Part 2....the Party
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Seen and Be Scene
One must understand that I was just a poor boy with my story seldom told…no wait, that’s Paul Simon. I was brought up in a Presbyterian family, by Republican parents, in West Texas oil country. The raciest things there were the cheerleading routines at the Friday night football revivals. What I’m trying to say was that I grew up somewhat sheltered and naive. So as I recount this series of scattered memories, you should read them with that background in mind. I was no player; didn’t even really know the game.
Ric, Rusty and I had decided to rent a house together. Apartment living required either cramped space or a rented place in which to rehearse. A house seemed the audacious move. We chose a nice one, a two-story with 4 bedrooms, a huge living room, a larger den, a breakfast area, and a dining room. This was no Big Pink in Woodstock; this was a beautiful family home in Sharpstown, at the time a well-to-do suburb in Houston. Why the owners agreed to rent to three guys in their early 20’s with long hair and who waited tables (we omitted the poor, struggling musician part), I’ll never know and I’m sure they eventually regretted it. Rusty was the charmer.
He wasn’t really living with us; he was merely using the address as cover for his parents. He was actually living with his girlfriend about 20 minutes away, so we hung blankets over the entryways into the dining room and he put his furniture in there, setting it up nicely as if he really lived there. In my recollection, we only ever actually had his parents visit once and hers came twice. He had a key and I think he slept there once after a fight with her. He agreed to pay $50 a month in order to perpetrate this charade. Nevertheless, in order to make this thing work economically, we invited a tall, broad-shouldered, bearded Tennessean named Daryl to take one of the bedrooms and share the rent. It must be said that he completed his state’s stereotype by being a fine and enthusiastic drinker as well. I always thought of him as Sam Houston, a loud, cantankerous, boisterous fellow, but fun to be around. Daryl and I wrote a couple of songs together in the new-Nashville style. To complete this group, Daryl invited his fellow companion, another Tennessee immigrant refugee named Dave to take the other room. Dave was quiet, heavily side-burned, and had an alarmingly sized gun-collection. He was nice though, polite and always shared the work load. In retrospect, I have no clue where we met these two guys. They didn’t work with any of us I don’t think, but they worked in a machine shop so I think they vaguely had some Ric connection, since that was his background.
So here’s how the house laid out; Ric and the ghost of Rusty were downstairs. In the living room was a full regulation pool table. The wall was painted some freaky collage type thing. I don’t recall doing it myself, but it sounds like the kind of stuff I’d do. When we eventually moved out it took us 3 days to repaint that wall. The breakfast nook had our band equipment, Ric’s Hammond B-3 organ, an early monophonic Roland synth, my two guitars with amps, Rusty’s guitars and amps, and a full PA system. Inside the house. Nice.
Our tape players, stereo system, LPs and tapes were in a downstairs closet. Ric had run the house with wiring so that we could all hear what our latest effort might be, or the hottest new album, or something from my Beatles collection. Oh, yeah, the valuable collection was stored in my room. Ric’s wiring job was effective, but not neat and lines and nails ran along the tops of the walls, up the staircase, through door jams. Added to that were posters, this being the era of wall posters. Rock bands were everywhere and we were none too selective. In addition to the requisite Wings posters and Lennon and Harrison pictures, we had a huge poster of Chicago, Simon & Garfunkel, Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, the Rolling Stones and….um…..Orleans…with their naked, hairy chests and moustaches. On the wall behind the couch. It wasn’t me.
Upstairs had a bath and three bedrooms; mine, Dave’s, and Daryl’s. My bedroom was the smallest and had an access way to the attic and for some strange reason; I put a small desk and tended to write in there. I cannot explain this at all. My room was private so I needn’t worry about that aspect, and writing in an attic that at times must have been about 120 degrees makes no sense. But I did it. Idiot. Daryl’s bedroom faced the next door neighbor’s two-story hose and came with an added benefit. Their daughter, who’s age I never learned but had to be at least 17 or more, had her bedroom facing his and many nights would put on quite a show. I think we were obvious enough in our attempts to be unseen that she exactly that we were there because some nights were E-tickets. A full program that had us coming back for more. Who needed Penthouse Forum when this blond would literally bend over backwards and forwards?
Anyway, to the good part. We were all bringing in steady, if meager, money by waiting tables. The jobs left time for the real important things like writing, rehearsing, recording, and scoring weed. Ric and Rusty worked at a popular sports restaurant called The Mason Jar and I worked at a Steak and Ale located just down the freeway from the Jar. The staffs from both restaurants (and several others in the area) would often drink away their tip money at the local bars, like The Pour House. Having since turned our little suburban oasis into a frat boy’s dream house, we decided that we needed to throw an outrageous party and invite some of our co-workers from both restaurants. So we did. Posters went up and the party was chatted up. At home, intricate plans were devised and laid out. Somewhere along the line two major and, to our minds unique, ideas were proposed, discussed, and accepted. The first was that one of the upstairs rooms, Daryl’s, would be reserved for smoking, both legal and illegal substances. (The majority of the house dwellers were major pot-heads and this was a given.) The second idea was that there might be some making out by some of the guests, and we’d play it up by having an ‘orgy room’. We took most of our mattresses and put them in Dave’s room side by side; one big bed. The guns were moved into the attic. Signs were made for the doorways; ‘Smoking Salon’ and ‘Orgy Room’. My room was used for holding guitars, valuables and things we wanted to keep out of the way, so the sign was the sign for ‘No’ and had a man and a woman silhouettes holding hands. One could have interpreted that the room was only for Gays.
We laid in some beer and something Daryl volunteered to make out of Everclear and various ‘ingredients’ that he called a ‘Mississippi Special’. It was a revelation, since after drinking it, it explained a lot to me about what is wrong in Mississippi. Ric decided tacos and burritos would be a great idea, so we got the restaurant to sell us 30 lbs. of hamburger on the cheap and he cooked most of the day.
The Saturday night arrived and while we had put up sign-up sheets at the restaurants, we could only hope- or fear- that all of the 35 who signed up were truly coming. Restaurant parties were known to fail miserably when only a few showed up and there had been a substantial amount of investment in beer, alcohol, and food. We optimistically placed a sign-in book at the front door (whose Martha Stewart idea was THAT?!?!?) so that if and when the official inquiry came, we had a written record of the perps and pervs. We needn’t have been concerned; the required 35 guests arrived in just the first 45 minutes; and they brought…friends. Lot’s of ‘em. Suddenly we were in the archetypical John Hughes film! They mooved in like wildebeests, most with six-pack in hand, and stampeded into the foray. They emptied into the den and spilled into the backyard, which I’d barely even been in. They sat on the stairs a la Animal House and they manhandled our guitars and pawed our records. By the time we recovered enough to read the names in the guestbook, more than 100 people had passed through our door. Those, of course, were only those who had taken the time to sign. The first signatures were clear and legible; the last were indecipherable comments that trailed off.
Psychedelic flashes of vignettes strobed before my Mississippi Special -drowned blood-shot oh-my-god crazy eyes. One is of careening into the smoking room and getting high just standing there; the smoke hung in the air like low lying fog. The very walls of this room had to be stoned; the glass in the window frames were melting from the copious amounts of THC and the carpet had so much ash and pot ground into it that we never succeed in getting it out. The revelry was so grand that I found two completely full baggies of high grade marijuana in the room the next morning. Nobody ever inquired about them and I guess it was assumed they had been largely consumed. Party favors.
I sauntered into the orgy room and found…well…an orgy, kind of. Moans and hands and clothing gone awry. There were two girls, accompanied by their ‘dates’, whose blouses were opened to the gaze of anyone close by and in the dark recesses of the room I saw movement. A primal, sexy, undulating movement. Still, it’s bad manners to walk over and say “Are you two fucking?” I wanted to say “Didn’t anybody get the joke?” but apparently no one was looking for funny.
I didn’t need to guess about the next couple I encountered. I walked into my room to get something and there, in my bed, was definitely sexy movement. What does Emily Post say about such situations? Do you ask them if everything is all right? Offer a post-coital drink? Tell them that they have the wrong room for fucking and offer to re-locate them? I just went “oops” and backed out, tripping over my eyeballs.
Downstairs was as crazy. In my small town up-bringing, one acts as a host at one’s party, but this required more of the ring master or the animal wrangler type. People were everywhere. There was a line to all three bathrooms, and even a small crowd in the room we jokingly referred to as ‘Rusty’s. There was no protecting valuables or privacy. The overflowing trashcans required constant attention and 30 lbs of hamburger only took us into the first hour or so. I suppose that was lucky since it freed Ric up to actually attend the festivities. Darryl cheerfully played bartender and made more and more of the Mississippi Specials. An emergency call was placed to one of the restaurants for more booze and it amazingly, and probably illegally, showed up. And Daryl’s concoction was popular. I mean, people were messed up...bad. Including the hosts, I fear.
My personal biggest freak out occurred when I found four people in a closet that could really hold two, going through records and tapes. One of them had figured out that you could use the mic from the tape recorder to broadcast throughout the house and was making rude suggestions and crude jokes. What I discovered, however, was that they had pushed the record button on the tape player and had recorded their joyful noise right over 2 or 3 of my demos. Forever lost to electron redistribution. They were brusquely ushered out of the closet and I grabbed my damaged tape with the 18 minute gap and any other thing I might have previously missed and sulked to my room. The ‘guests’ had left and had even straightened up the covers and pillows. Nice fuckers. I hid my things in the ever more crowded attic and stumbled back downstairs. This festival showed no signs of ever shutting down. To my mind, people were always arriving, bringing more friends, more beer, more pot, more noise, more, more.
The damage, unintended though it might be, was growing. A drink had clearly been spilled across the pool table. A lounge chair belonging to Ric had a leg broken off and was sitting, wounded and askew, in the corner of his bedroom. The master bathroom window had been opened; the shampoos and conditioners on the window ledge were scattered in the tub and the screen had been pushed out at the bottom. A sticky wetness from god-knows-what trailed from the kitchen, through the den, and was leaving a pinkish stain on the hall carpet. The bathroom upstairs had the faint but distinct waft of purging.
Like a bad fade-to-black, somewhere in the midst of all this things got blurry for me and I awoke some unknown time later to the panoramic carnage of the aftermath. Most everyone had left, quite irresponsibly, I’m sure; there was not a single person attending the previous night that had any business getting behind the wheel. A few bodies were still scattered around, draped in garish positions upon wrecked furniture like Pompeian plaster casts. Mouths agape in slumbered horror at what they’d witnessed. Every available bed was occupado by one or more. The orgy room looked somewhat like a European hostel, with at least ten people sleeping it off. The smells the permeated the house was a blend of everything rock and roll; New Orleans swamp, Chicago slaughterhouse, Reeperbahn whorehouse. I made the grievous error of looking into the cooler holding the remnants of the Mississippi Specials and was greeted by the odor, once so pleasant, that nearly caused me to embarrass myself in front of several hazy eyed witnesses. Luckily I crossed that gorge and peered out into the back yard. Paper plates, plastic cups, napkins, cigarette butts, covered the patio and part of the lawn. Yechhh.
I turned back and looked into the breakfast nook/kitchen. Paper plates, plastic cups, napkins, cigarette butts, covered the counters, the floor, and spilled from the garbage can. Yechhh. There was left over food, dirty dishes, beer bottles that must have numbered in the hundreds, the effluvia of disaster. They had consumed and destroyed everything we had, like a vast army of South American ants. My head pounded like it never had before and I knew, for the first time really, what a full-force hang over was. That strange connection of the head, the eyes, the throat, the stomach, and the bowels that makes one feel so very alive and close to death.
People slowly and painfully rose and emerged in little groupings of two or three, surveying the terrain, searching for the forgotten door. Like Civil War soldiers, carrying their wounded, they deserted the very thing they had volunteered for and started the journey home.
I was lucky; it was my battlefield. All I had to do was dig the graves.
Seen and Be Scene
One must understand that I was just a poor boy with my story seldom told…no wait, that’s Paul Simon. I was brought up in a Presbyterian family, by Republican parents, in West Texas oil country. The raciest things there were the cheerleading routines at the Friday night football revivals. What I’m trying to say was that I grew up somewhat sheltered and naive. So as I recount this series of scattered memories, you should read them with that background in mind. I was no player; didn’t even really know the game.
Ric, Rusty and I had decided to rent a house together. Apartment living required either cramped space or a rented place in which to rehearse. A house seemed the audacious move. We chose a nice one, a two-story with 4 bedrooms, a huge living room, a larger den, a breakfast area, and a dining room. This was no Big Pink in Woodstock; this was a beautiful family home in Sharpstown, at the time a well-to-do suburb in Houston. Why the owners agreed to rent to three guys in their early 20’s with long hair and who waited tables (we omitted the poor, struggling musician part), I’ll never know and I’m sure they eventually regretted it. Rusty was the charmer.
He wasn’t really living with us; he was merely using the address as cover for his parents. He was actually living with his girlfriend about 20 minutes away, so we hung blankets over the entryways into the dining room and he put his furniture in there, setting it up nicely as if he really lived there. In my recollection, we only ever actually had his parents visit once and hers came twice. He had a key and I think he slept there once after a fight with her. He agreed to pay $50 a month in order to perpetrate this charade. Nevertheless, in order to make this thing work economically, we invited a tall, broad-shouldered, bearded Tennessean named Daryl to take one of the bedrooms and share the rent. It must be said that he completed his state’s stereotype by being a fine and enthusiastic drinker as well. I always thought of him as Sam Houston, a loud, cantankerous, boisterous fellow, but fun to be around. Daryl and I wrote a couple of songs together in the new-Nashville style. To complete this group, Daryl invited his fellow companion, another Tennessee immigrant refugee named Dave to take the other room. Dave was quiet, heavily side-burned, and had an alarmingly sized gun-collection. He was nice though, polite and always shared the work load. In retrospect, I have no clue where we met these two guys. They didn’t work with any of us I don’t think, but they worked in a machine shop so I think they vaguely had some Ric connection, since that was his background.
So here’s how the house laid out; Ric and the ghost of Rusty were downstairs. In the living room was a full regulation pool table. The wall was painted some freaky collage type thing. I don’t recall doing it myself, but it sounds like the kind of stuff I’d do. When we eventually moved out it took us 3 days to repaint that wall. The breakfast nook had our band equipment, Ric’s Hammond B-3 organ, an early monophonic Roland synth, my two guitars with amps, Rusty’s guitars and amps, and a full PA system. Inside the house. Nice.
Our tape players, stereo system, LPs and tapes were in a downstairs closet. Ric had run the house with wiring so that we could all hear what our latest effort might be, or the hottest new album, or something from my Beatles collection. Oh, yeah, the valuable collection was stored in my room. Ric’s wiring job was effective, but not neat and lines and nails ran along the tops of the walls, up the staircase, through door jams. Added to that were posters, this being the era of wall posters. Rock bands were everywhere and we were none too selective. In addition to the requisite Wings posters and Lennon and Harrison pictures, we had a huge poster of Chicago, Simon & Garfunkel, Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, the Rolling Stones and….um…..Orleans…with their naked, hairy chests and moustaches. On the wall behind the couch. It wasn’t me.
Upstairs had a bath and three bedrooms; mine, Dave’s, and Daryl’s. My bedroom was the smallest and had an access way to the attic and for some strange reason; I put a small desk and tended to write in there. I cannot explain this at all. My room was private so I needn’t worry about that aspect, and writing in an attic that at times must have been about 120 degrees makes no sense. But I did it. Idiot. Daryl’s bedroom faced the next door neighbor’s two-story hose and came with an added benefit. Their daughter, who’s age I never learned but had to be at least 17 or more, had her bedroom facing his and many nights would put on quite a show. I think we were obvious enough in our attempts to be unseen that she exactly that we were there because some nights were E-tickets. A full program that had us coming back for more. Who needed Penthouse Forum when this blond would literally bend over backwards and forwards?
Anyway, to the good part. We were all bringing in steady, if meager, money by waiting tables. The jobs left time for the real important things like writing, rehearsing, recording, and scoring weed. Ric and Rusty worked at a popular sports restaurant called The Mason Jar and I worked at a Steak and Ale located just down the freeway from the Jar. The staffs from both restaurants (and several others in the area) would often drink away their tip money at the local bars, like The Pour House. Having since turned our little suburban oasis into a frat boy’s dream house, we decided that we needed to throw an outrageous party and invite some of our co-workers from both restaurants. So we did. Posters went up and the party was chatted up. At home, intricate plans were devised and laid out. Somewhere along the line two major and, to our minds unique, ideas were proposed, discussed, and accepted. The first was that one of the upstairs rooms, Daryl’s, would be reserved for smoking, both legal and illegal substances. (The majority of the house dwellers were major pot-heads and this was a given.) The second idea was that there might be some making out by some of the guests, and we’d play it up by having an ‘orgy room’. We took most of our mattresses and put them in Dave’s room side by side; one big bed. The guns were moved into the attic. Signs were made for the doorways; ‘Smoking Salon’ and ‘Orgy Room’. My room was used for holding guitars, valuables and things we wanted to keep out of the way, so the sign was the sign for ‘No’ and had a man and a woman silhouettes holding hands. One could have interpreted that the room was only for Gays.
We laid in some beer and something Daryl volunteered to make out of Everclear and various ‘ingredients’ that he called a ‘Mississippi Special’. It was a revelation, since after drinking it, it explained a lot to me about what is wrong in Mississippi. Ric decided tacos and burritos would be a great idea, so we got the restaurant to sell us 30 lbs. of hamburger on the cheap and he cooked most of the day.
The Saturday night arrived and while we had put up sign-up sheets at the restaurants, we could only hope- or fear- that all of the 35 who signed up were truly coming. Restaurant parties were known to fail miserably when only a few showed up and there had been a substantial amount of investment in beer, alcohol, and food. We optimistically placed a sign-in book at the front door (whose Martha Stewart idea was THAT?!?!?) so that if and when the official inquiry came, we had a written record of the perps and pervs. We needn’t have been concerned; the required 35 guests arrived in just the first 45 minutes; and they brought…friends. Lot’s of ‘em. Suddenly we were in the archetypical John Hughes film! They mooved in like wildebeests, most with six-pack in hand, and stampeded into the foray. They emptied into the den and spilled into the backyard, which I’d barely even been in. They sat on the stairs a la Animal House and they manhandled our guitars and pawed our records. By the time we recovered enough to read the names in the guestbook, more than 100 people had passed through our door. Those, of course, were only those who had taken the time to sign. The first signatures were clear and legible; the last were indecipherable comments that trailed off.
Psychedelic flashes of vignettes strobed before my Mississippi Special -drowned blood-shot oh-my-god crazy eyes. One is of careening into the smoking room and getting high just standing there; the smoke hung in the air like low lying fog. The very walls of this room had to be stoned; the glass in the window frames were melting from the copious amounts of THC and the carpet had so much ash and pot ground into it that we never succeed in getting it out. The revelry was so grand that I found two completely full baggies of high grade marijuana in the room the next morning. Nobody ever inquired about them and I guess it was assumed they had been largely consumed. Party favors.
I sauntered into the orgy room and found…well…an orgy, kind of. Moans and hands and clothing gone awry. There were two girls, accompanied by their ‘dates’, whose blouses were opened to the gaze of anyone close by and in the dark recesses of the room I saw movement. A primal, sexy, undulating movement. Still, it’s bad manners to walk over and say “Are you two fucking?” I wanted to say “Didn’t anybody get the joke?” but apparently no one was looking for funny.
I didn’t need to guess about the next couple I encountered. I walked into my room to get something and there, in my bed, was definitely sexy movement. What does Emily Post say about such situations? Do you ask them if everything is all right? Offer a post-coital drink? Tell them that they have the wrong room for fucking and offer to re-locate them? I just went “oops” and backed out, tripping over my eyeballs.
Downstairs was as crazy. In my small town up-bringing, one acts as a host at one’s party, but this required more of the ring master or the animal wrangler type. People were everywhere. There was a line to all three bathrooms, and even a small crowd in the room we jokingly referred to as ‘Rusty’s. There was no protecting valuables or privacy. The overflowing trashcans required constant attention and 30 lbs of hamburger only took us into the first hour or so. I suppose that was lucky since it freed Ric up to actually attend the festivities. Darryl cheerfully played bartender and made more and more of the Mississippi Specials. An emergency call was placed to one of the restaurants for more booze and it amazingly, and probably illegally, showed up. And Daryl’s concoction was popular. I mean, people were messed up...bad. Including the hosts, I fear.
My personal biggest freak out occurred when I found four people in a closet that could really hold two, going through records and tapes. One of them had figured out that you could use the mic from the tape recorder to broadcast throughout the house and was making rude suggestions and crude jokes. What I discovered, however, was that they had pushed the record button on the tape player and had recorded their joyful noise right over 2 or 3 of my demos. Forever lost to electron redistribution. They were brusquely ushered out of the closet and I grabbed my damaged tape with the 18 minute gap and any other thing I might have previously missed and sulked to my room. The ‘guests’ had left and had even straightened up the covers and pillows. Nice fuckers. I hid my things in the ever more crowded attic and stumbled back downstairs. This festival showed no signs of ever shutting down. To my mind, people were always arriving, bringing more friends, more beer, more pot, more noise, more, more.
The damage, unintended though it might be, was growing. A drink had clearly been spilled across the pool table. A lounge chair belonging to Ric had a leg broken off and was sitting, wounded and askew, in the corner of his bedroom. The master bathroom window had been opened; the shampoos and conditioners on the window ledge were scattered in the tub and the screen had been pushed out at the bottom. A sticky wetness from god-knows-what trailed from the kitchen, through the den, and was leaving a pinkish stain on the hall carpet. The bathroom upstairs had the faint but distinct waft of purging.
Like a bad fade-to-black, somewhere in the midst of all this things got blurry for me and I awoke some unknown time later to the panoramic carnage of the aftermath. Most everyone had left, quite irresponsibly, I’m sure; there was not a single person attending the previous night that had any business getting behind the wheel. A few bodies were still scattered around, draped in garish positions upon wrecked furniture like Pompeian plaster casts. Mouths agape in slumbered horror at what they’d witnessed. Every available bed was occupado by one or more. The orgy room looked somewhat like a European hostel, with at least ten people sleeping it off. The smells the permeated the house was a blend of everything rock and roll; New Orleans swamp, Chicago slaughterhouse, Reeperbahn whorehouse. I made the grievous error of looking into the cooler holding the remnants of the Mississippi Specials and was greeted by the odor, once so pleasant, that nearly caused me to embarrass myself in front of several hazy eyed witnesses. Luckily I crossed that gorge and peered out into the back yard. Paper plates, plastic cups, napkins, cigarette butts, covered the patio and part of the lawn. Yechhh.
I turned back and looked into the breakfast nook/kitchen. Paper plates, plastic cups, napkins, cigarette butts, covered the counters, the floor, and spilled from the garbage can. Yechhh. There was left over food, dirty dishes, beer bottles that must have numbered in the hundreds, the effluvia of disaster. They had consumed and destroyed everything we had, like a vast army of South American ants. My head pounded like it never had before and I knew, for the first time really, what a full-force hang over was. That strange connection of the head, the eyes, the throat, the stomach, and the bowels that makes one feel so very alive and close to death.
People slowly and painfully rose and emerged in little groupings of two or three, surveying the terrain, searching for the forgotten door. Like Civil War soldiers, carrying their wounded, they deserted the very thing they had volunteered for and started the journey home.
I was lucky; it was my battlefield. All I had to do was dig the graves.