Alone Again

I swear tunes migrate from one part of my brain to another and come out of my mouth spontaneously as a whistle. I don’t know where they come from and I don’t know why. At times I don’t even know the name of the song until I hear myself whistling the tune and recognize it. And from time to time they remain just random unnamed tunes. Sometimes I know why that particular song leaps out, because I’ve thought of a related topic, or see something printed that is relevant, or someone speaks words that trigger it in conversation. It’s almost eerie. I must have hundreds of both musical scores and sets of lyrics up there. Because I don’t read music they can’t be visual like sheet music. I don’t know what they are. But both the notes and the lyrics come from somewhere. I hit the right notes with my whistle, usually right away, or I know without thinking what notes to sing if I give voice to the lyrics, also imprinted in my brain. 

Let me give you an example. I was working at our church cleaning second story gutters and one of the guys I was working with was talking about the sorry state of our chapel. As we moved the ladder to the next spot I began to whistle a set of eight monotonous notes: four the same, the fifth a step higher, the sixth the same as the first four, the seventh a step lower, and the last note the same as the first. I repeated it again only a little higher.

“What is that song?” the guy at the other end of the ladder asked. I whistled it again. 

“I don’t know.” I whistled it again. After a few more notes it came to me.

“Going to the Chapel, and we’re gonna get married.” I sang the words. It was a Motown song by the Dixie Cups, Chapel of Love produced by Phil Spector (I looked that up). It came whistling out of me because my friend said the word chapel. That’s what happens up there in my head.

I found myself whistling a song in the shower at the YMCA last week, for what reason God knows. A guy who swims laps when I do recognized it and sang a few lines from the chorus.

It seems to me that there are more hearts
Broken in the world da, da, da, dadada (going up the scale)
Da, da, da dadada (going down) What do we do?
What do we do?

“What’s the name of that song anyway?” he asked.

“Alone Again, Naturally by Gilbert O’Sullivan.”

“Well thanks for the ear worm,” he said as made his way out the door. “I’ll be humming that the rest of the day.”

The words he didn’t remember are: That can’t be mended, left unattended.

Alone Again (Naturally) brought to mind something I’d felt and things that happened one summer very long ago.

I helped my brother closest in age to me, who died of lung cancer six years ago, at the age I am now, build a house. It was the house in which he raised his family and where his wife still lives. He, his wife, their first child (then a baby) and I lived in a two bedroom apartment the summer between my junior and senior year of college. The year was 1972. My brother and I worked long days.

My brother’s friends would come out to the worksite in the country after they finished their jobs to help us and drink beer. Sometimes we saved heavy tasks for when they arrived, like standing up stud walls we had fabricated on the deck during the day. Some of those guys would go out for more drinks as the day ended and take me with them. One of them, an ironworker named Mel, liked to go to a strip club in downtown Elgin, really more of a bar with a small stage and lots of mirrors. I don’t remember a pole. The girls would emerge through dark curtains from the back, play songs on the jukebox, hopping up on stage in their high heels quickly after putting in quarters and punching in their selections. One beautiful young woman always danced to Alone Again (Naturally) by Gilbert O’Sullivan. 

We all smoked cigarettes then. Like our Dad my brother smoked Camel straights, unfiltered, while I had switched to Camel filters. I would quit smoking 15 years later. Sadly he never did. Mel smoked Pall Malls. 

Smoke filled the beams of colored light that shined on the strippers. The colors changed and were controlled by a foot pedal on stage by the dancers: blue, red, purple, yellow, orange. The girl who danced to Alone Again (Naturally) looked best in blue. She had long dark hair. She never smiled and looked at the men looking at her only fleetingly, preferring to look at herself in the floor to ceiling mirrors whenever possible. I didn’t like to look at the men either. We looked desperate I thought. Awful. It was a working man’s bar with an occasional suit wandering in. We were dirty, having come straight from the job. I had red smudges on my white tee shirts from the chalk line. The bar wasn’t air conditioned. Despite spinning ceiling fans the place had that stuffy stale beer smell and it was hot. As we leaned forward watching the girls our forearms stuck to the varnished wooden bar top. There was no cover charge but beers were expensive. Mel and I peeled the labels off bottles of Old Style as we drained them. 

We tend to dismiss the lyrics of pop songs but back then these were haunting. It was not only the words but his delivery of them in a dead pan voice.

And as if to knock me down
Reality came around
And without so much as a mere touch
Cut me into little pieces
Leaving me to doubt
Talk about, God in his Mercy
Oh if he really does exist
Why did he desert me?
In my hour of need
I truly am indeed,
Alone again, naturally.

The beautiful girl, in the smoky blue light, mouthed the words silently to herself. Her hair swung back and forth, shiny, as she danced to the tune. Sometimes when she sang she closed her eyes. Her practiced moves came so easily. She had long legs. You could hear her shoes scuff softly on the linoleum stage as she turned and spun. As she danced I asked Mel:

“What do you think she’s really like?”

“She’s a stripper David.”

“I know that but she’s still a girl. A real person. I wonder what she’s like as a person with clothes on?”

“Why are you asking me? I have no idea.” Sensitive was not a word one would use to describe Mel.

The girls came out and sat at the bar only once in a while. When they did I was way too shy and scared to approach them. I didn’t think my stripper girl was much older than me. I was about to turn 21. If I had been able to talk to her I decided I would ask her what subjects she liked in school, if she had brothers and sisters, you know normal things. I wouldn’t have talked to her about sex like probably every other man in the bar. Oh, I imagined having sex with her, but I knew I wouldn’t. Even then I knew I was not good at having sex with strangers. It just didn’t work well for me. I was uncomfortable being there in the first place. But I watched like all the other men. Oh, I watched all right.

I imagined she played the song because she loved the words. She and the song became the same for me, like she had written the lyrics and lived the narrative they described. I thought I knew her. When she closed her eyes and mouthed the words I thought I knew what she was feeling. I thought I felt what she felt. And though I had never talked to her and never would I felt close to her. When she came through the curtains and put her money in the juke box, the first few bars of the song filling the room, I felt like we were almost together, even if she didn’t know me. I worried for her. It was the song that got me. 

In a little while from now
If I’m not feeling any less sour
I promised myself to treat myself
And visit a nearby tower
And climbing to the top
Will throw myself off
In an effort to
Make it clear to whoever
What it’s like
When you’re shattered

It would be such a terrible waste if she really did that; so young, so beautiful, and such a good dancer. I thought I could help her. A little drunk, twenty, and naïve like farm kids can be I imagined myself getting her out of that bar, bringing her to ISU, finding her a job as a waitress. She’d make great tips. I had a whole plan.

Looking back over the years
And whatever else that appears
I remember I cried
When my father died
Never wishing to hide the tears
And at sixty five years old
My mother God rest her soul
Couldn’t understand why the only man
She had ever loved had been taken
Leaving her to start
With a heart so badly broken
Despite encouragement from me
No words were ever spoken
And when she passed away
I cried and cried all day
Along again, Naturally.

Oh God, she’d lost her parents. I ordered another beer and looked at her more. She moved hypnotically, eyes closed, reaching for her bra clasp. Poor girl. She had no one but me.

After she was with me for a semester or so she could start taking classes and be a dance major. I imagined her as very smart. She’d never have to dance in front of sweaty working men again. She would take her clothes off only for me. I’d buy blue light bulbs for my room. I’d be good to her. I’d make her breakfast. After a while she could move in to my room, or we’d find a place of our own, just her and me.

My brother might know she was a stripper but the rest of the family wouldn’t. I’d take her to the farm and my Mom would teach her how to cook. (Why did I assume she couldn’t cook?) She’d love my Mom and my Dad. My only sister would think she was great. I wished she had been able to meet my older sister who just passed away, also from cancer, leaving a husband and three kids.

I knew how sad she felt. I’ve felt the pain that hits you when people you love die, just like she felt. I knew what despair was. I could help her.

 
Left standing in the lurch
at a church where people are saying,
My God, that's tough
He stood her up
No point in us remaining.
We may as well go home
As I did on my own
Alone again, naturally


Oh please, not that too! No wonder she’s suicidal. I’d never do that to her. She’d learn I was reliable. She may not trust me at first but I’d prove to her that I was safe and caring. She could count on me.



We’d be so happy.


Truth is I was terribly lonely and alone that summer. I drank too much. My oldest sister, who I relied on so much, was gone. She was the confident one, the exuberant one, the organizer in our family. I didn’t know what I was doing really. I was making it through school but I didn’t know what I would do when it was over. I felt lost myself. And there I was in some crappy joint fantasizing about a girl I didn’t know and was afraid to talk to. It was heartbreaking. Even now when I whistle that song and see her dance in my head, in smoky blue light, I feel it again.



As it turns out Gilbert O’Sullivan, an Irish song writer, experienced few if any of the emotions he brought to life so vividly in the music and the lyrics of Alone Again (Naturally). He readily admitted, years after the song was a monster hit (six weeks as #1 on the American Billboard), that it was not autobiographical. His mother was alive when he wrote the song. He did not know his father well, who had mistreated Gilbert’s mother and died when his son was 11. Whether he ever contemplated suicide is not known. It is not believed that he was jilted, left waiting at the altar as it were. The lyrics without the sound of the voice and the music, now that I I’m older, seem sappy and awkward. But, as the Irish are known for, Gilbert certainly told a dramatic tale. He had me going there, in a hot clammy bar, smelling of beer, in dim blue light, watching a beautiful girl dance 43 years ago.




I think of her still when I whistle that song. My dancer would be in her sixties now. I hope things worked out for her. I hope she quit stripping and found someone who took the time to know her as a person. With any luck she learned not all men are like those sweaty guys who stared at her over their beer bottles in 1972. I hope she’s OK.



Sometimes those songs in your head are more than just songs. I think that’s why we remember them.