Back when The Cowslingers were playing 125 dates a year, I
had a girlfriend that was by all accounts a very sweet girl. She got mixed up with me by the sheer chance
of attending a baseball game with her girlfriend that was tangled up with my
dangerous alcoholic co-worker. She was a
very normal woman. This was
appealing. When you spend 1/3rd
of your time playing places like the Star Bar in Atlanta and Brownies in NYC, a
normal person is very rare. Most of the
people I hung out with then had an amazing mosaic of bad choices pulling them
in 12 directions at once. It’s where the
songs came from. I didn’t know too many
normal people at that point. I sort of
forgot they existed. She was sort of
like a unicorn that wandered over to me.
We got along well and sort of fell into this relationship. I don’t know what she was thinking. I didn’t
bring much to the table. I was ALWAYS
gone and when I was home I was generally sleep deprived. Still, she hung in there and did her best. I must have had brief flashes of charm.
Pretty soon, enough was enough. After I started routinely falling asleep at
her family gatherings, the bloom was off the rose. I remember one night driving from Atlanta at
2am to make some sort of birthday lunch for her 2 year old niece. I made it to the lunch, but then after eating
the men dispensed downstairs in the Man Cave with Uncle Gary and the
fellas. About 12 hours earlier I had
been playing with The Woggles watching Manfred leap off a bar into a wildly
dancing crowd while we all sang “My Baby Likes To Boogaloo”. Now I was on the same day watching golf with
5 guys who between them had maybe 6 LPs, the edgiest one probably the Top Gun
soundtrack. It was jarring. I had nothing in common with this world. They would have me in a recliner, the lights
dimmed, and the hush of a golf tournament whispering from the TV. They might as well shot me with a rhino
tranquilizer and told me to read a Russian novel. Nighty night.
Shortly after the latest of many “fall asleep at Uncle
Gary’s” incidents, the girlfriend had decided to put in a patio on the back
deck of her charming little house. Those
that know me know full well I cannot build or repair anything. To have me involved in building a patio is
like asking a nursery school class to build a B-1 bomber from scrap. You can provide me with tools and complete
instructions. There is a very slim
chance I can accomplish the task. Every
single home repair person that comes to my house looks at me like I’m a pussy
because of the various small handy man jobs that have been left
unattended. On top of that, I know any
woman I have ever been involved with thinks less of me because I can’t do
something manly like change a hot water tank.
It’s not my fault. It’s in the
Miller DNA. It’s not what we do.
So here we are on the dawn of the patio project. I have been no help in the planning because
as I have stated I am not a) capable and b) in the Cleveland zip code when
supplies have to be picked up. The night
before I think we played in Columbus at Little Brothers. My life in those days was spent being yelled
at selling rock radio commercials from 830a-530p. I then hopped in a van and drove to exotic
locales where we generally headlined. That
means we had to load in by 830-900. We
then had to wait until 12 to play after the openers finished. With three hours to kill in a bar, there is
only one option for four young guys. We
would drink as much beer as possible and get to the edge of being able to
function properly while playing. Those Columbus
shows were usually throw downs, so I’m sure I had 97 beers and went crazy. Someone poured me into the van and then we
drove back. I definitely remember going
over to her house really late (meaning for most people obscenely early like
5am) with the intention of getting up at a reasonable hour to help. Please believe I had the best of intentions.
I stirred awake at 11am or so. I was dead tired and heard off in the
distance someone digging. Where was
I? Oh yeah… I’m going to help with the patio. So I walk outside and obviously three hours
of work has been accomplished, but not just by her. Her passive aggressive work friend, David, was out with his shirt off digging. Good old David. When he heard that her deadbeat boyfriend
didn’t know anything about patios, he’d be sure to come over and help. Why, who doesn’t like digging a pit in the
summer heat on a Saturday? Meanwhile
while he is out there playing the role of “ideal boyfriend”, I’m inside
sleeping one off. None of this potential scenario had been
mentioned to me prior to this moment. This
had been set up as some sort of surprise lesson. It would have been good to have known Good
Old David was coming to help out prior to my walking out there in shorts
barefoot asking if there was anything to eat.
It definitely played to the image of “you can do better than him”. I will wholeheartedly admit to anyone reading
this that she could have and I assume eventually did do better than me. This was not only clever maneuvering by David,
but also devastatingly effective in highlighting my shortcomings. In the late 1990s I really only did two
things: tried to present the illusion that I was working at my job and playing
rock and roll music in America’s best indie rock clubs. I was a deadbeat. David had made his point.
A week or so later I was out. David’s plan had worked, that filthy son of a
bitch. David snuck right in and assumed
my spot in the loft bedroom.
Unfortunately for David, he didn’t possess a few of my other qualities
and she quickly bored of him. He was
demoted back to the friend zone and she tried to woo me back. At this point I knew it was doomed. I would never look at her the same way again
after the old David switcheroo. I
eventually succumbed to her beautiful gestures of humility and kindness for a brief Round 2 though
I knew it would end in disaster again. It
did. The whole relationship was a
mistake on her part as I would only continue to disappoint her and by proxy the
rest of her family. I was who I was and
nothing was going to change that. Her
timing was awful. I often wonder if I
come up at family dinners as a discussion point of the “near miss” she made
with a horrible man. On paper I looked
good, but I’m sure there were tales of (in the words of Ray Davies) drunkenness
and cruelty. I ran into one of her
closest friends a couple of years ago and she looked at me like I was Ted
Bundy. My PR with that group has taken a
real hit. Maybe I should have done some
direct mail or an infomercial or something.
Yesterday I was minding my own business deep in the outer
rim of Cleveland seeking asylum from the RNC madness. I was in a funk thinking about everything and nothing
at all. There in the corner of the room
at a booth was David. I hadn’t seen him
in years. He looked relaxed and artsy,
his hair a bit long for his age. He was
being the comforting friend to some woman seated with him. I had to hand it to him. He stuck to his guns. There was some poor guy in that woman’s life
that was going to be hit in a couple of weeks with a “why can’t you be more
understanding of my feelings like David?” rap.
That poor sap. David would be
padding around his well appointed kitchen in a kimono and a man bun making an
espresso in a few weeks. He’d cue up
some Elliot Smith later that night and make some Thai food while that poor sap’s
dog looked on. David wouldn’t pay attention
though. David must be a “cat guy”. You can just tell. “Have some gruner veltliner… Tell me what happened darling… He sounds awful…” A
couple of weeks later he would move on to some loft apartment downtown giving
some other woman a foot massage while making up mystical shit talk about
pressure points. That fucking guy. I paid my check and left. When I walked out I made eye contact and nodded at him. I don’t know if he recognized me. I went home to my patio which had been built
by men that thought less of me as I cut them a check. I tapped out emails while an opera I didn’t and
probably wouldn’t ever understand wafted out of distant speakers. Fucking David.
No comments:
Post a Comment