Lyin' Here On This Lumpy Bed: Meditations on Grace

Recently I've been pondering grace, which I ponder every year or so in an extended, uninterrupted way. This time it was because someone used it in the context of accepting pain with little inclination toward vengeance or control.

As I have been watching John Waters's movies off and on this year, and I am in Maryland at the present moment, where I stumbled upon some Waters radio interviews, I do believe grace can be explored with Watersian tools.

Doris Duke, on her 1969 "I Don't Care Anymore" song released on I'm A Loser: The Swamp Dogg Sessions, and more available on her Greatest Hits, talks about a lot of bad things that have happened to her which pack a blues punch on the baby fat underside of deep, sweet soul.


Waters cites Duke's song as one of the gems he was sad to cut from his fourteen track compilation, A Date With John Waters (2007, Watertower Music; $13.98 on Amazon). He discussed the project with NPR's Bob Boilen when it was released, and explained that it's not ironic readings of pathetic, and bizarre situations that draw him to quirky, sometimes extreme songs: though they work as ironic, it's their originality and their function as narrative.

John Waters is not powerful because of irony, which most of us creative types end up sculpting in, elbow and knee-deep, myself included. He takes the absurd and the often-considered repulsive of life head on: he asks what Quadruple-D breasted girls want in life and lets them answer for themselves. He doesn’t answer for them. He calls himself a control freak but again and again, he listens, to the crazies who entertain us because they are sparkly and different and make us feel two parts sane and three parts unenelightened to be so stuck and assimilated into unreasonable doldrums. Which is the opposite of being controlling.

Isn't this a step toward grace? To listen and record, without irony? To uphold regardless of and sometimes in spite of tragedy and meaninglessness?

What catches actor, director, writer, and music afficionado John Waters's attention about Duke's song is not the part where she sings about coming up from the south to the industrial north when the mills closed, or the part where her husband treats her like he bought her 'by the pound.' Nor was it the job after job she works, each worse than the one before; it wasn't the bit about losing her mother, either, that spoke to him. What snagged him was the bit about her singing all this while lying on a lumpy bed.

What is grace, again?

I mean, embracing the specific and the pathetic in your fellow humans may not be Grace with a capitol 'G' or "prevenient grace" (Methodist) or "Divine Grace," "actual Grace," or "Sanctifying grace" (Catholic, Catholic, Catholic). All such forms seem to me to be direct intervention of the divine, but I'm sure I've got that perverted and watered down. It might not even be the layperson's why don't you say Grace-grace, or the Goodness of Gracious! grace, but that elusive fairy dust element, stuck in the ether out there, that notion someone is considered possessing when they commandeer forgiving, joy-seeking wit in the face of tragedy that is one pinky toe shy of ridiculing its victims. The wispy veil that some people earn, are born with, or, if you're like me, try to learn by watching others--seeing but embracing, though your vision of reality is harsh, accurate, detailed. Forgiving yourself, others and life's absurdities and telling it like it is. Letting go. Loving the raunchy as a piece of the whole. I don't know.

lyin' here on this lumpy bed

It’s not a hard bed, and it’s not a mat on the floor. It’s a lumpy bed, which we can all picture, even if it means recalling shitty nights slept on motel mattresses long ago. Well, wherever you retrieve your lumpy-bed memory, guess what, she's saying, it's my present-day situation. Sure, she has a bed. So no, she’s not trying to say she’s destitute or anything. But it’s lumpy goddammit, and when you add that to the fact that she left her husband who treated her like he owned her, worked a bunch of jobs that sucked, and then lost her mom, a lumpy bed is just effed up.

So Waters is drawn to the pathetic and specific, elements, when intertwined, make for a great kickoff to story. We know where Ms. Duke is in the song, because the song is taking it seriously that we want to be able to picture from where this protagonist sings. What's her perspective? The songwriter knows we intuitively ask, even if claim all we crave is something to thump our insides to for a few minutes.

Other selections in A Date With John Waters, like the he/she duet "In Spite Of Ourselves" (Iris DeMent and John Prine) which Prine wrote for Billy Bob Thornton's 2001 movie Daddy and Them, are more about love in its saccharine goodness, not its cursed, splintered fallout.

But here too, Waters applauds a song that gives us unattractive, unbearably human characteristics, this time in a way that somehow come together and make some joy for the two people involved--in only the way they would find joyful. Pathetic and specific.
-She don't like her eggs all runny
-He drinks his beer like it's oxygen

"Incredible sincerity," he says to Boilen of these songs, "and at the same time absurdity. They’re so original they’re perfect." Like people? Like real people who are just unfurling in front of you with no edit.

In spite of ourselves, we'll end up sittin' on a rainbow. Against all odds, honey, we're the big door prize.

"You’re laughing, but at the same time…it’s narrative, and it’s sad."

When you can hold these contradictions like a child's handful, cupped, close, in your mind and at the same time--that just might be grace.