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The power of the spoken word or spoken image.
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MP3 23.2 MB • 320 kbps • 10:08
Story behind the song
This is my response to wonderful review by Andreas of The Frankfurt Dialog Company which pretty much summarizes the story behind the song:
Thanks Andreas ... I hope you don't mind, but I would always submit something like this to you because I know you will listen to and understand the lyric. Yes it is hard and especially because it is a perfectly true story. Every detail is as it happened to me and Venable.
The only thing that maybe you misinterpreted is the part about what happened to me when Venable went off to the war ... because actually I enlisted ... I enlisted for my own reasons and not because I had any thought of the war, it was just that my own life was in a shambles. But I did not want this song to be as much about me but more about Venable and maybe my failure to be able to look beyond some ugly things to offer real human compassion.
So, I did go off to the same war, but definitely I came back whole and came back to resist the war and joined the Vietnam Vets against the War along with my brother. You will not find me supporting any form of war. So in a sense the War was good to me because it taught me the most bitter lesson about real war of any kind.
So all these years later, I did have to write this and have my talk with Venable. He was someone who was the way he was because this is how he had to deal with life ... we lived in a projects in NYC that made you go one way or the other to survive. I've always had compassion and would overlook the hardest people's faults that is what he sensed in me ... but it is also a song about not going the whole way with compassion. You have to act more on what you feel to make compassion work.
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Lyrics
Ah Venable, you were a little man.
From a tiny child to a half-pint adult,
You were giant in spirit,
But not in heart.
You made everyone fear you -
Tough as iron, you came with trouble for us all
To bully us for what you wanted
Or to make us ride in those stolen cars
Our knuckles white while you stood on the gas pedal screaming.
In the midst of the War,
Nobody was surprised and many were relieved,
When you enlisted in the Marines.
Swaggering off to boot camp
And swaggering back in your crisp uniform.
Bragging of what you did
And what you would do to 'Them'
When you shipped soon to 'Nam.'
On that cold, solitary night,
When I was the only one in the park,
You appeared.
And then you said, only to me,
How you were afraid.
How you couldn't tell anyone else.
How you just could not go.
But I wanted you to leave me.
There was no reason for this sudden confidence
Other than you sensed I had some feeling in me.
And as much as I wanted you to be gone,
I felt a great sadness.
Despite what you said,
You went off to your war
Just as I went off to mine -
Each of us fleeing something worse than what we faced.
Before I knew it, you were back bragging about your wound
And how tough you had been.
But I could see the pain.
There are all kinds of wounds that need fixing.
And soon I saw you at night in the park
With your pain fixed
And your head nodding
And that rubber strap still latched around your arm.
No one was afraid of you then.
Time goes on and we busy ourselves in our lives
Just as I did until I saw you
That night in the dark of the subway tunnel;
A solitary and frightening unknown under a hood
Until you called my name.
Once again you confided in me
And said you were OK now.
You had found a woman
And both you and she had found Jesus.
It was all working out.
But I saw you there,
In the dark under that hood
In a place where nothing ever works out for the good.
Anyway, I said I was happy for you,
And I was,
Thinking sometimes not all is lost to despair.
But still you were there hiding in the dark,
Still hiding something from the world.
I can't say I was surprised
When I heard you OD'd some place that no one knew.
How they had that funeral that few attended
Beyond the family and some old neighbors.
At times I wish I could have cared enough
To be some help to you
Even if I would have failed.
I wish I could have been
The person I thought I was or should be.
Was I capable of love beyond my own petty distaste,
Without fear or expectation of return?
I wish I could have even made that last gesture
Of throwing the flower on the seal of your life.
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