Attempting Normal (10 page)

We talked for a few minutes. She said she was a fan of my radio work and used to come see me with her boyfriend when we did live shows and they lived in Brooklyn. I kind of remembered her. She had that strange mutant beauty that models have. It’s the kind of beauty that no matter what they are wearing or how they try to hide themselves, a sharply defined, electric appeal comes through and zaps your desire.

She said she was still with her boyfriend but they lived out of state now. She was in town for a few days and wanted to hang out. I said, “Do you mean
hang out
hang out?” She said they had an open relationship and that as long as she was honest about what she was doing it was cool. I didn’t ask for too much explanation. It felt a little weird. I wondered if he was aware of the status of their relationship but I didn’t mention that. I was in.

I really couldn’t believe it was happening. I felt I had won some kind of prize. I had been so beaten down by myself since the split that I had no sense of self-esteem left, and I really hadn’t had much to begin with.

We left the coffee shop and went back to my apartment. We had insanely deep, amazing sex. We danced in my living room. I smoked a cigar naked in my kitchen and watched her do an improvised nude mambo to Tito Puente music coming out of the radio on top of the fridge. It was one of those moments I realized that I could be anywhere—a castle, a yacht, a private jet—but it wouldn’t get any better than that moment. It would not be any better than what was going on in my dirty beat-up Astoria kitchen. That is the power beautiful women have: They are portals into the timeless, into other worlds. And I had needed very badly to get out of this one.

We spent a couple of days together. I knew that was all I had. I
felt grateful and stupid. That is what beautiful women do to me even if I don’t know them. Does that make me shallow or just a man? I don’t know.

The last day she was in town she and I were walking arm in arm down Fourteenth Street. We were just talking and laughing, knowing this would be our last day together. About a half block ahead of us I sensed a familiar frequency moving toward us, a form, a person whom I had motion memory of. It was my ex. This was the moment. Could there have been a better one? No. I see her just as she sees me. The woman and I move past her. The woman does not know what is happening. I am watching my ex-wife as she watches me and we pass each other. Nothing is said. I look back and she gives me a “what the fuck” look. I turn away and start giggling. The woman I was with asks, “What are you laughing at?”

“An amazing thing just happened. That was my ex that just walked by. I haven’t seen her in over a year. The fear has been lifted! Thank you.”

She didn’t quite know what I was talking about but I felt my heart open in relief. At least I could save a little face. Not that it mattered, really. In retrospect her look could have been shock that I didn’t stop and introduce her and not what I assumed and wished she was thinking at that moment, which was:

“You have moved on and replaced me with someone just as beautiful.”

It was all so shallow, so relieving, so petty, so perfect.

  9  

I play guitar. I play a lot. I play when feelings build up in me and I need to put them out in the world in a safe way. Guitar is the only method of meditation that I have. I do it alone. I do it well enough for it to work. I wasn’t always like that.

I was forced to play guitar. When I was kid there was an old Harmony hollow-body guitar with f-holes lying around the house that belonged to my father, who, I assume, at some point got manic and obsessed over guitar, took some lessons, then abandoned it. Judging by the songbooks that were lying around my father wanted to be Pete Seeger. I guess he saw himself as an everyman lunatic bard, singing about the struggle of the self-obsessed.

I was about ten years old when my brother and I started taking lessons. Like any other activity my mother encouraged, I don’t think it was about anything other than it meant she didn’t have to deal with us. This was the same incentive for her to send us to
camps (two different ones in one summer), swim team, Hebrew school, and actual school.

I don’t know where my mom found our guitar instructor but he was a large, bearded, fat Christian hippie with horn-rimmed glasses named Brad and he had a tiny, portly wife named Claudia. Over the few years that he taught us guitar they became caretakers for us. My mother would build a day around keeping us out of the house. Brad and Claudia would pick us up from school or swim practice, take us out to dinner or prepare it for us, take us to their house for a lesson, and then take us home. It was odd.

Brad collected records and Claudia was an artist. There was a lot of sitting on cushions and eating vegetarian food. Brad was not a great player but he was a patient teacher and he liked to get us singing. I learned the basics from him. Chords and songs. He also introduced me to music I had never heard, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. Blues music struck something deep within me. I really don’t know why but I felt the rawness and mystery of it. Voices crying out of a place so far beyond my understanding, certainly as a ten-year-old, moved me. I innately understood the flow of the music. I have a blues-based brain and I have to thank Brad for turning that on. The depth of my appreciation continues to expand as I get older. I don’t listen to much new stuff, but the stuff I do listen to gets deeper every time I hear it, which I think is a testament to the genius of the form if you don’t trivialize it. Bad bar bands killed the blues for many people for many years, which is a shame.

Once we were back at home, my mother would force us to practice for fifteen minutes every night. My brother and I would sing together and fight over which songs to play. Eventually we figured out how many times we could play “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” “Rocky Raccoon” and “Johnny B. Goode” to eat the time.

In my freshman year of high school I auditioned for stage band
but couldn’t get in as a guitar player because all I knew how to play was chords, and not many of them. I told the conductor that I could play bass. He said if I promised to learn how to read music I could be in the band. I said sure. Needless to say I never learned how to read music, because getting high with friends and driving around doing nothing was more important. We got our licenses at fifteen in New Mexico. It was insane.

I became the bane of that conductor’s life. He hated me. I would stand in the back of the band with my Hohner copycat bass that I bought off Brad and try to improvise, having no idea how to play bass, not a clue as to how to read music, and certainly no ability to improvise. There was another bass player who would stand there with me. He had no idea what he was doing either, but we were both getting some kind of credit. We would take turns fucking up the rhythm section. It was embarrassing.

We did a lot of traveling as a family. We had a Caprice station wagon and my brother and I would lie in the very back listening to the eight-tracks that my father rotated through. The ones that had the most impact on me were the soundtrack to
American Graffiti, Abbey Road, The Buddy Holly Collection, Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits
, and “Hocus Pocus” by Focus. There were some duds, like
The Best of Bread
and Mac Davis’s
Greatest Hits
, but “Guitar Man” was kind of touching and “Baby, Don’t Get Hooked on Me” seemed curious and sordid to my ten-year-old mind and anything to accelerate puberty was welcomed at that time.
American Graffiti
was my dad’s music. He loved it. I still know every song on that soundtrack. There were two Chuck Berry tunes, “Johnny B. Goode” and “Almost Grown.” “The Stroll,” “Get a Job,” “Chantilly Lace,” “Surfin’ Safari,” “Party Doll,” “Peppermint Twist,” “Maybe Baby.” My dad would sing along with all of them. The songs meant something to him. I wanted
them to mean something to me so I could mean something to him. Now they do.

I became morbidly obsessed with the Big Bopper, Buddy Holly, and Ritchie Valens after my father told me they had been killed in a plane crash and how upsetting it had been to him. When I heard their songs, they were saturated with death. When I looked at the picture of Buddy Holly on the cover of the eight-track it filled me with dread and horror. Buddy Holly was the sound of the dead to me. All his songs were haunted. It was the same with Janis Joplin. My parents had the vinyl of
Pearl
, with the beautiful picture of Janis on the chaise longue on the cover. My mother told me that she died of a heroin overdose. In my mind Janis was heroin. That’s what it looked like. The Full Tilt Boogie Band were smack’s supporting players. I was fascinated with dirty hippies and drugs. They seemed to have figured it out.

The Chuck Berry songs also got under my skin. I was already stuck on that two-string opening to “Roll Over Beethoven”—one of the first records I owned for myself was
The Beatles’ Second Album
, and out of all the songs on that record their cover of “Roll Over Beethoven” just killed me. I sought other versions of it. I was nine and I had my grandmother buy me a Mountain album because they did a cover of it. I finally arrived at Chuck’s with his live
London Sessions
version, and then later in the car with my dad’s
American Graffitti
album, my fixation was set. To me that riff was the gateway to everything. I was obsessed with it. I had no idea how to play it. It seemed impossible. I couldn’t get beyond chords under Brad’s tutelage.

The guitar player in my high school stage band was a Latino kid named Adolfo. He had perfectly feathered hair that he was always combing with a large comb that stuck out of the back pocket of his bell bottoms. I stood behind him watching his hand move up and down the neck effortlessly. Once on a break I mustered up the courage to talk to him. It was hard, because the entire
band sort of hated me because I sucked and I was holding them back. I really just wanted to be kicked out. It was very stressful.

“Adolfo, do you like Chuck Berry?” I asked, shyly.

He clearly didn’t want to be seen talking to me, so he answered me but didn’t actually look at me. It was like I wasn’t there.

“My old man does.”

“So does mine! Do you know how to play ‘Roll Over Beethoven’?”

Then, like magic, without even thinking about it, he laid into that opening riff. I was stunned and awed. I asked him to show me how to do it. He did, but he still wouldn’t look at me or let me touch his guitar. I went home and tried it, it worked, and the entire world changed. I had it, the key to music. I was ecstatic. I was probably the only fifteen-year-old kid in the world in 1977 who was beside himself because he could play a Chuck Berry lick.

My first electric guitar was a Les Paul Deluxe copycat. Then I moved from Chuck to Keith Richards and I bought my first Telecaster when I was sixteen—just like Keith’s. My brother let the guitar go in favor of a tennis racket and I moved on to another teacher, Vaughn. I started going to this music store that was owned and run by an aggravated, bitter jazz drummer, a wiry little balding man with a large moustache who always seemed pissed off. He had studios in the back for teachers. Vaughn was a tall, lean dude with a frizzed and wavy bleached-blond perm. He had a moustache and glasses and smoked Marlboro Lights. He played in a band and he became my mentor.

Vaughn would let me smoke while he taught me how to play lead. The approach was, I would bring in a piece of music on tape, play it for Vaughn, and he would figure it out and try to teach me. What usually happened is I would watch Vaughn figure it out and
be amazed that he could. I would try to play it once, badly. He would be encouraging. Then we would smoke and he would listen to my teenage problems and talk me through them for the rest of the lesson, that is, most of the lesson. I learned my pentatonic blues and country scales and moved on. My guitar playing skills leveled off.

I had the basics and I had heart. I was never disciplined enough or enough of a nerd to master the guitar, or anything really. I just needed to know enough to express myself, to get me out there, out of myself, to be heard and to feel something. I could never focus on learning leads or playing songs correctly. I was always an interpretive player. I would find a song I loved and play a version that was good enough for me. I was only in a band once, in ninth grade, and we only knew four songs. We went through several band names but the song count stayed the same.