Bone

Seeing music

2008-03-02T09:48:00.000-08:00

I wish you could see music the way I do.

I got about one and half working eyeballs. One's freakin' great, and the other just kinda tags along for the ride. Most of the time. When I'm tired, it kinda does its own thing. This means that I'm one BB away from a seeing-eye dog and a white cane. Needless to say, I got a pretty raging blindness phobia, and I can't ever watch "Kill Bill Vol 2." again.

But where I got you beat, Eagle-Eye McGee, is how I see music, and very few people seem to know what I'm taking about, so I guess it's fairly rare.

Have you ever heard of a psychological condition known as synesthesia? Now you have, because you know me, and I've got it. It's nothing debilitating like schizophrenia, but it takes some explaining.

This is a condition often associated with savants, those fortunate few who possess a seemingly supernatural skill in one area. (Cool it, Smalls. A savant I ain't.) Often, these savants are referred to as idiot savants, like the Rain Man, who could memorize a whole phone book. The movie Rain Man is based on a real person, Kim Peek, and he can really do those things. Check him out on YouTube if you're bored.

Another example of savantism can be found in Daniel Tammet, a young Englishman whose astonishing skill with numbers allowed him to memorize pi to over 22,500 decimal places. It took him 5 hours of continuous recitation. He can also perform fascinatingly complex numbers in his head and carry them out to greater decimals that a laptop computer can. We're talking at least thirty decimal places here, folks.

I identify with Daniel Tammet because he's a synesthete too, though with him, it's numbers.

Here's how it works. A synesthete, such as Daniel, hears or sees a number on paper, and in his head, that number has color, texture. It is, in part, what allows him to work with numbers so personally. This has been proven clinically. Synesthetes in tests could repeatedly pick singular numbers, like 5's, out of a mishmash of 2's (in a particular typeface, such as the digital font made famous by computers in the 80's, 2 and 5 are mirror images of each other) because the 5's were green while all the 2's were red. They were all printed in black ink, of course, but to the synesthetes, that's how they saw them inside their minds.
It looks like this:

Synesthesia means a mating, a coupling, of one sense to another. For some, a smell might have certain color, or a taste might have a certain sound. For me, I see sounds as colors.

I drive people bonkers because, in the car, I'll slide my 'Blue' disc into the CD player. (Now, on the iPod, I just pull up a like-named playlist.) The 'Blue' disc contains what are, to me, blue songs. Not blues, but blue—songs in the key of D are blue. Songs in the key of G are purple. C is red, and E is golden. F is orange, and A is yellow, B-flat is yellowish-green, and B is St. Patrick's Day.

Do you get it? I hope so, because that's the best way I can think to explain it. This is why song lyrics mean little to nothing to me, and why I can never remember them, but I can play a song nearly flawlessly (on bass, the only instrument I can play worth a crap) after hearing it only a few times. You can give me a song title and I'll tell you what key it's in. I can hear the first few notes of a song and tell you what song it is before the vocals start. And, more importantly, this means that I have (almost) perfect pitch. You can play a note, and, more often then not, I'll tell you what note it is.

Where I'm going with this is what music does to me, inside my head. I catch a lot of flak from people at shows I'm attending, or when listening to stuff at a friend's house, because I listen with my eyes closed and then I get jumped on for falling asleep. It's true I can fall asleep anywhere, but if there's music playing, rest assured I'm wide awake.

I listen to music with my eyes closed because what's being created in my head is a hell of a lot more interesting than what's going on around me. The music paints such wonderful pictures, such vibrant colors, that I am gladly lost inside them. I'm particularly fond of songs in the key of D-flat, because those songs are a deep, deep indigo. Get to a chord change, however, and new colors appear, and the palette broadens. I wish I could show you.

It's not all roses. Songs in a minor key are always gray, which is why I'm lost in telling you what key a minor tune is in.

This is also why most (not all) jazz is lost on me, because there's no sense to it. It's a jangle of bright, clashing colors that don't paint anything I recognize. To me, listening to jazz is a lot like looking at a Jackson Pollack.

But when it works, oh, such beauty. And there are chords in songs that paint such fascinating pictures, or maybe are just such a beautiful blend of colors, that I'm speechless. I'll do my best to show you what I'm talking about.

In a previous post, I tried to show you what I saw in my head when I heard the word splendor. To illustrate this, I showed you this picture, of the ceiling in back of the altar in St. John the Baptist Church. Remember this?

Now, I want you to play "I Believe I can Fly," by R. Kelly. Fast forward it to the second half of the chorus:

I believe I can soar,/
I see me running through that open door/

On "soar," the change is an A-minor 7. But on "open," according to the chart, that chord is an F minor 6 with A-flat in the bass. If you're not a musician, that means nothing to you, but let me tell you that the colors I see in that chord look a lot like the ceiling over that altar, but…moving, shimmering, swimming, blues and golds and…

I'm at a loss for words, as I often am when listening to music. At least, words that would mean anything to you. But I love that song. And most of all, I love that chord. A very similar chord also appears in The Lion King's "The Circle of Life."

'Til we find our place/
On the path unwinding/

And right after "unwinding," there it is. This one's slightly different, because it's an E-flat minor 6 with a G-flat in the bass, but it looks the same. Except where R. Kelly's is blue, this one's green.

I wish you could see it like I do.

Super Bowl commercials

2008-02-03T20:49:00.000-08:00

This blog really isn't about Super Bowl commercials.

I thought it prudent to title this one something other than its true objective, because one of my friends saw the title of a previous post ("Fitting in"), though it was gonna be another one of my whine-fests and respectfully declined from pursuing it further. He told me this, so I'm resorting to subterfuge to drag you in.

This one's about being alone. And it's not a whine-fest at all, because I'm alone a great deal of the time, and it's more often than not by choice. I don't have to be.

Being alone's not so bad. It really isn't.

There's some bad stuff associated with solitude, sure. I get into a lot more trouble when I'm alone, that's certain. Today, I'm out bumming around, running errands, going to the library, heading out to Batavia to take a look-see at the old BMW I just purchased (don't get your panties in a bunch. I'm not yuppie material, for one, and besides, this one's gonna need some spit and polish, not to mention a few trips to eBay and perhaps the local boneyard before it's presentable as yuppie-material), dropping a check into State Farm's drop box to cover the insurance on the Mystery Machine. I'm on Rt. 30 (heading due west, giggle) and some yokel in a Volvo XC90 pulls out in front. The speed limit's 50 and he's doing 45, so I pass the guy. As I get back in the lane, he gives me the high beams, which means he's pissed. I give him the finger. Look, man, just go the speed limit, will ya? Of course, though, the light at the next intersection's red, and there's no one in the turn lane next to me, so he pulls up alongside and rolls the window down and starts yelling. I've got the windows up and I'm playing the stereo way too loud, so I can't (nor do I want to) hear what he's saying. I'm a guy, though, and so I have to do the guy things, which is raise my eyebrows and beckon in a "You want some?" gesture. This other schmuck, who's wearing a black beret like Sly in Rambo 9, starts laughing. Not an "oh pshaw" dismissive kind of laugh, but an "are you serious?" type. It's funny, 'cause he's right, and he must have seen that in my face that I can't fight. If I had stepped out of the van, I'm sure the 6 foot 5 and the combat boots might have given him pause, but there's something in my face, my mannerisms, that tells this dude, as it must tell everybody, that I'm a paper tiger and talk the talk but can't, and never will, walk the walk.

Would that have happened if I'd had somebody else in the car? I doubt it, but then I wouldn't have passed the guy for fear of scaring my passenger.

This has happened many times before. I was once beaten unconscious and thrown into the bed of my own pickup truck, back in the day when I was 120 pounds wet and couldn't grow the merest scrap of a beard to camouflage my nanciness. I once had an empty beer bottle thrown at me while on the bike, while on another occasion (also on the bike) I had a guy pull a knife on me. I've had lit firecrackers thrown into my open windows, and been spit on countless times. I doubt any of these would have happened if I'd had a wingman, but then I don't think I would have gotten into these situations in the first place.

Why, then, do I choose to be alone so much?

There's a few reasons that I think would satisfy the curious. Not dating anybody, not playing out as much as I'd like, and all (not most, but all) of my friends live at least a half an hour away. I proudly hold my outpost out here on the Southern Border, after which you run pretty much into cornfields until Springfield. But that's not really the reason. I've got a car, and it gets pretty good gas mileage when it runs (right now, it doesn't, and while the Mystery Machine is more than willing, I tire of watching the gas gauge plummet with every brush of the loud pedal). Let's see if we can put the situation into better perspective. (Ponder, ponder…ah, there it is.) Read further if you're so inclined.

Would you like to come with me to check out the ruins of the foundation of a turn-of-the-last-century church in Alton? It's a long drive, and while I'm there I'd like to stand next to the life-size statue of the world's tallest man, Robert Wadlow. On the way back I'd like to check out the world's largest ball of tin foil in Ballwin, Missouri, or Topeka, Kansas. Or, want to come with me to a pine forest in Michigan, where we can get out of the car and just listen to the trees talk? I'd also like to check out Muddy Waters' gravesite, and on the way back visit his house, and on the way there I'd like to drive through what's left of the Robert Taylor homes. Want to go with me to two levels beneath Wacker Drive? Down there there's a neat little brick-paved courtyard that has a spectacular view of the top floor of the John Hancock building, so you can be in the lowest spot in the city, literally and figuratively, and looking at one of the highest, in both capacities. You gotta dodge some homeless people, though, and be prepared to give a buck or two to the ones you can't avoid. While we're down there I'll take you to a place where you park your car and your front bumper is literally hanging over the Chicago River. Hope the parking brake works! On the way home, I'll take you to the Billy Goat Tavern and toss a burger down your throat, but I hope you like cheeps, because no fries.

Sometimes I just want to get on the road to be on the road, and I have a hard time finding people who want to come. Sure, you say you want to come now, but will you be as sure 5 hours from now? How about 10? That's the spooky part. I'd rather go by myself than go with someone who's friendly as we're leaving my driveway but wants to kill me 200 miles down the road. No thanks. Alone's better.

I like to see a ghostly two-track through the cornfields and stop, sometimes locking up all four (or the rear, if it's Moose we're talking about) and turn down it. You usually have someplace you want to go.

I like to stop along the expressway and park underneath an overpass and listen to the traffic pound past overhead. You're usually nervous.

I like to drive to the top floor of the Hollywood Casino parking garage in A-town and get out and fantasize about what's going on behind the lit windows of the tall building just to the southeast, or contemplate what a bitch it would be to have to change light bulbs in the large shooting star they keep lit up there all year round. You're usually cold and want to get back in the car.

I like to go to Reckless Records downtown and buy up all their used Disney movies, digging the hell out of the looks on the faces of the counter clerk at this mutant-tall biker dude with a skid-lid covered with stickers slapping down Bambi and 101 Dalmatians. You're usually pissed 'cause they have 7-inches of the Pink Lincolns and The Subhumans, but they don't have any Dave.

I like to stake out the Biograph Theater on Clark St. to see if I can catch a glimpse of the ghost of John Dillinger. You'd rather go into the Red Lion Pub across the street for an ale.

Even if you're not really thinking these things, I get nervous that you are and pull the plug. When I'm alone, I can take my time and not worry about what the person I'm with is thinking.

Other drawbacks of being alone a lot, however, are:

You start talking to yourself. If you do this only sporadically, as I do, often the sound of your own voice can scare you. "Who's there? Oh, it's just me." A cycle like this can often make you question your own sanity.

You think a lot. This can be good, for most people, but if you have some self-esteem issues, this can do more harm than good.

You feel lazy, as though there were something more productive you could be doing than just bumming around checking things out.

Oh well. Sometimes it's just fun. Or, if it isn't fun, it's at least comforting. I drive around doing things and listening to my iPod, with a playlist entitled "Alone." These aren't sad songs. They're alone songs. Tunes like "I Believe I can Fly." "Constant Craving" by k.d. lang. "Hey You" by Floyd. "At Seventeen" by Janice Ian. "Stairway to Heaven." "Mother Nature's Son." "Mercy Street." Instrumentals by William Coulter, Mark Knopfler and Andy McKee. Classical pieces like The Moldau by Smetena.

There's lots of people I enjoy being with, true enough. And I think (hope) there's people who enjoy being with me. But a good friend of mine once said (and here I'm paraphrasing), "Always leave 'em wanting more." What he meant, I think, was that it was better to appear somewhat rarely rather than have people become sick of him (us). I took that ball and am running for the end zone with it. The end zone's somewhere beyond that far hill. See it? You gotta look.

I'm a weird, quirky enough guy that I fear people will tire of me. It happens. I've been on long road trips during and after which I feared this greatly. Tell me it's all in my head, but I'm a believer. People get snappy and I take according measures. I'll just catch you on the flipside and you can tell me how it all ended over an ale.

This isn't to say that I enjoy being alone all the time. Truthfully, I enjoy your company, and if you've got something good going on, the chances are high that I'll be glad to join you. But if you're busy, have fun and don't worry about me—I'll find ways to divert myself.

Fitting in

2007-12-28T01:45:00.000-08:00

I never really have fit in anywhere, and for a good portion of my life, I have felt…different. I was sure of this even at a young age. I'd look at the things I did and compare them to the things "real" people did. I remember being three or four, and riding in the backseat with my next-door neighbor, Bonnie. Her mom and my mom were in the front seat. I noticed how, when Bonnie looked around, her eyes, large, blue, and unblinking as most small childrens' are, didn't move in smooth arcs, like I thought mine did, but seemed to snap quickly from sight to sight. I learned over time that everybody's eyes move like that, but like I said, I didn't think mine moved that way, and so I tried doing that—snap, I'm looking out the windshield. Snap, now I'm looking at something on the floor. Snap, now I'm looking at Bonnie. She looked at me like she thought I was crazy and started to cry.

I have that effect on a lot of people.

This feeling still haunts me. "Hmm…not many bass players use Yorkville amplifiers, so that must be why my gear sounds weird. Gee, I see a lot of real bass players using SWR amps, so I'll go with that. And golly, I sure don't see a lot of bassists playing out using Washburn basses. Is that why my sound is a little off? It sure sounds off to me. Well, there's a power of Fender basses out there—guess I'll get me one of those. Maybe then I'll be a real bass player."

Stuff like that. And even after the two SWR amps and the Fender Jazz V, I'll look at other bassists using Modulus or Alembic basses, running them through Gallien & Krueger heads and Bag End bottoms, and think I should be using that. Just, you know, because it sounds realer.

I never have liked ketchup or mustard on my hot dog, and McDonald's just grosses me out. But real kids always liked that stuff. Why am I different? Is it because I'm not a real person?

Disney movies? Love 'em. Most of the people I know think they're gay.

All the bikers I know are into Harleys or crotch rockets. (Well, not all, but most). Very few have heard of the Magna v65, even after I show them my taillight and give 'em a righteous snootful of my exhaust. Most of them think it sounds goofy, though I think it's sexy as hell and sounds like an aria. (Well, after you get it above 6,000 rpm. Below that it sounds like a garbage disposal with a spoon stuck in it.)

I once drove across the country to see a burned-out mining town in Pennsylvania. I was gone for three days, and when I got back, people asked me what I went there to see. When I told them, they nodded, wide-eyed, and began to back away slowly. The same thing happened when I drove to Champaign one afternoon to see a statue in the middle of a garden on U of I's campus, and when I drove to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and back the same day to see an exhibit at the library.

How can I be a real person? All of the people I know are very real, and they all
seem to think the stuff I do is strange, so that must make me less of a person.

Of course that thinking's bullshit, but sometimes it's hard to keep the voices quiet.

So I'm used to not fitting in, and I'm used to hiding the things I enjoy to keep the derision from my peers to a minimum, and that's fine with me, because as I've said in a previous post, I'd rather keep the things I enjoy hidden from view than catch a load of crap from someone who couldn't see things the same way I do even if they wanted to, and feel like an asshole for my pains of trying to describe it.

But I did some screwing around this week while back at an old job, and the screwing around turned into quite an experiment, and the results of that experiment were, to say the least, worthy of some consideration.

This may require some background, and I'll fill the canvas in by saying that I wasn't always a teacher, and I wasn't always a musician. Before both, I was a truck driver, and I delivered printed forms (stuff like printer paper in triplicate—white, canary, and pink and little holes along the side for the big-ass industrial pin-feed printers a lot of business used back in the 90's; cartons of copy paper in numerous colors, as well as a shitload of white; invoices; packing slips; snap-out and offset forms) for a company owned by the family of my best friend Adam. I delivered most of these things in a large white cargo van that was surprisingly fast and agile for its size, and I got a lot of stuff delivered very quickly and had a good time doing it. That was, of course, before the company had the name and number printed on the side of the truck, and afterwards, a few phone calls to the boss from fellow motorists I'd pissed off slowed things down considerably, though it was still a lot of fun. You've never seen looks of outright terror on people's faces like those I generated while all kinds of stupid redneck crossed-up sideways, drifting a deep left-hander through an intersection while in the throes of glorious, bellowing-V8 power oversteer in three tons of not-my-van.

I did this with the ink rapidly drying on a bachelor's degree in Biology, and I quit after a year to go off to grad school. Of course, grad school's where I learned to become a teacher as well as sequence DNA, and it was during my tenure at Northern Illinois's Plant Molecular Biology Centre that I became a die-hard rock star, working on my thesis during the day and rehearsing with the boys at night, climbing into our rickety 1976 Dodge van and playing gigs in shithole bars in Rockford, Rochelle, Belvidere and Loves Park. That band came and went, as did others. But by and by, I graduated, landed a job at a local high school and began the teacher-by-day-rock-star-by-night lifestyle that endures to this day. There are times, however, especially when I've had a crappy day in the trenches of higher learning, that I yearn for the days of bombing down the expressways at 90 carrying 30 cartons of Hammermill 8 ½ by 11, bound for the Chalet Nursery in North Chicago.

Well, it's Christmas Break, and I've nothing constructive to do, so when the driver who replaced me announced his retirement last week, Adam called me up and jingled the keys over the phone. "We'll find a replacement in a couple of weeks, old son," he crooned, "but if you could help us out a bit, it'd take some of the pressure off until we do."

Hell yeah. Back the saddle, baby, and that old white van is just as big and as fast and as ass-happy through corners as ever.

Okay, so that's enough background. So today, I had four or five stops, in Addison, Elk Grove Village, Lincolnshire, and finally Chicago's west side. And as I'm pulling up to the first, I get this wacky idea.

I like to do different accents, right? And my friends are always saying how good they are, right? I'm only back for two weeks, and it's been eleven years since I've been to any of these places and nobody knows who I am and they'll more than likely never see me again after this, so…why not be from a different country at each stop? When you're waiting your turn in line at the many different loading docks around the Chicagoland area, you get a pretty good handle on the fact that a good many people who make a living driving stuff around in this country are not actually from this country. I could have some fun with this.

It take a little courage to step up to the plate, though, so at my first stop I pick an easy one. I'm from England.

I walk up to the receiving door at my first stop and ring the bell. The intercom crackles and a woman's voice answers. "May I help you?"

"'Allo, love," I say cheerily, and swing into my pitch. Instantly all the 'a' sounds become 'ah' sounds, and "Classic" becomes "Clahssic." (It's a bit more complicated than that, as I'm not shooting for the guy in the Geico commercials but something a bit more Northerly. Watch the movie "Snatch" sometime and you'll get the idea.) The door to the receiving dock rattles upward and I back down the ramp. Once all the cartons are unloaded, I shove my clipboard beneath the dock manager's nose. "Anywhere on the bottom, please it," I say, and all the consonants have disappeared. "Bottom" becomes "Boh-om" and "it" becomes "ih."

He signs and hands the clipboard back to me. "Right then, 'ere you are," I say, snapping out the middle copy and whipping it out to the guy. "Fank yew, guv," and off I go. The guy has a quizzical look on his face, and I'm tempted to bust out something like the finest Chicago police officer and really turn the guy's mind inside out, but I'm careful not to break the illusion.

At the next stop, I'm an Irish guy. A little tall and dark-haired for a guy from the auld sod, but then there's a Scottish racing driver named Dario Franchitti, so it's not out of the question. This one's harder to maintain, but "Bright" becomes "broight" and so the game goes on. Nobody asks me where I'm from or how I came to this country.

At the next, I go for broke and grab a handful of my roots. I'm Russian, and on top of that, my English sucks.

I walk into the office. This is a lumberyard, and it's full of big sausage-eating Chicago hard-ballers. Am I really going to go through with this? The guy behind the counter leans over, and, around his toothpick, mumbles, "Help ya?"

Oh God, I'm really going to do it…

"Eh, yes. I am from (here I deliberately bungle the name of the company.) I have twelve cartons of paper. For (just to be consistent, I mangle the name of the destination)."

The guy blinks. "Who'd you say you were from?"

I try again. "Is…name on truck. Over there."

The toothpick guy looks out the window, then back at me. "And what are you dropping off?"

"Is paper. For printer."

The guy looks at me, utterly dumbfounded, then says, "Hang on a sec. I'll get Lou." He picks up the phone.

"Thank," I say.

I wait for a while. There are other guys in the office, and the atmosphere is noticeably tense. Finally, Lou walks in and approaches the counter guy.

Toothpick says, "This tall guy here is delivering something, but I can't understand what he's saying. Talk to him, will ya?"

If I drop the ruse now, I'll get my ass roundly kicked, so when Lou looks at me, I say, "Am delivering paper," and thrust my clipboard at him. He looks at me, then down at the bill of lading.

"Oh, I got ya," he says. He looks over his shoulder at Toothpick. "He's got our invoices and five cartons of copy paper."

"Yes, copy paper," I say.

"Where's your truck?"

"Is in parking lot, over there."

Lou grabs his coat. "I'll help you," he says. "How big are the boxes?"

Would a Russian guy with shitty English know how to say, "About one and a half by one and a half by three feet?" I'm guessing not, so I wordlessly frame the approximate size with my hands. Lou nods and asks, "You got a dolly?"

I don't think a Russian guy with shitty English would know that word, so I shake my head and stammer, "Am sorry. A…?" I open my eyes wide, lower my head and turn it slightly to the side, and look at the guy. I might be taking this too far.

Lou mumbles something under his breath. It sounds like, "Fucking foreigners," but I'm not sure, and anyway, would a Russian guy with shitty English catch that? I doubt it, and anyway I'm not a foreigner, so I ignore it. Lou goes into the back room and comes out with a dolly of his own, and follows me out to the truck in silence. We load the cartons onto the dolly, then I hand him my clipboard. "Please, for sign," I say. "On bottom."

He signs and I give him his copy. He takes it and turns away, and I yell, "Please to have for Happy New Year!" all Balki Bartakomous on the guy. He waves in return, and he was pretty nice and helpful too, so I refrain from yelling "Yeah, ya sausage-eatin' pile o' rat shit!" after him. The temptation is indeed great, yet surmountable.

I climb back into the truck. That was pretty stupid, I acknowledge, but as I drive away and contemplate what country I will be from on the next and final stop, I realize a valuable lesson has been learned.

Talk about feeling like an outsider! And I was faking it the whole time! What must it really be like to work as a foreigner at a job in another country, knowing you came here because it was better that what was available at home, but being unfamiliar with the streets, the people, and not knowing even if you could understand or make yourself understood? Not knowing if the contemptuous looks and not-so-well-hidden sniggers of laugher were directed at you?

As I pull up to the day's last stop, I decide to be the Russian guy again. I'm considering being Mexican, 'cause enough people have told me that I look like a Mexican that I'm pretty sure I can pull it off, and besides that, my Mexican accent is frigging awesome. However, too many people around here speak Spanish and I don't speak a word of it, so it'd be too easy to get caught out. I know of only a few people who speak Russian, so I'm pretty sure I'm safe; nevertheless, I'm nervous, because I know I'm gonna do it again and, once you start, you can't stop--at least, you can't if you have any pride in your game. And I'm thinking to myself, these people here are going to see the nervousness on my face and know that I'm faking it. But really, if you really were a foreigner, and you really were going into a place full of people who knew the language while you were just stumbling around, wouldn't you be nervous too? I think, though the language barrier isn't genuine, the nervousness is and that's the final bit of polish that sells the product. I try it one more time getting gas on the way home.

"Please, twenty dollars," I say, handing the lady behind the counter, a dour-looking fatty with her hair viciously cranked back in a tangerine-colored hair tie and about five pounds of eye shadow on, a picture of Andrew Jackson.

"Which pump is it?" she asks, and she's not nearly as mean-sounding as she looked.

"Is Honda Civic," I say, pointing and pronouncing it Cee-veek.

"Sure thing, hon," she says. "Have a happy new year."

"Happy to you," I say, with a big dorky smile. She returns it. Gosh, she sure was pleasant. Would she have been as nice if I had sounded like I looked—a hulking dude in beat-up yellow work boots and an equally beat-up, grease-stained Caterpillar ball cap, black leather jacket, leather work gloves; black shades, a goatee and one motherfucker of a five-o'-clock shadow? I'm sure she expected me to sound like Jack Nicholson on amyl nitrates.

I think I'll be a little nicer henceforth to people for whom English is not the native tongue. And maybe I won't feel like so much of an outsider now. Or if I am, I will at least thank God, that, when I'm misunderstood by the people around me, it's not because of the language barrier.

Cog

2007-12-14T20:40:00.000-08:00

You know, it’s been a while. Been a while for a lot of things, but mainly, it’s been a while since I’ve had anything I thought worth saying.

Been a while since I’ve spoken to a number of my friends, and that’s no one’s fault but my own. Of course they’re concerned, I guess, and I thank them for that. I certainly do miss them and maybe I will get coal in my stocking for hiding and I wish I could come out of this but it just won’t leave. Maybe it will someday soon.

Been a while since I’ve taken a ride on the Moose, and I feel that part of me atrophying as it does every year about this time. That’s something that time will fix, but I’m still loath to take out the battery and put it to bed for the year. There’s snow on the ground and it’s twenty degrees outside, and I know I won’t fire it up again until March at the earliest, but I’m still in shock as to how quickly riding season seemed to be over, even with that blessed respite October seemed to give us.

Been a while since I’ve seen my beloved Lois, and nothing will ever fix that. I’m still trying to get used to the idea, and I can still remember everything about her, how she looked, how she sounded, how she felt. I can’t seem to remember anything about how frustrating and heartbreaking it can be to have to deal with a very old dog on her terms, and I can’t remember how I used to freeze with dread and shock every time she had a seizure, simultaneously wishing it would stop and hoping that this would finally be it and it would all be over so we could get to grieving, and it’s a blessing that I can’t remember that. I can still remember how she used to smile when she saw me (yes, some dogs really can smile, and if you’ve ever seen it I hope you feel as blessed as I do) and I can still remember how she used to love bananas and how she used to sleep with her head on my chest and I can still remember the looks in the eyes of the lovely Polish cleaning ladies when they asked “Where dog?” and I had to tell them.

Been a little while since I’ve played a gig. A few weeks, at least, of this writing. It’s funny that the whole SST thing is all over and it seems to be, in part at least, because of my hectic schedule and now that we’re done, I’m sitting here on a Friday night writing this, and contemplating finishing it tomorrow night because I’ll most likely be sitting here again. This is tough on me, and I’ll sometimes find myself taking my basses off the wall and just holding one of them. Even the ones I don’t play anymore, the retired ones, just so I don’t forget what it feels like. Of course gigs will come as they always do, but when you’re insecure like me and time between draws out like this, your mind plays games with you and you wonder.

Been a while since I’ve seen my grandmother. I’m an evil dick for not visiting, but she doesn’t know who I am anymore and I can’t handle that, this wonderful woman who made me racing-car-shaped birthday cakes when I was a kid, as well as the best French toast I ever ate and, up to as little as five years ago, marveled at our dog who loved broccoli and oranges; up to four years ago and knitted a crib blanket for my newborn nephew; up to three years ago and who still knew my name.

Been a while since I’ve seen my grandpa, and all I can remember about him is how he used to sound when he’d call our dog, in his wonderful accent that was equal parts Russian and South Side hitman—“Allo dere, baby.”

It had been a while since I’ve played a Mass, up until last weekend when I played a double-header, one near Kankakee and one right here in the Plain. It wasn’t as much fun as I remembered it being.

Been a while.

So, in all this in-between time, there’s lots of time to think, and to go to bed early and online-Christmas-shop and grade papers and write finals. And there’s lots of time to aimlessly surf the net, and that’s where I guess the inspiration to write this came from.

I found a website linked off of one of my favorites, Gorillamask, and spent some time digging around on it—www.nothingtoxic.com. I’m not knocking the guys who put this site together, and if you’re into that kind of stuff then please be my guest. But there’s well over 700 pages of videos to check out and it left me, after checking out a small fraction of the first half, feeling raw.

This is where you go if you want to see senseless beatings of old people—by muggers, by so-called caretakers, by sons and daughters. This is where you go if you want to see executions of people in other countries, for crimes such as being homosexual, for renouncing the nationally recognized religion, for being a woman. If you want to see a guy beating his dog to death with an axe handle, go here. If you want to see cops shooting unarmed people who came out of the house or car with their clearly empty hands held way way up, go here. If you’re interested in checking out gang fights, muggings on buses, two thugs in an impromptu for-real boxing match outside the school at 3:30, you’re all set. One more drunk celebrity pulling a sneaky-pete coke hit out of a vial stashed in her hair and snorting a line on stage while on camera? Check. Aftermath footage of a car crash in which six people were killed? Check. Two girls pulling each others’ hair out on the dance floor because one looked at the other’s boyfriend-of-the-month? Check. One young punk clocking another over the head with a skateboard, resulting in convulsions? Check. Soldiers, over and over again, being incinerated by IED’s? Check.

I watched a few of these because I had nothing else to do. I wish I hadn’t, because I came away feeling hopeless for our species and the planet we inhabit. How can any group of people ever hope to make the world any better when our priorities are so far out of whack? Is this really what we’re meant for, why we’re full of the urge to go forth and multiply? Can’t we do better than this? God, I’m so ashamed of us.

That was last night.

Tonight, I found another, Manicworld, and it kindled a small spark of what might be hope. Maybe, I’m thinking. Maybe there are some things we can stand up and be proud of, some things that might be regarded with approval by whatever other intelligence is watching us and, I’m sure, shaking its collective head in disgust.

Go there and you’ll see some unsavory stuff. But you’ll see some neat stuff too.

A guy who makes the most wonderful shadow puppets I’ve ever seen, and if you doubt that shadow puppets can make a thirty-four-year-old man reach for the Kleenex, watch this guy and then come talk to me.

A guy on “America’s Got Talent” who looks like any other club-swinging hoon on that other site but who comes on stage and sings some of the best reggae I’ve ever heard. His wife and newborn daughter are hoping he wins. I am too.

A large brown dog protecting a toddler from a drawerful of sharp knifes by closing it with his nose every time the tot, squealing with laughter, pulls it open.

A pit bull who’s adopted a small clutch of fuzzy yellow chicks.

A montage on some of the more remarkable pictures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, that extend farther into deep space than humans have ever seen before and show that there are countless (literally, countless) galaxies, each with millions upon millions of stars, out on the farthest reaches of the universe, 78 billion light years away.

Oh God, this planet is so sorely fucked, and we are such a messed up group of people. We wantonly hurt each other for our own miniscule and momentary material gain, and go out and do it again and again. We’ve so squandered so many blessings and gifts.

And yet, watching a neat collage of the greatest moments in sports, I realized that we don’t have to be fucked. We choose to be fucked, a great number of us. But there is such potential for greatness! Such potential! Not greatness on a game-winning-grand-slam-in-the-bottom-of-the-ninth-at-the-World-Series greatness, but the greatness that comes from taking what we have and, somehow, making it into something more.

I’d like to think that I’m in there somewhere, that one of my exploits might someday land on a website like this and some poor hopeless wretch is sitting at home on a Friday night after the usual frozen pizza for dinner and watching, feeling just as hopeless as I sometimes do. I’d like to hope that, maybe someday, some chump just like me is watching travesty after travesty and feeling lower and lower, until, maybe, something I do pops up and brings a smile to the guy’s face.

I’d like to think that I could be one of those people on the side opposite of the turmoil, blood-and-guts world that I see while fighting to squeeze my little car, the most fuel-efficient one I can afford, into a quickly-shrinking space of asphalt between two lumbering SUV’s in the freezing rain on the commute to work some dreary, cold early-winter morning, when the washer fluid is just barely cutting through the road phlegm coughed up by the traffic onto my windshield.

I’d like to think that I could be someone who, smallest of cogs that I am in the biggest of machines, instead of firewalling my engine just to get next to that fruitcake in the TrailBlazer so I can give him the finger, would just let the guy in with a cheerful flash of my highbeams.

I’d like to think I could be the small cog that somehow makes things run a little smoother instead of gumming things up just to lay claim to my little piece of the here-and-now.

I’d have to start, however, by getting back on the axle and reengaging my teeth, chipped and worn as they may be, back into the machine. I need to do that soon, because it’s been a while.

That machine scares me.

Who made me?

2007-04-09T00:31:00.000-07:00

Who made me?

I don’t mean who designed me, or what forces collaborated in August of 1972 or thereabouts to spit me out in the bosom of spring, 1973. We all know the answers to those questions about ourselves, or at least we think we do, or at least we hope we do.

But I’m convinced that if you took a newborn Jay and popped him in a gray-lined institution and fed him three squares a day and educated him only with a single tutor, Prince Caspian style, and released him unsuspecting onto the world damn near 34 years later, you’d have quite a different animal.

I’d still be 6’5” and still have dark hair and one reasonably-working eye and size-11 feet, but if you asked me what my favorite song was, or who my favorite author was, or how to put new strings on a bass guitar, or how to extract DNA, or how to calculate the Ideal Gas Constant from the pressure, volume, temperature, and molar content of a gas, or the lyrics to the Canadian National Anthem, or how to change a timing belt, or how to adjust valves on an overhead-cam V-four, would I know?

I’ve been trying to answer that question lately, and what inspired it, I guess, is a conversation I had with a good friend not so long ago. The answers, I’m finding, aren’t so cut and dry, but they’re there, if you look.

And one has to consider, as well, that a person is not a product of a mold, a bas-relief image spit out whole and functioning from one pressing session. We’re continually impressionable, I’m finding, and of course the degree to which we are impressed upon, and the duration of that impression, is directly proportional to the detail and depth of the person, or thing, that is impressing upon us. A one-dimensional kind of person isn’t gonna change me much, but be vibrant, alive, forthwith, interesting, and you will change me, as you will change anybody with whom you come in contact, despite my or their efforts to the contrary.

Of course the majority of shaping comes from our folks. I have friends whose parents weren’t around much, or if they were, they were a negative influence at best. I also have friends whose parents were much too protective and coddling, and these friends suffer, I feel, though I don’t think they know it, for these influences. (Think about that one for a little while—your parents wrap you in this protective shell all the time. Not only does it preclude being shaped by the world around you, but also, it seems to me, prevents you from the necessary interactions with your folks and immediate family that is a large part of who we are. What fun can you have with Silly Putty if you leave it in the little egg-shaped case all the time?)

From my folks, I learned how to give, and I learned to hold money, and all it represents, in contempt. (It’s interesting that, while my brother and I were well-raised by the same two wonderful people, I learned to hate money and he learned something entirely different. We’re not better or worse, my brother and I, just different. If you’ve met us both, no doubt you’re nodding emphatically.)

From my folks, I learned how to appreciate art and music, and they encouraged me to make my own from an early age. I learned to appreciate life and preserved it whenever I could, but I also learned when to make the distinction between preservation and survival. I once watched my mother cry when her Thunderbird hit a rabbit, but I also learned that a good regimen of nutrients for a good ol’ Midwestern boy included meat and potatoes, despite the fact that my mother is a vegetarian.

I learned not to question God but simply appreciate Him.

I learned that walking away from a fight was often the bravest thing you could do, if you knew you couldn’t fight. (I didn’t learn how to fight from my folks, by the way. I learned from my brother. And I didn’t learn how to fight so much as learn how to get my ass kicked and keep on smiling. I also learned that, if you want to be a good friend, start with your siblings. My brother did that, too.)

I learned how to work on cars. My brother learned how to work on houses. Today our knowledge is still mutually exclusive, as I just changed the fuel pump in his Chrysler (a nasty, nasty job), in exchange for him helping me build a deck this summer.

I learned how to work hard and not blame anybody else when I failed. I also learned, though they didn’t come out and tell me this, that if they were footing the bill for my tuition, there wasn’t a single excuse for me to not get straight A’s. This also taught me that, if you paid for something, get your money’s worth out of it. This explains why my house is old, my car is old, my basses are old (and when I say old, I don’t mean the years; I mean the mileage. Look at my Washburn bass sometime and tell me I’m lying.)

There’s a lot more where that came from, and I don’t really think I’ve scratched the surface, because if you hang out with me and my dad at the same time, you’ll notice a lot of similarities. That’s great, in my opinion, because there’s no one on the planet I’d rather be more like than my dad, but it also indicates that he, and my mother, have had a lot more to do with the person I became, and am becoming, than anyone else.

But they’re not the end of the story.

We’ll play a little game here. I won’t name any names, but if you’re reading this, and if you know me, perhaps you’ll pick out a little bit of yourself, or someone you know, in these next few passages.

I learned that there are people who can drink well and people who can’t. This doesn’t just mean people who can drink a lot, though I know people like that and I like to think I’ve learned from them, too. People who drink well know when they’ve had enough, and people don’t, don’t. That’s an admirable quality, and I’m learning this more and more as I get older.

I learned how to work hard and study to earn a spot in some really good bands, and from many, many musicians with whom I’ve played, I learned that, once you get on stage, there’s no such thing as a safety net. You’re only as good as the time you put in, and if you haven’t put in enough, while the people in the audience might not have noticed, the people on stage with you certainly have. I also learned that a band is only as good as its shittiest member.

I learned that nothing is insurmountable if you can just keep on smiling. I know people who have used this knowledge well. These are the people to whom I look up, and the people whom I respect, most of all. I also know people who knew this but couldn’t—or wouldn’t. Either I don’t respect them or they’re already dead, or amounts to the same. I also learned that there I times when I can do this, and times when I can’t. My self-image fluctuates accordingly.

I learned that, when things are at their shittiest, sometimes it helps just to go somewhere and laugh. You can’t do this all by yourself, however, because then things are shitty and you feel like a nut. (Yes, I’ve tried this.) You need someone to laugh with, someone to make you laugh, someone for you to make laugh. A friend with whom you can reliably do this is undoubtedly your best friend.

I learned that, when you’re angry, expressing your anger with a big dirty churlish burnout down the street is not always the best way to go about things. It doesn’t help the situation and it just means you’ll need to buy tires sooner. Plus, it attracts the cops.

I learned what what other people think about you matters a whole hell of a lot more than what you think about yourself. Convincing yourself of this is another matter entirely.

I learned that being a good drummer does not start with having the best gear. In the same vein, I learned that a good musician can make any instrument sound good, while a shitty musician can make the best gear sound like ass. I also learned that, while modulation of meter can be interesting when executed well, sticking a five-beat fill into the middle of a 4/4 song just confuses people.

I learned that, when you’re working on a car and it’s giving you problems, sometimes it helps to find a really big hammer and just lean it up against the fender or the door, just so the car knows it’s there. “You feel that? You want me to use it? Then cooperate, dammit.”

I learned who Jaco Pastorius was. I had no idea who he was ten years ago, and now I’m intimidated as hell by him and love him all the same for it. He also taught me that there are harmonics on both the 4th and 5th frets of a bass. He taught me all this despite being dead. I wouldn’t have heard of him, however, if someone hadn’t introduced me to him. Vicariously, that same person introduced me to Stanley Clarke and Victor Wooten (via Béla Fleck). Another person introduced me to Donald “Duck” Dunn and Johnny B Gayden. Has it influenced my playing? You tell me.

I learned from another person that, when you’re angry, sometimes a big dirty churlish burnout down the street is just the ticket.

That’s stuff I’ve learned, stuff on the inside, and really, in the interest of avoiding boredom in you, O Honored Reader, I’ve curtailed my list quite a bit. But that says nothing about the things on the outside, the things you can see about me; the CD’s in my rack, the stuff on my iSlap, the books on my shelf. There’s bits and pieces of all of you in there. There’s a big chunk of someone in East of Eden, and there’s a big chunk in O. Henry and Moacyr Scliar, too. There’s Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Adams and Jack London and Joseph Conrad, and there’s Timothy Zahn, too. There’s only me in Peter S. Beagle, though, and Paul Kidd. There’s a lot of my folks in Stephen King, because I got into trouble at age seven when the librarian at Winfield Public Library caught me sneaking Christine out of the adult fiction section.

And what of the larger things? Who’s to say that the clothes I wear, the car I drive, the house I bought, are all offshoots of something you said or did seven years ago? If I didn’t know you, my life would have turned out differently, I’m sure. Maybe this bottle opener on the pillar of my basement is because of you, and that inspired a lot of other people to go out and get one. Maybe this tattoo is because of you, but maybe it was inspired by someone I haven’t seen for five years or more. Maybe these little notes that I write myself and keep in my wallet to remind me of things are because of me, but maybe there’s one that you wrote me a while ago that I keep in there too, and that reminds me of something else. Maybe it was something I watched you do to your cat that made me go home and hug mine a little tighter, or maybe it was something you did for your dog that made me go home and do the same thing for mine.

Little things, big things. Miles and milestones.

Well, know that if you know me, you’re in here with me somewhere, for good or evil. And know that, as I go on down the road and meet new people and experience new things, there’s nothing that can replace you in here, because no one could have changed me in the way that you did, and I keep that in here too.

A post in the spirit of the season...

2006-12-28T21:21:00.000-08:00

Well.

I guess it’s about time for another motorhead post.

Wait! Wait! I meant, another post about, uh, Care Bears! C’mon, please, sit down. I didn’t mean to scare you off. Here, would you like some lemonade? How ‘bout a scone? Finger sandwich? Bite-size burrito? There ya go…it’ll be okay. Comfy?

So these two Care Bears were having this drag race and…

HA! While you were selecting your burrito (damn fine, if I do say so myself), I handcuffed your ass to the chair, so y’all just sit right back down and stay put whilst I wax all gearhead and greasy on ya. You ain’t goin’ nowhere. That is, of course, unless you click the ‘Back’ button. Please don’t.

It won’t be entirely bad, though. In fact, you might find it to your liking, as it seems appropriate for the holiday season.

Ahem. Now then…

My dad’s a gearhead, and that means that my brother and I are both gearheads. Not so much any more, you understand—for him, it’s the two-kids-and-the-minivan dealie. For me, it’s ‘cause I’m broke. But there was a time when we were as gearhead as possible.

We both learned a lot of tricks from our father. We learned to match revs on downshifts, which is kinda hard to orchestrate as, while you’re hard on the brakes with one foot and stomping the clutch pedal in with the other, you have to blip the throttle to catch the engine with the transmission. This a) allows the engine to help in slowing the car down, and any help that allows you to wait a little longer before you start braking for a corner means you go in just a little hotter than the other guy; b) is just that much smoother, as not blipping the throttle and just abruptly letting out the clutch could cause the wheels to lock momentarily as the engine drags on them, possibly sending you into a nasty spin; and c) sounds really cool. Regardless, it means that you have to slide your brake-foot over to the right a little bit and blip the throttle with your instep. The professionals call it ‘heel-and-toeing,’ but it’s really toe-and-instep. This takes a lot of practice, but by now it’s a habit.

We learned that a little wheelspin is a good thing on a launch, because it keeps the engine from bogging. You don’t want too much, however, as you make a lot of smoke and noise and teenage kids think you’re a hero while the other guy is showing you taillights.

We learned that when the going is slick and taking a corner really fast can be treacherous, the handbrake is your friend. We learned, also, that you can use the foot-actuated parking brake in most American cars if you hold the release lever out with your left hand while you steer with your right.

We learned that power oversteer (what the young’uns call drifting) is one of the most beautiful things to behold on this planet, when done well.

We also learned that, in the glory days of muscle cars and the SCCA and Speed Racer and Carroll Shelby and the Corvette Grand Sport and the Cobra 427 and Woodward Avenue, that you could set up a drag race with any guy you got next to at a red light with a simple ritual that worked flawlessly.

You’d pull up to a red light, and either the other guy would already be there, or he’d slide up next to you. If you wanted to race the guy, the ritual went like this:

1). You’d blip your throttle once. Just once. If the guy was at least open to negotiation, he’d answer. Just once.

2). You’d look the other way as though you were not interested. More than likely, the other guy was doing the same thing.

3). You’d kind of roll your head on your shoulders toward the other car and look at the guy from underneath your eyebrows. If he was looking back at you, you’d perform the fourth and final step that aimed to seal the deal.

4). You’d make a pistol out of the thumb and forefinger of the hand closest to the other guy. You’d lift it all lazily and, with a snap of the wrist, point down the street toward the next intersection. If the guy was a taker, he’d answer with the same gesture, and the race was on—that is, if the light hadn’t changed back to green while all this was going on. If you had time and you wanted to seem especially bad-ass, you’d light a cigarette—but only if you knew you had time. You didn’t want to appear rushed.

5). If you won, you wouldn’t look at the guy at the next stoplight. He was beneath you by now and was no longer worth your consideration. Hopefully, while you were beating his ass and making him snork up your exhaust fumes like a demon, he got a chance to look at your license-plate frame that said only “A.M.F.”

(Oh, God, Jay, please tell us what A.M.F. stands for! Does it mean “Association of Mindless Fruitcakes?” Does it mean “Amigos Muy Fraternanza?” Does it mean “Actually, Mine’s Fucked?” Please, please tell us!

Nope. Gotta wait til the end.)

6). If you lost, you’d turn right at the next intersection so you wouldn’t have to look at the guy. Or, if you were stupid, you could try it again—but if he beat you once, he’d probably get you twice and you couldn’t have that.

My brother and I did this a lot fucking around on the streets of our neighborhood—me in my rattletrap Cavalier station wagon (with a 5-speed, don’t forget) and him in his piece-of-shit Chevy Monza, or me in my Mazda pickup truck and him in his rust-bucket 1982 Honda Accord. Regardless of what we were driving, he usually won.

So let’s fast forward from the late 60’s to 1998. I was in my third year of grad school, and I was home for the holidays. I had loaded up my 1988 Acura Integra LS (by this time, my altercation with a large-ish full-size Chevrolet pickup had long since occurred and the poor thing bore a large scar all down the driver’s side) and driven home a few days before, and now it was Christmas Eve. Our tradition worked like this: I would get out of the church after playing two Christmas Eve masses in a row and meet my brother, who had come from his then-girlfriend’s house, and my parents at our long-time family friends, the Beliches. We’s stay until midnight or so, drinking warm grog and snacking on cookies, then drive home, all in separate cars, to wait for Santa.

We usually left at the same time, but this night, my brother and I pulled out of the Beliches’ driveway while my folks were still saying their goodbyes. My brother and I had a good time playing tag on the deserted streets on the way from Winfield to our house in Naperville. I did a lot of handbrake-yanking in my four-cylinder front-driver, while my brother got all ass-happy in his 1989 Thunderbird SC (the ‘SC’ bit stood for ‘Super Coupe,’ a play on the ‘Turbo Coupe’ of the previous-generation Thunderbirds, and also stood for ‘supercharger,’ which nestled comfortably between the cylinder banks of the 3.8-liter V6 and spun that bad boy up to about 235 horsepower). His car was rarer, and slightly faster, than most SC Thunderbirds because it was a 5-speed, too. A fast car indeed, that.

We pulled up to the red light at the intersection of Naperville Rd and Ogden Avenue. At 12:30 in the morning of Christmas Day, the place was a tomb.

I heard a throttle blip from the lane next to me. Just one. I answered.

I rolled my head toward my brother. He was looking at me from underneath his eyebrows.

He made a pistol with one hand and pointed down the empty street. I followed suit.

(Let’s pause right here and say that I knew I was gonna get killed. 116 horsepower versus 235? Yeah, I know, but let’s just let the story tell itself, because the ending’s not what you think.)

Another trick my dad taught us is that, if you pay attention to the traffic signals on the cross street, you can often get an idea when the light on your street’s gonna go green, so you’re not caught entirely off-guard. I leaned forward in my seat and watch the cross light change from green to yellow. Out of the corner of my eye I could see my brother doing the same thing. I dialed up about 4,000 rpm and held it there.

When the light went green I dumped everything and put my foot to the floor. Because of the lighter weight and shorter gearing of my car, I actually beat my brother’s Thunderbird across the intersection, but then I heard a growing whine behind me as the supercharger spooled up and he was past me and gone before I even got second gear.

Too into the moment to lift, I kept my foot down and chased my brother’s taillights around the first bend, the lovely whoop of my engine echoing my own. I think I touched eighty or so, my brother easily twenty car lengths ahead, and that’s when I noticed the flashing red-and-blues in my rearview mirror. Apparently the cop had been sitting in the gas station across the street from us and had watched the whole thing.

“Oh, shheeeyiiit,” I breathed, even as the cop shot past me and bore down on my brother. My relief quickly switched back to dismay at the thought of two minutes worth of fucking about landing my brother—not me—in the cooler on a reckless driving charge.

My brother had already slowed down considerably and was drifting toward the shoulder. I attempted to go around and had plans to immediately pull over and plead my brother’s case, seeming as though the cop had no interest in me, slow and battered as my car was. But when I tried to pass on the left, the cop swerved and cut me off. His arm shot out of the window and motioned us both to the shoulder. We complied sheepishly. I pulled in behind my brother, my shaking hands on the wheel.

The cop’s PA system crackled. “GET OUT OF THE GODDAMN CAR, BOTH OF YOU!”

We both got out, still dressed in our traditional holiday garb—a jacket and tie covered by a long black overcoat. At least we matched, somewhat.

“GET YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR AND KEEP ‘EM WHERE I CAN SEE ‘EM!”

My brother walked back towards my car, and we both stood there, squinting in the cruiser’s glaring lights, our hands held high.

“ALL RIGHT, BOTH OF YOU WALK BACK TOWARD THE CRUISER, NICE AND SLOW!”

We walked slowly as though to the gallows.

The cop’s window was still down and we could hear him jabbering a lot of cop-speak into the radio. He sounded excited. The radio answered back. He got out and stalked over to us.

“All righty, boys. Do I cuff you, or are you gonna cooperate?”

We both answered for the latter at the same time.

“Good. Now get those licenses out and hand them over to me. Wait right there and keep your hands up.”

We did as we were told. Neither of us spoke. We both knew we were fucked. My deepest fear was that my brother would be doubly fucked simply for the fact that he had been winning.

All of a sudden, we heard the cop exclaim. “Now what the hell is this?!”

He got back out of the car and ambled over to us, not hurrying. “Do you mean to tell me that you two assholes are brothers?”

“Y-Y-Y-Yes, s-s-sir,” I stammered, trying desperately not to stammer.

“Well, what the fuck are you two doing, drag racing on Christmas Eve?”

“We haven’t done anything like this in a long time, Officer,” said my brother. “It really was more of an ‘old-time’s-sake’ thing than anything else.”

“I guess it must’ve been,” said the cop, not nastily. “I ain’t never seen a more mismatched drag race than that.” He gestured to our cars idling at the curb. The glare from his door-mounted spotlight made the bashed-in contours of my car’s driver’s side stand out in stark relief.

Another car pulled in behind the cruiser, and my brother and I looked at each other. Backup? The headlights, however, looked like those from no cruiser I had ever seen. Nor were they; they were the lights on my mother’s Lincoln Continental. Both she and my father got out. My mother made as if to brace the police officer, but my father stilled her with a hand on her arm. Slowly, they approached the cruiser.

“Now, who the fuck is this?” the cop demanded.

“Uh, sir?” I managed. “Begging your permission, sir, those are our parents.”

The cop leaned back against his cruiser and started to laugh. “I don’t believe this.”

He told our folks about the entire escapade. They engaged in a brief conversation, punctuated with, thankfully, laughter on the parts of both the cop and our parents. The cop gave us back our licenses with one final admonition, then got back into his cruiser, still laughing. He turned around in the road and drove off the way he had come, turning the red-and-blues off as he went.

My mother wouldn’t talk to us. She stormed back to her Lincoln and got in on the passenger side, apparently too pissed off to drive. My dad, head down in laughter, came over to us.

“You two are some of the luckiest assholes I ever saw,” he said. “No one would believe this if I told ‘em. I’d say this was just about the best Christmas present I ever saw anyone get.”

“Yeah,” said my brother. “If it hadn’t been Christmas Eve, if we hadn’t been related…”

“…if your mom and dad hadn’t shown up to fuck up the entire deal,” my dad added. “Get in your cars and let’s go home, and if I see either of you do anything stupid on the way there, I’ll kill you myself.”

We went home.

Now I drive an even-slower 1992 Civic. My brother has a Chrysler 300M, and even with the automatic, it’d still kill me. The two child seats in the back remind us both, however, that such shenanigans these days would be highly frowned upon. But, in the summertime, when we get the bikes out…well, I’ll let you fill in the details on that one all by yourself. Although these days, I usually win.

And that’s the end! Merry Christmas, and may the coming new year bring you all happinesses.

By the way…

“A.M.F” stands for “Adios, Mother”…well, you get the idea.

On inabilities...

2006-12-03T23:33:00.000-08:00

You know what’s really frustrating?

Have you ever…man, this is gonna be tougher than I thought.

Have you ever felt some way about something…some piece of music, a movie you saw, a painting, a friend, a pet, an object, where you just knew that this thing—this person, this whatever-it-was—was made just for you, and you were so happy you’d found this—so blessed—that you wanted to climb onto your roof and shout about it…but everyone you tried to tell about it just…didn’t get it?

I had a dream, once. My dreams are weird in that they are full of details that words are insufficient to describe, but I’ll try, if you’re interested.

In this dream, I was an older man. Mid 50’s, maybe. And I lived in New York, and I was in the Mafia. And I turned informer, and they relocated me and my wife. We had no children.

I remember the apartment we lived in—a nice two-flat brownstone in Buffalo. I remember my wife. Her name was Darla. And I remember the photographs on the little table sitting in the corner, in little ornate oval or rectangular frames, arranged neatly on the doily that draped elegantly over the table’s edges. And I remember each of the people in those photographs, because each of those people were people I knew. I can’t tell you their names now, but I probably could’ve after I woke up.

There were songs on the radio that no one walking on this earth has heard. That’s because they were songs my brain made up, in the dream, but I knew each one, and I sang along just like you do when you hear “Sweet Home Alabama.”

I had a car… a big old black thing, something 70’s. Probably a Chevrolet Impala or a Plymouth Gran Fury, something nondescript. That part’s cloudy, I guess because in the dream I took the bus a lot.

And I remember the way I looked. I was shorter, with a bit of a paunch, and I had iron-gray hair that was peppered with the black my hair had once been. I didn’t wear glasses or facial hair.

There’s more, but I’m probably losing you, so I’ll just continue. In the three months that this dream seemed to take, we moved, set up our new house, and were just getting used to the way things were going to be when the Mafia found us.

I remember getting thrown into the trunk of a car and taken to some warehouse after dark. They dragged me out and took me, my arms and legs still bound in duct tape, into what appeared to be some smaller room, all the furniture, the file cabinets, covered with months of dust. They knocked a couple of wooden slat-back chairs out of the way and threw me on the table. In the direction I happened to be facing, I could see my wife, whom they’d tied to a chair. Her face, liberally streaked with tears, her lovely auburn hair, dyed but beautiful nonetheless, a wreck. Her blouse was torn. One shoe was missing. A large-ish thug kept a .45 trained on her temple.

They hadn’t taped my mouth shut, and so I began bellowing. I don’t remember what I said, but I stopped when another large fellow jumped up on the table and straddled me. He had a trenching spade in his hand. If you’ve never seen one of these, allow me to describe it briefly—the blade’s about eighteen inches long (all the better leverage, my dears) and about five inches wide at the top, tapering to about three at the business end. They can be curved but aren’t necessarily.

I remember saying, “What, you’re gonna stand over me like that and make me watch while you kill my wife in front of me?”

The big guy straddling me on the table said, “Nope. We’re gonna make her watch while we kill you.”

With that he held the spade in front of him, lifted it over his head and brought the blade down deep into the soft part of my rib cage. It hurt like a sonofabitch, but it went to new levels when he put his foot on the blade just as you’d do with any shovel. He pushed down with all his considerable weight and then pried backward. The pain turned bright white in my vision, and then all went black, and then I woke up.

I have tried many times to describe this dream to others. But no amout of explaining could ever express the years that took place; the love I felt for the people in the photographs, those people that were my family, whom I had known for decades and decades; the love I felt for my wife; the helpless hatred I felt for those Mafioso bastards who were taking it all away. (Hey, I’m just trying to describe it from the dream’s perspective; I don’t have any animosity toward the Mafia, if you’re reading this.)

How could I explain that to you in a way that would make you understand? Apparently I can’t, as the looks on the faces of the legions of people I’ve told seems to suggest.

I feel that way all the time.

I wrote a song once. I write songs all the time—and in my head they’re fully finished, fully produced, all the lyrics written, all the parts charted—but I can never get them out in time before they’re…well, let me put it this way. Yes, I wrote one song. Got it recorded, too, and I was really happy with it. You’ve never heard it, though (well, maybe a few of you have, if you know me) and the reason has nothing to do with publishing rights or band breakups or any of that stuff. A copy of that song is sitting on my desk. I could put it in and play it if I wanted to, right now. I could make thousands of copies and throw them out the windows at people as I drove down the street. I wouldn’t, though.

You know why? I think that song—that one song—was the closest I ever got to being able to put things into words they way I wanted them to sound—for the first time, I beat myself. But would others get it? You can’t win if you don’t bet, they say, but I’d rather not bet and take the loss. It’s easier. I know what I meant when I wrote that song. And for once, just once, everything clicked. For me, that is. The lyrics were what I meant. The music was what I meant. The stops were what I meant. The way the guitar sounded was what I meant. I’ve never been able to do that again, and to expose this one time, this one successful snapshot, and risk it being misconstrued…well, I think I’ll just hold this one close to me and keep it that way. If you’ve heard it, I thank you for the very least for your time. But even if it were worth selling, don’t expect to see it in any music stores.

(You’re a good and talented person, kt, and if this is what you go through everytime you give us something new to work with, I stand up and applaud you with revered awe.)

I’m writing this whole thing because of a movie I just watched. I won’t tell you the name. But I want to stand on the street corner and yell, as loud as I can, You all need to see this movie! This is the best movie I’ve ever seen! Sure, it’s only 22 minutes long, but you have to see it! You have to! It really could make the world a better place!

I won’t do that. You know why? Because you’d go watch this movie and thing, God, this thing sucks! What’s he yelling about? He must be some kind of freak!

I did tell someone about this movie, and this evening this person was at my house, and he saw the DVD jacket on my shelf, and he said something like, “Is this the movie you were talking about?” He slid the DVD off the shelf and looked at the cover, and every molecule in me was screaming. He said, “It’s animé.” I said, “No, it isn’t.” He read the title out loud, and in his tone of voice I could hear him dismissing it. I struggled to keep my voice neutral and said, “Hey, don’t knock it.” All jovial-like. He said, “Okay,” dismissively and harmlessly, and slid the DVD back into its spot on the shelf. I was tempted to say “Hey, you already got it down off the shelf; let’s throw that sucker in. You got 22 minutes?” I couldn’t bring myself to say the words, though, because I knew the guy would never see in it what I saw, and I would have to try to explain.

And having that happen would kill me, because I wouldn’t have been able to explain why this movie touched me the way that it did. Even if you didn’t like it, I would want at the least to be able at least to explain to you why I liked it, and more and more I find that I…can’t explain why.

I can’t explain why my favorite song in the world is “The Voice of Eujena” by Brother Cane.

I can’t explain why I think the coolest bike ever built is the Honda Magna v65.

I can’t explain why I think raised-white-letter tires make any car look bad-ass.

I can’t explain how much I love my dog. This one’s the worst.

I can’t explain why I dig The Blues Brothers,
or music from Stax, or Donald “Duck” Dunn’s bass playing so much.
I can’t explain what it is about Disney movies, or why they get me so bad, or why I can only watch ‘em in the summertime.

I can’t explain why I think four-string basses look stupid but five-string basses look awesome.

I can’t explain why I deeply dig groups like Foreigner, Journey, Kansas, Survivor, Boston, or Styx, but Yes, King Crimson, Cream, Rush, and Emerson, Lake, and Powell make no sense. (Jethro Tull’s the shit, though.)

I can’t explain why I love blues. I know I’m white and I’m not supposed to enjoy blues, but I love it. I also can’t explain why I hate most (not all) jazz.

I can’t explain why I love Bob Dylan’s voice while Neil Young’s voice drives me batshit.

I can’t explain these things. I wish to God that I could, because for some reason, these things that I can’t explain seem to invite scorn or derision. I’m baffled, because I know all of us have different tastes, and you like “Mapletown Friends” or “C.S.I” or “The Maury Povich Show” or KMFDM or Motley Crüe or The Atlanic Star Vocal Band or Cabbage Patch Kids or Almond Joys or extra mustard on your hot dog or pai gow poker or your pet iguana. I don’t share these likes, but I swear to God you’ll never have to explain them to me.

It's damn hard...

2006-10-30T00:09:00.000-08:00

...to be a walking anachronism, but with a little fortitude and just a little help from alcoholic beverages, you can get through. It's a-gonna be ugly, but you can do it.

What prompted this little rant was a late-evening jaunt through Meijer's. They built one damn near right across the street from my house, you know, and the fucker's open 24-7. That scares me. You know how it makes me feel? Ever read The Mangler by Stephen King, where the demon-possessed industrial ironer-and-folder busts out of its moorings at the local wetwash factory after chewing up a couple of hapless night watchmen and a private investigator, and the two guys are standing in the living room of the one guy's house listening to this crazed raving machine maniacally galumphing its way down the street? Yeah, it feels a little like that.

So I went there to get some sundries for school. You know, the usual--propane torch (I'm totally serious here--St. Francis is so old, the chemistry classroom in which I teach (if you can call what I do teaching) has no gas lines, but a propane torch works damn fine) because the one at the school sprung a leak as I was trying to light it and pretty much burned my eyebrows off. Thanks for your sympathy; also, some watch batteries for the poor abused stopwatches I had to resurrect after one of our more-established science teachers commandeered all the other ones; some Matchbox cars for the lab I did today (again, totally serious. Y'all wouldn't last 10 minutes in my life) and some Drano (for the house. God, get your minds out of the gutter.) I also bought some Velcro (I'll let you guess what I used that for.) and a new pair of jeans. Well, scratch that--tried to buy a new pair of jeans, but they have every size but the size I need.

Anyway, while I was shocked that I could procure all of these items at the hour of 12:30, and all at the same place, what shocked me more was just the size of the joint. Can you imagine what it must be like to come here from a third-world country and walk into a Meijer's, or a Wal-Mart, or just your average supermarket? I'm not knocking the convenience, but...

Well, here's a little anecdote for you.

I tried fixing my buddy Big Larry's car, which had decided to run on five cylinders for a while, just to be coy, it seems. I used my dad's ODB II (that stands for On Board Diagnostics, not Ol' Dirty Bastard) scan tool and it told me that it had detected a misfire on Injector 1. Fine. I figured I'd replace the spark plugs and wires, and just for a goof, the coil for cylinders 1 and 4. Oh, and to get at the three cylinders on the back side of the engine, you have to detach two engine mounts and rotate the whole block forward so you can get between the engine and the firewall. Took about three hourse and a lot of beer. Guess what? Still ran on 5 cylinders until about two weeks ago, when Larry called me up to report that all of a sudden it had decided to clean up its act. Runs great.

I don't understand that. I also don't understand why the anti-theft system in my dad's Corvette decides every once in a while that my dad is a perpetrator and, in an effort to thwart a theft, renders the whole car completely comatose for about half an hour, then starts up and runs like a fucker.

I don't get why, if I leave the old oxygen sensor in my Honda Civic, it runs like shit, but if I put a new one in, it runs great though the 'Check Engine' light comes on.

I don't understand why my computer won't recongnize my iPod until I turn it off and then on again three times.

I don't understand a lot of these things.

I understand that if you put gas in my old Ford, it will start. Every time. If it doesn't start, it means a) the battery's dead, in which case you leave the Ford in the parking lot of the gig you're playing while the opening band is just getting warmed up and you get a ride to the local Auto Zone (also open 24/7, thank God) and put a new battery in and drive home, after wedging an empty Aquafina bottle between the battery and the inner fender to prevent a hard ground that five minutes before was gaily shooting sparks out from under the hood while the carburetor hungrily sucks down gas not two feet away, or b) it's out of gas.

I understand that if you plug in my old SWR tube amp and plug in my old Fender jazz bass, you will be the loudest thing within four blocks and the neighbors will complain.

I understand that Freddie King was able to say just as much with his one guitar and one old tube amp than the guy I saw last weekend at Penny Road Pub with a 10-pedal effects array on the floor in front of him.

I get old things. I don't get Meijer's. That's not to say that I don't appreciate Meijer's, 'cause I was able to buy a dehumidifier there at 11:00 at night when I found that a lot of things in my basement were getting fuzzy due to the moisture in the air caused by a crack in the foundation that let water seep in.

But I don't get the modern stuff, and I often feel like an alien, watching TV over at my folks' house and trying to understand what passes for entertainment these days, or listening to music my students play in their cars as they leave the parking lot and yearning for the days of Thin Lizzy and AC/DC, or slipping out through the self-check at the local Jewel and sliding a little piece of plastic through a card reader so I can buy my Ramen noodles and tortilla chips without speaking a word to anyone. At the same Jewel, you can now pay with a fingerprint.

I'm not old. At least I don't think I am. But I'm starting to feel that way. And I wonder what the world will look like in another 33 years, and what I will think of it then.

A Day in the Life...

2006-09-07T22:02:00.000-07:00

Went to work today where I...

...taught some physics,

...taught some chemistry,

...played some bass,

...graded some stuff,

...planned a lab,

...wrote a test,

...then I went home where, on the way I...

...stopped off for dinner and a beer with a lady friend...

...stopped at a junkyard in a tie and wingtips and got some shit, all the while getting frickin' weird looks from the Hispanic guys who work there, and managed to not get any grease on my pants...

...stopped by my folks' to grab my dad's onboard-diagnostics scanner so I could work on my buddy Big Larry's car, where I...

...hung out with my dog for a while and loved the hell out of her,

...drank a couple beers with my dad and his friend Ted, then I...

...went home and worked with Bauler for a while on his Environmental Biology class, then we...

...went to Barnes and Noble where I...

...bought a copy of "The Fifth Element," "Labyrinth (fukkin' David Bowie fukkin' rocks that shit)", "The Dark Crystal (muppets with baaaaad attitudes)", and "Tucker, The Man and His Dream,"...

...perused the Illinois section for ghost books and found none that I didn't already have,

...gave dirty looks to the dude behind the counter who tried to charge me double for a copy of Newkirk's Guide to the Totally Boned, put it back on the rack and told him to piss off, then I...

...went home and tried to take a look at my cat, who hurt his paw yesterday (unsuccessful)...

...watched "That Thing You Do", then I...

...wrote this crazy little bullshit blog all the while fighting the pop-ups and intermittenly surfing YouTube and Newgrounds. Now I will...

...run through some tunes for the gig Friday night, or I...

...might just say "fuck it" and head off to bed, where I...

...plan to sleep like a corpse while hopefully the Benadryl takes hold and I won't wake up feeling like my head is still full of wet cotton, then I...

...will wake up and head off to another day in my weird schizo life and will most likely have some fun. Or so I hope. And, with luck, the next blog will not be so inane. Let's see what happens.

Ode to a Delta 88--update

2006-09-07T21:54:00.000-07:00

After a long and drawn-out battle, some of the episodes of which you may have noticed I beleaguered you with here, success!

The fucker RUNS! On all eight! And it's fast! And it doesn't puke anything on my driveway! All right, so the "check engine" light comes on once in a while, but everytime I open the hood and check the engine, it's still there! Woo!

And (hopefully) thus ends the period of blogless darkness in which I have toiled. Gotta tell ya, campers--this thing took up a lot of my available memory. I laid on the floor in my garage a lot--sometimes underneath this miserable shitheap, and sometimes, just on the floor, off to the side, holding my head and fighting off the urge to just put my thumb in my mouth and whimper. It's worth mentioning, I guess, that a) I'm really not a mechanic and b) I've never tried anything like this. And consider what you would do in such a situation, which I will illustrate for you here: you get a car for free and find out it doesn't really run well enough to do anything with. Why in the name of all that's holy wouldn't you just say "fuck it" and call Victory Auto Wreckers to come and get it the hell out of your hair? Why didn't I? There came a point (inconveniently, that point was when the old engine was out and lying on the floor and the new engine was dangling precariously from the engine hoist about three feet over the engine bay while I was reaching underneath it to clear some hoses out of the way. Remember, I've never done an engine swap before, which means I have NO idea how to properly lift an engine. Where do you hook up the chains? I have the engine hoist set on "1/2 ton"; does this engine weigh more than that? I'm using chain from the jungle-gym I tore out of my backyard two summers ago to lift this thing; d'ya think it'll hold?) where I was ready to scrap the whole idea, but what do you say to the tow-truck driver when he comes to pick up the car and there's not one but two expulsed engines he's got to deal with? I like my teeth, thanks. I also like not being shot.

Well, now all that's left is to clean the bastard up and get rid of it. It's still a little loud, though, as you probably could tell from the clip, but I think I'm done lying underneath it for a little while. Although, I've never done an exhaust system swap before, either. Hmm...

Anyway, 1983 Oldsmobile for sale, cheap! Runs great! Expertly maintained (snort)! New (er)(er)(er)(er) engine (hee hee...the car's got 77,000 miles on it and the engine's got like 120,000)! Interior mint (if a little dusty)! Wire wheel(cover)s! Large (3 corpse) trunk! Asking price: get it the hell offa my driveway!

Arrgh

2006-09-07T21:53:00.000-07:00

Arrgh

Arrgh.

Sometimes you just gotta say it...so here, in the manner for which it was truly intended...

AAAAARRRRGGGGHHHHH

Not in a bad way, though. Arrgh like "Arrgh, it sure felt good to get that splinter yanked out of my thumb" or "Arrgh, playing upright bass can suck but it sure feels good when you stop" or "Arrgh, I just unloaded 3,000 pounds worth of Marshmallow Peeps and now it's Miller time" or "Arrgh, my cat weighs a fuckin' ton" or "Arrgh, it's 12:30 and I'm just rolling in to my driveway after a long-ass dress rehearsal at Triton College and I got up this morning at 6:00 and I have to do it again tomorrow" or "Arrgh, I'm sure glad I didn't vote for Bush" or "Arrgh, it's like majorly time to unbury the Moose from the back of the garage and tell the record-profit oil-baron jerkoffs where to stick it."

Oh, and speaking of bikes, have you ever ridden anything so fast it made you feel like you were going to shit your pants? I did, Saturday night on set break at the Venice gig. Thanks, Fred, for letting me take it for a spin, and I'm happy to tell you that I didn't put any additional miles on your new front tire because it was off the ground the whole time. Well, maybe except for when I had to stop. There's a new name for "Instant Brown-Stain Maker" in the Webster's Thesaurus, and its name is "Triumph Rocket III." I gotta get me one of these. It a) sounds like a Ferrari, b) looks like something out of a comic book, c) will do 90 in second gear and d) will instantly suck the skin right off of your skull if you're not paying attention. Did I mention it's fast? Oh, and also, it's black. Blacker than midnight in a mole's asshole. Blacker than a power outage in a mineshaft. Blacker than a really, really black thing. How much more black could it be? The answer is none...none more black. Well, maybe a little. Anybody got an extra $15,000 they can spot me? I'll pay you back next week, I swear.

This is as random a blog, I guess, as it is possible to post. Truly the hoofprints of lack of sleep and overworking and the fact that there's 50 bones left in my bank account and the Mouse is back in the shop and the Dragon's full to the gunwales with gear and I'm driving my dad's minivan.

Well then. Off to beddy-bye, I guess, and hopefully I'll make more sense upon the morrow.

Skoal!

Crap.

2006-03-20T09:20:00.000-08:00

You know how they say bad things always come in threes.

You also know how they say "No rest for the weary."

I've a new one...Crap.

Here's an annotation to my list of assumptions from a few months back. If you happen to be fortunate enough to own more than one car, people will assume a) you are loaded and b) you have, like, twelve cars. I know this latter to be the case because my students always tell me I have twelve cars. I drive the Mouse to work 90% of the time, and then I drive the Dragon for some special requirement, like taking a bunch of rented gear back to Modern Music, which is theoretically on my way home, and all hell breaks loose. Everybody knows the Dragon; it sticks out in this parking lot full of teachers' Accords, Camrys, and minivans; as well as students' Matrixes (Matrices?) Neons, Focuses (Foci?) BMW's, and Acuras like a nipple ring on a pit bull. Therefore everybody knows when I've driven the grand old beast to work, and invariably a student will ask me, usually right before we begin class with prayer, "Like, how many cars do you have? Like, twelve?"

Well, my dad always told me that if you live far away from work and, if you have the means, you should have two cars. And I do. And, of course, they're both complete pieces of shit. And, all the more ironically, they're both broke. The Civic's back in the shop with an unknown transmission noise after $1200 worth of clutch transplant and assorted sundries. Of course, while returning from the local Auto Zone to buy a replacement headlight for a student, the Dragon decides to ingest a part of the coolant send to the heater core. I come flying into the St. Francis parking lot in a cloud of sickly-sweet-smelling steam, and of course I manage to do it just as Ms. Brady's theatre class are getting on the bus for Carmen.

I'm less concerned with how I'll get home than I am about looking like a nincompoop in front of people from whom I am trying to earn respect.

Crap.

Well, it's off to find a roll of duct tape. If you hear from me again, you'll know I got home okay.

On some assumptions...

2006-01-23T21:54:00.000-08:00

On some assumptions...
I've learned that, as you roll through this thing we call life, people are gonna make some assumptions about you. As if you cared, here are some...

1). If you're over 6'3", people are going to assume you play basketball. I don't play basketball. I can't dunk. I couldn't possibly care less. What I care about is, if someone tosses me the keys to a 1967 Ford GT40 Mk II, will I fit inside?

See, assuming someone plays a sport based on how their built is inherently stupid. Allow me to throw a scenario at you.

"Wow, you're tall. Do you play basketball?"

"Well, let me ask you--do you bowl?"

"Why would you ask if I bowl?"

"Well, why would you ask if I play basketball?"

"Well, 'cause you're tall."

"Well, you're fat."

See what I mean?

2). If you play an upright bass, people are gonna assume you play jazz. I don't play jazz, and in fact I royally suck at jazz. I regularly listen to jazz and go "What the fuck?" I have a hard time following the chord progression, and decent jazz bass players leave me in the weeds. If I got up in front of a jazz club with my upright bass, I'd get killed by barbarians with rocks. Also beatniks.

3). If you ride a motorcycle, people are going to automatically assume you are some kind of rebel. That's fine--I don't mind people thinking I might kill them at the slightest provocation (though nothing could be further from the truth) if it means they'll think twice about cutting me off. Another assumption that goes hand-in-hand with this is that, if you ride a motorcycle, you have a leather jacket. My buddy Adam doesn't have one. My buddy Matt doesn't have one. Alright, I have one, but it's not a statement; it's insurance in case you wipe out, which I have. Also, I get cold a lot. I have ridden to work in a shirt and tie, complete with wingtips on (which make it a bitch to shift, and also increase the chances you'll fall over at a stoplight if you put your foot down on a particularly greasy spot), yet with no leather jacket in sight. Now that's rebellious.

4). When people ask you what you do for a living, if you tell them you are a physics teacher, they will assume you are some kind of genius. Could anything be further from the truth? I can't even balance my own checkbook. On the way in to work in the morning, if the heater's going too strong, I often turn down the radio and then wonder why it's still hot. Ask me to add two numbers and it'll take me awhile because I have to find my calculator first. Have I gone to work and left my front door wide open? Yes. Can I correctly spell the word sheriff? Occasionally. Did I once get pulled over in downtown Hinckley for making a U-turn right underneath a 'No U-turn' sign? Hai! Have I paid the same water-bill twice? Yes, on multiple occasions.

5). If you start a blog with numbered items, as I have, people are going to assume you have a bunch of items. Especially if you normally write Dostoyevskyan diatribes of epic lengths, as I have. And, when I began this one, I expected to have a bunch more stuff. Bummer...I seem to have run out of ideas. I hope you didn't make popcorn and settle in to read another installment in the "This is Jay's Life!" soap opera. Really, I thought I was gonna have a lot more to say... See what I mean?

Okay...I stop now.

On learning new things, and making an ass of myself while I learn them...

2005-12-29T00:18:00.000-08:00

I learned tonight something interesting about homeless people.

As a Christian, I've always believed that you should give when you can, and even when you can't, because that's what we're supposed to do. Everyone always tells me, "Hey, man, you're too nice." Yeah, it's true, I guess, and mainly what it gets me is kicked in the balls, coupled with general contempt from people I am striving desperately from whom to earn respect. Homeless people pose a challenge. If you see one, you know you're gonna see a bunch, and I try to give everybody something. I know they're usually lying; "Please, man, I'm just trying to get to the bus." Yeah, well, as Stephen Wright says, everyplace is within walking distance if you've got the time. It would seem to me that homeless people have a surfeit of time.

Well, anyway, playing a gig in the city is usually a fun time, and this one paid great, but you know you're either gonna have to shell out a shitload for parking or drive around for a while to find a parking spot. Increase that driving time about one and a half times when you're trying to find a spot big enough to hold the Dragon. I'd rather walk five blocks than pay 24 bones for parking, but I got nailed by three homeless guys just on the way back to the bar. I give 'em each a buck. Hey, by the Lord's blessing I happen to have three bucks to spare. What would Jesus have me do? Hey, share the wealth.

Well, that's all fine and good. And perhaps I'm not old enough, or haven't played in the city enough, to be jaded and callous. But when the gig is over, I had no idea that homeless people wait outside the bar as you're loading your shit out. They offer to help, and that's nice, but I can handle my own shit, thanks. They offer to watch your car for you, but the Dragon's a total shitbasket that I'd have to pay someone to steal. Fine and good. And once all my shit's in the car and the doors are locked, I feel a lot better and I go back in the bar and wait for my cut.

Here's where things get hinky. Tonight's gig was with a band called Brother John, and the musicians are without exception fantastic, and they're all totally worldly and they've been everywhere and I am as out of place among them, I feel, as a cockroach on a wedding cake. They're all professional musicians and I'm a physics teacher.

But by the same token that compels me to give a buck or two to a homeless guy when I see one, I try to help everybody load their shit out as well. Hey, Marty (the drummer), can I grab a tom, or maybe your stick bag, or something, and give you a hand out to the car? Hey, John (the band leader, and overall musical savant), can I grab the monitors, or give you a hand out with the piano or something?

It's just a part of who I am, I guess, and that part of me seems to be somewhat alien to everybody else at this level. I'm learning, I guess.

But the true lesson to be learnt comes after all my shit's in the car, and, rather than sit around watching other people work, I try to jump in where I can, and start hauling shit out to John's van. Hey, I got two hands and a strong back, and there's speakers, speaker stands, monitors, amplifiers, crates containing chart books or cords, mic stands, guitar cases--you know, all the stuff a fully-functioning R & B band would have. I've done it before at other gigs, and whether John or anybody else is appreciative or not I really can't say--I think people would rather me just leave their shit alone, but I can't sit there when there's work to be done and watch other people do it.

Ah, but this time there's homeless guys outside, waiting to help you lift your shit into the car so you might be compelled to slide them a little green. Whether anybody else likes me helping them out with their stuff is one thing; it's definitely not cool for some homeless guy to be grabbing your stuff. Here's what I learned:

1). If the van is outside and the band leader has a few things to load in, DO NOT walk out with a bunch of stuff and set it on the ground next to the van (which seems logical enough to do, as it prevents the band leader from having to make another trip into the bar to grab more shit--it's right there. How convenient). Stacking it on the ground gives homeless people the opportunity to come up and grab something and offer to put it in the van for the band leader. Remember--they do this (I've learned the hard way) so that you'll give them something. (I used to think they were just doing it to be nice.) The band leader does not like this--again, totally understandable. However, when he protests, it becomes obvious to the homeless guy that a) his offer to help has been rejected and b) he's not going to get anything out of it. I've just learned that when this happens,

2). Homeless people get nasty. As I am walking back into the bar to grab more stuff, I hear John and the homeless guy getting into it. This particular guy is calling John a "Ted Nugent lookin' muthafucka." Not only does it not occur to me to stay out there and jump in if the homeless guy starts swinging, as it appears he might, it also does not occur to me to not grab more stuff until I see the other band guys busily stacking shit inside the door to take out to the van once John's got the stuff already out there nicely tucked away. And here, once again while trying to take a load off of someone else, I've made a bigger burden of myself.

I'm learning, I guess, but the curve is very steep.

On doings of the Halloweenish variety--part II

2005-10-31T16:54:00.000-08:00

Remember what I said about luck? How sometimes, for no reason, it’s bad, leaving you feeling totally ass-raped by life? Other times, equally for no reason, it’s awesome, leaving you feeling like you could give the President the finger and it would get you a Cabinet position?

What sucks about that is that it can change on you like that. And, to be truthful, I have never seen such luck of either variety in an all-out battle like I saw that night.

Up until this point, once we had actually got under way, our luck had seemed pretty good, especially when considering how crappy our luck had been to begin with. The odyssey from Garrett’s house had heretofore gone well.

We were heading along another paved bike path that hugged a line of trees along the park’s border. The property line was somewhat irregular here; the fence along the border took a right turn up ahead. The trees followed; so did the bike path. We were staying close to the trees, and were preparing to scout out the path around the corner. Before we had decided who would do the scouting, we heard the unmistakable throb of a big V8 engine, and, beneath that, the whispering hum of tires on turf. We were all staring stupidly at each other when a police car, driving on the grass, straddling the bike path, prowled slowly around the corner.

With no time to think, no time even to honorably react, we all dove toward the brush along the fence. I was the slowest to respond, so I was the last in. There was simply no way the cops hadn’t seen us; how could they have missed us? Jesus, we were on private property well after the posted closing hours; we were all wearing black, and if that were no indication that we were up to some kind of fuckery, we all had weapons. For all that’s holy, Garrett had a three-foot samurai sword. It would be a long time and a lot of money before we got out of jail.

Bob and Garrett had thrown themselves through the bushes toward the fence. Despite their fright, they were able to pull it together enough to stop moving as soon as possible. Joe went fetal and rolled as far towards the back as he could; I simply dove and curled up into a tight a ball as possible as I fell.

I ended up with my head tucked into my chest, facing the fence. I was waiting for the creak of the cop’s door opening, and the play of the flashlight over the dead leaves and other such detritus into which we had attempted to bury ourselves. This would undoubtedly come right before we heard the cop’s voice, but after we heard the snap of the safety strap on his holster being released.

We heard none of that. What we heard was the muffled burble of the cruiser’s engine as the cop nosed it the rest of the way around the corner. He didn’t slow down or speed up; he just kept prowling.

I remember something stabbing into my lower back. I reached down to brush it away and found that my black sweatshirt had ridden way up. My gear was not designed for cowering in bushes; curling into a ball had caused me to display a great deal of plumber butt. Not only that, but the waistband of my undies, a gleaming white, protruded fully two inches above the top of my pants. That was the side facing the cop; how in the name of God had he not seen that?

I counted to 10 fully four times before I could get my arms and legs to move. I poked my head out of the bushes and saw the cruiser’s taillights, still straddling the bike path, disappear over the rise over which we had come not one minute before. It sure seemed like a lot longer that that. Bob came scrambling out next.

“He didn’t see us!” he hissed. ”Holy shit! He didn’t see us!” He went on repeating this in some kind of mantra as we all did our best to get our shit back together.

Well, after that, there was precious little that could scare us off. We turned the corner and got back on our way. There was no pretense at stealth now; and besides, if we had been that close to disaster and walked away unscathed, what could get in our way now? We moseyed on down the bike path. We spoke in normal voices, instead of the harsh whispers we had been using, lisping instead of using the s sound to cover the hissing sound of a sibilant—the part of human speech most likely to be overheard. I bummed a smoke off Bob and fired up.

We hit the path into the woods and just kept going. I had thought there would have been considerable build-up required on all our parts; after the brush with the cop, however, I felt I could have punched Dracula right in the face without missing a beat. We made it to the slab and just hung out there for a while.

“So, what happened?” you, O Treasured Reader, are undoubtedly asking yourself.

Well, the short version is, yeah, whatever it was that stalked us that first night came on back and stalked us again. It did the surround thing, too, and after having my nerves nicely toasted by the cops, I just couldn’t seem to work up enough of a scare to really enjoy myself. I sat there, mostly, wishing I’d brought some Off, for the mosquitoes were certainly made of sterner stuff in late June than they were in late September. It seemed I was not the only one of this opinion; Joe, Bob, and Garrett seemed equally unperturbed. Garrett went so far as to draw his katana with a lovely sounding sssshing! and went in after the crunchy noises coming from all sides. It was kinda cool, actually; Garrett’s pretty good in the thick of it, and after we lost sight of him, we couldn’t tell which was Garrett and which were the evil bad nasty things.

He never did manage to catch sight of one. He came out of the woods after about 15 minutes and said, “You know, it was weird—I never could get any closer to them than they sounded from the clearing. It was like they knew I was stalking them.” Bob went in for a try, his boot knife clamped in his teeth as he pushed branches aside. He came out again with the same result.

Finally, I went into the woods, knowing that I was crazily pursuing something that seemingly had the ability to appear out of nowhere and without warning or delay multiply itself. I had my knife clenched tightly in my fist, wondering just what the hell I would do if I came across some gibbering ghoul that suddenly went for my throat. Or—and here I invoke imagery from that wonderfully similar scene in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, where he makes the second trip to the Micmac burial grounds, this time with the freshly-exhumed body of his son cradled in his arms—what if some disembodied head, grinning like a fiend, suddenly dropped into view from the branches up above? What would I do then? I sometimes wish I could have re-tried that scene with a fresh set of nerves, but after you’ve had your psyche’s ass kicked pretty resoundingly, it’s damned hard to work yourself into a suitable fright.

I’ll tell you what almost did it, though—having walked on a straight line away from the slab and the other three, I stopped for a quick bearing check, and verified that the stalking noises from The Other were still there—and still on all sides of me, which meant, much to my almost-dismay, that one of Them was between me and my friends. While not enough to scare me, it was enough to make me turn around and go back. It seemed to take a lot longer to get back to my waiting compadres than it had to leave.

I never did see anything.

So, there you have it. We walked on back to Garrett’s house, with no pretense at covertness, or any precautions at getting spied by the locals. We retrieved our gear from underneath the willow tree. I dug inside my duffel bag for my watch and was shocked to learn that it was after 3:00 in the morning.

We all went home.

Is that a bullshit ending or what?

As it happens, there is a small epilogue, though it seems to remove some (but certainly not all) of the mystique from the escapade. Whether you like that mystique to be more unexplainable in a supernatural vein or in a style more X-files depends, I guess, on your inclination to read further.

About two years after that (and a shitload of discussion over pool tables and around booths at Denny’s or The Country Cup in Lisle), I found myself leaving Garrett’s house after a night of our usual high-rolling pool-shooting bar-hopping antics. Bob dropped us off at Garrett’s in his new Riviera and pulled out leaving a nice pair of black stripes on the asphalt. I had my bike, so I started it to let it warm up and lit a cigarette.

“You know, I wouldn’t mind another shot at it,” I said, dragging deep and letting the blue cigarette smoke mingle with the condensation from my exhaust in the filmy glow of the streetlights.

“Shot at what?” said Garrett, one eyebrow arched.

“I wouldn’t mind going back in there and waiting until we see something,” I said, wondering if I really meant it. Hadn’t it been enough, just hearing? I could live my life pretty normally with that, but there are things people have seen that have changed them forever, you bet. You can’t unsee something, and some things, no matter how hard you try, can’t be forgotten.

“Well...” said Garrett, trailing off and kicking aimlessly at my front tire.

I waited. Finally, I prompted him. “Well what?”

Garrett just looked at the driveway for a little while. He pointed at my shirt pocket. I fished out a smoke and handed it to him. My lighter quickly followed, but he had his own. He waited a little while and made sure it was nicely going before he continued.

“When was the last time you went by those gates on Mack road?” I jumped a little inwardly at that, because Mack Road was the northern border between our woods and civilization. It was a fairly good-sized bit of the world, bordered by Atten Park on the eastern end, Butterfield Road on the southern side, Winfield Road on the western edge, and finally, Mack. There was another stretch of impossibly high chain-link fence that ran along Mack for a little while. About halfway along was a gate. With the proper key, you could have easily gotten into those woods with a car parked not five feet down the shoulder. Without one, you were stuck with the path and Shank’s Mare.

“Well, it’s been a couple of months, I guess,” I began, but stopped because I realized then that it had been more like five or six.

Garrett huffed out the last of his smoke and stomped out the butt under his boot heel. “Tell you what,” he said. “Why don’t you climb on this bad boy and motor on by there and call me tomorrow night and tell me what you saw.”

I did. And when I saw what I saw when I came around the bend and my headlight picked out the gate around the next curve, I slowed down and finally stopped. The gates were wide open, and through their gaping maw, picked out in stark relief in my high beam, I saw the battered yellow shapes of construction equipment. And standing at attention, eyes fixed gamely on me was a state trooper, his hand resting loosely on the butt of his sidearm.

Like an idiot, I got off and removed my helmet. As I pulled it over my head and looked up, I noticed that the cop’s gun had cleared the holster.

I have never had a gun pulled on me before. I tried to strike up some kind of conversation, as though riding along a deserted two-lane at two in the morning and pulling up in front of a cop to have a nice nocturnal chat were all par for the course. The cop beat me to it.

“Climb back on your hoss, boy.”

“Well, look—I used to play in these woods as a kid,” the fear in me kindling the lie, letting me knit it out of ether and ashes while I stared into the lidless black eye of his sidearm. I was prepared to go on and on, clueless as to what I would say but knowing the words would be there as I needed them. I was curious myself as to what would come out of my mouth, but he stopped me cold before I could get farther with a wave of hand.

“That’s great, he said. “Soon there ain’t gonna be any woods here to play in. Puttin’ in a golf course.”

I sighed, all my inflated ego, my wordsmithing, dissolved. “Well,” I half-whispered, not really paying attention anymore to my flapping lips, which babbled on seemingly of their own accord, “I guess you can never really go home again.”

The hammer of the trooper’s gun came back with an oily click.

“What did you say?” he asked, his voice dripping cold poison.

Frightened absolutely beyond the capacity for rational thought, I haltingly repeated myself, hoping I had gotten my own words right, taking great care to enunciate clearly and hoping to God he had misheard me, and that had been what set him off, not what I had really said.

“Oh,” he said, after I had finished, letting the hammer of his gun ease on back
down. “No, I guess you really can’t.”

By this time I was backing slowly toward my motorcycle, fumbling my helmet over my head as I went. He didn’t seem to be inclined to pursue, so I threw my leg over the seat and, not bothering to strap my helmet on properly, gingerly started the engine and slowly motored onto the pavement. With a quick glance over my shoulder to make sure the cop didn’t have his gun back out, I cranked the engine to the redline and let the clutch out with a snap. The front wheel came off the ground and stayed there, and the next time I looked at the speedometer I was over a hundred and climbing, and that was the last I ever saw of the woods behind Atten Park.
That’s where the story ends, dearest reader.

Or is it? As it happens, there is a small post-script. It turned out that what was surreptitiously stashed in those woods under that concrete slab was, according to my friend Adam’s home inspector, a fully functional Nike missile silo in retire. I guess the night I almost got shot by a state trooper was the night they were taking the missile out. Hey, you can’t build a golf course over a nuclear missile, for Christ’s sake. Think of what it would do to the back nine after a launch.

Though that explains the cops’ behavior, both on that night way back in September when the whole thing started, or that last hellish encounter at the gates, ready to expulge their mysterious and menacing contents, it doesn’t explain the slowly stalking thing that, while scaring us pretty badly, also helped to bolster our belief that there are some things out there that can’t be explained.

And, for a little while, I got to be one of them myself.

Ode to a Delta 88--update

2005-10-30T16:21:00.000-08:00

Dammit--all back together and the thing still runs on 7.

Options are--scrap the bastard, or stick it out behind my garage (thereby cementing my status as true redneck emeritus) and drop a new engine in it this spring. I'm really angry, so I think it's gonna be the latter, because I'll be screwed if I'm gonna let this thing get the better of me.

Although, seeing it go to the crusher--fuck that, watching it actually in the crusher--would be perversely therapeutic...

I'll wait a couple of days and let myself cool off, and then we'll see.

Crap.

On strange doings of the Halloweenish variety...

2005-10-26T15:16:00.000-07:00

A story whose time to be told has come

We’re in the meaty part of the Halloween season, and in no profession (other than, say, store manager or costume manufacturer) is this more evident now than in the schools. Jack-o’-Lantern and Frankenstein cutouts are plastered on every door (except mine), little embroidered ghosties bob jauntily from the rearview mirror of the Ford Excursion in the lane next to me; the school-teacherish lady behind the wheel of this behemoth remains next to me until she gets into the left turn lane about a half-mile on and turns into the Hobby Lobby. What’s she got a hankerin’ fer? Your guess is as good as mine, but I think the chances are at least even that she’s there for some more of that cuddly Halloween malarkey.

That’s all fine and well, and taking things like vampires and zombies and ghosts and horrid amalgamations of human body parts that are formed into one staggering, lumbering automaton with a suspiciously verdant complexion and a strangely-flat-topped head and making them all cuddly is fine. We don’t want to actually scare anybody with any of these things, now do we? ‘Course not. And really, what could be cuddlier than a furry little bat or a hook-nosed witch? I can’t think of anything offhand, can you?

In truth, these things are kinda scary before they get run through the cute-inator. Their histories and etymologies stretch back long ways, and there was a period of time when people actually believed in that stuff—that witches rode broomsticks, that bats drank blood and were the transmogrifications of Slavic aristocrats; that werewolves stalked the streets whenever the moon was full; that the house on the hill was full of ghosts.

Who’s to say that no one believes in that stuff today? I sure do. And sometimes, when you’re lying all snug in your bed, it can give you a bit of an uncomfortable pause to consider what might be stalking around just outside your tightly-shut and locked door. There could be anything out there, anything. Things that go bump in the night are not always totally explainable. There’s been countless volumes written, countless movies made, countless TV documentaries aired, on stuff that goes bump. It can’t all be explainable. You got your ghosts, your yeti, your chupacabra, the mysterious Goat-Man of the Northeast. There’s werewolves, and maybe just one or two of the countless goths that roam the colleges and cities really are vampires. I once read an account of a ghost sighting in Ohio that consisted of a woman in a blue ball gown standing in the doorway of a room and just staring at the viewer. Her head was that of a well-decomposed corpse. Another in Ypsilanti Michigan reported seeing a skeleton busily digging a hole in the viewer’s backyard. Can you imagine that? Just a skeleton, plugging away with a shovel in your garden?

There’s creepy stuff out there. And, of course, there’s me.

All right, here I gotta mention a little detail about what I was like as a kid. I read The Hobbit, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and I loved them. I read all of C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia and a year to this day does not go by that I don’t read all of them again at least once. These books and others of their ilk spoke often about doors that led to other places.

"A door," said the Queen, speaking more to herself than to him.
"A door from the world of men! I have heard of such things. This
may wreck all. But he is only one, and he is easily dealt with."

From C. S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.

I spent a lot of time and money in the Science Fiction and Fantasy section of my local bookstore, and on my free time, I’d get on my bicycle, or later on, I’d get in my car, and I’d look for my own door. I already believed in magic, ghosts, and UFO’s; why not my own wardrobe, my own magical country, with talking beasts and mythical creatures and battles and valor and knights and magic coming out of every hole in the ground?

I never did find that door. I haven’t stopped looking, either. I suspect I’ll find it someday, one way or another. It may come in the form of a fast-moving truck when I’m crossing the street and not paying attention; it may come in the form of some rapidly-metastasizing tumor that the doctors just didn’t catch; it may come in the form of a heart attack. More than likely it will come on the bike, when I’m (stupidly) not wearing my helmet and I hit a curve too fast. But it may be that I’ll be hiking in the woods and I’ll just come upon a door. Not in a tree or cave or anything like that; it may be just like the door at the end of Prince Caspian or The Last Battle, where a door that appeared to lead from nowhere to nowhere actually led farther than anyone could otherwise go in a lifetime.

I’m digressing like a bastard here. Like I said, I never did find that door, but what’s most interesting, it turns out, is that all my friends from high school were looking for it too. None of us have found it, and some of us have stopped searching. But there was a time when that was what just we did. Some groups of friends do the paintball thing; some got together and played Dungeons and Dragons (I liked the idea, but I always thought the guys who played that stuff were a bunch of pussies); we looked for the door, and we did stuff that felt like looking, even though we knew it wouldn’t get us anywhere.

We went to abandoned drawbridges. We went to cemeteries. (Hey, it seemed logical to us. Still does—if ever there was a gateway to the next world, it would seem to me that a cemetery is as likely as anyplace else.) We went to places where important historical events happened. My buddy Garrett went to Stonehenge. I went to Four Corners. Joe did all the research. Joe was, and is, by the way, the closest thing to a true psychic I have ever met. Larry provided the cigarettes, and Bob provided the booze. We took my old truck most of the time. We busted out the Ouija Board on several occasions, and that thing was a story in itself. We bought spell books, tarot decks, maps, incense. All we wanted was some kind of proof that the door to the next world existed, and we would have taken anything weird as evidence, using the argument, “Hey, if this could happen, why not that?”

Finally, one night, we were all hanging out at Garrett’s house. Garrett’s folks lived (still do, actually) on Creekside in a little subdivision called Adare Farms. What this meant was that Garrett’s house was close to our high school, St. Francis, and also close to Wheaton-Warrenville South High School, which adjoined a large outdoor sports complex called Atten Park.

In those days, Atten Park ended and the woods began, and they were some heavy-duty woods. Garrett, having grown up around there, played in those woods a lot and knew them like the back of his hand.

This night, we had nothing else to do, so we were on our way out the door to shoot a little pool at Gala North—a bowling alley in Carol Stream. It was Late September-ish, and still warm out. We were all dressed in what we thought were our sophisticated pool-shooting clothes—button-down shirts, black jeans or slacks, shitkickers, the occasional black leather vest. We all had two-piece cues, three of us were packing squares—Larry with his Reds, Bob with his Camel Turkish Blends, and me with my Light Wides—and Bob had his pocket-flask nicely filled to the top. We were waiting for Garrett to get his shit together. He came out of the bedroom after a few minutes, combing his hair back in that modernized duck’s-ass he used to use before the he went with the George Clooney look.

Walking out the door, I remember saying something like, “Man, I’m fuckin’ bored. I don’t wanna just go shoot pool again. I want something different. I want a fuckin’ adventure.”

“What, you wanna get into a bar fight?” Bob asked, grinning and cracking his big knuckles. “I could go for that.”

“Naw,” I said, “I mean something different. I mean like a quest.”

“Whaddaya mean, ‘a quest?’” asked Joe. “There ain’t nothing to quest for around here.”

“I wouldn’t care if we had to make one up. I just wanna do something different—something that means something.”

Nobody said anything. After a little while, though, Garrett said, “Well, actually…”

Which is how we ended up walking through the woods behind Atten Park on a pitch-black moonless night at 1:00 in the morning.

It may have sounded up to now like I was in the midst of one of my usual pointless meandering blogs. This is not the case—because as of now, this is where the story gets weird, and I swear to you that what I’m about to tell you is true, for the very life of me.

As I said, Garrett knew these woods like the back of his hand. When I mentioned doing something different, he got his crafty look on his face.

“Okay. You want different? I’ll show you different. How’s this?

“In the woods behind Atten Park, there’s this weird concrete slab. I don’t know what it is—it’s just this rectangular slab, on the ground out there in the middle of these woods. It’s about the size of a basketball court. I’ve known about it for a long time, but I can’t explain it. It’s just—weird. Wanna go check it out?”

“What, now?” asked Larry, his tone incredulous.

“Yeah, now,” said Garrett. “Jay’s all on about how he wants to do something different, even a quest, maybe. All right, here’s our quest—to go check out this creepy fuckin’ slab in the middle of the dark frickin’ woods when it’s pitch black out.”

“Hell, I’m in,” I said.

“Me too,” said Joe.

“Hell yeah,” said Bob.

“What the hell,” said Larry.

So we piled into my old truck—a little brown Mazda with blue-dot taillights, raised-white-letter tires and a good-sized valvetrain racket from me running the poor thing at the redline while all kinds of crossed-up sideways in snowy parking lots. (See my previous blog for an action shot.) Larry climbed into the shotgun seat, and everyone else jumped in the back.

We pulled up in the rearmost parking lot of Atten Park—about 200 yards back from the street, adjoining the community garden plots. Garrett took us down a path through the middle of the postage-stamp sized gardens filled with late summer squash, armpit-high corn, beans, pumpkins. We ended up on a small beaten single-track into the woods. None of us thought to bring a flashlight. Larry and Bob alternately fired up their Zippos. It didn’t help.

We walked down this path, blacker than midnight in a mineshaft, for what felt like hours. In reality, it was only around 15 to 20 minutes, but when you’re out walking in the woods at night, I’m sure you can understand how time can stretch out when you’re not looking.

Garrett seemed to know his way pretty well, and eventually, we emerged into a clearing that was suspiciously geometric. Just like he’d said—a concrete rectangle, out there in the middle of these woods. For no reason.

I guess we hung out there for about a half an hour. Mosquitoes are still pretty thick ‘round these here parts in September, and we got our share, but we were too blown away to care very much. Larry’s Zippo had long since run out of fuel, but Bob’s was still going strong, and we estimated this big concrete slab to be about 100 feet long on the long axis and around 60 feet on the short. We also discovered that the surface was not perfectly smooth—it was lined with grooves at regular intervals along both axes, dividing the surface into congruently-sized squares.

Well, in reality, there was not much to do once we’d gotten there and sized up the thing, and so we were just hanging out, discussing in harsh whispers what the nature of the place could possibly be, when Joe stopped us all. He held up a hand, quavering in the flickering of Bob’s Zippo.

“I think it’s time to get out of here,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” Garrett hissed, his dander up, as you might expect, given that we were in a creepy place and Joe was insinuating by both word and action that things were about to get creepier. They did.

As if on cue, we heard someone walking through the woods. We didn’t hear it gradually get closer, as we would have expected; it was just not there one second and there the next. Not on the path, mind you; it sounded as if this person were crashing blindly through the trees. Its footfalls made a distinctively human sound—Crunch. Snap. Pop. Crunch. One foot at a time, not hurrying.

In hindsight, the situation was even creepier than it seemed at that moment, standing there, listening. Let’s look at the facts—had it been a cop, I sure as hell don’t think he or she would have been taking his or her time, as this thing seemed to be doing. More than likely, a cop would have been moving at a far greater pace in order to bring us to bear that much sooner, and, probably, would have been waving a flashlight and/or shouting something to let us know he or she was on the way. Face it—crashing through the woods is no way to sneak up on something.

No flashlight. No hurrying. No shouts. Just crunch. Snap. Pop. Crunch.

Had it been punk kids out to raise a little hell, I would imagine they’d do a lot of sprint-and-hide, just like any kids do when up to fuckery. You really can’t assess what kind of hell you’re raising if the sound of it is obscured by your progress through the branches, and anyway, what kid raises hell all by him- or herself? There’d undoubtedly be some hollering, some name-calling, perhaps a Black Cat or M-80 lit off every once in a while. Hey, I was a kid not so long ago myself.

No sounds of sprint-and-hide. No hollering. No M-80’s. Just crunch. Snap. Pop. Crunch.

This is enough to scare the shit out of anyone, I guess, and we were. Transfixed there like an insect pinned to a card, that was me. I was just getting ready to whisper to the others that it was probably time to get the hell out of there.

Like I said, it gets weird, but I swear to you that I am not making this up.

Up to now, we had heard only one person (thing?) out in the woods, just walking. Getting closer? Getting farther away? Doing laps? Too scared to tell, but at least it was only one.

As I thought that (I swear I’m not making this up), instantly instantly instantly there were noises on all four sides. Crunch. Snap. Pop. Crunch. Either some twisted sadistic quadrophonic deal, or now we were surrounded.

Garrett stepped up. I have never lost my respect for him for his actions that night, and in particular at this moment.

“We just gonna go back down the path to the truck,” he said, “and we’re not gonna run. We’re just gonna take our time, and while we’re doing that, we’re gonna talk. About anything. The Bulls. The White Sox. Monica Lewinsky. Anything. Just walk and talk. Now.”

That, O Treasured Reader, is what we did, and that was a) the scaredest I have ever been in my life, and I have been really scared; and b) the longest walk, by far, that I have ever taken. We made it back to the truck with no problems, no boogeymen jumping out from behind trees with fangs bared and a severed head in each dripping fist, no goblins, no vampires.

There were however, two police cars in the parking lot, nicely blocking the truck in its place, radio squawking with the results from the run on my license plates.

In ten seconds they had us spread out—Bob on the hood of one cop car, Larry on the trunk; Garrett and Joe on the other. It was my truck, so I guess it was only fit that they had me spread ‘em on my own hood. They held us there—no cuffs, thank God—while they searched my truck. I was too scared to notice whether they had us at gunpoint, but I’m sure they realized it wasn’t necessary.

It was a small truck, and there wasn’t anything in it to find, so the search was over quickly enough. The first cop had us line up along the side of the truck.

“You hold ‘em,” he said to the other. “I’m gonna take a walk back there and see what’s up.”

Now, does it sound to you as if the cops were overreacting just a little? It sure seemed like that to me at the time. It doesn’t any more, but I’ll get to that.

We stood there, feeling like assholes, while the second cop smoked a cigarette and stared at us. The first came back out of the woods after another eternity. We thought he went back there to look for beer cans, roaches, illegal fireworks. The following exchange between the two cops absolved us of that notion.

“Everything all right?” asked the second.

“Yeah,” replied the first, sliding his flashlight back onto his belt loop. “Nothing got touched.”

Rewind rewind rewind

“Yeah,” replied the first, sliding his flashlight back onto his belt loop. “Nothing got touched.”

Nothing got touched.

What the fuck were they talking about?

“All right, you punks,” said the second cop. “Park closes at sunset. You’re trespassing. Could bust you, I guess. How ‘bout you pedal your little asses out of here and don’t let us see you back here again, daytime or night time? That work for you?”

It worked. We pedaled. And when we got the chance, we talked, and talked. It turned out what was supposed to be a fuck-around quest became a real quest, of sorts, after all.

We didn’t really care what we had found. All we cared about was that we had found something weird. And what we wanted was not so much to find out what that big concrete slab was, or why the cops were so touchy, or even what it had been that was stalking us out in the woods.

What we wanted was some proof that we hadn’t hallucinated the whole thing. What we wanted was to do it again, and see for ourselves if we had really heard what we thought we heard.

I guess it was the unseen thing that intrigued us most. The truck parked out on the gravel parking lot was visible enough from the street, I guess, and it wouldn’t have been too hard for the cops to pick up on that. But we had been way deep in the woods when we heard that noise, and we all agreed that it just wouldn’t have been possible for cops to move someone into stalking position without us hearing them move into position. The thing we heard hadn’t moved into position—it was just not there one second, and there the next. And besides, how had it multiplied like that, just instantaneously?

We wanted to answer these questions, true. But more than that—had we really heard something? Only way to find out was to do it all over again—but no truck, no cops this time. Nothing to give us away. If that thing had just appeared like that, like it sounded it had, it would find us no matter how we got back there. Or so we thought.

After many long nights of discussion over pool tables and at bars, waiting in line at the movie theater or for our turn to play Double Dragon or Street Fighter at the arcade, in the back of my truck in a blue haze of cigarette smoke, we decided that a mission of sorts was in order. Our mission—to make it under cover of darkness into the woods and back to the slab without a vehicle and without being seen by the cops. Once there, we would engage in a rigorous regimen of sitting and waiting for something to appear, as it had last time—with no warning. If it came back, would it come closer? Would it multiply like it had last time? Would we actually see it this time? Part of me hoped we would, but I think a bigger part of me hoped we wouldn’t.

We figured covering the two miles from Garrett’s house to Atten Park would take some doing—especially at night. We decided all black was the way to go. We put our gear together with the following criteria in mind—it had to be black. It had to be black, and anything that wasn’t black had to be black. It also had to be close-fitting, as getting caught on a branch by some loose flap would undoubtedly have sucked, especially when the chance that we would be chased by an unseen stalking thing was not altogether zero.

We also agreed that carrying a weapon of some sort was a must. If whatever was back there decided to show itself, I’ll be fucked if I’m gonna find myself defenseless. Garrett, who put his gear together in the ninja style, came packing a katana the length of one of his legs. Bob had a wicked little boot knife. Joe brought three tiny throwing knives that tucked neatly into a quiver on the back of his hand. We laughed at their effectiveness—how could something that tiny be accurate?—until Joe took all three out with one pull and went snick snick snick—and there were three tiny throwing knives sticking out of a tree ten feet away. I was convinced. For myself, I brought a hunting dagger that strapped to the outside of my leg. It was wicked sharp—in fact, the only blood spilt during the entire fiasco came when I tried to put it back in the scabbard and used my finger as a guide. I still have the scar.

We also felt it was necessary to plan out our route from Garrett’s house. To this end, we did some research and learned that there was a small corporation in West Chicago that specialized in taking high-altitude photos. Give the guy an address, and he’d produce a two-foot-by three-foot rolled photograph with your address’s coordinates as the center. At the altitude from which the photograph was taken, you could count on a five-mile spread in any direction from your specified coordinates. We gave the gentleman Garrett’s address, figuring that a five mile radius would more than encompass Atten Park and the surrounding woods. With such a high vantage point, we could plan our route much more effectively.

Surprise, surprise. Upon receipt of our photograph, we found that the area due west of Atten Park—our woods—was blacked out. Completely. For two square miles, on the photograph at least.

Now what the fuck? Strange stalking beasts? Hyperactive cops? And now you can’t even get a picture of the place?

This did nothing but increase our intensity and resolve. There was enough on the aerial shot to plan enough of our route to get close, and then we’d just wing it. We walked our planned path more than a few times in the daytime, knowing that it wouldn’t look anywhere near the same a) in the dark, b) while you were running your ass off and c) while you were scared out of your skull. We figured we’d cross that bridge when we came to it.

All of our planning took almost the entire year. We set a date of June 23.

Have you ever noticed how, sometimes, your luck seems to turn for the worst when you most need it? You’re late for work, but every single traffic light you come to turns red at your approach. You’re busily trying to make dinner so you can eat so you can get on the road so you can get to the gig, but all of a sudden your parents, every single one of your friends, and about three telemarketers call your phone within five minutes. That happens to me all the time. Once, I got so angry that I took my cell phone, went into a nice slow windup, and heaved that fucker across the lawn.

Other times, your luck will run straight and true and blinding white for a little while. This doesn’t seem to happen as often, but it does happen. I once found myself at the heart of the Christmas season without a penny to my name and no way to buy Christmas gifts. I hired on as seasonal help with Toys ‘R’ Us, but the first paycheck wasn’t due ‘til after New Year’s, the bastards. I got invited to a pool tournament two weeks before Christmas and walked out of there with $250 big ones in my pocket. I pulled shots off that night I had never tried before and wouldn’t dream of trying. I simply couldn’t miss. I’m no pool shark, and if you played me tonight you’d have a good chance of winning, but I was unstoppable that night. I still can’t understand it, but I sure appreciate whoever was doing the shooting, ‘cause it sure wasn’t me.

We had luck of both kinds on June 23rd. It seemed the evening would be cancelled by rain, though it had theretofore not rained for the past three weeks. All that evening, it seemed to threaten rain with low-lying clouds and ominous rolls of far-off thunder. Driving to Garrett’s house, I got pulled over for having a broken turn signal. Garrett’s parents were supposed to be gone, but his mom came down sick and they cancelled their plans. Joe’s mom decided that day to put his one black shirt in the wash, and shrank it almost laughably. Bob couldn’t find his car keys.

We all got to Garrett’s a little late. I was a little lighter for the lack of my driver’s license. Bob had to borrow his folks’ extra set of keys. Joe stopped by Wal-Mart on the way and got another black pullover. We met on Garrett’s porch, wearing our street clothes, our gear and weapons stowed in a couple of large black duffel bags. It was 9:00 in the evening. We felt that it wouldn’t be right to get the ball rolling before the witching hour, so we dropped the stuff in Garrett’s garage and went to the local Denny’s to load up on caffeine and sugar. When you’re three hours away from an escapade you’ve been planning for almost a year, those three hours can take a hell of a long time.

Hit time. We had planned to get suited up and leave from Garrett’s back porch. His parents were, however, sacked out on the couch in the downstairs room adjoining the porch, so that was out.

“Fuck it,” said Bob. “What else could possibly go wrong? Let’s just get started, and bring the stuff with us. If there’s a place to change along the way, under a tree, behind a bush, I’ll do that. I just can’t stand waiting any more.” We all agreed, so off we went.

About ten minutes into the two-mile hike, along a route that took us through backyards, along deserted side streets, along the banks of a large retention pond, skirting the environs of a large waste-water treatment plant, and along an eternally long bike path that was far too well-lit by sodium arc lamps from the park, we found a big bushy willow tree. Pushing aside the drooping branches was like parting a thick velvet curtain, and we found the space within as dry and shielded from view as Garret’s house. We got ready, and left all our street clothes there. Dressed all in black, masks on, knives out and ready, we got started.

Remember how I said that sometimes, all the luck you have is bad? And sometimes, though it happens rarely, you get a run of luck that is so good, it scares you? We had used up all our bad luck for the trip, it seemed, and we were due for some good luck. As a sign that Luck herself agreed, upon emerging from the willow tree we were shocked to see the full moon emerging from a break in the clouds. Would Luck continue to smile?

The hardest part was the long stretch of bike path. Brightly lit, and narrowly guarded on both sides by high chain-link fence (the really flexy kind with the spiky stuff at the top that can’t be climbed), it provided the greatest chance that we’d get spotted—either by cops or nosy townspeople out for a walk. We decided to tackle that section on at a time. I was the fastest runner, so I ran point and sprinted down the path—a good 75 yards—until I made it to the dark shelter of the park beyond. I made it without incident, and turned around and flashed my little red LED flashlight to signal the others. In about 10 seconds, here came Garrett, almost as fast but silent in ways I knew I hadn’t been. Joe came after, huffing like a freight train but with arms tucked into his sides and his head held low. Finally, Bob, mustering all the speed for which he’d been known on St. Francis’s defensive line, came hauling down the path like a demented steamroller, arms pumping, knees popping almost to his chest, teeth bared, eyes blazing. Holy shit.

Getting past that point, we felt, was the most difficult part of the journey. All that remained was a lovely stroll through the park under cover of darkness to the path at the edge of the woods. Okay; actually, the walk through the woods would be more difficult, but at least we wouldn’t have to worry about the cops.

Hee hee.

Well, like I said, this one’s a long one, and I didn’t think it’d be fair to make you have to swallow this all in one shot. So maybe this is as good a place as any to break it up. Stay tuned for the next post, which should be up shortly.

Dare I say it—to be continued?

Ode to a Delta 88

2005-10-21T22:22:00.000-07:00

O what a frustrating piece of shit you are.

Who knew? Who could possibly have known?

Here is a list of things I am not:

Politician
Florist
Veterinarian
Banker
Doctor
Hippie
Bricklayer
Freemason
Mechanic

I lament only the last.

A mechanic would have looked at you and said “Fuck this.”

Actually, a mechanic would have looked at you and said, “Yeah, I can fix that.”

I looked at you and said, “How hard can it be?”

Getting your fat ass on the trailer to take you home and tuck you cozily into my garage for the next five months, I noticed 1 out of 8 cylinders had taken the day off. Also, an interesting blue cloud was wafting oh so gently from underneath your vast hood.

“No problem,” thought I. “Bad spark plug. Surely nothing more involved than that.”

After you ran for a while in my driveway, though, did I detect the sickly-sweet aroma of overheated antifreeze? Yes, I did. And when I checked under your cursed radiator cap, did I notice that your coolant level was low, indicating a latent internal leak? Indeed. And when, in an act of final desperation, after new plugs and wires and distributor cap and rotor had failed to awaken that 8th cylinder, did I perform a compression check only to find that cylinder #5 was fully offline and effectively compressionless? Sai, you speak only truth.

Is this a blown head gasket or a warped cylinder head? Is there any way to tell, really, with the meager tools and skill at my disposal? No. What other options, after my hubris, but to replace the cylinder head and hope for the best? None.

I shall address you now, O Treasured Reader, to avail you of the travails involved in replacing a cylinder head on a 307-cubic-inch V8. Should you choose someday to undertake the task yourself, dearest friend, be advised that the procedure is germaine to most V8s, but not necessarily identical.

To remove a cylinder head, first you must take off the intake manifold. To remove the intake manifold, first you must remove the carburetor. To remove the carburetor, first you must disconnect a legion of hoses and connectors. Whether they will find themselves back in their original and proper locations is as much your guess as it is mine. Why didn’t I take notes? Why didn’t I label? Why did I think taking digital photographs on the lowest possible resolution would suffice as a proper mnemonic?

Also, you must remove the valve cover. To remove the valve cover, you must first remove the alternator and power steering pump. To remove the power steering pump, you must first remove the heat shield. To remove the heat shield, you must first remove the air injector four-way crossover pipe. To remove the air injector four-way crossover pipe, you must first strip the holy Jesus out of the bolts holding the air injector four-way crossover pipe on because those bolts have been on since 1983 and aren’t going anywhere. To remove the air injector four-way crossover pipe despite the stripped bolts, you must get out your grinder and cut the sucker off. While you are doing this, you must also get a glowing-hot fragment of metal in your eye because you are too stupid to wear your safety goggles.

Also, you must remove the exhaust manifold. To remove the exhaust manifold, you must first jack up the front end of the entire vehicle and remove both front wheels. Then you must lie on your back in a puddle of a noxious mixture of freshly-spilled antifreeze and transmission fluid because you broke your creeper last week using it as a ramp to load your motorcycle on the trailer. Then you must disconnect the exhaust manifold from the header pipe to the catalytic converter. You must also get a nice big chunk of rusty metal in your other eye because you are still too stupid to wear your safety goggles.

Once you have done all of these things, you can remove the cylinder head—but only after you have removed all 10 cylinder head bolts, each of which requires the application of over 150 foot-pounds of torque. Only then can you remove the head and smash the shit out of your thumb with it against the inside fenderwell.

Reverse all these steps to reassemble. Add to the mix that the cylinder head weighs about seventy pounds, and getting in onto the block without scraping the shit out of the new head gasket is a near impossibility for one of my so-called skill. Have I compromised the head gasket now? After all this work, will the thing run for five minutes (if it runs at all) only to rupture the new head gasket and advertise this fact by spewing steam gaily out through the tailpipe? Also throw in the fact that the intake manifold bolts just barely don’t line up with the bolt holes, for reasons only God knows why. Also throw in the fact that the new intake manifold gasket is a flimsy piece of tin that bends if you look at it funny, and which also must be liberally spread with Silicone RTV, an orange sealing substance that looks a lot like a melted popsicle and smells a lot like shit mixed with puke. Don’t forget, as well, that the RTV sets up in 5 minutes, so you have about that long to hoist the 50-pound intake manifold on top of the engine and bolt it into place—only then to find out that the bolt holes don’t line up.

Ah, lovely carburetor, with your four varnish-enslimed barrels and your vast Medusa of vacuum hoses and sensor clips! How would I like to throw thee across the garage? Let me count the ways...well, I guess there’s really just one, but man would that be satisfying.

And here is where I sit, staring at the oil-encrusted engine bay and wondering what to do next. And here you sit, O dear Delta 88, with your dented bronze finish and the small scrapes along the tops of the fenders because I forgot to use fender protectors, your nose in the air due to the jackstands, lending you a haughty fuck-you air that mocks me still.

Was I thinking this would be easy? Was I thinking you, O delta 88, would cooperate with me at all? Was I really so naive?

Will you be so smug, dear Delta 88, when I finally get you to run and take you out to Sycamore Speedway and beat the absolute shit out of you with an enormous grin upon my face the entire time, high on the sweet nectar of revenge? Time will tell in the ways that only time can tell.

On hiding, and on why I like stuff from the '70's.

2005-10-05T19:52:00.000-07:00

I’d like to thank all of you who told me that you were pissed off at me. You have every right to be pissed, of course—a lot of you are close friends with whom I hold close correspondence; others of you know me only by these words that appear in this sometimes-more-coagulated-than-othertimes ether we know as the Internet. Both camps have been wondering just where the fuck I’ve been, and the fact that you gave a shit at all means a lot. I appreciate the sentiment sincerely.

I dunno—sometimes you just gotta hide, I guess. I’m emerging from the hermitage thing, though, little by little. And in my months-long tenure of pulling the covers over my head, I’ve got a few blogs back-logged. Please find one of them enclosed herewith.

I was born in 1973. Of late, that year is starting to sound like a long time ago. It didn’t always, but between then and now is a span of 32 years and counting, and that ain’t too cool. I don’t like how pictures my folks have of me riding my first two-wheeler, or of my first day at kindergarten, or of the puppy we got when I was four—her name was Patch, and while she was no Lois, she was a sweetheart whom I loved dearly—or of my first piano recital (a seven-year-old in a blue pinstripe three-piece, can you dig it) are starting to yellow and curl at the corners. There was a time when these photographs did not look old, even as the styles worn by the people in them grew increasingly anachronistic. Now they do. Oh well. I guess they say that you can’t stay young forever, but at least you can be immature for the rest of your life. Thank God for that.

At any rate, it has come to the attention of a few of my closer associates that I have an affinity for things of 70’s vintage. This is certainly true. I love 70’s movies, like The French Connection, The Driver, Bullitt, Gone in Sixty Seconds, Star Wars, Saturday Night Fever, History of the World (part I), Blazing Saddles, and so on. I love 70’s music (fuck disco, although some of it’s cool, and the bass players to a one were fabulous), like Kansas, Boston, Uriah Heep, Brownsville Station, old Clapton, Allman Brothers, Zep, Ringo Starr solo stuff, and the list keeps going—to the extent that I have a 10-CD set of popular 70’s music indexed by year, given generously to me by one of my students (thanks, Jordan Kalasky; I listen to them a lot, and 1975 is my favorite, because that’s the disc that’s got Linda Ronstadt’s Blue Bayou on it). I love 70’s decorating styles, like Lava Lamps and black-light posters, and THICK FUCKIN’ SHAG CARPET. I even dig 70’s clothes, though I would not be seen in public in them today—platform shoes (c’mon; I’m six-five already), tab collars, corduroy pants, suede vests with fringe, and paisley. Bring on the paisely!

I like the goofy iridescent daisy-type flowers they stuck all over the dunk-tank in the Brady Bunch; I like girls with ramrod-straight ironed hair and pullover dresses; I like horn-rimmed glasses, I like perm haircuts on guys; I like CHiPs and BJ and the Bear, and most of all, Dukes of Hazzard; I like Jiffy Pop, Friday the 13th and Halloween, Amityville Horror and Jaws, old Sesame Street episodes where all the kids looked like they had head lice, and, in particular, I dug the fuck out of Electric Company. Sing it with me now, childrens—"One-two-three four five, six-seven-eight nine ten....(wait for it)...ELEVEN TWELVE." Gimme an amen-hallelujah if you see that cheesy pinball machine in your head while the music courses through you. I know I do.

I like 70’s bicycles, like the Schwinn Orange Krates and Lemon Peels with the rear slick tire (with raised white letters, no less!), and 70’s weight-benches with the overdone metal-flake upholstery that was usually red or blue, but occasionally white and, very rarely (get ready to hurl) orange, yellow, or (blargh) green. I like the Atari 2600 and the hopeless-yet-still-loveable renditions of Space Invaders, Omega Race, and Pac-Man they foisted upon us clueless-yet-rich consumers. I like Pong, dammit.

This summer, I extensively landscaped my crib with (are you ready for this one?) Lava Rocks.

"In the name of God," you, O Honored Reader, are undoubtedly asking yourself, "why?"

I’ll tell ya why, you impatient fucks.

When I was a kid, my dad would take me shopping with him at Ace Hardware. There were no Home Depots or Menards back then (holy shit I sound old), so Ace was where you went for stuff. I remember walking along the aisles with him, and in those days, you could smoke just about anywhere you wanted. My dad would fire up a Winston Unfiltered and we’d stroll along, looking for whatever it was we were looking for. Usually it was somewhere in the vicinity of the electrical department, and there was always an area where they had all the outdoor lighting arranged in this spiffy little display. Invariably, the lights were high-powered incandescents designed to project bright lights onto the side of your house from ‘neath your hedges. The lights themselves were black, but you could buy filters to change the color of the light to just about anything you chose—blue, green, red, white, and—of course—amber. I thought those were just about the coolest things, and just see if you can guess what they used in those mock-up displays to provide a landscape, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof, to put those lights in.

Lemme give you a hint—it rhymes with "Schmlava Rocks."

You never see that shit these days—now it’s mulch and more mulch, and lighting systems are all the candy-ass solar jobs (Shut up. Shut up right now—I fucking well know that’s what I have, but they’re cheaper to run and don’t require you to connect wires to them. Let’s move on.) that turn on at night and cast weak circular puddles of light for about a foot and a half.

I remember seeing that stuff in the aisles at Ace Hardware and thinking to myself, "That’s the stuff that grownups have; when I get old enough, I’m gonna buy me some stuff like that and then I’ll be a grownup too."

I still feel that way, and there were a bunch more things besides landscape materials and outdoor lighting that I ascribed to adulthood. And, since most of the things that were around when I was a kid that led me to associate them with being a grownup were from the 70’s, that’s where (or perhaps I would be more appropriate in saying when) I take things from.

The Dragon’s a good example. I saw a lot of adults driving shit like that when I was a kid. Now I have one, and that must mean that I am an adult, too.

My Sharona by The Knack is another. I remember listening to that as a kid and thinking to myself, "Well, jeez—only an adult would understand what these guys are talking about. What’s ‘running down the length of my thigh’ mean, anyway?" Well, now I’m older, and now I get it. I love that song. I like old Kiss, Queen and Rolling Stones for the same reason. I don’t think I was really grown up until I got my first copy of "Sticky Fingers."

I remember going to the bowling alley and wishing I was old enough to go into the arcade so I could play "Pac-Man" and "Galaxian" and "Omega Race" and "Donkey Kong" and "Jungle Hunt" and the king of them all, "Defender". Well, now I am, so I go. I like to play pool for the same reason. It’s something only adults were allowed to do when I was a kid. Well, I’m not a kid anymore, so I play pool whenever I can, and I’m usually smoking a cigarette when I do, because that’s what the adults did.

I remember going to my Aunt Joanne’s house when I was seven for Christmas Eve. My cousin and her oldest son, Phillip, had just turned eighteen, and for Christmas, my aunt had gotten him a Gibson Flying V. I remember going into his room so he could show it to me. This would be about 1978, I guess, and he had decorated his entire room in red velvet and tufted black vinyl. All the room lights had red bulbs in them. The guitar itself had a flame finish—it faded from black at the edges to red at the center. The case was black vinyl, and it was lined with red velour—and that’s why to this day, as far as I’m concerned, the colors of the 70’s are always gonna be black and red. Seeing those two colors always makes me feel like a high roller, and I don’t think the fact that the four suits in cards are black and red goes any distance toward relieving me of that sentiment.

Twenty-seven years later, I don’t feel any different. I’ve said to my friends and to my students alike—I don’t feel any different inside at 32 than I did at 12. I just have more life experiences with which to compare things. But I’ll tell ya—putting that Lava Rock in went a long way toward making me feel like a grownup. Now—who’s ready for some Pong?

Thanks, everybody.

2005-08-11T20:14:00.000-07:00

Two days ago, my dog Lois had a stroke. I was at work when my mom called me and told me that Lois couldn't get up, and, being that she is fourteen, the likelihood that we would have to have her euthanized was very great. Of course, I was totally devastated, and two of my associates with whom I was digging fence-post holes had the pleasure of seeing a thirty-two-year-old man cry.

When I got to my folks' house, I expected to see Lois on the ground. When she saw me, however, she got up. She promptly fell over, but she got up again and stayed up. She staggered around like a drunk for the next three hours, seemingly wobbling a little bit less with each passing hour. Pretty soon, she seemed to have recovered enough to be up to her old tricks of mooching as we ate a small lunch--indicative, we thought, that she was feeling better.

The vet informed us that Lois appears to have recovered to the point that perhaps euthanasia is not the best option for the short term, but we should expect that other strokes are likely and her condition will worsen with each. He told us not to be too optimistic in having her with us for much more than a few more weeks, and that we should be prepared.

Thanks, everyone, who showed me your love and support. If you know me at all, you know how I love the pooch, and all your kind words and gestures mean the world. In the meantime, as we are watching the clock and counting the seconds, I'm trying to keep it together. I had a post in the works about my little sojourn to a town called Centralia, in Pennsylvania, but it's kinda on the back burner for now. I'll be back to my senseless rants soon enough, I guess.

Anyway, thanks again, everybody, and remember that all the love you've sent me goes back to you tenfold.

On junkyards--with a little twist. Okay, make that a BIG twist...

2005-07-30T00:51:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you just gotta do something nutty. (This word, nutty, will appear numerous times in this blog. If this word is somehow offensive to you, or if the sound of it is of the nails-on-the-chalkboard ilk to your tender eardrums, then I would advise you to hit your “back” button now, ‘cuz I’m a-gonna use it a lot.)

Have you ever heard of a place called Sycamore Speedway? I suppose you have if you live in this area, but for those who live in other parts of the country, it would please me greatly if you would allow me to paint you a picture. Or, at the very least, supply a few with my trusty and ever-present camera phone.

And before I begin mixing paints for my verbal palette, I’d like to hearken you back to a previous blog of mine, entitled “Junkyards,” in which I regaled you, O honored reader, with tales of my exploits at a local automotive recycling facility to replace the stereo in my cursed complete-piece-of-shit minivan. Along the way, I endeavoured to express my love of machines in general, and of cars in particular, and how it is sometimes heart-rending to see these objects, inanimate though they are, come to such an end after all the romanticizing we do. You know how we Americans love our cars. In fact, it would seem that the face of our country is much more sculpted by our love of the automobile than other countries, where roads and byways were marked more by the passage of hooves and carriages than Buick Roadmasters and Ford Thunderbirds and Chevy Biscayne wagons liberally papered with bumper stickers and full of screaming kids. And, if you look a little deeper, you can kinda tell that this beautiful sprawling country with which we were blessed was explored, and trails blazed, by brave men and women on horses, but the true population of this great land was done by—at first—the train, and, in a much greater capacity, the car.

So we love our cars, and our country is based on this love—drive-in theatres, drive-thru (notice how it’s never drive-through, but always thru? God, we suck) fast food joints, motels, billboards, parking lots, driveways, to say nothing of the culture—The Fast and the Furious, Dukes of Hazzard (MY favorite), blinged-out ‘Sclades, Navigators and Hummer H2s. Gas prices are through the roof, but you sure notice a lot of new Mustangs (hell, I dig ‘em), Dodge Magnum Hemi RTs with gas-suckin’ 5.7 litre Hemi V-fuckin’-8’s, and there is a lady who lives across the street from my folks who drives a Bentley Continental GT. That thing gets 10 mpg on a good day, and we wonder why we have to import crude oil from the Middle East?

I can’t say anything, though—I was raised a motorhead, and as such, I gotta find outlets to get my fix. Thank God for the bike. Other people have to get theirs, too, and that’s where Sycamore Speedway comes in.

I should preface anything forthcoming with this—ever since I was old enough to want anything, I wanted to drive. As soon as I was old enough to want to be something, I wanted to be a race-car driver. My dad used to race, and I wanted to follow in his footsteps. I didn’t know if I would ever make it to the Indianapolis 500, but I didn’t care. While my brother and his friends were out playing baseball and fantasizing about the World Series, I was driving my soap-box racer and dreaming of Daytona, or Le Mans, or Monaco. When I was seven, I spotted a go-kart for sale on the street and rode my bicycle home at top speed. I pestered my dad, who finally gave in, over the protestations of my mother, and at last I was driving something I didn’t have to push. I got right to work on practicing my apexes, my drifts, my heel-and-toe downshifts (I knew it was only one speed, but fuck it—I had fun) and my Le Mans starts, where you have to run across the street, jump in, fire up, and get underway from a dead stop. I asked for a helmet for Christmas one year, and a Nomex driving suit the next. I got the helmet, but Nomex is expensive shit for a someone who’s gonna grow out of it in a year.

Well, God’s got a plan for every one of us, and racing wasn’t mine. That’s okay—I’m happy where I’m at. But for all of us who dreamed of Grand Prix races and fell short, there are places like Sycamore Speedway.

Sycamore Speedway is a quarter-mile dirt oval about five miles due east of DeKalb, Illinois. It’s in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by cornfields and asphalt two-lanes for as far as the eye can see. As near as I can tell, no one lives within a mile of the place. That’s a good thing, because on race nights, huge stadium-quality lights blaze down from 100-foot utility poles, the bellowing of huge oil-fired beasts relieved of their exhaust systems rattles the leaves on the nearby corn plants, and, by the time two hours have passed since the first laps were turned, a fine blue haze composed of all the myriad fluids of which a vehicle is capable of burning off hangs motionless over the track, until the predominantly easterly wind comes up around three in the morning and wafts the noxious airborne mixture off towards Lily Lake, the next town over.

On Saturday nights, they run late-model modifieds, V-8 powered brutes that resemble regular production cars in the nation's new-car showrooms even less than NASCAR stockers do. They’re big and scary and fast, and since the track is dirt, they spend much of their time in lurid four-wheel drifts, flinging the track surface towards anyone stupid enough to sit in the front row. Nutty.

Friday nights, however, are another thing entirely. Friday nights are devoted to what is known as “spectator-class” racing. The rules are simple. Take any car you want, knock the windows out, remove the head and taillights, wire the doors shut, paint a number on and go racing. Most of the cars are big ol’ rear-drive behemoths—Lincoln Town Cars, Ford Crown Victorias and Mercury Grand Marquis, Buicks and Oldsmobiles, the occasional Cadillac, and a shitload of Chevrolet Caprices. Tell you how it is, my children—if you have ever lusted painfully after an older Chevy Caprice, like the old taxicabs and police cars, get one now, because they are a dying breed, and places like Sycamore Speedway are killing ‘em off.

If the big guys are too imposing for you, there is a class for compacts. Name something small and you’ll see it in there somewhere—Honda Accords and Civics, Toyota Celicas, Corollas and Tercels, Chevrolet Cavaliers, Ford Escorts and Tempos, Hyundai-this, Saturn-that, and the occasional Geo Storm or Plymouth Reliant. Tonight there was even a Dodge Daytona. They have no mufflers, and they snarl like pissed-off Chihuahuas, madly spinning their front tires on a dirt-track designed for drifting. Also nutty.

I feel like a spectator at a butcher shop, the old melancholy washing over me as I watch these tired old heaps fling themselves around the track at the cruel behest of the last masters they’ll ever have. And sure, they’re just machines, but somewhere in there is a Saturn SC2 that someone’s older sister saved and saved for, working two jobs just so she could make the payments, her and her friends blasting the stereo and standing on the seats with their heads out the sunroof on a gorgeous summer evening on one of the few nights a month she got to have off. Somewhere else, there’s a Buick Roadmaster or Cadillac Fleetwood that was the last car your grandfather owned, and wasn’t he proud when he pulled into your folks’ driveway in it, the paint freshly waxed and looking so deep you could swim in it? Somewhere in there there’s a taxicab that once carried a movie star, or a police cruiser that once carried an officer to the scene of a domestic dispute where he saved some poor woman’s life from the murderous hands of her ex-boyfriend. And now here they are, battling it out on this clay track out in Redneckville, trading paint and knocking fenders, and when that oil line springs a pinhole leak and the light on the dashboard comes on, the driver just pushes harder, hoping to take out that guy in the Pontiac before the engine locks up completely. In a way, it’s sad.

And, in another way, it’s a fuckin’ blast, watching that guy trying to limp that Cadillac into the pits on three flats, or seeing someone roll over three times in turn four and land on the wheels with the engine still running. I spend a lot of times in the stands thinking, “This is nutty.” There’s other interesting things to watch, too. I learned early on that rear-wheel-drive cars with independent rear suspension are bad ideas in a setting like this. Some schmuck in a newer Thunderbird got collected from behind by another guy in a high-balling Chevy station wagon, and got sent ass-first into the wall. When the smoke cleared, the guy in the Thunderbird was able to get the thing moving, but its rear end was completely destroyed, the rear suspension collapsed like an unlucky animal that has somehow gotten both of its hind legs broken in a trap. The Thunderbird, miraculously still moving, made its way off the track. Later I saw it lined up outside the car crusher at the rear end of the paddock. End of the road, babe. In a place like this, you want a nice, solid, live-axle out behind you.

Walking around the pit area is like stepping into a Mad Max film. There are battered cars of every make and model here, in various states of disrepair. There are also people, of course, but they seem to come from one vein of descent. Mainly, they’re males in their twenties or thirties, heads shaved, tattooed, smoking liberally and often with a keg of some Miller or Budweiser product within easy reach. I once saw a guy beat the absolute shit out of a Cadillac DeVille with a mostly-full beer keg. Every time he’d slam it down on the hood, or the trunk lid, or the roof, the keg would spew a fine mist of beer from the place where the tapper was supposed to go. Each time he did this, his friends would cheer lustily, which fed the gentleman’s enthusiasm. When he was done, he was drenched in beer, and the Cadillac was pretty thoroughly fucked. I can’t say as I’ve ever seen that before. Very nutty.

You have to be careful walking around out here, because it’s nighttime but, as per race regulations, all the cars have had their headlights removed. You step around a tree onto the gravel paths that pass for roads here, you hear a growl of unmuffled exhaust and before you can turn around, you’re street pizza. Beer and loud exhausts do not inspire moderation.

Walking around is all well and good, and sitting in the stands watching people go really crazy redneck stupid fast is fine and dandy, and checking out the occasional guy beating the crap out of a poor multicolored Oldsmobile Delta 88 two-door with a sledgehammer is mildly entertaining (see above), but after awhile even this scene gets old. Thank God for the One-on-One Drag races. Now this is nutty.

To drive in this class, you need a) a car, b) a helmet, c) proof of insurance, and d) a Social Security Number in case they have to drag your monkey ass to the hospital in the ambulance they keep on the premises. That’s it. The entry fee is $25, and you don’t have to knock out any glass, or paint any numbers on your car. My good friend Mike Honegger, with whom I went there, entered his 2000 Pontiac Grand Am. I drove there in the Dragon, so I entered that.

Hee hee.

All righty, stop right there. Stop stop stop. We all know and love the Dragon. No one more so than I, believe me. And I understand the sheer absurdity of racing the thing. It’s like asking my beloved Lois to pull a dog sled. It’s like asking your old asthmatic and emphysemic grandfather to help you shovel the driveway. Fuck, it’s like asking your grandmother to help you move the couch, for Christ’s sake. I know this.

But in the Dragon’s case, it also looks fuckin’ cool. ENTER THE DRAGON!

So I go up to the lady at the counter and I pay her my $25 bones and I sign all the legal waivers and I show her my helmet and my insurance card. Eventually, we get the call to line up by the paddock next to the track entrance gate. Mike and I stand there bullshitting and contemplating just how stupid we are. To be truthful, I am about to get out there in a car that is over thirty years old that looks like it just came off the set of the Brady Bunch, but unlike Mike, I’m not still making payments on my car.

A track marshall comes walking down the line, checking his registration list and marking each car’s windshield with a number from his red paint-pen. In front of me is a guy in a clapped-out Lincoln Continental Mark VII. His car gets the number 8. The marshall comes over to the Dragon. He gives it the eye, then fixes me with a bilious stare.

“Hey, all the Spectator-class races are over! You’ll have to wait until next week,” he says.

“I’m not here for the Spectator class,” I say, Mike deep in the throes of a snickering fit behind me. “I’m running in the One-on-One drag races.”

He looks at me for a while longer, taking a huge drag from his cigarette. After awhile, he replies with, “Are you serious?”

“Yes, I’m fuckin’ serious. Give me my fuckin’ number.”

“All right, all right. God,” the guy whines, painting a large red 5 in the upper left corner of my windshield. He moves on to Mike, who has recovered somewhat from his snickering fit.

We stand there waiting. Mike is a highly cultured guy, with refined tastes in beer and music. We both feel like cockroaches on a wedding cake. After awhile, we get the cue to head onto the track. Motoring through the gate, I catch a track marshall motioning frantically to me. “Helmet! Helmet! Seat belt!” I already have my seat belt on, but sliding my helmet over my head while behind the wheel of the Dragon feels as alien and out of place as anything I’ve ever done.

There are about ten cars entered in the One-on-Ones. The races work like this—two cars are staged at the middle of the front straight. When the green flag is dropped, it’s a race to get around the track to the starting point first. The loser gets the bum’s rush; the winner gets staged against the winner of another one-lap drag. The ultimate winner gets the trophy and the adoration of countless rednecks. The track marshalls do their best to stage the cars according to equivalent performance. Ahead of me, a Hyundai Excel takes on a Honda Accord and gets eliminated. It’s my turn next, and I find myself next to Mike. We find this is actually not a bad match-up; he’s got about the same horsepower, but he’s pulling half the ass. And remember, O Honored Reader—the Dragon’s got a big fat ass. To compensate, they put me on the inside.

As we are staging, I hear the announcer barking out our names over the P.A. to the crowd.

“We’ve got Mike Honegger in a 2000 Grand Am, versus Jay Oh—how do you say this?--Oh-lah-something in a—get this—a 1973 Ford Gran Torino Station Wagon! Give the guy some credit just for showing up in a heap like that!”

I look over at Mike; he is laughing his ass off. Surprisingly, it sounds like the crowd is laughing too. And that's fine with me—I know I’m gonna get my ass kicked, but who’s lame enough to show up on a racetrack in a car like this? Hey, if you can’t beat ‘em, do your best to make ‘em laugh and you’ll go out a star.

Remember, Mike is still paying on his car; I have no such inhibitions. When the green flag drops, I put my foot to the floor. The Dragon heels over, the whole thing leaning in a reaction to the torque of the big-but-slow V8 under the hood. If I can make it to the first turn before Mike, and keep the inside line, I may have a chance. I toss the old beast into the corner, trying to keep a handle on where Mike is, not wanting to trade his nice shiny red paint for some of my puke-green, but putting about on the port tack throws the Dragon into a sizeable list to starboard, and I forget about Mike and just concentrate on not cracking the wall.

Apparently I have boxed Mike out; he is forced to take the high road through turns One and Two; he reels me in on the back straight but not enough to take the inside advantage from me. He takes the pit exit and I line back up.

This time they have me up against a guy in an older Cavailier Z-24—one of the older ones with a V-6. It’s pretty beat up, but it still has license plates on it. It’s a daily driver, apparently, but way too big a piece of shit for the owner to worry about what happens to it.

We stage up, and the crowd is really yelling. I hear a guy near the front row bellowing “Gran Torino! HELL yeah!” as though he might ejaculate all over himself at any moment. The starter drops the flag, the guy in the Cavalier beats me to the first turn and the race is over as neatly as that. I try to salvage some dignity by hanging the tail out, but the Dragon is not powerful enough for that, and the OIL lamp flickers on the dashboard after a few seconds of trying. Oh well. It was fun, and the crowd seemed to enjoy it, but this tired old thing still needs to get me home, and I need it next week to haul some gear. I head for the pit exit. The Cavalier goes on to get beat by a guy in a Pontiac Grand Prix, and an eighteen-year-old kid smacks the wall in his mother’s Ford Taurus. Life is pretty good.

Hmm. Maybe I could get my hands on an old Caprice or something and go back next week, this time for real. I’ve done crazier things. I guess. Wait...well, I’ll get back to you on that. I’m sure there has to be something...

On where we grew up, and what it does to us...

2005-07-19T02:09:00.000-07:00

Today was a weird day. It didn’t start out that way, but I didn’t wake up expecting the day to be normal, or weird, or anything. I’m laid off from the summer job, and there’s still a month or so before school begins, so I’m at the mercy of whatever comes my way.

I did actually have something planned; kind of an exception in the last week or so. Today I went into work to discuss some potential software on universal gravity with St. Francis’s IT guy. Went well, nothing fancy. I downloaded the trial of the package I wanted, and I futzed with it a bit. I liked it, I guess; well enough to give it a try this year.

Walked out to the parking lot, and as has been the case for the last month, in these strange dry days of constantly above-85 and few if any clouds, the bike was waiting for me.

[This in not another motorhead-style posting, as the last few have been, so you may read on, if you so choose, confident in the knowledge that I will not mention carburetors or drifting or wheelies or broken radiators. Nor will I post pictures of various things at 100 mph. Well, maybe one.]

So I climbed on and fired up the old beast, and I turned left out of St. Francis’s parking lot, and my brain switched on its little mental cruise control and I just went along for the ride. I found myself eventually in Winfield.

I don’t really have a hometown. I was born in Lombard; I lived in Winfield for a while, and I lived in Naperville for a while (though I try not to admit it—I hate that town) and I lived in DeKalb for awhile, and I’ve lived in Plainfield for awhile. I guess, though, that Winfield is the closest thing I have to a hometown, and I would move back there if I could.

I spent a lot of time just roaming the streets, the Moose popping and snarling and generally scaring the bejeezus out of pedestrians and motorists alike. Winfield is a small town, and it’s pretty quiet. It has a downtown area of sorts, but unlike most small towns like Hinckley or Sandwich or even Somonauk, where the downtown area is at least a couple of blocks long, Winfield’s is about a third of a block long, and it consists mainly of a small strip mall and a bar. Bikes are not a part of the overall Winfield picture. People stare. I did get back to my motorhead roots a bit by taking a nice high-speed blast up Summit Hill.

Summit is spooky going up, and even spookier going down. (It's important to note that the top of the hill is higher than it might appear in this snappy-snap, due to a trick of the light. The hill's actually in two stages--look about a third down from the top of the picture and you'll see it.) This is, incidentally, the hill I mentioned in a previous blog that my brother went down every day in his (soon to be my) MGB, catching enormous air and tearing chunks out of the asphalt on the landing as the suspension momentarily collapsed. You don’t get nearly as much air going up as you do going down, but today I got a little.

I guess the thrust of this particular blog came about as I was aimlessly roaming the streets, checking out the house I lived in and the schools I went to (Winfield has two—St. John the Baptist and Winfield Elementary—and I went to both-) and I realized how the places we live and grow shape the way we look at the world. In the grand scheme of things, I only lived in Winfield a little while, but of all the places I have lived, it seems that Winfield has colored the images in my head and my heart with the brightest crayons.

For example, in stories, or in songs, you often hear people describe how they were standing on the corner. In my head, whenever I hear that phrase, the corner I see is this one.

It’s nothing special; just a little corner in a small town next to a public elementary school. In my head, though, this corner is always at early evening in the summertime, where the sun is still up but mostly obscured by buildings or trees, putting a filter on the last minutes of daylight and softening the edges between light and shadow. I am standing on this corner, and usually I am looking at the little house across the street. I never knew the names of the person or persons that lived in that house when I called Winfield home, and I don’t now, but in my head I am standing on the corner waiting for someone to come out, and that person is a dear friend. I don’t know who that person is. Maybe someday I will.

Whenever I hear the word wall, this is the wall I see. It is the west wall of the gymnasium at Winfield Elementary, and it forms a corner with the rest of the building right here. I got the shit beat out of me a few times in that corner, where there are no windows. I also went back there a few times with friends at recess, just screwing around, and one of the things we always did was try to climb the wall using this odd column of bricks that poke out just a little. None of us ever succeeded.

You know that noise a hammer makes when it hits an anvil? If you can’t get a handle on it right away, listen to The Beatles’ “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and you’ll get the gist. Whenever I hear that noise, I see this:

Winfield Elementary has just about the same number of doors as any small-town public elementary school, I’d wager, but something odd is that each door has one of these—a combination boot-scraper and doorstop. They’re bad to be around when you’re getting your ass kicked, because once you’re on the ground, it’s pretty easy for your assailant to drag you over to one of these and start beating your head against it. But, when you’re bored, and all the swings are taken on the playground and you don’t want to wait in line for the slide and there aren’t any foursquare balls left and there’s still fifteen minutes or so left until recess is over, you can occupy your time quite easily with your friends Brian York, Danny Gray and Kevin Muto throwing rocks at one of these. The noise they make on the rare occasions they hit sound a lot like that.

Near the downtown area is a building on another corner. It’s a weird little building, and it currently houses a dentist. The building is constructed into the side of the hill that rises to meet the railroad tracks. What’s weird about the building is that it has a sidewalk along the front of it that is perfectly level, though the street is not. Even stranger is the fact that, when the sidewalk reaches the end of the building, it just stops, hanging out over three feet or so of empty space.

There used to be gravel at the base of this strange concrete cliff, instead of the nicely-manicured mulch beds there now. I once watched my brother attempt to jump his Murray off this truncated sidewalk. He hit the gravel and wiped out in an ugly way. He went off crying while his friends laughed. I gave them the finger and followed my brother home.

Winfield, though small, has its good sides and bad sides, like any town. I did not grow up on the good side, though I wouldn’t trade where we lived for anything. Most of my friends lived on the other side of the tracks, where the houses were nice and neat and backyards didn’t flood when it rained and raccoons didn’t live in the attic and snakes and woodchucks in the basement. If you crossed the crick in back of my house, you got to the scary side of town—ramshackle houses that backed right up to the tracks. All the bullies at school seemed to live on this street—Beecher Street. It dead-ended in a snarl of woods that also backed up to the Boy’s Correctional Facility at the DuPage County Complex on County Farm Road. My parents warned my brother and I to stay out of these woods. We obeyed--most of the time.

Even weirder was the fact that, right after the houses on Beecher Street ended and before the woods began, there was a scary industrial building, one story tall and about a quarter of a block long, that reposed back there like a sleeping wolverine. It was menacing in a dormant kind of way, because businesses came and went and never seemed to stay for long, leaving the building in what seemed to be a suspended state of decay. My parents told me to stay away from this place as well, because a lot of the older kids from this part of town came back here to do whatever drugs they’d found in their older siblings’ underwear drawer or drink the beer they’d persuaded some poor sap to buy them at the Winfield Liquor next to the bar downtown. They’d go in the alleyway between the building and the ten-foot-tall retaining wall that abutted the railroad embankment. I took a picture of this alley, but for some reason it didn’t come out.

That alley is still a scary place, and though I’m a thirty-two-year-old man (fuck, it feels weird just saying that) I still see that alley through the eyes of an eight-year-old. When you hear someone telling you how they got chased down some dark alley, I couldn’t have any less idea what alley you see in your head, but this is the alley I see in mine. It was always a dare among my friends—who’s brave enough to ride his bicycle all the way through from one side to the other? I did it a few times, shitting my pants the whole way. Even the graffiti was freaky—not spray paint, but somehow burned into the bricks in dagger-slash letters. I rode my bike through there today, and I made it maybe halfway through before I grabbed a handful of throttle. I couldn’t help it. Call me a candyass. And maybe if you visited this part of town today, or if you happen to live on that street, you’d see it a completely different way, and maybe the houses there are nicer and have been fixed up and the bullies have moved away and nobody does drugs in the alley behind the building and all the graffiti has been sandblasted and it’s all just as nice and innocent as you could hope for. My brain, however, has colored it a different way, and it seems that you can’t erase those colors, the ones in your head and in your heart; all you can do is wait for them to fade enough to use another color.

I went down my old street—Liberty Street. It’s one street over and parallel to Beecher, and it’s a dead end too; but unlike Beecher it dead-ends into a meadow. If you came up to me on the street and said that word, meadow, this one is the one I see. It was kind of neat, being able to walk out your front door and turn left and be in a meadow, even if it did flood when it rained.

My house was the last one on the left. Unlike a few others on Liberty, mine is still standing. Next door to my house used to be a little white house. An elderly couple, the Ziekerts, lived there. She was very nice and used to bake my brother and I cookies, but he was a total crabass. He died when I was ten or so, and from then on I mowed her lawn in the summertime. Strangely, and another example of the weird way Winfield lays concrete, the Ziekerts’ house was the only house on our street to have a sidewalk. Mine didn’t, and the house on the other side of Ziekerts’, the Wold’s, didn’t. What this meant is that the sidewalk started and ended in Ziekerts’ tiny yard, a three-inch-high cliff of concrete on either side. I learned the hard way that you cannot drive a lawn tractor with the blades turning over this cliff, or you will bend the holy fuck out of the blades on the sharp corner where the right angle of the sidewalk gives way to grass. The sidewalk is still there, though the house is only a ghost of a memory, and three of the corners are still sharp. One is nicely rounded.

Mr. Ziekert put a rock on either side of his driveway. One was pretty big; the other was fairly smooth, and over time, sank just deep enough into the ground to become a fairly decent jump for a kid on a BMX bike. It became for me a daily tradition on the way to school; I’d jump the rock and vault off the end of the sidewalk. When Mr. Ziekert was alive, he’d cuss me out whenever he saw me doing this. I’d give him the finger and keep right on pedaling. The Ziekerts are gone and their house is gone, but the rock, like the sidewalk, is still there.

I tried jumping it today on my bike, but it wasn’t the same, somehow. And anyway I went a lot farther into the Wold’s lawn than the last time I tried it twenty years ago. I don’t remember leaving tire tracks that frickin’ deep, either.

Liberty Street intersects with Church Street in a T. Church Street is aptly named, because at the intersection of Liberty and Church there is a church. Two of them, actually, but they both belong to the Parish of St. John the Baptist; the new church, built in 1983, in all its angular new-Catholic newishness; and the old one, built in 1906, and as gothic and glorious as you could wish for. I watched the new one being built, and on a dare I ran a lap around its inside perimeter after climbing through a window, only to find when I climbed back out that my asshole friends had absconded with my bicycle. But when you say the word church, it is the old one I see, with its gothic stained glass windows and its steeple complete with a cross that, up until about five years ago, had a pronounced lean.

I went inside and sat down near the back. I know this church like the back of my own hand, though it has been over fifteen years since I’ve sat foot in it. I know each creaky board, and I know that the sacristy on one side of the altar and the altar boys’ prep room on the other side are linked by a creepy tunnel that runs behind the altar, where the linoleum is peeling off the floor in big chunks. I know that the stairway to the balcony is blocked by a gate, but the gate is rarely locked, and even if it is, it’s easy to tickle. I know that the old pipe organ in the balcony, directly underneath the steeple, still works great, and I know where the power switch is, and when you flip it, the blowers that provide the air turn on with a lovely whoosh. I know these things, but I had forgotten them all until five seconds before, when I walked in.

I’m sorry the picture is so crappy; I wish it had turned out better, because it’s really the inspiration behind this whole blog. What you see is what I see from the very rearmost pew in the right rear of the church. When they built this guy in the early 1900’s, they did not know the meaning of the word restraint, and I could not be happier for it. The picture doesn’t show all the neat little details, but if you look in the area above the altar, you’ll see what I wanted to show you. Just above the altar, the wonderful vaulted ceiling is painted a deep blue. It is emblazoned with gold stars, and at the very back, two seraphim are doing homage to the Lamb. I didn’t show you this to throw my faith in your face. I showed it to you because, in my head, this ceiling is what I see when I hear the word splendor. That word is one of my favorite words, because of the image it paints.

A collaborative post...

2005-07-18T09:47:00.000-07:00

Holy leaping Christ, there I am! How did this happen? Where did this come from? How do I get this off my Blog, for the love of Christ himself!

Very seldom do I get the chance to drink booze that comes from a glass bottle.
Truly a rare, yet nonetheless appreciated luxury. Hand in hand with such a gift is the fact that it's after 1:00 in the morning, yet the atmosphere is redolent of somewhere more like the deep south than the Rust Belt. As I speak, it is still 80 degrees, not a cloud in the sky, the stars are more than visible despite the brightly lit front porch and my bike is busily puking oil onto the sidewalk.

Where did this oil-puking son-of-a-bitch come from and how the hell did it get on my lawn! It may have something to do with the tall skinny guy passed out in my lilac bushes. Heads will roll, I tell you! This will not go unnoticed!

The evening is inspirational, the gin and tonic is flowing freely and there are still 12 cigarettes left in the pack I purchased not two hours ago. Ah, summertime.
Yet, at this point I am praying for snow for I am a fat man, nonetheless, and the heat wears me down like an oil-less motor and soon I will seize in hopes the right lubrication finds me and restores me to the proper specifications. What those proper specifications are, I haven't a clue, only it's pretty damn far from this point in time. Althought, I get the true feeling one more of these strange concoctions -- a FINE TASTING gin and tonic -- will give me all the lubrication I could ever possibly want to make it through the night. It makes me wish I were one of the rich and fabuluous, like a private school teacher, so I could, myself, buy gin in a glass bottle, instead of the cheap stuff that comes in plastic with a handle and scrambles the brain like a needless egg on a summer sidewalk. Do I need help? Damn right! The keyboard and screen are out of focus.

I've spoken at length about the unforeseen virtues of the camera phone. Now is the time, I suspect, to explore at length these virtues. Is it possible to catch the bright blue glow of a righteous fart on such a device? Just how detailed would a hairy ball-sack appear at such a low resolution? Does the fact that I've ingested four extremely strong gin-and-tonics preclude my ablility to ride a wheelie for three city blocks? Would the camera phone be capable of recording such shenanigans? Should we be thanking the Great Magnet for the luxury of contemplating such minutiae? And what would the cops think? One must consider that there is a retired cop--an extremely cool retired cop, true, but a cop nonetheless--living next door. Is it worth the gamble? The gin and tonics, in a collective chorus, say yes.

Did I say extrememly strong? Holy Christ, it must have been a moment of weakness. In fact, this is all a joke. I've been chugging water as a science project, but making myself think they were extremely strong gin and tonics. You must have seen straight through my sadistic plot, truely believing that a couple stiff drinks would send more over the bow, painting a picture of drunken debauchery and lunacy in the moment. BUT OH NO! It's just an act. In fact, I am all put together, never more solid, and thinking pleasant thoughts of heaven as I race merrily toward the morning, wishing upon another sunrise, never cursing its sadistic brightness. That would not be me. That's not my style. I welcome change, a new beginning, hence I am enjoying this mystery drink with cubed ice instead of cracked. It's risks like that I must take to appreciate the knowledge I have gained in such a tumultuous life and am that much further along because of it. However, let's not mention this is not mere tobacco in my pipe. I think this experiment may be askew a bit, but I say, "Fuck it," roll on and let's see if this locomotive jumps the tracks.

With this in mind, where will this rambling, screeching torpedo take us? Contemplating my Bjarne briar pipe, at present wafting the sweet aroma of Georgian Creme tobacco over the railing of my front porch, I wonder if a similar effect could be garnered from harvesting leaves from the oak tree in my front yard, pulverizing them to a fine moist pulp in the mortar and pestle and smoking them. Would I derive as much pleasure from such an act as I would from moseying on down to the Bull and Bear, an illustrious tobacconist where my buddy Charlie (the aforementioned retired police officer) now has gainful employ, and sashaying on out through the door with a fresh pouch of China Black? How about if had my buddy fire up my Oldsmobile and rev the engine until the limiter kicks in while I crouch behind it and snork up the exhaust fumes like a junkie? Where would that take us? What's the score here? What's next? Is it running naked through the streets of St. Charles while screaming like a fiend? Is it jumping into the car and trekking south to Tiajuana? Is it blasting through the border into Canada, loading up a trunkful of Prilosec and hauling ass back to the states with visions of vast profits coursing through the cerebral cortex? Is it another gin and tonic? I think the lattermost sounds most appealing, as it requires the least effort. Well, after waxing vengeful upon the spider who bestowed upon my neck this boil which appears, in profile, to strongly resemble Ethel Murman.

As of yet, I could not quite grasp exactly the one who my boil best resembled, but Ethel Murman, I never would have guessed. She was a friend of mine once, before her tragic end. She is the one who taught me that a moth who lands in an outlandishly strong drink in the middle of the night will learn a hard lesson and rest a decaying afterlife on the freshly painted boards of a front porch in the midst of suburbia. I really wish I could have saved the poor bastard but no matter how much I screamed and yelled, the idiot dove in, no idea the grave danger he was entering. We've all been there, thinking we know best, and walked away wishing we still knew less than we do at the moment. And yes, crushed leaves from a mightly oak delivers one helluva buzz, one so strong I wish I could keep it a secret and sell it to all the high school kids. I could be a millionaire, if it were not for my conscious which constantly screams, "One day all the world will know how fat and stupid you truly are, and that your boobs are bigger than most girls at the age of 16." Certainly, my man boobs are something of a bragging right, but are nothing in comparison to jumping into a bottle of tanqueray and swallowing every drop and possessing the true grit, spirit and balls to resurface knowing whole heartily that life will be a complete shit sandwich in a matter of hours. It's something truly amazing, pure joy converting itself into agony the one split moment you aren't watching.

And that, my friends, is the true rub. The rub nub, if you will permit me a small bon mot. As I sit here, on my front porch, smoking my pipe, fighting the gin-spins, cursing the worthless bastard of a moth who decided to commit hara kiri by dive-bombing my drink, I'm perfectly content. What will happen in a few hours? Will five gin-and-tonics preclude my ability to pilot a bellowing, oil burning beast through the darkened streets of suburbia without attracting the attention of the local constabulary? Will I make it home without cracking up? Will I be found in the gutter in Cleveland, lying next to an empty bottle of Four Roses and a strange device resembling a meat thermometer constructed entirely of Styrofoam? What will my parents think? What will my cat think? What will this do to my plans to run for State Representative in 2012? At this time, the only thing to do is piss over the railing and hope my girlfriend doesn't see the spider tracks in the morning.

I keep writing in hopes the deluisions of grandeur land me in the eyes of being cool when I know I will never be cool, I will only be me. I am perfectly OK with that, not fine mind you, since fine would lend an assumption that I was happy with the preclusion, but OK with, because I am OK with me. I could give two shits about you and what you perhaps thought of me since I can not theoritically, practically or just plain come through my cable modem and whip the living shit out of you. So your thoughts are mine and my thoughts are protected by my copyright. Jesus Christ, I sound like a mean drunk and I should probably write that. Since we are being honest with each other, I should lend my voice in saying a bottle and a half of gin leaves you to the point of not only praying that God himself take you in a bolt of lightning but leaves a bottle of Tums as a gift. One may never realize the importance of the words I have spoken just now until that horrible day where you may find yourself sitting on the porch next to me, vowing suicide is better than pain. Of course, I'll try to talk you out of it, but listening your gut implode upon itself, I may just agree with you and let you die. I guess it depends if you are actually the one who brought the glass bottle of gin with or simply pulled it out of my "Secret Reserve Cabinet," and sold it to me "As New." If that were the case, then I feel no guilt letting you know, that your glass was poisend with a horrible excuse for tonic (Liquid Drano) instead of Schwepes. Now you know the dire need for Tums. Let me just say, they are of no help for you, you are dieing a horrible death and only your God can turn this tide. Please, don't puke over the railing in front of me, crawl down to the lilacs on the side of the house, it shall save lives in the long run. Boy, oh boy, I feel like a true, red-blooded alcoholic for I am still conscious and should not be. This can come from only practice and practice does indeed make perfect. And here is proof there actually is a God, for I have run out of ice cubes or else I would be passed out on the lawn too. That would be hard to explain in the morning, mind you, because my pants fit very loose and probably would be around my ankles before I fell unconcious. And the cops around here have very little sympathy and sense of humor. Therefore, I preach, I am headed off to bed, in hopes the world is not spinning in reverse or I shall be perched over the railing again. And at that point, God, I take back everything I said that you may have interpreted as blasphemus, wrong and hedonistic, for you and your dad knows I am neither of the three. Peace be with you and I really hope I speak with you tomorrow. God help me. And please -- to the painters tomorrow, if the garbage can smells funny, I had little confidence knowing I could make it up the stairs to the bathroom. Sorry, again, and your paycheck will be duely noted. I feel sick and embarrassed, and to bed I go, dreaming of death before morning. Kisses and crosses, I should probably go to mass tomorrow, even if it is Monday. I only hope I do not erupt in flames. Sincerely -- uh, I forgot who the fuck I am. Shit! I may be in trouble tomorrow.

On killing time in stupid ways...

2005-07-17T04:18:00.000-07:00

Well, it's been a little while since the last blog, and for that I apologize. Thanks to all of you who said something; that means a lot. To be truthful, I have a few brewing, but this one just kinda fell out of me.

I may have mentioned in a previous blog that I spend a lot of my free time on the bike. I don't know if you'd call me a biker; I mean, I ride a lot, and I even have a black leather jacket with all the zippers and stuff, but that's about where the similarities between myself and the typical biker stereotype end. I don't own a Harley, and I rarely ride in large groups, like the biker gangs you sometimes see riding in one large mass on sunny days. As a matter of fact, I ride alone most of the time. I don't hang out in bars or roadhouses with names like "Smokey's" or "The Broken Oar," and you will never see my bike lined up next to the rolling jukeboxes parked outside of Jimmy's in Naperville, big shiny trophy bikes whose owners spend three hours polishing for each hour of riding. No thanks.

Anyway, so my ass spends a lot of time on the bike. Where do I go, you ask? What do I do when I get there? A lot of times, there's no "there"--I'm just motorin'. I thought, if you're interested, that I would share some of the things I do and see when I'm out being the Great American Highway's guest.

For example, this evening I spent some time at my buddy Adam's house, enjoying a beer or two and kicking the absolute shit out of each other in Street Fighter. Simply fabulous evening, weatherwise, so I rode the Moose, and when we parted ways at 1:30 in the morning, I was still ready for some action. What is there to do around here at so late (or early) an hour?

Go trolling for Resurrection Mary? Why, isn't that funny; I had the exact same idea myself. Courtesy of that most wonderful invention, the camera phone, here are some action shots.

It takes a while to get all the way out to Justice, where Resurrection Cemetery is located. I took the expressway. It's kinda deserted at 2:00 in the morning, but...

...here's a random poor schmuck clipping along with me at 70 mph.

Here's someone else I passed. The speed limit is 65 mph, but not everybody goes that fast.

Hey, you have to find ways to keep yourself occupied when there's no radio to listen to. Here's what my speedometer looks like at at 30 mph.

Here's what my speedometer looks like at 100 mph.

Here's what my front wheel looks like at 30 mph.

Here's what my front wheel looks like at 100 mph.

Here's what my back wheel looks like at 30 mph. Yeah, by this time I'm a little bored. Riding on the expressway is kinda monotonous. I do not have a picture of my back wheel at 100 mph, though; that would be dangerous.

I won't bore you with the story of Resurrection Mary here; it's the quintessential Vanishing Hitchhiker tale. Mary is commonly seen on Archer Avenue, also known as Route 171, anywhere on the road between the Willowbrook Ballroom and Resurrection Cemetery. To get to that stretch of the road, you have to go through Archer Woods.

It can get kinda scary, not only because ghosts have been seen along this road, but also because deer populate the area in huge numbers. Deer are beautiful creatures, and I am content to watch them for hours. On this trek, a doe strolled out in front of me, totally cool, ears flicking leisurely, just a-moseying. I pulled off on the side of the road, not only because I was afraid of hitting her (Think about it--hit a deer in a car and it's a visit to the body shop; hit one on a bike and you're lucky if you're only in the hospital for a couple of days), but also because I just wanted to watch. She stood there in my headlight for a while, head up and ears pricked, legs so graceful and thin you'd think you could snap them between your fingers, eyes deep and liquid, reflecting my high beam in a shimmer of gold. She didn't spook until I shut off the engine, and then she was gone like a cool breeze.

Along Archer Avenue, right before the woods get really heavy, you see this. This is the gateway to Saint James Sag church, and it's known not only for its construction out of Lemont Limestone, the yellow brick that can also be seen in the Water Tower downtown, as well as Joliet Penitentiary of Blues Brothers fame, but also for the fact that a passing state trooper once looked inside the gates one night and saw seven robed, hooded monks standing (?) on the tarmac. At his shout, all seven floated away, much faster than a man can run. I take a peek in there every once in a while, but I've never seen any monks.

Riding a bike is usually great, but it has its drawbacks.

Traffic signals don't often recognize motorcycles, so you're often stuck at an intersection waiting for the light to change until someone in a car pulls up next to you. I waited at this intersection for about five minutes. Then a nice gentleman pulled up in a Toyota Highlander, and the light changed after about 15 seconds. Thanks, mister.

I got to Resurrection Cemetery without seeing anything, but weird things sometimes happens when you get close to the cemetery. Sometimes the lights in the mausoleum, known has having the world record of the largest area of stained glass of any building in the world, will flash on and off as you drive by. Trust me; with that much stained glass, you notice when the lights flash on and off at night. I didn't see any of that, but as I rode by I heard my cell phone, still in my pocket, make the noise it makes when you take a picture. Odd because a) it's not a loud noise and the bike is obnoxiously so, so there should be no way I should have heard it, and b) the camera function, or any other function, does not work when the phone is closed. At the next stoplight I checked and found it had taken two pictures on its own. They were just black, though, as you'd expect of a camera taking pictures inside your pocket.

Anyway, I don't always do weird macabre shit when I'm riding.

This is right up around Minocqua. Wisconsin. Beautiful black spruces, generally glorious countryside, but I'm here to tell you, do NOT ride a motorcycle way up north where you have no idea where you're going and get caught out after dark. Motorcycles have no map lights, so when you have to reference your directions, you have to get off and hold your little cheat sheet in front of the headlight so you can read it. Decidedly inconvenient.

On the rare occasion (too rare) I go riding with my brother and/or my dad. These were taken when creeping the old neighborhood in Winfield, Illinois.

Here's my dad on his Nighthawk. Yes, the look on his face accurately depicts the question he asked me at the next stoplight--"What the fuck are you doing?"

This is my brother Michael at a stoplight on his sweet 1975 Honda CB750 Super Sport. Okay, not really an action shot, but that thing is too damn fast to catch on film.

Can you believe that I used to think camera phones were stupid?

The ballad of Little Mama...

2005-06-30T23:08:00.000-07:00

So I had this minivan, right? I bought it when I was 25. And right about now, you’re asking yourself something like, “Why in God’s name would a young red-blooded American male, still full of piss and vinegar and the stuff that makes red-blooded American males act the way they do, buy a minivan by choice?” Well, if you’ve read my previous blogs, you know that at one time I had an Acura Integra. I bought it with well over 140,000 miles, but its usefulness, nor its ability to wreak havoc at the hands of a well-trained (or stupid—sometimes it’s disturbing how fine the line can be) pilot were not quite exhausted. I got the tired old thing up to over 100 miles per hour before I was tagged by a state trooper. I’m still paying for that one, in that, to cover the fine, I had to work for UPS during the Christmas season, and the knees were just never the same. (Hey, you try jumping down from a rolling UPS truck carrying a computer [still in the shipping crate, natch] repeatedly for thirteen hours a day for two months and then tell me how you feel, and we’ll talk.)

Anyway, in order to reduce the chances that anything like that would happen again (I am my father’s son, after all, and driving like a maniac is in my genes), I wanted something slow. A Volvo wagon? A VW microbus? I found this lovely GMC Safari in Schaumburg. It was owned for its entire 130,000-mile life by the same family. They had all the maintenance records. Hell, they still had the original window sticker. Not a spot of rust on it. The interior was perfect, the A/C ice cold, brand new tires. Also, it was very, very slow. Plus, as a musician, I relished the thought of any vehicle that could haul any and every piece of musical gear I own, all at once. I took it home.

I am of the opinion, however misguided, that complex inanimate objects, like computers, or motorcycles, or bass guitars, or, in particular, cars, have a sentience of their own, and that, if they like you, they’ll do nice things for you, like get you home even when the needle has read below the ‘E’ for the past 50 miles and you have 25 cents in your pocket. Or, you forget to change the oil for, oh, say, 15,000 miles and they just keep right on truckin’. I’ve had cars like that. The minivan—whose name was, as mentioned in a previous post, Little Mama—was not like that. I think it was pissed at me for removing it from its loving household and introducing it to the world of a piss-poor grad student who was moonlighting as a bassist. Let me tell you how I arrived at this conclusion.

On a vehicle with over 100,000 miles, you expect stuff to break. Fine. So when the exhaust system—complete and entire from the headers back—decided to fall off after two months of ownership, I just shrugged and handed over my credit card. Same with the alternator the next month. Same with the water pump the next month. Oh, and when I hit that rock and slashed the sidewall of one of my still-fairly new front tires. Ah, but this time, when I took it to the shop and requested that they order an identical replacement, was I surprised when they told me that that particular tire was no longer available? Yes, I was. Oh well—so it’s got three ballsy raised-white-letter tires and one whitewall. These things happen.

All righty, but after two years, three alternators, two water pumps, two power steering pumps, an A/C compressor, an exhaust system, and so on and so forth, things started to get old. And this is nothing, when compared to the weird shit that would break on the thing. For example---

I pull up at my friend Ed’s house. He’s on the driveway, sweeping or something, and as I get out, he says, “Hey, do you know that you’re leaking antifreeze?” I look between Little Mama’s front wheels, and sure enough, there’s a bright green puddle forming there. “Well, dammit,” I say, and open the hood. Not only is it leaking from the water pump that was at that time two months old, but the power steering pump is sitting at a crazy angle. I wait long enough for the engine to cool down so I can add coolant, then I drive my bad self back to DeKalb and make a detour for the shop that was thankfully within walking distance to my apartment.

I get a call the next day. It’s John, the mechanic. We’re well on first-name terms by this time. He asks an ominous question—“How much do you like this van?” Well, by this time, I fucking hate it, but do I have enough jack to by another car? Not even close. I do, however, have the ever-useful credit card, which by this time is dangerously close to the limit.

What has happened is that the power steering pump bracket has broken. Don’t ask me how something like this happens—I have no idea either. What’s even cooler, according to John, is that, instead of one bracket for each underhood accessory—alternator, compressor, power steering pump, what have you--GM decided to use one big horseshoe-shaped bracket on the front of the engine to which all accessories are attached. The bottom line: to replace this bracket, all the accessories have to come off, including the A/C compressor, which will have to be recharged with freon (very expensive, all by itself.)

Well, with no other option, and with my credit card whimpering softly to itself in the tight confines of my wallet, I tell John to go ahead. The van runs great for about another two months, when a mysterious short pops up that causes the taillight and instrument panel light fuses to blow as soon as I turn on the headlights. This problem takes a little longer to sort out. It turns out to be a short in one of the front turn signals. The boys at the shop are mystified—they’ve never seen this before.

Now things get weird. I have owned this thing for a little over a year at this point. By this time I have graduated and have gainful employ. I get home from work, and I am still living with my folks. I pull into my parents’ driveway, where my dad is standing and having a smoke. I get out, briefcase in hand. My dad gestures with his cigarette.

“D’you know that your car is smoking?” I turn around, and, sure enough, steam is wafting out through the grille and from under the hood. I open the hood and find that the entire engine compartment is covered in a fine spray of antifreeze. The radiator—this is the second one—is blown. I curse and slam the hood.

This time I take it to a mechanic my father has recommended. I get the van back on a Thursday. On Saturday, my dad and I drive Little Mama to Home Depot. It’s running fine, so I’m all smiley. When we get to the parking lot, I attempt to shut the engine off, and the fucking key won’t turn. I physically cannot shut off the ignition. My father tries as well. With no other option, we leave the engine running. I wait in the car while my dad gets what he needs from Home Depot. He gets back in and says, “Well, let’s just drive on back home. We’ll open the hood and figure out a way to shut the engine off from there.”

I swear I am not making this up: When I get back to my folks’ house, I pull the hood release lever. It comes off in my hand—the whole hood release cable just pulls out of the dashboard. The engine is, of course, still running, and now there is no way to open the hood. My father and I stand on the driveway smoking cigarettes and scratching our heads until the van runs out of gas two hours later.

Well, of course I take it back to the shop and go postal. I can’t conceive of how they could have screwed up the ignition while replacing the radiator. Neither can they, but they graciously replace the ignition cylinder and fix the hood release free of charge.

Oh, and did I mention that, when I bought the thing, it had not a single speck of rust on it? I believe I did. After about a year, the rocker panels (the parts of the body underneath the doors) had rusted out completely, leaving interestingly jagged remnants of bodywork sticking out. Numerous friends cut their legs on these. A girl I am taking out tears a vicious run in her pantyhose on one, and refuses to go out with me again.

Okay, so, now it’s March of 2001. In April, I will have owned Little Mama for two years, and officially I hate it. I have called it every conceivable name; I have spat on it, kicked it, and, if you look at the three remaining tires with their oh-so-ballsy raised white letters, you will see that the outermost half of each letter, the half closest to the tread part of the tire, is worn completely off. This is from me, in my impotent rage, throwing the van into corners so viciously that the tires just fold under and the van is literally running on the sidewalls. I am super-pissed, and my credit card had long since been maxed out. But, the thing is rear-wheel-drive, and there’s still snow on the ground, so there’s still some tail-out fun to be had. Now, before you condemn me for beating on the thing, and say to yourself, “Well, Jesus, Jay, that’s why the thing broke all the time—you beat the shit out of it.” Keep in mind that a) it’s a minivan, and you just can’t do the things in it that would have gotten me in trouble in the Acura—e.g., the steering is alarmingly loose at speed, so I keep it under 75 mph on the expressway; b) it gets really shitty gas mileage, so I can’t afford to drive it like a nut; and c) I use it pretty much to commute to work in rush hour traffic, so there’s little opportunity to get up to shenanigans. Besides, anyone who’s ever driven in snow will tell you that you don’t have to be stupid to lose control; it just happens. The fun part is doing deliberately.

So here I am in a snow-encrusted parking lot, turning hot laps with the ass end somewhere in the next county (which I have to admit, you don’t often see done in a minivan. I wonder what that looks like from the outside). Anyway, halfway through a beautiful left-hand sweeper, the power steering pump quits. Now, with no power assist, and with the van still well-sideways at well over forty miles per hour, I go careening gaily off course and into a large snowdrift. It takes a large tow truck to extricate Little Mama thence.

I think to myself, Well, shit—every time I fix something, something else breaks, so I’ll just drive it like this, with no power steering. Have you ever tried to drive a car that normally has power-assisted steering without it? It’s not easy. Not impossible, but it certainly makes driving a chore, and what used to be three-point turns become 25-point turns. I make it for two months before my father catches me driving the thing in this state, and offers me this alternative: he will pay to get the van fixed if I will agree to sell it. My forearms aching in acknowledgement, I nod wearily.

So now it’s May, and the sky is blue and the grass is growing nicely and birds are singing and little furry bunnies are hopping around and I have listed Little Mama for sale in the paper. I list all the options it has, and some of the newer bits that have been installed. I omit from the description the fact that the fucking thing has a curse. About a week after I place the ad, a nice little Hispanic family shows up. Young guy, about my age, mid-20’s, with a pretty young wife, and a six-month-old baby in the back seat of a beat-up Nissan Sentra—red in color, with funny white fender flares. This will be important later.

The guy—his name is Juan—takes it for a spin. He offers me $1300 on a van I paid almost $4000 just over two years before. I agree.

I run into the house, saying, “He’ll take it.”

My father’s eyes narrow into slits. “Did you print up a bill of sale?”

I pshaw with dismissal. “Naw—they seem nice. What do I need a bill of sale for?”

“Just do it,” says my dad, the sly old fox. “You never know; they might be drug dealers.”

“They’re not drug dealers, Dad, for Christ’s sake,” I say, but I acquiesce to his wishes. I print up two copies. I sign both, and Juan signs both. We each get a copy, and Juan drives off in Little Mama, his wife and child following in their red Sentra. I am sure that is the last I will ever see of Little Mama, and I dance a little jig on the driveway in celebration.

July, 2001, and I am tooling along in my Honda Accord station wagon—Magoo—on the return side of a trip to visit a buddy at Southern Illinois University, when my cell phone goes off.

“Jay Olaszek.”

“Yes, Mister Olaszek, this it Detective Brian McHugh with the Illinois State Police, narcotics division.” My testicles shrink noticeably.

“Y-Y-Yes...er, how can I help you, Detective?”

“Are you the owner of a red 1988 GMC Safari?”

I swallow. Hard. Something in my throat goes click.

“Well, I was, but I sold it. Two months ago.”

“Well,” says Detective McHugh, “The serial number comes back as belonging to you.”

“Really? Well, like I said, I sold it.”

“Uh-huh. Can you prove that?”

“Well,” I say, with an inward sigh of relief, “yeah. I mean, I have a bill of sale, and, like, stuff.” Thanks, Dad.

“That’s good,” says the detective, “because if you can’t prove that you no longer own this vehicle, you have some explaining to do.”

“Why, whatever is the problem, officer?”

Detective McHugh clears his throat. “This past weekend, we recovered your van with over 66 million dollars of cocaine in the back.”

I pull over. I talk with Detective McHugh a while longer, and agree to come down to the station the next day with my bill of sale. When I walk in the door, my parents are sitting at the kitchen table. My father looks calm as a cucumber; my mother less so. She looks up at me as I walk in; has she been crying? It’s hard to say, but I’m gonna bet yes.

“Did you know the State Police are looking for you?”

I explain the situation as best I can. My mother goes to bed; my father and I have a beer and discuss some things. We agree that it’s best to wait until we see what happens at the police station the next day before we start talking with the lawyer.

I get up bright and early and head on down the State Police headquarters, Division 5, in Joliet, right next to the Illinois State Penitentiary. I have my bill of sale cradled gently but firmly in both hands. Detective McHugh greets me cordially, and I show him my bill of sale. It turns out that the gentleman who bought the van, Juan something-or-other, has been wanted along with his twin brother for almost ten years for his involvement with drug trafficking. He has not used an alias to sign the bill of sale. I identify him in a mug shot. It turns out that the street value of the cocaine recovered from my van is to date the largest recorded in Will County history. Remember, Joliet is in Will County. The police caught him and his brother loading bags of cocaine from the trunk of a red Nissan Sentra (with funny white fender flares) into my van. There was another five or so million in the trunk of the Nissan.

You can read about this in the papers, if you have some time to kill. Just go to any library that has copies of Will County newspapers on microfiche and hunt around in July of 2001. It was on the front page of one or two of them, if memory serves.

As an epilogue, Detective McHugh asks me to accompany him out to the impound yard to positively identify the van. There it is, in all its rusted, three raised-white-letter-tires-and-one-whitewall glory. It still has the Christian fish bumper emblem, and the “Saint Francis Spartans” sticker is still in the back window.

Cursed? You tell me.

On having a shitty day...

2005-06-21T23:32:00.000-07:00

Today was shitty. We've all had them, I guess, and in my case they're few [knock wood]--at least, when they're due to things that don't occur only inside my head. But, rare as they are, today was a truly shitty day.

At work, there's been no rain for going on a month. No rain, and the grass doesn't grow. No grow, no mow, so things have been slow. We've been picking up work here and there landscaping, and today we began a project that looks to be truly monumental, even more so now that a) the 10-day forecast shows an outlook of temperatures climbing into the giddy 90's without a hint of rain in sight and b) we're inexplicably down a man.

Tonight, I had a dinner engagement with a colleague at St. Francis, the purpose of which was to read the anonymous reviews we asked our students to complete for us at the very end of the year. I simply passed out little slips of white paper to my students and had them drop them into a slot in a well-duct-taped box on my desk. My colleague--Mary Feltes--did the same. I read hers to her and she read mine to me. To be blunt, mine were brutal. I deserved them, I guess--everything my students said about me rang pretty true. If you're one of my students and you're reading this, thank you for your candor, and I will try to do better in the future.

To cap things off, I got home at around 11:00 p.m. and decided to walk up to the local Tuffy Auto Service Center to collect the Dragon. You all know the Dragon by now if you've read my previous ramblings. She's still in pretty good shape--not great--but lately it had developed this heavy vibration at speeds over 30 mph. Tuffy said it was universal joints. I could have done it myself, I guess, and thank Tuffy for the diagnosis, but we all know my success rate with things mechanical of late, so the job, I felt, is better left to professionals.

After a good long walk on a beautiful early summer evening, during which I had a lot of time to think about the whole teaching thing, I got to the parking lot at Tuffy and I saw this:

Cool, huh? Well, I ain't walking home, so nothing left to do but change the fucker.

Have you ever used the tire-changing gear on a car of early vintage? More likely than not, the answer is no, and the reason is probably that no one does it that way anymore because it's freaking insanely dangerous. Here's what the jack looks like:

Keep in mind that the Dragon weighs almost 5,000 pounds. I gotta use this thing? What's particularly cool is that, when the car's whole ass is off the ground, and you're pulling on the wheel to take it off (or pushing on the spare to put it on) the whole thing wobbles alarmingly. Could you imagine using this on a gravel shoulder in the rain? No doubt our parents or grandparents had to do this at least once, and I appreciate their sacrifices all the more now.

Once the Dragon's large green ass is safely back on terra firma, I notice that the spare is not quite inflated to the proper operating pressure, so it's off to the gas station to top it off. After this is done, I take the thing out on the expressway. Thank God, at least the boys at Tuffy did something right--the old beast is back to her old ways of long, low and smooth, eating up the asphalt and sucking down a gallon of gas every 10 miles or so.

Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

On junkyards...

2005-06-20T06:13:00.000-07:00

This is another oldie that I decided to take out of the closet. I hope it will serve in good stead of a truly original post; in any event, it kinda works as a prolouge to the story of Little Mama, my 1988 GMC Safari that was by far the most cursed thing I ever had the displeasure to know. This tale was written during Little Mama's short but all-too-long tenure with me.

Junkyards

The problem was the stereo. I know old GM minivans aren’t supposed to come factory-equipped with bumpin’ systems that piss off the neighbors, but one expects at least the basics. I like to have the fader set so that most of the sound is emanating from the back speakers. It balances things nicely, and anyway, the driver sits really close to the front speakers in my car, so unless they’re turned down quite a bit, one really doesn’t hear the back speakers at all. Little Mama (for the unwashed, Little Mama is my gas-guzzlin’ oil-burnin’ 1988 GMC Safari, replete with rusty rocker panels, a wheezy 4.3 litre non-Vortec V-6, and a bastion of mid-80’s GM idiosyncrasies such as a shitty stereo, among many others) was equipped with a stock GM stereo that, whenever a sizable bump was hit, would completely shut off the back speakers, thereby routing the entire signal to the front. Sometimes, just to be endearing, it would do this of its own accord, bump or no bump, as a result scaring the shit out of the unfortunate pilot, which, 99.3% of the time, happened to be me. After a year and a half’s worth of tepid ownership, I still had not gotten used to it. Also, I was becoming more than a little irate.

I woke up one morning this past September with a newfound resolve to ameliorate the issue. I ate a quick breakfast and drove to Best Buy with no intention of leaving until a suitable replacement had been selected. However, once having gained the threshold of said establishment’s not-insubstantial “Kar Audio” section, I quickly came to the realization that there was no fucking way I was gonna walk out of there with a decent sound-generating device under my arm on a teacher’s salary.

I drove back to my house and got some tools. It was time to head to the junkyard.

“Now, wait just one fuckin’ minute,” you, O Honored Reader, are no doubt saying to yourself. “Who goes to the junkyard to get a car stereo? Are you out of your freakin’ skull?” Well, if you’re broke, like me, and you just barely know the difference between a flathead and a Phillips screwdriver, like me, you pays yer ticket and you takes yer chances.

And, if you think about it, it makes some sense for someone on a budget, especially when one owns a vehicle manufractured by the General. From 1983 to 1994, most GM cars used the exact same head unit for their stereos. Considering that there are six makes to choose from—Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, Cadillac, and GMC—that makes the chances of finding a replacement all the easier. One would think, anyway. And so off I went, optimistic of my chances.

Going to the junkyard is, for me, always a happy, enjoyable experience. I stand a good chance of fixing a problem that is annoying enough to warrant me doing something about it, and usually on the cheap. Also, since the weather must needs be decent for such a sojourn, lest the prospector find him- or herself, not to mention the countless carcasses from which he or she hopes to extract momentary salvation, mired in three feet of viscous brown mud. Thus trips to the boneyard are always sunny, lighthearted affairs, when the weather is nice. Stephen King said that summer means different things to everyone. For me, summer conjures up images of rotting metal carcasses gleaming rustily in a heartless midday Midwestern sun, with me picking my way slowly and dreamily among the ruins.

I arrived at “Hub Auto Wreckers” at about 11:00 that day. Pulling into the parking lot at this particular boneyard, one is met with a setting that is probably similar to any Midwestern auto salvage facility. There’s always three or four cars already there, regardless of the hour. I never thought of boneyards as having peak hours. Nor they do, from what I have observed, because there’s always the same number of cars—badly beaten, misshapen wrecks for the most part, upon which Bondo has been liberally spread. They’re usually old American iron, from the 70’s and 80’s, though often you see a clapped out Nissan Sentra or Toyota Tercel, its muffler shot, CV joints rattly, and body pock-marked with calderas of rust. It’s usually one of these latter that I see abandoned at the back corner of the lot, too nice to scrap, but just worthless enough to preclude the owner investing any more time or knuckle-skin on the thing.

Entering this boneyard requires one to divert through a sagging box trailer converted to an office. Raised on blocks, one must climb a flight of six rickety wooden steps, open the door and cross eight feet to the other side, and climb back down another flight. On one’s trip through the trailer’s bowels, one is unfailingly accosted by the proprietor of the establishment, a fine Southern gentleman whom I once pissed off greatly by rendering effectively worthless a theretofore perfectly serviceable rear end to a 1976 Dodge B100 Tradesman—but I digress, and anyway, that’s a story all by itself. He dealt with me in the same laconic manner he had used since that day when I was but a wee shaver of 25 waving a 7/16 offset box wrench.

I told him what it was that I sought. I did not bring in the offending unit from my own vehicle. GMs are, as I have said, nearly ubiquitous in boneyards, and their radios accordingly as populous. He knew right away what I was talking about.

“Shit, boy, findyaself any GM car and start pokin’ away at her,” he replied. He turned and gestured to an aerial photograph of the establishment tacked to the bowed and peeling Formica paneling on the wall. “Pontiac’s here (front-drive’s here and rear’s here); Olds right about here, Chevy’s here, here, here, and here; Buick’s here, GMC’s over there, and Caddy’s somewhere over in that corner.”

I deigned to take my tools with me. I thought I’d prospect for about 15 or so minutes; then, when I found a suitable donor, I’d assess the situation, then go back and obtain the necessary tools. What I thought would be a 15-minute search, however, turned out to take quite a bit longer, because it seems that the first thing to get removed from a donor as soon as it comes in on the wrecker is the stereo. It took me a good hour to find the first suitable transplant candidate.

I started, of course, in the Cadillac section. The logic was that Caddies are GM too, but their stereos surely must be better than the standard fare on lesser General issue. (I have since learned that, for the most part, this is not the case.) I made my way slowly to the Cadillac section, passing through Ford front-drive (Escorts, Tauri, Sables, etc.) and Buick on the way.

Cadillacs are a strange brew. Even in a boneyard, there’s something different about them. They don’t even seem to rust in the same way as lesser marques. I wouldn’t say they have a regal quality about them, but there’s a sophistication, a sleekness, a worldliness that is more Las Vegas than continental, but imposing all the same. Here’s a white ’82 Biarritz. White leather interior, burgundy trim. Oil-caked crater where the engine used to be. I can see this car idling out in front of the Sands Resort out in Vegas, trunklid open as the valet puts in the suitcases. Here comes the owner, now, bulling her way across the lobby like a ship with every scrap of canvas to the wind. She is a stately woman, even in her leisure suit, a shade of green that contrasts nicely with the white of her hair. She flashes a smile whose brilliance is more likely due to Polident than to Crest, and hands the valet a fin as she walks around to the driver’s side. The door, while taking some effort to get in motion, closes with a reassuring thunk. She drops the transmission into DRIVE, hits the gas and is gone, the engine, a big 350, barely breaking a sweat as the Caddy hits 65 on the outbound side of the expressway.

No radio in this one, though. It’s still in good shape, otherwise. Probably what happened is the owner upgraded to a newer model a few years after she (or he; what does my imagination know?) got this one; it got swapped to owners who cared about it less and less as it got older. Maybe the engine finally gave up, and instead of fixing it, the owner just gave up too. The license plate is still affixed to the rear bumper. The sticker shows a year of ’96. Yeah, I’ll bet that was it. It sat for awhile, the owner probably intending the whole time to throw another motor in it, until…well, you know how it is; I guess we just need that space for other things. Boneyard’ll give me fifty bucks for it and tow it for free.

Here’s a black ’76 Fleetwood. Big bash in the driver’s-side rear door. Pretty rusty, and the paint is starting to crack. Still, this car can talk, and what it says is back the fuck off. I could be plenty mean if I wanted to, you bet. It’s too old to have the radio I want, though, and anyway, the entire interior has been gutted. Brightly colored wires spill out from firewall and under the dash. No seats, and the floor is peppered with small flecks of glass, all that remains of the windshield.

There are a lot of Cadillacs here. Here’s a pale-yellow ’87 Seville that was probably used for the sole purpose of going to and from church on Sundays, was sold after the original owner passed, and then brought here after the wreck. There’s a caved-in mess made of the front end, with general contours that would probably fit well around a telephone pole. The hood is crumpled over a snarl of hoses, wiring and cast-iron bits that would be more trouble to get at than would be worth to sell. Here’s a ’91 Eldorado, a burgundy beauty from the A-pillar back. The front end is a blackened, rusty ruin. There is, in my opinion, no better, more efficient, or more effective way to destroy a car than to burn one. There’s Caddies ad nauseum, and here and there an Oldsmobile Toronado or Buick Riviera, which to the uninitiated look similar enough to Cadillacs as to be easily confused. No radios in any of them.

An hour blown, I make my way over towards the Pontiac section. Straight off the bat I find two potential donors—an ’86 Sunbird convertible (red, of course) and a white ’90 Grand Am. I head for the Sunbird first, thinking that a ragtop must needs have a respectable sound system. I am not disappointed. It’s the standard quirky-sized GM faceplate, occupying the same amount of space as a 5  7 index card, but there’s a bonus I’ve never seen in a GM car before. This one has a five-band graphic equalizer, sandwiched between the volume knob and the clock. It probably is just a gimmick, and does little to improve the sound, but it sure looks cool. I head back to Little Mama for my tools.

The route I take back to the parking lot takes me past the minivan section. Out of habit I look for anything resembling the Astro/Safari twins. What I have found to be the case with the GM S-10-based minivans is that there are damn few in the boneyards, and those that are there are mere skeletons, having been thoroughly picked-over by faster scavengers than myself. Here are two, right next to each other. They’re easy to spot from a distance once you get used to it. There’s little left of either, and one has been turned on its side. Its general state of repair says that it was involved in a rollover accident. There’s not a straight body panel on it, and its roof is caved in over the left rear corner. I know that neither carcass will have a stereo, but I look in the overturned one just for the heluvit. It’s pretty bare in there, too. All the seats are gone except the rearmost. The fine brown clay that is the pavement of this place presses up through the holes that used to be windows, and lying on the C-pillar between the rearmost and middle side windows as though it were placed there is a child’s shoe. It is pink where it is not filthy. Sure, it could have simply been tossed there; it doesn’t necessarily belong with the remains of this vehicle. My overactive imagination, however, always so eager to project backwards to what the previous owners were like, and to what happened to them, sails into action. I jump on it with both feet before it gets very far. Stephen King is right. Sometimes having a great imagination is a neat thing, because you can envision whatever you want, whenever you want, in total privacy. But sometimes it turns around and bites the shit out of you with these big sharp teeth, and the wounds bleed for a while.

I reach my own van, and for a little while my imagination pulls against the ropes as I see a running, upright version of the wreck I have just left. Was the little girl sitting at this window just before it happened? Shaddap, you, I think, but not before my brain treats me to one or two especially choice images. Dammit.

I grab my toolbox and head back. I make sure I avert my eyes as I pass the minivan section. On my left is the Ford full-size section, replete with Crown Vics, LTDs, Mercury Grand Marquis and the occasional police interceptor. The police cars are cool to look at, but they’re rarely worth anything by the time I find them because they have popular bits like big engines, big carburetors, big tires, and big alternators that would just about light up your house. The scavengers usually head for these first.

At the Sunbird I decide that I will need only two tools; a 3/8” socket wrench with a 3-inch extension, and the Torx-head driver that fits about 98% of the interior fasteners in any 80’s GM vehicle. If you own a GM vehicle and you plan to work on it yourself, you gotta have one of these. In my car, Torx-head screws of identical size hold on the dashboard, headlight surrounds, taillight bezels, plastic rub-strips on the footwells by the doors, and so on. Six of them keep the dashboard faceplate in place on this specimen. Off they come, and there is the radio, held in by two 3/8” stainless nuts. 30 seconds later and it is mine.

I head on back to the office with my prize. I bring my toolbox in with me; of course the Southern gentleman will want to inspect its innards for any contraband. First, however, must come the money. I set my find on the counter.

“Hmm,” he says, industriously gnawing on the end of a paint-pen. “D’ja get this’un out of a Pontiac?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Lookie here like ya found yaself a l’il added bonus,” he says, jabbing at the equalizer with one horny thumb.

“Yeah,” I say.

“Well, these normally go for forty, but this’ll probably knock the price up a buck or two,” he says, looking at me as if for approval. I think forty is already insane for a radio that came out of a scrapper anyway; the windows in over half those wrecks are gone and this unit has seen untold rainstorms, snow, what have you. Forty’s lunacy; an extra five dollars is a spit in the ocean.

“What if it doesn’t work?” I ask, thinking that if I’m gonna get raped, it’s at least gonna be fair.

“Waal, shit, ya jest come on back in here and we’ll findya anuther’n,” he says, nice and easy-like.

I nod and hand over the wad. He takes it with one hand and writes some arcane hieroglyphs on the unit with the other. Hey, if they mean something to him, great. I place the stereo on the floor and hold up my toolbox for him to inspect. He does so thoroughly, then gives me a nod and a wink. “Ya got too much shit in thar t’fit in anything else,”

“Yeah,” I say, and head for the door.

It’s lunacy to pay forty bucks for a scrapyard radio, let alone forty-five, but it’s even dumber to leave before verifying that it works. I am prepared, and have the dashboard of Little Mama dismantled in no time. The offending unit is removed and the new one installed in five minutes. I turn the key to “ACC” and hit the power button, once again thrilled with the anticipation of fixing something with parts I got from something someone else threw away. It’s a great feeling, but it’s tough to describe. I once fixed the sunroof in my dad’s old ’83 Toyota Supra with a part I got from the junkyard. I paid five bucks for that part, a simple switch for which the dealer wanted eighty. That felt great; I felt like I was getting something back on The Man. That feeling feeds on itself. With these tools and these hands and this brain I can fix anything, and for cheap, too, I thought. The dealers want me to shell out major coin to fix my car for me, or, if I want to fix it myself, to pay exorbitant prices for parts. If it gets too expensive to fix, why, it’s time to buy a new car. But I can keep this old heap running as long as I want, if I don’t mind getting dirty and turning a few wrenches.

Is this some fucked-up metaphor for life? I don’t think so. But it seems that whenever a trip to the junkyard turns out to be successful, I walk out of there feeling like more of a person than when I went in. I feel like I’m in charge, for once. I did it my way, I think. No one can ever screw me again. I don’t have to be submissive, I don’t have to be weak, I don’t have to pander to anyone’s philosophies but my own. But it’s more than that, somehow. I don’t know…it’s like—it’s like--fuck.

Okay. I got it. You know what it’s like? It’s like, okay, here’s this rusted out/smashed up/burned to a crisp wreck. It’s worth nothing to anyone. But here…you see this grease-obscured part? This—what is it—this PCV valve? The dealer wants a hundred and a half for it. I got a hundred and a half like a got a rubber dick. But I can get it off this old heap for fifteen, and fifteen I got. Now I can take my kids to the zoo like I promised.

You see? Almost a square mile of seeming worthlessness. But somewhere in that rough waste there is a part that I could ill afford otherwise, but that allows me to propagate something that means a lot to me. “It’s just a van, Jay; fuckin’ relax.” Well, yeah, it’s just a van, but like all my cars have been, it has been a bed, a home, a hangout, an umbrella, and transportation from Point A to Point B. Point B is usually where the people I love are, and when it isn’t, my car takes me away again, to the next Point B. If I have to get greasy to keep that privilege—fuck that; necessity--—then so be it. It’s just a piece of shit, but it’s my piece of shit. And it’s just a radio today, but tomorrow it will be something else.

Feeling ten feet tall, feeling like a man again, I hit the power button and sit back.

Of course it doesn’t work. Why would I ever have expected it to work? Maybe I don’t have the key turned all the way to ACC (I do). Maybe the power plug isn’t all the way in on the back of the stereo (it is). Everything’s hooked up correctly, but I get nothing except a buzz through the speakers that sounds like a short somewhere. The fuckin’ clock doesn’t even light up.

Thoroughly pissed off, I pull the connectors brutally out of the stereo. I slam the door and head back to the office.

“Whudya mean she don’t work?”

“I mean it doesn’t work. It doesn’t do anything,” I reply.

“D’ja plug ever-thang in right?” I am struck by his ability to completely and clearly eliminate any traces of the y in everything.

“Yeah.”

“You sure?” This comes out y’shoor.

“Yeah.”

“Walp,” says the proprietor, turning around and throwing the erstwhile solution to my sound-generation difficulties on a steadily-growing rubbish heap in the corner, “go on back out there and digyaself out anuther’n. Good thing ye checked afore ye left.” Item: It’s been a while since I’ve heard the word one reduced to a mere contraction tacked onto the back of another word. Item: I have often seen the word ye written in books and stories, as in Hear ye, hear ye! I don’t believe I’ve ever actually heard it spoken until now. I ruminate on these things as I slouch my way out the door.

I aim myself toward the Pontiac section, meaning to make a donor out of that white ’90 Grand Am I had spotted earlier. My travels take me through the Oldsmobile section, however, and I find myself forced to stop. What catches my eye is not some horribly mangled wreck that still has blood on the upholstery, but a perfectly ordinary 1990 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera. What’s strange about this one is that it is, apparently, in fine shape. There are no dents, no busted glass, no evidence of fire. I walk over and open the hood. The engine is there, complete. Nothing is missing, save the battery, that I can spot. Sure, it could have thrown a rod, I guess, but this engine is GM’s corporate 3.8 litre pushrod V6. If there’s anything The General knows how to build, it’s transmissions and 3.8 litre V6’s. I’ve never heard of anyone having to replace one. I’m sure it happens, but to my knowledge it is rare.

I open the driver’s door. The interior is clean and intact. Like the exterior, the interior is a rich burgundy. There’s one of those green piney-smelling trees hanging from the lighter. I look at the odometer. It reads 45,873. GM’s didn’t use six-digit odometers until ’91, so this one could have rolled over once, but I doubt it. This vehicle’s in way to good a shape to be here.

I notice on the lower passenger-side corner of the windshield a parking permit for Sandalwood Apartments in Wheaton, Illinois. Sandalwood is a retirement community. I suspect, looking at the condition of the car, and the fact that the seat is pulled up really close to the steering wheel, that the last owner of this car was somebody’s grandmother.

Despite my efforts to stop it, my imagination jumps into action again, and I flash through a number of scenarios until I come up with one that seems at all likely. The short version—after a long illness, under which the grandmother’s family is placed under great strain, the old lady mercifully dies. In order to put paid to the woman and shut that door of everyone’s lives as quickly as possible, her things are given away. The car is put up for sale. After two weeks, there are no takers, so…well, just need that space for other things. Boneyard’ll give us fifty bucks for it and tow it for free. Again, I am most likely wrong, but sometimes an overactive imagination just will not be suppressed, and I get out of the car, overcome with a wave of sadness every bit as wretched as that experienced at the rolled-over minivan.

I walk away, thinking that the car’s too nice to start taking it apart. But one must know that it really is a matter of time before it gets what’s coming, and it does have a tape player that ought to fit in Little Mama. I go back and start hacking away. When I am done, I leave, but not before making sure the door is closed, a consideration few, including me, bestow upon junkyard relics.

Back in the van, having cleared the exchange with the owner, I plug in the radio. Upon hitting the power button I am blessed with a clear signal from 97.9 FM, and the song that’s on the radio is “Mississippi Queen” by Mountain. It’s just what I need to break my funk, and besides, the fucker works. My spirits brighten considerably, and I am beginning to put everything back together when I remember that I have not tried the tape player. I slide in Robert Palmer’s “Addictions: Volume I,” and hear just a snippet of “Simply Irresistible” when there emanates from the deck a muted twannngg! and the tape stops. I blink, then eject and reinsert the tape. Nothing. Eject and reinsert. Nothing. Eject and reinsert, this time with a hearty smack to get it in the right humor. Nothing.

Evidently what has happened is that the old lady who owned the car from which this stereo emanated used the tape player rarely if ever. The drive belt became dry-rotted from years of disuse until I came along and ZANG. Thoroughly frustrated, I rip the unit out and stomp off to the office. Therein, I place the offending item on the counter and just stare at the guy.

“This’n don’t work neither?” he asks.

I shake my head.

“Walp, third time’s the charm, as I’ve heard it said. Wanna try one more time?”

Well, I’m here, and I still have my tools, so I’m game for one more shot.

This time I go straight for the Pontiac section. I don’t stop or look around as I walk. I find the Grand Am and go straight for it. I rip the door open and fall into the driver’s seat.

God, what was GM thinking in the early 90’s? This thing is painfully ugly, with a dashboard whose instruments look as though they were placed by throwing darts. Half the gauges are digital, and half are analog, and all are hideous—a mishmash of angles and shapes and lines that lack any and all harmony with one another. The car on a whole is in poor shape, besides being ugly, so I attack the fascia holding the radio captive with a vengeance. I get it halfway out when I find that its egress is blocked by the console-mounted shifter. It’s an automatic, and the situation would be easily rectified by sliding it back into DRIVE, but that requires the ignition key, which of course is nowhere to be found. I’ve been in this fucking boneyard for four hours and I’m no further along than when I started. I’m tired and I’m pissed. I struggle with the shifter by hand to no avail, then finally resort to sitting on the floor and kicking it with the heel of my boot. Five minutes of this and the shifter finally relents, giving way with a crack that sounds like breaking bone. I’ve also got a killer headache, so when my imagination tries to jump on that little tidbit of mental imagery, I grab it in a hammerlock and go back to manhandling the stereo out of its womb in the dashboard. The process requires a little more breakage here and there, but I’m beyond caring now. It looks as though this car was cared for little anyway before it came here, so I feel little remorse for abusing it thus. Yet finally I have my prize, and with a sigh of relief I head back toward the office, wherein I verify the exchange with Bubba and head out towards the van.

As I am walking it hits me. Is that how it starts? Is that how people forget to care? Do you just get tired and pissed off enough that shit just doesn’t matter anymore? I guess now I can see how that happens. That Grand Am is a perfect example. It’s a rolling embodiment of apathy. A Grand Am is a fine vehicle, don’t get me wrong. But no one’s gonna buy one and take it home and spend a Saturday afternoon washing and waxing it. It’s basic transportation with a pretense of sportiness; that’s the way GM builds them and that’s what they’re used for. A car that’s bought for such reasons usually gets the short end of the stick. Think about it: how many mint-condition late-eighties GM vehicles have you seen recently that weren’t Corvettes or Cadillacs?

Cars that are built and bought that way usually live a hard life. It’s hard to get a ten-year old GM vehicle past 100,000 miles without spending a lot of money (g’wan; ask me how I know). Well, this one’s getting too expensive to have fixed all the time, so it’s time for a new one. We can probably get a grand for it though. And that’s the way it goes—I’ve bought cars on that rung of the ladder, five or six rungs down from the top, and sold them there too. And after awhile, it just stops mattering. You’re too tired and pissed off to care, so let’s have some fun while it still runs. Here, this oughta be good—watch me put my cigarette out on the steering wheel. Hey, check this out—you ever do a neutral-drop in a front-drive car? Sit back and watch the smoke. Hey, watch this…hey, you ever try…man, you won’t believe what I did with this thing…to this thing…I hate this thing…I can’t wait to get rid of this thing…I wish it would just hurry up and die so I can get rid of it.

I’m getting closer to the van now, and I’m about halfway across the parking lot when I hear a god-awful noise over my shoulder. It sounds like a bulldozer driving through a china shop. Sickening crunching noises peppered with the sound of breaking glass…like every chump that ever slowed down on the expressway to gape at an accident, I am powerless to stop myself from looking.

It’s the boneyard’s car-crusher, a device that takes cars from which simply no more use can be garnered and smashes them into little cubes about three-by-three-by-three. What happens is they use an enormous forklift, about two stories tall, to spear cars on the forks and them deposit them in the smashing chamber. They’re stacked about two or three high before they go in on the belt, and they come out in bastardized Hyundai-Ford-Isuzu-Saab-flavored boullion cubes. The crusher is powered by an enormous Caterpillar diesel, and it’s remotely controlled by the guy driving the lift.

As I watch, the driver trundles over to the crusher with an old Chevette skewered on one fork. He’s got it through the two rear doors; it dangles thence like a possum on a stick. It looks pretty intact, from where I stand; apparently Chevettes aren’t worth that much, even to boneyard scavenge rats like me. The driver places the Chevette on top of an old Mercury something or other, then goes around behind a pile of wrecks and out of sight for a moment. When he comes back into view he’s got a Mazda B2200 pickup truck upside down on the forks. He’s going pretty fast; he hits a bump and the truck goes flying. It hits the ground with a hollow popping sound that is totally unlike what I expect to hear when two or three thousand pounds of anything hits the ground from more than ten feet up. When the truck comes to rest there’s little recognizable left. The driver deftly retrieves it and pokes it in the crusher on top of the Chevette. He hits the START button and the diesel belches black smoke; the crusher starts and when it’s done there’s nothing to show that this cube ever contained a car that once gleamed on the showroom floor; was given as a graduation present to an ecstatic, tearfully thankful teenager; was ever taken to the drive-in; was used to pick up an old friend at the airport; was cursed on a heartless, crystal-blue Midwestern winter morning for failing to start; was ever cherished, hated, or acknowledged at all.

With an effort, I am finally able to wrench my eyes away, but they catch on an old transmission leaning against the fence. The torque converter is still attached; it has leaked pink transmission fluid that, against the dirt parking lot, assumes a coppery-reddish hue that looks like…

Fuckin’ imagination. I don’t want to think about that. I just want to put in this fuckin’ radio and get the fuck out of here.

This one works in both capacities. I have already decided that this is the last attempt; after this I start mugging old ladies, and Best Buy will yet have my business. But my reserve is short-lived; the signal is strong (though the track that is playing this time, “Shooting Star” by Bad Company, is just a little too poignant to be enjoyed) and the tape player works, although some remnants of a previously-eaten cassette tape must be scraped off the drive apparatus before it will play cleanly. I poke at it with a screwdriver for a little while before I realize that is going on 4:30, and it will be getting dark soon. For the first time in my life, I have spent an entire day at the junkyard. The realization leaves me feeling weird, and altogether greasier than that under my fingernails would attest.

The van’s dashboard bolts back together easily enough; it’s almost second nature by now. I throw my tools haphazardly in the toolbox and fire up the engine. The radio’s signal is crisp and clear, and before leaving the parking lot I adjust the fader and aim the van straight for a few choice potholes. The van’s body shakes alarmingly, and my tools rattle accordingly in the steel-sided toolbox, but not once does the signal come pounding up through the front speakers only. I am satisfied.

Back out on the expressway, cruising at a perfectly legal 65, Jimi Hendrix is easing through “Little Wing.” I recline the seat back a few degrees. It’s starting to get dark, so I turn on the lights. As the sun sets deeper, I come to realize that something is not right. As I pass under a viaduct and into shadow, I see what it is for the first time. The dashboard lights in my GMC glow not with the mystic green that is traditional for American automobiles, but with a milky white that began to come into vogue in the mid-eighties. The stereo I have just transplanted, however, glows not white, but red—a color chosen by Pontiac just as GMC, Chevy, Olds, Buick and Cadillac shifted to white.

I consider turning around, but just for a moment. Today has been an emotional roller coaster, and with the help of my hyperactive imagination I have seen more of the back door of the Great American Highway than I ever wanted. Sure, the radio’s red; but the sky’s blue and water’s wet and I am listening to the music as I head for home. In the light of the dying day, and in light of where I have been and what I have seen, that’s just fine with me.

On motorcycles that also have names that begin with M (are you tired of this yet?)...

2005-06-13T20:07:00.000-07:00

Well, in all this talk of music and mowers, MGBs and mayhem in the classroom, I have failed to mention one other thing that is of vast importance in my life. I have at the moment no significant other, and am at the moment in a state of almost constant brokeness (I do the little dealie where there’ll be a 50 in my wallet one day and the next, it’s gone), so I have to limit my free time and the ways in which I spend it to things that don’t regularly require a monster influx of cash. This rules out a) heavy drug use; b) a serious gambling disorder; c) eating binges; d) uncontrollable weekly shopping sprees; e) an inability to say no to telemarketers and door-to-door salesmen. Yes, they do still exist.

This leaves a guy like me, non-skilled in the ways of fashion or chasing down the opposite sex; without a suitable posh ride for sliding up to the Bamboo Room and palming the valet a fin as I swagger to the door in my reet pleats; without prepaid season tickets to the White Sox; with little to do at night (at least until another band gig comes along) or in the daytime on the rare day off. With the exception, of course, of the bike.

Yeah, I guess I may have failed to mention this thing. It ain’t nothin’ fancy, mind you—I’m not bragging about it; I don’t tout it as the fastest thing in three counties or the best looking. It isn’t any of these things, truly. And it isn’t even anything mega-sexual like a Harley or one of those oh-so-trendy Orange County Choppers or a ballet-dancing crotch-rocket that spends most of its time with one wheel in the air. But I’ll be happy to show you pictures, and if you steal a glance at my face while I’m showing you, I’m sure the look you see there will remind you of the look on new fathers’ faces as they show you pictures of their first-born. Yes, I am a sad, hopeless, twisted freak, but I knew this already.

It’s a 1983 Honda Magna v65. I’ve had the thing for 10 years now, and after those 10 years I can look over my shoulder at it while walking away and I still get the old thrill. My dad says that when this goes, it’s time to sell. I don’t ever foresee that happening.

Again, though, nothing fancy. Go into any bike shop and start talking bikes, and when they ask what you’re spreading your ass-cheeks on, tell ‘em you’re tank-slapping a Vincent Black Shadow and they’ll sit up and take notice. Norton 850 Commando? BSA 650 Lightning? Triumph Bonneville? Honda 305 Dream? 1948 Harley-Davidson Panhead? These will elicit nods of knowing approval. Even the new stuff, like a Triumph Rocket 2300 (I’ve ridden absolutely nothing even remotely as fast as that thing) or a new Goldwing will bring forth an "Ah," from the listener. A v65 Magna? Might as well tell them you’re riding a Schwinn. But there are a few of us out there who appreciate them, much as there are those who swear by their Magic: The Gathering ‘swamp-death’ deck or their train collection or their DeWalt 18V cordless jigsaw. It’s all relative.

Well, the Magna (see? Also begins with ‘M’, as do its other two appellations of affection, ‘Medusa’ and, more colloquially, ‘The Moose’) is nothing special, but I’ve been across the country on it, rebuilt it twice, dumped it at over 60 mph during the last hour of a 60-hour round trip, had it in my house, my parents’ house, my classroom, and had a piece of it in my pocket during every job interview I’ve had since I've owned it, and during my thesis defense. Again, I know I’m a sad piece of shit with no life, but all I can do is shake my head along with you. I dunno—it’s like the teddy bear or the blanky you had as a kid that you still to this day are loath to remove altogether from your life. I had a bear—his name was Brownie—and a blanky too, but they both got sold at garage sales before I was in high school. (Yeah, I cried. What are you lookin’ at?) So I have the Moose, and she is a part of me now. I don’t think I’ll ever sell it—I’ll just move it into my living room in place of the loveseat and kick back and watch movies on it when it finally decides to throw a rod through the block or something.

Well, anyway, this summer I have been extremely late in the instigation of my vernal ritual of digging the Moose out from the back of the garage and getting it ready for a summer of no-particular-place-to-go. I finally got it out last night. It’s old, I know (twenty-two friggin’ years), and it has a lot of miles on it, but there’s fight left in it yet. I changed all the fluids and charged the battery. It lit up on the seventeenth try, the old valvetrain clicking and rattling like a bag of nickels thrown into the dryer. Also, after five minutes, it overheated and puked antifreeze all over my shoe. Kinda like waking my grand-papa (I know you’re looking down on me, grandpa, and I’m only funnin’) up from his afternoon nappy-nap.

Tonight was better. Took the ol’ girl up to the Blockbuster to rent Shallow Hal, and all along the way I reveled in the raucous bark of the exhaust, so different, so naaaasty after I replaced the stock system with a MAC four-into-one. It’s still pretty fast; though it will no longer lift it in second with a little judicious clutch abuse, it’ll still stand up pretty easily in first. I enjoyed walking out to it from the Blockbuster and getting on just as a nice little family pulled into the space next to me in their Toyota Highlander. Two kids, about six and nine, in the back seat. Wait until they open the door and get out, then hit the starter and Ra-GAAA! Instantly they’re screaming their asses off and I’m scooting my bad self back to the hills. Oops! (Insert big innocent smile right about here.) I keep forgetting how loud it is! Silly me. Ah, summer nights.

Well, it’s missing a turn signal and still pukes about a quart of oil onto my left boot every two hours or so, but it’s good to have the ol’ piece o’ shit pounding the pavement one more year. Maybe next year I’ll finally have to move that loveseat out of the way, but we’ll just take it one day at a time.

P.S. I mentioned my old MGB a few blogs back, and I alluded to the electrical problems that plagued it as a result of its British heritage. Tonight, coming back from the video store, I got behind one coming up to the light. When he stepped on the brakes, the turn signals went on instead. I thought I was going to cry from the nostalgia.

I rolled up next to him. He was turning right (ah, but I didn’t know that yet, see, ‘cause the turn signals were otherwise occupied, dig it?) and I was going straight, but there’s room for a motorcycle and a dinky little shitbox in one lane.

"Nice car, man," I said, throwing the guy a shitty little salute.

"Hey, thanks," he replied. "Nice bike. Hey, is that a Magna v65?"

Sigh. It’s nice to meet someone who knows. "Yeah. She’s old, but she’s still pretty fast."

"Yeah, my cousin got killed on one," the guy said. "He was doing a hundred and thirty-five when he hit the tree, the cops said. Also, his BAC was over point two."

"Wow," I said, as the light turned green. "That sucks."

"Not really," said the guy. "He was an asshole. Had a nice bike, though." He stepped on the gas and took off in a cloud of blue oil smoke. I sat there breathing it in and experiencing almost total recall to age sixteen when someone behind me honked.

I snapped instantly back to 2005 and made my way slowly home, blipping the throttle at every opportunity and scaring as many small children as possible.

On trashing friends' backyards...

2005-06-12T10:59:00.000-07:00

With apologies, this is a shameless repost of a short story I wrote about five years ago. The contents herein are all true, of course-they took place at Jeff's house on New Year's Eve of 1999. Not that I didn't have other ideas for my weekly blog; I just felt like blowing the dust off this one.

It’s 1:00 in the morning on New Year’s Day and Jeff is jumping. An appropriately titled tune by Van Halen is blasting out of the speakers on the wonderful old console stereo, and from time to time Jeff launches himself free of the world for a split-second or two. Only once does the CD skip when he lands. Culley and Carey are over in the corner trying party hats on various and sundry of each other’s respective anatomies. Dani is unsuccessfully trying to engage Jeff and Kurtis in conversation over Eddie’s screaming guitar, and I am fuzzily trying to decipher The Book of Lists. No one knows where Pat is.

There’s something running through my mind like a three-legged gerbil. It’s lopsided and grotesque, but intriguing in an elusive sort of way, all the same. It’s got to do with past New Year’s Eve parties—a videotape—wild laughter—damn. It squirrels its way through my mental grasp once again.

I am standing now, and I mean to walk into the living room and exchange The Book of Lists for We Interrupt this Broadcast when I notice that the music has changed. It’s not Van Halen anymore, not even close. It’s really familiar, but I just can’t place it. Fuck, am I that drunk? I know this tune…ah yes. It’s Roger Waters and his pros and cons.

"…and Cadillac limousines and the company of has-beens…"

…Cadillacs…

…a V-8 screaming in harmony with someone’s wild cackling laughter…

…a house flashing past on the TV screen in a lit-window blur…

Click.

I find my way over to Culley and Carey.

"Hey, Mike."

"Whutchoo want?"

"Didn’t you tell me something about Jeff going out in his backyard and doing donuts on New Year’s Eve a few years back?

"Yeah, we watched the videotape."

"Do you…er, d’you think he might be up for it again?"

"Fuck if I know. Why don’t you ask him?"

I decide, in a fit of drunken half-logic, to do just that. As the words pour out of my mouth, while I listen impotently to myself, I notice Culley weave his way over, his eyes, still at half-mast, lighting up with a yellowish, booze-induced glow. I guess I must look just like that.

Jeff, as gracious a host as ever got spanked by the doctor, agrees with an air of nonchalance. "Sure," he says. "Just be careful."

Oh, but we will, won’t we? Course we will.

I fumble my keys out of my pocket, and realize they are not the keys to my rice-grinding pansy-mobile Acura affectionately known as the Blue Banana, but to my mother’s brand-new Jeep Cherokee complete with a 4-liter straight-six that would just about pull a house, shift-on-the-fly full-time four-wheel-drive, and a perfectly acceptable 6-speaker stereo with six-disc CD changer.

Dr. Jekyll, sitting astride the left hemisphere of my cerebral cortex, lets out a wail of dismay and pounds his fists ineffectually into the convoluted surface.

Mr. Hyde only grins a grin filled with picket-fence teeth.

Culley and I are staggering toward our respective mounts when Pat (ah, there he is) crashes out through the screen door behind us. He begs us to tell him what we are doing. We do. He ejaculates verbally, and starts running. We figure he wishes to join us, but—well, Culley has a truck. I have—for the time being, anyway-this embodiment of road-rage on wheels. Pat is running toward…oh, dear God. A 1998 Mercury Tracer rent-a-wreck.

It’s front-wheel-drive.

It’s a four-cylinder.

It’s a four-door.

It’s pink, for Christ’s sake.

Oh well. Culley sprints lopsidedly for his Toyota and I fold myself laboriously into the cramped (for me, anyway) cockpit of the Jeep. It fires up with a smooth yet torquey-sounding purr. I load a Susan Tedeschi disc into the changer and pull the transfer-case lever back towards me. A small light appears on the dashboard, indicating that the full-time four-wheel-drive is herewith engaged.

It is January, yet so far there has been no snow. We have agreed to stay cool and off the gas until we get to the track portion of Jeff’s backyard, but Culley goes careening around the corner of Jeff’s house with the back end of his truck somewhere in the next zip code, rear wheels effectively skinning the lawn down to the frozen top-soil. I, of course, immediately follow suit, but my attempt to boot the rear end out with a poke of the throttle only tosses me back in my seat as the Jeep lurches forward. Of course you can’t hang it out in four-wheel-drive, you dolt, I think. I slide the lever forward, and the little light goes out. Ah, now this is much better. I skate around the house to the back yard with the peppery echo of turf bouncing off the fenderwells in accompaniment.

Culley threads his way through the trees onto the track, now obscured by pasty-yellow prairie grass that, in life, stayed admirably out of the way of highballing dirt bikes and Honda Odysseys. Now, in death, it exacts it revenge by completely obliterating the track surface. No matter. Culley pounds all 160 horsepower right through the floorboards, and his truck pirouettes beautifully across the track’s infield, the front and rear wheels—the ones I can see, anyway—pogoing frantically up and down over the tussocks.

I find that the experience is all the more rewarding if I simply leave the transfer case in two-wheel-drive. Things are much more exciting this way; I traipse gaily over the dead foliage, the Jeep rarely pointing in the direction it is traveling. The heater is blasting and Susan Tedeschi is bellowing and the world is just fine as paint. A track on the CD finishes, and, just before the next begins, I hear a sound over the sonorous grunt of the engine that is sufficiently strange to make me punch the ‘stop’ button.

Yes, there it is again. A high-pitched buzz that rises and falls, rises and falls. It’s behind me, so in booze-induced paranoia I stomp on the gas again and shoot off across the field. I pause after awhile; the sound is still there, only now it is accompanied by bright lights that wash across my rearview mirrors periodically, leaving my vision swathed in fuschia.

I finally get up the balls to stop, get out and look. It’s a pink bubble, floating in a bouncy sort of way across the grass. Like the Jeep and Culley’s truck, its trajectory rarely matches the direction in which its headlights point. It lacks a certain grace, though, somehow; its rear end comes out, snaps back into line, comes out, snaps back into line. I figure there’s some serious handbrake-yankin’ going on in there. The engine is constantly screaming, and every once in a while it does a complete one-eighty, throwing up grass in large divots from its madly-spinning front wheels.

It’s Pat. He sees me and stops, frantically rolls down the window. Across his moon face is plastered what seems to me to be the largest grin I have ever seen.

"Man, what the fuck?" I ask him, laughing. "What are you doing to this poor thing?"

"It’s a rental," he replies. That’s all he needs to know, and all I need to hear. I sprint back towards the idling Jeep as Pat throws the Mercury into another series of wild handbrake-induced loops.

I’m back in the Jeep, now. Susan is belting out "Friar’s Point" as I make my way all the way down to the very rearmost of Jeff’s enormous yard. A brisk stab of the go-pedal and the Jeep is pointing back towards the house. I steer into it, the rear end hooks up and away I go. The ride is rough, but not too bad, and I see the speedometer briefly touch thirty. All of a sudden the ride becomes smooth as butter, and I look down to see both the tach and speedometer needles go streaking towards the redline. Like Jeff, I have managed to leave the earth behind for just a little while. I circle around and do it again, and again, and again…and, like Jeff, only once does the CD skip when I land.

Crashing back to earth for the fourth time—or is it the fortieth?—I see a bright flash of light from the large picture window at the back of Jeff’s house. Instead of tossing the Jeep into another sprint-car-inspired left-hander, I continue on into the backyard proper. It is Kurtis, who is taking pictures. Immediately my brain screams "PHOTO OP!" How cool that must be—I’ll go flying up toward the house, and I’ll yank the parking brake and go slewing wildly toward the window. Kurtis will have some awesome footage.

Here I go—I accelerate toward the house. The Jeep vaults over the lip separating the track from—God help me—the lawn. I see the volleyball net flash by on the left. I cannot make out the individual squares in the net, so I must really be hauling. Here’s the tree; I aim the Jeep at a point three inches to the right of the tree and pull up on the handbrake. The Jeep swings into a lurid slide towards the house. I think it’s pretty close to full-on broadside, but then I think I could do better. The camera flashes into my peripheral vision as I release the parking brake with a snap and let some more ponies out of the corral. The brake-induced slide turns into power oversteer, and I go back out underneath the tree and past the net into the track’s infield, where Culley is doing a long, slow donut while simultaneously leaning his head out the window to watch himself.

I get out and swagger over, timing the truck’s oscillations and stepping inside the loop. Third Eye Blind is pounding out of the cab. Culley sees me and stops, turns the music down.

"Man, Kurtis is takin’ snappy-snaps," I crow.

"Of what?" Culley demands.

I proceed to demonstrate. As I come around and head back towards the track, I see Culley’s red Toyota come hurtling toward the house. And…yes, here is that bulbous little pink thing, its engine a cacophonous wail. Culley pelts toward the house, but pulls the handbrake a little too late, and does not follow it up with a liberal application of throttle. He obliterates the fire pit. Pat spins the front wheels splendidly; the front end of the car washes out and goes skimming towards the patio. He cuts the power just in time to avoid plastering the barbecue.

Now this is a party. We loop madly around the lawn, throwing in variations occasionally. I come heading straight for the house if full attack mode, intending to step on the brakes at the last minute in a spectacular show of…well, I’m not certain, but I’m pretty sure it’s gonna be cool. I forget the Jeep has no ABS, however, and I slide grandly toward the window, all four wheels hopelessly locked. The Jeep comes to a stop a foot or two from the house. Kurtis snaps furiously away from behind the window. Jeff is next to him, and from the look on his face, he is either shocked, laughing hysterically, or super-pissed.

The flashing red-and-blues from across the way give us pause. We all converge in the center of the lawn and erupt from our respective vehicles. I am laughing, Culley is laughing. Pat looks worried.

"I think those cops over there are for us," he says, jerking a nervous thumb towards the back of the yard at the cop parked next to the house behind Jeff’s. The officer is out of his car and looking at us; as Pat says this last, he leaps into the idling cruiser. Even above the tortuous racket Pat’s car is now making, we can hear roar of the police car’s engine, and we know the officer tarries not along the way.

"Okay, we better cool it," I say sagely. "Let’s get these things back out in front of Jeff’s house before the cops get here. That way they’ll never know which cars were back here."

We pile in and go back around the front. I am behind Culley; he snaps the headlights off and flings himself from his truck as I pull up behind him. I am getting out of the Jeep just as Pat’s abused Mercury limps out from behind the house, its engine sounding like an electric mixer—and just as two police cars converge on Jeff’s house. One of them courses in from across the street to block the driveway, as though to prevent our escape; its nose dips violently toward the pavement in the officer’s haste to bring us to bear.

Pat parks his car where it is and kills the motor. He walks up as the cops are beginning the Riot Act.

"Are you guys driving around in this guy’s backyard?" one asks, his tone incredulous.

I look at Culley. He looks at me. We both look at Pat.

"Well," Culley says, "we were just moving some cars around to save some space."

The officer is nonplussed. "So you—all three of you—decide to do some donuts while you’re ‘moving cars.’ How long were you out there?"

We exchange glances. None of us answer.

The other officer speaks up. He asks the question that, had we been any less twisted, would have known our actions would have forced him to ask. "How much have you guys had to drink tonight?"

The lie springs to my lips and is spoken before I can catch it. It is of course a blatant lie, and the officers both know it, and I know they know it, but I cannot help it.

"Er…nothing?" My voice rises on the last syllable, as if I were asking a question. I have just signed our death warrants.

At precisely that instant Jeff comes hurtling out his front door and down the driveway. Before he has even gotten off the porch he is shouting at the cops. "This is my house! Mine! I told them they could! Private property! They’re fine!"

He continues on in a similar fashion until he reaches the group. He and the officers engage in conversation, most of which I cannot hear as I have my head buried in my hands. But Jeff is as savvy as he is courteous and generous, and finally the cops head toward their cars, after admonishing us and telling us to sleep here tonight. Most of us do…except me, who leaves in search of an all-night Do-It-Yourself car wash open on New Year’s Eve wherein I can wash Jeff’s lawn off my mother’s car.

On getting this blogging thing figured out...

2005-06-06T00:55:00.000-07:00

You'll notice, I guess, a drastic difference in the appearance of my little sanctum sanctorum here, simply for the fact that the type on the original setup was way too small to read. If I gave you a headache, I am deeply sorry. I hope the old look didn't deter you, and if it did, I hope the new look will not deter you.

On cars with names that begin with M...

2005-06-04T12:51:00.000-07:00

Well, here be my inaugural blog. I apologize for the delay if I have implied that there would be something up here sooner; I’m bad that way. Problem is, after a day of good solid manual labor, I plop my big ol’ butt down here to check my email and whatnot, and before I can get up a good head of steam on the old blogger train, I’m asleep or way too drunk to make any sense. Not that I make sense awake or sober, but at least the chances that I’ll be cogent are a little greater.

In any event, I am a motorhead of the rawest variety. I get this from my father, who also was a motorhead despite the best ministrations of my grandfather, who just didn’t get it. My dad was and is one of those types where you ask him his blood type and he says "Penzoil." My father has two sons. It was a safe bet that one of them would follow in his footsteps, and that person is me, though unlike him I have never raced professionally nor earned my living by my mechanical skills, meager though they may be.

So I’m a motorhead too. Where I differ from my father (among other things) is that I name all my cars. Yeah, I’m that type of motorhead. Don’t ask me why; you either get it or you don’t. I’ve always anthropomorphized the hell out of any vehicle I own, to the extent that I talk to them, give them oil changes or baths as gifts, try to be easy with the wrenches so I’m not hurting them (unless I’m pissed, and then I’m deliberately rough so I cause them as much physical discomfort as possible. To quote a quote from Kevin, y’all wouldn’t last 10 minutes in my head), and applaud them when they perform well or feel bad when I’ve done something less than nice to them. I felt guilty, for instance, when I totaled my Acura Integra, not because it was a nice little car (it was) but because I felt it deserved better. My father, who is unlike me also in that he experiences none of this emotional baggage, responded with "Son, you are fucked up."

Anyway, I name all my cars. They’re all female and for some reason, they’ve all had names that begin with the letter M. I don’t know why this is, for it certainly wasn’t contrived; it just worked out that way. Here, then, is a list of all the cars I have owned, and their names.

My first car was a 1978 MGB. It was, as the picture implies, a little convertible of British heritage. It belonged to my brother, who has none of the guilt ascribed by me to things done or not done to cars, and so he beat the absolute shit out of this thing at every opportunity. And, you must understand, by this I mean more than the average high-school burnouts in the parking lot. My brother had a mastery for torturing vehicles, and I have to say that the B held up well, even after an entire year during which, on the return trip from dropping our car-pooler off at his house, our route home took us down Summit Hill, renowned for the fact that there was major air to be had for anyone psycho enough to hit the crest at greater than forty miles an hour. My brother never once took this hill at less than seventy, and if you asked me to bet if a person could have stood at the crest of that hill and my brother’s car would have cleared that person, I’d have bet yes.

I inherited it after my folks got my brother a well-used but still serviceable Honda Accord for graduation. They had the B repainted and let me tool around in it. I had it for two weeks, then parked it on a hill and forgot to leave it in gear (the parking brake didn’t work). It rolled down the hill and hit the only tree within 50 yards.

Oh well; it was never that reliable in the first place. MGBs are British, and like all British cars of 70’s vintage, had Lucas electronics. You’ve heard all the Lucas jokes, right? Why do Brits drink their beer warm? ’Cause Lucas makes their refrigerators. Heard of the Lucas three-position headlight switch? Yeah—off, dim, and flicker. Hey, I just had a Lucas pacemaker installed in my chest, and I feel gr—

Anyway, the MGB had a badge on the trunk that said MG. It looked like this:
If you were really drunk, and squinted a bit, you might think that said "Midge," so that’s what we called it.

This is what we replaced the B with. It was a 1983 Chevrolet Cavalier station wagon. It looks good in the pictures, but it really was a piece of shit. It was such a bare-bones stripper that it didn’t even have a cigarette lighter. But the seats folded down, and that was cool. I never lost my virginity in this, but I watched two friends (on two separate occasions) lose theirs. Yes, I’m a shameless voyeur, but I don’t go around peeping in windows; I was just the designated driver.

My friends called it the Cadaver; I called it Maggie. Its one redeeming feature was that it was a manual. Of all my circle of friends, I was the only one who knew how to drive stick, so I taught all my friends in this. I only had to replace the clutch twice. It got T-boned in the parking lot of the Toys-R-Us where I worked.

Then I got this. This was a 1987 Mazda B2200 pickup truck, and she was a sweetie. I called her Myrtle—a fitting moniker, I felt, for a slow little rice-grinding pickup truck whose color exactly matched that of poo. What you see in the photo is what I did with it a lot—practiced my drifting technique in snow-covered parking lots. For this you need a rear-drive vehicle with a hand-operated parking brake (not required, but helpful) and preferably a manual transmission. Myrtle had all of these, and she excelled at power oversteer. I would go out on winter nights after a big snowstorm before the plows came out and just hang my ass out around every corner. I once lost it when well sideways at way over 60 miles an hour around a long right-hand sweeper and ended up in some poor guy’s front yard with the high beams blazing in through his front window into the room where he was watching TV. He got up and waved. I waved back. I managed to get out of there before the cops came. I still can’t figure out how he didn’t get my plates.

I sold Myrtle at over 200,000 miles when the top of the engine started making some funny noises. She was puking oil out of the rear of the engine and needed a clutch, and was really rusty to boot, so I let her go for $500 and got this. This was Matilda, a 1988 Acura Integra. A nice little car and reasonably fast. I got sideswiped by a truck about a year after I got it and the whole driver’s side was pretty well fucked. Both doors on that side still worked, though, so when the insurance company wrote it off as a total loss, I collected the money and kept driving the thing, though from then on it was known as the Blue Banana, because a) it was blue and b) it was bent. My friends hated to ride in the back, because the rear fender was pushed in over the wheel on that side and the tire would rub when I hit bigger bumps. "I always feel like such a fatass when I ride in your car," was my friend Bob’s way of putting it.

One night, at about 3:00 in the morning, I was heading back to DeKalb on the tollway. It was a crisp November night and the highway was deserted. I had been thinking about all my friends who wold brag about how fast they got from here to there because they got their car up to 120 or 130. I’d always wanted to try that, and so I put my foot to the floor and held it there. "Just so that I can say that I tried it," I told myself as the speedometer climbed. By this time, Matilda had well over 200,000 miles and was running on borrowed time. I got her up to 101 mph. That’s what the cop said when he pulled me over. That ticket cost me a shitload of money and my insurance went through the roof. My dad told me he was proud of me.

Matilda was pretty well shot, but I wanted no further temptation, so I got this. This was Little Mama (it kinda begins with M), a 1988 GMC Safari. I owned this fucking thing for two years and I was never happier to get rid of a vehicle than when I sold it. I never believed in curses until I met Little Mama, and she was truly a cursed thing, to the extent that she was even in the papers, and people are in jail. I firmly believe that they would be walking around free today (which would definitely NOT be good, as they were true criminals) if not for this incarnate of Satan on wheels. I could write for days and still not paint the true picture, but I won’t do so now. Hey, if you really want all the gory details, ask and I’ll be happy to throw down, but for now we'll let the thing sleep.

With rapture I got rid of Little Mama (giving the thing a good solid kick in the ass as she went) and got this, a 1991 Honda Accord wagon, to this day the best car I ever owned. Not the coolest, but definitely the best. She was gunmetal gray (a color cops notice a lot less than red or yellow) and was a 5-speed. How cool was that? When I got it, it ran fine but would only idle on 3 cylinders, making a neat little putt-putt sound that my mother said sounded just like a car in a Mr. Magoo cartoon. The name stuck, and I kept Magoo for a while until a lot of expensive things broke at around the same time. I fixed them all at great expense, and then noticed a clunking sound coming from the transmission. I sold her with full disclosure to a guy on eBay.

At this point, you may have noticed that all my cars have been used. Many of them were well-used when they came into my life, and really, on average they last about two years, with the exception of Myrtle, who gave me five great ass-hanging years. When Magoo left, I made a deal with my dad, who was riding an old 1977 Yamaha and had to push it home one out of every three rides. My folks had been pretty vocal up to this point that my cars were always pieces of shit and they were getting pretty sick of picking me up every time one broke down. I told my dad that I would get a new car if he got a new bike. We shook on the deal, and he came home the next day on a new Honda Nighthawk. I went out and got this.

This was Mariah, a 2001 PT Cruiser. Now, I am a guy, and PT’s have always been nancy-mobiles in my opinion. But after Magoo, I liked the idea of a hatchback with four doors, that was also a four-cylinder and a 5-speed, a combination that lends itself well to decent gas mileage. I told my folks that I would buy something new, by which I meant no more than two years old. Mariah had 29,000 miles and was loaded to the gills with stuff I’d never had before in a car and never expected to have on a teacher’s salary—-CD player, leather interior, alloy wheels, a freaking sunroof! But, on top of what I made as a teacher, I was working pretty steadily with a pretty good band, and they were paying me union rate for every gig, so I was pretty confident I could make the monthlies.

Right around this time I scraped up an extra $300 and got another pickup truck. They’re handy to have around, and for $300, my God! You’d pay that just renting one once from Menards or U-Haul. And don’t kid yourselves—everyone has need of a pickup from time to time. I have noticed that I have a lot more friends when I own a pickup than when I don’t, and I was feeling lonely, so I got Mimi—a 1984 Ford F-150. Quite possibly, this thing was the biggest piece of shit I will ever own—the body was two different colors and the taillights were held in with duct-tape. For all that, however, she was a sweetheart and was damn near indestructible, save for a penchant for eating starters. I had her for two years and put six starters in her. But, she was also a manual, so if a starter crapped out on me, I could get away with push-starting for a little while.

Having a big ol’ beater around that you can haul stuff with is a blessing beyond the capability of words to describe, so after Mimi failed three emissions tests in a row and my license was being threatened with suspension, I sold her for $300 and bought this thing, a 1973 Ford Gran Torino station wagon. Now, she is not the best car I have ever owned, but she is definitely the coolest. She’s big and ugly and green, and so her name is Maud. Around these parts, however, she’s known as the Dragon, because she’s big and green and ugly and smokes. Also, she sucks gas down like a bastard, so she sleeps a lot. Also, she has red eyes in the front, though in the picture they’re still orange.

Eventually the band money dried up and making the payments on Mariah became a struggle. I sold the PT (I was glad to see her go, really, because I felt like a failure after bouncing check after check) and was wondering what to do next when I was blessed with a gift from a good friend. That gift came in the form of a 1993 Chevrolet Lumina. She was left out behind a house in Big Rock and hadn’t run in around two years. My friend Kevin said it was mine for the taking. I rented a trailer from U-Haul and went out to Big Rock and dragged the Lumina home with my dad’s Jeep. I threw a new fuel pump in her and off she went. She was big, pretty fast and really comfortable. Also, she was free. Thanks, Kevin. Kevin told me that he had named her either Margaret or Meredith. I liked Margaret.

I drove Margaret around for almost a year before gas prices went through the roof this spring. Margaret was a V-6 with an automatic and got about 20 miles to the gallon, so I sold her and used the money, along with some from my savings account, to buy this thing, a 1992 Honda Civic with the uncanny ability to squeeze almost 50 miles out of a gallon of gas. She’s small and wimpy and is constantly in danger of getting flattened by Hummers and Lincoln Navigators, so I named this one Mouse.

Well, hey.

2005-05-30T06:20:00.000-07:00

By popular demand I have decided to transcribe all of my Myspace blogs to this more, shall we say, in the words of Shiny, more mature forum. I am going to cheat like a bastard, though, and will post on both for quite some time, until either a) I mature all the way or b) devolve into a babbling madman with the morés of a hedonistic third-grader.

So here I am.