Category: Nashville

Here is the poetically written story from Jordan Chism at Tenx9’s September event “Nashville.” She writes of moving to Nashville from NYC and her experiences adjusting to the new city. 

I knew within the first couple days of visiting Nashville that this was where I was supposed to be. Nature itself seemed to know Nashville’s nickname was “Music City” and acted accordingly.  Brooklyn, where I had been living, feigned its own life song with the never-ending bustle below my fire escape, but even the people seemed to move mechanically.  It was, overall, much too commercial for my preference. Everyone spoke with the grandiloquence of being somebody, and I was lost somewhere in the engine.  I longed for real houses with real basements, real yards, real moonshine, real long-haired musicians who didn’t just wear motorcycle jackets, but actually rode the motorcycles.  Nashville harkened to my small-city-Reno roots and still had all the opportunity of New York.

I had the foolproof plan of bringing to Music City all that I learned at the record label in Brooklyn,  instantaneously starting my own indie label,  all the while discovering the hidden musical regalia of East Nashville, and even releasing my own full-length album that very year. Of course this was all to be funded by invisible investors who would see my radiating drive and passion the way some clairvoyants say they see auras.

The dichotomy of my exceedingly extravagant dreams and my real, jobless life in between dead-end temp assignments that first year was something I chose not to acknowledge for many months. It finally dawned on me, as I was making out patterns in the water-stained walls of my  weeping apartment,  while staring at a dinner of seasoned rice for the fifth consecutive night, that if I was  to have feasts with the excess flowing  from my table to  all the mouths of the homeless in the city, as well as fund all my friends’ albums,  and be the owner of a speed boat the way I regularly was in my imagination, I was probably going to have to succumb to a nine-to-five for a while, but where I wondered?

My income became bolstered with a part-time serving position at my beloved Boswell’s Harley Davidson Grill.  Among other reasons I adored this job was that I felt like it gave me street-cred with the bikers (even though I wouldn’t be caught dead on the back of one of those death traps). Shenanigans abounded. The head waitress was Sparkle, who’s Christian name I never learned, a 65 yr. old, trike-riding, Scottie-dog loving, marvelous cartoon character of a dame. My most-treasured memory of her was when she mixed some cleaners  together and accidentally made mustard gas. And then there was Emad, the Egyptian cook who had moved here to save up in order to bring his wife and twin toddlers over.  He worked three jobs, often 16 hour days, and never got a day off. Emad  taught me so much about work ethic and  Egyptian curse words. This crash-course taught me sayings  that would make Cleopatra roll over in her sarcophagus, and we often used my new vocab  to secretly  talk smack.  Everyone worked hard there and everyone was equal.  When the occasional hoity- toity, weekend warrior rode in and ordered me around like I was his indentured receptionist, “My Good Man,” I’d say, and let him have all the reasons I wasn’t. Or when someone would make a comment about my chest, he’d also get a free lesson with his meal. Yes, as long as I didn’t talk politics there, I could be the spitfire I was.  I sometimes  wonder, if my dreams were to all come true, whether or not I’d just wish I was waitressing there again the way Mark Twain had wished he was just a steam boat captain after he gained  all his fame and glory.

In the same way that my job at the grill gave me a true taste of biker culture, my front desk assignments around the city gave me a genuine taste of what the rest of Nashville had to offer. Some experiences were sweet, some bitter-sweet, and some like vinegar. There were the accounting firms whose clients revealed their generous hearts around the holidays while others made me feel so negligible during the stressful tax season. One man complained in my presence that he might as well quit all his hard work and just be a receptionist like this poor girl for all he was paying in taxes.  I came across instances like this more often than I’d like to admit.

Swathed in the familiar air of burnt coffee, I witnessed the inner-workings of all kinds of businesses as their visions birthed a reality of prosperity or collapse. I saw the rising solar glow in a former addict’s eyes as he prepared to leave treatment, and I smelled the newborn roses brought to another patient by her Sunday visitors at my favorite of assignments (which I would later get permanently hired at): a drug abuse treatment facility.  I heard grandiose Navy tales and whistled tunes of glory from security guards.  I also heard the frustrations through the broken English of a crisp uniform-clad housekeeper who worked a superhuman schedule to feed her children in another, less agreeable assignment. In freshly shined windows, I saw the golden flash of an executive’s watch as he gestured that the housekeeper was taking too long on the windows.  He continued to suggest that she knew nothing because she knew little English.  I saw the housemaid’s crestfallen countenance in that same reflection.  It was the look I had been catching in my own reflection.

The frustrations I began to feel in these assignments were unparalleled to any of my former experiences. This impenetrable fog of nobodiness loomed for hours after awakening every morning. When it lifted, and I allowed myself to fantasize in the fresh light, I imagined  my dreams  floating up into the ether, getting muddled with everyone else’s dreams  into  chaotic, gray storm clouds, ready to sprinkle a lucky rain on a select few, and I was among the few less and less frequently in these visions. The somebodies were plentiful – executives with golden watches, musicians with Ivy League degrees that not only had the finest gear, they knew how to fix their own vintage amps, the kind I was too afraid to touch for fear of electrocuting myself. I became so tired of having to prove myself before given the chance to prove myself.  This city was starting to feel overwhelming and over-saturated. I let myself dwell in self-pity for months. By the time I marked my two years in Music City, I was too enmeshed in my own pride and hidden self-doubt that I stopped hearing the song of the city, the mockingbird was as much a nuisance as the switchboards I had to answer.  I was ready to pack up and move home.

But then something supernatural happened, and similar instances continue to happen, the sorcery of them planting my feet to the ground like they’re magnetized to the city. I went to a party that turned into an informal house show, and was moved to tears, convinced that the singer was really an angel, the fiddler a magician, the guitar player a deity, and the bassist and drummer some kind of alien hybrid. Oh, the magic! And some nights I’d just walk past a bar and stop in the street, unaware that I was holding up traffic, because the musicians in this dirty dive bar had enchanted the most exhausted, discouraged corners of my soul.

Yes, Nashville had revealed its ugly side, it’s pretentious side, just  like Brooklyn and every other city I had lived in (and run from, and heaven knows there had been a few),  because human nature has an ugly side and we do have a lot of humans in this town. Maybe I hated arrogance so much because I have so much of it, but my ego doesn’t want to admit it. Maybe the somebodies I came across felt misunderstood, too, and maybe they’re trying to prove themselves, too, projecting their self-doubt onto others like I’ve caught myself doing more than once.   Surely they’ve awakened to the desolate fog more often than they’ve let on, but somehow they make it out victorious.

Nashville’s ugly side is outshined by its magical side, well, less a side than a polished, multi-planed crystal. When it catches light, it casts lustrous colors which brighten the darkest places within me and is so stunning and incomparable to anything else I’ve known. In authentic Nashville song, you audibly experience other people’s dreams, and these dreams aren’t all muddled and muddied the way I let mine  occasionally get. These songs are the manifestations, in their purest forms, of something human beings envisioned together once pride was set aside, the competition stopped, and they just let their souls jam the eff out. It is unity and beauty and creation- a miracle. Music City has succeeded in doing what no other city had been capable of – it has trapped me in its love song.