The Unspeakable (19 page)

I was into the second year of my newspaper column at that point and it occurred to me that a Joni Mitchell art show might be a good thing to write about. It also occurred to me that this could be a good way to meet Joni Mitchell, which was far more important than coming up with a column. I visited the gallery a few days later and met the owner. He was an older Russian émigré who'd been doing print work for Joni for years but hadn't really known who she was until his son explained that it wouldn't be a bad idea to give her a show. Even now, he was not familiar with any of her music.

The exhibit was made up of a series of sixty photographic triptychs bearing green, semiabstract images. The gallerist explained that the work had come about when Joni's television set broke and began displaying zigzagging green lines and splotches that looked like photographic negatives. Joni took pictures of the screen with a cheap camera and, looking at them as a whole, thought they reflected the brutality and hypocrisy of the current political scene. Then she had the photos enlarged and printed on canvas.

The gallerist kept me there for more than two hours. He led me from triptych to triptych, explaining their meanings in a thick, phlegmy accent I could barely understand. I pretended to scribble things down in my notebook. I told him that what would be really helpful, for the sake of the column, was if I could interview Joni sometime when she came into the gallery.

“I wouldn't take up too much of her time,” I said.

He said he was having dinner with her the next night and maybe I could join them.

“Really?” I yelped.

He said he'd check with Joni to make sure it was all right and then call me and tell me where we were meeting.

*   *   *

“We're meeting at Crevin's,” he said the next day. “In West Hollywood.”

“Crevin's?” I asked. “I've never heard of it.”

“Joni likes it there,” he said. “Because she can smoke. Dress warmly. We sit outdoors.”

It took nearly an hour of searching for Crevin's on the Internet before I realized the restaurant was actually called Cravings. I allowed extra time to get there in evening traffic and arrived thirty minutes early. I sat in my car until five minutes before the meeting time and then entered the restaurant. The gallery owner was there but not Joni and we sat in the bar for forty-five minutes as he talked nonstop about “the passion of the art life.” I nodded along, understanding about every fifth word.

“Ah,” he said finally. “Here is Johnny.”

She was a big woman. Big as in strapping, strong boned. She was tall, with big cheekbones, and big teeth in a big mouth. She was sixty-three years old, though a near lifetime of smoking had etched at least another decade onto her face. Her hair was blond as ever and long as ever and pulled back in a loose bun. Though I can't exactly remember now, I think she was wearing some kind of poncho. I'm pretty sure she was wearing huge earrings, although it's possible that her persona is so closely tied to the huge-earring aesthetic that I've just imposed that on her in retrospect.

We were seated at a table outside. It was about 45 degrees. Joni took out a pack of cigarettes. American Spirits in the yellow box. She explained that her biorhythmic schedule was to sleep during the day and stay up all night, so this was actually her breakfast. She ordered a cup of tea and nothing else. I was starving but I ordered a bowl of soup and nothing else. I got out my notebook, though it was too dark to see anything I wrote down.

We talked about “Green Flag Song.” A few years earlier, she told me, she'd gone up to her house in British Columbia and taken a lot of landscape photos. When she got back to L.A. she discovered that her television had become “magical.” She was very angry with George Bush. She was even more furious with Dick Cheney. She thought the whole administration should be tried for war crimes. Then she talked about how multinational corporations were not only destroying the environment and the world's economy but also tapping into the personal energy fields of every human on earth. She said the United States was on the brink of a major food and water shortage and that today's young generation, growing up on materialism and rap music, was not prepared to handle it.

She said the Internet was wasting untold amounts of electricity and that this electricity was interfering with the sonar of marine mammals, particularly whales. She spoke in a casual, matter-of-fact tone that suggested she was merely stating the obvious.

I bobbed my head up and down and scribbled random words into my notebook:
torture
,
energy fields
,
whales
. I asked if we might talk a bit about her music.

“Of course,” she said, stamping out what was easily her twelfth cigarette and lighting another in one fluid gesture.

I asked her about the time signature changes in the middle section of “Paprika Plains,” a lush, sweeping, highly strange sixteen-minute track on
Don Juan's Reckless Daughter
. Had she written or planned them that way ahead of time or did they just evolve in the studio? This was something I'd always wanted to know. She said they were very much planned but that none of the players had been able to figure out what she wanted. I told her how much I loved the “stab and glare and buckshot” line in “The Wolf That Lives in Lindsay.” I told her that her music had been a profound influence on my writing. I told her that most of what I know about metaphor I learned from her.

I asked her about the Joni Mitchell problem. Not the part about people in country houses making fun of her yodeling but the part about people assuming she's sentimental and confessional when in fact she's the opposite. I said I always thought she wasn't a poet as much as a kind of musical essayist. Moreover, the lyrics people always interpret as confessions are really just invitations for the listener to come in closer. They're saying,
This isn't about me. It's not even about you. It's about the whole world.

“You know what I'm saying?” I asked.

“Yes, exactly!” Joni said.

She seemed unconcerned that the ash on the tip of her cigarette was now half as long as the cigarette itself. With anyone else, it would have crumbled onto her lap. But Joni smoked with such authority, with such an absence of apology, that the ash sat motionless and obedient, like a dog waiting for a command.

“I'm more like Saint Augustine,” she said. “He supposedly wrote confessions but really they were prayers for a fallen world.”

I asked her how she felt when people told her they liked her early records but weren't familiar with anything after
Blue
. She told me that
Clouds
and
Song to a Seagull
were the work of a totally different person. She said she couldn't stand to listen to them.

“People get so hung up on the folksinger thing,” she said. “They don't understand I'm a composer. This is composed music! It was the same for Mozart. Nobody understood what he was doing. They said there were too many notes.”

Joni said no one had ever asked about the time signature changes in the middle section of “Paprika Plains.” This pleased me immensely. Then she said that the political and social climate of the United States currently was a lot like Germany in the lead-up to World War Two, that Americans were not aware of the atrocities being committed by their own government and that the rest of the world was powerless to do anything but watch. She said people didn't like hearing this kind of thing but that as a Scorpio she could never help but speak her mind.

“Interesting,” I said.

The gallery owner looked on the verge of falling asleep. Despite some early efforts on my part to loop him into the conversation, he'd followed next to nothing and had evidently smiled and nodded his way to exhaustion. I asked Joni if I might send her a copy of my novel. Not that I expected her to read it, of course, but given how much inspiration I'd drawn from her, I'd like her to have it. She gave me the address of her house in Bel Air and told me to mail it to her there.

“You have honored me tonight,” she said. “People don't know what it means to honor someone. They think they do but they don't. You have truly honored me.”

We hugged. This was an incredible evening. And the best part was that it was over now. The entire time, all I had thought was that I couldn't wait for it to end so I could go home and talk about it for the rest of my life.

*   *   *

The next week, the gallery owner called and said that Joni had read and enjoyed my novel and wanted to talk to me again. He gave me her telephone number, explaining that she didn't have a computer or even an answering machine so I couldn't e-mail her and might have to try calling several times before I reached her. He reminded me that she was nocturnal and said I should probably call her at night.

I dialed her number at eight o'clock one evening. Then the next night at nine and the next night at ten. There was no answer. Meanwhile, I had to write a column about the exhibit, or at least about something. I had no idea what to say. I couldn't make sense of any of my notes and I had nothing substantive to say about the broken-TV photographs. I came up with a column that was really more of an art review and my editor said it was unpublishable, not only because I wrote for the opinion page and not the arts section but also because I clearly had no idea what I was talking about.

I started over and wrote about my excitement at meeting Joni Mitchell and how I didn't know what to say but that if there was anything I'd learned from her over the years it was that if you didn't “write from a place of excruciating candor you've written nothing.” I then went on to talk about how much I loved her music and what a great conversation we'd had. Except that I wasn't excruciatingly candid because I still half expected to see or at least talk to her again and I didn't want to say anything that would piss her off or make me seem so sycophantic that I'd be afraid to face her.

I called Joni's number a few more times, then decided maybe she'd gone out of town and that I'd try again in a few weeks. Then the column came out and I was so convinced she'd read it and been disappointed by its blandness that I stopped trying to call her. Several weeks later, I looked for the notebook where I'd written down her telephone number—the same notebook that contained her address and those useless notes—and I couldn't find it. I searched for it intermittently over the next few months and, in a burst of energy one afternoon, tore apart my office in disbelief that I could lose track of something as precious as the phone number of the person who wrote the score to my entire life.

But it was true. I lost Joni Mitchell's phone number. After everything—after the dinner, after the art exhibit, after the decades spent with my own private Joni as she piloted me through the indignities of adolescence and the indecision of early adulthood and the parting clouds of middle adulthood—I let the woman herself slip away like a dream burned into abstraction by the glare of wakefulness. Let me repeat that.
I lost Joni Mitchell's phone number.
I,
of all people
, lost Joni Mitchell's phone number. And also her address.

The column I wrote about her, which had the headline “My Dinner with Joni” even though we hadn't really eaten dinner, is one of the dullest I've ever published. It's also, to this day, one of the most popular. I heard from hundreds of readers, only a few of whom called me out for being so vague and noncommittal. Everyone else wanted to tell me how much they also loved Joni and how jealous they were that I got to meet her. Many told me how much they liked “Both Sides Now” and “Big Yellow Taxi.”

I never talked to Joni after that evening. But in the years since, I've occasionally looked at the ocean and thought about the whales being blown off their courses, their compasses rendered useless by all the buzz and static crackling overhead. I've thought that this notion is most likely ridiculous but also strangely poetic. It's actually the kind of thing Joni would compose a lyric about. She'd be singing about some love affair gone wrong but then she'd go to the whales and suddenly the song would be about something else entirely. It would be about the difficulty of listening to your thoughts in a cacophonous world. It would be about craving silence while also wanting to hear everything. It would be about wanting to be alone and yet wanting to be in love. It would be about one of life's most reliable disappointments, which is that your audience, no matter how small, is always bigger than those who actually understand what you're saying.

 

THE DOG EXCEPTION

A week before my dog Rex died I submitted his photo and biographical details to a website called the Daily Puppy. As examples of oppressive Internet cuteness go, the D.P. is in the upper stratospheric reaches. People send in photos of their puppies, accompanied by descriptions that are often in the first person, as though the dogs have composed their own dating profiles. The goal is to win a coveted “Puppy of the Day” slot on the home page, a designation that invites a trail of gushing comments on the order of “Ooh, you precious baaaby!” and “You are so furrylicious I could hug you for hours.”

The site also has a category called “Grown-up Puppy of the Day.” One morning, as I looked at Rex and got the distinct feeling he didn't have that many mornings left, I gathered up a handful of his best photos—Rex on the beach at Big Sur, Rex in the flower garden, Rex in front of the Christmas tree—and uploaded them to the Daily Puppy's submission page, along with his (somewhat grammatically challenged) personal ad. “My name is Rex and I am a grown-up puppy … my humans say that there's never been a dog loved as much as me.”

Despite an auto-reply saying that the high volume of submissions meant it would be weeks or months before my entry was even considered, Rex turned out to be the Grown-up Puppy of the Day the very next day. I was elated. This was essentially my version of my kid winning an Olympic gold medal. I immediately shared the link on Facebook, using many exclamation points.