Three from Flight 27 (and San Francisco) part 1

Every Friday, junior year of high school, I drove straight home at three o’clock after a week of class, rehearsals, practices and nagging teachers. As soon as I turned the lock on the kitchen door, my dog would go nuclear and practically piss herself with anticipation of, well, going to the bathroom. I grabbed her leash, tossed my bag on the counter, and ran her around the block as fast as I could.

Coco inside, water-bowl filled, money in my pocket? Check, check and check. Diving back into the car, I blasted the radio and drove north on I-87. Usually, the traffic would back up miles before the Tapan Zee bridge and I’d have time to review whatever I was supposed to have practiced the week before – A Nirvana tune, a Chilli Peppers tune, a Police tune.

Finally, head bouncing with anticipation, I drove down my drum teacher's driveway, grabbed my sticks off the passenger seat and headed into his basement. The smell of stale cigarettes still comforts me years later. We would sit side by side, striking a drum pad to a metronome, perfecting technique and warming up for the main event: playing the kit along to rock and roll. His drums were loud and obnoxious and he had me playing with tree trunks to get all the power I could out of them.

Our lesson was supposed to last an hour but I usually stayed for two or three. He’d show me more tracks to learn and beats to play; we’d talk about drumming philosophy and try to justify our mutual obsession with the instrument.

Around six or seven o’clock, I would drive home with no traffic. The drive home only took about forty-five minutes. Anything I put in the CD player sounded amazing after my musical neurons had been ignited all afternoon but one time, the amazing happened. I started “Dark Side of the Moon” in my teacher’s driveway and as the closing heartbeat faded away, I pulled into my own driveway. I couldn’t move for a half hour. It was as though my life was choreographed and had an amazing soundtrack and all I had to do was keep playing, keep drumming and keep studying music.

Fast forward nine years and we are standing in the doorway of my apartment after our last show. It had been raining to that Eeyore point where everything indoors was damp and moldy. Any person you spoke to was wet, tired and grouchy. And the gig? The stage monitors were lousy (venue’s fault), I brought the wrong snare drum (my fault), and the room had barely enough people to cover the club’s overhead. You have to laugh as you say it out loud: We made $5.00 from the door that night. Our lead singer almost missed the show and I played like shit for no discernable reason. It was a rough night to say the least.

In love.

The War Below

Every day, every few minutes: battle.

It is not a balanced fight. Each time the opposing sides rush each other, there is a strong faction and a weak one. I am not King Leonidas but I encourage the morale of my fellow warriors. It’s a subtle game: showing strength in the face of unavoidable destruction.

Wave after wave of enemies flood the turn and if you’re not careful, if you’re not quick and cunning, you may get beaten twice in one morning. The riders above show no mercy. Their strength is the inertia of their numbers.

Until Spring unveils her bosom of light, we will remain below; trapped in this frozen anus jockeying for the best position on the transport vessels to another battle in another station.

Oh, but if I could only cry out to both sides! I would join them in an alliance worthy of the majestic underground pythons we ride so thanklessly. It does not have to be this way! We could form lines and be patient and maybe even delay the train from leaving without our fellow man………

A dream that will never be made manifest.

I Don't Look That Old

A guy at the deli used to sell me beer in high school – I wasn’t tall enough to put the money on the counter yet there he was, filling my prescription. He’d charge me like twenty bucks for a sixer of bud light or something and I’d go off into the woods with eighteen friends and sip it down and… wow, I’m off track.

So on a Monday, I’m rested and happy. Usually, I spent the weekend taking long showers and sleeping in. By Thursday, I’m seven different seasons of exhausted and the only color in my cheeks is reflected off the dried coffee stains on my shirt. This particular Thursday, I left work around 8:00. God hates me for missing Ash Wednesday.

As I trudged home from the subway, cold air slapping my beard, tugging my tie, I turned into the market to do my grocery shopping: a quart of whole milk, a six-pack of bud light and a can of tuna. Two people have that grocery list: crack-heads and musicians. Holding cash, expending all of my energy to stay vertical, I heard the guy at the register whisper into a pillow at the other end of a tunnel. “Sorry?” I said. And he said, “I.D.?” Thoughts lined up in my head:

Was he talking to me? And for that matter, where was I?

Look down at my items to make sure he was ID-ing me for some sort of weapon: A gun or perhaps a Samurai sword. Nope, just a can of tuna, a quart of milk and some bud light.

Oh! The bud light! Shit. Right.

Wait a second; it’s nine-thirty on a Thursday night. Does he think I’m going to somehow make amphetamines out of my groceries and smoke them behind the gymnasium before calculus?

Dude, gimme my fucking tuna and bud light so that I can eat dinner and cry myself to sleep listening to old Cranberries albums, wake up, dump the milk into a carafe of coffee and go back to work.

A half-groan, half-sigh. It’s alright, I get it: Despite my vibe, my rhythm, half-wearing a tie and fully wearing exhaustion, I just don’t look that old.

I was a man

It wasn’t raining outside, but it may as well have been. I was slumped comfortably on the couch with my hands around a mug of tea and my feet up on the table. Next to them, my laptop was playing the West Wing. By anyone’s standards, I was in heaven: comfortable, relaxed, entertained and without deadline or due date. After an episode or two (I was in one of those television series DVD marathons), my girlfriend came to lie next to me on the couch. Like a koala using her parent as a soft extension of a tree, she clung to me and promptly fell asleep. As the West Wing ran faster and faster, racing between camera angels and jokes and political pitfalls, her breathing slowed and drew deep.

I know what I looked like in the mirror before going to the couch: I was a boy with short brown hair and a scruffy beard. But now, after just a few minutes, I was a security blanket, a fireplace, a house, a fence, a guard dog, a hero, a friend, and all I had to do was keep lying there. In fact, if I did anything else, I’d transform back into a boy on a couch. Measured in whiskers, bills to pay, and children, we climb on this mountain. At the bottom, a boy fights and wins. At the top, a man has fought and lost. You always thought it was about getting laid and making money and you didn't realize until it was right on top of you (or next to you on the couch) that she had to decide you were more than a human; that you were a superhero. And she did it by falling asleep. What power. What grace!

That’s why it’s all so damn funny. All the slammed doors and broken relationships and people you never hear from anymore. Lost battles and dead soldiers that crease your eyes with grey wrinkles. I was a man.

Ladies Man

A few years ago, a girlfriend accused me of giving her Mono.

“Hey hun, how was class?”

“I just came back from the hospital – he say’s it’s Mono.”

“Whoa! God, that sucks but at least I’ve already had it so I can take care of you without fear of catching it.”

“James you gave it to me.”

“I, uh… what?

“You gave it to me. You gave me mono.”

“I gave you mono. I gave? You mono? I had mono in high school – like, four years ago.”

“Yeah, well the doctor says it can come back and you could’ve given it to me so you did.”

On a sunny but not-too-warm day in April, the same girlfriend wanted to take a nap together. She loved taking naps. I have no idea why she stayed up all night and napped for hours during the day although there is a very real possibility that as a fetus, the doctor injected her with some bizarre Middle Eastern bat DNA. Unlike our typical daily coma, she insisted this day that we sleep outside. But not on main campus. No no, she wanted to sleep on a smaller field near one of the dorms. As I said, it wasn’t that warm so naturally, she slept on top of me. We were like a beached-whale sandwich. Imagine trying to relax with 150 pounds of girl putting your diaphragm through Dolph Lundren’s workout.

Do you think people in their dorm rooms saw us down on the ten foot patch of grass below? I wonder if they thought, like I did, “What the fuck are they doing out there? Is he about to get laid at three in the afternoon outside of Skidmore Hall?!?” And what do you suppose the tour walking by thought? “Wow, if I send my kids here, they too can pretend they’re sea lions during mating season. Gosh, I can’t think of a better way to spend one hundred and sixty grand!”

When I was sixteen, a girl I’d been dating for a few weeks told me she loved me. Naturally, I said it back. Sixteen. I think I had located a whisker a few days before. Wait, no, it was an eyelash.

There was the girl who spent an hour trying to find me in the hallway just so that she could slap me for something that she heard I did. (I didn’t do it.) The girl who looked like Kermit the frog. The girl who ten years later realized she likes girls. There was the girl who only wanted to be friends. There was the girl who told me that muscles mattered and seeing as I don’t have any…

I wonder: If I wasn’t in my present situation, would all of this be so damn funny? Stay tuned…

Fail

One of the best dreams I ever had ended. I was skiing and flying and people were in awe of all my power. Occasionally, I knew that it was a dream but I fought back the little voice imploring logic and reason so that I could stay dreaming as long as possible. And it wasn’t perfect. It was far from perfect. But it was a dream and like all of my dreams, it was wonderful.

When the alarm clock bashed on the door, I tried to ignore it knowing that I was being flushed down the toilet. And that’s really what waking up feels like, don’t you think? You went from swimming on a beach in southern California to floating in a toilet with paper and hair and piss. Round and round and no matter which way you swim, you’re out and it’s over and “good morning, Sunshine!”

I hate my alarm clock. I mean, I love my alarm clock and my job and my girlfriend but if I could just go back for a second… just a brief moment… no. It’s over. I’m awake.

The question now is whether or not I should go back to sleep. Try again for the unattainable: the perfect, never-ending dream. If this were a movie, the last shot would be me closing my eyes. A happy ending where we all agree that the point is to try and keep trying and life’s a journey.

Sorry to break the fourth wall but at this point, both in writing and in reality, I don't know what to say next.

Dust, dust and more dust.

For Bill.

Are your observations facts? Is your mind, your brain and is your brain, a biological machine?

Do you have to go somewhere to be somewhere?

The road up wound around like a dusty cartoon dollop of whipped cream. Me, slowly breathing while temperature fluctuations from wind and sun, clouds and rising elevation, blah blah blah. Such a lovely day.

My computer and phone were packed away in a saddlebag. I hadn’t turned either of them on for three days. I was the calmest I’ve ever been in my entire life.

A decision: I wasn’t moving; the earth beneath me was moving! You can accelerate or turn around but you’re a silver ball on a wooden toy and the ground is moving - you are staying in the

exact

same

place.

Well, wait a second: it does matter if you pull the trigger or if you let the man on the beach walk away.

Enough thinking for one day, I decided. The motel was about a hundred and twenty miles behind me and the next one was probably another three hundred ahead but the more important task of riding up the mountain demanded my focus.

Leather seat, rubber wheels, chrome and the dust on the side of the road… (I bought gas two states ago and spent about six bucks on it – everyone should travel this way)

And on and on to the top. What will I find when I get there? Probably exactly what you think: a beautiful view, a quiet moment and a road back down again. Perfect. That’s all I want. Find a mountain, ride to the top of it, and look around. Ride down and repeat.

Do you have to go somewhere to be somewhere?