The floodlights we found under my father’s workbench. I didn’t want to cut chemistry for the fourth time in two weeks, but Lee was the boss. Lee was Freddie Mercury, and I was only Brian May playing a tennis…
I remember buying the concert tickets. Front row seats at the Nassau Memorial Coliseum to see Queen with Thin Lizzy as a warm-up. The bands featured two lead singers who died tragically young: Phil Lynott and Freddie Mercury. Both shared eye contact with me—a disturbed teenager in the front row who wanted nothing more than to escape his mother’s illness.
At that influential concert, I struggled to understand myself, but I believed those performers saw me and understood me.
Even now, as I recall the deceased artists on stage, I refuse to believe I was just another blurry face behind the glare of their own floodlights. I knew they could see me as I was, a troubled adolescent who also deserved adulation and understanding.
Many decades later, my craft of writing remains a performance. It’s air guitar and costumed dress still under floodlights.
Luminosity forces us to make sense of pain and suffering. The craft of writing allows us to illuminate one moment, and to be effective, it should be properly restrained.
It’s easiest to understand restraint with music. Great composers remaining patient until the time is right.
Beethoven in Eroica, his Third Symphony.
Jeff Beck during the live guitar version of “A Day in the Life.”
In writing, restraint means holding back, while also trimming away unnecessary verbosity and sentimentality.
In an earlier version of “Floodlights,” I structured the entire piece around my mother’s biopsy. I blurted out “malignant,” even had her coming home with a new bathrobe. “My mother came home with a new striped linen bathrobe and without a left breast.”
And in a prior essay about my mother’s illness, when asked if the biopsy was benign or malignant, I answered, “a little bit of both,” entitling the piece: “A Benign Malignancy.”
In “Floodlights,” a subtle striking blow is what works. That question during the carpool ride. “Was it benign or malignant,” and my unwillingness to process the question.
The inability to come to grips with that answer clouded my judgment, leading me to cut chemistry class, get high and play air guitar, dressed up as Brian May.
This technique, I hope, is a more effective way to illustrate how irrational we can become when someone close to us is afflicted with a potentially fatal illness.
In addition to restraint, the use of specific details is an important part of our craft. Details allow the reader to engage in the moment, in real time, as a participant in a vivid cinematic experience, the goal in any well-written creative nonfiction.
Shortly after the Queen and Thin Lizzy concert, I began to keep a journal. My expression transformed. Instead of getting high and reenacting rock ‘n’ roll performances, I now captured moments on a page.
It would be many years before any of us were aware of the recurrence of my mother’s cancer, a little over a decade. A lifetime to a fifteen-year-old.
In the years since, I’ve honed my craft and learned restraint.
Today the floodlights are dim, but never unplugged.
And when the time is right, I turn the brightness up until the past is illuminated.
RICHIE SMITH is a New York artist, writer, musician, and physician, a cardiologist at Mount Sinai Doctors in New York. His work has appeared or is upcoming in The Brussels Review, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Forge, and The Banyan Review among others. He is currently completing his first novel. Find him on Instagram @smithheartpoet.
