Canoga Park, 1985
The neon light above the store on the corner down the block was on the blink.
“Liq…Liq….Liq…”
I put the two big bottles of ultra—budget merlot on the counter.
“How are you, my friend?” asked the skinny Lebanese owner, his close-set eyes twinkling alongside his long aquiline nose; his eternal five o’clock shadow like something from central casting for an Arab liquor store owner in a cop show. He knew me well.
“Fine, fine, “I said, “shokran!” See, I even knew some Arabic.
I smiled my bloated north-of-Ventura-Boulevard smile and pushed out into the parking lot. Heavy traffic on Vanowen. Vans, low riders, Beamers, pickups with four-foot ground clearance and exhaust flap covers flapping and clanking as they gunned their sex-substitute engines, spewing out more grey filth into the hot, valley smog. Grandmas, pachucos, blacks, Asians, and ancient, trembling white couples staring with frightened eyes at the vanished Valley of their youthful dreams, stood at street crossings, watching the dizzy world whizzing by at an astonishing speed. Latino families, mamas holding hands of beautiful white-shirted little boys and bright-faced, dark-eyed girls in school uniforms waited for the little flashing green man with the bad back to signal it was momentarily safe to cross the supercharged automotive artery. Tossed Butts and blown papers rolled and rattled in the tail-pipe wind gutter. The horizon was orange, brown, purple. The smog made nice sky colors.
No one could see me once I was in my car, I thought. I pulled the door shut and turned the key. Click. Click. Click. Nothing. Come on, dammit! Click. Click. I hit the steering wheel. Fuck! Catch. On. Thank you, you fucking piece of shit Chevette.
I backed out and turned up the side street and made my way home through the alleys; less cops. Couldn’t get caught again. The Reckless Driving was a lucky break. The next time I’d be in the slammer for more than just a few hours.
The night in jail with the seventeen poker-playing Mexicans and the assorted gang-bangers and other regular drunks like me had been humiliating, but I’d walked away with only a four-hundred dollar fine for the crime of reckless driving. An everyday deal between attorney and prosecutor. Standard shit in those years before all the brouhaha about DUI. Good thing I hadn’t made it to my coke dealer before I got popped. That would have been bad.
My little boy was playing in the living room. I slid the cork out extra quietly in the kitchen and filled a wine glass; put it behind a row of cook books on the counter for later. Drained another glass, then refilled. I went out the kitchen side door into the alley by the garbage can and fired up a smoke. I pulled the can away from the wall, exposing dozens of violet-red palmetto-bug cockroaches, who scurried momentarily away from the light before brazenly stalking back.
The moon was rising, dull and orange, over the lemon trees. Other people had avocados or oranges. But we had these lousy lemon trees. You can only make so much lemonade. There was my garden as well. Ungodly tomato hornworms had destroyed this year’s crop of Big Boys before I found them and threw both hornworms and Big Boys over the cinder-block wall into the alley.
The alley was part of the endless grid of streets, alleys, and houses that filled everything. Sometimes I climbed up on the roof to try to get a view of the distant mountains, the red Santa Susanna rocks to the north, which reminded me of Sedona. But Sedona was of another age of the earth, of my life. It was hard to believe I had ever been there. My Buddha’s Childhood Kingdom was a misty, half-remembered Shangri-la. I had left it but hadn’t found enlightenment; I had found my own limitations and other people’s excrement. Who knows? Maybe enlightenment was just another piece of cheap and easy nonsense; a Disney movie with talking raccoons and animatronic spiritual teachers that nodded endlessly and mouthed a reverby OM, while some crappy, lush synth song played over and over. Over the high-priced hills, the Jewish Alps, there was the vast Pacific Ocean, but here it was a sea of ranch house rooftops, palm trees, all laid out over the old orchards of the forties and fifties, bedded down with seething masses of people from everywhere, all coming to consume and regurgitate America. To the south, Woodland Hills and Tarzana shimmered; the houses across Ventura Boulevard, the houses of the rich and famous; Mercedes driven by awesome women wearing Gucci sunglasses. Dentist’s wives, their tauntingly beautiful daughters, incapable of even seeing me as I stood at the corner of Ventura and Winnetka, wearing my sweatpants, waiting for the lights to change.
The Radio
Wolf spiders. Wolf spiders on my blankets.
They look like scaled-down tarantulas, chopped and channeled like tarantula hot rods, but unlike their lumbering bigger cousins, wolf spiders are frantically fast. That’s part of the problem; you take your eyes off of them for a second, to get something to swat or catch them with, and they disappear. But where do they go? Under the other blanket? Back in the corner where the wooden bunk-bed frame doesn’t quite touch the wall, that place of unspeakable web-wrapped darkness? Tarantulas, of course, are gentle creatures; you can hang them on your sweater, let them amble over your slowly moving fingers. But wolf spiders are lightning killers, even if only of other wolf spiders. Their only other known function is to act as nightmare stalkers of seven-year-old boys.
I lay in the darkness in my little basement room. Off in the distance there was the ominous deep rumbling from the new “jet” planes flying somewhere in the night. I was under the covers, drenched in a cold sweat, hiding from wolf spiders and rigid with terror that H-bombs would fall out of the sky. I was waiting every second for it to happen. That was what they’d been feeding us kids: Commies and H-bombs.
I had the blankets pulled up around my head, because besides the H-bombs and the wolf spiders, there were the mice and rats and other short-and-long-legged crawling, creeping scaries waiting to get me down in that basement room.
My dad never got around to finishing this part of the house. It was on his list, but the list was years long and filled the blue-lined pages of notebook after notebook, each neatly written in his crabbed writing, each held closed with a rubber band. There were a great many things on that years-long list that never got done. He was a big starter but not much of a finisher, a man of many dreams, but not so many fully realized accomplishments. So I, who my dad called Charlie Owlbox, the Dog-Faced Boy, number three of four kids, ended up being stuck in this unfinished afterthought. My older brother and sister lived down the hall, in finished rooms. My little sister lived upstairs with my parents. The basement had a semi-smooth concrete floor that was supposed to be polished but wasn’t (that was a fifties thing, polished concrete, very modern (now it’s au courant again: Whole Foods floors), and there were missing acoustic tiles in my ceiling, which left holes from which mice and rats would sometimes peer down on me as I lay in my bed. I once woke up to find that a big, fat mama rat had brought her newly spawned brood to nestle in the comfy folds of my satin comforter. At first I thought they were kittens, as we had up to a dozen cats at any one time in our house, and there were kittens everywhere, but as I squinted at them in the dim morning light, I suddenly realized that these tiny squirmers were of a more feral species. I ran, I suppose yelling, from my room. My dad came to the dramatic rescue, in typical Hughes Call fashion, with his ceremonial navy sword in one hand and our black cat in the other. He flicked back the covers with the tip of his shiny sword and tossed the cat on the rats, which scattered in all directions. Black Kitty might have caught one of them.
Right at the foot of my bed there was also a dirt- floored “alcove”, full of dusty, cobwebby cardboard boxes, that was really a crawl space that led back under the house. This creepy, dark place was home to many kinds of critters, including the black widows that my older brother and his intrepid pals sought with jars. A flimsy little curtain only partially covered this nasty gateway to a child’s night terrors.
But my room was a well-lit refuge compared to what waited beyond my pocket door with its little hook latch. Outside the door, there was a dimly lit, narrow hallway with no wall paneling, just exposed rough joists strung with Romex electric cabling and draped with dusty spider webs. Directly across from my door was the open black hole of the highly ironically named “playroom”, another unfinished space filled with partially started projects such as my dad’s “catamaran”, the one he planned to sail to Hawaii, which was never more than a few two-by-fours tacked together and leaned up against the windows, which couldn’t be seen out of for the clutter. There were piles of cut-up sheets of plywood, stacks of boxes and old newspapers dating back to the thirties, three-legged chairs waiting forever to be re-glued, a couple of eight-inch black-and-white TV sets, an old wind-up Victrola, uncountable broken vintage electric fans and light fixtures, and God knows what else, everything covered in spider webs and a light fall of slightly smelly grime that I came to call Mummy Dust. It just had this strange indefinable odor. I’m sure Indiana Jones would be able to relate. This unkempt jumble was naturally home to myriad species of arachnids, including my unfavorites, the wolf spiders, and all the other web makers, big and small.
You see, my father was one of those people who couldn’t toss anything out, and I mean anything. Each old box full of whatnots, each partially cut piece of lumber, every hanging garment bag full of old, never-to-be-worn-again clothing (I knew there were corpses in them) had its own old memory or future use. At its most organized, the playroom was a place of labyrinthine, box-lined trails through the piles and stacks. This only got worse over time, until the tortuous paths themselves were filled to the ceiling. Nowadays, a person who collects stuff in this fashion would be labeled a compulsive hoarder, which is quite accurate, but the old name for the compulsive hoarder is more descriptive: packrat. Actually, both names are sadly correct.
You might think from the above that I grew up out in the hills of Appalachia or in some rotting urban tenement, but this was in Mill Valley, California, one of the most urbane pieces of suburbia that ever was. And my dad wasn’t some undereducated hick from the sticks or faceless denizen of a forlorn cityscape. What he was was quite a complicated man. His mother and father had divorced in 1919 when he was two, leaving him to be raised by his wealthy grandparents. His mother’s father, my great-grandfather, George Alexander Hughes, was the inventor of the electric stove, if you can get your mind around that. A third-generation Irish Protestant immigrant, Mr. Hughes started an electric appliance company that went on to become Hotpoint and he was the Chairman of the Board of General Electric back in the twenties and thirties. I keep telling my brother that sooner or later a few hundred old shares of GE will be found in some old pile of papers (my brother took many of my dad’s boxes with him after dad passed away) and we’ll be rich. The shares have as yet not been unearthed. When we find them, I’ll let you know.
My dad grew up in a big house near Chicago, where he got more attention from the liveried “colored” servants and cooks than he did from his older-generation, distant grandparents. He was shunted off to a fancy, waspy prep school and then Harvard and Harvard Business School. From this high-altitude springboard he could have bellyflopped into a cushy corporate job. All he had to do was toe the line and follow vaguely in Grandpa’s footsteps. But while serving as a young Lieutenant Commander, U.S. Navy (no doubt through his grandfather’s political connections) in the strictly non-combatant role of junior adjutant and tennis partner for Admiral Nimitz in Pearl Harbor during WWII, where in addition to his forehand my father finely honed his already considerable cocktail-party skills, he saw California. When the war was over, he turned his back on his guaranteed-to-be-boring corporate job prospects and left the Midwest for the wide-open sunny life of San Francisco. He was, despite his blustery protestations to the contrary, a black sheep who tried for a long time in vain to wear white; a lifelong failure at business and a staunch anti-Roosevelt Republican who finally came to his senses during the Vietnam War and became a Democrat and an anti-war, civil rights advocate. Should he have been surprised to have spawned a rock musician? As for Hotpoint Electric Company and the George Alexander Hughes’,” Father of the Electric Range”, family fortune? My grandmother, the party-loving-almost-good-enough erstwhile concert pianist, spent all the dough traveling the world on board Cunard liners draped in minks and pearls and entertaining Broadway’s and The New York Philharmonic’s stars at her 57th Street apartment, right across the street from Carnegie Hall.
Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.
My dad was also an alcoholic, who, though of the largely charming variety, couldn’t find the time to play catch with me or teach me how to drive. He was always too busy either sleeping a big night off or winding up to be Mr. Gregarious, the guy who lived for the next big, imaginative party coming down the pike. My parents both sang and my mother played piano; we had three of them in the house, with two back-to-back grands in the big living room, the curves matching like musical yin-yang pieces. My folks belonged to a theater group that did Gilbert and Sullivan and other light musicals, and our house was party central for the cast. Our parties were legendary. My dad once cut an eight-by-ten-foot hole in the living room floor and rigged a “stage” that could be raised with pullies from the infamous playroom up to the living room. Virtually everyone at the party, and we often had a hundred people or more at our soirees’, was required to have an act, which could be raised from the depths, the partygoers singing or doing a funny scene from a play. You’d think he could’ve taken a little of that energy to fix my room up. But he was the party master: he loved the ladies, he lived for the laughter; his nickname was Hugs. He had a clock that said, no drinks served until after five. The face was, of course all fives.
My Father was much loved by his witty, creative, and simpatico friends, but his own early childhood abandonment by his mother no doubt left him with deep, unfaced issues. His dark, wounded side found expression in the scary bowels of our house.
Of course, I didn’t know any of that when I was a young boy. I only knew that everywhere there were piles of stuff too important to be tossed out, projects too far down on the ever-longer list to ever be dealt with. At night the doorless playroom was a seething black pit full of lurking horrors. To the right was the laundry area, with its single, hanging bare light bulb, and to the right, the dark and creepy old blanket-draped doorway to dad’s “workroom” (where he hid his cases of cheap Tom Moore bourbon). There were two more of those scary, unlit, cave-like alcoves that ran off under the old house. The stairs that went up to the main floor had only steps, no facings, since they had been built by my dad, who we now know never finished anything. I imagined bony hands reaching out of the blackness for my ankles as I ran up to my parent’s bedroom in the middle of the night when I was too terrified to stay downstairs any longer. All this and H-Bombs and wolf spiders, too.
So, I snuck my hand out of the blankets and clicked on the green plastic Zenith radio. Wish I still that radio. It looked just like the front of a ’55 Oldsmobile, with chromish mesh over the speaker and a pea soup green body. Two dials. Volume and frequency. I turned it just on, didn’t turn the volume up at all. At first, there was only a very faint buzzing noise. But after a few minutes, as the tubes warmed, there was KYA coming in, too quietly for anyone to hear but me. The sound of the smooth-talking DJ was reassuring to a child who felt as if he had been abandoned to his cellar-dweller fate, and the comforting top-forty hit singles played all night.
There were songs that I loved: Don’t be Cruel, El Paso, Hello Mary Lou, Bye-Bye Love, Pretty Woman. There were many more songs I couldn’t stand: She Wore Blue Velvet, Hats Off To Mary, Tell Laura I Love Her, Itsy-Bitsy Teeny-Weeny Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini. But good or not, each song was three minutes long: verse, b-section, and chorus. We were a musical family and I was already at the tender age of seven a discerning critic. I waited for the songs that had cool guitar leads, songs that sounded like a band was playing them. Roy Orbison, Ray Charles, The Everly Brothers. I switched over to KEWB or the black station KDIA when Frankie Avalon, Neil Sedaka, or another one of those horrible teen idols came on. I liked the real stuff, no lush strings or oboes. The songs were my own private fort; if I listened hard enough, the night went away. Eventually I would fall asleep, but the old Zenith stayed on all night. The songs sank into my consciousness.
I was terrified down in that room, but as I drifted into dreamland on the waves of the old Zenith I was unknowingly uncovering something inside of me: music, a place of refuge. And it was my own Berlitz course: Learn to write hit songs while you sleep.
The Dance
Hard guys. Duck-ass haired, switch-blading, sucker-punching, candy money-extorting, playground-humiliating, stupid-ass hard guys. Worse than wolf spiders, because you could stomp on a wolf spider, but hard guys traveled in packs, like nasty dogs. You couldn’t take ‘em all on; there were too many. They cut the spineless kids from the herd and harassed them just for fun. Kids like me.
I didn’t have a clue what was going to happen when my mom dropped me off uptown on a fine evening in September of 1960, what magic was about to strike from the heavens, but that night I found my life’s calling, and those fuckin’ hard guys had a lot to do with my grand vision.
I was in seventh grade and it was the first dance of fall at the Outdoor Art Club in my hometown of Mill Valley, California. Though someday it would be the ultra dot.com village of multi-millionaires, where young latte-sipping entrepreneurs and their slim wives who drove sleek Mercedes and black Prius’s would buy ten thousand dollar paintings at the hardware store where I used to get my baseball bats, Mill Valley in 1960 was just a very, very nice small town with a California twist: Middle America meets the Ivy League and gets a dash of Zen mixed in with its highball (or red wine and the first reefers in certain houses). In 1960, we were on the borderlands of the future. JFK and Nixon were running for president; the Red Menace loomed over our mushroom-cloud- shaded heads. Vietnam and all that was still to come. The psychedelic Sixties were slowly but surely being born, but for now the button-down Fifties were still in control. I was eleven years old, five-foot–three, as skinny as a fishing rod, and only dimly aware of the big world.
It was a dance for seventh-and-eighth graders. For a brief moment, I was excited enough about the dance to not be afflicted with my usual paranoia about getting hassled by the likes of Allan Acree and the other Elvis-haired hard guys who haunted these events.
You see, the ghosts of my wolf-spider infested basement were fading away as I discovered the spiders were harmless and the ghosts weren’t really there. I had transferred my fears to a more present reality. I was now scared shitless by hard guys.
Hard guys. They were my shadow mirrors, the ones who pointed out to me and everyone else just what a total chickenshit I was. Hard guys liked to fight, or at least threaten to fight. Fighting and being tough was cool: in fact, the word for cool was tough. That ‘deuce coupe is so tough. The Nueland twins are so tough. Being the quintessential skinny little runty nerd, I lived in constant fear of getting my ass kicked; almost as afraid as I was of the H-Bomb, and I was still deathly afraid of that, by the way. You know the clip we all grew up with, that magnificent crown-shaped white-hot Bikini Atoll H-bomb mushroom cloud instantaneously blossoming from the sea. As the clip runs, the mushroom head rolls skyward, leaving a massive column of gray-white, the stem of the mushroom. Around the base of that impossibly huge and powerful tower rises a gigantic wave that dwarfs a fleet of mothball WWII warships. Yes sir and madam, that vision scared the crap out of me until my late teens.
But H-bombs were on TV. My immediate, daily problem was that there was seemingly no escape from these hard guys. They strutted around at school and at C’s drive-in with their Bryllcreemed hair, metal combs like weapons protruding from the back pockets of their Levis, just aching for any excuse to be shitheads. They pushed nerds like me around and if they felt like it they’d call you out, while their grinning thug buddies stood around leering. Then you were screwed; you’d have to fight down at the tracks. I worked very hard not to let that occur.
I had two, both failing, strategies: I tried to escape them by having younger, less threatening friends, which only made me a bigger (or I my case smaller) pussy, and conversely by trying to look like I belonged in their hard guy “in” crowd. I used Vitalis or Bryllcreem (a little dab’l do ya!), or even Wildroot Cream Oil (the one with cartoon shiny-headed Fearless Fosdick as its pitch man in the old print ads), and carried my own grease-slick comb in my back pocket. The goal was to get one curl to droop down across your forehead from the front of the combed-up pomp, like Elvis. I couldn’t quite pull that one off because my hair was too fine, so I finally resorted to this goo you dipped your comb into that made your hair as hard as a helmet when it dried. Why did guys grease their hair anyway? It was because in the fifties, bathing wasn’t really a fully realized national obsession yet. Old ways die hard. Some adults in that Robert Mitchum-John Wayne-post-WWII, post-Korea era only “took the plunge” once a week. So I tagged along and greased up and also razored off the belt loops on my Levi’s, neatly rolled the cuffs over, and wore a white t-shirt with the sleeves folded twice over my noodle-muscle arms. When I hung out at the abandoned railroad tracks after school, I folded a pack of Pall Malls or Marlboros in my sleeve just like the big boys. I smoked; I swore. But none of that worked.
Because there was no way in hell I could really ever be a hard guy. But I wanted to be popular, and I didn’t want to get my ass kicked. My tactics weren’t paying off. I was still getting punched, pulled under at the pool, and humiliated on the playground in front of haughty girls who thought it was funny.
I was a dorky enough chicken (did I mention the horn-rimmed glasses my mom picked out for me?) that my friend Dennis Brown even fought a proxy fight for me with Alan Acree. Acree was a junior thug from the wrong side of town who had a set of muscular one-year-older hard guys for friends, the dreaded, hulking Craig Byrd among them. Acree called me out because I had a club called the Tasmanian Devils Club with my younger friends and chubby Mike Walter, another nerd. It was a TV cartoon thing, for Chrissakes. We had other ad hoc clubs, like the Famous Monsters Club (we kept movie monster mags in a tree fort- oooh, Creature From The Black Lagoon , The Tingler!), and our less well-known but much more exciting junior jerk-off club, which congregated in my older brother’s junked cars: he kept girly mags stashed under the seats. Alan Acree said he had his own club, the Acree Devils, and what did I fuckin’ think of that? He poked me hard in the shoulder a couple of times for good measure. I stammered something about how that was cool. That wasn’t good enough for Acree. He called me out. I had to fight him down at the tracks after school.
Oh shit! I was shaking and near tears. I just wasn’t a fighter. Acree would kick my ass in front of everyone, all the hard guys and tough chicks and wannabe hard guys who hung out at the tracks after school. My friend Dennis Brown, who had the super-cool Kooky Byrnes hair and was five inches taller than I was, said, no sweat; he’d take care of Acree for me.
After school I went with Dennis down to the tracks, where the old spur line’s rusted rails passed beneath a wooded bluff; the place where everyone hung out to smoke and socialize and fight. The word was out: fight today. I was as nervous as I could have possibly been. There were a lot of kids there, way more than usual. Acree’s gang of six or seven goons came up, acting like they were the kings of the place, which they basically were. There was some murmured name calling. Acree had heard that Dennis was going to fight him. It wasn’t unheard of to have a surrogate fight for someone. Dennis was a guy who didn’t take crap from anyone, but he was kind of an outsider. That’s why he was my buddy, because I was one, too, but I was way more of a dork than Dennis. He and Acree exchanged the usual ‘fuck you’s ‘and other assorted niceties, like, this ain’t none of your business, Brown. Oh yeah? Maybe it fuckin’ is, Acree. First names were never used, except maybe when you said a guy’s name backwards, like Nibor Snobbig or Xela LLac. They stepped out into a ring formed by the onlookers. The ratted-haired popular hard-girl Nueland twins smoked cigarettes and acted bored. There was some tense calling, like at a baseball game. C’mon, Alan!, Git’ him, Take out the motherfucker, Hit him low. There was more vocal support for Acree; he was the popular thug. But there was respect for Dennis, who had the fighting skills that might enable him to kick Acree’s ass, which secretly a lot of kids wouldn’t mind seeing happen. I wasn’t the only one around school who had been intimidated and harassed by Acree. The fighters raised their fists and circled, looking for the first punch. Acree rushed in and Dennis pushed him off and got a shot in. Acree came back fast; he was a madman, scratching, kicking. He was shorter than Dennis, so he got in underneath and tried to do some damage. But Dennis stood up straight and punched and pushed Acree off. They kicked up some dust with their black loafers and some gravel from the old tracks went skittering around. The bout was all over in a few short minutes; a draw, like most fights. No torn Pendletons. Each guy got a couple of licks in. They exchanged some more salutary fuck you’s and withdrew into the crowd. So I didn’t end up getting my ass kicked, but I was sort of humiliated for not fighting my own fight. I wish I could have that one back. Getting a bloody nose from Alan Acree wouldn’t have hurt me as much as did the loss of my self-respect I suffered for having ducked out. Besides, Acree could never have hit me as hard as various music publishers and so-called friends would tag my ass over the years.
But despite the Alan Acrees of my world, I went on still aping the hard guys. What else could I do? Deep down inside, I wonder if I wasn’t always looking for a way out of all that shit. I’d never be a hard guy or a professional baseball player. Vickie and Bonnie and the other giggling, note-passing popular girls who took delight in slicing open my little heart by ignoring me would keep on doing so.
At least I knew that at the Social Club dance Janey would dance with me. We had twisted at a well-lit sock- hop on the slick hardwood floor of the Park School gym during the summer. We won the twist contest, that honor bestowed on us, the sweaty, beaming couple, by one of the younger, cooler teachers. Dancing was a blast. Most of my fellow dorks were too shy to dance, but I couldn’t stand still when the music started and I found that if I got the courage up to ask, some girls would dance with me. I could feel the beat, the melody, and the shouting choruses of the spinning 45’s racing around inside of me. Something undeniable was waking up within the groveling chickenshit. I was so ready for the dance that night.
I heard the muffled thumping of the music coming through the oak trees as I walked nervously up the curving sidewalk to the Outdoor Art Club. I began to twitch. I wanted to get there.
I got my social club card punched and went with Mike Walter or someone into the tiny, old hall. There, up on the box stage at the far end of the room, was the first band I’d ever seen. They were typical of those groups: drums, bass, guitar, sax; one Electro-voice mic going through a totally inadequate public address speaker. The sound system was designed to handle Outdoor Art Club functions attended by middle aged men who wore bow-ties and smoked pipes. My dad wore bow-ties and smoked a pipe. His Naval Reserve unit met there, under the banners of Flag, WWII, Fraternity, and Jim Beam. The little hall was paneled in dark wood. It had hardwood floors and a pale-green-walled, fluorescent-lit kitchen off to one side where during most events curled and coiffed women with top-buttoned sweaters and long skirts would lay out baked goods and brew big aluminum urns of weak Folger’s coffee. American and California flags stood on brass-eagle-topped stands on each side of the band-box stage. You could almost hear crew-cut men chanting ‘I Like Ike!’, or ‘Nixon’s the One!’
The Elvis-haired band guys in their matching suit jackets and skinny ties stepping together in time to the beat on the little stage looked like grown men to me, though they were most likely only as old as my brother Lewis, sixteen or seventeen. The amps and guitars were Fender, the two-tone, dark-blue and silver, Slingerland drums bought by paper-route earnings plus a loan from daddy. During breaks, guitar and bass hung by their straps over the amps. So tough! Cooler than tough! I wanted a Fender Jazzmaster or Stratocaster and a Bandmaster two-piece amp. The combo thudded away in the little boomy hall. The guitar and sax traded off solo licks; there was a Sandy Nelson drum solo on TeenBeat. All the Bryllcreemy lads and their bouffant hair-spray or page-boy lassies raised their voices on What I Say, Tequila, and Bony Marony. The two bands that night were called The Chord Lords and The Opposite Six.
Later on, I would get to know some of those band guys – the ones who made the jump to 60’s rock, that is. A few would become famous, like Bill Champlin, who would someday play in the super-group Chicago and write mega-hits. Others would go down, ,flat-top–with-fenders dinosaurs: Jazzmasters blazing, refusing to get hip, keeping their hair products, pints of cheap bourbon, Saturday-night-big-dance-and-fight, and old Duane Eddy rockabilly guitar riffs clutched in their hot-rod hands to the bitter end.
But back then, for me, these guys were like Gods. They played Duane Eddy’s Forty Miles of Bad Road, Sleepwalk, I Got a Woman, The Peter Gunn Theme, The Ventures’ Walk Don’t Run and a bunch of Freddie King-style instrumentals that featured only a handful of notes, mostly pentatonic scale: good dance stuff.
I let it all hang out that night. Once I finally got up the courage to ask her, Janey and I jitterbugged, twisted, stomped, and even slow danced until I was soaked in sweat and then we danced some more. There were sneaked cigarettes outside and some nervous futile attempts at kissing. She was kind to me; she kept dancing. But she wouldn’t smooch. Making out was still a year away for me. I just got to hold her hands a couple of times for a lingering moment after the slow songs, which fired my poor, hormone-wracked pubescent body enough to make my post-dance masturbation even more earnest than usual.
I was the original dancing fool. Since I was using a deadly combo of Vitalis plus that god-only-knows-what-it-is stuff you dip your comb into that turns your hair into a helmet, my sweat melted my hairdo and my would-be hard guy hair failed me, falling lank and wet on my forehead. But while my sweaty, horny manifestation may have driven cute little Janey to keep me at arm’s length, I had the time of my life. And I learned something that changed it forever.
The guys in the band had lots of girls staring at them while they played, some girls even sneaking suggestive glances at them over their boyfriend’s shoulders during the slow dances. And they watched the band guys when they were done playing, too, the girls giggling and glancing in little groups at the musos. Girls, the thing I most wanted. The hard guys didn’t fuck with the band guys. The musicians had a magic passport to cool. They were above the junior high Darwinian law of dickhead-beats-up-dickhead. The band guys hung out by themselves. They were in a world of their own. I wanted to be in that world. And starting right then at that seventh grade social club dance, I, a skinny little eleven-year-old dork with glasses and barely emergent cojones, had a feeling that I would get there. From that dance forward, there would be no turning back, I would have no doubts. I was going to be in a rock’n’roll band and get out of the hard guy rat race forever.
There was a nylon-stringed guitar at home. I don’t know where it came from, since no one played guitar in my family. The battered Spanish-style guitar only had the bottom two strings on it, but that was enough. I just slid my fingers around, kind of playing bass for the songs I had heard at the dance. I could kind-of sort-of figure some of them out. Tequila! I was on my way.
What’s funny is that I still play the same way today.
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