more from Nor'easter

(two)

      The splash down was probably the hardest part of the last eight years to remember. It was also the most reckless, and free. It was a gut wrenching and guilt ridden time. Getting wasted dominated every bit of my waking life. That, and trying desperately to maintain contact with Fletcher...he was about to take a ride, a big one, and I wanted to go along. He had been working on getting signed to a label in Manhattan, and that was about to break. Soon he'd be making a record, and touring. I wanted a seat at the table, tour manager, merch guy, guitar tech., driver...whatever. In the mean time I was kicking around the old sandbox with the surfer girls, and the Nags Head Pier crowd. Not a bad gang to be sharing a campground with when the fish were biting, otherwise, it was Natty Lite for breakfast, Pabst Blue Ribbon for lunch, and Jack Daniels for dinner.

     I had just moved in with Meghan. She lived in a condemnable upper deck of a shack over top of a consignment shop on the beach road about milepost ten and a half or so, not far from the pier. There were trailers in the adjacent park, and that's where most of the pier regulars took up residency during the season. It was a pretty typical looking little park to drive past, but to really appreciate the depth of southern white trash culture contained therein, one must spend a month or two. The fist fights over a honey bee, or rather why said bee landed on one drunks beer bottle instead of another drunks. The women, and the swapping. The bad, bad cocaine, or crank, or whatever it was. It was so bad, I would venture the guess that in those shining moments when such social stimulants made it into their fray, there was already such a level of group intoxication that nobody could really be certain for sure where the "drugs" may have come from, what they actually might be made of, or what the desired or intended effects of them might have once been. On those nights I just sat up there in our little upper deck shack, quietly. I'd drink my whiskey, or whatever and keep a watchful eye on them. As most of them would find a way to work as helpers, painters or framers on job sights around the neighborhood by day, they usually didn't last long past dusk...except for on the weekends, or the rare occasion that the drugs they found actually worked. On those nights it was lock the doors and turn off the lights, or even sleep elsewhere. These otherwise loving and compassionate souls would never hurt a fly when sober, and moreover constituted most of which I thought of as friends and family for those few months in the purgatory of my return to that incestuous beach, but ordinary conversation over turning on a light could ignite a firestorm of stumbling drunken violence if one wasn't careful. The mind is a hell of a place when the driver bails out. When the dark of the closets and monsters from under the bed come out. And it is hard to anticipate the next attack, when the attacker is waiting for the orders as well. No, most nights I sat above the show...like a contest or an experiment in an exposed aggregate squared circle of sorts, where pit bulls surrounded by broken ring girls were paraded, mixed, mangled and bred in a menagerie of pride and the shrugging off of rejection.

     The first few weeks I was back I had been "camping" with DC in the old storage shed/practice space. DC and I were in a reggae band together back in '95-'96. The reggae band was actually the reason all of us moved to Asheville in the first place. I remember further that I didn't even want to go, but Earth changes and all, prophecies of doom and destruction, and bumper stickers some of the other stoned out band members brought back from a trip out there which read "don't postpone happiness" seemed all too clear a message from Jah so away to Asheville the band went. It was a staggered move, and all but me, DC and Jeff went first. It seems they went out in August, and we went like in December, at any rate, ironically the move was the end of the band. DC was one of the band's main songwriters and charismatic forces. We landed at Mark's house (our bass man). While I stayed inside with Mark and the family, DC spent the better part of three or four days snowed into a tent, and then one morning when we got up he was gone. He didn't even talk to any of us the whole time. Looking back, regardless of his reasons for leaving, the real reason I get is that he was the only one of us smart enough to see that it wasn't going to work. He may have truly missed the Outer Banks, and the home of his childhood, and his family, but he was a college graduate, and a well traveled human being. Something larger of our collective situation was hitting him in the reasonable part of his brain, and he went home. He ended up hanging on to the old storage space where we learned to play music together and started a new band. By the time I got back in 2002 he was well established around town with bar gigs, and he had hooked the shed up with air conditioning. There was also a television inside, no wires, but we could watch videos. The shed, which was actually 20' by 30', was a pretty comfortable environ. The only hitch was that we couldn't park there. We couldn't give off any impression of "living" there, so we would park over by the Ramada on the beach road, and ride bikes back over to sleep at night. The spot was a great place to spend a hot night, but it was DC's spot, so I eventually had to find a spot of my own to be, and Meghan's worked out well enough, at least for the couple of months that it did. Meghan was an intense type of hurricane. She was referred to as "crazy Meghan" by a few of the idiots lucky enough to know her. She was attractive, but did not care one bit. She loved to surf, and she loved to listen to good music, and she loved to drink. Her dad was a General in the Army or something, and from the brief experience we actually shared I gathered that she was into at least not letting him down. He was in California during the time I rented a room from her, that was a short time, and what I know I got from seeing letters left laying around, she never discussed it. Anyhow, she was a rare breed of young woman. I remember seeing her scream into the parking lot of a local fish house where she and some other friends worked, drunk as piss, riding a rusty old beach cruiser. She totally slammed, ate the parking lot, and left a good bit of her knee outside in the gravel on the blacktop, next to where she left the bike before casually strolling through the front door and up to the bar, bloody knee and all, and ordering a vodka and cranberry. I would never refer to her as "crazy Meghan". I thought she was bad ass and beautiful, but like a sister, not like a piece of prey. She didn't know me from a monkey fart when DC introduced us. I was lucky to be called his friend. I think the fact that DC, being a tall, mystical and sexy looking white dread who sang songs of love and spirit maybe had a little effect on her when he mentioned "a friend" needed a place to stay. That coupled with the alcohol and her generous nature made me a shoo in for a spot in her dilapidated beach box. She may have later come to regret her quick decision, as I was carrying bad ju ju. She was a pure soul. She may have been just as every bit as fucked up as the rest of us, but she kept her dealings in the light. I had just come back from a tour of the dark side, and the bites...the scars and the stink still knew my name. The devil on my trail could still see my tracks, and knew where I slept, and Meghan, like the others had and would, soon got tired of sharing a place with me. I don't fault her one bit. I owe her actually. I owe her and her mirror for being some of the first light I would see since crawling back from the hole I had dug out of that mountain.