Cal Freeman
Tender Years: A Brief Memoir With “Eddie and the Cruisers”
A season by its weather swaps our footwear
and our garments as we travel snow-swept roads
without volition. This is what it means to tremolo
and slide. Nobody lives up to their memoirs;
no story can remain accurate once it’s set down.
Call it the always-evanescent present, call it
time passed before it’s arrived, call it self-mythology,
the putrefying masque of the persona, tail lights
tailing off in epistrophe—call this carnelian,
collodion of nightfall—young John, dumb bag
of bones riding that stretch of Ike’s interstate
between Allen Park and Marshall in his parents’
Escort wagon—call it an exculpatory metaphor
for how the self is interpellated a priori by
an ideological interstate apparatus, call it a parody
of Althusser, call it a staid middle class epistle.
He lies on the backseat, the chairs collapsed,
and watches Eddie and the Cruisers on a 12”
TV/VCR combo plugged into the cigarette lighter
while herds of deer peek out of weeds in roadside culverts—
call it distantiation of the self from self, palinode
of an early maunder. Pale as moonlight, skinny
as a wicket John, bag of bones, and why
was that film made, and why was he watching it
on his way past shelterbelts and maze fields turned
the blue of dusk, late autumn, single stoplight towns
with gas stations and landbound kettle lakes
and porn shops advertising “live peep shows”
and party stores advertising “live night crawlers.”
Call it the vomitous underbelly of the rural idyll
or something pithier than that if you think of it.
He learns the word “caesura,” he learns the name
“Rimbaud,” learns the anaphora of anaphora of songs—
that a life is a set of cylindrical structures for those
beyond us to decode. In the film the music’s mostly diegetic—
Chevy Bel Air dangling from the Raritan Bridge
in the morning rain while “Wild Summer Nights”
implausibly plays on its radio. In a classroom in Ocean City,
Frank Ridgeway (Tom Berenger), the bandmember
they called “The Word Man,” is puzzling over
“Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”
while flashing back to a moment playing “Tender Years”
on a baby grand on some bandstand in Atlantic City,
and is this diegetic, happening as it does twenty years remote
from the empty classroom where he dreams? Call it
the polemic against music in real time, call it the irrefutable
oneiric quality of song. Every poem is a persona poem,
a friend will tell our passenger many years later, and if this is true,
every poem is a palinode of a self worn down to its seams
in ventriloquy and maunder, which means we’ll never know
who Eddie Wilson or Arthur Rimbaud really were while knowing
that no one really is anyone once the credits roll.
John Cafferty’s soundtrack was criticized for its anachrony
(the band was from the early 60s but Cafferty sounded
like 80s Springsteen). Do people change or don’t they,
that’s what Wordsworth’s getting at, Ridgeway says.
For the longest time he heard it as “words worth getting at,”
not an author name but a question of emphasis—anaphora,
epistrophe, refrain. When Eddie Wilson comes back,
a reflection watching his younger self in a cathode ray tube
TV in the display front of an appliance store, his ensuing visitations
to former band members offer an answer our passenger holds onto
hopelessly. Call it stumbling the parapets of before,
the putative before. A man watches himself watching his former self,
a Bel Air dangles from a bridge rail, every poem is a persona poem
just as every resurrection, every film, every happy accident
involves some improbable possibility—a recovered
reel-to-reel, a missing stone, a living ghost.
CAL FREEMAN is the author of the books Fight Songs (Eyewear 2017) and Poolside at the Dearborn Inn (R&R Press 2022). His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals including North American Review, The Poetry Review, The Moth, Oxford American, River Styx, and Witness Magazine. He has been anthologized in The Poet’s Quest for God (Eyewear 2016), RESPECT: The Poetry of Detroit Music (Michigan State University Press 2020), I Wanna Be Loved By You: Poems On Marilyn Monroe (Milk & Cake Press 2021), Of Rust and Glass (Volume II) and What Things Cost: An Anthology for the People (University Press Kentucky 2022). He is a recipient of the Devine Poetry Fellowship (judged by Terrance Hayes), winner of Passages North‘s Neutrino Prize, and a finalist for the River Styx International Poetry Prize. He teaches at Oakland University and serves as Writer-In-Residence with InsideOut Literary Arts Detroit.