WORTH THE WAITS

It was that mystical time during my college years when the world around me was opened up and left to my design. I could be whoever and whatever I wanted. There were no more parents around to subtly guide my character, and I was beginning to understand that I could rebuild my identity into whatever I saw fit. It was at this time that I met a girl. She was dark and mysterious, and in her eyes she held so many secrets that I thought her thin frame would surely burst from the internal pressure of lies and hidden acts of passion. To see her now, in that illustratively blurry recollection called memory, is to see her sitting alone in her one-room apartment with dim light from a cloudy window pouring through the swirling trails of her cigarette smoke. She looks defiantly melancholy and slowly reaches to her record player where she flips over a scratched copy of Nighthawks at the Diner. And then, like all memories, the image of her fades. All I'm left with is Tom's honey-coated grumbling voice singing me to sleep. Even though that girl played a part in the play of my life, the only part of her that made it to this act was her chosen soundtracks. I know that somewhere in a dimly lit room there is cigarette smoke winding its way to a yellowed ceiling, and the maddeningly remorseful sounds of Tom Waits's new albums are pushing a lonely girl through the haunted images of her own past. They give her the small comfort they always have offered, but that no man could ever replace.
Somewhere in a dark back alley of some metropolitan city there sits a small, unnoticed door. Above this door sits a crooked, dangerously loose sign that simply reads "Saloon." To walk into the bar is to announce that you have officially given up hope. That there is nothing left to do but to sit at the stained bar and spend your last few dollars on whatever you can afford. Anything that will get you drunk fast enough to forget your misery. As you sit there, staring into the bottom of an empty glass of whiskey, an old man creaks out of his seat and makes his way to a dust covered piano. The piano is painfully out of tune, but the man picks away at the keys and begins to slowly string together songs that in no way lighten your mood. But they surely echo the sentiments of that blackened piece of charcoal in your chest. In a voice that has to make its way past the gravel in his throat, he wails about nothing and everything all at once, and you suddenly realize that he is signing the soundtrack to the movie of your life. The old man at the piano starts his last song and in it is some hope. Not much, but a little. You feel a crack begin to pierce its way through your stubborn heart. And before you can fill your empty glass with selfish tears, you wave down the bartender and demand more whiskey. Then you remember to get one for the old man at the piano.
Every time you buy a new record of Tom Waits you're actually buying an antique. The record is already old before you listen to it. It's old and cherished before the speakers of your stereo play one single note. Without ever hearing one lyric, you know that Tom will sing about all the things in your life that lie in the back of your head and are covered with dust and cobwebs. His music will create for you the theatrical epics of your own diminutive existence, and he'll do it with the care, importance, and honesty of a grandfather telling stories to his grandchildren.
If you're a real Tom Waits fan, you already have these albums. If you're not, then it's your loss.