House Party — Part II

Friday Fiction

“One, two, three, four, one, two, three… ” Snare triplet on four followed by a cymbal crash and the saxes (with short echo) on the one and the rest of the band on two and we’re off into the intro, I-IV-V, three times and then four bams! and the lyrics begin. Make sure that Eddie’s vocal is on top, while the B-3 Hammond Leslie speaker (slow rotation) pans between the mains. Kevin and Ricky have a nice guitar interplay going (exceptionally well tonight), this is going to be a good set. Now get set for the instrumental bridge, keep the organ just below the vocal, the four bams! again, with the alto sax going up an octave on the fourth one, add the organ through the rear speakers, and the bridge explodes. The four bams! signal a return to the verse, with the organ still in surround sound, the harmony voices with a little deeper echo, then the instruments stop and the voices are acapella. Killing the delay makes the vocals seem as if they move inside the listener’s head. The band (with delay) comes back in, and little a boost to the bottom end makes the dancers go nuts.

“Tommy… are you there?” asked Doug

Tommy snapped out of his reverie of a gig they had played forty years ago.

“Yeah, just a flashback.”

“LSD or otherwise?”

“Let’s Start Dancing, yeah I guess it would be otherwise… ”

“Not the Cross Lake gig?”

The gig where Ned dropped acid and the one. We had finally gotten to the point of some decent gigging with he summer holiday trifecta: Memorial Day, Fourth of July and Labor Day in a nice club in the lake district of central Minnesota. Most bands would have killed for that opportunity and the crowd had some real money, not like the scruffy hippies that showed up at the West Bank gigs. Ned managed to both drop LSD and get laid by one of the locals. Her regular boyfriend was out of town, so we were spared the job of bringing back his corpse. Kevin’s wife thought that with him being away she could get some action of her own going, something that would make him redirect his attention to her. It was a risky move on her part but she had wanted Kevin to quit the muic biz for a long time and her gambit worked; he was out the band by Halloween. A year later they moved out west and stayed there, making a life for their family. He wouldn’t be here tonight.

The rest of the band trickled in, exchanging greetings and horrible jokes. The set-up was easier than it used to be, nearly every piece of equipment was lighter than what was used forty years ago. Scott had brought two amps– “In case Bob Dylan shows up.” It was an old running gag in the band. The closest anyone in the band had got to Bob was when Dylan bought a sharkskin suit that Ricky had put in a consignment shop. “Bob Dylan wears my old clothes,” was Ricky’s mantra for a couple of days.

Ricky wouldn’t be here either, he had died in a motorcycle accident 20 years ago. There wasn’t a toxicology report, but Ricky’s living on the edge had been subsidized by a variety of illict substances. After that disaster, Tommy had sworn off taking any recreational drugs. Ricky’s son Gregg had made a moderately successful career as an Americana singer-songwriter and would be here tonight, Tommy hoped that Gregg would do a couple of his father’s signature tunes.

Ricky’s ex-wife (the mother of Gregg), Jaylene, walked in. To Tommy’s eye she seemed to be lost in thought, perhaps, like him, she was reliving some of the highs and lows of that earlier time.

Well, I knew this was going to be difficult. The band was why I got interested in Ricky in the first place. I had been seeing an intern, ‘Dick Wright’ if you can believe it. God’s gift to women, if you bought into his narcissism, and I had had just about enough of it when I discovered this scruffy band and shy the guitarist who played with his back to the audience most of the time. He was my Hank, I was his Audrey, we fought long and hard over almost everything, most of which I’ve forgiven or forgotten but some of it, like his escapade with his ‘French Whore’, still gets my goat. She even went up to Cross Lake with him while I had to work! She said she was she was a ‘writer’ doing a feature piece on the band. In French for a French magazine. An unlikely story. She ended up living on a ramshackle houseboat on the Mississippi River moored at the Bohemian Flats and ultimately died from AIDS. Still, for all his faults, Ricky was the most gorgeous man I ever knew. And our children were beautiful.

“Hey, Jaylene, how’s it going?” said Tommy, “Glad you could make it.”

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world, well maybe I would for a Bob Dylan concert.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” said Tommy, as he un-spooled a mike cable, “Scott hinted that we might have a surprise tonight.”

“The horns are finally going to be in tune?”

“I said a surprise, not a miracle.”

Jaylene smiled and went over to talk with Izzy. Tommy’s thought returned to those days when he worked with the band full time.

We didn’t know how little time we would have to put it all together. I remember turning down gigs, four days in a row because… why? Interfering with our quality drinking/doping time? Or the inane bickering in practice. But at least we did practice, which was more than some bands I worked with did. And it was something, even the endless jams were worthwhile, we were imprinting modes into our sub-consciousness, things that would come out later in inspired moments. But it was hard to get everyone on the same page. Or in the same book, or even the same library it seemed at times. And then it all fell apart, not that a casual fan would notice. We still got ovations every night, but it wasn’t the same.

House Party - Part III

My Life As a Feral Child

My childhood was not exactly what would be described as “structured.” Consequently, many happy hours were spent in idleness and depravity. I’ve prepared a map to give you a sense of the neighborhood, with a number key for particularly notable incidents.

1.  Magnuson’s grocery. Candy, pop, and baseball card gum. Belching contests on its stoop with my old pal Kevin.

2.  Phillip 66 gas station. Peeking in the bathroom windows, also with Kevin. They’d let us patch our bike tires there with a vulcanized patch kit that you would light with a match.

3.  Parking lot behind Lloyd's Diner where school buses were stored. Smoked my first cigarette underneath one of them with my childhood nemesis Frank J.

4.  Field full of trash. Endless opportunities for enjoyment.

5.  Site of my first mural- 4x20 feet, in crayon, on the stucco garage across the alley from my house. Remains my largest work to date.

6.  Place where the one legged man lived. His yard was full of weird slime balls growing up in the grass.

7. Johnson’s dog house. Strip poker, also with Kevin. ‘Nuff said.

8.  Jensen’s garage, where Kevin’s dad Jake kept his Gluek beer.

9.  Hanson’s. I cut myself on a razor blade there, I had to see if it was really sharp. It was.

10. Home Sweet Home. Site of numerous whippings and many instances of mental abuse. Sandbox in the backyard was a favored meeting place for all the neighborhood cats.

11. Next door. Some kids from Pennsylvania lived there for a while. They talked funny.

12. Mrs. Gustafson’s house. She was retired and lived alone, although an old man would show up once in a while. “The old fool” is how she described him on our party line.

13. The new house. When it was under construction, I nearly put out a kids eye with a well aimed rock when we were playing “war” around the excavation. When the house was being built, we'd pee and poop inside. Broke my arm here as well. After the house was finished, a big kid moved in who won all my marbles.

14. Jeanie P. and I got married in her back yard when we were six. Movie footage exists!

15. The apartment house. Received my first BJ in the alley behind the garage.

16. The MacAuliff’s. Hank was in the Marines in WW1 and had a tattoo to prove it.

17. Home of Arlan the queer. (see #15)

18. Home of Frank J. and his older JD sister.

19. The field where Frank pulled down his little sister’s pants. There would always be a stash of porn hidden (probably Frank’s) in the trees there. Mrs. McAuliff would set the field on fire from time to time. The swamp was further west, where my older sister once made me sit on the big stump under a mushroom shelf.

20. The Big Field. It was usually full of unused storm sewer pipes (the big ones), more endless fun, especially with firecrackers.

21. To The Mississippi Courts and The River and Green Lake. Where the mean kids lived.

We moved out in 1960, when I was 10, to a more “refined” area. I had to behave, the houses were only 8 feet apart there, with no fields or dumps—no places for kind of nonsense that we indulged in earlier.

Paradise Found and Lost?

               “There is no there there” ~ Gertrude Stein

Memories of past domiciles can, if one is prone to nostalgia, haunt. Every place I’ve ever lived previously is now completely altered: I really can’t go home again.

The first half of my life was spent living in four houses, at three locations in Minneapolis.
My early years were spent at 5122 North Third Street, in a tiny 2 bedroom house (built in the 1920s) that was part of a funky little neighborhood near the Mississippi River, the lot it was built on had been a livery stable at one time:



It was removed for the I-94 freeway in a process that took over 20(!) years. Ironically, where that house once stood never became part of the freeway, the greater part of it is taken up by a berm:



When I was ten, we moved to a much bigger 4 bedroom “Cape Cod” style house (5006 N. Emerson) that had been constructed in the post-war building boom on what had been a potato farm. It was architecturally nondescript, just like hundreds of others in the area:



It was taken out for a new housing “Greenway” project and has sat vacant for fifteen years already, although I have read that the project may be “started” very soon:



When I moved away from home I moved into a strange little building made of concrete blocks with a small kitchen (made of wood) tacked on (brown house on the left) and later moved next door to a Victorian duplex located on the fringe of the North Side industrial district:



This pair housed many of my friends over the span of twenty-odd (sometimes very odd) years. It too was scheduled for the I-94 highway but ended up being taken for “urban renewal” in a somewhat shady land grab and now hosts a bus garage:



I’m not one to cry over spilled milk; nothing lasts forever. The Highway carries tens of thousands of cars everyday; the bus company provides service for handicapped people throughout the metro. But the house on Emerson, the newest house, was torn down to build more houses of a similar size but cost much more. That the land has remained vacant (and lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax revenue over the years) in a time when affordable housing is at a premium does stick in my craw, however.

UPDATE: They have just started building on the old Emerson homestead:


R. Lewis

Down By The River

Friday Fiction

“So… can you tell me a story about a river?”

“About a river?”

“Yes, I’m curious. It’s as good a topic as any.”

“O.K. This is about the Mississippi, just down the street from where I grew up. We would swim in it.”

“Swimming… Was that allowed? Was that safe?”

“Hmm… Sort of. Not safe when the water was high, of course. In the late summer it was usually pretty low: three, four feet deep for miles north of the Camden bridge, nice and warm. We’d bounce along the bottom, always wearing our tennis shoes to protect against broken glass and clam shells. Don’t try to swim against the current. We’d heard stories about kids who had drowned there but, armored in our youthful sense of indestructibility, those warnings weren’t given much credence. Now if your taking about biological hazards, there was definitely E.Coli, Cryptosporidium, Shigella and other microbes, a real toxic soup. We knew not to drink the water. None of the guys got sick or anything other than a rash, as far as I know. Girls didn't swim there much.”

“Seldom or never?”

“The main reason was probably the fact we ‘river rats’ weren’t the most socially enlightened fellows. There were a lot of places girls didn’t go, its still true. There was one time, that I can recall.”

“Anyone you knew?’

“Oh yes, Melinda, she was a straight-A student, she was dating Robby, the handsomest guy in the school. Check that, I think see was ‘seeing’ Robby, he was too cheap to ever really take her out on a proper date.”

“He was that handsome? Really?”

“Really. You could look it up in my high school yearbook; Robbie, Hall of Fame: handsomest guy.”

“Ok. What’s the story?”

“It must have been late July or early August. It was a hot evening, probably about 8 o’clock, the sun was low enough in the sky to give the scene a golden hue. It was down by the river flats, 51st and Lyndale, there was sort of a permanent sand bar there—just a sliver—maybe 30 feet wide and a hundred, hundred twenty feet long, with some ancient cottonwood trees big enough to support a rope swing. Robbie and a few of his buddies were on this island, along with Melinda. They swam there often, I had been returning from the store when I saw them. To see a girl down there, swimming, that really got my attention. They were taking turns on the swing; it was fitted out with a plank to sit on. When it came to be Melinda’s turn Robbie gave her a shove as he grabbed to rope above her and deftly swung over her lap and made himself comfortable as they swung out over the water. Melinda was screaming—in glee—not in fright. I think she was having the time of her life. I watched these hijinks for a while, but left when it started to get dark.”

“This was when you were in high school?“

“It must have been between our junior and senior years. Before they split up.”

“What happened?”

“Robbie thought it would be a good idea to get a bj from Melinda’s best friend, Nancy, who, it turns out, wasn’t such a good friend after all.”

“That would do it, for most girls. What happened afterwards?”

“Robbie thought it was a joke, but he had plenty of other girlfriends. After graduation he went in the army and came back, married someone else, then spent his life working laboring jobs. He retired to a fishing cabin up North. Nancy moved out east, never came back.”

“And Melinda?”

“You know, I have a firm belief that if you look too far into any story you’ll always find a sad ending.”

“Tragic?”

“Nothing horrendous, but some might think it sad.”

“I’d like to hear it.”

“As you wish. The thing that makes all this sad is that Melinda never got over Robbie’s betrayal.”

“I’ll never fall in love again, huh? I only thought that happened in corny torch ballads.”

“She never dated, never married. She was frank about the situation, she told people at a class reunion that she’d never date, that she’d never get married. She kept her word. She worked as a successful investment broker for a while until she lost big in the dot-com bubble of 1999. Then she disappeared. End of story.”

“Hm. Not much of a payoff. The river part was nice, though.”

“That was nice, a special moment, glorious even, the high-point of Melinda’s life? At any rate, it’s been stuck in my memory for all these years. A Dreiser-esque story without the murder.”

“Mythic is a better word.”

Notable Northsiders - Charles C. Webber

When I was young, the nearest place to swim (other than the Mississippi River) was the public pool in Webber Park. The park, its pool, and the attached library were primarily financed by donations of Charles C. Webber and his wife Mary in remembrance of their only child, John, who died when he was ten years old. There was an oil painting of John Webber in the library; I had heard that he had drowned while swimming in the river. That may have been just a story warning us kids (the river was dangerous, but the bravest of us would swim there anyways), but we still enjoyed the pool as well.

The pool, as humble in real life as it appears in the photo below, was a place of mystery- when it first opened (in 1910) girls and boys had separate swim times and the pool itself was surrounded by a high wall to keep out curious eyes. There were separate changing areas; the girls' had booths for privacy, while the boys changed on benches in the open air. In the showers there always seemed to be a hairy old man, soapy and naked and giving the little boys the eye. Most of the guys would quickly shower with their suits on, not the most hygienic of practices, but no one wanted to be thought of as a "homo."


Swimming lessons always started in early June at 9 in the morning when the air was cool and the water icy. The pool was surfaced with a gritty stucco, any scraping on the side or bottom would cause a bleeding rash. There was a diving pool at one end, I never learned to swim well enough to use it. I was probably fourteen or fifteen when last I used the pool, it was for little kids, I thought, although I still couldn't swim well enough to use the diving pool. There were some teenage girls there wearing bikinis, so it still held some appeal. The pool and library have been replaced, but Webber's name lives on. No one ever gave our neighborhood a gift as great.




Webber Pool, 1925. Image: MHS

The Best Day

When my boys were young we took a trip to Dayton’s Bluff, a natural geological feature that overlooks the Mississippi River near downtown Saint Paul, Minnesota. The bluffs were well known, even before the white man, as there are numerous Indian burial mounds on the plateau above the bluffs. There was large cave there that used by the Native Americans for gatherings and ceremonies. The explorer Jonathan Carver “discovered” and named it in 1766. In the nineteen-twenties bootleggers used the cave to store their goods. In recent times, most of the cave has been destroyed to make room for a railroad, but the bluffs were still dangerous,  midnight drinking parties by reckless youths could prove fatal, you could fall or suffocate in the cave. It was into this locus I brought my pre-teen sons. Child endangerment? Perhaps. We had a good talk beforehand about the dangers this place possessed and they were duly impressed. We had a good time clambering up and down the cliffs.

We lived on a sand plain, so any elevation was a novelty to the boys, and the bluffs supplied that. There were plenty of places to climb, and the soft sandstone was festooned with carvings:

Chuck, the youngest, was enthralled:

For Seth, the oldest, this was the start of a long fascination of climbing. He later became adept at mountaineering and parlayed his skill into many trips to the North Shore, the Rocky Mountains, New Zealand and Antarctica:

As I look at these images I wonder what kind of parent I've been. I managed not to have killed them but I did put them in harms way that day. But kids have to be exposed to the natural world sometime, even if it can be dangerous it has to be better than just living a life of computer games and TV.

It was the best day ever.

Yes Nukes

Life on the Mississippi- Part Two


We tried our luck at fishin', but we saw more fission:


That's the big nuclear power plant, near Monticello Minnesota. We stopped on a sandy beach across from the reactor building. We didn't catch "Blinky", the three-eyed fish from The Simpsons, but Homer and Lenny were there- out on a donut break and giving us the old stink-eye:


Even bigger than the nuke was the coal burning power plant:



Pick your poison.

Ambivalence

For some, sailing is a way of life. Make that life itself. Not for me. Stuck on a boat with no way off. I've been that fix a few times, with my sister and brother-in-law. A very nice 30 foot sailboat, with sleeping for four (or six, if you don't mind the sky for a roof), a galley and a head. We sailed Lake Pepin, a large and wide stretch of the Mississippi river, between Wisconsin and Minnesota, about 60 miles south-east of the Twin Cities.

After getting prepared for our voyage, we motored out of the Marina, past the quay, and then set our sails, wherever the four winds would take us. Out in the lake. I explored the boat, aft and stern. Water all about. Took sailing lessons. Water all about. Dodged swinging booms and swirling , hissing ropes. No way off, water all about. Went below, tried to take a nap. Claustrophobic cabin all about. Got up. Drank some beer. Ate some sandwiches. Water was all about with no way out. Suffered sun and wind burn. Allergies acted up. No where to go for relief. Tried to read. Still in the same place, stuck in a boat with no way off. Other boats went by, we had to "race" them. Still stuck in the boat. The wind died. REALLY STUCK IN A BOAT WITH NO WAY OFF!

Hours later, we limped back to the marina. Docked the boat. Went ashore. Met some interesting people. Went to a delightful restaurant and had wonderful food in pleasant surroundings. Strolled about town, took some pictures, watched the sun set over the water.

I enjoy being in a canoe. You can paddle here or there, you usually can get out along the shore, explore things, take a leak, go back and paddle some more. A small fishing boat is fun too- and you can catch your lunch! But not a big boat, with little to do, water all around and no way out.

I went sailing with them a few more times. One time the wind was blowing pretty good ("a freshet") and the boat was about six inches away from capsizing. I was sure I would be a headline in tomorrow's paper- "P. Batty drowns while boating". Fun for some, not for all.

Ambivalence was the name of the boat.

A Short History Of Water

An excellent post by one of my Icelandic "correspondents" triggered a flood of thoughts about that substance that is literally the wellspring of life. Vin vitæ, the universal solvent, H20, or just plain water.
I grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a town built by and nourished from, the Mississippi River- the central aqueous artery for most of the central United States. I spent time on it, in it, and was filled with it- almost all the water I drank for the first 35 years of my life was taken from it. Not the best water, to be sure, but not the worst. When I moved from there, I began consuming well water, from a huge aquifer underneath the glacially deposited sand left over from the draining of Lake Agassiz. This is pretty good water, albeit somewhat hard. Two years ago, when I returned to Iceland for a short stay, I was drinking the best water in the world, and in what has to be paradise for a hydrophillic, was allowed to swim in it.

In the drugstore near where I work, I noticed that "Iceland Springs" bottled water is now available. So now, when I need a quality "water fix", I can have it. Crazy world, isn't it? Then again, perhaps not, after all what is the most important thing (after air) that an organism requires? Why not the best?

A Real Fun Guy

Life on the Mississippi - part 3


There's nothing quite like paddling down an unexplored backwater...


Modeling the latest in outdoor wear, P. Batty displays his svelte figure with a diaphanous set of anti-mosquito togs, frosted vinyl and camo green nylon mesh...


The local fungi puts on its own style show with this brilliant yellow frock...

Graffiti Bridge

Life on the Mississippi, part 5


The taggers' handiwork under the bridge lets you know that you are back in civilization.


The Love Boat- three horsepower version.



And like all trips, this one has reached its end.

Trailers

Life on the Mississippi, part 4



Different strokes for different folks.