What's That Ticking Noise?

The whole thing, but especially the line
from the blonde in the car at 3:08.

I don't know about you, but I have an ear-worm problem. About twice a week, or maybe more often (if you listen to my long-suffering wife) I get a song in my head. When I do, it's a little bit like lower back pain. I can't ignore it; it's the only thing I can think of, and then suddenly, it's gone.

I've been a victim of ear-worm-itis since I was a little boy. I remember I had a 45 of "Hang Down Your Head Tom Dooley." I must have listened the grooves off the record.

Maybe that explains my mother's disposition.

I also remember discovering poetry when my father recited the rhyme "Fuzzy Wuzzy." I went over it again and again. I couldn't believe its symmetry and humor.

Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear.
Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair.

Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn't fuzzy,

Was he?

Since I first heard that ditty, I've seldom encountered something so perfect. Sidney Morgenbesser, below, comes close. 

The genesis of this slight summer-Friday post is a current week-long ear-worm I've been both enjoying and suffering through. A song by Chano Pozo, who was shot to death by his drug dealer in Harlem almost eighty years ago.

Chano wrote "Tin Tin Deo." You can listen to Chano here. Video seems to be undownloadable from YouTube. Though this musical version by Oscar Peterson has my head and brain rapt.

Chano and Tin Tin Deo have been the "ticking noise" in my head for a week now.

I first ran into Chano when Hector Quetzacoatl Padilla had "Tin Tin" blaring on the loud-speakers of Estadio de Béisbol Francisco I. Madero during one pre-game practice just about 50 years ago, to the month. What a blessing to have had a manager and a fill-in father who love be-bop. If you've never played pepper to such a soundtrack, you haven't lived. Melville said "A whale ship was my Harvard and my Yale College." My Wottsamatta U education was gained fielding grounders listening to Tin Tin.

Like Chano, Hector grew up in one room with one mud floor, one mattress and eight brothers. Hector heard life and death and joy and sad and love and hate and hunger and fat and fast and slow in every bit of Chano. Chano, along with Freddie Fender, who was hot that summer, were our soundtrack on long bus rides through the snow-capped peaks of nowhere and the nowhere of the still-as-dust deserts and the grime of solidified ancient cities spinning apart like cheap Chinese toys in an out-of-control centrifuge.

I heard Chano again last week via a wayward synapse--it must have taken a wrong turn in Albuquerque--but it got to me finally. It arrived when it was almost midnight and I was driving a rented grey Nissan Sentra down in the dark from the peak of Mt. Lemmon, elev. 9100 ft. to the Tucson valley 22 miles below, as the road winds. 

It was my first time night driving since my cataract surgery in April. And the road had more curves than Rita Hayworth cross-bred with a Möbius strip. Of course, 91-percent of all drivers today tailgate. And drive too fast. Even on those roads. Even in the ink of night. But I persisted. 

I drove just over the speed-limit. Not fully trusting myself, or the Nissan's brakes or its steering or its engine. My wife was there. But it was Chano who kept me company.

He's still with me.

Oh Tin Tin Deo.