Sometimes Things Seem Hard

Something got me wide awake at 3am this morning. I went to bed at 10p last night listening to the heavy rain. I laid there from 3-4 in a suspended state where falling back to sleep is still possible. When Dexter came in at around 4 and cuddled up next to me for a half hour before going to eat, what I assume is, his breakfast, I laid there for another half hour before getting on my phone. Something had me thinking about past players who have played for me but now play for way bigger names, or have gone on to start their own band. If Mayall and the Blues Breakers had a country alternate that you could find on Wish.com, I’d be it.

I’ve never had a real band,. From the beginning I’ve always been around different people trying to play music. Different groups of friends who have life long and tighter bonds than I could ever have with them due to me being more of an outsider. My first chance at a band was while waiting tables with Macaroni Grill. Back in 2003, I was living in Arlington and drinking at Chili’s. The closest thing to live music I’d every been around was the Reba concert my folks took me to at the Tarrant County convention center when I was a teenager. Or the Trout Fishin In America show I saw by the same method when I was an adolescent. I’ve always been more fascinated in all the stuff going on around an event and in between the people, or even the architecture. Really, I am interested in anything other than the focus point. Looking back, I think that is why I never got any real guidance or encouragement to be in the arts…or really to do any specific thing except to go to college. To say I’m a late bloomer is an understatement.

While living in Arlington, TX I fell in love for the first time since high school, and when the girl asked me to move in with her to her dorm room on campus at UTA, I quickly accepted. Things didn’t last long. I remember one day coming home from work and my girlfriend and one of her friends were in our bedroom. I walked in and said hello and they both acted like I was interrupting them. Jenny (a Texas girl of German heritage who worked with me at Olive Garden) looked up at me like she was annoyed to see me. I didn’t have anywhere else to go and so later that week, without telling her, I moved out.

To say life was hard for me to figure out during those first years on my own would not do the struggle justice, but the fact is, I was unaware there was anything wrong with me. Unaware that when you move in with someone you have to accept that they will not always be happy to see you, even in a dorm room, where the other person is practically the only thing you can see. I hadn’t quite yet understood what it takes to make it, not only living with a girlfriend, but in anything. When I face conflict - it’s over. There is no going back. I can’t un-do it in my head and even when I win or lose an argument with grace, there is something forever tainted I’m unable to get passed. So it was probably shocking for Jenny to see me at the gas station by coincidence for the first time since moving out unannounced. It was probably even more shocking I was able to say hello and smile at her as if nothing had ever happened. She walked into the gas station, paid for her stuff and didn’t say one word to me.

I had found a one bedroom off Matlock and it was strange for her to be that far south from campus or work, so I was surprised too as I honestly thought I’d never see her again. So with my best put on face, I embraced the encounter with nerves of steel. As if we were just passing each other at the dish-pit during a shift. It turned out she had been seeing someone else anyway and was moving out of her dorm and into his apartment. Funny how people will let you think what you want. I thought I was a terrible person, but she just really needed me to help pay the bills. I don’t have it in me to keep a relationship of convenience or agreement going, matter of fact, I don’t have what it takes to keep any relationship going. Maybe had I stayed we would have gotten married or maybe she wouldn’t have been seeing that other guy. Maybe she knew I really couldn’t help give her the life she wanted. It makes me think of my friend James Michael Taylor’s song that starts with the lyric, “If I had been a Lutheran, I would have married Dodie Harris”.

During the same week I moved out of Jenny’s, I left Olive Garden and went across the street to Macaroni Grill. It was a more upscale place in those days and it introduced me to the first time in my life, since middle school, that singing could be cool. There were a few select waiters who would go and sing the Happy Birthday song in Italian for anyone who had a b-day. I quickly realized it was more about the confidence and less about speaking Italian or even knowing how to sing to get the position, so I started doing it. I was big into writing poetry back then and would spend other down time scribbling steam of consciousness poems on the create-your-own-pasta worksheets. Even though we didn’t get paid extra to sing - sometimes we’d get a 20 spot from the host of the table as a tip. I guess these were my first monies earned from singing. It was here that I met my good friend Ashaad, who would turn out to be my roommate for a few years. He was a great singer. Over the course of our friend ship we met a guy with a home studio and went over and recorded my first song. This would have been 2004. I wrote the lyrics and melody and the producer chorded us out some piano parts before Ashaad sang it. I can still hear it in my head and I still have the CD with a copy of that first song on it. It was a love tune about losing my good gal titled “When Will It Happen”.

When me and a new girlfriend, Erin, who I moved in with me, broke up and Ashaad moved out and came out, I knew my time in Arlington was over. I enjoyed working at Macaroni Grill so much I moved to the North Fort Worth area and transferred to the Macaroni Grill there. It was here I started meeting real musicians who were playing gigs. These people had ideas about what a show would look like, the set list they would play, they owned instruments and could play them. During the after parties I would try to improv lyrics and melodies while someone played a guitar. In those days the jam sessions would quickly become exclusive to only those who knew how to play. I get it now. Even though we were all drunk and just having fun, to these musicians these after parties were their only audience. They were not gonna have a know-nothing like me stealing the spot light and ruining the vibe all night. This exclusion is what lead to my initial attempt at learning an instrument.

I remember asking my good friend Colin, “What can I do? I need an instrument.”

He said maybe I could play the drums, and I went out and bought a $300 kit and started banging on it. The day I bought that drum set, I had just left the dentist and had my wisdom teeth pulled. I may have been a little intoxicated from the sedation when I called up Colin, “Hey man, I just bought a drum set from a pawn shop. Wanna come show me some stuff?”

After realizing I had no rhythm - and I mean no natural rhythm would come out of me and onto the drums what-so-ever, Colin politely suggested I buy a harmonica and our jam session ended. I carried that harmonica around with me for two years without every learning a single song; without ever looking up a single tab or having a single lesson. I never learned to play anything, but would whip it out on camping trips and play it horribly while my friends appeased my need to express something in music. Eventually I made up a few cool riffs and would impress some unsuspecting strangers on occasion.

As all my waiting tables jobs did, Macaroni Grill came to an end. I was very competitive and thrived on the idea I was the best waiter. I caused a lot of unneeded drama with those around me and while beating out the other waiters with sales and enforcing the rules and standards with an iron fist during shift, I simultaneously would orchestrate the theft of the table wine, which supplied the after parties. I knew that following the rules and training guidelines of Macaroni Grill would provide me with the most tips, but underneath it all I was still selfish and really only looking out for myself. With a better section and a lot of times, a larger section of tables, meant that most of the other waiters had to help me or the bussers would have to devote extra attention to me and less to them, without anyone but me getting the benefit. When I took off my boy scout mask every night for the parties, some were appalled. Looking back, I was also pretty obnoxious and def off key when belting sub par improvised lyrics to anyone listening or able to bare to listen. I’m not to quick to recognize when people are putting me down or when people aren’t enthused about my presence. It’s only in retrospect and now with years of singing experience under my belt, I can imagine what it must have been like to hear me back then.

I started working at Pappadeux off University right outside downtown Fort Worth, and this took my entire life to a new level. Going to high school at Boswell, I’d already been exposed to the city life. When my family moved from Azle to Lake Worth in 1998 it was of great benefit to everyone. Getting out of the somewhat backwards identity of a then Azlite was a blessing my parents bestowed on m I will always cherish. Upon moving, we lived within a bike ride of a YMCA, a short drive to the movies, only 20 minutes from Six Flags. The cultural mobility upwards was astronomical. This was what it was like going to work at Pappadeux. I only went there because I remembered my step mother bragging to me during my weekend visitation that she and my dad would be going there on their Friday date night. Us kids were never allowed to go there and were often reminded the exquisite seafood would be wasted on a pack of ungratefuls, such as we were.

I was surprised that most of the dishes there are served with ungodly amounts of cheese sauce. Pappadeux has done to Nola’s soul food what Tex-Mex chefs did to Mexican food. Later in life I learned it is possible my father never ate a single vegetable in his life. It wasn’t an unrefined pallet keeping me or my brothers from going to Pappadeux, it was the prices. Alas, higher prices meant more tips and I was thrilled to be making almost double what I made at Macaroni Grill. With the higher level of tips, I met people with higher value on themselves. I met all kinds of wonderfully smart college graduates and real life thinkers. They informed in in subtle indirect ways that the places I was hanging out at, i.e. Chili’s, City Streets, Black Dog weren’t the places to be. I was invited over to after parties and being a time in my life I was in listening mode, I grew exponentially.

I went from pretending to read Charles Dickens during laundry day, to devouring everything I could get my hands on. On the recommendations of my fellow waiters, and now friends, I stormed through the Hemingway catalogue, tore up Kerouac and his beatniks, dove into the world of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, gobbled down whole the works of the British novelists Huxley and Orwell and I would stay up all night in a frenzied terror in the library of TCC northwest reading the works of Salinger, John Holmes, Steinbeck, Jack London, Camus, and anything else my compatriots at Pappadeux would suggest. We’d spend our smoke breaks going over the plots and major themes, establishing and refortifying our ideas of archetypes and morals. I realized all this was just as pleasing to them as it was to me. I’d stay up all night with my friend Michael eating Valium, getting drunk and talking about what the next proper adventure would be.

At that time I had the lame idea to move to Austin. I was one of those Texans that in 2005 hated Texas and thought Austin was the only place a person like me could survive. I had planned on transferring with Pappadeux to their store down there with ideas of becoming a store manager and moving up within the corporation. My friendships convinced me to take a backpacking trip to Europe instead. Michael had a girlfriend in Spain and after all that Hemingway, I was hooked on the idea of Spain, of Europe. I didn’t even know what a backpacking trip could be like, but in summer of 2005, I pulled it off. I moved back in with my folks that spring and saved what would have gone to rent to get myself over to Europe. I brought with me that damn harmonica and when I got there, for the entire two months, although splendid and full of long winded stories and dramas of my growth and life, I really just spent it walking around. I had very little money, I think $2K in all to last me the entire three months. I slept outside in parks, in front of churches, on subway benches, desolate beaches and anywhere that seemed ‘safe’. I’d lay down and play a few of my compositions of the harmonica and write in my journal.

During these walks, and in each major city I visited I started seeing what I would come to know are buskers. Busking is the art of street performing. In my first European city, Amsterdam, I would sit on the benches in the plazas and smoke my joints watching the people. Over my three or so days there I kept seeing this pair of musicians reminding me of what I had wanted to be with my friends from Macaroni Grill. They would come seemingly out of nowhere, drop their instrument cases on the ground, open them up, dig in their pockets for a few coins to throw in the cases for anti before they’d start playing. They looked like Americans, played old sounding blue grassy stuff with a guitar and fiddle. Within 30 or 40 seconds a crowd, like an ameba mass devouring the cobble stone streets would approach the plaza, encircling the two performers and listen with joy for a few minutes. After a song or two the passers-by would approach the case and drop in a coin or two. The duo played 5 or 6 songs and they would grab their cases full with coins and bills and run off.

I followed them down an alley after one such performance, standing there with my pack on my back, my harmonica in my pocket, hands clasps around it crushing the soft metal into the wood, thinking if I should go up and, “Hey! I got this harmonica here. Can I join?” But just when I got close enough, I saw one of the guys smack the other one in the face and yell at him to get it together. I was floored. How could they be angry? They have been slaying it all day and from the looks of it making quite a bit of coin. But there they were; up close a couple of American junkies spending each performance as if it were their last. They looked dirty. I mean way dirtier than I was, and I had been sleeping outside without a shower myself for a few days. I didn’t know what to think. On one hand it looked like they had it made, but on the other, they were about as derelict as they come. I thought about Jim Morrison, or any of those drug addict rock stars and recalled how difficult it was for them even with millions of dollars and world wide fame.

For the rest of the trip, any time I saw a street performer, especially a musician, I sat and wrote beatnik poetry inspired by the music. I would stay far off and practice my harmonica to any song they were playing. I had no idea that my Key of C harp could only play certain songs. I guess I was a little tone deaf. I just blew on it and enjoyed the rhythmic qualities of the experience more than anything. I knew some notes were off, but couldn’t figure out what to do, so I just over looked it. I did the same thing a few years later when picking up my first used piano off Craigslist. The thing was so out of tune that even with experienced ears onsite we couldn’t get it anywhere close to how it needed to sound. I just over looked it and sat there creating anyway. I remember my step dad coming in on me while banging very liberally, even for me, on the keys and he shouted over me walking by, “Damn boy! Are you tone deaf?”

When I go back and look through my journals I was keeping while backpacking Europe that summer, there are wonderful passages about me crying at the sound of a violin, or weeping internally with no outward tears at a cello being bowed, or even a wonderful description of the aching pain in the gut due to the unique tonality of a singers voice and the melody. I wished America had plazas and street performers and musicians like this, I wrote. I wish I could be closer to this energy and become part of it, I continued.

When I came back home from this trip, I was different. My younger brother, Jason, would throw parties after work at my place over of East Lancaster. It was 2005 and I had found an place over there for just $350/mo all bills paid. One of our friends would bring over his guitar and Jason and I would improv melody and lyrics to the delight of every drunkard there. I had a terrible itch from the trip to Europe and all that exposure to new things. For a chubby Texan from north Fort Worth, I experienced drastic reverse culture shock upon my return to ‘real life’. I went about preparing my next adventure and about that time I met the only woman I’ve ever thought about marrying. Actually I had met her when she was 17 and I was 22 at Macaroni Grill in Arlington, but somehow she became best friends with a girlfriend of one of my brothers and so we met again. She was much more wealthy than my family. Although her father had made himself a million from almost nothing, the way Carolyn saw the world was very different from me.

She gave me these ideas of studying abroad. Something that had really never occurred to me. I didn’t really have that kind of money, but since I’d left TCC after 5 years and over 115 credit hours accumulated to go along with an associates degree and was now taking out 7K a semester to attend Texas Wesleyan, I was open to borrowing more to go abroad with Carolyn. I mean we were in love after all. It was amazing to be with her planning our adventures in a foreign country. I was still filling myself with books from Dostoyevsky, Herman Hesse and anything of the plays from the Harlem renaissance - stuff like Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and anything by Leroi Jones, especially The Slave or The Dutchman. Carolyn wen to TCU and so in addition to my pretty good education at Texas Wesleyan I was also getting the more upper class education from Carolyn and her experiences. Some how I managed to get with my provost and create a study abroad program that would take me to the exact same city as Carolyn, Barcelona. I didn’t know anything about the place. I had no idea how much living for a year abroad would change my life forever nor how much I would fall out of love with Carolyn and in love with every new girl who set her sights on me. In the end Carolyn stayed in Barcelona for 5 or 6 years. I stayed my one year at the University of Barcelona before coming back home. I played my harmonica late nights out my dorm room window there just off Calle Sardenya and one night some one yelled back…”Ey tio! No es tan malo.” and they shut their window and went back inside. This was the first time some one chose to stand idly by and listen to me create music.

If I thought the reverse culture shock due to 3 months backpacking was rough, returning from living in Spain for a year was crazy. I left an engaged man about to graduate with a double major, and returned home single and with even more thoughts of being a performer. I enrolled in what would be my second to last semester of college and had planned on buckling down and riding it out. That was until I read the book Into the Wild. In October 2007 I quit my job, unenrolled myself from college and moved into my 2002 Mitsubishi Lancer and started driving to California.