| 16 September 2006 Santa Esmerelda OK, so I blew it. I was tired from the week and should have gone down. I was pretty good about moving up my bedtime, and I had a resolution to do the same that night. There was a great movie on, the astonishingly violent Quentin Tarantino vehicle “Kill Bill, Volume 1.” I watched the samurai marshal arts sequence with my fiancé in Colorado. The time delay seemed to be about three seconds. maybe a satellite bounce, I thought, as I could hear the near future over the phone. It ended around ten, which is my target for lights out. It lets me get up and do what needs to be done, if one accepts Garrison Keiler's words from his Prairie Home Companion radio show. But something caught me, a hint of a song from long ago. It was behind something, and only the introduction. A dance song, disco almost. A cover of a real song, by Eric Burton and The Animals. “Don't let me be Misunderstood” was the original, but the version under the flashing katana blades was by a Hispanic group, with flamenco guitars and a driving, pounding salsa beat. It grabbed me hard, as it did when I was younger and wilder by a lot. The movie looped as I tried to think of the band, and how nice it would be to find the ancient cassette tape where that song was held. That was impossible. I am old, and living in the future. Uma Thurmond was on the floor of the church after the massacre, playing The Bride, and then there was hospital sequence began with her rape by unscrupulous truck drivers assisted by corrupt hospital employees. I sat down at the computer, a mistake, since anything involving a keyboard was going to wind up costing time and money, neither of which I had in great supply. But I had to find that song. I looked for the soundtrack to the movie as Uma was slamming someone's head in a door, and I thought about darkness in Japan someplace. That was it. It was one of the songs they played so loudly at the Black Ship Club on Yokosuka Base, where we listened to the songs from back home and danced only with ourselves before plunging out the gate to carouse across the Honcho district. “Don't let me be misunderstood,” we said, as if that was possible, in the chill of a humid evening with the moisture hanging palpable in the air, reflecting the bright neon and the need. They understood us perfectly well. Imagine fighting a war with no alcohol. Imagine that. I could not find the soundtrack. Which is to say that I found plenty of them, but none with the song I needed. I tried something else as the hands on the clock moved inexorable forward. Search for the song name, don't worry about the group. Sure enough, in a nanosecond it appeared, in a list under the Eric Burton original. “Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood” by a band called Santa Esmeralda. Leroy Gomez was the front man of a band named for a holy emerald, a color of rich green and blue, a religious color of seductive beauty. 1978. A long song. A driving song, A dancing song. It all came rushing back. Cold beer and odd tasting cigarettes, Lucky Sevens the brand closest to Marlboros you could by out there when the PX supply ran out. Suki the bartender looking across the dark wood, her eyes saying precisely nothing and everything. Scotch chaser behind the beer, a concentrated jolt of energy and stupidity. I clicked on the song and downloaded it to the list of songs that I purchase when I remember. I slipped on the headset, so as not to upset the neighbors and set the volume for as loud as I could. Fingers ran up the frets, the high notes singing of Valencia and passion and the drums banging insistently, driving forward, driving out into the street, into the darkness that Suki's eyes promised. I stood in front of the desk and my legs began to twitch, my hips began to sway. Hypnotized in the darkness, somewhere between now and then. I turned it off once I thought of another song to play on the iPod back in the bedroom. It was a brilliant idea, more loud music from a time far away, in the Philippines with the air as moist as the water, and the little women and their dark eyes, dark as night. Deciding to listen to the past calling out across the years was almost as good as batting the alarm clock off the bedside table a few hours later when it chirped into life at the regular weekday time. I thought I would take a pass on the body count in Baghdad, and the new trenching scheme to divide the capital and the deteriorating situation in al Anbar. As you say, there are awful people who want to kill us. This is much more personal than our long slow-dance with the Russian. As personal as the war for someone else's country in Vietnam, only much closer, since this time it is a war for ours. I listened with amazement to a series this week on the lives of Muslims in the United States that National Public Radio was running. I understand the motivation well enough to do something like that on the anniversary week of the great attacks. But I seethed inside at the effort to make me more tolerant to this faith that is now among us, and which at its roots is ruthless and expansionist. All the great faiths have their mysteries, which must be accepted if one is to follow the value system. I applaud those who believe, and just wish they would keep their revelations to themselves. I marvel that the Pope was so honest in his assessment of Islam, borrowed from the 14th century of his faith to describe the one that is in the 14th century of its own. Some of the believers are taking offense at this latest insult to the Prophet. Well, I am sorry about the misunderstanding, but I have been considerably offended myself by the plottings and the murders. And if an idle historical remark by an elderly German constitutes an insult, I would be happy to help devise something much better. But I imagine that is what the baddest of the bad guys want, something palpable to feed the fires that burn with rising passion toward what they consider the end of days. I do not think I will oblige today, though I will keep my options open. We do not want to frighten the civilians, do we? Not yet. Perhaps if I can find the right theme music, something can be arranged for later. Something rich with the color of passion, with a driving and compelling beat. Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra |