Cornel Wilde

January 15, 2014

 I don't think anybody intended for us to do what we did.

 Jimmy just wanted to do another one of those tapes that we always used to do like the one he did when I was out in Portland.

 Or the one we did for Ginger when we were in Jimmy's parents’ basement in Pompton Lakes.

Someone had a tape recorder; Jimmy had a guitar and he wanted us all to sing along.

We weren't even really drunk or high the way we were for the Pine Street recording that Christmas Eve when I gave Frank Quackenbush a tape recorder.

 I'm sure we were high but not that high and not high enough to explain what happened.

Jimmy started strumming the usual stuff, Neil Young and The Beatles but then someone noticed an old drum that Lewis had brought back from Afghanistan and decided that might make a good accompaniment.

 I'm not sure just who it was that grabbed it up-- maybe Louis maybe Julie maybe somebody else.

We were in the big apartment in Passaic at 86 Passaic Street it was filled with all of those fancy furniture, items that Garrick would later inherit and store in Frank Quackenbush’s basement until long after Frank died in 1995 and Ann died sometime in the early 2000s and may still even be rotting there today now that Darren owns the old house in Haledon.

When the beating started, when that drum started, the feeling that old apartment in Passaic changed, we all changed; it was as if we had reverted back to our roots back before there was a differentiation between white and black or Asian and we were all part of some primitive tribe.

Everybody wanted to get involved with the beat and so people started pounding on things, on the table top, on the couch even on their own knees or just clapped -- and then somebody figured out that they could use pots and pans and so they went in to the kitchen and brought out everything that was metal and all the utensils  and started beating on the pots and pans to the beat of the drum.

It was manic and it caught us all up in a fever of something I don't think any of us understood. We all got louder and faster and we beat harder.

And then in the midst of all this Jimmy started playing guitar, not like the old days where he was just finding some tunes that he remembered on the radio but something original, something that seemed to flow in and out of the drumbeats.

Then he started the sing

“Cornel Wilde. Cornel Wilde; where are you running to, man; you got no clothes on you.”

He was referring to the actor that played in naked prey in which a man was set loose in the jungle and was hunted, the movie somehow fitting in Jimmy's perverse vision of Africa and at the same time it fit this passionate thing that was going on, escalating, and vibrating and tearing up the air till we could hardly breathe; we just pounded; he sang; he strummed the guitar; we pounded harder; he played harder; he sang more.

When the whole thing ended the silence was so profound, we could only hear the crickets and the distant sound of traffic from the highway.

Nobody spoke for a very long time. Then somebody turned off the tape recorder and remove the tape

I do not know what happened to it which is what I told Jimmy this week when he called me up asking if I had it he is putting together all the old tapes that we did and thought that the songs from that night were valuable to include.

Jimmy goes through this phase every once in while in an attempt to build something out of those odd moments in our lives. But this didn’t find any of those other tapes we made, and I told him as much because it was so different even from the weird stuff he and I recorded together while high.

I told him maybe he could rerecord the song since he knew it at heart and probably had replayed it in his memory for all the years between now and back then.

But we both knew it could never be the same and that one special moment was something we could never duplicate.