Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Met a Dude


Met a dude on the Boardwalk in 1973. He had long hair and wore jeans, as did I.
I leaned against the sea wall and played few gasping notes on a harmonica I pulled from my back pocket. It had candy wrappers and clods of hair crammed all through the reeds, and the metal cover plates were crushed. It sounded like a robot death rattle.



"Bad shit, bro" said this dude, "I mean, Paul Fucking Butterfie
ld gonna shit his pants when you step up."
"Thanks" I said, "smoke a joint?"



"Fuckin A right on with your shit".



Without a word we ducked into an alley and fired up a doobie. It was a rainy day, the sky was grey and two story apartment houses in Mission Beach seemed to sag like wet bags of French bread left on a back porch in the dampest days of April.



We never saw each other again. I never thought it worth mentioning.

1 comment:

  1. Julio Knutsacker8:49 AM PST

    Ted,

    The huge psychic sag that was created by Nixon’s landslide victory in November 1972 washed across America like a slow, thick, filthy wave, hitting the breakers of the mind in the early months of 1973. I remember standing at the entrance of Crystal Pier in February of that year and getting a gut-punch of cold flat depression, as if some stale half-congealed oatmeal I’d eaten an hour earlier had finally caught up with me. I was looking at Maynards and seeing the Jolly Ox emerge, if that tells you anything. I was caught in a national act of peristalsis, moving subtly down a digestive tract of time towards an opening too dim to see. I didn’t hear any harmonica music from down along the beach, just the inanities of “Your Mama Don’t Dance” and “Crocodile Rock” spilling out of a muscle car parked in front of Denny’s. You wake up in moments like these and sniff the air and what you get is rotten kelp and bus stink and you are pinned like a bug, forever.

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