Long as I can grow it my hair....

As you will soon learn, this has nothing to do with hair, mine or the musical. This has to do with those youthful memories I am so want to share.

In the early 70's, when I had finally reached my majority, I took a job doing building maintenance at night. I made somewhere around $5.00 to $7.00 bucks an hour doing that job. That may not sound like much until you consider that minimum wage back then was some where around $1.65 an hour. I got paid monthly, by the job, not by the hour. The faster I worked, the more money I made. The more buildings I could clean between 10pm and 5am the more money I made. Vic turned me on to this gig. Vic turned me on to 2 things in my life that have stayed with me forever, the ability to clean professionally and the only real guitar pick I know how to do (everything else I made up).

Theoretically this job was supposed to allow me the freedom to work at night and go to college during the day.  Sometimes it worked out that way, more often than not it didn't.

Basically what college was like for me was this:

At the beginning of each semester, I would elect to take somewhere around 16 to 20 credits.  About 2 weeks into said semester, after I had had the opportunity to go to each class at least once or possibly twice, I would drop everything except maybe two music classes. If two music classes appeared to be cramping my style, I would drop down to one just in the nick of time. This was how I maintained my 4.0 average too. It's also why I never graduated.

At 19 I was making way too much money cleaning medical buildings and having way too much fun buying motorcycles, cars and partying down with my friends. 

After 6 months of having way too much fun, I found myself not only finding school cramping my style, but work too. I started dropping contracts so that I could have just a little more time to party before work. In the end, I got myself down to doing occasional odd contracts where it lasted maybe a month or was maybe just a one time gig. It still paid the bills and that's all I cared about.

Which is where the Aquarius Theater comes into this story.  One Saturday night Vic needed someone skilled in professional carpet cleaning to help him clean the Aquarius Theater.

The Aquarius was located on Sunset and Argyle, not exactly the heart of Hollywood, but close enough. It was a monolith that any Angeleno knew well.

My first time at the Aquarius was in 1971 when Sue Winchester and I went to see the LA production of the rock opera Tommy. That was a bizarre evening for me. We started out at a party given by some of the lowest teen life Simi Valley had to offer. I believe the house was on Alamo, just a short distance from Tapo Canyon. I'm sure it's all strip malls by now. I had a glass of Boone's Farm or Strawberry Hill (tell me what the difference in either one of those god awful teenage rot gut wines were? Oh yeah, they weren't Thunderbird, that was the difference), I didn't finish it because frankly, back then I hated drinking alcohol of almost any kind.

From the party, we drove the 30 some odd miles to Hollywood and the infamous Aquarius Theater. I have to say that at 17, I was pretty impressed with the Aquarius Theater. I was even more impressed with Tommy.  Here I was this innocent teenage kid with hardly any life experience seeing the real world for close to the first time. It wasn't my first time in a theater to see a live production, but it was my first time to see a rock opera (and my last come to think of it). My first theater experience was seeing Diana Rigg play Heloise at the Ahmanson Theater in the LA production of Abelard and Heloise.

Sue and I headed back to Simi after that incredible experience and decided to see how the party was going. It was probably close to 1 am when we got back to the party which had grown exponentially since our departure for the theater. There must have been close to 200 kids there by the time we got back. We grabbed some more Boone's Farm/Strawberry Hill and stood around talking with people we barely knew. Within moments of our arrival, some bad ass low rider got his shorts in a knot over some kid who had hit on his girl and stabbed the poor sob. That was our cue to exit stage left. 

Funny how that one moment in time is the thing I remember in greatest detail of my first ever evening at the Aquarius.

So back to Vic and the shampoo job, I took it cause I was going to get paid a fortune and cleaning carpets is a piece of cake. This was probably somewhere in 1974. I was probably close to 20 by then if not already 20.

At that particular moment in time they had been shooting TV specials at the Aquarius. I honestly have no idea what they were, I just knew that was what was going on there at the moment.

So we get in there and of course, it's just me and Vic. So we are walking around looking at shit, thinking this is a pretty cool theater. It smelled like most old theaters. Lots of layers and years of high gloss enamel on top of each other and the sweat of thousands upon thousands of theater and concert performers and goers.

I remember standing on the stage looking out at the sea of empty seats and thinking I would look mighty good up here to anyone out there willing to watch me sing.  That lasted all of ten seconds, it's hard to keep a fantasy going in your head when you know the real reason you are standing there is because you came to clean up after all that enamel and sweat.

We wandered on back to the dressing rooms (Vic decided to start in the back and work our way up to the front). We had gone maybe one or two doors down the hall when I saw the name Lily Tomlin posted on one of the doors. I actually got excited. I loved Lily Tomlin.  I remember standing there staring in that room, looking at the chair in front of the mirror and thinking that Lily had sat there. By the age of 19 or 20, the only famous persons I had ever met was Ronald Reagan and Gale Storm and frankly both were stars who were fading fast into obscurity (Ronnie figured out a way to actually stage a lasting come back though).  I had met the near famous on many occasion, but never the truly famous.  So standing there in that doorway actually had a real impact on me. It wasn't like I was actually meeting Lily, but for me it was close enough.

Had I known at the time that the Doors had recorded a live album there back in 69, I might have been even more impressed. But I was never a Doors fan, so maybe not.

Over the next 18 years after the Lily Tomlin dressing room even, I managed to meet many famous people (it's an LA thing, you can't seem to help it when you live there, you always know someone who knows someone and you end up meeting people just because).

That's my Aquarius story.

When I'm 64

One of the things about growing older is that your mind begins to falter. Add that to having several closed head injuries in your lifetime and it becomes darn near impossible to recall names of things, people and most especially adverbs. This problem is most apparent in conversation.

Just a simple example here: You want to talk to your spouse about painting the trim on your house. You are talking away, the flow of your creative juices pouring effortlessly from your mouth when suddenly, out of nowhere, you forget what the name of that thing you enter your house through is called.  You start to panic, you search your mental file cabinets frantically for the name of said item. You can't find it anywhere. You draw a total blank. (this all happens in nanoseconds btw) You begin to stutter. "and the color I am envisioning on the, the, the, ummmm... the.. you know that thing you enter the house through...ummmm (you still can't remember what it's called and you are looking right at it at the moment)". Your spouse looks at you and says "door?", you say "Yeah! the door." Now you feel like an idiot.

At this point you are thankful she loves you, because anyone else would think you are a moron. You might actually be a moron, but even a moron can remember the name of that thing you enter your house through. You feel lower than a moron.

Now this might not bother too many people, but if you were a verbose one such as I, this is demoralizing.  You end up choosing words with less than four syllables because you can't remember the word you are searching for. You feel like you should be writing for the National Enquirerer or working for Fox News.

Now is when you start cursing yourself for not taking better care of yourself when you were young. You wonder why you thought taking nose dives into brick walls was fun when you were a kid. You begin to consider that maybe you really are a moron considering you dove head first into bricks walls as a child (on more than one occasion I might add).  Your old resentment toward your big brother for putting that sledge hammer in your skull rears it's ugly head.

Today, I started to post something on Geekfest. It was a thread about the economy here in Eureka. My expertise is in marketing. I wanted to post something about how the last 4 quarters in my business has been adversely affected by the Iraq war. I had historical data to back it up. The problem was, I couldn't remember half the nomenclature necessary in order to sound authoritative. I searched and searched, but it wasn't there. I gave up because it was humiliating me to sit there pondering the nomenclature of a profession I practiced for over 20 years.

Getting old sucks. That and oxygen depravation.

Was this the little girl I carried

When I go back in my memory and attempt to recall my life as it was 45 or even 40 years ago, things begin to fog up a bit around the edges. Things that once were so crystal clear, now seen dimly through time.

I have snippets of of memory.  Moments frozen in the forever of my heart. Very specific moments saved like a treasure. A child's treasure. For it is the treasure of my early youth that I consider most precious.

In my mind I can stand in the front yard of my childhood home and scan it panoramically, picking out plants and trees, naming them off, remembering their scent, their feel, their spirits. We had a rather large Ponderosa Pine smack dab in the middle of the lawn that was surrounded by our circular driveway. He was magnificent. A stately gentleman that sprawled his branches sideways in ever direction.

I spent many an hour in that old tree. He was kind enough to allow me to his futherest points as he reached for the sky in his grandure. He was so strong, so sure, much as I might have imagined the arms of God might be where I to climb up in them.  There was a point however, where at his furthest reaches, his main trunk began to thin out and became supple in the breeze. It was not particularly wise to climb that far up him when it was windy. But often I did it none the less as the view at his greatest height was spectacular.

So great were his branches that they were large enough to lay down and be craddled in them. There was one branch that I loved more than any other.  On that branch there was this perfect craddle of smaller broken stumps of branches that you could seat yourself against. Seated against these, in front of you were even more branches that were broken stumps, perfect for holding on to and pretending they were the controls of a spaceship. I spent an inordinant amount of time being the captain of my own space ship as a child. All thanks to his generosity.

I am not sure how old he was. We bought that house in 1957. The house its self had been built in 1937, so my guess would be that he was at least 20 years old when we moved there. My guess is that he was probably 40 feet high when we arrived in 1957. When we left in 1969, he was probably 60 feet high. By then I had stopped climbing in him though. At 15 you don't much climb in trees anymore.

I went back home right after graduation for high school. I was finally free, 18 and had a car. When I drove to the old house, ther first thing I noticed was that the people who had bought our home had cut off my spaceship branch. If I had not hated them before, I seriously disliked them now. I drove home again a few years later only to see the loquat tree missing completely along with the China Berry tree and even more of Him.

Finally, on one trip up north, I swung by the old neighborhood only to discover him gone. Forever. No trace of him, grass covering the grave of his rememberance.  By then it was the mid 80's and I was in my early 30's.  I remember parking my car and getting out and just standing there staring at the spot where he had once dominated the house and yard. It seemed so empty without him. Barren.

Last time I was in California I didn't have the time to go see the old house. I barely gave it a thought. I spent more time driving through old neighborhoods where Debbie and I had once lived in LA. I spent 12 years in Fresno California, my formative years. I spent the rest of my life up until 1992 in Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley.

Somewhere in the garage is a box containing journals dating back to when I was 18 or 19 and continuing on until I got my first computer and began writing in Word Star. Funny, those computer journals are lost as even the disks I saved them on are obsolete now.  I did make a hard copy, I just can't find it.

They contain much of the original lyrics to songs I wrote, even as they were being written. They contain much bad poetry, which frankly my songs were mostly very bad poetry.

Now it's time to say good night. Good night, sleep tight.

Dona nobis pacem

Funny thing about visits to the doctor. You never know exactly what they are going to do til you get there. Ha ha ha, well, wasn't I fooled by my assuming things. I just assumed I would get a manual breast exam and have to play 20 questions. I was right actually, I did have to play 20 questions and I did have that manual exam, I just had no idea I was going to be pricked and poked and bled and pap smeared while I was there too.

The mammogram is being scheduled. They will call me with a date and time.

Basically that's it. I still know nothing and won't until after the mammogram. Even then I still may know nothing. I will however keep you all updated. I am doing fabulous, hope you all are too!

I said doctor (Doctor) Mister MD (Doctor) Now can you tell me, what's ailin' me? (Doctor)

Well, if you think I am going to sleep well tonight you are soooo wrong.  Not that I will know anything tomorrow, it's just my head is firmly removed from the sand and  the sunlight is killing my eyes. I'll let you know how the day went later. First I need a few shots of whisky or something. Oh wait, I don't really drink. Why do I always remember that at such inopportune times?

In the immortal words of John Lennon and Paul McCartney:

Now it's time to say good night
Good night, sleep tight
Now the sun turns out its light
Good night, sleep tight
Dream sweet dreams for me
Dream sweet dreams for you
Oooooooooooh.
Good night.......