Page 3 of Between the Beaches
– Abraham Lincoln
That night, I was gonna keep walking ‘till I got somewhere safe to sleep and then get back up and keep going, but that nice couple fed me and got me there to the greyhound station and before I know it, I’m enjoying a soda with a kind person on the steps outside his door and onward to wherever was next, until I could return to some true sense of ‘home’.
It would take me several more weeks as it would turn out. I didn’t make it back to the bus station that morning after all. And while I would pick up a few stories and a few scars along the way before I would make my way to where I was headed, I’d spend a week or so with my peoples to whom I was walking and then, with a fresh new gifted baseball cap on my head, I journeyed back by flight to the Midwest and stepped off the plane into another new chapter of my life with a return to restaurant work and renting out a room with 3 strangers in the hills outside of town and so on.
All of that, however, is a whole different story for some other time.
Chapter 3: The Way the Summer Sun Sets Behind the Waves
When considering where to take things next, I guess I feel inclined to point out that there are easily a million or more places or directions to take this piece from here. But if I don’t pick someplace now while I have the time to write, then for all I know this will progress no further in my lifetime and end up as just another half-finished saved work-in-progress file on some dusty old laptop, somewhere.
So, let’s dive right in someplace uncomfortable, shall we?
Let’s spin the wheel:
‘Love’, ‘Music’, ‘Money’, ‘Drugs/Alcohol’, ‘Government’, ‘Death’, or ‘The Human Experience of Natural Reality (and How It Has Changed Over The Millennia)’…
God’s not on the list because Love was already a category.
On a side note, by the way:
I’m awfully fond of the Tom Waits quote that says:
“There is no devil, only God when He’s drunk.”
For the purposes of that tangent, I’ll give this much to say that the word ‘God’ is like ‘Tao’ or ‘Zen’, there is a reason to have a word for it, but to define it with words is, in itself, simply a means to grow further from its true understanding… at least, initially.
May the concept of ‘it’ never eclipse your view of what ‘it’ really is.
So, let’s go with Music for 400, Alex…
My first guitar came to me on Christmas one year when we lived back in a mid-sized farmhouse about a mile from the 6-generation family farm and about 15-20 minutes from the two nearest towns. It was an electric guitar my folks picked up for about 50 bucks, that came already adorned with an old Misfits skull sticker and a small black and white Nine Inch Nails sticker, both already affixed to it by the previous owner. I was far beyond stoked.
I began taking guitar lessons at the local music shop where my folks had found the guitar and there at the shop, they often held contests whereby a guitar would be up on display near the front of the store with a giant fishbowl below it, where people visiting the shop could put in their raffle tickets or whatnot. We put in one for me, one for my dad, and one for my mom each time they held a contest and sure enough one day, there was this message on our answering machine that was addressed to my mom and declared that she had won the latest guitar, and that she could come in anytime in the next 30 days to pick it up. It was a considerably heavy piece, compared to standard electric guitars – a black Hammer ‘Slammer Series’… I was still a very novice learner at the time, but damn, did me and my buddies rock hard and fairly-mercilessly on that guitar over the next several years.
I remember that by the time we moved to a small town in the Metro East of the St. Louise region, which we’ll call Laterton, I had already found myself in possession of a few pieces of musical instrumentation of my own, which me and my buddies played the absolute shit out of just about every weekend. My collection of commonly-used instruments was essentially two guitars, a cheap bass, and a cheap drum set with some amps and a cheap microphone with a stand, which took several years to collect.
I can never express enough gratitude for those instruments in my life. I didn’t need fancy-ass, top-quality instruments at that time. I just needed to be set loose into the playground of music in a way that resonated with me.
As far as instruments went, though, our house itself was garnished with a sizeable collection however, which included everything from a banjo, and a small wooden harp, and an old Gibson acoustic from a few generations back, and a tambourine, and so on, all the way up to an old baby-grand piano that sat in the corner by the front windows of what otherwise would have been a living room.
Displayed throughout the house, the collection made the place sometimes feel like a little gallery of musical instrumentation. My parents didn’t play any of them really, but my father had been trained as a child in how to play the piano, so on some rare lounging occasions, he would (almost all of a sudden or sometimes upon request) meander over to the piano bench and play a song or two beautifully and then go about his day or evening.
I personally never went through the training for piano, but instead played rather experimentally by ear and then, on occasions, I would transcribe a few things from guitar or bass and play them on the piano.
In all of these regards, I was very blessed.
I had formed and performed with a few bands in my teenage years – one of which was named Dyonisus… This one came together primarily from out of the local Laterton public school. And, in part, it was because, in a small enough social setting, musicians often find other musicians rather naturally, given enough time, and bands just seem to coalesce out of thin air sometimes; but Laterton had a secret weapon in the cultivation of great musicianship that could be found in the small house on Oak Street where twin brothers Fred and Fin lived…though, as a matter of specific fact, it was most common that they were listed in the opposite order, when being mentioned. We would commonly and simply refer to the place as “Fin and Fred’s” as if it were some sort of open-mic lounge, inside a residential neighborhood… These two had moved back from Seattle a few years before I first moved to town and began making friends and otherwise slowly integrating myself into the local culture and community in my own semi-reclusive way… They moved into the tiny old house on Oak Street, directly next door to where their cousin lived with her husband and 6 kids, if I remember things right. Their cousin, Loraine, was amazingly musically-oriented as well and was involved with a few musical projects locally; still is, after all these decades, if I gather right.
I used to walk, ride my bike, skateboard, or snag a ride with one of the older guys over there and we would jam into all reasonable hours of the night, when they were home and in the mood for music and company, that is… See, the house didn’t have ‘standard hours’; it didn’t have a land-line and neither one of them carried a cell phone or a pager, both of which were still rather new to the general public in those days. So, we were always just kind of stopping by and checking it out as an option from one occasion to the next. We’d usually hear music as we rolled up and when we’d knock, it was a flip of the coin, so to speak. Sometimes, we got to kick it and jam, and sometimes not.
The quaint little 2 story brick house had a small kitchen right inside the back door which was the only one that anyone ever used… The front door to the living room was indefinitely blocked by a table with speakers and a humble little P.A. board and a 4-track recorder. These two had a nice full trap-set drum kit in the corner and a base with an accompanying bass amp, several guitars, two mics - complete with mic stands… It gave the type of vibe like a permanently ready-to-go, open-mic spot-meets-coffee shop in someone’s living room… And these guys loved to jam. It was low-key epic and fantastic. And just about every ‘rocker’ in town had managed to make it over there at least once or twice a month or so. Some of us made it over there far more often. Fin and Fred treated me kindly and with a sincere sense of mutual respect. They felt like family to me.
Fin had moved back after his marriage came to an end and he felt he had to move to the Midwest where he had family and a free place to stay, so that he could rather perpetually hustle and save until he could afford to move back.
One summer, after we had lived there in Laterton for a few years, but before I was old enough to drive, we took a family trip back West and my parents were doing well enough, in terms of money and credit, by that point to invite Fin and my buddy Duke to come along with us. So, to be exact about it: my dad stayed behind for the first week while the rest of us flew into San Francisco to stay at a local hostel and then drive a rental vehicle up the coast all the way to Seattle where Duke and I had always wanted to go and to where Fin could visit with his daughter, and back.
In San Francisco, we stayed at a hostel along the edge of the bay and out back, where there was a scarce little lawn area with some benches, there was indefinitely stationed an old cannon from long ago when defense of the coast demanded cannons be pointed out to sea every day and night; ready at all hours.
