Tom Waits, Cigars, Old friends, and Agents

Some nights I enjoy a drink. I put on Tom Waits, pour a drink, and even sometimes for the hell of it, light a cigar. I’ve got a few friends who claim to be experts on cigars. They drum them against their ear, they refuse to use anything other than a match to light them, and they pretended to be sad when Alejandro Robaina died, even though they had never smoked one of his cigars. I know nothing about cigars, and in fact prefer cigarettes. But lighting the cigar for me is like putting on a tie. There is no real purpose to it except to class up the joint a bit. I’m rambling again.

The drink, I can enjoy. A few mouth-fulls of 10-15 year old whiskey are always very pleasing on a cool summer night after it rains: When you can still hear the thunder rolling away and the rain is already evaporating off the pavement. That’s the time when I pour my drink and put on a Tom Waits record. Mr. Waits has such a vast discography and sound spanning nearly half a century. He started his career with a somewhat normal acoustic, singer/songwriter feel and his most recent albums sound like dark electronic blues from a future that I never want to see. My favorite of his albums though are the ones that seem to mix Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong. Those jazzy, raspy albums like Small Change and Foreign Affair. I’ll even put on Nighthawks at the Diner from time to time.

So it rained the other day, I put on Small Change, put three fingers of whiskey in my glass and lit up a cigar. I called a former student of mine. She was the student that I wished all my students were like. She read and wrote, that’s all. Occasionally she would go for long poetically painful walks up and down the coasts of this country, but she’d always be reading and writing while doing so. Since graduating a decade ago, she has married, divorced, settled down, married again and now has a couple of children. Her husband reads and writes just as much as she does!

I wrote her a letter awhile back and never heard a response. Normally I am completely unbothered by such things, but Tom and my whiskey put a telephone in my hand. She is doing quite well! She has a job teaching writing, and so does her husband. She even received a phone call from an agent who had read a few of her stories in some magazines. He asked her if she had anything worth publishing. She had just finished a novel! Now, agents are people who don’t read and write a lot. They read and judge a lot. But, they’re just trying to make a living, too. But for an agent to seek her out and ask if she had anything he wanted to read, I am quite happy for her! Most people bang down agents’ doors begging the agent to read their work! But this time he found her! Her husband is also a very talented writer and is on the verge of getting his novel published.

I’m glad I called! There was so much good news. My first agent was my brother; my second agent was my first wife. My last agent might as well have been Saint Christopher himself.