Six Strings on a Rooftop

jeancar6
Aug 14
4 min read

Invisible reader welcome to my Portland rooftop. I am Jean Carlo (JC), a queer Puerto Rican and hip-hop head who pulls all-nighters on personal projects. I am married to Gary. We pay rent that climbs faster than my student loans and we measure the seasons by Timber’s game nights and sneaker drops. The sky is pearl gray. Mt Hood hides behind buildings and construction cranes while six songs spin in my earbuds like jurors deciding my future. They will not stay background noise. They dig in with calloused fingers and ask what happens when rhythm meets the law.

Donny Hathaway starts with Someday We Will All Be Free. The Rhodes keyboard exhales soft pulses but a rim shot cracks on every fourth beat like a knuckle on a church pew. Hathaway wrote the song while wrestling paranoia and you can hear his falsetto stretch on the word someday the same way my lungs stretch during a panic flare. That word drags itself across the Supreme Court ruling in 303 Creative LLC v Elenis where a designer won the right to refuse queer couples. Someday has to work overtime when the law shrugs at my wedding ring.

Marvin Gaye slips in with Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology). One hi-hat tick widens into wood blocks that sound like dripping pipes. Gaye sings mercury fish and poisoned skies, and I picture my own neighborhood where rent hikes and wildfire haze arrive together every August. Gaye slides from B minor into A major and the ground feels like clay under my sneakers. Oregon Senate Bill 611 was supposed to slow those rent jumps, but ten percent still feels like gravity with its foot on my neck.

Walter Hawkins and the choir crash in with When the Battle Is Over. The Hammond organ spins like a jet engine, yet Hawkins drops a blue note right on the word battle making victory limp. My inbox is still packed with design internships promising exposure not money. I think of the intern lawsuit Glatt v Fox Searchlight Pictures and slap the desk in time with the choir claps. That blue note is back pay still missing.

Sam Cooke picks up the thread with Bring It On Home to Me. The piano runs gospel triplets and Cooke lets his voice crack on try. It is the sound of a queer kid rehearsing a confession in a high school bathroom. The song dropped in sixty-two when some theaters still had colored balconies. After Brnovich v Democratic National Committee chipped away at voting protections Cooke’s promise to bring love home feels like a dare not a lullaby.

Albert Collins plugs straight into my gut with When the Welfare Turns Its Back on You. His Telecaster is tuned open F minor, so he punches bass and treble in one swipe. Mid solo he pinches a note until it squeals then lets it fall into a growl. That squeal is my grocery receipt flashing eighty dollars before produce. The net that was meant to catch us feels like a rope bridge with missing planks.

Syl Johnson closes with Is It Because I’m Black. One guitar chord scrapes a minor seventh and Johnson drags every consonant in the line Something is holding me back until it feels like hands on my throat. The Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act says therapy coverage must match physical care yet the earliest in network appointment they can offer me is three months out. Each delay in Johnson’s phrasing is another hour on the waitlist made audible.

Night drops its curtain and crane lights blink like jury room clocks. I close my notebook. Melodies buzz in my pockets while Gary texts me about dinner and the group chat of my friends still awake fills with late night memes. Something is evolving here, not a tidy resolution but a sharper ear. The next time a ruling or a riff tries to sand down the rough edges I will hear every splinter and name it in full voice.

JC (He/Him)

still tuning these strings, drafting my next brief against silence...

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