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[weirdanecdotes]

Music Appreciation Education, Part 2

After I was branded as a genius, Papa bought an old upright piano and sent me to lessons given by an old lady neighbor who only taught The Classics. I learned how to read music readily. Papa said I could be another Mozart! I loved singing and got voice lessons, too. My Vocal Coach taught me how to play Ragtime and Bop and I fell in love with singing Broadway Show tunes.

I was great playing and singing at home but screwed up in front of others. I had a lovely soprano voice and could hit and more importantly hold a High C. Of course, when I sang Old Holy Night at a school Christmas program, I was so tense I missed it by a quartertone. I could see Papa’s reaction from where he sat in the front row. He winced and clenched his jaw angrily. 

On the way home, he told me I had humiliated him. I knew no better than to believe that was more important than the shame I felt. Mama was sympathetic for a change. She said, “She has stage fright. She’ll get over it as she gets more confidence.” But I’ve never shaken the feeling that I’m not good enough.

I made straight A’s because I could except for Conduct. I never got an A for that. I would get caught passing a note from one person to another and called out for breaking the rules. They didn’t.

My classmates didn’t like me. They said I was "conceited” because I used “grown-up” words. My opinion was: they should ask what I meant to learn a new word instead of condemning me for using it. And I forthrightly told them so whenever my “arrogance” was criticized thereby proving it. I was living my best life playing with fairy sprites and talking with angels in the woods. I didn’t need them.

Christmas when I was 11, I got a transistor radio—three times thicker than an iPhone—to listen to the radio when I was away from home and for emergency use. This was the Cold War Era. We all lived with grainy movies of mushrooming atomic bombs in our minds. At school, we practiced the now infamously ridiculous Duck & Cover Drills. Also, tornadoes happened every year. If I heard a warning siren, a special radio station would tell me if I was in imminent danger. Also, I carried a dollar's worth of dimes for a pay phone to call home, if needed.

A transistor radio was a status symbol when I was in the fifth grade. I was allowed to play it during lunch and at recess but not too loudly. I suddenly had a friend group who insisted on a station aimed at teens.

In the late 50’s, popular teen music was absolute dreck. I’m talking about anything by Annette Funicello or Frankie Avalon. Pat Boone singing Tutti Frutti appalled me. Every other song on AM radio seemed to be about tragic love and being forever haunted by your “Teen Angel” or worse, a doomed love like Running Bear.

That was some creepy morbid shit getting pushed at teens. I suppose it was intended to subconsciously associate sex with death.

That same year, Papa dared to leave the income security of a firm—despite Mama’s tears—and set out to be an independent architect. He had the help of Phil, a Good Ol’ Boy who knew all the right people to get contracts at state & county levels thru-out the State of Georgia. They were going to get rich building schools and needed an office.

We took the bus to see it to avoid looking for a parking space. From the stop on Peachtree Road, we waited for the light before crossing then strained our calves walking down the steep concrete sidewalk. On the other side of Pharr Road sat the original Citizens & Southern Buckhead Branch. But I cannot visualize the building we walked beside. All I can remember is a concrete block wall painted with beige enamel and a faded gray metal at the basement level. All the way, I held both of their hands to keep them together because Papa had set his mind and Mama was furious.   

The two-story building used to be a telephone exchange station back in the days when women plugged cords into wall units to physically make phone connections. The exterior was pale stone carved artfully with bold Art Deco patterns. But on the whole, it was such a short, squat, square building that it had a solid industrial quality.

Inside was as cool as a cave. Whatever had been in there before had gotten stripped back to the concrete. There was an entry that offered the choice of a glass door on the right—labeled Frank Garner Photography—or utilitarian switch-back stairs with enamel brown railings. At the top of the stairs, the reinforced concrete ceiling was maybe 14 feet high or higher, with exposed conduits for wires and pipes for the water sprinkler system. Our footsteps on the concrete floor echoed slightly. On the left was a door for Lowery Music. On the right, Papa’s not yet labeled door.

Now here’s where it gets surreal. The walls were constructed out of vinyl-coated mason boards glued back-to-back, possibly only three eighths of an inch thick, and four by eight feet upright. Glance back at the paragraph above to confirm the ceiling was 14 feet or higher. Yes, impossible to believe, but there was a gap between the top of those thin dividing walls and the ceiling. Heat came from a monster furnace near the top of the back wall that growled out rusty fumes across the entire space. This constant noise level almost blanketed the shared space and drowned out competing voices, providing the fleeting illusion of privacy. Until it was got shut down over the summer.

Mama moaned a complaint, “Oh Vernon, no wonder it’s so cheap.”

“Winifred,” he warned in a stern tone as he unlocked the door then pushed it open for her to enter before him. That was manners. Ladies First was a rule.

Lowery heard us arrive (how could he not?) and came out of his office to introduce himself. He looked much like he does in this photo. When he wore his white summer suit he was even more imposing.

He seemed like an overly jolly Baptist preacher, the type to be a big crowd-pleaser at revivals. His cheeks were florid w/ broken blood veins. His suit was shiny gray sharkskin and I noticed his huge gold watch. He smelled like Brylcreem, the superior goo to hold the comb lines into a man’s hair, and cheap gag-inducing Aqua Velva after-shave. He smiled, exposing his pearly white fangs and looked like a porcine wolf.

He bent over with a smarmy leer to hand down a cherry-flavored sucker. The cheap kind that was sold by bulk in boxes of fifty, each sealed in plastic, about an inch in diameter with two ends of soft cord stuck inside instead of a waxed stick. Mama reminded me to say, “Thank you, sir.”

I proceeded to unwrap and suck it right there and then. I had only recently given up thumb-sucking entirely and felt I needed comforting. While chit-chatting with my parents, Lowery watched me so intently I felt self-conscious and blushed. He threw back his head and roared with laughter up at the ceiling from which it echoed to the corners of the building. Then he looked back down with his feral grin to call me a “pretty little thing” and warned Papa to keep an eye on me. This was rather menacing.

But Papa didn’t send out any signals anything was wrong. I had to figure it was just me being weird. Because they knew they could be overheard, Mama and Papa didn’t have a shouting match until we got back home. I thought if Papa ever had to tell Mama something that might upset her, he should take her to his office.

When summer arrived, I rode the bus to have lunch with Papa. Sometimes I brought sandwiches, potato salad, and pickle spears from home. Other times, we went out and sampled the nearby eateries. We visited the firehouse, the Buckhead Library, and wandered thru various shops but kept ourselves on the east side of Peachtree Road. And I do not know why. Papa was an explorer but apparently not while I was his side-kick. 

Every day, Lowery’s office filled the air with lousy Country music and it slowly drove Papa insane. He loved all types of music except bad music. When Lowery listened to the start of song he then judged as irredeemable, he pushed the needle away w/ enough force to shriek a deep scratch across the disk. Then we heard sounds like cymbals crashing but way off key and tempo.

Years later I realized he was tossing lacquer disks into a metal trash can. Lacquers were made of aluminum coated w/ nitrocellulose lacquer and surprisingly heavy. They were the first media upon which sounds were engraved. It was the master copy that could be used to mass produce vinyl disks.

Lowery also muttered profanities and curses as part of his rejection ritual. He said things like, “Damned fool, wasted your fucking money getting this shit made” and “Fuck you”.

The first time I heard Lowery engaged in judging demo records, I giggled, Papa shot me a warning glance, and I muffled the sound with my hand. But this routine repeated a few dozen times over the course of a hot afternoon often sent Papa home with a migraine.

I enjoyed my visits at Papa’s office. After lunch, he would get back to work, hunched over his drafting table, and I would sit at his partner’s desk drawing or reading a book from the library. His partner was always “out selling”. That was all Papa said without explaining that meant martini lunches and golf, trout fishing, skeet shooting, and deer hunting.

I learned about that from Mama’s accusations, which Papa didn’t deny. “It’s business, Winnie, he’s trying to win bid—for us!”

I can’t say why information about business stuck in my mind. At that point in my life, the chaos of existence was like a jigsaw puzzle. I collected pieces to fit them together until they formed patterns. And Business, like manners, had rules. Feeling like my mind might drift away and never come back, I clung to rules to like a sailor lashed to the mast during a storm.

I could focus sharply on acing a test because I understood its place in the hierarchy of actions. But Business seemed to be a complicated process of convincing others to do what you wanted. And that seemed too hugely nebulous and complicated. Naturally, given my nature, I became obsessed.

Some people were schmoozers like Papa’s partner. He charmed, cajoled, and was so darn friendly people gave him what he wanted because they liked him. But others were so-called “tough negotiators” like Lowery, who blustered, bluffed, boasted and bullied get his way. He also used the phrase, “grease his palm”.

I had seen more than enough gangster movies from the 40’s to know what that meant. Lowery just said them more slowly with a Southern drawl but the words and the intent were the same. Many times Lowery got down to specifying exact amounts of money to be paid to him or others. I was fascinated but troubled. On the bus going home together, I asked Papa, “Is Mister Lowery a gangster?”

Papa blinked in surprise, “What gave you that idea?”

“Well,” my words flowed out with my breath, “he greases palms under the table and he threatens people.”

Papa laughed it off. “He just talks that way. It’s part of his style. I haven’t heard him send his boys over to rough someone up.”

“Papa,” I countered, “he’s buying time on the radio. He’s controls what we hear. Is that right?”

“That’s just the way it works,” he shrugged, “People buy time to advertise.” After a moment of thought, he added, “Phil buys lunch for some decision makers to present our case. That’s grease.”

I pressed, “But what if they expect money instead?”

“Then you pay them,” Papa shrugged then corrected himself, “We can’t do that with government officials. But I don’t think there are any laws against paying a disk jockey to play your song. That’s just like tipping a piano player at a bar to play a song you like.”

The Payola Scandal hit later that year.

Slowly in the back of my mind, all of this coalesced into the realization that people might not actually like bad music. It was all they were given. The very concept of popular music is that lots of people like it. But, what if they didn’t and some of them were just as annoyed as I was by the crap on AM radio? Did others buy the best of the bad because that’s all there was?  Lowery often talked about The Market like it might be a hydra-headed beast but it was just listeners who wanted background music to score their lives. And how would they know how much The Industry influenced their musical tastes?

Late in the day one afternoon, Lowery was doing his thing with the screeching and crashing sounds. Papa winced every time. The crease between his eyebrows got deeper. The corners of his mouth were tugged down by his clenched jaw. These were warning signs of an impending blow-up and I intended to divert it.

At a moment of silence when Lowery lifted the needle arm before slamming it down, I shouted, “Don’t! It’s not that bad!”

I drew in a breath and Papa shushed me then sat back with an audible sigh as I continued without pausing, “The banjo player is outstanding. All together I get a feeling of The Sons of the Pioneers from the band, comfortable and familiar. The singer just needs some voice lessons. He’s got character in his voice. You didn’t listen long enough and I’d like to know what the lyrics say.”

As I continued, thumps progressed on the other side of the wall and I was turned towards him as he came thru the door without knocking. Lowery stood there with his big lower lip hanging down and stared at me. He didn’t show any signs of anger. So I dared to confront him to his face, “I am an avid music listener and most of what you get is so bad it can’t be saved. But this band might have a future.”

I didn’t realize Papa was standing behind me until Lowery glanced up to ask, “Is she a midget?”

Papa chuckled out a “No,” pause, “she’s a genius. She absorbs knowledge like a sponge. She’s also got an uncanny ability with music. Lately—because of you—she’s been thinking about why the radio doesn’t play music she likes. And,” he concluded, “I’m sorry she has opinions and I hope she didn’t offend you.”

“May I sit down?” Lowery sat before getting permission and leaned with his elbow on his knee to peer at me and ask, “Don’t you like any popular music?”

“Sure, I do. Great Balls of Fire is, well, great.”

“Then you like Elvis,” Lowery ventured.

“No, I don’t. He’s fake. He’s a white man singing like a colored man. That’s not right. It shouldn’t be Country music anyway. Most of his songs come from the Blues.”

Lowery glanced up at Papa, “Very impressive, you’ve taught her all this?”

“Not directly or intentionally,” Papa lifted his shoulders, “I talk about music. It’s an important part of my life. She has sharp hearing and picks up the bass cello, for instance, and tells me it has a melody and could be a song by itself. Then she hums along with it to help me hear it.”

I got the full flash of his grin as Lowery joked, “Wanna work for me?”

Papa started with an “um” but I answered firmly, “No. I’m sorry. Country music is being corrupted by Rock n’ Roll. It needs to be true to its origins in Scottish and English folksongs with the cadence of a parade. There’s a rum-tum-dum that flows thru our veins. Speak to that and Southern listeners will be drawn.”

No, I do not believe Lowery spread my ideas around and the result was the #1 Country Hit that year.

But it might have been…because I hated it. The jarring inclusion of a gator used as a cannon barrel took a rousing fight song and ruined it with a hideous joke about a gator’s head getting blown off. That’s monstrous. I had my chance to be on a committee to veto crap like that but I’d rejected the opportunity because I did not like Lowery.

This is where my Bill Lowery Story starts after a brief description of the building and stating my immediate dislike of him:

One afternoon, we overheard a whiny complaining voice, “Mr. Lowery, excuse me but I must speak to you, sir.” He proceeded with shuddering emotion to detail how much he hated the music he was making. He was tired of being a clown and wanted to write a real song, not a novelty joke. I thought I knew who he was. Too often I heard his silly ditties on the radio and grimaced.  He was expected to produce more of the same but wanted to make real music. That sounded like a reasonable request to me.

Lowery commenced to lecture him on how The Industry works, what The Market wants, and gathered enough steam to start shouting “When you make a hit you, you make another one just like it. It would be stupid to do otherwise. Give the market what it wants.”

The talent protested, “People don’t want the same song over and over. They want to hear—.”

“Fucking bullshit!” Lowery cut him off with a roar of indignation and launched into a tirade that would rival Ned Beatty’s soliloquy in Network… if only I could remember all the words Lowrery said. But I vividly recall the pure malice in his tone. His humiliating barrage concluded: 

“You signed a contract! I gave you money upfront that you now owe me! If you can’t pay me back by making the music the market wants. OR I take your car and your house to get back my money. Your wife will leave you. You’ll end up a homeless bum on the streets. That's what happens to you if don’t do exactly what I tell you! There’s no way out of it” He bellowed, “I own you! I own your soul!”

I felt a chill shiver down from the crown of my head to the tips of my extremities. In a state of terrified shock, I barely breathed. I was too afraid to cry and glanced wild-eyed at my Papa who had been watching me. “Shush,” he whispered, “We’ll take about this later.”

I nodded and tightly held myself together. When we heard the weeping victim of Lowery’s rage depart the building, I had to jump up and run. I couldn’t contain my anxiety. I dashed out of the office and started down the stairs as Lowery came out of his office and turned his back to lock the door.

I kept glancing over my shoulder, fearfully. He jovially called down at me, “How are you today, young lady?”

I had gotten to the stair landing, spun around and lost it. “Don’t talk to me! Don’t look at me!” Papa came out of his office as I pointed my arm in accusation at Lowery, “You’re the Devil!” which I quickly retracted, “No, no, not the Devil because you’d be more powerful if you were. You’re one of Satan’s Minions gathering the souls of the damned for him!"

This is the conclusion of the story that got big laughs from radio disk jockeys and their bosses in the 60s. They would slap their knees, and guffaw while gasping, “Yes, yes, Satan's Minion, that’s Lowery!”

Looking over the railing, Papa firmly warned, “Sally, stop it.” At the same time, Lowery started down the steps, saying, “Now sweetheart, I think I understand what got you upset and you just don’t understand.”

Then I shrieked…like a little girl and shrilled sharply, “Stay away from me!”

The door downstairs opened and a guy in jeans and a bathrobe came out. He looked a bit like a young Kirk Douglas and said, “I’ll save you. No one’s going to hurt you here.”

Lowery erupted, “Frank, stay away from that child! All your brains are in your pants. You can’t be trusted with young girls.”

It’s hard to understand how this repartee flew so far over my head. I knew too much about too many topics while surrounded by the walls of a labyrinth of ignorance that was invisible to me. Ya don’t know what ya don’t know, ya’know?

I heard the playful tones in their voices, felt they were mocking me, and burst into tears. Papa arrived on the landing, picked me up on his hip, and walked up the stairs back to his office. I smothered my face in Papa’s neck and don’t know how we didn’t touch Lowery as we passed him. Papa sat me on his partner’s desk, stroked my hair out of my face, and made soothing noises. The door was open and the man in the jeans had traded his bathrobe for a polo shirt emblazoned with a Delta Airlines logo over his heart.

“Hey,” he leaned on the door jam, “I should have come up to meet you months ago but I’m in and out. Times I’m here, you’re not, and vice versa.” Frank talked a mile a minute like a speed freak. “I’m a pilot for Delta, sometimes I’m gone for days. Then when I’m here I do photography. You,” he pointed his finger at my face, “are pretty and ought to be a model.”

Papa started working from home afterwards and only went to his office for meetings. Four years later, Papa took me to Frank Garner to get my first modeling photos but that’s yet another story.

[weirdanecdotes]

My Music Appreciation Education, Part 1

Every Sunday afternoon of my life as far back as I can remember till I left home, Papa turned up the sound and devoted himself to listening to an eclectic mix from every musical category available. None of us had a choice in the matter. The only way to escape the sound was going outside and achieving a sufficient distance.

In my earliest years, he only had a radio to blast. It was the only free music at the time. He hunched over the set sitting on the living room side table and tuned it to a classical station. It might have been on PBS Radio but only on Sunday afternoons. He sat back in his armchair, closed his eyes, and absorbed Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Handel,  and perhaps a John Phillip Sousa march thrown in by the DJ who talked about the music before and after sharing it. It was intentionally educational and I learned.

When he got bored with that, he’d swivel the dial to a country station…with yodeling. I’m talking about the early 50s, before Elvis. Country in the early 50's was a purer art form. Elements of English and Scottish folk songs were interwoven with savage heathen drum beats. Plaintive lyrics about lost loves were accompanied by banjos and the rat-ta-tat of metal fingertips raking a metal washboard. Yee-haw was occasionally shouted with seeming spontaneity. I usually jumped up and danced when they played a do-si-do. I loved reels. I remember shouting, “What is that? What’s makes that?” the first time I heard a fiddle.

I believe the George Tech student radio station must have had a jazz hour later on Sundays and that’s how I fell in love with the sounds of Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Quartet. One day Papa may have found WOAK Radio by accident. It was the first time but I heard The Blues, most likely sung by Lonnie Johnson or Led Belly.

Mama immediately objected, “That music is not for us.” At the approximate age of three, I had no idea what she was talking about.

“Woman!” Papa went off on a histrionic tirade, “No one can put walls around music! You can’t say something anyone can hear belongs only to one kind of person. That’s preposterous!”  [This was one of his favorite words.] “Are you telling me you feel nothing when you hear this song?”

 “It makes me feel sad,” she retorted, “I don’t need to feel sad.”

“Sad!” He raved, “Sad does not begin to describe the depth of melancholy conjured by this man’s voice, the weariness and yearning for something more. You don’t mind sad when you hear on it the country station. What’s the difference? Don’t you relate to someone struggling to overcome the life they got handed to achieve the one they deserve? ” 

The song ended, the DJ spoke, and Mama crowed, “See I told you—not for us! It’s their music!”

The DJ had a fabulous radio voice, smooth and deep with a purr in the back of his throat. But I couldn’t understand most of the words he said because he had some kind of heavy accent. The next song was a bop with brass and a bass guitar—Muddy Waters probably—that lifted me to my feet, dancing and singing, “Happy! Happy! Happy!”

Mama laughed at my antics while Papa notched the plastic front of the radio to mark the station’s location for future use before turning the dial to a Popular Music station to made Mama happy.

It was the same station she always played in the car. Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Doris Day were big. They certainly had good voices and I genuinely liked their songs but there was something off about them. I was beginning to discern the slight distinctions between music that feels authentic and that which is manufactured for mass consumption. Some inherent predisposition attracted me to music with emotional verity.

I remember asking, “Why can’t we listen to the music we like all the time?”

Papa replied, “We need to buy a record player.”

“And records,” Mama cautioned, “Those cost money, too. Money we don’t have.” She was hand sewing the finishing touches on a dress she was making for me, which made a visual imprint on my memory attached to this conversation.

This was probably the first time I realized we were poor. A couple of years later, Papa graduated from Georgia Tech, got a good entry level job in a big architectural firm, and we moved to a rental house in Brookhaven. There we discovered Radio Shack.

He still could not afford the quality of stereo system he desired so he bought the parts to assemble one. He already had a small soldering iron with a spool of silver solder and a set of tiny screw drivers from his days as a Hobby Shop owner before I was born. Later in life, I built my first computer with parts from Radio Shack.

He shut down Mama’s gripes about expensive records by archly informing her he could borrow them from the Atlanta Public Library. I already knew he had a library card because he brought home new books, read them, and then they were never seen again. In the rental house, he came home with a replica of a great work of art in a gilded frame, which he also borrowed.

I had to see this incredible place that loaned books and music and art to poor people!  We rode on a bus downtown to the Carnegie Library. Afterwards, we also discovered a used record store. Papa gave me a dime—an allowance, he called it—and I wanted to spend it on a Muddy Waters record! I was five years old and the old guy behind the counter looked down at me to ask, “Do you know what you’re buying?”

I answered by singing, “Early in da morning, dat’s when my blues start falling down,” but got no further because I was drowned out by laughter. I got to keep my dime and the record.

Freed from the radio, we played whatever we liked on Sunday afternoons—loudly. Papa continued my education by telling me everything he knew about the music we heard together. I remember him telling me Franz Liszt was a big star who made girls swoon like Frank Sinatra, Mozart was a bratty child prodigy, and Beethoven went deaf later in life but could still write music! The association was formed in my mind that loving music involved knowing about its creators and how their lives shaped the music they made.

I also displayed an uncanny ability. We might have been listening to a country song the first time I said, “That part sounds just like…” something classical.

Papa arched an eyebrow and asked, “What do you mean?”

I got up and proved what I meant by first lifting & gently placing the needle to the part of the song I meant and suggested, “Listen closely and remember it,” then put the needle arm in its cradle to pull out a classical album and had to fidget some more to get to the similar part. Papa was astounded.

As the years passed, I got to be really good at switching between records to compare one element of a tune to another. (If only I’d had a second turntable…right?) Even so, when they had dance parties at home, Papa would bring me out to show off my savant ability. I must have been seven the first time I “performed” and by then I had four examples of songs that totally ripped off classical music.

I did a lot of uncanny shit and Mama was bothered about all of it. She strongly felt something was wrong with me. I was adopted and she didn’t expect me to look like her but, dammit, I said things that were beyond her comprehension. She actually resented the expansiveness of my vocabulary at such an early age. It was unnatural! Papa just blew it off and said I had a great imagination or an ear for music or it was a coincidence, whatever applied to her complaints. I completely understand her point of view. For fuck’s sake, I used to talk to myself in different voices while I believed I was talking to Raphael!

They wanted to adopt another baby and part of that process was sending me for a psychiatric evaluation to see if their parenting had damaged me. Fear was coming off Mama like infrared heat while she warned me, “Behave yourself and do not talk to your imaginary friends or say anything about them.”

I was afraid, too. I’d recently watched a couple of B&W movies on our tiny TV that scared me badly. Joan of Arc was about a girl who talked to angels and got burnt at the stake. The other one was Snake Pit about a woman who heard and saw things that weren’t there. She got sent to an Asylum in Hell.

But, hey, the shrink only wanted to play games like fitting shapes through cut-outs in a box and how fast I could put together some puzzles. He watched me play with a family of dolls while he asked yes or no questions and checked them off. Then he showed me pictures of scenes and asked me to tell stories about them.

I knew I was in danger then and there because I fucking loved telling stories since before I could talk clearly. I heard stories on the radio like The Lone Ranger and The Shadow; combined them with snatches of adult conversations; sprinkled on the-way-I-wished-the-world-was and told them out-fucking-loud to myself. That’s crazy!

This was probably the first time I edited the words that flowed through my mind and included “he said” and “she said” before changing voices. The last one showed a boy with a broken bike beside a highway and in the distance the shape of a car, too indistinct to tell whether it was coming or going. The shrink softly prompted, “Which way is the car going?”

“It’s doing both,” I insisted, “I don’t know which way the car is going because you can’t tell by looking? And guessing is only deciding if the story is happy or sad. It could go either way.” I mugged a shrug.

He pressed with the classic line, “How does it make you feel?”

The answer blurted out of my mouth, “I feel like no matter which way the car is going, that boy is going to be standing by a long empty highway in the middle of nowhere for a long time.”

“What will he do while he’s waiting?”

“He’ll watch those clouds,” I waved my hand at the illustration then pointed, “hear that bird in the tree chirping, crickets in the grass, too, probably, and feel the wind. Maybe he lies down in the grass and doesn’t want to leave when someone does stop because they think he’s dead. HA!” Then I added my real laughter at the idea.

The shrink cracked a smile then pursed his lips to look serious again. The next thing he did was ask how to use a long list of words and fit them into sentences. That was easy but, my ordeal was only half-over.

The other half was waiting-in-suspense for the results while Mama and Papa maintained a strained silence. Then I waited alone while he talked to them and started trembling with fear.

But they came out all smiles. They said he said I had the vocabulary of a college freshman. I scored in the upper one percentile on an IQ test and shown an empathetic personality. That shrink thought I was a genius! That explained everything as far as my parents were concerned. I was suddenly allowed to be odd and a bit freaky.

For your edification and listening pleasure, this is a sampling of what I heard on any given Sunday during the 50’s:

Every Sunday afternoon of my life from as far back as I can remember till I left home, Papa turned up the sound and devoted himself to listening to an eclectic mix from every musical category available. None of us had a choice in the matter. The only way to escape the sound was going outside and achieving a sufficient distance.

 In my earliest years, he only had a radio to blast. It was the only free music at the time. He hunched over the set sitting on the living room side table and tuned it to the classical station. It might have been on PBS Radio but only on Sunday afternoons. He sat back in his armchair, closed his eyes, and absorbed Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Handel,  and perhaps a John Phillip Souza march thrown in by the DJ who talked about the music before and after sharing it. It was intentionally educational and I learned.

When he got bored with that, he’d swivel the dial to a country station…with yodeling. I’m talking about the early 50s, before Elvis. It was a pure art form, to be sure. Elements of English and Scottish folk songs were interwoven with savage heathen drum beats. Plaintive lyrics about lost loves were accompanied by banjos and the rat-ta-tat of metal fingertips raking a metal washboard. Yee-haw was occasionally shouted with seeming spontaneity. I usually jumped up and danced when they played a do-si-do. I remember shouting, “What is that? What’s makes that?” the first time I heard a fiddle. I loved reels.

I believe the George Tech student radio station must have had a jazz hour on Sundays and that’s how I fell in love with the sounds of Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Quartet. One day Papa may have found WOAK Radio by accident. It was the first time but I heard The Blues, most likely sung by Lonnie Johnson or Led Belly.

Mama immediately objected, “That music is not for us.” At the approximate age of three, I had no idea what she was talking about.

“Woman!” Papa went off on a histrionic tirade, “No one can put walls around music! You can’t say something anyone can hear belongs only to one kind of person. That’s preposterous!”  [This was one of his favorite words.] “Are you telling me you feel nothing when you hear this song?”

 “It makes me feel sad,” she retorted, “I don’t need to feel sad.”

“Sad!” He raved, “Sad does not begin to describe the depth of melancholy conjured by this man’s voice, the weariness and yearning for something more. You don’t mind sad when you hear on it the country station. What’s the difference? Don’t you relate to someone struggling to overcome the life they got handed to achieve the one they deserve? ” 

The song ended, the DJ spoke, and Mama crowed, “See I told you—not for us! It’s their music!”

The DJ had a fabulous radio voice, smooth and deep with a purr in the back of his throat. But I couldn’t understand most of the words he said. The next song was a bop with brass and a bass guitar—Muddy Waters probably—that lifted me to my feet, dancing and singing, “Happy! Happy! Happy!”

Mama laughed at my antics while Papa notched the plastic front of the radio to mark the station’s location for future use before turning the dial to a Popular Music station to made Mama happy.

It was the same station she always played in the car. Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Doris Day were big. They certainly had great voices and I genuinely liked their songs but there was something off about them. I was beginning to discern the slight distinctions between music that felt authentic and that which was manufactured for mass consumption. Some inherent predisposition attracted me to music with emotional verity.

I remember asking, “Why can’t we listen to the music we like all the time?”

Papa replied, “We need to buy a record player.”

“And records,” Mama cautioned, “Those cost money, too. Money we don’t have.” She was hand sewing the finishing touches on a dress she was making for me, which made a visual imprint on my memory attached to this conversation.

This was probably the first time I realized we were poor. A couple of years later, Papa graduated from Georgia Tech, got a good entry level job in a big architectural firm, and we moved to a rental house in Brookhaven. Then we discovered Radio Shack was there. He still could not afford the quality of stereo system he desired so he bought the parts to assemble one. He already had a small soldering iron with a spool of silver solder and a set of tiny screw drivers from his days as a Hobby Shop owner before I was born and adopted. Later in life, I built my first computer with parts from Radio Shack.

He shut down Mama’s gripes about expensive records by archly informing her he could borrow them from the Atlanta Public Library. I already knew he had a library card because he brought home new books, read them, then they were never seen again. In the rental house, he came home with a replica of a great work of art in a gilded frame, which he also borrowed.

I had to see this incredible place that loaned books and music and art to poor people!  We rode on a bus downtown to the Carnegie Library. Afterwards, we also discovered a used record store. Papa gave me a dime—an allowance, he called it—and I wanted to spend it on a Muddy Waters record! I was five years old and the old guy behind the counter looked down at me to ask, “Do you know what you’re buying?”

I answered by singing, “Early in da morning, dat’s when my blues start falling down,” but got no further because I was drowned out by laughter. I got to keep my dime and the record.

Freed from the radio, we played whatever we liked on Sunday afternoons—loudly. Papa continued my education by telling me everything he knew about the music we heard together. I remember him telling me Franz Liszt was a big star who made girls swoon like Frank Sinatra, Mozart was a bratty child prodigy, and Beethoven went deaf later in life but could still write music! The association was formed in my mind that loving music involved knowing about its creators and how their lives shaped the music they made.

I also displayed an uncanny ability. We might have been listening to a country song the first time I said, “That part sounds just like…” something classical.

Papa arched an eyebrow and asked, “What do you mean?”

I got up and proved what I meant by first lifting & dropping the needle to the part of the song I meant and suggested, “Listen closely and remember it,” then put the needle arm in its cradle to pull out a classical album and had to fidget some more to get to the similar part. Papa was astounded.

As the years passed, I got to be really good at switching between records to compare one element of a tune to another. (If only I’d had a second turntable…right?) Even so, when they had dance parties at home, Papa would bring me out to show off my savant ability. I must have been seven the first time I “performed” and by then I had four examples of songs that totally ripped off classical music.

I did a lot of uncanny shit and Mama was bothered about all of it. She strongly felt something was wrong with me. I was adopted and she didn’t expect me to look like her but, dammit, I said things that were beyond her comprehension. She actually resented the expansiveness of my vocabulary at such an early age. It was unnatural! Papa just blew it off and said I had a great imagination or an ear for music or it was a coincidence, whatever applied to her complaints. I completely understand her point of view. For fuck’s sake, I used to talk to myself in different voices while I believed I was talking to Raphael!

They wanted to adopt another baby and part of that process was sending me for a psychiatric evaluation to see if their parenting had damaged me. Fear was coming off Mama like infrared heat while she warned me, “Behave yourself and do not talk to your imaginary friends or say anything about them.”

I was afraid, too. I’d recently watched a couple of B&W movies on our tiny TV that scared me badly. Joan of Arc was about a girl who talked to angels and got burnt at the stake. The other one was Snake Pit and a woman heard and saw things that weren’t there. She got sent to the Asylum in Hell.

But, hey, the shrink only wanted to play games like fitting shapes through cut-outs in a box and how fast I could put together some puzzles. He watched me play with a family of dolls while he asked yes or no questions and checked them off. Then he showed me pictures of scenes and asked me to tell stories about them. I knew I was in danger then and there because I have fucking loved telling stories since before I could talk clearly. I heard stories on the radio like The Lone Ranger and The Shadow; combined them with snatches of adult conversations; sprinkled on the-way-I-wished-the-world-was and told them out-fucking-loud to myself. That’s crazy!

This was probably the first time I edited the words that flowed through my mind and included “he said” and “she said” before changing voices. The last one was showed a boy with a broken bike beside a highway and in the distance the shape of a car, too indistinct to tell whether it was coming or going. The shrink asked softly prompted, “Which way is the car going?”

“It’s doing both,” I insisted, “I don’t know which way the car is going because you can’t tell by looking at it? And guessing is only deciding if the story is happy or sad. It could go either way.” I mugged a shrug.

He pressed with the classic line, “How does it make you feel?”

The answer blurted out of my mouth, “I feel like no matter which way the car is going, that boy is going to be standing by a long empty highway in the middle of nowhere for a long time.”

“What will he do while he’s waiting?”

“He’ll watch those clouds,” I waved my hand at the illustration then pointed, “hear that bird in the tree chirping, crickets in the grass, too, probably, and feel the wind. Maybe he lies down in the grass and doesn’t want to leave when someone does stop because they think he’s dead. HA!” Then I added my real laughter at the idea.

The shrink cracked a smile then pursed his lips to look serious again. The next thing he did was ask how to use a long list of words and fit them into sentences. That was easy but, my ordeal was only half-over.

The other half was waiting-in-suspense for the results while Mama and Papa maintained a strained silence. Then I waited alone while he talked to them and started trembling with fear.

But they came out all smiles. They said he said I had the vocabulary of a college freshman. I had learned them all from Papa & B&W movies from the 30s & 40s. I scored in the upper one percentile on an IQ test and shown an empathetic personality. That shrink thought I was a genius! That explained everything as far as my parents were concerned. I was suddenly allowed to be odd and a bit freaky.

For your edification and listening pleasure, this is a sampling of what I heard on any given Sunday during the 50’s:

And my Muddy Waters record:

[weirdanecdotes]

The Scar on My Forehead

I had a noticeable scar, a small circular red dot between my eyebrows. It has faded now. But when it was fresh, I was sometimes asked if it is a caste mark, some remnant of involvement with Hinduism or some other Far Eastern cult. But the truth is far more bizarre than that.

For most of my life I have had strange visions and involvement with various spirit guides, visitations by angels, and the like. Someone without a strong regard for reason and logic—which my Papa drilled in me—might have easily been deluded into egocentric error by such occurrences. But given my intellect and background, I have generally studied these experiences in the light of Jungian theory, interpreting them in terms of analogy and archetypal significance, instead of accepting them as literal, actual facts.

My search for explanations of this type of phenomena led me to the conclusion that there could be no objective method of evaluation when dealing with subjective data. Answers could only be found by jumping right in and participating with the source. And research into which systems might provide this kind of investigation brought me into the serious practice of the meditative aspects of the Qabala (also known at Kabbalah, Cabala & other phonetic variations). I spent over seven years in the middle of my twenties in daily meditations lasting between one and three hours. My devotion to this system and the results I achieved were previously self-published in a book, which has now been out-of-print for forty-one years. But, I recently discovered the damned thing is for sale on Amazon!

The problem with studying spiritual experience is that it cannot be quantified and inherently defies the scientific method. It leads to a logic loop wherein one cannot understand the experience without having experienced it. Any attempts to explain or describe direct experiences with Spirit by those who have them always come off as loony. It's just too easy to dismiss people like me as nutcases or as sufferers of extreme hormone deficiencies. It always comes down to a matter of faith: you just have to believe me because I have no vested interest in appearing to be insane.

So whether you believe me or not, I'll tell you the most important thing I've learned about Spirit: Spirit is real. I mean really real. As real as electricity, as real as gravity and all the other forces of Nature that are invisible to the naked eye. It is not merely a mental process or an emotional reaction or an intellectual concept. I have to say I believe this only because I have no way of proving that I know Spirit is real. At least, not in a way that the Amazing Randi would have accepted as convincing.

Spirit is in action, fine-tuning Its Creation, effecting actual physical changes all the time, everywhere thru-out the Multiverses. All religions are based on this Article of Faith but, I believe, some day quantum physicists will probably devise an instrument that will measure It. That will be the day that human beings begin to attain a full partnership with Spirit in the Manifestation of Creation.

What does all this have to do with the scar on my forehead? Be patient. I have to give you some background material. So grant me this premise: Spirit is real. Then we can proceed.

The trouble with pinning down Spirit comes from the fact that It is not a singular, laser point of Light but a multiplicity of effects and causes. Spirit does not act in one way but in many ways. In Qabala, Spirit is defined as being ten spheres of influence, each representing different aspects of how Spirit interacts with Creation. In the Roman Catholic faith, Spirit is One-in-Three/Three-in-One, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost with the Virgin Mary on the side and a consortium of Archangels and Saints who represent different Faces of Spirit that act upon and respond to humans. All religions have pantheons of lesser divinities that are more accessible than a Prime God Almighty.

There never was a true Baptist in Alabama who had a vision of Krishna and there's never been a Hindu in Pakistan who had a vision of Christ without being coached by a missionary. The point being, people interpret their spiritual experiences within their cultural framework, within the confines of their language and/or level of education. For example, a century or so ago, if someone out in the woods of Europe had an experience with strange lights and little people, they described it as an encounter with fairies and going into a magical hollow hill. Nowadays, we get reports of UFO's and little gray-green aliens and people who believe they've been abducted into alien spacecraft.

Humans have not yet evolved enough and don't have the language or the context necessary to describe what really happens during a spiritual experience. So those of us who are “blessed” by these kinds of experiences do the best we can with what we've got and mainly fall back on religious metaphors.

Now all of this was preliminary to confessing that for most of my life I believed Archangel Raphael was my Guardian and Guide. I don't know what this aspect of Spirit really is and, if I did, I'd probably lack the language to describe it. The best I can do is to say I had visions of and received instructions from what appeared to be Raphael as s/he was often portrayed in Renaissance paintings. I use “s/he” because angels aren’t gendered—by ancient canon—and they cannot biologically reproduce nor have sexual relations. Some, like Michael, look more masculine, while Raphael is... well... here s/he is guiding Tobias to go slay a dragon.

If you want to read a summary of that story go here, it's basically a pre-historic version of the Hero's Journey.

Over the years I developed a comfortable and comforting relationship with whatever IT is and by its instruction; in fact, by it’s compulsion I published by a book. After thirty years of fearful secrecy, I went public. I was drawn from a solitary pursuit of knowledge and understanding into an active role of lecturing, teaching and generally sharing what I had learned.

I put myself out there where the rigid and fanatical could hurl damnation and ridicule upon me, rivals viciously hated me and practiced Dark Magick to hurt me, and I suffered. But I more often met others who took comfort, inspiration and guidance from my work.

One night after I'd spent a day at a New Age convention, autographing copies of my book and debating spiritual theories, as I went to sleep it seemed like light had turned on and I opened my eyes and saw five pillars of flame at the foot of my bed. I could feel the heat and see the light they gave off but knew the house wasn't on fire because the smoke detector hadn't gone off. Propping myself up on my elbows, I squinted my eyes to bring the phenomena into focus.

Finally, this is The Story I told at parties, usually while high on cocaine:

One night, as I fell asleep, I had a vision of the five Archangels — Gabriel, Raphael, Metatron, Michael and Uriel—from left to right, arranged in a semi-circle at the foot of my bed. And they were having an argument about who should be in charge of me! Mainly Raphael and Michael were arguing, Metatron was mediating, and the other two were there to voice their opinions.

Yah’ see, the Archangel Raphael is the Guardian of the Element of Air, in charge of intellectual pursuits, and has dominion over artists and scientists and other visionary types. But, Michael is the Guardian of the Element of Fire. He presides over areas of passionate action, over statesmen and revolutionaries, terrorists and heroes, all agents of change and transformation. Among those who study these kinds of things, it is said that Michael brought about the American and French revolutions and that his influence manifested in the “Democratic Experiment” in these United States. Being under the Guardianship of Michael would mean going even more public and suffering far more...

I can't remember exactly what they were saying. Only phrases, “born to the White Branch,” and “transferred to the Red Branch” but then Michael turned towards me and stretching out his arm towards me, saying, “You are mine!” as a laser beam torched out of his finger and hit me in the forehead. Then all was a black, dreamless sleep until I awoke in the morning.

Feeling tired, like I had not had a restful sleep, I staggered into the bathroom and took a seat on the toilet to relieve my bladder. Still with my eyes more closed than open I recalled the experience of the previous night as though it were a dream. My elbow on my knee for support, I dropped my head forward into my hand and was startled by searing pain.

I jumped up to look in the bathroom mirror, leaned forward for a closer look and did not believe what I saw! There on my forehead between my eyebrows, was a bright red burn in the shape of a five-pointed star!

At this point, I often guffawed, slapped my knee, and roared, “Do you believe that!” Then used a reasonable tone, “But you see the scar? The edges spread as it healed and it looks more like a circle now. But it’s a burn scar, right? If it wasn’t angels, why would I do that to myself?”

“Maybe you were sleep-walking,” someone would always suggest, to which I would respond, “Really? I sleepwalked, heated up some metal thing with a star on the end and gave myself a painful burn—all without waking myself—or my husband?”

Someone else usually asked, “What kind of drugs were you on?”

“I only had a glass of wine hours earlier. I was simply tired.”

Sometimes there would be a cynic who accused, “You did it to yourself just to tell this ridiculous story.”

“Why would I do that?” I rebutted calmly, “What would be my motive for wanting people to think I’m a lunatic? I’m not selling a book about about my scar or being interviewed by the media. Telling this story does not improve my social status, ya’know.

"I’m telling you because I want you to just think about the possibility that it’s true. There are no real archangels that exist beyond our beliefs. They are simply archetypes that exist; arising in far-flung cultures around the world to represent…,” long pause, “something that is real. We can go round in circles, whip up a number of speculative and equally irrational scenarios before circling back around to the least irrational explanation, and that’s the fact I’m telling you something physical happened to me during a vision. I don’t expect to profit from in looking insane and proud of it. I’m only planting this one small idea for your consideration—.”

I did get more followers when I told this story on My Space in 1998ish, which was a 30 year delay before reaping any kind of reward from it—and after the scar had nearly faded. I didn’t take a selfie in 1981. Now that I’m truly old, the deep furrow between my brows has divided the spot into unequal halves. Perhaps—and I say this with a wink and a laugh—the mark is divided because I never committed to Michael and I am still attached to Raphael and faded because I rarely think about either of them anymore.

Here is the small idea in large print:

Spirit is real.

If you think about this idea, really consider it and roll it around in your brain, you might start to notice coincidences. You might attract synchronicities, which are meaningful coincidences. These odd occurrences won't be happening because of your thinking. You are simply noticing what's always been happening. But, every now and then, a coincidence goes beyond meaningful to significant and it's hard not to believe it's a message from the Unknowable. If that happens, remember how you laughed at me and laugh at yourself before you become delusional.

[weirdanecdotes]

How I Met Mick Jagger

This is also how I became an Unintentional Groupie. If I hadn’t befriended a couple of DJ’s, I never would have had access to music stars. This story takes place in the early 60s. It may shock you to learn music was segregated by color. And calling people Black didn’t saturate society until a decade later. To avoid offending anyone, I have substituted polite words where needed. Nor were there any issues about cultural appropriation at the time. I must have been woke because I got upset when White artists ripped off Black artists. But my issue with it was a lack of authenticity and the literal theft. Anyway, this story actually begins...

After we moved from Brookhaven to Buckhead and there were no buses to take me to church, Papa used to drive me to Peachtree Road Methodist on Sunday mornings to attend classes and morning services. By the time I was fifteen, he decided to sleep in and shifted me to attending evening services and a youth club afterwards.

Despite the fact the youth club had a basketball court where we could dance in our socks, most of the youths skipped out soon after they were dropped off. Some of them had older friends with cars who picked them up and brought them back in time to innocently look like they’d never been away.

Others left in gaggles to wander the streets and I tagged along without being invited. There was a strip of shops next to the church and behind that on Mathieson Drive there was a rather fantastical old house built out of rough granite blocks that had a turret!

I had no idea why we going but climbed the steep driveway and the even steeper steps to the front door, which was shockingly unlocked. They didn’t even knock before pushing it open.

Inside, rock n’ roll music boomed and a sign on the wall announced we had entered WQXI Radio. Up yet another flight of steep steps, we arrived at a hallway with plate glass windows on one side. Behind a locked door on the windowed room sat a DJ doing his job. When he saw us, he grinned and waved. Then during the next musical interlude he asked what we wanted to hear.

That’s how I met my first disk jockey—Patrick Aloysius Hughes. I put the emphasis on his middle name like he always did on the radio. He practically sung it into five syllables—Al-lo-wish-she-us!

After that, I went by myself to visit him on Sunday evenings. I told him my Bill Lowery Story and he laughed like a maniac. Pat was as hyperactive as I was and I was too ignorant of the world to even wonder if his buzz was natural or snorted. I wanted to know everything about his job and he was glad to explain how everything worked. Of course, we talked about music. I also learned about The Industry that controlled everything teenagers were allowed to hear, about Payola and how new releases came with gift boxes that included tickets to VIP seating at sporting events.

It was probably a few months before he unlocked the door and let me into the control room to flip levers and twiddle dials. That dear man never made any kind of move on me. He simply enjoyed company. One Sunday evening, Pat rather ominously told me Paul Drew—the DJ who manned the midnight till dawn shift—was coming just to meet me. I naturally asked, "Why?"

"You're like a prodigy or something," Pat shrugged, "You know music better than I do."

Paul arrived and beside Pat they looked like a comic duo. Pat was a tall string-bean good ol' boy and Paul was a short, round, balding guy with a Yankee accent. Pat flat-out loved rock n' rock. Paul was cerebral and filled his airtime with “easy listening” Oldies like Frank Sinatra, some classical music and a sprinkling of cool jazz.

“I hear you know music like no one else your age,” Paul eyed me with respect.

“She’s uncanny,” Pat enthused, “If she says it’s gonna be a hit, it is!”

Rolling my eyes, I allowed, “I do recognize all the current trends built into a track but mainly—if I don’t like it—I reckon it will be a hit just to annoy me every time I hear it on the radio.”

They guffawed then Paul sat down and seriously asked, “What do you like?” He even pulled a notepad out of his back pocket & the pen from his shirt to take notes.

Feeling utterly intimidated, I answered slowly, alert for any negative reactions, “Anything by Modern Jazz Quartet, Miles Davis, his especially Sketches of Spain, Andre Previn’s soundtrack for The Subterraneans, Dave Brubeck. I’m currently hooked on Pachebel’s Canon in D, can’t stop listening to it over and over. But, here I must confess,” I breathed out in a whisper, “for fun, I listen to WAOK.”

“Of course, you do,” Paul bobbed his head and chuckled, “Chuck Berry invented rock n’ roll.”

Taking that as I dig, I insisted, “He actually did. And Little Richard…”

He held up his hand to forestall my ire, “I know, I know. What other white music do you like?”

“Recently, Jim Salle [another story] insisted I listen to a folkie debut album by Bob Dylan. He knows my tastes. I bought it. House of the Rising Sun might fit your format. I believe Dylan stole it from a couple of colored artists. I predict some rock n’ roll band is gonna steal it from him.”

It took over two years before my prediction came true but Paul Drew remembered and called to tell me he’d just gotten The Animals’ version and was promoting it. Looking back, I think was in a sense their ideal listener and articulate enough to explain my opinions. But also, I was pretty.

Shortly after I got my driver’s license, Paul called early one Sunday in an excited state. “The Rolling Stones are passing thru the airport today! Like, in a couple of hours they’ll have an hour layover. If you can get out there, I can get you into the Delta VIP Lounge.”

I replied indignantly, “I don’t like the Rolling Stones.”

“Heh,” Paul snickered, “Of course not, that’s why they’re massive stars. Their managers aren’t going to let me near them. But, sweetheart, you can get to them. They’ll probably come to you!”

I guessed, “Then I introduce them to you?”

“Exactly.”

I called my BF Ginny who was a Rolling Stone fan and a beauty. I looked exactly like this, the same dress, minus the bandanna:

The Delta VIP Lounge had two levels. Immediately inside the entrance was a bar/café area but, on a higher guarded level, actual VIPs came to rest between flights. Ginny and I easily found Paul at the bar and he ordered us Coca-Cola’s with cherry syrup. The bartender added little umbrellas. We giggled like the schoolgirls we were.

Before Paul could detail his plan to gain access, The Stones arrived, loudly shouting profanities and obscenities. Like she was iron filings and they were magnets, Ginny slipped like a shadow past security, went directly to Brian Jones, and sat in his lap! He greeted her, “Well hello, baby girl!”

The guard may have taken that to mean we were expected because he stepped aside to let me follow her. I stood there uncertainly. From over three feet away, I could smell them. They were sweaty, filthy, uncouth, drunken fools. I glanced back at Paul, gave him a helpless shrug, and primly took a seat on a nearby Mid-Century Modern sofa, all imitation leather with chrome legs and trim.

I was stunned when Mick Jagger approached, took a seat at the other end, casually threw his arm over its back to turn towards me, and politely asked, “What brings you here this fine morning?”

I was stunned because unlike the other band members he was immaculately clean and well dressed in a blue-stripped seersucker jacket, a spotlessly white shirt, khaki slacks, and white buck shoes with red rubber soles. He looked like a prep school poet who did not belong with his rowdy bandmates.

I was stunned because color photography had not accurately rendered the paleness of his strawberry blonde hair, ice blue eyes, flawless cream complexion, ruddy schoolboy cheeks, or his mouth! Good gawd! I couldn’t take my eyes off his lips. He was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen in person and that took my breath away. I literally could not answer him.

He tried again, “Where are you coming from? Where are you going?”

“I’m just here because you are,” I whispered, “My friend is a DJ who would like to talk to you.”

He snapped, “That’s not going to happen,” breathed out his boredom in a shuddering sigh then asked, “Are you a fan?”

“No,” I gestured toward Ginny who had moved onto Keith Richards’ lap, “but my friend is.”

“Oh gawd,” he drawled at the scene, flipping delicate fingers to dismiss it from his thoughts, and turned his attention back on me. “Do you think we might have enough in common to have a decent conversation to pass the time?”

“We could talk about music." I turned a bit petulant, "I don’t like you because Little Richard did you first.”

“I don’t deny that,” he wasn’t offended, “He taught me all about performing on stage. I bet you don’t like the Beach Boys either and certainly not Pat Boone.”

I managed to smile and agreed, “Definitely not. I won’t hold your Little Richard impersonation against you personally. I’m sure he appreciates being introduced to music fans who would never know about him otherwise. Seeing you dressed as you are today it’s hard for me to imagine how you became a rock n’ roll star. Didn’t you study at the London School of Economics?”

He archly declared, “Economics is so boring.”

“I don’t think so,” I countered, “I got an A-plus in Economics.”

He stunned me yet again by gracefully sliding across the sofa to sit closer to me and eagerly shared, “Then you understand I was on track to work in a bank or, if I was lucky, maybe I’d be a stock trader. Now Keith and I go way back. We started a garage band and did covers of soul artists. We did gigs for audiences who had no idea they were listening to colored music. So while I was preparing to handle other people’s money just to earn a small share of it, I could already sing like Little Richard and saw, shall we say, a market opening.”

He paused and I inserted, “So it’s all about the money.”

Looking directly into my eyes, he insisted, “And my true love of R&B. Please don’t think of me as a rip-off artist. I’m paying homage to artists who are better than I’ll ever be and get them into bigger and better venues. We’re all getting rich together.”

I boldly asked, “May I quote that when I tell my DJ friend about our conversation?”

“Please,” he drew back in mock chagrin, “you can tell whoever you like. I’m not sharing any secrets. But let me enjoy having a real conversation with a pretty girl who doesn’t want to rip my clothes off. I feel like we’re connecting…intellectually. ”

“We are indeed,” I bobbed my head in agreement. "What I like about Economics is it creates the delusion that we control money instead of money controlling us."

I remember his eyes flying wide in surprise and how his teeth sparkled when he grinned but the rest of our conversation is a blur. It's not that I've forgotten our joking banter. My brain simply didn't imprint any memory cells while I was in the midst of a significant life-altering experience.

I relied on the etiquette lessons I'd been forced to take to maintain my decorum. In case you don't know what I mean, I kept my legs demurely crossed at the ankles, knees together, hands relaxed in my lap, back straight, chin up, and spoke softly. I was trained to be a Southern Lady.

I'm amazed I didn't quiver just a bit because I was experiencing sexual attraction for the very first time. It wasn't lust. I was simply overwhelmed by wanting a man to kiss me. I'd gotten kissed at Vacation Bible School when I was 13 and felt nothing. It was not an experience I sought to repeat until I met a man who glowed like an angel. People who have artistic souls and enough talent to become famous are not ordinary. They possess Charisma—a magical ability to enthrall others.

I have the vague impression I was witty and his laughing grin was the living embodiment of joy. I'm serious. That man's ridiculous mouth is a caricature like a Comedy mask made for Greek Theater masks.

The spell was broken when a man called his name and he turned away to hear they were cleared to board their next flight. He stood up and so did I. He looked me up and down in appraisal and I got nervous, "Um, ah, I'm so glad I got to meet you. I now admire you as an artist and a person.”

AND HE BLUSHED!

I nearly fainted but got distracted by Ginny getting French-kissed goodbye by Brian Jones then noticed how Mick stood, awkwardly fidgeting like he couldn’t decide how to say goodbye. Subtle body shifts suggested he might try to hug me. If he did, I might break down in tears.

Instead, I offered my hand and he held it gently while saying, “You’ve made my day. I’d ask for your number but I have no idea when I’ll ever be in Atlanta again. This has been an extraordinary encounter. Thank you so much.”

“The pleasure has been all mine,” I gushed then giggled girlishly.

“No,” he drawled, “we shared the pleasure.” He started away but turned back to add, “You know my mates aren’t going to remember your girlfriend but I’ll probably never forget you.”

He was wrong about that. Less than two years later, Ginny was in the UK living with Brian Jones! I never expected to hear from him and, therefore, wasn't disappointed.

[weirdanecdotes]

“You My Kind”

In 1969, I was nineteen and working my way through college by modeling. I got some good jobs, but mostly I accepted whatever bookings my agent could get for me. Atlanta was having its first “Film Festival” and I got booked to be one of the award bimbos. You know what I mean, something pretty in the background that steps forward at the appropriate moment to hand the honoree their plaque and then gently leads them off the stage when their acceptance speech goes on for too long. The event took place in the Regency Hyatt ballroom.

I packed a small bag the night before and came straight from classes to arrive on time, changed into something slinky and applied my stage make-up in the ladies’ room across the atrium from the ballroom entrance.

I figured the evening was going to be exceptionally boring and since it didn’t take any brains to be a bimbo I thought I’d make the evening more interesting by dropping a small hit of acid. I lounged around the ladies’ room until I started to get off and it was time to report in. At the same time I entered the atrium and started to walk toward the ballroom, a man came thru the ballroom doors and started walking toward the men’s room behind me.

Under the influence, the atrium was distorted and seemed immense. It started to feel like I’d been walking across that terracotta tiled floor my entire life. And the one focal point of that endless progress was the man coming toward me. He swaggered—languidly. His arms and legs moved with a loose grace. His hair was dark, hanging to his shoulders and then flipping up and out. He had a full, thick beard as dark as his hair, was wearing black cowboy boots, black leather pants, a denim shirt open to the navel, and a brown suede jacket. I thought he was definitely a studly dude but a bit too overt to be my type.

As we sailed closer I noted the sensual pout of his lips, the delicacy of his cheekbones and depth of his eyes. There was a medieval quality to him, a resemblance to Michaelangelo’s David.

As the distance between us closed, we locked eyes, literally. I glanced into his eyes and could not look away. Those thin blue rims accented the dilated black holes that threatened to suck my consciousness down into an alternate universe. The guy was clearly as high as I was.

When we arrived less than three feet apart, he broke the spell by speaking. “You my kind,” was all he said.

My knees buckled under the full force of his sexual magnetism but I kept walking and like ships in the night we passed each other, gliding to our respective destinations. By the time I entered the ballroom, it hit me: That was Jim Morrison! Ye Gods!

This was confirmed immediately by the other bimbos gathered behind the stage. Giggling like schoolgirls, they chirped, “Isn’t he gorgeous?” and “I wouldn’t mind being taken advantage of by him?” Etc. He was there because a film about him—“A Feast of Friends—had been nominated for an award.

There were five of us and we lined up at the foot of the steps to the stage. Like a kind of relay race, we were each, in turn, handed a plaque and climbed the steps to the stage, crossed to its center, handed the winner their award and led them off the other side of the stage. On that side, we stood for a moment to have a photo taken with the winner then walked around behind the stage and took our place at the end of the line, moving forward till our next circuit up, over, down, camera-flash, and back around.

I had been right about the boredom factor. But I was in a lovely trance watching multicolored fireflies buzzing in the darkness off-stage and when I had my moments on center stage I had a good vantage point in which to view Morrison’s increasingly out-of-control behavior.

It appeared that he and his entourage had been given a central table in the banquet style proceedings. Even if they had not been the center of attention, Morrison would have commanded it by repeatedly bursting forth with obscenities and drunken belches. At one point, while I waited patiently for the award winner in the Best Film Editing category to finish thanking all of his relatives and friends, Morrison was shaking up champagne bottles and spraying their contents on those unfortunate enough to have been granted a table near his. I thought what an asshole.

And so I glided through repeated circuits, up, over, and down, flash and around until the next category was Short Documentary and the plaque put in my hands read, “Jim Morrison. Feast of Friends.”

I thought this is Kismet and shrugged. My mind was floating like a balloon above my head, connected only by a slender thread. My body was like a robot on autopilot as I climbed the steps, took my position center-stage, and the MC announced the winner.

What happened next has been chronicled by more than one of Morrison’s biographers, one of whom described me as “devastatingly cute.” Morrison climbed atop his banquet table and jumped to the next table in front of his, knocking over glasses which spilled their contents into the laps of people who jumped up, shouting in outrage. From there, he then leapt up onto the stage like a tripped-out Errol Flynn in a pirate movie.

Paying no heed to the plaque in my hands, he grabbed me and proceeded to thank the festival for giving him such a great award. Slurring words and barely coherent, he still made it clear he considered me to be his award!

I can’t remember his actual words; I was in a disassociated state of shock. He French-kissed me wantonly and tongued my face like a Saint Bernard reviving a ski accident victim. He dropped his room key between my breasts and huffed alcohol fumes in my face saying, “See ya’ later, babe.”

The audience rioted. Dozens of Southern Gentlemen rushed the stage to save me. The thunder of their outraged protests was deafening but—I swear to gawd—one man actually shouted, "Unhand that woman!"

It took the MC and two other men to hustle Morrison off the stage with me still in his clutches. I don't remember going down the steps or the flash of the camera. Weeks later, I got a copy of the photo that was taken and it was a close contest between which of us had the most dilated pupils—Morrison’s or mine. Unfortunately, years later I gave this photo to a friend who kept an actual shrine to Morrison. Otherwise, I would insert it here.

Somehow, Morrison was detached from me and, made surly by the separation, roared obscenities. He and his party were forcibly removed from the banquet hall. But I didn’t get to witness that. After my rough treatment, I was not required to make another circuit and sat dazed and slack-mouthed until the proceedings broke up.

Released from their duties the other bimbos rushed to my side, gushing about my good fortune. It was unanimously decided that I should, without any reservation, use the room key for its intended purpose.

I wasn’t a virgin but I wasn’t quite a whore either. Back in the ladies’ room, I changed into my street clothes, removed my stage make-up and thought about it long and hard. Hell, I wasn’t even a Doors’ fan. There was no denying the man’s sex appeal but he was an ill-mannered, uncouth jerk. I decided I ought to return it to him just to see what would happen. His grossness could all be an act to promote his Lounge Lizard persona. Privately, he might be a reasonable, likable guy.

Down the hallway outside his door, a line of women waited . One of them snarled, “Get to the back of the line, sister.”

Giggling, I replied, “He gave me his room key.”

They stood aside in awe as I used it. Hearing the key in his lock and the door opening, he called out, “What took you so long?”

It was a standard sized hotel room, not a suite, nothing fancy. Inside there was a bathroom on the right so I had to step inside the room a few paces to see him sprawled, naked, across the bed. The door swung shut behind me.

“Hey, baby, come ’ere,” his head rolled back so he looked up at me upside down and he raised a limp arm in a come-hither gesture. I stepped around the edges of the bed, keeping my distance and lamely said, "I thought I’d return your key.”

“Well, sure," he tried to raise himself up on one elbow and failed, “I been waitin’ for you. Come here.”

"I’m not sure I want to,” I replied a little primly as I sat down on the chair by the window. Then my body suddenly decided it was in no hurry to go; I felt light-headed and dizzy. He had a great body, let no one tell you otherwise. Pale as a marble statue, he was stroking his limp penis without noticeable effect.

“Come here and help me with this," he said with a catch in his voice that seemed at once petulant and pitiful. I was not experienced enough to recognize that he was too drunk and drugged to perform. At my age I’d never met a limp dick and had no idea what was supposed to be done about it.

As if reading my mind, he instructed, “Come here and suck it, baby, please, ple-e-e-ze, o please baby, come and suck my cock.” He was turning his words into a song that could never be played on radio. “All I need is a little help and I’ll pay you back.”

I slid from the chair to the side of the bed and put my hand around his cock, replicating his motions. He seemed harmless enough and genuinely pathetic. I wanted to help him and thought getting fucked by a notorious sex symbol would make a good story.

“Help me, baby, put your mouth around me,” he pleaded, that distressed catch in his voice again. And I went down on him.

For the next two hours he gave me graphic instructions on how to do a blowjob. I made smacking and slurping noises, went fast then slow, deep down till it made me gag then slowly pulled up to the tip and flicked it with my tongue, lapped down the side then up the length of him like a big popsicle, like an ice cream cone. But he never got one bit harder than when I’d started and my jaw started aching.

At first his words were gentle, instructing, guiding, but they became insistent and domineering as though I could give him the starch he needed if I wanted to but was holding back. The plaintive crooning turned to frustrated irritation then vicious anger.

Alarmed, I sat up straight and spat, “Hey man, I’m not some fag hag. What’s wrong with you?”

He was too weak to even be angry. “Go on then, go on. Send in the next one. It’s been grand, good-bye, good-bye.”

After I opened the door, the next girl in line pushed past me. I kept my head down & my jaw clenched as I walked to the elevator. I felt ashamed—mortified by my failure.

A short anxious man walked beside me to the elevator. He softly asked, “How’d he do? Did you get a rise or what?”

“I beg your pardon,” I arched an indignant eyebrow, “Who are you?”

He said he was Morrison's personal manager, “concerned about Jim”, and went on in a tumble of words about it not being “my fault”, which I appreciated. “Jim’s on medication. He’s been having, um, difficulties.”

“O wow,” I said as I got on the elevator, “I feel sorry for him. What a bummer, being a famous sex symbol with a limp dick, how ironic. It’s like finding out Marilyn Monroe was frigid.”

The little man used his back to keep the elevator doors open & pleaded, “You won’t tell anyone, will you?”

“Are you kidding?” I feebly chuckled, “I live at home and my parents still believe I’m a virgin. What am I gonna do? Call National Enquirer and tell the world I’m a whore? Relax, dude. ”

He breathed out, “Thank you,” in relief and let the doors shut.

Over the passing decades when I was drunk enough, I entertained parties with this story and got delighted laughter. But, my friend with the Morrison shrine burst into tears of pity for his fallen idol. Other Doors' fans have reacted with disbelief and even anger. Like, how dare I tarnish their Sex God's reputation? Younger feminists have chided me for feeling ashamed and made me explain how young women in the South used to be programmed to serve men back in the Mid-20th Century. Now in the twilight of my life, this story no longer feels funny. I feel sorry for Jim...and my younger self.

[weirdanecdotes]

The Honeymoon Story

I swear to gawd every word of this story is true. Only the name of my first husband has been changed.

Chad and I were married on a Saturday in June of 1970 that broke records in Atlanta for heat and humidity. When my mother and I booked the sanctuary and reception hall at her church back in March no one thought to mention that the hall wasn’t air-conditioned. Therefore we had the shortest reception in the history of such events. The icing on the wedding cake was melted before we could use it as a prop for the traditional bridegroom-with-cake-smeared-in-his-face photo. I had to peel my sodden wedding dress from my body and dust myself with talcum power before I could get into the panty hose that went with my honeymoon-going-away suit. If our well-wishers had thrown corn kernels instead of rice, it would have popped when it hit the concrete.

Despite the fact that we’d gotten all dressed up, we didn’t really have anywhere to go except back to our apartment—which also wasn’t air-conditioned. We had very little money for a honeymoon and a “friend” had recommended the Starlight Motel, which was, they said, on the beach of St. Simon’s Island. Anticipating that we would be too tired after the wedding to drive all the way to the coast, we made reservations for the day after.

As we lay on our bed in our soaked underwear, with an oscillating fan making vain attempts to cool our sweat-drenched bodies, we discussed the possibility of getting into an air-conditioned motel room sooner rather than later. We figured that if we left immediately we could make it to St. Simon’s by 11 p.m. and check-in to a higher degree of comfort. It would be worth the extra expense, we decided.

We were as exhausted as we’d expected to be; the wedding had been emotionally draining and we’d both been awoken early by mothers who had wanted us to partake of a “last family breakfast together.” But we gamely revved up our VW Bug, which also wasn’t air-conditioned and headed south to the Georgia coast.

By the time we arrived in Brunswick the bank clock was blinking “11:00 P.M.” and “105°”. The rubber soles of my sneakers made audible suction noises with I lifted them from the floorboard. Road vibration and windburn had added to our state of exhaustion but we assured each other that we would soon be checking into cool comfort.

Brunswick was one of those towns that rolled up the sidewalks after dark. There was not a living soul abroad in the night and not a single gas station illuminated the dark. We drove across the causeway between Brunswick and St. Simon’s and passed by the only place with any sign of life on our way to the beach. Its neon sign read The Aquarius Lounge and a small group of hippie-types milled around outside. We commented to each other about the delayed appearance of cultural trends in small towns. The scene appeared to have been frozen in amber back in 1966.

We drove up and down the beach road and found not a single motel sign, lit or otherwise, except for The Cloisters, a retreat for the ultra-rich and way above our income bracket. Confused but not yet alarmed, we drove back to the Aquarius to ask the locals about the location of the Starlight Motel. As we got out of the Bug in our bell-bottoms and t-shirts, we blended in with the crowd quite well.

A girl in her late teens, wearing a baby-doll mini and pastel love beads, approached us and drawled, “Hi, I’m Elizabeth. Ya need a place to crash?”

Containing our amusement at her retro-jargon, we explained that we had reservations at the Starlight Motel and wouldn’t need a crash pad if we could just find it.

“Like wow,” she said, “That’s back in Brunswick. Ya passed it getting here. Take the causeway back and when ya dead end on the coast road the Starlight is straight ahead.”

We thanked her for the directions and started back across the marshes, perplexed. Why had our friend said the motel was on the beach if it was back in Brunswick? Sure enough, the Starlight was where Elizabeth had said it was. We hadn’t noticed it before because it was completely blacked out. Not a single light burned in any of the rooms or the manager’s office. The neon sign out front had, like everything else in Brunswick, been turned off for the night. We pounded in vain on the door of the manager’s office. The situation had the feel of a “Twilight Zone” episode; one of those eerie stories where the characters were suddenly the last people alive on the planet.

Back in the car, we were stumped. It was now after midnight and we had no where to go. “Wait,” I got a bright idea, “Let’s head down to Jekyll Island. It’s a convention center and there’s bound to be a string of motels there that are still open.”

Slap-happy with fatigue, we were still optimistic that we could solve our problem and sure enough the coast road that runs along side Jekyll was lit up like Daytona Beach with one motel after another. But they each flashed the same message, “No Vacancy,” “No Vacancy,” “No Vacancy.”

Stunned with disbelief, we pulled into a Howard Johnson’s and went in to ask if there was some mistake. “Oh no,” the desk clerk informed us, “The Georgia Municipal Association is having their annual convention on Jekyll Island and there’s not a motel room available for a hundred miles. You’d have to go up to Savannah or down to Jacksonville to find a vacancy.”

Numb with shock, speechless, we drove back toward Brunswick. I looked at the passing “No Vacancy” signs with pained resentment. “Stop!” I exclaimed, “Look! There’s one where the No Vacancy sign isn’t lit up!”

Chad slammed on the brakes and burned rubber turning into the parking lot. Breathless with relief, heedless of expense, we staggered into the lobby and told the desk clerk, “We’d like a room, please.”

“I’m sorry.” The desk clerk was an elderly woman with a kind face. “We don’t have any vacancies. It’s just our sign is broken.”

That was it for me. I broke into sobs and wailed, “This is our wedding night! We have reservations at the Starlight Motel but by the time we got there they were closed and we’ve got no where to go and I’m exhausted! I’m hot and tired and I’ve got to lie down somewhere — now! Can’t we just lie down on the sofas here in the lobby?”

Chad, never one for public or even private displays of emotion, regarded my hysterical breakdown with embarrassment and apologized to the clerk for my outburst.

“Oh you poor dears!” the clerk exclaimed, genuine tears of sympathy springing from her eyes, “I wish I could help you but I can’t.”

“That’s all right.” Chad assured her while pulling me out the door with his arm tightly around my shoulders, “Pull yourself together,” he said rather harshly.

In the VW, I continued to rant and rave until he calmed me with the idea that we could sleep on the beach. “We have a sleeping bag in the trunk. There’ll be a breeze from the ocean. It won’t be that bad for a few hours and then the Starlight will open by eight or so,” he reasoned and with sniffles and hiccups of choked tears I agreed it was worth a try.

So back we went through “downtown” Brunswick and out the causeway to the beach on St. Simon’s. As we passed the Aquarian, we noticed even its lights had been turned off.  It was now 2 a.m. in the morning and I was beginning to feel delirious.

We parked by a Public Beach sign, got out the sleeping bag and hiked over the dunes to the beach. No trace of a breeze blew, not even a wisp was stirring, and we were immediately covered in stinging mosquitoes. Slapping and flapping our arms, we ran screaming back to the car and rolled up the windows despite the heat. I began to sob hysterically again and Chad didn’t even try to comfort me.

With no purpose in mind, other than generating some breeze by movement, he started up the VW and slowly followed the causeway road back to Brunswick. As we came up the road in front of the Aquarius, one lone speedster stood, dancing from one foot to the other, under the street light.

Simultaneously, we turned to each other and exclaimed, “Elizabeth!” Our hope renewed, we pulled up beside the jive dancer who was obviously enjoying the residue of some type of barbiturate. “Do you know Elizabeth?” I asked.

“Sure, I know Elizabeth. Everyone knows Elizabeth,” he was boogeying to unheard music; his teeth chattered from the surfeit of adrenaline in his system.

“She offered us a place to crash. Do you know the way to her, ah, pad?”

“Well, sure,” he began, “Ya take this road here and then turn left before you get to the beach road and...no, I can’t tell you — but I can show you. If you’ll run me home to pick up my other shoes then I can take you to Elizabeth’s.”

We agreed to this bargain, our hope renewed, and I opened the door and leaned forward to let him climb in the back.

“Nice to meetcha. My name’s Speedo.”

“No kidding!” Chad and I laughed. “Thank God we found you...” We started telling Speedo our tale of woe but he kept interrupting with directions to his house and didn’t seem able to concentrate on our story line so we gave up.

At his house, he ran in and a few minutes later ran out, wearing different sneakers and a rucksack over his shoulder. Climbing back in he explained, “I’d let ya crash with me but I live with my parents, ya know.”

“Bummer,” we both nodded in understanding.

Speedo maintained a running patter of almost incoherent phrases between orders to “Turn left,” “Turn right,” about how sorry life was in a backwater locale such as St. Simon’s. We left paved roads and went on ever-narrowing dirt tracks deeper and deeper into primeval jungle. Out in the brush I could hear wild bore crashing and snorting, imagined pythons slithering, heard night birds calling alarms and began to get nervous about our passenger.

Suddenly, in a thicket of bamboo branches that snapped in through the car’s open windows, as the headlights showed the dirt track narrowing into a dead end, Speedo shouted, “Stop!”

Chad and I looked at each other, our eyes wide with panic. I had a vision of a newspaper headline—“Honeymoon Couple Found Slaughtered in Coastal Wilderness.”

“Lemme out here,” Speedo pushed my seat forward in an effort to get out and was knocked back by the resistance of my body. “You’re almost there. Keep going straight, take the next left and you’ll see the trailer park sign. Elizabeth’s the third mobile home on the left. Lemme outta here.”

“Keep going straight ahead?” Chad mumbled, gesturing toward the wall of bamboo.

“Yeah, really,” Speedo assured him, “The trees’ll get out of the way. Honest.”

“You wanna get out here?” I couldn’t keep the disbelief out of my voice.

“Yeah, I love the jungle at night,” Speedo enthused, “I really grok it, ya know.”

I opened the door and leaned forward to let Speedo out. As the thrashing and crashing sounds of his progress through the underbrush died away, Chad and I both took deep breaths and laughed weakly. I shared my newspaper headline vision and he told me the hairs had stood straight up on the back of his neck. We had both jumped to the same awful conclusion and sighed in relief.

Inching forward along the track the trees really did part and allowed passage to a broadening of the track farther on. A battered sign for St. Simon’s Island Trailer Park appeared in the beam of the headlights. We turned left and counted the mobile homes on the left. With exhalations of relief, we noted the lights were still on in Elizabeth’s. It was, after all, almost four in the morning.

After exchanging glances of trepidation, we stood on Elizabeth’s threshold and I knocked gently on the door. Within moments the door swung out and a young woman, who was not Elizabeth, leaned out. “Hey, you the folks from Atlanta? Elizabeth said you might show up to crash. Come on in.” She stepped back, her arm swinging wide in a gesture of welcome. “I’m Jane, Elizabeth’s roommate.”

We stepped up into the main room of the mobile home. It was furnished with over-sized throw pillows and bean-bag chairs. We were immediately hit with four things — it was still hot as hell, the room was overrun with cats, smelled like piss, and was thick with fleas — in that order of comprehension. But we had been welcomed in and there was no polite way to make an escape. Besides, we were too tired to even care anymore and both collapsed on the nearest cushioned surface. Reclining at last, I noted that the mobile home was rocking like a boat on the ocean and that strangely bestial sounds were coming from the back end.

“Elizabeth’s in the master bedroom with the band that played at the Aquarius tonight,” Jane explained, taking a seat on a bean bag opposite us. “She’ll be out in a while or so then you can have the master. There’s a big floor fan back there so it’ll be cooler and you can get away from the cats.”

She lit a joint and passed it to us. “Elizabeth said she should have stopped you from going back to Brunswick. She knew the Starlight was closed for the night. But she didn’t think of it till ya’ll drove away. She told everybody, ‘Sooner or later they’ll figure it out and come back.’”

“Yeah, we really appreciate this,” Chad said, ever well-mannered no matter the circumstances, “You wouldn’t believe what we’ve been through.”

“This is our wedding night,” I offered absent-mindedly as I was counting cats. There were seventeen.

“Your wedding night!” Jane shrieked before going into a coughing spasm of hilarity, “O wow! Wait’ll I tell Elizabeth! She’ll get a blast outta that!”

In counting the cats I had noticed that one of them was jerking in apparent convulsions and wondered at Jane’s lack of alarm. “What’s wrong with that cat?” I asked, pointing out the one I meant.

“Oh, that’s Ulysses, he’s spastic,” Jane explained, “Call him by name, call him to come to you...” She choked on more laughter.

I called "Here, Ulysses,” putting out my hand to the poor creature. And the harder Ulysses tried to come toward me, the more his spastic legs took him sideways and farther away from me. Jane laughed till tears came down her face. Even Chad laughed half-heartedly. I was too weak and numb to lean forward and bring the cat to me the way I wanted to. My head dropped backward and I tranced out on the ceiling tiles.

 When her laughter had subsided, Jane asked, “What made you think the Starlight was on the Island?”

Chad told her our friend recommended it and Jane went into another laughing fit, “That was no friend! Wait’ll ya see! Oh man, they played one hellava trick on you!”

I closed my eyes then and knew no more until I was roughly awakened. Dawn was lighting up the windows and Jane said, “Elizabeth’s going to Jacksonville with the band and I’ll be going to work. You two can have the master. Get some rest and leave when you want to. Don’t bother to lock up or anything.”

As Chad or someone else walked me down the corridor, I heard Elizabeth’s voice shriek, “Their honeymoon!” followed by a chorus of male laughter.

I fell forward onto a king-sized mattress on the floor, felt a fan being aimed at me, smelled sweat and cum on the sheets, and didn’t care...

Later as the sun rose in the sky, the mobile home turned into an oven and we woke in pools of sweat, gasping for air. Not even fully awake, we staggered to the Bug. I fell asleep in the car seat and don’t know how Chad found his way back to Brunswick. The next thing I knew he was carrying me into a cold room and putting me on a clean, sweet-smelling bed.

It was almost evening before we woke and consummated our marriage. We went out afterwards to find a place to eat and realized the immensity of the joke that had been played on us. The Starlight Motel looked out over a mosquito-infested marshland and backed up to the Hercules Gunpowder Factory. Huge smokestacks billowed steady columns of black soot, wafting down like a toxic fog. When we went swimming in the motel pool the next day, drying off smudged our beach towels and we needed showers to get clean.  

We passed the two remaining days of our honeymoon in our room, feeding quarters into the Magic-Fingers machine that vibrated the mattress, and felt depressed. We only left in the relatively cooler hours in the early morning and late evening to get something to eat.

Knowing our destination, Chad’s rich uncle Alan gave us a gift certificate for dinner at The Cloisters for the last night of our honeymoon. We dressed up in our best and entered the environs of Old Money. Toasting each other with champagne, I told Chad, “Our honeymoon started in a hippie crash pad and has come to its end in this expensive restaurant, if our life together follows this pattern, we’ll be all right.”

It did. And we were—for almost fifteen years.

[weirdanecdotes]

Too Many Roosters

From a very early age, I always wanted a small cottage with a big garden and a small flock of hens. I had no special love for chickens as a species; they weren’t up there with kittens, puppies, pandas and koala bears on my list of cute animals. I wanted them for fresh eggs and aged manure to re-activate my garden beds. My desire was strictly practical.

A flock of four to eight layers could easily provide what an old couple needed but Dear Husband (DH) had higher ambitions including breeding his own. Consequently, we ordered two Partridge Rock roosters, two Easter Egg-types along with twenty-one hens in those two breeds and Silver-Laced Wyandottes because they looked pretty in the hatchery’s online catalog. We expected a bonus “exotic” chick for a total of twenty-six. What we got was twenty-nine balls of fluff.  Not being the types that would complain about getting more than we paid for, we considered ourselves lucky. We ordered an excess of chickens in the first place because DH expected 50% losses along the way. He was wrong.

I discovered baby chicks are quite adorable little balls of furry fluff that sit in the palm of your hand. They cheep and emit tiny whistling noises and blink at you anxiously. Among themselves they huddled together for warmth and comfort, making an effort to recover from the trauma of their short lives. They had gone from an egg to a box, gotten jostled thru the US Postal Service, roared down a highway, and been spilled into a Rubbermaid bin with an infrared lamp instead of a hen to keep them warm. At intervals during the day, a giantess came and, at random, plucked them up, checked their butts for pasting and terrified the heck out of them.

With twenty-nine of them, it was impossible for me to develop any kind of one-on-one relationship with any of them and they all seemed very much alike in their reactions. A couple of them weren’t as terrified of me but generally I didn’t feel an empathetic connection to the little critters. They were a means to an end and not intended to be pets. Eventually, I expected to eat them so becoming emotionally attached seemed counter-productive.

By the time they were two months old and let outside, the roosters were clearly identifiable by being larger and more aggressive. We ended up with two Golden Red Araucanas, one white Easter Egger and four Partridge Rocks for a total of seven obvious roosters. We went back and forth on the sex of the “exotic” who early on got named Odd Chick on account of being so different from all the rest. Odd was much bigger than the obvious roosters but had a round female body and a very passive disposition. We thought it might be a Silver Laced Cochin because of its feathery feet and black and white markings but we never sure.

I got into the habit of going out every evening after dinner and sat on a garden stool in the middle of their grazing yard to observe their behavior. It was relaxing to do so and amusing. My first feelings were that they were vaguely reptilian. They reminded me of characters in the Jim Henson movie Dark Crystal. I couldn’t see how anyone could develop affection for these last remaining links to the dinosaurs with their b-b-sized brains and robotic responses. I didn’t see any thoughts or feelings behind their eyes, only genetically-programmed instincts.

I started giving them names just to be able to talk about them to DH. The two red roosters got named Big Red and Lil’ Red. 

The white one became Whitey. The biggest Rock was Mister Big.

The three lesser Rock roosters and all of the hens went unnamed for weeks because of a lack of distinguishing behavior. It wasn’t necessary to refer to them because they didn’t do anything remarkable.

The roosters, on the other hand, engaged in daily battles for dominance. A pair of them would lock eyes across the yard and rush at each other at top speed until they crashed chest-to-chest and knocked each other backwards. Standing a foot or so apart, they would then spread their legs in a wrestler’s stance, crane their heads forward on elongated, fluffed-out necks and have themselves a stare-down. The first one to blink lost the game and would run away, cowering. Some evenings, the yard looked like a Mosh Pit with the males careening at each other and knocking each other silly. Since Odd didn’t play these games and hung with the hens, I became convinced it was a she.

As time passed, Big Red and Mister Big got so much larger than the others that the game ended at the beginning with the smaller rooster getting bumped so hard he scrambled to get away. Oddly, the big guys didn’t confront each other. The lessor Rock roosters stopped wanting to play at all, cowered at a glance from another male, and hid among the hens. 

Only Whitey and Lil’ Red continued to challenge the hierarchy and the game evolved to the next level. Instead of letting the loser of the bump-and-stare retreat, the larger rooster would then pursue him and snatch his tail feathers. This would bring me off my stool, yelling. I couldn’t sit there and watch physical harm being done. Even so, the saddle of Whitey’s back ended up bald before he gave up and took to slouching down behind the hens to make himself invisible.

Now, I suppose Whitey brought this upon himself by constantly picking fights with the bigger roosters and, as DH explained, it was the law of the barnyard in action but I felt sorry for him. DH, who grew up on a farm, told me that one day one of the roosters might kill another one and that’s the way it worked. The biggest, baddest rooster got to rule the flock and pass his genes unto the next generation.

From my point of view, Lil’ Red’s behavior became pathological. He sought out confrontations with the bigger roosters like he had delusions of grandeur. Being sneaky and quicker was his advantage. He always got away before his tail feathers could be snatched and acted like that was a victory. He would strut about, nodding his head on an elongated neck like he was the boss of the block and to prove it he’d attack a hen or two. Viciously, he darted up behind an unsuspecting hen and stabbed her in the back with his beak or raked her head with his talons.

I decided I really didn’t like Lil’ Red very much. He wasn’t as pretty as Big Red and didn’t have the thick neck and whiskers that distinguish the breed. In fact, his head looked too small for his body. His eyes were rimmed with red flesh and he started to look demon-possessed to me. He’d get up in my face while I was sitting on my stool, take the stance and lay a stare on me. I thought he was surely crazy if he thought he could fight me and win no matter how fast he was.

One evening, Big Red was grazing in the grass and Lil’ Red snuck up behind him, bit into his neck, and did not let go. Big Red twitched and ran with Lil’ Red hanging from his neck. He slung his burden left and right, against fence posts and walls, and still Lil’ Red held on. Exhausted and screaming with pain, Big Red crouched down and shivered. Suddenly every rooster in the yard was on top of him, stabbing and stomping to finish him off. 

I was already on my feet, yelling, running across the yard, and when the pile-on occurred I was there to slap and kick away the attackers. The roosters scattered from my wrath and Big Red lay still on the ground. As I stooped to pick him up, Lil’ Red came at me and I backhanded him across the yard. I scooped up Big Red and took him in the house.

We put him in our “hospital” bin, gave him massive doses of vitamins, and kept him in for a couple of nights. I was all for killing Lil’ Red right then. As I saw it, he had violated some kind of chicken code of honor by sneaking up on Big Red from behind. He didn’t deserve to be king of the flock for being devious. DH thought Lil’ Red showed intelligence and didn’t think we should do more than give Big Red another chance to fight for his status.

By the third morning, Big Red was frisky and pressing to get out of the bin so I carried him back to the yard, let the other chickens out of the coop, and watched to see what would happen. He puffed himself up to his full height and stood his ground as some of the hens came around him and made cooing noises. Mister Big nodded but didn’t challenge him. Lil’ Red came out, saw Big Red, and darted around the yard hiding behind hens and smaller roosters. I stood watch for a couple of hours as Big Red went about his business, feeding and drinking, and Lil’ Red kept as much distance as possible in a fenced yard. When it appeared that Big Red had no concept of revenge but had learned constant vigilance and Lil’ Red shied from a re-match, I left them for the day.

That evening Little Red went on a rampage of hen attacks and Whitey was doing it, too. It appeared to me that knowing they couldn’t win against the alpha males, these two malcontents were determined to boss over anyone they could. DH explained that biting hens on the neck is the rooster equivalent of foreplay but I found it very disturbing.

As the days passed, all four of the dominant roosters began biting the hens. They showed no signs of knowing what to do next but they seemed to be having a competition to see who could bite the most necks. The two biggest, dominant roosters – Big Red and Mister Big -- were paradoxically the most gentle; they’d nip, get a squawk and let go. Little Red and Whitey were downright vicious. They’d grab onto a hen’s neck and wouldn’t let go. The poor hen would flap her wings, shriek in pain and wrench her body away at the cost of a few feathers. Lil’ Red made a big mistake trying to bite Odd’s neck. S/he whipped around, Ninja-fashion, jumped up and stomped on his back.

The three lesser Rock roosters just watched; they appeared to have given up their maleness weeks before. The reward for their lack of competitiveness was getting bitten in the neck by Lil’ Red or Whitey. Lil’ Red went beyond that, of course. He’d bite the smaller Rock in the neck then use his foot to bring their head down on the ground and stomp their beaks in the dirt.

So one morning, I wasn’t surprised when the smallest Rock rooster had his left eye swollen shut. I took him into the house and put him in the hospital bin. When DH got home, we gave him antibiotics and vitamins. I wondered out-loud why we were investing effort in the weakest link in the flock. But, instead of putting the pathetic creature out of his misery, DH jokingly named him One-eyed Jack. After a couple of days, it became clear the eye was damaged beyond repair but still DH couldn’t find the will to kill the poor creature. Jack was such a timid, pathetic critter that after a couple more days neither could I.

I admired many of the other chickens for their beauty but this was the first one for whom I felt any affection. He didn’t instinctively jerk away from me; that was the difference. He seemed to like my attentions. I tried to return him to the flock but it didn’t work. Within minutes, the hens were pecking at him and I had to scoop him up. Perhaps, he smelled too human or they all just immediately knew he would never be of any use to them. I let him roam outside of the yard and watched as he ran around the perimeter of the fence trying to find a way back into the flock. It wasn’t going to happen; Big Red and Mister Big prowled the fence beside him, trying to peck him thru the wire. After a while, he took shelter in the compost shed beside the grazing yard and just watched the other chickens from a distance. I brought him feed and water and let him be.

That night when I went out to close up the coop, there was Jack roosting on the handle of my watering can by the backdoor. I brought him back in and put him in the bin. DH laughed, “We’ve got a house chicken now!”

Meanwhile, my evening visits to the chicken yard had become quite upsetting. The place was a frenzy of pain and misery as Lil’ Red and Whitey attacked everything smaller than they were. So I presented the problem of too many roosters to DH. Having the rooster population inside the chicken yard reduced by one seemed to accelerate the competition. Could we just get rid of the main offenders?

Perhaps he thought I was exaggerating and came out to see for himself.  After witnessing repeated attacks on the hens in less than ten minutes, he became irate, chased down, grabbed and tossed the excess roosters out of the yard. Lil’ Red, Whitey, and even the two smaller Rocks found themselves on the outside with Jack. Like a pathetic puppy, Jack greeted them happily only to be rebuffed with pecks and nips. Having a better knowledge of the lay of the land, he avoided them after that. I protested the ejection of the two smaller Rocks; they were blameless. But, DH was too angry to hear reason. He swore that he regretted ever getting roosters at all and even Big Red and Mister Big were on probation. If he saw them mistreating the hens, they’d be out, too.

By nightfall, Whitey and Lil’ Red had figured out how to get back into the yard by climbing atop the compost heap and then flapping over the fence. They celebrated their return by attacking any hens that got within two feet of them. DH didn’t feel up to chasing them down again and decided to see if the yard would settle down. So for a couple of nights, Jack came inside and the two hapless Rocks who continued to shun him were left to find shelter under the compost shed. And Lil’ Red and Whitey continued their reign of terror.

On the third morning when I went to let the chickens out of their coop, I discovered three explosions of feathers across the lawn and one Rock cowering alone behind the feed can in the compost shed. DH said it was a dog that did the deed. I worried the dog would return for the remaining outside Rock. Or worse, come again to dig under the fence and find some way into the coop. Leaving it to Nature to cull the flock might have brought unintended consequences…

That evening as I sat on the patio at dusk, Jack loped up to me and clucked with anxiety. I assured him that I would take him inside again. Not contented by the sound of my voice, he hopped up into my lap, scurried up my chest and took roost on my shoulder. I slowly stood up and went over to the kitchen window to call DH to look out. “Aaarg,” I said, “I’m a barnyard pirate with me one-eyed roo.”

The following morning, DH arose at 5am and sat with his shotgun across his lap to wait for the return of whatever had killed the deceased and never-named rooster. Whatever it was did not return that day.

All day the remaining free-ranging rooster kept company with Jack deciding, in the absence of others, that he wasn’t such a bad fellow after all. I named him Curly for his corkscrew tail feathers. It seemed like it would be a good arrangement but the problems with Lil’ Red and Whitey remained unresolved.

The next day DH decided to chase them down and clip their wing feathers so they couldn’t get back into the yard. It took sweaty effort to chase them down and even with half of their left wings cut off the demon roosters flapped back over the fence. Lil’ Red immediately grabbed Odd by the neck and started to claw his/her head. That was it for DH; Odd was the prettiest chicken we had. He ran into the yard, grabbed Lil’ Red off Odd, and broke his neck with a quick jerk. Still in a fury, he started to chase Whitey then said, “Hell, I’m not wasting my breath,” went into the house and came back out with his rifle. That solved that.

By evening, tranquility settled upon the chicken yard. Big Red and Mister Big strutted with unchallenged superiority and felt no need to bite necks. Both of them crowed to let everyone in the neighborhood know they were the Bosses in our yard. Then, Odd made this noise, not a crow at all, more like the cry of a wild loon and still we wondered if he was a stealth rooster or whether she was announcing she was Queen of the Hens. Curly was cozy with Jack in the compost shed. Instead of digging a hole, DH strode off to the woods and made an offering of the dead demon roosters to the buzzards. That night I was all for putting Curly inside with Jack but he wouldn’t let me catch him. He made it thru that night and all seemed, as it should be.

The next day after dinner, we went out to the garden and discovered another explosion of feathers by the compost shed. In broad daylight, something had come and taken Curly. Jack had wedged himself between the fence and the feed can and only lost part of his tail feathers. When I called for him, he jumped out of his hiding place and flapped up into my arms. I took him inside immediately and the next morning he resisted when I tried to take him out of the bin. I decided to let him stay inside. I stayed outside all day in horrid heat, waiting and watching, then all of the next day until I had to go inside to fix dinner.

When DH got home, he hammered on the kitchen window yelling that there were dogs in the yard. I ran out and there was a golden retriever and a black mixed-breed strolling toward the chicken yard. The retriever got to the fence first and the chickens looked at him curiously. When the black dog came into view, they jumped up, made frantic cries of alarm, and ran into the coop. The black dog had a collar so DH told me to run and get the camera while he called the dogs to him. When I returned moments later, the black dog had already gone into the compost shed, returning to the scene of the second hit. The retriever showed no interest in the chicken yard; he was far more interested in having DH scratch his head. I took pictures of the black dog in the shed. It even went over to Jack’s hiding place and nosed around. It then went to the first explosion of feathers it had made and nosed around there. Not finding any easy pickings, it scouted around the fence trying to find a way into the yard.

I was yelling at the dog while I took pictures, telling it to get away but it was focused on its quest for more chicken meat. DH had gone into the house to get his gun. A fat little boy roared up on his four-wheeler and demanded to know why I was yelling at his dog. I told him his dog had killed two of our chickens and my husband was getting a gun so he’d better get his dog and lock it up while he could. Strangely, he said, “I’ll tell my Daddy,” and roared off across the cotton field toward a man on a tractor.

When DH came out, I told him about the boy and pointed to the man out in the field. We waited and watched the dog continue to test our fence. The boy did not return. The man continued to drive his tractor thru the fields away from us. Maybe fifteen minutes passed. The black dog proceeded to dig under the fence and got halfway under it before DH said, “Damn,” and shot it dead.

We chained up the retriever thinking that if no one claimed it, we would keep it and train it to protect our chickens from other dogs. Eventually, the farmer drove up on his tractor and demanded, “Why’d you kill my dog?”

We told him; showed him the paw prints inside the yard where the dog had started to dig under the fence, showed him the feather explosions, showed him the photos I’d taken of the dog’s behavior.

“Damn,” the man said, “I’m not getting any more black dogs. Last one I had did the same thing and I had to put him down. Glad I didn’t have to do it this time. Least, my kids’ll be mad at you instead of me. I know you had to do it. Once a dog tastes chicken there’s no going back. Hellava way to meet a new neighbor, ain’t it? I’m sorry ‘bout this. What do I owe you for the chickens?”

Of course, we professed our genuine sorrow and thanked him so much for understanding. That’s the way it is in the country: You just don’t mess with a man’s stuff and everyone understands the consequences of dogs killing chickens. He told us the owners of the other dog and said he’d let them know we had it. They came later and were so grateful we hadn’t shot their dog, too. We explained how her dog hadn’t shown any interest in the chickens or acted guilty. All the same, she said she’d pen the dog up and not let him roam around anymore.

When it was all over, DH put his head in his hands and grieved. “When I left Vietnam, I swore to myself I’d never kill another living thing. Now I’ve killed two chickens and a dog all because I insisted on having roosters.”

I felt guilty, too. I ran the whole sequence of events thru my mind.  I go back to the point where I began to feel that Little Red was evil. After he attacked Big Red, I shouldn’t have waited to discuss the situation and expected my husband to do the killing.  I should have followed my impulse, gone back out and chopped him up with a hoe. Then, maybe Whitey wouldn’t have gotten bad habits and Jack might not have lost his eye. The two blameless Rocks would still be sitting with the hens. And the kid’s dog would still be alive, feeding undetected on the large flocks that roam free on the other side of the road. But, it really does start back at the beginning with too many roosters.

[weirdanecdotes]

Introduction

We all tell stories about our lives. We take episodes out of context and string them together in a narrative format with a beginning, middle and end. Anecdotes — we toss them off to total strangers at social gatherings, on long airplane flights, and in waiting rooms of one kind or another. We tell funny stories or amazing stories that end with “Do you believe that?” Or revealing stories that share part of our lives and serve as a method of introduction.

As we develop friendships, we tell longer stories that provide the background on why we are the way we are. Many of these stories are only told late at night after sufficient intoxication.

Over the years of telling and re-telling, it becomes harder to recognize the embellishments, exaggerations. Outright distortions creep into these narratives. Memories suffer from bad formatting filtered through the gross distortion of our singular perspective, our emotional reactions to the events being recorded, and our degree of inexperience or ignorance at the time. We are all “unreliable narrators” when it comes to telling our own life stories. 

Very often we remember the story long after forgetting the actual experiences that formed it. In the mouths of natural storytellers, these autobiographical bits become transformed into purest fiction and whether they ever happened becomes irrelevant. The reason for their existence is their entertainment value.

I’ve had more than my share of weird experiences and have developed them, over years of re-telling, into a collection of stories. Don’t ask me if they are all really, really true; I don’t know anymore and don’t really care. They are meant to be amusing, entertaining, or sometimes enlightening. But in some cases, my weirder stories are the ones that are absolutely objectively true. 

******

I’ve been dithering about putting my stories in chronological order. Dredging up my Origin Story is emotionally painful. I’ve decided to throw up stories willy-nilly and my work towards sharing the more revealing tales. Or I might not get that far because I have lots of fun memories to recall first.