64 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019
the listener. When your voice breaks si-
lence, how does it make silence speak.
You did it at least once, certainly, for
my son and probably countless times
for others, including me. How does a
song reach out and touch. Do you sing
to please yourself. When a song feels
good to you while you are singing it,
is that the best test. Is that the answer
to all this letter’s dumb questions. Or
maybe simply an answer I
want, need. “URML”’s secret.
I
had a friend once who
killed his lady. Crime oc-
curred in Philly, about eight
years before a song you ad-
dressed to your lady reached
No. 1 on Billboard ’s rhythm-
and-blues chart. Years before
he committed a murder, I’d
lost touch with him, my for-
mer friend, occasional cut-buddy when
I was an undergrad at Penn in the early
sixties. A guy who hung out around cam-
pus, long-haired, scraggly-bearded, a kind
of sloppy, happy-go-lucky, sinister phony,
a powerfully persuasive and manipula-
tive guy with a malodorous charm about
him, Charlie Manson before anybody
had heard of Charles Manson, other than
my friend and his coterie of fellow ec-
centrics and visionaries who circulated
among themselves counterculture news
and views through a kind of crude pre-
cursor of the Internet before anybody
else had heard of Internet or Manson.
My friend, a nice kid on the lam from
middle-class, suburban Jewish parents,
had transformed himself into a Philly
street character whose intimidating range
of knowledge, arcane reading, provoca-
tive ideas, and batty eloquence, despite
my reservations about his lack of per-
sonal hygiene, drew me to him as he was
drawn to me, despite or because of our
obvious differences, me growing up poor,
therefore street tough, streetwise, he as-
sumed, a jock who played college ball,
physically attractive, smart enough,
though intellectually underdeveloped,
politically unsophisticated, naïve, poorly
read, innocently gregarious, but my new
buddy soon perceived that I was ambi-
tious, ruthless and predatory in my deal-
ings with other people as he was, my in-
sightful, observant, preternaturally selfish,
shamelessly inquisitive, greedy new ac-
quaintance. In the role of professor/guru
he enjoyed explaining himself to me.
Claimed he answered to no one. Respon-
sible only to himself. Made it clear that
nobody possessed rights he was bound
to respect. Even in Powelton Village,
Philly’s wannabe version of the Village
in New York—your city, Mr. Jackson,
where you grew up in Harlem—we must
have been an unusual sight: tall, fit black
guy, and squat, flabby white guy, the un-
likely pair of us roaming
neighborhood streets, parties,
participating in rallies, arts
festivals, demonstrations, de-
fying cops and authority, hit-
ting on women, getting stink-
ing drunk in local bars, but
welcomed almost always, any-
where we showed up, by the
helter-skelter mix of all sorts
of people that constituted
Powelton’s inhabitants. An
odd couple, but didn’t we embody, maybe,
a new day, a new dispensation, a social
and cultural revolution everybody back
then wanted to believe they desired or
at least were willing to accommodate
since it promised better sex, better drugs,
unbounded freedom and license, an op-
tion to be contemptuous of traditional
styles, conventions, and rules, an inalien-
able right to hit the road, Jack, and head
out for far away, for exotic destinations
when the place where we find ourselves
becomes unsatisfactory.
My former hangout partner, whom
the cops arrested in 1979 for killing his
lady friend, who still maintains his in-
nocence though convicted twice—once
in absentia because while out on bail
awaiting trial, he’d fled the States, then
found guilty a second time in another
Philadelphia courtroom after being ex-
tradited to America from a farm in
France, a fugitive seventeen years on the
run, hiding under assumed names and
fake identities—my old intimate, my
fellow bullshitter and relentless pursuer
of any pretty girl we hoped seducible
(including one he admitted he tried hard
to catch and didn’t catch, but I did, a
girl whose background mirrored his, ex-
cept her parents lived in Connecticut
and much richer than his, a girl I even-
tually married, mother of my children,
including my son in prison, the mar-
riage in name anyway lasting for thirty
years neither party has yet to forgive the
other for inflicting, enduring, and even
so during those thirty-plus years, Mr.
Jackson, on numerous occasions I would
have counted myself lucky to have pos-
sessed a voice like yours and your song,
“URML,” to serenade her, which goes
to show what ... nothing of course, as
my bearded mentor would insist, except
the poor taste in choosing lovers cer-
tain pretty, seducible girls exhibited back
in the day and how fickle, how unfaith-
ful songs and singers can be). My for-
mer buddy continues to claim that he
is an innocent victim of a C.I.A. frameup
organized to discredit and get rid of him
because the C.I.A. knows he knows too
much about contacts it established with
an advanced, extraterrestrial civilization,
contacts that notorious agency desper-
ately wishes to keep secret from the
American public. But I bet if I visited
him in prison and we got an opportu-
nity to converse in guaranteed privacy,
he might not leak any nitty-gritty about
the C.I.A./Star Wars connection, but if
the chance arose, he would confide to
me that he killed his lady for more or
less the identical reason that I attribute
to you as your explanation of why you
sing as you do. He’d confess, just short
of bragging, and perhaps with a wistful
semi-grin, yes, he loved his lady but she
split, and when she came back to pick
up her stuff, he believed that if he killed
her, not only could he keep her, he’d
please himself, and pleasing himself al-
ways good, so he did.
C’mon. Think about it, dude. Pleasing
yourself the best possible reason. Unless you
wanna be a stooge for somebody else’s bull-
shit. A stupido stooge. Doing what the man
says cause the man says it’s good for you. Go
fuck yourself, what I say. Your wars. Your
pissy little no-brainer jobs, a whiny wife,
litter of whiny, ungrateful brats. For them.
Do it for them, man tells you. Family the
reason. Or God. Country. Any goddamn
reason just so you do what you’re told. Don’t
think. Just get in line, turkey. Bend over,
turkey. Be over before you know it. Before
you can finish saying, What the fuck am I
doing here. Well, not me. Not today. Not to-
morrow. Huh-uh. I will always do what
pleases me. Me. Me. Me, friend. What pleases
me. Best reason and only reason. And I rec-
ommend strongly, old chap, mon semblable,
my darker brother, that unless you want to
be the man’s bumboy chump, you best do as
I do. Be insolent, abrasive. Extend to your-
self bottomless generosity and benevolence.
