At exactly 12 midnight I put on the headphones and climbed back into Lotus with “Redemption Song” cued up and rolling, for on one of our majestic 3 nights together Ramona had, in a gratuitous move of skill and nerve, gone up to Bareleg Rummy, the Fido’s B talent entertainer and asked him to play a song for Michael, and then returning to my confused look she took me in an embrace to the dance floor which was eerily clear, and Rummy started in on a beautiful and surprising rendition of Marley’s most internal song, really along with Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna” and Lennon’s “Working Class Hero” one of the GREATEST lyrics ever penned, and Ramona and I just locked time space and deliverance into our mulatto press...I couldn’t believe she was telling me this would be our song because this song had been my song ever since I listened to it three or four times in a row in the back of a car headed from San Diego to Huntington Beach with an angry couple up front driving my then girlfriend and I back home after a double date night out that turned ugly when the babes in both of them turned selfish and pouty and then erupted in class-action screaming right in the middle of a club making us all run for cover... the guy kept playing Redemption Song over and over in some mad pique of genius cause it put me in a darling cocoon in the back seat and somehow eased him and shut up my girlfriend’s obnoxious royal maintenance roommate...so this song stayed with me for the ten-year interim and became almost a maritime soundtrack in my heart and which also had been played over and over since my arrival in Belize not only by me but by most the locals too...it was a kind of adopted soul anthem...
So I was awestruck with that eerie feeling of things, too many things to be coincidence, things being somehow contained, fated, so that you’re left in the arms of some goddess on the middle of an empty dance floor under a palapa roof in sweet air bath night, “won’t you help to sing these songs of freedom, it’s all I ever had...” and the ego lays down its hammer, the last nail having been driven straight through the heart...
That’s where I was then, and it’s where I was midnight Christmas day... Regardless, I cried. I cried and cried and cried. Maybe I would lose my melancholy if I stuck my head in a fast-moving automobile...but this wasn’t melancholy rather it was triste, something that just falls out of the sky when the sun touches you...attached to your vision even when your god rides off on a bicycle or pisses on the wall with utter detachment...you’re left with your triste like a sun spot, fouling the reception of signals from the muse...Here in Belize I was to test my moral resistance against beautiful women, the vamped foe of writer and poet alike...
And all the while the task of both is to keep the terrific alive, to live always in the various, to make the terrific even more terrific, to pledge idealism to nothing but live only terrifically, think only terrifically, die terrifically...the seed only of the terrific need be tilled and nurtured...women can be varying and frequent degrees of terrific, but terrifyingly so...
-Michael Price
