The Sorcerer

I have communed with a sorcerer. Sat rapt as he synthesized figures from dust, carved civilizations from empty space, wove entire worlds from the thread of dreams and shadows.

I walked by him in the subway, he nodded as I passed. I could still hear him at the platform growling incantations to the deep strumming of his acoustic guitar when I realized I was no longer waiting for the train, I was watching from a distance as my body carried me back up the stairs, my volition no match for the persuasion of his desperate screams.

At his feet, my harmonica between my fingers, at my lips, and while I knew no spells of my own, I had merely to ride the sound of his voice and the electricity of his energy passed through the metal reeds in my hands. Two songs later and at his request I had run home for a keyboard. When I returned his empty case had transformed into a sea of fluttering green and I could see the gleam in his eyes at the potential exponential multiplication of his powers.

Now I was his apprentice, and as he taught me his mystical melodies, coins, bills, a packet of dark green leaves that he quickly pocketed rained down from the passing masses.

But while his shattering song gripped and beckoned, the act of creation was in his words:

“How you feelin? … Love that dress. … ¿Cómo está? ... Hey, you a dancer?”

She shakes her head.

“Well, I’m makin a video and you look perfect for it. Even if you just kinda move back and forth.”

She smiles as she leaves, “Oh no, no, no!”

And finally to me, the teacher to his student, “See it don’t matter what you say, it’s just about making a connection. Then they remember you and next time they say, ‘hey, I’ll give 'im a dollar today.’ ”

After a reworked version of “Yesterday” that smashes my body into shards and leaves me a helpless crumpled mass on the floor he reveals the mission and mantra, the duty and obligation, the sacred creed:

“They might be running late, we gotta make em on time. They might be unsure, we gotta be consistent. They might be tired from a long day at work, we gotta make em feel like they just woke up. It’s our job to get those motherf---ers out of their pockets!”

And somehow I’m not sure anymore whether I’m the apprentice or the target of the greatest sorcery of all:

“You stick with me, we’re gonna be rich. I been looking for a piano player. Tell you what, we’re gonna record a record, you know in the nice studio over right here in Berkeley, I got all my own songs, and we’ll get ‘em copywrited, 25 dollars, and we’ll get em to make the CD’s in the factory, you know so people can’t copy em, and people’ll be like ‘why won’t it copy’ but it’s because it’s the kind you can only print in the factory. Now let’s see, today, I give you one third. Cause you’re just learning. And after you learn the songs you can make one half. Now you’re a professional, and this is just for rehearsal. Man, when we’re playing real gigs, at clubs you know, we’re gonna be rich. I’ll ask em for two hundred dollars for 45 minutes and three fifty for an hour. You don’t think so? That’s what I’ll tell em. And you can lead the band. Don’t like the trumpet player? You tell em not to come back and they’re gone. Oh yeah, we’ll have our own horn section and a drummer and a bass and another guitar. Man, only reason I’m not big already is I got mixed up in heroin, but that’s all over now, now I’m ready for the big time…”

And as he molds continents between his fingers and casts an ocean with the flick of his wrist and a galaxy with another I don’t want to reach out to test if they are solid or if they crumble into dust or shatter and evaporate into a cloud for another storm because they’re so beautiful, brilliant images suspended between us, scattered about the room, floating slowly into the afternoon sky. I don’t want to ask how he will pay for studio time, tell him that copywriting costs thirty-five dollars, that there is no factory-made CD that can’t be copied, that I’ve played gigs and no one pays what he says he’ll get, so many things I don’t want to ask, I don’t want to say. So I don’t.

He counts me twelve one-dollar bills and eight quarters.
I check my phone. Six. We started playing around four. "I'm making seven bucks an hour."
"Is that how much they pay you at your job?"
"No, well how long have we been here?"
" 'Bout forty-five minues."

He promises to call me tomorrow. 

He doesn’t call me tomorrow.

I see him as I walk by the subway a few days later. 

I don’t stop to say hello.

His favorite song:

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