The fleeting moments of summer
When I worked at the Pipe Den – and I wasn’t cut out for retail – I had a lot of hours that were without customers. At one point I began rereading Shakespeare and just for the hell of it memorized the Macbeth’s “Tomorrow” speech. The last lines are: “Out out brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage, to be heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
While working on the final draft of The Perfect Song, I added the section in which Poul aimlessly wanders. He becomes a bartender, has mystical experiences with gypsies, and is the butt end of a long joke by quiet intellectual in the bar. The Tomorrow passage came to me and seemed a natural part of the story. Faulkner already nabbed “Sound and Fury”. I took “hour upon the stage.” There is a key passage in the book when Poul visits a gypsy camp and has a conversation with a seer. Her insights make his hair stand on end. * * * I actually did meet some gypsies once. It was at the Pipe Den. They were partially responsible for getting me fired. The first gypsy came in and politely explained that they were migrant workers who would be getting paid the next day but they needed tobacco. The next thing I knew, the little shop was filled with gypsies. While this guy gave me his sob story, the rest of them wandered around looking at pipes, peering into tobacco jars, checking out the cigars A few minutes later they headed next door to the barber shop. They left there pretty quickly. Grant, a huge, burly guy with bushy brown hair and a beard appeared at my door. “Them god-damned gypsies. I booted them out on their ass. You didn’t let them in the store did you?” “Uh, yeah. They seemed nice enough,” I said. He shook his head at my naivete. “Better look around and figure out how much stuff you lost.” He walked back to his shop, still shaking his head. He was right. Pipes were missing from the racks. Cigars on top of the humidifier were gone. Anything that was in reach was slid into their pockets with professional grace while I talked with the lead gypsy. It was an expensive lesson. Six months later I was fired because the inventory was off. Actually, all of us in The Pipe Den and The Record Store were fired. But that’s another story.
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