chapter 4

4

I first got into the whole thing a long time ago. Just sitting and thinking. Not even in a meditative or Zen way. Just relaxing the mind. A purity of just being. All this thought gave you a developed sense of control. When things around you seem to speed up and get out of control, most people react with tenseness and stress and make mistakes in judgement. The trained mind unwinds, steps back and views everything from a different perspective. Slower, more deliberate, more casual somehow. Delibrate. Being able to control the mind and the emotions had its advantages. An advantage that I might have used to my advantage, if I had only thought of it when I needed it the most.
There is a lull before a performance. A calm before the storm as it were. You have to focus and get in touch with yourself, and, yet open up at the same time. Thoughts come back. It's acting really. You have to be happy and entertain, regardless of how you really feel. It's an acquired skill. Some people can't do it at all. They carry everything around with them all the time. Performers just don't have that luxury, but life for us would be a lot easier if they did.
I had about a forty five minutes before I had to start. Time could pass slowly at this point. Usually, I'd make a set list, but not for a while. Didn't make an sense anymore. I would never follow it. Instead I just made a list of all the songs I knew and kept it on the stage. It was really nice at first, nice and neat and done up on the computer in 72 point arial font and put in a plastic sheet for longevity. I'd just scan it from time to time to get ideas, and of course, I took all the requests that I could. I tried to do at least half original material, but sometimes, especially late in the night when your playing for a mostly drunk crowd, you tend to do mostly cover material. Give them want they want, and leave them wanting a little more, simple, and the only real key to success in this music business.
I stared at the notebook/journal in front of me. I was sitting at the table that the girls and the foreign guys had been sitting at. I thought about writing something. I really had to write more, to chronicle things. To get the ideas on paper. The book would come, the short stories, everything would come with time as long as I was consistent with the writing. And yet, now I stared at the notebook, I went over to the bar and got a beer. Sam Adams. Might as well get the good stuff, it was part of my pay after all. I walked around the room and looked out the window. It looked like a quiet night, not many people on the street for this hour. It was one of the first cool nights of the year and maybe that was keeping people in. There was a football game today and maybe the tailgate parties got everyone too drunk and they were taking the early evening naps gearing up for the big evening blow out... Who knows?
I looked at the stores and the bars across the street. I started to walk to the front door just to take a look outside, but I decided just to sit down and relax and wait. Waiting was hard, that was well documented by lots of people. Right now, I was experiencing why.
Again, I stared at the journal. The edges splintered and torn. This book had been through so much. All the travels of the past four years, all the ups and down. It knew things that no one else had ever known, about me, about life, about things in general. I opened it up to a random page and read. Sometimes when I was driving I'd dictate into a cassette and transctbe it later. This appeared to be one of those entries.
...I drove into the sunrise. Somewhere near Charlotte NC. Or maybe we were still in Georgia, I don't know now. Somewhere near but not close. Just another exit on an anonymous interstate through the haze of the early morning. I was coming over a bridge and the crescent of the sunrise was highlighting the warehouses and run down buildings along a river. Black buildings against an orange and pink sunrise sky, and in a pure sense, quite pretty actually. Silohetted. The structures seemed to be long ago deserted and left to rot and be looted and broken into. I could even see the sun through the empty windows. Scrap buildings. Square and unimaginative in their architecture. Dark and impersonal, functional buildings. Not designed to be pretty, designed for purpose, one thing and one thing only. Maybe at one time this part of the city was a thriving port and these buildings were important to the local economy. For all I know they still are, but they don't look like it. They have large windows and large doors, and, in the sunrise, they take on an eerie overbearing form. Orange penumbra of the sunrise in the background, bringing the hope and melody textures of a new day. Just beyond the warehouses is only the sky. Blue. And today a few clouds. Just a few. Then, only the openness and the far away, and the infinite.
I had plenty of time to think. Everyone else is asleep. Everyone doesn't care anyway. Not their thing. They are too busy with the daily rituals that is life on the road. Looking for places to eat. It's not so easy along the highway to find a place that 9 people with varied eating habits like to stop at. Arguing about where and when to stop and eat. Looking for places to go to the bathroom. Arguing about places to go to the bathroom. Looking for things to read. Not caring about what anyone else was reading. Looking for the Penthouse that somehow left in their suitcase and is now stowed away somewhere. Looking for their smoke to ease the boredom. Trying to share but at the same time be sure that you had enough. Listening to tapes of our shows and other shows and arguing about what to listen to.. Evaluating, overevaluating everything. Let it flow. Plenty of time. Let the time dilute everything. It always does anyway. The stimulus is there all the time.
We have at least 50, 60 miles until the next stop. I wasn't tired but my mind was fried. Up since 5 the previous morning. A little hungover from the consumption of the previous night. I little spacey. Sleepy, but not ready or able to be asleep. Afraid I guess of what I might dream. In a good state of mind, but a bad situation to create. If I had a guitar in my hands right now, I might even write a good song. Maybe a sad song and probably a meaningless song. A song that someone somewhere out there can relate to because it's also happened to them".
The notebook is hard to use when your driving, that's when the little tape recorder comes in handy. There were times I'd drive and one of the crew guys would act like a steno or something. Take dication. Lots of neat stuff come out that way. For one reason, I could just go off. At the same time, his couldn't write too quickly, or to legibily and things would get put down that were never said, but were cool anyway.
And I thought about all kinds of things. How horrible it was that mothers couldn't feed their babies; how sad it was that the same mothers later in life didn't care enough to see that the kids got to school. How it almost made me cry to hear about all the crime and the death and the intimidation our culture had but on each of us. It isn't so easy to just "be" anymore. You have to always be on the look out, you have to have someone looking out for your back. Making sure that you're not getting taken advantage of. Not going to lose it all for some cheater who only wants to take the easy way out. What ever, that was the sad part.
These were big problems. I had my own little problems to deal with just like everyone else. I had lots of bills. I had a rent for a place that I rarely ever used, and of course food and car insurance and all that stuff. It all added up. And the inside didn't always cut it. More bills then the deposit that went in the account. It was expensive being on the road. Paying for every meal, staying in hotels most nights, gas, everything.
More or less my financial situation was like anyone else, a function of how the cash came in, versus the money that had to go out. I didn't really care about the bills, but I didn't like the hassles that I got when I wasn't able to or simply didn't pay them, and the fact was that I was honest and tried to pay on time. As of course, like everything else, I had my philosophies about the whole thing. Money and greed was the root of a lot of the problems. You couldn't be a true artist and worry about money. They could not exist in the same place at the same time. The suffering and struggling artist transmuting pain and anguish into things of beaury...
But truth be known, the problems were simply that we all didn't make enough money and the lack of it is what put me in the hole. I could still philosophize all I wanted with a big wad in my pocket or my bank account.
You can always fake poverty, but it's tough to fake affluence.
And I had acquired a lot of things, like guitars and materials to support the music of course, and I had to have them of course, and them I had my tape decks and notebooks and my "life tools". In the big ledger sheet somewhere up there in sky, I felt that the bottom line was good to me... but I had no way of proving it.
I had little personal things to deal with too. Little things mostly, but the little things all added up. Seems like there were no medium size things in life. Just large and small, trite really. And so many what ifs... but that, is life. How different things would have been if I had gone to a different college, was born to different parents, or if I developed my skills like others, become a violinist , or an architect, or a steel worker, or a marine biologist, or a writer? or something else, anything, or a maybe, a prodigy of some kind.
These thoughts were somehow out of control now as I sat at the table waiting still. They weren't conscious decisions. They were handed to me, and I did with them what I could at the time, but for now I was forced to deal with them. I always had this rationalization if and when all else would fail, "It all worked out a certain way for a reason ". Everyone questions these things at one time or another I guess, at least I do. The raison d'être all that. Time... What if... what if... and the end result doesn't really matter, because you're where you are at the moment now anyway. Does it matter. It matters if you let it, if it's still a part of you, then it matters. At least where I leave it for now. So now, looking back, driving along at about the same speed as the early morning rush hour line of cars on either side of me, staying in my lane, avoiding hitting and being hit, I think back to the small ones, that made the big decisions what they become and how the time continuum would have been different.
I didn't want to limit myself to only one thing. That was too much. Had too many things to do and too many things to accomplish before the long long ride was over. The long long ride that is one lifetime. The short ride itself wasn't all that bad, but it was a ride that had to happen. You have to be able to get from one place to another so you might as well enjoy it. Sometimes you see a lot of interesting things just driving around. New places to eat, new places to drink, new sights to see, new things everywhere. On a nice day the sheer feeling of motion can carry you through the ride, and on the bad days, well, it can get really bad. And then there's commuting. Commuting can be an ugly word.
It was time that didn't really exist. Time that had to be devoted to something not really all that practical. Not useful time, mindless time, Time when you had your car, your tapes or your radio, and your out of key voice singing along, and, what's more, even the music was the same after a while, and the signs on the side of the road, and the other cars, and your scenery and your directions and your focus and, if you were lucky, a clear road ahead of you.
And I drove along, and at that point, suddenly, although it had been building for some time, I realized that, slowly and in a festering way, I had wasted so much time and so much energy. So much time and so much energy on things that meant nothing, then or now. I felt like pulling over to the side of the road and letting it all out, but I couldn't. That was an admission of guilt, of being wrong somehow (and that was too much of a defeat - now or forever) and I wasn't ready for that yet, just the realization was too much for now. The admission was something that had to be taken a little at a time before things could be "all right".. It was time to move on, but I had known that for a while. It was time to look back and take stock, but I knew that already too.
And I floored the accelerator in an attempt to leave it all behind on that bridge and move ahead to places that were warm and comfortable and safe, but the thoughts just kept coming faster and faster...
There was a time when living in the moment was de riguer. Everyone was doing it and it was the thing to do. If you wanted to be popular and cool, you lived in the moment. There were a lot of casualties from living in the moment. People who took it all to the nth degree and worried about nothing, let it all pass by, material, and interpersonal, until it didn't matter anymore. For that really was the point anyway, it really didn't matter. So many days and nights spent experimenting with what could be accomplished. Experimenting with the mind at large. Who's life was it anyway? And we all petered on. It was a weird combination of peer pressure, and peer motivation. We all helped each other drift. We all helped each other rationalize when things weren't going along as they should have. We all thought about what was right and wrong, but we made our own definitions as a very small social sect. But we could get any with it. We were the only ones that we had to answer to. No one would know or care. Who could know or care anyway? So why bother? That was the point of view, the prevailing point of view that me and all my friends had. And it was practical and it worked for all of us. In the isolated closed system that is college, in the microworld lies somewhere between thinking that you know everything and realizing that you know a lot but not enough, but then revising that to including now knowing enough PEOPLE, there is a fundamental truth that you either get, or at some point later in life, you get given to you whether you want it or not. And not always at the right time and place. I was lucky, I could see it coming, not everyone else I knew had the foresight to plan, or the foresight to anticipate, or the sheer strength to ignore all the signs. See, I had all the signs as plain as day, as clear as they could have ever been, and I just chose to ignore them. Up there were the air is clear and the sun never sets and the world is like a big piece of candy waiting to be swallowed, I didn't think things wouldn't always be as sweet as they were then, as sweet as they were those long summer days. Days that were so packed with energy and activity and results, that the sheer inertia carried you through onto new and higher things. See it all made sense at the time, and "at the time" was all that mattered.
So I looked across the highway, billboards everywhere, we were going right through Charlotte now, almost to the next exit, the next stop, someone else would take over the wheel. Thirty miles, just like that. Hidden in the distractions of the mind. Sometimes, when you have a lot on your mind, it fills the void that is created by the block of time itself.
You have to be there, you might as well be there doing two things at a time. I told myself that the world was round, I took that in faith. I wasn't sure whether it really matter if the world was round or not, it was just a fact that had a lot of peoples lives and beliefs together. That's all. Just a simple idea that everyone chose to believe for now and forever even before they could prove it, they believed it.
Sort of like the past, I have to believe it, even though I never lived it. Now I'm not sure why or how, but I did live it and in many ways I'm proud of what I did and proud of why I did it. Not that anyone knows or cares, but you have to have you're own little victories in life. You have to create your own battles and you have to win them. Every minute of every day. Without that you really don't stand much of a chance to get anywhere. You never have the chance to win.
I steered the van off the highway and after a few turns we were sitting in the parking lot of a Denny's. Denny's was OK, especially for breakfast, no one would complain. I woke everyone up and went inside and hit the bathroom. There were the usual profundities on the wall of the stall, but one, even now sticks in my mind. It was intended to refer to bodily wastes, but somehow, it also represented my thoughts at the time...

if it's yellow let it mellow
if it's brown flush it down

Suddenly, it was time for the show to start. It didn't matter that me and the bartenders were the only ones in the room. That didn't matter at all. It was time to start and that was the agreement, so I started.
I had been reading about traveling so I decided to start with one of my songs, Last Exit, usually I sang it fast, almost R&B style, but, to an empty room, at lower intensity, it came out more like a ballad...

I'm leaving the east coast and
heading out to the west coast
I don't know which one I want the most
All I know is that I want to be with you
And I've got to make that choice now
Wishing every turn off was the last exit home to you

I'm cruising Pennsylvania
Speeding through Ohio
Using up petroleum
just like it's beer I've been drinking
Driving stoned and bored
Wishing every turn off was the last exit home to you

Now I'm flying through the flatlands
dreaming about your soft hands
I drive into my daydream
I get caught doing 91
State trooper says,
"You're in a heap of trouble son"
Wishing every turn off was the last exit home to you

Now I've been with you on the west coast,
but now I miss you on the east coast,
just when I get my roots set,
I hear the road call,
and life can be so lonely
Wishing every turn off was the last exit home to you

Home to you...