MOM N DAD FUEL UP TO GET FINGER(11)’D…

MOM N DAD FUEL UP TO GET FINGER(11)’D…

Ok, so I knew of a band called Fuel out of I wanna say York but could be from just about anytown, Central PA. Quite possibly Harrisburg, but in fact I forget exactly where. Either place or way, the band was one of us. I really didn’t know much of them, my cousins did, and their music grew on me. I’m more of a classic rock kinda guy, these guys were as much late 90s as they came. No, I didn’t see them come up, but they were in mid-fame, having a video on MTV and they were playing at a bar in a small town called Cross Keys, PA.

Cross Keys, PA…?

I have no idea where Cross Keys is in PA, so I had to consult with my, above all else, closest cousin and best friend jonny mac who accompanied me to the show. Or did I accompany him…? either way, we went. Jonny and I pretty much grew up together. Our family is huge, and he is the eldest son of the elder of the second set of twins in my father’s family. Oddly, yet truthfully, I am the only son of the eldest of the first set of twins in the family. Didja follow that? He is a year older than me, and we’ve been stuck at the hip since I can remember “coming online” as Louis CK put it.

(It’s the earliest of memories you can have, and the very first memory of Louis as he said on stage at the beacon theater, was taking a tremendous shit, and he coined the phrase for me at least, “That’s when I came online”, that time when everything from your eeaarrllyy childhood is forgotten and your first memory is that. Can you say run-on, with commas? Louis CK is the new Carlin of our time. Not in any way like George, other than in the amount of new material he is putting out there. Probably a close second to a comic named Doug Stanhope.  I wanna say Stanhope is up to 10 cds now, if not more. I saw a video of CK explaining his learned behavior from George, and he is becoming one of the most prolific and risen comics of our time. Can I over explain this any further? I tend to digress a lot but in this case I am respectful of stealing material from comics and do what I can to give them full credit for any words I use that was theirs… their material is like lyrics to a song for me… and I love what they do for me. Its hard to make me smile some days, and when I listen to comedy it makes it a little bit easier.… moving on… )

Jonny mac and I have been pretty close over the years. We’ve been through the spaghetti incident, the peeing over the car incident(s), the five minute fart incident (not knowing it but uncle mike was building ammo against us from an early age) all that was before we were, say, 8 years old. We’d call each other to find out what santa gave the other, whoever knew first about the man behind the suit (prolly him) never told… I think I was 12 when my Uncle Kevin the colostomy-bag-of-douche told me. I think I was taller than he was then… too. He’s got MS now though so forget the rhythm, Gloria… Karma is gonna get you…  To-night!

Jonny mac prepared me for the change of schools I was about to go through in the big tree behind gramma’s house. That was supposed to be 5^th grade, but hell waited till 6^th grade, and it was disastrous to me psychologically, simply because I am a socially awkward person. And my parents had just divorced, and I was introduced to anxiety attacks from grade 6 throughout high school.  Life was lookin up through a cloud of shit, but that cloud had an end, I just had to get through it! Hello? What’s your name? the dim dark hell of Depression? Well, it’s bittersweet to meet you.

But jmac was/is there for me. Crazy as I was/am. And I love him dearly.

So long story short… (of jmac at least… my fingers couldn’t write about ALL of our adventures, but this probably won’t be the only one told…) jonny mac in his youth and even today… if you take him somewhere, he becomes instantly accustomed to the area, as if he’d been there before. And in a lot of ways I believe with travels with my grandfather in his young young days, jonny mac became a human map. If he’s been there once, he’ll never forget how to get there the second time. I have trouble finding my car in the morning, but jonny mac literally is a genius of the road. {Infamously - to us - at the age of 4 or 5, my aunt cissy wanted to take us to the pool… all the cousins. Maybe 10 of us at the time. There were regular roads and highways, and she was from San Francisco. No one knew how to get there. But jonny mac got us there in the usual 10 minutes flat.}

So we were off to see fuel (remember them?) in Cross Keys, PA. Again, don’t ask me how he knew where it was, but we arrived at the bar called Woody’s.

It was a pretty rustic place from the outside. I parked on the side of the road due to the traffic coming to the place was pretty solid. Like I said, Fuel was starting to get a name for themselves, Finger Eleven was their opening act, and I wanna say it was the start of maybe Fuel’s first hit song from the new cd Sunburn. I am getting way too deep into the band BS and it really doesn’t matter… so back to the bar.

We walked in to this small on the outside but huge on the inside place of PACKED bar. You ever see the Japanese load their working class people onto trains? Or even the Pakistani workers’ trains? It was tight inside. Very little elbow room but the room was eclectic. There were those from the city, those from the country, and those from, well, Cross Keys, PA.

We found our way to the bar and jonny ordered a Hennessey n coke, and I ordered a lager. (an aside to this story… jmac was working overnight at the time so sleep deprivation had a lot to do with his condition…) we chatted and mingled and did what we could to look like we belonged there. and as the night wore on he ordered another henny n coke, and I ordered another lager. Out of the corner of our eyes there was an open table so we decided to sit down and take a load off. We shot the shit, were enjoying the opening to Finger Eleven (third band’s name escapes me) and we were tapped on the shoulder to see if anyone was sitting across from us.

“you are” we said. So they did.

Sitting across from us was an older couple. He seemed like a tradesman… one who worked HARD for his money using his hands and every wrinkle on his face showed every hour he toiled at his job. She seemed like a diner waitress type. And it seemed like these two saved up a bit just to come to the show. And we were proud to be sitting across from them, two snot faced 21-22 year olds.

At the time I smoked cigarettes and a little cheech n chong. Because of the latter I used to (still do) wrap my lighters with an immense amount of electrical tape in odd designs and colors so that when it was passed around with the chong, I knew where it was and not just did I like it, but everyone knew the wrapped lighter was mine. So I always got it back. You chong smokers know you pay a huge amount of your habit on lost and stolen lighters, which in the karma scheme of things you ended up getting them back over the years.

When this man of working class took out his Marlboro reds pack, I noticed he had a red lighter on his cigarette pack. It was a beautiful red bic, and it had red electrical tape on it.

“jon! Jon! Look!” I said… “his lighter…”

So I asked the guy… “why do you wrap your lighter with tape?” (holding mine in my hand in my pocket to blow his mind… but I wanted to hear it from him…)

he said “well, I like the way it looks, I always know where it is, and everybody knows its mine.”

I pulled my hand from my pocket and slowly turned it to unsheath a green Bic with black electrical tape wrapped around it. I asked “can I call you DAD N MOM??”

“I would be honored” he said. And we were friends for life, err, that night at least. It was a milestone I never thought I would have ever seen. I mean, I’m a kook, but how perfect was it that we were sitting across from these people we didn’t even know and I was equally as kooky as the guy sitting across from me.

Off to the bar and instead of a 5^th Hennessey and coke, jmac ordered a lager for himself and a lager for me as well. I don’t remember if jon had anything to eat that day, he was running on fumes from working the night before, and he introduced a new friend to his stomach full of liquor.

The adage… “Liquor before beer, have no fear…” is bullshit.

Jonny had come for Finger Eleven, and had seen some of their act. The stage seemed to be in the basement in another room, and we were positioned on what was now I guess the balcony, yet we never climbed stairs. Fuel was about to come on so I grabbed a high chair and knelt on it to see over the rail down into the abyss. Fuel was electrifying. The riffs and signature sound when you hear it was amazing, and loud as you wanted it. Forget “finger” eleven, we were at “volume” eleven.

Jonny came back and joined me for a minute, walking sort of sideways and looking a bit green.

“GIMME YOUR KEYS!” he shouted.

-WHAT?

“gimme your keys! NOW!”

-you’re not driving anywhere!

“TRE! I’m gonna be sick! Gimme your keys!”

So I did. I waited for the set to be over because I expected him to come back to the concert. Sometimes drunk or not a good puke will snap you out of it. but he never came back. So I went out to check on him… … …

I think he made it just past the handicapped ramp to get into the place when he lost his alcohol. But he kept walking. So as I went to my car, you could see a trail as if I was hunting a sick jonny mac… the telltale sign was there. the whole way to the car.

It seemed as if a puke arrow was pointing to my car and the passenger side door was open.

“you ok jon?”

-yeah immabefine… ijuss… i… it was hot and I had to… “ *hurl*

“hmm, you wanna go?”

-no, no, go watfuel I’ll bein…

“hmmmm ok, well, here’s the cd so you can think you are in the concert even though you’re stuck out here… see ya in a few”

-ohg – ok…

So there I left him, jamming to Fuel’s cd Sunburn, with his seat reclined a bit, to puke it out and I figured I’d see him later. But after Fuel’s next and final set, he was still out there, sound asleep.

I closed his car door and headed to Hershey where he lived. When he came to, we were at his home.  

“where… how the hell did you drive home?”

My sense of direction is zero, so I was thinking  the same thing. To me a 40 or so minute drive. To him, he time travelled. And travelled - travelled. I figure he expected to be good to go for the next set, but that was long over.

“tre,” he asked, “how are we back at my house???”

-well, you passed out and I watched the concert and closed your door and drove home. Let’s go to bed.

“good idea”… I think he said.  

III

I WANNA ROCK WITH GENE & EDDIE

When I was a late teenager, my uncle Eddie was in a band called “the treacherous four”, later known simply as T4. They were a rockabilly style band and played just about every kind of rockabilly there was. Well, in my late teens never really hearing of rockabilly there were few bands I knew of so I was introduced to the genre with open arms. And Eddie was a phenom on stage. If you closed your eyes you could hear Elvis. You could hear Gene Vincent. You could hear Eddie Von Bach. That last one not many have heard of but over the course of his T4 career Eddie played some of his own written songs. Some were about dancing, some were about love, and some were about choices. 1000s of them.

But I was a pretty down kid at the time. My girlfriend of 10 months and I had just broken up on I wanna say 11/15/95,   not that I really remember it or think about her on a daily basis or anything, but I was in a pretty foul mood. I celebrated a bad thanksgiving with my sister and mother in Boston, and later I was back home when Eddie took me under his wing and said “Ya wanna go to the midtown for my concert?” I knew he had to be out of his mind because I was just 19.

The midtown was a local watering hole for years and it still stands. Its on herr and second st in the middle of town in Harrisburg. They would sometimes check IDs so you had to outsmart the bouncers. It was quickly proven to be not that difficult. Eddie instructed me to “Walk in like you owned the joint. Be confident. Act like you’d been there, get a seat and a coke, and nobody will bother you.”

As you could probably guess from my other writings I am a bit of a pussy and still am at 35. But the more I thought about it I decided I couldn’t do it. So he said “HERE, hold my guitar, walk in there, put the guitar on the area where I’ll be singing, and sit. DO IT.”

So, tail between my legs, yet balls proudly throbbing with every heartbeat of adrenalin, I grab that guitar case and swallowed vomit as I nervously yet confidently walked right past the bouncer guy, set down his guitar case, and sat down.

It was my first roadie job of my career and payment was life experience and countless hours of music and people watching entertainment.

The smoke filled hole-in-the-wall was right up my alley. You could see there were lights on but they all looked like their own spotlights, enlightening the sorrow filled faces that are in just about any bar. The patrons were hunched over, sulking in their drink and asking the bartender for their therapeutic advise and of course, for more drink. This place would, eventually, be my place of worship to the alcohol gods myself, but this night I wasn’t in it for my future. It was just to make it through the night without being noticed and thrown out. I just wanted to hear music and observe, and I was in it to win it, but I was so nervous I guess I was more noticeable to those who had been used to the blue hue.

The bouncer noticed me sitting alone with nothing but nervous jitters. I quickly ordered a coke with ice and the bouncer stopped over to me.

“whatcha drinkin buddy?”

-oh a coke with ice. I’m the DD tonight so i’ll drink tomorrow night.

“sweet…” he said “enjoy the show…” and he walked away.

That was it. I was in and enjoy it I did. Phew! Can you spell relief? R-O-L-A-I-D-S… no, no… like non-anxietal relief. P-R-O-Z-A-C… yeah, that’s more like it.

Lotta family showed up and it was a regular hootenanny affair. Mac n mare showed up, rere, the locals, plus nancy and john were there. It was sweet. I can still to this day hear my uncle sing those tunes and I long for those days again. They were simpler times, although tumultuous. I really didn’t have much of a social life in school so this was an eye opener for me about how much fun the bar scene was.

Plus there was Nancy. Gorgeous woman with the deepest voice you’d ever hear on a lady. Raspy, smoked-all-her-life kinda voice and I am not sure she even smoked. Her husband is the coolest guy and was totally chill with everyone he seemed to meet. The direct opposite of me. But as I watched them dance I saw the greatest thing ever on a stunning woman.

I watched her zipper disappear. This was something you didn’t see much in 12 years of catholic school.

The jeans she had on were so tight that as she gyrated and danced with such fervor the undulations of the curtains eventually peristalsis’d their way into eating the jeans at the seam. At that point she may have been in her 30-40s, and all I could hear, beyond Eddie raspily singing into the microphone was Simon and Garfunkel… “coo-coo-cah-choo mrs robinson…” remember those old horns from the 1930’s cars? “Arooooooooooogah!” I was droolingly smitten…

And in a bar…

And 19…

I miss the good old days.

“C’mon little baby save the last dance for me…”

Nancy was a tough girl though. Many years later, I was in the car smoking with my then buddy Kevin and she asked to join us. I guess she wasn’t used to the horrible local sativa we were puffing on and she punched me…HARD…directly in my gut. She thought it was laced and for all I knew it may have been but not to my doing. It was the same old dirt we all were zoned on for the years we knew as our early 20s. as I held in vomit from the gut punches I couldn’t retaliate for 2 reasons. She was a chick, an elder one at that (cougar? Sure, yet married so off limits) and she could kick my ass. So I cried in the bathroom like a little girl to which my father found me in there saying that I had to get out of there because his constituents (he was a politician) had said I was in there and I was embarrassing him. Whatever, I left, and a few weeks later she looked me dead in the eye while she sang the old Eagles’ standard “get over it” at karaoke. I don’t care. I still loved her. She and John had I wanna say three kids together and the one ended up passing away a few years ago. But Nancy is doing as ok as she could be, even showing me a scantily placed tattoo her daughter inspired her to get… it said “heaven can wait” yet Nancy was an angel on earth to me. Last I saw her was I wanna say 2006 but don’t quote me on it. It was a hell of a love affair in my brain (notice I didn’t say in my head) and I spent many a night tossing and turning wondering what could have been if I was born a few decades earlier.

Nowadays I know what would have happened. I’d just be a few decades older still wondering what could have been…

Oh well…

DAMM THE TORPEDO!

Ok firsts of all I am sorry. I wanna apologize to my 3 readers that this is about to be published for you to see, but in fact it was hilarious… to me.

My life revolves around my cat. Unfortunately I wasn’t aware that you become your cat’s pet when you decide to get one. That wasn’t in the brochure. But as life goes on, your hierarchy within the home goes from you being the HNIC to you becoming the litter the cat rests his healthy dump on. It’s an exciting adjustment of power. First you show the cat around, like H-I (nicholas cage) in "Raising Arizona" ("THIS HERE'S THE TEEVEE!")...  let him soak in the litter box location and where the food and water is. After he is well adjusted, your crown becomes a little less comfortable. You become “Odie-like” in the life of Garfield, and therefore you become the village idiot-slave.

Once the cat is the new HNIC, white smoke appears to come from your nonexistent apartment chimney. The pope cheers in the new kitty, even younger priests are hopeful you are heterosexual so you produce more kids for them to molest, which makes ya wonder… is it chastity that makes the church hate gays, or just an intervention of the production of children being cattle-chuted into the churchs’ rectories that pisses them off…? I digress…

In general you don’t need an alarm anymore. The wake-up call is instinctively 3 minutes before your alarm would go off anyway. Cries of “get me food” “stroke my belly” “play with me” “clean my can” or “get me water” all sound like “meow” but they have their own inflections of “RIGHT MEOWING NOW!”

The morning slave pleases his master with a pat on the head, fresh bowl of water, clean litterbox, and a shake of the food tray to bring down more food (it’s an autofeeder). At THAT point its ok to then get your own day ready, as the loud warning MEOWs subside.

The routine doesn’t end there though.

You still must please every asset in the master’s life when you are around… the constant barrage of demands continue to rein down on you until whatever task it is is finally completed.

On the days that life is manageable, although few and far between, we race around like headless chickens in the apartment. I tripping him up, and he doing his best to foul my footwork. And those of you who know anything about my high sports achievements can attest, I have no footwork whatsoever.

Think bambi on ice. That’s me.

But yesterday something must have been stuck in the zipper lining of his fur coat, cause running away from him to confirm I shot a pill in half from 35 feet away with my pellet pistol, he decided to go pearl harbor on me and sock me with a head down, 4 paw torpedo to the shins.

I hoped he didn’t use his head, otherwise we’d have to redo the play but 15 yards back, and I am not that great of a shot, because he came at me helmet first… and as Al Michaels can tell you, that was no miracle, but a penalty...

My ass hit the ground with such force that the normal pain that shoots up your back wasn’t felt. It had been years that I have own—, err, that the cat has owned me, and this was the first time i got whacked. I just doubled over in painful laughter. He sauntered over to me making sure I wasn’t paralyzed to steal my socks (RIP Patrice O’Neal) with a “that’s right BITCH” look on his face.

He gave me a headbutt, then cried loudly “I want water…NOW!”