Marshall Boswell (second from left) and the author (second from right) busking with Enormous Richard on the University City Loop in 1989. (Photo courtesy of the author)
Before the president of the United States began publicly musing about developing the Gaza Strip into a hip resort town, a sort of Las Vegas in the Middle East, I could claim only one small gift of second sight.
I was driving west on Highway 40 in St. Louis one day in the late 1980s with the University City Loop as my destination. I was listening to one of my favorite records, Paris 1919 by John Cale. As my car sighed to a stop on the highway off-ramp approaching Skinker Boulevard, Cale was singing a lyric that included the woman’s name Martha, and I was singing along. It was at that moment that I saw something that was really happening or had happened or would happen, but that I had not seen and could not see and had no reason to know had happened.
I saw a woman I know slightly named Martha sitting at a small kitchen table near a window in an apartment just north of the U. City Loop. She had taken off her shoes and was wearing white wool socks on her feet. She was eating fresh cherries from a glass bowl.
I barely knew this Martha. I did not know where she lived and had never been to her home. In time I would become good friends with her father, the late Danny Kohl, an activist biology professor and one of the historic saints of Washington University in St. Louis, but at that time I had only two minor connections to Martha. She had trained me as a clinic escort for the National Abortion Rights Action League, and my girlfriend at the time had some kind of beef with her. The only time I ever heard Martha’s name, after my clinic escort training was over, my girlfriend was being a little catty about her.
Martha and I were both associated with Washington University, like her father, and inevitably we crossed paths on campus. I stopped her and said, “Martha, this might seem a little weird, but can I ask you a few questions?” She said sure.
“Do you live just north of the U. City Loop?”
She said, “Yeah, don’t you? Doesn’t everybody?”
“Do you wear white wool socks around the house?”
She frowned and said, “Yes, I do, I always take my shoes off when I get home and I love white wool socks.”
“Do you like to eat fresh cherries?”
She smiled and said, “Cherries are my favorite. I have a bowl of cherries sitting on my kitchen table right now.”
“Is it a glass bowl?”
Martha laughed and said, “Yes.”
I explained the curious situation, and we both laughed it off. I guess it says something good about Martha’s temperament and my reputation that she never suspected that I was doing any kind of stalking of her. We just both mildly accepted the possible reality of trivial psychic phenomena and that apparently one had just happened to us.
Before the president of the United States publicly imagined the Gaza Strip as a hip Middle Eastern Riviera, I only ever told this story to mock myself at parties. It was one of my bits. It turns out I am a prophet, I would declare. However, I can only foresee the ordinary and boring things that people do when they are home alone, like eating a snack. I see you with my second sight. I see you eating cherries from a glass bowl at your kitchen table wearing your white wool socks. How useless is that?
Then the president of the United States started in with this crazy talk about Palestinians being moved on to some other unspecified greener pastures while the Gaza Strip gets a Mar-a-Lago makeover. Where had I heard this story before? About the Gaza Strip being, not troubled, but hip? In a rock song I wrote decades before with the future dean of David Foster Wallace studies.
It would have been 1989 when I was trying to write songs with my graduate school buddy Marshall Boswell before he left Washington University, where English Department faculty were underestimating him, to complete his PhD dissertation on John Updike at Emory. (Marshall was one of two graduate students I thought were being underestimated because they were physically beautiful, blonde, and socially gifted in conventional ways. The department zeitgeist was frumpy, awkward, and non-blonde.)
Marshall was so conventionally good-looking and talented musically that he stood out in our campus band that we had started with a couple undergraduates from the art school. One of my high school buddies from the redneck steel town of Granite City, Illinois, who sang in a popular local cover band, slummed down to the Loop to see our band Enormous Richard at a small club one night. My buddy stopped me when I stepped off the runty stage riser to say, “What’s the deal with that guy?” he gestured at Marshall. “He’s good.” His implication was clear: and we were not.
Enormous Richard was a goofy folk-country punk band with mostly simple song structures and familiar rootsy chord changes. Marshall, who had fallen under the spell of Paul Weller of The Jam, came up with more varied chord changes, bigger chords, more ambitious song structures, and less monotonous rhythms. I had fun writing songs with him in the brief time that he was in St. Louis.
Marshall has held onto the piece of paper where I wrote these words so he could set them to music.
• • •
You’ve been to Europe, yeah, you’ve seen it all
You’ve even smoked a bowl in the Taj Mahal
You sat in St. Paul’s with a hit on your lip
But your goal this summer is to be looking hip
In the Gaza Strip
We’re on a plane to the Middle East
The flight attendant comes by and she’s pushing a feast
They got Molotov Cocktails and Arab Flambeau
You flip up your shades and order Perrier
You say Israelites, I’d like to party with them
We’ll be getting bombed in Jerusalem
Then hitchhike over to Palestine
In hopes Arafat has chilled the Canaan wine
Walking down the street you see a kid on a bus
He’s got a machine gun and he’s making a fuss
But his handkerchief would look good on your head
Playing hackysack and checking out the Dead
You bend to tie a shoe, a rock misses your face
You really think the fireworks are great in this place
U.S.-made bombs are dropping again
But you can’t hear a thing because your Walkman’s on 10
And Iran would be heaven
If you could only turn your Walkman up to 11
Beirut would be swell
If you could only get your Walkman up to 12
Libya would be just keen
If you could only crank it to 13.
• • •
Let me be the first to say I did not see this one coming as clearly as I saw Martha with the wool socks and fresh cherries all the way down to the glass bowl. In my 1989 spoof song, the visionary seeing a glammed up Gaza was not a real estate developer with a thing for resorts but rather a “Touch of Grey”-era Dead head, a trust funder with a thirst for adventure travel. But I offer this as evidence that I had a flash vision of an unimaginable future that later came … it is hard to say “true,” anymore … that would later be envisioned all over again by the president of the United States. I was a prophet of, I would hate to say “doom”—I was a prophet of unimaginable absurdity.
In 1989, when Marshall Boswell and I wrote “Looking Hip on the Gaza Strip,” Donald J. Trump was on a kind of roll. In 1987, the same year the Grateful Dead were rebooted as a national campus band by “Touch of Grey,” Trump had published his book The Art of the Deal. In 1988, Trump had successfully bought the Taj Mahal—the Atlantic City casino, that is, not the marble mausoleum in India where our fictional hipster smoked a bowl.
One unforgivable lapse in prophecy is evident here in my focus on the Walkman, a media dinosaur employed in 1989 to listen to music on headphones via the vanishing medium of cassette. Our hipster protagonist ignores and distorts the reality of the world around him with the help of this device. When an immensely more powerful man of the future than I, the 45th and 47th presidents of the United States, would envision a Gaza Strip with resort hotels rather than local people struggling for a meaningful existence, according to their own ideals, immensely more powerful social media that I did not foresee would have emerged to disorient and distract from a reality of U.S.-made bombs and delusions.
