ONE
(one)
I dreamed the crooked story about a woman from New Jersey who had set herself adrift down down a river. She was trying to escape something. Although she survived she was brutally beaten and bashed, slammed against cold rocks by the flushing current. She was cut by the broken bottles and rusted chain mesh cyclone fence. She had been told that there, by the edge of it and us, was a popular escape route, and to such a marvelous land that there would be "people to chase", but that to get there she would also need to pass some sort of mythical dinosaur or dragon like creature. I don't know, I was dreaming and she was babbling so fucking broken and fast from that place of hers. A song echoed in the background, against the living canvas towers of steel and glass and granite. The melody warped as it bounced off of the coats of trees of colored shape shifting swash..".It was a siiiiiil - ver head ed mon ster...." duh duh duh da, da dda da duh, the rhythm pulsed like out of one of the cabs in Thailand, blaring random acid beats underneath soft drink advertisement wrappings, sounds like maybe stains from an old Saturday morning Syd and Marty Croft costumers ball.
Saturday morning, which was actually a building--a very large building with wings and a large face, clock like, yes a clock tower sort of structure.Nobody had ever seen a building before. The legend of this had made it out to be a monster - bizarre.
I was in the river, rushing as well, but not ready to go. I remember kneeling, and the waters running over my pant legs. I recall trying to dig down with my feet,to burrow myself in to the smaller loose rocks of the river bed to hide. Bizarre.
I had been having these dreams of buildings, but usually industrial and many, never just one. And what the fuck was the destination, and as a building, and why the fuck do I hurt so damn bad??? I was in the river, now in the parking lot. And that is where the hurt makes sense, where the world comes in. It was June of 2002. I don't remember what started it, or how I got there, in the Isuzu that wet morning , but the night before must have been a good one. I think Larry Keel played at the Music Hall with a little help from Vassar Clements, and...I can't remember the other guy, but another bluegrass legend as well, Vassar would be gone a few years later, but he was a solid fiddle player, known as "the Father of Hillbilly Jazz". Larry still plays, and he has reached a damn near living legend status himself, in some regions with such an appreciation as the folks in Western Carolina, Tennessee, sweet tasting places like the one I loved then.
I was there to cook for the fellas, like any other band that came through the Grey Eagle, I loved the show and all, but it was work for me,I sold the food there, I was "Yamama's Snaqueria". My show wouldn't start until I could close up shop after the bluegrass was done and get downtown to Broadway's, that was my spot to get it right. That's where I played, along with the likes of Fletcher, Gris Sears, and his best girl Sierra Glynn...all the local singer songwriter types who loved music and loved to drink. Broadway's had a fair number of good pool tables, a fan fuckin tastic jukebox, and I'm talking from the Clash and Dead Kennedys to Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn, from George Jones to The Merle(- Gris, or more formally - Morgan G. Sears' bad ass rock band). Me ,Gris and Fletcher had one hell of a time during the brief and powerful burn that was my affiliation with that smokey little downtown's stone garden scene. The only problem with that is I was in charge of running a business, or rather, was supposed to be in charge. In reality I would check in and out daily to collect the fifty or so dollars from the contra dancers or country swing shaggers, all the while spending most of the time sitting at the bar of the 'Eagle with Jack, listening to bootleg tapes and drinking Nehi grape, throwing the dollars at the jar. I think I cleared maybe eleven, or fourteen hundred the night Larry Keel played, and then the party was on.
Slowly waking up, rubbing the dirt from my eyes and thinking back, it was a good night...last night, but Larry Keel was actually TWO nights back, and that night had lasted into the better part of my last night, which "wound down" back at Fletcher and Ashley's place. That's right, after the "Second Annual Ridgecrest Revival", Drug Monkey (Fletcher's band) and The Unholy Three ( Mr. Sears' outlaw country band) played Saturday night to kick it all off. I remember blue lights flashing and washing white walls inside as Drug Monkey played "like a baby", and I remember later, having to find Fletcher and pull him out from under a parked truck. He was my closest friend at the time, and I didn't want the party to miss him. “What's wrong?' I asked him, trying to rouse him from his crash...”do you need to go up or down, whaddya want?” I was equipped with a pocketful of pharmaceutical heaven. Up? Down? No matter, I had the answer. He declined my help at the time. It seems the homemade liquor had gotten the best of him, being primarily a beer drinker, and I could see why all of a sudden. That would be the only time I remember him drinking anything but. He would intentionally tune his guitar to a strange sort of open “d”, which he said allowed him to play “no matter how shitfaced he got”. It was for that reason I was a little taken back to see him playing the WORST set I think I ever saw him play, no matter...he soon bounced back. That guy had the ability of Hendrix when it came to recreational drugs. He was a good second to my Morrison. We were both pretty screwed up that night. Shit, EVERYBODY was. I remember playing drums with somebody's band and just stopping in the middle of a song, as I witnessed my hands just stop doing what my brain would have liked them to do. I also remember falling in a ditch, or rather a ditch rising to meet me as I staggered in the direction of the bonfire, and I blame it all on the home made liquor. We had EVERYTHING, and we consumed everything we had. We made that party a thing of legend, complete with a Sunday morning vehicle to vehicle bottle rocket fight DURING CHURCH HOURS in Black Mountain, looking for warm grease and clean vinyl seating after our raucous celebration of debauchery. After we ate, and got cussed out at a stoplight by very well dressed and otherwise responsible looking church going hypocrites, we slithered back to Asheville. We attempted to lay peacefully for a few hours, and we eventually would. But we didn't go down until the last of the moonshine and the molley, the morphine and the coke we cooked, and the adderall and codeine that hung the moon just right told us we could. Eventually, after all of that, our over-sensitized congregation finally let that weekend, and our gluttonous ritual all slip away, and let the day's dry ditches come up to meet us now that we were defenseless to care. We hid from the glare and the truth of the coming of the day like a pack of street urchins, hiding underneath the city while waiting for some imaginary heat to die down. Awake, but asleep. Chemical. Plastic.
That night, it must have occurred to me how futile the fight to try and ignore the dawn. And I remember at the end of it all, Fletcher and Ashley hugging me, there, by the basement door as whiskey and I slumped back over toward the truck to call it a night, to call it even. They were giving me that eye, the eye someone gives you that shows they care, but they really have done about all they can as far as making the big picture look like something survivable, and they asked me to not go, as I must have been mumbling about leaving in my stupor...at least not without saying bye first, I assured them that I wouldn't. A few hours later I would.
As I pulled myself from the backseat I was taken by the sweetness, and the cool of the mid morning summer air. It seemed light green, like filtered through leaves of young maple, and just as enticing as that promise of a new season, but somewhere else. I decided to leave my jeans on as I drove down to the restaurant. I didn't know it when I laid down a few hours earlier, but I was leaving. Nobody was up yet. Nobody would be up for quite a while that wasn't sick or driven by some fool's errand like mine. Monday morning was a slow business day for the restaurant anyway so I had already stopped opening Monday for lunch. I grabbed what change I had left in the register, scratched a "closed for two weeks" chalk message on my sign and was gone. I went back over to Fletcher's and knocked gently on the door, no answer. I wrote them a note...old and familiar in the tone...or was it? As I look back now, maybe my tone that day would prove to be more a harbinger...I don't know, but "sorry I am leaving without saying goodbye, I know I just told you I wouldn't but, I have to go, be back in a few weeks though, to sort everything out...I love You guys...call me.
-Butler.
The day began to transform from cool and new to a warm Tennessee Valley pollutant haze. I knew that my jeans would be way too much clothes at the beach, and I thought about changing into shorts, but never did. "Later," I figured "there will be plenty of time for that when I get there, once I AM too hot for these jeans...right now, they feel good, smell like home to me, last time for a little while...time for different clothes to wear, different spills and smells to cover them and me in...ahh! -I think too much" I thought further, as the pounding of a cocaine headache and my body's beg for the end of the whiskey bottle, or for some other manufactured endorphin began to dominate my maddened mind. "Keep the engine going!", my cat and mouse trap world just screamed."Pour in some more, lets keep this FUCKING ENGINE ROLLING! ! ! "I finished the quarter bottle or so, there in the parking lot waiting to see if Fletcher or Ashley would stir, notice me missing or moved. They didn't. So I pulled the old Trooper out of that private gravel drive one last time. I idled out from between their building and the next, over the sidewalk and onto the street. I made one last stop at the mans house on the way out of town to pick up a gram of that soapy shit he had to get me the 400 miles to the coast. " I wanna go fishing" is what I thought, and I didn't want to cook another god damned thing.
That morning, before I decided finally to give it all away, over the sinus headache of the whiskey, the pollen, and the white, there in the truck I could smell the salt air my mother still talks about smelling, every year about that time. I thought about that in that moment, before the drive away, above all the other hurt and tired thoughts. I sat there enjoying the tranquility of that early summer's green light cast on some mountain towns mid day air as a hapless and unattached observer passing through.
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