talk, recapping who got shot down by which girl, which girl you really should have been trying to score with, the one over against the far wall, under the neon Coor's sign, wearing the gray tanktop and stylish glasses, the one over there looking away coquettishly whenever you turned that way to make sure she was still there and not with any of the guys in the bar, which of course she wasn't and you should've done something about it. Any of the smoky guys in your car would've gladly been your wingman if you'd just given the word. Of course you know what you should've done, but you give feeble excuses, like you didn't want to strand your friends in the middle of South Norwalk, plus she probably doesn't like guys like you who aren't fashionably dressed, and what the devil were you thinking going out in your baggy cords and band t-shirt, it was like you were trying to have an excuse not to have to talk to any of the pretty and well-attired girls you long for from afar.

The music on the ride home should be slow, but not sleep-inducing. Ideally, it will have pedal steel guitar and a lot of reverb on the vocals, but you'll be okay without those things. It will not be instrumental; instead, an old-sounding gentleman or lady will sing, creakily and with a hint of too much whiskey, over plucked guitar strings and light percussion. It will make you feel like you're floating over the road, and when you roll the windows down you'll hear the crickets and tree frogs lay in a rhythm that fits perfectly. The night air will cleanse your polluted nose and lungs and you'll forget, for a second or two, that you've got two or three friends in your car, on the verge of passing out and drooling all over the upholstery.

When you get home, you'll reluctantly turn off the engine and eject the tape or CD and carry it inside with you so you can continue the feeling. You'll put it in the stereo in your bedroom, set the volume as low as it goes while still being audible, and open the window as wide as you can stand it. You'll slip under the covers, turn out the light, and listen to the wooden music and the animals outside, maybe sirens or a train in the distance, and you'll gradually drift off to sleep, disappointed that the music is different when you're not in motion, flowing down the backroads of the town where you grew up, the town every song is really about.

November 17, 2001 11:26 AM | TrackBack