“Thank you. Shall we?” He gestures to the park. We walk across to Turtle Pond, tucked just north of Seventy-Ninth Street. He guides me to a bench not too far from the pond.
I’ve seen Goos Mom before. She’s a Central Park institution, but she went west for a spell, and now, evidently, she is back. At nine o’clock, she heads down the walking path, her short, gray hair peeking out from under her signature Yankees cap, her olive-green rain boots on. She pulls her fire-engine red Radio Flyer wagon with the New York State license plate with GOOSMOM on it. Her pet goose, with the black head and white stripe, sits inside the basket, guarding over the goose food next to him. When they reach the pond, the ritual unfolds. Geese fly in and wait patiently by the water as she retrieves bins from a shed. She fills each one with goose food, places them symmetrically around the pond, and then claps three times. Then the geese race over to the food and chow down.
“I wish I knew who she was. Have you ever talked to her?”
He shakes his head. “No, but sometimes I make up stories in my head about who she is and why she takes care of the Central Park geese.”
“You do like stories, don’t you?”
“Well, so do you. You tell stories in your music. I do it in my writing.”
“Only yours are true,” I point out.
“That might be the pot calling the kettle black.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your music, especially your last album, might just be true too. Like true to your feelings,” he says, petting his dog, who sits dutifully at his feet. “Your last album was straight from the heart. That’s why so many people connected with it.”
Straight from the heart. That’s precisely how I wrote Crushed. But I can’t write from the heart now. I can only write when it’s aching. Not when it’s reaching for this man by my side.
“You know that, right?” he continues. “Sometimes I think you don’t realize what your music has done for people.”
I give him a sideways glance, like he’s crazy.
“Do you have any idea how many people blasted your songs over and over?”
“Yeah, when they were hurting,” I add in a withered voice.
“So? What’s wrong with that? Music heals. You probably helped heal hearts.” He taps my hand again, and the slightest touch from him sends a spark through me. “Speaking of, how about that preview?” Matthew asks. He reaches into his backpack for the reporter’s notebook that’s become so familiar to me now.
“So this is gonna be rough, not to mention a cappella.”
“Duly noted.”
So there on the park bench, snug in my coat, at the top of a grassy hill, a hundred feet from Goos Mom, who’s now standing with her hands on her h*ps watching her flock, I sing, like he says I do, about what’s true—true to my feelings. I sing “Don’t Ask.” I sing about my frustrations, my pain, my lingering anger. When I’m done, I find myself more nervous than I expected for his opinion.
“It’s good. It reminds me of some of the songs on Crushed.”
“You didn’t like it.”
“I did like it. It’s good. Is it your best song? No. But it’s good. And it’ll be even better when you polish it up.” He pauses, pen racing across the lined paper to record his notes. “Anything else?”
“Not my best song?” I say, raising an eyebrow.
He puts the notebook down and smiles. “You know I like your work. You know I loved your last album. I just told you how much. But I’m a critic too. This is my job.”
“So,” I begin, reaching for his notebook and adopting my best reportorial pose. I flip it open to a blank page and take his pen out of his hand. “Tell me about the rock critic in you, Matthew Harrigan. How did you know you wanted to be a rock critic?”
“I will tell you, but this is almost like your Olivia Newton-John fetish.”
“Oooh, a fetish,” I whisper. “The rock critic has a fetish.”
“My parents were both BBC producers.”
“That’s the fetish?”
“No, that was their job.”
“That is so British.”
“Yes, I know. Funny thing—we are English. Anyway, that’s how they met, working at the BBC.”
“But I thought you were…” I let my voice trail off.
He raises an eyebrow, daring me to ask.
“Fine. I’ll just say it,” I spit out. “I thought you were a baron.”
His mouth curves in a grin. “Many of the titled still have jobs.”
I grin back, because that’s as much of an admission as I’m going to get.
“My dad had this absolutely insane record collection. He had bootlegs of all the big English rock bands. He was one of those guys who actually posted ads and responded to ads in collector magazines, you know, trading bootlegs with other collectors. We had Pink Floyd, Rolling Stones, Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Cream, you name it. And we listened to them over and over. So really, I had no choice.”
I write down in big block letters: NO CHOICE. Then I peer at him as if I were wearing horn-rimmed glass. “But where’s the leg warmer and leotard portion of this story?”
“Ah, so how does this all connect? Well, I became totally obsessed with music. And I started reading Billboard. And, because my parents worked at the BBC, they received the top 100 list a week or so before it was actually published. This was nothing special; all news outlets did. But I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. So they used to bring these wretched black-and-white dot-matrix printouts of the top 100 list home every Sunday, which was nine days before it ran the following Tuesday. And I loved them. I plastered my walls with these printouts. So there I was, a ten-year-old boy in the mid-nineties living just outside of London and I didn’t have cars or sports or even music posters. I had these sort of ridiculous printouts of lists of songs instead. And then I would take a green highlighter and draw across week to week to chart the movement of the songs.”