When I got there, the bench was literally full of homeless guys, but I overheard some talk of going to get something to eat, so I started to set up anyway. Turned out that the young guys left to eat, but three older, scruffier guys weren't part of the club and got left behind. I know a lost cause when I see it, and rolled across the street to the Fingerhut side.
Where it was completely dead. Hardly anyone even slowed down -- it was just me and the Cat in the Hat. But one girl took a look at the list and was completely thrilled to have me play "A Whole New World" from Aladdin. And two older ladies came by and one of them couldn't even wait until I was done singing "Catch the Wind" to tell me that I had "a *beautiful* voice". Flattering for sure, but she didn't have to act *so* surprised...
Anyway, when nobody is stopping, you have two choices. (A) Play all your best, most polished stuff, hoping to rope somebody in, or (B) Play for yourself: obscure stuff, and songs that need some more work to become A-List.
I did the latter: "Handyman", "Wonderful World", the Everly Brothers' "Dream", "Mexico", "Billy Jean". It was kinda fun. But when one of the homeless guys who can't even say nice things without cursing a blue streak came across the street aggressively demand that I *re*play "Mr. Bojangles" 'cuz it was his mom's favorite, I decided it was time to cut my losses.
But before I left, I went over to tell Shirtless Josh, who acts as a den mother to the rest of the homeless guys, that I had driven "Robo Mike" to his mom's house the night before, and not to worry about him -- his not being around on Sunday was probably a good sign.
Got there at about 7:30, and there was nobody else playing. The great part about starting later is that I have battery life to play later, and we did -- until a little after midnight.
Only one homeless kid, and also the large lady who mimes my songs. Fortunately, she wasn't as drunk as usual and was more restrained. Unfortunately, for some reason they had towels spread out on the bench, taking up even more room. I couldn't tell if they thought they were "saving seats" for their friends, or what. But at least they were at the far end, so the regular people had a place to sit.
It was a pretty great night. Lots of people came by and requested songs and hung around. At 8:30 or so, a pair of couples came by, obviously already pretty well lubricated. They arrived just as I was doing "Let It Be" for a nice proper Chinese lady, and they rudely stood right in front of her and sang along, loudly and badly. Nothing I could do about it, but it was a shame -- I preferred her company to theirs.
One of the guys asked me to play some Jethro Tull. I told him I didn't know any, but then thought better of it, since, come morning, I always regret not taking a risk the night before. So I fired up "Mother Goose", and luckily, they were drunk enough to not notice how badly it went. Later on, I also played "Father and Son" for a lady who requested it, even though it's in my "Still Learning This" section. Born to be wild...
Around 9:30, I was playing "You've Got a Friend" when a young couple came up. The guy spun around to face her, dropped to one knee, and proposed, right there in the middle of the song. I couldn't hear them, but apparently she said yes, 'cuz the cute friendly foreign people sitting next to them on the bench started applauding. After the song, the older couple standing on the other side asked, and were flabbergasted when they confirmed that, yes, he'd proposed, and she'd accepted.
The foreign people were obviously thrilled, too, and after a while the man came over and handed the groom-to-be a big wad of money as an engagement present. The girl was speechless with surprise and gratitude at these perfect strangers' generosity. I've been playing out for people for almost 13 years now, but this was my first live proposal. Flattering that the guy thought that underneath my song was his "perfect moment".
Oddly, the guy asked me to play "Fire and Rain" next, which I did, and refrained pointing out that the girl in the song had committed suicide...
I had equipment trouble all night. The guitar was getting quieter and more distorted all the time, and the distortion get terrible through "Sound of Silence", which was coincidentally a good choice, since the original recording famously features distorted guitar. I should recognize by now that the symptoms mean a dead battery in the "DI" preamp, but I didn't, and replaced the battery inside the guitar that powers its pickup. Twice.
It still didn't work, which finally made it dawn on me that it was the DI, but that one's hard to replace, jammed in the backpack, so I just wired up the guitar bypassing the DI. But pretty soon after I'd finally got the guitar sounding good, I broke the tuning peg button of my A string in half, trying to tune up. I had a nice lady waiting to hear "You'll Be In My Heart" from "Tarzan", so I tried to play it anyway, dodging that now-floppy string by playing alternate bar chord versions, but it was a mess, so that was the last song.
On the way home, at 1:30, I passed by "Robo Mike", one of the nice homeless kids. He was walking up El Toro road through the wilderness down there, so I went back and picked him up. He was pretty high (apparently his self-appointed nickname isn't a reference to "Robocop", but to "Robitussin"), but he had decided to see if his mom would let him come home.
Turns out she lives about a mile from my house, so I took him as far as the gate to the tract, but he couldn't remember the code, and she wouldn't answer the phone, so I had to just leave him there to see if he could figure out a way in. I felt bad about that, but figured, worst case, he'd have to sleep in the bushes there, so he was no worse off than sleeping in the bushes in Laguna. And at least I'd spared him the three-hour walk. On the other hand, he might have been able to make a better case to his mom a bit more sober at 4:30, than so high he couldn't put a sentence together at 1:30.
Clearly he's made some bad decisions, but he's really a pretty good kid, and I hope it works out for him and I never see him again down on The Corner.
Since Saturday was a bit of a disaster, I thought I'd go down about 7 on Sunday and see if I could salvage the weekend. But when I got there, the young homeless guys were camped out on the bench again, and by the time I got back from parking my car, the Two Guys with Guitars from the night before had appeared. But they had only played for a bit last time, so I sat down to wait them out.
Mikey the Greeter came by with his take-out dinner, and we had a nice talk, but the Guys just wouldn't quit. They're not bad, but it's a bit annoying because they're just acoustic and nobody can hear them, and even then, most of the time they're just practicing or jamming, and not really "entertaining" at all.
So I waited and waited, but they never left. Around 8:30, I finally decided that, since I'd drug all this stuff out there, I'd better go play on the Fingerhut side, just to have played at all.
I set up in my "minimum deployment" mode -- no CDs, songlists, or sign out, 'cuz I was hoping that the Guys would leave and I could roll back over. That never happened, and though I eventually got a songlist out to pass around, I didn't sell any CDs, 'cuz nobody knew I had any.
The good part was that although there wasn't a lot of foot traffic on that side, there was also not much auto traffic behind me, so it was nicely quiet to play in. And I actually got a lot of attention from the passersby. One couple stopped and asked for a couple of songs, and I guess those went well 'cuz they stayed and asked for some more, and some more, interleaved by occasional requests from other people coming up.
One guy asked for "anything by 'The Band'", so I did "The Weight", and he sang along with that one and a few more afterwards. The other couple finally decided that they needed to go home, but the wife suggested that I put an ad for playing parties on Craig's List, which I'd never thought of.
The husband thought I should go try to get in at The Cliff restaurant. I said that I thought they only hired bands that played original material, but he said that they go there all the time and there are lots of cover bands. He said that I needed to talk to "Andrew", and thought that maybe next Saturday he'd come down and somehow hook me up with him. Or maybe convince Andrew to come down and listen.
I just might be getting close to being desperate/brave enough to pursue such a thing.
Since summer is officially over, I decided to take a chance that nobody else would be there, so I wouldn't have to get there so early. So I had dinner at home (instead of in the car on the way down there) and got there at 6:30. Warren had something else going on but would come down as soon as he could.
As I was walking from my car down to the corner, a couple was walking the other way on the sidewalk, and the guy started clapping. I looked at him and he said, "We *love* your music! I have your CD, and I play it all the time!" Pretty cool, getting applause before I even set up...
When I got to the corner one of our homeless friends, who calls himself "Robo Mike" these days, was on the bench, just goofing around on his guitar. He's easy going, and had no problem letting me take over. Unfortunately, he was there with 3 or 4 of the other young homeless guys, who were occupying almost the entire bench.
And worse, they were making incredibly rude comments and offers to all the pretty girls who walked through. It was the kind of stuff you only expect to hear from cartoon construction workers on TV, not in real life. I figured the best I could do would be to start playing and hope to drive them away, or at least, drown them out. So I played all my most sappy songs, hoping they'd get bored and leave, but no luck. But at least the rude comments subsided somewhat.
I had some nice people come by and listen, but since they couldn't sit down, none of them lasted very long. Then at around 8:00, right in the middle of "Mrs. Robinson" (I had given up on boring the guys away by then), the amplification goes dead. There was no power getting to the wireless rigs and harmony box. I got out my pocket knife and rebuilt the connector at the battery, but after twenty minutes of messing with it, decided that it wasn't really the connector -- there just wasn't any charge in the battery.
So just as I was starting to pack up, and was going to text Warren to tell him not to bother, he rolled up. Oh, well. We did get a chance to have a nice long chat.
So I was thwarted by equipment failure just as it was starting to be "prime time". And while I was trying to fix the, the homeless guys had finally gotten bored enough to leave, making it even more frustrating to not be able to play. But maybe it was, at least, a lesson on how to get rid of them...
My 60th birthday is coming up in a few weeks so I thought I'd write up a few of my Stories, while I can still remember (or make up) a reasonable portion of them, complete with entirely bogus, Photoshopped, made up images. None of the following may be terribly true or accurate, but it's how I remember it.
In 1979, there was a total solar eclipse across the Pacific Northwest. When I was a kid, my answer to, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" was always, "Astronomer". Since this would be the last one on US soil for 38 years, I was determined to go. I was 24 years old, nominally going to Golden West College, and working part time at minimum wage in its library, which somehow paid for my half of an HB ghetto apartment, bad food, and 63 cents/gallon gasoline.
I asked my buddy John to come along. He foolishly agreed. We'd take my 1968 Ford longbed Econoline with "The Blatzmobile" emblazoned on the side, take turns driving, sleep in sleeping bags in the back, catch the eclipse, visit some friends in Seattle, and come on home -- what could go wrong?
I happened to be taking Astronomy 101 as a night class at Golden West at the time, and since I was the only student in the class that was taking it for the content, not the imprint on a transcript, I was the "teacher's pet". I told him about missing a class or two because of the eclipse trip, and he amazingly (and irresponsibly) let me borrow one of the school's eight-inch Celestron telescopes (Spock's favorite!), along with a sun filter. All packed in a strong "footlocker" style case, which turns out to be a good thing...
The eclipse was due to occur around 8 a.m. on February 26th. We stocked up on "Red PVC" (aka "Red Vines" (never "Twizzlers"!)), and left on the 24th.
We make good time that first day, with one exception. Johnny's driving and awkwardly trying to fiddle with the tape player that's on a shelf behind his head, and swerves a little in the process and gets pulled over. The cop ascertains that he's not drunk, just driving like it, and lets us go with a warning.
Later that evening, we're cruising through the forest and coming up on Bend, Oregon. Johnny is driving, and "Steeleye Span" is on the tape player. All is right with the world. The highway through the forest is one lane each way, and we're trapped behind a slow-moving camper truck. Johnny decides to pass him, and creeps out to the left to check on the oncoming traffic.
Background Info: In a normal car, the driver is sitting well behind the wheels that steer the car, and that's how we all learn to drive. In these old-school vans, the steerable wheels are directly underneath the front seats. This has the effect of causing people who aren't used to it to oversteer.
Johnny isn't used to it, so when he sees an oncoming car and turns to bring the van back into our lane, he oversteers. It's February in Oregon, and, unlike quicksand, "black ice" is a real thing, not a Hollywood invention. The back end of the van starts to slide.
Johnny does the exact right thing: steers into the skid, but, again, oversteers, and now we're skidding in the other direction. He (over) corrects that skid, and the next one, and now we're spun around almost 180 degrees and we slide off the road, down a 6 or 8 foot embankment, rolling over all four sides and back onto the wheels again, dead stop.
Side Story: Ever since I'd known him, any time anyone took a turn kinda fast, Johnny would yell out "We're gonna ROOOLLLL!" Here it was actually true for the first time, and he neglects to say it. What a blown opportunity...
The old van just has seat belts, not even shoulder straps, but we're both fine, although unconvinced that "Permanent Press" is the proper setting for a full-sized Econoline. The engine has died, but Maddy Prior is still singing away on the tape player in the otherwise spooky dead silence, which seems wildly inappropriate given the circumstances, so one of us slams the player off. The van's heater barely works, so we've got a lit propane-burning catalytic heater sitting between us, which it seems prudent to shut off, too.
Since we were going backwards when we left the road, the roll goes towards the driver's side first. The initial impact on that side takes the normally square cross section of the van and makes it a right-leaning parallelogram. The rectangular windshield no longer fits in its parallelogramed frame, and gets spit 30 feet away across the clearing, shattered. The passenger door flies open partway through the roll, and is sticking out like a flag in the wind when that side comes around to the dirt, shattering the window, folding the door in half, and breaking it off its hinges.
The stuff in the back of the van looks like it was once mounted on the wall, but the hooks all simultaneously broke and it's on the floor now. My metal toolbox has visited on all four surfaces during the roll, and left triangular holes punched in the cheap paneling on the walls and ceiling. The school's telescope is, luckily, completely unharmed in its well-made footlocker case. It's too bad I won't be sending in a testimonial letter to the manufacturer.
It's Oregon, and for miles in either direction, the highway is bordered by trees. Amazingly, exactly where we left the road there's a clearing for the entrance to a logging road. A hundred yards sooner or later, and we'd'a been smashed into a wall of trees instead of barrel-rolling in the soft thin snow. Nice aim, Johnny!
It's 1979 and even if there were cell phones, neither of us would'a been able to afford one. But the guy in the car behind us, who musta had a great view of the van wagging its fanny and then rolling down the ditch, stopped and said that he'd send a tow truck back once he got into Bend, just a ways up the road.
The tow truck shows up, winches the van back up the embankment (pulling a tire off its rim in the process), and drives us all back to town. We don't know what else to do, so we leave the van in the parking lot of the (now closed) Ford dealer, and, without a van to sleep in (well, without a van with *windows*), we walk across the street to a motel to get a room for the night.
In the morning, we go back to the Ford dealer to explain the busted heap of a van that had magically appeared in their parking lot during the night. At minimum, we'll need a windshield, the tire re-mounted, and to figure out why the engine won't start. They'll look at the latter two, but they don't have a windshield for an 11-year-old van.
But we had an eclipse to get to tomorrow morning anyway, so the plan became to rent a car -- which, small town, they handled -- and fetch a windshield from a junkyard in Portland on the way back.
Being a Ford dealer, the cheapest car they have for rent is a Fiesta. They run a blank tissue-and-carbon-paper form with Johnny's credit card (I didn't even have one at the time) for the rental. We throw the telescope and sleeping bags in the hatchback, and we're off again.
The path of the eclipse runs off the Pacific and through Washington and Idaho, west to east. We're looking to be anywhere along the path that has clear skies. The Cascades run north-south, cutting Washington in half. The radio tells us that the mountains will hold the clouds that form over the ocean on the left hand side, so we go up the right.
By that afternoon we're in central Washington, but the radio has changed its mind -- now the winds off the ocean will keep the western side clear. So we make a left turn toward the mountains.
But as we approach the pass through the Cascades, we hit a traffic jam, completely stopped. Turns out, being February, there's been an avalanche and the pass is closed. We sit there for a while, but finally make a U-turn out of the jam, and find a Washington Highway Patrol office right there at the foot of the mountain, and pull in. We go inside and tell the lady at the front desk that we'll be waiting in the parking lot, and maybe she could come out and let us know if/when they manage get the pass clear.
Which never happens. We spend the night trying to sleep, freezing to death in the parking lot in a Ford Fiesta. I don't recommend it.
In the morning, the pass is still closed, but it doesn't matter 'cuz the radio has changed its mind again -- we're back to the Cascades will block the clouds, and Central Washington is the place to be, the further east, the better. So we defrost the windshield and we're off again, as fast as we can go.
The eclipse is due about 8:15, and we're halfway to Idaho in the middle of nowhere when it comes around, so we just pull over in a likely spot at the side of the road, set up the telescope, and wait.
If there's even the tiniest bit of sun still showing from behind the moon, it's not "total", and you can't look at it. Except with the solar filter on the telescope. But that's boring -- just a shrinking sliver of sun, looking just like a crescent moon. So we just hang around, waiting the last few minutes.
But finally... Since we were in the middle of nowhere in the central plains, there was a small valley in front of us. I guess I should have realized it would happen (it being, like, the definition of an eclipse), but as we looked out across the valley, the Shadow Of The Moon raced across and over us. It Blew. My. Mind. The actual shadow. Of the moon. Cast by the sun. Came racing over our heads.
Suddenly the flat "bowl of the sky" was a 3D *apparatus*. Tangibly. The moon was *here*, and the sun was way out *there*, both zooming around, and we were underneath them. They weren't just glowing circles rolling across the sky every day, they were *things* up there, with relationships to each other in 3D space. You just don't/can't get it, feel it, own it, until you see it happen under an eclipse.
But of course the shadow passing over also meant: totality. I yanked the solar filter off of the telescope. It was amazing. Binoculars, too -- amazing. You can't decide whether to look at the sun, or marvel at the world under the eclipse. It's not exactly "dark", but it's gloomy. Stars are out. The light is weird, silvery, and the world has literally never looked like that before.
You spend two and a half minutes going back and forth between looking around, and up, looking through the binoculars -- which show the whole sun and the corona, and, frankly, looks like the pictures you see in books, but still, better, 'cuz it's *live* -- and looking through the telescope which magnifies the edge and you can see bright pink *prominences* jutting out into space. Completely amazing. Fact is, everything and everywhere you look is completely amazing. You really don't have the capacity to soak it all in.
But it's just two and a half minutes, and the sun peeks over the opposite edge that it disappeared behind, and it's over. You can't look at it anymore, the corona and stars are gone, and the view through the solar filter is just like the pre-show, but backwards, and even more boring than the first time.
So the telescope goes back into its box, and minds blown or not, it's a quick U-turn and off to Portland. I just doesn't seem right to have a Life Altering Cosmic Experience, and then immediately head out for the Junk Yard, but life likes to pull crap like that.
After an old-school session with Yellow Pages and paper maps, we find a junk yard in Portland and are the proud owners of a used, but unshattered, windshield. Getting it back to the van is another problem. It's too long to fit in the back of the tiny Fiesta, so we have to slide it in standing up between the seats, where it forms a "Cone of Silence" barrier between us. Conversation sounds like shouting down a well, all the way back to Bend.
When we get back to the Ford Dealer, they've fixed the tire and reconnected the coil ground wire that was preventing the engine from running. The new old windshield won't properly mount in the now-parallelogram windshield opening, so the guy sticks it to a fat bead of caulking, and covers the edge with duct tape. "You can take it to a real body shop and get it mounted better when you get home." (Which, of course, never happens.) All this goes on Johnny's credit card 'cuz he feels guilty and I'm broke.
When we go around the other side of the building to turn in the rental Fiesta, the lady hands Johnny his copy of the already-signed and now-filled-in form we'd left behind, and says, "You're lucky. There was something wrong with the odometer. It said a thousand and sixty-six miles, so we only charged you for sixty-six."
We're confused by this, but it slowly dawns on us as we walk away that we'd been gone for less than two days, and they couldn't believe that we'd driven over a thousand miles in that time, so they blamed the "mistake" on the odometer. Now, if they'd'a said something to us before writing the total we'd'a probably 'fessed up, but, since the credit card transaction was done already, and all the rest of this is costing (Johnny) a broke-college-kid's fortune, we just accept the gift and let it slide.
So the van runs and has four wheels and a windshield, but the passenger door is windowless and folded in half, and the driver's door is still straight but the van is leaning away from it by 4 or 5 inches.
We drive to a hardware store and buy a rubber mallet and a lot of duct tape. In the parking lot, we set the folded passenger door on a concrete parking berm and jump up and down on it until it's straight enough to duct tape back into its opening, and then fill the entire window cavity with more tape. The driver-side window is miraculously fine, but we have to tape up the 5-inch gap at the top to keep out the February-in-Oregon cold.
The back doors are jammed and unopenable in their parallelogramed frame, so with both front doors taped closed, the only way in or out of the van is through the side doors behind the passenger seat. And since the engine is in a big box between the front seats, that means climbing over it every time. But we're young and flexible, so no big deal.
We get back on track by driving up to Seattle to visit some friends that have moved there. Not much to tell, except the part where the clutch is dying, so we're on a vertically undulating country road on the way to another junk yard to get a clutch, and it gives up entirely and we end up powerless, rolling back and forth between two small hills like the shoop-shoop B-B's in a Hula Hoop.
I have no idea how we made it to the junk yard and got the new clutch, but somehow we were finally on our way home. But then, somewhere in the middle of the Central Valley, barrelling down I-5 just after dark, we get lit up by the CHP. Not *again*...
I'm in a sleeping bag in the back and Johnny's driving again, but not particularly speeding, so we're mystified. He pulls over, and I reluctantly climb out of the entangling sleeping bag and get my shoes on. Johnny has to wait for me to clear the area before climbing over the engine to follow me out the side door.
The sleeping bag and shoe delay, the rigmarole's silhouette on the backdoor window curtains, and the unexplained side door egress freaks the CHP guys out, so they pull their guns and put us "up against the wall" (van).
They run our licenses and all that, but we have nothing, and have done nothing. They only stopped us 'cuz my registration sticker is still sitting in an envelope on my kitchen table back home, and not on the license plate, but they radio in to see that I'm paid up, so they let us go. First and last time I've had a gun pointed at my head. Wasn't on my Bucket List to begin with...
Late that night, we finally make it home -- in one piece, broker, but also richer. Wondering when the next total eclipse is. Best, worst, road trip ever.
My 60th birthday is coming up in a few weeks so I thought I'd post a few of my Stories, while I can still remember (or make up) a reasonable portion of them. None of the following may be terribly true or accurate, but it's how I remember it. It's probably appropriate to start with my "Brush with Death".
Around Christmas 2002 I had a heart attack or two, or so they tell me. They weren't the "clutch your left arm, grit your teeth, and fall on the ground (and die, or not, depending on the needs of the script)" kind like you see in the movies, which is probably as fortunate as it is anticlimactic. But to start at the beginning...
For a couple of weeks before Christmas, whenever we'd walk the dogs, I'd get a dull ache in my left wrist. I'd be thinking, "Gee, I don't remember typing all that much today." In retrospect: duh!
Then when I went to bed on Christmas Eve, it felt like I'd wrenched my back. (Along with, you know, like, every other muscle I own. Despite having done nothing all day to wrench anything. *Willfully* stupid, or just *plain* stupid -- you decide.) I tossed and turned, vainly looking for a position that didn't hurt, and eventually managed to get to sleep.
Christmas Day at my mom's house in Downey. The presents are all opened, and most of the relatives have gone home. I mention to my mom that I've been having this pain in my left wrist, and she says "Go see a doctor". I'm like, "Oh, it's not that bad, and only once in a while", and she says, "Go see a doctor". My dad, whose family all dies from heart attacks, and himself a recent recipient of a quintuple bypass, wanders through, and my mom tells him that I'm having pain in my left wrist. He says, "Go see a doctor, it's your heart".
I say, "No, no, no -- it's just a little ache", leaving out the "that happens when I exercise, and creeps further up my arm the more I do, and goes away as I cool down" part, 'cuz I'm not exactly aware of that pattern yet.
My dad says, "I'll prove it to you", and goes and fetches one of his nitroglycerin pills. I put it under my tongue as instructed, in dissolves, and nothing happens, and I say so.
Side Note: Of *course* nothing happened -- there was nothing *to* happen. I realize now that my dad thought that I was having pain *at that moment*, and his "proof" was going to be that the pain went away when I took the nitro. He didn't know I wasn't having any pain to alleviate, and I didn't know what he meant by "proof". Communication Score: 0 out of 10.
So he says, "Oh, they lose potency when the bottle's open. I'll get you a new one". I take that one, and...
Science Note: Nitro stops heart attacks by somehow magically opening up the (clogged up) arteries around your heart, so all your blood can go there. Very clever -- unfortunately, there may not be enough blood left for your head.
... I immediately faint. I'm sitting on the couch, so I just keel over. I wake up moments later to see my dad hovering over me yelling my name, and my wife on the phone, lying to the paramedics about me having a heart attack. All I'm really having is a nitro-overdose-induced fainting spell, but potato, potahto.
Pretty quick the paramedics arrive and come tromping in in their big yellow pants. The guy asks me if I can sit up, and I'm feeling perfectly fine now that there's blood in my brain, so I say, "Sure!", and sit up and almost faint again, and lie back down, and revise my answer to, "No, I guess not". He says that if I can't get over to the stretcher, he has to take me in, and I figure it probably won't count if I crawl over there, so off we go. (By the way, I can definitively state that having a heart attack on Christmas is the *definition* of "Never live it down".)
On the way to the hospital, I imagine they installed the I.V.s with the blood thinners and beta blockers that I ended up with, but I don't like needles so whenever they bring any out I go to my Happy Place and refuse to notice. Is that a squirrel?
At the hospital, they apparently don't have any rooms for me, so I lie on a gurney in the hallway, and as the nitro wears off, I have another "wrenched back" episode. I tell each passing nurse, "Ouch" or words to that effect, and they each respond the way you do when a drunk junkie asks you for spare change from a dark alley -- pretend you didn't hear and walk faster.
They eventually get me into a room, and very eventually the cardiologist shows up (it is Christmas Day, after all), and suddenly it's old home week. The guy is my dad's actual cardiologist, and it's all "Hey, Don! How you doing? This your boy?" My dad sheepishly admits his felony distribution of prescription drugs, and the guy just slaps him on the back and says, "Hey, don't worry about it! I'd'a done the same thing!"
The rest of the hospital stay is a bit of a blur -- no doubt there were needles involved, and, like I say, once those come out, I'm decidedly Not There anymore. Apparently, they decided that they could run a camera up in me to take a look at the trouble, but couldn't be bothered to actually fix it while they were in there. Sure 'nuff, the pictures show that my hereditarily high cholesterol has caused my arteries to jam up like a grease-filled glass pipe in a Drano commercial.
But apparently they can't just throw some Drano into one of these fifty needles that are already installed in me -- they gotta do it old-school like Roto-Rooter and physically scrape the gunk away. And that takes, somehow, more people in the room than the camera work does, even though it's essentially the same procedure. And it's Christmas, so there aren't enough people around to do it. So they decide to (upside!) ambulance me down to my own hospital in Mission Viejo, where I can be closer to my people, and the equipment isn't left over from World War Two.
At Mission, they put me in a room in I.C.U., even though I was really just waiting around for some doctors to get home from their golfing trips in the Bahamas. Apparently they had rooms to spare, 'cuz, surprise!, most folks try to *avoid* the hospital at Christmas time.
I spent most of the time laying around, getting re-poked every half-hour or so (it seemed) by another nurse wanting more blood. I invariably told each of them that I don't like needles, but since needles are a Nurse's Best Friend, they just laughed it off, and didn't notice me not laughing along. Until one guy who said, "Oh, I'll use the tiny needle, then". What?!? There are "tiny needles"?!? And he went to work and I didn't feel a thing. Why is *this* a secret?!?
Apparently they can tell if you've had, and count, heart attacks by looking at your blood. There might be tea leaves, a carved bone rattle, and some possum teeth involved, too. They told me I had had two heart attacks. Really?!? When? I don't remember clutching my left arm, gritting my teeth, and falling down. But the possum teeth don't say "when", just if. I reckon they were that toss-and-turn night, and the late evening that I spent invisible on a gurney in the hallway.
I was visited in the hospital by a surprising number of friends and family, who apparently didn't expect me to leave there vertically, but who were civil enough not to mention any money I might owe them. And I spent a lot of time trying to sleep with a dozen stickers with wires attached glued to my chest. I finally decided to (Born to be Wild!) just lose the hospital gown that was making it even worse, having to thread the wires out the neck, and, as we all know, doesn't cover anything anyway.
At one point a pretty nurse came in and asked me if I wanted to, you know, freshen up a little. I thought, "Score! Sponge bath!", but she just tossed a packet of giant wet-naps on the bed and closed the curtains on her way out.
Finally, a cardiologist managed to trade in his golf gloves for some surgical ones and come by to see me. (He was Muslim, but who can blame him for taking advantage of someone else's holiday?) He walked in reading the chart, looked up, and halfway turned around to leave. Apparently, by the chart, he was expecting some 70-year-old fat guy, not a 48-year old skinny one.
He ended up doing the procedure, where they run a mini Doc Ock bendable robot arm up from a cut in the big artery under the fold where your tummy meets your leg, up to your heart, swab it out a little, and leave some expandable ballpoint pen springs in the tight parts to hold 'em open. I'd describe it more fully, but I'm getting woozy just thinking about it.
To make it just that much more fun, they can't put you to sleep for it so you don't have to watch, but they can give you a Valium so you get to watch but you don't care. And actually, given the Valium, it's kind of fun to watch the giant industrial robot arm with the X-ray cam at the end, wooshing around you every which way so the doc can tell what he's doing in there, and not, you know, tear a hole in an artery wall so they have to crack your chest open to fix it (which is, it turns out, why there are so many people around -- just in case).
Of course, you spend an hour or so waiting for everyone to show up and get their stuff, and, you know, the extra needles, ready. And you don't want to be thinking about what they're about to do to you, or all those needles. I spent that time running through the most complicated guitar song I know, "Scarborough Faire", in my head, envisioning the left and right hand patterns in 3D space like a guitar-centric version of the beginning of "Toccata and Fugue" in "Fantasia". The Valium may have helped with that...
Anyway, Spoiler Alert!, it all went fine and I survived to tell the tale. In Downey, they cut into my right leg to run the camera up to my heart. In Mission Viejo, they used the left leg. Afterwards, Mission Viejo put in a single dissolving stitch, and by the time I got home, you couldn't tell anything had happened there. On the other hand (or leg), Downey had put a big wad of gauze and, I'm not making this up, a giant plastic C-clamp around to my buns to hold it. Even six days later, it looked like I'd been hit by a truck. The blood thinners undoubtedly contributed to the bruising, but yeowch! (I have pictures, but you don't want to see them.)
Inexplicably, in the following few days while I was resting up from all the fun, I had an urge to document the experience in cartoon form, despite little or no previous experience (or skill) with drawing cartoons. I'll include those here.
It's been more than a decade since all of this, and I haven't had a twinge of trouble since, so, good job, Doc. And it's strangely comforting to know where your weakest link is. Whenever I do something stupid (like eat something that's fallen on the floor, or drink from a BPA-infested water bottle) and my wife says, "Don't do that", I say, "*This* ain't what's gonna kill me".
This was our first Saturday since the official end of summer, and the lack of traffic and ease of parking were omens of how few people would be out, at least for the first few hours.
But around 8:00 the after-dinner crowd started to arrive, and it turned into a terrific night. The palm frond flower guys are gone, and we had almost no distracting homeless people -- just that one large woman who doesn't so much *like* my songs as worship them, and insists on miming every bit of the lyrics, scaring tourists and small children in the process.
My voice was in inexplicably terrific shape, and I could hit the high notes with incredible ease. I think that the amp was up too loud as well, since there was nobody else out playing to be bothered, and I can sing so much better when the monitor is good and loud so I can hear myself.
My cop "buddy" Darren came by on a bicycle, and listened from across the street for a while (so I played "You've Got a Friend", *really* quietly), but I think he was mostly interrogating Crazy Josh over there. He eventually rolled right on through, and didn't say a word. Later on a different cop came by, but he didn't say anything either. Still, it's unsettling to have so much Law Enforcement attention. But probably "Chilling Effect" is what they're there for.
Still, overall a great night, especially after the discouraging nights we've been having lately. Plenty of nice people listening and putting in requests, and a few of them with foreign accents, so not all of the tourists have gone home yet. I sold 10 CDs and there was an unexpectedly lot of money in the jar.
Around 9:30, there was an empty space, so I tried out the new song I've been messing with, "Sultans of Swing". It sounds pretty cool at home, but totally lame out in real life. But two groups of people (embarrassingly) showed up while I was playing it, and sat down to listen, so maybe it wasn't that bad after all. I might give it one more try...
My brother got me a gig playing for his Lawyer Club party, so the pressure was on me not to make a fool out of him in front of his peer group. Not to mention that they weren't altogether sure about paying for a pig in a poke.
It was in the huge backyard of a judge, who introduced himself as "Charlie". HIs wife was the twin sister of the mom on "That 70's Show", and a real sweetie. The group turned out to be mostly people in the right age bracket to like my stuff, and it went quite well. Since it was basically a cocktail party, there was no applause, but fortunately, I'm not as sensitive to people not "actively listening" as I used to be. And people did give me a thumbs-up once in a while, and I take it as a compliment whenever someone comes up to request a song, though I suppose It could be them hoping to find something on the list that's better than the crap I've been playing so far...
After cocktails, there was dinner. I tried not to notice that all the tables filled up except the one closest to me. But after dinner, the spell broke somehow -- I guess they finally had nothing in their hands; drink nor fork -- and there started to be applause after the songs, starting, inexplicably, with the Everly Brothers song, "Dream". I guess it sounds pretty great with the harmony box singing the high part. I'll have to try to remember to bring that one out more often.
After everyone was gone and I was packing up, the judge and his wife came over to talk to me, and she must have used the word "perfect" a dozen times, about the songs, my singing and playing, the fit for the party, etc. She made me a grocery bag full of leftover food, tried to give me two bottles or wine, and slid me an additional $60 before I left. Sometimes it's a bit insulting for people to seem so surprised that I'm pretty good, but I'm sure they mean it as a compliment.
Several people came up to take business cards, including one guy who had hosted this apparently-annual party in years past, and presumed that he'd be doing so again. The judge's wife was sure that other people would be contacting me for future parties, so they must have been talking about me behind my back...
I’m just glad it worked out so well, or my brother'd never be able to live it down. And I imagine that whoever "fronted" the $200 won’t have any trouble getting reimbursed, now that everyone in the club has heard what they paid for.
