A scammer and a 49er walk into a casino…

“I won the Nigerian lottery,” Tony said, deadpan. “Four million dollars.”

Tony, Heather and I stood ten paces from the door of Muckleshoot Casino, the most profitable casino in the country, according to the concierge. Tony met us for an Elvis Presley impersonator concert at the Galaxy Lounge. The last night of a seven-day run, the musicians flowed through the setlist like an oiled assembly line: tight rhythm, perfect solos, big smiles. During the encore, an inebriated woman stumbled on stage for a spot-lit moment with the wigged singer, and “Elvis” kissed her cheek as security ushered her offstage.

“All I have to do is send them $150,” he said. “I’ll pick the guy up at the airport in Seattle, and he’ll give me the cash. After expenses, of course.”

The fluorescent lights of the parking garage created a sort of halo around Tony’s stocky silhouette. I couldn’t see a smile forming, reassurance that he was joking. So I waited for the punchline. Heather looked us both over, sensed the gap in humor.

Tony lives in a tiny home on his sister Susie’s gated vineyard in rural-esque Washington. Armed only with a Chrysler 200 convertible, a monthly Social Security check, and his past, Tony navigates his 60’s with a Garmin GPS that doesn’t always show him the right way to the doctor’s office in Tacoma. Tony needs a defibrillator to replace his pacemaker, because there’s a higher chance that his heart will stop cold turkey than go arrhythmic.

As the gatecode-keeper, Susie determines who Tony should have as visitors. I’m allowed, but no one else, it seems, like the family of a young man he mentored. You see, Jeff stayed with Tony years ago, and stole a gun from Susie’s house. She pressed charges. Jeff went away.

Jeff was shot and killed by police in Wenatchee not long ago. The infant and the girl Jeff left behind are not allowed to visit Tony, per Susie. What if they steal something?

“It may be that I only have to pay $50,” he added. “They’ll keep a higher percentage, but I’ll still make three million dollars.”

“Sean,” Heather said to my agape jaw, “he’s serious.”

Tony was quiet.

Standing speechless in the chasm between the casino and the parking garage, I wanted to tell them about an episode of This American Life I listened to in 2008.

Ira Glass interviewed an American who operated an online forum dedicated to taking revenge on the Nigerian lottery scammers: when a forum user received a common spam email which read something like, Your great-great uncle, Arthur Hatterfield IV, left you an inheritance of 3,400,000. We would like to pay this sum to you as soon as possible: all you need to do is give us all of your personal information and $50.

The forum users would conspire replies, encourage the “trustee” to develop a relationship with the scammer: yes, I would like to receive the money. Please meet me in Somalia.

In one case, a Nigerian scammer took a series of buses across sub-Saharan Africa, in hopes of receiving US$50 – a huge sum. He emailed the trustee, a middle-class twenty-something in suburban U.S. America, and said that his bus was overtaken by guerrilla militants at the border, and he was stripped and tortured, broke in a country where he didn’t speak the language, and could the American please send some of the $50 to help him?

It was hilarious fodder for the online conspirators – nothing is true on the internet, after all – until the intrigued forum administrator followed up on the tale. He made some calls, and somehow got through to the scammer’s employer in Ibadan, Nigeria: yes, the man had gone off to Somalia, he must make money; yes, he called us about his bus, but he is on his own. We cannot help him.

The forum administrator told the story to Ira Glass, and I stored it in my memory, and think about it whenever some such email shows up in my inbox. No doubt Tony read a similar message, then looked up from the computer, out the window at the mansion and the vineyard – Susie’s little kingdom – and thought, well, fifty bucks isn’t much.

“Maybe the Nigerians will pay,” Tony said. It was getting darker outside the casino, and the fluorescent halo seemed brighter now.

I had just caught up to the fact that he wasn’t joking, or telling us some joke he played in his spare time.

“Tony, there’s no money!” I blurted, just as the pieces of hope slid together in my mind. The tiny home, the controlling sister, the missed doctor’s appointment; Tony needed to win the lottery.

If a man has nothing, I remembered from a scene in Flight of the Phoenix, as two men stood amongst the wreckage of their airplane in the Sahara Desert, give him hope.

I can’t help but think that by saying there’s no money, and by writing this, I am taking hope away from a man who needs it more than he needs four million dollars. Tony’s got more than his past and a GPS: he has a lifelong dream of seeing the San Francisco 49ers play in Candlestick Park, and I’d love nothing more than to sit with him in on November 2nd, as they play the Seattle Seahawks, albeit in the new stadium, as a gesture of apology, and love. That would be my lottery winnings.

star thistle chaos.

Today is our first mensiversary of marriage. We’re biding our honeymoon in the California hills, and I feel neither present nor attentive to the task at hand. This invisible culture, whose industry requires a blurring vagueness here, propels the migratory gypsy circuit into a focused frenzy for a few months of the year. Mornings and evenings I sinfully connect to the internet, an archaic device that tethers me to the outside world.

Five years of seasonal work has taught me this: the twenties fly too fast to not do what I love. Fishing has been the most adventurous and lucrative job I’ve had, my often-told story of life amongst the tides. And, I’m writing a new story. One which up to now I mistakenly thought would have little to do with fishing and Alaska.

For years I wanted Alaskan roots. When I was 12, my mother drove my brother and I north from the New Mexico desert into the Alaskan winter. For a decade nowhere else qualified as home. When my heartbroken version of a vision quest came along, I felt like an upside down Alexander Supertramp running away from, and ever carrying, a cute box half-empty of longing and  tragedies. Alaska was my backyard, not some faraway frontier. I needed to go somewhere. But, as Eddie Vedder put it, I was “starting from the top.”

And you can’t do that.

To every man: his own adventure, a set of lessons to keep his honesty afloat, and love. 

 

I’ll be back shortly.

surprisingly mild collisions

For years I feared being the common denominator between the fractured circles and scattered connections of individuals I loved. Whereas a more social person might host a party to introduce clients to ex-lovers, business associates to a young entrepreneurial cousin, or invite fundamentally religious family to a wedding at Burning Man, I’m less inclined to create intricate networks than simply reach out in a random direction many times to connect. Life seems more foreign when mutual friends are rare.

In 1999, a band called Powerman 5000 released an album entitled Tonight the Stars Revolt! The biggest hit of their career, ‘When Worlds Collide’ (popularized by the Playstation game Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2), taught me two important lessons: 1 – if you really love a song, don’t set it to repeat a hundred times a day, and 2 – the collision of worlds was a wild and violent phenomenon, like stars exploding, and should be avoided at all costs.

This was of course before I’d seen Hubble images of what happened to the cosmos when stars revolted, exploded, or collided. It was also before my first acid trip, when I discovered that people themselves were stars, made up of the same particles and energy that have floated around the universe since the beginning, of, well, everything.

At some point between then and now, Mrs. McCarrey’s tenth grade English lessons on Symbolism clicked. Hawthorne’s veiled minister, Melville’s whale, Dickinson’s enlightened agoraphobia. Physics and Literature suddenly explained similar concepts with varying amounts of clarity and eloquence. The hippies and rastafaris and Buddhists, all of them, even the sheep of Christ – they were right. Religion is but language to worship the One, the Self; they all try to convey the same essential messages in different ways: everything is of source energy, or a reflection of it. Regardless of what we call it, or the stories we attach to moments of its transformation (birth, marriage, Genesis, Big Bang, Holocaust, etc.), everything is energy. If God is everywhere in everything, then God is Energy.

Stay with me; I’m getting to the point.

Another lesson – one from Uncle Scott, from his time in prison: if you’re ever worried, or scared, about how certain people could potentially relate to you (in his case, with shanks or the Crazy Eye), remember this mantra: here is God experiencing itself as this person. Here is God experiencing itself as me, as you, as her or him or them. God, regardless of history, association, or gender, is only a name.

We as people wish to be called by our true names. That is to say, we wish to be heard, seen, experienced, and loved exactly as we are. Christopher McCandless figured this out, perhaps too late. Now, who am I to keep individuals from discovering they are fingers of the same hand, to keep one from reflecting the beauty, wonder, and talent of another?

Worse yet were my sins of refusing to accept what others experienced in me by not allowing them to connect over a common denominator! It is simultaneously the epitome, and the very opposite, of selfishness, in that I would do anything to keep my needs for being seen from getting met.

It’s a hard line to follow, that of truth between selfless and selfish. In his brilliantly titled book Never Eat Alone, Keith Ferrazzi talks about the benefit of adding value to yourself by connecting people. The orange hardcover sat on a shelf for years, and the only thing I took from it was guilt for eating by myself. All the while I applied its networking wisdom slowly, bringing people and worlds together which would certainly have never met otherwise. Most often both parties learned something about me from the encounter.

I’m not sure I ever made a point. That’s okay. Consider this processing out loud. Like telling a story and remembering a detail as it comes out of your mouth. Those are the important ones. Have a good day.

computer performers, and the art of being on stage.

Okay. I could have titled this better. Don’t worry about that.

I’m concerned for your future live music experiences: they are in grave danger of becoming tedious and wearisome affairs whose facilitators’ bad posture and lack of communication with the audience threaten to forsake you, the paying attendee, the party-goer, the dancer, the let-looser.

Somewhere between the era of LP-addled radio stations where disc jockeys sold us on their favorite music (or that which record companies wanted us to buy), and the evolution of the MacBook Pro as a musical instrument, the attention of the audience wandered, listened to whatever happened to be on the station or stage. We the audience, lacking direction, sought pints of beer and electronic cigarettes to complement our inhibitions around dancing our asses off.

Luckily, this was not entirely our fault: massive collections of sheep-like humans who are corralled by electronic sound waves into the fenced and walled barriers around stages designed to keep our attention (bright, moving lights; BIG sound; pretty people) have been deprived recently of an important element left to rock, metal, and hip-hop.

The vital element of conversation as it pertains to musical performance determines the connection between musician and audience. 

When I had a narrower taste in music, and attended death, black, or doom metal shows every week (a wide diversification, I know – but listen to Burzum, then Cattle Decapitation, and you’ll know, too) – to keep in line with elitist opinions, add to my arsenal of black t-shirts, save money on import fees on CDs which at the time were not distributed in the US, and – most importantly – to spend as many sets as physically possible rocking out in the mosh pit, I learned how to converse with my favorite musicians, whether they were on stage, or smoking pot behind the venue.

They wanted chaos in the audience, and if we were still, they would ask for it. Demand, at times. We’d form circle pits and walls of death (where the crowd divided, each half moving toward a side of the floor, then, at the drop, ran toward each other at full speed), ecstatic for the opportunity to release whatever angst, anger, sadness, or joy we’d been carrying. Sometimes, it was like Fight Club, except with a better soundtrack.

The models of character musicians to me were invaluable: grown men – and some women – dressed in black leather with metal spikes jutting from their wrists, necks, and shins, who wore masks and face paint and whose vocal cords were formed more like steel cables than organic tissue – intertwined examples of owning their musicianship and theatrical performance. The blast beat or drone of the music was but one element of the shows, and so inspired by that madness and musical alchemy was the 17-year-old Sean that I decided that, while I had only a smattering of desire to someday partake in being on stage, I wanted to be a part of it by way of wanting the sound to befit the grandiosity of the performance. In the midst of my love affair with all musical things heavy, dark, and metallic, I went to school for audio engineering to learn how to polish the monolithic shows that had so enraptured me.

<<>>

Fast forward ten years.

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Needless to say, sound engineering and manipulation gained me an appreciation for music and performance that I had never before been open to. Interning at recording studios and running live sound squashed every cultural attachment I had to the correlation of my personal identity and the genres of music I listened to. Riding my bike around the playa of Black Rock City, as one example, caught me loving punk and metal again, and by night partner blues fusion dancing to Random Rab, or Kyrstyn Pixton.

What confuses me now is that when I attend shows by electronic musicians in Portland, the audience demographic transmogrifies into a beer-drinking, bearded man who does not move his body under any circumstances whatever. At a downtempo set on the playa, it is guaranteed that most people dance. The same set at a club in Portland will see a dance floor of still humans with pints in one hand, the other hand in a pocket. Talking amongst themselves.

This sounds like judgment; in truth it is curiosity laden with my annoyance with having not the space to dance, and wondering, who pays $14 to stand there and stare at a plain-dressed kid hunched over his laptop? Because I do that at home, but the lights on my stereo are equally entertaining. 

Every concert and show I’ve attended and performed (which together number in hundreds) has taught me one succinct lesson: the energy on stage and the energy in the audience mirror one another. Presenting one’s music can be a performance (done internally, for the self), or a conversation for and with those whom support your art. If you want the audience to dance, say so. Into the mic, Say more than Thank You, Do You Want One More?

This is an open request to performers, particularly those who employ computers as their instruments: pay attention to your presentation, and to your audience. Music is but one element of the performance. I will enjoy the show so much more if I experience your soul interwoven with it. Set your computer higher; stand up straight. Keep a mic nearby. It is your responsibility as performer to source only 50% of the set’s energy –  the rest belongs to the crowd.

If you’re not feeling it, be assured that neither are we; and if we’re not, then for whom are you performing, and with whom are you conversing? 

Aural Pleasure

“…I’ve decembered eastern european cities, and found graffiti rainbows muraled on the walls of bombed-out buildings, and all they were building there were churches.”

Krivo’s worn, upright bass and I grooved in the same Mississippi River eddy; Zach’s banjo twang rolled over rhymes which had been stuck in my throat for ages. Jazz and hip hop etched their spray can beats across the enraptured faces of our audience. A one-bulbed chandelier swung in small circles above my head, and my ephemeral kingdom reached to the far edges of Zigzag’s living room. The reign continued for a few seconds longer; I bowed and smiled, stalling to soak up the attention, then made sure to disappear to the kitchen while they were still applauding.

A couple of weeks ago, we went to the Portland Poetry Slam at Backspace. Now, I’ve been involved in Slam Poetry off and on for the last decade or so in that wherever I’ve moved, I’ve made it a point to find the local slams, lose at least five in a row, then resign to only reading during the open mic segments, energetically rejecting Slam’s competitive nature. It didn’t occur to me until that night at Backspace, a hip venue in Portland’s Pearl District, that one day I would grow out of Slam altogether – not just performing on its sidelines, but doing my own thing exclusive from its young and angsty passionstance.

Memorization has been a subtle enemy of mine for ages. To evolve the battle one night, I lay on the couch and plucked images from the air, hallucinations and dreams. Somewhere in my body they translated themselves into words, and journeyed into my throat and flew off my tongue and back into the atmosphere from which they came. They sounded like a raft drifting down the Mississippi at night, a woman swishing her feet in the water, decorated in filigree. Like a peacock feather birthed from the corner of her eye, spirals and vines in bluegreen violets swirling.

At the Poetry Jam Aural Pleasure #6, ZigZag and Susan’s lovechild, performers and listeners merged professionalism with infantile grace. I was honored to be amongst you. That inspiration flowed through me and into the microphone. The audience and musicians wrote my second poem; thank you. I choose to interact with poetry right now with a freestyle stream. My knees shake less; heart beats harder.

It snows sawdust in heaven when I cut down poetry to meter and rhyme. Thank you Roberto Bolaño, Saul Williams, and the mercilessly-loyal-to-form poets who thickened my skin to a clammy, callused tattoo. I’ve found a relationship with words that pleases me. Sometimes, it pleases others also: their faces glow, and air stops in their throats. The tempo of the music rises and falls like yogi rib cages on windy ridges. I’m glad to be on stage in those moments, with a mirror to show the audience the beauty I see.

the beginning of all things to end

A viscous yellow dawn lit up the prairie desert. As far as we could see, pale grass and cacti were all that inhabited the earth. Occasionally a dirt road perpendicular to the highway scratched into the unknown. Out my window, north, as foreign to me as the recent past. The rising morning sun, nowhere to be found, warmed nothing. The Greyhound bus rolled at the same fifty five miles an hour it had since San Antonio.

Behind me near the toilet we weren’t supposed to use, three men who’d just been released from Leavenworth gambled candy bars and coins over a deck of cards featuring Playboy models from the 80s. I picked one up from the aisle. “I haven’t seen titties since 1994, son,” one of them said as I handed him the queen of hearts. He should’ve been wearing a shiny purple fedora and diamond studded glasses to match his gold teeth. I returned my headphones to their rightful places and turned up the volume on my discman.

Hey, I ain’t never coming home
Hey, I’ll just wander my own road
Hey, I can’t meet you here tomorrow
Say goodbye, don’t follow.

On Texas highways tears dry quickly. Keeping track of them has for me always been a useless trade. The afternoon before, I’d departed my father’s house. Another home, another family. My pace was quickening. Six months before my mother’d said, energetically, conform or leave. I left. A few weeks before the bus trip west, my father picked up the phone just as I said to a girl that Kansas was a pit of foolish racism and self-hatred, and that I was leaving as soon as possible. He took me to the bus station himself. I climbed into the air-conditioned coach, a final reprieve from the oppressive Midwest swelter. My father stood and cried where we’d hugged.

Many of the moments by which I’ve defined myself have looked like this. Sometimes they take place in airports, other times gas stations. Rarely a smoke filled Waffle House at three a.m. My favorites are bus stations and depots. Always with different people, most of whom I’ve loved. Chances are I love them still. For me there’s nothing like leaving, departing, moving on, embracing the Next, especially when it’s the unknown; a peaceful fear washes over me, and I am left with a sense of balance. Will I see this person again? Will I return? When? From where else will I go?

The feeling used to seem like an oxymoron. Fear does not at once seem peaceful at all – it seems wrenching and panicky, like cowardice. Something to regret. Since that Greyhound bus on the desert highway, I’ve done all I can to say goodbye without looking back. It seemed weak. I wanted to embrace the next step, and honor whom and what I’d just departed because inside I was gone, already giving my whole self, nervous knees and short breath, to the Unknown. From a perspective that says unabashedly and inconsiderately it only gets better from here, looking back for me is a counterproductive burden. If my presence is my greatest gift, then I have given all I can. Thank you for being a part of it. A part of me.

So, to Portland, home of my savasana winter; to the communities I’ve orbited; the playgrounds on which I’ve learned how to manage my energy; friends, tribe, and family, all of whom I love for your contributions to the world around you, for your willingness to do the work it takes to grow and go where necessary to make it to the next step, the unknown – thank you. I’m headed off for my circuitous adventure, another enamoured summer on the seas along Alaska’s broken coastlines. See you on the other side.

night time railyard jam

In times of abundant solitude, when I find myself in the right place, I remember that I vibrate a very specific frequency. Like any musical note, I can play in a group, key, or song, and the result can be anything a jam session or album can be – a ludicrous cacophony lubricated by and written with intoxicants, or a sweet melodious story told by a child sitting on the lap of his grandfather, who adds context when necessary.

And I can also ring alone, in a hum or whistle, with rhythm or without, and associate my sound with a place, mood, or feeling. My frequency can be found amongst the raucous metal of a train yard in the pre-dawn hours.

The monolithic ministers of power, thousands of gallons of diesel swishing in their bellies, move slowly down one track and up another with rumbling fortitude. Assembling a train can take hours of slow laborious movement. Railroaders call it Tying Up. Great metal hooks smash and latch together like fingers grasping just before losing grip. An air hose connects the engine – the power – to the Fred, a portable traffic light of sorts, that replaced the caboose as indicator of a train’s derrier.

The process is slow and done by tired men – there are precious few female railroad workers – fatigued by long and odd hours, and assembling occurs without any grace at all.

Stop n’ go is not like your kind Amtrak conductor, or the gentle European rides through Southern France; cargo trains bang and slam and squeal for lack of oil.

When dozens of cars in a line and need to be attached, engines push down the line to quieter cars. I picture my back to a wall, a Mack truck coming at my face at 60 mph. The result is a sequence of small, controlled explosions, milliseconds apart. Watching the phenomenon – a daily occurrence , by railer’s standard – excites me. Two hundred thousand pounds of box car, cylindrical tank and lumber frame jilt six inches to crash into its neighbor, disquieting it from meditative stillness. Inside the clang, my note rings through the steel, part of the railyard song. Our jam sessions nightly under the highway bridge, the river running north. Our giant horizontal domino set decorated in graffiti and rust prepares to travel, like birds on a wire waiting for a southerly.

time is running out

The weekend had offered more than we could handle: workshops on sacred sexuality; the New Warrior training with the ManKind project; the FisherPoets Gathering in Astoria; Fire Conclave practice; further recovery from the worst flu either of us had ever experienced. And I suppose I could have worked.

We’d been out of commission for two weeks, during which Heather took a road trip to California, and I shifted between the futon and the desk to edit my novel. The day after Heather returned, a dear friend stopped through Portland for a day, and work threatened our visit. I found him sitting in a Burger King on Hawthorne at ten at night, vagrants outside searching the trash cans for aluminum and cigarette butts. It wasn’t the first, or even the thousandth, place I’d expect to find Hargobind the Sikh yoga teacher who liked to discuss the intricacies of love and relationships over tea in the deserts of New Mexico. We all went for pizza instead.

Twenty four hours later, Heather and I sat in squeaky floor chairs in the old Masonic hall on 17th. A British woman rambled on about the secret sanctum (“do you know where that is, ladies?” she asked, giggling) and how it was impossible to reach Christhood if you’re not a priest or priestess. Occasionally her partner said something about embodying the masculine sexual expression, to which she rambled in response. Twenty minutes in, thirty-five of forty people were dozing off. I pretended to stretch and took a nap. Heather and I passed notes, which was okay because we sat in the back and weren’t bothering anyone. “Let’s go spin fire,” I wrote.

In the hallway dozens of photographs of prom queens decorated the walls. Names like Edna, Gertrude, and Esther matched the years in the captions: 1933, 1956, and through the ages. Sally smiled most recently, in 1994. Her teased blond hair glowed like 80s glam rock. The girls’ grandfathers’ photos adorned the opposite wall. I felt as if I was looking at a brick wall – rows of grumpy old white men in small glasses and corny suits hiding secrets in their kerchief pockets. I’m not sure they would approve of the candlelit woo-woo rambles in the other room. We left before the dead had their say in the matter.

From their we found the Watershed, an artist studio where some Fire Conclave people meet to trade spin tricks and show off their social awkwardness. The Conclave is a collective of jugglers, fire spinners (which includes staff, poi (think tennis balls on the end of a chain, one in each hand), hula hoops, bull whips, swords, and anything else you might want to set on fire and spin into shapes), and other circus arts performers who attenuate the flames at Burning Man, and make the world a beautiful place for acid trippers and children alike.

The next night, we’re sitting in Clemente’s, a restaurant in Astoria, Oregon, listening to FisherPoets read nostalgic passages of their seasons on the sea. Like the writers on the stages, we’ve got stories to tell, though we haven’t let thirty summers pass before we care to tell them. Though I’m ten feet away from the painted podium I can’t hear for shit; the sound man seems to have gone AWOL, and I check the PA system for syphilis. If only it was that good.

Later, a sexy fisherpoet named Tele (Norwegian for ‘tundra’), a Mat-Su valley girl who trolls out of Sitka, caught Heather’s eye, and we spent the next two hours tailing her words til she asked for our digits. Her musings on Home were as nomadic as mine, and after she read her essay I wondered what the hell I had to say anymore. Inspiration’s a bitch sometimes – she says ‘thanks for your attention, now go think something else.’ Like what? I need to find a day job, because this fishing thing is working out too well for me? I haven’t been doing it long enough to know anyone who’s drowned yet. (Though the skipper of the F/V Ark Angel was killed in a motorbike wreck in Thailand recently – does that count?)

I performed a piece for a poetry contest that ended the festival, and got a response from a 100+ person crowd any slam poet would likely cream his pants for. A twelve year old named Chloe took the contest, though, which might get her to take up poetry, or fishing. But I’m not sure how much money will be in either by the time she’s old enough to drink, a likely addiction of both professions. We took to the dance floor, then the road, and then bed, grooving to hip-hop beats and hopes that tomorrow we’d suddenly have more money in our pockets, more happiness in tow, and some resonance to flee with toward the fishing grounds.

Funny how we glide through experiences with the enthusiasm of travelers, adventurers, inventors, and our younger selves, asking the universe with sidelong glances how it could get any better than this before the madness slows, the highs and lows equalize, and we’re walking through the slurgi like companions of the day-to-day. With illnesses our bodies scream for attention – you’ve stressed me out, and now you’re gonna pay. Stare at the wall for a few days, slurp soup and eat vitamin C like candy, and I’ll think about letting you run through the hills, climb rocks, or see the sunset without seeing stars. Wait a minute. Your ambition is not as important as you think. Breathe in. Express. Breathe out again. Repeat.

And isn’t it funny how as soon as they let us loose again, were off for more adventures, impatient for experience. Connection, pizza, sex, fire, poetry. In two months I migrate to Alaska once again – for fishing, for writing, to bring in the abundance. The year is almost over, and it seems it’s just begun.

fly.music.fly

On forgiving days I remember musical instruments stacked near the front door waiting to be thrown away, and thinking I know he hates me but will he teach me how to drum, or how to pluck the bass strings wide as my pinky. Music beat me from the inside, pounded at my ribcage wanting out. It wasn’t so different from him, really, but I couldn’t see the bruises on my insides.

The man who lived with us acted in more than one way like an overgrown baby. He wore diapers and had a beard and played Doom on Windows 3.1. He liked guns and spanked me with a faded red ping pong paddle when I didn’t do what he said. On Saturday mornings, while my mom slept after her night shift, he made hot dogs with my little brother, and told stories about his motorcycling days. Travel stories leaden with broken headlights at night and semi-truck collisions and friends’ midnight roadside funerals.

I wasn’t allowed to get dressed until dusk because the bleach and ammonia he charged me with which to clean the floors might ruin them – and I didn’t want, he said, to make them as dirty as I was. So I sat on the floor with my ammonia rags, and wiped the same cookie-sheet-sized spot for hours. “That’s okay,” he said when my four-year-old brother pointed out that I wasn’t moving very much, “he’ll clean another spot tomorrow.”

In between my bleaching shifts – that is to say, in the ten minutes before bedtime – I trekked to the living room, and stared at the dormant instruments in the dining room. Because I was “dirty,” I wasn’t allowed in the dining room. Ever.

I didn’t care about his rules, but I did care about night time, when my mom was gone. I cared about the black leather belt he tied around my feet before pulled my pants off. He lifted me up by it with his big biker arm and made me yell out loud the Smacks up to ten, twenty six, or fifty one.

Sometimes I skipped numbers. I wanted to confuse him. I wanted to kick him in the face. I wanted to shoot him with the gun with which he shot his dog Buck right in front of me. He had asked if I wanted to dig the grave. My rebellion earned me darker bruises, higher numbers. My third grade teacher Mrs. Sap sometimes asked why I insisted on standing up during class. I told her that I just wanted to stretch my legs.

One time, when I thought he was sleeping, I walked into the dining room. A blue and gray audio mixer rested on the dinner table. I’d formed the faders into a tidal wave. Cables sprawled from it and went everywhere, like Medusa’s serpentine dreadlocks. Microphones attached to black stands whose arms stretched farther than mine reached out to inquire about what I had to say. No one had asked me for my voice before. The curious mics waited for me to speak. I put my lips to one, barely able to stand for the shaking in my knees. I whispered to see if it would reply. It didn’t. I tapped on it. “Is this thing on?”

And guitars. So many guitars. Hanging from the walls, leaned against each other, strings still. Waiting to be moved. Under the table, bolted into a giant black box were horizontal boxes that featured lights and numbers and knobs. Pretty lights and words I didn’t understand. Compressor. Noise Gate. Reverb. Unity. Phantom Power.

Phantom Power.

Bill Major’s baritone mumbles rumbled like an earthquake through the cardboard french doors of my mom’s master bedroom. The sound of his footsteps rattled the metal wires that gave the snare drum its snap. The snap that sounded like ping pong paddles and the screams of my nerves as the dwarves from my brain ran with fear and messages of danger down their escalators, my limbs, to my feet.

He must have noticed the tidal wave that I’d created. As my mom set our plates in front of us for dinner, he offered with a smile to teach me about the mixer. “Can I play bass too?” I asked, excitement seething. “Absolutely,” he said.

That night, I blacked out from the pain, and the scent of ammonia in my cleaning bucket burned my throat. I wished to God to never think about music again.

At my intake interview for Charter Psychiatric Hospital a few days later, I refused the chair. The interviewer offered me a stuffed panda bear if I would sit. My mom normally insisted obedience from me, but that time she didn’t push the subject. The therapist took notes.

—

A year later, my foster brother Brian first put on his new copy of Jar of Flies. I was nine. His CD player sat on top of the dresser we shared; he had the top four drawers, mine the bottom three. We shared a room because my foster (his adopted) parents couldn’t fit all their compassion under one roof and provide it privacy.

When he dropped to do his bedtime pushups, the little boombox rumbled bass through our neatly-folded clothes at night. I sat on my desk doing the homework I’d told the Powers That Were I finished hours ago.

By day, Brian taught karate and opened doors for girls. Every morning he made his bed militarytight and bounced a quarter off mine at my request. He sat at a desk to write and listened to Pearl Jam and Green Day. 19 and just learning to drive stick. Sometimes he let me shift. Feel the car, he’d tell me, you’re one with it. Undoubtedly something he’d heard that day from Don, our adopted/foster dad. Not that I cared.

When I wrote, I pushed the pencil into the paper so hard it crumbled onto the page. The graphite spear tore into the paper, my anger its momentum. At school I sharpened pencils as an excuse to not write. When I’d overused the sharpener, and Mrs. Mirabel handed me a pen instead, I inked pages like the tattoos I wanted on my skin. My nerve dwarves via their fast elevators brought rage and sadness and fear through me to my fingertips, and the pen translated them into my silent voice.

Alice in Chains faded into my consciousness about the time I’d stabbed enough holes in my homework that I had to start over. Brian did his pushups. I couldn’t move from the bed. I’d never heard a man cry like that stereo did. Harmonicas and violins and pain. I didn’t understand the words, but I felt their edges. On the cover of the EP, a boy’s eyes stared at me through a jar of flies. I thought it was a mirror, and I saw myself for the first time in a glow of orange and pink and dying insects. Now, in my late twenties, when I walk into record shops, I look for Jar of Flies to feel that sense of peace again.

In the way that teenagers swear that songs were written just for them, then transform radio hits into anthems of adolescent suffering, I listened to Alice in Chains at nine, ten, eleven years old, oblivious to their myriad references to heroin, and pounded my fists on my knees and stomach and chest to the rhythm of I stay away, no excuses, don’t follow, bleed the freak and grind your angry chair down in a hole. I tried to tell my music inside that I heard it, and how could I get it out? And if I could, would I?

The stacks of instruments lay comatose near the door for years. Some were given away, or sold. Music sounded to me a beautiful and foreign language spoken by people I would never love. When I tried to speak it, my mother ordered me to turn the volume down. Lower the noise. Lower your voice. You have no voice. I drew triangles from the circle of fifths, and turned sixteenth notes on their puny heads. I tapped my foot from 4/4 time into Idon’tgivea/fuck, and practiced scales until my calluses turned my fingertips into stoic statues incapable of feeling. When I finally failed at playing with others, I went to school to learn how to engineer audio. To manipulate it to my desires. I wanted to know how to listen to others, and which way to turn the knobs to mimic the music pounding inside their chests.

From music I learned that musicians were different from people who played instruments. From music I learned that I could not play the music of my dead best friend. I could write the discombobulated history of my family with one masochistic scratch of my pen across my wrist, but I could not erase the scars.

Instead I followed the outlines of my leftover bruises until they reached the sea. Voiceless and broken open, I stepped aboard a vessel in Alaska, started nourishing myself properly, and only when I’ve lost my direction do I look backward.

Music teases me. I play with the idea of working my way inside her again. We live in each others penumbras, know the other like old lovers, and keep our eyes keen for when the sunmelody sings new curves upon us, ears open and still ringing, for the last time will never be like the next, no matter how I misplace my memories. And as soon as I remind myself that I’ve moved on, that I’ve found new loves that meet me better, she’s there to reject me out of hand, like it was her idea all along.

It’s a game, and I swing on this idea that the rules are ever-changing, like the tide and guitar strings and the flies in my jar, who die and come alive and die again, as I wish to remember them.

OnStage: The Goblin Cellist Extraordinare

As the bluegrass cradled and rocked the living room for her friends, Sophia sat on her heels, building a fire behind the stage. The sparks escaped the fireplace and embers popped like drumbeats to the strings – silky violin lines, the high tension beauty of a fast mandolin and guitar, cellos and vocal cords singing similar frequencies. The sweet pine smoke wafted through the orange Moroccan-designed room, and we listened to Rushad the eccentric cellist sing about his mini-love in striped pants and gypsy hat. His microphones were our ears; the PA his fingers and throat.

Rushad Eggleston, the self-proclaimed Proprietor of Igwarfnees, introduced himself and thanked the Three Intergalactic Lesbian Wise Women for hosting the Lily Henley band and himself. Two of the 3ILWWs were my good friends Sophia and Kirsten, and though I wasn’t previously aware of their stellar status, Sophia – perhaps in jest (or perhaps not) – quipped that the title was “not entirely untrue.”

The super secret house concert was twenty-five people strong, including the five-piece band. We’d been lit up by three lamps, a few candles, laughter, and now a campfire in the brick hearth. A giant dreamcatcher hung from the ceiling in the middle of the living room. Sometimes Lily would sing through its strings, and, true to its nature, we heard only beauty from the other side. For the night, we resided for the evening in the world of Sneff, a farm in the sky whose animals are songs that escape instruments and throats sometimes by accident, and other times from envy. Sneff is Eggleston’s creation, his home on stage, where he speaks his own language, one that lacks clear meaning. He compares many of his lyrics, which sound very much like Lewis Carroll’s poem ‘Jabberwocky’, to musical notes: it’s not about the definition, he says, it’s about the sounds that the syllables make; that’s where the meaning is.

Eggleston, veteran cellist and co-founder of popular alt-bluegrass outfit Crooked Still – and these days his new band Tornado Rider – is on tour with Lily Henley and her band, a bluegrass-ish outfit made up of New Yorkers, Southerners, and herself, an international nomad.

Mid-show, he, who claims to be half-goblin, but looks more like Johnny Depp caught somewhere between Pirates of the Caribbean and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, staged a gargoyle-pose contest between band members to kick off a song about, well, gargoyles. His comical antics on stage seem to display his blatant, innocently vulgar genius on his instrument. At times he hopped on one foot, do the can-can, or hide behind a chair to emulate the monsters of Sneff, or the goat god Pan in his storybook songs – all while playing, and quite proficiently so, his cello, which was wrapped around his shoulder with a furry pink strap.

Though his eccentric nature might seem to keep him from the “beacons by which music is measured these days – Rolling Stone, Jimmy Kimmel Live, Coca Cola commercials, and that shit.”, Rushad has no problem with said beacons, or recognition for his talent. He was the first ever string player to be offered a full-scholarship to Boston’s Berklee College of Music. In 2002, while still in school and playing with the Fiddlers 4, he was nominated for a Grammy. Recently, when Mazda wanted to commission two cellists for the commercial revealing of the new Mazda6, they found none other than the Tornado Rider himself.

Despite contagious reassurance from the public, Eggleston is transparent around his “facade” of confidence. “I’m kind of a self-deprecating guy,” he said on stage, idly playing. “Sometimes I hate myself, so if I call myself a fuck-up at any point, you could let me know, so I can stop.” And we did.

Watching him play reminded me of the semi-trance people enter when they truly listen – with all their senses – to music. When I looked around the room and witnessed the audience in varying states of bliss, the Intergalactic Wise Women included, I realized once again that music, for many, is a foreign language. We can listen to notes and syllables that at once seem to make no sense at all, like Eggleston’s lyrics, but only once we stop trying to make sense of it can we allow the notes to unfold into phrases and songs, the words into paragraphs and stories, and extract what meanings we will.

As the night quieted and tired bohemians trickled from the house awash with songs written in airplane lavatories, heavy discussions about breakups with young chilren in the backseat, or rolling down the hills of Big Sur, the band took compliments humbly and with gratitude. They sat on the floor for a late-night jam session with smiles and laughter. Said Lily, the angel-voice herself, says touring with Rushad is a blast. “It’s always like this. We go bowling, take nothing seriously, eat tasty food, and get up when we want. I love it.” The violin and mandolins accompany Rushad’s percussive cello melody with cricket sounds, and left us with what was left of the night: ice cream, and a 2 a.m. run to Voodoo Doughnuts.

Music should always be like this.