Sam Wong Hotel

The following is an essay I submitted today for my Listening in Culture music class. I wanted to write about a song that meant a lot to me, but didn’t feel like I could in the way the exemplars proposed. So, I broke the first ‘rule’ of the FAQ — not to use too many ‘I’ statements — but I think I’m better off for it.

—

How much of your life have you found in a song before? How much of the song in your life? It is hard to explain how much something as elusive as art means to us. For me, it feels impossible to write about a piece as important to me as ‘Sam Wong Hotel’ in a conventional manner. I could tell you it is a singer-songwriter song, a single guitar and voice, that it is about San Francisco, but I wouldn’t really be getting at anything of substance. That type of analysis is just regurgitating a whole lot of nothing new, and it seems to me a disrespect.

So: ‘Sam Wong Hotel’ by Sun Kil Moon is a perfect example of the ambiguous literal, a piece of art that might not feel sharp at first, but that will cut you deep below the skin if you let it. The following essay acts as an extension of the song — of the ambiguous literal — an application of the song to my life, and hopefully my life to yours, in some vague way.

I wake to my alarm at four in the morning. It is June and damp, a fog hung low and thick over my hometown. I am damp — my cotton sheets and open window don’t help in the summer. I am uncomfortable and a pit of hangover hurts my stomach, even though I’m not. It’s just waking up so early. I want nothing more than to throw my phone out the window and ignore the call of the day.

Half awake, I roll through my morning routine; clothes, a contact lens, my packed bag, the bathroom, a breakfast consisting of whatever is on hand.

I walk down, through the woods of our compound, onto the boardwalk my great-grandfather built. The morning dew is cold and clings to ferns overgrowing the path — I can’t bring myself to cut them — and then clings to my bare legs.

I pass my cousin’s house, and grab one of the shitty single speed tourist bikes we bought for $10 a few years ago.

There by the blue, blue sea

On my morning walks

Seagulls dip and sway

Over the mossy rocks

It’s now 4:45. My commute to work is short: a ten-minute bike ride along the water. Town settled down a couple hours ago, when the last of the club stragglers fought their drinks home on two legs or a bike or all four legs.

Down at the pier I meet Captain Chevy, and ditch my bike lockless at the nearest stand. He’s got tired bags under his eyes from his troubled sleeping. We exchange a few words about the wind, the morning, last night — but mostly don’t talk.

The Heidi Lyn is a 40-foot downeast lobster boat, and our office. We load a couple thousand pounds of fish skins and coolers full of ice on deck. It’s now just past 5, and we begin the crawl out of the harbor.

It is my job to arrange the deck for the day of hauling. We have 300 traps to get through, which all need to be picked, rebaited, and set back into the Gulf of Maine. I use a line to tow the coolers into the front-left corner of the deck, prepare the banding table, and slop five totes of rotting fish skins and guts into the bait box. I start stuffing bait bags, and instantly feel sick. The smell is one thing, but the ammonia from the skate skins makes my stomach curl into itself. I look around the harbor, at the cormorants and gulls, the 200-foot yachts, the moon, and out to the dunes, now faintly lit by the sun burning through the fog far, far behind us.

Oh feel the wind blowing in

Cool summer days

Boats in the bay

Sailing along

We round Long Point, the very end of Cape Cod, the final sandy whisper of Provincetown. Our shelter from a northeast wind is fading as we abandon the protection of the bay. The chop picks up a bit. The horizon looms grey. My stomach is no good on boats. Enough to keep it together for the season, to be an effective fisherman, but not enough to feel good.

Passing Race Point, we nose it north into the open ocean, headed an hour offshore to Stellwagen Bank, where our 800 traps lie. The boat bounces now into headwind waves, spraying the deck, spraying my face. Done with my chores, I claw up to the cabin door and then down into the head. I curl up in a sleeping bag, put on my headphones, and turn on Admiral Fell Promises.

Under a lone palm tree

On my easy rest

Centered in my gaze

Her pretty yellow dress

Admiral Fell Promises by Sun Kil Moon is a 10-track album of poetic and musical brilliance; the words and nylon-string guitar arrangements each more beautiful than the other. The album wanders with Mark Kozelek (the man behind Sun Kil Moon) through life and on tour, weighted in location and imagery and vague meaning. I’ve come to call this the ambiguous literal. Visions of life, descriptions conveyed sparsely enough to kaleidoscope and rearrange and change hue for each person they touch.

Each morning, lying in the berth, when ‘Sam Wong Hotel’ would come on, I would sigh and curl a slow smile. There is softness in a lot of situations — even pounding out across a rough ocean in a commercial fishing boat at 5AM. The tone of Kozelek’s guitar and voice and words — of this song — could have wrapped those mornings on the lobster boat up and into oneness and we all would have dissolved together.

Oh, Katherine drifts again

Into my mind

Freezing the time

She visits me still

It is now mid July and I have been laid off. The catch has been so poor that Captain Chevy has all but run out of money completely; he will fish on his own for a week, and if he makes enough to rehire me, he will. In the late afternoon, I stick myself into the back of a friend’s stuffed car on a whim and we leave for New York City. I am adrift, chasing a girl in Brooklyn and time away from home. At the crest of the Sagamore bridge, I look down at the boats creeping through the Cape Cod Canal, past the rows of colored summer homes, thinking of my job.

Oh, marina

Pastel hues

Which one tomorrow

Of your many moons?

By two in the morning I’m home in Manhattan, to an empty familial apartment. No one has been here since I visited for a weekend in June. Mail has piled up high, left to no one. It’s hot so I put the air conditioning on. I sift through the letters and pamphlets, the sorting smoothes the tired chops of thought. I put on ‘Sam Wong Hotel’, the song that has soundtracked this summer. But now its words and tone bring solace, bring a sound for the nothingness of this empty apartment. It does not see the ocean unfolding into the day. I go for a walk. I stare out over the east river to Roosevelt Island and Long Island City.

Coast guard city light

My late evening walks

Down the port’s mouth square

Pass Sam Wong Hotel

I spend the days in various states; upset, waking up on the wrong side of noon, in a haze from heavy nights with friends crawling the subway out to Greenpoint, and then happy, deliriously so, nonverbal and stuck to the fence outside Honey’s house by alcohol and drugs. I go to sleep very late, somehow having made it to Harlem, to Jesse’s house, onto his couch.

And the sun burns through the fog of the night before at two in the afternoon, and it finds my eyes. I wake up in my best party shirt, unbuttoned but the last, in my white pants. I write Jesse a note, that I have someone to see in Chelsea, I’m sorry for going before you wake up.

Harlem is rolling along and the day is hot, the sidewalk air full of barbecue smoke and subway steam. I get on a CitiBike. The ride feels gentle despite the night before, down into the head of Central park and then through its entire body, back towards home.

I’m meeting Ginger, a girl — a woman — from this summer; who I’d have chased to New York instead if not for a boyfriend of four years. She wants me to model for a painting that will open in Chelsea in September. She reassures me it has nothing to do with me; I’m just an object to carry her meaning. I curl a slow smile.

We roam; I get coffee, and sushi, and feel a bit better. We pass the Chelsea Hotel, and I tell her about Leonard Cohen’s song for Janis Joplin, I urge her to listen to it. I pose for her painting down by the piers. I say goodbye to Ginger for the foreseeable future. The painting ends up being her only Untitled painting in the entire show.

Oh, Chinatown

Closing down

Ghostly moon mist

Eerily dressed

The ambiguous literal. ‘Sam Wong Hotel’ is 114 words — a string of stripped back poetry following a middle aged man’s walk through San Francisco. I often wonder if it really means anything about those walks, even to Kozelek.

I am a boy, and this was my summer, and this was the song I was married to. Some pieces of art have a greater capacity for attachment than others — I see nothing of myself or a lobster boat or a girl in a Rothko. In ‘Sam Wong Hotel’, I am back on the roaring atlantic, bracing against the cold of those harbor mornings, back in New York and off my head, back to thinking of a girl.

This song cannot take you to those places. You will not feel the sunrise spindrift, the lying down after a twelve hour day of fishing, the ache I felt headed to and then out of the city. But you are not meant to, just as I will never know what it does for you — if it does anything at all. That’s just the beauty of ‘Sam Wong Hotel’, of the ambiguous literal.

Oh harp player

On Grant Avenue

Which one tomorrow

of your haunting tunes?