Most people find this hard to believe, but I have been a musician most of my life. It’s true, my skill level, such as it is, wouldn’t immediately indicate such a thing. But, in truth, I was a musician long before I ever learned how to play an instrument. I suppose that observation still remains mostly true today.

When I was young, I had a fascination for pianos. Whenever my family would visit a household that had one, I would immediately rush to it and not leave for the entire stay. Once seated at the keyboard, I would reverently press the notes, absorbing all the beautiful frequencies involved in the sounding of that single tone. Then I would press two-notes together. A chord. And I would positively swoon at the interplay of frequencies. I found it so overwhelming I would often begin crying at the sound.

I was already composing music on the piano Grandma Polly gave us preceding their arrival, but it was probably the Beatles that inspired me to learn guitar. My sister had been taking lessons, as she had shown a distinct aptitude for the piano, before ours even arrived from our grandmother. But my sister was a classical music nut. She didn’t really like her piano teacher—who wanted to teach her to play chords and musical accompaniment to popular music in the jazz tradition.

So she quit taking her lessons after a few months. But I used her practice books to teach myself the basics of music theory: mostly centered around the construction of chords. I figured it out. I got it. When some family friends gave us a pretty decent homemade guitar, I started teaching myself chords by hunting down the individual notes on each string. This made for some chord fingerings never before seen on the planet. But I still use some of them when I play today.

Eventually I learned somewhat how to play guitar in the manner of the day. By junior year in high school some friends and I formed a band—the Forgotten Few. We rehearsed more than we actually performed. I remember we played a few parties. And we tore up a smorgasboard at Wichita Grade School. The kids went crazy. Beyond that, we were generally forgotten by the few who heard us.

In college I fell in with Marv Ross and Lew Jones. We were three young singer songwriters, and I think we may have fancied ourselves as the next Crosby, Stills and Nash, except we all three wanted to be Neil Young. But beyond that, we were three pretty decent, young songwriters and we deserved to be heard. We played one memorable gig at the college in Mount Angel (which closed long ago).

Mount Angel is out in the foothills of the Cascades east of Salem. We borrowed Tom’s van to make the trip out there from Monmouth, where we were going to school. As fortification, we sat huddled in the back of the van and drank a substantial quantity of wine—and none among the three of us were really much in the way of drinkers. But, as things turned out, it was just as well.

The cheery Mt. Angel College Student Union

We were a little keyed up for that performance—our first, ever. It was in the cafeteria or the Student Center, some dimly lit room of moderate size with claustrophobic ceilings and ominous curtains drawn tight as if to portend no flight. There was an audience of respectable size, maybe thirty or forty students, all sitting very quietly in folding chairs. We set up our gear in front of them as they stared at us without the slightest hint of expectation. Slightly drunk, we hurried to the back of the room where there was a table with cookies on plates and an enormous urn of coffee.

Grabbing cups of coffee, we stood at the back of the room for quite some time, apprehensively eyeing one another. The vibe in there was cheerlessly dreary. It hadn’t occurred to any of us to consider the fact that though Mount Angel College was a Fine Arts school, it was owned and operated by the Catholic Church, so it wasn’t exactly party central. Even still, we could not possibly have foreseen the doleful, woeful bunch we encountered there.

We were to play two forty-five minute sets. It was painfully obvious from the very start that dancing of any sort was of course out of the question. But it soon became clear that there would be no clapping of hands, nor tapping of feet, no nodding to the groove, no knowing glances of understanding, no smiles of appreciation. Nothing.

They simply sat there and stared at us. When we would finish playing a song, they would politely place their hands together, very softly, as if they were wearing kid gloves. If we played a song they knew, they clapped modestly louder. If we tried an original number on them (about two-thirds of our material), their response was kitten paws quiet. We’d play some heartfelt rockin’ little number, wrapping it up with a ringing G chord. Sepulchral pall.

In retrospect, I’m reminded of something bass player Paul Kerouac once remarked at a Walkie Talkie gig ten years later: “Hey, I didn’t know dead people smoked!” Except these kids weren’t smoking. I’m not sure what they were doing, but whatever it was, it was not being entertained by us. I don’t remember packing up after we finally finished, or leaving the facility, only that we got the hell out of Mount Angel as fast as Tom’s van could haul us.

Six or seven years later, while I was still living in Dallas, Oregon, I formed a band with Roger, Roy and a couple of the Mikes from the fir cone dryer. We called ourselves Last Standing Tree. We rehearsed at Mike’s house, a squat, brick-red cottage that lay on some wooded acreage in the rolling green hills of the coast range, just outside of town off Ellendale Road.

We performed all over the mid-Willamette Valley, from Gates to Philomath, from Yamhill to Stayton, from McMinnville to Corvallis. We played every dive bar in the region that had music of any kind. Our specialty was a broad selection of Grateful Dead material, as well as a hearty assortment of country rock songs by artists such as the Eagles, Allman Brothers, Jackson Brown, Graham Parsons and JJ Cale. We also threw in an array of original songs, just to keep the audience at bay.

While we had a small coterie of friends and family who would generally attend our gigs close to home—like when we played the Blue Garden or the Shortstop Inn in Dallas, the Falls City Tavern, or the Cooler in Independence—most of the more distant events were staged before complete and not always completely satisfied strangers (a guy once offered us fifty bucks to quit playing, so he could shoot pool in peace). Still, we did have a fan base.

Gypsy Jokers

From playing various parties and other functions throughout greater Polk County, we acquired a bit of a reputation with the Gypsy Jokers motorcycle gang. The Jokers have been around since the ‘50s and are pretty much considered right up there with the Hell’s Angels as far as badassed motorcycle gangs go. The two gangs had turf wars back in the ‘60s down in the Bay area, which resulted in the Jokers moving up to Oregon (I guess we know who won). Numerous members lived out in the hills surrounding Dallas. They were spread all over the Willamette Valley.

One or two Jokers at a gig was usually fine. Everybody got along and the good times rolled. But more than about five or so and the mood would fill with menace and the air would pretty much leak out of any sort of party balloon we in the band were attempting to musically inflate. When a troop of those guys showed up, we generally took a break. But, for whatever reason (probably the Dead and other “outlaw” songs we played), the guys typically took a shine to us.

I don’t remember exactly what year it was, but it was fall, because it was beginning to grow chilly at night, threatening frost. One of the Mike’s, I’m not sure which one, scored us a gig playing at a Gypsy Jokers party out on the road to Monmouth. It was held outdoors in a big, wide-open field, next to an orchard.

Tank

Early one breezy afternoon, we drove a borrowed flat-bed truck down a long gravel driveway that divided two rows of apple trees and eventually led to an old, dilapidated yellow, two-story house. A guy named Tank greeted us. He could have been named “Truck” and no one would have argued. He had a leather red face, bushy brown beard and long, greasy hair combed back in deep furrows. He was in uniform: motorcycle boots, dirt-slicked jeans, t-shirt and grimy black leather vest, obligatory sleeveless Levi jacket sporting the familiar gang emblem of a skull wearing dark glasses on the back.

Tank told us to park in front of the house where we would use the truck bed for a stage. He hauled a couple of power cords out to us and we began setting up. A couple of bikers and their chicks ambled by from time to time and we would stop what we were doing to chat with them. One of the guys, kind of a hippie-looking dude in Jokers regalia, very neat and clean, with wire-rimmed glasses, a beaded headband and long straight blond hair, happened to mention he had a degree in engineering from MIT. One never knew with those guys. They were rebels.

We went on as scheduled at around three. It was to be five sets of rock and roll entertainment. We were to play until dark, around seven or eight or clock for a fee of five hundred dollars! We began playing to a modestly responsive crowd—pretty laid-back. They lay in tribal clumps out in the field in front of us, drinking and smoking weed, grooving on the Dead songs especially.

Parked motorcycles encircled a large, faded pink outbuilding, about fifty yards to our left on the east side of the property. An enormous amount of smoke steadily streamed from the open shed windows and periodically loud shouts and booming laughter would erupt. Bikers and their chicks randomly stumbled in and out of the building, eventually wandering toward the house behind us or to a familial cluster in the listening audience.

As the day digressed into evening, our spectators began gradually to disappear from our view. There were a few campfires out in the field and one over near the outbuilding. We could see shadows maneuvering in the twilight, but responses to the conclusions of our songs dwindled to occasional faint biker chick hoots and monosyllabic biker roars.

Eight o’clock rolled around and we finished our final set. Thank you very much, Gypsy Jokers and goodnight now y’all. However the Jokers weren’t quite ready for us to call it a night just yet, so someone somewhere sent forth an emissary to urge us to soldier on and continue to play into the night. A veiled sense of menace hung over the request. He scrounged up a couple of clamp on work lights, thus we were able to see what we were doing. So we played our first set over again and tried to leave. Another agent arrived imploring us to continue playing for the betterment of all mankind. So we played our second set over again.

As might have been expected, we began our second pass through our fifth set sometime after midnight. It was downright cold, our frosty breath fogged the night around us. It appeared to us that no one was even out there, we could discern no movement or sound. But every time we tried to quit a voice would gruffly bellow out from the darkness: “Keep playing!” Twice, shots were fired.

It was after one-thirty when we concluded our fifth set for the second time. We knew we had to come up with a plan or we might never be able to escape from that place. It was entirely possible that the Gypsy Jokers were intent on kidnapping our band and making us their music slaves— doomed to play “Me and My Uncle” five times a night into eternity. Out of desperation we arrived at a strategy.

We launched into our “encore,” “I Know You Rider” for the second time. Our scheme was to slowly pack up our gear as we played, each of us taking extended solos—finishing with the drums. As each member would finish his solo, he would put away his guitar, batten down his amp and hide in the cab of the flatbed.

While Roger was executing a drum solo of extreme anxiety, a couple of the braver among us stayed behind on the flatbed to furtively pack up and fastly secure his drums and cymbals while he played. Finally, he was just down to his snare drum and stand. As Mike grabbed the drum stand and throne, Roger kept beating furiously on the snare as if his life depended on it.

Once everything was packed up, Roger jumped into the crowded cab, snare drum clutched tightly under his arm. Roy fired up the truck, swerved into reverse, turned, and hit the gas, spraying gravel as the wheels spun. We sped out of there as fast as we could go, the sounds of gunshots ringing through the apple trees. We never got paid for that gig.

                                                                        II

Another six or seven years later, Walkie Talkie, the band I had originally formed with second wife Hilda, had reached the end of its tenure as staunch purveyors of original music to crowds of tens. Acting on Hilda’s consistently self-serving counsel, we embarked upon a new, wondrous career as a lounge band—the object being to forego all dreams of finding success in the music industry in order to make a living in it.

One thing for any aspiring rock musician to remember is: “if music is your job, you are not playing.” Many rock musicians attempt to avoid this reality. That’s why they booze it up and take drugs and do other self-destructive things.

Back then being in a Top Forty “lounge band” was probably the lowest rung on the rock and roll ladder. The human jukebox. There was no musical creativity in a lounge band. The creativity came in stagecraft—lighting and dress: the package. The presentation. That’s where the best stood out from the rest. Sounding exactly like the band they covered was the next requisite. If you were going to be doing “Billy Jean,” you damn well better sound like Michael Jackson. Whoo!

Four sets a night, six nights a week. The good ones played the Red Lion circuit. Red Lion’s paid top dollar—as much as a thousand dollars a night, or more. I can’t remember who booked the Red Lions. It was a woman and she had bleach blond hair. At that time the circuit consisted of six or seven locations between Vancouver and Salem. So a band could play a week or two at one location and not return for another couple months.

We certainly weren’t one of those bands. The industry was hierarchical and tiered to conform to band ability and the needs of the dive that was requiring music on a nightly basis. Andy Gilbert and his minions at Pacific Talent governed the best rooms, booking more than half of all the music clubs in town. Pacific Talent is still around. They still book the best bands to events and fairs and the like.

Carmen

We weren’t one of their bands either. We hooked up with the Tom Stinnette Agency. I don’t remember ever meeting old Tom. A young woman named Carmen was our liaison. She was very nice—a vivacious redhead who seemed to strike up some sort of bond with Hilda. Carmen did a good job of keeping us moderately busy, though most of the gigs paid only a fraction of what the others were receiving with the better agencies.

But we were kind of a tough band to book. We really only wanted to play Top Forty music we could tolerate, like Scandal’s “Goodbye To You,” the Cars’ “Shake It Up,” “Burning Down the House,” and “Safety Dance,” but circumstances compelled us to learn “Beat It,” “Every Breath You Take,” and “Flashdance.” I, for one was humiliated. But dollars had to be made.

Holiday Inn at Wilsonville?

One of the many, many places Carmen booked us was into the Holiday Inn in Wilsonville. That particular Holiday Inn still looks as if it were built during the Russian Constructivist era. It’s an austere building that sits off the I-5 Freeway out in the middle of nowhere—near Wilsonville, if that’s actually a real place. We played there on several occasions. In fact they had a room for the band before the gigs and during breaks. That was a touch of class to which we were unaccustomed.

One Saturday night as we arrived to play, Len the head bartender had a very worried look on his face. It seemed that a tribe of gypsies had booked the entire hotel for some sort of a convention and they were running rampant around the grounds, causing all kinds of mayhem, stealing sheets and towels, and anything that wasn’t bolted down. Actually two TVs were missing, even though they had been bolted down. The hotel manager kept appearing and disappearing again, with a look of sheer terror on his cloud-white face. He clearly was in over his head.

There were a lot of gypsies in Portland when I was growing up. Many lived in tenement rooms and apartments in buildings in Old Town near the Chinese district.  On Sundays, the gypsy women would break out their most colorful skirts and scarves and would stand out on the sidewalk talking and laughing, as the kids played out in the street.

And there were several gypsy businesses along Southeast 82^nd Avenue in some of the neighborhoods I navigated by bike with my buddies in junior high school. Most of the businesses were fortune telling and palm reading ventures. But there were also gypsy hairdressers and auto repair enterprises. A few gypsy kids went to my junior high school. They kept to themselves, but were nice enough. There wasn’t any social stigma or anything.

So the prospect of a bunch of gypsies overrunning the Holiday Inn did not daunt me nearly to the extent it seemed to trouble the help. They were all frantic. The staff was scrambling around picking up ashtrays or anything loose that could be pocketed. The smell of fear was palpable around the place. For their part, a sizeable clan of gypsies gathered in the bar for the entertainment. They seemed passive enough. They laughed boisterously and smoked with an enthusiastic eastern European intensity not often witnessed in this region.

We had been playing the room since Thursday, so we were already set up to perform when we came down from the “green room.”  The bar was a madhouse as we entered. There were crazy gypsies everywhere, partying with an enthusiasm worthy of, well…. crazy gypsies. We’d never played for gypsies before, so we weren’t exactly sure what to play for them.

Allen remembers their hair as orange, but I remember the gypsy women’s hair as being an uniformly cranberry tint with blood orange highlights. Many of the women wore brightly-colored scarves and most wore ornate golden earrings. They would chatter and laugh, relentlessly scanning the room with nervous apprehension.

All the men sat together, smoking profusely, an ominous grey cloud hovering above them, threatening nicotine rain. Most of them wore moustaches, with heads of thick, black hair slicked back stiff. The popular fashion statement for the gentleman gypsy of the day was the plunging neckline. White shirts predominated. Some of the more adventurous among them wore white shirts with vertical stripes. Bejeweled rings and strands of gold chains seemed requisite.

We kicked off the evening with Culture Club’s “I’ll Tumble 4 Ya,” at the conclusion of which there was no discernable decline in the gypsy din. “Flashdance” seemed to raise a vague stir. “Der Kommisar” and “Should I Stay or Should I Go” went nowhere. We worked our way through the first set, but could not seem to catch the attention of our gypsy audience. Finishing up with “Mickey,” to no avail, we trudged from the stage and made our way back to the green room. It was going to be a long night.

We came back for the second set, determined to win their gypsy hearts with Loverboy, Hall and Oates, Prince, Duran Duran. The hits baby! We were pulling out all the stops. As I stepped to the mic to sing “Workin’ For a Livin’,” a wide, burly man in a white shirt, unbuttoned to the navel, with lots of gold chains draped around his chest, was standing below me with the urgent look of a worried gypsy king on his face. And, from what he said anyway, he actually was a worried gypsy king. Or king of his tribe, or clan—I never got their line of ascendancy straight. But he was worried. And he was the head guy. That much we had straight.

It seemed that his subjects were complaining. And, don’t you know, unhappy subjects make for an unhappy gypsy king. So he was unhappy. He had a request. We were familiar with musical requests. Most of the time we couldn’t fulfill them, because believe it or not, most musicians are not human jukeboxes. We did, however, eventually learn “Freebird” and a Journey song, which cut down on our request failures by about fifty percent.

But on that particular night the king of the gypsies was making a request I had never had posed before. Could we play some Kenny Rogers? Kenny Rogers? The incongruity of the request skewed my reality for an instant. Kenny Rogers? No one had ever requested Kenny Rogers before. I was certain I didn’t know any Kenny Rogers songs—I couldn’t even think of any! A couple other band members were familiar with some of his material, but none of them knew how to play any of it. No Kenny Rogers.

No Kenny Rogers? Very bad. Very bad. The king drifted off, none too happy with our exchange. We set about trying to fire up the gypsies with Huey Lewis and the News, Naked Eyes, Men at Work, David Bowie, the Pretenders. We gave them everything we had, met only with icy stares and reproachful glares.  We were in trouble. We still had half the night to go.

At the end of the set, before we could evacuate the scaffold, the gypsy king was again standing at the foot of the stage, a look of expectant impatience on his face. He wanted to know if he could use my guitar and play some Kenny Rogers songs. One rule of band is: Never give up your instrument. Guard your instrument at all cost. I said sure.

The guy proceeded to play the entire Kenny Rogers songbook. All the hits, all the B-Sides. After a while Chris the drummer and Larry the bass player jumped in to back him up. Allen might have played lead guitar on some songs. Hilda got up and sang on the duets. I just sat and got smashed on gin and tonic, as the gypsy king sailed through the early gold like “Ruby,” “Lucille” and “The Gambler” before moving on to the latter-day stuff such as “Islands in the Stream,” “Lady,” and “She Believes in Me.”

His subjects were overswept with rapturous joy. The moment he started strumming my guitar, they all flocked to the dancefloor as if a sign were flashing above the stage. Suddenly everyone was laughing and grooving to “Through the Years” and all the others. All was well with the gypsies. Their king was singing Kenny Rogers.

  III

It was at the end of a bleak October, only a year or two later. Hilda and I were in the throes of finalizing a dreary divorce from our miserably ill-starred marriage/business relationship. It was a generally depressing time. I was disconsolate, with not a lot going on in my life at the time. My relationship was gone, thus my band was gone, thus my job was gone. It was a dark time.

Lew Jones

Former college bandmate and ever the faithful friend, Lew, was on persistent lookout for anything for me to do that might help to bring me out of my funk, even if it was only for a few days. A distraction. A shiny object. And there were a few projects he came by that did offer some temporary refuge from my inconsolability. And while one event may have ultimately had the opposite effect, it remains vividly memorable in my mind some thirty years later.

Lew asked if I wanted to play for a funeral. Given my mood, a funeral seemed strangely appropriate to my own grief-stricken state of being, so I agreed to join in the fun. Perhaps I could bury my own dead things. He also brought in two brass guys whose names I don’t remember, but we’ll call them Rob and Don, because those names are representative for horn players. We rehearsed a few times. But how often do you need to rehearse for a funeral? Besides, the gypsies had only requested four songs.

Wait, wait, wait. Gypsies? Yeah, I don’t know how he did it either, but somehow Lew hooked us up with playing at a gypsy funeral. Having had some recent experience with the tribe, I felt inclined to remark about my trepidations over the outcome of the undertaking, especially as we didn’t know any Kenny Rogers material. But Lew was certain all would be well. His contact with the gypsies had been amicable and straight-forward. He understood what they wanted from us. We were going to be paid one hundred and twenty-five dollars each for a couple of hours of our time. Okay then. No problem.

We were to meet the fellow who hired us at the Pine Street Theater where old Mrs. Bihari was lying in state. From there we were to march with the procession over to Saint Francis church, maybe six blocks away, where the service was to be performed. That seemed simple enough.

We arrived at the Pine Street Theater in the midst of a remorseless drenching downpour. Waiting in the foyer for our envoy to appear, we could see in the main hall the old gal dressed in a white nightgown, spread out on a queen bed bedecked with white silk sheets, looking very angelic and quite dead. She was surrounded by weeping women, all with heads covered by dark scarves. Behind them stood the men, motionless, staring blankly at a spot in space about eight feet above the scene.

Our guide, Zindelo eventually appeared, looking very haggard. He was quite dark-complected, taller and more slender than most of the other men, with night black hair and moustache. He wore black slacks, a white oxford shirt with blue pinstripes and a black nylon flight jacket. He motioned us outside and promptly lit up a cigarette, puffing it profusely. He described for us in detail the sequence of events that would get us over to the service at the church. Our only real responsibility was to play a dirge on the trip over. We assured him that would be no problem. All I had to do was play an E minor chord on my guitar. I could handle that. The pressing problem was that it was pouring down rain.

At some point people began to gather in the vestibule. We stood in the doorway a guitar and horn at each side, and began to play Chopin’s gloomy funeral march. Over and over and over. If you think of that piece to yourself, you only make it through a time or two before you veer off the road of consciousness and lose interest entirely. There are actually a lot of pretty parts in Chopin’s piece but we didn’t play any of those.

The crowd at the entrance stirred and parted as six hefty men came forth bearing on their shoulders Mrs. Bihari in her bed. Zindelo gave us the nod and we walked out into the deluge, droning the death march. We didn’t make it to the corner of  9^th and Sandy, maybe one hundred feet, before we were all soaked to the bone, including Mrs. Bihari who really did seem to be the most serene about the conditions—perched smartly above us all as we trudged inexorably up the hill through the onrushing creek toward the church. Born by water, borne through water.

Gypsy flight jacket

When we finally made it to the small church we members of the band were forbidden from going inside to dry off. We stood out on the loggia with a dozen or so of the men as they chain-smoked with religiously aggressive fervor. It’s my recollection all of the men looked alike, possibly all from the same family: dark haired, some with moustaches, others not. They were all dressed like Zindelo, wearing white shirts, black slacks and the same black nylon jackets with jaunty military epaulets.

While smoking ferociously, the men also gorged on chocolate—primarily Hershey bars. Suddenly, as if by some signal, seemingly every one of them produced a bottle of Chivas Regal and began guzzling with alarming gusto. As time passed, each guy would saunter over to us and offer us his bottle. Drink! At first we politely refused. Shit, things were already weird enough! But Zindelo quickly hustled over, informing us that refusing to drink a gypsy’s Chivas Regal at a funeral is blatantly disrespectful. So we drank. And drank. Jesus, did we drink.

I don’t remember how long the service was. I don’t remember how long it kept raining. Although I know we did fulfill our bargain and play “Golden Earings” as they wheeled Mrs. Bihari out of the church in her shiny mahogany casket. After that I lost track of Lew and Rob and Don. I think I pretty much blacked out. I know from the hangover I experienced the next day that I probably approached alcohol toxicity levels. It was one of my lifetime epic drunks, ranking right up there with the Decriminalization Party of 1973.

I think Lew drove. I hope I didn’t. Anyway, somehow we ended up about ten miles away at the Rose City Cemetary up on Northeast Fremont. As we made our way down the puddled asphalt toward the burial plot, the sun broke cheerily from behind the clouds. It shone brightly on a party of thirty or forty sobbing women of all ages and maybe thirty stern men who, among other things, clearly did not want to be there. It was a packed house.

Lid closed, the shining, ornately carved wooden casket was perched above the final resting place, and the crowd gathered close to hear the priest recite the final prayer. It was a touching moment. I haven’t been to a lot of funerals in my life. It was a very nice ceremony.

The priest concluded his duties and walked away from the grave. The gathering of people closed in tightly around three attendants as they began to slowly lower the casket into the ground. In an instant there were Chivas bottles anew everywhere, and everyone—men, women and children—poured the booze on the box as it was going down. In addition currency began descending into the grave, mostly twenties, but there were larger denominations, being strewn indiscriminately, falling like rain into the void.

This Land Is Your Land

Zindello appeared from somewhere, signalling us to play the final song of our set. And so with the sun shining brightly on that wet October day, as poor Mrs. Bihari was slowly lowered to her final rest, Rob and Don raised their gleaming horns heaven high to accompany Lew and me as we banged our guitars and, as requested, belted out a spirited version of “This Land is Your Land.” The attendants dutifully retrieved their ropes and began shoveling dirt into the grave as we continued singing the song over and over again until all the mourners left the site.

********************************************************************************************************************

Have you written a book? Wanna pitch it to a literary agent or publisher? For God’s sakes learn to write a proper query letter. Learn to boil your book down to a couple hundred choice words. But make it exciting. Make the jaded reader of your query want to read the book. Seems easy enough, eh? Try describing your favorite book in 200 words that somehow conveys the impact as well as the story. Maybe you’d like to start with the Bible.

The Bible X

God said to Noah
You should build yourself an ark.
It’s gonna get wet.

I

I had just turned six when my family elected to move from the Los Angeles area up to Portland that summer. My dad and a couple of his buddies had been working for the Southern California Gas Company. They saw in Portland possible happy hunting grounds within the burgeoning Oregonian natural gas furnace and appliance industry—where it was their intention to create a flourishing service and repair empire.

Looking out the front door

I wasn’t against the move, necessarily—not particularly fond of Southern California (as much as a six-year-old can have preferences about such things). We lived at the very north end of the San Fernando Valley, where beyond our housing tract lay only barren desert: sand and sagebrush, creosote, tumbleweeds and cactus. My recollections of the two years we lived in that neighborhood are an endless grayish, beige brown in tone. No, for my part, I was all for pulling up stakes and getting out of Dodge. The grass looked greener up North. At least in my estimation as a six year old it did.

Oregon

For one thing, Oregon smelled a hell of a lot better. I’ll always remember the mossy, soggy, decaying balsamic scent. I still capture a faint Proustian hint of that fragrance at times when walking in the woods. It was a different world. As far as I recall, I had only seen actual rain just a few times in my life before we moved to Oregon. People had lawns! There were trees. Open fields.

When we first got to Oregon, we stayed in Milwaukie for a couple of weeks with Ray and Jean, some friends of my parents. While we were out looking for a house to rent in the area, we frequently traveled up and down Oatfield Road, the main thoroughfare in that neighborhood. On several occasions something very strange happened.

Old man at the side of the road

As we drove along in our powder blue Ford station wagon we sometimes passed a weary, old, white haired man ambling slowly along the shoulder of the road. He was always dressed in the same worn, gray work pants and dingy white shirt. He wore suspenders and sometimes he carried a dark coat with him, slung over his arm as he walked

Every time, as we passed him, he would stop walking and stare at our car—directly at me. His stern gaze inevitably met with mine, and his piercing blue eyes would widen as if he recognized me. It never failed to send a chill down my spine. As we drove past him, I would turn in my seat to catch another glimpse out the rear window, but by then he had vanished. No one else ever saw the man. My parents thought I was just imagining things, or inventing them. But they always registered some surprise whenever I brought up the mysterious guy as we traveled down Oatfield

We soon moved into a white, ‘30s era bungalow on the corner of 32^nd and Evergreen at the south side of Milwaukie, about a mile from Ray and Jean’s place. The property had a little creek running through the sloping back yard, an open field next door on the north side of the house and small forests across the streets on the west and south sides. It was like living in a residential park. Paths wove through both forests, thick with typical Oregonian vegetation.

Early one Sunday (I know it was a Sunday, because my parents were still in bed), not long after we moved into the new house, I was exploring the larger forest across 32^nd, where lay the headwaters of the little creek that ran across our back yard. It was a misty gray, moist morning. I aimlessly wandered down a trail through the undergrowth, occasionally looking in the shallow creek for crawdads, which closely resembled the scorpions more customary in my native land. I closely observed and noted ferns and other flora unique to the region.

Had I been paying attention to where I was going, the incident probably could have been avoided, but there it is—callow youth. Upon taking one (wrong) step, the ground yielded squishy beneath my feet. Moving. Faintly squealing squeakily. I looked down to see four or six squirming pink and gray baby things under my foot. With a shudder, I recoiled in horror.

Mama Possum

Suddenly, farther down the narrow corridor I could see what at first I thought might be a cat approaching at high speed from the south. Unfortunately instead of a kitty, it was a hissing, barking mama possum, approximately the size of a Jack Russell terrier. And it was rumbling down the path directly toward me with some kind of badass retribution on its mind. It was in that instant I discovered that whatever that thing was—it had a long conical snout and ugly, gnashing, jagged teeth. And upon closer inspection, it obviously in no way resembled Jingle Bells, my poor departed cat.

I wasted no time in getting the hell out of there. Screaming bloody murder, I ran all the way home, busting into my parents room where, in retrospect, I’m pretty sure they were having sex. Hysterical child interuptus apparently made my unintelligible ravings about some saw-toothed monster across the street sound like maybe some of those “old man by the side of the road” tales I had been spinning of late. Be that as it may, I never again ventured into that forest unaccompanied, nor without some sort of weapon. Vigilance became the watchword.

That September I started school. Mom accompanied me the first day. Upon our arrival, I was not feeling positive about the conditions at the school. For one thing, there were other kids—strangers—in the room. I was under the mistaken impression that it was going to be some sort of one-on-one learning experience, a brisk dialog between my mentor and I. Instantly I felt a sense of intense betrayal, a poor little lamb being led to slaughter.

I remember sitting near the back of the row of desks next to the window, a whole roomful of other nervous little kids twitching and whimpering like a passel of baby possums. About every minute or so, I would look over my shoulder toward the storage area near the door, where Mom and a couple of other overprotective mothers stood looking on supportively. It’ll be okay, Honey.

Inevitably, that moment came when I looked over my shoulder and she had vanished. It was almost like the old man by the side of the road. She just disappeared. I remember sinking into a swoon of despondency that lasted many days. Mom and I re-enacted that first episode on several more mornings. I did not take readily to the atmosphere at school.

For one thing, the room was far too brightly lit. It seemed, well, institutional. And the other children were out of control, acting like six-year olds. What’s more, Mrs. Ystad wore big, heavy, brown, horn-rimmed glasses that completely obscured her face. From my vantage point she looked like a pair of glasses with two eyebrows and a mouth.

Eventually, I accepted the fact that I was to ride the school bus for Flying Dutchboy eternity, there to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous sixth graders and other unruly entities. Still, as time passed I managed to make a few friends. David Cookson, Bobby Wisner and Tommy Phelps were chief among them. Tommy lived on Nixon below the field next door, down a path that crossed the trickling creek. David lived just down from Tommy, off of Aldercrest. I didn’t know where Bobby lived.

Lightning

One day in late October I was over at Tommy’s after school, hanging out, watching Mister Moon on TV. It was intermittently stormy and rainy outside, with a few brief sun breaks. At the show’s conclusion I took advantage of a sun break to make a dash for home. I crossed the creek and made it up the path to the top of the hill when it began to rain again torrentially, and a bolt of lightning flashed brilliant white in front of me. Having never seen lightning before, I experienced some mild alarm, but continued on along the route back to our house. About half way across the field I encountered a low blackberry bush that was burnt and smoldering in the rain. I’ve always wondered about that.

II

It was about that same time that I started having problems with earaches. They were frequent and often agonizingly painful. And they often kept me up at night. It was a miserable time. Mom took me to the doctor and it turned out my tonsils and adenoids were inflamed and causing infections in my Eustachian tube. It was determined that an operation was necessary in order to remove the offending tissues.

So, before dawn the day after Christmas my parents drove me across town to Saint Vincent’s hospital where the operation was to be performed. I had been enticed into cooperating with the whole scheme under the impression that I would spend my convalescence reclined in ice cream heaven—“all the ice cream I could eat.” Those were the exact words.

That sounded great to me. One would think that I would have been more wary given the treachery I had only recently endured over my entry into the world of scholastics. But alas, one of my chief features, that of gullibility, has now been fully exposed, though it’s much too late in the game for anyone to possibly profit from that disclosure.

On the table

The memory remains quite vivid of laying on the gurney as a masked nurse in a blue skullcap wheeled me into the operating room. The light above me was very bright white. There were three or four other faceless people hovering around. I was quite frightened. Someone placed an oxygen mask over my face, cool air gently forcing its way into my lungs.

But the air abruptly changed to some malignant petroleum wind, like alcohol or airplane glue, but even worse. Ether. I began to panic, telling the shapes to take the damn mask away, the air was bad. One of them told me to “just blow the bad air away.” Two puffs and I was down.

Sun

And transported to a blood-maroon hued hall. A great glowing golden sun hung on the wall at the far end of the massive room. Indifferent shadows danced at the periphery, and loomed and pooled gloomily at my side. I was not so much in fear of the spectacle as in awe. I had never seen anything like that before. Everything went well, operation a rousing success. I exited the operating theater tonsil and adenoid free, ready to resume my life as a child.

Ice cream prize

I awoke in a dim grog and promptly vomited blood all over the hospital bed—immediately screaming out in delirious terror. Nurses came and things were eventually made right. Before long my ice cream prize arrived in a stainless steel bowl on a tray. However, one unforeseen wrench in the works was the fact that I could not bear to swallow. My swollen throat would not allow it. All the ice cream one could want, but throat too raw to swallow. Rime of the Youthful Tonsilectomy. It was abject hell.

Eventually they sent me home and somewhere along the line I was finally rewarded with the afore-promised ice cream indulgence, though it was a hollow bounty and by no means worth the effort it took to acquire. Duly noted.

Winter passed rather uneventfully, settling into the dull routine of relentless first grade rote repetition, interspersed with brief interludes of incoherent play in the gym at recesses and after lunch. Tommy, Bobby, David and I became fast friends, spending most of our free time together, looking for any innocent forms of anarchy available within our limited sphere.

I’m not sure who it was—probably David—but someone hatched the idea of a competition—something dangerous, something outside accepted boundaries. Something wild! Since it was his brainstorm in the first place, he elected to initiate the proceedings. The four of us stood outside the girls lavatory, while David worked up his courage.

He drew a deep breath, and without warning sprinted through the in-door to the girls’ lavatory. He stayed in there for fifteen or twenty seconds while the panic-stricken girls screamed uncontrollably. It was delightful pandemonium. As David came running out, Tommy galloped in, the object being to remain inside longer than anyone else. He definitely stayed in there for a greater duration than David had, a count well-past twenty. Then he tore out as Bobby scurried in. And he stayed in there longer than the other two had. Around twenty-five, I think. That’s what I counted.

Hysterical girls

Then came my turn. I dashed through the door as Bobby scampered out. Inside, girls were jumping up and down, waving their hands frantically, crying, running in aimless circles—too frightened to simply leave the premises. Quickly scuttling over to the wall next to the washbasins, I squatted down on my haunches, buried my head in my arms, and counted to forty.

Secure in the knowledge that victory was most certainly mine, I trotted triumphantly from the girls’ can, directly into Mrs. Mitchell—who was standing stiffly next to my friends, an enraged expression on her somber face. Mrs. Mitchell was a tall, slender woman with graying hair and she wore a long, dark skirt, which enveloped me like a wave as I plunged headlong forward.

Idealized Hokey Pokey

Mrs. Mitchell was not a woman with whom to be trifled. She was known among her second grade students as a dark force. Strict and demanding. She taught my class for rhythms hour on Friday mornings in the rec room, where we did the Hokey-Pokey and we shook it all about with military proficiency. Left right, left right.

As I desperately swam in the tides of her voluminous skirt, Mrs. Mitchell fished around in the wake until she caught an ear. Grabbing it indelicately, she dragged me howling up to Mister Spring’s office. There, she pushed me down onto a wooden chair outside the room where he sat at his desk, talking on the phone. Mrs. Mitchell told me to stay there and not to move until the bell rang to go back to class. She informed me that I would be spending every recess in that chair for the next two weeks.

Mister Spring

I was petrified at that prospect. Mister Spring was a notoriously harsh disciplinarian, who stood for no shenanigans, and ran a very tight ship. He was in his fifties, of average height. Thin. A dashing shock of cloud white hair. His face was angular and leathery tan. He had a mole the size and placement of which was identical to that of Abraham Lincoln.

Mister Spring sat working at his desk, and occasionally peered out at me through a window into the foyer where I sat. From time to time he would get up from his desk and wander out of the room, ignoring me whenever he passed. He never once addressed me, or my infraction, over the two weeks of my detention. It was as if I wasn’t there.

For my part, I mostly sat there meditating, humming to myself, thinking about what I had done, pretty certain that my days as a lavatory racer were at an end. The guys and I had acquired a reputation throughout the lower grades as being devil-may-care mayhem makers. And while that attention was well worth the penalty, I was much relieved when that phase was finally over.

III

Shortly after my seventh birthday that spring, I began to experience strange, recurring dreams. They were dreams outside my ken. Not of this world. Awe-inspiring dreams. Unexplainable. Mysterious. Typically they happened a couple times a week.

Beams of Light

The dream would begin as a single beam of light, spanning all dark space and perpetual time. The beam emitted a subtle pitch, vibrating almost imperceptibly a slight color. As the dream transpired, the beam began to merge with other beams of light. They all emitted a unique frequency and vibrated a vaguely different spectral hue.

Sphere of Light

Slowly a billion separate beams, a trillion separate beams, an universe full—each its own distinctive vibration—from all directions, converged into while emerging from a great repository sphere of immaculate white light. The sphere sang a perfect soprano mother sigh, the all thing of every, each tine of the faultless orb, chiming the harp of an eternity of celestial souls.

The dreams didn’t frighten me, or at least not as they should have. I was fascinated by their inarticulable majesty and drawn like a moth to the magical musical fire in it all. It was the endless reverberation of the herald angels. It seemed to me, in my naïve universe, to be the truth.

Milwaukee Braves

At about the same time, I became aware of the sport of baseball. The Milwaukee Braves were doing very well. As the season progressed into the summer, the Braves remained the leaders in the National League race. I was absolutely brimming with civic pride. I did not understand baseball at all other than to toss a ball with my dad. But our guys, our Milwaukie Braves were takin’ it to the streets! I learned baseball and geography on approximately the same time line. But not for another year or so.

The King

That same summer, my cousins came up from California to visit us. My cousin Jimmy was six or seven years older than me and was crazy, man, crazy over Elvis. He had all of Elvis’ singles: “All Shook Up,” “Teddy Bear,” “Hound Dog,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Jailhouse Rock,” all of them. It chafed my dad no end to have to let his nephew play those infernal things on his beloved hi-fi system, the one he built himself and of which he was extremely proud. Only cool jazz was supposed to emanate from that special speaker he had crafted, with the exclusive coaxial duplex driver and the deluxe folded horn cabinet.

Elvis sounded like a million bucks through that sound system! And I started to pay closer attention to rock music than I had in the past (when I was six). American Bandstand began broadcasting nationally around the same time, so there was an immediate conduit for that newfound interest as well. Mom always listened to Al Jarvis and watched Peter Potter’s Juke Box Jury when we lived in California, so I was, like, hip to the hits, man. But the rock and roll was a bit of a new thing.

Early that summer, a couple of weeks after public school let out, Mom decided that my brother and sister and I needed religion—so she sent us to a “catechism camp” at St. John the Baptist parochial school in Milwaukie. My dad was raised Catholic, although he only went to church on Christmas and Easter. The only prayerful words I ever heard him utter were “God damn it” and “Jesus H. Christ.” Still, Mom had converted to Catholicism to marry Dad and felt duty-bound to protect us from going to Hell, if it was at all within her power. So we dutifully attended mass every Sunday.

Jesus healing a deaf man

Catechism camp was relentlessly dreary. Perfectly useful summer days wasted in a drab, institutional-green room with nothing for distraction but a blackboard and everywhere renditions of Jesus walking among lambs, Jesus preaching to people, Jesus tending to the sick and dying. The fellow seemed well intentioned enough, as far as I could tell.

Cheerless, colorless nuns floated around those classes, glumly preaching the harsh black and white dogma of the Catholic church. Occasionally a grim priest, almost always Father Wachter—not a man of many words—would address the class.

Father Wachter

He would enter the room with jaws clenched, and standing there before us would deliver in a dour monotone a reproachful sermon as to how we were all doomed to the merciless fires of unceasing hell unless we got ourselves intimately familiar with the Sacraments of Penance and Communion without delay. That being made darkly clear, he would turn and walk directly out of the assembly without saying another word. He did that several times in the two weeks I was stuck that class. It never failed to send shivers up my spine.

Sister Thaddeus Clare

My teacher nun that summer was Sister John Mary. In her I learned a profound lesson that served me well for the rest of my Catholic servitude: Never trust a nun with a man’s name in her patronage. In those days, your Sister Matthew Theresas, or Sister Thaddeus Clares, and Sister Rose Timothys were sure to be bad news. Poor, pitiable, humorless drones in black habits framed in white.

Sister John Mary

Sister John Mary was the most severe of them all. She radiated cold, bleak despondency. She was tall and deathly gaunt, her cheekbones protruding ominously. She carried with her a wooden footruler, the one with the metal edge, often slapping it in her hand to maintain our attention. It was Sister John Mary’s charge to instruct us in the plan for avoiding Hell. And it wasn’t going to be any picnic.

Our four hour days primarily consisted of learning the Apostles Creed, which was the basic oath to the tenets of the church; and also the prayers necessary to save our wretched souls: the “Hail Mary,” the “Our Father” and the “Act of Contrition”—the password prayers required to avoid the certainty of hell. We kids had been baptized. So we already had Original sin out of the way. But there were still the other obstacle sins that we needed to constantly confront, confess and endlessly pray away, ever unceasingly.

So, in order for us to be chaste enough as seven-year old children to receive Holy Communion in the fall, we needed to be heartily sorry for whatever violations against whomever we may have committed up to that point. Therefore we were going to need to confess those sins to someone (usually Father Wachter) behind a dark screen in a little black-curtained booth at the back of the church—always on Saturday afternoons, when any sane child would be out doing pretty much anything besides confessing sins one had to make up in order just to confess them.

Hell

But deeply impressed with the importance of avoiding something closely resembling Dante’s depiction of Hell, I committed to memory the creed and prayers that were so damned important in ensuring my infinite innocence before the grand court—although there were occasions when I confused them with the Cub Scout oath, which I was also attempting to master at around the same time.

The brain-washing went well enough until we hit a snag on day seven. I asked about the beams of light. I asked Sister John Mary about the beams of light that made a colorful sound, that all merged into the big ball of light with the voice of all life and time. The other kids looked at me dumbfounded. I wasn’t trying to be impertinent. I figured the beams of light had something to do with God and Jesus. And, logically, she seemed to me to be the most likely resource concerning such spiritual provisions.

However, Sister John Mary stared at me with a shocked spiteful sneer, as if I were a lower order of demon. She rushed like a shadow from the front of the room to my side. Without a word of interaction, she ordered me to extend my right hand, palm down. I remember looking at her inquisitively, as if we were going to play a game of some sort. Without further interaction, she drew the ruler, metal edge exposed, and smartly rapped me three times across the knuckles of my fingers.

A fine line of blood instantaneously formed across all four knuckles and I peered up at her, wounded in every way. Without a word she returned to the front of the class and went back to whatever she had been indoctrinating us with, probably a perfect “Act of Contrition.” I never brought up the beams of light again. But I never forgot them either. Something changed in me that day—something for which I would not find a word to describe for another year or two.

Henry Aaron

The Milwaukee Braves won the World Series that year and Henry Aaron became my favorite player, because his name was closely associated in every way with the team’s success, especially that year. The civic response to all of this around the City of Milwaukie was decidedly low-key I felt. I didn’t see any signs of a celebration whatsoever. I was a bit disappointed in that.

Eventually Geography became a subject and I discovered Milwaukie, Oregon and Milwaukee, Wisconsin were actually two places quite some distance apart. Still I ended up choosing my favorite professional football team based on that understanding: the Green Bay Packers.

About that time I was made aware of the word “agnostic” and became one the moment I heard the definition. Actually I had become one the instant Sister John Mary cut me across the knuckles. The scars from that cut have never healed.

The dreams of the beams of light began to subside around that time too. Eventually, not long after Christmas time and the birth of my youngest brother, the dreams stopped altogether. My parents felt compelled by Catholic guilt to force me to continue attending some form of catechism until my Confirmation at age eleven, when I was allowed to choose my own spiritual path going forward. I declared agnosticism and quit going to church altogether.

And as that path unfolded over the years, I kept a promise to myself, one that I made at age eight when I stopped having them—to never forget the dreams. Through all the abundant changes that have manifested within my life, I have never forgotten and will always remember as the one great truth this single spark of light that spirals a vibration of my own lone existence through all indefinite time.

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The latest installment of Biblical Haiku:
The Bible IX

The new testament
Tells the story of a guy.
Didn’t hang out long.