Category Archives: microprose

All the way up… I was lookin’ back

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25 Guitars

Everybody there used to be somebody once…

Everyone had a story. Some had been factory workers laid off from a string of jobs. A couple had been suits, grinding away in corporate offices. There was an accountant. He liked to joke that he’d help the others with their taxes for a swig of Mad Dog 20/20.

For a while, there was even a doctor, a foreign guy who’d been caught overprescribing. Word was he’d overpribed half the inland empire and, when he lost his license and his world came down around him, warrants out for his arrest, the doc had run away, eventually spending all his cash and ending up under the wide overpass, on the railroad right-of-way… not more than a quarter mile from the harbor. With the rest of the nobodies who used to be somebody.

When people asked the lanky, long-haired guy with the cloudy blue eyes for his story, he kept it simple:

“One day… I just fell.”

That was it. All you could get out of him. He kept to himself and slept somewhere else, only coming into the encampment to trade and occasionally score something to take the edge off. Folks said he drank — but he drank alone. Someone said he often sat by the bluffs along the beach, a pony bottle in an inside pocket of his worn, gray parka.

One day some college kids came down into the camp.

“We heard about this guy, here. He used to be a rock star.” They said a name and a younger guy with half his teeth missing, taping a battered baby stroller back together with duct tape said, “Yeah, I heard of him.”

The college kids passed around a photo. It was one of those head and shoulder shots with the top of a guitar showing and a rough and chipped brick wall in the background.

“Oh, yeah. That guy. He comes around here maybe once or twice a week. He’s kind of a loner. So… what? He was a big rock star? When?”

When? A long, long time ago, indeed. A million miles and ten thousand years ago.

A condo, a fiance, a fancy car, an agent, a dog, and 25 guitars ago…


25 Guitars

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Tuesday, December 06, 2005

lyrics
25 Guitars

Go back home and
tell all the kids
this is what it’s like
when their hero hits the skids

go out to the farm and
tell my ma and pa
the higher you climb
the farther you must fall

I started out thinking
that I’d always know the score
now I hardly know
what I was counting for

I lost my one true love
my agent and my car
my condo and my dog
and twenty five guitars

but baby I was lost before
I ever got to town
I threw the map away
the day I let you down

yeah I hit the big time
but the big time it hits back
and all the way up
I was looking back

Wake me up and say its all a dream
we could drink coffee and talk about what it all means
I dreamed I dreamed I threw it all away
If I could just wake up back in your arms today

I was on the fat side of heaven
how come it felt like hell
each day was a struggle
one day I just fell

The bottom dropped out
I laughed the whole way down
with a noose around yer neck
LA is a much nicer town

Wake me up and say its all a dream
we could drink coffee and talk about what it all means
I dreamed I dreamed I threw it all away
If I could just wake up back in your arms today

Go back home and tell all the kids
this is what it’s like when their hero hits the skids

(C)1997, 2007, TK Major

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Sometimes a Cigar…

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The Day My Cigar Went Out in the Rain

It was a rainy, March day in 1973 — a little like this rainy, March day.

My ex-GF was wrapped up in the ratty old full-length mink we’d bought for a few bucks at a Purple Hearts Veteran Thrift Store. When the sun started poking out from the gray clouds, she’d pulled her long, jet black hair out and now it was down, hanging across the damp and mottled fur… she couldn’t possibly have looked any cuter. As we walked the wet and puddled streets, we talked, our shoulders bumping together. I chewed a soggy, rum-soaked cigar that kept going out.

We’d been broken up for a while. She’d taken up with an old drinking buddy of mine, one of her teachers at the state university we both attended. Her new boyfriend had taken a teaching job in Germany and she was waiting to finish school (or something… damn, how fast it does all fade away) and in a few weeks, she too, would have packed up and moved to Germany.

It was the seventies, of course, and there was no such thing as a simple relationship in those days — at least not among the college hippies and disaffected bohos that formed our extended social set.

With our relationship officially over for many months, we’d drifted into a relatively easy and comfortable friendship… a complex one, to be sure… still deeply shot through with longing on my part — yet it had been my insistence on a completely open relationship (in order to pursue what I’m positive we both thought at the time was the “great lost love” of my life) that had finally heaped enough pain on that relationship that it finally shattered in a devastating explosion of raw emotion and pain… I realized for the first time that it was pain that I had caused.

It sounds, I suppose, impossibly callow, but until that moment it had never completely sunk in that I was capable of causing pain to my loved ones… it was, I suppose, my portal into adulthood… a transition I’m not sure that I’ve really completed. (And I’m sure that regular AYoS readers are nodding their heads knowingly right now.)

But on that day, the memory of the pain was submerged a little… though we were walking the same streets around the neighborhood we’d shared for several years — the same streets we walked obsessively the day some months before when she finally managed to communicate the pain I’d caused her.

Early in the relationship, she had moved across the street from the tiny bungalow I’d rented for a few years in college. It wasn’t my idea and it had made those open relationship, free love early 70s sometimes awkward and, on one pivotal night, deeply, deeply painful for her — and for me, as well, as, over the years, the memory of that night and all that flowed from it burned ever deeper into my memory… like an acid tear eating always, ever deeper into my soul.

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Monday, December 05, 2005
Saturday, February 04, 2006

The Day My Cigar Went Out in the Rain

You were wrapped up that day
in an old fur coat
we were splashing in puddles
in the lane

That was one day
I won’t ever forget
the day my
cigar went out
in the rain

I was going to send
for the letters I wrote
to see what life
was like in the past

The times that we laughed
and the times that we cried
fall away from the light
so fast

(C)1974, TK Major

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Each new dream… same as the last.

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When Ashley said goodbye...

Each new dream… same as the last.

And yet they kept on coming. A procession of rosy futures… glimmering… flickering… fading.

He stared at the surface of the coffee sitting in the stained mug on his warehouse desk. There was just something wrong with the way he was doing this life thing…

A decade earlier, starting out in life, he thought he had it all lined up. A smart, cute, funny girlfriend who put up with his bullshit, his wandering eye, his compulsive, no-end-to-it truth-telling. (“Well, at least I never lied to you!” he said way too often to his tearful, agonized girlfriend.)

But now, looking at a string of broken relationships stretching back to those golden-seeming days, it looked like an empty, bitter joke…

But, as always, a new dream would come… a new girl, a new set of possibilities… a new set of lies he would tell to her, to himself.

A new dream — but always the same, sad story arc.

He remembered a brief moment when he was about four or five, watching himself standing over a toilet and thinking, this can’t be a TV show, ’cause no one ever goes to the bathroom on TV. But it sure does feel like one…

His bitter laugh echoed against the concrete walls of the warehouse when he thought, Man, I should just fire the writing staff…

OK…. enough of all that. Today’s version of this song is kind of fun, I think, a funky, glam-folk reading of what I’ve always thought of as kind of a sleeper.

Internet Archive page for this recording

previous AYoS versions
Thursday, September 29, 2005
Tuesday, January 09, 2007

When Ashley Said Goodbye

Amber said hello when Ashley said good-bye
I said hold on but there’s no wondering why
when love wants in, love can knock down yer door

I said Amber, I think this is forever
she said baby you’re yanking on my tether
when all is said and done love will even up the score

Love will fool ya — love can kill ya
Love is all that love can give ya
and still you keep coming back for more

Love is funny — love is cruel
Love’ll make Einstein act just like a fool
Love’ll make a tomcat dive in-a swimin pool

All these toys all these games
all these pretty dollhouses going up in flames
if you play around enough you know you’re gonna get burned

Love will fool ya — love can kill ya
Love is all that love can give ya
and still you keep coming back for more

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When the cocked .45 came out from behind the cop’s leg, honest to God, I found myself thinking — Damn, I know busking is illegal but geez…

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A nice, peaceful sidewalk cafe
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.”

Life in the city.

There’s Always Trouble (in a Fool’s Paradise)

[re-run – 2005-10-24]

There’s always trouble
in a fool’s paradise
There’s always trouble
but the fool don’t realize

Trouble comes knocking
just when trouble wants
trouble knock down your front door
and take everything you got

There’s always trouble
but the fool don’t realize
there’s always trouble
in a fool’s paradise

There’s always suffering,
plenty to go around
but give it to some other guy,
on some other side of town

I don’t know my neighbors,
but they seem nice enough
and if the Insane Crips come and blow them away makes
it hard to maintain my bluff

There’s always trouble…

Trouble stay out of my backyard
I can pretend it don’t exist
sure enough I feel real bad
for that poor fool the trouble hits

but it really aint none of my affair
I fold the paper away
cause I sure enough know I don’t wanta read bout
the trouble headed thisa way

There’s always trouble…

Theres always turmoil
in the heart of Babylon
but you go where the gold is
and the rest just tag along

theres always casualties
in the race to stay alive
theres always casualties
but sometimes the strong survive

There’s always trouble…

1990-09-07
(C)1990, TK Major

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