You could start out drinking in a trucker bar on West Anaheim Street in Long Beach, end up closing a bar in Bakersfield and still find yourself driving back into downtown LA with an hour to spare before dawn…
What to do with your time?
About this version: I’d been meaning to drag my laptop and a mic over to my buddy Kurt’s house for a long time and something like this version of this song would have been a good candidate for a bongo part by the intuitive and adaptive percussionist.
My own sub-beach party overdub on the recording below can only hint at what might have been if I’d just got my ass in gear…
I drive around all night
looking for nothing to do
I play guitar til dawn
but every song’s about you
if I sleep I might dream
and we all know that dreams don’t come true
Ain’t nothin wrong with me baby I just got the blues Ain’t…
walked along the shore
wondering what a smart guy would do
in the Idiot’s Guide to Love
I must be listed in the back under “fool”
sure once I had some answers
now I’d settle for some lies that sound true
Ain’t nothin wrong with me baby I just got the blues Ain’t…
It’s easy for you sugar but then
everything’s easy for you
You know what you want
and you know how to make it come true
But, it’s hard for me, doll, to
bid all that we had adieu
Ain’t nothin wrong with me baby I just got the blues Ain’t nothin wrong with me baby I just got the blues
I suppose you ought to know you’re in trouble when you realize you consider your daily dive into the soothing depths of the bottle to be somehow heroic.
But the truth is that I was not just a willful and enthusiastic drunk, I didn’t just romanticize drunken nescience — I exulted it as somehow emblematic of man’s struggle with his own weaker nature.
In those days — and for a long time after — I viewed my drinking as a badge of honor, like a wounded survivor proud of his crutch.
So, where you might see the protagonist of this song as, oh, say, for arguments sake, a pathetic loser, when I was writing it, I saw the guy as a tragic hero, battered and wounded, yet rising (through the haze of a thousand hangovers stretched end to end) to face the sysiphean ordeal of daily life…
He could give up.
But, somehow, he reaches deep inside himself to find that last bit of courage, reaches for his medicine, and goes on to face another day.
My pals have been shuffling off this mortal coil faster than I can recover my equilibrium, here.
I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised, Ben had been in the hospital a month or two ago with congestive heart failure. Still, though there’s not much about congestive heart failure that sounds like a walk in the park, it seemed like things were coming back together.
It looked like he’d even be going back to the work he loved: animation. He’d talked to Nickelodeon and it looked like they would be hiring him for a new project.
But it wasn’t to be.
Still, thing were looking up. He slipped into unconsciousness at his home and passed away not long after.
You almost read about this in the evening news instead of in this blog. This happened just about two hours ago…
When the cocked .45* came out from behind the cop’s leg, honest to God, I found myself thinking — in that slow-mo way — Damn, I know busking is illegal but I’m just sitting out here in my favorite sidewalk cafe, plunking on my guitar like I have hundreds of times, talking to a pal, drinking some coffee…
But when he brought the gun up the bead was on my friend.
“Take your hands out of your pockets very slowly,” he said, the .45 looking surprisingly big like they always do when you’re on the wrong end of one. (Hell, they look big from any angle, to me. But compared to the nines most of the cops around here have carried for years, this thing looked like a WWI Howitzer.
My friend slowly realized the cop was talking to him. He got this funny little smile on his face and, very, very slowly drew his hands out of the front pocket of his hoodie, which had its hood up over his head.
“Put your hands on top of your head very slowly — don’t make any sudden moves.”
I quickly figured that if I didn’t get hit by a through and through, I’d at the very least be wearing my friend. It didn’t seem like a happy way to close out the week.
My mind flashed back about ten minutes to ordering my coffee. The barista at the counter had taken a phone call as I put my two bucks across the counter, looked concerned, then got a big grin and said, “Oh, no. Don’t worry about that — he’s a customer. He’s a sheriff’s deputy and he just got off duty… really, everything’s OK.”
He clicked off the phone, laughing. “The burger joint across the street saw a guy with a gun outside — but it was a buddy of mine, a deputy just off some assignment and he was in some kind of plain clothes thing with a gun strapped on. He took off a few minutes ago.”
Having had a few guns pointed at me before (including a cocked .38 held right upside my head by another Long Beach officer back around ’79 — that was a traffic stop that netted me a $35 ticket) I had gone into physical slow motion as soon as I saw the gun — thinking in an oddly abstract way, Gee, I wonder why he’s got that thing cocked? — even though, oddly enough, it didn’t strike me as funny it was out of the holster.
[*UPDATE:I’ve been reminded that .45 automatics are typically carried cocked with the safety locked, so the fact that this weapon was cocked was actually not surprising but if the safety was dropped as well, then it was ready to go.]
Just about as I was going to very slowly start explaining what I imagined had happened, one of the baristas came out (no uniforms at this place but I think he was wearing an apron) and said, “Wait, everything’s okay. It was a sheriff’s deputy who was here a few minutes ago and the guys across the street didn’t know he was a cop. Really, these guys are regulars, they’re OK.”
The gun lowered,and he holstered it and grabbed his mobile, walked around the side of the building for a minute or two and came back. He hadn’t said anything to us but my pal lowered his hands after the cop went around the corner.
My friend — a guy who really has seen, if not everything, at least most of it, never broke a sweat.
As the cop came back around the building, he put his hands back up on top of his head and, with just a hint of sarcasm said, “Do you want me to leave my hands on top of my head?”
The cop, a guy much, much younger than either of us, looked faintly annoyed but was muttering about the “damn deputies” and something about their gang clothes and how the Sheriff starts them all out as COs in the (wildly overcrowded LA county jail) and they all come out from that duty thinking they’re gangsters.
“I really apologize, sir. Apparently a motorist saw the deputy with a gun and called it in. I wish those guys would…” and I didn’t really catch the rest, I don’t think it was meant to be heard.
My friend smiled and said, “No problems. Don’t sweat it.”
