Monday, December 30, 2013

A Winter's Tale and a Happy New Year


Just a brief post this time, since I'm allegedly busy working on all sorts of stuff. But I wanted to let you know that my short story, "The Ambiguities," is featured this week on the excellent podcast site, Tales to Terrify. If you're reading this after the week it's been posted, the site has an extensive and rewarding archive. As usual, they have done a beautiful job with the reading and presentation. I can't ask for more.

Well, maybe I can ask for more. This story, and the novelette "Surfaces" that Tales to Terrify featured on another podcast a while back, are available in a Kindle e-book, Surfaces . . . and Symbols, available here.

"The Ambiguities" works for this time of year. It's set in the winter, during a snowstorm, and the narrator is trying to make a flight to California. Her local airport in Madison is closed. The airport in Milwaukee is closed. She gets on a Greyhound to head down to O'Hare, and that's where things get interesting. I'm looking out the window now and the snow is falling. The temperature is dropping. What better time to listen to (or read) a tale of peril set out on the linear wasteland of I-94?

I'm a lousy salesman. This year, with three mini e-books out, I have managed to make just under ten dollars, which is to say I am not about to become the Charles Foster Kane of e-publishing. So be it. I know that, in this Brave New World, all us writers are supposed to become salespeople and marketing whizzes and two-faced, glad-handing self promoters. 

If I were that good at those tasks, I probably wouldn't be writing.

Let's put it this way: I am one of those persons for whom it is hard enough simply to be a good writer. I'll be happy to settle for that, if I can.

A new year will be starting soon. I wish you all the best. 2013 has been an interesting year for me. It's had its moments, though I can't say I'll be sorry to see it go. I have novel to finish, a couple of novellas and a couple of short stories. And if I can sell 'em in 2014 I'll be a lot merrier a year from now than I am now.

In spite of my grumping, I remain hopeful. The beautiful thing about hope is that it doesn't cost a dime. It's all that other junk that's expensive. Hope is about the only thing left I can afford.

May the new year ambush us with joy and amaze us with sympathy.




Sunday, December 8, 2013

Books that stuck . . .

Recently, on Facebook, folks have been passing around a post about “books that have stuck with you,” or some such wording. I usually don’t respond to requests that require me to post my list then tag a bunch of friends. I don’t like to bother friends with stuff like that. Friends usually have enough to keep them busy. Most of my friends are writers, artists – people who have to keep busy to keep going. Also, a lot of these Facebook requests require to rate your “favorites,” or something you think is best, or better than something else. I don’t like ranking books or movies or songs – I keep things fluid in that regard.
But John Carl, I believe, tagged me in particular, and since part of the directions were that I don’t give the selections that much thought (“fifteen books in fifteen minutes”), I quickly came up with a list of books I remember and that have become part of my consciousness. The books are me and I am the books.
Even when you give something “little thought,” thoughts take a lot longer to play through. I listed the books, and the list generated discussion, and the discussion generated more discussion.
A book that has stayed – or “stuck” – with me. Did it mean a book I read in my youth, or just any book I’ve encountered over the years? Some of my earliest memories are of exploring books, going through the pages, whether I could read them or not. From age three on, I was poking around in books.
There were lots of books whose titles I don’t remember – just picture books. If I don’t remember the titles, did they stick with me? Well…
My dad made a bookcase. A long one, with two shelves. Plenty of books on there, but with the exception of some Reader’s Digest omnibus collections of condensed books, some cookbooks and a ten- or eleven-volume thing that was a sort of children’s encyclopedia, I think it was called the “Childcraft Library,” the books were all in Polish. It didn’t matter much at the time, since I could read neither Polish nor English. I didn’t read so much as sense the presence of words. And I also sensed that there was something important about these things, these “books.” If they weren’t important, why would someone build a case to hold them?
There was book of illustrated bible stories. I think it came out from Golden Books. I remember in particular an illustration for the David and Goliath tale – a marvel to me for depicting a decapitated giant without resorting to blood and gore. The artist posed the body of Goliath in such a way that his body reclined over a downward turn in the terrain. Further back, David walked away, holding high Goliath’s head. His posture and expression seemed quite triumphant. I wondered over that picture for a long time and on many occasions. I think I wondered why he so triumphant, walking away with a head that was of no earthly good to him. I mean, why not just leave it there next to the body? Was he going to get some sort of prize for bringing the head back? Was he going to have it stuffed and hang it on his wall? I couldn’t guess. Bible stories were like that. They made no sense to me, and yet they were apparently very important to grownups and older kids. I think I was less interested in the stories themselves than in the fact that people found those stories so important. Adam and Eve, Noah, Moses – Moses had to be important; they had made a whole movie about him, and about the ten commandments. God split the sea in half, made pillars of fire, sent lightning down to smash golden idols. They didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but visually they were fascinating.
The most I could make out about God, though, was that “He” had a really bad temper.
Of the Polish books, I found out later that one impressive set of volumes – in uniform size and binding – were the works of Henryk Sienkiewicz and the epic poem Pan Tadeusz. My parents revered these works, but they never read them, not where I could see them. Of course, they read them when they were children, remembered them vividly, and both my parents could quote passages from Pan Tadeusz.
You might think I’d have learned more Polish from my parents, but I didn’t. I think my parents were sorely divided on the subject of teaching my brother and I Polish. On the one they, they wanted us to learn the language of our heritage. On the other, when they spoke in Polish they knew we wouldn’t understand them. They had their own language – the secret language of adults. In the end, I think, the most I learned of Polish were the basic Catholic prayers, the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary. My mother typed them out, in Polish, and taped them on the wall of our bedroom, just above the nightstand and below the crucifix that hung above it.
I do remember my dad reading to my brother and me a children’s edition of Robinson Crusoe. I vividly remember his reading of the scene where Crusoe comes upon the footprint in the sand, his placing his foot within it and discovering that it did not fit his own foot, that there must be someone else occupying the island. At this time, I won’t place too much significance on my remembering that scene, although I can. It is fraught with significance. But I will say that it impressed me because of its vividness – words making a picture in my imagination – and because the scene illustrated a basic sort of deduction – reality could be tested and examined. I needed to test reality because my home life did not resemble the “normal” world I encountered by watching television, or observing the behavior of the other kids in the neighborhood. The world of home and the “normal” world did not match up. I just couldn’t figure it out.
Another bunch of books that have stayed with me: no, not comic books; that’s a whole other story. It was a stack of paperbound books that sat in the lower right corner of the bookcase. Not “shelved” – stacked. They weren’t like American paperbacks. They were what we call now “trade”-sized paperbacks. No illustrations on the cover; no blurbs. The paper was cheap and thin and smelled with a distinct “non-American” scent. The covers weren’t even made of paperboard, just a slightly heavier grade of paper. The covers, titles, texts – all in Polish.
They did, however, have pictures.
There were pictures of soldiers in uniforms. They were pictures of soldiers holding guns. There were pictures of big cannons, of bombers flying overhead, of demolished cities.
Pictures of war.
I understood war in terms of action and activity – shooting, fighting, bombing. Kinesis. Motion. It was fascinating.  Have to admit it was fascinating. I’d seen some war movies on TV and I think my folks took me to see Pork Chop Hill, Ski Troop Attack – a few other war movies. War was in the movies, and I don’t think it could really be avoided. War was reality, or so it seemed. My parents both lived through the Second War War. My father lived in Lublin during the occupation. Nearly all his friends had died by 1945. My grandfather served in the Polish Army and nearly ended up as one of the officers executed by the Soviets in the Katyn Forest – though I didn’t learn that last fact for years. My mother went to school in Scotland after she, her mother and her sister nearly circumnavigated Europe to escape the Nazis.
Which is to say, there was some talk about “the war” in the household. Not a lot of talk. But talk of the war could not be avoided.
So these pictures of the war fascinated me. Unlike what I saw in the movies, they were “real.” It wasn’t the sort of sharp, well-lighted, “pretty" photography that an American cinematographer could perform. They were black and white – and gray. Gray upon gray. Everything gray. The images were often grainy and muddy, the sun too bright, the shadows too deep. I was a kid, but I could sense the authenticity of these images.
Then I reached the last pages of the book.
These were photos taken in the concentration camps.
Remember, I wasn’t much older than four, and I was looking at photographs of bodies – human bodies, naked bodies, bodies so starved you could make out the ribs, the knobby joints of every limb, the skin tightened against every cheekbone, the eyes fallen into the hollow recesses of their skulls. Dead eyes, hollow mouths, twisted teeth, wide open nostrils.
Bodies stacked in brick niches next to what I later discovered were oven doors. Bodies piled on little carts, stacked high – higher than you could imagine a cart so rickety and primitive could bear.
I stared at those photographs as much as I stared at the ones of all the military hardware and the uniformed combatants “doing their jobs.”
I stared at them more. And when I stopped staring I could still see them.
To a four-year-old, war makes a sort of sense. Not a “good” sense. An insane, twisted sense – it’s still a sense. A bunch of guys on one side shoot a bunch of guys on the other side. The other guys shoot back. Somebody “wins,” the way you win a ball game, or a game of checkers. That’s what it seemed like. And World War Two “made sense” in that “we” were fighting some very, very bad guys. Even for a kid, there was no way to mistake Hitler for George Washington – no way to mistake David for Goliath.
But those photos from the camps –
I will not pretend to understand them. I will not pretend to have derived lessons from them. I can’t say that I felt that what happened, what the pictures documented, was evil, because the placing of meaning to words and images is a complicated thing, and I was just too young to comprehend anything so big.
All I knew was that it was awful, it was terrifying, and I was frightened.
It was out there. The war was over, clearly enough. We were living in Chicago, in America, and everything was “all right” now, wasn’t it?
At least that’s what my parents tried to tell me, when I asked them about the pictures.
Nevertheless, it was out there. Whatever made what I saw in those photos a reality could still be out there.
Could.
I knew nothing about history as history. The difference between what was, what is, and what will be was too much for a four-year-old imagination.
It’s probably too much for a fifty-eight-year-old imagination, still remembering the afternoon I came upon that stack of books, in my dad’s den, in the bottom right corner of the bookcase.
So that book, whose name I don’t remember, whose words I couldn’t read, but whose pictures I could see, and did see – that’s the book that has probably stayed with me the longest and has had the most profound effect on whoever it is I have turned out to be.

+                          +                          +

For the record, though, this is the first list I came up with:
1. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
2. The Man With the Purple Eyes by Charlotte Zolotow
3. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
4. Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
5. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
6. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
7. Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov
8. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
9. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
10. Who? by Algis Budrys
11. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
12. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
13. A Walk on the Wild Side by Nelson Algren
14. Native Son by Richard Wright
15. Less Than Angels by Barbara Pym

After some discussion, I added these (I was on a roll): What Is Cinema? by Andre Bazin: The Parade's Gone By by Kevin Brownlow; The Instrumentality of Mankind by Cordwainer Smith; The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy by Ernst Cassirer; The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer; Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges; The Professor's House by Willa Cather; A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor; The Confidence Man by Herman Melville.
And after some more discussion, I added three more books from my misspent youth that have stayed with me: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut; Revenge of the Lawn by Richard Brautigan; Journey Beyond Tomorrow (aka The Journey of Joenes) by Robert Sheckley.
And yet three more: Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me by Richard Farina, which I read in one sitting and drove me nuts because I could not accept what the fictional character of Gnossos does at the end of the story; a book that wasn’t very good (by my standards, whatever they are) but that I also finished in one sitting: The Butterfly Revolution by William Butler; and I would be remiss not to mention Against Our Will by Susan Brownmiller, who had the courage almost forty years ago to say what some folks still find difficult to acknowledge today.
Poetry? Like comics, that’s a whole ’nother story that would fill another entry at least as long as this.

And you will notice not one inclusion of a book about (or by) dinosaurs. Again, dinosaurs deserve their own sweet, generous chapter. Ask me no more questions and I will tell you no lies.


Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Getting Stuck on “The Button”

This is an afterword I wrote about my short story, "The Button," which will appear in another little e-book I'm putting together, Through the Brightening Air. The e-book will also contain the poem "Red Lion in Winter" and "Last One Close the Door." What with the Red Lion building finally being torn down, and the passing of Andrea Dubnick, this has all become much more contemporary than I thought it would be when I started.

 
I first conceived of “The Button” as a kind of performance piece disguised as a short story. It came to me on one of those rainy, foggy nights depicted in the beginning of the story. The idea, as I saw it, was to tell a story that in some way encompasses the venue, The Red Lion Pub, as well as some of my own personal memories of hanging around and about on that stretch of Lincoln Avenue in 1969 and the early 1970s. It was to be like a ghost story you tell when you’re in an old place with a haunted history. And at the end of the story, you throw in a line like, “And sometimes, on certain nights, you can still see the Headless Brakeman, swinging his lantern, whistling in the pelting rain … ” Then someone way back in the room starts to whistle, and everyone screams.

At least that was the idea.

I wrote the story in haste, trying to complete it for a reading I was scheduled to do at the Red Lion – the scene of the crime, so to say. I grew up with the Twilight Tales reading series, up on the second floor of the pub. Twilight Tales and I go back a long way. That was where I first read “The Measure of All Things.” It was down in the bar where Marty Mundt said to me, “You know, that character, Axel, the dinosaur who won’t stop saying, ‘Hiya!’ – you should do something more with that character.” I had already been thinking of writing another saur story, with Axel at the center.

Andrea Dubnick and Tina Jens, the two movers-and-shakers that made Twilight Tales move-and-shake in those days, also encouraged me to write more about the saurs, Axel in particular. They went to the extent of greeting me with “Hiya!” every time they saw me.

Tina still does.

Marty’s enthusiasm sealed the deal. I wrote “Bronte’s Egg,” and then “In Tibor’s Cardboard Castle,” and I even got a lick in of “Orfy” as a work in progress on two occasions before the pub closed its doors in 2007.

The reading series had incredible staying power, especially for all the years (over a decade, if I’m not mistaken) it was held at the Red Lion. Tina Jens and her many minions worked hard to keep it going. Many readers of top caliber read there: Gene Wolfe and Algis Budrys at the top of that list, at least for me. Many writers got their start there, not only learning how to fine-tune their writing but how to fine-tune their reading of their writing.

We learned to play the room.

I’ve seen big-time writers, Hugo winners, read into their pockets with muttering, racing voices, like a reading was an endurance race. At Twilight Tales, you had an audience, and you learned to read to them. Some nights the audience was tiny. Some nights they filled the second floor all the way back to the upstairs bar.

On summer nights there was the patio in the back, with the big tree that grew right through the floorboards. According to Twilight Tales’ own book, Tales From the Red Lion, in some background contributed by writer/director/all-around-talent Lawrence Santoro, it was under that tree that Chicago’s Shakespeare Rep Company got their start with a production of The Tempest. With the right set of readers on the right night, that patio would be filled as well.

I read at all those incarnations and set-ups upstairs at the Red Lion. The ones I liked best were inside, with the “stage” set against a group of windows in the back of the place. The audience would sit at tables in the room. Someone would screw a high-power light into the ceiling to help the reader be seen (and for the reader to see what she or he was reading). If you were reading, looking straight out into the audience, to your right would be the wall that came against the wall of the building next door – 2440 North Lincoln Avenue. The same building mentioned in “The Button.”

Several times I wondered if, in a world if infinite possibilities, it would be possible to commingle the ghosts of the building next door with the ghosts of the Red Lion.

Yes, the Red Lion had a great history of being haunted, and people I knew who would never confess to a belief in ghosts (and what does it mean to “believe” in ghosts anyway?) said they experienced very odd, strange disturbing feelings and sensations up on that second floor. You can read more about it in Tales From the Red Lion. What’s important is that I knew about the ghosts – everyone knew about the ghosts, alleged or real.

Mate this knowledge with the crazy idea that ghosts may be our experiences of time travelers, and you see what I might have been getting at with “The Button.”

 

When one works at the “art” of fiction, one sometimes wonders if it’s possible to break the wall between fiction and non-fiction that doesn’t fit the simple category of “lies.” We get plenty of examples of the latter every day in our media: in advertising, in advertising that tries to pass itself off as journalism, in corporate communications, in marketing – you know the drill.

It’s something else I’m talking about, something more akin to alchemy. It doesn’t call for the “willing suspension of disbelief,” but for the willing suspension of the rules of reality – or the suggestion of it. The idea, figuratively or literally, is to make a story that becomes real – or at least “real,” or in Philip Dick’s terminology, “apparently real.” When one thinks of it that way it seems Borgesian – “The Circular Ruins” revisited.

In other words, I wanted to see if I could make myself, and an audience, hear Rad Tate and Gideon Faust kick out the jams next door.

Well, I had my chance, and I blew it.

I had the venue. I had the gig. I had the story – mostly.

It was all in my head, and I wrote at a furious pace to make the deadline.

At the last minute, when I tried to print the story, it wouldn’t print. The document got locked up. I tried to retrieve the raw copy from the document and transfer it to an email, which I could send to my office and print out there.

It wouldn’t print out there. The email wouldn’t even open.

Every effort I made to retrieve and transfer my story hit a brick wall, lined with concrete and reinforced with titanium.

The thought occurred to me that I shouldn’t try to read the story, but tell it – I said I wanted it to be like a performance piece after all.

I chickened out. I read an awful piece I cobbled together at the last minute because I didn’t want to read anything I’d already read there. More’s the pity. The crowd was right. The moment was right. Even the weather was right – it was a tad chilly, and damp, and foggy, just like the weather described in “The Button.”

But I wasn’t ready to push myself and to trust myself to do the job of being a storyteller.

There was a thing I used to tell my short story students when they seemed to be caught and struggling in the mechanics of language and structure and their own expectations of what they should do: I’d say, or scribble on the board, or on their handed-in assignments, “Trust the story.” In other words, let the story lead the way; you follow.

Alas, I couldn’t follow my own advice that night, and I crashed. Crashed and burned.

It would be simple, and simplistic, to blame it on the ghosts.

You can always blame it on the ghosts.

It took me a while to return to the story. When I heard that Tina Jens was planning a new edition of Tales From the Red Lion, I told myself that this was the moment to get it down – to “do the thing” I hadn’t been able to complete before. I started the story from scratch, since I had nothing more than the notes I’d salvaged from my preliminary work. I made the deadline, and what you read here are the results of my walk down Lincoln Avenue one chilly, foggy night, when I thought I could see the rotating beacon atop the “Playboy Building” (as it was known in 1969), and I felt all the places that once stood on the street still stood there. Past and present and future were all there, intermingled.

 

I write this in the autumn of 2013. Since I first conceived the story, more of what I remember from days past has disappeared – physically.

A month or two ago, the building that housed the Red Lion was finally torn down. My friend, the author Wayne Allen Sallee, posted the photos he took of the hole in the ground where the Red Lion once stood.

Last month, Andrea Dubnick, who hosted many evenings of the Twilight Tales reading series and edited so many of the chapbooks that came out of that series, passed away.

And Delphyne Woods, a person who embodied “The Sixties” more than anyone else I ever knew, was found dead in her apartment in September. And she may have been dead for more than a week before she was discovered.

We live in a world of ghosts, but there’s nothing to be afraid of. Sometimes we meet the ghosts and sometimes the ghosts meet us.

And sometimes we are the ghosts.

 

Oh yes, one more thing – about that button.

The button referred to in the story was one with the fist drawn and designed by Frank Cieciorka. It was a pen and ink line drawing, or a woodcut, very bold and very distinct. Google the name and you’ll find an image. It’s iconic. Mr. Cieciorka, alas, died in 2008, another ghost in a world of ghosts.

Like the narrator of the story, I bought that button in the little head shop that resided in the same building that later became the Red Lion. That button got me into a lot of trouble. I had an Algebra teacher who was a fanatical Christian, who demanded I take the button off in her class.

And at the event at the Aragon on December 29, 1969, mentioned in the story, I had to chase that button down. A guy I met had taken it off my shirt and, after inspecting it, put it on his own shirt and headed out of the ballroom. A joke. Hah-hah. I could have let him walk away with it (hey, weren’t we not supposed to be into possessions, then?), but I didn’t. I wasn’t sure why, but I liked that button and I knew it was important that I retrieve it from the casual acquaintance (who was probably one of those Joe Cool jerks, so impressed with his own slickness, he thought he could walk around and take what he wanted – a carte blanche socialist. In those days, in Chicago, most socialists were carte blanche socialists, I soon discovered).

Later, I put the button on my guitar strap, along with a dozen other buttons I’d gathered over the heyday (What Panther, Black Panther, Yippie!, the omega, the peace sign, a shiny little bug-shaped button that resembled a roach. The button stayed put for over thirty-five years, but I took it off the guitar strap when I wanted to use it as a prop for my reading/performance piece.

Almost immediately, I lost it.

It slipped it into a pocket, or under a stack of junk. It re-emerged after my fiasco at the Red Lion and since then I have lost it and rediscovered it several times.

It used to worry me – losing my “time machine,” but I don’t worry much about it anymore. It’s a time machine, as I said, and as such it’s probably getting around, returning to the scene of many crimes and a few triumphs. And wherever it’s gone to, it’s probably having some amazing adventures. But I have no doubt I’ll see it again.

It’s probably not true to say that nothing is ever lost, or that nothing ever completely goes away, but I can’t quite give up the old habit of hoping. The button is in the world – hope is alive.

Thank you, Frank Cieciorka. Thank you, Andrea. Thank you, Delphyne.

Thank you all.

Monday, October 28, 2013

Everything’s gone but this song (from "The Va-va-va- VOOM!" novel in progress)

Yesterday, I drove past the grand old building on the northwest corner of 63rd Street and Central Avenue. It's being prepared for demolition. It has stood in the same spot for over eighty years and now, for some reason, it's a hindrance to air traffic for the neighboring Midway Airport. Anyone who can't smell a scam about this deal must be having nosebleeds.

I bought comic books -- and monster magazines, and writers' magazines and paperbacks -- in the corner drugstore of that building. "Central Rexall Drugs." I had crushes on two of the cashiers. I bought my first Castle of Frankenstein there (and, as you all know, everything I ever needed to know I learned from Castle of Frankenstein). Steve Ditko. "Charlton Comics Give You More!" Turok Son of Stone. Magnus, Robot Fighter. Jim Steranko. Jim Steranko. JIM STERANKO!!! Monster Mania. Modern Monsters. Ray Bradbury . . .

Another personal landmark is about to go down.

What was the name of that book about Richard Nickel, the photographer who tried to save the legacy of Chicago's great architects, like Louis Sullvan? -- They All Fall Down.

So, with the imminent death of one of my favorite old hangouts, and the inundation of news about deaths near and far (Andrea Dubnick, Delphyne Woods, Fred Pohl, Lou Reed, Marcia Wallace . . . how many more?) the song below has been on my mind.

It comes from the world of my novel, The Va-va-va VOOM! It's not a spoiler (not a big one, at least) to say that this is the second song Cath (the narrator) wrote for Rad Tate and his band, The Knuckles. The song credit goes to Gideon Faust and "C. Ulaszek" (perhaps because Rad still believed that "Chicks can't write rock and roll!" -- a comment that triggered the first set of lyrics Cath wrote for the band, the title of which is where the novel takes its name). Rad Tate: vocals; Gideon Faust: lead guitar; Curtis Klucynski: rhythm guitar; Marlon Woodson: bass (the GOOD bass player!); Donnie Callahan: drums. Dutifully transcribed from the version only available on a Dutch compilation CD, long out of print -- at least in this universe. Please note: this music is coming out of cheap guitars and big amps, at a tempo that would get you a speeding ticket even in Montana.

Yeah, I know: everything goes. Then you move on. Get over it. But first . . .



EVERYTHING’S GONE BUT THIS SONG

E
Been around | Seen it all
E
Saw when they built it and I saw it fall.
A
Big world | Falling apart
E
Won’t be much left than when it all got start.
 

E                           B
’Cause it’s gone,
B                      A
Baby it’s gone,
A                    B                          A
It’s all gone, gone, it’s all gone
A                             G                                E         B
Everything’s gone but this song.
 

E
We had | A movie show
E
A little drugstore with a wooden floor.
A
We had | A corner tap
E
An all-night diner and all sort of crap
 

E                    B
But it’s gone,
B                      A
Baby it’s gone,
A                    B                          A
It’s all gone, gone, it’s all gone
A                             G                                E         B
Everything’s gone but this song.
 

E
It’s gone | It’s all gone.
E
May stick around a while but not for long.
A
It’s gone | Everything’s gone.
E
I never said if it was right or wrong.
E                           B
But it’s gone,
B                      A
Baby it’s gone,
A                    B                          A
It’s all gone, gone, it’s all gone
A                             G                               E          B
Everything’s gone but this song.
 

E
My friends | Were pretty cool
E
We’d hang around a lot right after school.
A
In the garage | Or down on the street
E
We made a mess of every place we’d meet.
 

E                           B
But they’re gone,
B                      A
Baby they’re gone,
A                    B                                 A
They’re all gone, gone, they’re all gone
A                             G                                E         B
Everyone’s gone in this song.
 

E
My chick | Was pretty slick
E
Met at the bar and got it on pretty quick.
A
Made love | Every day
E
We kept on ballin’ ’til they took her away.
 

E                    B
Now she’s gone,
B                      A
Baby she’s gone,
A                    B                            A
She’s all done, done, she’s all done
A                             G                                E         B
Everyone’s done but this one.
 

E
It’s gone | It’s all gone.
E
May stick around a while but not for long.
A
It’s gone | Everything’s gone.
E
I never said if it was right or wrong.
E                    B
But it’s gone,
B                      A
Baby it’s gone,
A                    B                          A
It’s all gone, gone, it’s all gone
A                             G                               E          B
Everything’s gone but this song.
 

E
Went to work | At a couple of jobs
E
In some old fact’ry for a couple of slobs
A
Lousy work | Lousier pay
E
Didn’t miss it when it all went away.
 

E                           B
Now they’re gone,
B                      A
Baby they’re gone,
A                                   B                         A
The work’s all gone, gone, it’s all gone
A                             G                                E         B
Everything’s gone but this song.
 

E
Who gives a fuck?  | Who gives a damn?
E
Your old man’s dying and your mom’s in a jam.
A
Your stupid sorrow and | Your stupid pain
E
Just watch it all going down the drain.
 

E                                  B
’Cause they’re gone
B                           A
They’re all gone
A                                          B                          A
The whole thing’s done, done, it’s all gone
A                         G                                    E         B
Everyone’s gone in this song.
 

E
Big world | What is it for?
E
We stick around until they show you the door.
A
We’re gone | Everyone’s dead
E
You didn’t hear a word that I just said
 

E                                B
’Cause you’re gone,
B                           A
Baby you’re gone,
A                         B
You’re all gone, gone, you’re all gone
A                             G                                E         B
Everyone’s gone in this song.
 

E
I’m gone | You’re gone too
E
Nobody knows us and you know that’s true.
A
We’re gone | We’re all gone
E
The only thing that’s left’s this fuckin’ song.
 

E                             B
’Cause we’re gone,
B                         A
Baby we’re gone,
A                       B
We’re all gone, gone, we’re all gone
A                         G                                E            B
Everyone’s gone but this song.
 

E
It’s gone | It’s all gone.
E
May stick around a while but not for long.
A
It’s gone | Everything’s gone.
E
I never said if it was right or wrong.
E                    B
But it’s gone,
B                      A
Baby it’s gone,
A                    B
It’s all done, gone, gone-gone-gone,
A                                                                                      
Everything, Everything, Everything, Everything’s –  
E
It’s gone | It’s all gone.
E
May stick around a while but not for long.
A
It’s gone | Everything’s gone.
E
I never said if it was right or wrong.
E                           B
But it’s gone,
B                      A
Baby it’s gone,
A                    B                          A
It’s all gone, gone, it’s all gone
A                             G                               E          B
Everything’s gone but this song.
E
. . . So long!
 
Photo from James stoneofzanzibar on his Flickr page (many thanks), taken January 30, 2012. This great photo accents the Aragonese terra cotta facade. A building of true architectural distinction in the neighborhood of Clearing -- about to go down, probably to be replaced with some wretched little brick box.