old fans

can identify in my raw face the reflection of the rock dude in leather pants humping a monitor at the Channel, the Rat, CBGB's. they connect with a persona and with a band that no longer has anything to do with me or with what i am working on now. how do i react? not well. i try to not be rude. i smile and nod, but in the background smirks embarrassed discomfort. my first encounter with this phenomenon happened when i came home my sophomore year from college. it seemed that many of my high school friends were trying to relocate the person i'd been, the person they remembered but who was no longer wearing those ratty, down-at-the-heel loafers. they seemed to want me to put 'em back on. 'c'mon, rick. this ain't you!' in some ways we never change, not deep down. the overcoat of identity masks the Essential Self from all but the most observant. we are comfortable in the personality-of-the-present, but we don't like it if we can't shed skin, if the butterfly can't liberate itself from the chrysalis. that's why i become distant at holiday reunions and blame the hard eyes of old friends who are convinced i haven't changed, when, in fact, i had, in a thousand ways. i couldn't be 'read' or i didn't want to be. my emotions were covered with bruises and that was the problem. when i seemed to 'not be into girls that much' it worried my high school pals. they didn't get it or didn't want to. my new friends at Yale thrived on an honest playing field. i'd stopped being the make-'em-happy-president-of-the-senior-class boy who knew in his homo heart that he had fooled everyone, including himself. to be back home was like staring into a fun house mirror and despising the distortion. and so it is with fans. even new ones. they like a song i never play any more. they treasure on a dusty shelf a record i can barely recall. not long ago i ran into a woman who as a teenager was fanatically devoted to one of my bands. before shows she'd appear back stage with some wild object she'd decorated meaningfully and given to us with all her heart. sadly, i not only failed to recognize her, i had no memory at all of any incident or interaction or gift. it had all gone down the brain drain. i felt awful. i did not live up to her nostalgic day dream. i'm hardly a big shot in the music business. i am, at best, a small fish in a small Jamaica Plain pond, known, but not iconic. which is fine. i like how it is. mostly i like what i'm working on at present and am well over my archives. so forgive me, whoever you are, if i have that vacant look when you say hi, when you remember when. i have long since thrown out the leather pants or the see-thru blouse or the lead vocal stomp. i do sincerely appreciate your post card recollection. on a rare occasion when i listen to a record i made 20, 30 years ago, i am moved by the spew of memories, jokes, arguments, colors and scenes. one thing does bother me, however. i wonder when it's a guy, say, in his 40's with kids? 'did i hit on you back then?' because the boy he used to be is now scatter-eyed, losing head hair and has a pig gut. maybe he was fond of the attention. maybe, in retrospect, he'd actually wished i'd tried t get into his pants. or maybe because i didn't, he respected me, but worries about his shy son standing just behind him. all of this in my cob-webbed attic over something as shallow as being recognized as The Rick Berlin.

secrets

'if i tell you this you won't tell anybody else, ok? cuz i've never told this to anybody ever'. i promise when they ask, but why me? is it the Uncle Homo syndrome (he has to be discreet because he had to hide his 'nature' all those early years and will get it about secrecy)? do they unload because i have a rep? i leak and they want it told to others. they want the dead fish pried out of their gut and onto the street. these confessions remind me of the criminal who is driven to tell a girlfriend, a cell mate, a lawyer, a brother so that he or she will unlock him from the prison of his guilt. so yes, sometimes i break my promise. i slip a velvet whisper into a safe ear just because the secret is nasty, funny, or impossible to keep. i insinuate permission. on the other hand i hide a handful of privacies who's lock box has never ever been violated. some are mine, some belong to friends, or strangers. they live inside my head like a child hiding in the basement, safe but wary. secrets begin in childhood. they begin the first time you realize that mom and dad are not god and that they don't know everything there is to know about you. they don't see you walk out of a barber shop with a comic book that doesn't belong to you. they don't catch you flipping through dad's Playboy unmoved by Marilyn's juicy tits. they don't know what happened between you and your next door neighbor out in the barn. you are out of range from mom and dad's all-seeing eye of Saruman. this began for me when i realized that Santa Claus was a fiction. that he smelled of booze and had a voice like Uncle Karl. i didn't say anything about it because i hated the truth. i didn't bring it up with my sisters because they were younger and living the magic of Christmas. i kept doubt to myself until i met my first best friend. he was the first person i told things to i never told to anybody else and with whom i did things i never did with anybody else. things that were secret. secrecy is a part of love. my first best friend was the first person i ever fell in love with even if i couldn't use those sacred words. i thought about him when he wasn't around. i felt differently when i touched his arm and when he leaned against me. i was hurt when he criticized. my heart leapt when he laughed. it was the secret of how i was with him that changed me, made me feel new, re-invented, bursting with light. which is why, later on, a love affair gets it's charge from secrecy, from a dream world enshrined in a cathedral built, brick by brick, with the person you love. why, early on, i didn't want to use the 'l' word until i was sure. i didn't want to jinx the miracle with a silly verb. i didn't want my friends to be in on what was happening or to break love down into shards of demeaning transparency. if all secrets are known then magic evaporates in a torch light that exposes worms and rust and insects.

got physical?

we all know what this means: ye olde finger up ye olde bung hole. we think about it on the way there. will he forget? would we remind him? does he look forward to it, or does he resist? will there be a smudge spot left on the paper afterwards to be scraped up by an orderly? will he, this time, find a brocoli-sized nub in there to be burned out, sliced up and scare the be-jesus out of us? will it be time for that loathsome unit, the black snake? trapped for days with nauseating gulps of Gator Aid, CVS enemas and a nurse reminding us that 'the drugs are awesome'. you think about it, all of it, if time is on your side or if it's not and you realize, as the clock winds down, that these visits will increase. that bad news will begin to happen to your body. that fear will intrude on sane reflection, that on a sunny day it might rain. so far i've been lucky in the doctor/diagnosis department. for the last 10 years i've had the same primary with the same 'you're fine' salute. he's thorough. he spends more than the alloted HMO hurry-up, he has seen me through minor worries and reads me like a country doc. like the honest auto mechanic who gets the difference between silly and serious, my guy never advocates procedures or drugs that won't heal or help. sadly, he has transfered to Florida. good for him, but not good for me. my most recent annual is with a new dude who has, as the President might say, a 'funny name'. as soon as he comes through the door to check me out in my reverse blue-green house dress, my heart jumps. this guy drop dead resembles the phony interns i've seen on porn sites. the ones who 'examine' their hot young patients, heart, lungs, glands, only to eventually jerk them off into oblivion. the 'patients' mildly resist until they let go all over the place. i'm doubly in doubt about my new guy when i notice his long eyelashes and borderline lisp. 'uh oh' i'm thinking, 'the prostate check is gonna be weird'. he snaps on the rubber glove like Nurse Ratched and is in and outa there like a mouse to the cheese. whoa! the doc has skills. he wraps up the look-see, says i'm in good shape and informs me that in one year's time he, like my previous primary, will be moving on. i'll have to hunt and peck another fella (or woman?) to do the probe based on a name, a funny name.

farting

i know. some do, some don't. or they say they don't, but they do, don't they? everybody farts. (isn't that an R.E.M. song?) anyhow it is not who farts but who thinks they're funny and who doesn't. my sisters do. my nieces and nephews don't. my (German) room mate does. my co-workers don't. my father did. my mother did not. she slapped me loud and hard across the face in a Thai restaurant after i cut a string-of-pearls oinker. (i was in my 50's). she did not think it was funny, except once when i blew a brown note into my cat's face. mum was sitting on the couch and peering over a magazine as i squatted and aimed my artillery inches in front of Ralphie's little pink eraser. he squinted, edged a bit into the brown blizzard, wrinkled his nose and sniffed, as if reading a tea leaf. mum lost it. she doubled over with tears of laughter streaming down her face. i got her. just that once. so i guess even with the proprietary, a fart can make you laugh. it is one of those rare unpredictable acts we humans are capable of. we never know, we can never predict what it will sound like, or how it will stink. like jazz, it improvises it's own vocabulary. i don't think i'll ever get over it. armpit blats were funny when i was 5. sour puffs in high school english were historical events. in the sickening incubation of an enclosed fuselage everyone is suspect and grim. in a noisy bar egg and beer conspire to force you to the floor or out the door. in elevators you foist them off onto an infuriated friend. Holden Caulfield cut one in chapel and that was in a book you had to read. i doubt i will ever get over doing, hearing, talking about, waking up to these foul snorts out the back door. they keep the kid in all of us present and accounted for. embarrassed? well maybe, once, tho it's more of a shit than a fart story. on the dance floor at Villa Victoria, Daisy, a black queen, asked if i wanted t do a bump. why not? a teensy pebble of coke won't make me crazy and maybe i'll transform into a dancin' fool. so i did it, right then and there and immediately had to go. had to go bad before i shit myself. there was only one unisex piss pot and this being an emergency i cut in line, squirreled in and locked the door. i knew how bad it was going to be. i'm not sure if it's the shit itself, the gas or the effect of cocaine on nostrils that does this, but i can assure you it is just The Worst Smell Ever and sure enough, the results were ungodly. i batted at the fumes to disperse them and planned on returning to Daisy and the hot pump of the dance floor, but realized, as i exited (slamming the door in hopes that it would kick back the smut smog) that a line of 10 frantic queens were waiting in line to get in there and bump themselves silly. uh oh. i ducked, arm in front of my face like a Chicago mobster who doesn't want his picture in the paper and bolted for the door just as les girls rushed in and then almost immediately ricocheted back out in a fanfare of shrieking, fanning noses, coughing and gasping for air. i'm outed, flat out outed. i squirmed through the exit and made my way home, tail between rubber legs. the moral: shitting and farting never amuses all the people all the time.

is there ever another place to be other than where you are?

you're in a dungeon, strapped to a table with electric alligator teeth snapped onto your balls. a guy in an executioner's mask has his hand on the trigger and he ain't a dominatrix, he's a motherfucking sadist who will get you to say anything, do anything, fuck anything and you will not resist. if you could 'jump' to a safe harbor, you would, wouldn't you? i would. and so, isn't it true that we're always in the right place at the right time with the right situation or person? what i'm stabbing at here is the realization (increasingly as i get older) that all experience benefits the Self in spite of our too many all-too-human, grass-is-greener complaints. even when it seems the opposite. even when we wish to be almost any other place than right here, right now. ('you ok?' i ask the dishwasher. 'i just want to get the fuck outa here and go home.') but he can't, can he? he has to finish up or quit. that's how we learn. that's how we grow. the unavoidables that we resent and confront and grope our way past. a hairdresser friend of mine put it this way describing parents who hope to protect their kids from hurt and harm: 'we can't keep their lessons from them even if we wanted to.' case in point - i've been a waiter at the same joint for 20 years. my friends can't believe it. 'are you kidding!? 20 years?!' or from a returnee - 'are you still here?' is that running in place or is that running in place? whatever, i love the job. i always have. i actually look forward to going to work. the unpredictability of the customers, the absurd soap opera gossip employees whisper, the kids you watch like a high school teacher grow up and fly the coop, irritated by the parents they once revered, the see-saw variable of tips you make on any given night, the hard elbows of football dykes - all keep the colors bright. hey, i could have left town. i could have moved to Paris. i could have had any number of shit jobs around the globe and seen the rest of this wild planet and been the richer for it. but i didn't. i'm here. the archbishop of rationalization has traveled far in Jamaica Plain. of course one thing i could NOT do was endure a corporate gig, let alone qualify for one. up early, home on a cocktail slide, freaking out the boss with my oddball 'artistic' behaviors. not me. this is where i am, it's where i belong. the tape has not run out on what make's the job and the town new, over and over again. i love it here and i've come to accept that i need to live in one place long enough to get the music done right. if i played guitar maybe that would be a different story. you can carry that thing on your back. but i can't. i look really stupid playing anything but a piano. so here i am, a faux Buddha under a New England elm tree.

why don't i know the song?

'Rick, that song on the radio, what is it?' 'what song? i can't hear it. (tinitis first off and if i could, i wouldn't know what it is anyhow. the real problem: i know next to nothing about about the history of music. big time songwriters ladder-up the Bunyan shoulders of beloved predecessors, right? you can tell from the interviews. 'oh, yeah. when i heard ______________ for the first time, i knew, deep down, that i had to...' so they listened. they got it. they danced on the hum wire of the artist-to-artist umbilical chord, birth by proxy. when a 'new' song shivered out of them it was often a tip of the hat to bygone music warriors. when something familiar reaches my ears i recall neither the name of the tune nor the artist or worse, the wrong name and the wrong artist. i stroke my chin as i watch earnest fans bump, grind and sing, word/melody perfect, along with the tunes blasting in a bar or on the radio or in ear buds and i'm flabbergasted. how do they know this shit? as if they ARE the song, reliving the exact time and place when it first hit the heart, replaying the timeless camaraderie of 'hey, we were there, you n me babe, right? remember?'. the smarm that creams over the tune choices for weddings, start-up relationships and the death of loved ones. but for me it's a wash. i can't make out the words for the life of me. i wish i could, i do, but tinitis combined with the study task it would take to educate myself would turn it into a homework assignment. listen to the tune, absorb it, master it, memorize it. i don't. i can't. i like to hear from someone else about a song. about how it was recorded, why it was written and why it holds meaning for my friend. but that's the end of it. it is my beer allies, my co-wokers or even total strangers that compel me to write music. it's their stories, failures, troubles and love labors lost that appeal to my vampiric stenographer. it's them, my pals, not the famous, that get me. and also movies as shortcuts to actual life. 'be here to love me' (the doc about Townes Van Zandt) became the inspiration for a tune i dedicate to him even as i know next to nothing about his music or lyrics. and another thing? i 'see' picture-scapes when i write, sound track hallucinations. (it's always been like that, starting in college when i dropped acid, locked myself in a tower with an upright, closed my eyes and improvised whatever cerebral celluloid flickered by on the eyelid screen.) i guess you could say that basically i write out of my ass, not from a music hall-of-fame or r+b or folk or rock or punk throwbacks. not because Cole Porter wasn't a true genius, or Joni Mithcell can say love like Eskimos can say snow in 10,000 ways. ok, i do know a little about a few of 'em, my own particular music heroes. still, with rare exception, i don't know the tune, the singer, the genre or the words. it seems not to matter all that much. Nick Cave put it this way: 'there's a song walking down the street and if you don't shake it's hand, somebody else will'. it is like that. i'm like that. still, it haunts me, my weak excuses for not knowing those who's work came before and thus i enable my part-time self image as a charlatan.

ted

i had t go. i'd been t st particks t honor bobby. this was as critical a view. i dislike lines + crowds. i went t the sox victory parade in '04 + the first one for the pats in the snow. glad i went, but after waiting for hours on numb feet just t see the boats lumber by i was let down, bored, is-that-all-there-is-to-a-victory-parade? sure, it was good t plant my feet in honor of the hard-earned, long time coming, champs. t see the rock star athletes on display in real time. but once was enough. on the other hand i liked being in line t hear obama speak during the campaign. the people, thousands upon thousands, psyched, inspired, happy, up - a part of something bigger than my routine, as if all were one. that was the last time i saw teddy. bellowing on stage t introduce the new torch bearer. i'd also met him, years back, in a bar. shook his generous hand. 'good t meet ya, senator...' etc. not a big deal but something never forgotten. on the way t the jfk library, on the T, looking out the window it seemed as if a lot o' guys looked like him. overweight, chin up jaunty, toothy grin, eyes on the sky, feet on the ground. but they weren't. no one was or ever will be. not in my lifetime. the line was as diverse racially as it could be in this ol' whitey town. there were tears wiped away under sunglasses. eyes downcast or uplifted or both. kind thoughts about strangers. i was gonna read t pass the time, but didn't. i quietly inched towards the under sail like library with the rest. the kennedy kids thanking us for being there, for coming t honor their grandfather, for loving the world he believed could be better even as dark forces conspire against it. inside the smith room where i'd last seen krugman speak, lay the great man in state, surrounded by soldiers who didn't blink, by members of families who'd lost love ones on 9/11, who'd been connected to the senator in loss, by members of the clan who sat quietly on spindly metal chairs. we had t be there. all of us. to do this. to honor this storm of a man who outlasted so many hurricanes in his personal + public life. we need him now more than ever. every time, every time i hear the words: 'and the dream shall never die' tears fill my eyes.