Thursday, November 16, 2017

Live from Liberty Apartments


7:30 a.m. Sunday morning. Alone in the laundry room of Liberty Apartments at the east end of town in an undisclosed convention-defying Kansas community. I'm drinking Maxwell Piss coffee and and speaking to you over wheat fields and over Facebookland and Twitter through an apparatus in a medium that might be felt by you. And isn't that what we're all looking for these days? Some feeling?

We occupied tables at The Galveston, an upscale restaurant off Douglas in Wichita's Old Town District that sometimes featured jazz combos with weekend brunches.  It was the kind of event I attended more for professional reasons than any desire to bullshit with people even though that's what I always end up doing. The Big Names from the Wichita Media and Communications industry were there.

At every such meeting, attendees have to stand and introduce ourselves. I stood up from the oval table and my honey garlic chicken with potatoes and wine glass and talked for 30 seconds. I can BS, I can speak extemporaneously. Shoot from the hip as they used to say. It reminds me of high school speech class when Mrs. H assigned us to give an improvisational speech. What she didn't know was all my speeches had been improvisational. Today I'm a member of a Wichita branch of Toastmasters, from which I've won four blue ribbons for public speaking. We have yet to become a chartered organization.

"I have an online presence," I said. "Some of you are aware, there's a small cult of readers. I'm not like Big Time Viral Bloggers -- Hyperbole and a Half and Nadia Bolz-Weber's Sarcastic Lutheran. My presence is unconventional -- or to use my friend, Shannon's word, 'edgy.' In my day job I work for an underground writing society where I write in a more conservative fashion, but I'm not at liberty to divulge details about that at this juncture."

I was told me I might want to meet the Date Goddess. "She's unconventional too," Shannon said as she poured herself a glass of water. "I'm aware of her," I said.

Janna Hauff is the self-proclaimed Date Goddess. She's a local relationship expert and matchmaker who primarily works with professionals because they're the only ones who can afford her services. Her website is topnotch professional. She's a hell of a marketer.

I introduced myself after the meeting as people were networking. Told her I was a big fan. She had purple streaks of dye in her almond-colored hair. Jewelry around her wrists. A psychedelic mini-skirt dress with pink Go-Go boots, sundial necklace and Etsy bracelets bearing hemp and a longing for the beach. She talked about the "art of relational existence," of connecting people who share a congruence and setting them free to share space together.

"So you're the guy with the blog?" she said.

We shared our Linkedin pages. Connected there. Exchanged business cards. Mine features the caricature that my cartoonist friend Bryan Clark drew for me.

Threshold

Two days later I sat in the lobby of the clinic, reading a book, when Jennifer poked her head out.

"Jeff," she said.

I sat my marker in place, closed the book, grabbed my fedora hat and walked in front of her, back to her office.

"How's Mr. Jeff?" she asked.

"Well, I'm alive."

"That's a victory," she said. "Every time you go out, you're winning."

Skin protectorate
I took a seat on the couch in her office and applied Chap Stick (skin protectorate) to my lips.

"I like Butter Cake," she said.

That's Jennifer. She has several flavors of coffee for the keurig stationed by her bookcase, from which I once noted she had a copy of Jung's Man and His Symbols.

"I just use Classic Chap Stick," I responded. Original style.

"You're a basics kind of guy, aren't you?"

"Perhaps."

"You must have a lot to talk about. That's a long list," she said, referring to the list of topics I'd jotted down on the Sticky Note affixed to my book cover. It was my old copy of Ken Keasey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? "We had to read it in high school English, Jennifer told me. "This book depresses me," I said. "The writing is brilliant. Next to this guy, I suck."

"Who says you can't write something and accidentally create something as good as 'Blowin' in the Wind?' You project your own insecurity on the world, into your relationships." Other books her shelf -- Rollo May's The Courage to Create and Robert A. Johnson's Inner Gold: Understanding Psychological Projection.

Then I told her how I get jealous of married couples with cute little kids. "That used to be my life," I said.

"That's normal," she said, tying her dark hair back in a pony tail. "It's like a couple struggling with infertility. They see another couple having babies and they're happy for them. But at the same time, yeah, they're jealous."

"You're one of those people I'm jealous of," I said. She has two kids of her own. The oldest is 5.

"I know."

Then she added how she's just a normal person and has problems in life like everyone else and it's not all idyllic. I knew she'd say that. My envy? "That's silly," she said.

"Yeah, Maria always said how I looked at the past with 'rose colored glasses' and wanted what I didn't have."

"We've talked about that."

 Oh God, I miss having someone to do my laundry with, someone to throw ingredients in the crock pot with, but I just can't see myself stepping out in that world, I told her.

"When you're ready, you'll know it," Jennifer told me.

Now she thinks I've crossed a threshold.

"You were a basket case in the beginning," she told me, while simultaneously spraying a fragrance on her wrists and rubbing them together like writhing bodies. Pressed together and rubbed like so many emotional rhythms.

Night moves

Friday night. Got a text from my friend Sawyer. "In town, you wanna go grab a beer?"

Back when he lived in town, we both wrote for the Industrial Media Complex. Now, he's news director of a radio station in Kansas City, Missouri, but says his days there may be numbered.

Back in those wild days, he lived on the third floor of a kick ass apartment building -- Empire Apartments -- down the block from the office on the left side of the street and the stately Barron Theatre, built in the 1930s in Blushing, Kan. (oops, looks like I revealed the name of the town). The apartment building also dated back back to the 1930s and had recently been restored to its original grandeur. (I guess people wanted glamorous movie stars and opulence to take their minds off the Depression.) There was a spacious lobby with an ivory colored sculpture of a gown-wearing goddess leading to stairs. Elevators with neon buttons and gold framing the door. There was a sleek wooden floor in his apartment and room for a washer and drier. Back at Liberty Apartments, (a rundown building also built eighty-some years ago) I didn't even have a dishwasher.

On a few occasions, we jammed together in the industrial building where we worked. Why not? We had the fucking keys. We plugged into the amps. Just played stuff I could handle. Old, moldy versions of uncomplicated stuff. "Smokin' in the Boys' Room." "Summertime Blues." "Louie Louie."

Sawyer and I met at The Cave, a rathskeller off Main and Sycamore streets. There were Miller Lite and Budweiser bottles everywhere, but Sawyer and I are what my Apple Ale drinking pastor at the Church of All Saints and Sinners calls "beer snobs." We both ordered Irish Red. Waitress said we were a couple of smart guys. We were joined at our booth by my gardening gurvi friend Jessie and her husband, Shane, looking like they'd emerged from an ashram. They were also drinking craft beers, but would you expect anything less from a couple of lovers of earth-grown farmer's food from the local free land?

At the back of the bar, drunk girls sang karaoke. "A lot of sexual tension here," Sawyer said.

A guy and two girls, on the high road to oblivion, sang the country weeper, "Don't Take the Girl."

"Johnny's daddy was takin' him fishing when he was 8-years-old," they sang almost off-key, but kinda cool and buzzed.

As it eventually always happens, later in the evening a drunk blonde chick would be holding a mic, singing "Like a Virgin." Lyrics sliding down the screen.

A woman, I surmised to be about 35, sauntered over to our booth. She had a mildly attractive face, and thirtyish crows' feet, signaling she'd been around in life. There was nothing remarkable about her except the black yoga pants. When a woman wears yoga pants, I don't care what she looks like, how big or little she is, I'm gonna look at her ass.

She said something about how her kids were with their dad that weekend.

"Macy (we'll just call her Macy), this is Sawyer and Jeff," Jessie said as she motioned to each of us. They used to work together at the ______. Jeff did that special on us for channel 8."

"Oh yeah," Macy said & turned to me. "That was brilliant."

Jessie and Shane sat on Sawyer's side of the table. "I'm sitting by Jeff," Macy said, as if she wanted to and not because there were no other choices.

"You write that blog," she said.

"You've actually read that thing?" I said.

"Dude, we follow each other on Twitter," she said, taking a sip of her drink.

"We do?"

"Yeah, I follow your personal Twitter handle and your blog's handle."

Suddenly, I remembered. She looked more chill, less reserved than she did in her Twitter profile.

"Oh yeah!," I said. "Now I remember. You tweet about stuff like chauffeuring your kids to soccer games and being in PTO."

"That's my life," she said. "Now, it's the kids' dad's weekend and I get to indulge in a little me time."

She was having a Dark n' Stormy, a highball cocktail made with dark rum and ginger beer over ice with lemon lime.

We all laughed characteristically for a bar. Talked over the noise of the crowd and the karaoke singers. Did shots -- Irish Car Bomb and the Mind Eraser. I ordered more beer, told stories about living in Liberty Apartments -- "There's this stoner kid there, thinks he can do levitation and have out of body experiences. Some old hippie-ish woman whose into sock puppets and Jesus freakery. This other woman, fortyish -- she's into bourbon and body art."

"Liberty Apartments," she said. "Back in The Village where the writers, artists, musicians and drug addicts live."

I told her I'd written on my blog, while sitting right inside that bar when it was as crowded and noisy as it was that night. I just tuned everybody out. Sometimes listened to Davis or Monk with my ear buds.

"Writing is just the greatest goddamn thing," I said. "I publish something good and feel like freakin' Elvis. It's like cocaine, sex."

"Probably better," she said, looking straight at me. Wide-eyed and with intent. We both looked at each other right then with that look you give someone when you know it's going to happen.

One-thirty a.m. Last call. Jessie, Shane and Sawyer were talking more low key with stupid laughter, finishing drinks. A week later, Jessie would tell me she knew something had gone on with Macy and me before Macy told her about it.

We were legitimately buzzed. Not fucked up, but over the legal limit. She used the Lyft app on her phone to get us a ride.

She had her legs wrapped around me as I turned my key into the hole, getting into my apartment. We hurried inside 'till we were standing by the bed, taking each others' clothes off. I was expecting drunk, sloppy sex but a few seconds after I got on top of her, she rolled me off, got on top of me and rocked her body, it was mind blowing.

"Oh fuck," I said, caught up in momentary passion. "Oh my fucking god."

She rocked back and forth. Wild.

"Do that again. Can you squeeze your vagina?"

"I'm trying" she said.

Near the end, she said, "I'm gonna ride you like a horse."

years ago when Maria and I were living together before we got married, i had a dream that she was riding a mechanical horse outside some small town '60s looking Dillons Grocery. as she tilted back in forth with the horse's motion, she spoke those same words in my dream

i'm gonna ride you like a horse

I looked up at Macy -- "yes, yes, yes," she said -- and I exploded inside her.

Snoopy
***************

I woke up alone at 6:30 a.m., but I knew she was still there because I smelled fresh brewing coffee. I rose, put on my boxer shorts and a T-shirt, went to the adjoining bathroom for a needed morning piss. When I walked into the living room, she was sitting naked on my couch, reading my journal and drinking from my Snoopy coffee cup.

"That's private," I said, a little pissed. "Those are my own personal thoughts."

I grabbed my a mug (It had a seal and contained the words, "State of Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation." I collect coffee cups) from a cabinet in the adjoining kitchen and poured myself a cup.

"You already reveal a lot on your blog."

"Maybe so. But that's all for publication. This is not. It's the principle of the thing."

She ignored what I said.

"But this goes beyond your blog," she said. "Why don't you just go there?"

"My audience ain't ready for that shit."

"It takes two people. You don't have to live in a house of regret."

"Okay, but you wouldn't know about all that if you'd respected some boundaries and hadn't gone where you weren't supposed to. That journal is my own, you know."

"I'm sorry," she said. "I was wrong, but I wanna see you happy. Wherever you land."

"I have a therapist. Her name is Jennifer. Actually, I wouldn't mind sleeping with her too. Of course she has this thing about not wanting to breach her professional ethics and I don't want to do anything to destroy our professional relationship of counselor and client."

No need to explain why to her why I looked the way I did. She'd read the damn thing. It's my place, I should be able to lay that damn notebook anywhere I wanted. I lightened up a little, told her a little history. "My high school English teacher, Mrs. Hanzlicek, had us keep journals. I just kept mine going."

She looked penetratingly at me, the cartoon-covered notebook resting on her naked thigh. "I wouldn't have let you pick me up if you weren't something."

It was dawn outside the window curtains and I stared, for no reason, really, at her nude body. So blessedly real in the emerging morning light. All its imperfections.

"Set that bird free," she said.

I took a wooden chair from the attached kitchen, sat across from her. "Before I had this longing to live kind of artsy," I said. "Maria said the grass is always greener with me."

The Club

A recent Saturday afternoon. I went to the Kansas Authors event at Wichita Public Library. I had a limited amount of time before I had to shoot a small town drag racing event down a farm town main street. A thing my producer, Reese, had suggested. It would probably be a minute-and-a-half story for KPTS's Kansas Personalities. There were children's authors, mystery authors, Christian writers. (I remember there was a Christian sex therapist displaying her book, Like a Soul Virgin.) Hindu stuff. Buddhist. Fiction. Romance. Self-help.

I ran into Janna Hauff, the Date goddess. Wearing a tight mini-shirt, sleaveless black shirt, loopy ear rings and high heels. She displayed the three books she'd written. They were  all about about relationships, dating, sexuality. I hadn't read any of them yet even though I was a fan of her website, which contained a short blog. Her latest book was called, Perpetual Emotion: Being Attune to Your Emotional Rhythms (and Your Partners).

"Remember me?" I said.   

"You look familiar," she said, inquisitively. "Tell me where we met."

I reminded her of the social function a couple of months back. It came back to her, how we'd connected on Linkedin.

"Oh yes," she said. "Sorry I haven't gotten around to reading your blog yet, but I will. I've been very busy."

I admitted that while I've read her blog and was a fan, I had yet to read any of her books and didn't have the money to buy one that particular day. "That's okay," she said. "You're here."

"I am what my friend Jennifer would call 'being present.' Hope I'm mindful too. She talks a lot about being mindful."

Hopefully, I would be at the author's event next year, I said. "The pastor's wife at my church told me emphatically that I had to write a book. I thought she was gonna take me to task for all the cussing and sinning in my blog. My ex-wife likes to remind me, 'You're no saint, Jeff.' But the pastor's wife -- her name is Emily -- she was pretty cool."

"Well I hope to see you next year with our group of authors. It's a diverse club. There's definitely a place for you here."

"We all need to fill space," I said. "I'm still figuring out where I belong, being divorced, losing my identity as a Family Man. And I severed my ties with the underworld writing organization. It felt like the ground fell underneath me, but perhaps I'm finding my footing again."

"Welcome to life," she said.

"Yes, I'm finding it to be quite transitory," I said. "And I've moved back to the Wichita Metropolitan Area."

"You have to stay activated to your social network. Stay engaged."

"Well I'm meeting my friend Reese for a beer tonight at Maggie O'Malley's pub. We meet there for a book club."

"Super. We all need a buddy even if it's a drinking buddy."

"Yep. Then I have a date. A new gal. Meeting her at IHOP. We'll see how it goes."

 
          

 "Don't Do Me Like That" -- Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers

















I

Saturday, November 4, 2017

30 years of Faith


                                                 
                                           "Faith" -- George Michael

I saw a Facebook item about the 30th anniversary of George Michael's Faith album. I wish I would've read it. Can't find it now.

When George Michael died last year, my mind drifted back to what a groundbreaking accomplishment Faith was. It was artistry. True pop craftsmanship. I wouldn't call it a sense of Heaven or sublime pop infinity. That's a definition I reserve for works like the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and Teenage Fanclub's Bandwagonesque, but Faith moved me.

I was primarily a hard rock and metal fan (even though I'd mostly been metaled out by the time I turned 16). Around the same time Michael's album came out, I was listening to Metallica's Master of Puppets. The first sign that this was a great album was the funky, in-your-face "I Want Your Sex." I knew the title was indicative of all the hell my mother said society was sliding into (even though she had a youthful record collection that entailed the Rolling Stones' "Let's Spend the Night Together" and Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit."

But although it was outside my essence, I liked the song.

My friend Alana remembers me working at Western Sizzlin' steakhouse where I stacked a bunch of plates off tables and pushed a cart around. I was naive, green, but an older guy at the restaurant -- Brett, a 21-year-old attending Emporia State University -- was a man of the world. He explained to me how "I Want Your Sex" was an "anti-Aids song." The lyrics, "sex is natural, sex is fun, sex is best when it's one-on-one" celebrated monogamy. It was socially interesting in an era when the President's response to the AIDS crisis was no response -- ignoring. After all, it was a gay men's disease and who cared about them.

George Michael


This was year's before Michael would come out rather infamously, getting busted for soliciting gay sex at a public restroom only a few blocks from his house. He'd abandoned the effeminate Big Hair look he'd had as part of the pop duo, Wham. ("I thought he looked like a fag." Yes, I actually made this unpalatable quote and said that ugly word to a friend 30 years ago. I've sinned in my life.) In the video for the song, "Faith," he'd adopted an early Brando-Elvisish retro look -- the leather jacket and boots and all -- that looked surprisingly contemporary and new again.

The song lived up to its title with a cathedral organ, followed by an up-tempo Bo Didley signature chugga-chugga guitar sound, acoustic, neo-rockabilly and pleasantly pop. It was catchy. Around 10 years later, I would love Limp Bizkit's rocking cover of the song. That version had a sense of humor about it.

The superior pop vibe of Faith came across most acutely in songs like "One More Time" and "Father Figure" -- my favorite cuts from the album. I hadn't had any sex or love affairs yet so I didn't know what the hell it was all about, but I sensed from these songs that there were things dark and psychologically troubling in the universe of love.

I worked with another guy, the editor of the campus newspaper, The Lighthouse, at Grossmont Community College in nearby Beaulah, Kan. Along with being a waiter, he moonlighted as a dee jay and he told me the kids went crazy at middle school dances when he played "Father Figure." I wondered why and was compelled to speculate. It was obvious even to my young mind the song was about psychological projection and dysfunctional love. A father figure? The high-tech pop-soul-gospel-harmony of the song. What was it that drew in these kids?

The album wasn't cock-oriented hard rock, but I could more freely admit I liked it after reading a Rolling Stone profile of Guns n' Roses that Axl Rose listened to George Michael. But he also listened to things like Queensryche's Operation: Mindcrime, an album Rose described as "the best screenplay I've ever heard." The one album that affected me more than Faith 30 years ago -- a favorite to this day -- was GnR's classic debut Appetite for Destruction. The pop crossover of the jangly, rough "Sweet Child O' Mine" largely signaled the enveloping of a musical landscape I would explore, if not as a musician, than as a writer.

In 1987, Michael Jackson recorded his Bad album, which I've always believed exceeded Thriller. Prince recorded his most critically acclaimed work, Sign o' the Times. A year later, my mind would be opened more by such albums as the Cowboy Junkies The Trinity Sessions, Midnight Oil's Diesel and Dust and the Sugarcubes' Life's Too Good.

But largely, the '80s were a suck decade. Bland. Insipid. Uninspired. Mirroring the empty materialism perpetuated in the decade. At least in the confined Top 40. Disasters like Foreigner, Loverboy, Nightranger, Warrant were tragic jokes. Synthesizers and plastic-pop pretensions were vapid and lacking anything resembling punch. I consider The Smiths to be the antidote to such wasted pop contrivances.

Alex Chilton
But it was all going to open up for me. In 1987, I also discovered Minneapolis, Minnesota's The Replacement's Pleased to Meet Me album -- its cut, "Alex Chilton" getting play on the local AOR (album oriented rock) station. This would lead me down the rabbit hole of Hootenanny and Let it Be -- introducing me to Memphis cult figure Chilton and his ground breaking early 70s band, Big Star, just as the Stones would turn me on to black music -- everything from Marvin Gaye to Solomon Burke to Howlin' Wolf to Muddy Waters, back to Robert Johnson -- as George Michael's "Kissing a Fool," with its retro pre-rock pop sound would turn me on to Sinatra, Dean Martin and that whole cocktail era.

Thirty years later I'm still opening doors -- in music, film, television, literature. Still going down rabbit holes. (Have you read John Updike's 1960 novel Rabbit, Run?)

Before I sign off, let's look at some other groundbreaking music from the '87-89 period.


                                "Smooth Criminal" -- Michael Jackson

                                 
                                              "Teenage Riot" -- Sonic Youth
                               

Christmas parody letter 2018

Ho! ho! ho! Everybody. It's Christmas time again and I hope you're feeling jolly and that your yuletide is gay. May you all be d...