If You Really Want Change
If you really want change, find one good thing you once were; become it again, and never let go. As the boy has the habit of saying about many things: change sucks. That's the one true thing they won't ever tell you, but deep down you know is true. They want to convince you that you haven't done it enough. Let me tell you something. The mere fact that you might consider change to be something good unto itself is symptomatic of a deep confusion caused from doing too damn much of it. My generation had to do plenty of changing, but it would never have occurred to us that it was something good onto itself. Change is a trauma to what is good in our life, not its source.
Like I have said before, a good liar has to know the truth, but what I didn't say about a lie is just as important: to succeed at a lie you must know the truth, but that is only true of the teller of the lie. For a lie to truly succeed it is just as important that the recipient either not know the truth or at the very least be confused about it. All this talk about the wonders of change tells me there is a lot of confusion out there in the hands of some fine liars.
In our past souls, Americans were capable of being a great people. When you looked at all of us, it looked like we were always becoming something different from what we were. When you looked at one of us, you saw that person becoming one good thing that person was to begin with. To confuse what we all looked like for what each brought to that whole to make it what it became is a deep confusion. Oh, I know. One is either an agent of change, or one is a Republican. I've got news for you; I am neither. I am in love with what it means to be an American. I hear the cornet of Louis Armstrong; I see the jive shuffle of Bert Williams; I think of the scientists John Bardeen, William Shoakley, and Walter Brattain who gave us the transistor back in '47. Each one was a great agent of change because once they found the good voice in themselves they were beyond change. And that is the real key to a good life: to get to some good place where you are beyond change.
It is not an easy thing to know the one good thing, and sometimes you can know it and end up allowing every other thing to get in its way. I always assumed that to play the cornet was my one good thing. After my father died in '29 and my mother and I returned to the house we owned but rarely lived in, I could barely tolerate the life that my mother settled into. For her it was the one good thing that Vaudeville could never have provided. After having tutors all my life I found myself in public school with a wondrous collection of morons. They would grow into some fine people that I would spend my life with and a life I don't regret a minute of, but back then their one good achievement was avoiding sticking their thumbs up their collective asses.
So thinking I knew better I decided one night to borrow this stranger's automobile and head up to Amherst to hear some good jazz by some folks I had met back in better days, and managed to find myself spending a something over a year in an institution called the Lyman School in Worcester. The only reason I didn't spend longer there was the fact that I heard New York calling and decided to depart in the middle of the night without benefit of goodbyes to those "fine" folks.
Now I thought I was going there to play my cornet with Muggsey, The Mezz, Benny, and Eddie that I had met a number of times back during our engagements in Chicago. It was Benny Goodman who was the source of my first gig playing in a pit band for a show called Girl Crazy at the Alvin Theater with the likes of Jack Teargarden, Glenn Miller, and Gene Krupa all before any of them were known outside the business. He would also get me into a couple of recording dates with Ted Lewis. This was all back in early '31. New York was cold but I and the guys pulled in enough of money that we lived OK.
So here's the thing. I thought I was going down there to be a great cornet player, but that kind of greatness isn't in all of us. I was still a teenager and as Benny told me when filling out the union application, when they ask your age, all they want to know is that you know the correct answer, my age was sixteen but the correct answer was eighteen. Put the correct answer down and everything will be fine. The correct answer had a way of always becoming something other than paying attention to my horn that I could play well enough. When your young you sometimes don't see all that much distinction between being good and feeling good. I was great at feeling good and being good could wait. There was a whole decade between that arrival and the war and the war and the hop houses and the hop houses and meeting my Maggie again when I slowly learned under the watchful eyes of the sisters of saint joseph as a janitor back home what the one good thing for me was going to be.
I am an old man now, and probably shouldn't be preaching. I certainly never paid any attention to anyone else who thought they were good at it before my time came. All change hurts someone. It all comes down to what we think we need in this life. No one can do it for you. Decide on the one good thing that will never change, and all the rest of the change will take care of itself.
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