The Pixies Have Gotten Fat and So Have I

Today I went to an old Tex Mex haunt of mine. I needed something to shake up my taste buds as I’m recovering from what appears to be The Flu Light. I slept away the middle of the day, so I ended up there around 3 pm. This being a Monday, I was one of five customers, tops. I ordered a chicken taco, chili taco and chips and queso. That ought to do it, I thought.

I took my food out to the patio where nobody was eating at the moment. So it was just me, a bunch of little gray, hopping birds that have grown accustomed to being fed and Warren Zevon shaking the speaker over my head as he sang about Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner.

When I was in college, back when there was still a Soviet Union, the music you would hear on that patio would be underground stuff that was just starting to break, like REM, the Pixies, Husker Du. Now, for some reason, you hear mostly music from the sixties and seventies. Often it’s the more interesting, slightly obscure choices, but still I wonder about this evolution.

I remember what it was like to hear those songs back then. I grew up in a small town out of range of radio stations that played any such music, so when I went to college, it was as if I had tapped into a secret frequency broadcast from a world of jangly guitars and urgent voices. The sounds were raw and honest, the energy fresh. I had never heard anything quite like it.

That music became my soundtrack. It was on the college radio station when I was driving; blaring at parties where I got drunk and kissed girls I never saw again. It was on my Tex Mex patio.

But I suppose soundtracks last only as long as the scenes they accompany. I don’t get as excited by music. I don’t go to shows. I don’t kiss strangers anymore.

Last week I tasted the old passion a bit. It was sparked by a film, a concert film. It was the compilation of six years of filming the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. I saw bands I had never heard of, some I had. It was electric with human, personal energy, the kind that happens when many people get together to feel, to listen.

And the Pixies were there. The mentors to many of the other artists present, they were deservingly received with reverence by their fans and peers. They sounded as great as ever, but looked different. Of course they were older, but the lead singer, Frank Black/Black Francis, and bassist, Kim Deal, had gained quite a bit of weight. I thought to myself, as I shoved another handful of popcorn in my mouth, “so have I.”

When the Pixies finished their set, the crowd – most of which were toddlers at most when the band first rattled college airwaves – offered up a messiah’s tribute in applause and shouts. The band stood at the lip of the stage, humbly waving in gratitude and absolutely glowing.

I glowed most of the next week, too, with scenes of happy people dancing on grass and singing songs about the sun playing over and over in my head. I was hardly cynical at all for nearly seven days. It was strange, but nice.

Then I found my way to the patio.

As I was enjoying my chili taco, a college-aged girl and boy came out onto the patio with a man that I assumed was the girl’s father. I’m not sure why I didn’t consider that he could be the boy’s father. “I’ve Seen All Good People” by Yes was now playing on the sound system. The girl kind of shook her hips and pretended to dance a little. She was pretty. I thought, “Ah, youth,” and took a second look.

Then I took a good look at the father. He was no doubt around my age. Maybe a year or two older, but no more. That’s when it hit me. I’m getting to the age when the daughters of people I went to school with will be starting college. It’s very likely that I’ll be sitting on this patio when they come out here with friends and I’ll glance at them, not as the daughters of friends, but as beautiful young women that make men sigh.

I sat there as napkins blew across wooden boards at my feet and little gray birds hopped on chairs and tables around me like some kind of barbiturate Walt Disney scene. I looked at my chili taco and thought about the Pixies. Some acid seventies version of “House of the Rising Sun” with bombastic fuzz guitar was now playing. And so unfolded my moment of clarity. I understood why the music had changed on the patio, why I hear mostly songs dating back to my birth and earliest years. It’s a new soundtrack for the reality of my now. It's another reminder of my age that plays as I watch others dance along the precipice of youth, glimpsing adulthood with their buckets of beer and all night eyes.

Not to worry, my old friends from school. In the standoff for my attention, the chili taco always wins out over your daughters these days. And as far your daughters’ interests go, I don’t need to assure you that they have to do with everything but me. So, not even after two or three Negra Modelos will I be walking across those beer-stained planks to make the inevitable old fool of myself.

But if by some fluke the Pixies’ “Gigantic” can be heard some cool, spring night over the clinking of bottles and collegiate chatter, I can’t promise we won’t both be chair dancing.

Swimming in the Bomb Crater

Mr. Kim says I’m 100% Korean now that I’ve had Saengson-al-tang, or fish-egg soup. Whenever I visit his and his wife’s Teriyaki restaurant, I update them on my latest meal at a Korean restaurant I also frequent. Mr. Kim always laughs, shakes his head and smiles big, surprised that I’ve ventured into dining territory that many Americans apparently won’t even consider. Not even his son likes Saengson-al-tang, he says.

He tells me I should dye my hair black, learn more Korean and move to Seoul. Says I would fit right in. Mrs. Kim tells me how healthy Korean food is and gives me free dumplings and seaweed paper for my rice.

I’m thinking about the Kim’s today because it’s the first day of Chusok, the Korean thanksgiving holiday. Every year at this time the highways in Korea are nearly impassable as families travel to their hometowns to be with family and graves of ancestors for memorials. Special food is prepared and ceremonies are held, both in homes and graveside.

This also happens to be the anniversary of my father’s death in Vietnam. September 17, 1967. In a place called the Ho Bo Woods, near the Cu Chi tunnels. I was negative one-month old that day, still sloshing around inside my mother, just waiting to see what the noisy world had to offer. I wasn’t hearing anything at the time, my ears muffled by my tiny water world.

There was so much to not hear. Like nightly news my mother and grandparents watched with its body counts and smoky footage of soldiers and ordnance. The humming engine of my mother’s Volkswagen Bug that had slipped off an icy road into a ditch, still running because the key had been broken off in the ignition by my mom’s knee. The knock at the door or my aunt screaming for my mother when she looked out the window and saw a man in uniform at the door. They stood there, not opening the door for a long time.

But I didn’t stay deaf and unaware. I was born. I grew up.

Mr. Kim grew up just after the Korean War. He remembers playing with his friends in hills that were battlefields just a few years earlier. They discovered artifacts. Knives, ammunition. Bones.

He also remembers visiting a beach in Inchon, where bombs fell in an early battle when the Americans countered a North Korean invasion. This left craters into which the ocean spilled over, creating waterfront swimming holes. As recreational pools go, these weren’t the safest. The depth was unpredictable. Mr. Kim found one that turned out to be safe and spent his beach time in it, his own personal bomb crater.

My childhood swims were always at crowded concrete pools or a lake with catfish as large as divers. I suppose it’s likely that explosions were responsible for my lake, too, since it’s manmade. But traces of war were only as close as the television, the broadcasts that were a bloody, shrapnel-nicked thread running through my youth and adulthood. I carry with me a forever montage of guns and diplomacy flashing behind a spinning “In The News” globe.

There I was, trying to float while thousands before me had mastered it post-mortem. I held my nose as we all held our breath, with our eyes on the sky and minds on missile silos in the Midwest. I mustered the courage to step off the high dive as the Soviets hit the ground in Afghanistan.

I grew older and my mindset changed from “war happens” to “war hurts,” then finally “what the hell are all these bombs about?” After about ten years of paying more attention than before, it was clear that it’s all personal. Very personal. I’ve come to realize everybody I know has in some way been touched by war. Whatever age, wherever. So many losses. Some births.

Now I’m all grown up. I’m older than my father ever was. And unless I meet a fate that involves disease or hungry giant catfish, I will watch other children grow older than their mothers and fathers. So many more reasons to drive home on Chusok, shaking our heads without smiles.

It’s late in the afternoon now. Before long, the Kim’s will close their restaurant and drive home, or to church maybe for a Chusok dinner. Traffic should be much easier in Nashville than Seoul now.

Soon I’ll go to a poetry reading where I’ll probably read a rambling piece partially inspired by my father. The theme for tonight is “Yesterday.”

Now a helicopter is passing over the house. Think of all the pools and lakes you can see from up there. So many places to swim, but I don’t. There are new bomb craters, too, but they’re not filling up with water. Oil and blood rise in them. That’s hard to swim in.

Maybe I’ll try to get some teriyaki chicken before the restaurant closes. I might also pick up some kimchee to go – the Kim’s have a stash – and drive to the local Vietnam wall.

“I might get burned up by the sun, but I’ve had my fun.”

Halloween Eve, 2004

I drove the streets around 1:30 am, the same streets I once knocked up and down in bands and with friends trying to make some jangly noise.

The ghouls and demons were sparse. Well, at least the ghouls were. There was a sizable cluster of costumed twenty-something’s along Demonbreun. They were spilling out of the clubs and restaurants now in the same buildings once occupied by tourist shops. What was a gaudy joke of a street has become the new hip strip. Police cars-in-waiting flashed their blue whirlies on one side of the street as angels, beasts, maids, Dorothy’s, hookers and devils met each other on the sidewalk on their way to cabs and cars.

Carefully they all proceeded, watched over by the Music Row roundabout statue dancers with their bronze breasts and penises waiting to make the next ass-tight rich white man-of-power uncomfortable. Beautiful young ladies crossed the street with knee-high socks and thigh-low skirts carrying the painful beauty that autumn brings and brings and brings.

I thought about going to a strip club, but bought a cheeseburger instead.

To the Taiwanese dancer in Vegas:

I hope your laryngitis is better. Shouting over Nelly five nights a week can take its toll. I know this has been on your mind, so I want you to know that I meant it when I said I would have bought a dance from you. I was down to my last ten dollars, and that's just not enough. That'll barely get you a thimble shot of regret.

But I've learned to make that last.

There's a Leonard Cohen poem:

Marita
Please find me
I'm almost 30

The signal is never as strong as when it's the news of opportunities lost landing somewhere else. The aching glow from across the bay of what you drove away; what could have been, sometimes already planned or in motion. The fucking up of electric for-maybe-ever moments that could only have been more perfect if you had gotten out of the way.

Drink it down:

Thousands of hours staying this side of the line
Thousands of hours staying this side of the border
Never calling the number on the crumpled paper
All the money spent on prostitutes and food
Letting the song end without asking for a dance
Waiting to ask until a cigarette voice from behind says, "Come on, let's dance."
Being too polite to say, "No thanks," and walk across the floor
Wrecked road trips
Wrecked moments
Someone who wanted to be with me

I'm almost forty.

"Feel the beat from the tambourine"

It was a good wedding. One of the best I've known. It rained, but I was told that was actually a good sign on a wedding day. A blessing or something such. The affair was inside, anyway.

But with the wet blessing came melancholy breezes. The best man didn't make it. He's a Marine and his leave was cancelled because he's heading back to Iraq soon.

To keep him with us through the wedding, another groomsman bought a bag of plastic army men and passed them out to the wedding party, then later placed them on all of the tables at the reception. The bride pinned one up under her dress. I ended up with the metal detector guy in my tux pocket.

At the reception, somewhere between whiskey sours and cream cheese icing, I noticed that surplus army men had been arranged with plastic sandbags and barbed wire on the wedding party's table up front. A brown tank had started to take a table cloth hill not far from my fork while "Dancing Queen" moved us onto the floor as if we all had Shaun Cassidy hair.

We should all have Shaun Cassidy hair. And zebra print dresses. And dance like Ann-Margret. We should always meet in bars and stagger to "You Shook Me All Night Long" until our glasses burn.

I wasn't able to drink enough to wash down the lump that had come when the deacon mentioned our Marine during the ceremony.

Dissident coasters

I think this is the night I'll throw away the copy of the Maoist Internationalist Movement Notes that's on my end table. I have this scene that fills the spaces between Asian subtitled independent films and episodes of King of the Hill where the FBI, ATF, Secret Service or Coast Guard storm into my house. I have no idea why. When I tell them that I was only using the MIM newsletter as a coaster, they don't buy it - despite the half-eaten rangoon covering Vladimir Putin's face. So out it goes.

I was given the copy of Notes by a co-worker who discovered it on his windshield after a night class. He brought it into me as a tribute to the day a few years back when he signed me up on-line for both the Communist Party USA and the Libertarian Party. For at least a year I received mailings from both. At work. The Communists won as far as volume mailed.

During this time, I got a call from someone trying to start a local chapter of the CPUSA here in Nashville. At work. I was away from my desk, so I had the luxury of hearing what he had to say without engagement. He was planning a meeting at a Shoney's for people interested in joining. I would know the group's table by a hat in the middle of it. I don't know why he couldn't have just arranged a sign next to the salad bar that said "Communist Party USA. Welcome Nashville Comrades." I didn't go.

The baby board at work is missing. This is where photographs of employee's newborns are posted upon their arrival. A thorough investigation is underway. The Korean cleaning lady told me that the company's facility manager called her company owner and asked if they had seen it. I doubt his call was at all accusatory. Just part of a routine investigation, I'm sure. Still, I couldn't stop my eyes from rolling. I imagine telling him - with as straight a face as I can muster - that she's probably a North Korean spy and affiliated with the Nashville Chapter of the Communist Party USA. At a chapeaued table in the Music Row Shoney's they made their plans and those plans included the acquisition of our company's baby board.

Matters of intelligence are often convoluted.

A strip mall passage to Asia

"Come on, come on, come on, come on ... "

Yesterday, Saturday 2004, I drove past Jack in the Box and thousands of nail salons to get to Pho Bac 54 - An Authentic Vietnamese Restaurant. Jim Morrison sang from the dash that he was going to love me "until the stars fell from the sky." I thought about how thirty years ago soda shop soldiers were flying to Vietnam to the same soundtrack.

At Pho Bac 54, I watched CNN on a big screen television while eating a pork and egg quiche dish. The French influence, I assumed. A headline about six bird flu deaths in Vietnam scrolled across the news ticker. Five were children. A family at another table had soup and spoke what I guessed was Vietnamese. I later learned that Pho Bac is soup.

Two nights ago, my Korean friend said she had a dream about me. In the dream, she drove to my house and knocked on the door. A stranger answered. He said I was asleep, but he would wake me. I came to the door groggy and rubbing my eyes. I told her that I needed more sleep. She said ok and goodbye then drove away.

Tonight I had Thai food at a place called the Orchid in a strip mall between a Radio Shack and a furniture store with $800 lamps. I ordered the Orchid duck, but they were out of duck. I settled for the Orchid chicken. This dish came out flaming. I expected my waiter to extinguish the fire after the presentation, but he just left it burning. So I let it burn. It wasn't long before the fire went out and I felt a little more relaxed. An older couple, an American man and an Asian lady, came in and sat at one of the low tables. He seemed nervous. Happy, but tense and chatty. He asked the lady to order for him. I thought about how the menu had detailed descriptions in English of every dish. I heard them plan to order the Duck. I wanted to warn them that there was no duck, but I let the scene play out.

Who was that stranger in my friend's dream? I've regularly had dreams and have been told about dreams where there is someone unfamiliar, often a peripheral figure who does little. What if this background player is actually the same presence in all our dreams, kind of an extra whose role is to hold together our collective dreamscape? When the scene unfolds and there is a lack of needed continuity or symmetry, this extra is there to connect and balance. An every-synapse with an unfamiliar face and a knack for blending in.

What if the extra decided it was time to headline, to be remembered from dream to dream? What would happen if he no longer wanted to speak lines only for cohesion or eavesdrop from another table only to patch together images, but longed to say and do things that would bend the course of the moment, change the way the scene would be remembered and would stain his presence into future scenes?

Maybe there would be no more duck orders.