Archive for March, 2010

Eyes against mine

I pull the small of your back

Hands slice slowly down your waist

I pull again

Lift you into me

Breathe each other

You are here with me

We meet

Drink of each other

Brown dress and beautiful skin

Gorgeous in my head in my nose in my hands and in my mouth even my ears there are no words for this

Trampled flowers

Good kisser

She lingers on the end of the word

Unlocking the door

A girl smiling back

Oh I think Oh

Then the back of her

The book closes

I am lost

Danced too long

Too late I see she can’t

feet make patterns in the sand

I understand that she cannot.

Ever Never lethal it stings then aches

Then She betrays

Slowly the crack crawls across

Trampled flowers beautiful vibrant

Rotting and pungent

It breaks me

I keep moving the universe pays no mind

This weeks assignment in my advanced memoir & autobiography class:  “…you are encouraged to find meaning in other sounds, and to convey that meaning largely by describing the sounds themselves.”

Where do I begin?  I can be lulled to sleep by the sound of heels clicking in a mall or chalk on a chalkboard.  Water trickling, ice clinking, waves lapping, rocks tumbling or bacon frying all hypnotize me.  A tiny fraction for example.  I played the drums for years.  I was never very good but my kit always sounded better than everyone else’s.  Once I understood that my passion for music had so much to do with the sound of it as opposed to melody and lyrics and not that I didn’t have a profound appreciation for those things, I plotted a course to become an audio engineer.

I knew I knew.

I did just that.

It’s a huge subject for me.  What I’ve come to realize is that it’s not merely sound that stirs me so vehemently.  It’s all my senses.  I can’t know that I’m different in this way, but I suspect it.  I’m so easily overwhelmed by what I observe.  I love to cook.  It occurs to me to be enjoyed by the same part of my brain that was so rewarded by mixing records.  It’s all about the combination of flavors and textures.  My repertoire is not extensive but what I do, I do well.  I try to pair my efforts with an appropriate wine.  Sometimes the wine is complimentary and sometimes it represents a ballast or contrast.

Smokey old vine Zinfandel with homemade pizza, sauvignon blanc with an arugula and asiago salad  or port with Stilton bleu cheese for example.  I taste each dish and its oenophilic accompaniment in my head before I begin.  I never cook with a recipe.  I gather all the flavors ahead of time and commence to combining them.  I’m not opposed to recipes, it’s just that they don’t often look like they taste like what I imagine in my head.  My approach confounds my mother somewhat.  She’s an excellent cook but doesn’t always understand my seat of the pants approach.  I can taste it ahead of time or I wouldn’t be able to prepare it.  I can see the meal complete with the soft focus f-stop photography of a food magazine.  I almost always plate it myself.

When I read or write, it’s a movie in my head.  I see it, smell it, hear it and taste it.  The best records I ever made I could hear almost complete in my head within the very first days of recording them.

It occurs to me that this assignment is meant to be about the senses in general and with obvious reason directs focus to one in particular.  I can’t separate them however.  I’ve no idea whether this makes me somehow different or unusual.  There is no way for me to ever know because I simply cannot climb into someone else’s head.  Most of my friends are artists of one kind or another.  I think it’s because they see and interpret things with the same degree of awe that I do. I believe everyone one does to one degree or another, it’s just impossible to measure or quantify.

Dude, it’s so subjective.

The distinguishing characteristic of humans from all other species is without a doubt, art.

Imagination is the purest and most important sense and I know I’m intimate with it.  For me it is fundamentally intrinsic.  I see it in my head.  I can feel it and touch it.  I can’t help that it is my prevailing impetus.  Without my hyperactive imagination, I would be blind.  I was in analysis for a time and my therapist told me I was hyper vigilant and commented often on the noise she was sure I experienced in my head.  I would rather die than have it somehow revoked.  I imagine that were it to disappear, I would go gentle into that good night.

Drinks for my friends.

“This is a big fucking deal”  -Joe Biden.

“The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.”  -MLK

The Devil is thriving in the Catholic church.

The Ides of March have passed.

The health care bill passed with some drama.  As it should.

Outside, the wind blows hard.

My favorite part is that they lied without shame and cheated overtly and they still lost with ceremony all around them on worldwide television.  Republicans sucked the other day like they haven’t in decades and it was all on display.  They barked like dogs and continue to whine like toddlers.  Shameless.

I readily confess I don’t have my brain wrapped entirely around this bill and some specifics of the reconciliation language.  I have been paying attention.  I didn’t for a time and then I did again.  I got kinda sick of it all.  It does suck.  The bill.  As in sucking chest wound suck.  A mandate without fierce oversight, a mechanism to not only compete but provide accountability and barometric pressure is pure dumb.

A license to ill.

It was on it’s head already.  I sort of understand the economic imperative behind the mandate but throw us a bone bitches or don’t even bother touching me there.

 

I just can’t help but get caught up in the symbolism.  I know the bill sucks but it does accomplish some pretty important shit.  I’ll defer to the fantastic Ms. Maddow:

“On September 23rd…

• All kids get covered (no pre-existing conditions)
  
• Can’t get dropped if you get sick (no more insurance companies dropping you)
  
• No more lifetime limits (on benefits)
  
• Children can stay on until 26 (coverage up to that age)
  

On January 1, 2011…

• Premium payment reformed (80-85% for medical care) with rebate if you don’t use coverage
  
• Free Medicare preventative care (no co-pays)
  

By 2014…

• Total ban on all pre-existing condition denials
  
• Health exchanges open
  
• End to annual limits on benefits

Republicans want to repeal this…”  -democraticunderground.com

I’m not sure I want to “do” Rachel but I’m positive I want to get her drunk and cuddle.

So yeah, some good stuff.  It’s just that it barely flirts with incentive for fairness via non profit competition.

That’s the part I liked the most when we started this whole thing.  I see it as key.  Public option, extended Medicare, whatever.  Vital.  We have miles to go before we sleep.

Single payer, Universal, whatever label you choose and whomever you choose to accuse,  the richest spender nation on the planet ought to be covering it’s people.  We buy half of all the weapons.  Half of all of them.  Half of all the weapons made for war, we buy.  I don’t think we’re as big as Canada geographically, but our dick is way bigger.  Can you hear me now?  WAY bigger.  We could take Canada in 72 hours without the military.  They don’t have many guns but we do.

What exactly are health exchanges?  We now know they will be open.  How many?  Where?  I’ll assume that’s good news.  A place to trade bandages and syringes.  Do I have to volunteer?  I’m gonna have to choke a bitch.  I’m gonna have to read this bill and the 157 page reconciliation.  I’m working like twelve hours a week and taking a class.  You can see how I’m underwater.

My feet hurt and it’s humiliating.

It’s a simple problem and the answer is simple.  Shave five or fifteen cents off the defense budget and we can throw in some jobs for infrastructure.  Health care, jobs and mortgage relief.  We spend half the entire global budget on weapons and ten times as much as our nearest competitor.  China.  That there is my idea of Socialism, spending way too much of the people’s money on things they vehemently disagree with.  Wait, that’s Communism.  Isn’t it?  When they can’t afford roof and bread it is.  There is your Goddamn communism.

That there is your buttock.

Wars are your ass.

Your ass mam, has gone missing.

I’m trying to make a point here.  We still are a wealthy nation, despite our recent financial regress.  Much of it was concentrated without equity in the last decade but there is plenty of money right here in River City.  There is no reason, moral or fiscal, we should be denied this right.  It insults my intelligence when anyone complains about paying for it.  They talk about health care being 15 to 18 percent of our GDP.  The defense budget is well over half of every dollar you pay in taxes.  We spend so much fucking money on weapons, it makes the world go round.

Literally.  The world turns because of America’s efforts to be able to kill everyone of us.  Thank God for us.  Don’t piss us off.

Still, I’m impressed and finally proud again of the Democrats.  They pulled it off and scared the crap quite literally out of the obstructionist asstards by supplying them with an example of lockstep so long taken for granted as a fundament in the Republican playbook.  Smoked them at their own game.  Here’s hoping this bodes well and emboldens this heretofore assemblage of invertebrates.  See little Billy, we knew you could do it.  Now get your little ass back out there because the game isn’t even half over.  Be a Democrat for fucks sake.

Now the crazies come out like corpses of Laurel & Hardy with giant red eyed rats speeding off and away from their persons and pockets and folds.  Slack jawed zombies repeating obsolete talking points and swinging scythes.  The Baggers.  The Birthers.  The Hawks, Neocons, Bigots and Bible thumpers.  What an egregious ship of fools.  Obsructionist pricks for infamy.  Avoid their rodent familiars and do not dance with either of any of them.

It’s not safe to drink their liquor.

They really are beginning to parody themselves.

I’ve always thought that being a good loser is important.  I’ve been on the losing end enough to approach being gracious I think.  I’m hopeful that losing has humbled me, it sucks and it shames me but I try to learn and stuff and be polite about it.  The way one loses speaks volumes about one’s character.  If you listened to Boehner on the floor the other night or The Human Shitsmear and Butt Boy Hannity these last few mornings you might think the sky is about to kill you in your bed.

Not good losers, but excellent assholes.

These pricks are the epitome of sore losers along with the entire lock step, teeth full of Orios, lime green plastic tumbler full of cherry Kool Aid and rum mouth breathing members of the 1/4 Paradigm.  That was a pretty cool sentence.  If you don’t know about the 1/4 paradigm, categories are on the right on the main page.  Just scroll down.  I have a fairly general theory about relativity and how it applies without bias but with predictable pattern in a sociopolitical context.  I offer a bold constant.

I don’t really know about other countries but I understand very well that one of every four people in this country are ignorant dipshits.  My “1/4 Paradigm”.  In stores near you.

You’d think an invitation was extended to a banquet just ahead of the apocalypse.  You’d think because we passed a weak ass health care bill we were courting Satan himself.  The bill sucks.  Hello irony.  Fuck us in the neck.

The reaction has been of the meanest of spirit and bafflingly irrational.  Childish and callow.  Pointless.  Some fourteen state attorneys general have or intend to file suit.  Futile.  Not going to happen, if any single case enjoys a day in court it will be ashes, ashes and they will all fall down.  A waste of time money and the attention of even the dumbest citizens.  Give me a break.  Might as well piss up a rope.

Children of the corn.

What has my attention is the ugly and still gathering brutal reaction of the great unwashed.

Bricks through windows and awful terrorizing threats directed at our elected representatives that have finally and with courage, attempted the right thing on behalf of us all.  Stupak came around and they went after him like a common enemy.  Cheers Bart.  Those were your people.  An articulate bunch.  Very brave and very cool.

Kucinich is still the king of composure and principal.  What a class act.  I think Maddow and Kucinich should snuggle.  Just then, Dennis’ hot, six foot tall, copper haired, wife with a scorching accent enters the room in a black skirt, pumps and a line up the back of the stocking.  Nobody gets the Kucinich cool like I do.

Cantor’s claim of a bullet is looking dubious.  I bet that little prick is lying.

What frightens me is the virulence and vehemence, the irrational fury of those that would oppose a leap forward.

What makes me sick is the publicly elected officials who foment such dehumanizing disregard for common decency and difference of, or deference for, an opinion.  This is America.  We aren’t ever going to be herded onto boxcars for mass extermination.  If it ever happens here it will last an afternoon, maybe a day.  I’m not referencing irresponsible roundheads like Limbaugh, Hannity or Beck but rather the Boehners, Bachmanns, Cantors, Kings, Grassleys and Demints.  Allegedly responsible representatives who hobby, trade and wage in fear and dangerous incendiary nonsense.

Dirty, filthy immoral bastards who would blow anyone for $20k.  How do these people get taken seriously?  See above.

They deliberately cultivate and collect the same brand of bigoted, racist and ignorant subhuman that so violently opposed civil rights legislation.  Dumbass mouth breathing fucktards.  A handful of those folks have ended up being assassins.  Murderers.

American tradition and legacy is such that justice and liberty for all eventually prevails.  When there is will there is way.

It can take a while and never without a price.  The vulgar and profane consistently manage to extract more than a pound of flesh.  They are arrogant and bereft of humility.  At this pace, there will be blood.

They will go too far unfortunately and their cause will be consigned to history as ill advised and malattempted.  Political leprosy.  Social pariahs.  Just like McCarthy, Nixon and Dumbya’s entire posse.

These people are as ridiculous as they are dangerous.  There will be blood.

Just do the best you can to think peace.  It’s gonna get ugly.

It just might start rural.

All these earth quakes.  Bound to be a volcano.  See what I’m saying?

Health care is no mere privilege but a right that comes with being born human at least.  I believe that.  I always will.

Drinks for my friends.

Da do, da do, da do, da doont.

shoooom!

The watch looks still to me, it reads five after nine.  For days it reads five after nine. Everyone else can see the time while they admire it.  I think the way they look at it would compel them to tell me if it’s stopped.  I hope. People comment on it often.  I look at the second hand but can’t see it moving.  If someone asks me the time, I turn my wrist and hold it up or my answer will be a guess. Sometimes they say the time they see out loud as though I’m waiting to hear it.

I am.

So confused.

A pair of those reading glasses might allow me to appear less culpable.  I could fumble for them as I hold up my wrist.

If he’s of me in any way at all, he must own his cowardice.  I believe he does.  I see it in him.  Just like me.  He’d rather just fuck with me than confront me.  He shows me what he can do but he never comes straight at me.  A jackal.  A pussy.  Just like me.  He’s always running.

I’m going to kill him.

He thinks I can’t or won’t.

I think I can.

I submitted to a bully once. I was in the sixth grade. I was confused. He wasn’t any bigger, he was simply more evil. Mean. For awhile, I was afraid. I went to ridiculous ends to avoid him. I stole a small hunting knife from a sporting goods store. I would duct tape the leather sheath to my leg before I went to school.  I was desperately afraid of his face and his capacity for cruelty.

I pictured stabbing him.  I believe I would have.

One day the entire student body sat in the gymnasium bleachers for an assembly. A giant red brick structure built in the thirties with an ancient oval roof. Autumn. Cold inside, colder outside. I sat with my friends and spit Skoal on the floor. All of us had our coats on. We did our best to casually smear the tobacco juice into ambiguous weather puddles with our feet.

My friend Lance was next to me. He didn’t chew tobacco. He’s now some sort of neurological physical therapist and or surgeon.

His last name was Dalton and I could feel him behind me.  Every time the crowd would gasp or jeer at the ridiculous civil defense film on the soft sell of nuclear attack we were being shown, he’d hit me hard on the back with fist and middle knuckle.

It didn’t take long for Lance to clock it, look me in the eye and say “Who is this fuck?”

Dalton had always been a coward. He’d always confront me with his friends around him or never at least in a crowd where there was a chance of me having an ally. I would back down, because my shame was my own. There was no one else to see it.

This was different. He’d grown bold. I don’t think he was very smart. He certainly hadn’t thought far enough ahead to understand the corner he’d backed me into. Fear is a great force multiplier.  Fear can be everything.

I didn’t snap, but my decision came quick. I was humiliated and terrified.  I exploded. I spun around and swung as hard as I could for his head. He turned away in anticipation of the blow and my fist landed solid with a pulchritudinous smack on his ear.  It was all I had until he toppled like a raw turkey carcass on a tripod with a shit leg.  I went to work.  I swung and swung, over and over.  He bled and pleaded.  His blood and snot were all over my hands and sleeves.  They pulled me off and away from him.

He spent the rest of the afternoon sobbing and bleeding in the nurse’s office.

His meat was under my fist.  I defeated him.  He was mere flesh and fear.

It’s time for my fist again.

I am sure. I begin to understand him. It will be easier if I lure to him to a mall or a bar instead of an empty field or a park at night. I will kill him. We are the same he and I.  I am smarter.  I wonder how well he understands that.

I will kill him.

Does he know to look inside to figure me out?

Does he drink wine with his meat?

I’m giving him the name him Richie Cunningham.

I will kill Richie Cunningham.

Opie is toast.

The night is pleasant. Barely a moon. I’ve been asleep, the fire is embers. The carafe of water is empty and I figure that I can’t hold out until morning.

Something I hate; finding a bathroom in a strange house in the middle of the night.

In a hotel room, I just bounce around until my feet feel cool tile.

Whatever, I’m like a fire hydrant. I feel good. Energy.  I throw off the blanket and bounce up. Legs are good.  Barely sore.  Past the den and there’s a small bathroom with a light on the left just beyond the kitchen.  Thoughtful of Carlo.

There’s an actual urinal with a heavy duty chrome flush, what looks like a quartz puck that smells like fresh and disinfected heartburn, and one of those long low toilets with a black seat and an identical chrome flush all municipal style. White tile. It’s clean and smells good with an institutional dispenser that spits brown paper when I turn the crank.  The sink has no cabinet and is a white  deep porcelain tooth protruding from the wall.  A vaguely art deco wall mounted soap sprinkler vomits pink powder when I toggle the lever back and forth. I smell pine.

I piss.

I’m back in grade school.

As I’m draining I see the open door leading to the kitchen.

I rinse my hands again.

I decide to make my way back through the kitchen. It’s smaller in the dark.

I come around to the couch and sink back into it’s comfort.

I’m thinking I expect what’s next.  It begins as deja vu.  Creepy.

Richie smacks his hand on the windows. Running around the deck. Frustrated and in a frenzy. I’m spooked but I know he can’t get in or he’d be in.

I attack the fucking window.  I bang hard on it with my knuckles and demand that he look at me.  I scream at this fuck to look at me.  I want to see him. Close.  So I do.  It shocks me.  His eyes are desperation and rage.  He’s not here today.  His head is never still.  It shakes back and forth and nods up and down furiously.  It never stops wagging.  Like a relentless spasm disease.  I’m in an aquarium gawking at a manic shark.  But He’s the beast and I’m in the cage.

Sputum violence.  A misting of blood.

Carlo’s yard is full of dark swine with fear in their eyes.  They scream and stomp.  They swell back and forth like shiny schools of  slippery rapid fish.  There are hundreds if not thousands.  Blue black and brown, stinking of catastrophe and madness.  I think if I just had some weapons of mass destruction.  Guns.  I need guns.

He doesn’t look at me.  Panes of glass divide us.  Either one of us could reach through like the movies.  Pull the other through the panes as our first bad ass movie move.  Then we would do Kung Fu for a little while.  I end up blowing his head clean off with some giant gun.

Oh, man.

I yell and flip him off. I mock and tease.  I laugh at him.  Scream and curse.  I’m seventeen.

He’s sobbing and sucking back drool.  He bleeds from all the openings in his head.  It drips and sprays.  He’s a mess.  He’s in his underwear again.  It’s grimy.  Yellow.  I realize it’s a diaper.  There is dirt caked on his thighs and forearms.  He is hairless except for his head.  He could be comedy.  Tragic while hysterical.

I press my index finger and face to the glass and tell him I understand.

I tell him I understand it’s him or me and that it will be me.

I tell him I’ll kill him.  He will die.  It will be me.  I am shouting.  Promising to kill him.

I work at holding his gaze, his eyes in their convulsing head.  I promise with little breath left that I will kill him.  I will cut him.  I’m going to gut him and watch him bleed out.  I’m whistling and whispering, out of breath.  I’m out of breath but still screaming.  My face feels on fire.

He bounces off the front door.  Raging.  He screams in the yard.  He pounds his own face and head with his palsied curled fists and long ass talons.  He even throws rocks at the windows but none so much as crack.   He leaves sobbing and sucking it back.

I stand and watch his retreat.  He lights a fagot while marching away and his army of swine follow.

He cannot enter.

Dumb and exhausted, violent resolve is slow comfort.

There’s a particular and peculiar sensation upon a man experiencing when he needs to pee real bad.  It vibrates and tickles on down to the wrists and hands.  When the man is able to unleash, there is no greater instant gratification.  The body does quiver and rattle yet the the spasms are cathartic relief.  It is existential.  Primal.  When it’s over, it’s over.

All my fears and unrest go dormant.  The watch still ticks and I don’t care I can’t see it moving.

I go to sleep.  I dream of the watch.

It all stinks of asphalt and road.  Petroleum.  Oil.  It stinks bad.  I check the watch.  It tells me I have twelve hours to go on an eight hour shift.  Life smells toxic pink like nail polish and green weeds in the desert halfway between here and Vegas.  Heat.  Pulled Pork is a despicable term.

Dad says the watch needs a battery.  Tells me Wall Mart.

I leave the dream as we sit down for Rueben Sandwiches.  Corned beef.  Sauerkraut.  Swiss Cheese.  Rye bread.  Mayo and the Poupon.  Grilled.

Drinks for my friends.

This is a tale of beauty and simultaneous beast.

Personal.

I think one of the reasons we share for being here in this class is we’re willing to tell the truth about ourselves.

Can’t ever write engaging or effective if honesty is neglected.  It goes for fiction as well as memoir.  It goes for writing anything.  In the broadest context, taking pen to paper should always be an absolutely honest endeavor.  I’m pretty adamant about that.

Here we go.

Her name was Linda and she was lovely.

Women would approach us out having drinks or shopping just to tell her how beautiful she was.  To compliment her on her skin or her smile.  Her hair or clothes.  This in LA.

She was drop dead in the eye of many a beholder.

First generation African Canadian.  Born and raised in Vancouver BC.  She was an attorney and a fashion designer with her own line; shoes and handbags too.  She actually made a lot of her products.  Painfully bright, talented and like I said, drop dead.  It was as though the sun shone on her even indoors or at night.  I picked her up at least once or twice when she was a bouquet.  I opened the door for her and flowers spilled into my car.  She smelled of gardens and seasons.

She possessed an elegance and composure that I’d really never experienced.  I irritated her once by using the pepper before passing it to her when she asked for it.  Not a low maintenance woman.  I opened every door and ordered for both of us only after understanding her preferences.  But, we had fun.  Drinking and laughing and making out in public.  Falling from the sidewalk onto the street in an embrace.  Pressing and groping each other against cars of strangers in parking lots.  She commanded breathy that I put my hand down the front of her pants or my mouth on her breast while we sipped cocktails in a dark swanky lounge on Ventura Boulevard in front of an elegant glass fireplace.  Gardens and seasons and immaculately put together.  Very little makeup.  A gust of femininity.  A tide of sensuality.  I adored her.

She fascinated me and lured my lust with  billboard smiles and clingy dresses and I’m not here to discount the wit and overt clever.

So vibrant she crackled.  Gregariousness, soft and subtle but insistent, insidious.  She checked into my head like an anvil.  I was smitten.  I was briefly beside myself.

I remember following her home after our first date at her behest and kissing her before she pulled into her parking garage.  Kissing her for the second time and watching her go safely inside.  She turned just before entering and giggled “Good kisser…..” all girlish lilt, almost Irish.

Pecan pie.

She had me.

There was a dress.  New Years eve.  A dress.  It was her brown skin and the brown dress and the way it fit her.  People stared.

Vanilla Swiss Almond.

She was thus far, the most beautiful woman ever to entertain my affections.

Ten or twelve years younger, I can’t remember now.

She drove a black convertible BMW Z3 roadster.  I taunted my Audi TT would embarrass her up in the voluptuous curves of Mullholland or in the 1/4 mile.  I was pretty sure I was right.  She was game.  Chicks can’t drive you know.

We had an excellent time.

I am here to tell you, beauty can merely be, skin deep.

It’s an awful truth.  Trite but still just horrible.

A really hard lesson.  A lot of men have this story to tell, the version varies somewhat but the plot is consistent.  Middle aged man falls into lust and infatuation with some young harpy and and she cleans his clock.

She got me for $10K.  Her name is Linda Antwi and she suckered me.  She played me.  She sucks and I’m stupid.  I hate being stupid.  I’m a man who takes some pride in not being stupid.  I pushed the envelope by fancying myself possessing a modicum of common sense.  Impervious to the wiles and charms of seemingly winsome charisma and benign guile.

We’re having cocktails one night across the street from my place and she mentions she’s got an opportunity to go to the Sundance film festival and get her product in the gift bags of the stars.  Her store on Santa Monica Blvd. is opening in eight or twelve weeks.  I have money.  I’m not rich but I’m no stranger to a six figure salary.  I don’t remember the exact figure but she needs a few thousand dollars.

It was $2,900.

No sweat.

I offer.  I’m pretty well ensconced in the idea of this woman so I offer to loan her what she needs to make it happen.  I’d like to think she didn’t ask but she did.  I want to help.  She is smart and beautiful.  She can do this and I don’t want to regret not helping her when she could really use a hand.  I care and believe in her.

She hoovered it, with a cursory amount of disclaimer and promise.  When I do something like that, I’m prepared to be out the money.  I was ok with losing it.

A couple grand, so what?

I picked her up about six minutes after I said I would to take her to the airport for Sundance.  I left work to do so.  She pissed and moaned at me for being late, despite getting her there in plenty of time.  She told me she was “really angry with me”.  You’re gonna see a pattern develop.

I’m gonna tell you more, but I’m just gonna look even more like the kid who eats paste in the back of the class.

Okay, so she’s getting her wisdom teeth pulled.  I offer to take her and pick her up.  She’s gonna be anaesthetized.  I leave work to do this.  I take her to the pharmacy after being a limousine for the extraction and we wait for her prescription to be filled.  In the parking lot I help with the bloody gauze.  They are blood saturated pillows.  I remind her if she swallows to much she’ll hurl.  I take her home and make sure she get’s in her front door.  I tell her to call my cell or my office if she needs anything and I’ll drop it off on my way home.

Didn’t hear anything that afternoon, figured she was sleeping.  On the way home I stop and get some daisies with sunflowers and chicken noodle soup.  The second I walk in my own door my cell makes it’s noise.  She’s hungry.  I tell her I have chicken noodle and not the cheap canned crap, but from the Ralph’s fresh soup kiosk.  She tells me she likes tomato.  Ralph’s is across the street from my swingers paradise.

I’m like 43 years old and getting this elaborately suckered.

I deliver a fresh tomato gorgonzola and a tomato basil bisque.  I bring the flowers.  There are shoes everywhere.  Not random but neatly paired and aligned along a wall in the living room.  I think about how many shoes must be in the bedroom.  Her place is odd.  Not as girly as I imagined.  Overstuffed and Canadian.  Very clean.  I wave a hand at the shoes.  This could be a problem.  She said no, she didn’t see a problem.

On the way down the stairs to my car I realize she’s never thanked me once for anything.  Ever.

It pisses me off.  I understand I’m an idiot.  I loathe the role of patsy.  It doesn’t fit how I see myself at all.

Outside smoking just now and an owl hooting the same three notes.  No wind, no noise from traffic.  The same three notes over and over so consistent.  I’ll bet it could carry my littlest runt of a feline away and tear it to shreds while eating it.  Beauty can be vicious.

I think she got over me pretty quick.  She was passive aggressive while labeling me narcissistic.  It took me longer so I tripped on my dick and my heart for a while.  I was in therapy at a buck seventy five an hour.  Not because of her, I was already there.  The shrink and I concluded that I had a fair degree of humility and Linda was a bitch.  It was handy to be in therapy during this one but it was still too little too late.

A few weeks before she’s about to open her retail store on Santa Monica, the same week I’m driving downtown every week in a suit and tie to testify in federal court on behalf of the company I work for that used to sell glass pot pipes and glass dildos, and now only sells glass dildos, my cell makes it’s noise and she tells me her investor ripped her off for $20k.  She is distraught.  Tears.

Are we there yet?

Somebody say grifter.

She sends me an e-mail so clever as to be clumsy.  She needs $7500 and she’s desperate.  The tone is unusually humble.  I tell her I have to think about it and I do.  I mean, this woman is kind of a bitch.  Tells me her investor ripped her off for $20k.  We have drinks at Mexicali on Ventura and she buckles for my benefit.  I believe her.

Because I’m a fucking sap.

I do choose to believe her.  I’m wondering just how she’s ripping me off at the same time.  Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen.

She promises me for years she’s going to reimburse me.  Ha.

I’d just been with a woman, albeit briefly, who was sweet as pie but a bitch.  She was six foot one and had the most amazing face; it didn’t last long enough for me to get her clothes off.  At least she was sweet as pie.  She dumped my ass thank god.  She was a bitch.

I was just polishing what twenty year old chops I had so…..

Gorgeous though.  Oh my.  Just beautiful.  The sun was in her face too.  Really.

So anyway.

I loaned her the the goddamn money.  I can’t help but picture myself in a mirror with “dipshit” on my forehead backwards so I can read it.

I really can’t believe I did that.

I suppose I should be flattered by the amount of time she invested in making a fool of me and walking away with ten thousand dollars.  She worked hard at it.  Way short of earning it, she did apply her self with considerable effort to steal it.

Work with me here.

We were out one night and she got painted.  Hammered.  Linda Antwi is a good drinking partner.  There were two or three flights of stairs up until her door.  As waxed as she was, I had to make sure she got at least that far.  So I did.  She was able to find her apartment key and hand it to me.  The second we were inside with a light on she began to disrobe.  I paused.  I did.  I paused.  Spun around and raised my voice for her to lock it behind me.  It clicked and I surfed down the stairs with my head burning.  Perfume in my ears.

I don’t recall the circumstances but she needed me too open her store one day.  A Sunday.  So I did.  I thought it an interesting mission. All I had to do was open and close it.  She had an employee to work it who sucked.  She sold nothing the whole day.  The employee was tattood less than artfully.  Kinda dumpy and obnoxious.  She was dumb as a stick.

She checked up on me.  Called her store and I answered to tell her I was here now at five minutes to ten.  I think I bought a really cool coffee table off craigslist that day.

I don’t blame her.  I doubt she knows what she wants but it’s not me and that’s just fine.  I can’t help but be grateful for the heads up.  She just wasn’t that into me.  Fair enough.

It sucks to lose a chunk of  your ass to a woman who treated your heart like a pinata.

She is callow and shallow and she owes me ten thousand dollars.

She’s being very cunty about it and my only choice is to breath relentlessly down her neck.  I’m not sure I have that in me.  I entertain myself sometimes by plotting ways to make her regret and my mother reminds me that I don’t own a mean bone.

I will be dressing in Bear costumes and the like.  Tonight I’m the head of a pony……..Hey Linda……..

Now I’m a cowboy.

Tomorrow I’ll be a bird of prey.

She watched me lose my job and my apartment.  This while she was making money without rent or car.  Last I heard, two or three months ago, she promised to pay $200 a month.

I’ve begun to gather evidence for legal action.  I have other hobbies too.  It is what it is.  Someone who lies so well they are able to lie to themselves and a dumb ass like me who’s susceptible to beauty.  Two plus two = $10k.  Beauty is not necessarily three dimensional.  It may very well be just this tall and just this wide.  Not always.  I know different.

Really I do.

Drinks for my friends.

Mike,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             This is the most passionate, elegant rant I’ve read in a long time.                                                                                                                                                                                                The use of language is awesome.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              Bob

I reckon back and forth.  Between today and yesterday.  I wish I could work in a record store again.  Those were the days.  Time keeps on slippin, slippin, slippin into today.

Remember vinyl records?  Polyvinyl chloride.  I remember scraping at the shrink wrap and peeling it away.  The smell of the ink and the black plastic disc that flooded my sinuses when I opened an album I’d bought and most likely peddled home hanging from my handlebars in a loose plastic bag.  The package.  The liner notes.  Who produced and who engineered.  Where and when it was recorded.  Who played what.  Listening to it and following along with the lyrics.  Listening to it.  Hard.  Listening to it really hard.  Busting with pubescent adolescent concentration.  I heard it.  I listened to it.  Couldn’t get it out of my head for days.

My brain was on fire.  Music set my brain on fire.  Melodies informed my day and tones haunted my waking and sleeping.  Magical.  No other word works here.  Magical.

Joe Walsh “The Smoker You Drink The Player You Get” which includes the single “Rocky Mountain Way“, featuring the just invented Talk Box later loaned to Peter Frampton for “Do You Feel Like We Do?” on “Frampton Comes Alive”; I think still the best selling live album of all time.

I worked in my hometown record store when CDs first hit the market.  Remember the long boxes?  They said digital was perfect but it wasn’t.  It sucked.  Third order harmonic distortion was the fuckery artifact of digital.  Analog trends towards even order harmonic distortion.  Complimentary to the octave either up or down.  In tune you see.  Odd, or third order harmonic distortion is dissonant and therefore unpleasant.  Not natural.  It was loud though.  Signal to noise was through the roof.  “Pachelbel’s Canon“.  I kept smoking the system in the record store I worked in.  I’d put it on at the end of the night and forget about it and the canons at the climax would arc the system and there was the smell of ozone while I vacuumed in silence.

Back then they didn’t have four year programs for audio engineering so I moved from Carson City Nevada to Atlanta Georgia to attend an art school with an audio engineering program.

I shot a documentary about the licorice pizza.  How it was made on down to the cost of materials.  I walked with a perfect 4.0 and received the outstanding graduate award. I’d barely begun to understand how records were made.  Records begat  CD’s and digital took over so completely there is no longer even a tangible product to hold in the hand today.  Recorded music is now the epitome of disposable.  For most, it is dispensed from a device the size of an individual package of sugar free gum with thin wires leading to buds inserted in ears.  No lifting the needle, rewinding or physically manipulating anything but buttons so diminutive that they disappear beneath our thumbs and fingers for instant gratification.

For our part, We never fired a sample (a bit of pre-recorded digital to replace an analog sound), We always recorded and mixed to analog tape and never entered the digital domain until it was time to master the record.  We would physically cut the 1/2 inch master together with razor blades and translucent blue tape.  Totally old school even back then.  On every record we ever made you heard what the band played.  Honest and exciting recordings, mistakes and all with the warmth and vibe and zero digital manhandling.  We joined the band.  Alex and I.  The “we” is me and Al and the band.  I taught Al to engineer and Al taught me to produce.  Al used to explain to others that I grew up listening to the sound of records and he grew up listening to songs.

We no longer afford this form of art the attention it deserves.  Matters not it’s the latest pop catering to the lowest common denominator of societal taste or a grand and inspired performance of a historied classical opus.

The once ubiquitous record store and the culture that enveloped so many of us, has vanished completely.  At least compact discs were a tangible product.  A package.  The Tower Record chain, with it’s full to overflowing shelves and it’s flagship Sunset Boulevard store vanished with a whisper some three or four years ago.  It breaks my heart.  I adored the perfume and pulse of my neighborhood record store.  The frenetic atmosphere and the snobby clerks.  That I’d produced and engineered a record in the top ten that would go on to sell 3.5 million copies at the time would earn me nothing more than a long look I’m sure.  I never mentioned it.  I would only ask after the latest Primus or Queens of The Stone Age or Lucinda Williams with humility for example.

I never could find that one ridiculously cool recording of Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue and American In Paris I’d worshiped on vinyl.

I was grateful that the first record I ever made was released on vinyl.  A punk record but that still sold some one hundred thousand copies.

I own a stereo that I spent nearly a decade assembling.  Lots of time researching and listening to the various components.  Me and Shaq, Shaquille O’Neal, had the same audio dealer.  A crazy liitle guy named Elliot with a house in the dense foliage just south of the boulevard.  The amplifier, preamplifier, transport, digital to analog conversion and speakers ran me nearly fifty thousand dollars.  I paid thirteen hundred dollars for the power chord (AC cable) alone that plugs into the wall from the power conditioner with it’s oxygen and crystal free copper buss bars that provide pure virgin power to the components that reproduce sound in my living room.  Both pieces of equipment designed by a retired NSA physicist.  Two hundred fifty watts a side into eight ohms and twice that at into four.  When I crack it wide open with nothing playing it is dead quiet.  It doesn’t even hiss.  Two speakers, five feet tall, 180 lbs each, hybrid ribbon and soft dome tweeter array, no subwoofer, no surround sound and it sounds like God to me when I play anything at all no matter how quiet.

They call me an audiophile.  I kinda don’t like that.  I used to be a vegetarian and I didn’t like that label either.

Beethoven’s Ninth will blow your hair back like that old Maxell tape ad from the eighties on my system.  So will Fiona Apple‘s first record.  I love the lushness and hips on that recording.

It is simultaneously a pinnacle of scientific achievement in sound reproduction and hopelessly archaic in the eyes of most people under thirty five.  Small grapes for the ears vs. speakers that weigh a large man.  Data compression and convenience versus all out raging sound.  I fear the mixers are wearing the ear grapes these days.  Paradigm gone.  Window open.

Yet, God as I understand it in my living room.

Sometimes I feel as though the majesty of popular music enjoyed for hundreds if not thousands of years has been eclipsed by the frozen diet meal and a hard disc recorder.  I’m genuinely afraid that art is no longer more important than microwave popcorn.

I need to tell you this.  The difference between humans and animals is not reason.  That is embarrassingly silly.  The difference is isn’t even humor.  My cats crack me the fuck up.  The difference is art.  Human beings everywhere would do well to understand and remember that.

Drinks for my friends.

Carterenda has a smile that is slippery

Her smile slides over her teeth

Her teeth and lips are ideal flesh and bone

Flesh full lips beneath beautiful eyes across shiney lovely bones

Doe sweet eyes

Cinnamon skin some freckles and her hair silken from gold to black and around every fusilli

Her smile conceals all that she knows to be true.  She is wise and glistens.

I inhale her moisture and perfume

I am enchanted

She is flawless

She likes the horses, she likes the track.  She likes champagne and caviar and she’s adept at at concealing her distaste for the gringo

She wears a loose dress of subtle color yet her shape is obvious

She believes her hips to be powerful and her lips to be flowers

She is correct

Her lips pull back like you’ve no idea for a grin playing havoc with my belly too and she barely puffs from a long black stem with a cigarette at it’s end.  Her tongue escapes behind her lips and there is a tiny pop and a puff of smoke.  Her lips pull back again from tooths in wonderland.

She looks at me as though she’s about to ridicule.

I wish I was in a supermarket from my childhood.  Smelling the onions and grapefruits while marveling the glossy floor and symmetry everywhere.  Cucumbers.  The bread aisle pungent with yeast and grains and jars of mustard offending my pre-adolescent hyper senses.

Colors so vivid, I wanted to puke.

Pastries with jelly centers enveloped in loose glossy cellophane on shiny disposable tin foil trays…… all iridescent….rows of cereals, sauces and cans of everything.  Detergents and cleansers with shiny blue green orange logos.  Dirty sacks of potatoes that mother could make anything out of.

What does she want?  I’m really not sure what to do here.

Carterenda sparkles

I would take her home to do my best

Drinks for my friends.

His name is Michael J. Bacon.

The only explanation for the rest I have to tell you is that I can’t help but attach to a shit hot brain when I spot one.

I first met Michael in Middle school.  Fifth and Sixth grade.  McGough and Paille.  Mcgough was handsome enough but a little too drawn and lanky for me.  She had an edge.  Very pretty nonetheless.  I wouldn’t mind remembering her better.  Paille was hotter than Georgia asphalt, a sassy China doll, immaculate and refined.  Always perfectly put together.  A story for another day.  I set a new record for demerits in her class.  She schooled me.  We were their pets.  Grace Bordewich Middle School circa ’75, ’76.

The building no longer exists.  It was old even then.  It was awesome.  Broad stairs and high ceilings.  Radiators for heat and their attendant dampness.  At it’s grandest in winter, it still informs my dreams.

Ridiculously smart.  Way ahead of me.  He very simply understood everything around him.

When I started fifth grade I was relieved to find out I wasn’t weird.  They put me with the smart kids.  I felt at home.  Smart kids have discipline.  They lost me there.  By sixth grade we were into Shakespeare and some Algebra and I was ditching school, chewing tobacco and riding my bike in every neighborhood I could find not like mine.  I was grooving on Beowulf though.  I got my hands on The Lord of The Rings.  Understand the West side was lush compared to the desert East where I slept, ate and rode the bus to.  A whole different world.

Most of the smart kids came from the West side.  Their parents were rich by my standards.  They lived in houses, I lived in a 40 X 20 foot trailer.  I was accustomed to walking through classes, tests and assignments without having to work or study.  I completed reading programs in a few weeks that were supposed to keep me busy for a semester.  I was used to being bored.  I started a chess club, read science fiction and designed my own space shuttle with elaborate blueprint like plans on graph paper.  I calculated thrust and fuel all to scale.  I studied the solar system, comets and astronomy on my own.

Yet one of these things just didn’t belong so I found myself back in Gen pop in Seventh grade.  I had no respect for the academic lifestyle.  Still, I’d made these smart friends.  I respected them.

Bacon was different.  We clicked.  He was smart and funny.  Irreverent.

Michael is a bartender in San Francisco.  Currently a candidate for a PHD in Victorian Literature.  That he entertains my impasse gratifies me to no end.  He is so goddamn smart.  He’s got this great theory about what he calls “gentrifuge” in the nineteenth century.  A theory about gentrification and the effect of a centrifuge on Fleet Street in London in the Victorian era.   He dispenses humor and wisdom with the same countenance because it’s all the same to him.  Robin Williams quick, without the embarrassing chewing of scenery.

He really is brilliant.  He carried a newspaper article about my arrest for possession of marijuana for years until he was finally able to give it to me.  I’ll tell you this about that.  We were gong so fast we didn’t know we were being chased.  He ended up giving it to me through someone else.  Was it Nebeker or Shaheen?  I found myself with a Gin Mary in hand, smoking a joint with him one Nevada day on the roof of Cactus Jacks.  At the time, the bar at Cactus built their Marys with a long string bean.  Michael’s maxim that day was “do the legume”.

He tells a story about me pulling an Everlasting Gobstopper from my mouth in sixth grade and pointing out the corn belt.

In the past few months, Bacon and I have had drinks a few times.

We are both very pro gin.  Bombay Sapphire.  Gimlets or straight up on ice.

I wrote a blog late last year about seeing Michael for the first time in fifteen years.  I’ll let it speak for itself:

“Morey (owner of Mo & Sluggos) touches me on the shoulder when I tell him I’m there to meet Mike Bacon and asks me if I want a drink.

Mike tells me I’m in graduate school.  He means that’s where I am in life.  He thinks that’s how I should look at it.    He’s so painfully bright he dances around me and I hope I’m keeping up.  He points out things I did or said I don’t remember and it’s kinda hard to believe it came from me.  We’ve been friends since the fifth grade.  He shares all manner of things.  I think he tells me he’s gay because I didn’t ask and I’m almost sure he tells that truth one person at a time.

He dated Cecilia Martin right before pining for dudes.  This is huge to me.  You gotta understand Bacon and I just can’t help you there.  I can tell you things about him but they don’t define him.  Plus, Cecilia Martin was an absolute vixen by the sixth grade.

I believe she had braces.  To this day, I find women with braces sexy.  I want to kiss them.

He’s episcopalian and he says he goes to church.  This is the single most confusing thing he tells me.  We drank gin.  Bombay Sapphire only.  I think I bought two drinks.  Joe Tresnit, who lives with my friend Kelly Newman’s dad Reg, bought a couple, Morey Tresnit who’s business I want, bought a couple and Bob Tresnit, father with the not a leg, bought a couple.

We liked the gimlets the best.  Mike had to remind Joe how to concoct them.

A subtle but sublime pleasure to indulge in cocktails and conversation with this man I’d not seen in fifteen years at least.  Erudite, razor sharp and lightning fast wit……..

Bacon took me to his athletic shoe of a rental car and gave me a small tin with Obama’s face on it’s sliding cover and a chunky little bit of green inside.  He also supplied me with a one hitter painted to look like a cigarette.  I’m no stranger to paraphernalia  but I never sold these.

Bacon said something pretty profound about re-branding the word ’socialism’ into an “E. Pluribus Unum” kinda vibe, “Out of many one”.  They didn’t teach Latin here in the brush but I got it.  Pretty elegant and disarmingly simple.  I think it means nothing about leaders or demagogues but it’s about ideas.  It’s just that in any other context,  it’s incendiary rhetoric.  Neither concept is understood at all by the average American.  That’s what I got.  I think he was reminding me of the consensus.  Maybe he was reminding me that we have one.  Could be genius and could be foolish.  Either one of us.

It’s this kind of confusion what makes pot great.

He spoke so calmly and sincerely.  He half asked if he was effeminate.  I shook my head.  What he is, is who he is.  He’s a sensitive and sincere man who sees most of what’s on display.  In Carson City, Bacon is like a well dressed comedian from New York City.  The Catskills.  Jewish maybe.  Carson folks have no idea but they like him.  He is as close to the ten to twelve year old that I knew, as a 44 year old could possibly be.

His beard and glasses are Freudian.  Marxist if only by visual implication.

He looks you in the eye and with very little physical language, imparts crazy thoughtful observations and very perceptive conclusions.

He delivers wisdom and humor in the same voice because it is the same to him.  He’s advanced.  He is calm and passionate without raising his voice.  Here is an orator for one or a few but not a crowd.

I am rich to have a man like Michael Bacon look forward to spending some time with me.  He told me, that I and his grandmother had made his day.  He is exceptional in many ways, but so foghorn, lighthouse bright it would be intimidating if not for the lack of ego and a completely unassuming honest look in his eyes and on his face.  I don’t doubt Master Bacon is what he his without exception.

He left a comment on that blog nearly a month later:

“Douglass, I was honored and privileged to see you and now to find this. You’re a star-maker!

Like you, I struggle with the ‘native Nevadan’ concept, partly because it is a rarity but also because of its stark loneliness. I carry the solitude of Nevada into every city I visit, re-writing the song as ‘Please fence me in’. It might have been easier to have assimilated to the Copenhagen/Coors/conservative set but that we were repelled by it makes us the Nevadans who weren’t, or the accidental Nevadans. The state is like an abusive ex, we know it when we see it. To have emerged with a great friend in you was more than I might have hoped for. By the way, the last time I saw Cecilia, she was still as lovely as ever– and fun……….

Now come to SF for a refill of that Obama tin. I will pass through there again the day before Thanksgiving. Thank you Mike. And look in on my beloved Tresnits when you can. They are and always were an oasis in that Great Basin which spawned us, tanned us, froze us and blew us away.”

I can’t help but adore this man.  I wonder how he’s evolved with so much humility being so obviously smarter than everyone around him.

The idea of wealth in friendship is no myth.  It just might be everything.  It makes me smile inside.

Drinks for my friends.

Now you may or may not know that brainspank was down for a week.  It was an ill-fated attempt to at upgrading and advertising.  In the process I lost the graphics and only one blog.  My latest blog.  No word on graphics yet but I did discover a copy of said blog in my drafts file.  I took the liberty of editing and upgrading and here we are…….I’m just proud to be an American helping Americans one window treatment at a time.  Come see me at Costco………..

Without further ado: 

Michael Whitaker was the kind of guy who confounded most of the reasons I had for liking or disliking people.

Aggressive and smarmy.  When we first met, I thought him unctuous.  His enthusiasm was almost effeminate and rang bullshit to me.  I didn’t like him.  He seemed to know less than he thought.  I might have been aggressive and smarmy too.  I’m sure I knew less than I thought.

Cold isn’t a problem for me until the wind blows.

I was a cocky bastard.

Michael was rotund and sweaty.  About as big around as he was tall but obviously agile.  Belushiesque.  Always on something so he perspired so profusely.  Whatever you snort for pleasure is poison and it makes you sweat.  Toxins have no choice but to find escape from the pores.  I know this from personal experience.  I got into some bad biker speed one night in Pacoima and nearly lost my mind.

Long time ago.  A good story.  It involves Johnny Angel (Wendel), now a progressive radio talker, bodyguards, a professional big bust model and pink kerosene smelling biker speed that I was naive enough to think cocaine.

Anyway.

Corpulent fingers on hands that were amazingly strong.  There were times in the middle of the night, 2 or 3 a.m., he’d take it upon himself to knead my back as I sat with the tape remote between my legs or console in front of me.  He meant well.  It was an intrusion on my person.  He never smelled bad but but his nails were sometimes grimy and his face was a map of rivulets and streams.   I sweat.  I’m a sweater.  I leak from the head.  Whitaker’s head ran sometimes, like he just walked out from a car wash.  And he was thick and hirsute.

I don’t remember ever seeing him eat.  His eyes were so damn smart.  He clocked every single thing.  Like a cat.  Ever notice how some cats don’t want you to watch them eat?

Always completely about whatever we were doing.  Manic.  Hyper vigilant.  It was easy for him to tell me not to worry about things I knew I had to worry about anyway because he didn’t worry about anything.  He wasn’t interested in my world or anyone’s idea of else.  Michael’s world was completely his own.  I wondered sometimes where and how he lived.  We weren’t concerned about the same things in life,  in music however, we complimented each other.  We understood each other.  We visited each others world.  We made music in Studio C.

He filled out track sheets, box labels and had an excellent memory.  He remembered what I forgot.  He helped me in every way he could.  He helped us, the artist.  He helped us, the band.

Together we would guide artists around and through the obstacles that they might otherwise stumble upon.  We crafted and cajoled and reinforced.  We nurtured.

He bounced around my edges while I kept to the inside.  Did my best to keep the sounds fat and the performances with the right amount of rubber on the road.  I earned his respect about the same time he earned mine.  My muse.  His muse.

We did record a guitar out of time once through an entire chorus and neither of us realized it until after I mixed it.  Has to be the dumbest thing I ever did.  It was a forest for the trees mistake.  Patricia Sullivan, The lovely MissRicia, repaired it for us in mastering.

“Gozer the Traveler. He will come in one of the pre-chosen forms. During the rectification of the Vuldrini, the traveler came as a large and moving Torg! Then, during the third reconciliation of the last of the McKetrick supplicants, they chose a new form for him: that of a giant Slor! Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you!” -Ghostbusters and Bob Borbonus

I kept my control room at 65 and wore long shorts and a sweatshirt.  I wore a doo-rag with my hair tied back.  Oxblood Doc Martins that came half way up my calf with heavy wool lumberjack socks.  My partner Al would bundle up.  He had a fragile constitution.  I was fond of reminding him.  I was alert at that temperature and I’d discovered that sound deteriorated at a rate that coincided with an increase intemperature.  Twelve to sixteen hour days are best served cold.

Vitamin B (snortable), Vitamin C, lots of water and not so much coffee.  Juice.  Salads.  Fruit.  No booze until just before bed.

I’d go out to the guard shack and have a smoke when Hollywood was a hundred and one degrees.  Back to my control room to get some hot coffee and a banana.

I did so much then without even knowing what I was doing.  I slept there, I showered there.  I ate there. I drank there.  I learned about life there.  I less occasionally lost my mind there.

Easier to make a snare drum crack right in a control room that’s not a sauna.  Easier to make guitars bite and bass guitars growl and lumber along just behind the beat of the kick drum when even the kick drum hangs back.  Sometimes.  All electronic equipment runs better in a cool environment.  Now and then the AC would go down and every control room would rocket past a hundred degrees inside of fifteen or twenty five minutes.

Big fans doing a push pull at every control room entrance and exit.

Heat smears things to the ear the same way it shimmers and distorts the lense when looking at anything from a distance on an oppressive summer day.

I wish there was a past tense word like ‘shat’ for ‘shit’ for ‘sweat’.  Swat?  Perspired.  Michael Whitaker was fat and greasy and I adored him.

He was a human holiday.

Unmitigated enthusiasm and too infectious euphoria.  Sensitive to the artist as a cautious bull surrounded by china.

Whitaker didn’t really know how to play the guitar, I don’t think, but he could make it feedback in pitch and even get a melody out of it.  He really was a genius at it.  He played Mellotron on tons of stuff we did.  Mellotrons are unbelievably cool instruments: “The Mellotron is an electro-mechanical, polyphonic keyboard originally developed and built in Birmingham, England in the early 1960s.” -Wikipedia.

That works for me.

Press any key and it starts an actual loop of prerecorded tape of some component of an orchestra.  Completely analog.  The most amazing thing was you could play a chord on it.  The loops from each key played in time.  A pre synthesizer.  We had the same one John Lennon used for a while.  The ones I recorded were in tune with themselves, thanks to a genius A&M tech squad.  They weren’t always completely in tune with the track but a little dissonance isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Chili and lime.  Sweet & Sour.  Ginger, lemon, soy sauce and garlic and raw fish.  Capers, lemon and butter on whitefish.

A raging wall of collapsing guitars stacked upon each other so that the dissonance is harmonically irresistible.  So that you can feel the wind coming off the wall.  There really is nothing like that sound.  The feel and sonic force of 12 inch speaker cones literally warping and contorting while reproducing the distorted chords being forced down the throat of the magnets driving them.  It was one of my favorite sounds and I knew just how to make it.  When it came to big guitars, I could put the anchovy in the paste.

Cilantro and/or ginger.  A little soap in the gravy.  Maybe it’s not so comfortable on the tongue but you’re glad you swallowed it.

Like an oyster.

“Like disco lemonade.”  -stolen from some song I’m too lazy to look up

Always use celery salt on sauerkraut.  Always.

Contrast is as valuable as a compliment.

I digress.

We were talking about Whitaker.

Everything about him was fierce and gentle.  He had an office but no desk.  This was A&M records.  The most successful independent label ever.  Used to be the Chaplin Stage.  Charlie actually lived there; his foot prints are in the cement right before the steps to the studio.  It’s a protected historical monument.  I worked there for about a decade.

Geographically on the cusp of social unrest.  We all had to flee the riot.  It came up La Brea chaos ugly.

Michael’s office was pillows and bean bags and crappy playback.  We’d go there to listen to a mix and I’d  listen out of the corner of my ear only.  Crappy playback.  And a bong.  A giant bong.  I rarely took a rip off that monolith, so I can’t say I didn’t.  A policy that was part of my work ethic.  I never sat behind a recording console anything other than stone cold sober.

There were times I ended up behind one influenced, but never at my own discretion.

It was well lit.  Michael’s office I mean.  Cheerfully moody.  Rugs and candles and cushions and carpets and incense.

It occurs to me that I got away with what I did because there really was honor among thieves.

Michael, in a peculiar way, was a musical genius.  A production genius.  I learned a ton from him.  He never once thought inside the box.  His brain was untamed.  I was the producer and the engineer so I had to spend time within the box.  I had to decide about the box.  What size and what color and all that.  Big picture stuff.  Michael kept fucking with my box.  We agreed he could touch the faders after they were marked.  We came to an understanding.  He was free to contribute as he saw fit and we hardly ever disagreed.  There were certain things like delay times or reverb parameters we had to consult on before he laid a hand…..they were timed to the tempo of the song.  Meticulously.  All effects were in time with the track; no good engineer leaves that undone.

He was raw and intellectual talent.  He was crazy and combustible.  I don’t really know or understand where he came from.  I’ve no idea what his sexual orientation was.  He was goddamn swirly pudding.  He talked about his past in vague terms.  He told me once he could have ended up bad.  I think I know what he meant.

I don’t know what else he was actually.  I guess the A&R department paid him, but he had no power to sign anyone.  He didn’t have an expense account.  He had an office.

I’d cultivated the A&R departments business and this guy Jeff Suhy started to send tons of gigs my way and Whitaker was part of the deal.  He was nuts but I have tons of affection for him to this day.

We’ll get to Suhy.  He’s his own chapter.

One of us was the others muse constantly.  I got what I wanted when I wanted it because I was the engineer and the producer.  The stud duck as my my father would say.  But he still drank my milkshake.  The phone on the console would blink and ring.  “Fruzen Gladje?”  “Without reservation”, I replied.  Four minutes later, Whitaker pushes through the double doors and lands on my day.

He suggested one dark Sunday morning that we track a vocal on La Brea Ave.  Jessie Montague.  From the Studio C control room to the La Brea sidewalk was 150, maybe 200 feet.  We had to run mic and headphone cables all the way out.  XLR, low impedence, so  I was grieving over inductance loss.  We had more trouble from the cans than the mic.  A couple passive DIs and Bob was your Uncle.  Ask me about Bob is your Uncle.  He’s your lucky Uncle.  We had the guards open the gates.  I set up a music stand, headphones, a fet 47  or a 414, I wasn’t about to hang a tube mic on LaBrea, and a pop filter.  She sang a version of Come Together by the Beatles that slays me to this day.  Whitaker played mellotron at the bridge and some stabs in the verses.  We faded it on the cars going by.  It was then I realized I should have recorded it in stereo.

Like he was egoless.  Michael never once looked at his own dick the entire time I knew him.  Not even when we were pissing next to each other.  The metaphor is unlovely but apt.  Michael was all about the band’s dick.  The artist’s vagina.  I’m sure I looked at mine.  I know I did.  I called him “White Acre”, he called me “Douglass”.  That was it.  He looked at you and talked to you.  Sometimes I didn’t completely understand him but he always knew what he was saying.

I had a giant ego back then and Michael Whitaker handled me just fine.

When I think of Whitaker, it makes me miss the whole thing.  I miss the whole thing.

Making records is the coolest job in the world.

Drinks for my friends.