Life With Lester, Van and a Bum

Learning the Ways of Life With Lester, Van and a Bum
There’s a reason I’m bum-fixated — and it’s not just because of my always-inescapable liberal guilt. Bums (yes, I say bums; not homeless, transients, derelicts or vagrants — not because I think any less of them, but because I like the word) have fascinated me with the ideas of both freedom and bondage that come with utter destitution. However, when I met some of the bums of New York City, my fascination was transformed into something else entirely.
The bums of New York seem more immediately desperate than the bums of California (open sore-baring bums of south Berkeley notwithstanding). Here, you can respond to their “Can you spare some change?” with vocal or tacit refusal, or, if you’re that kind of person, with the “pretend you don’t see ‘em and keep on truckin’” plan. In New York, bums don’t cotton to that kind of shit. They’ll follow you for blocks, asking you again and again for a little help, or, at the very least, to recognize that they’re walking alongside you. No jokes-for-change there, folks.
It all started on the plane to New York City for spring break. Flying somewhere above America’s bread-basket, I found some interesting insights in an essay about Van Morrison’s 1968 sophomore album Astral Weeks. Written by Lester Bangs, the genius drug casualty/tragic hero of rock criticism, this piece caused me to listen to the album — really listen — for the first time in years. (I actually paid real money for the CD sometime in high school, but tossed it into my overflowing “boring” pile when it was immediately less accessible than Moondance. You should not do this.)
The thing about Astral Weeks-era Van Morrison that I didn’t realize until Bangs made it so obvious to me is that here, unlike any of Morrison’s other work (his best song, “T.B. Sheets” is excepted, but more about that later), he faces one of the greatest questions of existence felt by those born not into poverty: facing those less fortunate than yourself, and deciding exactly how to feel about it.
My first and most memorable experience with the bums of New York happened on West 116th St. and Lenox Avenue — which, as it turns out, is actually called Malcolm X Boulevard — inside the rapidly gentrifying borders of Harlem. Trying to hail a cab for our group of six after a horrifying Senegalese dinner (stick to Ethiopian, I say) I heard a weathered female voice call from somewhere alongside of me, “Hey, can I talk to you?”
Being in a hurry, I tried out the “keep on truckin’” plan, only to get back a “Hey! I’m talkin’ to you! Don’t you hear me? I’m standin’ right here! You trying to ignore me?!” The rest of my friends kept on a-truckin’, but I was instantly ensnared by this most basic request for interaction — the recognition of another person’s existence. Fifty cents later, I was tearfully informed that she had buried two of her sons, that she was “attending” Columbia, that she just wanted to know everything there was to learn and that one day, she hoped that she could see Europe, especially Paris, but probably never would.
Instantly I felt love, sadness and pity — the only reason I hadn’t been to Paris was because I was too lazy to buy a ticket, and here I was taking in this bum’s home turf, on a holiday. Of course, she was a complete liar, as my native New York friends would later tell me; but, really, does lying about her dreams just to net a handful of pocket change from some passing rube make her situation any better?
Van Morrison is faced with this overwhelming sense of sympathy in “Madame George” on Astral Weeks, where he sings about looking into the face of a downtrodden transvestite hassled by street kids and run off by the cops, and is so taken by his love of this tragic figure that he’s got to take the next train away — it’s just too much for him. “T.B. Sheets” is even worse. Faced with the slow death of his girl, Morrison can’t handle being beside her sickbed any longer. He’ll send her some wine later, he says, turn on the radio, whatever she wants — he’s just gotta get away from there. He can’t fucking take it. When he’s faced with the overpowering love/horror of existence, Morrison can only turn away from it, passionately knowing that he doesn’t know how he should feel.
Bangs’ interpretation is what kept ringing in my brain after my own Madame George experience: “You’ve got to hurt until you feel like a sponge for all those other assholes’ problems, until you feel like an asshole yourself, so you draw all the appropriate lines. You stop feeling. But you know that then you begin to die.” I thought, I can either let the misfortune of others eat away at my existence until I can no longer live for myself, or I can pass right on by, and be one of those fuckers that doesn’t care about anything except themselves. Either way, I’m fucked.
That’s why I finally understand why Morrison’s breathy vocalizations and manic emotion are at their most striking on Astral Weeks and “T.B. Sheets” — because he asks this question, and, like me, he has no answer.