Slow Players #17: "Tough Rackets" (Cohen)

I first met Leonard Cohen at a party. I was slouching against a glass display case—the party was being held in a furniture store, one that belonged to Cohen’s daughter, although I didn’t know that until later—when an older man in a charcoal suit wandered over to stand next to me. For a long moment, I didn’t recognize him. I was too busy absorbing his beautiful jacket, his trilby hat, his well-tended nails, his pleasant, old world affect. My people are from Montreal—my relatives on my father’s side—and so I’d grown up surrounded by men like this: dark-eyed, shrewd uncles and older cousins, and so for a long moment, even after I’d worked out who he was, I pretended this was who he was: Cousin Lenny from Montreal. We traded hellos, stabbed crudites at the hummus plate at my elbow that had been had been his original destination, then fell into small talk, as one does on these occasions. I must’ve have asked him if he knew the guest of honor—it was a book launch for someone, I no longer remember who—and eventually he smiled at me and said,

“So. What racket are you in?” I told him (“I’m a novelist”), and he shook his head and murmured, “Oh. That’s a tough racket. I tried that, but I just couldn’t hack it. It only worked out for me when I had a steady domestic life, and I—didn’t have that, most of the time.”

It’s difficult to convey, really, the temperature of our conversation, which wasn’t long, but wasn’t really short either: about twenty minutes. For some reason, we were alone together, the room was full, but it was just the two of us talking, and nobody came over to interrupt or to disturb the famous man, and I sort of enjoyed playing along, pretending I didn’t recognize him, or care who he was. I suppose I didn’t care who he was. Having lived in and around Los Angeles for a long time, having grown up in a crucible of the movie business, where usually the remit was to ignore famous people—they were family friends, business colleagues, or (later) personal friends, and in the end their celebrity was the least interesting thing about them—it was second nature not to care about such things, and I was far more interested in Cohen’s other qualities: his evident warmth and good humor, his sly and appealing way of seeming to deflect attention, his aura of interest and curiosity. My uncles and cousins are like that too. We talked for a while—he asked questions about my habits and routines—and eventually, because I couldn’t resist, I asked: “And you? What racket are you in?” He told me he was a touring musician. “Talk about tough rackets,” I said, and he smiled. “Yeah. There’s no real way around that, is there?”

All this was a long time ago. I don’t remember the year, exactly, but it was somewhere early in Obama’s first term, the swollen epoch in which the terminal patient had a temporary air of rude health, so to speak. For a brief while, I enjoyed this encounter, and my memory of it, as a kind of reminder that the life of a working artist even at its best is difficult, or at least not plush. A few years earlier Cohen had been embezzled out of the bulk of his life savings, and so had been spurred back on the road and into the recording studio, away from what might have otherwise been a period of comfortable retirement. It didn’t seem to bother him too much (though, naturally, I’m sure it did), not to the naked eye, and I liked his wry, old-timey way of putting it: “What racket?” Of course the arts are a racket! Everything is a racket. But (and, man, I can still see that little smile, that little ironic gleam) they’re the best racket, the only racket. If you’re going to die for something—and you should, because the only alternative is to die for nothing—die for those.

As luck would have it, because Los Angeles is a weird, weird place, I started running into Cohen with regularity. Not constantly, but often enough over the next few years that it began to feel a little peculiar: looking over to see him next to me at a stoplight; brushing by him on my way into an elevator; seated between him and Ed Ruscha at a dinner party to which I’d somewhat inexplicably been invited. Most of these encounters weren’t the speaking kind—he became more of an augur of fortune; Hey, I saw Leonard Cohen walking out of a Kosher market on Pico, this afternoon—and the few that were more or less repeated the first one. I never wanted to remind him we’d met (why would I? Our few conversations were substantive enough to be interesting, but not quite singular enough that he should be asked to remember them, or me), and the truth is, I liked it that way. I like art because I’m not tasked with searing myself into the consciousness of its maker, and also because I’m not tasked with the burden of knowing the person behind it. Not that I haven’t known and loved any number of artists, famous and otherwise, personally, but there’ve also been cases where the experience of knowing them was . . . not particularly additive, and so I was oddly charmed by having an amnesiac’s experience of Cohen: the same first meeting over and over. I will say that he seemed, always, the same: gentle, kind, and approachable. I never commented on who he was one way or the other: I either pretended I didn’t recognize him or (as with the dinner party) it was a given that everybody knew and so there was no need. I may have leaned on him a little hard at that party, mostly as refuge from the untalkative, almost inanimate, Ruscha—I felt like I was crammed between a person and a concrete wall—but it was the same conversation each time: writing, what it was like, how he’d found it discouraging, reading (usually poets, we discussed: Cavafy, Lorca). You don’t need an artist to be who you wish them to be—weirdly, it’s sometimes almost a relief when they turn out to be a real prick, a disappointment, since it does nothing to alter the attractions of the work, or its meaning—but it was charming to find Cohen almost exactly the way you’d wish him to be. Not to everyone, I’m sure, but to me, at least: a stranger he happened to meet many times.

What is the point of it, I wonder? Not of this story—I’ll come to that—but of the arts? It isn’t to make you a better person, it isn’t moral instruction, it isn’t about—another poet Cohen and I discussed a little—“How to Live, What to Do,” but it isn’t about mere distraction either. It’s really about what these encounters with Cohen were about—a recurring encounter with a stranger, with that stranger who also happens to be yourself—but it’s also true what Gilbert Sorrentino says in his wonderful, piercing story “The Moon In Its Flight:” “Art cannot rescue anybody from anything.” Last summer—July ‘23, as I was pushing through the final set of changes before delivering the first draft of The Golden Hour to my editor—I started to feel funny. I don’t mean “funny” as in merely weird, alas, I mean uncomfortable, and then with shooting pains in my side. I was typing at a standing desk, shifting from foot to foot, before finally, one night, I went to the ER, where they discovered a kidney stone and, what was worse, a growth in my bladder. I had a surgery, two surgeries, to remove a cancerous tumor, and by the time I was done pissing blood (they got it, but since then there’s been a few courses of immunotherapy to protect against recurrence and periodic painful scopes to keep an eye on things) I was so freaked out I didn’t know whether to be grateful (were it not for that kidney stone, I would have been—I would be right now—in much deeper trouble) or terrified. I still don’t. Art helps, of course, with that—if you’ve got something to say, say it now, while you can—but not entirely. Art cannot rescue anybody from anything.

Of course, Cohen knew that. His work was in touch with death if it was in touch with anything at all, and the air of amusement and irony that rose from him—an air that he and I had in common, I suppose—spoke to that as well. I’ve always loved that kind of writer, and that kind of person, the most. People who seemed in some sense as if they were already dead, or who wrote like it. Denis Johnson was one of those. Charles Portis. Shirley Hazzard, even, in her moments of lethal detachment, the sentences that punch through a scene to sever an artery. But I was thinking of Cohen even as I wrote, shifting from foot to foot, pushing ‘send’ to deliver my manuscript before piling off to the hospital for surgery. My mother had met him a handful of times too, something I’d never mentioned to him. She knew him through her friend Judy Collins, the singer who first made “Suzanne” and “Bird on a Wire” famous, although that friendship dissolved sometime in the late sixties and I don’t believe she ever saw him again. She loved the songs, and Cohen’s own versions of them, and played those records to me over and over again in my childhood, and so they, too, were part of what made me an artist, and of what were, unfortunately, unable to rescue me from anything, just like they cannot rescue you either. But.

The last time I saw Leonard (and I suppose, in the end, I can call him that, right? “Leonard”), we were in the waiting room of a radiologist’s office in 2015. I was there for a scan, an unrelated matter that turned out to be nothing, and the room was empty except for—him, sitting in his suit, holding a styrofoam cup. I sat down and he looked up and smiled, without recognition. I reached for a magazine, then thought better of it.

“Excuse me. Are you Leonard Cohen?” Not because I didn’t recognize him, but because I wanted, for once, to make it legible, and I suppose to express my gratitude for his work, and his existence. Which suddenly seemed—an older man, a radiologist’s office—more tenuous than I’d previously assumed.

“I am.”

Somehow, it didn’t take. I said something about his work, and he said thank you, and then he turned it around and said, “And you? What racket are you in?”

He said it the same way, and then, when I told him again, he said the same thing: “Oh,” he said. “That’s a tough racket.”

So it is, I guess, but since then I’ve had tougher. And since then Cohen has died (going under on the eve of the 2016 election, which seemed ideal an ideal moment to say goodbye, even if his passing left me feeling a little extra bereft), and art seems less important than it did before (less, but also more, because that’s sort of how these things work: the capital-I Importance some things have when you’re younger gets replaced with a lower case iteration that’s also more urgent, and more intense), and the world seems worse, of course, but the thing is, all of this is a lie: the world is the same slaughterhouse it’s always been, certainly no better but arguably not “worse;” art does rescue some people from some things, even if it can’t spare them from the ultimate thing, and Leonard is still here, even if he’s also gone, turning to me with his cup full of orange barium sulfate and tilting it towards me, smiling. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to finish off this delicious beverage.” I have no doubt that stuff was nauseating. But of course, he finished it, down to its final drop.

Until soon,