Zack Thompson knew what he was doing. He still does. He was probably would have been more comfortable a few decades earlier when instead of starting a band he would have been "breaking into show business".
Zack played guitar and piano and dabbled with a few other instruments. He was 'really good' maybe not a virtuoso type, he couldn't break out some solo he'd spent four and a half hours learning like Kevin could, but that was mainly because it wouldn't occur to him to do something like that. He rather spend the time writing new songs.
He also managed to get shows and have decent equipment, he was however one of us, so we'd never let him know any of this was impressive.
We'd rehearse in the music room after school since he was in the good graces with the music director, constantly offering up guitars, piano, or vocals for any school function.
Things were different in Zack's band, the Delinquents, if you didn't know what you were playing he'd tell you, and if you didn't know after that he'd let you know that not only were you playing it wrong but that you were also a fucking asshole.
But the songs were easy, catchy, hook-y, poppy even. They were pop songs drenched in distortion. So sooner or later everyone kind of got everything and it clicked.
Zack got us on a show in Ridgefield Park at the Elks Club.
Now, the Elks shows were a little bit of an institution, or least had the reputation as such probably due to the high volume of fliers that seemed to find their ways into school. There were always stacks of poorly photo-copied pictures on colorful paper going around in the hallways or lunchroom, so this particular show seemed to have some extra prestige attached to it.
Zack told us we had 40 minutes and wanted to throw a few in a cover amongst the originals, but it had to be the perfect cover song. Not something that would be on the radio after you packed up and left the place. No, this had to be something rare, something that the regular bands at this show would hear and go "whoa, who are these guys, how do they know this song?" Or maybe it was to have a song that no one was quite sure was ours or not. Hard to say.
The song we wound up settling on was Spank Thru by Nirvana, which was hardly an unknown song in our little group of friends since it was on an import compilation that Zack started taking orders for every time he went to the Red, White, and Blue in Paterson.
But that was the song. And we were all into it and thought it would probably go over well if these shows were anything like we heard they were.
We pulled into the lot at dusk. Steven,the drummer, convinced his father to let us load everything into his van. His father was an electrician or something of the like and was what can only be described as "super-encouraging".
"Alright right guys, you guys are going to rock tonight right?" he'd say in his smooth jazz radio voice.
"Yes sir, we plan to rock," I didn't know him well so I just kind of mumbled whatever I could get out.
Zack on the other hand had been around the Grace household for a long time had no such hang ups: "That's right Mr. Grace, you bet."
We hopped out and quickly noticed the familiar sight of the pack of smokers, dressed mostly in black, most of them with their heads slung to the ground, and of course some of them, not really smoking at all, just puffing.
It was comforting to know that at least there were some people there already, it was early. Zack's girlfriend Jess (not her actual name yet again, I did know several Jess' in this era, but she wasn't one of them) decked out in her ripped jeans and Doc Marten's was a weird image to adjust to after getting used to seeing her in the standard Catholic school uniform.
We hung out in the front of the place for a few minutes, smoking, I bummed one off of Jess who, unfortunately, only smoked Newports. I could swear I felt the menthol tearing out sections of my throat on the way to my lungs. I figured I had an hour or so before I started coughing up blood.
An hour later there was no blood, and perhaps of more concern, there weren't very many people either. We were ready to go on, second behind some other band we felt very confident we were much better than.
We set our gear up and were pretty much ready to go. The hall was dark, and there were a few regulars of the Club, old grizzled men smoking cigarettes and pipes, looking at the television aggravated they couldn't hear what was going on.
The stage was an empty section of the bar with the dull bluish neon the only thing lighting us besides the TV and whatever glow was coming in through the windows from the flood lights outside.
I was set up right against the deep brown panelling and just below the plaque with gold plastic elk antlers sticking, out for Joe Trulugio, the Elks President from 1973-1975. Old Joe looked uncomfortable in his picture; stuffed into a tuxedo with tinted glasses and oily black hair that was starting to gray a little in the front. He a thick black moustache, and his smile showed off his impressive set of choppers. I wondered if maybe Joe was sitting at the bar smoking a pipe, I played a little scene out in my mind where somehow I wound up knocking off the plaque somehow, violating an ancient Elk law and was beaten unmercifully by a bored group of drunk war vetrans who were pissed off they couldn't listen to the World Series because a bunch of high school brats were giving them a few hundred dollars to rent out the hall on a Saturday Night.
I should also probably mention that we did have a tendency to dabble with some make-up. Nothing serious, I mean we weren't fucking Kiss or anything like that, but it wouldn't be uncommon for some, or all of us, to throw on some eye-liner, or maybe even some nail polish every once in a while. In fact, somewhere in the universe there is a video tape, probably buried in a box in someones garage, or hopefully disintegrating at the bottom of some Bergen dump, that contains footage of Zack, Elliot and I performing for probably close to an hour in dollar store house dresses Zack picked up for us at his beloved Red, White and Blue. If memory serves there was also an impromptu wrestling match that took place afterwards, as well as some bonus footage of Elliot and Zack getting tossed from the Bergen Mall. That will all be on the Special Features section once the tape is recovered and converted for a Fall 2011 DVD release.
Anyway, yeah, so I had some eye liner on. Not much, just enough to look kind of silly. Well, I say silly, I think the guys sitting at the bar had some other words for it, but they, for the most part kept it to themselves.
We started the set, some of the kids from outside started to filter in. Now you had about 25 or 30 kids crowding around us. They started bumping into each other a little, just kind of swaying, and then slowly it started to build until a few kids in the middle were throwing hockey checks. Well that was it for the bartender.
"HEY! YOU TELL THOSE GUYS TO KNOCK THAT SHIT OFF OR YOU'RE ALL OUTTA HERE!" he yelled in our general direction.
We kind of looked up for a minute.
Zack, always the professional took charge; "Hey guys, just be cool, no need to knock each other over or anything let's just have a good time."
Well, the guy freaking out might have startled a few of them and they headed out for another cigarette, since of course they weren't allowed near the bar to smoke, and after that probably wouldn't be interested in going anywhere near it even if they were. So the audience had thinned out a little when we broke into what was supposed to be our show stopper. Zack started the first few chords to Spank Thru, which, is a cute little song about the end of a relationship and the act that the American Heritage Dictionary (Third Edition) describes as "exciting oneself or another's genitals by means other than intercourse".
Needless to say the folks at the bar didn't really take kindly to the song even with Zack warbling up some of the lyrics.
So this on top of the makeup and the junior grade mosh pit did not put us in the best of regards with the proprietors.
We ended the show early, after the Nirvana song, and quickly tore down our gear and stacked it outside. Most of the kids were still there, in fact it looked like more had shown up for the next band. We talked a little while and most of them knew that the guys inside were miserable old codgers, but for some reason they kept agreeing to let them rent the hall out each month. I asked one of them for a cigarette. Another menthol. It was that kind of show.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Monday, July 13, 2009
i CAN'T REMEBER IF IT WAS aWESOME (fRIDAY)
I have fond memories of a weekend in 1996, though I kind of prefer to think of it as 1995 so that I'm a little younger when it happened, and to be honest it probably wasn't a weekend, it was probably a few random weekends over the span of a year and half or maybe even more, but for the sake of this nonsense, let's just say it was a weekend in 1995 and let's agree that it happened in a cool autumn setting of early October.
There were shows back then, I mean there are shows now and there have been the whole time, but nobody really gives a fuck anymore. Occasionally you run into a good, or dare I say great one, but for the most part you know what you're going to get, and it's really more about having a night out with some friends as opposed to congregating with a similarly fashioned pack of brats clustering themselves together and seeing no reason why the rest of their lives won't be spent like this.
But to be honest we always hated those people anyway. Anyone who was too up on the idea of a scene, impressed with the numbers of leather jackets and lit Marlboro's dangling out of pierced lips in front of Paramus Park was probably a social class elitist and likely just wasn't any good at sports or else they would have been flipping over cafeteria trays and demanding lunch money. The more people hanging around the more likely little sub-groups of a certain snobbery will pop up dictating who gets to sit at the cool kids table.
Of course I may just be looking back with bitter eyes because no one ever bothered to ask me to sit at said table and thus splintered off into a group of hateful little bastards.
But enough on the evolutionary theory of social groups eating their own, we're back in 1995 and there were shows and they used to feel like a big deal. Even if there was one every week or three crammed into a weekend, they all felt like a big deal and occasionally they were.
Now, to protect the identity of anyone who may not want to associate themselves with my spouting off at the mouth on a late night caffeine fixed tirade I'll take some precautions with bending people's names since I've already decided to cram a few events that I feel very certain did happen, into one little weekend during October 1995 even though I know that's not when they happened. If they even happened, which you know, I'm pretty sure that they did.
So Simon had a car. He was older than us but he was dating a girl we all knew from school, Kelly Foster. (Again not her real name cause God knows what she would think if she was bored at work one day and Googled herself only to find her name tangled up in this mess.) Kelly was the prototypical cool girl, she was so cool in fact that you kind of didn't even realize how pretty she was. She was kind of tomboyish and she hung around all the timeand she was dating Simon for as long as we knew her so maybe that's why it was easy not pay attention to her, because we were all impressed with her boyfriend who was both driving and in a band that actually got shows and had pretty decent equipment. So to a select few of us he might as well have been a rock star.
Simon told us we could open up for him at a showcase his band was having at Backstage Studios.
I should also probably mention since I'm having a little fun with the timeline here that I was in two bands at the time. Sometimes I wasn't but there was definitely a period of overlap. That was the curse of playing the bass. Everyone played guitar, and there were certainly a few drummers out there, but the only bass player I knew when I got to high school kept getting sent to Bergen Pines and eventually got tossed out of school. So there was a void, a vacuum if you will, and I figured that it would be better to suck at something almost nobody else did then suck at something every schmuck was doing.
So there was the metal band and the punk band or at least that's how I categorized it in my early-mid teen ignorance. The metal band included Kevin Riley on guitar and vocals and the great Eliot Krause on drums. Elliot actually was the utility drummer for a while and he and I were the rhythm section for both bands for a few weeks. We played covers; mostly Metallica and Pantera with some Alice in Chains and Nirvana sprinkled in probably to keep me happy. Kevin wrote songs but they were epics and he only brought one song to practice which was about 10 minutes long, so with that pace we stuck mostly to the covers.
And to be honest I didn't know what the fuck I was playing half the time. He had books and magazines with guitar tabs and would lend me them but most of the time I would just try to play what he was playing. I was probably a mile away from the drums and who knows if the notes were right but I thought I knew what I was doing so it all seemed to make sense. I mean we weren't' playing funk, the whole thing probably sounded like a loud glob of unmixed noise but most of your friends at that age don't really have a rigid grading scale. They're just impressed hearing something that sounds like a song they might know coming out something you're doing.
So anyway, Simon got us a show opening for his band in West Paterson at a rehearsal studio in West Paterson.
Elliot's mother drove us to the show because her car was big enough to fit all our stuff. When we got there the usual platoon of smokers were camped outside. We didn't know any of them and immediately nerves crept up our teen aged spines. "What if we really suck? Are these guys going to beat us up?" Kevin was already there with Simon and he was on the stage tuning his guitar.
"You guys are late"
We weren't but we played along.
"Oh sorry". We set up quickly. Simon's bass player was hanging around onstage convinced that there must be an automatic camaraderie between us he asked me a technical question.
"What kind of rig you got man?"
I know nothing about gear, at all. To this day I still know very little. This particular amp I got because it was big and loud and affordable for someone who might just be dabbling in music on his way to a long career in the US Congress.
"Um, a Peavy" I answered somewhat dim-wittedly. He looked at me and immediately sized up that this would not be the tech savvy sparring session he had craved so he just nodded and started scanning the rest of the stage.
"Hey man, you want your amps miked up? Guys? We miking the drums and the amps tonight?" this slick sounding son of a bitch in casual goth regalia jumped up onto the stage with a bunch of laminates dangling from around his neck (just in case anyone doubted his access to all areas) and a white knuckle grip on some cables he was just dying to run into or out of something.
"Sure," I answered but I immediately wasn't so sure "We're miking the drums right?"
Yeah. Sure. We're miking the drums right? Because I've done this a thousand times.
"Yeah," Elliot answered as if he actually had done this a thousand times.
"Cool you got it," he disappeared like a gnome doing invisible silent work.
I plugged in my $10 tuner that very clearly had BASS written on it lest I become confused, and fiddled with my rusting strings until the needle lined up on all them.
Then the most important piece of equipment was the last to add: The Setlist.
We all knew what we were playing, we only had five songs we could do because three of them were 7 minutes but every band has set lists taped down amongst a nest of wires and speakers and why should we be any different, this was after all a professional rehearsal studio.
I carefully wrote out all the songs with a big black marker and handed them out to the other two. While that was going on the room, which if I was any good I would have already described as long and narrow, started filling up. There were couches and a few old upholstered chairs randomly scattered and the lights were down except for a bright red glow that came off a few of the gel lights from the stage.
I felt like an asshole. We were standing there and we could hear everyone talking but could only see a few people and we had no idea if we should just start. We stared at each other for a moment waiting for someone to maybe introduce us, and then decided to just let Elliot count us off. Which he eventually did and BAM the drums were fucking miked. And wow. Miked drums were incredible. Loud. Loud. Loud.
Every hit sounded crisp and perfect. Elliot could have been playing a different song than us but it wouldn't have mattered because the drums sounded so cool to us that we would have taken the blame for not following him.
About half way through the first song the effect kind of wore off on me though and I started getting flushed with nerves. First I thought maybe I was too loud. I couldn't hear Kevin's guitar at all, and what if I was drowning him out, so I turned down a little. But who the hell could hear anything over the drums? Then I started thinking "fuck that I practiced these fucking songs I want to be heard even if I am fucking them up". So I turned up the volume on the bass. Once we got to the Nirvana song, which I think was Drain You, I felt pretty confident and even went over to the amp and turned up, when I swung around with a smirk I caught the face of Simon's bass player huddled in the corner making a face like he just noticed he had shit in his mouth and he made the universal sign for "turn down" while shaking his head "no". But it didn't look he was only saying "no" it looked like he was saying "Oh Lord please destroy whatever that horrible inhuman frequency is at the source".
There is nothing like a disgusted look telling you you're doing something wrong that you thought was right to instantly deflate a freshly ballooned ego. I turned way down and played the rest of the show in full shoe-gazer mode letting my self go deaf at Elliot cracking his China Boy cymbal a dozen or so times.
After we finished the last song a stereo kicked in and Simon's band seemed to jump onstage in unison to get their gear set up. We quickly unplugged and dragged our amps and drums off to the side, occasionally stopping for the ol': "hey you guys were good" slap on the back. At that point I knew it was probably bullshit but at that point in my life self delusion wasn't a problem I realized I had, so I kind of figured these were good honest folk and that we had in fact just rocked.
There were shows back then, I mean there are shows now and there have been the whole time, but nobody really gives a fuck anymore. Occasionally you run into a good, or dare I say great one, but for the most part you know what you're going to get, and it's really more about having a night out with some friends as opposed to congregating with a similarly fashioned pack of brats clustering themselves together and seeing no reason why the rest of their lives won't be spent like this.
But to be honest we always hated those people anyway. Anyone who was too up on the idea of a scene, impressed with the numbers of leather jackets and lit Marlboro's dangling out of pierced lips in front of Paramus Park was probably a social class elitist and likely just wasn't any good at sports or else they would have been flipping over cafeteria trays and demanding lunch money. The more people hanging around the more likely little sub-groups of a certain snobbery will pop up dictating who gets to sit at the cool kids table.
Of course I may just be looking back with bitter eyes because no one ever bothered to ask me to sit at said table and thus splintered off into a group of hateful little bastards.
But enough on the evolutionary theory of social groups eating their own, we're back in 1995 and there were shows and they used to feel like a big deal. Even if there was one every week or three crammed into a weekend, they all felt like a big deal and occasionally they were.
Now, to protect the identity of anyone who may not want to associate themselves with my spouting off at the mouth on a late night caffeine fixed tirade I'll take some precautions with bending people's names since I've already decided to cram a few events that I feel very certain did happen, into one little weekend during October 1995 even though I know that's not when they happened. If they even happened, which you know, I'm pretty sure that they did.
So Simon had a car. He was older than us but he was dating a girl we all knew from school, Kelly Foster. (Again not her real name cause God knows what she would think if she was bored at work one day and Googled herself only to find her name tangled up in this mess.) Kelly was the prototypical cool girl, she was so cool in fact that you kind of didn't even realize how pretty she was. She was kind of tomboyish and she hung around all the timeand she was dating Simon for as long as we knew her so maybe that's why it was easy not pay attention to her, because we were all impressed with her boyfriend who was both driving and in a band that actually got shows and had pretty decent equipment. So to a select few of us he might as well have been a rock star.
Simon told us we could open up for him at a showcase his band was having at Backstage Studios.
I should also probably mention since I'm having a little fun with the timeline here that I was in two bands at the time. Sometimes I wasn't but there was definitely a period of overlap. That was the curse of playing the bass. Everyone played guitar, and there were certainly a few drummers out there, but the only bass player I knew when I got to high school kept getting sent to Bergen Pines and eventually got tossed out of school. So there was a void, a vacuum if you will, and I figured that it would be better to suck at something almost nobody else did then suck at something every schmuck was doing.
So there was the metal band and the punk band or at least that's how I categorized it in my early-mid teen ignorance. The metal band included Kevin Riley on guitar and vocals and the great Eliot Krause on drums. Elliot actually was the utility drummer for a while and he and I were the rhythm section for both bands for a few weeks. We played covers; mostly Metallica and Pantera with some Alice in Chains and Nirvana sprinkled in probably to keep me happy. Kevin wrote songs but they were epics and he only brought one song to practice which was about 10 minutes long, so with that pace we stuck mostly to the covers.
And to be honest I didn't know what the fuck I was playing half the time. He had books and magazines with guitar tabs and would lend me them but most of the time I would just try to play what he was playing. I was probably a mile away from the drums and who knows if the notes were right but I thought I knew what I was doing so it all seemed to make sense. I mean we weren't' playing funk, the whole thing probably sounded like a loud glob of unmixed noise but most of your friends at that age don't really have a rigid grading scale. They're just impressed hearing something that sounds like a song they might know coming out something you're doing.
So anyway, Simon got us a show opening for his band in West Paterson at a rehearsal studio in West Paterson.
Elliot's mother drove us to the show because her car was big enough to fit all our stuff. When we got there the usual platoon of smokers were camped outside. We didn't know any of them and immediately nerves crept up our teen aged spines. "What if we really suck? Are these guys going to beat us up?" Kevin was already there with Simon and he was on the stage tuning his guitar.
"You guys are late"
We weren't but we played along.
"Oh sorry". We set up quickly. Simon's bass player was hanging around onstage convinced that there must be an automatic camaraderie between us he asked me a technical question.
"What kind of rig you got man?"
I know nothing about gear, at all. To this day I still know very little. This particular amp I got because it was big and loud and affordable for someone who might just be dabbling in music on his way to a long career in the US Congress.
"Um, a Peavy" I answered somewhat dim-wittedly. He looked at me and immediately sized up that this would not be the tech savvy sparring session he had craved so he just nodded and started scanning the rest of the stage.
"Hey man, you want your amps miked up? Guys? We miking the drums and the amps tonight?" this slick sounding son of a bitch in casual goth regalia jumped up onto the stage with a bunch of laminates dangling from around his neck (just in case anyone doubted his access to all areas) and a white knuckle grip on some cables he was just dying to run into or out of something.
"Sure," I answered but I immediately wasn't so sure "We're miking the drums right?"
Yeah. Sure. We're miking the drums right? Because I've done this a thousand times.
"Yeah," Elliot answered as if he actually had done this a thousand times.
"Cool you got it," he disappeared like a gnome doing invisible silent work.
I plugged in my $10 tuner that very clearly had BASS written on it lest I become confused, and fiddled with my rusting strings until the needle lined up on all them.
Then the most important piece of equipment was the last to add: The Setlist.
We all knew what we were playing, we only had five songs we could do because three of them were 7 minutes but every band has set lists taped down amongst a nest of wires and speakers and why should we be any different, this was after all a professional rehearsal studio.
I carefully wrote out all the songs with a big black marker and handed them out to the other two. While that was going on the room, which if I was any good I would have already described as long and narrow, started filling up. There were couches and a few old upholstered chairs randomly scattered and the lights were down except for a bright red glow that came off a few of the gel lights from the stage.
I felt like an asshole. We were standing there and we could hear everyone talking but could only see a few people and we had no idea if we should just start. We stared at each other for a moment waiting for someone to maybe introduce us, and then decided to just let Elliot count us off. Which he eventually did and BAM the drums were fucking miked. And wow. Miked drums were incredible. Loud. Loud. Loud.
Every hit sounded crisp and perfect. Elliot could have been playing a different song than us but it wouldn't have mattered because the drums sounded so cool to us that we would have taken the blame for not following him.
About half way through the first song the effect kind of wore off on me though and I started getting flushed with nerves. First I thought maybe I was too loud. I couldn't hear Kevin's guitar at all, and what if I was drowning him out, so I turned down a little. But who the hell could hear anything over the drums? Then I started thinking "fuck that I practiced these fucking songs I want to be heard even if I am fucking them up". So I turned up the volume on the bass. Once we got to the Nirvana song, which I think was Drain You, I felt pretty confident and even went over to the amp and turned up, when I swung around with a smirk I caught the face of Simon's bass player huddled in the corner making a face like he just noticed he had shit in his mouth and he made the universal sign for "turn down" while shaking his head "no". But it didn't look he was only saying "no" it looked like he was saying "Oh Lord please destroy whatever that horrible inhuman frequency is at the source".
There is nothing like a disgusted look telling you you're doing something wrong that you thought was right to instantly deflate a freshly ballooned ego. I turned way down and played the rest of the show in full shoe-gazer mode letting my self go deaf at Elliot cracking his China Boy cymbal a dozen or so times.
After we finished the last song a stereo kicked in and Simon's band seemed to jump onstage in unison to get their gear set up. We quickly unplugged and dragged our amps and drums off to the side, occasionally stopping for the ol': "hey you guys were good" slap on the back. At that point I knew it was probably bullshit but at that point in my life self delusion wasn't a problem I realized I had, so I kind of figured these were good honest folk and that we had in fact just rocked.
my eyes are turning to glass and other lines from old Irish ballads
It's kind of quiet outside for all demonic shadows crawling all over the ground.
Oh how I wish it was a decade ago so I could light a cigarette and enjoy this little moment.
But it's not and now I only inhale the warm moisture drenched breeze and listen to some sad Irish bastard sing some ballad about a faraway girl.
And what the hell does he know?
They're all faraway.
Oh how I wish it was a decade ago so I could light a cigarette and enjoy this little moment.
But it's not and now I only inhale the warm moisture drenched breeze and listen to some sad Irish bastard sing some ballad about a faraway girl.
And what the hell does he know?
They're all faraway.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
I Should Have Met You in Virginia
Yeah it's too bad you're gone now, but I guess it's better than wondering if there'll be any more purple drenched nights waiting to see what you're in the mood to do. Playing around in some speed-driven game of head chess that I'm no good at.
I'm out of motives and other things like sincerity.
But I guess most of all interest.
I'm out of motives and other things like sincerity.
But I guess most of all interest.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
to watch what the hell I was doing from a different set of eyes
I couldn't think of anything else to do.
There was no sleep on the horizon, but it wasnt' late anyway.
Who really wants to go to bed?
There's a pool hall down the street, I haven't been in a pool hall in six years.
I used to go with my girlfriend once or twice a week. We'd enter hands clapsed, and warm eyed at each other, and somehow we'd be in some kind of competitive hellfire by the end of the night.
I have to stop to think for a minute or two if we broke up over a pool game.
I don't think so.
It was probably something else, but she's gone now. Off into some other movie just a foggy memory in things I'm not even sure really happened.
But here's this pool hall, and it sounds great. a low hum of chatter and a juke box creeking out some loud saxaphone.
I wish I knew more jazz off the top of my head. I used to get haunted by old, grainy footage of black and white jazz artists, but I've since moved on to other highly irrational fears.
And that's part of the reason why I'm at this pool hall shooting a game by myself finding out how bad I really am at this game.
I can't hang around waiting for every magnificent blend of neurosis to creep into my head, waiting to be acknowledged for ten minutes so that I can form some kind of super cock tail of crazy.
No thanks. I'd rather scratch on an 8 ball in public for a few hours until I can't see straight.
The jazz is over and someone put on Public Enemy.
That's cool with me.
I like to fancy myself a bit of a late 80's early 90's hip hop afficianado.
Even though I'm probably not.
I wish I knew how to play pool well.
I can play a little.
Occasionally I'll hit a shot, very loud, very convincingly, and glide across the table to the next one that I'll pretend I have some natural ability to see before the other player does. But in the end I'm not very good, and that's too bad because the life of a pool hall hustler, or at least a pool hall hustler in the movies, appeals to me.
If I won at this point, I probably wouldn't be able to supress a grin, and the next thing I'd know is I was getting my head cracked open with a stick or a cue-loaded fist.
And before I can sink my last ball the lights come up and to let us know that the night is over.
At least for billiards.
There was no sleep on the horizon, but it wasnt' late anyway.
Who really wants to go to bed?
There's a pool hall down the street, I haven't been in a pool hall in six years.
I used to go with my girlfriend once or twice a week. We'd enter hands clapsed, and warm eyed at each other, and somehow we'd be in some kind of competitive hellfire by the end of the night.
I have to stop to think for a minute or two if we broke up over a pool game.
I don't think so.
It was probably something else, but she's gone now. Off into some other movie just a foggy memory in things I'm not even sure really happened.
But here's this pool hall, and it sounds great. a low hum of chatter and a juke box creeking out some loud saxaphone.
I wish I knew more jazz off the top of my head. I used to get haunted by old, grainy footage of black and white jazz artists, but I've since moved on to other highly irrational fears.
And that's part of the reason why I'm at this pool hall shooting a game by myself finding out how bad I really am at this game.
I can't hang around waiting for every magnificent blend of neurosis to creep into my head, waiting to be acknowledged for ten minutes so that I can form some kind of super cock tail of crazy.
No thanks. I'd rather scratch on an 8 ball in public for a few hours until I can't see straight.
The jazz is over and someone put on Public Enemy.
That's cool with me.
I like to fancy myself a bit of a late 80's early 90's hip hop afficianado.
Even though I'm probably not.
I wish I knew how to play pool well.
I can play a little.
Occasionally I'll hit a shot, very loud, very convincingly, and glide across the table to the next one that I'll pretend I have some natural ability to see before the other player does. But in the end I'm not very good, and that's too bad because the life of a pool hall hustler, or at least a pool hall hustler in the movies, appeals to me.
If I won at this point, I probably wouldn't be able to supress a grin, and the next thing I'd know is I was getting my head cracked open with a stick or a cue-loaded fist.
And before I can sink my last ball the lights come up and to let us know that the night is over.
At least for billiards.
Monday, June 15, 2009
and you get so worked up you can hardly see straight.
Motion detector lights are what finally snapped me in the end. The sting of failures in life and love and goals and horrible memories amplified and magnified through various vices, that all was manageable. But a few motion detector lights burning bright shadows across my back yard are what finally sent me spinning into a nervous frenzy hoping that the loony bin wasn't booked up for the summer.
Initially a few lights getting set off in dark isn't a big deal. No, there are stray cats and various woodland creatures scurrying around, not to mention the water a few yards down the road. Maybe some missing-link-type-mutant pulled itself out of the water and crawled its way into my back yard looking for the nearest WaWa so it could pull the classified section and look for employment or reasonable rents.
Most of this is my own fault; I was reading a string of "real crime" books, that delved into the horrible, gruesome murders by serial killers and mobsters. Ritualistic and random, all the kind of details that get your mind gears spinning in the middle of the night and wonder what kind of weapons you could stave off an attack by some 9ft hooded phantom.
This was all elevated by the dreaded "Horn Incident" of early 2009. To explain this properly would require a knowledge of automobiles that I just don't possess but suffice to say, through various incidents of road rage that resulted in my fist being pounded into the steering wheel apparently damaged the interior circuitry of the horn, the full extent of which revealed itself just after midnight on a cold February night while I was engaged in one of my eerie murder books. The unrelenting, constant whale of a car horn is unsettling enough, but when you don't realize why it's happening your brain gets flooded with panic.
My first thought was that it was a neighbors car, then I realized the sound was too loud to be far away, my next thought was the maniac who'd been stalking the back yard was revealing himself; ready for a showdown, holding the horn down until I came out, startled and unready to meet this demon head on.
Well I wasn't ready. And there was no demon. Just a broken car horn which required a flash light, and the frantic yanking of fuses, while the deafening siren began to erode my hearing. Finally, the right fuse was pulled and the horn was gone, but the ringing was still there, it felt like every nerve was vibrating, and I couldn't quite shake the feeling that somebody was snickering out there in the dark watching me turn into a nervous, trembling pile of jelly.
A few months passed by and the lights stayed off, and my paranoia levelled off. Must have been a stray cat or some rabid possum. Then the warmer weather came and the light started going back on. I played this off, it's spring and things are popping up and exploring. Then a week straight of lights going off. Just once a night. But at the same time every night. Those old creaky paranoid gears started turning again. It was time for some serious action.
I decided a stake out was in order. I'd sit outside in the daylight, and then go prone after the sun had gone down. I had on all black, even the ski mask I pulled over my face once I got into my "combat ready" position. I was armed with a roll of quarters I'd forgotten to take to the bank and a slightly dull knife that I'd found in an old tackle box. I took my position with the vigilance that a man protecting his home must have. I was determined to find out the cause of the disturbance even if it was something as silly as a cat, or a squirrel, or even the wind.
Unfortunately I underestimated the amount of patience one must possess in order to be successful in such an operation. Self doubt began to creep in. "This is awfully silly" I thought to myself.
I headed back inside and threw the ski mask to the ground, I turned around and out of my peripheral I caught the image of the light stabbing my eyes with its shine. That was it. Now I was just being mocked, I flew out the door, towards the light, and started covering every possible route someone could have taken, but there was nothing. No answers. No small animal scurrying away, no missing link mutant, no long gusts of wind, no weapon wielding maniac. But it didn't matter anymore. I'd had enough. All I would be thinking about now is whether or not that fucking light would go off again.
I packed my bags and headed to the Ocean County Medical Center. In Bergen County they used to have a place like this called Bergen Pines. I don't live in Bergen County anymore but when I did I didn't worry about random maniacs kicking open my door. Or maybe I did and I've just blocked it out since. I asked before admitting myself for "chronic fatigue": "You guys have a security system right? Like in case anyone tries to break in?" The nurse looked at me somewhat puzzled,"uh, yeah we've got that".
"Good," I thought, "now it's their problem."
Initially a few lights getting set off in dark isn't a big deal. No, there are stray cats and various woodland creatures scurrying around, not to mention the water a few yards down the road. Maybe some missing-link-type-mutant pulled itself out of the water and crawled its way into my back yard looking for the nearest WaWa so it could pull the classified section and look for employment or reasonable rents.
Most of this is my own fault; I was reading a string of "real crime" books, that delved into the horrible, gruesome murders by serial killers and mobsters. Ritualistic and random, all the kind of details that get your mind gears spinning in the middle of the night and wonder what kind of weapons you could stave off an attack by some 9ft hooded phantom.
This was all elevated by the dreaded "Horn Incident" of early 2009. To explain this properly would require a knowledge of automobiles that I just don't possess but suffice to say, through various incidents of road rage that resulted in my fist being pounded into the steering wheel apparently damaged the interior circuitry of the horn, the full extent of which revealed itself just after midnight on a cold February night while I was engaged in one of my eerie murder books. The unrelenting, constant whale of a car horn is unsettling enough, but when you don't realize why it's happening your brain gets flooded with panic.
My first thought was that it was a neighbors car, then I realized the sound was too loud to be far away, my next thought was the maniac who'd been stalking the back yard was revealing himself; ready for a showdown, holding the horn down until I came out, startled and unready to meet this demon head on.
Well I wasn't ready. And there was no demon. Just a broken car horn which required a flash light, and the frantic yanking of fuses, while the deafening siren began to erode my hearing. Finally, the right fuse was pulled and the horn was gone, but the ringing was still there, it felt like every nerve was vibrating, and I couldn't quite shake the feeling that somebody was snickering out there in the dark watching me turn into a nervous, trembling pile of jelly.
A few months passed by and the lights stayed off, and my paranoia levelled off. Must have been a stray cat or some rabid possum. Then the warmer weather came and the light started going back on. I played this off, it's spring and things are popping up and exploring. Then a week straight of lights going off. Just once a night. But at the same time every night. Those old creaky paranoid gears started turning again. It was time for some serious action.
I decided a stake out was in order. I'd sit outside in the daylight, and then go prone after the sun had gone down. I had on all black, even the ski mask I pulled over my face once I got into my "combat ready" position. I was armed with a roll of quarters I'd forgotten to take to the bank and a slightly dull knife that I'd found in an old tackle box. I took my position with the vigilance that a man protecting his home must have. I was determined to find out the cause of the disturbance even if it was something as silly as a cat, or a squirrel, or even the wind.
Unfortunately I underestimated the amount of patience one must possess in order to be successful in such an operation. Self doubt began to creep in. "This is awfully silly" I thought to myself.
I headed back inside and threw the ski mask to the ground, I turned around and out of my peripheral I caught the image of the light stabbing my eyes with its shine. That was it. Now I was just being mocked, I flew out the door, towards the light, and started covering every possible route someone could have taken, but there was nothing. No answers. No small animal scurrying away, no missing link mutant, no long gusts of wind, no weapon wielding maniac. But it didn't matter anymore. I'd had enough. All I would be thinking about now is whether or not that fucking light would go off again.
I packed my bags and headed to the Ocean County Medical Center. In Bergen County they used to have a place like this called Bergen Pines. I don't live in Bergen County anymore but when I did I didn't worry about random maniacs kicking open my door. Or maybe I did and I've just blocked it out since. I asked before admitting myself for "chronic fatigue": "You guys have a security system right? Like in case anyone tries to break in?" The nurse looked at me somewhat puzzled,"uh, yeah we've got that".
"Good," I thought, "now it's their problem."
Sunday, May 17, 2009
A Painfully Long Rant to Rid Myself of whatever
Well, a nice little rush of nerves, or blood pressure has seemed to putter out already and I feel like I have nothing left to say. WHich may be true, and lucky you if it is, because all I really feel like doing is pissing all over this lovely October weather we're having in middle of May. And I mean that. I'll take whatever cold gusts of wind I can get before the air gets thick with mosquitoes and the smell of sweat from every vacationing ninny in the tri-state area.
Oh the boardwalk just ain't what it used to be, I used to like the warning signs of summer but now kicking around the seaside just seems like some sad old re-run, the soundtrack to a nightmare I keep thinking I'm going to have where I run into my seven year old self and have to force a smile through some "don't worry everything will be fine" kind of speech.
And fuck him for asking.
But no, summer doesn't hold any kind of mystery anymore, it just means it's going to get hot and the girls will be drunker and the police will be cracking down on any reports of fun breaking out. A good time to stay indoors and crank the air conditioning until the power goes out and catch up on some kind of self improving endeavor. See you in the fall.
But of course it never works out like that aye? No no no, there's always one last shot up north or trip to some club where they eye you up a little more each time: "You sure you want to come in here?"
"Well, no friend I'm not, but this is where the few people who still go out on school nights seem to be so I may as well wander through it so I can get drunk and aggravated and bitch about how much I hate places like this. Here's my $10."
Long gone are the days of Craig Porr busting my door down with bootlegged movies, pizzas, and fresh supplies of cheap beer and probably for the best, I'd probably call the police on the poor bastard if he tried that shit today.
And then there is that old California Dreamin that gets in my spine every once in a while. Those commericals where Arnold beckons you to come out and party with the movie stars. And that all sounds great, and really Arnold I do want to stop by out there but I just don't think, financially we'd be running in the same circles. No I'd probably be in the roach infested two-room that smelled like stale, leaking water, while I hid under thin sheets at night praying not be home-invaded.
We're only a few weeks away from stories of crime being on the rise, since the economy is shit. That tends to go hand in hand and I can't imagine it not becoming a story sooner or later. I'll have to start arming the house from predators, these motion detector lights won't scare them off for long. No. We're going to need some serious security measures, even here in safe old Brick Township. Don't let the coast line fool you folks, five miles inland Central Jersey might as well be North Virginia. Shooting ranges are everywhere, Gun clubs, and the recent alarming trend of bumper stickers that say "Bricktucky" I've been spotting on pick ups. Whatever the fuck that means. That's not even clever.
The box is closing in. It might be time to set the Pontiac on fire and drive west with Benny and Jets crackling through the stereo on a loop and see how far I can get before the whole thing shoots into a fireball. Pretty soon I'll be surrounded by gun nuts, home invaders and vacationing yuppies sucking up the thick summer air and taking all the parking spots while they blast their dumb sub-woofers, and I sink further into the fist-shaking, get-off-my-lawn curmudgeon I knew I'd always be.
Oh the boardwalk just ain't what it used to be, I used to like the warning signs of summer but now kicking around the seaside just seems like some sad old re-run, the soundtrack to a nightmare I keep thinking I'm going to have where I run into my seven year old self and have to force a smile through some "don't worry everything will be fine" kind of speech.
And fuck him for asking.
But no, summer doesn't hold any kind of mystery anymore, it just means it's going to get hot and the girls will be drunker and the police will be cracking down on any reports of fun breaking out. A good time to stay indoors and crank the air conditioning until the power goes out and catch up on some kind of self improving endeavor. See you in the fall.
But of course it never works out like that aye? No no no, there's always one last shot up north or trip to some club where they eye you up a little more each time: "You sure you want to come in here?"
"Well, no friend I'm not, but this is where the few people who still go out on school nights seem to be so I may as well wander through it so I can get drunk and aggravated and bitch about how much I hate places like this. Here's my $10."
Long gone are the days of Craig Porr busting my door down with bootlegged movies, pizzas, and fresh supplies of cheap beer and probably for the best, I'd probably call the police on the poor bastard if he tried that shit today.
And then there is that old California Dreamin that gets in my spine every once in a while. Those commericals where Arnold beckons you to come out and party with the movie stars. And that all sounds great, and really Arnold I do want to stop by out there but I just don't think, financially we'd be running in the same circles. No I'd probably be in the roach infested two-room that smelled like stale, leaking water, while I hid under thin sheets at night praying not be home-invaded.
We're only a few weeks away from stories of crime being on the rise, since the economy is shit. That tends to go hand in hand and I can't imagine it not becoming a story sooner or later. I'll have to start arming the house from predators, these motion detector lights won't scare them off for long. No. We're going to need some serious security measures, even here in safe old Brick Township. Don't let the coast line fool you folks, five miles inland Central Jersey might as well be North Virginia. Shooting ranges are everywhere, Gun clubs, and the recent alarming trend of bumper stickers that say "Bricktucky" I've been spotting on pick ups. Whatever the fuck that means. That's not even clever.
The box is closing in. It might be time to set the Pontiac on fire and drive west with Benny and Jets crackling through the stereo on a loop and see how far I can get before the whole thing shoots into a fireball. Pretty soon I'll be surrounded by gun nuts, home invaders and vacationing yuppies sucking up the thick summer air and taking all the parking spots while they blast their dumb sub-woofers, and I sink further into the fist-shaking, get-off-my-lawn curmudgeon I knew I'd always be.
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