As foretold, I’m laying Tulsa to rest, in the House of the Muses part II. In ass-backwards fashion, ending at the beginning, with Woody Guthrie.
From forty thousand feet, with spotty wifi, writing somewhere between the Redwood forest and the New York island. I’ll take the liberty of conflating those two lines because as you can see, Guthrie altered his own “original copy of this song.”
*All you can write is what you see,
Signs “Woody G.” above, and I see this land was made for you and me. Right below me, en route from Portland to Newark.
I also see the verse:
Was a big high wall there that tried to stop me
A sign was painted said private property
But on the back side it didn’t say nothing…
“This land was made for you and me.”
I can’t possibly do the Woody Guthrie Center justice flying through the ether on United wifi. It’s a house full of pictures—the ones I took, and Woody’s.
A prolific illustrator…
Cartoonist as well…
A portraitist…
An abstract portraitist…
He even scrimshawed a brass artillery shell into a beautiful cartoon woman named Moonbeam, while serving in the Merchant Marine.
An alchemist, turning bloodshed into beauty with anything he could get his hands on.
Every image I upload threatens to crash this endeavor. I should wait til I’m closer to Woody’s NY home at the time, where he wrote “This Land,” and the next song, but this is a portentous flight. Who knows what kind of network to expect in Newark?
One has to improvise and hope for the best along the way.
Without being too fancy about it.
On the walls surrounding “This Land is Your Land,” are the lyrics to “Mermaid Avenue.”
“That’s the street, where the saint and sinners meet.”
Where the hot dog meets the mustard and the bagel meets the lox, the smokefish meets the pretzel, the borscht sounds like the seas, where Mexican hot chili meets chop suey and meatballs sweet. Where the beer flows to ocean, where the wine runs to the sea.
“Mermaid Avenue that’s the street, where all colors of good folks meet.”
The saints and sinners of Coney Island, at the carnival feast. Where Woody never met a mermaid but it sounds like there were plenty of prostitutes.
Where the ocean meets that rockwall
Where the boardwalk meets the beach;
Where the prettiest of the maidulas leave their legprints in that sand
Just beneath our lovesoaked boardwalk…
This land is your land.
Only one problem. That private-property painted wall. There’s bulls along the barbed-wire fence and cops to chase you from the “Sea Gate” to the Gates of Eden.
And old man Trump owns the new neighborhood.
Woody and his “bunch” lived along “old Mermaid’s Avenue in Coney Island” for five years.
“They have been long and they have been hard ones, but every street needs a little song.”
Woody’s “Desolation Row”—“between the windows of the sea, where lovely mermaids flow”… unseen. Except by Bob Dylan. He took plenty of what I found inside Woody Guthrie—the wind, the mermaids, the gates of Eden and more.
So Woody found a new beach haven, after five long hard years on Mermaid, as the plaque explains. Think you’ll recognize the landlord:
Guthrie misspelled things in a hurry as bad as I do:
Woody never really had a home. America was it. He had a hard life. His mother Nora suffered from the Huntington’s disease which would eventually take him, and she had a habit of starting fires and burning things down, including their house. And Woody’s sister, who died as a result of a heated maternal argument. And his father, who was also badly burned.
When the dustbowl struck Okemah, he wandered to the California Eden and Oregon, to Coney Island and Beach Haven, and everywhere in between. Across the seas in the Merchant Marine. Writing and picturing, puncturing brass artillery, leaving his mark and singing.
He wound up at the Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey from 1956-61, his first of three hospital homes, before his eternal rest in 1967 and finally, the Woody Guthrie Center in 2013. Where “people are the song.”
He was “treated” for Huntington’s while Allen Ginsberg’s mother was being lobotomized at the same institute, as I learned from Ginsberg’s own late-life psychiatrist, Stevan Weine, in Tulsa. At the time, New York housed 1/5 of the psychiatric patients in the U.S.
This is where Bob Dylan made his famous pilgrimage to visit his idol in illness.
Woody would’ve been wearing a shirt like this.
His songs “were really beyond category. They had the infinite sweep of humanity in them,” Bob said.
He never let anything get him down. Made art in the psych wards, just like Ginsberg turned his mom’s lobotomy into a Kaddish prayer. Stuck his tongue out at fate.
He had three wives, each more beautiful than the last, but Marjorie, his second, was his true love. I already mentioned it takes a “married man” to sing a worried song, the original lyrics to “It Takes a Worried Man,” in House of the Muses I:
“I’m a worried now, but I won’t be worried long.”
The onset of Woody’s Huntington’s came between them, but Marjorie was with him in the end, at Greystone.
Before Greystone Park, he wandered God’s green earth, fightin’ Fascism and racism, espousing grotesque togetherness wherever he went. A true ecumenical, he practiced a religion long forgotten.
As
published yesterday, in “Humanism: the shortest poem I’ve ever written:People are my steeple.
That about sums Guthrie up. A fellow humanist.
Sherman Alexie’s an indigenous author, now lives in Spokane. Nearly canceled, like Guthrie in his day, in the latter’s case for being a “sympathizer.”
Guthrie wrote three books—novels and autobiographies, the most famous of which is Bound for Glory.
Guess who played Guthrie in the film adaptation? None other than Black Elk Speaks—David Carradine. The man who once played an Indian medicine man in Tulsa for the American Indian Theatre Company (read here). And a lotta kung-fu characters. (He was mostly Irish.)
I guess what I’m saying is I got myself a sort of one-man religion. I practice a faith long forgotten. Not matter who you are, you’re in it, and no matter what, you can’t get out of it.
My profile says “Church of Horticulture and the Humanities.” I’ll explain the gardening later, in case you haven’t figured out the Death and Vegetables part already. But here’s the man who once said “Elvis never meant shit to me,” then changed his mind, signing something for Woody Guthrie.
And here’s my best intentions, in the words of an Okie.
There’s so much to say about any one man or woman. We all contain multitudes, and Guthrie’s got a galaxy of those. But it t’were all one in the end.
I’m tired and now I’m crossing Atlantis, trying to hold up. Past the New York island. God willing and the creeks don’t rise, if they have wifi in Italy and I can find myself an electrical outlet adapter in time to edit—I’ll beat you to Friday by a mile if I’m lucky.
Except for you, Subscriber in India. Where the hell’d you come from? The world turns East, and I’m a-headed in your direction.
Selah, sail on, and good night.
“Take it easy, but take it.”
—Woody G.