The Word Crows [2005]

I turned left off Oak and nearly immediately found a space to park not quite across the street from the Rock House. It was noon on the nail and it hadn’t occurred to me yet to feel like everyone was playing a joke on me. I got out of the car thinking just that. Like I was the only one of us who knew how to operate an alarm clock. Noon! on a Saturday! Where was my famed intuition? Could I not smell shit when it plopped down right before my nose? I didn’t want to move too far away from my car. Door locks didn’t matter all that much when you could see guitar amps through the windows.

But still, it felt so ace just being out. Saturday noon, downtown baby. The traffic the way it would be if you lived there. The air still held this lovely fucking nip that was just starting to burn off. The light was crystalline, only now slowly beginning to fog. Just standing there on the sidewalk life felt so goddamn fat with fat possibilities . . . all of which I figured would wind up failing, but still, that stolid moment in time.

There were a few people out walking, per a Saturday noon in a downtown neighborhood. What with my bad eyes, I saw a large sinister form approaching; finally I understood it was an old man pushing one of those two-wheeled old-people grocery carts. Except that, closer in, the poor old shrunken bastard was propelling himself along in a wheeled walker that happened to have a large wire basket affixed afront. The way my heart was still pumping madly made me want to stab it.

I felt nearly chastised, though I kept it to myself, when soon enough a pair of cars pulled in and parked and all the band and all its gear was miraculously in the same right place at the right same time. My jaw was dropped. I thought for sure at least one of the fuckers wouldn’t be able to make it outa bed.

I was just happy to get the shit hauled out of my car. My make was notoriously easy to steal. You can crack open the steering column and start the car with a can opener, which breaks the key ignition. It’s an expensive repair—for a couple weeks I’d just driven around using the very churchkey the joy-riders had so kindly left behind.

But the antlike unloading of equipment made less sense when no one answered the door. We weren’t done, but the walkway was already filled—who wanted their stuff on the dewy gooey grass? The doorbell button didn’t seem to make any noise. It looked like it’d been repainted over and ruined well before the goddamn things were even invented. There was actually some ancient looking note tacked up in the immediate proximity. It was sun-seared and rain-smeared, despite being sealed in a few rounds of kitchen wrap. Like anyone could read the fucking words. We figured the instructions were to KNOCK LOUD. But even that didn’t seem to matter.

Eventually Henry and I went around through an old wire gate on the side to try the backdoor. For all our rapping and pounding and hollering out Larry!, all we raised was some huge fucking dog; after our initial heart-attacks, we hoped its "I’ll-tear-through-this-door-and-eat-you-alive" choruses would help the cause. But then even the dog got bored and wandered back into the house.

There was a window within reach and we tried it but nothing happened, not even more dog—it held that tight. We shrugged at each other. What else could we do but go back up front and shrug our shoulders some more?

And then all five of us sort of stood around on that small spit of front yard, scuffing our feet and mumbling about the stupid prick. What else could we do? We knew he was there--he always drove and his van was parked out back. Well, Dan and Tonic went back up the stoop and started kicking the shit out of the front door. Out on the lawn the rest of us started shouting out his name. "Larry! hey Larry!" And then over and over again, the true chant, "Open up, you fucking asshole!"

It took about fifteen minutes, and we were all worried someone would call the police, but finally his girlfriend Tina stuck her sleepy head out this tiny garret window on the top floor. Christ, if they slept way up there they probably suffered from chronic heat prostration—no wonder they couldn’t wake up, they were probably on the verge of dying. And so maybe he could come down and open up the door for his fucking savior already. We’d all showered—or thought about it—hours ago. What was up with his bed-head, the bitch, when he finally stumbled downstairs, long after Tina had let us in.

That was what we had to work with. A guy with a girlfriend still so apparently fresh he didn’t have to worry about making his own coffee. He did have to endure the chore of fetching and fixing his own mug. Oh, it just sucked. Larry barely had a cup down before he was packing a fat onyx bowl with some shit that looked like it’d just hopped off the Red-Eye from Humboldt County. As if any of us who indulged would turn down a taste of that. So then we had a bit of downtime because the fucker kept on reloading. After all that, we slowly built our band in the front room. Larry was working under heavy gravity, so a couple of us ran out to get beer.

Across Oak was a brand-name drug store that inside seemed like an overblown convenience store. There was a grocery section the size of an entire old-time grocery store but this grocery carried nothing much but big bags of chips. There was an entire aisle of disposable diapers. And then a bang-up fucking booze section, like the whole place had sprung up around and encompassed a still-thriving neighborhood liquor store.

It was hard not to notice that the only people who came there to shop were the ones hoping to not get caught shoplifting. But then the socio-economic thing slid off, ‘cause we were a fucking band doing major shit, here in line to buy our fuel. We got a twelve-pack of cheap crap beer and a bag of chips that glowed an unholy orange.

We partayed; ready to rock, sir! We were all set up, strings tuned, amps humming. Permission to rock, sir! But Larry kept having problems so deep even he couldn’t explain. He kept trying things but they never worked, so finally he sat back and repacked the bowl. The beer was all claimed by then so why not?

I never quite understood what was wrong, but it involved a call to Ian, a call to try and track down Ian, because Ian had a nearly identical half-inch recorder that worked, which sort of implied that Larry's didn't, which meant that we were pretty fucking fucked. Ian had some stuff to do first. But he was hopped up and on board because he was such a huge Caws fan. Ian was a great guy and we all liked him, but nevertheless he was a fucking soundman and it seemed stupid to bet my afternoon against his ever showing. But there was nothing to be done. Nothing but to wait through some hours.

It was a smart band-move to stop drinking, but then there was nothing to fill the hours. Except the sort of nagging headache and lagging metallic taste that comes from really needing another beer. We all sort of moved apart so we wouldn't get on each others' nerves. I wound up in this small bay on the side of the house, lush with the calm of diffused, second-hand, daylight. The area was a microcosm of the house: just crammed full of shit. Stacks of books and shit. The little niche could barely contain the half-length Victorian fainting couch it contained. I arranged some pillows under my head, then moved to move some books so my legs wouldn't knock them over anyway. It was an awkward positioning, my legs delicately akimbo, but I settled into it. I lay there, chain-smoking in slow-motion, praying for a nap to descend. I was stoned as shit, laying there in the dappled light like I was out on the edge of a copse, in a hut built of stacks of old books. Thank god I'd thought to buy a soda along with all the beer, otherwise I would have turned into a parchment mummy. I sipped at it very occasionally, careful to keep it capped--wouldn't want to stain an expensive rug and have nobody notice it!

Generally I came off alcohol through a longish period of sleep. But lay there as I may, I could never quite dip down deep enough to submerge. I didn't even get the comedy of the half-way-there Freddy Kruger-style slippage. I just lay there, thinking of aspirin, wishing my bones would stop aching. I felt like I was being turned into an Impressionist Masterpiece, a man pinned, mortified, to canvas. I was drowsing on a settee. The subject lay in dappled light. But couldn't fall asleep!

The set-up was too oppressive. Laying there in my little niche. Outside it was sort of maybe warm if you stayed in the sun but in here it was like I was under a patchwork quilt, overheated by the stale remnants of summers past. Each breath I took was labored. If ever the remnants of ancient plagues lingered, it would be in my nook. The air was tactile, the evidence in the haze, the smell of it all. I was cocooned in this sort of eddying pool where all the same goddamn air molecules had been hanging around for a hundred years!

I was ready to contract typhoid and get it over with.

Finally I had to just give it up. I was trying to compress the afternoon hours but laying there was expanding them. I swear I’d been cramped up like that for several hours, but it was barely one by the bastard clock I next saw.

But getting up changed nothing. We were all just sitting around out on the front stoop starting to sport hangovers. Gotta keep drinking, but we were mostly getting hungry. The notion was floated—call a number and this guy brings you pizzas. All you have to do is pay him. Anything substantial would do the trick—I wanted to avoid dining out of the drugstore. Trying to decide on the pizzas killed an enormous amount of time. I gauged the discussion, trying to figure how many of my precious few bucks I’d wind up tossing in. Henry was doing this virtual operetta on the virtues of ham and pineapple pizza, and a way-way stoned Tonic was chiming in. You know, fucking move to Hawaii, then, and leave the rest of us alone to get normal pizzas. But they both had the cash to put down, and the best I could get out of the mess was half the other just pepperoni. When it came time to toss money into a pile, I took advantage of the flurry and frenzy and dropped just a pair of dollars, and didn’t balk when there wasn’t quite enough. I knew how it would go. Everyone would want "just one slice" of pepperoni, and for my second I’d have to either pick off mushrooms and olives or eat this like Grandma’s Sunday Dinner slice. Instead of the thick layer of mozzarella cheese it’s one of mashed potatoes.

The dude came, and I was so embarrassed by the tip I did cough up another bill. Next came the feeding frenzy. We consumed the boxes of dead babies. We were ready to bite off the extremities of anything intruding on our feed. But after two slices there was tons left, and it was like insulting the delivery guy if you passed on a third. I’d had enough of the fucking tropics, brushing the chunks of pineapple off into the bushes. I wasn’t too keen on the ham, but at least it lay flat; it wasn’t worth the effort removing. The ham fat and the cheese fat melded together in the oven. Better just to eat it all.

We all over-ate. It was disgusting. We made the Romans look like pussies. My brain, it was like the screensaver came on while all the blood rushed to my stomach. At which point the sodium withering began. From the dough through the sauce and cheese and every topping but the goddamned pineapple all the pizza was Salt City, USA. Great, getting to feel not just justifiably bloated, but, ironically, shriveling up from the inside out. Finally I gave up and went back in to my little suckie nook. I just wanted to expire for half an hour, that was all. But once I was back on the stupid piece of shit Harvey Half-couch I got ticked off real fast, trying to just be laying there, tic-ed off really, those further parts of me twitching away like I was a physical as well as mental spastic.

It did take me about twenty minutes to get back up, and then I was just in a bad mood. Everyone was. Even when Ian showed up. It made no sense, even with his arrival, that I hadn’t gone home hours ago. Sure, I mean, Ian came carting his 8-track, but then that just meant the problem was doubled—two crappy tape decks and two stoner retard sound-dudes now. The two of them, they killed an hour.

But then we were good to go. We were a band standing around and sort of shrugging. It’s like logically we were supposed to go get more alcohol, but who felt like drinking? Drinking more, now, yet again. We dodged back to the scary store and bought a bunch of sodas. And then we set to work.

The bullshit continued, Larry taking forever getting levels set, sending the pipe on another merry trip. I was antsy to start working, but dreading it because I really couldn’t see anything coming of the day—by then darkened to night—but a bunch of tired incompetent crap.

We all stood there in the front room, making fussy tiny dirty sounds as we played around with our instruments, waiting for Larry to finally get finally and totally completely fucking ready. Larry was, in his way, like the bastard seed of a thousand soundmen, gone completely and utterly insane! I was assiduous in praying a little more tuning would help in overall compensation for the general horror to come.

I found it hard to tame the mounting anxiety, to put it politely. Even my tuner seemed to be in a who-gives-a-shit frame of mind. And then I opened up my folded copy of the set list. It was obviously written in more optimistic of times. We’d decided to start off with what we dubbed the Ménage à Caws—three of my older songs run on end, a brilliant initial suggestion by Dan the Man. But why the fuck were we starting with it? I couldn’t even get my strings in tune, and on top of an utterly exhausting day full of fucking absolutely nothing we were just going to jump in suddenly and play our asses off for like twelve minutes solid?

This was absolutely fucking nuts! What were we not thinking? I wasn’t about to suggest any sort of last minute change because anything I suggested would be just as nuts. When just the idea of us strapping on our instruments at this point was as big a NutFest as they make.

It totally sounded like a real wearisome Take 29 sort of deal to me, so I set my teeth and got ready to grit my way through it. I’d deal with the dentist later. Time to think of extraneous stuff vaporized when Larry called across his set-up, "Okay. We’re rolling."

And I stood there for a few seconds, grinning then chewing my lips. Hannah started with me, but it was my stupid little intro lead that made or broke the Menage, and in extension the big shitty mess to follow. Finally she just stomped her foot and started counting off, eyeing me and then we were doing a lovely duet, albeit at two different tempos. I was way too poco, or however it is they mark sheetmusic. And then the rest of the gang crashed in, they too at their own tempos, confusing the issue even more but feeling somehow familiar and comforting as we tried valiantly to sort out the mess. I opted out—it was that painful, even in the doing—and let things collapse, the song ending with the wheezing of a punctured bagpipe.

I was reconciled to the task so I didn’t let a slump develop. I flailed us back in, waving my guitar like the conductor’s baton, just to clue them in. Hannah and I locked eyes and moved our lips like retards counting off. We still weren’t together, and neither was anyone else, but all that got resolved—as though done deliberately!—right as the song slid into the first verse. It couldn’t have been planned more perfectly, and despite the odd jumps and skips the LP of the night played like we’d inadvertently sold our souls to the devil. And this rough and stripped night, a day gone twelve hours and turned into night, a noon gone midnight, it was our payback. At the exhausted end the rough playback was totally fucking magic. We were flopped around but hyped to go ahead and do the vocals. But then nothing was happening, for the longest time.

The more we sat there, sprawled on couches, being our own cheerleaders but still flat on our asses, the more I just fell. I plummeted, listening to all the sickening shit—we were so great, we were never going to get the fucking vocals done. I stood up after awhile and made my way back into the kitchen. The sink tap was there to refill my soda bottle, but I was more interested in the back door. I went out the door I’d seen earlier from the outside, and as I did I couldn’t help but wonder what’d happened to that monster dog.

I sat at the head of the stairs down to the yard, lighting up, seeing the back gate from the other side. I sat there and smoked and tried to dispel the gathering black clouds out into the real atmosphere, a plume of bad thoughts obscuring the moon instead of my shiny face. I sat there puffing, minding my own business, and then my heart about burst—out of nowhere, this beast came charging up the stairs. There was the dog, I panted, and it sort of nuzzled me once, then settled around and sat down beside me. The dog was damn huge! My only pal in the world was not only hairy, but he played for the NBA. I was just settling into the loveliness of all that when the door opened and Hannah stepped out.

She sort of staggered out. "C’mon," she swayed, "forget about killing yourself, it’s time to sing."

I was in no mood, but felt it a better distraction. "Then I’ll be needing some throat lubricant."

"Don’t worry, we’ll take care of that."

I gave the dog a buddy hug, "See ya, pal," then rose.

Once inside it quickly became apparent that Hannah’s we’ll had dropped its apostrophe and plural and become well, as in, well, guess I’ll take care of it myself, then. I vocalized my goddamned concerns. It could’ve been called whining, except my money was where my mouth was—was I sucking myself off?—and I indeed spearheaded the expedition to snag some more beer right before, as it turned out, the drugstore dispensary was set to turn off some lights and shut the place down. We quickly grabbed the on-special 12-pack. The old gal who checked us out was checking us out, looking like she wanted to know where the party was just so she could come and personally suicide-bomb it. But we weren’t talking! Henry started saying something to the cashier, but I kicked him. Even if all her friends she wanted to bring along happened to be decades younger than her and with good gum-grip on all their teeth, my foot still connected with Henry’s shin. That’s life, you wander around every day wondering what the fuck these other people can possibly be thinking!

When we got back, I immediately sucked one down. I’d had to spend every last cent of the less than three dollars I had in the world to upgrade us from a six-pack. I had to claim at least three or the mooches would beat me. I’d out-mooched them on the fucking pizzas, and I wanted to stay in the lead. Larry had to be factored in despite not paying—he’d tossed the pipe and rolled a fucking cigar while we were gone.

I didn’t really have anything to worry about. The more I looked around the more it looked like Henry and I had been the optimistic fuel tankers for a party that’d already fun out of gas. I popped a fresh one and shook my head and declared, "Too much slouching on the couch!"

The protests were allowed to be half-hearted because first-up anyway was me and my big mouth for the Menage plus one. It was totally weird just standing there before the mike stand with everyone else sprawled around looking. But the beer infusion had primed my pump. I quit real fast with the headphones, and the rest of the session had the other tracks bouncing from the speakers. Hannah stood up to growl and shout some back-ups. Tonic had been nagging me all day about letting him repeat the final verse of the park song at the very end of it, so I stepped aside from the mike. I watched as he swayed in, right on cue, the stupid stoned bastard! As the song collapsed all around him, he sang the words slowly, in a true baritone. He sang it beautifully, without the bile of my original, his lips caressing the words—no wonder all girls melted at least a little for him. The guitars cried out like dying birds and Tonic sang, "See the sun spill down some shade/the trees they braid the cover/when I lay down by the riverside/will I be a corpse or a lover?" absolutely perfectly.

But then later Hannah had to be pulled up and propped up, until she shrugged everyone’s arms off her and did a couple songs.

Henry though was like a princess. He lolled there on the sofa like there was certainly no pea placed somewhere in the lower levels. He wouldn’t get up to sing his song. "Just gimme the mike," he slurred.

"You are such a languid fag," I declared.

Henry just grinned and sort of patted his surroundings. His greatest effort involved leaning forward enough to reach around behind to draw then out and puff up and replace a prime pillow of his lounging. He sat up straight on the couch to sing his song, his free arm fending me off as I tried to swoop down and shout-along words through the verses.

When it was all done it was like someone was lying to us. No way could the ordeal be over. Then there was talk of starting in on mixing the whole mess proper. I was already gathering up all the remaining unopened beer. There wasn’t enough weed in the world to make me stay. I pointed like at a clock. "See? It’s like fucking two in the fucking morning already."

Some stayed to play around a bit but I didn’t. I had to be up in five hours, get my kid off to school. Poor kid.

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