...But the Little Girls Understand by Steve Kistulentz

for Doug Fieger (d. 2010), Berton Averre, Prescott Niles

and Bruce Gary (d. 2006)

The men don’t know growls

Willie Dixon’s most famous tune, but

the version I prefer—low fidelity

cassette bootleg, howling tin sound with

shredded paper drums—remains

unreleased, recorded not by some venerable

Mississippi blues curmudgeon

whose name, artfully dropped here,

would evoke afternoons porch-sitting

with magnolia wine and box-string guitar,

or might bestow upon me

some sorely lacking hipster bonafides.

That’s never going to happen,

since I am talking here

about a nearly unlistenable cover,

the monophonic noise and mid-range screech

of The Knack, live in Hollywood,

before a packed house at the Troubador,

July 1979. So what if I was twelve?

I’d already gotten it, learned how to pluck

out the gallop of My Sharona’s bass,

hoping someday I’d ace out Doug Fieger

and be Sharona’s back door man

myself, though I’d have been better off

learning how to get in the front door first.

Which was the vaguest country,

women, or the blues? I did not know.

I still might not. I only knew

what I was learning: that a song

could actually sound like sweat;

that Ray Manzarek, gangly Ray best known

as the piano-playing witness to greatness,

had dropped by to sit in,

and when he’d come down Wonderland Avenue

it was a benediction, as if to say, Hey,

these guys are all right, forgive them

their sins of leather tie and Beatle boot.

So I want to say thank you

to whatever thought to tape that show,

because it taught me that I wanted a forever

girl like Sharona, who,

as the 45-rpm picture sleeve promised,

played the coolest records

for her slumber-partying girlfriends,

who all looked like the camisoled girls

in the Runaways or the equally fated Go-Gos.

But I am getting ahead of myself, since,

as Leonard Cohen says, everybody knows

how this story ends. I have everything

The Knack ever recorded, including

this version of Back Door Man,

which tells me everything that was wrong

with 1979, and later, everything wrong with me.

How does the show end? Listen

to the cassette, a moment in unsteady time,

the Zapruder film of the skinny tie era.

For the band, you know how it ends

already: rehab, divorce, rehab, forgiveness,

comeback tour, state fair nostalgia;

immortal Sharona—her real name

—sells real estate, million-dollar homes.

That’s what those little girls do,

they grow up, which reminds me

My Sharona, that set-closing number,

may be the saddest story I know.

Steve Kistulentz, "...But the Little Girls Understand" from The Luckless Age. Copyright © 2011 by Steve Kistulentz.  Reprinted by permission of Red Hen Press.

Source: The Luckless Age (Red Hen Press, 2011)

Stephanie Doty
Women's Issues Matter
February 14, 2014
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/