Six Pack

 

We leave so much behind when we transition from childhood to adulthood, that often we don’t even notice when things are no longer with us – things such as the relationship we have with Mother Earth when we walk barefoot. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of that old connection when I run out to check the mail or get something out of the car without bothering to put any shoes on. Like an old song that takes you back, certain tactile sensations on the bottom of your feet can transport you to a place and time you thought you forgot.

 

Like all the other kids I knew growing up in Yorba Linda in the early 70s, I wore shoes only to school or when my parents forced me to put them on for certain formal occasions; weddings and funerals come to mind. I hated wearing them so much I usually pushed the issue to the point of being physically punished; corporal punishment was cool in our house back before spanking was deemed politically incorrect. My old man spanked proudly and even used to show off his patriarchal prowess to the other nearby adults by publically threatening to take off his belt. And like all the other kids in the neighborhood, I saw no logical reason to put shoes on to go in a restaurant or grocery store. Some of my earliest memories as a living being interacting with the environment involve me being barefoot – for example, the hot asphalt searing as if I were standing in an iron skillet while my head was aching from eating a pistachio ice-cream cone too fast, my tongue and teeth frozen. So many sensations: some pleasant, like walking in the grass or sand at the beach, and others not so much, such as stepping in a pile of warm, fresh dog shit – or even having a dog lick your foot for that matter. Of course, some things every kid has to experience, such as stepping on a nail, and there are some dangers you never have to be warned or threatened about twice – like riding barefoot on the back of a bike and having the meaty ball of your foot torn off by the real-wheel spokes.

 

I remember marveling at how the pavement retained its heat once the sun went down and the air cooled. You could stand in the middle of the street wearing nothing but a pair of cut-off Levi’s, the air temperature perfect with just a slight breeze that seemed to carry away the smog that made your lungs heavy during the day. The asphalt was still warm as the final peach-colored line of the horizon blended with the blue-black of night sky. We stood like that almost every night, waiting for the fireworks to explode above Disneyland thirty miles away. Their dazzling array of brightly colored shapes would expand like tiny universes being created – silently for a few seconds until the sound followed, a muffled thump you had to strain to hear. The novelty of the event had long worn off, however; the commencement of the nightly displays was the signal for us to get our asses home.

 

My parents split up when I was eight or nine and my mother took my younger sister while I stayed with my father. This was a turbulent time for our family and I must have fallen through the cracks for a while. Since my mom was gone and my dad was always at work or somewhere, I pretty much raised myself for a time. Much to the annoyance of my family, I like to blame my current poor behavior on my “feral years.”

 

I would often spend weekends in the summertime at my buddy’s house. Leon had parents but when they were home, which was seldom, they didn’t care about where the kids were or what we did. On those nights we ran amok all over the neighborhood. A girl named Lisa lived up the street and I had a terrible crush on her. Some nights I would stand in front of her house for a long time, wondering what she was doing in there. Was she watching TV? Sleeping? What was she wearing? Which room was hers and what did it look like? I’m surprised I didn’t grow up to be a regular stalker because I sure was one when I was a kid. Sometimes I would stand under a street-light in the circle of the high-pressure sodium glow hoping that Lisa would look out her window and see me. Maybe if she knew how much I ached to be close to her, she would sneak out so we could roam the neighborhood and go on adventures together – barefoot of course. And if one of her parents were to come out and challenge me, I wouldn’t back down. At least that’s what I told myself. I never found out if I was as bold as I thought I was, though, because Lisa never appeared. By the time I finally gave up, the asphalt was cool to the soles of my feet which were now sore and tired from running around all day on the hot pavement and gravel.

 

Time softens some of the edges of past hardship. I came out of that period okay once things settled down and other people in the family realized what was happening. Of course, no one can truly analyze the value of their living conditions until they’ve lived long enough to gain some perspective and compare them to the experiences of other people. Probably the worse I ever had it back then was having to drink Log Cabin syrup because it was the only thing edible in the house. Some might argue that the worst thing was the psychotic babysitter that used to make me stay in the bedroom while she had sex with her husband, but what’s so bad about that? Later I resented my father for his indifference back then and grew to hate him for other reasons, but now with some hindsight I thank him; he taught me self-sufficiency and helped me to understand that there truly is only one person looking out for Numero Uno. 

 

 

 

I was living in the barracks at the Navy Base in Alameda, waiting for my ship, which was still a month out, returning from a world tour. While we waited, my buddies and I spent every night at the enlisted man’s club or out on the town getting drunk and chasing whores. I had picked up somewhere that this was a time-worn naval tradition and I certainly took to it easily enough.

 

I woke up one morning with a woman who fell into a different demographic than the one from which I normally select. I somehow knew instinctively that I had crossed into forbidden territory, but I was yet to discover how. The clues, however, started to appear right away.

 

I realized first that the apartment was actually on base, which meant there was an existing military dimension since the woman who took me home was not in the navy. Sure enough, when we got up I started to see the kids that lived there milling around. I soon learned that the woman was married and that her husband, the father of the kids, just happened to be in the Navy – of course – and his ship was due back from a world tour very soon. I casually asked her the name of the ship and tried not to cringe when she gave me the answer that I already knew. I assumed that since her husband would be back in a few weeks, our brief encounter would amount to nothing more than a casual, one-night fling. I saw no harm in telling her that I was waiting for the very same ship, the Arkansas, to return. I left her house never expecting to see her or hear anything about our sloppy interlude ever again.

 

The woman – we’ll call her Yolanda – started to stalk me while I was still living in the in the barracks. She would leave messages for me at the quarterdeck and I sometimes saw her waiting out by the main gate, just standing there. I couldn’t go to the club anymore; I spent my every waking moment figuring out how to avoid her. Really, I don’t know what she saw in me or what she wanted from me; it had only been one night of drunken, meaningless sex – unless I had said something to her to indicate otherwise. I couldn’t remember. The last thing I wanted was to get emotionally involved with anyone, much less someone with a bunch of runny-nosed kids, who was married to a dude on my ship. Nor was it so much a moral issue as it was one of self-preservation. I don’t know about now, but back then it was fairly easy to commit the perfect murder if your ship was out to sea – you just catch your intended victim alone up on the weather decks and throw him over the side. I didn’t want to have to live my life looking over my shoulder to avoid being shark bait.  

 

Yolanda continued to stalk me even after my ship returned and I had reported in, now living on board. One day a guy I didn’t know approached me and gave me an envelope. He said that a woman that fit Yolanda’s description who was waiting outside the entrance to the pier gave it to him to give to me. The envelope contained a black rose. I asked ten people regarding the significance of this gesture and received ten different answers. I had already been freaked out by Yolanda’s psychotic behavior, but now I was even more worried about her husband; my buddies and I did some investigative work and discovered he was a snipe (*a machinist’s mate or other lower deck dweller for those unfamiliar with squid vernacular). So now I was avoiding this guy, too, because I didn’t know if Yolanda had told him about me or not. But unfortunately, there are only so many places you can hide on a ship, even if it is a 585-foot nuke cruiser. No small vessel by any means, but it seems much smaller when you’re in the middle of the ocean and someone wants to kill you.

 

One day I was down near the bottom of the ship and stuck in a tiny compartment that had one hatch as an entrance – or the only point of egress, naturally. The space was called Elex Cooling and I had been tasked with scraping an old gasket off a pump flange. Ironically, I seem to recall guys in our division bitching that it was a snipe’s job to fix that pump. Anyway, there I was, jammed underneath this 8” pipe, trapped in what was basically a steel closet, when I sensed that someone was standing in the open hatchway. I twisted my head around and sure enough, there he was, Yolanda’s husband. He was a big lanky, corn-fed looking dude, maybe six-five. I didn’t say anything and we just looked at each other for a few seconds. I was in the worst possible position to put up any kind of defense and he was in the best possible position to stomp my head flat. Finally, he spoke and got right to the point.

 

“I heard you’re the dude who’s been fucking my wife while we were gone.”

 

I respected his frankness and responded in kind.

 

“I did,” I admitted, “but it was only one night. She told me she was married and I never saw her again. That’s the truth.”

 

And it was, for the most part. I didn’t tell him she was stalking me. He looked down at me for a few seconds more then got kind of a sad, resigned look on his face and he nodded slightly. I held my breath and waited. 

 

“Oh, well, she’s a fucking whore anyway,” he said, finally.

 

Before I could respond, he turned around and disappeared. I exhaled the breath I had been holding and got back to scraping.

 

 

 

I’m standing there grinding out a couple of riffs with some heavy power-chords on my Les Paul and I see the way you’re looking at me. The sudden realization of what this means hits me over the head like a club; it’s finally going to happen, something I’ve only fantasized about or seen in magazines. I give you the once-over in your snug cashmere sweater and tight 501s stretched over your hips and ass. My imagination kicks into overdrive and I feel like I’ll explode if I have to wait another minute.

 

Now we’re in your room, trying to be quiet because you snuck me in through your window and your mom will call the cops and hopefully they get here before your older brother beats me to death. It is late at night and your room is dark, quiet and a little too warm and stuffy. I look down at you in the gloom and see the shadowed features of your face as you gaze up at me from the bed, the covers pulled up to your chin. I know that you are completely naked underneath and ready for me. I undress and lift the covers to climb in next to you. The warm aroma of you swirls into my nostrils and I feel drunk, my brain buzzing with anticipation and apprehension simultaneously. We are in a cocoon together, enveloped in a safe place where the world cannot touch us. Our skin crackles with electric desire as we lay entwined like the silk strands of a purse string, thighs rubbing and nipples making occasional contact that practically sends me over the edge. My fingers explore between your legs and I am totally lost, all of the intricacies of your female anatomy completely foreign to me and I have no point of reference. I feel you smile against my cheek and you let me off the hook; you pull me on top of you and as I slide into you, you stake my soul like a demon – a succubus that has added me to your collection.  

 

 

 

I was once in a heavy metal band called Rampage in Bend, Oregon. I played lead guitar, and at 16 was the youngest member. Everyone else was in their early twenties. We basically sucked; we were broke so we didn’t have the equipment we needed, never had a vocalist, and couldn’t find anybody to play bass for any length of time. We had a small – very small – core group of devoted fans that dug us, though, who always found us parties and keggers to play. We didn’t care about money, we just wanted the exposure. There was also all the female attention that came with being in a band and what that entails. You know.

 

Back then, a year or three before the arrival of the high-powered, virtuoso breed of axe men that changed all the rules – guys like Yngwie Malmsteen, Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, and the baddest man of all, in my opinion, Alex Skolnic from Testament – the gold standard for rock lead guitarists was Eddie Van Halen. Randy Rhoads had just appeared as Ozzy’s guitar player, but he was still not quite on the radar. Our band didn’t play any Van Halen songs because the solos were beyond my grasp and it felt like I was mucking around on hallowed ground whenever I tried to duplicate them. Still, I secretly spent much of my private practice time trying to dissect some of Eddie’s solos. Of course, “Eruption” was the most famous and recognizable, with all the flashy double hammer-ons and whammy bar dive bombs. I didn’t know how to read music back then, and I don’t think we had tablature yet, so if you wanted to learn something, especially a piece as arcane as “Eruption”, you had to do it the old-fashioned way. You had to grab your guitar, plant yourself in front of the turntable with the LP and put in the work picking apart the piece note by note.

 

Now, even if Eddie Van Halen himself would have come over to my house and given me extensive instruction on how to play “Eruption”, there’s still the unavoidable matter of playing all those several hundred – maybe thousands – of notes cleanly at an almost inhumane rate of speed. And since the piece is guitar and nothing else, except for a minor drum part near the intro, all of the focus is on that instrument, which means every little mistake and incidental contact with other strings represents an epic fail for the virtuoso. Let’s be clear; I am no virtuoso, nor will I ever be, but I had aspired to attain those heights back then. I learned the notes and practiced “Eruption” until the fingertips on my left hand felt like someone had smashed each one with a ball-peen hammer. Never once in the privacy of my garage where I practiced did I ever play the piece all the way through without making several noticeable mistakes. Therefore I generally refrained from playing it in front of anyone.

 

One night our band was playing a kegger in this tiny house crammed to the gills with drunk people. The energy was great, everybody was having fun, nobody was fighting and no girls were sobbing with mascara running down their cheeks yet. We had an area roped off in the corner of the living room and my bandmates and I were clicking from the start. We had been playing for an hour or so and everything was falling into place. Even with our substandard equipment we sounded good; Colin, our drummer, was still lucid and firing on all eight – he tended to get drunk a bit too early in the evening and start to flare – and everyone’s instincts seemed to be synchronized. I had just enough of a beer buzz to take the edge off and the extra confidence inspired my playing. Just like shooting pool, there’s a little zone between not enough and too much where your game improves. I was drenched in sweat and had my t-shirt off, there were more hot sluts than you could shake a stick at, and I felt like I was about to burst into flames myself. 

 

We finished a song, I think it was Def Leppard’s “High ‘n’ Dry,” and Colin started messing around with his snare – he had a wingnut that used to always come loose. The moment felt right, so I went for it. I cranked up my Fender Deluxe Reverb amp to full volume and slid down the low E string of my Gibson SG to stop at the A major power chord on the fifth fret and let it sustain until I got some nice natural feedback. After a pause there, I started the intro to “Eruption” and glanced over at Colin who was staring at me, confused. As I said, I never practiced the piece in front of anybody. Still, he recognized it immediately and jumped in at the right time to play his tiny part. Then I was off and running. I felt like the spirit of Eddie Van Halen had taken control of the ten fingers of my two hands and every note rang out clear and clean. I felt so relaxed and in my zone, just digging the vibe of everything that was going on, I played the piece almost flawlessly – at least as good as I’d ever played it. When I was finished the group of drunk partiers packed into the little house went crazy. Maybe it’s true that everybody gets fifteen minutes of fame, but that night I got two or three – or however long it takes to play “Eruption”.

 

 

Tina 

 

I met Tina when I lived in San Mateo. My father, who lived in Yorba Linda, had lost custody of me and I went to live with my mother who was dating a guy who would eventually become my stepfather. Randy was close with his sister and her husband who lived up in the hills in east Oakland with their two daughters, Tina and Lisa.

 

I think I was twelve and Tina was eleven. From the beginning, we clicked on some weird level, both of us feeling like we weren’t really into what everyone else was doing. Looking back, there seems to be even more truth to our connection, especially when I consider the similarities of how we both evolved as individuals. Our families spent a lot of time camping back then and Tina and I would split off from the main group when we hit the river or lake, or as soon as we could and do our own thing – like catching crawdads. Tina was the only one besides me who loved it. Even later, into our teenage years, we would go by ourselves sometimes until it started to feel awkward. One, I was madly in love with her which was technically inappropriate I supposed, because we were cousins (by marriage); and two, she showed no indication whatsoever that she harbored amorous feelings towards me. Even as kids on those camping trips, Tina and I would sit in my stepdad’s van and listen to “Frampton Comes Alive” and “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” on the eight-track player until the battery was so dead the engine would barely turn over. It felt completely natural to not do anything else but that – to just dig the music and the relaxed, silent bond between us. We were always connected like that. Even after our families moved away from each other, I always felt like Tina was right there with me, like those times in the van or on the banks of the Eel River waiting for our crawdad trap to fill up. And throughout the years, especially once our separate lives began to get complicated, our paths of self-destruction seemed to run a parallel course. One of the last times I ever saw Tina we were in our late teens. It was a camping trip, just like the old days – our two families had converged on the shores of the lake at Camp Far West up by Beale Air Force Base in northern California. I hadn’t seen Tina in a couple of years and I remember how excited I was to hear that she would be making an appearance; although the word was that she had been hanging out with a rough crowd and making poor life choices. When she showed up at the lake, my heart sank. All the family rumors appeared to be based in truth; she brought some scumbag with her, a new boyfriend fresh out of the joint. Tina barely greeted anyone in either family and treated me like I had Ebola. The two of them stayed away from everybody – just like Tina and I had done way back when. As I look back on it, Tina was probably just trying to avoid a confrontation between her boyfriend and anyone else that was present, not just me. I recall Tina’s mother Barbara being quite verbal about the gall Tina had to show up at a family outing with a man who had a swastika tattooed on his neck.

 

I’ve heard from Tina twice in the past twenty years. First, she wrote to me when I was in jail embarking on my own path to becoming an ex-convict. Her letter had an optimistic feel to it that made me sad. She told me she had done some time herself down in Nevada and that, later, one of her boyfriends had knocked all of her teeth out, but now she was doing much better. She sent me a picture of herself with her kids which I would stare at while I daydreamed of alternate realities during that tough period of my life, but it has long since disappeared; the picture got lost somewhere between my transfer to jail and prison. I tried to keep in touch but I heard that her current boyfriend was the jealous type so I didn’t push it. I heard from her again ten years later – which was five years ago. Her letter said that she had gotten married again, to a different guy, but the optimism in her tone was gone. She sounded morose and regretful and I like to think she was trying to tell me that she wished the circumstances of our lives had been different in a way that wouldn’t have kept us apart. When I wrote her back I tried to convey how I had always felt about her while at the same time making an attempt to respect the boundaries of her marriage – not normally my strong suit – and told her to please not make me wait another ten years for a letter. Well, like I said, it’s only been five, so there’s still hope. It looks like I’m going to spend the entire rest of my life missing Tina and wondering what we would have been able to accomplish had we joined forces. More likely than anything wonderful, though, we would have just accelerated our paths of self-destruction and been the worst thing in the world for each other. Maybe Tina somehow always knew that about us and made sure we stayed apart.  

 

 

 

From our perch on the roof of the well house we can look out over the small valley – more like a wide, shallow ravine. The moon is full and huge in the sky and has turned everything an eerie blue, even your pale skin as smooth as a butterfly’s wing. We sit so close to each other I can feel your warmth on every surface of my right side. You watch me closely, waiting, your eyes big with a wet reflection of the moon in them. I am so scared I’m practically trembling, and my hands are smeared with sweat. I finally gather the courage to act upon what we’ve been hinting around about all evening – otherwise I would never have had the guts. I slowly lean forward and watch your eyes close and lips part just before I touch them with mine. I can taste your sweet tongue and smell your clean skin. My five senses light up and there is a buzz in my ears as my barely adolescent brain kicks into overdrive, analyzing and cataloging all of these never-before-experienced sensations. And although I didn’t know it then, this moment will belong exclusively to you for the rest of my life, the memory locked in a secret place like a sacred shrine in my heart that nothing or no one can take away – until the day my heart ceases to beat. I wish I could tell you this, but now, forty years later, I have no idea where you are or if you’re still in this world.