dusty dusty dusty concrete bleak fluorescently lit, sad; cardboard and cement dust, cold & grey as dirty chalk…
trudge trudge trudge
Radio the AM balm
wave-ing over the cold air, a silver box, hanging in the loading dock
like a halo
singing… the same songs but
different… the fun was a hoping game he played secretly inside as he emptied the pile of square cardboard from Ignace, from _____, from ________, from other exotic Northern Ontario legendary small towns, and settlements whose yellow lights in windows he’d never see.
Would it come on tonight. Would they play it?; his blest exuberance that bulldozed his eager synapses with a serotonin injection, so potent it raised his mind like lightning up & out of this dust?
Yup
“!!!!” striking the ground with no wind in him… only the echo in the loading dock of “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhs”, “ahh”s & the tinkling ivory lace running across the opening, amid bursts of field explosions.
And he felt, and reasoned …informed; informed by years of listening to The Who, duly, that Elton John’s Pinball Wizard was not. The original What was! What was What, was the original vulnerable sinewy VOCAL, fleet & raw GUITARS, virtuosic THUNDER roiling under tricky DRUMS. Wonder of nature the quinity – The4one.
…and (okay…) yet… in this “substandard” version there was still …an anticipation not unhappy.
He’d heard it before, and knew to … wait. Knew to trudge dustily from parcel pile to truck-trailer across the loading dock floor (how come?), & to time his arrival, at the radio hanging on one of the open bay doors, to the exact moment…(because) …THOSE 4 last CHORDS at the end just drop
– that nonchalantly – like a signal getting air – tough chopped asphalt chords and a few, graceful, delicate high piano notes, dragon and angel flying upward, wings of his soul for 12 seconds.