(3) The Clash, “I Fought the Law”
wrangled
(10) The Sundays, “Wild Horses”
211-161
and will play in the elite 8

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on 3/23/22.

jamie a. lee on the clash’s “i fought the law”

1975.

It might have been earlier or later, but this feels right. I think it was my Aunt Theresa who taught me how to carefully open the small suitcase to take out Mom’s and Dad’s record player. It folded into the suitcase and could be carried to different rooms in our home. I cannot recall what it looked like, just its portability. However, I do remember the second case that carried the small 45 vinyl records. It was red and white with a design of flecks or small leaves as I remember. When I unlatched it and lifted the lid, the inside, too, was red. Inside the records formed a wave that my parents rode in on. That sounds funny and a bit cliché, but a phrasing reflects what I can actually picture. And feel. Music was meaningful to them.
They were high school lovers and then there was me.
I fought the law and the law won.
Their record collection of 45s consisted of the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” and “Hey Jude.” I adored the labels on these records and imagined myself a designer. Then there was Roger Miller’s “My Uncle Used to Love Me, But She Died.” So queer in a way. The baby queer that I was back then loved the play with language. I like it still. The Monkees’ “Daydream Believer” was one that we all sang out loud. I developed a crush on Davy Jones. LOL. Bobby Fuller’s “I Fought the Law” (1966) was in this mix of the songs I remember loving and singing along to when I was 6, maybe 7.  I love this opportunity to return to it now in my 50s.

I remember these songs so clearly. We lived in the first house my dad built, a modest ranch-style house with a large garage where he worked on cars. Before that we lived in the old house at the back of the property where my great grandmother lived for a long time. I have a vague memory of that house; I think it was bright with windows and yet dingy with light blue walls and peeling wallpaper. Not a lot of walls, though. Old. No running water. Of course, I was too little to remember these details of this old house that speak to the working-class context that framed our lives. Mom tells stories of corralling me in the living room with chairs or in my crib so that she could go outside to pump water for my bath. I was all over the place. Naughty, she described.

Dad had a job at the local gas station; he pumped gas and fixed cars at the station and in our front lawn; later our garage. I remember the gas station sold pop in tall glass bottles and we always got 7-UP to share. Mom didn’t have an out-of-the-house job at first. She stayed home and took care of me and then my brother when he came along two years after I was born.
The laws and social norms pushed Mom out of high school once she was showing her pregnancy. She could not set a bad example for the others in the school. She was considered dirty and hypersexualized. She was pushed out. There were different rules for women and men. Dad, however, got to graduate from high school. Eventually Mom took night classes to get her GED. Then she worked as a cleaner at an office and then as a waitress. Today, I wear her class ring everyday as a reminder of the time, the laws that foreclose dreams, and the fight I have in me.
I fought the law 

My Grandma, Dad’s mom, helped Mom by watching us at her house. I got in trouble a lot because I messed up Grandma’s houseplants. She regularly sent me outside to play with my Aunt Theresa who was nearly two years older than me. It was this same Grandma who also filled Mom’s head with soap opera storylines of deceit and of cheating husbands. Mom was naïve and gullible; what this means to me is that she trusted people and that they betrayed her trust. Mom recounts these stories she was told. She was a teen-age mother stuck with two kids, no high-school education, in an old home with no running water, and in a family and community where she was never given a fighting chance. I learned to fight first for her, later for myself, and then for others.
I fought the law.
Dad had his buddies. He had fun. He tells stories of an ice storm when he and his friends tied a long rope to the back of his old Ford hot rod car. They took turns skiing behind the car on Interstate 94. On their sneakers. Nearly got killed. And he was a smoker. I remember the smell. It burrowed into my clothes and stuck to my hair and, seemingly permanently, in my nostrils. I think I can still smell it. His mom smoked too. She sat in her living room chair smoking, sipped coffee and then bottles of Coke, and watched soaps. These were the days of our lives. Dad stopped smoking when he threw his cigarette out the car window as he was driving and it blew back inside and burned up his backseat. Glad we kids weren’t in there.
Dad is the oldest of seven kids. Two brothers were his “real” brothers who are dead now from various cancers and disease. The younger four siblings were born later with the only Grandpa I remember. One big family with different histories but shared cycles. The law of the land and the law of the father structured who might change these cycles of dis-ease, poverty, and trauma. It was not Grandma’s generation. It was not Mom’s and Dad’s generation. I look back and understand that Mom was caged in ways; Dad, too, was caught up in a cage. Only a bit bigger than hers. Social norms functioned to squish dreams and hurt each of my parents. They were given impossible choices. They didn’t know what they were doing. To each other. To us.
I fought the law.
Still the music played. Throughout the 1970s, Mom and Dad listened to music. The car radio always had something playing. They sang out loud sometimes. Country Western songs mostly. I remember when that stopped. Mom was jealous. Remember those soap-opera stories that Grandma fed her for years? Well, real or not, the storylines stuck. The storylines were ones that Mom and Dad thought about and fought about. They were ones that moved me into action to make peace and hold tight to my frightened brother. We both knew how the story would be played out and we each stepped into the roles that we thought could comfort us.
I remember riding in the backseat of our red Chevy Nova listening to the country station. The song played “Your nobody called today. She hung up when she I asked her name.” Sylvia’s “Nobody” was a song about cheating. It became the background music of the storyline in which the husband is confronted by the wife about having an affair. Mom and Dad were the main characters. Then there was another fight. Mom jealous. Dad angry and violent. In the aftermath of such episodes, the radio was turned off and we drove in silence. The car was filled with a dark mood and no more music. I held my breath and my brother’s hand in the backseat as the car continued down the country road. Farm fields, barns, cows, trees, and a not-peaceful quiet. 

Aunt Theresa and I spent a lot of time in her room listening to music. Chicago was our favorite band (though we did love Seals & Croft, Bread, and the Jackson 5). She was my big “sister” and my best friend. She knew what cages I was trapped in because she was trapped in them too. She loved me and I loved her. Her room was that soft place to land. We listened to love songs. Love found. Love lost. We played games, Barbies, read, and just chilled with the sounds of the music that we came to love. There was that one Dan Fogelberg song about meeting his old lover in a grocery store. Love found again. The song unfolded in story. Aunt Theresa and I knew all the words. Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life” was another favorite that we sang in her room and in the way-way back of Grandma’s brown station wagon. Our way back seats folded up so that we looked backwards out the car’s back window. Always moving in a backwards direction or going nowhere. Fast. She and I were in our own little world of song and singing. Other days we hiked through the cow pastures and corn fields to the fence that separated Grandpa’s and Grandma’s farm property and Interstate 94. We sat on the fenceposts and sang songs to the passing cars. We performed the songs after watching Friday late night music videos and other music-centered TV shows like Solid Gold and American Bandstand. “Stop in the Name of Love” was one we sang and danced to, copying the arm movements we saw on TV. We performed but the cars never stopped. We stopped doing these things once my little family moved to another small Wisconsin town about an hour away. She and I would be separated until we got our driver’s licenses. We then faced our growing pains and challenges of relationships and being young women on our own. We tried to know ourselves and also keep knowing each other.
I fought the law and the law won.
Why did every verse end with the law winning? Would there be a chance to win? The Bobby Fuller Four’s song was a bouncy one. The band hailed from El Paso, TX. Considering the US politics in the 1960s, how can fighting the law and the law winning sound so—hmmm….—danceable?!
I fought the law and the law won.
In the early 1980s, I discovered The Clash singing this same song that framed much of my early childhood. Here British punk slams right into Bobby Fuller’s toe-tapping song to invite a much-needed fighting spirit. The difference was palpable. Alas, the law still won.
My friends and I were into music. We bought cassettes from record stores and made each other mixed tapes on our boom boxes. Once we could drive, we borrowed cars to drive the 40 minutes from rural Wisconsin to First Avenue in Minneapolis for the All-Age Danceteria nights. We were 16 and in a brand-new milieu of music, movement, love, loss, anger, and rage. We shouted! We sang! We danced it out!
The Clash lived up to its name. The punk sounds of this familiar song returned me to the quiet car rides when we were silenced and uncomfortable in the storylines of deceit and betrayal that were always followed by violent outbursts and a disempowering silence. The Clash filled me with power.
The music video is what really hooked me. Watching Night Tracks on late Friday nights to see music videos without having to have cable TV was a turning point for me to understand how musicians understood their own music in the context of world politics. The videos were not only documentations of bands performing, but the telling of stories. I fought the law and the law won. The Clash music video centered politics, international conflict, and ended with named wars and invasions. It centered the power of the media, too, in our changing landscape of TV news and entertainment. I was a part of this changing landscape. I wanted to be a part of this story, this storytelling. I wanted to change the stories. I wanted to fight the law. I wanted to win.
I fought the law and the law won.
I keep fighting.

Jamie A. Lee is a queer archivist, activist, and Associate Professor in the School of Information at the University of Arizona. They are an award-winning filmmaker and founder/director of the Arizona Queer Archives and the Digital Storytelling & Oral History Lab. They also have an amazing NFL football card collection that they started in the mid-1970s. Visit www.thestorytellinglab.io for more about their business.

WILD HORSES, CARRY ME AWAY: MORGAN RIEDL ON THE SUNDAYS’ WILD HORSES

to the horse I rode away, and to my mother who wouldn’t leave but let me

My fate rested in the hands of two high school students on summer break. The pony-tailed girl standing before me in an overlarge T-shirt sized me up, then turned to the demure boy beside her and said, “She’d look good with Bob, whaddya think?”
I hoped he would disagree because, even though I didn’t know who Bob was, the name sounded old and dull to my ten-year-old ears. But the boy nodded, and so decided my fate.
I’d wanted to be matched with a black horse like the one in The Black Stallion, and Bob was flea-bitten grey, or what my younger sisters called “white with spots.” In most ways, he wasn’t anything like Shetan, the wild black stallion whose name means “devil” in Arabic. But in the one most important way, he was. He carried me.
At the end of the week, rather than practicing how to maneuver though obstacles like cones and bridges in the indoor arena, the instructors led us to a trail around the lake where, one at a time, we cantered the perimeter. I’d already seen how sitting on Bob’s back made the pieces of the world fit more neatly together. But as he and I flew around the lake, I discovered it was possible to escape the puzzley world altogether.
Nearing the lone tree at the end of the loop where I was supposed to slow, I wondered what would happen if I—just didn’t. If instead I leaned forward, pressed onward and let Bob take me away. I saw us leave the ground and everything behind.  

Four years later, I was still stuck on the ground—I’d even burrowed under it, holing up in my bedroom in the basement where I kept a huge dictionary to launch at the wolf spiders that trespassed. With Webster’s beside me, I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer on my little DVD/VHS-combo TV, sucked into a subversive world where a small girl isn’t helpless but a hero. The chosen one. Even while saving the world, Buffy still dealt with the same mundane problems I did, from divorced parents to school dances. This was before vampires shimmered rather than combusted in the sun, but Buffy loved one anyway. Until he left. Maybe even after.
In the season 3 finale, Angel breaks up with Buffy because of everything he can’t give her, and although she realizes it’s for the best, she’s still devastated. Ends aren’t easy, even the ones you want. Still, in the episode’s last scene, Angel surprises her at the prom for a final dance as The Sundays’ cover of “Wild Horses” plays.
In Harriet Wheeler’s voice, I heard what the characters couldn’t say. I love you and goodbye. Delicate and elegiac, the vocals floated above the ground and made me remember what it felt like to leave it for a while. And beneath was a wistfulness I understood but only later discovered a word for: hiraeth—nostalgia for a home you can’t return to or one you never had. I replayed the scene again and again to listen to the song and feel the mournful aching of a loss I was trying to move past.       

CHILDHOOD LIVING IS EASY TO DO

We’d been in our new house on Robinwood just a couple of weeks when my dad left a note on the counter and, with it, left us behind. At first, I didn’t know if I’d ever see him again, and for a while, I didn’t. Mom couldn’t tell me where he went or why. His leaving was a mystery I couldn’t solve, even after years of pretending to be the Great Mouse Detective. Back in our old house, I’d wear my plastic mouse nose and become the great Basil of Baker Street, and Dad would leave rhyming riddles around the house to lead me to where he was hiding. This time he didn’t leave any clues behind.
He did leave Mom a weekly allowance that didn’t go far with three kids, one still in diapers. We lived on cereal, PB&J, and mac & cheese until Mom went back to working nights at the hospital. But the job didn’t last long once Dad started getting flaky with weekend visitation. I’d sit on the steps where our walkway met the sidewalk, watching for his maroon Pontiac to turn the corner. In the beginning, I waited hopefully and was disappointed if pickup time came and went without him. When that happened, Mom scrambled to find last-minute childcare for the night. If she couldn’t, she called in sick. I learned you can’t be sick forever—the only thing you can be forever is gone. After a while, she gave up and went to work for her dad. It was less money and fewer hours, but she was home when we were—and when Dad wasn’t.
Weeks came and went. Mom tore pages off her monthly calendar, and I started to dread waiting for Dad on Fridays. I moved my sitting spot from the steps at the end of the walkway to the front porch steps. I watched not the road but the sky, wishing for the kind of weather that canceled the tennis lessons I hated taking. Eventually, I just stayed inside and watched the clock. I’d peek out the window around 6 p.m., hoping I wouldn’t see his car pulling up to the curb. Since he was often late, I never knew when to stop holding my breath. Fifteen minutes? Thirty? I asked Mom how late he could be and still get us. “It’s his weekend.” From her face, I could tell she wished she had a better answer to give me. I understood then that I could never stop worrying.
We’d moved into a house my grandparents rented for us, so my sisters and I changed schools in the middle of the year for the second year in a row. At least this time we were still in the same district and would be taught the same curriculum, which sounded great in theory. In practice, I had to put on the same second-grade play at my new school that I already performed at my old one: The Lion & The Mouse. Though I knew there was no getting out of it, I was determined to memorize and deliver a different line this time around. I mustered the courage I believed a lion to have and met my new teacher at her desk. “Can I have any part other than hunter #3?” She made me the mouse.
This surprised everyone, me most of all. I was shy and spoke so quietly I’d been held back in preschool. I almost asked if I could switch to hunter #1 or hunter #2. But even though I lacked vocal projection, I had a lot of experience being a mouse. I’d been pretending I was an animal since I was 3, stuffing my blanket into my pants as a tail, wearing various plastic noses, and running around on all fours so much I developed a large cyst on the top of my wrist. If anyone could play a mouse authentically, I was sure it was me. On stage, I gnawed the netted lion free.
At home, I was having nightmares. I saw the face of Medusa. Green skin, glowing eyes. I didn’t meet her gaze. Not because I feared her piercing stare turning me to stone, but because I was transfixed by her hair of writhing snakes. They didn’t scare me. They disgusted me. The thick girth of their bodies where thin strands of hair should have been made my fingers jump. I reached out and grabbed hold of one and pulled it loose. The snake detached from her skull with the sound of smacking lips. I discarded the creature whose corpse ended abruptly in strange flatness. On Medusa’s head, hair sprouted from the spot, as though the strands were contained fully grown within the snake’s body. I pulled another. And another, until there were no snakes left. I’d pulled them all.
I awoke and rushed to the bathroom to check my own hair. Brushing it back, I could see the bald patch above my right ear hadn’t grown any bigger, but standing in front of the mirror, I felt the urge to make it. My fingers searched for the thickest, darkest, roughest hair and removed it. Over and over again. There was always another strand that irritated. At some point, the scrape of my nail or an overly aggressive yank caused my skin to bleed and I panicked. Blood was supposed to stay inside.  
     In the morning, when I showed Mom the scab so she could assure me I wouldn’t die, she was horrified. She signed me up for therapy. I begged her not to tell Dad. The next time he showed up for visitation, the first thing he said was, “How is your hair?” I shot Mom a scathing look of disbelief as I followed Dad out the door.
I began therapy with a lot of trust issues and with Leftie, my Beanie Baby donkey, complete with a hand-crafted bridle made of string. Though my therapist, with his white hair and face like Einstein’s, fit my expectations, nothing else did. His office felt more like a living room than a clinic. Rather than reclining on some futon, I sat on the floor in front of his fireplace. When he spoke, his voice was quiet. When I spoke, mine was quieter. But neither of us said much. Rather than talking, we drew.
He sketched two hills separated by a valley in the middle. A Billy goat perched on each peak. The story he told didn’t have a troll or a bridge or even a plot, so I didn’t think it really counted as a story, but in its telling I realized the point of the exercise. It was obvious the picture and story were an analogy for my family. It felt pedantic even if I didn’t have the word for it then. I decided to tell a story that had no connection to my situation. I drew mice. I had some experience since for my kindergarten self-portrait I’d included a mouse nose and whiskers. When the therapist asked for my story, I explained the mice’s parents were dead, so the oldest mouse was left to care for the younger mice siblings, venturing out from the safety of the burrow to search for food.

WILD HORSES COULDN’T DRAG ME AWAY

After horseback riding camp, I became obsessed with Bob. For Christmas that year, I got a Breyer horse named Freedom that looked just like him and a model stall customized with Bob’s name on it.  As much as I wanted to, I never rode Bob again. I only pretended he was mine. Mom enrolled me in weekly horseback riding lessons at a stable closer and more affordable than his. I learned that to fall in love with one horse is to fall in love with them all. Slowly I stopped pulling out my hair.  
When I wasn’t riding horses, I was reading about them. Mom taught me to love books, often reading aloud to my sisters and me before bed. She opened the door to Narnia this way, and once through, I saw no reason to leave. I discovered something in C.S. Lewis’s novel The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe that I would search for in other books afterward. It was a story of unconditional love. The lion—Aslan—disappeared but always returned, died on a stone table but came back even then.
Mom frequently took us to the local library for free fun. We could spend a whole afternoon there. In the children’s section, she’d read stories aloud to my youngest sister while we two older siblings looked around. I discovered a section dedicated to horses and shelves of authors who wrote novels about them. In Walter Farley’s series, I encountered Shetan, the same black stallion whom I’d first seen on screen. I met Misty, the island pony, and Sham, the Godolphin Arabian, in Marguerite Henry’s tales. When I ran out of novels about horses and the people they carried, I turned to nonfiction where I learned about the language of horses and the language of memoir. I read everything the library had, and I came to understand something that I knew most of the adults in my life couldn’t.

Visiting Dad was something I no longer wanted to do, and I started saying so. I had homework and friends and hobbies, and I was tired of waiting. I told Mom, she told Dad, and I didn’t have to go with him that weekend. Or the next weekend I was supposed to. Or the one after that. However, as I’d already learned, nothing but “gone” is forever, and eventually, Dad wasn’t having it. He suspected Mom was behind the shenanigans, so then I had to tell him myself each time I didn’t want to go. Dad had a way of looking hurt that made me feel guilty, but that guilt just didn’t weigh as much as the pain and anxiety.
Dad let me say no a couple of times until one Friday I said “no” and he told me to get in the car anyway. On the thirty-minute drive to his apartment, I stared out the window the entire way, and I saw a black horse galloping beside us. He leapt fences and wove in and out of trees. His eye never left me. I closed my own eyes and reached through the window, grabbed ahold of his long mane, and swung onto his back. I wanted to ride away, ride home, but we couldn’t change course, so I rode him all the way to Dad’s apartment. It felt good to be out of the car.
After that, my “no” didn’t seem to ever count. I rode the black horse to Dad’s apartment on Friday and then back home on Sunday. At night I dreamed I became the dark horse. I opened the door to the apartment and my body morphed into an animal that could fly without wings.
During the day, I was there and not there. Since I realized I wouldn’t be rescued, part of me was always plotting an escape. Finally, one Friday I refused to get in the car even after Dad said he wasn’t going to let me say “no” this time. I told him I wasn’t coming and went back inside the house. He called the police.
When the cruiser pulled up, I asked Mom if I was going to be arrested. She tried to laugh through the stress and assured me I would not go to jail. “Then will the policemen make me go with him?” She didn’t think they could. But they did.
The officer told me I had to get in Dad’s car. I assumed the “or else?” was jail. I wasn’t worried about me anymore—I realized it was Mom they’d take. I rode the black horse to the apartment. After I rode him home, I steered him to court.

At 12 years old, I missed school to take the stand. Dad wanted Mom jailed. I wanted out. In the voice of a mouse, quiet but determined, I told the magistrate that I didn’t want to visit my dad anymore. The magistrate’s face was unreadable as I explained why and answered his questions. I worried he couldn’t hear me, or could but didn’t believe me, or did but didn’t care. In the end, I gnawed myself free. 

WILD HORSES, WE’LL RIDE THEM SOMEDAY

Healing is a rare and wild thing.
The trauma of it all hid inside my body, though nothing can hide forever. In high school, I tried to escape it. I stayed in my basement bedroom listening to a CD of sad songs I’d burned. Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel.” Joni Mitchell’s “River.” The Sundays’ “Wild Horses.”
     In Harriet Wheeler’s vocals I heard the desire to promise something that I suspected she could not. Forever. Still, her voice was more than honest—it was earnest. She pleaded not with the listener to believe her but with the wild universe to let it be true. To make leaving something we didn’t need to do. Because to leave is to leave behind, whether you want to or not, whether you’re being dragged away or carried. Even facing the inevitable, The Sundays’ cover insisted on an unapologetic hope, which was something I needed.
A doctor I didn’t want to see prescribed pills I didn’t want to take. When I stopped swallowing them, Mom took another approach. She put me back in weekly riding lessons after a two-year break. A month later I asked if I could use the money from my part-time job to pay for a second lesson each week. Several more months later, I asked for something bigger.
I wanted a horse.
     I opened my notebook and laid out my plan. I’d researched and done the math: I had nearly $3,000 in savings, and I had just gotten another part-time job at the movie rental store, where I could make about $100 a week. In the newspaper’s classifieds, I’d found a co-op facility just fifteen minutes away where I could do barn chores in exchange for a reduced boarding fee.
Mom said no. It was too much money, too much work, too much could go wrong. Neither my calculations nor my promises nor my pleading changed her mind, so I retreated to my bedroom. A few hours later, she said she’d changed her mind.

I found him online. The drive from my home to his was nearly 300 miles. I said little the entire way, just clutched the directions printed off MapQuest, checking each step, reviewing our progress until we reached our last turn. As we arrived at Cooper Street, the houses sat too close together, sharing each other’s confidence with no room for yards, let alone pastures.
Mom slowed the car and pulled to the curb. She checked the street. It was right. We checked the GPS. It was right. I checked the directions. They were right. Then I pulled out the email I’d printed before we left to check the address. Cooper Road. I didn’t expect a town of little more than 1,000 people to have both a Cooper Road and a Cooper Street. We attempted to reprogram the GPS, but it couldn’t locate a Cooper Road. “What do we do now?” I asked. Out the window, I saw a pastor on a bicycle coasting toward us. He stopped at the passenger window and asked if we needed any help. I wondered what lost looked like.
The pastor directed us up the road and a little out of town. It wasn’t much further, he promised. He righted his bike as Mom restarted the car. I looked out the window to watch him go, but he’d already disappeared.
The woman wasted no time in leading us around to the barn. She disappeared into a stall at the very back and emerged with the black Arabian that until now I’d seen only in pictures online. Ali swiveled his head to look at me. His eye caught mine and I recognized it. I knew then—he was mine.
Ali arrived late in the night, and the blackness of his coat made him disappear into it. Not yet, not without me, I thought. I renamed him Aslan. In college, I would learn of the Christian allegory of Narnia. I’d also learn that in the Islamic faith, Ali was given the name Asadullah, which is Arabic for Lion of God. My horse, the lion and the lamb.
Finding Aslan was just the start, as it is with any horse story. I dragged him across the country with me to college, to my first job, to graduate school—Ohio to New Mexico to Colorado and finally back to Ohio. In the ways that count, though, he took me all those places.
The books I read as a kid taught me a horse could save a person, or they could save each other—or, perhaps more accurately, in saving a horse, a person could save herself. I didn’t rescue Aslan in the conventional sense. I found him and loved him. I don’t know if it was Aslan or the stories I believed about him that saved me in the end. I’d seen a love that could walk away, but Aslan has always found me. When he sees me or hears my voice, he ripples over the pasture like he is the wind itself. Bob showed me I could escape this world on the back of a horse. Aslan made it so I didn’t need to.

Morgan Riedl is a doctoral student at Ohio University in Athens, where she lives with her partner and her retired horse (not in the house). She has an MA in creative nonfiction from Colorado State University. Her essays have been featured in The Normal School, Sonora Review, and Entropy, and her poetry is forthcoming in Thin Air.