Editor’s Note: Click highlighted words and phrases to see collaged images created specifically for this essay by Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas.
My
wife,
the mother of our
four children,
a generally responsible woman who cares deeply for her family and tends to order and
general neatness
of place and of time, stayed
out until
almost two a.m. last night visiting our neighbors the Aguilars, whose name must mean something about tending
eagles,
whereas Karina’s maiden name, Cabrera, has something to do with tending
goats.
My own last name, Madden, may derive from the Gaelic for
"little dog,"
though my family coat of arms features a
falcon seizing a duck.
My son, being the fourth of a continuous line of
Patrick
Charles Maddens that began in 1915 with my grandfather, and being the son of a
Uruguayan
woman, goes by the nickname Pato, which in Spanish means
duck,
the animal, not the verb. In any case, the eagle would probably win in a
battle
with the goat, the little dog, and even with the falcon. The duck is already
dead
or dying, which might keep the
falcon occupied
while the eagle goes for the goat.
Which is to say that you can essay about anything, find some
small hook
in the overlooked or takenforgranted. When I was young, I read in a description of my coat of arms the phrase “falcon seizing a duck argent,” which I took to mean
a kind of duck
or perhaps something akin to agent. Years later, once I’d visited
Argentina
(though long after I’d heard the band Argent’s song “Hold Your
Head
Up”), I understood that argent was the color of both the falcon and the duck, a fancy way of saying silver.
The band Argent occupies the same file in my
brain
as the bands Bread and Free. All three float rather vaguely through
my mind,
which is otherwise highly ordered when it comes to rock and roll. Free I remember because one day when my junior high class went to New York for a field trip, my
best friend
Vin and I had some free time and so browsed the record stacks at a shop in the Village. We thought we were
funny
when we found a band we’d never heard of before, saying stuff like, “Hey, this record is Free!” There were only half a dozen other people in the store, two within earshot, but wouldn’t you know it, one was a
rabid
Free fan.
He glared and droned, “Hey, don’t knock it.” It didn’t really matter that we weren’t.
Rod Argent, formerly of the
Zombies,
formed Argent along with two future members of the Kinks and a guy named Russ Ballard, who wrote many of the band’s songs. Besides the slightly repetitive “Hold Your
Head
Up,” their other big hit—made bigger, years later, when covered by KISS—was “God Gave Rock and Roll to You” (which I don’t doubt).
The first record I ever owned was KISS’s
Double
Platinum which I bought at Sears, with my own money, and which my father convinced me to get instead of Alive! because, he said, live recordings tended to be sloppier, less precise than studio recordings. I brought the silver-sleeved LP home and played
"Making Love"
over and over with no idea what it might mean. That’s not true. I thought, based on the band’s name, that it meant “kissing,” perhaps spelled out and singsongy: “k-i-s-s-i-n-g” and all that.
My favorite
KISS
guy was Ace Frehley, the only one with silver makeup, whose 1977 solo album featured Ace’s cover of Russ Ballard’s “New York Groove.” The way I figure,
The Star (Paul Stanley) might be able to win in a battle against The Cat (Peter Criss),
assuming it’s a
regular cat
and not a man-sized were-cat of some kind, but neither of them would be any match for
The Demon
(Gene Simmons) or The Space Man
(Ace).
And in a
battle between The Demon and The Space Man,
given futuristic
technology
and a higher understanding of the laws of the universe, what the heck, my money’s on the Space Man.
Patrick Madden is the author of three essay collections, Disparates (2020), Sublime Physick (2016), and Quotidiana (2010). He teaches at Brigham Young University and Vermont College of Fine Arts; he's coeditor of the journal Fourth Genre, coeditor of the 21st Century Essays series at Ohio State UP, and vice president of the NonfictioNOW Conference.
Image collages by Lina M. Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas. She is the author of Drown Sever Sing and Don’t Come Back, and has published in the LA Review of Books, Poets & Writers, The Yale Review, Harper’s and more. She has two forthcoming books from Ohio State UP and teaches at University of Chicago.