Docta's Note:
This seems to be about numbers but it isn't. It is long and rambling. Sometimes it's funny. Sometimes it's dirty. You will have to be persistent or on drugs to get through it. Is it worth it? Ask my agent..wait, I don't have an agent. Ask anyway.
Dear Chance,
I read your letter and
frankly it confused me. I have tried to write my measured response coherently
but your deadline has passed and so I am forced to reply with this collection
of thoughts. I am sure you are intelligent and patient enough to find your way
through them.
PS I aspire to achieve
ever higher levels (maybe 35 some day) and I know you will be there to help.
Part 1: 20 will do (don’t try too
hard)
I didn’t think 30 would break
it. I thought 35 was even possible. I wandered in at 20. You detected a lack of self confidence, so
you boosted me with lots of hot rod dirt track time. It looked like my opponent
was on crack. I recited my lessons (my mantra, really). I concentrated and I
survived.
We dialed back again to 20
and made peace with everyone. We didn’t need the 35 or the 30 and it’s a lot
more mellow here except for these diehards that insisted on bringing their hot
rods to art gallery openings.
“ I can’t do without my 32”
was what we heard over and over again, as if a “club of 32” had organized and
sent out a flyer. It seemed like Florida. The traffic had subsided. A Buick
Riviera became my primary mode of transportation. (4 speed automatic: Well
that’s 2 more speeds than we use-ta have.)
The “37 man” gave me a starter pack of Marlboros, said he had trained with
Richard Petty but he was just a delivery man who liked to drive fast and I
decided to leave him his pride. I took a picture of him in his Rocket -88. He
had added DynaFlow. It was chopped, channeled, shaved, with flared purple
bubble skirts, that, like the ladies I remember from then, kept too much
covered.
31 was the key but as soon as
I signed on my metabolism went to the equivalent of a 10. I wouldn’t exercise
but I would do something. Should I stand on a scale? Look, I’m not one to wait
around, so I weighed myself. I knew they wouldn’t believe me no matter what I told
them, so I got a printout to take with me. It’s a new model and it can do that.
I turned it in and I got a few social points. Were they good for something?
(Does anyone ever buy you a beer?) Can you at least seem interesting?
Yes, that I can do and anytime I’ll do it for you.
I was in disgust with that
corny rhythm, so I asked him if we were having a good time. He looked at me in
a sad way, burst out laughing and said
How long did this terror go on with the guys -or were
they monsters trapping you in a cave? After 3.7 days I stopped.
“I can’t give you 30, I can’t even give you
24. The mosquito net provided all of the protection I’m going to have tonight”
“I snuck a gun out from the
city, but I’m a peaceful guy.”
The direction of this was
becoming tedious at best so I wandered away. Was I asked to confront this
situation? No, I just wasn’t there, I hadn’t seen it firsthand, and that would
prevent me from jumping to a conclusion prematurely. I laughed as a quick web
search confirmed it as cliché #27 in that holy book for salesman, “OHM”.
OHM the person wandered in and I could
tell he was special. He was cool - it was his ease in entering a room with
strangers that I’ve known for 20 years. I hadn’t had as many words with her
as he has since a-few-minutes-ago with Flora, I could read her aura (hey, wait
- “Flora’s Aura”) and she was all I
could think about. She started out as Tinka bell, then got a little rough with
Doris Day. We brought him up to the present time, and he got beat that way.
I could take a day off and
fix this.
On to the ship. Flora was closed up in her room, waiting
for her release, she got into Ella, It was that or Englebert Humperdink, so she
actually made the wise choice. They
hooked up and had a drink. The bar was toward the back of the ship, the rugs
were a little sticky but otherwise the place wasn’t too bad. Breezy on deck, we
liquored up in the wind anyway. Bad beer with no alternatives. A few days of
mixed drinks got me right back to beer a grade or two down but it still was
beer and it still tasted good. Jay came by and interviewed us as we just
happened to be walking by the studio. Synchronicity led us into in alley, but
it wasn’t bad. There were new flowers, a
dark entrance, dampened, cluttered by the excess of rainfall and everything was
growing like crazy. It was a cafe so I ordered and opened a book. I vowed I was going to look normal because it
was a fast food chain, the lights were the lighting equivalent of a blues –
oriented band with guys just trying to have fun, but with neon lights, the
doorman was a priest who let even under-aged kids in, giving them equal
treatment with arms tightly crossed, uptight, democratically dispensing dirty
looks to all. (He prided himself on treating everyone equally). The band
pretended they had no goals so they could secretly keep alive their secret of
“really wanting to make it” hidden just under the surface. It fed their future
and kept them alive through their day jobs and the increasing demands on mind
space made by their wives.
“I wouldn’t be so bad with
just the wife”, a guitarist remarked after an especially beer-ey practice,
“but the girl kid is copying
her bitchiness, and now Its like I have two wives. “
This helped secure his place
in the band as a permanent member. The whole situation has been discussed many
times before, and I know you know the answer. Bored, I looked up Joseph Stalin.
I was on a web site used for generating book reports by providing a summary
that’s 10% as long. Would it work for me, would I learn from it? It provided
the facts at least as well as a text book. The big neglect was they didn’t
discuss his ill mind. The statistics weren’t enough. What would it take? Nobody
knows, so you can submit your own personal estimate at home via web
guessing how many people he killed due to his paranoia. It’s a poll they are
conducting on their web site, and history will be written according to the
majority answer. I hear it’s lonely if you are undocumented so I voted.
Pulled into Popeye’s thinking
this was New Orleans and somebody figured out to fast food it, the New Orleans
experience I mean, but it was just a good KFC with some spices. I didn’t feel I
missed anything by not trying it over and over. But we DID try it over and over
because a few of us had no money and this was the best we could do .(Obviously
lazy ass shits). When you’re in New
Orleans and nearly broke plan on farting a lot more. Our budget dictated we
switch over to Buster Holmes. Professor Longhair ate there (After all he sang “got those
red beans cookin”) We perpetrated or even started the myth that he got those red beans cookin’ at
Buster’s) ) Buster’s red beans and rice was a meal for nothing and it tasted
great, but the farts from it – especially with beer. Blue flames. I was plugged
into a tradition at last.
I carefully observed the
regulars at Buster’s (my mentors,
really) every time I went. One couple, every time he treated her wrong, I noticed her
girdle was a little tighter. I developed many theories as to where the fat
went. Some of it was obvious in the overflow. The rest went unexplained.
My emotions overflowed my
shirt that day too, and I understood men with hairy chests for the first time.
I was sweating and for me, with little body hair, my shirt soaked right
through. I figured the guys with more hairs would have the advantage of the
hairs catching the moisture for them. Which one, hairy or hairless, would turn on the girls?
I shaved. I didn’t know what
else to do after that, so I shaved some more.
I passed on the compulsion to shave myself all over, playing Freecell
ever more.
As you can see, this has just
about wound down. And if there’s anything that I’ve gotten really good at it’s
exiting the ship just before it goes down. Sitting in the bird sanctuary, I
heard them. I asked for “the magic there”, they mistook my request and it put
me in a mind-groove with Frigidair. Together we established that I owned none
of their products but I needed some one to talk to and would you still be
there?
Chance's assistant started wheezing over the phone
filling in this fairy tale that he was embellished more with each line and so
it took him twice as long to deliver. He didn’t recognize what he was doing. We
knew he wouldn’t care if he did. I thanked him over the phone. I could tell by
the tone of the wheezing I was getting to him. He’s got one of the fast new
fishing boats that made him intoxicated with an attachment to it bordering on
psychotic. We categorized it as normal behavior because every one else thought
it was normal. I filed it away in my brain to be processed at another time, for
now I was absorbed in the Dylan line “I picked up the telephone, a foot came
through the line”. It was infectious and
even I jumped in. I was always a consumer too, but all I cared about was cars.
Despite the obsession, when I was a kid I could have only the mildest influence
on my dad as to what kind of car he’d buy. He figured out that it was not the
base price of a car but the options are where the consumer loses. So he bought
the cheapest model with no options. That was the starting point. We
successfully argued for a radio and a heater. 1958. The windshield wipers were
vacuum driven. You had to accept not being able to see for long periods of time when you
accelerated. That was the “bad time“ for vacuum wipers. If you floored it
they’d totally stop. If u let off the gas the wipers would go on. I mantra’d
“Everything in balance”, even back then, maybe better back then. So you
accelerate mostly - but when you needed to see,
you’d back off the gas a bit and let the wipers run. This and a “Blue Flame”
145 Horsepower six. It was the cheapest motor, of course. When farts are lit
with a lighter they make a “Blue Flame”, too, as I learned after eating at
Buster’s many years later.
We had dessert. Chocolate
éclairs were always trouble. So easily squashable. “Now vee take da weenie and
it doesn’t work.” Anybody could squash éclair weenies. So fuck all those
bullies.
145, like the basics of the
blues, 1-4-5, would have to do. I didn’t settle for 20, I was happy there. I
Hope this answers your questions, Chance, and gets you through another week.
Good night, and good luck,
Your pal
Hardly Chance (AKA MC “Liquid
Ice”)
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