Blues From the Mirror
by
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I’ve got to begin. Gotta do something to alleviate this growing tightness of cobwebbed fatigue that’s bullying me into repeated cycles of twenty-four hour weariness. C’mon man, do something, or this feeling will intensify into a blue depression. Listen to the blues. My butt digs deeper into the cushioned chair. My cries of hunger are replaced by another craving. A craving that’ll help get me straight. I would love to be in one of those too-crowded dingy blues joints back in Chicago. I know it sounds a bit weird, but there’s a feeling you get- an illuminating sensation that’s difficult to describe. Yeah, that’ll set me straight. So, let’s go. Recollections of places and singers come at me in a blur, too many to savor at once. My ears reach out to hear. I grab onto a memory. Junior Wells once blew me away with a gut intoxicating version of "Stormy Monday Blues." I was on the northside of town, doing the bar rail lean with a bottle of beer, when the song extracted me from me and then into me. It was as if the contents of the bottle became the music of Stormy Monday. What I did next came natural. I dove in and swam naked to the bottom of that barley pool. It was there, in a suspended moment of time that I realized that my body and mind weren’t separated, but were together inside the song. It terrified me! And yet, I didn’t want to leave because the music was inside me. I can’t explain it any other way, but . . . it’s got to get inside to work. By inside, I mean, really inside. I don’t think you can understand it, unless it happens to you. Somehow, I’ve got to get back inside. Back inside of me. My recent south to Memphis and beyond trip had me experiencing that feeling, but you know, during times like this, holding onto that something without a name is slippery and hard. I’m not there, and it’s going to take some time, but that trip made me realize that the music of my life and history is still inside of me. I haven’t really talked about that trip. Its not like I don’t want to, but I saw things- saw images and heard music that wasn’t seen or heard by anyone else. I don’t know why I see the things I do, but I believe they’re trying to talk to me. Anyway, that trip wasn’t taken to go anywhere in particular, as it was to just get up and go. It was a getaway into a roulette of the blues. Blues away from my blues, and the Blues Man was a constant image along the way. The Blues Man is always around, even if a person doesn’t see him. Believe me, he’s there. He’s everywhere you go, singing on a nondescript stage in that small joint in your mind. He is there as legacy, as history and life itself. So, in a real sense, that whole trip became like that special Chicago Blues night. I believe it was about getting inside and listening to the Blues Man. I mean, really listening. If you listen, you’ll hear and I heard what oozed from him, as he sat buried in his music, wearing sunglasses and a worn shirt that covered the legacy of the whip. I could almost hear the ancestral echoes of field hollering weave within the smoking hiss of his lonely moan. It grew deeper as the Blues Man sat within the eerie isolation of a trance that could never be understood. I’m not heading for Chicago. Well, at least, not right now, but I do have that there trip. I close my eyes and a strange ease wraps itself around me. I gotta take that ride. I’m taking it again, as if it’s happening at this moment. It is.
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About the Book
It is 1982, and Jerry Andrews is a man who never did play it by the book. This was the case when he decided to unbuckle the straps of stability to pursue a dream. The dream, that of teaching college history was achieved, but it didn’t come without the blues. His marriage dissolved, his best friend died, and then just when he smelled the scent of tenure, he was terminated. The termination leaves him broken, whereupon he retreats into the tunnel of internalized solitude. Thus begins the slow journey to redefine his life, his place in the world. He breaks the solitude to take his personal journey on the road from Illinois to New York. Follow him as he works in a restaurant, tips his elbow in bars, and unwittingly gets deeper into the heart of America, tasting tidbits of current events, politics, art, environment, landscape, and regional cuisine along the way. Through it all, and commingling within his journey is a quilted story of America, with the concept of "we the people," as the center pole. He learns to listen more closely to everyday stories from a passing variety of characters. They float by, some stopping- their voices filtering in and out, becoming stimuli that intersects throughout the book. For this journey, his constant companion is his lost profession of history. His historical love didn’t end with his termination. It takes on other forms, as images, dreams, and visions. Yes, that’s right, dreams and visions. Jerry Andrews, a man who never did play it by the book, is someone who sees and touches the world a little differently than most people. For example, the memory of a mystical Zuni bracelet becomes the setting sun in the western sky, and transports him to a place of remembered warmth. A place where he dances with migrating sandhill cranes, and ponders- why is a lonesome coyote showing herself and singing to him, a predator? This isn’t everyday daydreaming; it’s real. It’s real because to Jerry Andrews, it actually happened! His companion, history walking, isn’t textbook neat; it’s unrestrained and full of the blues. It’s against forgetting, and is transmitted via historical inserts that flow as tributaries through the river of the book. The history is varied, from coal mining to farming to the Delta Blues; from Native American to Hispanic history; from Vietnam to Guatemala to Ulysses S. Grant to John Dillenger. These multifaceted inclusions weave a fabric that is America, and transcend the borderlines of time and place. His journey to mend his broken spirit is an honest gathering of spiritual knowledge that acknowledges what Black Elk said, a true journey never ends.
About the Author
Pete Madzelan resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He has had short stories, essays, and poetry published in various periodicals and literary journals. He was educated at Southern Illinois University, and has worked as a cook in a variety of restaurants along with stints as a cab driver, assembly line laborer, fabric cutter, and bookstore manager. The author has resided in the novel’s three main locations of New York, Chicago, and southern Illinois. Though much of the book was written in New York, it became apparent during the process of the novel so dependent on history and place, that a return to localities beyond short sojourns was crucial. Subsequently, he returned to and resided in southern Illinois to live within the flavor of place: of backroads and small towns, of seeing the corn become knee-high by the fourth of July, of studying the nuances of the Mississippi River from varied localities. From that base, his circle widened to take in other locations within the novel, like Chicago, St. Louis, Nashville, and Memphis; the Smokies and the Delta. Much of the fictional discourse for the novel germinated from personal experiences, conversations, eavesdropping, employment, education, and historical research. The blending of fiction and actual historical events came from the realization that everyday we walk with history. Think about it, everyday something connects us with the past. It is a constant that should be cherished and studied, even the avoided underside of the subject. It is against forgetting and, after all, every one of us is history walking.