The Bell Boy

It was the fall semester of my junior year and I was living next door to a church on the top floor of a four story apartment building that I shared with three other college students.  

A fogged and anchorless summer had left me scrambling for housing just days before classes started.  I should have known better than to consider Clinton Street.  It was too far from campus and its decaying store fronts  were haunted by pawn brokers, used furniture vendors and thin, husky throated barmaids.  Once a main commercial thoroughfare, it had fallen from grace and by the late 20th century was best known for an initiation ritual known as "The Clinton Street Run." Perhaps to illustrate the concept of the mind-body gap, packs of bright eyed college students would attempt to jog its length, consuming no less than one drink at each of the more than sixty bars along its course.  Naturally few survived to tell the tale.

So there was Cliff, Danny, Carbo and me.  We met the real estate broker in the Tub of Suds coin laundry on the first floor.  She gave us the key to the place, told us her knees were bad and that she would wait for us in the white Lincoln out front.  We climbed the wooden stairs single file.  Stacks of yellowed newspapers and heaps of black garbage bags cluttered the back porches.  Over flowing litter boxes, coffee cans full of cigarette buts and on the third floor, a set of brand new white wall tires with shiny silver rims.  An emphysemic hack echoed from behind a screened door and I could feel an unseen pair of eyes follow us up the last flight of unpainted stairs.

Carbo loved the place.  Seventy-five bucks a bedroom, free steam heat plus electric.  One month deposit.  Before I'd even had a look at the bathroom, Carbo had produced a deck of cards and we were cutting for rooms.  Carbo pulled a king and I got a duce.  So he and Cliff ended up with the two front bedrooms with the big south facing windows and Danny got the spacious digs off the living room.  I was left with what once had been the kitchen pantry, a tiny squat backed into the north east corner of the building.  The walls were covered with dark brown imitation wood paneling and there was a single, prison-width window that faced the solid brick wall of the Orthodox Catholic church across the alley.  Lucky me.

Carbo was Italian, but a northern barbarian must have soiled the purity of Carbonne family tree, for unlike his Sicilian brethren in Astoria, Queens, Carbo had light brown hair, a slight nose and a big white tooth orthodontia enhanced grin that could disarmed any prejudicial stereo types linking him to the kind of Italians made famous in the "Godfather."  But that is where the dissimilarities ended.  Carbo was a pure disco-dancing wise-guy in the making.  He wore shiny silk shirts open to his navel, gold chains with crucifixes, way too much cologne and was studying accounting, I assume so he could return home and go to work fixing the books of la famiglia's businesses.  

Looking back, I think Carbo must have suffered from ADD, for the only way he could concentrate when studying was with a looping eight track of Led Zeppelin's "House of the Holy" played at max volume on his Crazy Eddie mega watt stereo system.   We all knew when Carbo had a test coming up. His three foot high speaker columns and hundred pound tube amplifier would kick to life, sending visible concussion waves through the paper thin walls of the apartment.  Dishes would crash down from the shelves above the sink. Jake, Danny's little black mutt, would crawl under the couch, claw at its ears and whine.  Every widow in the apartment would rattle as if a squadron of F-15s were strafing the building.  And there Carbo would be, sitting at his tiny desk in the corner of his big room, a towel wrapped around his naked torso, chain smoking Newport's and pouring over depreciation formulas and amortization charts surrounded by a stack of accounting books.  I had tried banging on his door and screaming at him to turn it down.  We all had.  But Carbo would just rise from his chair, take a few striding gaites to the door, grin at you with his toothy smile and then push it closed in your face.  He never even pretended to touch the amp's volume knob. 

Carbo was big and Carbo was tough.  He stood about six foot two and was made of 220 lbs. of pure muscle.  He looked like a body builder, though I never saw him work out.  He also held a black belt in karate. Unfortunately his marshall arts training was all about fight and had nothing to do with meditation or spiritual balance.  

Like the rest of us, Carbo loved drugs.  He loved all drugs; ups, downs, pot, pills, whatever.  On the weekends (if they could actually be delineated from the weekdays) it was a black-beauty washed down with Budweiser, a cartoon of Newport's and a card game somewhere off campus.  How Carbo found those card games I'll never know, but he would come in at four or five in the morning and dependent on his mood, tear the apartment apart or cook himself some steak and eggs.  Then he would head to his front bedroom and crash.   He slept in what I called his Lone Ranger mask; a black felt eye blinder designed to ward off  ambient light.  Other than that he wore nothing.  

Many a morning, I would be in the bathroom taking a shower and Carbo, blinders pushed up on his forehead, would kick through the door,  plop down on the toilet and take a deadly smelling dump.  Nothing quite like the humidity of a shower mixed with the ordure of a toxic crap to start the day off right.  Carbo would have his ear-plugs in, so no amount of cursing from behind the curtain would disturb his communal evacuation.  

But Carbo's ear plugs were no match for God.   You see the real-estate broker in the white Lincoln never bothered to explain why the apartment, with its gigantic living room, spacious kitchen and free heat was renting so cheap. We just figured it was because it was on Clinton Street, the arm pit of the civilized world.  But there was more to it than that.  It was the  church, and not the shared parking accommodations or the inconvenience of the occasional wedding or funeral, but the church bells.  

On Sunday morning, this Catholic parish believed in reminding its congregation of its holy duties.  But there were no finely cast bronze knockers hanging high in the bellfry tower with Quasimodo swinging from vines of heavy hemp.  No, the bells in the church next door were different.  In fact they weren't bells at all.  They were actually electronically enhanced analogue recordings played through an amplification system fit for Shea Stadium and they were broadcast every quarter hour until mass at high noon.  

Through ringing ears, one could almost hear the Angels snicker at Carbo's mega watt stereo system and the searing, ear splitting, heavy metal music he played at such outlandish volumes; almost hear them laugh at this young man, curled up fetal-like beneath his mamma's pink down comforter, his ear plugs in and his Lone Ranger mask on with Sunday services approaching.

Sure, Carbo was big and he was tough but beneath his eighteen karat gold crucifix, Carbo was but another fatally flawed mortal, full of sin and rife with weakness.  

One Sunday morning as I was about to leave the apartment by the front door, I happened to glance over at Carbo's room.  I saw something move inside.  Move quickly.  Like an attack dog springing for the throat of an intruder.   I stepped cautiously into the front hallway and peered into the dun light of Carbo's room.  There he was, his back to me, buck naked, gluts flexed, spine straight, triceps bulging, standing before a wide open window, a few wisps of December snow drifting in on the lightest of breezes.  The Remmington 308 deer rifle he'd brought from home after Thanksgiving was pressed tightly against his shoulder, an eye glued to the scope and aimed directly out the window at the huge gray fiberglass speaker attached to the church tower.  It was exactly 8:30 a.m. and the recorded bells had just begun their wavering, mid-hour, magnetic-tape clanging.

"Carbo NOOOOOOOO!"  I shouted at the top of my lungs  "Danny's got a quarter pound of Columbian in his bedroom!!! You shoot out that fucking speaker and the cops will be all over us!!  What are you thinking!"

Carbo just stood there. Then I noticed his sculpted Roman butt cheek twitch.  Then his shoulders dropped a bit and the taunt muscles in his back relaxed ever so slightly. The rifle came off his shoulder and with his left hand he dumped it into the corner against the wall and with the heel of his right fist, slammed the upper section of the double hung window closed.  He didn't turn around.  He just tugged down on his Lone Ranger mask and sort of fell sideways onto the king size bed, the one he'd dubbed his off shore drilling rig.  He yanked the pink comforter up over his shoulder, buried his head into the pillow and immediately started snoring.

If the angels snickered, I didn't hear them.  I just pulled Carbo's bedroom door shut and under a long, slow, deep breath, whispered,  "Let sleeping dogs lie and bell boys rest."

  

Freedom

The red, white and blue

I'll admit, the gun thing in the U.S. is confusing.  When a person goes berserk and sprays a crowd with lead, who doesn't curse the weapon?  On the other hand, America has spent most of its life poised on the edge of a great and violent wilderness.  Hasn't the right to bear arms contributed to our underlying sense of freedom and individualism? 

As much as I love aesthetic order (and the tidy lay-out of European cities)  I understand that structure also represents control. Its hard to be free and controlled at the same time. It seems that every day Congress enacts new laws and communities script new regulations. Every day the human population increases in number.   And every day, an average of two hundred other species are driven into extinction.

Totalitarianism* as described by Aldous Huxley in "Brave New World" could very well be where we are headed. So relish these days when you can still take a car... or a horse... and ride west without a passport, apply for any job you want, live anywhere within the continent you choose or just stay put and spend every dime you have on branded clothing and restaurant food.  Its all up to you!

*  totalitarianism:  of or relating to a system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state : a totalitarian regime.

Enlightenment (Move You Shall!)

Goal Posts of Life

I was still in my early thirties when I packed up my wife, our three cats, some basic household necessities and headed off for Nashville, Tennessee to become a professional singer /songwriter.  After about six months of dragging body and soul around Music Row, Printers Alley and to every other neon blitzed Holiday Inn and Ramada featuring a writer's night, I began to realize that it was definitely not the life for me.  So one afternoon I found a glitzy little hair salon, walked in and asked the stylist to cut off my pony tail.  She was happy to oblige and I returned to  the streets of Music City looking like a young Kennedy fresh from a swim on the Cape.  Within a week I'd abandoned my finely tooled cowboy boots, dropped the acquired twang and jettisoned the ever present bottle of Bud Light.  

Dixie is known for Baptist congregations, sky splitting revelations and joyful, teary eyed Christian salvations.  Perhaps the tenor of Davidson County rubbed off on me in a perverse way, for instead shaking hands with Jesus like most rock bottom country singers, I ended up in Barnes & Nobel searching the shelves for books on Buddhism.  In the coming months I began to meditate, became a vegetarian and started to spend hours exploring the State Park system of Eastern TN, Hell bent on training to become a through hiker on the path to self-realization more commonly known as the Appalachian Trail.  

I practically gave up penning songs and turned my attention to filling thousands of pages in hard covered journals with detailed descriptions of my metaphoric encounters with life; pithy stuff, like capturing the sublime in a conversation shared with a Pakistani grocery store clerk.  Everything took on new meaning.  Everything was part of the journey to my inner self and of course, enlightenment.  I even gave up smoking pot.  Did you get that?  I gave up smoking P-O-T; something that I had deemed central to my identity and considered indispensable as a tool to demolishing the psychological barriers my formal education had erected between the right and left side of my brain, between ego and truth, between mundane citizen-cog and sensitive artist/composer.  But you know what?  Try as I might, I just wasn't ready.  The joyful prayer flags might have been fluttering in the thin, crisp air of the Tibetan highlands, but half a world away, in the valley of Cumberland River, I remained an unevolved Occidental toiling for pennies within the meat wheel of life.  

Then one morning, after about two years on the ethereal trail, I found myself sitting straight backed at the kitchen table in our rental home on Goodmorning Drive.  My eyelids at the pre-requisite half mast, I was attempting to telepathically alter the position of a pair of shoes I'd left on the floor by the opposite wall.  Mind you, I was only trying to move one, and only a millimeter or so.  Nothing too grandiose or showy.    You see, with all that acquired "I create the world" ripoche rhetoric circling in my satori ready mind and totally accepting that "reality is illusion and nothing is as it appears,"  I just wanted a sign.  A tiny "at-ah-boy" from the other side, something from Carlos Castaneda's nagual, a nod from nothingness, a wink from anybody's heaven.  I just wanted to see a shoelace drop or the leather tongue twitch.  

So I sat there in a trance.  For how long I'll never know.  I became totally "one" with those shoes. I performed a mind-meld that would have smoked Spock.  I emptied myself of every thought but the complete and total connection to the energy of I-Shoe-I.  And guess what happened?  Out of nowhere, like a fly-speck on the distant horizon, it began to form. Faint but increasing in volume ever so slowly, shaping itself like clay deep within the muscles of my distended diaphragm.  A primal animal noise.   A gurgling organic sludgy sound, rising from the core of my being, expanding like a balloon on a helium spigot.  Soon this auditory vibration was taking on color; brilliant, crystalline prismatic hues brimming with intensity, forcing a way upward, like a striped beach ball held too long underwater, shouldering past my calm and practiced deep healing breaths, up through my tracheae between awed vocal cords and from there gushing forth like the blood curdling blat of a tortured and dying calf.  My muscles re-coiled, my chair fell back, and in one seamless sound guided move I let my leg fly like the Saints' own John Carney, a kick so Zen that it sent those shoes right over the spiritual goal posts of life!  "BY GOD BASTARDS, MOVE YOU SHALL!"  

Enlightenment never felt so good.

Hard Travelin'

Woody Guthrie

I learned a whole lot of Woody Guthrie songs for an American history course I took at Harpur College the summer of my senior year.  For my finals project, I used folk music to document the hard times and social injustice experienced by those who had lived through the desperate days of the Dust Bowl.  

Paul was taking the class as well. Paul was a Dead-head.  He was also a member of a benign cult of young psychedelics called the Joses.  The Joses had a signature handshake, one in which they wiggled their fingers above and below each others palms as if they were the appendages of a germaphobic wood-tic.  The Joses also had a trademark.  It was a circular, self-adhesive black felt pad about an inch in diameter; the kind used to cushion the bottoms of wooden chair legs.  Jose members kept a small stash of these "black dots" handy to stick on inviting surfaces sort of the way urban gang members are known to tag walls with their signature graffiti.  I recall finding a black dot in England, pasted to one of the 40 ton rock pillars at the Neolithic temple of Stonehenge!   Somewhere along the line the Joses had gone global. 

Anyway, when Paul wasn't off dotting the acid raves of Grateful Dead concerts, he attended the State University of New York.  I can't remember what he was majoring in but we both found ourselves in the same history class that summer.  Paul was a good guitar player.  I had jammed with him a few times during my sophomore year.  The relationship had culminated in a bar gig, but due to my insobriety, it had gone very badly and soured our friendship. The college class seemed fortuitous and my suggestion that we work on the finals project together a perfect way to make amends.
  

The search for audio tracks from the years of America's Great Depression led me to WHRW, our college radio station.  I spent evenings there for a couple of weeks, listening to recordings in their archive collection.  In 1935 the United States Congress had passed The Emergency Relief Appropriations Act., freeing up federal money to fund Roosevelt's "New Deal" programs in order to put the nation back to work.  Under the financial umbrella of the Works Project Administration (WPA), musicologists employed by the Library of Congress became the nation's first audio recording technicians, collecting performances from all sorts of little known blues and folk musicians of that period.  Woody Guthrie was undoubtably the most prolific artist on their registry.  

It took me a while to adjust to the limited quality of the mono recordings and the raw sound of Guthrie's guitar and vocals, but little by little I was drawn in by his stories.  Google and Youtube did not yet exist, so transcribing the lyrics and figuring out the cords was a slow process involving countless needle-drops.  In the process, the incredible talent carved into those plate thick vinyl records began to dawn on me.  This was not the music of the The Stones or The Beatles, but it was every bit as powerful.  It was a style unto itself, created by Guthrie to capture those dusty, displaced, Dust Bowl characters who had taken to the road in search of a better life.  It was more than that too.  For me his songs had a philosophic quality, a sort of creed a guy could live by.       

By the time my history final was due, I was sold on Woody Guthrie.  I was playing a hundred dollar EKO six string; an Italian made battle-axe designed to look like the far more expensive Gibson Hummingbird.  I carried it in a black cardboard case and came to class that day wearing a ratty straw hat, a harmonica brace and a faded red bandanna around my neck.  I had a good set of liner notes rehearsed to accompany the songs which described how families of Okies and Arkies lost their farms to drought and bank foreclosures, how entire counties nailed shut their doors and windows and headed west on highways like Route 66 or hopped the "flat rattlers" of California bound freight trains, risking life and limb for a new start beyond the Rocky Mountains in the idyllic, fruit filled valleys of the Pacific Coast.  

Unlike the subjects in Guthrie's songs, I had been raised in the comfort of a brick-faced colonial home in a secure middle class suburb.   Still, I felt strangely qualified to sing Woody's songs.  I had hitch hiked to California the summer I graduated high school so I suppose I felt I'd done a little hard travelin' of my own. Those eight weeks on the road had opened my eyes to a side of America I had never known.  There was the Mexican girl who invited me to stay at her brother's apartment in Denver.  I joined half a dozen family members on the living room floor that night, all proud, generous people who had come north to work. My host took me to the Hilton Hotel the following day and introduced me to his friends and co-workers.  To my surprise, all the signs in the multi-tiered basement of this luxury complex where printed in Spanish; not exactly what I had expected from the cowboy town portrayed by Hollywood westerns.  

As I moved on to the Rockies, then south to Flagstaff, I learned it was the less fortunate who most often gave you a ride or offered you a place to stay; the folks with the big cars and giant motor homes, who peering out at you from behind air conditioned glass, seldom if ever shared anything but their exhaust.  An eighty-dollar Ameri-pass on the Greyhound Bus line was my only motel, an olive-green sleeping bag my only bed.  I was on my own for the first time in my life and even though September would find me safely enrolled in college, my take on American culture would undergo a tectonic shift.   This new perspective expressed itself in countless ways, from the music I enjoyed to the friends I chose.

I met Paul in the spring of 1976 and ended up living in his off campus house for a few weeks during the summer break.  In his room Paul had a huge glass urn where he used to toss spare change; pennies mostly, like it was some kind of wishing well.  One day I borrowed about half a buck's worth of coins from this "kitty" to buy smokes.  It was a loan of course, one which I fully intended to repay.  Cigarettes only cost about sixty cents a pack back then and unfortunately I was hooked.  I felt I had to have them.

I was in the living room practicing guitar when Paul came in.  He was dressed in faded jeans and a loose fitting sleeveless tank top.  A kerchief, folded diagonally, covered the crown of his head.  It was knotted just above the base of his short black pong tail.  A feathered hoop hung from his left earlobe. His smile faded as his dark eyes tracked from my guitar to the filter cigarette left burning in the ashtray.   Paul knew I was dead broke, so when he asked me where I'd gotten the money for the butts, he knew what my answer would be.  I told him I'd taken some change from the big bowl and added that I would be replacing it as soon as I could.  Paul wasn't at all happy about that.  Even university hippies have their limits.   He said I had abused his trust; ripped him off when his back was turned.  My defense was that the few dimes worth of coins I'd taken were simply a loan and that there had been no deception involved. But Paul was a man of principle.  Regardless of my tobacco addiction, the confession and guarantee of repayment aside, in his eyes I was no more than a common thief.

Paul didn't like cigarettes.  True, he was a habitual pot smoker and amateur acid head; he wouldn't say no to a nitrous buzz and was known to use downs as more than a medical necessity.  But screw State or Federal law, the only the rules that applied in the Jose house where his own.   Aware of his own contradiction, he supported his position by quoting Bob Dylan:   "Those who live outside the law must be honest."  Paul was pretty righteous in regard to tobacco.  Herb was cool, but not Camels.  He was a vegetarian as well. I guess he hoped a diet of fresh fruits and vegetables would counterbalance  the negative affects of his illegal drug use.  I happened to dislike most greens, particularly those tasteless, gruel thick lentil dishes college students were famous for.   So Paul and I had our differences. Helping myself to those few coins just added fuel to an already smoldering fire.

Paul let me stay on after the wishing well incident only because we were scheduled to play a paying gig together in Hoosick Falls, New York.  Hoosick was his home town, a tiny village backed up against the Adirondack Mountains and the Vermont border.  Paul wasn't a singer, so I was to carry the vocals and play rhythm guitar, while he did his thing riffing out like Jerry Garcia.  The bar where we were booked was a good two hour ride north.  I didn't own a car and neither did Paul.  Somehow he arranged a ride for himself, but the driver had no room for me, my girlfriend or our instruments.  That meant hitch hiking 160 miles with a woman and two guitars.

Bea, my girlfriend of three weeks, was from the upper Westside of Manhattan.  She was studying film production at New York University, but had taken a job for the summer at a sleep-away camp on the eastern edge of the Catskills. I'd seen the same ad in the New York Times and desperate for money, had taken the LIRR out to Huntington where I interviewed with the director and was hired on the spot.  Anxious to escape New York City, I hitched hiked north to the camp the following day believing the next eight weeks were going to be a little piece of heaven.  To my surprise, camp was nothing like I had imagined it.    

It was raining the evening I arrived and continued to through most of the next day.  In the morning, after a mess hall breakfast of cold pancakes, watery scrambled eggs, and purple colored "bug-juice," I found my way under a leaking barn roof to what was to be the camp's music room.  Not only were there no guitars to be found, there were no instruments of any kind except for a couple rusted tambourines and an upright piano missing half its ivories. The music department spoke volumes of the good things to come, including the cabin of fifteen eight year old boys that I was to spend the summer babysitting.   It was a fucking nightmare.  They were the youngest kids in the camp and all spoiled brats.  During the day they were feral, snarling and snapping, screaming and demanding and at night they would whimper for their mothers and wet their beds.  Within the first week I had yelled myself hoarse.  The damage to my vocal cords combined with rain-forest humidity and lack of sleep lead to a case of tonsillitis which, without health insurance or ready cash and with a pack a day habit,  grew progressively worse.

Camp counselors we were allowed a couple hours off every other evening.  The drinking age in New York was eighteen, so a bunch of us would pile into a car and head to the local bar to pound brews. That's where I met Bea; long lean legs, faded jeans and western-cut saddle boots, a worn cotton T-shirt  and thick black hair to her waist, smoking a Camel straight and sipping a Dewars on the rocks.  I'd never met a girl who smoked Camels, let alone drank pricey scotch, so I was pretty impressed.

That first night we ended up between a couple of cars in the camp parking lot,  pants around our ankles, heels and toes sunk deep in the soggy, rain soaked sod.  A few days later we both quit our camp jobs and together headed for Pennsylvania with another counselor named Rob.  Rob played bass.  I think he had a vision of us becoming the next  Hall and Oats and touring the country with a one song set of "All Along the Watchtower".  Rob also owned a Camaro, had a fat bag of weed and was okay covering his own gas, so naturally I bought into his fantasy and the three of us headed for my family's vacant summer home in the Endless Mountains.

After a week of ceaseless rain, Rob's hopes of collaborative glory had drown and he and the Camaro were on their way back to Long Island.   It had been a heartfelt good-bye.  After all, with Rob went the beer, the pot and the wheels needed to acquire more.  Nearly out of groceries and down to our last cigarettes, Bea and I decided to quit the farm and head north to Binghamton where I assured her we would find the welcoming arms of college friends I'd met the previous semester. That's how we ended up at Paul's, in his tiny off campus house, crashing in the attic room, nipping pennies from the wishing well and further damaging my infected tonsils with daily rehearsals for the upcoming Hoosick Fall gig.   

Back in the early seventies hitch hiking was still relatively safe.  I can't remember the number of times I thumbed from the farm in PA to my parents place in Michigan.  Rides were plentiful and I often made the twelve hour trip in the same length of time as it would have taken me to drive.  It was usually young people who picked you up; counter-culture types with long-hair and maybe a joint.  I made a lot of temporary friendships that way and heard some incredible stories.

It was mainly guys who hitch hiked.  There were women out there too, but they were few and far between and if they travelled alone, they always ran the real risk of rape.  Bea had never hitched before she met me so thumbing rides was a real adventure for her.   It really was a different era in America' social history.  People weren't scared of each other like they are now.  Sure we were taking a risk, but that is part of being young and as naive as it might sound, we felt really safe together.    Bea was a tall, attractive Chinese woman, so she drew attention like nobody's business.   I would sit down in the tall grass above the berm or lean behind a convenient telephone pole while she held our cardboard sign toward approaching traffic.   It never took more than five or ten minutes before some young guy, truck driver or business type would pull over. Then they would spot me, rising from the weeds or stepping from behind the pole with my guitar case and back-pack. Some pulled away immediately, the deception obvious, but most were just kind hearted folks who greeted us with a smile.    

The biggest problem that Bea and I had, is that we both liked to party.  I was all about marijuana while Bea was into liquor and cigarettes.  At twenty, she was already worried about whether or not she was becoming an alcoholic.  That kind of thought never even crossed my mind.  She was beautiful and lots of fun when she was drinking.  As for me, I just figured all men drank.  It was normal to want to have a few beers.

When I was on the road, I always hoped for rides from potheads.  On the trip to Hoosick Falls that afternoon we hit the jack-pot twice.  Unfortunately, by the time we made Albany, my eyes were half closed and my throat was on fire.  Two weeks of jonesin' Bea's filterless Camel's and all those hours at Paul's rehearsing vocals had taken their toll on my throat.  After a  couple of powerful joints, my tonsils were swollen to twice their size.  I looked in the rear view mirror at some point and noticed that they were bright red and spotted with white abscesses. I'd been running a low grade fever on and off for several weeks but that afternoon I was shaking with chills and feeling really light headed.  Nurse Bea recommended gargling with whiskey,  so we picked up a pint of Jack Daniels at a local liquor store before hitching our last ride in to Hoosick.  The whiskey did seem to help, at least for a while.   So did the beers I was soon being spotted at Goobers the bar we were to play for that evening.  We'd arrived at the tavern just after five o'clock and we drank steadily until Paul showed up at around 8:30.  Bea was in fine spirits.  I felt like Hell.    

There was no such thing as a digital tuner back in those days.  You did everything by ear and when you were high, tuning could be a real trial.  But when the room was spinning and the floor warping like a concave mirror, I found it nearly impossible to match tones. When you're young and healthy looking people can be slow to appreciate just how fucked up you are.  During the sound check Paul kept telling me my B string was sharp.  Unable to find the note, I remember glancing over at the two of him and croaking, "Guess I'm a fret too high!"   

And so the gig started.  We opened with a medley of Grateful Dead tunes; "Me and My Uncle" into "Goin' Down The Road Feelin' Bad" and then onto an old Commander Cody song called "Home in My Hand".   These were no brainers for me to sing, but that night my tonsils were so swollen and I was so drunk that it was like I couldn't breath, like someone had their hands around my neck and was trying to twist the life out of me.  The more I pushed to get the vocals out, the more hoarse I became. We were booked to play three sets and by the end of the first I was completely done in.  Solution?  Drink some more.  

I woke up the next morning in a pop up camper van with Bea asleep beside me.  I was drenched in sweat, with the overhead canvas brilliant white in the sweltering heat of the first sunny day we'd seen in weeks.  My head was splitting.  My tongue felt two sizes too big for my mouth.  I had symmetrical lumps the size of walnuts bulging from both sides of my neck.  Swollen lymph glands.  When I went round to the house to use the bathroom, Paul was there but we didn't speak.  He was so pissed off because I'd fucked up the show and made him look like a fool in front of his hometown friends.  I'd completely let him down, but I felt so sick I really didn't give a shit.   I searched the bathroom cupboards until I found some aspirin and then after waking Bea, we headed out for the New York State Thruway and the asphalt ramp that would lead us back to Greenwich Village and Bea's Sullivan Street Apartment.   

I didn't talk to Paul for a full year after that.  It wasn't until we found ourselves in that history class that fate offered us an opportunity to rekindle our friendship.  When we settled on the idea of doing the finals project together, I was determined to make the best of the second chance Paul was giving me.  

Unfortunately, this time Paul dropped the ball.  He may have showed up to class in a straw hat, but the guitar he arrived with was an electric, I think it was a Fender Telecaster.   Although the first manufactured electric guitar dates back to 1931, it wasn't until the 1950's that electrics became popular.  Before that they were more of a novelty incorporated in the big band format.  During the days of the Dust Bowl most rural homes were lit with candles, kerosene and coal oil, (Guthrie's younger sister had died in a house fire started with coal oil) There just wouldn't have been a lot of places to plug in an amplifier like the one Paul had brought along.   

Then there was the issue of tunes.  Paul had learned only one song, a blues number unrelated to the period.  The set list I'd given him a few days earlier had disappeared and there had been no time to run through the songs.  So Paul did what he did best.   He "noodled";  that is, he improvised note dense lead runs over the equally word dense lyrics. Since most of the compositions were solo folk pieces, there were no instrumental breaks or bridges for a rock guitarist to riff out in.  The words required rather precise melodic frames.  In this style of music, competing with or playing over the vocals is considered a major No-No. So after a while, Paul just sort of gave up and strummed along, probably a wise choice considering the circumstances.   

I'll admit I was a bit put off when we shared equally in the  "A" earned for the presentation. I'd worked my ass off learning those tunes and for whatever reason, Paul had just floated through. But as they say, what goes around comes around.  After the wishing well conflict and the fiasco I'd made of the Hoosick Falls show, I told myself we were even.  Yet old failures are fickle.  They can leave scars under which bits of unreconciled quilt lie dormant. You think you've made peace with the past and then something flips a switch in your brain and that suppressed shame morphs into a wave of unexpected spitefulness. This inability to cleanse and heal through forgiveness is a well documented source of psychological trouble. 

   
Almost a decade past without seeing Paul.  Then one afternoon, over lunch, a friend let me know that my old Dust Bowl buddy had hit the skids in Atlanta.   He had picked up a cocaine habit in NYC and had taken it with him to Georgia.  He lost his band down there and then ended up ripping off his roommate's stereo or TV in order to score drugs.  The roommate, an ex-Jose member no less, insisted Paul check in to rehab or hit the highway.  Paul, with no income, disappeared onto the streets.  

As I listened to the story, the memory of the fifty cents I'd borrowed from Paul's wish bowl came rushing back, dragging with it the bitter taste of that dehydrated, hung over morning in Hoosick Falls.  But instead of feeling remorse or empathy for Paul's situation, I felt the shadow of a grin twist my face.    

In 1990 I was in New York recording an EP when Paul's name surfaced again.  My producer had also been a friend of Pauls.  He recounted a trip to San Francisco made a few months earlier and how he had bumped into him on a side street down around Fisherman's Wharf. Paul was selling CDs and second hand books that he had displayed on an old rug.  When the cab pulled to the curb and the tinted rear window came down, the rail-thin vendor reportedly stepped forward and heard what must have been a familiar voice ask,

"How's it goin' Paul?" 

Apparently not good.   Paul just winced, rolled his eyes away and said  "Hey man, I'm not a mind reader, whatcha need?"

Paul's decent into heroin addiction and homelessness had actually run parallel to my increasing abuse of alcohol and marijuana as a young business man in New York City. The more money I made, the more I drank, and depression and anxiety became constant companions.  I blamed everybody but myself for the pain I was creating in my life.  I was so disconnected from my body that it felt like I was in the audience watching a marionette controlled by invisible strings.  While I denied the damage I was doing to myself I was quick to expose the inadequacies of others.  A sarcastic wit's brutal sense of humor was employed to assuage the issues underlying my increasing alcohol dependence.  

Its a long road, this road to Recovery.  And as Woody Guthrie sang, it's "some hard travelin', I thought you knowd!"   There are parts of us all that are dinged and dented, parts filled with guilt, shame and remorse.  There are angry and destructive components there as well.   The energy of those emotions can propel us forward or it can create an internal gravity that holds us in orbit around out dated ways of thinking.  If we are mindful of the limiting behaviors that arrest our development, we can learn to navigate around the obstacles that would otherwise derail us.   We all have an incredible potential for growth and change if, as Abraham  Lincoln wrote, we call upon "the better angels of our nature".    

The lessons of our past are useful, but memory can also thwart our development.  As in music, poor technique must often be unlearned before a new approach can be absorbed.   That can be a tremendous struggle.

Paul is now heroin free and he is helping others overcome similar afflictions.  Thirty seven years after that summer night in Hoosick Falls, the current chapter of his life reached me.  It has given me cause to rethink a part of my history and a shame I carried these many years.   It has offered an opportunity to apologize to Paul, to Bea, to Rob and to any others I may have wronged along the way.  It has also allowed me the occasion to retire that part of my past so that I can enter the present with a greater capacity to welcome the many wonderful experiences it has to offer. 

Best to you all,
rb



        



*Bound for Glory 

by Woody Guthrie , Joe Klein

ISBN 0141187220 (0-14-118722-0)
Softcover, Penguin Books, Limited

The Rockets Red Glare

"... and the bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night that BIG DADDY's Fireworks was still there."

What is it with fireworks?  Never really have understood them.  They say that in the American West, the land was so vast and the populace so scarce, that firing a gun or exploding a piece of dynamite helped a man feel less alone beneath the seemingly infinite big sky. But I live on the Eastern seaboard. Fly over any star filled night and you will be hard pressed to glance down and find a spot not illuminated by life. New York City, population eleven million, is only a 150 miles away.  Here in the Appalachians, the humidity drenched hills shelter hamlets with family ties reaching back several centuries.  Hardly those vacant, wide open spaces of desert dust and prairie grass.  So why all the  explosives?

Well, in my book, all roads lead to Rome.  I think it's some deep seated genetic hangover from the old coliseum days.  The need for a real testosterone rush.  Fireworks explore the masculine the way adolescent boy's critique thundering flatulence. Perhaps the whining missiles and clusters of deafening star riddled flame are actually an outgrowth of Papal fear; a Technicolor display of Dante's nine ringed Inferno, each explosion another tortured soul writhing in eternal pain.  Could it have been black robed missionaries who smuggled Roman Candles through Ellis Island content to watch them flourish like a tubercular pestilence in the puritan body of this great Protestant country of ours?  I wonder.


Blame the Grucci family, an immigrant clan from the toe of Italy. They perfected the art of pyrotechnics in their provence of Bari, where the famed cone shaped stone roofs of Alberobello provide security from areal explosives.  Yes, Google's Wikipedia credits the descendants of la famiglia Grucci with commercializing the fireworks industry in the United States (if you can believe that). 


Fact is, from the moment 16th century explores returned from China with black powder, the Europeans were in love with firecrackers; not for warding off evil spirits like their yellow skinned brethren, but for vanity. Explosive color, off set by the brillant illumination of flaring magnesium, made for a glorious statement after a big win in some gruesome battle or added a touch of aphrodisiac pizzazz to a wedding of prepubescent royals.  Yes, and nothing better than a pitch black night over a dark sea for enhancing the effect.  No wonder the crew of the Californian, only nineteen miles from the sinking Titanic, thought their distress flares were just rich folks having fun.       

Anyway, its dry and hot here in Gibson, Pennsylvania.  It rained for about ten minutes yesterday. Some thunder and lightening and dark clouds, but no real moisture.  They say the corn in Indiana is dying by the bussel.  A third of the crop will be lost if rain doesn't come soon. Nashville, that valley of intersecting interstates and the sluggish Cumberland River, has been without electricity for days and temperatures have been consistently over 100 degrees. The cheaper housing, those single story brick faced ranches that lay like fallen dominos along developer's snaking roads and cul-de-sacs, are like little pizza ovens without AC.   Still, I suppose the malls and box stores have their own gas fired generators and the cooled, canned air is keeping things quite pleasant.  Retail returns have probably never been better.

I spent the Fourth of July digging dirt.  The 400 square foot flagstone patio I'm constructing is sandwiched between a small reflecting pond and the clapboard sides of the owner's house.  No room for heavy equipment.  So for the past three days I've been  chopping away at he hard packed earth with my pick-axe, shoveling the clay-laden dirt into a wheel barrow and rolling it away.  Well-heeled yankees have jokes for such labor.  "Hey, you speaking Spanish yet?" is one of my favorites.  I remember listening to the great Senator McCain interviewed during his Presidential election bid. He spoke of the resilience of the Mexican and Latin American farm workers enduring the Arizona heat to tend to the state's irrigated crops.  He said something like "Most white people can't do that kind of work".  Maybe it was a hard-won compliment for our companeros to the south, but it sure harkened back to the antebellum adage that the black African was just better suited for the heat of the cotton field. Slavery and poverty have an amazing way of outfitting a person for such tasks.

Speaking from personal experience, a freckle-skinned white man in his 50's can only handle about four hours at 90 degrees plus. I keep a bandana around my neck and soak it with ice water every 20 minutes or so.  It cools the blood in the juggler vein and helps keep the heat stroke at bay. And to think, my farm sits atop the Marcellus Shale, the biggest natural gas reserve in America.  Along with my neighbors, I'm a multi-millionaire in waiting.  Still, I keep buff the old fashion way:  manual labor.  

So, adios amigos y feliz Cuatro de Julio!

Suspicious Minds

Trayvon Martin

Trayvon Martin, a seventeen year old black kid from Sanford, Florida was fatally wounded on February 26, 2012 by a neighborhood watchman who deemed his behavior "suspicious."   The shooting has brought racial profiling to the forefront of the media.  A short video promoted by Moveon.org features Howard University students donning the signature hooded sweat shirt  worn by the Martin and asking the viewer "Am I suspicious?"  My answer is "Yes!"  And you have been for a long time.


The black male became "suspicious" on August 21, 1831 when Nat Turner set out with a group of conspirators to free the slaves of Virginia.  He didn't make it too far.  Turner's bloody rampage began with the slaying of the family that owned and named him and then moved on to other plantations until close to sixty white people had been clubbed, knifed or axed to death. The band of revolutionaries were soon dispersed by the state milita.  When Turner was finally captured, he was tried and sentenced to death.  He was then hanged, beheaded, flayed and quartered.  Some of his skin was later used to make a souvenir change purse that would end up in the pocket of a white man.  


New laws soon followed, further limiting the nearly non-existent civil rights of blacks through out the South.  Black worship services were ban unless a white minister was present. Teams of slave hunters were commissioned to insure the return of local run aways.  During the same period, over a third of the three million slaves in what would become the Confederacy were sold and transported from the tobacco farms of the  "upper" South to the cotton plantations of the Mississippi basin.  A general polarization of the feelings regarding slavery was developing throughout the United States.  The Nat Turner revolt functioned as its spring board.  Court rulings and social stigma soon limited the public discussion of emancipation in Southern communities while abolitionists became the target of violent, vigilante justice.  In the North, by the time Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as President, over one million Yankees had joined the ranks of The Wide Awakes, a non-violent, highly organized movement to end human bondage. 


After the Turner uprising of 1831, all blacks in the South became suspicious.  Fear began fueling a new and enhanced form of racism that continues today in the United States.  Just as Nat Turner emerged from the shadow of moral and legal injustice imposed by the "peculiar institution" of slavery, so have the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 come to symbolize an uprising against the white Judeo-Christian ruling class of the world.  The World Trade Towers symbolized the western ideology of economic domination through monopolization of global resources, manufacturing and distribution. The Towers, in a sense, were the very manifestation of capitalistic oppression of the majority by the privileged few.  


Polarization is occurring again. The Occupy Wall Street movement and its the demonization of the financially dominant 1% is pitting citizen against citizen and world community members against one another.  It harkens to the times pre-dating the blood letting of the American Civil War.   Fear and anger drive the political policies of our country.  Our prisions are over flowing, our public education system demoralized and our military continually deployed.    


If we are to avoid cultural and environmental disaster, we must face our demons together.  The suspicious must lower their masks and step into the light.  The fearful must meet face to face with them and acknowledge their own racism and xenophobia.  Most of all, we must come to terms with the gluttony that demands endless consumption of resources at the expense of global health and individual equality.  Technology must be tempered with love; a love for the planet, a love of nature, of species, of race and most importantly, of self.  Self is where it all begins.  We must all pull back our hoodies, reach out our hands and begin building the kind of human family and community we are capable of becoming.  

Alex and Abe

Tsar Alexander II

Synchronicity.  The Russian Tsar Alexander II and U.S. President Abraham Lincoln.  The connection?  Freedom. 
  

It began with Nikolai Sheremetev, grandson to the Russian Field Marshall and heir to the wealthiest estate in the country.  It involved a woman.  Her name was Praskovia Kovalyova.  She had been born a serf in 1768 in the Sheremetev family home the year Nikolai turned nineteen. 

Footnote:  By the mid eighteenth century human bondage had become a thriving institution in Russia. Introduced a few hundred years earlier by Ivan the Terrible (1553)  it is estimated that by 1762 when Catherine II became Empress of the country more than ten million souls were the legal property of either noblemen, private industry or the government.  Serfs were the equivalent of America's African slaves only they had not been imported from another continent so they shared the same heredity as the gentry who owned them.  Of course this could be said of a number of the slaves in the Thomas Jefferson household as well.
   

Anyway, Baby Praskovia grew to be an exceptionally beautiful young lady.  She also had a wonderful saprano voice that made her a favorite at the nocturnal sing-a-longs organized by the young aristocrat among his best endowed female serfs.  The estate's bevy of beauties kept him so occupied that as his forth decade approached he was still a very happy bachelor.  Without a wife or legitimate children to distract him, Nikolai was free to pursue his passions with great intensity.  Beside serfing, his love of opera was nearly obsessive and he made it his goal to assemble the finest performance company in all of Russia.  This gave Praskovia a leg up on the other house maids for her voice was so magnetic, so enthralling, so incredibly superb, that Nikolai fell hook, line and sinker for her.   With an hour glass figure and the voice of an angel, the music world followed Nikolai's lead and welcomed petite Praskovia with open arms.  She soon became the diva of the opera house as well as her master's devoted lover. 

Nikolai Sheremetev

Praskovia Kovalyova

After her debut in 1779, noblemen and women began to flock to Koskovo to experience the young singer's exquisite voice and delicate beauty.  Her leading role as Belinda in Antonio Belines "La colinie"  show cased her polished talent and new-won fans were introduced to her as Zhemgukova or in English, "Pearl." 

For the next twenty years Pearl's fame grew as did her sophistication within the world of Russian celebrity.  She soon became  fluent in both French and Italian and mastered the harp and clavichord.  Empress Catherine II was so impressed with her dramatic performance as Elaine in "Les Mariages samnities" that the ruling monarch insisted on meeting Praskovia and rewarding her with an exquisitely crafted diamond ring.

But great opera is full of tragedy.  When Pearl was just twenty-eight she contracted tuberculosis and the damage inflicted on her lungs forced her to leave the stage.  In homage to her career, Nikolai Sheremetev disband the opera company. Two years later, Nikolai granted Pearl and her other family members their freedom and then, in a secret ceremony in Moscow, they married.

To put the event in perspective, Nikolai Sheremetev marrying beautiful Praskovia in 1801 would have been the equivalent of Presidential hopeful Thomas Jefferson taking the plunge with his then slave-lover Sally Hemings.  It was an unacceptable.  A complete outrage!  The big difference of course, was Sheremetev had the guts to do it, while Jefferson was too much of a lilly white aristocrate to jeopardize his political career.  But the Russians are a passionate people and love is the greatest passion of all.

Within a few months of their marriage, Praskovia became pregnant and in February of 1803 she gave birth to their son Dmitry.  Sadly, the stress of the pregnancy had so debilitated Pearl, that her health collapsed and she died three weeks later.  Heartbroken, Nicholas could not attend her funeral and confined himself to his room.  He lived the remainder of his life in self-imposed seclusion and died six years later.   His entire estate, the richest in Russia, then passed to little D., the son of a nobleman and a serf.   

Fast forward to 1855.
  

Honest Abe

Catherine the Great's grandson, Tsar Alexander II, is strolling the streets of Kuskovo with the now salt and pepper haired Dmitry.  The 58 year old nobleman tells Alex the story of the great love affair between his mom and dad.  The Tsar is so taken by it, that he goes home and immediately signs the initial decree that leads to the freeing of all Russians serfs; an event which will occur in 1861, the same year that  Abraham Lincoln will take the long train ride from his home in Springfield, Illinois to Washington DC.  

In order to thwart an assassination attempt planned for Baltimore, Maryland, Lincoln will travel the last few miles in disguise and slip into the capitol unannounced during the early morning hours.  There he will assume his elected position as President of the United States.  Two years later Honest Abe will sign the Emancipation Proclamation which will lead to the freedom of 3.1 million slaves held in bondage in the United States.  

Pretty cool.   The evolution of humanity occurring world wide and in sync before the first gutta-percha coated telegraph line was laid across the ocean floor.  Bravo!