Went to pick up my guitar today. When I was almost there, navigating the vast and bewildering crosswalks of the Atlantic Center, it occurred to me I didn’t have the little ticket Igor gave me when I dropped it off. Insurance, he called it. They couldn’t keep my guitar without giving me a ticket. “What’s the value?” he asked. I said five grand, what the hell. Coulda said one, coulda said ten. He handed me a receipt that said work order and had the estimate total, seven hundred something. At home I put it on my desk and forgot about it.

What if they demand it? What if they won’t give me back my guitar if I don’t produce it? I saw myself protesting furiously. That’s my guitar. Appealing to Igor. You know that’s my guitar. But it’s Guitar Center. All corporate and shit. Owned by God knows who. They do things by the book. No ticky, no guitar. I envisioned the altercation becoming savage, physical. I’m not leaving without my guitar! The security guards upstairs would be summoned down. What seems to be the problem? Sir? Sir? Motherfuckers calling me sir. I’d get my phone out, tremblingly call 911. No, not 911. That’s ridiculous. Clownish. I’m not making a fool of myself. No, I’d call the police. Explain in a measured voice that this place of business had stolen my guitar. 

When I went in Igor didn’t seem to recognize me. But he did. Then he gave me my guitar. I played it a little. Paid him and left.

I discovered an email I’d received seventeen years ago, from a CD buyer, with a tally of what it was paying me for my entire collection—a dollar here, two there, sometimes $8.50 for some obscure reason. As I scrolled down the list there were titles I recognized, some I’d completely forgotten. The artists, even. But I realized this was music I loved, that I listened to again and again—physical objects in my possession, occupying space in my home. Necessarily I played them. Necessarily I loved them. But since I’d sold them—impulsively, heedlessly, but not unwisely after all—they were out of my life.

So much has been lost. And maybe, realizing this, something might be regained.

The Enterprise - 61

Brett and Tom and I had been playing tunes, Brett on drums even though he’s not a drummer, Tom on bass even though he doesn’t play bass. I felt guilty playing guitar. Brett had a room in a storage facility in Chelsea where he rehearsed with his band. Climate controlled and powered. I didn’t know such a thing existed. I thought storage rooms were dark, dusty and cramped, a place for things not people. In this building the hallways were bright and clean and the spaces big enough to live in.

Brett had made a carpeted space for a set of drums, two amps, and a mic stand, ringed by miscellaneous belongings, furniture maybe, some clothes, appliances. Maybe they were his. Maybe not. Maybe this was all his bandmate’s shit, his bandmate’s space. I took advantage unthinkingly, ungratefully. Here we were. We could plug right in and play.

We played weirdo covers, a hard rock version of “Chim Chim Cher-ee.” We played one or two of my tunes and Tom’s. Was there a point? We had fun. One time we thought, we have enough to play a set somewhere. We should play a show, one show only, start and end in a blaze of glory. But we never did.

After playing we’d go to a bar. Maybe that was the point.

We drove to Baltimore one weekend to see their friend Jim, the drummer in their old band, play a gig. It rained hard on the way and Brett was driving fast, peering below the windshield fog. This was DC Sniper time and we were heading into his territory. He’d shot eight people already, or was it nine, and six had died, or was it seven. I imagined him laying in wait in a perch overlooking the freeway. Maybe we’d be next.

We stopped at a rest stop just over the border in Maryland. There were teenagers hanging out, like this was the place to be in whatever fucking town this was. Racing through the main hall, twisting the knobs of gumball machines for something to come out. Two boys wrestled as they walked, smirking insolently, getting in people’s way and not caring. This is how they interacted, with arms and hands. How they communicated.

At the table next to us a girl gushed to her friends, “I heard he shot five people in a single day!”

We went out in the streets of Baltimore, bar to bar and down some ruined streets with the houses boarded up. Slept on a couch in Jim’s house. On Saturday night we watched his band play fusiony prog rock at a hipster bar crowded with young guys in beards. A confederate flag hung on the wall with no apparent irony.

My Week

I burned myself on Monday, pouring water from the kettle down the bathtub drain. Hurt like a motherfucker but I didn't care. On Tuesday I sat before the camera for someone’s documentary. On Wednesday when I rode the train back home from work I tried to steal a sentence or two from what the woman next to me was reading. It was some kind of religious self-help nonsense, possibly a chapter on loss and grieving, banalities deflecting attention. Thursday J put the keyboard on the living room floor and picked out the melody from “Doctor Who.” We played guess that note and I started on dinner. And Friday is today. I had a vivid dream, what was it? Carrying something. The responsibility to carry. J’s looking through Magic cards, humming “Message in a Bottle.”

Margaritaville is quieter this year, no “Five O’clock Somewhere” seemingly on the hour, every hour. And no Jimmy tunes at all. It had seemed for years that they were mandated to play the one about the lost shaker of salt at a certain frequency, at a certain volume, perhaps by the fine print of the franchise agreement. And now nothing. Are they in mourning? No. They’re liberated.

It was the day McConnell froze midsentence. The old crank suddenly at a loss for words. His gaze utterly vacant. You’d think he was contemplating something deep within himself. But there was nothing there.

Sinead O’Connor dead and there’s more talk about her shaved head than anything about her.

Dappled sunlight shone on the sloping street, occupied for now by grills and folding tables and kids drawing in chalk. People sat drinking beer, most on the building side but some, like us, by the graveyard. There was a space allotted for music: mic stands, speakers, drums up on the sidewalk.

Right now a duo played: a sax player in a dandyish leopard-skin suit and fancy hat and a guitar player dressed normal. They were pretty good. When they were done I spotted the sax player hovering around the food table as I got a hot dog.

“Mind if I… grab a…?” he said uncertainly.

I said of course, of course. Though nothing was mine to give.

“Nice playing,” I said. And really meant it. You don’t always mean it when you tell someone nice playing. It feels good to say it and mean it.

He made one of those ass-backward acknowledgments, “Thanks much to you” or something. It was a bit weirder though. Like maybe, “What you said I appreciate.” Might have even ended with “my man.”

I stood there for a moment wondering whether he actually understood that I wanted to pay him a compliment. Then he spoke again.

“You just wait for the next band. There’ll be LOTS more people,” he declared, pointing. “And that’s a PROMISE.”

And the next band played and he was in it. And they weren’t quite as good actually. And there were exactly as many people as before.

Music had been promised between two and five and here we were two-ten and they were still tuning up and fucking around, some sitting on folding chairs in the street, 5th Ave revelers strolling by with their grilled corn and mozzarepas. I really didn’t mind. The plunks and blurps from their instruments faded nicely into the hubbub of the fair. I didn’t want the music to start.

I read the police report off my phone, glasses up on my head so I could get up close and see the print. Witness #1, Witness #2. The alleged perpetrator’s unlikely alias, Hugh. By one account he was Puerto Rican, by all the others Italian. White. Heavy-set. 5-11.

One passage described the blood as magma-like.

I peered away from time to time to watch a documentary about an extraordinarily successful singer from the nineties whose song may or may not have led to the suicide of the man who coined its title. She collapsed in tears in her interview on her rickety wooden chair.

He was described as having a widow’s peak. Upon his arrest out of state he had been using “some sort of cane.”

The perpetrator and one of the witnesses arrived at the victim’s house in the perpetrator’s thirty-year-old pickup truck. Something was broken and the victim and the perpetrator spent a few hours troubleshooting. Then they came back in the house together.

Day 7

I must have lost consciousness for twenty seconds or so on that floatie. I found myself on the other side of the roped-off area. In the neighboring zone, with its different swimmers and different beach. I propelled myself back with my hands. The sky looked the same.

In a land far away they’re lining up for rifles to shoot at the rampaging invaders from the East.

They’re playing The Song now, I’ve heard it twice. Everything goes to hell eventually.

Day 5

Back on the beach again, It’s Five O’clock Somewhere and Cheeseburgers in Paradise. It’s interesting that I haven’t yet heard The Song played a single time. And the volume seems to have gone down. Might there have been some sort of emergency arbitration between Margaritaville and the nearby businesses that resulted in a series of edicts? 

Out beyond the buoys Captain Moses’ One Love bobs softly with the Giant Bubba in tow, awaiting a clutch of drunken, sunburned tourists to rake across the waves.

Day 4

I dove down to touch the canon and tried to appreciate something of its antiquity. It really just felt hard under a veneer of moss. Like an old stone wall in the Connecticut woods. The anchor veiled in seaweed looked like a crucifix someone had escaped and discarded. And yet the fish and the coral and everything else is alive.

On the way out some others on the boat, maybe Eastern European, Russian, asked if it was okay to smoke. Nods all around. A mother and son pulling from the same pack. He lit up right after he got out of the water, too. Cigarettes as a means to delineate events.

It had rained pretty hard in the afternoon.The flagstone terrace of Rick’s ran with rivulets of dirty water that amassed in little pools. We watched the cliff jumpers, saw the sun set through the remains of the storm. The DJ played loud, punctuating the music with birthday shout-outs. Goddamn if it isn’t always someone’s birthday. A young couple, well-dressed, sat facing each other romantically at the corner of the bar. They were daintily eating dishes of penne pasta, one marinara, one cream. She lifted her phone and gazed into it as though it were a mirror.

Day 1

I marveled at the blue sky, mouth agape like an idiot. Two birds thrashed in a nearby palm. Were they special birds, I wondered? Special Jamaica birds you don’t see back home. Are they somehow aware of their own identity as such, their splendor? I watched them dart around the fronds. Just a couple of birds.

I decided to roll off the floatie face down as though someone were trying to dispose of my corpse. To cast me adrift hoping I’d never wash ashore. I fell gently below the surface.

At poolside I took pains not to drip on my book. I lay on the chaise and read and drifted off to sleep and read again. At one point I remained conscious just long enough to read two words: the game.

I ate a small bag of hot and spicy banana chips and turned the edges of the pages crimson.

Music blared from the bar over the fence. Footloose, Night Nurse. You could hear the DJ’s patter but nothing else, no giddy, drunken crowd. 

I had to fashion a bookmark from a corner of paper towel.

While music was playing in the living room I had a thought, or a feeling, or both, that the music wasn’t really playing at all and the room was silent. It might have been an effect of the restlessness of the mind today, always seeking new stimulation, never satisfied with anything in the moment. So then I perceived the room as both: a silent room and a room filled with music. Both were equally real, equally true.

Sitting in my easy chair I remembered that not an hour ago I’d had an idea for a song and now it was gone. What was it? Something to a country tune. It’s always easy to think of a country tune when you get an idea for a lyric, or to think of an idea for a lyric when you think of a country tune. I don’t know. The one follows the other eagerly, easily. Not that it has to stay that way, or should. The lyric can change. The music can change. Or both. Now I had neither. You can’t abandon something you forgot. Was it about forgetting? I wish I could forget… my name? No. It was about doing something, getting through it, something rote. But it was poignant, maybe all the more so for being mundane. Definitely started with the word I. Like so many country songs do.

It took me all day to remember what I’d watched drunkenly before bed last night, a documentary about Sam Cooke. Smokey Robinson appeared to me, his fine features and processed hair, and I realized he’d been on it had to be about music, but what? R&B, Motown? Sam Cooke. 

The ticket window was on the side wall of a head shop in an old Victorian in the sad little town between us and the city. My mom dropped me off there to wait in the freezing cold for spring tour tickets. Sweet coffee in a dented thermos. Camel unfiltereds snuck in my coat pocket. Just putting my hand in there would make it reek of that dark, sweet perfume, Turkish and domestic blend. But my mom didn’t know. Or she did.

The line snaked back into the dirt parking lot behind the building, filled with beaters and VW buses. It became amorphous there, people playing hacky-sack or huddled in little circles to get high. I sat on the embankment by the wall and watched. Someone blared a live tape circa 1979, “He’s Gone.”

A Deadhead invited me into his car, a beat-up old boat, to warm up and smoke a joint. He put on Neil Young, “Down by the River.” I’d never heard it before and it took a hold of my brain, that da-da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da-da on the guitar and the refrain, which I didn’t understand at first but then I understood and then misunderstood again, in circles and circles, shudder day, shutter day, shotty day, shut her day, shot her dead, shut a day, shudder day.

Late at night while washing dishes I had an insight that the Grateful Dead’s peak years of cultural influence were not the ‘60s but the ‘80s.

When I got into the Dead I thought I was late to the party. The ‘60s had happened, the ‘70s too. Jerry fat and gray. I wasn’t around for the Acid Tests, the Be-In. The Fillmore, the Carousel, the Avalon. What could it have been like to go to a concert on a Tuesday night, get dosed by Bear and wind up naked in the park, not lost and despairing but with a dozen kindred souls, all laughing ecstatically, scrutinizing the straight world as it awoke to go to work and not giving a fuck except about the universe? This happened, I know. But not to me.

Shows seemed to occur on the fly yet were promoted—and so memorialized—by gloriously psychedelic posters. Cost a buck to get in, maybe five or maybe nothing. For years this band had played in parks, on the street, on campuses, all the while revolution in the air. I know—I saw the pictures in the books. How I wished I was there. All the clothes were cooler. The hair. Everything was happening and nothing was predictable. You could probably go right up there and sit on that stage if you wanted, by the tangle of cables and the speakers with the tie-dye grilles.

When their audience got bigger the Dead responded in kind: a sound system three stories tall, shows that lasted hours and hours, long weird Dark Stars. Egypt on a lark. I missed all that, too. Now the band seemed diminished, constrained; endlessly touring the hockey arenas of the United States, subject to regulations as to when to stop. Set lists, though still varied and unique, had acquired a creeping formality: some songs were openers, some closers; there were first-set songs and second-set songs and everybody knew the encores. The weirdest music all tidied up and filed away in the middle of the second set. There were tendencies for certain sequences. Tendencies for sequences of sequences. Ronald Reagan was president; nothing was happening and everything was predictable.

I got it on good authority that Jerry was a junkie and I thought, my God. The darkness of it. The coldness. In my naive head all filled with flowers it seemed like a betrayal.

But the music was still there. Jerry bent at the neck, playing furious triplets in dorian mode. The drummers never hitting anything at once. Or on the one. Phil. There was a careening, dangerous quality to the music—dangerous in the sense of something big that’s falling over—that could be quite compelling if you were so inclined. And quite not if not, which kind of proves the point. Turns out the formality provided a context, a foil. The deviations, the surprises, they meant more than mere chaos ever could.

In fact the Dead were never more powerful and influential. They reached many, many more people than they had before. If you were a kid in Pittsburgh, or St. Louis, or Santa Fe, you went to the Dead show when it came to town. Like it or not. There weren’t a lot of kicks to be had in this country in 1983. No Instagram and nothing on TV. If you wanted to do anything interesting you’d better see the Grateful Dead.

It only took a few influential stoners to go at first, then next time ‘round there’d be a horde: younger siblings, someone’s preppy girlfriend and all her friends, jocks who got drunk in the parking lot. And this cycle of influence was a machine: for years the band played up and down the East Coast every spring and fall, through the middle of the country every summer and on the West Coast all the other time. It would be difficult to not go to a Grateful Dead concert.

And everyone took acid. Didn’t matter if they liked the band or not. Many did, but for sure many didn’t. I remember the scene at the Springfield Civic Center in the spring of ‘86. I went with my Deadhead friend Bill like always but there were lots of others from our school. Being a devotee I hoped pridefully that they’d get it, that their minds would be blown by the music. Of course they didn’t give a fuck—except maybe one or two that did. There was always the one or two. But most of them were there because it was there, man. I recall watching a friend, a popular kid whose tastes ran toward the Hooters and Crowded House. He roamed past circles of dancing hippies, bemused, while his best friend sat nearby, cradling his LSD-exploded head between his knees. What the fuck were they doing there? Wrong question. How the fuck could they not be there?

The Dead in fact instilled in the American adolescent a reflex for taking psychedelic drugs and going to the coliseum, maybe telling off a cop or two, then finding their way home Gonzo-style to put the pieces back together. Wake up late for school and mumble at their moms. Kids began to do this at every show—not just the Dead. When Iron Maiden came to town, same thing. Clapton, same thing. The Police, Def Leppard, Bad Company. Didn’t fucking matter. No matter the music, no matter the culture it was intended to represent, when performers looked out from the stage they saw thousands of dosed-out teenagers whose perceptions and reactions could not be relied upon too well. The Acid Test continued.

This was the true influence of the Grateful Dead, and their legacy too.

Awoke to someone using the whole keyboard at the end of a tune, rumbling bass notes. I had been dreaming about moving out of a house and writing songs at the same time. The songs, two of them, were turning out well except I was having trouble rhyming “morning.” The line was something like, “And if we’re still together come the morning,” and I wanted to avoid rhyming it with “warning” ‘cause I’ve done that already in another song. Can’t have two morning-warning songs. But what else? All I could think of was “adjourning.”

 I got a magical bit of time after my crazy dentist screwed my implant in again and before I had to go play with the guys at the Navy Yard so I went to our old haunt Nancy Whiskey, unchanged from the early 21st century, tin ceiling, Irish flag, full of people who don’t belong in TriBeCa but are there anyway: old black guys, young black women, construction workers playing shuffle board and shouting curses. And me. “Gone Daddy Gone” by the Violent Femmes is playing and maybe that’s the only song everybody can agree on.

One of the construction workers spies a local crossing the square outside, a pretty young thing with a halter top, and proclaims, “Number 10 with a bullet right there!” A guy at the bar says, “But they never come in do they?” I guess you can see why.

Actually no one gives a fuck about the music most of the time. Except when something suspect for its softness and obscurity plays. You can be soft and universal, like “Maybe I’m Amazed.” But otherwise someone’s gonna shout a profane complaint.