Love Makes it Go

20 odd years ago, something strange happened. Some people said it was because of a shift in the wind, whatever that means. Others said it had something to do with the stars. I say, it was because of love.

My name is Jude. I have done some good things in my life, but I have also made some mistakes. Some big mistakes, to be perfectly honest. I like to think that I am—I was—a good person. But there is no denying that I hurt people.

Galesburg, Illinois is a small town. I grew up there, and I got out of there as fast as I could. When I was 16, my stepfather picked up a wrench from the cluttered surface of our kitchen table and told me that I had a month to come up with rent or I was out on my own. I put a change of clothes in a bag, grabbed my winter coat, and got on a bus East. It took me sixteen hours to get to New York City—one for every year of my life. I was scared, but I was free.

The drive from Illinois to New York in November is contemplative. The trees are thin, spindly. There is frost on the grass of fields that fly by you at dawn and cows look like aliens dropped in Middle America. When you step off the bus at 7:30 in the morning in New York, there is electricity in the air and, even though you’re so hungry you can’t think straight, you don’t want to eat because all you can think about is what is to come.

East 71st and York is right by the river—and rent is cheap there. I got a job (washing dishes) and an apartment (a crumby one). It took me three months but I got a girlfriend, eventually, too. I did not have a lot of money and sometimes I had to go days without eating but I didn’t care because I wasn’t living under the roof of people I hated and I was free.

I had been in New York a year when things took a turn for the worse. I got a call from Illinois from an aunt that my mother had passed away. The funeral was in five days, she said. We didn’t have the greatest relationship, she knew, but it would be good if I could go. I put the phone down and made one of the biggest decisions of my life—I decided to stay.

I say one of the biggest decisions because it was the first one where I felt like I had an intuition and I stuck with it despite an instinct to the contrary. There were a lot of things telling me that I had to go to my mother’s funeral. That my confrontation with my stepfather was something I could handle. But there was another feeling, or voice you could call it, telling me that I didn’t have to go.

Ruth was two years older than me. People said she was pretty and I agreed. We met on a bus uptown from the restaurant where I worked. She was reading and I asked the name of her book and we started talking and pretty soon we had a relationship.

When I told her about the funeral, she didn’t speak. She knew about the relationship I had with my mother and stepfather and I think she sympathized. We stayed up all night talking after my aunt called, and the thing I remember her saying best is, “Well, what makes you feel happier?”

I remember thinking about that, really thinking. I felt like I owed something to my mother, on the one hand. My head was telling me that a good man should go to his mother’s funeral. But, I also had this undercurrent of joy at the thought of staying in New York. At the thought of putting the pain of Galesburg behind me and moving on with my life. Ruth and I ate breakfast at a restaurant nearby and I called my aunt from a payphone on the way home and told her I wouldn’t be going back to Illinois.

——

The next few months were some of the most interesting of my life. Ruth and I spent a lot of time together, but I also had time to myself. I had played the guitar since I was a kid, and I picked it up again, spending most of a paycheck on a used one I found in a store in Midtown. I played in the evenings after work and then in the mornings when I woke up and then all the time. I played songs I knew and I even started to write a few.

Ruth encouraged me to start performing and I did. I played in coffee shops and bars and pretty soon I had a following. People would buy tickets in advance to hear me play and there were sometimes lines outside of the bars. I enjoyed the attention and I finally had some money. Ruth was with me the whole time—she was at almost every performance and she would walk home with me late at night and we would talk about how the show went.

One evening, after I had finished playing, someone came up to me and gave me their card. It was a man from a record company. “Give me a call,” he said. “We might be able to offer you a contract.” I couldn’t believe it, and neither could Ruth. We were both so excited that we each took the next day off work and got stoned together, spending the whole day in our apartment in a cloud of hazy grey smoke.

Things started happening pretty fast after that. I was offered the contract, and then I suddenly had a record deal. I was recording every day and playing shows in the evening. I was happy, just excited to be alive.

One day, returning home from somewhere, Ruth and I had a fight. We were walking through the door and I said something careless and suddenly we were yelling at each other. All the good feelings of the weeks since the record deal evaporated.

To make a long story short, I told her I didn’t love her. Not only that, I insulted her. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I remember it was bad. She left the apartment in tears, and I sat staring at the wall. There was a laundromat downstairs from the apartment where we lived, and it played music all through the day. I listened as jazz drifted in through the window and tried to calm down.

I thought long and hard about what I had done. Was I arrogant? Ruth had been the one who had encouraged me to take up performing in the first place. Why did I feel like I could push her to one side now that things were going well?

That night, it rained. I went for a walk and I stood at a crosswalk and, water soaking through my shoes, the thought crossed my mind that everything was pointless. Unjust.

Central Park in the early morning is often misty. If you go at around six o’clock, there usually aren’t that many people around and you can have some time by yourself as the sun rises. It is a 35-minute walk from York Avenue to the middle of the park. I went every day, feeling the city wake up around me and thinking about what I had said to Ruth.

There was a bridge near the entrance of the park where I often saw a homeless man sleeping. I would walk past him usually, but one day he said hello.

“How are ya?” He smiled at me. The man had a long, grey beard and was missing a few of his teeth.

“Well, thanks.” I slowed down. I still felt upset, even a week after the argument.

“You’re up early, my friend.”

“I’m just going for a walk,” I said to him.

“Want to sit down?” he asked. I sat.

The sun was just rising and there was a curtain of light around the tunnel entrance. There were piles of leaves along the walls and the sound of early morning traffic was starting up.

“You seem blue,” the homeless man said. “What’s going on?”

“I hurt someone I care about,” I said. “Said some things I didn’t mean.”

He nodded sympathetically. “Been there, brother. Was it a woman?”

I thought about Ruth. The way she looked as she left the apartment. What we had said to each other on the day we first met.

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, all I can say about mistakes is something I learned a while back and that helps keep me going. I’ll tell you if you want to hear it.”

I nodded.

The man looked up and exhaled. Then, half-smiling, he said, “Here it is: the mistakes that you make are actually you. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have made them. So ask yourself, do you want to be that person? And if the answer is no, then change.”

My name is Ruth. When I first met Jude, I was 18 years old. I grew up in New York, and for every Illinois country-tale that Jude had to offer, I could tell a story about life on the mean streets of the big city.

My favorite part of New York growing up was Yankee Stadium. I used to take the subway there with my brother and young cousin on weekends; we would sit together and listen to the sounds of people commuting as the train rumbled its way towards the Bronx.

Once, my brother pointed out someone on the platform to me. It was a person standing by themselves, reading a newspaper, wearing platform shoes that made them stand a foot above their normal height.

It surprised me, but also made me happy. I thought about the person throughout the day and then remembered them later on. It was one of the first times that I ever felt gratitude for something that I saw.

After the argument with Jude, I was not just upset, but miserable. I trusted Jude; I cared about him; I never thought he would act the way he did.

——

I left the city for a few days so that I could clear my head. Everything felt dull and, often, the things that I did felt pointless. I wanted to move on, but I was also drawn towards Jude and, at the same time, I wanted to fix things between us.

Feeling upset, I thought about my life and my memories of childhood. I remembered that time on the subway and I started to look for things that could cheer me up. Animals, colorful cars, strangers on the street who smiled. I felt unhappiness in my own life but I noticed joy and, essentially, happiness around me. It was enough to keep me going.

I had been so focused on the unhappiness I felt as a result of the argument with Jude that I wasn’t paying attention to the things happening around me. But, when I started, it made everything better. I was not grateful for how things were going in my own life—personally—I mean, but I was grateful for life in general, or life itself, I guess. Remembering that time on the subway helped me start to notice joy again, and that made me feel better.

Walking home from the park, all I could think about was what the homeless man had said to me. I had hurt the person I cared about most in the world. I think part of me wanted that not to be my fault. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was my fault—that it could only be my fault.

As I made my way towards the river, I thought about why I had told Ruth I did not love her. It wasn’t true, I realized, but I had still said it. And it had felt true enough to say at the time. So why did I say it? I guess the success of performing had gone to my head. But why had I wanted that success in the first place? It was confusing.

Since signing the record deal, I had been more focused on recording than playing live. The record company scheduled me to record in the studio almost every day of the week. My live shows were no longer as important. There was one scheduled that evening, though, and I decided to see how it would feel to pretend that I wasn’t successful—like how it was before I lost Ruth.

That night, I took my guitar and walked to the venue where I was playing. There was a crowd of about fifty people and I was nervous in a way that I had not been since the day I first started performing. It felt right, somehow, to be playing in a place that wasn’t crowded and to be playing for the right reasons, too. I decided to leave my deal with the record company.

The next day, I wrote a song about Ruth. I tried to put everything I loved about her in the tune and words. I missed her and I had no way to contact her, but I wanted to express how I felt.

Out of all the songs I had written over the past few months, it was my favorite. I played at all the places where I used to perform, and I did it out of love—love for her and love of music, as well.

——

I had been out of New York for a few days and I decided that I was not going to return. I had had an amazing life there, but it was over; I wanted to start again.

It felt good to be on my own, watching the world around me, and learning new things about the person that I was. It was scary but it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle.

I went to a few different places but eventually settled in a town in Michigan. I liked it there, and I felt happy and relaxed to be out on my own.

A few months after arriving, I was at a restaurant where they played live music and I heard a song. The song was about me. I couldn’t believe it. Jude must have written it, I thought. But how could someone be playing it in Michigan? And why hadn’t I heard it on the radio?

I was excited. Nervous, too. I decided to go back to New York to look for Jude.

Ruth and I have been together for 20 years. I often think about the night that we had the argument, and I can’t believe that I ever thought anything was more important than her love and friendship.

I sometimes wonder how she was able to hear the song that I wrote hundreds of miles away from New York City. People across the country must have been listening to it and playing it for themselves.

All I tried to do was put the way I felt towards Ruth into words and a melody. I didn’t intend for it to become famous, but I guess people heard something in the song that made it appeal to them, too.