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thewestern · 8 months

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Chapter 10

The days were getting shorter. She knew that much. Kitty could see it was nearly pitch dark, and here it was only half past five o’clock. Although it was challenging to register the passage of time inside the Newfy. Apart from the slow-pitch softball-sized porthole punched into the front door, the only other window was a stained glass rendering of Jesus H. Christ on a motorcycle, in flowing robes of red white, and blue leather, jumping over something out of frame, possibly a record-breaking amount of school buses, the Snake River or the Sea of Galilee. Hank was of the religious belief that natural light had no place in an alehouse. On occasion he would infrequent some of the newer taprooms, many of which occupied facilities that were once zoned industrially — body shops, warehouses, other houses of light manufacturing — since retrofitted for retail purposes. As craft breweries, they bore scant resemblances to their former selves. Except for the exposed ductwork and loading docks with the big garage doors that could be rolled all the way up to the top. Weather cooperative, the day drinkers would flock in droves, to Hank's utter beffudlement.

Who in the Sam Hell wants to get a buzz on in broad daylight? He could never figure.

In his quaint fucking view of things, a big part of the Pub’s broad-based appeal was that no matter the frightfulness of the elements outside — be there gale-force winds, driving rains, whiteout blizzard, flash flooding or towering walls of eternal hellfire — take one step within, and you shall be sheltered. To hunker down. This is a place of refuge. We grant thee asylum. Seriously, hang up your crown of thorns and stay awhile. And leave your troubles at the normal-sized door. For your worries are but microscopic airborne particulates that cannot survive in our hermetically-sealed environment, what with its dim lighting and nearly complete lack of ventilation. Here is all things Safe: haven, harbour, house, room, space. Safety guaranteed. Here is a House of Ale, and you are welcome to make yourself at home.

Or whatever it is, it’s not a damned pool party.

The commotion of the afternoon was passed, and the Newfy had settled back into its well-worn malaise. Kitty had returned to grading, this time sidled up to the bar. Don’t Sunday evenings feel like the end of something more than just a weekend? Around Half Past Four P.M. local time, the last of the beautiful people from the afternoon crowd would’ve cleared out, back to their loved ones and their lovely homes. Maybe we’ll get takeout from that new [ethnic food] place … Doesn’t that sound good? Anyway, I don’t feel like cooking. And, ooh, what time does [our show] start?

They called them the Sunday Scaries. Today that passed for tongue and cheek. But the truth was, apart from Death, there wasn’t much at all to be afraid of. Not anymore. Fear itself, maybe.

In the great afterwards, the Off-Peak Hours, that was when the really interesting ones slinked in, as Russ used to say. Looking over their shoulder, like they’re on the lam from somebody. Or else they’re kind of guy or gal who maybe doesn’t have a place he or she’s gotta be Monday morning. Hank’s type of person. Sort that’d stopped coming around so much anymore.

Now the Newfy was mostly just slow going, on a dreary Sunday night like tonight. For the express purposes of boosting staff morale and maybe attracting back some of the old, end-of-the-weekend stragglers, the Mick had made a rare-for-him marketing-slash-managerial decision — to implement his very own semi-regular Sunday Event Series. As per the poster Zeke had placed strategically above the back corner urinal in the men’s restroom — which read, The Mick’s Choices … Never miss a Sunday show — he would pick a live concert recording of the band Phish, locate the corresponding disc in his totemic CD wallet, and play it on the stereo system in the bar. That was pretty much it.

The Mick would strenuously agree that one of the most embarrassing things about himself was his bordering-on-autistic recall of the tens of hundreds of Phish tapes he had accrued over lo these many years. (Once he asked Kitty to teach him how to Do a Spreadsheet so he could better index his vast catalogue — for posterity. She thought it was cute, the way he was hunting and pecking his way around the rows and columns, his tongue protruding like Michael Jordan. Which isn’t to say that he didn’t do a fine job. He did. For a fact, his may be the only private collection of Phish live recordings to be arranged in strict adherence to the Dewey Decimal System. It also bears notation that this was the first and last spreadsheet the Mick had ever made. One and done. We should all be so lucky.) From the Hollywood Bowl to Madison Square Garden. From Redwood Acres Fairgrounds to the Big Cypress Indian Reservation. From Side A to Side B. That Side was made for You and Me.

To be clear, he hadn’t personally attended a single one of these concerts. Unlike Hank, the Mick had not spent his twenties (in Hank’s case well into his thirties and even intermittently into his forties and fifties), hitting the road and following his favorite band across the American Expanse. His work schedule and salary at the brewery would not have accommodated for such a lifestyle, and he had no earthly idea how Hank had ever managed. Big a Phish fan as he was, Mick had only seen a couple dozen shows over the years, mostly within a modest driving distance of wherever he happened to be existing at a given moment in time. Now maybe to the layman that sounds like a lot, but by the standard of being a Phish fan, it was quite a paltry sum indeed. No skin off his back though. Because his love for the band Phish was only exceeded by his burning hatred of waiting in line. Line of traffic into the parking lot, lines to get into the venue, lines to buy a beer, lines to take a leak, lines to get back out of the venue, cars lined up again to leave the parking lot. Lines intersecting on an infinite loop. Every line takes something away from a man. Nevermind the time it took him to wait.

(Beside his thing about lines, the Mick had a better excuse for his comparative truancy. Here is the story of the Mick’s very first Phish show. It was summer O-Four, during which he and his middle schoolmates spent the balance of their abundant free time at the local Cineplex. Mostly they loitered, but quite deliberately — they explored the parking expanse on their BMX bicycles, delighted in tormenting the only slightly older concessionaires, raced one another in the arcade driving simulation, Cruisin’ USA. In the alley behind the theater the Mick shared his first kiss with an especially willing partner who would shortly thereafter undergo a teen pregnancy, by a separate suitor, however. Occasionally they would even see a movie. On the night in question, that which would go on to define the course of the Mick’s life in more ways than he would care to admit, he had purchased a ticket for what was supposed to have been his second screening in the third installment of the Harry Potter film adaptations, The Prisoner of Azkaban, however, with the expressed plan to sneak into something R-rated, either the teen sex comedy — Girl Next Door, the cutting edge body horror-slash-torture porn — Saw or the revenge action thriller Man on Fire, in retrospect really the only worthwhile one of the bunch, although GND does have its moments. In the course of he and his comrades performing reconnaissance to identify which of any of the three entrances was unmanned by an acne-scarred sentry, the Mick was stopped dead in his tracks by something he smelled, wafting from the end of the corridor. And it wasn’t buttered popcorn [diacetyl]. It was weed [tetrahydrocannabinol {THC}], cowboy. You bet your sweet ass. Like an old-timey cartoon, led by his upturned nose he danced along the scent plume’s trail toward a unmarked theater — Theater Nine and Three-Quarters, if you will — at the far aft of the movie house. Now he could hear the music. He entered into a state of divine banishment; glorious ostracism. Never fully to return.

And we're glad glad glad that you're alive

And we're glad glad glad that you'll arrive

And we're glad glad glad glad glad glad glad

And we're glad glad glad that you're a glide)

(Okay, for all the non-heads out there, what had happened was that the Mick made this discovery — which altered the course of his life in ways he wouldn’t care to admit — of his all-time favourite band Phish, on the occassion of what was billed to be their farewell run. As such, it was simulcast into movie theaters in jam band-friendly markets across North America. Last picture show, type of shit. What the Mick couldn’t tell by seeing his dilated pupils projected onto a sixty-foot screen was that Trey was in a bad fucking way. Had been for some time. Downers. God damn opiates. Of course they had gone on hiatus before in the late nineties. This time was different though. Seemed like if they didn’t stop for real Trey was going to die. Seems like a no-brainer then. No sense in losing one’s life over a silly thing like music. Well not exactly. You see by then Phish was more than a band. They were a company. Phish, Inc. With obligations outstanding. In an interview with Anthony Mason of CBS Sunday Morning, on the occassion of their thirtieth anniversary, Trey recounts how all of their close personal friends — some of their family members even — were on the payroll. That at-the-time they had in the ballpark of eighty full-time employees working out of an office park in Burlington. That’s a small-to-medium sized business, kimosabe. If they as a band stop going on gigs, then all those people — people they’ve known and loved their whole lives — are out of theirs. And this is to say nothing of their legion of devoted fans. What the hell are they supposed to do? Get a job? You sound like their mothers.

Wouldn’t you know that the Grateful Dead, in their day, stared down the very same dilemma. Like Trey after him, Jerry was killing himself on stage every night in front of thousands of people who worshipped him. His only chance at getting out alive was to call the whole thing off. Stop the fucking music, once and for all. But he couldn’t. Too many people depended on him. And in the Dead too, they were more than just employees. For a fact, they were referred to as The Family. So even when the other guys in the band would take a break, Jerry would keep going. Head back out on the road with the Jerry Garcia Band [JGB]. Keep the paychecks coming. The good times rolling.

Maybe Trey learned from Garcia’s martyrdom. Whatever the justification was, they shut it all down. Everybody got let go. And the fans, they were pissed. Four years they had to wait. Like it’s the fucking Winter Olympics. For his part the Mick didn’t much mind. Getting to the party just as it was presumed to be over. Maybe it was he didn’t know enough to know what he was missing. Beside, he had the whole back catalogue to work through.)

Women are understood, as well as expected to be more patient. However, a Phish concert is one of those special few places on the Planet Earth where the queue for the Ladies’ Room is the considerably shorter. (Monster truck rallies, minor league hockey games, the Arab peninsular state of Qatar — all make great date night ideas for this reason.) Kitty, being the supportive partner she was, had tagged along to at least a third of those twenty-something or so shows he’d seen in the time they had been together. She never quite Got It. Not in the manner Mick had. But she managed to enjoy herself just fine all the same. Most of all she liked the lights. They reminded her of the planetarium at Space Camp. An immensity of our universe, began one of the elder counselors. For many days before the end of our earth, people will look into the sky and notice a star, increasingly bright and increasingly near. As this star approaches us—as this star approaches us, the weather will change. The great polar fields of the north and the south will rot and divide. The seas will turn warmer. The last of us search the heavens and stand amazed. For the stars will still be there, moving through their ancient rhythms. The thalamic constellations that illuminate our night will seem as they have always seemed: eternal, unchanged and little moved by the sharpness of time between our planet’s birth and its demise. Orion, the hunter. One of thalamus constellations and the most brilliant in the heavens—

Oh for sure … Kuroda is basically the fifth member, as he had Micksplained to her on more than one occassion around when they first began dating.

—Cancer, the crab … Containing a large loose cluster of stars called Presaepe, or the Beehive—

He was referring of course to Chris Kuroda, the band’s longtime lighting designer, forever a fan favorite.

—Taurus, the Bull—

Legend has it that sometime around the late nineteen eighties, Kuroda responded to a classified ad in the Burlington Free Press: WANTED: Creative light person to run new light show for Phish on a salaried, permanent basis. This very valuable partner will travel with the band as a 5th member. We are looking for someone from the New England area -- no need to live in VT. Honor and recognition in case of success. Call (802) XXX-XXXX.

—And while the flash of our beginning … Has not yet travelled the light years into the distance … Has not been seen by planets deep within the other galaxies … we will disappear into the blackness of space from whence we came … destroyed as we began, in a burst of gas and fire.

His genius resides at the intersection of light and sound. This is because he, Kuroda, improvises right along with the band, anticipating their many crescendos and other musical flourishes and syncing his cues accordingly. It’s a fluency he’s honed over many hundreds of shows, spanning decades. His entire adult life.

—The heavens are still and cold once more. In all the complexity of our universe and the galaxies beyond, the Earth will not be missed—

Over the course of his custodianship, as this grand beacon of Phish — a lighthouse on a rocky eddy, orienting the ship to the faded horizon —the band has nonetheless gone on several extended hiatuses — taking time away to start families, pursue solo projects, dry out with the odd rehab stint. On his sabbaticals, Kuroda has carved out a lucrative niche as a phaser gun for hire — mostly moonlight designing arena tours for pop stars. He’s collaborated with the likes of Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande and other luminaries. Their demands differ from those of his day job in that these shows are all choreographed to the micro-second, so as to be repeatable night-after-night in cities around the world. (Hello Cleveland!) Tedious work for a man of his talent? Perhaps. But that’s not to say there aren’t perks. Notably these freelance gigs allow for him to experiment creatively with pyrotechnics, lasers and other elements which are not a part of Phish’s standard arsenal. So that’s something.

—Through the infinite reaches of space, the problems of Man seem trivial and naive indeed—

Without a doubt, dipping his toes into the mainstream has influenced his ongoing life’s work with Phish. For many years the band performed in front of backdrops designed by the visual artist Marj Minkin, also bassist Mike Gordon’s mother. Until Kuroda unveiled this new rig — a seventy-plus panel wall of LED lights, suspended in midair, twenty-two feet above the stage. It marked a considerable aesthetic departure, to which fan reception was lukewarm at best. Kuroda, who harbored his own reservations about the propriatary jumbotron, gathered a consensus among the organisation that video just wasn’t their thing. But while the endeavour was short-lived, it bled into subsequent innovations in LD automation, including the mechanized network of trusses which have become a mainstay not only at Phish shows, but have permeated the concert lighting industry writ large.

—And Man, existing alone, seems to be an episode of little consequences.

###

There was a neon sign behind the bar depicting Doctor Lupus, chugging a Wolff Light. It would flash in such a way that his right foreleg — the one holding the can (wolves don’t have arms) — would have the appearance of raising up to his muzzle and pouring a fluorescent golden stream onto his protruding tongue, which would then retract contemporaneously to the can being lowered back down. Meanwhile, with the opposite paw, he would quick draw, spin, fire once into the air and then reholster a six-shooter, before turning his head to disperse the gunsmoke with a hearty belch. Hank had bid for the item at one of the many estate auctions he attended over the years.

Apart from elaborately illuminated Doctor Lupus, the Newfy didn’t have any sophisticated lighting or other A/V effects to speak of, for which to accompany the Mick’s Choices. Sometimes Kitty would find a black-and-white movie on the plasma screen TV above the bar — maybe a Kung Fu flick or something else cool like that — and play it on mute in the background. (You’ve probably heard from your older sister’s boyfriend that The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd syncs up perfectly with The Wizard of Oz if you press play precisely when the MGM lion roars for a third time. But did you also know that Can’t Buy a Thrill by Steely Dan and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers bear no relation to one another whatsoever?) Tonight there was just a game that Mick was distractedly watching while Kitty finished her homeworks. It was halftime in Football Night in America. Redskins versus Cowboys — a nationally televised matchup of massive media markets you’d have seen dozens of times if you’d seen it once. Pitting bitter division rivals, two formerly proud football institutions become moribund franchises, mired through decades of mismanagement, for which team ownership takes no accountability, being as they are themselves buried under the weight of expectations by their entitled asshole fanbases.

With the score deadlocked at six after two quarters, this particular tilt was shaping up to be a real fucking pillow fight. Anyway, it’s not like the Mick had any dog in the fight. But what the hell. It was on, wasn’t it? Sometimes that was enough.

(In an increasingly fragmented media landscape, with myriad cable channels and the emergence of over-the-top [OTT] video content streaming platforms, professional football remains among the few reliable ratings draws for networks to sell advertising against. You look at a list of the Top Ten most viewed TV shows in a given sweeps period, eight of them are all but guaranteed to be primetime games. The other two are singing competition-based reality shows. For some reason people really fucking love those.)

[This evening’s halftime entertainment was the Tuition Toss Up, Proudly Presented by Wolff Light. Two competitors were given thirty seconds on the clock to throw as many footballs into a large plywood cutout of Dr. Lupus’ mouth. The Winner would receive fifty-thousand dollars — made out on a giant cardboard check — to be placed in escrow and paid toward an accredited higher education institution of their choosing. {That ought to cover a semester or two.} But don’t worry about The Loser … Because nobody leaves the Tuition Toss Up empty-handed. The Runner Up would receive a some-expenses-paid vacation voucher to a Wolffenbeir Company-partner resort, as well as discount airfare for two.

As the two undergraduates desperately underhanded pigskins, rattling off the snarling fangs of this two-dimensional beast — as if he were blowing them beyond the target — the Mick thought of Russell Schehrer of all fucking people. Russ, who could often be found on the beer league soccer Pitch, as he insisted on calling it, didn’t much care for American Football, as he insisted on calling it. No doubt though, he would have had a field day with this spectacle.

I mean, what’s next? The Tackling Healthcare Cost Challenge, brought to you by Big Insurance. Two chronically ill patients face off in an Oklahoma Drill — a full-contact contest to decide who truly is the toughest in the fight against Type Two Diabetes. Better not play pre-existing condition defense. Because winner gets their insulin, hospital bills and assorted other medical expenses paid in part {conditions apply — see website for details}. Second place goes home with a free month’s-supply of diet sodas and a t-shirt jersey. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Long SNAPping Derby …

{Russ didn’t converse so much as he would just riff. When he’d start in talking, one could get up from the conversation, go to the restroom, wash his hands, pour himself a fresh beer, sit back down and Russ’d still be there jawing away. Like he was fucking Bill Hicks. And hell, maybe he was half right most the time. But boy was it tiresome.}])

For this week’s selection, the Mick had played it somewhat safe with an underrated classic: Phish. 1996 Fall Tour. 6 December 1996, The Aladdin Theater, Las Vegas. On the one hand, just a super playful set. Some very adventurous riffs on a few standards — Wilson, Llama, a monster Mike’s Groove. But then you can also tell the band is really rounding into its Apex Form. Like, listen to the fucking YEM … it’s fucking all-time, man. Honestly, it wouldn’t be crazy to say that whatever roll they got started with this show — the Fall Tour finale — catapulted them into the legendary run of Winter and Summer Ninety-Seven. The encore … It’s a countdown to takeoff.

Because this was the Mick’s Choices, after all, he had taken the liberty of skipping straight to said encore, beginning at the end on Disc Three of three. Spanning forty minutes, really it was more of a third set unto itself. A self-contained rock opera, if you please, crescendoed around the oft-requested Harpua, a ballad about a boy and his cat, on an odyssey to a desert oasis, or at least in this telling. The Mick and his compatriots had arrived at the part of the story where a pair of cowgirl sirens beckon four Elvis impersonators onto stage with their hypnotic yodeling. They challenge the young boy to battle, in the form of a dueling performance of the song Suspicious Minds, which was something of a comeback hit for the King. Shakes of his latter career death rattle. The boy, played by drummer John Fishman, himself donning Presley’s signature satin cape over his own signature donut dress, sings the ultimate verse with Trey taking his place on percussion. Finishing it off with a few arm windmills and karate chops, successfully he gains passage from the Elvises. Again, the Mick was not particularly proud to know this. He would be especially embarrassed to see it all written out like that in regular English. And nevertheless …

We’re caught in a trap

I can’t walk out

Because I love you too much, baby

Why can’t you see?

What you’re doing to me

When you don’t believe a word I say

[Rollicking keys]

Grace was but a tiny little baby — if she were even born — the night this encore occurred. The Mick would have been just a small boy himself, not unlike like our hero, Harpua, and he figured to be some years older than her. Still, she had heard the recording of this show, although she had only cherry-picked the first set for Harry Hood, her own personal national anthem. Something of a Harry completist, Grace had heard hundreds of versions. This was pretty good Hood. By no means the best, although she couldn’t rattle off, say her top five renditions. Not off the top of her head. Grace didn’t have anywhere’s near the Mick’s advanced degree of scholarship on the band’s live oeuvre. She’d likely been to as many if not more shows though.

Whereas the rest of the Newfers only tolerated the Mick’s Choices out of pure professional obligation, a true fan herself, Grace truly appreciated her boss’s curatorship. Tonight though she wasn’t fully Feeling It, having found herself in a bit of a funk. This of course owing to the love triangle that she became entangled in that afternoon. The details aren’t important, or any of your fucking business by her estimation. But suffice it to say the bizarre situation of being caught between contemporaneous lovers met an predictably awkward end.

Zeke meanwhile was over the moon simply to be in Grace’s orbit, albeit seated a full five stools away on the opposing end of the bar, separated by Mick, Kitty and a strange man dressed as a Cowboy.

#novls of tumblr #chris kuroda #ck5 #washington football team

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