The Distance Between

Summer 2000: I’m living in Medford, not far from the Tufts campus, working for a non-profit at the corner of Boylston and Arlington and playing in a band. I pick up the 96 bus at the corner of Walnut and Summer St., and the bus takes College Ave to Harvard Square, where I catch the Red Line into Boston. The morning driver is often rather dour, and the bus is filled with people heading into offices and labor, thus the commute always has the feel of a death march.

Most mornings I end up sitting across from the same family. The mom is a natural beauty: chestnut hair, high cheekbones, glowing skin and personality. She always reads to her daughter, who is about six and having the time of her life, letting her natural exuberance and curiosity about the world guide her. The father is always set apart, reading the Wall Street Journal or crunching numbers in his portfolio. He looks like a heavier Kotter with a full beard, and he always wears a Rolex, a floppy fishing hat and Joey Ramone glasses.

They’re a striking couple: striking in their differences. Not just in their physical differences, but also in their demeanor. Sometimes the father plays with the daughter, but mostly it’s the mother. Occasionally they banter softly a bit, but it’s always strained and under their breath. The father will whisper and grunt; never looking up from his paper or work, and the mom will look frustrated, and then pull it back before returning to story time. The daughter is oblivious to it all, fortunately, but I can almost physically see the distance between them.

If the morning commute is a pall on the day, the evening commute is an entirely different world. The bus driver on the afternoon shift is older, and obviously loves his work and his friends. Every stop he adds “good old” to the street: “good old Royall Street!” “good old Florence Street!” It’s a touch of Mayberry in suburban Boston; a lovely break in the monotony of commute/work/commute/repeat.

Most evenings I end up sitting across from the mom and daughter, and most evenings the father is absent. Staying late at the office, no doubt. On these commutes, the mom seems freer, more of herself, as she reads to her daughter and points out landmarks along the way.

As the summer goes on, more and more, the father is also absent in the morning. By Labor Day, he’s gone, as is her ring. I have a front-row seat to a slow disintegration.

Thirteen years. A lifetime ago. I think of them sometimes. The daughter would be in college now. What school is she attending? What is her major? How did the divorce affect her? How did the mother make out? Was there one cause for the split, or many over time? Who pulled the trigger?

They were a family, and then they weren’t. I never learned their names, never spoke a word to them, knew nothing of them and still don’t. They had no idea of my existence, and still don’t. Parallel lives, never to intersect. But they remain with me; a vision of heartbreak during a high summer of golden twilights, “good old College Ave” and an unbroken horizon.

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Florida Stories, Volume IV: Nine

Image Source: Michelle F. on Foursquare

I have a foot in sand at the edge of the water. I feel the suck as the wave laps and pulls back out to the deep. The sand is wet but firm, cool after the sun has started its descent. Green lights slowly flicker on the distant pier, and the sound of gulls and breakers is all-encompassing and all-compelling. The day-job is non-existent and my blood pressure is flatline.

My wife and I share the sunset (from the wrong coast, of course) and the knowledge of years and experience. We are on Crescent Beach in St. Augustine, just south of my formative years in Jacksonville, on our ninth anniversary getaway trip. We have a 7:30 reservation for a Spanish/Cuban bacchanal at the Columbia Restaurant in St. Augustine, but right now we’re lingering, taking in the moment, hoping to throw this unforgettable moment to the sand and hold it in place forever.

We were wed in Seattle, where my wife is from, on June 21, 2003, and returned to our Maine home after a one-night honeymoon at Mount Rainier (where we spent the night in separate twin beds). On our first anniversary we happened to be visiting a friend in Brooklyn, and we spent the day at Coney Island and then bar-hopping across the East Village and Brooklyn. Precedent set, we decided to be Somewhere Else for every anniversary. This plan has brought us to coastal Maine, Montreal, Washington D.C., San Diego and back to New York. And now, back to Florida.

The above scene is how I envision our ninth anniversary unfolding as I write this on the Sunday before. It’s a moment that we’ll remember forever for us. And it’s also a triumph for me as I continue the re-write of my life. Eight years removed from the sands of Brooklyn, I am now toe-deep in the sands of my past, reclaiming the trauma of my pre-teen years and reclaiming this patch of earth for us.

However today unfolds, I am eternally fortunate to be spending it with my soul-partner and best friend. Happy ninth, love. The best is yet to come.

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Aftermath

The death of a friend carves a cruel path of mild destruction. It’s not the full-on ransacking that comes with the loss of one with whom you share blood and DNA. But it’s pretty damn bad.

The internal inventory feels entirely too skewed to the first-person. I wish I could have visited, I wish I had gotten that care package out in time. These thoughts aren’t inherently selfish, but somehow it feels that way.

Then there is the technological archiving and excavation process. I can’t bear the thought of deleting e-mails and texts. But do I need to keep her phone number? Am I pissing on the grave if I free up a little Random Access Memory that will never be used again?

With the end, present tense turns to past tense. She would love this song! necessarily becomes she would have loved this song!. A slight hiccup of thought, and a 180 degree turn of direction.

The hell of it all is that I never actually met Turquoise Taylor Grant, who left us peacefully Tuesday morning, at the age of 45, in Ventura, CA after a two-year battle with liver cancer. But because we have many mutual friends across the various sub-sets of my life, we met online and became close.

My wife spent a weekend in San Jose with The Turq in a subset of online friends.

My friend Lynette shared an Acme Theater stage with The Turq and my late friend Mikey Dee, in my Boston rock subset, long before I met any of the above.

Eventually one is always six-degrees away from someone, and I was fortunate to be six-degrees or less from Turquoise on many levels.

Watching her battle the tumors from 3,000 miles was difficult. I often felt like Washington Roebling, bedridden with caissons disease, supervising the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge by telescope from his apartment window. I wanted to BE there. (And back we go to that first-person survivors guilt: I wish I could have done more. Um, what could I “do”, being 3,000 miles away and, oh-by-the-way, not a cancer specialist?)

But this is the wonder of technology and friendship: I was able to be there, via binary stream, with a laugh and a bit of encouragement. Not much, but not bad. (And she made two years. Not a bad ass-kicking of the original prognosis.)

And I’ll always have our collaborations-to-be. Once we were reminiscing about the TCBY frozen yogurt stand at the Downtown Crossing subway station in Boston, and how it always smelled of urine. This lead to one of us ordering a Piss-tachio cone, and this became the name of the band we were going to form. Our first album would be titled Urine This Too!. The Turq had some pipes, and our set-list was entirely of her choosing: Deep Purple’s “Hush”, Al Wilson’s “Show And Tell” and Heart’s “Barracuda”. I believe velvet pants and pimp hats may have been involved.

Or the New Year’s Eve morning when we started tossing Maine dialect back-and-forth phonetically, and by the time I left the office we had the beginning of a play about a young kid working in a textile mill with a pregnant girlfriend and another pregnant girlfriend.

This is the detritus of a life ended far too early. I am forever touched by what we had, but in the early aftermath I can’t get over the feeling of being cheated. All the world (and I) cheated of her smile and spirit. All the world (and I) cheated of present tense and future shenanigans.

I never met Turquoise Taylor Grant, but she touched my spirit deeply, and I am numb and depleted from her physical loss. A mild ransacking, but nevertheless.

Lessons Learned, Volume II

Image Source: Mikey Dee

All train wrecks occur on a timeline.

Everything is, and is exactly how it should be, and everything is inevitable. Life happens exactly as it should, every breath and occurrence unfolding perfectly at the perfect time, and we don’t get to pick and choose the outcomes. All we can do is piece together the aftermath and try to consider ourselves wiser.

I was twenty seven and old before my time when I met Mikey Dee. After years of going nowhere by myself and dreaming, I had finally started to get my shit together, becoming a staff writer for The Noise. Mikey was an editor, and I had seen his name on thank you lists in various liner notes. Big Time Boston at last.

I got an e-mail from Mikey, addressed to “Mikey’s Pals,” inviting me to a party at his house. I was so painfully shy and socially awkward that I thought he might have invited me by mistake, so I called his office at The Planetary Group, where he was Director of Radio Promotions. I called at 8:00 PM, or some such ridiculous hour, figuring no way he’d be there and I could leave a voice mail and ask for an e-mail.

He answered the phone. Shit.

“Um, well,” I stammered, “I haven’t been on staff for long, so I just wanted to make sure that invite wasn’t a mistake.”

“No way, man!” he said, amazed at my emerald green. “C’mon out!” I did, and we became fast friends.

Mikey Dee was a writer, an editor, a DJ on WMFO Tufts, a radio promotions tsunami and a fierce advocate for the Boston scene. He was a life force: a respectful Jew who devoured pulled pork from Redbones, a fanatic of all things Hollywood and a delightful cad (his take on …ahem… subtropical interactions with Amazon Redheads: “I’d pack a lunch and stay all day!”). He was out at live shows six nights a week, always front and center, air-drumming like mad and having the time of his life.

Except for Sundays (“It’s a day of rest!”) when he’d be home making his famous breakfast bonanzas, doing the Times crossword and generally chilling.

If he didn’t like your band, he’d play you anyway and say, “You COULD be great. IF…” If he loved your band, he’d use his benevolent pulpit to shout, “BEST BAND IN BOSTON.” And he took me under his wing and ample nose. ME! Who the fuck was I to get such friend treatment from such an untouchable?!?

Oh, life! The throwaway moments that seem like nothing at the time, but end up resonating forevermore. One night at the apartment I had the balls to say, at twenty seven, that I felt old. Mikey sized me up a nanosecond and said, “You’re what, twenty seven? Well, I’ve got ten years on you, and I’m still rocking!”

So subtle are these gifts, so gently offered. The message: straight-up Andy Dufresne in Shawshank: get busy living or get busy dying. That one throwaway line, proffered out of love on a nothing night in the late autumn of our lives, 1999, changed my life and worldview. Now, at thirty nine, I feel younger than ever.

Mikey’s roommate Tina called me at 4:00 AM, three months after we had all met, when we were so young, crying, “Mikey didn’t make it through the procedure!” I was on the first subway to Children’s Hospital. He went in the night before to have a shunt inserted into a cognitively narrow aorta. In and out, a few weeks recovering and back to normal.

No, three massive brainstem strokes.

I arrived at the beginning of the rest of Mikey Dee’s life, and I was there for the first thirty-six hours, from the first utterances of the word “stroke” to the talk of “baselines” and “prognosis” and well beyond. From that moment a group of friends came together, dubbed “Team Dee.” We fought like hell, and did everything possible.

Mikey’s strokes had left him in a locked-in state: cognitively all there, but unable to speak or move. We did everything we could, moving him to Spaulding Rehab Boston, and instituting Sunday Singalongs at Spaulding.

If you were there on a Sunday, you would have seen anyone from T-Max, Publisher of The Noise, to Boston rock mainstays Sean O’Brien and Linda Jung and Lynette Estes and Pete Sutton to Boston Rock Opera founders Eleanor Ramsay and Mick Mondo to Kay Hanley and Mike Eisenstein from Letters to Cleo to Gary Cherone from Extreme and Van Halen to Sir David Minehan from The Neighborhoods strumming an acoustic and singing Beatles songs at 11, while our wheelchair-bound friend Mikey bobbed along internally. No publicity, no big deal at all. This is what we do for one of our own.

At first I felt completely responsible: for informing all of Mikey’s Pal’s of every millisecond of movement and every blink-once-for-yes-twice-for-no movements. I wanted to be there every nanosecond of every day, and never let anyone down, ever. I was the rock for Team Dee, right? No fallibility here, never mind that I had only known the guy for three months.

After a while, with guilt that I still carry today, I distanced myself a bit from Team Dee. My band played along with 140 bands for the second round of For The Benefit of Mr. Dee! Shows in 2001, and I visited whenever I could. Eventually my “Yoko” came along from Seattle and we moved to my home of Portland, Maine.

And on July 6, 2003, Mikey Dee passed away. Official cause: pneumonia. Unofficial cause: dying well before his time of an unexpected stroke three years earlier.

I still carry extreme guilt that I couldn’t do more for my friend: I couldn’t instantly cure him and heal all of his friends and well-wishers. But I still to this day carry the lessons that Mike imparted on me: don’t feel sorry for yourself, live like it’s your last day and mentor whenever and wherever you can.

The first line of this piece came from Michael Wolff’s heartbreakingly poignant cover story in the May 20, 2010 issue of New York Magazine, and I give full accreditation here.

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Beyond The Glamour

Photo Source: Eleanor Lonardo http://www.flickr.com/photos/elonardo/

06/21/01
Ragged Glory

We practice at The Sound Museum in the South End. Our building is a former warehouse/industrial complex-type building located in a triangle between South Boston, Bay Village and Chinatown. It’s an interesting melting pot of winos, hookers, drag queens, Chinese Laundromats across the street from Irish pubs, working warehouses, gourmet pastry shops, alleys and vacant lots strewn with trash, piss and used condoms, and townhouses carefully sandblasted by young elitist corpromaggots and Starbucks glitterati (30 years ago the first wave of idealistic young professionals bought up these crumbling townhouses in droves, displacing the “low-income”, i.e. “ethnic” tenants, and then declared the South End to be happily “integrated”. They were wrong).

The road leading to our building always makes me think of post-war Berlin. Inside, it’s not much more glamorous.

Our space is a brick room, with one wall covered with silver lined insulation. No climate control. In the dead of winter, we can only use a space heater for ten minutes or so before playing, lest we blow a fuse. In the dead of summer, it’s a total blast furnace, even with a fan.

Our space carries the stench of starving musicians; stale beer, smoke, sweat, hell knows what else. Sharing the space with two other bands doesn’t help matters, as tidiness isn’t quite a priority in their world. It’s a melee of unwrapped cables, wah-wah pedals, coffee cups, empties, overturned ashtrays, dirt, grime and destitution.

There is nary a hint of glamour involved, at least tangible glamour. We go in, we play very loudly, we sweat off a few pounds, we go home, we come back, break down and hump out the gear, drive many miles, set up, play the gig, break down and hump out the gear, drive many miles back, dump it off back at the space, go to bed at ungodly hours, drag-ass into day jobs, miss loved ones, and deal with aches and pains. We do this frequently. This is the cost of love, and the price we pay for those 45 sustaining minutes on a stage.

This is what we live for. We’re an American band.

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The Soundtrack Of Life

Image Source: Baeble Music

I cannot let go of the song. I hear off-beats and syncopation in the metronomic click of the turn signal, and fill the spaces tapping on the steering wheel. An air-conditioner unit thrums on the street and I hear harmonies and counterpoint. The bells of the church ring and the overtones are out of tune and I cringe. I have studied and lived the music my whole life through listening and playing. I am conduit and grateful receiver.

The cloth of my childhood is patchwork record covers. Simon & Garfunkle, Barry Manilow, Joan Baez, Elvis, The Monkees, The Beach Boys, The Crew Cuts, Beethoven, The Carpenters, The Bee Gees, Star Wars, Saturday Night Fever, John Denver and The Muppets, K*Tel disco compilations, AC/DC, Ozzy, Van Halen, all obsessed over and absorbed like nutrients.

Grade school added a layer of metal and punk rock: Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, The Dead Kennedys, The Ramones. My first guitar at age 11, and hours and hours playing records and learning how to play. Passion charging from my soul to my fingertips. Big, rich, melodic sounds on the radio: The Cars, Journey, Madonna.

High school brought CD covers and a return to the underground: Smithereens, The Smiths, The Cure, Hoodoo Gurus, The Replacements. College found me studying jazz: Bird & Diz, Coltrane, Miles, Hawk and Newk. Every day since has found me loving all of the above.

“Logic” dictates that when one grows up and discovers classical, jazz, talk radio or Adult Contemporary, one puts aside the music of youth. I’ve never bought that, and I’ve never practiced it. I have changed tremendously, but the Alvin & The Chipmunks or Gordon Lightfoot or Black Flag record I loved when I was a kid has NOT changed. And it remains as critical and influential as it once was. So why not add Adult Contemporary to my repertoire, rather than abandoning aural pleasure?

I can’t let go of my past, nor do I want to. And I am better for it.

I cannot let go of the song. The records of my youth, the CDs of my developmental years, the MP3s of my adult years all weave a sonic narrative through my life. Every note is still there, informing my every move. Every memory has a soundtrack.

I walk down the hall at work to the beat of a song I heard when I was five. I drive toward sunsets that trigger sunsets and songs from when I was ten. My studies allow me to recognize the 12 notes used by (insert modern star here) as the same 12 notes used by The Beatles and the same 12 notes used by Woodie Guthrie and the same 12 notes used by Louis Armstrong and the same 12 notes used by Bach.

Trace the lineage, count the rings on the stump. It’s all there in my mind and heart. I have studied and lived the music my whole life through listening and playing. I am conduit, receiver and giver of the eternal song.

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Stillwell and Surf Ave

Image Source: Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao

It was a dime a dream and a dozen to be had on those young nights, when we didn’t have anything to worry about and holding hands on the coaster was enough for the rest of our lives. Stifling F Train to Stillwell Ave and to Surf Ave and magical salt-breeze relief, and days that would stretch out with no end, until the night came and the lights danced and hearts soared.

Riding the wheel, Cyclone spins, scalding sand of the boardwalk too much to take. We shared ice cream cones and Cokes and hot dogs and laughs and dime store dreams, and the day and the city and the beach and the world was ours.

At the top of the tracks we gasped, the Verrazano and the Manhattan towers close enough to grab and keep and the force of gravity about to take away our breath. Back on solid ground we hugged for stability and for love, the kind that only the young can know.

We dipped our toes in the protean sea, crystalline blue far ashore, churning green at our feet, and dove in, and hosed off and sweat suntan lotion. We rolled in the sand and nuzzled and whispered vows of love and meant them and the next day and the next year and the next decade didn’t exist.

We had everything and gave away nothing. We were young and in love at the seashore.

It was all we knew and all we needed and all I want…

Bucket Love

Image Source: Brian Ulrich

The autopsy reports never made it into the paper, so nobody knew exactly how a 5 ½ ft. tall, insanely heavy bucket of KFC came to rest on a weed-strewn sidewalk far from its sign pole. But since there weren’t any jobs in or under the bucket, nobody cared much, either. It was a curiosity for a while; something to speculate about while walking quickly to somewhere else. After a while it became a non-sequitur part of the landscape: Pop-art without the art, or the pop.

For Judd and Sonia, it was a place to make out on their way to or from drinking until her parents got home from work. And on the Valentine’s Day of their junior year, it became the spot where they officially became a couple.

Judd was a nervous wreck all day as he held the promise ring he swiped from Spencer’s in his sweaty palm. He knew everything would go well, but he just wanted to get the romance out of the way so they could get back to messing around, as a for-real couple. He practiced his lines internally all day during class. Finally school let out.

Judd and Sonia met up and started along the path to her house. When they got to the bucket, he pulled them over.

“Um…uh, Sonia?” Judd said. “Uh…there’s something I’ve wa..wanted to ask you.”

Sonia gasped, feeling the air rush out of her stomach. Judd got down on his right knee and pulled out the ring.

“I was wondering if…if you’d….y’know…go out with m-me?” Judd said, sliding the ring on with his shaking, boiling hand.

“Of course!” Sonia said. She pulled Judd up off the sidewalk, shoved him against the old rotating chicken bucket and planted a kiss on her new man that shook rust flakes off the lid. After she let Judd surface for air, Sonia gave Judd her class ring, which he put on his necklace. He then pulled out a slightly melted Hershey’s Kiss and gave it to his new girl. Formalities out of the way, they continued to her house, stopping off at Durgin’s Market first to swipe a few 40s.

Romantic? Not really. But romance is what you make of it, and the KFC bucket proved to be just romantic enough. It was not in the city plan, and it wasn’t around long enough to be a permanent installment. But for a few weeks one winter, a fallen piece of fast food advertising became a landmark along the path to young love.

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From The Begining

Photo Source: Joel Meyerowitz

Rick fell back into the couch, greatly enjoying the all-over buzzing and exhausted feeling that comes from a great lay. Being a conscientious renter, he had thrown a towel down on the velour couch before christening it. Afterward, he pulled the bottom of the towel between his legs, forming a hybrid diaper toga. He would get up, but not for a few minutes.

The windows were cracked, just enough to let in a slight breeze that flitted over Rick’s naked body. The smell of sand and fried seafood drifted in, along with the sound of a game show from a few doors away. And the sound of the breakers, rhythmic, mechanical, perpetual, filled the cottage.

It was the beginning. Beginning of the long weekend, beginning of a relationship, beginning of a whole new outlook. Brand new day. Rick was loving the solitude of the cottage, the white noise of the surf, the feel of the world ahead in infinite possibility, starting with the weekend. Relaxed, calm, untroubled. He lit a roach, took a deep pull, laid back and enjoyed the spreading warmth, from the beginning.

Daniel emerged from the bedroom, freshly showered and dressed for dinner. He shook his head at Rick in a tisk-tisk schoolmarm act, and said, “Well, look at this scene of degradation we have here! You’d better clean yourself up, boy. I believe our reservation was for Daniel and Rick, not Daniel and Dick.”

Rick stood up, let the towel drop, then picked it up and started an exaggerated wind-up and pitch. Daniel ducked out of the path of the towel – a curveball, low and outside – and got Rick in a bear hug.

They kissed again, and then just stood there in the living room, lingering for a few minutes, holding hands, enjoying the beginnings of it all together. No words, no sounds, no offices or deadlines or traffic or psychodrama, no appointments, no scrambling through take-out menus, no landlord pounding on the doors. No end to this beginning. Nobody else around, nothing but the gulls and the pounding surf and whatever was to come, that weekend and beyond.

Finally Daniel gave Rick a pat on the ass and said, “Better get to. Don’t want to be late.” As Rick slinked off toward the shower, Daniel picked up the towel, yelled, “And fachrissakes, will you cover yourself, you heathen?!?” and hurled the towel at his new friend. Rick stood there grinning for a nanosecond, thinking of all the possible comebacks he could unleash. But they both knew, without words, that Daniel had just won the first of many snark wars to come.

Rick picked up the pace on his shower in order to make their dinner reservation. That was the only bit of urgency to the long weekend away.

Rest Stop

Originally Published 09/26/2011

Photo Source: Stephen Shore

The western flank of the Verdugo and San Gabriel ranges loomed above the northern arrow point of La Brea, shimmering in the clear white light of morning and coming down. Morgan and Dawn, having driven all night, had stopped at the filling station to rest as the blotter they shared on leaving Taos wore off. Morgan went inside to buy some beers for the rest of the drive, while Dawn slipped into the telephone booth to confirm their arrangements.

They only got a buck from Morgan’s grandmother. There was three plus in the cigar box under the bed yesterday morning, but by the time he went back last night, only $1,000 was left. She probably ordered something from the TV or the Fingerhut catalog, or gave it to Jesus. Goddamn woman was losing her marbles quick. This was unexpected, and they would now have to alter their plans a bit. Still, a grand would hold them over for a good stretch, at least until after the cops were on to them.

Dawn dropped a dime in the slot and dialed Robby’s number. Robby was a friend from high school with access to a cabin in the San Gabriels where they could lay low for a few days. After about fifteen rings Robby answered and said they could come on out. He had left the key under a rock off the right side of the house, and some beer and blankets inside. She thanked her friend, lit up an Old Gold and slid out of the booth and back into the car, finally back to zero and glad that this piece had fallen into place.

And, Morgan told himself as he waited in line with a six-pack of Stroh’s, there was a good chance that his grandmother wouldn’t notice a damn cent missing. The cops would notice that they were missing. But no missing $1,000 meant no larceny charges. All they had to do was be cool for a bit and then explain why they left home. And that was easy enough: because that’s what you do when you’re young and in love. That always works, right?

Morgan got back behind the wheel, popped the top on two cans and lit a Winston, slouching down and into the leather bench seat. He exhaled; smoke billowing out along the roof and windshield and dissipating into the warm Los Angeles morning. He grabbed the directions to the cabin and the Texaco map in the glove compartment and started tracing the route. The cabin was between Rancho Cucamonga and Mt. Baldy, off 210 after taking the 101 and the San Bernardino Freeway. He turned to Dawn and said, “Well, last stretch. You ready?”

Dawn took a deep pull on her Stroh’s. She lit up another smoke, leaning all the way back on the head rest. “Yeah, but I need some breakfast first. Can we stop somewhere?”

“Yeah, that’s a good idea” Morgan agreed. “Let’s go.” He started the car, popped his lock down, rolled the window down and pulled out onto La Brea, and right on Melrose. They stopped at a diner on Melrose by the Paramount lot, and had pancakes, French toast, fruit and coffee. When they got out the air was fragrant with eucalyptus, lemon and orange trees, and they both breathed it in deeply before getting in the car and heading northeast toward the mountains.