Free China Blues by David Donnell

Commodores,
                                                           Lionel
    Ritchie’s old group, and some of my favourite songs
    were by Credence and The Band – “Up on Cripple Creek,”
    that got us all moving.
                               And some of the parties
    I went to would have a Fats Domino album
    from time to time,
                          the same way I guess that you go
    to a party sometimes and somebody brings out an Elvis
    album, one of the ones where he sings “Heartbreak Hotel,”
    or “Rip It Up,” or “Blue Suede Shoes.”
                                                     The Domino songs
    are masterpieces of dialectical simplicity – one clear
    staccato line perfectly balanced against another.
               He was easy to dance to, there’s no two ways about
                            that;
    you would just fly into the air
                                          and do a weird swing
    with your outside foot or a double boogaloo or something
    on the last beat of each of those lines,
                                                      they were
    that punchy. And then somebody would play Led
    Zeppelin, and somebody else would play Bonnie &
    Delaney,
            and then around 2 o’clock in the morning
    Joan Baez would sing that song by The Band
    beginning with the line, “My name is Virgil McQuaid …”
    But you couldn’t beat those Domino songs to dance to
    – they were so precise you could alter your own beat
    and dance slow motion if you wanted to,
                                                          and then you
    could speed up and dance faster than Muddy Waters &
    The Stones. These songs never die never
    die never die.
                   So play it again,
    O sweet hero of my childhood,
                                           I was thinking of you,
    one foot on the pedal
    a bunch
           of yellow flowers in your hand/ Like a torch.

THE FLOWERS
    The red&yellow flowers sit on the clean oak table in a circular white bowl. These flowers illuminate the whole room. Okay, I exaggerated a touch, I pushed a little too far on the verb. There is an overhead light, a tall blue Art Deco standing lamp & a large table lamp that a friend gave me some years ago.
    I take a walk down to Bloor Street & buy 2 multi-grain rolls & a copy of
The Life of Isabelle Eberhardt
, a book which Whitney, the girl in my novel, is very concerned about. Then I go for coffee with Jake at Dooney’s. A strange name for an Italian café, don’t you think. Jake says, “The world is changing so fast that it’s upside down. You would probably be much happier if you were at the University of Chicago.”
    I am not an aesthetic person. Not really. I was born in a large house with trees in the backyard. Pheasants walking half-circles in winter. Yesterday we watched a film about 2 detectives in Paris.
    Last night I had a dream about walking naked, I was comfortable in the dream, in a large tailor shop with bolts of dark blue & light grey cloth on the shelves.
    I saw a fire once that almost blinded me. It was an enormous fire. It was several blocks long & the fire trucks looked like red & yellow helicopters, red & yellow whirlygigs. I know nothing about the Soviet Union except that they have polar bears in Siberia, huge white animals that stand on their hind feet & nibble at carrots & potatoes.

SHOPPING
    Robert’s not a gay guy and neither am I, but what does that mean? We’re both straight guys, but we’re not completely straight. These words are almost amusing. It’s possible that they were thought up by rabbits in a think tank.
    He’s about 30,