Maria and I left the consignment store next door to the pizza shop. She commented on the Victorian styled merchandise and suggested we go to Goodwill. It was a Saturday afternoon that didn’t seem like a Saturday, but neither did it seem like a week day. We’re still young so why not?She looked through the clothing racks while I rummaged through the used book shelf and record bin. There was a Diary of a Wimpy Kid kid book – one more for me to pick up for Max. Our boy can never have enough.
I flipped through the LP’s standing in a crate. There were possibilities: Tom Jones Live in Las Vegas, a Mitch Miller sing-a-long (wasn’t there a reference to him on Season 1 of Happy Days?), Englebert Humperdinck. Possibilities. True potential.
While knelt down, staring at a Partridge Family album, circa 1970, I felt her presence. My eyes grazed the silver metal of a shopping cart and I saw her.
“Would you like to look through the dress shirts and khaki pants?” Maria asked, reminding me that I needed new clothes for work.
I followed her back to the front of the store to look along the men’s clothing racks. I pick up a honey mustard –colored silk shirt.
“No,” Maria said.
“Oh yeah,” I say. “This is hip lookin.’”
“It looks like something you’d squirt on a Polish sausage,” she said.
“Don’t you talk that way,” I snapped.
As I said, we were shopping for clothes. Maria would pick up a shirt, saying it looked “cute,” and I’d say “piss on that.” I don’t mean to be rude, but she has no sartorial radar to speak of, no striped-slack-sensibility to be had. To hear her tell it, though, I couldn’t dress myself in the morning without her telling me what pants to put on. She thinks – and quite wrongly, I add – that my fashion sense is for shit.
I go almost crazy over a pair of plaid circa 1976 Budweiser-colored slacks.
“No,” she said. “You are not getting those.”
“They’re totally fly,” I protested.
“Everyone will make fun of you.”
“I don’t give a shit.”
It ain’t easy pickens at Goodwill. Inevitably, however, I’ll find a gem, feel totally rocked, and Maria will piss on every find I come across: a green plaid coat, absent a collar; a cocktail-looking bowler shirt; coffee-colored slacks…She ain’t having it.
There is an area in which Maria and I are in complete accord, however. We both have a deep-rooted disdain for 80s and early 90s clothing, just as we do for much of the music of the era.
“It’s like Bozo the shittin’ clown,” I say.
“This is so Boyz2Men,” Maria adds.
“What are we suiting up for?” I ask. “A freakin’ Ben Stiller-Living Color show, circa 1992?”
“Oh, why don’t you just get a Kid n’ Play cut,” Maria says.
“Go all House Party,” I add.
Then I pick a corduroy jacket off the rack and try it on. The label reads “County Seat,” the store from Towne East Mall that closed around the late ‘90s. It was one of the few places in the mall that I actually liked.
“No Jeff,” she said.
“Oh yes,” I say, before retreating a bit.
I still want the jacket, but it doesn’t have quite the coolness of the cord jacket I purchased from Anthony’s (a now sadly defunct little chain from the Midwest) in downtown Ark City, circa 1996.
I tell Maria that County Seat was a good store, every man needs cord and it’s fitting that I should do this (buy the thing).
I tell Maria that County Seat was a good store, every man needs cord and it’s fitting that I should do this (buy the thing).
“There’s a reason that store closed,” Maria protested.
“I don’t care.”
My eyes meandered over to this fellow, himself checking out clothes, grinning to himself,obviously listening to our exchange. I started wondering if this guy is also a writer. Perhaps he’s taking mental notes of our conversation, I thought, and will soon be in the parking lot, scrawling overheard quotes on a notepad to post in a blog, magazine article or to keep on hand, should a good opening arise.
Anyhow, I noted a discoloration in the right elbow and returned it to the rack. Wasn’t as good as my old cord jacket, anyhow.
Then Maria spots a red jacket screaming for J. Guy to try on, as I can never have enough red jackets or neckties.
“I look like Hugh Hefner,” I said, wearing it proudly like a morning jacket.
“You look like Colonel Sanders,” she responded.
Dressing room experience
Maria and I were in the dressing room where I tried on some shirts she picked out for me. These included a fern green button-down shirt to accompany a cream-root beer-flavored pair of corduroy slacks.
A knock on the locked stall door.
“Occupied,” I said in a voice I felt to be audible.
A smarmy man slid on his back, underneath the door which stopped roughly one-foot from the ground. For a nano-second, I was a little scared.
“Whoa there, killer,” I said.
The man apologized profusely, said he thought the booth was vacant. Later, Maria would tell me she was “freaked out,” not scared. Although, had she been alone, she surely would’ve been fearful, she said.
He then took a stall next to us. “Sorry man,” he said, still apologetic.
“No worries,” I replied, echoing the words my editor, Adam, always texts me when I inform him I’m unable to meet deadline for a story.
Around ten minutes later, as Maria rolled the cart up to the check-out line, the oily guy approaches me again.
“Man, I’m so sorry,” he said. “I thought it was empty.”
“It’s all cool, mate,” I responded, extending my hand.
We shake hands and I note his camouflage T-shirt with the gasoline-colored image of James Marshall Hendrix in the middle.
“Love the shirt, man,” I said.
“Hendrix, man, he was the greatest guitar player to ever live.”
“The man has an entire sky scraper building unto himself.”
“The first time I heard, Eddie, man, that’s what made me want to pick up a guitar,” he said.
Huh? While I respect the direction Van Halen took in the late ‘70s with the guitar “tapping,” vibrato and tone exploration – most powerfully in “Eruption” off their debut album – I’m not a huge metal power chord fan, and I feel this once cutting edge band sold out musically and commercially over 25 years ago.
I returned to Hendrix.
“He perfected distortion techniques that Bo Didley and Link Wray were experimenting with 10 years earlier,” I say.
It does appear that we have a philosophical difference as I prefer a more backwater voodoo-like blues-base and my new friend is partial to Bach-like classical rock, given his mention of names like Joe Satriani, Stevie Vai and Yngwie Johann Malmsteen.
I’ve had this conversation with a musician friend, Scott Mackey. With music – as in all art forms – the pendulum swings back and forth between the basics and more advanced wizardry. You go from three-chord rock n’ roll to a rock style that’s essentially classical music. Then punk or grunge will come along and get back the other way. The moment one style is predominant, some 16-year-old kid is sitting in his garage, gathering up to take over the world with something new, old…forgotten.
(By the way, Mackey has been a pivotal force in the Wichita music scene for more than 20 years. Until a few years ago, he played guitar with local psychedelic power lords, Black Gasoline. Check em’ out. He’s currently doing sound work for roots rock band Moreland Arbuckle. Check them out too. They’ve been getting a lot of play on KMUW. That’s left of the dial at Wichita State University’s public radio station – 89.1 FM.)
My new friend and I stood there different, yet the same, Hendrix at the nexus.
“Come on,” Maria called back to me as she walked from the register with our purchases.
I shook hands with this guy again as we said bye. He apologized for walking in on us again and I joined Maria out the doors and into the parking lot.
“You should put this on your blog,” she told me as we walked to the car.
“Sure,” I said. “I don’t know what that guy was on, but he wasn’t coming from a sober place.”
I suggested we next go to our hometown and check out the record shop. There are good things there, I told Maria – Mickey Newbury, Nancy Sinatra, Dead Kennedys, Duke Ellington, the Archies, Roy Acuff…
