Having been thrown clear of the car upon impact, I floated down towards the
Pacific Ocean which was rushing up at me due to the accelerating nature of
gravity. My girlfriend, Gloria, yelled something to me as she hurtled passed
to my left clutching the dazed goat, amid a shower of windshield shards. I
think it was a continuation of the conversation we were having just before
we struck the goat and careened into the retaining wall only to move on
through the windshield — I clearly remember thinking how surprising it was
to learn that, in addition to her penchant for provocative clothing, Gloria
possessed such extraordinary powers of concentration and this almost
childlike curiosity. You see, we had been deep in a discussion of Jack
Murphy’s new album and how unsettlingly eclectic, haphazard in fact, the
songs are — my position, not Gloria’s. She maintains there is a sort of
mystical connection that binds the disparate elements together, charming the
ear into hearing continuity and the heart into embracing the notion that
some sort of an actual belief system informs the lyrics. "They all kinda
sound the same in a true way," was what she actually said. Right before the
goat wandered in front of the car, I screamed at her, "It’s all a cheap
trick, can’t you see that?" She did not see that. I did not see the goat. At
about two hundred feet above the quickly approaching waves Gloria’s question
reached my ears with unexpected clarity: "He wrote good stuff with Frank
Wildhorn, didn’t he? All those Linda Eder songs … they were good weren’t
they?" The rest of Gloria’s declarations were intermittent due to the high
winds, sounding like a radio with a bad tuner — "Tony nomination … record
alb … Fillmore East … all can’t … cheap trick!"

   When Gloria and I awoke in the cheesy hotel room we had rented below 26th
Street somewhere in Chelsea, the goat was not there. I looked around. The
bathtub had overflowed and there was water all over the floor an inch deep,
but there was no goat. Oh, how I missed the goat who, at least in my drunken
disjointed dreams, represented some sort of touchstone for musical truth,
instead of the main course at the Middle Eastern restaurant where we had
dined the night before, awash in Oozo. We turned off the water, emptied the
tub, began mopping up, and continued discussing Murphy’s album, Live and
Learn.

   The title song was one that we both agreed had merit. However, I felt it’s
unbridled optimism was out of character with Murphy’s fundamentally dark
world-view. Gloria thought it had a good beat and said it gave her
"marionette feet." The Picture Show was so obviously inspired by Cinema
Paradiso that I thought an infringement of copyright lawsuit couldn’t be
more than a goat or two away. It was then that I found out that in addition
to her penchant for provocative costumes, her powers of concentration and
childlike curiosity, Gloria was also a paralegal. She informed me that a
lawsuit was unlikely due to the murky nature of copyright law. She smiled
and said she liked movies a lot and could we please get some more Oozo? A
bit early, but all in all not a bad idea.

    We checked out. The clerk at the front desk eyed us suspiciously but
said nothing as I offered him my Discover Card — the only one that had not
yet been confiscated due to the slowness of the computers used by Sears. I
felt the need to say something haughty to cover my embarrassment about our
wet shoes squishing shadowy footprints on his faded carpet and the fact that
we had no matching luggage, but I couldn’t think of anything. Gloria,
sensing my predicament, tossed her head back like Bette Davis and spat out
"What a dump!"

   We hit the street. Finding Oozo at nine in the morning can be problematic so
after some debate, we settled for a six-pack of Budweiser from a bodega on
eighteenth and sixth. This was when we explored the "fall songs" as I refer
to them. It seems so obvious when one looks at the titles on the album
dispassionately: Katey Fell … If I Fall — same verb, different tense — as if
Murphy’s imagination was defeated immediately after plagiarizing the idea
for The Picture Show. Both of the "fall songs" deal with the uncertainty of
romance, but the second is far more adolescently full of hope. Katey Fell,
on the other hand, encourages the listener to jaded pessimism — a knowing
wag of the head, a rueful smile — until the last couplet rescues the heart.
Shameless sentimentality. Gloria said it made her "so angry to think that
Katey was gonna make the same awful mistakes she always made, falling for
the same transparent lies from the same shallow losers—" she stopped
suddenly, suspecting that an autobiographical tone had crept into her voice.
Gloria popped open another Budweiser and we continued on towards Greenwich
Village where we had parked the rented Geo Metro the night before.
What can one say about Holiday? Maracas, puffy sleeves, swaying palm trees …
you’ve got a lot of splaining to do Mr. Murphy. Gloria simply squealed,
grabbed her right elbow with her left hand, threw her head full of pink hair
back and did a series of mambo-like pirouettes before becoming too dizzy to
continue.

    We found the car on Bleeker and Lafayette as it was being hooked up to a
Police tow truck. My pleadings and protestations notwithstanding, the Geo
Metro was impounded. They said it was going to some place in Brooklyn.
Gloria and I sat on the curb in the space formerly occupied by the rented
car. Brooklyn was out of the question, so I borrowed Gloria’s cell phone and
called the car rental agency to inform them of the car’s whereabouts. They
seemed very upset.

    Sitting there — head in hands, asses on the curb and feet in the gutter —
Gloria and I looked like the personification of the last four songs on
Murphy’s album, known collectively as The Black Oxen Suite. All of these
songs smack of rear-view mirrors and reverse gears, casting about in an
effort to see how our lives lead us to where we wind up. As far as I’m
concerned this is true Murphy territory: lonely, bleak, longing for a
redemption he suspects will never be found:

   "The years like great black oxen tread the world
And god the headsman goads them from behind.”   —Yeats, 1913

   Gloria’s analysis was somewhat different. "Under The Shelter Of Youth has a
really cool middle part and I like the Background Ooos on Forever Young.
Everything Comes and Goes is pretty just like Jack’s wife, but Hurricane
creeps me out a little."

   Upon reflection — the house in Simi Valley, Marjorie and the kids,
my relationship with Gloria and the subsequent bankruptcy and divorce, the
trip east, the fitful dreams, the goat, the flood, the rented car — I
decided to discard my surname and continue running east.

                                                            — Jimmy The Gent, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 2003