There were perks to being a jazz columnist. Free records, no cover charges, and awesome seats at the Hollywood Bowl were nice. And having lovely women in tight sweaters say Hi! and smooshing their boobs against me in a bear hug as they planted big smooches on my cheek and/or lips was always sort of disconcertingly pleasant. I say disconcerting because I could never tell if I knew the ladies or not. You see I’m epileptic, and epilepsy comes and goes in severity, sometimes it’s mellow and other times it roars in like a violent summer storm. Thus my epilepsy flared up suddenly in 2006 and had severely impaired my facial recognition skills, indeed had done so literally overnight. In fact, it had done so so suddenly that I couldn’t recognize many people at first, even close friends and siblings, people I’d known for years and saw every day could look like complete strangers and those I did recognize immediately looked different. People who were acquaintances I couldn’t recognize at all. So you could come up and give me a big smile and squeezy hug and a big wet smooch and unless I knew you really well it was likely I wouldn’t have a clue who you were. Such things happened in the oddest places. I remember once in the lobby of the ABC building where I worked a leggy knockout in a miniskirt and skintight top yelled Hi Brick! and gave me a full body boob smooshing hug with the big smooch on the cheek in front of the big lunchtime crowd. I’d learned to not look surprised by then and we chatted for a minute. She was on her way to some meeting or broadcast or something, she said, and was late already, and as her frantic manager or agent or whoever finally got her into the elevator and the doors slid shut behind her and those long, lovely legs, I wondered who she was. I really had no idea, not the slightest. I mean, I’m sure I did know who she was, we’d obviously met, met long enough to rate a smoosh and a smooch, I just couldn’t recognize her. The people all around me in that ABC lobby who’d seen that smoosh had no idea who I was either. Just somebody, obviously. Nobodies never got full body boob smooshing hugs with big smooches, not from leggy miniskirted dolls to die for. Only the somebodies got those. So all the nobodies in the lobby pretended not to wonder who I was, as one does, and I pretended such smooshes and smooches were a normal thing, just part of whatever job it was I must be doing. That’s show biz. Once packed safely into the elevator for the ride up to my floor I figured the incident was already forgotten. As we ascended an attractive woman next to me whom I didn’t know looked at me and grinned, pulling a Kleenex from her purse. Now Brick, she said, that won’t do at all, and she reached up to wipe the cherry red lipstick from my cheek.

When the osteoarthritis kicks in hard for a few days and you hurt all over you can feel your life pass in every twinge. You remember all the things that fucked up this part of you and what wrecked another, sometimes you even remember the time you cracked that knuckle so hard on the edge of your ride cymbal or falling down the stairs or what fractured your spine one of the times you fractured your spine. You can remember all the the sixty pound boxes you lifted and tossed up onto your shoulders, thousands of them, all the furniture you helped girls move, all the movement that finished off your knee. You can feel where your flat foot stomped on a bass drum pedal every few seconds, like smacking a board with a hammer over and over and over. You can remember all the stairs you ran down two or three at a time hundreds of times. Your body becomes a big memory machine. Good memories. You even relish the hurt, because it brings back younger, stronger, fitter times, and how goddam much you dug doing all the things you’re paying for now, as you knew you would, the big old beat up geezers would warn you, don’t do what I did, as if you ever would do anything else, hell, you wouldn’t have changed a single thing. You do what you gotta do. You’re a big giant guy, you’re young, you’re strong as an ox and not much brighter sometimes, and you don’t worry about nothing. You’ll wind up a big giant crippled old motherfucker, but you lived the life.

Ouch.

I did the same thing with the brain, though, pushing it far beyond what the wiring could take, setting off seizure after seizure because, hell, that’s what writers do. That wasn’t a great idea, but there were no old epileptic writing geezers to say don’t do what I did, the ones that had done what they did were in institutions or hiding in bedrooms or medicated all to holy fuck and you never see those guys anyway. So I just pushed the limits. Paid for it. Still paying for it. Got some mighty pretty writing done, though, there’s that. And it’s never been dullsville. Weird maybe, but never dull. Ha.

That’s it.

Then the next day….

A lot of this thing was me having a ball writing rhythmically berserk sentences that any editor worth their Strunk and White would feel an overwhelming urge to correct, the high point of which was “You even relish the hurt, because it brings back younger, stronger, fitter times, and how goddam much you dug doing all the things you’re paying for now, as you knew you would, the big old beat up geezers would warn you, don’t do what I did, as if you ever would do anything else, hell, you wouldn’t have changed a single thing” which has all the grace and beauty of a drunk falling down the stairs. I was just letting that fucker roll, it kept tumbling, word after word, breaking all the rules and finally ending on a thing, one of my favorite words, though I couldn’t tell you why. That’s the fun way to write, just let the words roll out on their own, they’ll get somewhere eventually, and when they do just put a period down and hot damn, you got yourself a sentence. Also, I’d like to take credit for medicated all to holy fuck, but that’s actually Shakespeare.