“He awoke to the sound of water
dripping into a rusted sink. The streets below were bathed in medieval
moonlight, reverberating silence. He lay there grappling with the terror of
beauty, as the night unfolded like a Chinese screen. He lay shuddering, riveted
by flickering movements of aliens and angels as the words and melodies of
“Marquee Moon” were formed, drop by drop, note by note, from a state of calm
yet sinister excitement. He was Tom Verlaine, and that was his process:
exquisite torment.
Born Thomas Joseph Miller, raised
in Wilmington, Delaware, he left his parental home and shed his name, a
discarded skin curled in the corner of a modest garage among stacks of used
air-conditioners that required his father’s constant professional attention.
There were hockey sticks and a bicycle and piles of Tom’s old newspapers strewn
in the back, covered with ghostly outlines of distorted objects; he would run
over tin cans until they were flattened, barely recognizable, and then spray
them with gold, his two-dimensional sculptures, each representing a rapturous
musical phrase. In high school, he played the saxophone, embracing and
Albert Ayler. He played hockey, too, and when a flying puck knocked out his
front teeth he was obliged to put away his saxophone and dedicate himself to
the electric guitar.
He lived twenty-eight minutes from
where I was raised. We could easily have sauntered into the same Wawa on the
Wilmington-South Jersey border in search of Yoo-hoo or Tastykakes. We might
have met, two black sheep, on some rural stretch, each carrying books of the
poetry of French Symbolists—but we didn’t. Not until 1973, on East Tenth
Street, across from St. Mark’s Church, where he stopped me and said, “You’re
Smith.” He had long hair, and we clocked each other, both echoing the future,
both wearing clothes they didn’t wear anymore. I noticed the way his long arms
hung, and his equally long and beautiful hands, and then we went our separate
ways. That was, until Easter night, April 14, 1974. Lenny Kaye and I took a
rare taxi ride from the Ziegfeld Theatre after seeing the première of “Ladies
and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones,” straight down to the Bowery to see a new
band called Television.
The club was CBGB. There were only
a handful of people present, but Lenny and I were immediately taken with it,
with its pool table and narrow bar and low stage. What we saw that night was
kin, our future, a perfect merging of poetry and rock and roll. As I watched
Tom play, I thought, Had I been a boy, I would’ve been him.
I went to see Television whenever
they played, mostly to see Tom, with his pale blue eyes and swanlike neck. He
bowed his head, gripping his Jazzmaster, releasing billowing clouds, strange
alleyways populated with tiny men, a murder of crows, and the cries of
bluebirds rushing through a replica of space. All transmuted through his long
fingers, all but strangling the neck of his guitar.
Through the coming weeks, we drew
closer. As we walked the city streets, we would improvise ongoing tales, our
own “Arabian Nights.” We discovered that we both loved the work of the Armenian
American composer Alan Hovhaness, our favorite work being “Prayer of St.
Gregory.” Examining each other’s bookcases, we were amazed to find that our
books were nearly identical, even those by authors difficult to find. Cossery,
Hedayat, Tutuola, Mrabet. We were both independent literary scouts, and we came
to share our secret sources.
He devoured poetry and
dark-chocolate-covered Entenmann’s doughnuts, downed with coffee and cigarettes.
Sometimes he would seem dreamy and faraway then suddenly break into peals of
laughter. He was angelic yet slightly demonic, a cartoon character with the
grace of a dervish. I knew him then. We liked holding hands and spending hours
browsing the shelves of Flying Saucer News and going to Forty-eighth Street and
looking at guitars that he could never afford and riding the Staten Island
Ferry after three sets at CBGB and climbing six flights of stairs to the
apartment on East Eleventh Street and lying together on a mattress gazing at
the ceiling and listening to the rain and hearing something else.
There was no one like Tom. He
possessed the child’s gift of transforming a drop of water into a poem that
somehow begat music. In his last days, he had the selfless support of devoted
friends. Having no children, he welcomed the love he received from my daughter,
Jesse, and my son, Jackson.
In his final hours, watching him
sleep, I travelled backward in time. We were in the apartment, and he cut my
hair, and some pieces stuck out this way and that, so he called me Winghead. In
the years to follow, simply Wing. Even when we got older, always Wing. And he,
the boy who never grew up, aloft the Omega, a golden filament in the vibrant
violet light.”
( Patti Smith, fonte “The
New York Times” )
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