The Weekend That Was, Part 1

Wednesday, Mar. 31, 2004 -
Ap�sl�min ida corbalanyrtne 'ls�o rohl'daathi�m v� nen�a iroyss�rd.

Tuesday morning, a few minutes past 1 AM:

We were silent, and since we were accustomed to the noises of the truck and the road, the night seemed quiet and still. I watched the intermittent streetlight glide like fish flashing in dark water, over the hood of the truck and into the cab, slipping onto the steering wheel and over his hands. The metaphor was not mine, my guess was that it was from something I had proofread in the past year, but the source eluded my drowsing brain. It wasn't even particularly accurate�it was the darkness that seemed to advance and retreat in the seas of amber light. Either way, limned by light or tattooed by shadows, I found myself studying the Fiend's hands on the wheel: the undelicate muscles, the square knuckles, the flat oblate fingertips with closely-trimmed nails, filed smooth. The shapes of his hands always please me, with their conveyance of real strength, though the image of roughness is an illusion. The Fiend is assiduous with the care of his hands, necessitated by his daily occupation with paints and stains and glues and the soaps needed to scrub them off his skin. His touch, as I well know, is tender and sensitive against the places where I am tender and sensitive. That thought was enough to bring me half-way to arousal, the kind of sleepy arousal you don't encourage, that brings warm and pleasant slumber as it subsides, if you're in bed.

I wasn't in bed, we were only a few minutes from home, but I was falling asleep. It was the end of a long weekend, long in the sense that I had spent most of it awake. It began very early Saturday morning, singing "Someone To Watch Over Me" to the unexpectedly attentive late late crowd at Josie's place. It's always a bit unnerving to perform before an audience that's actually listening to what you're singing, but I got through the four-song set without embarrassing myself.

We were going away for the weekend, but then we weren't. Jer had been working with Josie in his studio* all Thursday and Friday, and they still hadn't perfected a soundtrack they needed to finish before Jer went back to school. Classes for the spring semester began Monday, although Jer had made arrangements so he didn't need to attend a class until Tuesday afternoon.

I did tell you once, didn't I, that Jer's a damn good fiddle player? And Josie's a damn good guitar player, a damn good piano player, and his band, the Interchangeable Light Orchestra, can morph into different configurations to befit the occasion. The Ilo can be a jazz combo, a Mariachi band, a Dixieland band, or a 12-piece orchestra, plus various fusion permutations. In the studio, with electronic augmentation, it can be nearly anything and has been a World War II swing band, a 60's surf band, a rock opera and a honky-tonk jukebox. Josie's first love is the blues, but he also loves all styles and eras (except the current one) of pop music, and he's crazy about things like zydeco, ragtime, bluegrass and cowboy music. He's a part-owner of a small but valiant "live music only" nightclub jousting at the monstrous windmills of DJ-driven disco. Josie and his partners wanted to create a haven for gay men seeking refuge from the brutal vapidity of dance clubs, but that's proven to be a universal need and the place draws a nice mix of the straight and the queer. The clientele is both eclectic and faithful, and I think the club might be making some money finally�I believe Josie no longer subsidizes it with his Chumash heritage. Josie has a Mexican grandmother that I know of, and one of his forbears was a Spanish priest who abandoned his vow of celibacy, but he's enough of a Chumash Indian to get a chunk of money from the casinos on the Santa Ynez reservation. And his long-time lover, a gentleman I just have to call the Pussycat (I can't resist, and anyway he is a big pussycat) is also part-Chumash and collects his share of California's compensation to our Noble Native Americans.

The Pussycat is the Ilo's star vocalist, but once in a while Josie coerces me into singing with them. And I'm Josie's wedding singer�the Pussycat, who sings the blues superbly, doesn't like the fluffy stuff and flatly refuses to do weddings. I thought Josie was getting out of the party band business, I didn't sing with him for more than a year, but last year I did four weddings with him. He does mostly Mexican weddings because those are his only opportunities to play Mariachi music in front of a crowd. I sing for him when he does weddings for white people, and I think he does those because he likes mocking the bourgeois straight world. He gets a kick out playing songs like "I Will Always Love You" and "I Have Nothing (If I Don't Have You)" from The Bodyguard soundtrack, which everyone thinks of as hugely popular, hugely romantic ballads�, but when you actually listen to the lyrics, you realize they're about the disintegration and desperation of love. I think the irony is too subtle for our audience, or they don't care, they just want something they can slow-dance to. It's not that they don't enjoy irony, but you have to hit them over the head with it. One of our most requested songs is also from The Bodyguard: "Queen Of The Night" as sung by a six-foot-tall, 180-pound man in a tux and braids.�

I've got the stuff that you want
I've got the thing that you need
I've got more than enough
To make you drop to your knees
'Cause I'm the Queen of the Night
The Queen of the Night
Oh yeah

I don't grab my crotch when I sing the second line, I just sorta frame it with my hands and smooth my pants tight over my pelvis.

~

* Not his studio in the sense that he owns it, but in the sense that it's his office, his place of work. I think the studio is still owned by the music producer who offered to make me a pop star. This was when I was much younger than I am now, but I still had the good sense to refuse him. I was barely outta my teens, but I somehow figured out that a musical career would be a disaster for me. My singing voice is a purely natural gift, but otherwise, when it comes to music, I am a big fat ignoramus (except for the fat part) and even though I have been in bands (only as the vocalist) I have not been particularly interested in learning music. And for the most part, I don't like musicians; they bore me. (Jer, Josie and the Pussycat are exceptions to the rule.) But maybe the main reason why I said no to the Producer Who Said He Could Make Me A Star was because of the Olive.

The Olive, simply called "Olive" by the those fastidious cognoscenti who took especial care to be precisely hip, was a supper club on Sunset, a favorite of My Two Dads, two lovely gentlemen, Keith and Marshall, who guided me through my late teen years. One of Keith's former students was part-owner of the Olive, and we went there quite often for meals, even though food at the Olive was only accidentally good and the service was, um. . . eventful. Marshall is a tax accountant for people in the entertainment business, and because of him I met and observed several music industry types. They had a definite allure, I'll concede them that, and some people I met were intelligent enough to hold an interesting conversation, but I was impressed, almost overwhelmed, by their intensely insular and self-absorbed world�it was a rather unhealthy feeling. Not quite a Welcome To The Jungle, but it made me realize that I did not want to work among them, even though we did have a bit of fun with our serpentines.

(Linkage courtesy of veg.)

� One of my favorite songs to sing is "I Drove All Night", which was written for Roy Orbison, but was a hit for Cindy Lauper. As long as the Cindy Lauper version was the one most familiar to my audience, I was cool with it. But when Celine Dion got ahold of it, I was pissed. I made the mistake of whining to Josie about how I wouldn't be caught dead singing a Celine Dion song, and he just looked at me and said, "This from a man who owns Whitney Houston?"

I'd like to think he meant that as a compliment to my voice, sorta like "Huh, that bitch Whitney better not come singin' 'round here, 'cause you own her skinny black ass." But I think he might've been alluding to my collection of vinyl. Did I mention that my taste in music is largely indefensible?

(When Josie discusses the playlist with clients, he doesn't allow them to even mention "My Heart Will Go On"�the preamble to his negotiations with the bride or the wedding planner usually goes something like this: "While I welcome suggestions and requests, I have to say right up front that we will not even consider playing that fuckin' godawful piece of crap from Titanic.")

� My hair has surpassed the two-foot mark.

Addendum: Whoops, the Olive was on Fairfax�but it reeked of that cloying Sunset strip hipster-cool mentality, which one of its owners successfully recreated in Bar Marmont, so I tend to think of it as a Sunset nitery.

<~>
Ap�sl�min ida corbalan� 'lse nesgla ugar�-cham sa cru ogrulho bat�oltha al�mv�sde.

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