LETTERS FROM HOME: ON THE RUN WITH SHERYL CROW & THE MIDNIGHT CABBY

Feb. 16, 1995

As she searches through the stations/for an unfamiliar song.

-- "Run, Baby, Run"

Dear Ken,

It's a rainy morning, and Sheryl Crow is on the CD player, doing her disappearing act. I called her mother a few months ago, when "All I Wanna Do" was all over the place, and Time and even the University of Missouri alumni magazine had done stories about this phenomenon from the little town in Southeast Missouri, and mom said it's been too much phenomenon for me. Very graciously shut the door in my face. I said I understood.

But I wonder: Is it too much attention, or too much of the wrong kind? If these are private people, how happy are they about their daughter becoming famous for a joyful song about drinking beer at noon in a bar with some guy probably named Billy, idly watching while the responsible world scrubs their troubles away at the car wash across the street.

Somehow she pulls it off, makes it art.

That's the problem with this writing business. If you keep at it, sooner or later you start zeroing in on the truth. Your own truth, of course. There are billions of stories in this world, each one the truth. It's honesty that's scary and the hard to find.

Before moving back from California I was editing a weekly south of San Francisco and this guy walked in with a handful of columns he'd written about driving a cab. He romanticized it, of course, made cab-driving through those mean streets sound like a feat of derring-do. Doubtless, it sometimes was. So we called him "The Midnight Cabby" and ran a picture of his crinkly eyes, and everybody was happy. Except me.

I kept pushing him to tell more. To tell the story he told me about the fare who had just found out he won the Lottery and wanted our cabby to find him a prostitute. And so on.

But he wouldn't tell the real stories, preferred his self-image as the patrolman of the night, always on the lookout for dangerous fares and traffic hazards.

We'd meet at a pub every Wednesday for lunch and talk about writing and his columns in particular. He was half-Cherokee, wiry like an Oklahoma cowboy, divorced, had a son he hadn't seen in years, lived in a hotel where you pay by the week. Something, more likely someone, had wounded him deeply. I never got close enough to find out which.

But little by little, these parts of himself began appearing in his columns, which I think is the revelatory function writing serves. And it was working until the day he wrote a column about driving in the fog at night and seeing apparitions and fighting off murderous thoughts. I probably should have taken that one to a psychologist instead of putting it in the newspaper.

Anyway, he promptly decided to take a two-week vacation from writing his column, then came into the office accusing me of rewriting his copy, of being soft on crime and homosexuals, of maybe being a homosexual. You name it. He demanded another editor. Since I was the one and only, the Midnight Cabby rode no more.

What scares us is getting close to the bone. Our own bones. Sheryl Crow takes a good jab at it, reveals that she leaves people before they can leave her, and how needful she is to feel her lover's healing hands.

For the past few months, the whole country has been relating to her need to escape herself by hoisting beers "until the sun comes up over Santa Monica Boulevard."

Once you can tell that stuff to strangers you can start listening to yourself.

Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.