The Reappearance of Leslie Fink
by Derek Godin
The Hammerstein Ballroom might
as well be Mars, and if you're
among the standing crowd, you
know the story; once upon a winter
on the slippery shores of
Lake Superior, Leslie Jane Fink
found a hammered dulcimer gathering
dust in a family friend's garage.
She was struck not by the instrument
but by its tone, an ethereal ringing
of steel strings rising with the heat.
She couldn't convince the owners
to part ways with the old chordophone,
so she made do with a pawn shop guitar.
She learned to play it all wrong, hoping
to coax out sounds similar to the dulcimer,
and that attempt at approximation was
her secret success. Her flat-top shimmered
and glided like skipping stones in
the ambient air. She dressed her naked melodies
with lyrical lorem ipsum at first,
until she was compelled to compress
a short life's worth of workaday
frustrations compounded by lake
effect snow and dimming hopes
for an open future into a dozen lullabies
laid over rococo tapping patterns,
alphabet blocks atop artisanal detailing.
Her rage wasn't confrontational but
simmering, a persistent unease
foregrounded by the little bits of
filler text she'd keep in her
choruses as keepsakes.
She called her album I Don't Like This,
fit for a song cycle of gentle refusals.
She hand-dubbed copies for her parents,
and then the rest of her family, and
then her friends. Those friends would
move away and donate their tape collections
to Goodwill once CDs had won the Format
Wars, and those tapes found their way
into the pockets of collectors and
hipsters who drove themselves mad
trying to find out who the girl on
the bed on the album cover was, all
buzzed head and bruised smile.
Leslie Fink, it was said, did not exist.
Somewhere she thought she stopped
being herself; those songs occupied a
chapter in her life the same way
Scooby-Doo reruns or the dumb drummer
she dated in high school did.
She felt she ship-of-Theseus'd
herself out of viable artistic expression
once she got a job and a kid.
But the bark of old trees can still burn.
Sometime after kid number two,
the internet happened, and MP3
blogs happened, and know-it-alls from
the coasts started boasting that
this pebble polished by the waters
of the Superior was a diamond in
the rough, and that its vanished
author was the missing link between
Leo Kottke and Bikini Kill,
a Midwestern Joni Mitchell with
an oddball sense of humour.
Some intrepid writer types found
her name in the Marquette
White Pages and were stunned she
wasn't trying to hide. She was
appreciative but bemused that someone
admired what amounted to her dusty
old Polaroids. She said she had
the master tapes sitting in an attic
somewhere, every demo, every take,
every nonsense phrase sung in counterpoint.
A producer expressed a genuine interest
in building a monument to Leslie's ghost.
So she named the expanded edition
of her one record I Still Don't Like This,
and the cover was an image of the same
bed from the same point of view,
only Leslie was now 46, long greying
streak in the longest her hair has ever been.
And now the stage is as bare as her teeth.
My fingers aren't as dexterous as
they once were, she says, and the
tendons in my wrists are tighter
than I'd like, but I'll happily
trade one day of difficulty dealing
with pickle jars and doorknobs
for this night tonight. A rapt
crowd appreciates the gesture.
Before tonight, she says, the
most people I've ever played these
songs in front of is two, twice.
My parents one time, and a band
audition when I was 23. I don't
think I failed, she said over the
phone once prior to tonight,
because I wasn't trying
to succeed. It was an experiment
in expression; I was drawn
to the sounds in my head that
weren't mine, but everything
sounded like me anyways. Success
looked like learning to play and
sing at the same time. The success
you're on about I can't even
conceptualize; that kind of
success is like love, I wouldn't know
what do with it if I had it. Later,
what Leslie thought was a one-off caused
that old restlessness to resurface
long enough for another album's worth
of material to grow from her like the
rings on an old birch. And now
if you walk by the record store
on 3rd and West Park, you'll see,
glistening like a stop sign at high
noon, a stark red album cover with a
monochromatic portrait in the center,
her name over her eyes, and the
words Falling Ill over her mouth.
There will not be a tour.
