Perhaps the worst thing about all this is the idea that our big beautiful Buick that had explored trackless wilderness, plunged through rivers, and maneuvered effortlessly through Chicago traffic was done in by that little fuck of a box on wheels, a Toyota Scion. A Scion. I can pick up a Scion with one hand. You can blow on them and they flip over. And yet one destroyed my car, a car that had never broken down, ever. Oh, ignominious Death.
Author Archives: Brick Wahl
Knee
(2008, I think.)
Crutches…I swear I spend so much time on those things. I am as beat up as athlete….I did a lot of physically strenuous work when at US Borax for a decade, I was the big strong guy lugging and lifting and carrying (and the chicks there loved it….sigh….)….but man does that ruin the body later. All the veteran heavy lifters warned me, they were all crippled and I would be too. They were so right. Especially as I have always had a defective knee–part of the package deal that included epilepsy, malformed knee, general lopsidedness. I never realized they were all connected till I saw the results of my epilepsy diagnostic exam and it discussed that stuff. One fucked up hox gene will affect various things.
I thrashed that left knee dozens of time and never ever took care of it. It would come apart under me and I’d crash to the floor in excruciating pain, I mean it’s a blinding, breathtaking pain, you can’t do anything but writhe. But it would subside fairly quickly, so I would just wait a couple minutes till the pain became tolerable enough to stand again, and then go on about my business. Which was the worst possible thing to do. Eventually they had to do arthroscopic reconstruction (I was out in the clubs on crutches almost immediately….) which worked well for a long time but arthritis set in. Last time they opened it up the doctor told me it was 90-95% destroyed already (I’d had no idea) but since then I had gotten it to the point where it was getting me up the stairs easily enough and I could walk plenty, but it feels fucked up now. This was a bad fall (a severe twist, actually, ouch) and I probably ruined it for good (I didn’t). We’ll see….but my guess is knee replacement inside a year. (Nope.) We’ll see if I can get it back in shape enough to be functional first (which I did).
You know, I’ve never paid much attention to pain. I always forget to take painkillers. Don’t like anything stronger than Tylenol or Excedrin, and even those I avoid. But maybe that’s wrong. I ought to start paying attention.
Not sure when I wrote all that, but I was obviously hurting. When I whine like that it usually means I’m in a lot of pain…. I found out later that a seizure drug I had been on for years had exacerbated the arthritis and pretty much dissolved the knee. I mentioned that to the knee surgeon. He shrugged. Que sera sera, he said. Which is as good a philosophy as any.
A drunk lady
(2010)
A drunk lady in a jazz bar thought I was the bass player last night. She loved the way I played bass. Asked if I was doing another set. I said no. Then the music’s over? I said no again. Then they’re playing without you? I said yeah. Why? I was fired. Oh, she said, I’m sorry. I said I’ll be OK. Later, half way through the next set, I get a tap on the shoulder. It’s her. Hey! You’re not the bass player! I said I know. She blinked and wobbled, thinking. Then she figured it out. You’re you, she said. I said I was. She smiled. That’s good, she said. I thanked her. She was about to say something else when she fell off the barstool. I helped her up and slipped out the door.
Elvis sideburns
I was born with a head of jet black hair. Had the Elvis sideburns as well. That was 1957, in Long Branch, New Jersey, and all my uncle’s rock’n’roll hoodlum friends came round in leather jackets, baby oiled my hair into a tiny pompadour and sang Hound Dog. Then they went out and ruined civilization with their devil music. I haven’t been the same since.
My first baby picture.
Dress to impress
Just out on the westside. Lotta white people over there. Even the Mexicans speak English, and when they speak Spanish they leave spaces between the words. We stopped at the beloved Santa Monica-adjacent Norms. The usual assortment of customers. The protagonist of the novel was based upon a real Los Angeles murderer shouted a weirdo a couple tables over. I ordered salsa with my omelet. It was watery and about as hot as a maraschino cherry. So I poured Tapatio all over everything. The people around me stared like I was some kind of dangerous masochist. Maybe I was that real Los Angeles murderer. Then a drop dead gorgeous blonde walked by. And another. And a third. Wow. They come in batches over here.
We wandered about getting back, looping one way across town, then the other. Driving just for the hell of it. At Sunset and Vermont there was a Transsexual Liberation rally. Hey hey, ho, ho the guy screamed through the bullhorn, something something has got to go. He screamed it over and over through the traffic din. Around him stumped a couple dozen protesters waving signs. Transsexual Rights Now, etc. None appeared to be transsexuals. They just looked like regular frumpy people, computer nerds, couch potatoes. Either they have gotten remarkably realistic with the surgery, or none of them were transsexuals. A blazer or two wouldn’t have hurt any. It’s certainly a good cause. They just need a little fashion sense. Dress to impress, even at a protest rally.
On the road
(Good lord….this is an abandoned draft for a piece I later posted called Mix Tapes. It began as an essay about cassettes. Then apparently I was possessed by Jack Kerouac. Strange, in that I was never a fan. But here I am in the imaginary travelogue of a Good Sam Club beatnik. Apparently at some point I reread this, blanched, and then fearing for my sanity I lopped off these paragraphs. Fun idea, though, you have to admit.)
Part of the problem is that it’s virtually impossible to actually play my old mix tapes anywhere. I still have my ridiculously fancy double cassette deck I bought cheap in the technology’s final throes. It has all these sad features that attempted to match CDs. You can program a cassette and it will play the tunes in any order you want. One tune will end with a loud click, then the machine will whir, click, whir again, click again, and another tune will come out. All these tunes off a cassette played in random sequence. Both sides. Side A track three followed by side B track seven followed by side A track one. Whatever. It seemed so sad and pointless. Like making a really nifty adding machine to compete with calculators or a glow in the dark slide ruler to compete with personal computers. Yet I consider it a tragedy that cars no longer have built in cassette players. Best was a cassette/CD player. Ideal would be cassette/CD/mp3 player. Of course now cars come with a built in computer. So you have CD/mp3 player/infinite variety of web-based music. Which is when you crash the car. So you hire a chauffeur.
Maybe a motor home would be better. You could have live music in a motor home. Can you imagine anything cooler? Hauling ass across the Mojave at three in the morning, the craziest shit happening right behind you. That long sleepy night time stretch between Baker and State Line, all the scenery, the long dead volcanoes to the south, the vast beds of ancient lakes, the desiccated mountains all utterly gone in the darkness, and you’d be ensconced in that driver’s seat, drinking coffee but thinking of whiskey and behind you some handpicked players playing a long, long set, hundreds of miles worth of jazz. Inner Urge? They’d tear into it. The Bridge? Like you’d never heard it. Giant Steps? Need you ask? Then next stop 88 miles and they break into East Broadway Run Down and you’re barreling past all those goddamn trucks. You’re flying. Like this is the most righteous motor home ever. It’s maxed out, tricked out, pumped up, and fully stocked. There’s a bar, a bartender even, and it’s like a 747 lounge but way cooler. I read about a party Jackie Gleason threw on a train from New York City to Los Angeles. A solid week of a rolling righteous jazz party. The partiers got off that train and they died right there in Union Station of shock at the sight of so many sober people. They hadn’t seen somebody uncrocked who wasn’t in a Pullman uniform since Albany. (The city, obviously, not Joe.) Well I’d throw a motor home party and zig zag across the states with live jazz and beautiful scenery and local eateries and picnics full of leftovers and produce from farmer’s roadside produce stands. Stop late at night, sit round a fire and talk and talk. Drinks, marshmallows, the sweet smell of reefer coming from somewhere. Low volume chatter, people are sleeping. Early next morning we’d relaunch with a scatter of gravel and an open road. Put something into the cassette/cd/mp3 player. Something easy to start with. And more coffee. There’d still be a little pink in the eastern sky. No fixed direction, no plan, no nothing. Just moving and looking and breathing all that air. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere the band would start, just jamming on a blues. A long lazy trumpet solo. A river off in the distance. Mountains ahead. A fork in the road. Someone flip a coin. Left or right. East, west, north, south. Whatever. Doesn’t matter. Just keep moving and jamming and living a crazy, beautiful life. Of course there’s the money thing, the reality thing. But if I were a Herb Alpert, say, this is what I would do.
Man, this story got a little off track back there. We were talking about cassettes. Blogging is like a too long saxophone solo, or an acid trip. Or a crazy guy on a bus, talking and talking. But I really have thought these thoughts out there on the road. Alas I have to work like everyone else. All the stories I could be living, but can’t afford to, so I make them up. Reality has never been my strong suit.
Hospital
(Just found this, from 2013)
Thanks to all for the get wells to me, tho’ I was just a big guy with a little cold. Nothing special. As was hers at first, even less so. The pneumonia popped up after she seemed almost perfectly fine again. Kinda snuck in there. She’s responding well to antibiotics, her vitals are back to normal, fever gone, feisty, funny, insulting. There was talk of her being released tomorrow tho’ I suspect she’ll be there till Monday (they kept her there an extra night and she was home on Tuesday). Such a room they got her today….big and spacious, comfortable bed and a beautiful view down Sunset Blvd. Dusk was gorgeous. I was tempted to pull the lever that converts the guest easy chair (seriously, it’s a compact, little easy chair) into a bed. A hospital with a convertible easy chair. Only thing missing was a wet bar.
Spent most Sunday back at Kaiser just hanging with Fyl who’s just about fully recovered. Coming home tomorrow (it was the day after tomorrow, actually). Her room was comfortable and the National Geographic Channel was showing hours and hours of the new Cosmos series. It was one of those oddly comforting experiences you can have in a quiet part of a hospital, you’re sealed off from everyday reality, they bring in food and the occasional medication and take the occasional vital sign. She’s virtually mended and was bored as you can be when you feel near well in a hospital bed, but episode after episode of Cosmos was pure escapist mindfuckery and I was sad to see it end. The only real distraction was a stunning sunset that bathed the room in pinkish light. Nice.
Nostalgia
I am sick to death of nostalgia. I think people should do something new until they die. Unless, of course, you’re getting some nice money to put on a show for the old folks and their impressionable children. But otherwise, people, the past is over. Gone. Like we’ll all be eventually, so I don’t see the point of repeating our twenties over and over until the arthritis kicks in.
Second Best
I remember years ago I used to hustle poems to enter contests. I was broke, I needed the money. One time I got a hundred dollar check and some tacky certificate that I’d won second prize. The first prize was a thousand dollars. The collection–it came with the check–was appalling, the third prize and runner ups were pure dreck. I remember wondering who the bum was that got my thousand dollars, so I read his poem. It was easily ten times as good as mine. There were two hundred bad poets in the book, then me and one guy way better than me. I hated that guy. If not for him that thousand dollars would have been mine. The book and certificate went into the trash can, though I cashed the check.
Fortunately there was no internet back then, and no blogs, and my F-bombs were in longhand on a pad of paper now tucked deep in my closet somewhere.
All is fair
(2013)
I remember when you guys met. Pretty steamy romance going on there!! I love you both.
Yeah that was 34 years ago next month–1979. I remember we hooked up at the FUBAR in Goleta–it was a Robbie Krieger show and we were bored to tears–and went back to her pad, partied with her boyfriend–he had sake and hash–and then kicked him out. I didn’t realize it was his pad. But I was bigger. All is fair in lust and war….
He was a nice guy and I felt a little bad–well not that night, maybe, but later. He was hurt, left her an angry note and called her a facist. But I was bigger and could spell. So I won.
Fyl and me in 1982. It’s the earliest shot I can find online. Photo by Spike.
Brick Wahl 