He woke up in a motel in Yuma looking at a cockroach.
He couldn’t remember exactly how he got there but he was pretty sure he didn’t have a truck, anymore. He fumbled on the bedstand under the imperious gaze of the cockroach, finally gripping his keys. Sure enough, the key to the Chevy was gone.
It all started when he didn’t come home from the bar one Friday night to the little garage apartment he’d shared with her since high school.
It wasn’t that he didn’t love her or think she loved him. He knew she did. He’d never doubted it until the moment he realized it was only that love that was holding her to him — that a sensible woman would have dumped his dark, driven, compulsively drunk ass long before.
That realization broke him like a twig.
He was drinking alone at the bar and thinking. And it just hit him and he knew what he had to do. He had to leave.
She would find someone new, someone who would be better for her. And he’d be free to go to hell, which is basically what he felt like he had to do.
It was a win-lose situation, but as long as she was doing most of the winning and he was doing most of the losing, it seemed right.
As promised, here’s the song I wrote immediately before yesterday’s “She’d Be Mine” — telling much the same story from a somewhat different perspective — and in a significantly different style.
Although this was originally written as a country/roots oriented song, as well, it seemed to drift inexorably toward a funky stripped down reading, as can be seen in the ‘studio version‘ below.
(I’m not really sure how to make the distinction between the fully produced versions that already exist for some AYoS songs and these, highly informal — okay, slapdash — acoustic versions. The ‘studio versions’ were also recorded at home on my own gear. My studio at my old house was my office. Here in my tiny beachside flat, my studio — and my office — is my dining room table. Hell, it’s the dining room table, too.)
Just below is the little story/blurb I sometimes used to promote this song in the “good ol’ days” at the old mp3.com (where the ‘studio version’ garnered many thousands of plays over the several years that indie music paradise was open for biz).
You’ll note that it’s more or less a prose retelling of yesterday’s “She’d Be Mine”:
That last time he saw her will always stick in his mind. She was getting out of a white Volvo, a toddler nearby and a baby in a stroller. The wind and the sun caught her hair and it drifted in slow motion. For an instant the last eight years were a dream.
He hadn’t seen her since just after her wedding. He’d been invited, she even called, but he didn’t go. He told himself it was just an accident he was playing guitar in the park across from the church as she and her new husband ran out to the limo in a hail of rice. The sun caught her hair, then, too.
He could smell the Eucalyptus trees at the edge of the parking lot and for a second he was aware of his own cigarettes and whiskey, dirty denim smell. He shifted back a little into the shadow of the awning and tipped his head into the big paper cup of acrid chainstore espresso — but she might as well have been in another universe. He guessed that, really, she was.
Sometimes
Sometimes I think about ya
think about, think about
think about the things
I thought I’d do for you
Sometimes I wonder
how you’re doing now
I think about it
but I think it turned out best
when I think it through
I know I let you down
I let you down, I let you down
I let ya down hard
and blamed it all on you
I threw your love away
and I laughed and I laughed
I laughed until I died
and when I came to…
the world — it was dead
and I walked around and I walked around
I walked around the world
but I couldn’t find you
I tore my soul open
it was empty, it was empty
a tunnel into nowhere
and I never got thru
sometimes I think about ya think about ya, think about ya think about the world I mighta had with you
(C)1999 TK Major
