September 3, 2001

 mfinley.com   
"It'll Never Happen Again"

by Michael Finley
(c) 2001 by Michael Finley

When you were young, were there songs that just knifed through you? I remember in 1965, Bobby Darin had a hit with "If I Were a Carpenter." It was a little thick, but such nakedness of emotion. Would you marry me anyway? Would you have my baby? I was fifteen, and it cut me like sharp scissors.

The composer was Tim Hardin, and in college I bought his second LP, and would listen to it with my roommate Frank, who owned the first. In turn I played both for my girlfriend Jan, a faculty brat who knew much more music than me, everything from Judy Collins to the Fugs. 

In those days Hardin was categorized as a folksinger, but really he was an early singer-songwriter, like Jackie deShannon or Paul Simon. What was striking to me was his ability to nail the feeling of a song in a few notes. In one, Hardin addresses Hank Williams, who dies before Hardin can hear him perform:

Goodbye Hank Williams, my friend.
I didn't know you, but I been places that you been.

In another, he begins:

I remember our first affair.
All the pain, always rain
In our lives.
It'll never happen again...

 

That last line, repeated three heartbreaking times, was what threw me: It'll never happen again. Could there be a more sobering thought, implying severance of love, and therefore severance of life? But isn't it true of everything sweet that ever happens to a person. It never can happen again. Because that's how life is.

I thought of the sorrows of my own life -- my sister's death of a leaky heart when she was 15, and I was 11, and my father's coming round to the empty house a year later, to tell me he was going away, and shake my hand under the Chinese elm.

I dreamed at least every week that Kathy had come back, and it was all a big mistake somehow, or my dad did. But they never did. It never happened again, just like in the song, and how keenly I felt that loss.

After Christmas break Frank, my roommate, told me he got tickets to a Tim Hardin concert in Greenwich Village, and he and his mother Nancy drove up from Princeton to see it. His dad was in the foreign service and his mother was an artist, so Frank's dorm room was full of paintings she had made of interesting people she had known in Khartoum and Rome. So Frank figured she would be open to Hardin, and he never dreamed Hardin would make him regret the choice.

But that is what happened. It turned out Hardin was addicted to heroin and pills and I guess booze, and he showed up at the concert frantic and repulsive, grabbing his crotch during songs and talking to the audience about cunts and cocks, and flicking cigarettes into the front rows. And the songs weren't the tender ballads of our records, but jazzed-up going-nowhere heroin crotch songs you wouldn’t ordinarily want to take your mother to.

Nancy was cool with it, but for Frank it was an evening of embarrassment, disappointment, and a wasted thirty dollars. How could that foul-mouthed beatnik be the same tender guy who sang "Misty Roses" and "Reason to Believe"? We continued to listen to him that spring, but more as a conundrum than a fan favorite.

My girlfriend Jan and I had a good thing going. She was the kind of girl anyone would like to know, beautiful inside and out. She had small features, faint eyebrows and an indistinct mouth, and her complexion looked like it could go haywire at the drop of a hat. But she was wonderful just the same, and it wasn't just me that said so. I once overheard this straight guy named Bruce that I went to high school with, who went on to the same college as me, tell someone I was with the greatest looking girl there. When I heard that, I looked at her with blood in my eyes. She was tall, and hip, and kind, and she loved to laugh.

I was a virgin, but Jan got it into her head that I was witty and a poet, which was practically as good as not being a virgin, and we would walk around our college town for long afternoons in the warm October light, talking about everything and nothing, my arm around her waist, resting on the cool bare skin above her belt. She reminded me of my sister, but I was very hot for her, and the news that she would be pulling out of school and going to a place up in Minnesota instead, where her dad Ned taught art, distressed me no end. But what could I day? I had no intention of ever being a carpenter; indeed, I'd be a terrible carpenter, because I have no patience with details, and things don't fit in my hands, and she was the one who wanted babies, not me. Still, I yearned for her like the man in that song.

I not only yearned for Jan, I yearned for her family. The few times I visited with them, I joined them at the family dinner table and exulted in the conversation, which managed to be both unselfconscious and intelligent. Jan was the oldest, a regal daughter. Her brother Will was a bodacious prince, innocent but very opinionated. There was a mom and a sister and another brother involved, too. Aces every one, but I can't describe them all to you.

The centerpiece of the family was Ned, the art professor. He was a small man, but red-headed fiery and ferociously clear about what he believed. He'd been a Navy pilot in the Pacific in World War II, and I got the idea that he came home against all odds and married his sweetheart from school. Which was something I could get my mind around. Now, his hand almost always cradled a warm pipe bowl, like him a survivor of wartime action. He was a man who was tempered by flame, and just naturally more serious and sensible than other men. Best of all, he seemed to honestly respect me. I found I acted better around him than I did around anybody. I liked who I was when I was with him, just like I did with Jan. I didn’t want to lose these people.

He seemed to like the madness of the sixties, but not the predation or the laziness or the bullshit. He despised faculty members who fooled around with students. He despised shortcuts of any kind. "Do the work," was the advice he gave everyone. Jan once confided to me that Ned told her he liked me very much, and it took me by such surprise I caught myself blinking back tears.

One remark stands out for me. Ned was recounting a conversation he'd had with other faculty members that day. "Fred, you hold onto that pipe of yours like it's a friend," one teacher joked. "It's my only friend, Charlie," Ned said ruefully. "My only friend." And he chuckled violently at the recollection.

Several times, trying to call Jan back to me, I hitchhiked to Minnesota and bombed in on her. But each time was a disaster. Her mom and dad were patient and kind with me, but Jan had outgrown me. She had new boyfriends, older boyfriends, artists and actors, and they were more neurotic and therefore more adult than me. Gradually, it sank in to me that the thing we had at the college in Ohio was over, and it would never happen again, just like in the song.

A year later I dropped out of school and made one final effort to make Jan see my way, flying into Minnesota without a winter coat on a cold night in November. We talked, and became friends again, sort of -- we said we were "going unsteady." I took a job at a parts warehouse, and after work she reintroduced me to her life and to her friends, like Maddy, an artist who studied under Ned.

But in the end Jan shut me out. On the last day of the sixties, she told me she was engaged to marry a Vietnam veteran from her home town who had got shot up and shipped home. They never actually got married, but it was convincing enough to send me away again, this time to an apartment a half mile away.

One day, as I was lying on my mattress on the floor of my upstairs apartment, Maddy came by to look in on me. Maddy was five years older than me. Her husband, a chiropractor, had been in Vietnam for almost a year. She was blonde and attractive without quite being pretty. I don’t think they were in love. When I looked at Maddy I saw an asymmetry that made her seem tentative. But she was smart and serious about painting, and she gave me fair warning when she pushed a sketchbook of self-portraits in pencil into my hands. In each picture, there was something disturbing about her. Her face would be ready to cry, or the sun would be in her eyes, or her cheeks would be sallow and aged, or a shadow would be passing over her, a shadow of depression and doom, like March in Minnesota, the season of ice and obituaries. I told her they were great.

She relayed to me her sympathies regarding Jan dropping me, and something in her eye led me to kiss her, and we made love on the raggedy mattress. A part of me just wanted to be loved by someone, anyone, and this was great on that level alone. But a vengeful part savored the idea of doing it with a friend of Jan's and a student of Ned's.

Maddy and I were together for a couple of months. We never lived together, but we often spent the night together. Because painting was what she cared about, she set me up with an easel and paints, and encouraged me to paint ripoffs of pictures from her art books. I did what I thought was an OK version of a spooky landscape by the Nazi painter Emil Nolde. But my first painting was a copy of the cover of Tim Hardin's "Greatest Hits." Thinking back, it seems weird to have painted a picture of another man in front of a naked woman. But something about Hardin was hooked in me. He had a knack for sorrow, and I was starting to have one, too. I wished I could express things the way he did, that reduced all life to a blubbering, heaving heap.

Maddy and I didn’t really work. Before we split, I took her to visit a friend of mine, a black cop I knew in Minneapolis named Roger. He and Maddy exchanged glances, and as we were leaving, Roger took me by the arm and asked if I would mind if he called Maddy, because she sure had a beautiful body. I swiveled to look at Maddy slide into her VW Bug as if I had lost her forever, and I had.

But I did not want to be part of this attachment any more, or any attachment. It surprised me to be ashamed of my actions, sleeping on the home front with the wife of a man in combat. Ned wouldn't go for that, I knew. It was sleazy and insincere. It was ignoble and wrong.

I was drifting into a decade of loneliness. Jan married and soon had three children. My old roommate Frank moved to Minnesota, and we took up where we left off, as grown men. The thing that still connected us was the music. We spent hours listening to the people who mattered to us -- Tim Hardin, Leonard Cohen, Tim Buckley, Nick Drake. We were lonely men listening to lonely songs.

We sometimes traveled together with our dogs on canoe trips and car trips, and trips to folk festivals. For a time we were even in business together, collecting glass jars from people's alleys and using them as candle molds to make candles we sold to knick-knack stores. It wasn't a very good business. I guess I was just helping him to have something to do.

It took me years, but I eventually began putting a life together, meeting and marrying Rachel, a freckled foundling from Indiana and a lovely girl, and having a daughter in 1984 with her, and in 1988 a son. As a father I wanted to be like Ned, charismatic and unstinting in love, but it wasn't in me. My life was too unheroic and too gruesome. I ate the crusts from the kids peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and gained weight.

About that time Frank was going with a nurse named Eve. He and Eve and Rachel and I and our kids would sometimes get together at our place for a cookout, and to push the children in the backyard swings. As they had been serious for over a year, Frank indicated that if she got pregnant not to worry, that he would take care of her. But there was a misunderstanding, because Eve did get pregnant, and instead of marrying her Frank broke it off, and in cruel fashion, marrying another woman, the daughter of a local surgeon, in the space of a couple of months. I went to the wedding, which was quite a toney affair after our dumpster diving days. I toasted their happiness, but inside I was troubled.

Eve had the baby, but Frank never visited the hospital. Eve took the child home and set about to raise him, but Frank never came around. He agreed to pay child support on the side, but on the condition that he not be the boy's father. His excuse was that he was a married man, and he needed to focus on the life he had chosen, not this one that was trying to trip him up. But it was hell for me to be his friend, because I had little kids, and I knew how important having a father was, and it tore me up to visit Eve and see the little boy who asked about his dad.

The funny thing was, Frank's parents, back in Princeton, knew about their grandson, and came visiting every year with gifts and games. His mother Nancy, whom Frank had taken to see Tim Hardin at the Village Gate, took the boy into the family with all love and honor. Frank knew about this, and permitted it, but he could not bring himself to be a party to it.

And little by little, I stopped seeing Frank. I still loved him, but our friendship ended in a flaming wreck over the boy, who I knew would grow up hollow and hunting, the way I did.

The following year I got word from Will, Jan's brother, that Ned was dying of lung cancer. His best friend the briar pipe was taking him down.

I went to the funeral, and saw Jan and her husband and family. At the reception afterward, at the house, a woman came up to me and asked if I recognized her. "It's me, Maddy," she said. "Maddy Anderson." I nearly choked at the need to reprise in a moment our relationship of a decade ago, but she put me at ease with a smile. Jan came up to me, too, and told me once again how fond Ned had been of me.

On the back porch was Will, sitting in a still glider. I sat beside him on the top wooden step and swigged from a bottle of beer.

"After the war," Will said, "Ned spent nearly a year in Idaho in a mental institution. He didn't speak during that period. People who knew him gave up on him ever coming out of it."

"What happened?" I asked.

"The plane he was flying, with a crew of about ten men, was shot down by Japanese antiaircraft fire. They went down about 500 miles from Midway, and he and four crewmates floated in the ocean for the better part of a day. Ned's head was injured, and he was a small fellow, but he kept the plane's navigator, Les, who was injured and unconscious, afloat with him the whole time. The ocean wasn't rough, but it was still challenging, you know. But Ned held onto Les all that day and into the evening, talking to him, encouraging him to hold on, help was on the way. Les talked at first, but as time passed he just spit saltwater out.

"Around nightfall a rescue ship arrived to pull them out of the water. One of the two other men was plainly dead by this time, floating face down. Ned and Les were still upright together, and Ned insisted that Les be pulled aboard first, clambering up the riggings after him. But just as Ned reached the top, the rescue team kicked Les overboard, obviously dead. Ned watched as Les's body toppled back into the waves, and something inside him broke."

Will looked at me. "The part I don't get is what happened to him in Idaho that year. He was empty and useless all that time. But at the end of the year something happened and he became who he would be for the rest of his life. Not just a healthy man, but a strong one, strong enough to raise us all, and be a decent artist, and a good man, too. I wish I knew what he did to heal himself."

It's funny how things come around. Thirty years later I remain friends with Jan and her brother Will. This past summer she invited me and Rachel and my kids out to her horse farm. All her family made it, even Will, who drove all the way from New York with his son Victor. It was a hot day, but we sat in plastic chairs under an oak tree so big and so spreading that no grass grew underneath. The ponies cantered in the enclosure, and the kids of all the families climbed the corral planks to watch them, all except the ones too young to leave their mothers' laps.

Everyone was there, excerpt for Ned, and we didn't have much to say, but we sat and told teasing stories about the old days anyway, and I felt I belonged as much as I ever did. It's not true that it never happens again, but it sometimes just feels like it.

In time even Frank and I became friends again. His marriage to the surgeon's daughter came apart after a couple years, and he suffered like a man in a parable, having created two families but being welcome in neither. In time he married again, and was a good father this time around, staying home with his two daughters and loving them modestly and with all his heart. I don't know that he ever reconciled with the little boy he abandoned. But he changed in his heart, so I suspect maybe he did.

One night the two of us went out to a steakhouse, and over meat and red wine I told him how sorry I was to have pulled away from him all those years. Poor Frank looked at me with dumb surprise. "I thought you were just tired of me," he said.

"I was always your friend," I said to him that night. "But every time I saw you, I thought about the boy. And living the life I've lived, I couldn't choose you above him."

It was about the time of Ned's funeral that Tim Hardin died of an overdose. Frank told me about it on the phone. Obituaries stressed that things went downhill for him early, starting about the time of his night at the Village Gate. A woman left him, and took his son with her. Tim Hardin made other records, and they had their moments; I remember a tune called "Shiloh." But none ever resounded with people the way his first two did. That was a heady swirl of youth and nerve, and because he was young he must still have had hope, no matter how sad the songs. He wasn't finished yet. There would be other opportunities. But there never were. The moment of sweetness never came round again.

And when I hear him today on a CD, I sometimes still cringe with embarrassment, sitting in Maddy's apartment, painting Hardin's face instead of a naked Maddy. I know Ned would have understood my dalliance. Everyone has to heal, in Idaho or Minnesota, and we are all of us sanatoriums for one another, if we take the best we are offered. And look what happens when you do. My babies are grown, and in the fullness of my years I bask in the grace and love of so many.

But when the wind inside blows chill I can still summon up that feeling of bereftness, when sense that everything is stripped away, and your sister died in the night and your dad is upstairs packing his things. That's when you are alone in your soul, and your only solace is knowing your shout of surprise could not have gone unheard, and that look on your face, in acrylic or in oil, may be all that is remembered.

Goodbye, Tim Hardin, my friend. I didn't know you, but I been places that you been.  

 Copyright (c) 2001 by Michael Finley

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Comments on the site

Thanks for your reflections about Tim Hardin. I first heard Tim play in the early 70s in The Riverboat on Yorkville Avenue, Toronto. His first album was my favorite. Nothing could compare to his songs, and still can't. Maybe Lucky Thirteen by Bert Jansch. I left Canada in the mid-80s to teach university at Miami University of Ohio, after my political radicalism became too much for the Dean. Then, in 1993, I was recruited by UCLA, where I teach courses in radical pedagogy at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Two of my closest friends from the 60s made it into the early 70s before committing suicide. They would have understood my feelings about Tim Hardin. Fortunately for me, Jenny, my wife, appreciates Tim. Every month or so, I listen to Tim, and let the past well up inside of me. And, for a short time, I drown in the sweet sadness of lost youth and forgotten love.

P M

That was a very moving piece. I was a big fan of Hardin's also. "If you love me, let me live in peace," having been my family's black sheep, or "I feel like I'm talking to myself, when I say what I mean."

C. P.