Everybody’s rappin’ about the future like the shit’s already here. But we know that ain’t right. Y’all remember when Nintendo used to huffpuff that jibjab about “The future is now”? Fuck, mang, compared to the crunk we smoke in the Nine, them graphics in the wayback sucked the freckles off an Irishman’s bro-mounds and the gameplay was stiffer (all whitebread Kenny G bip-bop-bipzipple-zwiddlyoof) than the same cat after his last gulp o’ Guinness flattened him Frankenstein.

See, the future wasn’t then, man; the future then was now. But the future now ain’t now; it’s somewhere else, baby. See, future’s a tee-hee motherfucker, a spoiled sprite playing a mucked-up version of hide-and-seek where it’s never your turn.

Aha, but, you say, the future is tomorrow, is it not? (Fuck you think you are, Adrian Monk?) Aha, but, I retort, tomorrow is just today with a 24-hour extension, and that goes for all our today-tomorrows linked to tomorrow-todays, and on and on and on. It’s a string of reprieves from a ridiculously sympathetic landlord.

So when does the future get here? I mean, does it call ahead? Will it be wearing a nametag? Is it shtupping Aunt Martie? Does it like onions in meat loaf? All perfectly legitimate questions. Like my man at the corner used to say: lucky for you, I got the shit.

People I agree with say I’ve got vision. Well, I don’t know if I’d go quite that far. I’m more of a prophet for a daring new age in communication innovation revolution revelation. But I’ve always been that way. One time when I was a kid, a klatsch of my homeboys flapped into my rumpus yapping about a road trip to Woodstock to catch Janis and Joan. “Off the jock, slick!” I snapped. “I’m learning WordPress.”

That’s me, daddy: forever looking forward. My car don’t go in reverse; the street flips over. When I stop at Little Caesars for fatty comestibles, sometimes I read right through the menu into the pharmacy across the street. In fact, I’m so future I posted this in 1974, but your eyes couldn’t handle it till now. I’m so future I’m dead. If you call my number, a recording says, “Move on.”

And movin’ on’s hard to do, especially for the troglodytes in the media and pretty much anyone who’s never been inside my house. Now, hey, like, man, I used to dig the paper trip too, right? But that shit’s tired, Lambada tired. If you’ve got atoms anywhere near your aura, you should probably just blow your brains the fuck out now. There’s no place for you in the future. Eject that noise right out of your life. Burn everything that sucks.

Teach others to let go too. When you’re out massaging kumquats and feeling up the Cheerios, if you see someone jackbooting down the aisles with a physical shopping list, with ruled lines and ink and human-looking script, snatch that jazz toute quick and throw it away. There’s an app for that, you dumb fucking bitch.

Walk into your local newspaper office and seize the first unoccupied desk you find. Should someone gob off with monosyllabic stupid like “Who are you?” clock him in the offending trench. Shit, these people call themselves reporters, asking questions like that? You’re a breath of fresh Fourth Estate air, that’s who you are. Tweet the local scuttlebutt, fire everyone who still keeps pens in their drawers, then measure the staff conference room for a bed and flat-screen (i.e., the stuff you won’t burn), and a shelf for all your Pulitzers — that is, if we even have Pulitzers, for I have foreseen in their stead a bounty of Burger King gift cards and a cheek-peck from the Target-sponsored Chris Anderson Hologram. If you’ve loftier aspirations, barricade Conde Nast from the inside and blog as James Wolcott until Graydon Carter’s too drunk to care.

Of course, none of this shit’s gonna matter once the unicorns return. You may chortle now at the idea of a fantastical equine struggling with the safety on a Glock 21, but you won’t be able to tweet your amusement fast enough to grok your fatal mistake.

Onward!

I’ve been called “weird” all my life. Its a longtime hurt. Even today the word wounds a little, puts me on the defensive, which tends to startle and bewilder the one who invoked it. “But I meant it as a compliment!” he or she will stammer as bug-eyed I raise the butterknife. And, yes, that’s most likely true. But when you’ve heard it as long as I have, you understand the depths of its cruelty. The word carries with it a debilitating stigma from which you never quite recover. I mean, I don’t think I’m weird. Never did.

As a kid, “weird” meant different. Too different. It was right up there with cooties. If you weren’t an outright outcast, you were regarded with a wary curiosity. As someone who came of age in the era of Riunite Reagan yuppies, I can assure you that “weird” was never a compliment.

Then, in the ’90s, something funny happened. Weird became acceptable, even preferable. (Or maybe we just grew up.)

But it was a weird weird, a synthetic weird, one with very specific guidelines. Thanks to the burgeoning “alternative” wave (what we’d once called “college rock”), people began impulsively buying guitars, letting their hair grow long, upchucking dismal pentameter (typical images: rancid cancer, rotting hearts), listening to bands they would’ve dismissed as whiny-faggy only months before, and embracing a wholesomely middle-class angst.  Suddenly we were up to our soul patches in artists emerging from their suburbanite ennui to become the beautiful ugly butterfly. And just as suddenly, I wasn’t weird anymore — at least not fashionably weird, outrageously weird, a Horshack “Ooo! Ooo!” of eccentricity.

Now, quite frankly, I’m weary of weird. It’s stagnant. Humdrum. Blase. For instance, can you think of anything more monotonous these days than a tattoo? A recent informal scientific study has revealed that 214 out of every 7 people over the age of nine possess at least one.

That number was significantly smaller during my squirtage. I only knew of two such people, and I was related to both. My grandfather (rest his soul) and his younger brother, my great-uncle, both sported the usual ink of their surly boozehound generation: the anchor on the arm, strategically positioned to distract potential floor-chompers as the Frye men peeled up a long sleeve to reduce the wind resistance on a haymaker. That’s what a tattoo used to be: a self-inflicted scar, stamped to the sort that deliberately lurked in shadows. Rare. Weird.

Today, of course, you can spot ribbons of meat ink on every hipster chump at any upscale downtown twee trough. A tattoo in 2009 is about as subversive as quaffing a vanilla pabulum Slurpee during a church-youth soccer practice. If you’ve just stumbled from a parlor freshly blemished with the latest in pseudo-spiritual Chinese script, congratulations: you now have something in common with the average 38-year-old housewife.

Strangely, this ritual is no longer an act of rebellion or the artistic yawp of an individual, but a rite of peer-pressure passage, the new conformity. You no longer have to travel to the part of town with more blood than piss in the streets; there’s a licensed inker in every mini-mall, offering professional services in puncture, garrote, and slash. Self-mutilation is now status quo, joining a host of other pedestrian thrills, like French maid costumes and Catholic schoolgirl outfits. (Same goes for Mohawks, which ceased taunting the squares when I was still in grass-stained corduroys. These days the ‘do can be seen on elementary school playgrounds and on teenagers trying too hard.)

We’re living in the loathsome peak of the New Weird. Cosmetics. Accessories. Costumes. Brands. All of which must be acquired through commerce. Real weird’s costs, however, are purely social, and you can wear whatever the hell you want.

Weird, huh?

Hello, blog. I’ve little to report from the real-life trenches, but it’s nice to touch base.

Potential new trajectories seem afoot nonetheless. One required a Thursday afternoon haircut (awww), but fear not: Rather than sacrifice the length I’ve so lovingly cultivated, I instructed Herr Scissors to limit her butchery to the drapes against my shoulders. Those had indeed grown tiresome (my locks, not my shoulders), a curtain drop rendering me half-deaf whenever I strained forward.

“Down to the natural hairline,” I said. Many snips ensued. I kept most of the length — minus an inch and a half — and declined the Layer. As a curious result, my hair still believes it’s long. The back thatch curls into empty space, an abrupt cliff. I resemble a 19-year-old girl declaring adulthood after marrying her high school beau. My shadow is my body topped by a bell. I am sensible, with the potential for rogue.

In deference to my financial discipline, I’ve yet to purchase the Beatles remasters. Thank God they didn’t upgrade the catalog ten years ago, when I would’ve sighed at the Last Twenty cowering in my billfold and sacrificed it for Revolver (’cause tomorrow never knows), or stuffed as many digipaks down my Wranglers as possible and made for the nearest unwatched exit, Let It Be against my balls. Instead, the older, wizened me stood at the display, near picked clean, and admired the band’s ceaseless vitality. Not bad for four guys who called it quits two years before I was born. I get older; the Fabs remain timeless. Somewhere right now “Eleanor Rigby” is peeling a preteen’s id from its moorings, a phenomenon that will outlive us all.

My haircut and I spent Friday in Corvallis, sweltering through summer’s insistence on a late-game comeback. An impressive sweat took hold as I wandered through town, apparently befouling my mood as well as my body. I passed a bearded beatnik reclined on a bench, seemingly lost in a private reverie. Upon seeing my scowl, however, he raised a cardboard sign. “SMILE,” it read, so I did. In fact, I laughed. How could such a beautiful day render me glum? “How ya doin’, brother?” he asked as I passed. “Maintainin’,” I replied. “How ’bout yourself?” “Can’t complain,” he nodded, following his own sign’s request. My heart filled suddenly with rays of Dilla. If forever we gonna talk the talk we gotta walk the walk, see? Ladies and gentlemen, Pharoahe Monch as a funky Edward G.

The weekend’s consumed by a strange calm. I exhumed some old DVDs I ain’t watched in years, the highlight being Whatever Happened to Kerouac?, with its footage of a flask souse (Frere Jacques) clashing with an august rummy (William F. Buckley) and kicking some “Flat Foot Floogie” on his Ivy League bean. Time’s been benevolent for a change. Maybe it’s my reward for a semi-productive week spent dousing linguistic fires as in days of yore. “I need paragraphs!” came the call. Then paragraphs you shall have. What a simple pleasure: threading words together, clamping them down with verbs and adjectives. It’s a zone I call home.

On Friday, in an air-conditioned respite from the summertime beatdown, I got to shop-talk with fellow craftsmen, hang around slingers of the written word. Quite a change from my usual freelance seclusion: eyes fused to flat-screen, mind prowling for work, silence my only sidekick. Can’t talk. Must feed the coffers. Pitches, cover letters: a mad, endless science. But “SMILE!” says the sign, so I do. My hair continues its curl to nowhere. I will not.

I’m the saddest little music scribe y’ever did see, ’cause tomorrow’s Beatles Day, and I ain’t got no Beatles.

It’s not fair. All my other critic buddies received copies. They’ve been frothing over the remasters for weeks up and down Facebook and in and out of my Hotmail. Sometimes they “accidentally” forward me their real-time revelations in breathless superlatives: “OMG, ‘Please Please Me’ just baked my fantasies into a melodic pecan pie, using the harmonica’s new clarity as whipped cream! Destination: Delish!”

Even my mom scored the monaural box, and she hasn’t whistled past a music department since Bonnie Tyler stopped releasing albums on cassette. She got in on some “First Flush of Beatlemania” discount given to anyone of age who’d purchased the records new or screamed themselves into orgasmic comas from nosebleed cocoons at any of the band’s shows. Now she talks like an audiophile. “I’m glad they were reissued in mono,” she sniffed when the discs arrived, massaging her rusted MARRY ME MACCA button. “They have a warmth and intimacy missing from the more aggressive sonics preferred by today’s uneducated ear.”

Being that my mom was part of an initial fair-weathered wave that had split by Rubber Soul, when the ex-Fabs got “too weird,” I implored her to at least sell me the remaining titles since she wasn’t going to listen to them anyway. “How much?” I asked, unveiling my bankbook. I thought maybe she’d decline money and haggle it down to a lunch or two or a few more regular phone calls. But to my surprise she jabbed a stiletto under my bottom lip and seethed through a hateful clench, “How much you got?” I opted to pay my rent instead.

Desperate, I called my man at Capitol. First I finessed past a wily secretary feigning the worst French accent I’d ever heard. When I trapped her on her sloppy conjugation, she tried to convince me the label had outsourced its publicity department to India. Calling her bluff, I demanded digits. She gave me a toll-free number that connected me directly to Jim in Billing at the Bozeman Gazette. When I called back, she pretended to be speaking through a thick mustache. “I dunno, I just empty the wastebaskets, they don’t tell me nothin’ around here,” she said.

Finally, I got through to Terry. “Capitol Records, Publicity, this is Terry,” Terry chirped.

“Terry! My knizzave!” I clucked. “I’m calling about –”

Terry cut me off. “I’m sorry. Did I say ‘Capitol Records, Publicity’? I meant ‘SlapZappy’s Pest Control.’”

“Aw, dude,” I whined. “You didn’t gimme this much grief on that gloomy post-Heather McCartney.”

“Our office hours are 8 a.m. to the moment you called. If you know your party’s extension, please press ‘pound’ now.”

“Don’t do me like this, brah. It’s the Beatles!”

“Oh, my God, I’m about to get sideswiped by a gas truck! AAAAAHHHHHH!”

The line went dead.

I rang Apple but ended up talking to a youngish girl mostly about giraffes. “Yeah, giraffes are cool,” I said, attempting a patient segue. “But I’m calling about the Beatles.” “Beeeetles?” she asked, confused. “Yes,” I replied. “They’re a rock band.” “Oh!” she said. “My dad’s in a rock band, and my mom did a movie with Ben Affleck.” Great — I’d been given the private cell of Gwyneth Paltrow’s kid.

Next call: Yoko Ono, who chuckled, “No, I don’t even have copies yet, if you can believe that.” I didn’t. In the background I could hear her late husband hit that glorious “cry-hy-hy-hy” in a sparkling “This Boy.” “What’s that?” I demanded. “I rented Backbeat,” she stammered. “Oops — muffins are done!” CLICK.

Well, shoot. What am I gonna do with all this pent-up gush? Waste it on the Season 5 boxed set of The Office? Sweet-talk a strumpet out of her gin-stained tee? Commend a local pizzeria? Where will I go with my effusive words of love?

NOTE: The following story is a work of fiction.

Autumn in Hollywood, 1979. You knew the season had changed ’cause the sun bailed early after hanging all day, pouring OJ over the tinsel. Frank Sinatra wasn’t exactly where he wanted to be, but at least it was a place he found agreeable.

Frank was making a record. A monster, his first in years. Long enough for a whole generation of young people — those mile-tressed jackanapes who scorned him as Establishment passe, a weathered memory of ancient Camelot cool — to blob into blase adulthood, their Utopian passion dimmed by the mundane demands of reality. Shit, they may as well have matured into their image of him. Except Frank wasn’t that; Frank was still Frank, for the 64th year in a row, all lights and camera and action. “It” had been passed like a scepter from one pretender to the next during Ol’ Blue Eyes’ involuntary exile, but nobody came back like Frank.

“Good take, good take,” he nodded to the room as the music dispelled. The room was visibly relieved. All that remained was the anticipation of the Chairman’s next request. A full orchestra sat out the seconds; the ostensible directors, controllers, and engineers (titles, shmitles — Frank outranked ‘em all) sat behind glass and quietly counted the dimes as they tumbled off the ledger. Reprise’s dime. Frank’s dime, really, in a funny kind of way, since Reprise had once been his.

But then everything around Frank belonged to Frank: his time, his pipes — even the physical space they occupied now. Every inch of United Western Recorders was possible because of his financial generosity. If he and Bing hadn’t ponied up, old Bill Putnam would’ve been recording brass sections in his bathroom. Everyone benefited. Bill got his own place, and so did Frank. Whenever he got a golden-throated itch, this was where he came.

No one could recall who came up with the idea. The label yokels were always pitching the Chairman something, just to have an audience with him. They were obsessed with the concept of “now,” some revolutionary eureka that was actually a parasite clinging to older ideas, then spit-shone for a new batch of unwashed masses. This baby would be one of those mondo-numbers that bent your wallet and snapped your spine. If it went platinum there’d be a million happy hunchbacks.

The idea was pretty heavy too: a three-cylinder exploration of Sinatra’s whole career — the whole enchilada, all the way to marble and dirt, and all those years that he, you, and I would never, ever see, when kids landed spaceships on Neptune to neck to the Sinatra oeuvre. Sensational.

Now. Everybody jabbered that word. Excitement was always palpable in label conference rooms. Must be the tight space. “This is very now!” someone exclaimed, and for some reason, no one laughed him back to squaresville. Frank hated that word, cringed in its presence. He couldn’t swing. It was too…too — what’s the word…fluid? Fluctuating? Tenuous? Whatever. It was never faithful for long.

“Now” was a Sammy word. Sammy was always a little too conscious of the argot. That was his bag: “groovy,” “outtasite,” straining to ingratiate himself with the kids who couldn’t give a shit if he’d copped their language. He’d even bought the Cocoanut Grove, that wonderful nightclub smacked to the ass of the Ambassador Hotel, and tried to update its image. He squeezed out all the Tinseltown history and went disco-corndog, turning it into the “Now Grove,” a painfully hip embarrassment.

Frank remembered the words he’d taken to heart years before. “You know what ‘now’ is, kid?” some fuddy-duddy posited to a younger Ol’ Blue Eyes. “Tomorrow’s used-to-be.” And here “now” was again, fattened with hokey urgency by the adult children of the bobbysoxers who once melted in Sinatra’s presence. Don’t tell ME about now. I’ve seen so many come and go.

But everyone was thrilled with the project, a real label hard-on. Frank was interpreting contemporary material, a perfunctory nod to the kids, then hooking the grandmas with new jaunts down their shared hit parade (that fab nostalgia buck), then rocketing into the beyond on an ambitious trip for the professional chin-scratchers with access to typewriters and nationwide eyeballs.

It was an audacious swing for the fences that made Frank sound as if he sat at his hi-fi in his spare time, collecting songs and taking notes. Billy Joel was hot, with that great tune about being yourself. Frank in his prime would’ve made it a showstopper, the kind appreciative true-blues would cut off with applause before he reached the end of the first verse.

George Harrison was another cat who appreciated a cuddle number. He was a little older and from a slightly different era, but that was OK. George was a Beatle, beloved beyond belief. In Sinatra’s hands, “Something” could only be improved, its new master slipping into its awestruck gaze like a custom-tailored suit. Other ideas were floated, but everyone knew they meant nothing unless the Chairman was engaged.

Frank took all suggestions under advisement but resolved, as the Paul Anka (nice kid) anthem went, to do it his way. Which meant he would populate the project with his people. None of those knob-twisting weirdos the labels were always foisting on older artists. Frank didn’t need some excitable virgin shoveling funny dust up his nose and layering this on top of that with a slice of this other thing back here like he’s building the world’s most complicated shit sandwich. This was a job for Sonny Burke. Sonny was the genius who kissed greatness into September of My Years and too many other productions to count. (Trilogy would be his last.)

For the three sides, Frank called upon his most trusted arrangers. Billy May, who made every timeless crescendo sound as if dropped from Heaven, was a natural for “Past.” That was obvious, given their history together. For the “Present,” Sinatra grabbed Don Costa, the go-cat who loosened up pop for the new kids back in the ’50s. He made Lloyd Price’s “Stagger Lee” swing, Paul Anka’s (nice kid) “Lonely Boy” swoon, then guided Ol’ Blue Eyes through his early-’60s glory. “Future” went to Gordon Jenkins for the ultimate gas: marathon orchestrations, to put the dimestore jivesters and punklings on notice: You don’t fuck with forever. Record any scemo noodle you want — people dig classical pop, and that will never change.

Frank often fantasized about faceless critics — the ones he had yet to berate by phone or belt in person — wailing in terror when the youth-pandering electronics they were likely expecting were instead a wallop of their pops’ 78s, more vibrant than ever before. Go ahead and rail against the dinosaurs, pal. The last voice you hear will be mine.

“Why don’t we try this one, fellas,” Frank announced to the room. Pages dutifully shifted to the composition in question: Justin Hayward’s “Nights in White Satin,” a dangerously sneaky surge from the Moody Blues’ Days of Future Passed (1967). Frank enjoyed the album title’s pun and irony, and thought the song itself was gorgeous as hell, if a little overblown. He happened to catch it on a morning drive one day, when the song was enjoying something of a second wind, reaching #2 in 1972, some five years after its initial release. He felt the instrumentation (the aggressive thrust of Peter Knight and the London Festival Orchestra) was a little too powerful, but it made his whole being shudder nonetheless. Imagine what he and a little experienced sonic restraint could do with it.

Now he was about to find out.

He adjusted his reading glasses and awaited his entrance.

Nights in white satin
Never reaching the end
Letters I’ve written
Never meaning to send

He closed his eyes. Saw a beach. He felt the sand give beneath his feet and form walls between his toes. He carried his sandals in his left hand. In his right hand was her. She was young. Vibrantly young. Defiantly young. Brushing the strands of raven hair from a face the light ocean wind had the audacity to obscure. Her exotic features became even more so when she smiled, as she did right now, so long ago. He’d touched that smile so many times, pushed past it with his own, yet he was driven to it always.

Beauty I’d always missed

The strings arrived as commanded, and Frank shivered with them.

With these eyes before

Those eyes.

Just what the truth is

This was truth.

I can’t say anymore

There was so much left to say.

Frank felt an alien stirring in his heart, something that demanded to be summoned, released. It rattled from the deepest reservoir and shook his whole body.

‘Cause I love you

He’d sung that sentiment so many times, coaxed untold thousands to their radios to sigh over how much he cared. Now his declaration was the ultimate in personal, directed at one person: the girl in his fantasy, which was once his truth. He sang in a voice that was no longer his. The weight of his words thundered through everything in him that felt longing and pain.

Yes, I love you

The gathered began to notice a glow forming around the crooner. The players played through the distraction, possessed, trapped in perhaps the greatest love song ever committed to tape. They were startled by the change in Frank’s voice, which was still a formidable instrument even in this, his twilight. Not only were the years stripped away to expose a rip-roar delivery, it had an almost inhuman range that not even the younger Sinatra at his absolute zenith could reach. He seemed to be grabbing it from somewhere else.

Oh, how I love you

As the choir soothed its leader’s proclamation, the glow began to expand, until it caressed the entire studio in insistent red. One of the engineers thought he saw a flicker of movement in a space beyond his periphery, then an assistant tapped his shoulder and pointed at the ceiling. A little boy smiled from wall to wall. The startling vision cut abruptly to the next scene, this one of a waterfront, its waves crashing in a silent distance, as if watched from the safety of a pier. Italian faces filed past. Handshakes. Women. Lips. Flowers. Houses. Anonymous gazes lost in ecstasy, stretching down a darkened hall.

They were watching Frank’s memories. Sinatra, his orbs fused shut in rapture, was oblivious. The boy kept returning, waving at a gathering he couldn’t have seen, as he hailed from an America three generations back. Other couples strolled past overhead, stopped to watch, shook their heads, and pressed on.

Some try to tell me
Thoughts they cannot defend
Just what you want to be
You won’t be in the end

This time the girl materialized. Forceful, gorgeous. Everyone in the studio recognized the fiery screen beauty. They also knew of her tumultuous history with the man before them now. But she was smiling with that famous smile that sent many boys happily to dreamland, the only place she would ever be theirs. She brought a certain comfort to the room and to Sinatra, who continued to perform with a near-lethal vigor. She watched as if listening only to him.

And I love you
Yes, I love you
Oh, how I love you

Her smile covered the width of their little world. If they reached out, they could touch it. The ocean wind continued to pull her hair across her face, obscuring her features. She made no effort to stop it, which only added to the mystery and glamour of her once-endless youth.

As the music finally settled, so did the room. When it died, she was gone. And Sinatra opened his eyes as if for the very first time.

The main engineer collected what was left of him and punched into the room. “Playback?” he asked.

“N-no,” Sinatra stammered, visibly shaken. “I never want to hear that again.”

Slated for inclusion on the Trilogy set, “Nights in White Satin” was deemed unreleasable. It was replaced on the “Present” disc by the more straightforward “That’s What God Looks Like to Me,” recorded without incident. It seems even the Man Upstairs lacked the power of She. “Satin” remains in the vaults — deep within, locked away, a still-beating heart.

]]> http://thedailywrazz.wordpress.com/2009/09/06/letters-ive-written-never-meeting-descend-frank-gets-moody/feed/ 0 coryfrye http://thedailywrazz.wordpress.com/2009/09/02/dont-get-me-wrong-some-of-my-best-friends-are-pedestrians/ http://thedailywrazz.wordpress.com/2009/09/02/dont-get-me-wrong-some-of-my-best-friends-are-pedestrians/#comments Wed, 02 Sep 2009 06:10:52 +0000 coryfrye http://thedailywrazz.wordpress.com/?p=880 ]]>

A week or so ago, blogosario Mike Henneke compiled a list of his pet peeves. I wracked my syrup-sloshed sponge for a passel of my own and came up with a cool zillion, but only one I care to acknowledge here. Because it so twists my craw and is so ridiculously petty, so Larry Davidian in its neurotic triviality, that it makes me laugh. Until it happens.

OK, picture this: You’re on foot, standing at an intersection, waiting for the light to change. It’s bad enough you have to cope with the pedestrian-oblivious piloting cars, you also gotta contend with the sentient sneaker ooze polluting our sidewalks.

What I mean is, let’s say you’re first to arrive at a particular corner. Naturally, it’s your responsibility to press for the “WALK” signal. Not a problem, no burden ‘t all. You apply one firm tap and clock out. Your work is done. Return your hands to your pockets and watch the world zip past, late for lunch, late for work, late for early, late for the rest of their lives.

Now let’s say you’re joined by another dude within, hmmmm, 15 seconds of your selfless act. He’s likely either seen or been within earshot of that motion. (Exempt from this otherwise hard-and-fast rule: children. They love to touch stuff.) But what does he do? In defiance of the unspoken civilian contract with the Department of Transportation, he squeezes right past you and hits the button. And not only does he hit the button, he hammers it, baby, he goes Clubber Lang on that shit. Rapid belts, hip checks, seizure slaps — he’s like an insistent wind pelting a pole with its tetherball chain.

It’s a behavior I didn’t notice until I lived in L.A. One day I was at a stoplight at Santa Monica and Avenue of the Stars, doing my mellow hang, when this flibbertigibbet of a tinsel-thatched fig materialized at my right shoulder, babbling moviebiz into his mobile brick, his every word split by an alien THUNKATHUNKATHUNKATHUNKA. I looked down and he was whacking for a “WALK,” unable to hack not being in perpetual motion. But I give L.A. residents a pass: They’re notoriously impatient, and, at the pace they live, deservedly so. The city’s a mesmerizing quagmire of sensitive artists, ruthless businessmen, and other wild eccentrics, and what they manufacture is vital to my life. But here where I live, THUNKATHUNKATHUNKATHUNKA just means your dealer lives on the next block.

In any case, don’t these people realize that one THUNKA is sufficient? One confident, commanding poke? Repeated blasts do not register as a priority at DOT central command. No one is going to fling his headset and announce, “I need a manual override at the corner of Sunset and La Brea; we’ve got 36 –  I repeat, thirty-six — pedestrians waiting to cross. I don’t care if it’s against regulations, McCord, what if one of ‘em needs to get to the Arclight? Goddammit, man, have you never had a dream?!”

But even the single-tappers get on my nerves. You saw me. The sound was still reverberating as you approached. And it’s a very distinct sound; you’re not going to mistake it for a leaf blowing past or a burger bag settling. The plot is already in motion. Enjoy yourself: you’re on a 40-second vacation!

When you decide to hit the “WALK” button, anyway, what you’re really saying is “Hmmm, guess I’m alone at this stoplight” or “Step aside, fellow stroller — you did it all wrong.” Maybe I lack the necessary credentials to put our joint request across. Who knows? Well, I do. When the little white figure snuffs the oppressive red hand, I know who made that progress possible. You’re welcome.

What silly thing drives you nuts?

A sister blog was born tonight. Dunno how often I’ll update it, but you can check it out here: Tonight We Roll.

Excerpt:

I’m no great shakes when it comes to bowling. Competent among civilians, too wildly inconsistent for league play. On average, I throw down maybe once or twice a year. The last time was around, I believe, the 2007 Christmas season, when an old friend and her husband drove down from Portland to visit relatives. I should add that the bowling was their idea; they were deadly serious about it. If I’m not mistaken, they came with their own shoes. He brought his own ball. These two urbane professionals, weaned on haute cuisine and the finest grape, gleefully digested grease-laden troublemakers and chased them with gulps of what usually comes in cans.

Come check out how I did in my first pine-hug since 2007!

So exciting!

Photo by Cory Frye

Oh, you Wrazz. Ninety-one entries in and I still haven’t the foggiest as to who you are. I know I outlined a grand plan in my very first post last November, but let’s face it: neither of us have any interest in staying on course. Where’s the fun in that?

I was miserable after that limiting directive. It forced me to mutter through Twilight, for Edward’s sake, and struggle to hear past the bray of pheromones and preteen snivel only to be rewarded with a middling story about a synthetic emo brat and her asexual Nosferatu squeeze. To satisfy the “wr” in Wrazz, I made bleary-eyed plods through cyberpsace to hyperlink Chris Jericho’s WWE profile for the 600th time at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday so that wayfarers could descend upon my Raw report, stomp past the meddling text, and tug one to pictures of Kelly Kelly. I tried to be wrestling. I tried to be jazz. I tried to gobble pop music like the speed peddled under the counter at a derelict uncle’s bicycle shop. Instead, I lolled in all that lay between. Because I’m Cory Frye, and I was born to amble.

But then, I countered, a successful blog is the blog with a hook. People dig consistency. They’re especially wild about gimmicks. Julie Powell prepared dishes from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking night after night for a year, and Amy Adams mowed those million-dollar tresses to portray her on the big screen. Slate editor David Plotz blogged the Bible and just signed a six-picture deal with Lionsgate to merge his resulting bestseller with the Saw franchise. Yesterday afternoon I was shopping and noticed a book by some dude who read the entire Oxford English Dictionary. These folks were inspired, of course, by Kevin Murphy’s daring A Year at the Movies, in which the erstwhile MST3K writer/puppeteer/voice actor warmed theater cushions all over the world, snarfing popcorn and a full Thanksgiving dinner while partaking of the 2000 cinematic season.

Ordinarily, I’d think that’s kind of cheating. It’s just long-form reactions to the creative toil of others. The hard work’s already been done. Which is more difficult: preparing a souffle according to a list of instructions, or coming up with and perfecting that souffle in the first place? And the dictionary? Come on.

But I’m told there’s big bucks in this kind of blogging. So I’ve spent all day, minus the six hours I wasted frantically searching for my mislaid cell phone (it was upside-down in the laundry basket, of all places), trying to find a year-long shtick with universal appeal.

My initial eureka was “I’ll travel the country, bowling in every town.” Then I realized it might not work. What made Powell and Plotz so captivating was that they approached their subjects as neophytes, whereas I have a history with bowling. Although I know little of the sport (the extent: Earl Anthony and Dick Weber weren’t too shabby), I’ve been around ten-pins since I was knee-high to a ball rack. My “aunt” Linda (my real aunt’s roommate) would babysit me between frames in alleys up and down Orange County back in the ’70s. So there’s always been something magical about that symphony of slow rumbles into pocket-clatter — and when it hits just right, the tone is unmistakable. Decisive, even.

Not only that, but because I was left-handed, Linda saw a bright future for me and my natural curve on the pro circuit. So the week I turned 11 I was down at the local center, signing up for the weekend junior league. I devoted two years of Sundays to aiming my thumb at the 1 on an imaginary clock as I sent ten-pound pearl after ten-pound pearl to its destiny. Today I bowl maybe once or twice a year, and while I have yet to break 200, I scoff at anything below 150.

So there’s no grab. All these years later, I remain average at best. Therefore, there’s no discernable arc as I evolve from hapless gutter-hugger to giant of the pine. There’s nothing to keep asses in seats as Seth Rogen, depicting me in the film adaptation, rolled to self-discovery. Besides, the greatest bowling movies have already been made: Kingpin and The Big Lebowski, both released in the late ’90s during the sport’s cultural plateau. Perhaps I could use bowling as a metaphor for America, crossing borders but never foul lines. I could document the cuisine, the Friday night flavor, the feel of a rented shoe in a foreign town. Actually, that does sound appealing. Maybe the PBA’ll offer to underwrite the whole socio-shebang, because God knows I can’t afford it.

What else could I do for a year? Send text messages to random strangers and see what relationships form from wrong numbers. Purchase the same six items at Target every day and keep track of cashier reactions. I could read all the status updates on Facebook. Feign an accent in public. Listen to the same awesome song 152 times a day and chronicle my growing disenchantment. There’s no limit to what I could do.

Or couldn’t do. That’s another possibility: deprivation. The trendy hot big now thing to do is to not do. For instance, every week at least one of my friends trumpets his/her triumphant Web exodus for an extended period so he/she can, I dunno, engage fellow bipeds in healthy social interaction or some such shit. Sadly, that would be impossible to blog in real time, so I must resort to more trivial refusals. I’ve always wanted to protest the excision of vowels in online discourse; it’d be neat to dump consonants for a while. Perhaps I’ll refuse to watch my favorite TV shows or order chili fries with my half-pound Del Taco burritos. What if I didn’t clean my whole apartment for a year? Whoops — already well into that experiment:

[PHOTO REMOVED BY WORDPRESS AT THE BEHEST OF A CIVILIZED PEOPLE.]

Anyone else have ideas? If not, I’ll be down at the alley, honing my natural curve.

TRACK 8:
ICE CUBE, “IT WAS A GOOD DAY”

“Today was like one of those fly dreams.”

friday, july 22, 1994
6:13 p.m.

’Nother summer night in the newsroom. The three’ll hang for a few hours before going our separate ways, perhaps a movie, maybe a party. We’re expecting a grand — and I use the word grand loosely — total of three phone calls, all of which’ll be taken care of before the sun faints around nine. Honestly, we could take the initiative right now and be on the streets in a half-hour, but fuck that. We need money. We’re more than willing to sacrifice a few useless hours priming the pump.

Gary and I usually arrive separately but around the same time, 5:30. We dip into the well of letters to the editor, transcribe them at a snail’s pace, and catch a few minutes of television before Chris comes through the side door. This is our cue to telephone the Hasty Freez across the street and order dinner to-go. (We highly recommend the fries, but for thrift’s sake, you’re better off buying a 44-oz. Pepsi [a 75-cent value] at the Stop-N-Go across the street on the building’s opposite side, because the Freez offers nothing larger than a 24.) We’ll make the short trip, sun our egos in the congenial beams of the female burger-peddlers, who all know us by name. Then we visit the Stop-N-Go and come back to the office to sit around, bullshit, and wire-troll, one ear perked for the faint ring of the receptionist’s telephone, which is separated from us by a thick wall and a closed, locked door. Of course, we seldom answer before 7:30. Until then, fuck it. None of us are keen to deal with irate subscribers ignored by their paperboys. Not our fault, not our responsibility.

Tonight’s topic is a variation on a familiar theme: This newspaper is a fucked-up dump run by clueless old jackasses who wouldn’t know shit if it was seven-feet tall and wore a nametag and fright wig. I do my usual routine about the paper’s lack of a proper entertainment section, primarily because I’m desperate to write film and music criticism and don’t want to be trapped forever in the mausoleum of prep sports. I’m dangling a bite-sized chunk of bacon cheeseburger over a thick patch of ketchup when Chris Sabjeck changes the subject.

“You know the thing that sucks the fuckin’ worst about this place?” he asks. “The lack of adequate femaleage.”

“Define adequate,” Gary replies through a wet nosh of fried potatoes, “because this place is like a Mennonite graveyard when it comes to women.”

“That’s exactly the problem,” Chris says. “They’re married or unmarried but they’ve been on staff for a hundred fuckin’ eons, hence, married to their work and to that bald froggy fuck in the editor’s chair they’re always trying to impress. Gotta make good for Daddy. Where are all the young, attractive, single reporters just looking for a nice night out? Because as much as I dig you guys, I gotta have something better to stare at than a couple Adam’s apples.”

“What about the interns?” I offer.

“Oh, yeah,” Chris snorts. “The interns. Here’s a free education, junior: You don’t want that hassle. Both of us been down that road. Believe it.”

“What’s wrong with the interns?” I ask. “They seem nice — ”

“Of course they seem nice,” Gary says. “They are. But then they do a not-so-nice thing: They leave your ass.”

“Tell ’im about Sheryl Hargrove,” Chris says.

“Who’s that?”

“Well,” Gary says, “it’s not really a story about Sheryl Hargrove but about how fuckin’ nasty this company’s internship program is, OK?”

“OK.”

“Sheryl Hargrove was an intern here about, what, ’89?”

“Summer of ’89,” Chris confirms.

“For the summer, like every intern every year, right. Most beautiful girl I’ve ever laid my eyes on, smartest girl I’ve ever met in my life. First day we met — instant chemistry. It was one of those River Rhythms shows in the park. I don’t remember who was playing, but that’s not important, right. Anyway, me and Chris got a blanket out, a couple coolers, a few brews — sitting pretty, enjoying a warm night, good music. Sheryl shows up. Says, ‘Hey, don’t I see you guys around the newsroom? Just thought I’d stop by and say, “Hey.” ’” Whatever.”

Chris butts in. “No, if you remember, she was asking about your Roger Clemens column.”

“Oh, that’s right. She read this thing I did about meeting Roger Clemens. It ran a couple days before. I didn’t think anything of it. But yeah, she did say something about that column, I remember now. Anyway, we get to talking, and we had a lot of things in common: same age, same points of reference — ”

“Man, you’re lucky I was, like, 14 pounds overweight that summer. Because I woulda been buff as fuck,” Chris says.

“I can’t believe you’re still harping on that,” Gary snorts. “It wouldn’t have mattered if you had washboard abs and were all oiled and naked and shit — ”

“Dude, if I were oiled and naked that day, it would’ve mattered. Believe me.”

“Yeah, you woulda been arrested,” I interject.

“Hey, last time I checked, having the biggest cock for 70 miles ain’t no crime, which, I might add, just happens to be its exact length.”

“Anyway,” Gary continues.

“You know I’m just flicking you shit, right?” Chris asks. “Seriously. You guys were great together.”

“Well, thanks. I appreciate that, five years after the fact,” Gary says. “Anyway…where was I?”

“I was naked and dicked up like a motherfucker,” Chris zings.

“Anyway, the point is, Pud Nuts, what I’m trying to get at, is this: TeddCities, in its infinite corporate wisdom, developed this internship program for one specific purpose: Fucking with the male race, specifically townies like us at these podunk little shit rags out in oblivion. Think about it for a second. It’s totally devious. Nubile young things get sent to four newspapers in one year for a ‘learning experience.’ Wink-wink. Three months, just long enough to establish friendships, relationships, roots — then, just when you think, Hey, I’m actually happy, they’re off again, zoop, down the chute, bye-bye. New faces, new adventures. And you’re stuck back wherever you are, going, ‘Dude, what the fuck?’ Unless they get a job offer and stick around, which they never do, right? And can you blame ’em? Man, if someone loosened the shackles that’d been growing around my ankles since birth and said, ‘Hey, the world is yours,’ I’d be fuckin’ gone. One year to fuck around? A trip across the country? Shit, yeah.

“The point of many points is: Nothing good’s gonna come of it. OK? The program’s just too perfect. A psychological mind-fuck nobody can crack. It’s like in the Old West, y’know, when the wagon train of women pulls into town, knickers shooting out the stagecoach windows. You think, Somewhere in there is my soulmate. Actually, you just wind up getting punched in the mouth with gonorrhea. Officially, the whole thing about the internship program is to educate budding journalists on the job. Send them to backwater towns to cut their teeth. That’s what all the fine print says. The unofficial objective is to leave jerks like us stuck at these little papers so heartbroken we never want to go anywhere else, because all we’ve got going for us is hope. No turnover.

“Sheryl fucking Hargrove, dog. Did you know I didn’t wanna get out of bed for six months after that shit? Sure, we were, like, ‘Oh, I’ll write you.’ And we did, for a while. A lot of addresses: Belleville, Illinois; Clear Lake, Iowa; New York, New York. The letters got shorter and shorter and fewer and fewer. Finally, they just stopped.

“Then about two years ago I get this wedding invitation in the mail, along with a very short note. Handwritten, one page, about the size of a baby’s face. She’d met this ‘really nice guy.’ Her editor, for Chrissakes; dude’s, like, twice her age. And they were oh, so happy, and she hoped I was happy for her, and was she doing the right thing, and…eesh. She wanted me to come. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. And I couldn’t tell her why, because it’s stupid to still feel that way after all that time. Anyway, it was all just as well, because I got that invitation two days before the wedding. Can you believe that? I was, like, a last-minute invite, like I just suddenly popped into her head. Hey, remember me? The guy you said you loved?

“Tell me this: How is that people can just forget you so easily? You know? You can spend every minute of the day with someone, tell her things you’ve never told anyone, make promises about how it’s never gonna change, ever, ever, ever. But it’s all horseshit between bedsheets, man. Because somewhere down the line, you wind up a meaningless afterthought. You’re not even a person anymore. Just a pleasant little memory to pass the time while she’s doing the fucking dishes.”

9:02 p.m.

Chris and Gary just stepped out the door, the names of lost girls attached to their dialogue like TP to tennis shoes. They have a date with a fresh pitcher of ice-draft medicine down at the First Round, which they’ll quaff between even more stories. See, right after Gary recovered from talking about Sheryl, they went into long, wistful volleys about all the other interns they’d pursued, captured, and been forced by company mandate to return to the sea. There was Sheryl Hargrove, Amy Mendoza, Justine Dickerson, Darcy Donnen, and Stacey Stevens from USC. (I remembered Stacey and her Benneton sweaters and her corkscrew sorority locks. She neatly deflected the nine dozen marriage proposals fired from every bachelor pad in the whole besotted county.) Finally, the roll call was cut off by a closing door, and I was alone at last.

There’s something cool about a newspaper office when no one’s around. Usually it’s so anxious with activity that when it finally gets its space to itself, you can feel the whole building sigh and slump into at-ease. The air conditioning hums sweetly at timed intervals. The main computer terminal exchanges excited chatter with itself, sputtering unread wire stories down unseen links into every hard drive. The composing room hisses during the day with the sounds of precision slicing and hurried human implorations for news pages over the violent rhythm of the press. But at night it is dead, with only tiny scraps of paper, melted balls of glue, and X-Acto knives (our managing editor calls them “exactamundo blades”) awaiting duty.

Sometimes I go wandering. I hang out by the silent printing press or try to balance myself on my stomach atop the paper rolls in storage. I think about the future, which always seems more promising than the now. I further elaborate on my eternal interview with Charlie Rose, who decides I’m worth exploring for the entire hour. I refuel my imagination in the break room, another clue to the newspaper’s hectic pace with its salt-pocked tables and issues laying exactly as they did when their readers stopped and leapt back to work. A chalkboard outlines advertising revenue for the quarter and compares it to last year’s position. I guess we’re doing OK.

What I really want to do, though, is get on the phone. And I think I’ve been on every phone in every room I’ve thus far visited. Strangely, nowhere seems private enough, even though I’m the only one here. I want 40 layers of plaster between me and any intrusion, whether it be man, mineral, or vegetable. Maybe if I went back to the printing area. But then there’s nowhere to sit except atop the inky-footprint steps leading up to the press’ top level. There are no secrets in the break room, since any conversation can sneak down a hall and be heard by anyone passing through to take a leak.

Eventually I find the perfect phone on the other side of the building, in the assembly area where workers fold newspapers every morning and hitch ’em up for the trucks. I walk up a flight of stairs built of thick, exposed wood and find myself in the morgue, where every past issue dating back to the early 1900s is bound between green and black hardcover. I take a seat at an empty desk with a phone. My index finger hovers ever so hesitantly above the “9” that will grant me an outside line. A scrawled number sits in black ink on a torn scrap of paper. It stares blankly back at me as a reminder that I already know this number by heart, but maybe, hopefully, I’ll forget it mid-dial and be forced to check it again. Myriad doubts crowd my mind, but I resolutely split them down the center and, with some dramatic trepidation, punch the six digits.

One ring. Good sign. I didn’t miss any of the numbers.

Two rings. Hey, I’m in deep now.

Three rings. Well, at least I had the nuts to try, right? I kick my tootsies like a little kid about to get free ice cream.

Four rings. I’m feeling relieved because, really, what business do I have calling her?

Fi—

Hello?

Startled, I sit up.

“Uh. Hi.”

Hello?

“Zis Deanne?”

Yes.

“Um, hey. It’s Eric.”

Hey! What’s up, Pud Nuts?

“Hey, look, I’m sorry for calling so late.”

Late? Aw, hell, Eric, it’s only, what, 9:30? I’m just sittin’ here watchin’ some movies.

“Oh. Cool.”

So, what’s up?

“Um. Well, nothing, really. Work. You know.”

You guys work on a Friday night? Harsh.

“Oh, it’s nothing. Just a few things. Stray things. Not, like, big, important stuff.”

Oh, I know all about that big, important stuff. Did I tell you about my expose this week?

“Big scoop?”

Biggest in my whole career. I thought the Timber Carnival was the be-all of this town, but I was so very, very wrong. I wasn’t sure my heart could take much more excitement. Then Grant assigned me the break that could put me on a very little map.

“What, pray tell, is that?”

Are you ready? Are you sittin’ down?

I look around and reply in the affirmative.

Lawn care.

“Lawn care?”

You heard me. Lawn care. Can you believe it? Listen to this. I mean, I’ve got [rustling of paper], listen to this, are you listening, I got 19 pages of notes on lawn maintenance. Dang, I can’t even read this, I was writin’ so fast. I think this says, “snail death,” or maybe “small dish” — I don’t know. I’ll have to check the tape.

“There’s a tape?”

Of course there’s a tape. There’s a tape and 19 pages of notes, and there’s gonna be a follow-up phone call on Monday to some landscaper in Sweet Home named — what is his name — Darren Tweller, about using tree bark and mulch as decorative elements. I don’t think we should be talkin’ on the phone about this; I don’t want any of y’all’s rival papers to pick up this story before we get a chance to blow the whole thing wide open.

“Oh, don’t worry about that. Everybody knows about the power of mulch.”

Aw, man. Why’d you have to go and tell me that?

“I’m sorry.”

I thought I had my fingers on the pulse of a revolution.

“We know everything about lawns by now.”

There’s gotta be somethin’ new, though. I wanna come across somethin’ no one’s ever known about lawn care. Somethin’ the president of lawn care don’t want you to find out. Somethin’ sexy. Like this: I hear them little lawn figures are makin’ a comeback, like the one of the woman in the summer dress bent over the tulips with her bloomers showin’?

“Hey, sex sells.”

You know it.

“Yeah.”

I doodle an infinite Figure-8 on the desk with my fingernails.

So, don’t you have a hot date or somethin’?

“Nah. Not tonight. This is my day of rest. What about you?”

Not in the mood tonight. Sometimes I enjoy the peace and quiet, you know what I mean? Sit down with a good movie, good book — just be by myself.

“With your lawn care notes.”

With my lawn care notes.

Now I’m extravagantly doodling my name.

“But, yeah, seriously, I know what you mean. I like the peace and quiet too. Like now. Have you ever been in this place when there’s no one around?”

No, I’m usually too busy running screaming out of it.

“It’s actually kinda cool. Feels like everything’s all right. Like nothing’s goin’ on. No good news, no bad news. Just life.”

We won’t know ’til tomorrow.

“Yeah, but there’s something comforting about now.”

Except for the fact I’m trying to —

“Hey,” I say, “I just wanted to tell you it was really fun hangin’ out.”

Really? I had fun too. We should do it again sometime.

“Yeah.”

I have now written my name about 17 times.

What are you doing next Friday?

“Next Friday? I dunno.”

Well, maybe we could do somethin’.

“OK. Cool. Sure. Yeah, we’ll hang out, get a couple beers, maybe catch a movie.”

Oh, so you’re askin’ me out on a date?

“No! No, of course it’s not a date. You know, we’ll just hang out.”

Heh heh.

“What’s so funny?”

You.

“What’s so funny about me?”

Oh, no, no, no, God, no, it’s not a date! HISSSSSSSSS!

“Well…”

You act like a, like a datin’ vampire or something.

“Dating vampire. I like that.”

Anyway, you figure out somethin’ not-date-y for us to do and give me a call.

“OK. I will.”

See ya then, Pud Nuts.

“Sounds good.”

Don’t forget to have me back before daylight, or remind me to bring a shovel and a bucket.

“Hey, that could be the story you’ve been waitin’ for.”

Nah. I’ve taken buckets and shovels out with guys before.

“You’re good. You’re vicious, but you’re good.”

I know. See ya.

“Bye.”

Bye.

I bask in the dial tone, the new sound of heaven.

Track 1

Track 4

Track 6

TRACK 6:
TEENAGE FANCLUB, “THE CONCEPT”

“She’ll drive us home if there isn’t a bar, oh, yeah”

sunday, july 17, 1994
10:15 p.m.

The last thing I typed tonight, around eight o’clock:

CORVALLIS — James Thomas belted a last-second four-run screamer over the left-field wall to lift the Mid-Valley Rockets to a 5-4 comeback victory over Richey’s Market in Class 4A baseball action Friday night.

“I’ve always envied those people who were old enough to see Bobby Thompson do that,” said Rockets helmsman Greg Potter, referring to the famous “Shot Heard ’Round The World” that sealed the New York Giants’ 1951 World Series win over the favored Brooklyn Dodgers. “It always sounded so grand; the footage never did the excitement justice. Tonight, James Thomas was my Bobby Thompson, and I can tell people for the rest of my life that I personally witnessed one of the greatest moments in mid-valley baseball.”

Thomas’ stellar numbers led the Rockets: The West Albany senior brought in all five runs on only three plate appearances. Teammate Clayton Draper went 2-for-3 with a triple, and Larson Hugh doubled. For Richey’s, Hague Stefanski went 3-for-4 with two RBIs, while teammate Jake Cooley doubled in the team’s third run.

Both teams were evenly matched defensively. Market moundsman Paul Garey limited the Rockets to nine hits with nine strikeouts and a pair of walks. Pitching foe Ben Webster fanned seven Richey’s hitters, walked two, and kept their offensive drive to seven hits.

“It was a fantastic all-around performance from all the kids,” said Richey’s coach Dom Tomlinson. “Hats off to both teams. They turned in a classic night of baseball.”

The Rockets, 4-1 in league and 7-7 overall, head to Lodi, California, this weekend for tournament action, while Richey’s Market, 3-2 and 9-4, rest up for a Saturday non-league home contest with Astoria.

At Corvallis High School
ROCKETS 5, RICHEY’S 4

Rockets            001      000      004      –         5          9          2
Richey’s           030      100      000      –         4          7          3

W—Rockets, Webster (2-0). L—Richey’s, Garey (3-1). 2B—Rockets, Hugh; Richey’s, Cooley (1). 3B—Rockets, Draper. HR—Rockets, Thomas (4).

Why did I bother to remember this? Because like the young James Thomas, I too had a memorable night. Actually, I crept back into the Herald office, revived the computer, accessed the file, and printed that sumbitch as evidence that the night actually happened — an event unrelated to Mr. Thomas’ heroics, to prove the world keeps spinning and spits out equally worthy dramas and triumphs.

Here’s what happened:

‘Twas a summer Sunday — a day of rest and lawn care for all of practicing suburbia, pure death for a small-town paper’s sports department — so I rolled into work in the late afternoon, checked the prep schedule, which burped up only one game, from the day before: the heated crosstown baseball contest, a once-a-summer event. What I typed above was backup; the assistant sports editor had covered the game and most likely interviewed both coaches at length — probably not the most scintillating verbiage in either case. So what I typed was probably no more revelatory than what my boss heard with his own ears as he frantically scribbled shorthand while his captive interviewee, arms folded lazily, leaned against a dugout pole and stared mooshy-eyed into the dying horizon, his mind picking hoary laurels from the ether and gathering them for a bullshit harvest.

Our Sunday softball game was called on account of rain. It rains a lot in Oregon, but not as often as people think. Summers are usually pleasantly warm, with invasive showers seasoning the streets about 10-15 days on average per year. I’m the only sports guy in tonight; I called everyone beforehand and told them not to bother, because I was the only one without a life. But it’s cool; I got to milk my part-time hours for every drop of cash, sucking back Pepsis and staring dumbly at reruns on the newsroom television.

Around 6:30 p.m. I heard the authoritative clack of a key entering the side door, then a vacuum rush of air. This was always an exciting moment wracked with suspense; I couldn’t see the door from where I was positioned — my view was obstructed by an interview-room wall stretching a hair beyond the entryway. It always took a few seconds, roughly six footsteps, before the mystery guest materialized in the flesh. It was a fun game. You could always tell the janitor by the sound of his jingling keys and the thin whistle of a nonexistent tune. The editor’s identity was usually betrayed by the steady ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti of his 12-speed. Others came quietly, their footfalls soft as gossip.

Tonight it was the head photographer, Gary Ewen, his bulky equipment slapping against his six-foot frame as he made a quick beeline for the darkroom, where there’d be the ritual clatter and ringing and pop music for the next two hours as film was unloaded and washed. He was followed by holy shit Deanne Santos, reporters notebook in paw, arriving at her desk and coaxing her PC to life. I pretended not to notice either of them. Way too cool.

“Hey,” I heard her say as she flipped the disc drive’s butt switch. “What are you doing here on a lousy night like this?”

“Oh,” replied way too cool I, “I had a few things.”

“Big feature, huh? One for the boys at Pulitzer?”

“Oh, naw. Loose ends, you know. All the glamorous stuff you envy. The usual.”

“Yeah, well, I just spent the last two hours at a church dedication, which is like boredom in a sweet candy shell. Shaped like a cross.”

“Fun stuff,” I quipped, playing at her level.

“Timber Carnivals, church dedications — gotta tell you, Mr. Puddice, this town needs a newspaper like a stoplight needs a toothbrush. It concerns me that nothing newsworthy actually happens here. It’d be a nice gesture if y’all murdered somebody before I leave.”

“Last murder, I think, was 1983. We’re not due for a while,” I said. “Well, I take that back, actually. It wasn’t a murder, just a rumpled-up coat.”

She began consulting her notes. “Yeah, well, I can see why reporters all turn into raging alcoholics. Nothing to do between homicides.”

8:02 p.m.

She’s standing over me now.

“Need a lift?”

“Huh?”

“Finished my story. Most brilliant thing ever written by anybody. Need a lift? It’s still pourin’ out there.”

I plaster on the false disinterest. “Nah. I’m OK.”

“Come on, Mr. Cool. It’s comin’ down pretty hard.”

I hear the rain, pelting the building with a zombie fervor, like God dumping nails from the sky. Fucking Pacific Northwest.

“No, really,” I say. “It’s nothing.”

“Don’t sound like nothin’ to me. Sounds like it’d cut you to pieces if you weren’t wearing a coat, which you’re not, because you’re a big ol’ macho dip.”

“Did you just call me a dip?”

“How far you live from here?”

“Um,” I reply, adding a couple extra houses, “about nine blocks.”

“Lemme get my purse. Y’ain’t goin’ out in this.”

I make my way to the door — quickly, but not so quickly I can’t be stopped. “Really. I’m fine. Thanks.”

She shotguns her purse strap over her shoulder and darts after me. “Don’t make me use my Southern hospitality to kick your ass.”

8:33 p.m.

We don’t exactly make it back to my place. We race to her car, a Pontiac 3000, about two models and 700 years of evolution beyond the hunk of Smurf-colored shit I drove for three years (currently a corpse in repose in my apartment-complex parking lot, its insides picked clean by vagrants). The headlights come on, the heater harrumphs, the engine hiccups into existence, the KRKT country station mushrooms mid-song, the wipers slide elegantly down the windshield, and we’re off on the jaunt to my front door.

“Sorry about the mess,” she says. I’m sitting amid piles of notebooks. Other than that, the interior is immaculate, a far cry from my own ride, which, before its clearance sale, was a newspaper stand and cassette-case graveyard.

I pluck a tape from atop her dashboard. “Ah. Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.”

“Yeah. Ever heard of ’em? They’re pretty good. They played that state fair I covered a couple weeks ago.”

“Ever heard of ’em. Shit. Will The Circle Be Unbroken? ‘Hand Me Down That Can O’ Beans’?”

“What? Oh, come on. You made that last one up.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“You totally made it up!”

“I’m totally serious.”

“Bullshit.”

“The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band were in this movie called Paint Your Wagon with Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood — ”

“Sing it.”

“What?”

“Sing it.”

“Fuck that. You kidding me?”

“Sing it.”

“No.”

“I’m gonna think you’re full of it until you do.”

“It’s a ridiculous song.”

“It’s nonexistent, is what it is, Mr. Puddice.”

“I really don’t want to sing it. Take my word for it.”

“Quit stallin’, you big dumbass. Now I’m gonna think you’re purposely wastin’ my time just so you can make somethin’ up.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“If you don’t sing me the song, you owe me five bucks.”

“How do I owe you five bucks?”

“Texas bet.”

“A what?”

“Texas bet.”

“What the hell’s a Texas bet?”

“A Texas bet is a bet that happens whenever I say it does.”

“We didn’t shake hands. There wasn’t — ”

“Don’t have to shake hands. A Texan’s word is enough.”

“What about my word?”

“You’re not from Texas.”

“How about we just rent Paint Your Wagon —”

“How about we don’t?”

“Yeah, but that’s proof, though.”

“Sorry, it violates the bet.”

“How does it do that?”

“The stipulations of the bet dictate that you, as a man about to be five bucks short, must convince me, a natural-born Texan, that there’s a Nitty Gritty Dirt Band song about some beans, while in this car.”

“Turn left here,” I say as we reach the corner of Fifth Avenue and Madison, near Pop’s Branding Iron, serving kidney-twisting breakfasts 24 hours a day. She sees my hovel, its sewage illuminated by dying streetlamp.

“This it?” she asks, pulling toward the curb.

“Yeah,” I groan, going through the motions of a man about to escape. “Hey, thanks for the — ”

My passenger door suddenly locks.

“Sing the song.”

“Oh, come on.”

“I still got a half-tank left, plus enough cash in my purse to fill up again. We can sit here to daybreak if you want, but you’re not getting out of this car until I hear that stupid song.”

I exhale with the gale force of Jack Frost. “You,” I say, “are the most sadistic woman I’ve met this year.”

“Thank you. But compliments don’t unlock doors.”

An era of silence passes between us, the motor chortling quietly. It’s obviously on her side.

“OK,” I capitulate. “Promise not to laugh?”

“No.”

I sigh.

“Fair enough.”

I clear my throat, then pinch my diaphragm to make my voice as nasal and tinny as humanly possible. My hands go into hambone mode, slapping my knees like a drunk tumbling in the gutter. I pretend Deanne Santos is nowhere in sight, that maybe she’s not even real, that her smirk is just a trick of light, a weird tree branch in the distance, silhouetted in shadow against a full moon. My mouth opens and it all comes pouring out:

Hand me down that can o’ beans
Hand me down that can o’ beans
Hand me down that can o’ beans
I’m throwin’ it away
Out the winder go the beans
Out the winder go the beans
Out the winder —

I feel a hand on mine, with the cushion of five bucks between the flesh.

“Enough,” says the hand’s owner. “For the love of God, please stop.”

I nod in victory and take the easy money. “Not bad for a night’s work, huh?”

“Nope,” she smiles. “Now you can buy me a drink.”

“What?”

She shrugs apologetically.

“Texas bet.”

8:47 p.m.

NOTE: The following was transcribed from memory less than two hours after the fact (around 10:15). Its veracity cannot be fully verified.

SCENE: Buzzsaw Lounge, along the Willamette River, near the railroad tracks on the ass-wiped end of town. The Buzzsaw conceals two indentities: redneck trough by day, heavy metal coke den by night. Its two patron classes would confuse and scare the shit out of one another. We arrive between the two shifts: a Bon Jovi cover band — with its arsenal of memory fodder for coppa-feel prom nights — won’t take the stage for another two hours; the restaurant/bar area is sparsely populated by an otherwise normal Sunday crowd.

DEANNE: Y’have dinner yet?

ERIC: Well, I actually grabbed some crap from the store—

DEANNE: (reading menu) Crap, huh? Sounds healthy. You know what sounds good right now? One of these pepper-jack burgers.

ERIC: Well, I’ve never really eaten here, so —

DEANNE: If I got one, would you eat half?

ERIC: Probably not, I mean, I’m not that —

DEANNE: Well, I’d like at least a little something. I haven’t eaten all day.

ERIC: You can have the burger.

DEANNE: Yeah, but it sounds too big.

ERIC: And I have this thing with burgers, anyway, where I don’t like a lot of extra stuff —

DEANNE: How about fries? How does that sound? We’ll order some fries.

ERIC: Oh. Sure.

DEANNE: Are there waiters here?

ERIC: I don’t know.

DEANNE: This is your town, Mr. Puddice. You’re supposed to, you know, just snap your fingers, know your way around.

ERIC: Heh. I wish.

DEANNE: (waving) OK, there’s somebody. Hope he works here. If he doesn’t, kick him in the nuts and take his wallet.

ERIC: You don’t want to make a new friend?

DEANNE: I make friends everywhere I go. It’s part of my sparkling personality.

MAN: (arriving at table) Yes?

DEANNE: Yeah, um, I don’t want you to get offended by what I’m about to ask, but are you the waiter? Are there waiters here?

MAN: Actually, I’m the bartender, but—

DEANNE: See, we’re from out of town. We don’t understand the protocol.

MAN: I understand.

DEANNE: I mean, it was OK that we seated ourselves, right? I didn’t know.

MAN: (laughing) Of course. So. What would you like?

DEANNE: How big are the fry baskets? Are they in baskets?

MAN: I’d say there’s enough for two people.

DEANNE: All right, let’s get one of those.

MAN: OK. Would you care for anything to drink?

DEANNE: Well, it’s early yet. Corona?

MAN: OK. And you, sir?

ERIC: Um, Guinness?

MAN: Is that everything?

DEANNE: Yes, thanks.

MAN: I’ll be right back with your drinks.

(lingering, loitering pause)

DEANNE: So. What’s your story, Mr. Puddice?

ERIC: Story?

DEANNE: Yeah. Tell me about your life. Say more than five words to me at one time.

ERIC: Oh, my life story.

DEANNE: Yep. Everything from conception to the moment we crossed paths tonight.

ERIC: Well, it’s pretty boring.

DEANNE: Except for the conception part.

ERIC: Well, yeah, but I don’t really remember that. The lights were off.

DEANNE: Carson was probably a rerun…

ERIC: (laughing) My God, you are mean!

DEANNE: I wanna hear about what it’s like to be born in a town like this.

ERIC: Well, actually, I wasn’t born in this town. Or this state. In fact, it’s one of my dirty little secrets.

DEANNE: Ooooo, what’s that?

ERIC: I was actually born in…San Diego.

DEANNE: Oooo, little Cali boy on the sly, eh?

ERIC: Matter of fact, I lived in California until I was seven years old.

DEANNE: Get out!

ERIC: It’s true. I’m more sophisticated than you think.

DEANNE: Do other people know about this? I mean, was your family forced to hide in shame when they moved here?

ERIC: No, my dad found work pretty easily, but every time they brought up the sales tax, we had to watch our backs.

DEANNE: So you were born in California, moved to Oregon, how’d you get here? I mean, why are we sitting here together?

ERIC: Well, I lost a fixed bet.

DEANNE: I meant how’d you get into newspapers, numbnuts.

ERIC: I’ve graduated from dip to numbnuts.

DEANNE: I break out the two-syllable words for people I like. Three syllables, you get to slip a little ring on my finger.

ERIC: I got into newspapers ’cause I like to write.

DEANNE: Really? What kinda stuff?

ERIC: Um, social satire, music essays—

DEANNE: Zzzzzzzzzzz…

ERIC: Hey!

DEANNE: I just noticed that numbnuts almost rhymes with Puddice.

ERIC: Yeah, I guess it kinda does.

MAN: Here’s your drinks. The fries’ll be right out.

ERIC: Oh. Thank you.

DEANNE: Thanks. How do you spell that, anyway?

ERIC: Spell what? Oh, um: N-U-M—

DEANNE: Your last name, dumbass.

ERIC: D-U-M—no, seriously, it’s P-U-D-D-I-C-E.

DEANNE: Hm. Kinda sounds like pumice. I don’t know if I’d walk around with a name like that.

ERIC: Just think of it as mostly pudding and all ice.

DEANNE: You musta caught all kinds of hell in school.

ERIC: Tell me about it. I was Pumice, Pudlicker, Pudwhacker, Pudwhacker on Ice, Pudlice, Pudding Dice, Pudding Dick, Pudding Dick with Bill Cosby on Top, and Pud Nuts. Most of my friends still call me Pud Nuts. In fact, no one’s called me Eric since I was about 13. And that was my mom.

DEANNE: Actually, Pud Nuts is kinda cute. Sounds like a little cartoon dog or something, with a squeaky lisp and a captain’s hat.

ERIC: Well, I don’t know if it’s that cute.

DEANNE: I think it’s cute. Can I call you Pud Nuts?

ERIC: Are we friends?

DEANNE: I’m your best friend.

ERIC: Then go right ahead.

Here’s what I’ve pieced together about Deanne Santos. She was born in Bulverde, Texas, on October 22, 1972. So, like me, she’s 21 years old and has similar stories about being the Last One in her Roving Gang to clear all the adult milestones. She’s the youngest of six children. Her dad’s an architect; mom runs a jewelry counter at some JCPenney. In order of attendance: Bulverde Primary School, Wes Sisson Memorial Elementary, North Bulverde Junior High, Bulverde High (go, White Stallions!), then on to the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she majored in journalism and minored in English Lit. Slow four-year roll, then she applied for the TeddCities internship program, which has dragged her on a year-long tour of its most dailies, including ours, followed by the mighty Los Angeles Times before she settles back home at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, where she hopes to score a full-time gig. She got into journalism back in junior high, scribing the usual insipid chatter found in those mimeographed wonders that pass for the student rag, but never considered it as a career until her sophomore year among the Stallions, where she joined the yearbook and newspaper staffs simultaneously and found the discipline agreeable and repartee enticing. She ended her senior year as the newspaper’s editor, having snapped the yearbook connection like a useless limb (“Shitty backroom politics,” she dismissed with a wave, her nostrils recoiling as if detecting a lingering hint of said scat), and was still proud of her accomplishments. Under her supervision, the paper won three major high-school investigative reporting awards — quite a feat for a sheet previously known for jamming its many voids with arcane school trivia and robotic crowing over the installation of new vending machines in the boys’ locker room (“‘Now the jocks can choose between a post-game Pepsi or Coke!” she hiccoughed, smiling sourly at the memory of this yellow huzzah. “It’s a marvelous time to be alive and thirsty in America!”). She hopes to someday land in that executive emperor’s suite for a major metro. I believe she might do it.

For all the probing magazine articles written about our generation — our slackness, our apathy — they’ve been fooled. There’s restless ambition beneath the patchouli, a drive laced in our Doc Martens. Secretly, I am no exception. Openly, neither is Deanne Santos. Truthfully: goddamn.

(Read “Track 4″ here; visit “Track 1″ here.)

NOTE: Dunno why Sony sent me this — perhaps a publicist with a sadistic sense of humor — but, forever the professional eardrum, I activated my flapjack spinner, wallowed in 20 slugs of Old Milwaukee, and let my addled mind mosey through melodic fields of wheat.

Keith Urban, “Kiss a Girl”
Dan Harris didn’t know why, but whenever his ears caught that riff he swore it was The Outfield returned, or a misheard lick from “Jessie’s Girl.” Then came that honeyed grumble in a barn-dance timbre, and his excitement turned to eh. It was that damn Keith Urban, shimmying loose from Breanna’s glitter-specked iPod jukebox he and his wife bought her last Christmas. Hadn’t there been some other girl-smooching song she was into last summer, by a real live girl who didn’t look too bad curving up the tabloids at the checkout stand? But that was 12 whole months ago. Breanna was dating Terrence Jorman now, and he had both C and W leaking out his pickup, his ears, and that twang he must’ve spent the better part of a year perfecting to a chick-magnet flow. All these qualities stood cornstalk tall beneath a ten-gallon hat whose condition mysteriously defied any change in climate.

Dan couldn’t complain, though, really. Terrence was the better of the two Jorman boys, born of good blood. His daddy, Preacher Tim, slipped from the womb gripping a pulpit and spitting wholesomeness off his tongue, even if a few of the non-devotional tongues burned with gossip about a gradual plunge following his wife’s exit seven years ago, destination none of your goddamn business. If the rumors were true, then Terrence’s brother, Bill, was getting a 20-year head start on downtrodden, as if Preacher Tim had gone back in time to drink himself to an early grave.

Kenny Chesney, “Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven”
So read the righteous signage outside the recently erected Conway Belt Baptist Church, a monstrosi-temple screwed into the solid earth once occupied by a more modest house of worship. The building was still in the honeymoon stage, where it resembled nothing more than a garish tower of hues so bright and unreal they looked almost appetizing.

Bill Jorman sat on the hood of his pickup in the just-poured parking lot and regarded the failing sun by sparking flame to what the boys called an “enhanced Marlboro” or “hillbilly spliff,” a stick sweetened by a sunsplash of Jamaican heaven. Yeah, that’s the shit, Bill nodded to no one but the birds. What he wouldn’t give for his own island, rocked by titties and hips, with neverending Cuervo lapping the shoreline. “Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to go now,” said the song. “Speak for yourself,” Bill grumbled as he took another tug.

Taylor Swift, “Love Story”
Breanna remembered the first time she saw Terrence. Well, it was more of an “ogled” than a “saw.” He didn’t look like no Terrence, but that was only part of his unpredictable charm. The rest was concealed behind a sideways shotgun smile that turned most of her friends into mashed potatoes ready for the gravy boat. He was sitting on his brother’s tailgate during the last football game of the season, off in the parking lot by his lonesome. He was always there, like he wanted to be seen being apart from the action, hoping for an inquisitive, curvy type to answer his prayers.

While he waited, he patiently peeled an apple, the Chinese symbol on his arm undulating against a rolled-up sleeve. Breanna broke the ice by asking him what his tattoo signified. “Peace in love,” he winked, slipping a chunk of Granny Smith past those lips she’d find herself dreaming about from then on in. He’d played hard to get, but Breanna was tenacious. She finally snared him at the Grab-n-Go in June, right by the candy rack, where they’d someday lay a true-love plaque.

But now they were driving to the lake, chewing up backroads in his father’s old Dodge. She watched in silence as he concentrated on the drive, then returned her gaze to the passenger-side window, where her foot rested over the door, playing with the wind and catching summer between her toes.

Rascal Flatts, “Here”
Breanna inherited her looks, especially those burnt-ember tresses that sighed at her shoulders, from her mother, but every deadly atom of romanticism came from her dad. Dan and Mara Harris had been married forever (23 years in non-Breanna time), but Dan still looked at his wife through the same eyes that dropped dead for her back in high school. Today he sat at the kitchen table, elbow against the fading checkerboard cloth, as his beloved poured a cup of black coffee. The sun crested just so through the window over the sink, caressing her body in youthful shadows. He filed the image away, where it danced with the others.

Montgomery Gentry, “Roll With Me”
Bill poured himself out of bed, yet another layer of luster stripped from his wasted life. His fuzzy mind implored him to piece shit together, but it lacked the will to do little more than shove him into another pointless day. What purpose he’d once chased eluded him now. Bill manipulated his cranky joints with a groan and stumbled into morning. Waking up was like starting failure all over again.

Trace Adkins, “Marry for Money”
Preacher Tim slid another Lincoln across the counter. It was still daylight at Friendly’s, so the bartender was all his. He was part of the unacknowledged humiliation shift, peopled by those who ought not to drink but do, to dull something private and insistent. Tim could feel his eyes burning red, smell the numb filling his fingers — all a necessary part of the transformation, the ritual he began shortly after She — there’s always a She at the bottom of an empty glass — bowed out by long-distance in 2002. He’d always suspected she’d snuck his self-respect and sense of direction into that carry-on, which somehow was enough to transition from 20 years with him to a new life with — hell, Tim couldn’t even bring his mind to form the name. It was like slapping at dried cement to retrieve your keys.

“Penny for your thoughts, Preach?” asked the barkeep. Tim snickered and applied his best preacher face, which nonetheless logged every trace of his mid-life anguish, like the ones he’d counseled so many other couples through. But his reassuring words could not cure his own. Next time, he vowed, he wouldn’t walk the aisle for love, not a solitary goddamned drop.

Carrie Underwood, “I Told You So”
It all went down so suddenly, even had the nerve to swoop into the afternoon, where bad news serves its cruelest and worst. Tim’s increasingly heavy soul as he endured every tear-soaked mea culpa and confession of indiscretion streaming through his cell phone was juxtaposed by the sun resting over lush lawns and neighborhood bustle. His own sons were oblivious, shouting and laughing as they drained bucket after bucket after brick through the driveway hoop. Tim shuddered slightly as the sprinkler flung spatter against the side of the house. He imagined it was the blood from his heart, a void he needed to fill by any means necessary.

Alan Jackson, “Country Boy”
Tim wrestled sadness with a bottle, but his oldest son coped inside every willing girl in town. Bill donned them like back-to-school fashions, then chucked them just as quickly. He’d found a new conquest that very morning en route to work, stopping at the 7-Eleven to buzz his shell with coffee and scope the local action. Today it was Regina, a long-gammed breathtaker attached to a gallon of milk and a box of the luckiest doughnuts Hostess ever packaged. He stood behind her in line and fantasized about how that flank would look sashaying down his porch at dawn. When it turned out she didn’t have enough change, Bill saw his chance. He kicked his voice down to the register where his idol George Strait lived. “Allow me,” he drawled, passing a dollar to the clerk and a twinkle to his customer. After four minutes of parking lot chatter, he moseyed off to work one phone number heavier. He’d never call it, though. He didn’t have to. It was just an accepted part of the dance.

Josh Turner, “Everything Is Fine”
Dan watched in amusement as that Jorman boy conned another wide-eyed girl with just the tang of his tone. Both sons seemed to be gifted in this way, but Dan supposed Terrence used those powers mostly for good. Breanna coaxed the best out of anybody; she could dust the black off the devil himself. Dan was thankful for his luck. With only minor setbacks and barely enough turbulence to startle a baby from its nap, his life was surprisingly easy. It was something his own daddy stressed. “Keep it simple, Dan,” he always said. “Complicated’s for a troubled mind.” If that was true, Dan suspected Bill Jorman was the most complex boy alive. Hopefully, he’d grow up someday. And hopefully by then every Jorman in existence would be a speck in the Harris family rear-view.

Sugarland, “All I Want to Do”
Just as Bill had predicted, Regina didn’t waste time with things like chivalry and guidelines. She made her demands known by lunch, when she called him at work and told him things that damn near peeled the pink off his ear. That night she devoured him. Tore down his front door, grunted a greeting, then shot him to the moon. For the next eight hours they were a restless tangle of sweat and sheets. When he finally rose from battle, she was in the kitchen, free of stitch and inhibition, preparing pancakes from the ingredients he’d forgotten were in his cupboards. “Breakfast?” he asked as he watched this very special episode of Rachael Ray. “It’s the least I could do,” she smirked. “You took me places, tiger.” “Still got a full tank,” he growled as he swallowed her nakedness in his arms.

Miranda Lambert, “Gunpowder & Lead”
His right hand soothed the fading bruise on her side, the one he discovered the night before only seconds after trading hellos. “My ex-husband,” she whispered, as if he might be hiding in the room. He was apparently a real wild dog, vicious, jealous scum. Chased questions with accusations, then punctuated those with his fists. Never to her face, but in the neighborhood of her stomach, where no one but him would see. Bill told her he’d handle it, but she caressed his solid chin and said, “That’s sweet, honey, but it’s all taken care of. He’s a different man now, and far away from me.”

Asshole didn’t realize that all the lessons he’d heaped upon her body had turned her into a most attentive and vengeful student. What she took away from those beatings was that his days of swinging, cursing, and connecting were coming to an end. Six weeks earlier she’d been out with a couple girlfriends, taking harmless after-work whirls at Friendly’s while he stewed in the shithole they shared, entertaining thoughts of mad perversions. When she finally rustled through the front door, she took a shot to the side that sent her staggering into the kitchen counter. All those memories of beatdowns jumbled past anything warm and fuzzy, and she came up knowing it was time to retort. “Who you fuckin’?” barked the tyrant. Smiling, she produced a handgun from her purse. “I’m fuckin’ you,” she said and fired.

Gary Allan, “Learning How to Bend”
The preacher addressed no one from his pulpit. He paced the stage throwing words at two levels of vacant benches. On Sunday, this right-fine superchurch would be packed. He’d look out upon a choppy wave of expectant eyes and programs fashioned into fans against the holy heat. But today he had the congregation he deserved. How would he lead this flock when he himself was so hopelessly lost?

Jamey Johnson, “In Color”
He thought back to his own father, a steel-girded man of the cloth. Dad was ramrod straight, as straight as his father before him. His family had founded the church that once sat on this patch. It was a much smaller structure, of course, and not as ornate, and Tim kind of missed that. When the new place was built, Tim made sure that its pulpit stood exactly over the old one. Maybe some of that old family certainty would rise from this sanctified earth and take hold of his shattered life.

Darius Rucker, “It Won’t Be Like This for Long”
Terrence emerged from the restroom and passed beneath an old sign depicting an angler’s tall tales to his buddy over a couple of campfire cold ones. “Must’ve been a blowfish,” the buddy cracked.

Shanty Town was the only seafood joint in Conway Belt, the last locally owned eatery left in the city. It passed for date-night cuisine among the serious teenage set. While Terrence was preoccupied, Breanna had traveled to the future, seen their children, bore witness to their impending bliss. Terrence found it all curious. “You named our kids?” he chuckled. But he listened as she described their house, the things they did with friends, the dynamics of undying romance. Their whole lives passed as they waited for pie.

Dierks Bentley, “Sideways”
The Jorman family’s second shift began at Friendly’s around dusk. Preacher Tim by then was safe at home, pretending the drinking had stopped. Bill was safe at the bar, ordering another rum and Coke and talking over the disco shout that passed for rowdy gitdown with the locals. Though most of the clamor came from a group of bridesmaids eternally feeding the jukebox and howling through the first three notes of every song. “Such a shame,” Bill sighed at the barkeep. “All them records, ain’t none of them half as good as the worst George Strait.” He turned to watch the girls take over the floor, donning hats copped off potential suitors and spinning with delighted squeals. Bill readied his sweet talk, magically produced a round of mixed drinks, and forward-marched into glory.

Jake Owen, “Don’t Think I Can’t Love You”
Jillian left a pretty memorable impression for a one-night stand. His brain caught fire just pondering the shit they’d done. It was a motel fuck for the books: orgasmically cheap and wildly desperate. They clawed at each other like junkies, each thrust and parry jarring their sense of civility. They were carnivores, primitive and hungry. Bedhoppers who’d found each other at the peak of their respective games. There would be no breakfast, just the usual morning-after rules.

Bill opened his eyes just as a shirt sailed into his face, followed by the word “Up.” He moved the shirt to see two impatient legs pacing the floor. “I’ve got to be at a wedding in three hours,” the legs said, “and I need to get stuff ready.” Bill grunted a pinch and asked, “How long you in town?” in the most innocent voice he could muster.

Jillian cut through his charade with a thin laugh. “You’re a big boy,” she replied. “You know what this was.”

“Yeah, but, I dunno. I was thinkin’, you know, Southern hospitality, dinner, conversation. It’d be fun, just hangin’ out.”

The legs stopped to consider.

“OK,” they said. “Reception ends about 5, pick me up at 8. One thing: the redneck chic’s got to go.”

Eric Church, “Love Your Love the Most”
Bill smiled through the weary morning slog, a trail of smoke billowing from under his tires as they met the dirt backroads. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d taken a girl out on anything resembling a date. He was always so official in his slutdom: skip the prelims, hit the springs. George Strait purred his approval through the truck’s speakers. Country at its best.

Billy Currington, “Don’t”
The “date” went better than expected. Bill thought it was the shirt and sports jacket; Jillian said it was a good start. There was a slight trip-up thanks to the deliberate obstacles she tossed before Bill’s rolling train: the other couple, a handpicked friend and her significant other, who joined them at Shanty Town and dominated most of the dialogue. Rather than getting to know the girl who struck him curious, Bill sat quietly as the trio went inside baseball, speaking in a slang unknown to him. But he was eventually engaged, and he didn’t let go. By the end of the night, after the appropriate number of celebratory tip-backs, everyone was hugs and kisses under a descending moon.

For someone who hadn’t suffered the ritual since high school, Bill didn’t fare too badly. Not bad at all, he thought as they arrived at the motel and no farewells were exchanged. Instead, Jillian said, “You’re a better guy than I’d suspected, Bill Jorman. Walk me to my room?”

Only a few inches separated the doorway from the room, and with a kiss Bill crossed them with ease. “Not tonight,” she murmured as he pressed her backward toward the bed. He moaned in light protest, but she remained steadfast. “It’s all part of the new dance,” she whispered before she went to the desk and dropped her address on motel stationery. “Souvenir,” she said, handing it off, a playful secret. He scanned the page and saw something amiss.

“Where’s the phone number?” he asked.

“Dance,” she smiled.

Lady Antebellum, “I Run to You”
The facades and cityscapes may change from generation to generation, but the life of Conway Belt, population anybody, like life anywhere, follows a time-honored path. At 1o a.m., the clack of locks still sharp in the barroom air, Preacher Tim will creep into Friendly’s to drown his grief. For now he does it mostly in secret, but soon the talk will come. Breanna will watch her parents in harmony and pile that template onto her own fantasies with Terrence Jorman, like she’d done with her previous boyfriends, like she’ll do with later boyfriends, like she’ll do with the man who will eventually become her husband, voiding all the other perfect lives she’s ever entertained. Regina and her abusive husband will pass into urban legend, their tale only growing in morbid intensity.

No one will speak of Bill Jorman. Even Dan Harris will forget that name, just as Terrence becomes a wallet-sized memento tucked in a chifferobe, that infamous Jorman swagger lost to time. Because Bill Jorman woke up one morning and watched the town rot from his living room window. Then, much like his mother did seven years earlier, he stuffed everything he needed into a duffel bag and left the only trace of his existence in two words on the back of folded-up motel stationery:

Good bye

After that, the freeway took him, and he went willingly.

George Strait, “Troubadour”
Somewhere the sun rises on a car moving south. Two voices chirp from the backseat, children in boredom-fueled play. The passenger hears a song on the radio with a very familiar voice. “Isn’t that George Strait?” she asks the driver, resting a knowing hand on his knee.

A lot of things had changed, but it still didn’t get better than George Strait. “I’ll be an old troubadour when I’m gone,” the singer vowed in a voice the driver had emulated through many torrid nights in another town, another life. “Speak for yourself,” said Bill Jorman as he hit the last exit home.

Willie Nelson
American Classic
(Blue Note)
Original release: August 25, 2009

After the success of his Two Men with the Blues collaboration with Branford Marsalis last year, Willie Nelson ambled into a studio to clasp a fistful of American standards to his bosom. The result is 12 most agreeable tracks that highlight the legend’s way with a lyric. He caresses every syllable like an old lover come to call, his mesquite-cured lilt pouring just one more glass, for old time’s sake.

Musically, Willie’s surrounded by some of the finest jazzmen to ever handle a melody. Pianist Joe Sample drives most of American Classic, an able accompanist and foil. Christian McBride keeps a steady hand on bass, and Anthony Wilson’s guitar burbles sweetly when called. Even old pal Mickey Raphael drops in to saw through a few numbers on harmonica.

To his credit, producer Tommy LiPuma keeps an orchestral urge to swell in check; when strings do surface, they’re unobtrusive — supporting, not overwhelming. This is especially evident on a pop evergreen Willie long ago made his own, “Always on My Mind,” here refreshingly spare and reflective, with that bombastic yearning left in the distance.

Willie’s covered this ground before, most famously on 1978’s Stardust, yet he remains revelatory in this setting, forever as depicted on Classic’s back sleeve: a laid-back, long-haired interloper in a tuxedo. He will always be the party-crasher, a hell-raiser among the swells.

And there is a rascally flavor to his voice, even on the straightest interpretations. It’s hard not to hear a devilish rake when he swears, “I’m gonna be true — if you let me” on “Come Rain or Shine.” He locks smoky horns with Diana Krall on “If I Had You,” singing to her as if she’s already sitting in his lap. His other duet partner, Norah Jones, doesn’t stand a chance against the elements in “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”; wily Willie sounds as if he’s delivering the most practical advice (“Look out the window at that storm”), even though we know his true intent.

But there’s no denying the love and reverence he has for this material, how carefully he carries the collected works of some of the last century’s greatest tunesmiths. While American Classic may not match the historic status of Stardust, it sits up there in those very same heavens, a gentle beacon shining down.

Photograph by Ian Britton (Source: www.freefoto.com/preview/9905-08-4?ffid=9905-08-4)

As our culture mutates at an incredible speed, futurists stress the value and importance of social networking. Perpetual communication, they insist, is essential, for our very relevance is dependent upon our ability to master and manipulate the latest tools. Luckily, there’s an abundance of Web sites devoted to the maintenance and cultivation of an online presence. Currently-popular destinations include Twitter and Facebook, with Myspace dry-humping the scrap heap and LinkedIn serving the professional.

All of these are potential boons for us, but has anyone considered how this affects the most neglected segment of our population, one that lacks a sufficient voice in such matters — or any matter, for that matter? No matter: It matters.

I speak, of course, of the dead.

Hi. I’m Cory Frye. As a licensed psychic and conduit to the hereafter, I am gravely (get it?) concerned with the deceased’s ability to haunt the living. My spirit guides, who have asked to remain anonymous, inform me that over the last few decades the incorporeal have abandoned outdated tactics — rapping on tables, slamming doors, transporting candles from room to room — and are attempting to engage their fleshly counterparts using more contemporary methods.

Some naturally refuse to make the transition; since eternity still awaits the arrival of a new-media consultant, there’s no one to shame the archaic into adopting newer ideas (though it can be argued that there’s no “new” in the ether, as there’s no concept of time). John Belushi still uses land lines. F. Scott Fitzgerald swears by wires. His dispatches, in fact, have successfully filled an abandoned brownstone in Brooklyn. (Attn. Simon & Schuster: The address is available for $60,000, plus a cut of sales.)

But even those disembodied souls who’ve embraced the latest developments find themselves increasingly frustrated with the living’s lack of response. One gentle phantasm, who left this mortal coil in 1977 when most people were still using rotary phones, has discovered that not only does her granddaughter refuse to answer her cell if she doesn’t recognize the number, she pretty much ignores her phone altogether. “I have defied the laws of physics to make contact,” the freezer-bait reasons. “The least she can do is check her voicemail.” Text messages are equally futile, as the emotional heft of a transmission from the Great Beyond cannot be adequately conveyed in vacuous shorthand and emoticons: GRAMMA RUTHIE HARTS U XOXOXOXO KTHXBAI !!!!

(Incidentally, this has also become an issue for the undead, particularly movie slashers who can no longer rely on telecommunications to scare the panties off coeds. Have you seen the trailers for that House on Sorority Row remake? The killer has to text his prey. How is that scary? U GUNA FUKN DIE 2NITE >:( Or, “Oh, my God! The tweets are coming from inside the house!” Sorry — these geese bump not.)

Unlike the living, with their multiple calling plans and Internet platforms, the options for worm food are severely limited. The dead are not eligible to vote (though they turned out in droves to elect Bush in 2000) or collect Social Security, nor, thanks to the afterlife’s nonexistent wifi, can they register for Facebook or Twitter accounts. Most would be at a loss for status updates, anyway, since existence on a metaphysical plane is difficult to articulate in words.

Frankly, the dead are pissed. Can you blame them? For eons, dirt-gobblers have been represented in the popular culture by offensive stereotypes, to illustrate the air-breather’s alleged superiority. They especially despise the popularity of supernatural-based television entertainment. The most egregious offender is Ghost Hunters, which reduces the living/dead dynamic to a series of hackneyed parlor tricks, thus cheapening the craft of haunting. “They’re always saying, ‘Move that chair’ or ‘Knock three times,’” grouses eight-year-old Ezekiel Hathaway, who perished in an 1886 Montana mining disaster. “I’m like, ‘I’m an intangible being, OK, not Tony Orlando and Dawn.’”

“They’re so bossy,” adds the late Molly Brown. “I think of everything I accomplished in my life, and now I’m being asked to entertain plumbers by breaking glasses in a hotel kitchen. Believe me, honey: If I want to address the living, you’ll know. And I don’t need to blink on useless doohickeys to tell you I’m in the room. I would, however, appreciate you not wiping my cryptic messages off the bathroom mirror so you can take pictures of yourself in sunglasses and bra for your Match.com profile.”

Our meat-puppet narcissism is exacerbating our already tenuous relationship with the afterworld. If your grandmother shuns you for not returning her calls in life — you were “too busy” (i.e., posting Facebook links to your favorite NPR pieces and wishing strangers a “happy birthday”) — how’s she going to react when you ignore her wails from beyond? Do you really want to explain your earthly behavior when you see her again? What if JFK’s trying to reach you? Or Ernie Kovacs? Or your aunt’s Pomeranian? We must deactivate our computers and exhume our Ouija boards before it’s too late (zombies).

Photo by Vincent la Foret/Stills Press/Retna

Whenever my loinspawn ask about Woodstock, I always think of Trevor. He was my best friend in those days, and he seemed to have the skinny on everything. It was he who first told me about an exotic “music and arts festival” scheduled on the far-off East Coast in August. It sounded a world and a lifetime away as I busied myself stapling homemade zine fliers into a post outside Boccherini’s Coffee and Tea House in our hometown of Albany, Oregon.

“All the bands are gonna be there,” he goshed between hits from his latte bong. Personally, I couldn’t see how anything could possibly top Body Count at Lollapalooza, but there was something in his voice that gave me pause. Besides, he assured me, “Adam Curry says it’s a phenomenon most unprecedented in the annals of music history.”

Intrigued all afternoon, I turned on my TV when I got home. There it was: Woodstock. How about that? My generation had finally wedded art and commerce with rock ‘n’ roll. You’d think someone would have discovered the connection earlier, but the ’80s had been too airless and crass, the ’70s were an oblivious case of the doped-up alley shakes, and the ’60s were utterly hopeless, as a reinvigorated Republican party dominated the decade under the aegis of Jerry Rubin.

A third day was added later.

The event was backed by Woodstock Ventures, Inc., a weapons manufacturer that came to prominence in the Reagan era. Captained by 74-year-old CEO Michael Lang, the bloated arms dealer was keen to tap the youth market in 1994. “Generation X? I think they’re amazing,” Lang told Fortune. “They’ve accomplished in smaller numbers what their parents’ generation was too lazy and stupid to even attempt. As for our involvement, we didn’t do much, honestly. A couple promoters in their early twenties came to us, jester hats in hand, and we just threw cash at ‘em while brooding in our self-imposed prisons of dark-souled avarice.”

It’s hard to explain to my kids just how different America was 15 years ago. It was a time of great change, an era of personal prosperity and hope. We had an awesome President and a thriving economy, and the only people who weren’t happy were assholes. “But weren’t you bored without cell phones and the Internet?” asks my son, Popquiz Hotshot Frye, 11. “No,” I chuckle. “Back then, girls wore baby-doll dresses.” “That’s how you met mom, right?” adds my daughter, Shannonhoon Beegirl Frye, 13. “That’s right, sweetie,” I reply sweetly. “Nobody drunkenly dropped her purse in a baby-doll quite like your mom.”

But all that was in an unforeseen future. All I could think about then were three fun-filled days in Saugerties, New York. It sounded like a memorable blast. But in the end I couldn’t go because I had to catch up on all the Conans I’d taped. Priorities. Trevor seemed relieved, as he’d begun pulling double shifts at the food-processing plant to pay for the tickets. As it turned out, only his girlfriend Pinta was available for the cross-country trek. Now, there was a storybook romance. They were so into each other that one night they hit the tattoo parlor downtown, where he got Buddy Holly etched into his upper right arm and she got Mary Tyler Moore inked into her left. In close quarters their tattoos kissed and made beautiful Rivers Cuomo music together. Now Trevor was telling me he planned to propose to Pinta right after The Cranberries’ set, when the moment would be just so. “I hope we get to make love in mud,” he sighed.

Radio bands bent under the weight of the impending event. There were the usual interviews with disconsolate ’60s icons. “I can’t believe we didn’t think of it,” ached John Sebastian. “It’s such a no-brainer. Jesus Christ, we dropped the ball.” “That’s what I meant when I said, ‘We blew it,’” explained Peter Fonda, referring to his memorably dismissive epitaph in 1969’s Easy Rider, then celebrating its 25th anniversary. “We were just a bunch of blind, capitalist pricks, and all we cared about was keeping Nixon in the White House.” Crosby, Stills & Nash recorded a jingle for McDonald’s, which played with increasing frequency as the festival drew near. “By the time we got to Woodstock,” their sweet harmonies enthused, “we were half a billion served.”

The promotional machine was in permanent overdrive. Since I couldn’t attend, I had my choice of myriad pay-per-view packages, all of which I purchased, along with four new televisions so I didn’t miss a single Flea bass plunk. I also bought the T-shirts, a couple hats, and the official Woodstock game for my Super Nintendo (the object was to help Henry Rollins beat the shit out of everyone in Candlebox). Trent Reznor went door-to-door to talk about Nine Inch Nails’ performance scheduled for Saturday, August 13, and Perry Farrell recruited his Porno for Pyros bandmates through a cross-promotional tie-in with MTV’s The Real World. So by the time the concerts finally aired, I was totally Woodstocked out, spending most of my days sweet-talking girls at the 7-Eleven down the street. I managed to catch a few performances when I wasn’t schooling company on F-Zero or napping, which was pretty much my entire schedule at the age of 21.

They say if you remember Woodstock, you weren’t actually there. I think that’s true. At least it was for me — and Trevor, funnily enough. The week before the festival he fortified his air-conditioned minivan with girlfriend, Bugles, Mountain Dew, and Pearl Jam bootlegs and got as far as Portland, Oregon, before he realized he was going the wrong way. So he just said, “Fuck it” and stayed. He and Pinta have been there ever since. They have two children of their own now and operate a microbrewery specializing in hemp-based elixirs. They still listen to The Cranberries while making out on the couch.

As for me, I’m fully domesticated. Two kids, loving wife, home mortgaged up the ass, and a St. Bernard named DJ Muggs. We’ve all gone our separate ways, Generation X, but I still have fond memories of that ancient summer, when the music raged and we all shrugged our shoulders as one.

Here I invented a punk band from scratch, using the Minutemen, the Germs, and Violent Femmes as templates/inspiration, for a supernatural L.A.-centered music-industry novel I’ve been tackling off and on since leaving Rhino in 2007. This is a brief peek into the group’s backstory. (Real scene vets will scoff.) As for the overall book, imagine W.P. Kinsella at the corner of Hollywood and Cherokee.

Distant Suffering
(1980s)

Years Active
1980-1985

Hometown
Pico Rivera, CA

Genres
Rock
Folk
Protest
Anti-Folk
Avant-Garde
Jazz
Funk

Members
Jason “Broken” Sanchez
Dennis “Deep” Patton
Simon Arch

Discography
1980: Four Square Alarmed [EP] (Skydog Records)
1980: Will Pay Damages, Even If Physical [EP] (Skydog Records)
1980: Come Out Screaming [Live EP] (Skydog Records)
1981: The Greatness of Man Is Genocide (Skydog Records)
1982: Lies, Betrayals, Swindles & Laws (Skydog Records)
1983: Idiot Christ (Skydog Records)
1983: The Tide of Disruption [EP] (Skydog Records)
1984: One Nation Under the Thumb (Skydog Records)
1985: Society Eats It, Excretes It, Defeats It (Skydog Records)
1985: Simple Simon Met the Pie-Eyed [split 7-inch, limited] (Lost Sanchelez Records)
1985: Never Let Them Hear You Think (Skydog Records)

Excerpted from Distant Suffering’s All Music Guide biography (author: Thom Josewski):

According to legend, Distant Suffering literally collided into existence at El Rancho High School in Pico Rivera, California, in the spring of 1979. Eighteen-year-old Jason Sanchez, known derisively around campus as “‘Broken” Sanchez (short for “Heartbroken”; Sanchez eventually discarded the apostrophe) for his failed attempts to seduce female classmates with overwrought poetry, was leaving the school’s parking lot in his 1974 Chevy Nova when he metal-kissed classmate Dennis Patton’s 1978 Plymouth Duster, pinching its tail-light into a blind squint. Sanchez scribbled a quick apologetic note (“Will pay damages, even if physical,” which would later provide the title for DS’ breakthrough EP) with his address and telephone number and stuffed it under the Duster’s left wiper. Taking the note’s contents literally, an incensed Patton raced to Sanchez’s quiet suburban home looking for a fight. Instead of fisticuffs, the two discovered a mutual but definitely unspoken affection for the punk rock then emerging from New York and blossoming on their own coast, thanks to exposure on Rodney Bingenheimer’s Rodney on the ROQ, a popular program on Los Angeles’ KROQ-FM.

After their high school graduation in 1979, Sanchez and Patton became fixtures in Hollywood during the dying embers of punk’s infant glow. They were a familiar sight at the corner of Hollywood and Cherokee avenues, where they busked for bus fare home. “We weren’t very good,” Patton recalled years later, “but no one strummed an out-of-tune acoustic guitar like Sanch. He made it scream. We made five, ten bucks a week easy.” Their site selection had a strategic purpose: Across the street was Brendan Mullen’s club, The Masque, burrowed in a downstairs basement thrumming with bass. Just up Cherokee’s steady incline were the notorious Canterbury apartments, where L.A.’s punk glitterati squatted rent-free for years. Patton would fondly recount watching Darby Crash wobble up the sidewalks, legs rendered rubbery by the mountainous trek up Cherokee. “He spewed a beer river near my shoes one night,” Patton laughed. “He said, ‘Don’t take it personally. Your music’s fine.’ When Darby died I put those shoes in a closet like religious artifacts.”

Unlike most street musicians, Sanchez and Patton’s hit parade were improvised real-time sociopolitical streams or juvenile screeds against women who’d turned the corner only moments before, noses aimed high. “Our songs were spur-of-the-moment meaningless,” Patton once quipped, “but they were ours.” Only one of those improvisations survived to be recorded (launching the invective-laced fury of debut EP Four Square Alarmed, in fact), and the full band encored with it at every live performance until the end. “We’d come back out onstage and whip on our beat-up acoustics,” Patton said, “and the old-timers from the scene went apeshit.” The song, of course, was “Fuck You (Cop Car),” two breakneck minutes of expletives stumbling down a verbal mountain until somersaulting into the cathartic yelp “Cop car!” The instant perennial was born in the fall of 1980, with Sanchez, belly warm with spirit, yelling and strumming “Fuck you!” in a furious one-word roll until a black-and-white materialized at cruising speed down Hollywood Boulevard. “Cop car!” he shouted after it. The duo made it an inspired duet, both bellowing the denouement whenever 5.0 glided past. Passersby would often request “that ‘Cop Car’ song” and respond giddily when their favorite part came. “We knew it was a hit right away,” Patton later recalled, noting that the song accounted for 70 percent of their tips. “‘Cop Car’ got me bus fare, Big Macs, and Iron Man comics,” he said, “so, yeah, it’s been good to me.”

Six months of steady busking resulted in the duo’s first serious booking. The Masque had shuttered by then, but the Starwood was at full steam — and one night found itself in desperate need of an opening act for the visiting Lemminz, a short-lived Polydor act from Manchester. Someone suggested the scruffy, melody-assaulting teenagers who’d transformed the Hollywood/Cherokee T-section into a Dylanesque nightmare for foot traffic. “We were supposed to be a novelty,” Sanchez said in 1982. “They thought they’d get us onstage and we’d be cute for a few laughs. Me and Pat decided, ‘Fuck that — we’re gonna be a real band.’”

Excerpted from “Sanchez Breaks,” Fuckin’ Up #4, June-July 1982:

Q: So Simon comes in.

A: Yeah. What happened was, some guy from the Starwood just came up to us and said, “We hear you guys are really good, and everyone talks about you, and we’ve got this band coming in, but they need a local supporting act” — you know, that trip, which we loved. What the hey, right? We’re 19 years old. But we also knew why they asked us to do it. We weren’t totally stupid. We were supposed to be a novelty. They thought they’d get us onstage and we’d be cute for a few laughs, like, “Hey, it’s those guys! What are they doing onstage? That’s some funny shit.” Me and Pat decided, “Fuck that — we’re gonna be a real band.” We were serious, you know? We wanted to be legit.

Q: Did you think of Simon right away, like “We know just the guy”?

A: Kinda. We knew about Simon; he was the same class as us. But he was a jock. One of the untouchables, you know? Girls liked him. Moms liked him. Everyone liked him. He had a bad-ass Corvette. He had these thick fuckin’ surfer arms. He was good at anything with a ball. He wasn’t punk to us at all. But Pat knew he played the drums, so that was one advantage he had. Cuz we didn’t know anybody else who played anything!

Q: So how hard was it to approach the “popular” kid?

A: You know, I thought it would be hard. He’d laugh at us and kick our asses or something. But Simon was really cool about the whole thing. We’d graduated, so all that status stuff was meaningless. He was working at Pioneer Chicken back then, right up front where the chicks could see him. The owner got off on having a local celebrity athlete hawk his grub. Pat went in one night — we decided he’d be the one to do it, since he once said, “Hi” to Simon at a Jeff Deaver party that summer — and pushed his way past the tits and ass and said, “Hey, man, wanna be in our band?” Simon was like, “What kind of band?” Pat’s like, “We make a bunch of noise to piss people off.” And Simon says, “Sure.”

Excerpted from “Interview with Simon Arch,” Long-Gone Suicide #12, December 1986:

SA: I didn’t know those guys at all. They were off my radar in high school. My priorities were totally different: pussy, football, surfing, and beer. I’ve crossed football off the list since then [laughs]. I knew about Sanch because of his nickname. All the kids called him Broken Sanchez. Most people think it’s a punk name, but it goes back to before punk. They called him Broken because he couldn’t score with chicks. Maybe his dick was broken, maybe his heart was broken, or maybe the little chemical mechanism that made him attractive to women was broken. Or maybe he couldn’t communicate with them properly. I don’t remember. Today everyone’s like “What a cool name,” but for many years Sanch didn’t think it was so cool. He made it his own, though. Pat I think was just a run-of-the-mill stoner with rich parents. He had a nice car, which Sanch nicked. Which is how the band started, as you know.

MICK DIXON: What did you think when Dennis Patton asked you to join his band?

SA: I thought, Why the hell not? I didn’t have anything else to do that summer but drink, fuck, and surf. Variety is the spice of life. [laughs]

MD: What did you think of punk rock? Were you aware of it?

SA: Not really. I’d seen pictures of all the Mohawks and safety pins and whathaveyou, and honestly, I thought it was some fag trip. I liked Led Zeppelin. John Bonham. Keith Moon. Billy Cobham was my man too.

MD: It’s funny you mention Billy Cobham, because ordinarily you wouldn’t think a jock would be into fusion jazz!

SA: Well…I mean, the dumb jock is something of a stereotype, just as much as punkers being a bunch of violent douchebags is a stereotype. The guys had to get over that too. I had to keep telling them, “You know, just because I was All-State doesn’t mean I don’t care about nuclear war.” [laughs] But I’d actually been drumming since I was seven, so I could appreciate people who did it well or just flattened me as musicians. I knew my way around the kit, which gave me an advantage over the guys when the band first started rehearsing. They were used to just strumming whatever the fuck they wanted. I had to rein them in and show them how to stay on beat and write some hooks, some riffs. At first they were pissed, but, actually, I was just talking to Pat the other day and he said, “Simon, you were the discipline we needed,” which made me feel real good.

MD: The famous story goes that you were working at Pioneer Chicken –

SA: Yep. Right there on Whittier Boulevard in downtown Whittier, California. It’s gone now, I think. I haven’t been back to Whittier in years. But, yeah, I was working there and one day DP comes in and says, “You play drums, right?” I told him yeah, and he said, “You wanna be in our band?” I asked, “Well, what kind of music do you play?” He goes, “Noise.” Boy, was he right about that!

MD: What was your first impression of them?

SA: Total shit. Sanch thought he was Bruce Springsteen, but old Bruce, back when all he did was write a mess of words and hope the music came close, like “It’s Hard to be a Saint in the City” and shit like that. They both played guitars, but only Sanch had any promise whatsoever. I told DP, “Maybe you should play bass.” He said, “Fuck that Geddy Lee shit.” [laughs] I had to inform him that he would have to sell his soul and both balls to ever be as good as Geddy Lee, so we fought for a while about that, until I asked him to play the line from “Spirit of Radio,” which he couldn’t do. Your honor, I rest my case! [laughs] Sanch had rhythm, but because he now had an electric guitar instead of an acoustic guitar, he thought every song needed a solo. “You don’t have the chops!” I remember yelling that at him throughout our first rehearsal. “You don’t have the chops! Stop wanking off! You suck!” [laughs] Boot camp had begun!

I’m making it sound like it was terrible, but, really, it wasn’t a total loss. When they played me “Cop Car” for the first time, I couldn’t wait to pound on that motherfucker. It’s that song that made me want to join their band. It blew my mind. It was so simple we could play that song forever. Real genius. But we had our work cut out for us. Two weeks to get our shit together for Starwood. Sometimes I just told them, “Hey, they want your street act. Just go do your street act!” They said no, they wanted to be taken seriously. This was their Dylan Goes Electric.

From Stopgap (Vol. 12, No. 6):

Who The Fuck Are The Lemminz,
And Why Do They Think They’re Punk?

by Jeff Stoppard

If you happened to open the Starwood doors last Friday night, I hope you were wearing waders and holding your nose, because the swill that spilled out was the toxic chum of bullshit corporate punksters the Lemminz, about the faggiest name for a talentless haggle of sooeys since Blue Oyster Cult. Imagine the Byrds with Desi Arnaz Jr. trying to perpetrate a Dicks fraud. Their lead singer looks like he barely escaped Blue Cheer with his potbelly intact. I swear someone in the audience saw the bass player flailing away, pretending he didn’t play the instrument for 200 years in Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and asked, “Dad, is that you?” Behind embarrassing song titles like “Lost Little Punker Girl” and “What the Cool Kids Don’t Know,” Polydor thinks they’re the second coming of the Pistols. I think Polydor’s A&R reps should stop mixing airplane glue with highballs. Better yet, they should all throw themselves under trains. The only saving grace was opener Gilby & The Dilholes, the professional moniker for a couple JDs who stand like statues in Hollywood harassing tourists with songs about mayonnaise and pigs (cops). They’re young and they can’t play for shit, but we all lustily bellowed along with the showstopping “Cop Cars,” [sic] which sounds amazingly hardcore with recent addition Simon Arch, obviously a real musician, drilling holes in his kit (drums, you sicko). Now if only the Lemminz would do the same to theirs (you’re right this time). Not a total waste, but management needs a spanking for that headliner. Bleargh.

Excerpted from “One Night Only: Gilby and the Dillholes!”, Music-Verse Monthly [U.K.] (Vol. 12, No. 10), October 1997:

[Dennis Patton] I’ve had a thousand people come up to me and say they were at that first Starwood show. I know some of them are full of it, cos I don’t recall more than 40 people in the whole venue — and I personally knew about ten of them! Four of them are dead now! Jesus. But it’s become part of the legend. Truth is, it wasn’t that special. People remember it being better than it was because the Lemminz were so bad. You had to be there. I never bought that album of theirs, but someone at their label must’ve been out of his mind. I hope that person got fired, cos live those guys were pathetic. Just awful. I remember they had a song that went — and I’ll never forget this lyric as long as I live — ‘Welcome to the mauling/Our leather spikes are calling’ ['Pump Your Fists and Rise,' from The Lemminz Are Cummin'! (1979)—Ed.]. They were, ugh, like bad BTO mixed with Venom. Spinal Tap all the way. Sometimes just for fun Sanch and I would sing that on tour. The audience always got it.

[The band name] was Sanch’s idea. We knew it was gonna be a one-off. We just wanted to get a show under our belt, and it was the first thing out of his mouth. He was Gilby, we were the Dillholes. You could say it was juvenile, but we were 18-19 years old, for Chrissakes. It went with our aesthetic. We’d been the goofy kids from East L.A. in Hollywood, harmless. Now it was time to make our move. At first it was just me and Sanch, but then we recruited Simon, and Simon really worked us to death, shaped us until we were kind of a real band. He was Mickey to our Rocky. We didn’t have quite that dramatic a change, but in two weeks of rehearsals we’d gotten to be a pretty tight unit, so much that when we got to the Starwood people were taken aback. Oh, you know, they’re serious. Which is what we wanted. We weren’t looking to be a joke. We were looking to be an experience.

Untitled interview with Broken Sanchez, Flowers Dead #3, February 1981:

BS: I’d heard stories about the Germs and the Stooges, where the guys would cut themselves up or smear peanut butter all over themselves, but that wasn’t me. I was inspired by that, but that wasn’t me. I felt we had to be memorable beyond that stupid name. So I took it upon myself to become a master showman, ha ha. I’m a pretty big hombre, but I’m agile. I just started bouncing around, pretending like I was throwing my entire body into every riff. I had long, curly hair, which of course went everywhere, like Neil Young.  I’d flick sweat; my entire body would be this wet sheet. You could peel it off me like orange skin. I’d pull at my guitar neck like I was keeping a little kid from getting hit by a train, then shoving him back in front of it. The whole band got way into it too. Deep [Dennis Patton] was rockin’ his ass off and Archie was through the floor. I remember beginning the show by telling the crowd, “The next band blows nutsac worse than us, so cherish this memory.” That little moment before we dismantle your whole world.

Excerpted from “Interview with Simon Arch,” Long-Gone Suicide #12, December 1986:

MD: Then there’s the infamous Starwood show…

SA: That legend is totally overblown, in my opinion. The truth is, we were terrible that night, but we were terrible in an interesting way. Sanch copped to it from the start. He opened by saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, we suck, we know we suck, but everyone except our drummer can’t play a fuckin’ thing. The next band sucks worse, and they’re professional musicians. Who wouldja rather see?” [laughs] The Lemminz weren’t too happy about that, but it was true. That was Sanch, always startin’ shit. I spent most of the evening either playing catch-up with Deep and Sanch because when they got nervous, they got really fast, because they wanted to get off as quick as possible — or trying to pull them back into the actual beat. I felt like their fucking dad. [laughs] There were a couple times they got loose and the audience started pulling away, and I’m shouting over the feedback, “‘Cop Car’! ‘Cop Car’!” — our crowd-pleaser — trying to win everybody back. We played that a few times that night, once for about ten minutes. We’d stop whatever song we were mangling and dive right in. Over the years it’s gotten this, like, mythical status, but that night I almost crapped my OPs on pure fear. I didn’t feel very legendary barfing in that grimy-ass men’s toilet, wondering if I hadn’t made the stupidest career choice ever.

From “20 Years of Distant Suffering,” Magenta, Spring 2000:

DENNIS PATTON: “It’s weird. Now that I think about it, the Starwood show was the beginning of the end. It was obvious that we weren’t gonna be Hollywood mascot clowns no more, so that was one strike against us. When we got some decent press that wasn’t ‘Look at these weird dumbass kids playing street guitar,’ but, ‘Wow, what a great band,’ all our original fans started turning on us. ‘Oh, they’re selling out.’ ‘They have ambition.’ ‘They’re recording an album.’”

As you can tell from my blog, I’m pretty much a nonconformist. You might even say I’m a born unorthodox dissident who doesn’t give a fuck. Offline, I’m even more so.

For instance, I drive a Scion. I know, right? Most pseudo-hipsters would stop there, but I went the distance. I told my dealer, Steve Labredo, I says, “Steve, the factory color is not conducive to my refreshingly quirky iconoclasm. It would be unacceptable for my id to be dictated by some slob of an automaton fascist paint gun.” So Steve let me peruse a thick book of alternatives, and after a few hours of deliber-twitteration I decided on Scarlett Johansson, a hue I chose ironically because she’s such a shitty actress and I hate her. Steve assured me I was the first person ever to select that color, making my car even more one of a kind.

After my new skinjob I thought what better way to christen my new ride’s CD/mp3 player than with…a Scarlett Johansson CD! So I drove to the nearest half-dead melody swindler and relieved it of one (1) copy of the disc she knitted with Pete Yorn.  “I’m buying it ironically,” I told the clerk as he expectorated into my bag. Which was true. See, I hate Pete Yorn too. And what’s more ironic than touring the city in a gruesome-shaded vessel while listening to two people I despise? That’s so me.

But my maverick bent doesn’t stop on the road. It’s a way of life! I eat nothing but Twix and Pringles Extremes, two irreverent comestibles that tend to shock anyone over 30. The Twix always came in handy whenever I found myself in Diablo Cody-ish awksitches (“awkward situations,” if you speak not the tongue) with impossibly attractive women. If and when I uttered something potentially offensive, I reached for a choco wand, took a thoughtful bite, and stopped time long enough to salvage my nookie with a velvet-tongued humdinger. Like one time last summer, I suckered this strumpet back to my hovel to, um, blog. Oh, we blogged, all right. Four entries after a bottle of scotch and two more in the bathtub.

I break out the Pringles Extremes for amorous emergencies, when a girl suspects I’m a little too uptight. Once she sees me coolly pop a crisp down my chute, she knows I’m a savage between satin. (Caution: Cheetos only work on wine-cooler chicks.) Before Pringles: “No, let’s just cuddle chastely on the couch.” After Pringles: “CAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWK!”

Recently, though, I’ve encountered a conundrum exclusive to cultural renegades. I’m worried that my current bank isn’t unique enough. For a while I had a savings account at Cal Fed, because I thought that Elvis Schmiedekamp guy was a freewheeling rake who watched my money personally, but later I realized he was a sellout puppet, so I transferred everything to Washington Mutual after one of its ATMs greeted me like a high-school pal. (“Ya wanna, I dunno, like, check your balance or some shit?” its screen inquired as I coaxed $40 from its tummy; I chuckled and pushed “Naw, ’s all good.” To which it replied, “No big. Thanks for chillin’ wit’ WaMu, dawg.”) But now it’s owned, I think, by Chevy Chase.

I’m not looking forward to being just another customer again, with no charismatic employee/pitchman to admire. So I’m trying to decide between Wells Fargo and Red Canoe. I’ve studied both institutions’ ATM screens very carefully, and it’s a toss-up. The former has these cute pictures of various wry domestic sequences, my favorite being the upwardly mobile multiracial couple (diversity is a plus) hovering over a freeloading relative snoozing on the couch. That’s a scene we can all dig, right? Red Canoe, however, as seen above, beseeches me to “Be Different,” which in their case means strapping on a lifejacket and hitting the metaphorical rapids of financial excitement. On the one hand, I like a bank that can make me laugh. On the other, I like getting splashed in the face.

I tried asking my buddy Paul for advice, but being Paul, he was a useless dick. “You’re too susceptible to empty hype,” he oinked. “It doesn’t really matter who you bank with, or whose food you eat or jeans you wear. Like driving a Scion doesn’t make you different.” “Be the original, not a copy!” I barked. That’s the mark of a Scion owner! Paul!” Being a gentleman, I refrained from adding that as the owner of an anonymous rustbucket, he was just jealous. I mean, any dipshit can walk into a dealership and buy a 1982 VW Rabbit GTI, but a Scion — that’s a different story. “See what I mean? You’re just parroting an advertisement,” Paul said, making no sense whatsoever. I fired back the only rational response: “Meh meh meh, my name’s Paul, and I’m a giant douchebag.” He wilted into his dumplings.

My girlfriend Genevivre laughed when I told her that story. “That’s exactly what Jonah Hill would’ve done,” she said approvingly, “except he’d repeat it until it wasn’t funny anymore, then he’d keep at it until it was re-funny, like a fart that turns a corner and waits.” “Yeah, but I wish I’d done it more like Seth Rogen,” I confessed. “He would’ve said douche nozzle just to be a contrarian.” We agreed and sat in silence. Genevivre worships at the Apatow altar and has taken to dressing like Charlyne Yi, which makes her frumpy-hot.

Genevivre is 12 years my junior, but we get along swimmingly. Of course, we first had to overcome a common language barrier. She speaks in broken Juno whereas I long ago pickled into a wry Thurston Moore with a light Spin Doctors brogue for a gregarious veneer. So we’re often operating on different levels of acidic sarcasm. Our age gap has also made for some interesting predicaments. She gets mad when I won’t talk like Michael Cera in bed (“Stammer, dammit!” she growls between thrusts. “Fuck me like a timid, indecisive manchild! Moan toward an inquisitive register!”), and I nearly broke up with her once during a Pixies show when she innocently asked, as I swooned enraptured to “Wave of Mutilation,” lost in those far-off Doolittle nights, “So when are the Pipsqueaks coming on? These fat old hacks are giving me a headache.”

As much as Genevivre gets on my nerves sometimes, I have to remember that she’s young and relevant, so I must obey her if I want to stay acceptably different. But every now and then I find myself reviewing old tapes of ex-girlfriends while moping in a candlelit din with a cold bottle of vintage Zima. We were all so young and relevant then ourselves, dancing together across the same glorious wavelength.

Here’s a recording made on my 25th birthday in 1997 (I’ll upload the video someday, once I’ve found the appropriately hip Death Cab for Cutie track to accompany it):

HER: I love you, pumpkin.
ME: I love you, too, honeybunny. [raised voice] All right, everybody, be cool! This is a robbery!
HER: Any of you fuckin’ pigs mooooove, and I’ll execute every motherfuckin’ last oneaya!

[Both collapse in paroxysms of laughter.]

ME: Ah, Pulp Fiction.
HER: Totally.
ME: Y’know, we are so perfect together.
HER: Omigod. Cory!
ME: What?
HER: You said that without using air quotes!
ME: That’s right, baby. I think it’s time I made a commitment.
HER: No shit?
ME: Not fragrant clump one.
HER: Oh. I am so fucking happy!
ME: Me too. I feel it, I really do.

[Mazzy Star's "Fade Into You" whispers in the background.]

HER: [softly] Hey. Got something for you.
ME: Yeah?
HER: Yeah.
ME: Yeah?
HER: Yeah.

[rustling]

HER: Happy birthday!
ME: Oh, wow! Thank you! Wow! What is it?
HER: [coyly] Open it.
ME: Aw, come on. Not even a hint?
HER: Patience is a virtue.

[rustling, tearing]

ME: [disappointed] Huh.
HER: You like it?
ME: Hm.
HER: Is that good?
ME: It’s a box of ska.
HER: Yes!
ME: Oh.
HER: Don’t you like it?
ME: Well…
HER: Well?
ME: Well, it’s just that ska is way overplayed and trendy now.
HER: Huh?
ME: Well…
HER: I was with you, like, two days ago when you bought all those Specials albums! You didn’t seem to think ska sucked then!
ME: Yeah, but teenyboppers like it now. I can’t listen to this shit. I need something different.
HER: Me too. I’m leaving. You’re an asshole.
ME: Hey!
HER: [angrily] What?
ME: Can you at least leave the receipt so I can trade it for some Esquivel?

[Door slams. ME shrugs and pours a martini.]

HOPE SANDOVAL: “A stranger’s heart without a home…”

Ah, ska and Esquivel, swing and space-age bachelor pad music. They were all a zillion trends ago. It occurred to me that perhaps what’s now will soon be outre as well. I can already see it happening with some of my favorite phrases, like “I think I just threw up a little in my mouth.” It seemed so fresh once, but now Genevivre smiles only slightly when I say it and insists up and down she has no idea how those Kimya Dawson mp3s got into her Zune (her shade: Rose McGowan). “Hipster Alzheimer’s,” Paul called it. “I think she picked it up from you.” “Fuck off, Accusatory Magoo,” I retorted, but my heart wasn’t in it. Calling everyone “Magoo” or variations on “Jumpy McJumpenstein” has lost its edge as well. It’s overplayed and trendy. I don’t have time for that. I need to drown in different, surround myself with like-minded different.

“You can’t make a conscious effort to be different,” Paul explained as we passed the Red Canoe billboard that so recently captured my fancy. “Either you are or you’re not. Products, youth, and fashions don’t change that.” Spoken like a card-carrying member of the status quo.

I bit into a Pringles and felt different surge through my body, compelling me to get a tattoo, a funky-colored Mohawk, some oversized faux Hollywood sunglasses — all the necessary accoutrements of individualism in its purest form. Paul would never understand. He only consumes off-brands, which offer nothing but sustenance in place of an outlet for personal expression. What a sad life he must lead, to never know freedom, to never think outside the bun.

As long as I’m on the subject of telecommunications (not my fave), let me tell you about the first short story I ever published. It ran in the December 1986 edition of West Albany High School’s short-lived literary journal, Writing on the Wall, and remains the earliest surviving example of my first serious forays into the verbal trade. I still have the spiral-bound beast; it slumbers a-moulderin’ in the Frye Archives (a series of deteriorating boxes in my father’s attic), and someday I may have the brass handful to exhume it and publish the story here for kicks. Until then, forgive an old man a self-indulgent stroll.

The piece was cutely titled “Reach Out and Touch Someone” and was the natural culmination of an obsession with Stephen King and a Twilight Zone revival then chilling Aqua Net bones on CBS. By the time it was published, I had already dismissed the story as passe and ancient; why, I’d read it the previous spring to my eighth-grade English class! I only submitted it because my freshman writing teacher had asked me to contribute. Rather than whip up something new, I riffled through mothballs. It was easier. Meanwhile, I had “grown” leaps and bounds as a virgin scribe, slowly divesting my history of its roots in childish horror and inane supernatural twists.

I’d started in earnest at age 11 or thereabouts — whenever it was that I’d first finished Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot. I decided that the writer’s life was for me. Initially, I took away the wrong lesson from King; my first attempt at a novel, in the sixth grade, was an innard-fest clinging to a threadbare plot.

At that point in my life I’d never seen a horror movie, so I sat over blank paper and concocted what I thought one might be. The eventual story — which crapped out after 40 handwritten pages (this gig was harder than it looked), to my disappointment — followed the murderous rampage of a somnambulist named Jones who went Michael Myers on an equally sleepy community. But Jones was no mere strangler or pillow-freak; once he hit his R.E.M. cycle, he was a surgically precise maniac with superhuman strength. He tore people’s guts out, ripped the brains from their heads. He killed so many residents — practically picked the town apart, decimating its police force to an abandoned building and unused patrol cars — that I had to create a last-minute character in the final three paragraphs to put Jones down for good.

When I poked the last period, I felt the writer’s high for the first time. Excited, I took my scraps of notebook paper to my mom and ordered her to read them immediately, with me standing over her shoulder. After she finished, she paid me the finest compliment any preteen boy’s likely to hear from his mother. “Cory,” she said, “this is gross.”

“Reach Out and Touch Someone,” by comparison, was tame and subtle. But I’d gone through a lot to reach even that level of maturation in 1986: three years of gradually diminished bloodshed (despite the pleasure of watching my mom vomit and wonder what the hell she’d birthed; never ask about “the one with the chainsaws”) and allusions to King. I wasn’t quite out of the woods yet, but recalling this swill some 23 years later I can see my own nascent “style” coalescing, with mordant humor and a hapless protagonist. I was no longer pilfering DNA from other people’s stories. Instead, I was creating characters that were either extensions of me or of people I knew. And despite its supernatural element, “Reach Out” was inspired by an innocuous event in my own young life rather than something I’d just read or seen on television.

It happened when my parents decided to replace the phone in our kitchen. I still remember the old unit: a brown rotary job with a green backlit glow and a cord that went only as far as my bedroom, which I was forced to keep immaculate, because it was the most popular space in the house. God only knows what people talked about in there. But at some point in mid-1986 my dad declared our shit-colored wall pill dead. So he pried it loose, stuffed it in a bubble-wrap envelope, and sent it back to AT&T (something “Reach Out’s” main — and only — character would do as well), then affixed a new model over its shadow.

The new phone had two things in its favor: push buttons for rapid-fire dialing (though you still had to sit through dit-dit-dit as numbers tumbled into place) and a ringer you could actually deactivate. I found that the latter feature came in handy for undisturbed afternoons. Of course, I was often too, er, busy to turn the ringer back on. Our house once went three days in isolated bliss until my dad picked up the phone one night to call somebody and found my grandmother already on the other end. “I’ve been trying to reach you all week!” she thundered. “Where the hell have you been?”

The new phone in my story, of course, had a third feature. It was haunted. Since a haunted telephone is more of a cheap gimmick than an authentic scare, it gave me the time to develop its human prey.

The character is a single man in his mid-20s. He lives alone in a small apartment and works, well, somewhere that doesn’t let him loose until well after 9 p.m. each evening (my 1986 bedtime on weekdays). When he gets home, he pops a Totino’s (my preferred 1986 delicacy) into the microwave, then settles into his couch, his warm, soggy dinner simmering through a paper plate into his hand, and watches Late Night with David Letterman (which I recorded religiously, since I couldn’t stay up to watch it) before finally hitting the sack whenever he damn well pleases, Mom.

I loved this guy. I truly did. He could do all the things I couldn’t. He enjoyed the freedom of adulthood in a space bereft of restrictions. But even he couldn’t escape the residue of my life. His own kitchen is a virtual carbon copy of the one in which he was created, down to the wallpaper patterns and the garish floor tile that ran from the back door to the hallway on one end and the living room on the other. He was even a Lakers fan. He looked like me, talked like me — he was me, or at least how I’d envisioned my future self. (Sadly, I was scary on the money.) Most importantly, had my parents never replaced the family phone, he would have never existed.

Which was just as well, since “Reach,” being of a supernatural bent, required me to kill him. But since I’d developed a softer narrative touch, I was merciful. His death was clean, with not a drop of blood or a single perforation. In fact, it was quite existential. As I said, his phone was haunted, so aside from hosting the usual array of callers, it also served as a portal to the dead. So throughout “Reach” he hears from a procession of relatives, friends, and acquaintances whose only means of contact are the coins over their eyes. Finally, in the hair-raising twist you likely saw coming in this literary equivalent of a Pacer dragging a muffler, he hears from…himself. Cue the bone-white booga-booga, fall dead on the pipe organ, soak your sleeping bag, and goodnight.

If memory serves, that was the last horror story I ever wrote. Soon I found other subjects to explore, like romance, poetry, and girls. Y’know, torture. But even now I’ll pick up the phone and brace for the voice on the other end: the younger me, desperate to know how a Totino’s pepperoni tastes in 2009.

Stick around, kids, and someday I’ll tell you about…the tapes.

“My F drive was just migrated to another system. Stay tuned for more important details.”

So read my very first Twitter tweet (though they weren’t called “tweets” then, just texts flung into the abyss), sent at 10:37 a.m., December 19, 2006. My friend Mary hipped me to it. When I say “friend,” I mean “friend” in the pre-Millennial sense: a carbon-based life form with whom I often traded zingers and beer. At that time my Twitterverse (that coinage didn’t exist, either) consisted of Mary and Heather, and we three made quite a quipster trio. It was beautiful; oh! we were young and wordy.

Being a visionary, Heather bailed early, bored off her nut. Mary continues to retreat and return, retreat and return. These days I use Twitter primarily to shill for my blog and drop barbs too racy for Facebook. Twitter just does that to me, y’know: it’s a dumping ground for my bluer updates. Facebook’s the upstanding supper club enveloped by valet parking; Twitter’s the backwater shanty with chicken wire for windows.

Isn’t it sad what Twitter’s slowly becoming, yet another social tool caroming down digital grease into the gas-station toilet of mass culture? Haven’t they learned anything from Myspace or Friendster, twin ghost towns of eerie emissions and phantom lamentations? Sometimes I get e-mails from both sites, each growing more increasingly desperate. “Come see what your friends are doing!” they trill in their shiver-y Karloff, oblivious to the truth that my friends split long ago.

Unfortunately, Twitter’s headed fast to the same nowhere, a repository of bimbo bots, bands, and businesses that all may as well be bimbo bots for the fat lot of good their presence does them. It’s hard to trudge through Twitter without kissing a cesspool. For example, a couple weeks ago I was watching afternoon television and clacked an offhand remark about Meredith Baxter repping Consumer Cellular. Within a day, Consumer Cellular was all up in my shit. It coyly batted its digital lashes at me, tracing circles on my biceps. “Isn’t Meredith grand?” it gushed. My natural response was “Who the fuck are you?”

Now, I understand companies use Twitter for customer service and to woo potential suckers with such unspoken assurances as “We might be monied-up fortresses guarded by phalanxes of secretaries and lackeys and helmed by misers who draw multimillion-dollar salaries as easily as you suck breath, but hey, we’re as meat-and-potatoes as Joe Blow you!” They present themselves as gregarious business-schooled pals always game for a heart-to-heart over a cyber-cold’un. But are we being engaged as people or algorithms? Are we involved in a conversation or simultaneous courtship/foreplay complete with spiked drinks?

The site’s search function has practically made eavesdropping a strategic business move. I mention Consumer Cellular, Consumer Cellular responds. Back in the (Biz) Stone Age o’ Tweet, my friend Mary mentioned she was toodling around the pool at a Radisson. Today she’d be besieged by 140-character missives from Radisson asking if the water was warm enough. Frankly, I find it all a little creepy. I don’t want to know that my comments about products and services are being monitored, and that those products and services might be moved to talk back. I don’t open my fridge and shoot the breeze with my yogurt; why would I want to do it online? I joined Twitter to hang with friends, not to be hijacked by intrusive jive artists glomming onto key words and racing toward opportunity, silver tongues a-waggin’.

Strip the false camaraderie and the momentary novelty of a “relationship” and at heart it remains a cynical marketing tactic. Businesses aren’t on Twitter to mingle with the masses; they’ve logged on to devour. Behind every seemingly innocuous tweet is an angle, a nefarious paw slipping under your nightdress. You can’t befriend them in any meaningful way; they don’t exist beyond their product. You’ll never argue with them over the Final Four. They won’t dish advice. They won’t jabber about an awesome show y’all caught at the Crystal Ballroom last Saturday (the Crystal Ballroom will, though). All you are is cattle, and they’ll do anything for your moo. When Consumer Cellular private-tweets “Isn’t Meredith grand?”, it’s not a rejoinder among compadres but an opening salvo using the human touch as bait.

And how many actual humans populate Twitter anymore? Most of the e-mail updates I receive keep me apprised of which charlatan is following me now, from the scumdiver who found me in a chum-troll to the nonexistent strumpet whose first and likely sole tweet reveals a propensity to engage in unspeakable acts at college parties, videos of which are available at this handy bit.ly link, wink-wink.

Then there are celebrities, all in Twitterverse abundance. Following them is amusing for about a day or so, until you realize that they’re like the rest of us. They don’t have much worthwhile to say, either, and, like us, they tend to acknowledge only those in their immediate orbit (in their case, other celebrities) while lobbing an occasional morsel to simpering twats begging for a howdy. It’s much like watching them on television or reading about them in magazines: a passive and vicarious thrill. As much as I enjoy Rainn Wilson’s entertaining blurts, I doubt he quietly watches the anonymous stream of no-names clinging to his every word and chortles at my latest ham-fisted nugget. And I have to wonder about Jeff Jarvis’ productivity. How does he get anything done when he’s thugging out on newspapermen all day?

Forget the Twitter revolution. Steel yourself for the noisy sputter and fade, with unlimited commercial interruptions, as a tidal wave of useless info sends it all asunder.

Poster for the 2007 Robert Pasternak exhibition, "Drawing Breath: Intuitive Figure Drawings"

Originally published October 31, 2007, on my since-abandoned Myspace blog.

Breathing has played an integral role in rock’s development since the very beginning. It’s safe to say that the form was, indeed, shaped by the constant, rhythmic intake of life-giving oxygen. One can’t imagine “Rocket 88,” widely acknowledged in melodic annals as the first true rock ‘n’ roll record, had neither Ike Turner nor his Kings of Rhythm (and, conversely, Sam Phillips — breathing is just as important for non-musicians as well) been inhaling and/or exhaling. In fact, Ike recalled to Mojo in 2000, “Only cat that wasn’t [breathing] was the motherfucker we sang about” — an automobile, the Olds 88, which lacks the necessary circulation and genetic architecture.

Unsurprisingly, this sparked a trend that continues to the modern day. Musicologists may challenge the legitimacy of genres and artists — often violently so — but most concur that the best music is recorded by breathers. Of course, many breathers eventually become non-breathers, the fate that befell one-half of the Fab Four, generally considered to have been the greatest and most revolutionary breathing band of all time. But months of careful research have concluded that both John Lennon and George Harrison were, in truth, oxygen-dependent during the sessions that yielded Double Fantasy and Brainwashed, respectively.

Breath, or the lack thereof, has been a perennial subject for songwriters. Jerry Lee Lewis recorded the hit “Breathless” in 1958, but, despite rumors to the contrary, was inhaling and exhaling freely in the studio (“Lotta thangs The Killah don’t do, killah,” he confessed in 1988 over a Coca-Cola. “One of ‘em is, I don’t not breathe.”), as were The Corrs in 2000. The only artist to have successfully acetated a song called “Breathless” while reportedly not breathing is Shankar Mahadevan, in 1998. However, since he’s still alive, we can assume this wasn’t a permanent condition.

One of the most famous (and staunch) advocates of breath were, of course, Pink Floyd, all of whom had been breathing since the 1940s. But it wasn’t until the mid-’60s, with the rise of Swinging London, that breathing became an important statement. “After marijuana and LSD, the natural high of breath seemed, well, natural, didn’t it?” Roger Waters explained to Rolling Stone in 1973, shortly after the release of his paean to breath, Dark Side of the Moon. “Besides, it was cheap to the point of free, although abundance and abuse could make you light-headed.”

“Most people think Dark Side is about insanity, the crisis of aging, the passage of time, things of that nature — critics especially,” he elaborated for Q in 1987. “But it’s not. It’s about what a powerful sensation breathing is. It’s got a fucking song called ‘Breathe,’ don’t it? ‘Breathe, breathe in the air/Don’t be afraid to care.’ That’s me saying, ‘Open your passages and let it all in. Air is wonderful.’ I tried a bit of the song earlier on a Ron Geesin album called The Body, but no one took it seriously, cos most of it was tape loops of yobbos farting and belching, and who wants to breathe that? Later we say, ‘Shorter of breath/and one day closer to death.’ I’m warning people, ‘This is what happens if you stop.’ As for ['The Great Gig in the Sky'], Rick [Wright] told Clare [Torry], ‘Explode with the joy of breath.’ “

David Gilmour agreed in a recent documentary for the BBC. “It was us who made breathing acceptable again, in the ’70s,” he said. “Look how many people were using their noses and mouths on a regular basis. They were breathing up a storm, among other things.”

Indeed, the ’70s proved to be boon years for breathers of all stripes. More people were breathing than ever before. But one artist in particular was about to turn the lessons of Floyd into an art form. In 1975, for the first time in rock ‘n’ roll history, someone audibly breathed on record: “Round and Round,” the penultimate track on Aerosmith’s Toys in the Attic. It’s a galloping electric assault whose only respite arrives when Steven Tyler invades a welcome hush with the harsh release of a whispered “chaaahhhh…” “The music was just so dense and heavy, I felt like people needed a breather, literally,” Tyler later explained. “I did it on ‘Uncle Salty’ too.” It became a Tyler trademark of sorts, thus inspiring what’s known as the hard-rock or metal “chaaaahhhh…,” evoking ominous images of screeching ravens, churning skies, and jagged vistas.

The “chaaaahhh…” school eventually split into innumerable camps, including the New Wave “CHA!” (see Big Country, et al), a curt call that mocked the bacchanalian excess of ’70s rock. “Elongating the word was unnecessary,” Mark Mothersbaugh said in 1981. “It represented the dinosaur that rock had become. We kept it short and simple, returning the music to its roots in short, ebullient bursts of breath. No one needs to breathe that much or that hard. That’s not where we were coming from. Treat it like a sneeze. Do it, finish it, then proceed to the next idea. It’s a motto Devo still observes to this day.” In fact, the brisk cracks and snaps featured in the band’s classic “Whip It” were a demonstration of this new ideal.

But, whatever its history, whatever its long-term effect, one thing is clear as mountain air: breathing and music are inseparable. One is impossible without the other. Much like rock itself, the act of breathing is here to stay. And as long as musicians continue to breathe, it will never die.

John Hughes died today. He was 59. He’ll be remembered for producing, writing, and/or directing a series of popular teen films in the 1980s, which are enjoyed even today, long after those teens (i.e., us) have softened into middle age with teens of our own, kids who can somehow look past the dated (what the squirts sardonically call “retro,” although in a tone of reverence and awe) attire to the eternal truths of the adolescent experience buried within. For those of us who were his target demographic back in the day — I was in middle school during his peak, a cauldron of confusion and desire — the movies were a fantasy-laden version of a hormonal modern drama too horrific to contemplate.

Although I loved his Oxy oeuvre, I did have a few issues with Hughes. For one, the families in his films always seemed impossibly upscale (did anyone in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off live in a one-story house?) — even the broken one belonging to thrift-shop poster-girl Andie Walsh in Pretty in Pink. Her squalor was well-scrubbed. If that was the wrong side of the tracks, I’ll bet you could eat the mess hall’s Charlevoix Veal right off the jailhouse floor. Also, while the girls at my school swooned over Anthony Michael Hall and Jon Cryer, they were strangely immune to the true geek’s obvious charms. Oh, how they wanted to pamper Ducky, coddle Ducky, take Ducky in their spray-tanned limbs and kiss his fashionably quirky lips. It was bad enough I’d never be a Jake Ryan or a Blane McDonnagh; I wasn’t the right kind of outcast, either.

On the other hand, I’m glad Hughes at least acknowledged the loser’s humanity. Most teen-centric flicks tended to pillory the spaz as a sexless dope flailing impotently around the genetically blessed. With his Messy Marvin countenance, Hughes seemed to identify with the social underdog. When he cast the geek in Sixteen Candles, his directorial debut, he eschewed the look usually adopted for such roles. “Every kid who came in to read for the part … did the whole stereotyped high sch0ol nerd thing,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 1984. “You know — thick glasses, ballpoint pen in pocket, white socks. But when [Anthony] Michael [Hall] came in he played it straight, like a human being. I knew right then that I’d found my geek.”

Although he may have understood the geek’s dilemma, as a successful man in his early 30s, perhaps he regarded his own adolescence with fondness and sympathy. Therefore, his films seem to simultaneously criticize and celebrate the artifice of high school, with the Beaver Cleaver happy-ending aesthetic of his youth transferred to Shermer, Illinois, with a more colorful palette and parlance. The girl scores the dreamboat (always a sensitive chap beneath the popular, chiseled sheen), the guy lands the babe. Or a babe: The Geek loses a redhead but gains a blonde in Candles, and poor-goob Ducky, politely declined by his own siren-locked pal, is awarded one helluva senior-prom consolation prize by the Hughes ex machina mere seconds before Pretty in Pink’s fade.

These are but slight alterations, however; the old pecking order remains firmly in place. Even after an educational Saturday detention in The Breakfast Club, when Anthony Michael Hall (garbed in geek again) asks, “What’s going to happen to us on Monday, when we’re all together again? I mean, I consider you guys my friends. I’m not wrong, am I?”, the only right answer, as voiced by school queen Claire Standish, is the one he doesn’t want to hear. It’s the most honest moment in any of Hughes’ films — and he’s responsible for more than you think — which makes it his best.

I knew him initially as a filmmaker/producer. Then about 15 years ago I read some of his pieces for the National Lampoon. Most were toothless in the irreverent Lampoon vein, but the best had a nostalgic patina. The ones that stand out in my memory are “Vacation ‘58″ and “Christmas ‘59,” from which he’d later draw the Griswold family (yep, Vacation was his brainchild). The latter story introduced one of his more alarming stereotypes, Long Duk Dong, whom he uprooted from the page and shoved into Sixteen Candles for comic relief. As much as I loved Gedde Watanabe’s performance — the character is memorable and lovable, even though you hate yourself for laughing — he seemed out of place in a whitebread fairy tale.

However, whatever need Hughes had to offend or subvert through deliberate provocation was usually complemented by a Capra-esque sentimentality. Crack him open, he was a sugarplum softy. Home Alone was Looney Tunes bathed in shmaltz. Despite its thorns, Planes, Trains and Automobiles walked a straight-and-narrow mawkish path. Uncle Buck teetered between sadism and morality but eventually fell on the right side. Curly Sue was paint-by-numbers sap. After that, Hughes just began cashing checks. I doubt many historians will defend the merits of Baby’s Day Out or Dennis the Menace.

Nonetheless, John Hughes was an important part of my life. I never got to live in Shermer, Illinois. My moxie and determination didn’t win the girl in the end. A detente was never reached through weekend summits between the brain, the athlete, the basket case, the princess, and the criminal. But Hughes succeeded where so many chroniclers of adolescent ennui have failed: by bringing comfort to all of us.