In Dreams

I’ve been having a bad dream for the past few years that I can’t quite figure out. Most of my dreams, I can’t remember, mainly because they’re too nuts. Not like movie dreams that have some recognizable purpose or plot. Mine usually involve dead people, celebrities, people with wings, talking animals, animals with people’s heads and vice-versa, purple skies, centaurs, shifting physical scenes, like a forest, open countryside and rural dirt roads suddenly appearing in downtown Manhattan (that dream always relaxes me), or a cliff suddenly appearing in a bedroom and me walking off. They’re vivid as hell, I only remember bits and pieces, and the ones I do remember make no sense and spook me.

This recurring one is a nightmare, albeit not a horrific one. No vampires, werewolves or yellow-eyed demons. It’s simple. In varying formats, some unseen authority figure determines that something went horribly wrong back in the early 80s in terms of tabulating grades and earned credits … and in each case, I am forced to go back to high school to get my diploma, which was erroneously awarded to me at the time. Starting Now. As an adult. Dream started in my 30s, now in my 40s.

I don’t have this dream every night, week or month. But often enough to know it’s a recurring theme, and one of those troubling dreams that always leaves me with a headache when I wake up. (That’s usually how I know I’ve had a nightmare that I can only vaguely remember.)

This last one stuck out for me because the first day of school, where I decided to use my wings and fly to my high school which is just where it was and is now, about two miles out the road on Route 61 … this time, I was wearing red leather lederhosen, with no shirt on underneath, but reconsidered when I was about to go through the front doors, realizing how weird I would look to the kids (or anyone, outside of a few select nightclubs, Right Said Fred blasting from the jukebox). I never went in – and this is where the dream ended. The dream tends to end before I actually take classes, or even see any of my old teachers.

The dream never applies to college, probably because going back wouldn’t be as uncomfortable or unrealistic. Plenty of adults go back to college. But I’m sure as hell not after hearing horror stories of people dropping $20K/year on their kids’ college educations now. Of course, in my dream, I’d expect to be the same gangly, fresh-faced kid I was then … as opposed to the more Rodney Dangerfieldesque reality of passing time.

I’m not sure why this inspires so much dread in me. Even when I was a kid, I thought too many other kids in high school were assholes. Couldn’t stand the trendiness, the cliques, the cattiness, the profound lack of maturity. I run into adults constantly who haven’t seemed to grow one iota mentally or emotionally over the following decades. Or at least I constantly encounter people at work who embody the worst of high school. Kids now? Cellphones, texting, the desperately empty pop culture, which makes the empty one I grew up with seem like the Renaissance. I don’t know if they’re “worse” than how kids were then – they surely do seem that way. But I can see what’s going on now is pretty similar to disco culture we had in the 70s, save amplified a few thousand times to overbearing proportions, with the Guidoism similarly turned up to 11. Watch Saturday Night Fever sometime … not much has changed, only grown more embarrassing.

In some strange way, I’m seeing the dream as a parting with my youth. I don’t want to go back, this much is crystal clear in my dream. There is dread. I’m being forced to go back. As you get older, you stop playing games with the concept of “youth.” Well, at least I do. There are plenty of guys well into their 60s dying their hair jet black and wearing that dead give-away “all black” outfits that scream “middle-aged man still trying to look hip.” There are some things about adulthood I will never grasp: overbearing self importance, fake authoritarianism, wearing collared shirts at all times, never wearing shorts, extreme debt, dishonesty as a way of life, money as status, forced life decisions, etc.

But one of my biggest pet peeves about adulthood is other adults kissing the ass of youth. You see this all the time with music. In the bad adult mind, this stuff is considered sacrosanct as it represents kids claiming some type of music as their own … and recalling how they felt at the time, too, about the bands and music they worshipped as teenagers. But they forget that there was plenty of music in their time as teenagers that they openly and wildly hated, too, often music that gets targeted at all teens. I would expect to walk up to some full-blown indie kid now and hear him say, “Man, hiphop sucks. It's empty. It’s a parasitic form of music that’s gone nowhere in decades and had very few original ideas to begin with.”

All right, so that was me talking. But a kid saying that is considered valid because of his age – me saying that is an “old man” who “needs to listen to some old school/underground hiphop to really hear the good stuff” and “just doesn’t get it.” I get it. I got it for about two years in the mid-80s and moved on when I grasped it was going nowhere musically. I get all kinds of music way beyond hiphop or the predominately white pop rock I was raised with. I’ll often see this debate with music fans, with lame adults always siding with the “can’t criticize anything kids like because you're not a kid” take. They won – a long time ago. And look at pop music now: horrible junk for the most part that gets more constricted, redundant and tired with each passing year. A 13-year-old seriously listening to a very small field of pop music for three months has just as valid an opinion as a 45-year-old man who’s spent decades listening to all kind of music well beyond and including pop? That’s how the world works now. Everyone’s equal. We should exchange the Supreme Court with the cast from Jersey Shore. Why the fuck not?

It’s that altar our sick culture has erected around youth, that demands we all worship at it, even when our teen years are a dot in the rear view mirror. To criticize it in any fashion is to be out of touch. When any sane person can see the altar is 98% shit and 2% substance. Sane teenagers see this all the time, but of course are heavily outnumbered by morons, same as it ever was. But we’re all expected to maintain the façade, out of some misguided sense of respect. Life goes on. I don’t mind seeing kids foisting this lie on me, as they don’t know any better, but adults? I don’t get it. Seeing life this way is an extremely defeatist attitude that ignores the simple act of aging. It’s permissible to be honest: if you think something sucks, say it sucks. Life goes on for everybody. Somebody thinks that makes you old and out of touch, let them get old and out of touch, so they can see what bullshit a stance like that truly is. I want to be out of touch with teen tastes because I’m not a teenager, and there’s something creepy about adults playing up the faux hipness they mistakenly see in themselves out of some deep-seated insecurity regarding the aging process. I can only guess what compels adults to swallow such dogshit. (Best guess is some of them are making money from that stance and know not to rock the boat.)

I can recall being 11 or 12, sitting in my dad’s room, listening to a rough cassette copy of Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album. This was the first album I bought, with snow shoveling money. And what an album – some of Elton’s best songs are on there. But there was too much filler, a forced double album when the guy was already putting out two albums a year. When I say a “rough” copy, I mean rough, recorded to cassette the old-fashioned way: holding an awful, low-grade plastic microphone, plugged into the cassette earphone jack, up to one very bad stereo speaker for the length of each album side. It sounded awful, even the good songs.

I was sitting there, listening to what may be Elton John’s worst song, “Jamaica Jerk Off.” I don’t think it’s a song about Jamaicans masturbating. “Jerk” could be referring to the type of chicken you get there? The actual lyrics don’t seem to be about guys jerking off. It’s just a dumb title, strapped on a terrible cod reggae song that Elton never should have recorded, not even as a b-side. I recall not being too crazy about the song even then, and had no idea what jerking off was (although you better believe I would in another year or two). But I had recorded the album in its entirety, and there it was.

Just as the song is playing, Dad walks in to take some money out the wallet in his drawer. I notice him pause as the song is playing. He doesn’t fly into a rage, but barks out, “That song’s disgusting! You shouldn’t be listening to crap like that!” He didn’t flip out and take or turn off the cassette player. Just made it known he thought the song was a piece of shit, and walked out. By the same token, “Candle in the Wind” or “Bennie and the Jets” could have been playing, and he’d have been put off. But not to the extent of hearing a horrible-sounding song about masturbating, or so he thought.

I recall being mildly offended in that “this is my kind of music, man” way … but even in that moment, sort of agreed with him. He left before I could say, “Yeah, you’re right” and explained that I had recorded the entire album without editing anything out. The song did suck, big time. What I loved about Dad, and his generation, is/was their ability to just say, in essence, “fuck this shit” to their kids and not be worried about any repercussions. If I had kids, I can guarantee you, I’d be the same way. Nothing was broken in him or wrong with his generation. They thought something sucked. They said so. We all got over it. I’m sure Dad’s opinion would have applied to many things I loved then musically and still do now. So what? Not everyone gets everything, and sooner or later, we all get off the merrygoround of pop culture, especially when it starts getting too sickening to bear, as it has been through the 90s and 00s.

Peel away the layers, and I think this provides the sense of dread in that dream. I think there’s also a fear of change going on in there. Change is good when you’re a kid, but as you get older, changes are not always for the better. People die. Get sick. Lose work. Get divorced. Lose friends. There’s still positive change, but a lot of the changes we go through after 30 aren’t good. Of course, you learn this is life kicking your ass, and provides even more opportunity for some kind of growth once the shock wears off. But we all hit these plateaus in life and just move right along, punching the clock, banking the money, wondering if this is what it’s all about, etc. I’ve been claiming that I’m hanging on to this clammy “working in an office” way of life by my fingernails … for decades now. Would love to ditch it for something else, but not quite sure how to pull it off in terms of money/level of income and such. I suspect that dream dwells on that longstanding desire for change.

I have no idea what the red leather lederhosen means. Only happened this past time. In my sub-conscious, I can recall that scene in the so-so 80s flick Streets of Fire where Willem Dafoe, as the bad guy, comes walking out of a wall of flame in those leather bib overalls with suspenders – I think that was the vibe I was going for in the dream, but of course looked like a total asshole instead.

Alternate Born in the USA

When Bruce Springsteen put out his enormously successful Born in the USA album in the summer of 1984, I was waiting for it. “Dancing in the Dark” had come out a month earlier, and I grew to like it after being initially put off by the 80s synth sound. I still recall putting the album on for the first time, on release day, and feeling blown away by the title track, and much of what followed. It was that summer’s album, endlessly playing my homemade cassette copy on the Sparkomatic in Dad’s Yellow Hornet station wagon, driving around with the beautiful Born Again before she was born again. It was a good summer.

But some things don’t age so well. That girl was gone a year later, in more ways than one, and over the years, I’ve come to realize Born in the USA has real problems as an album. You can hear what the problem is: what Springsteen was convinced he wanted at the time, mass superstardom, how he geared the album to invite that level of celebrity into his life … was not what he wanted, which he found out later, and that desire was at odds with who he was. Not his image … working-class hero, friend to the blue-collar man, etc. Who he was … a guy from Jersey who never had a job as anything but a musician, had played his ass off all his life, carved out a beautiful niche for himself as a respected and successful recording artist, but pushed himself into a role that was far from his simple desire to do what he had been doing. Born in the USA now sounds like a bloated attempt to achieve mass fame.

It helps to understand the history and recordings leading into the album, to hear the kernel of an idea he had, to put out a solid album of shorter rock songs to follow up the starkness of his all-acoustic Nebraska album – sort of a rock-and-roll addendum to that album’s folk leanings, with the same concise, no-frills lyricism. It wouldn’t have made him a superstar, but the album he could have put out would have been his best. I listen to the music around that album, the stuff that has never made it out officially, and can hear a much better album that would have been completely true to who he was as a musician and worked out just fine with his image.

But, producer Jon Landau seemed to insist on superstardom, and Bruce went along with that desire. “Dancing in the Dark” was an addendum to the end of the sessions when Landau noticed they didn’t have what he felt was a blockbuster first single for the album. So, he made Bruce write one, complete with teen-friendly synthesizer backing and beats, tailored to the production values of the time. This song should not be on the album: it should be what it is, a single. Bands used to release singles all the time that weren’t on albums, and this is surely one of those cases.

But that wasn’t the only song that shouldn’t have been on the album. “Cover Me” is among Springsteen’s worst songs: b-side material at best, a song he should have given to someone else. As it was the second song on side one after the title track, everyone involved obviously thought it was a gangbuster track that would blow the roof off. Even that first time I heard it, I thought it was a bad song. I was too young then to hold it against him, but what was he thinking? (Aside from the obvious, that he had let himself be talked into throwing more contemporary-sounding material on an album instead of sticking to his creative guns.)

And there are a few other songs on the album that I would have made b-sides. Songs that are now considered Springsteen classics, but for my money, are just a little too bloated or playing too hard into image-mongering:

Downbound Train: I know people who swear by this song, but I just don’t quite get it. This would have been a b-side. A great b-side, too. (I could have been talked into putting this on the album.)

No Surrender: Cheesy stuff. He had earlier cut a song called "Where the Bands Are" that’s simply a better executed version on the same theme of recalling what it felt like to be a kid playing in a band. A better song all around. This is a b-side. “Blood brothers on a stormy night with a vow to defend”? Man, come off it. This is deep-dish sicilian with extra cheese.

Bobby Jean: a great song. For me, this was the keynote song of the album for a long time. Better than a b-side, too – I’d have saved it for the next album. (If you’re familiar with Springsteen’s outtakes, there are any number of songs around each album that are just as good as what he chose to put out, but didn’t for reasons known only to him.)

I’m Going Down: this song has b-side written all over it. How a song like this made it onto a serious album, knowing the songs he had sitting in the can that he didn’t use, I have no idea.

Glory Days: a good song, but wouldn’t have made the cut. For one huge reason: Bruce describing a fastball – a common baseball term for the pitcher throwing his hardest, fastest pitch – a “speedball” – which is something made of heroin and crack cocaine that a drug addict snorts or smokes. There are no “speedballs” in baseball. How in the hell did anyone in Springsteen’s camp not know this? How did he, purportedly a lifelong Yankees fan, not know this? Did people know this and not have the balls to approach him and Landau, and say, “Bruce, there are no speedballs in baseball.” It’s not a bad song – would have b-sided it, or saved for another album.

What’s left? A core of strong, short songs (some that were better in their original form before Springsteen greatly altered the arrangements), along with a slew of outtakes from the home-made demos he made that, you can tell, must have been his original concept of putting out a twangy, rockabilly-style album, without the calculated image mongering that floats through most of the above-noted song. I’m going to list each song, in order, to my Alternate Born in the USA, with accompanying youtube clip when possible (or MP3 download otherwise) so you can hear how this would have come across … save a lot of these songs are demos and would have sounded even better as finished product. But, here goes. And the album is now titled Your Hometown, not Born in the USA.

Side 1 Track 1
Vietnam
Lyrics from this song eventually appeared in “Born in the USA” and the b-side “Shoot Out the Light.” He should have stuck with this original track as it communicates a rawness not present in the final product (in which much yelling and forceful singing was made to replace this original subtlety). And it conveys the image of the song’s protagonist being a ghost and not knowing it, being told by the factory foreman, “Son, you died in Vietnam.” He should have kicked off the album with this exact track, more polished of course and tightened up without the lyrical stumbles, as he was clearly feeling his way through the demo. Jimmy Cliff has a song called “Vietnam” that feels like what Springsteen was going for with this early take. It works so much better than the song “Born in the USA.” I loved this song at the time, but can live without it now.

Sidenote: Much was made of Ronald Reagan trying to appropriate this song for his own political purposes in a speech of his from the time. Springsteen’s response was that Reagan had no idea what the song was about, otherwise he wouldn’t have quoted it in such context. Well … with a video for the song that featured Bruce looking as if he had just come off swingshift at the sewage treatment plant, and the fist-pumping arrangement he laid on this song, I’d wager most of the fans in the stadiums he played for on the ensuing tour were getting the same limited message Reagan’s speech writers did. Which was a catchy chorus that played into any number of “Burn This One” t-shirt American stereotypes, with Bruce pumping his fist triumphantly in the air in the video. The album cover was Bruce as working-man standing in front of a huge American flag. My take? Don’t expect everyone to understand your message when you’re playing around with massive images that existed long before you were famous and will be around long after you're gone.

Side 1 Track 2
Darlington County
I would have seen this song as being in competition with “Glory Days” and chose this song instead. A rollicking, fun-sounding song that’s really about two big-talking-but-broke guys from the North headed South to look for work, only to have one of them hand-cuffed to the bumper of a state trooper’s Ford. Could be the best song on the album. This is Springsteen at his best: writing unassuming, straightforward rock songs that have a deeper message woven through the lyrics.

Side 1 Track 3
Sugarland
Another straight-ahead rock song about a farmer sitting in the Sugarland bar while his life falls apart around him. There’s such a great sense of forward motion on the song when that rhythm guitar kicks in. Springsteen was equaling his heroes (John Fogerty, Chuck Berry) with songs like this, and it’s a strike against him not to recognize it. He put a piece of tripe like “Cover Me” on the album and left a song this good off? Shit. Totally senseless.

Side 1 Track 4
Delivery Man
Again, simple song about a truck driver having an accident on the road, save his cargo is chickens, and all that implies in terms of chasing them down afterwards. Sounds stupid? Simple? The music makes it works – that twanging sound of early rock, the echo applied to the vocals, just a great little song that works on every level. I can hear myself listening to this in a car on the interstate late at night and feeling at one with the world.

Side 1 Track 5
The Big Payback
Another stripped-down rock song about a guy who sees himself as never catching a break in life (“the big payback”). It occurs to me there wouldn’t be a lot for the rest of the band to do on these songs. There wasn’t anything for them to do on Nebraska, and limited duties on his more sedate (and apparently solo) follow-up album, Tunnel of Love. Clarence would have been shaking a lot of maracas and not playing much sax. Maybe this should have been another solo album, with the concept of a more fleshed-out, electric follow-up to Nebraska? That would have worked for me. Give Roy Bittan and Clarence a break. No horn sections either. But instead we got the headband, buff biceps and big, blowzy choruses.

Side 1 Track 6
Stand On It
This was a b-side that was better than some tracks on the album. Tight, ass-kicking rock song that gets it done. Again, much like Chuck Berry simply describing what he sees in his American life, Bruce does much the same with unassuming songs like this that work just as well.

Side 1 Track 7
Shut Out the Lights
Listeners would say … wait a minute, parts of this song appeared in “Vietnam.” Exactly. Wraps up the first side with a slow-take on the same Vietnam Vet having the same bad time, save the song’s tone now suits its message. This was a b-side – again, inexplicably. A better song than many that were on the album. The running theme of this piece!

Side 2 Track 1
Don’t Back Down
This would have been the first single – just a great little pop song that would have worked just as well as “Dancing in the Dark.” Again, when the rhythm guitar kicks in on the second verse … that sort of stuff is priceless in rock and roll. The subtle little moments that make all the difference between a good and great song. Same title as a great Beach Boys song, too.

Side 2 Track 2
Working on the Highway
Nothing magical or deep here. A simple song about a guy who works on the highway. A rock song. Calls to mind any number of early rock greats, like Buddy Holly or Bobby Fuller. That’ll be the day when I die. I fought the law and the law one. When I looked straight at her, she looked straight back. I know what he means … you do, too. This isn’t rocket science: it’s rock and roll.

Side 2 Track 3
TV Movie
Another b-side that … oh, I think you get the picture by now. Springsteen would later write a bad song called “57 Channels (and Nothin’ On)” – this was a better attempt at looking at life through the skewed lens of television. TV movies are always worse than real movies, which is a nice little dig this guy takes at himself and how he sees his place in the world. Oh, and the song rocks?

Side 2 Track 4
Pink Cadillac
The best b-side Springsteen has ever put out. Should have been on the album. The double entendre in the song makes for fantastic rock and roll, taps into the myth of car songs and twists it around perfectly. Did I mention the song rocks?

Side 2 Track 5
Johnny Bye-Bye
I didn’t have this youtube version … which is even better than the already solid b-side from that time! This is just a great song about the death of Elvis Presley. For the 10,000th time, this should not have been a b-side. Are you gathering that when I finally heard all these bootleg versions and b-sides Springsteen chose not to use for the final Born in the USA album mix, I was shocked and dismayed? To me, that period from the Nebraska album, where many of these songs took root, leading into the Born in the USA sessions, Springsteen had stripped his songwriting down to its essence, which was describing how he saw America in the most basic, easy-to-understand terms possible, yet imbuing each song with a deeper, darker meaning that made clear his underlying sense of distrust for where the country was headed at the time. He got no better than this as a songwriter, and was miles above any songwriter at the time. There may have been times before and after this time period where he wrote more impassioned and daring songs, but in terms of basic songwriting, this was his golden age. The best rock and roll, the most elemental of it, sounds so much easier than it is to create.

Side 2 Track 6
I’m on Fire
Along with “Darlington County,” a song that was pretty damn good as-is on the album. “I’m on Fire” appears to be one of those few “high lonesome sound” rockabilly tracks that made the cut with him and Landau … when the whole fucking album should have been all of these songs that took the basic concept or rock and roll as Springsteen knew it (a lonely kid growing up in the 60s and a musician taking his place in the pantheon in the 70s) and pushing it forward. “Dancing in the Dark” was a pop single made solely to provide a hit. “I’m on Fire” is Springsteen being true to himself and channeling the best of his musical heroes. This would have been the second single from the album.

Side 2 Track 7
Your Hometown
The title track of the revised album. Yes, it’s the early version of the big ballad “My Hometown" that closed the Born in the USA album. This version, simply stated, blows the doors off the big ballad Landau and Springsteen chose to go with. Much the same lyrics. Same message. It just sounds so much better without the crappy 80s synth keyboards and hammy ballad touches of the final version. This version kicks ass. In a song that’s about getting one’s ass kicked through life. This is how life is … you get your ass kicked, and you keep rolling. You don’t stop to have a big spotlight pick you out onstage and try to make other people cry with your story of woe. Fuck that. Life kicks your ass. Life kicks everyone’s ass. Your hometown is dying. You don’t feel so hot yourself some days. But what is there to do, but keep chugging along the way this song does?

That’s it. A vastly different album, one that rocked twice as hard and long as the final product, had no bombastic/cynical hits aimed at teenage kids in the 80s, and stayed true to the artist’s vision of rock and roll as he knew and practiced it. Springsteen would be slightly less well known now as a result, but he’d have an album to his name that would be known for being rock solid from one end to the other, made no apologies, asked for none, and would be remembered today as the best album he ever put out. As it stands, he’ll be reissuing a deluxe version of that album (Darkness on the Edge of Town) this holiday season, and I’ll surely be buying it as it’s stacked with the kind of outtakes noted above. This should have been the one.

The Future of Music

Sparkomatic. Let the word sink in for a moment. Spark … O … Matic. If you were a working-class kid in the early 80s, this was the automotive radio/cassette deck of choice. Preferably with a Big Brute power booster (which seemed to make the muddy Sparkomatic sound like mud and shit) and whatever speakers you could afford. For Dad’s yellow Hornet station wagon, I made my own speaker cabinets with some bottom-of-the-line Pioneers and particle board Dad left in the basement. One of those still sits next to the coal bin. The damn thing looks like something they listened to The White Album on at Spahn Ranch back in the summer of ’69.

Sparkomatic is not the future of music. It wasn’t then. It was something you bought when you had just enough money to afford a system for your car, but this was still momentous, as you could make cassette copies of your vinyl albums and take them on the road with you. Eight tracks had been in vogue before this, but I recall very few people having eight-track tape recorders. One of Brother M’s friends did, and I recall the huge ordeal we went through just to have the guy make an eight-track copy of ELO’s Face the Music. Brother M had acted as if this guy had just mixed and produced the album himself. It took the guy 40 minutes. He probably made a copy for himself and got stoned the whole time!

It may not have been the future, but it represented a greater mobility and freedom of choice for the listener. Of course, you had to have the records and stereo at home (in my case, the similarly budget-priced Soundesign audio system) to first create your own mixes, but that was understood. A few years later, the Sony Walkman would roll in and change everything. I bought one almost immediately. I’ve read quite a few articles over the past few years regarding how isolated we’ve all become because of iPods and everyone listening to music on earphones in public. Shit. I’ve been doing this since the mid-80s. A lot of people have. It’s nothing new.

Why bring up Sparkomatic now? Because it occurred to me the other day that the state of the recording industry now would be like going back to the early 1980s and having Sparkomatic dictate to record companies how they should operate. All they did was supply consumers with a mode of listening – granted, a great one that allowed them to take their music with them. The concept would have been ludicrous.

We have the same today with Apple’s line of products, kicked off by the iPod and followed by a handful of devices that allow the consumer to take his music anywhere. But we also have iTunes? Steve Jobs himself has said it exists only to sell the devices. Same goes for the music he doesn't create or own: it exists only to sell the devices.

Let that sink in, too. The music exists only to sell the device it is played on. Go back in history again. Records existed only to sell record players? No. Record players existed so consumers could listen to great music at home. There has always been a culture of cool around great stereo systems, but it was just that. A cool thing to own, especially a higher end one. But it meant nothing without the music to play on it.

The same basic concept still holds true today, but Jobs has turned the world so upside down in terms of making the listening device the “cool” thing to own that it’s very hard to see this. And a lot of people don’t. The listening device has become more important than the music on it. Free downloading has done more than any other factors to decimate the recording industry in the past decade. There are many other lesser reasons: the industry humping hiphop into the ground by making it the driving financial force at least a decade past it’s sell-by date, price gouging, suing individual free downloaders at random, installing root kits on CDs without the artists' permission or fan's knowledge, outrageously priced live ticket prices with two-figure hidden fees, lopsided corporate structures that threw far too much money at top executives, refusal to help brick-and-mortar stores survive at the turn of the century (by not budging on list prices on physical product in the midst of a downloading revolution) … it’s a long list.

Suffice to say, the recording industry has treated its fans like shit for as long as I can remember. This was driven home to me as a kid in the 70s every time I went into chain record stores at the local malls. For every cool record store owner or employee, there were a dozen who were the worst sort of douchebags. Snotty, arrogant, acting as if they were the recording artists themselves (many were … in Foghat cover bands). Buying a record became a test of “guess the cashier’s moods and tastes” which was usually wrong as they’d smirk at your purchase no matter what it was. When I moved to the city in the 80s, I was introduced to the wonders of Tower Record employees, perhaps the kings of shithead record store employees in terms of their blithe lack of respect or concern for the customer. It seemed like they hired these people solely for whatever sub-genre of music their limited taste in clothing and hair styles represented. (But I have to say, Tower had some great employees mixed in with the shithead parade, not to mention some very cool people running small indie stores all over NYC.)

It may not have seemed like much – how can you blame an entire industry for lower-rung retail employees? But that same arrogance and disdain towards consumers that was so ingrained in the foot soldiers was common currency in every facet of the recording industry. They just didn’t give a shit about the people supporting them. But you know what I’ve learned as an adult? Every major industry is like this, and in some cases, as with oil, cable TV and real estate, displaying outright hostility towards the people helping them not just survive, but live like kings. It’s a system built on shit, and it will fail someday. Of course, I’m not sure what will happen when it does – life could grow much worse than what we know now – but that doesn’t make the lack of respect for the common consumer any more acceptable.

So, when the “music is free” revolution started going down in the late 90s, you better believe my sentiments at the time were “couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of pricks.” Of course, that was before I realized free downloading was going to crush the industry and threaten the ability of many recording artists to go on making music in any form. When the massive retail stores went down a few years ago – which was like an empire falling – followed shortly by the indie stores that were the heart of the industry, very few people seemed to recognize the huge blow this was. “Oh, the mode of consuming has simply changed, people are downloading from iTunes and buying the occasional physical product at Amazon or Best Buy.”

No. An entire generation of kids has been raised on the concept of free downloading all music being perfectly normal. Sure, there’s a sizable contingent of people still buying music legally, as downloads and physical product, but the numbers are so far below what the industry normally puts out, and not coming back, that it should be crystal clear that things have changed forever and will never be the same again. Video gaming has also usurped music listening in terms of cultural coolness with kids, and this is just bad news all around, as far as I’m concerned. You need to see a few kids who play these games for hours daily to grasp how warped and ultimately uncool this trend is. It’s a waste of time that makes a kid listening to his album through headphones for an hour or two (which I did routinely for years at the same age) seem profoundly productive in comparison.

So, in this climate where music has little to no monetary value with the next generation, yet a vast majority of them own some type of Apple product to play this value-less music on, you have to wonder where things will go from here. When you can download the entire catalog of Led Zeppelin or The Beatles in a few minutes for free, the acts of absorbing and growing with the music become negligible, and those two acts were what made the recording industry so powerful and lasting in its prime.

Thus, we have THE CLOUD. If you’ve been reading up on this topic lately, THE CLOUD will save us all. A lot of people are putting forth that Jobs annual unveiling of new products in September not including larger hard-drive iPods represents his understanding that THE CLOUD is just around the corner, and he no doubt has his fingers in that pie financially.

Simply stated, the cloud is music by subscription. You don’t own it in a traditional sense of having physical product or files on your hard drive. In the future, we are told, the consumer will pay a monthly fee to a service that allows him to stream any song at any time at any place. The cloud will include music officially sanctioned by both major and indie record companies for the consumer to listen to. (Right now, that means The Beatles would not be in the cloud as they’ve denied digital rights to their music.) There are countless bands that would not be in the cloud simply because they were on small indie labels pre-CD age that no longer exist. There are thousands of live tracks that fans have downloaded religiously over the past decade (where they once would have paid a small fortune to bootleggers …) that will not be officially sanctioned. And there are thousands of bootleg tracks out there, studio outtakes and such (think Dylan’s complete Basement Tapes) that will not be near any cloud. Much as we see certain channels dropped from cable companies due to rate disagreements, certain artists will surely pull their catalog from the cloud routinely when they dispute how much they should be getting reimbursed for renting out their music.

Barring all that, the cloud will contain a huge selection of music, no doubt about it. It will be yours, but you will not own it. If you stop paying your monthly subscription, your cloud will disappear, which could mean tens of thousands of tracks and playlists you’ve assembled over the course of years. Think about that. You’re 72 years old. Have a cloud that contains 50,000 tracks, and an intricate system of playlists that spans every genre of music known to mankind. You’re now on a fixed income , can barely afford the grocery bill at the senior citizen high rise, and something has to go: the cloud.

I’m looking that far ahead, because your average Facebook fuckhead carrying on about the beauty and inevitability of the cloud isn’t. I’m looking that far ahead because that’s what music fans do – we look to grow and move forward with our music collections, like greedy land barons snatching up every available piece of fertile ground we can find. It’s a good thing, to see an appreciation of music as some type of personal growth, because it is in a way. I can look back to the first singles I bought in the early 70s (Gilbert O’Sullivan, Elton John, etc.) and trace my development with the passing years and desire to learn more about music in general, particularly music outside my daily cultural reference points. To have something as banal as not making a monthly subscription payment completely wipe out what would literally be an empire of lifelong musical tastes carefully constructed over the course of decades?

It’s bullshit. That’s an extreme case, but it’s good to look at that extreme and understand just what renting music means on a long-term basis. Which is to say, something like the cloud would make sense to the casual fan, someone who listens to music intently through his teens and early 20s, or the adult who wants to hear “the oldies” from that time in his life, or have a tasteful collection to play at family gatherings and such. This is the bread and butter of the recording industry – where they surely make the bulk of their profits. Selling to kids buying the cool stuff now and adults looking backwards.

But right there is the problem. Kids now are either not interested in music as a cultural force … or they’d downloading it for free in massive numbers! Either way, there is no or limited financial value in trying to sell anything to them, much less the commitment of a subscription service. There are obviously some kids buying music, but they’re heavily outnumbered by those who aren’t.

And we’re going to sell a subscription service to these kids who are already swiping gigabyte upon gigabyte of music? No. They’re not going to buy. You will have a set audience for this, the kind of people who buy everything on iTunes, the Apple army and adults who don’t really care enough about music to own it (i.e., a lot of adults). Admittedly, this is a large cross section of people who could make this a viable option … but nothing, and I mean nothing, like the financial windfall the recording industry was in its prime. I have no problem with the cloud being another option, but knowing how fucked up the recording industry is now, and desperate, too, I can only hope they don’t fall for this line of reasoning, hook line and sinker. Obviously, this isn’t going to happen immediately, but again, I’m looking down the road.

Which is what has a lot of people thinking “cloud” when Steve Jobs doesn’t even mention the iPod Classic and only puts out product with smaller storage drives in this year’s annual unveiling of new product. He seems to be gearing his tastes towards boutique purchases, incredibly small iPods, the size of half dollars, that you just know are going to be hot sales items with all the kids. But that’s all. It worries me that the lifelong fan, the sort of person, like me, who could easily fill up a 160 GB iPod (I’m at 110 GB now and will have this thing filled up in another year or two … and this is sparingly putting on music, not throwing artists’ catalogs on there wholesale), are being viewed as non-entities in the future of music.

We are the future of music. Some kid buying a fucking iPod Shuffle is more than likely not the future. A decade from now, he’ll look at the cute little colorful thing in the drawer and think, “Yeah, man, that summer we saw MGMT at the shore, fuckin’ A, dude.” (Presumably, he'll then add some MGMT songs to his subscription service.) I have to believe your average consumer of products like this is not the future: the musical passion is not there. (As it wasn't for most kids I knew in high school who championed Styx, Journey, REO Speedwagon, etc., and their CD collection today represents a time capsule of all those bands and nary a whimper from any band that came into existence past 1985. Nothing wrong with this in my book, but just underlining the fact that kids glomming onto popular bands, while showing little or no desire to appreciate other kinds of music, represent a one-off sale, not long-term customers. Of course, the recording industry has been built on millions of one-off sales as opposed to thousands of long-term customers.)

The desire to sport a fashion accessory is the future. And, again, as noted upstream, music has become an accessory to a fashion accessory for far too many people, who have mistaken the vehicle for the driver. It’s a Catch 22: you can’t sustain an industry without creating a sense of passion and dedication that will carry a fan through decades of listening experience. Gadgetry does not create passion. It creates a love of gadgetry. Which has nothing to do with music. Unfortunately, the world we live in now, music needs the gadgets to survive.

I can’t fault Jobs too much. He’s simply responding to market demand. Sure, creating it, too, but he’s not going to be making product that no one wants to buy. I have to believe there will be a built-in market of hardcore music fans who will always buy a larger, hard-drive based player. (I would hope he’d shoot for a 250 or 320 GB player down the road.) Forget about just music, a lot of people would buy a larger-faced product to watch TV shows and movies that they own, too. I’m not against the concept of a subscription-based service for all these forms of media. I’m against the idea of that becoming the sole or leading way people consume these media.

The pain of it is, I could go out and buy a 500 GB Archos media player tomorrow if I wanted. But I recognize Apple as putting out superior product and having such a broad consumer base that there are any number of accessories being manufactured by other companies that make switching to Archos much less appealing. (For me, I’m speaking directly of iPod charger/speaker systems, which are fantastic – does Archos have anything like this for its players?) I like the iPod and have invested over 18,000 tracks into its system design at this point … transferring those files, and a few dozen heavily-detailed playlists, to another system at this point would be an enormous pain in the ass. But catching wind that Jobs may be gearing future efforts towards much smaller players in anticipation of THE CLOUD sits even worse with me.

What do record companies need to do? I’d say one thing only, if they are to survive. Invest heavily in companies that will challenge Apple’s market dominance in media players. Now’s the time. Because this company that does not create music has usurped the creative direction of companies that do create music. It’s not right. The universe is out of balance, much as it would have been in 1983 with Sparkomatic telling CBS and Warner Brothers how to market and distribute their music. The thought of that would have been laughable to the extreme at the time. The extremely laughable has become reality in 2010, save I can see only one person laughing, and that’s all the way to the bank.

August 1984, State College, PA

I realized after writing my last piece that a nice bookend would be describing the act of leaving for college two years earlier. My first two years of college were spent a local Penn State branch campus, where I kicked ass academically for the first time in my life (having been a solid B+ type student in the past). But I couldn’t go on doing that forever as the campus did not offer four-year degrees. It was time to hit the big show.

I had been to State College before – obviously to find an apartment the previous spring, which was difficult as I had no idea how crazy that process was. Basically, if you didn’t have a place for the upcoming fall semester lined up by March or April, you were shit out of luck. I went up in late May and must have been through dozens of places that were too expensive or strange. I had never lived away from home before, save for extended vacations to relatives. Eventually, I found a place about a mile north of campus, the lower half of a ranch house owned by a strange but friendly middle-aged guy named Mike. I would be sharing the apartment, although I had no idea who my roommate would be, as I had no one to provide on my end. Mike told me he’d find someone over the summer. The rent was great – I think $160/month if I recall, There was a cornfield on the edge of the yard, which immediately put me at ease with my rural upbringing.

That was one of those factory summers, the second and last. God, I had such a good time there – not being facetious at all. Again, finite amount of time working there, being exposed to a bunch of guys who weren’t out to screw each other over, a very healthy way to be introduced to the concept of adult employment. And that was the summer of P, the Born-Again girl as noted in the previous post. I don’t have her picture handy, but believe it or not, she looked a lot like Jessica Alba circa the movie noted in this week's picture on the upper right.

Just a gorgeous, out-going, manically-depressed Catholic girl with a Christ complex. That summer we were hanging out regularly, a few nights a week, driving out for ice cream or going to the mall, listening to Springsteen on my cassette deck in the station wagon – very innocent stuff, as even holding hands was a stretch for her, easing away from the concept of becoming a nun. That night she wore a white dress and sandals. We went up to sit in the graveyard on the edge of town after dark. The weather was like now: hot, sunny days followed by cool nights where you could feel fall inching closer.

I was feeling horrible, knowing I’d be gone in a few days, and she’d still be there. Of course, not yet realizing I could drive the two-hour trip home any weekend I wanted … and did most weekends that first year away. “Edge of the earth approaching” type vibe that night. And she sensed it and was so kind. We should have went for it that night. Granted, not getting laid on my grandparents’ grave – that would have been totally inappropriate – but pushing it forward to the next level. But as also noted, I had my first hemorrhoid, no doubt due to the stress I was feeling over leaving, that burning little nut just above my asshole, which I did not know was a hemorrhoid at the time but would later realize when I got this thing once every three years. I was way too out of sorts to think like a horny teenager, but looking back now, man, I should have gone for it.

Work wrapped up later that week, and that weekend I packed my meager belongings (most importantly, stereo, records and Radio Shack Nova 40 headphones). Packing up, I quickly realized Mom was in worse shape than I was. She looked like the Grim Reaper was coming to take me away to hell, as opposed to me making the next logical step in my life and going away to college. Dad was fine – he laid a $20 on me when he caught me outside loading up the station wagon. Mom made the mistake of trying to show me a map of how to get to State College, when I had already been there at least half a dozen times and knew the way, as she knew, but Mom, to this day, has a habit of getting hyper-active and strange upon departures. She opened up the map in front of me, and I snapped, “Mom, stop it. I know the way. You don’t have to show me anything.” She slammed the map shut and stormed into the cellar.

But I had to go. Dad shook my hand and gave me advice on what to do in case the car broke down. I remember it was overcast, but not raining. And it was that moment I felt about as empty and afraid as a kid can get. I was leaving. Right fucking now. Leaving home, possibly for good. I knew it had to happen, but I didn’t want to go. But I had to. Where’s Mom? I’d had it. I was a bundle of nerves, wound up, and didn’t feel like waiting around. I got in the car, turned the key and started driving.

The last thing I saw, looking in the rear view mirror, was Mom, standing in the middle of our street, waving. She had run up from the basement when she heard me pulling out but was too late. That moment sticks with me now, as I can see it will happen one day in the foreseeable future with Mom, and me on the other end, save she won’t be coming back. I thought about driving back to say goodbye, but let it go. (I should note here: I already had plans to drive back the following weekend!)

I didn’t weep as I left my hometown – that came a few towns later, when it sunk in that I was leaving home, alone in the world for the first time, which I’ve since come to realize is a liberating feeling, but had no clue at the time. That feeling, as I recall, was amazing. Feeling horrible, just beat to shit, but knowing full well there was no turning back, and it had to be done.

Any way you drive to State College, PA, you are spending hours on heavily-wooded interstates, in my case, blasting straight across the state on Route 80. It’s a ride I’d make a few dozen times over the next two years, and I think getting out on the road like that put me at ease, playing my music and letting the hum of the road miles relax me. I got to State College a few hours later, pulled the station wagon into Mike’s driveway, and this big guy came out to greet me, white guy who appeared to be somewhere in his 20s, wire-frame glasses, sideburns. This was new roommate, M.

That half of the house we’d be sharing was a two bedroom with a bathroom, kitchen, living room and garage. Man, if I could have rented that place for myself, it would have been heaven, and I probably could have with the money I’d saved up, but wasn’t thinking that far ahead as I was still a kid.

M was friendly enough, from a rural area south of Pittsburgh. He had spent a few years in the armed forces and was now going to college in his late 20s. This guy was considerably older than I was, which felt strange. I could have done a lot worse – as it was, we simply had very little in common. Most nights after classes, I’d come back there, make small talk with M, then go back to my room and work on my writing. He must have thought I was a sequestered lunatic, but I did need to write, and that was the only time I could do it. As it was, I had a nice quiet room to do it and felt fine with that. M made the living room his domain, as I recall it, watching a lot of M*A*S*H reruns on TV or listening to his albums, Four Way Street by Crosby Stills Nash & Young being the main one I recall.

This was probably all for the best, as Mike had made it clear he didn’t want any wild parties or tons of kids coming by to hang out and cause trouble. And I had work to do. Most nights, Mike sat up there alone, practicing his steel guitar. Mike was an odd duck to begin with – a nebbish sort of bachelor who put out vague Norman Bates vibes. But the steel guitar thing was just too weird. At the time, I had zero comprehension of country music and thought the steel guitar was a pure hick instrument. (I’ve since come to realize it’s an incredibly delicate piece of equipment … and love hearing it on any piece of music.) I’d picture Mike up there, naked, wearing a hockey mask, and playing Hawaiian songs on his steel guitar in his living room.

It was a strange time. But good. As noted, applied for a columnist position on the school newspaper, landed one, and that served as a doorway into a cool little world of fellow English and Journalism majors, all of whom got to know me through my writing and being in the same classes.

There was one Journalism class in particular, my first one, that had a strong effect. I did poorly in that class, a C, which was basically because I still didn’t know how to write. I was great at writing tight little humor pieces and such, but reporting? I’m still not very good at that. I can interview people – actually, very well – but that sort of backseat-taking a writer does to become a good reporter was beyond me at the time. My ego was too big to do it well. And the instructor was a real stickler. Not a bad guy, but the sort of exercises he gave us, those who/what/where/when/why exercises of taking a jumble of facts and arranging them properly, was just a huge pain in the ass. I should have learned this stuff at the time, but it didn’t sink in until much later.

But in that class were some interesting people. The guy who sat next to me was the late Damon Chappie, who I later learned went on to have a pretty interesting career as an investigative reporter in Washington, D.C. He was doing much the same at Penn State, getting into hard-edge stories on the paper along the same lines. It’s not fair to say I didn’t like the guy, but I was put off upon first meeting him as he was sporting that lame fashion trend of mid-80s yuppies: a polo shirt with an upturned collar that he wore to every class, and Vuarnet sunglasses on a rope. The sort of thorniness that surely served him well as a reporter was present then in his personality. He put some people off, but we got along in a strange way. He was a very good reporter, which was clear from the get-go in that class.

(And I’d meet him again later. This story about Dewey Beach, Delaware, that lawn party … I saw Damon at that party. We sort of ignored each other instead of greeting each other as long-lost classmates. It was strange. We should have said hello, but didn’t. That was a very bad weekend!)

And there was old friend Justin. Meeting him, and then the group of guys he was hanging with down at headquarters on College Avenue, was another important door opening, as he and roommate Colin have gone on to be lifelong friends (as I knew they would). As I recall, Justin was a gangly, good-looking kid who wanted to be a poet and worshipped T.S. Eliot and Bob Dylan, so once he caught wind of my columns, we clicked immediately and felt that spark of friendship from the first hello. It was a very cool experience to meet people on the exact same creative wavelength, and they weren’t assholes. (In New York, I’d meet plenty of people who were, despite their artistic leanings, and veered away from these sort of folks as time went on.)

There were two women in that class who were great. One of them, I can’t even recall her name: a hippy chick from Pittsburgh who must have smoked 2-3 packs a day and was a real free spirit. Good-looking, too, but apparently had some sort of hippy 30-year-old boyfriend who was never around. Again, it was cool to be able to discuss Beat writers and music with someone like this, who was a real open spirit, not the kind of person I was meeting back home, sort of the doppelganger of P.

And there was Stacey, a Jewish girl from Philly. Pretty, too, and she always took shit for being too jappy (Jewish American Princessy, not Asian). She was jappy, which was a gauche thing to be around college English majors. She was just being herself and apparently felt comfortable enough with herself to stay that way – good for her. We goofed on her at the time, but she knew who she was. She flirted around with Justin quite a bit, and me, too, the following year. I still recall grinding her ass a bit when we all went to see a show at a jam-packed local bar by Backstreets, a hugely popular Springsteen tribute band. I also recall a strange night just before graduating, in her living room in one of those apartment towers, Justin out on the balcony, periodically waking up to puke over the edge, two of her roommates passed out on the living-room floor, and she and I sort of drunkenly spooning but not doing anything more. This was college!

As scheduled, that first weekend I came back, hung out with P, and for the first of many times, ate like a horse when I got home as I wasn’t eating that much during the week. I didn’t know how to cook (and wouldn’t truly learn until about five years ago) and lived on ramen and Chef Boyardee. That was also our salad bar days back home, which started when I was at the branch campus, and all the guys back there were in their late teens and early 20s. Some time during the week, we’d all converge on the Bonanza Steakhouse salad bar and kick ass with the endless salad bowl. We must have consumed 2,000 calories of salad, dessert and soda at each sitting … and neighbor JB would invariably end up puking in the parking lot, which was always hilarious in that rough-and-tumble young guy way.

It was a heady time. Having had a bad few weeks at work lately, doing things I don’t want to do for money, just like Dad did, I can look back at those days and miss that sense of feeling perfectly in stride with life, that I was doing what I was supposed to be doing and taking a lot of joy and good will from the experience. But that’s how a kid should feel about life: hopeful and uncertain at the same time. It’s an adult’s lot in life to put up with a fair amount of shit and endure the grind, especially in times like this.

I leave Pennsylvania all the time now, about once every six weeks or so when I go back to see Mom and decompress the city for a few days. It’s a routine, that never feels fully routine. I can tell it still bothers Mom to say goodbye, whereas I’m much easier now with it, can say goodbye at the drop of a hat, as I’ve done it dozens of times over the years. But it seems like she never gets used to it … which must be a parent’s lot in life whenever one of her kids goes out the door for any reason.

August 1986, State College, PA

I’ve noted before the ragged time I’ve seen friends having with kids in their late teens/early 20s as they try to find their way in the world. And I surely noted that any romantic notions an aging person has about that time in their lives ought to pay attention to situations like that, because they bring back the rampant insecurity, lack of direction and awkwardness that we tend to gloss over or forget with passing time.

Of course, their parenthood issues aren’t isolated to those years. That last blast of tension they feel before their kids go off on their own seems fairly lightweight as compared to some of the wild shit they went through with the kids in their teen years. And the nonstop time and attention of their early years. If they were lucky, it seemed like they had a small window of child-raising comfort from about the kids’ ages of 8 through 12 or so. (That's the age I think of when I think of "lost youth." Not teenage years. Which tend to be car wrecks of varying degrees for most people.) I don’t envy them or sit around pining for children. It seems like whatever joy is passed along, there’s a ton of “other shit” that goes along with the process … and I’m talking about basically good kids with relatively few problems. Troubled kids seem like prolonged grief and worry.

But I’m trying to recall that last summer at Penn State, when I finally took time off for myself to just do nothing for awhile before adulthood kicked in. I kick myself now because I didn’t do something like the youth hostel thing and bum around Europe for a few months. That would have been the time. I know a few people who did that, and they all have good memories of that trip.

As it was, I had maneuvered through college like a shark. Was the first to graduate in my family, although I was the youngest. Had good grades (a step down from excellent, which I had my first two years when living at home and studying my ass off). Made a bunch of new friends, a core group of which I still know today. Wrote a weekly humor column for the college newspaper that got my feet wet in the writing world. In short, had a fantastic college experience that worked on so many levels. About all I did wrong was fall for a girl who swayed into the shady world of Born Again Christianity, wasted far too much time trying to make that work and then mourned the loss afterward. I should have been screwing like a billy goat in heat, as so many guys were back then, instead of emulating a forlorn 33-year-old divorcee.

But I knew it was time to go in the summer of ’86. I can see why so many people hang onto college long after they should have left, as college towns present a microcosm world of high ideals and permanent youth which one can play along with well into his 20s, but it must get a bit silly after that. I knew I had to go, but wasn’t quite ready, as I had no plans or direction whatsoever. I knew I wanted to write, but had no idea how that was going to happen on any real level. The college paper let me get away with murder, gave me carte blanche to write anything I wanted. How many newspapers have you read this sort of stuff in? Magazines? It’s self indulgent, for sure, but I also hope it gets across someone stretching out a bit. I knew straightaway that if I landed an entry level editorial gig, I’d have to spend a lot of time writing in styles I didn’t want to write, and writing stories I didn’t want to write. Possibly for years. (And I just never wrapped my mind around that, all these years later. So be it. God bless entities like the NYPress in the 90s and my old pals at Leisuresuit.net for letting me loose.)

My landlord, Olgie, suggested I take a few months off, if I could afford it, and just enjoy the town for the summer, as I had never spent a summer there. (My first two college summers I worked in Dad’s factory, which was a great experience. Third summer, I spent literally a few hours fumbling through two shit jobs I wanted no part of then reverted to a teenage “do nothing until school starts” mentality for a month, which felt deeply awkward and ill-fitting at that point in my life.) I could afford it, the German Department, where I had been working, was glad to have me stay a little longer, so I decided to treat myself and spend three months working 20 hours a week with no other responsibilities.

It was a good summer. Got up late every morning. Ran 6-8 miles. Worked four hours a day. Spent my afternoons lazing in the sun on the main lawn. Hit the local record stores late afternoon. Had just enough to buy all those cool mid-80s indie albums. Hung out with the few friends who were there for the summer, too.

I’ve never been as relaxed since. There have been times in my adult life when I wasn’t working, especially between freelance and temp gigs, but those were always fraught with money worries. That summer at Penn State, I knew I was gone come September, didn’t have much money, but figured I’d be going home, at least temporarily.

All summer I’d also been sending out cover letters and articles to dozens of publications. First wave was ones I wanted to work for (music magazines like Rolling Stone, big-city papers, etc.) Next was any publication I could find the address for. I must have sent out 200 letters, with no immediate response. Eventually, one of my favorite music magazines would write back, and I’d write a story for them that fall. And I got two huge thumbs up from associate editors at The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Detroit Free Press, although their editors wouldn’t hire me (sensing rightly that I’d make a pretty bad “serious” editorialist, which has always seemed like a bad racket to me, especially the political junk).

It was sobering. All summer long, not even rejection letters, just silence. Even my home county newspaper didn’t respond … which I’ve never forgotten. To get the freeze out from such a bland, vanilla publication felt like the worst rejection … getting ignored by people I didn’t even want to write for!

So while I had that gray cloud of no future hanging over me, I still managed to feel relaxed and casual about life in general. Evenings I’d come back to Olgie’s house. Right at the end of my tenure in her place, she moved from a nice little house on the outskirts of town to one just off fraternity row right off campus, so I helped her move and lived there for a month or two. A great change – walking to bars and the downtown area as opposed to worrying about being too drunk to drive. And her new place was beautiful, huge backyard, and a back deck that we’d hang around at sundown and chat, this time of year, enjoying the cool of the evening before I’d head out for whatever that night.

And that would usually be music-related. Seeing local bands, like the fondly remembered Screaming Ducks, who were your basic bar band playing 60s and 70s hits, long in the tooth by the time I got there, but they had a great repertoire of Van Morrison, Stones, Beatles, CCR, etc. … the kind of shit that still went down well in a crowded college bar circa the mid-80s. In the summer, there’d be just as many townies as college kids going to their shows, and it was a nice atmosphere, not the mob scene of the school year.

What I remember most was a few of us, almost always Doug from the record store, heading back to our friend Pat’s place in one of those huge apartment developments a mile or two from town, hanging out into the wee hours, getting drunk and listening to all kinds of shit Pat had in her record collection. Pat was a good 10-15 years older than us at the time, working on the Arts staff at the paper and doing graduate work in Psychology, and she had a record collection that was mind-blowingly good. I've surely caught up and gone way past since then, but her collection was deeply impressive at the time, and filled with many things I'd never heard.

When I got into Soul music, she was way ahead of me, as that was the music of her childhood. I can still recall one night her putting on a Ray Charles album. Not the stuff I knew like “Georgia on My Mind” or “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” His earlier, more raw stuff, like “It Should’ve Been Me,” “Night Time is the Right Time” and “Mess Around.” That sound was a revelation to me, and another door kicking open to even more music I’d never heard before. There’s still a rawness to early Ray Charles, and that time in R&B music, the 50s before rock exploded, that I love to hear.

Pat would blow our minds routinely like this. James Brown. Ray Charles. Solomon Burke. And of course all the great indie stuff floating around. MTV’s 120 Minutes would usually come on as we were lounging on her cheap sofas and easy chairs, and we’d take in the latest offerings, dozing off a cheap red wine drunk to Camper Van Beethoven. That was such a sweet time in life, to have that sort of time, hours every night, to sit and talk with friends, listen to great music, stumble onto old and new stuff we hadn’t heard before, never realizing a lot of this stuff served as a musical foundation we’d spend the rest of our days building on.

That’s what I miss the most about college, and that summer in particular: that sense of spare time. I knew it wasn’t endless – I could see the end and knew it was coming. But there’s something about your mind at that point in your life, some weightless, worry-free spirit unencumbered by memory, experience, decades of passing time … it was just easier to hang loose and relax back then. Everything about our lives encouraged it. Very few responsibilities. No big-money jobs. No careers. No kids. No marriages. No divorces. Relatively blank slates, writing good things on those slates, and having brains enough to know they were good, lasting things that were changing us and pushing us in directions we hadn’t gone before.

At our graduation in May, a bacchanalia I wrote about here, we had that party to end all parties that went on for the better part of a week with all sorts of depravity and wild emotions. My two good friends from that time and former roommates, Colin and Justin, both came back and made appearances later that summer. First was Colin, who was off to Los Angeles with his then-fiancé to start life on the west coast. They came by to visit in July and encouraged me to come with them … as none of us quite knew what were doing and figured any option is as good as another. I held off for awhile, actually for months, and then went out there, to Venice, CA that winter. And had a fucking terrible time, as they were fighting like cats and dogs, in a one-bedroom apartment, and I was often stuck in the middle. That hang-loose sense of college freedom was replaced by a claustrophobic “relationship starting to come apart” vibe that I had to be part of … and got the fuck out of there in a hurry! I could have stayed in L.A., but felt out of place there and came back home a few weeks later feeling totally defeated and lost.

But that was in the future as compared to the sunny afternoon they showed up and bid farewell as they took off for the coast. Ironically, Colin now lives in a house in Venice only a block or two from the ratty apartment building we were living in at the time (that's still ratty). Married, but not to that then-fiancé. Doing well for himself and moving along with whatever well-trained dogs he has in his life at any given moment.

Justin came by that August, feeling just as lost as I was, too. He was thumbing it from his town up around Erie, PA down to see his Mom in the Philly suburbs and stopped by. Actually, I gave him a ride back home one weekend, which got him a lot closer to Philly. He was in his Woody Guthrie phase, which would last awhile, roaming around. I was shocked that he was still thumbing it, which seemed like a 70s thing, but he seemed to be doing all right with it. He’d later try to shoehorn himself into an advertising position in northern New Jersey, where I visited him once, and he seemed just as miserable as I was over our prospects. Save he eventually freaked out and did do the Europe thing. Caught him again on the tail end of that, this time while living in the Bronx, which surely blew his (and his hippie girlfriend’s) mind when they visited briefly. He’d eventually find his way to California, too, farther north, and is also doing pretty well, running a graphic arts business while his wife does office work, and I think they have 50 kids now.

But I do remember us that summer: “I don’t know” should have been our motto, because none of us had a clue how we were going to get from Point A to Point B, or even what Point B was, as that time immediately after college, unless you’re going to grad school or really busting ass to race down a career path, is just a huge question mark. I will note one glaring difference between us then and what I see with my friends’ kids now: we knew how to support ourselves. For one thing, we didn’t have credit cards, or expensive gadgets like cellphones, therefore could only spend what we had, and learned to budget our money, too, what little of it there was. We didn’t have parents supporting us either – for a few years there, I was learning to be self sufficient when I could see a lot of fellow students were cruising on parental donations. I think that’s the core difference – we drilled it into our heads that we were going to make it on our own.

Of course, after that summer, I immediately went home as I had no other options. Immediately got work at the local branch campus as an English tutor, which I could have parlayed into a teaching gig down the road (but didn’t when I ran off to Venice that winter). Right choice? I don’t know. I can see my going off to California like that struck some kind of spark in me that would eventually lead to me taking the big plunge and moving to New York a year later with about $300 in my pocket and a cardboard suitcase filled with two or three days worth of clothes. If I stayed back there and put in the years to become a professor? I often fantasize about summers off and a more relaxed daily schedule. But I also think about the red tape and stale rigidity of colleges … and the teenage pussy, I can guarantee you, would have driven me crazy. It was driving me nuts the short time I was there as a tutor, girls only 2-3 years younger than I was, and I was forbidden to go there. I’ve seen how flirty college girls get with older men, and lord only knows how reasonably attractive male professors keep it together.

None of this was on my mind that August. The future was a blank slate, and I was saying a slow goodbye to a way of life I knew could not last. August always feels like a “goodbye” month to me. Goodbye to summer. Which feels good, as I love the fall. But as you get older, you tie this in with your own life, and there’s that bitter sweet feeling of youth fading away with the last days of August. So it goes. I surely hated this song in the summer of 1986 – I was way too cool for school – but Rod Stewart, after his fall from grace, got it right every now and then. This was one of those times, and this is how August feels to me now.

Random Acts of Kindness

These things happen every now and then. Hopefully, you’re making them happen sometimes. I had a nice one on Saturday that’s worth noting. Saturday was possibly the hottest day of the year here: temperatures in the mid-90s with high humidity. Just the sort of brutally hot New York day that encourages sane people to stay inside and not move. Because you move, you sweat, a lot. It’s been a pretty miserable summer in this respect, with forecasters noting “a cooling period” when the day-time highs drop to the high 80s.

We had a tornado warning Friday night around 8:30 that luckily only turned out to be a nasty thunderstorm for half an hour. Blew right through. I didn’t hear any branches coming down on the street, so I felt all right. Got up this morning, surveyed the landlord’s patio, some minor stuff down from high winds, but nothing horrible. Turned the corner, and saw that one of the dead trees on her property had snapped off near the trunk and was suspended against the telephone wires up above.

Man. This was a mixed blessing. Any time part or all of those dead trees come down, it saves her a truckload of money in terms of not having to get them cut down eventually, which would be a four-figure proposition around here. So it was a good thing that this entire tree had come down in one fell swoop.

It was a bad thing in that someone would have to bring the thing down and clean it up … that someone being me. On the hottest day of the year. I took my clothes to the laundromat and set about doing this in between loads. You can guess that I sweated buckets – looked like I had jumped in a pool with my clothes on, sweat just pouring off my body as I worked on this thing. First move was to push the hanging tree over to the sidewalk so I could then grab the broken-off trunk and pull it down the sidewalk, thus bringing the whole severed tree down. Which I did, with a great bang and crash as 30 feet of dead wood hit the sidewalk and cracked. I jammed my thumb in the process, a similar injury I used to get all the time playing basketball in my childhood. Thought I’d broken it, too, hurt like hell, but kept moving and it wasn’t as bad as I thought.

It was easy pulling off the broken branches and stacking them on the patio. The hard part came in sawing down the trunk, with a small branch saw I have for tree limbs, so I could carry large chunks of it to the patio. This was where the sweat really started pouring. Sun was beating directly down on the sidewalk, just relentless. Got to the point where I had the 10-foot long stump of the trunk to go, still too heavy to drag or carry, with about a 20-inch diameter to cut through. You can’t do this easily with a branch saw. You have to feverishly cut here and there, rotate the trunk as much as possible, keep cutting, and when you think you’re getting close, repeatedly pick up the trunk and slam it on the sidewalk, or position it so you can jump up and down on it and hopefully break it in half.

This sucked. Really sucked. I must have sounded like Mel Gibson phoning his girlfriend. It was taking me forever, close to an hour of fruitless sawing and dropping, and I was losing my mind. I went into my apartment and got Dad’s old hammer, using the claw to chip out the wood I had been sawing at, which was working, until I bent the head of the hammer in half. It was that kind of job.

Had I kept going like this, I’d have eventually won out over the stump, but it would have taken a long, long time. Just then, this older Mexican guy who was clearly walking around the neighborhood collecting plastic bottles from the trash saw me, came over, called out, “Amigo need help?” He immediately took the branch saw and started going at it, which went a lot better with one guy, me, holding the stump down. I’d had the job about 80% done on my own but was losing steam and sanity. This guy came along at the perfect time, when I felt like quitting, and apropos of nothing save being a nice guy, he helped a stranger on a day when fucking nobody was going to help me.

Five minutes later, we picked up the stump and dropped it on the sidewalk. Nothing. Again. This time we heard a slight crack, both of us smiling. But it was still connected. At this point, I started jumping on the stump as it was at a slight incline, and sure enough, I snapped it with my body weight, breaking that piece of shit down into halves that could be carried onto the patio. I was elated. This guy was a saint … and if I’m not mistaken, he hadn’t even broken a sweat. He even helped carry the second huge piece on the patio, heaving it on his back.

I gave him a $10 spot for his troubles, which he gladly accepted, and we shook hands. He asked me if I wanted to take down the other dead tree on Sunday. I said no, wasn’t my call to make, and the landlord didn’t have any more space to put the limbs. So he picked up his plastic bags of empties, bid me a good day and went on his way.

That random act of kindness had me thinking all day. It’s hard to find friends when there’s hard work to be done – I’ve found this to be very much true. You can generally count those people in your life on one hand. I try to be one of those people because I know how hard it is to do stuff like an apartment/house move, or shovel snow, or clear a yard of debris, or anything that would be hard as hell on your own. Even if I don’t know you that well, I’ll clear time to do something like that. On one hand, I simply like doing that kind of work in small doses. On the other, this is what you do for people you know … help them when you can.

Of course, it’s not all that rosy and self congratulatory. I have people in my life I’ve let slide. People with bad problems. In most cases of their own doing, but sometimes a combination of things: sliding off the map AND having something catastrophic occurring to deepen the bad luck streak. And I find myself strangely distant in these situations. More accurately, I make myself strangely distant and don’t make much of an effort to bridge the gap.

It’s a guilt thing with me – I feel bad about this handful of bad situations in my life. Won’t get into specifics or name names. But it does bother me that I’ll bend over backwards to give you any sort of physical help you need but will hedge on the emotional variety at times. In each case, I have to note, situations where the person spent years burning down the house in some sense: drinking, drugs, carousing, etc. These aren’t bad people, but they’ve had issues that have gone on for decades. And I guess it offends me in some spiritual sense that the message (stop doing this shit) didn’t sink in after the first warning shot. Or the second. Or the first radical failure. Or the second. Or the third. And so on.

I know the cause of their decline shouldn’t matter, but it does. So much of how I see the world now can be traced back to the winter of 2004, watching Dad pass away. When you see someone in your life like that get pile-drived by a disease and slammed into physical failure and then death, it has a profound effect. In other words, I saw someone I care about a great deal have his health destroyed by circumstances beyond his control, watched him fight these circumstances to the best of his abilities, and lose.

That experience turned me ice cold towards people who throw their lives away. Some who are friends and acquaintances, too. I wouldn’t say I’ve given up on these people. Haven’t even read a single one of them the riot act. People are going to live however they want to live, and I’m not going to stop them. But after watching my father have the shit kicked out of him in a hospital bed, I get fucking angry when I see people willfully put themselves in harm’s way in any sense. As you get older, you see, some people push themselves into a downward slide, repeatedly, over and over, year after year, willfully making the wrong choices, in the mistaken belief that their youth, wits and guile will get them through, like they have in the past. Not realizing how much they’ve eroded their reserves of youth and luck. Much less the good will of those around them who’ve spent as long a time putting up with this stuff. Bad shit catches up to all of us, and much faster if you entertain it.

So I can rationalize my inaction on that part, but still recognize there’s a person there I’ve known for a long time, decades or much of my life in some cases, and I’m letting the person down. I’m not writing this as some sort of emotional pep rally to get back into these situations – I’ll probably go on doing very little to nothing in each situation – but I am aware of it and can acknowledge it. Which counts for very little here. But I’d rather see this larger picture of myself than focus in on my desire to randomly help people when they need it. Life gets tricky like that. Or maybe it just gets more clear. When you’re younger, you tend to focus on your positive qualities because that’s how you want the world to see you. But you get older, you see it all within yourself, the good and the bad, hopefully can acknowledge both, and understand your shit truly does stink just like everyone else’s. If you’re like me, you’ll spend the rest of your days doing good and bad things, and wondering how it all pans it out in the end.

Still, what that guy did for me today was great, and it registered, will surely influence me to do the same in situations where there is no personal gain for me, save to help someone having a rough time. Be a saint when you can, because it’s not as hard as you think it is. No one bats a thousand, so there’s no harm in hitting one out of the park every now and then to counter-balance those times when you strike out using a corked bat and blame it on the ump.

Steinbrenner’s Inferno

George Steinbrenner passes on at the age of 80 on July 13, 2010.

Moments after his life ends, he feels himself gliding through a long, dark tunnel. There’s a light at the end of it, and he feels irreversibly drawn to it. Only it’s not a golden light: it’s a red light. A burning red light. As he grows closer, he can see it’s a raging inferno, like a neighborhood in the Bronx burning down in a riot.

He slides out of the tunnel and finds himself dumped in a room that looks like a major league baseball clubhouse. It’s empty, save for a card table in the middle of it. “I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive" by Hank Williams is echoing from the PA system. An old-fashioned Coke machine with bottles hums and sweats in the corner.

At the card table sits a being who is obviously Satan, just as depicted for centuries: a large, red man with yellow eyes, black hair, goatee and horns sprouting from his forehead. He has a tail, cloven hooves and is swathed in a long red cape. The only strange touch: he wears a New York Mets cap jauntily arranged to keep his horns showing.

Satan is playing poker with a rail-thin, dark-haired, middle-aged man in a mustard-stained tank top, a pair of white boxer shorts with hearts, stirrup socks and baseball cleats. The man has a cigarette in his card-holding hand, and a can of Billy beer in the other. It’s Steinbrenner’s old friend/nemesis, Billy Martin.

Billy: (blows a smoke ring and glances over at Steinbrenner on the floor) Well, well, well. Look what the cat dragged in.

Satan snickers and wags his tail.

Steinbrenner: Billy, what the. I was just napping in my hospital bed a few minutes ago. What in the hell is going on here?

Billy Martin: You got it. Hell is going on here. You’ve gone to hell, George. I’ve been waiting for you.

Satan: So have I.

Steinbrenner: What do you mean “hell”? This can’t be hell. I like the clubhouse. I can even live with the Mets hat.

Satan: This is hell. You own this place. The clubhouse. The team. The stadium. If you walk around outside, it will look a lot like Pittsburgh. You now own the Pittsburgh Pirates. Any good players you have came up through your farm system and leave once their contracts expire. You can no longer afford to buy the best. Your family owns a string of kielbasa restaurants in western Pennsylvania. Your team lost tonight to the Houston Astros, 7-2. Attendance was 8,531. Billy is your manager, and you can’t fire him.

Steinbrenner: Christ. This really is hell.

Satan: Come. Sit at our table. We can deal you in on the next hand.

Billy crushes his beer can and throws it over his shoulder.

Billy: Christ, I can’t stand this shit. It’s warm as piss, too. Can’t you ever get Budweiser down here?

Satan: You know warm Billy beer is part of your hell. We save the Budweiser for sinners who love good imported beer. Besides, you have the same name.

Billy: Don’t remind me. I got drunk with that asshole once in Texarkana in 1979. There was something weird about that boy. He smelled like turpentine and had his own Secret Service agent. Kept chasing my dog around the yard. Shit, Satan, give me the Belgian beer for once, you know the only beer I like is Bud.

Satan smiled at Billy, knowing who ruled here. Just then, Richard Nixon came through the clubhouse door.

Nixon: George! Old buddy, how are you?

Steinbrenner: Oh my God. Dick. Dick Nixon! You’re here, too?

Nixon: Where else would I be? All politicians go to hell. Well, in reality, all lawyers go directly to hell, and most politicians are lawyers by default.

Steinbrenner: But we were good men in our lives. We did so much good for the world.

Nixon: Don’t I know it, George, don’t I know it, but not everyone can see things the way we do. I never got to thank you for the campaign contributions in ’72. I know you caught hell over those, but I’ve never forgotten.

Steinbrenner: You showed them, though, didn’t you, Mr. Nixon. Crushed McGovern and all those hippies. The day you won that election, I put right up there with any of my World Series wins. What do you do down here?

Nixon: Well, I, uh, don’t like to talk about it.

Satan: He’s Bella Abzug’s campaign manager and sex slave. She’s down here, too.

Steinbrenner: (grimacing) Oh, dear lord. Oh, that’s so harsh. Mr. Nixon, I don’t know what to say.

Nixon: Don’t say anything, George. I don’t want to talk about it.

Steinbrenner: What do we do here?

Satan: This is it.

Steinbrenner: What do you mean “this is it”?

Satan: Some sinners get chased around lakes of fire by one-eyed demons. Some roll boulders up huge hills only to have them roll back down and crush them for eternity. But for our special sinners, like you, we give you a special kind of hell. When you’re here long enough, we allow you to walk around and be part of other people’s hells. So you know you’re not alone.

Billy: George, I lose to the fuckin’ Astros 7-2 every night then get puking drunk on Billy beer.

Nixon: And Bella beats her Republican opponent in New York state every night, then makes passionate love to me in the coat room at the campaign after party. Believe you me, it’s no picnic for her either.

Satan: Mr. Nixon, you know full well you earned your place in hell.

Nixon: So I took a few short cuts.

Steinbrenner: Don’t you do stuff like sit in a theater and watch the movie of your life play out?

Satan: Even I have a heart. That would be hell for everyone. You don’t realize how much time you spend on the toilet and sleeping. You really want to sit in a movie theater and watch that? My ass gets sore if I have to sit and watch a three-hour movie, much less an 80-year long one. Yours does, too.

Steinbrenner: I see your point. But why not a highlights reel?

Satan: Because, Mr. Steinbrenner, hell is not This Week in Baseball, and I’m not here to please you. You work for me here. And I don’t take requests, unless they’re to make some other sinner’s time here more harsh.

Steinbrenner: I’m not the kind who takes orders from anyone!

Satan: (laughing) Oh, I’ll never give you any orders. I’ll just give you this illusion and make you repeat it for eternity. Yell and scream if you want. Make threats. Try not to do it. But you will do this every day and night here. Your office only has a beat-up window fan, and it’s always 87 degrees with 75% humidity. You thought Billy gave you a hard time in New York with a great team? Try it in Pittsburgh with a team batting average of .241 in a stadium where you can hear drunks in the upper level shouting obscenities in Polish at the players.

Steinbrenner: Right off the bat, I have to ask. How do I get to heaven?

Satan, Billy Martin and Richard Nixon erupt in a blaze of laughter, doubling over and slapping each other on the back.

Steinbrenner: What’s so funny?

Billy: George, man, don’t you get it? It doesn’t matter what we thought of ourselves when we were alive. Even Hitler thought he was a great guy. You’re here for a reason. Probably a lot of reasons. I know I am. And you have all the time in the world to think about them. After awhile, it all sinks in.

Steinbrenner: No. This can’t be. There must be some mistake.

Nixon: Take it easy, George, we’re not going to pull a congressional committee on you. We’re not here to judge. We’re all just doing our time. I have no idea what heaven must be like.

Satan: I do. It’s over-rated. Why do you think I left?

Steinbrenner: Well, if it’s so over-rated, why not let me go there instead?

Satan: Mr. Steinbrenner, understand I rule down here. But I’m not running the whole show. Much as I hate Him, I answer to God. We all do. He sent you here. All I did was open the door and let you in.

Steinbrenner: Can I talk to God? You know, I talked to Him all the time when I was alive. In prayer. Or just when I needed help. I know He was listening.

Billy: Well, you must have called Him an asshole or something, because here you are.

The PA system starts to play “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” by The Charlie Daniels Band. George gets a glimmer in his eye and sits down at the card table with Billy Martin, Richard Nixon and Satan.

Steinbrenner: Satan, I have a proposition for you.

Satan: Wouldn’t be the first one I’ve heard or the last. Go on.

Steinbrenner: What if we had a poker tournament, right here, right now, and if I win, you let me talk to God.

Satan: And if one of us wins?

Steinbrenner: You decide. Make me go to Woodstock for eternity. Give me the Cleveland Indians to run, and make Abbie Hoffman the coach. I don’t care. Just give me the chance.

Billy: Satan, don’t listen to him. The man’s a born liar. I know you’re good, but you might lose.

Satan: Billy, you know I never lose.

Billy: That’s the truth. Only thing I think about when we play is how close I can get to winning without it ever happening.

Satan: I’ll take you up on this wager, Mr. Steinbrenner, but understand you will lose. I’m not even worried about introducing you to God. It won’t happen. And even if I did, more than likely, He would tell you why you’re here and be done with you.

Steinbrenner: Just keep your word, Satan. If I’m lucky enough to beat you, you let me worry about God and what to say. If I can sit in a conference room with Reggie Jackson and Billy Martin screaming their heads off and come out on top, nothing scares me after that.

Billy: (burps, opens another Billy beer) Fuckin’ A.

… the scene fades out as Nixon and Steinbrenner pull up their fold-out metal chairs to the card table and Satan shuffles the deck of cards.

… fade back in through a white cloud. A celestial choir. Through the mist, Billy Martin appears, dressed as he was in hell, save he now wears a Yankee’s cap. He’s sitting at a small rectangular white desk on a cloud, in front of large set of silver gates. He’s drinking a can of Budweiser. An elderly woman appears through the cloud and approaches Billy.

The Woman: Who are you? Am I in heaven?

Billy: Who the fuck are you? That is the question, mama. Who the fuck are you?

Disembodied voice: Billy! Language! You know not to speak like that to angels.

Billy: (mumbling) California fuckin’ Angels, should have kicked Jim Fregosi's ass when I had the chance.

The sound of footsteps. It’s George Steinbrenner, in a white suit, and he appears through the gates behind Billy Martin, opening the gates.

Steinbrenner: You’ll have to forgive, Billy, ma’am, he’s still a little rough around the edges. I just traded Mother Teresa and St. Peter to Satan for Billy, $500,000 in cash and a soul to be named later. He’s still learning the ropes here.

The Woman: Is this heaven?

Steinbrenner: Yes, this is heaven. When you pass through these gates, you’ll transform to the best you ever looked in your life, remember only happy times and be reunited with everyone else here that you knew in life. This is heaven!

The Woman: (weeping) Oh, thank God!

Steinbrenner: And me, too, George Steinbrenner!

The Woman: I wasn’t expecting anyone famous to meet me here.

Steinbrenner: Well, I’ve only been here a few days.

The Woman: But you died a few weeks ago, didn’t you? Where were you?

Steinbrenner: Well, long story short, I went to hell. I didn’t like hell. Hell was the worst thing you could imagine for yourself, repeated for eternity. I don’t want to talk about it. But when I was in hell, I challenged Satan to a game of poker with the stipulation that if I won, I could talk to God. Well, we played for two weeks straight, and in the end, I had Satan down to a pair of underpants and an IOU for a ’57 Chevy. So, he got mad, and made a lot of noise, but in the end, he let me talk to God.

The Woman: Have you seen God?

Steinbrenner: No. No one ever does. But you can talk to Him. And up here, He’ll answer you. So I talked to Him. Explained my situation. That I had done a lot of wrong things in my life. Really turned the game of baseball into a mess. Treated many of my underlings with extreme disrespect. But at the end of the day, the good outweighed the bad. And I should have gone to heaven, not hell, there must have been some kind of mistake.

The Woman: And what did God say?

Steinbrenner: He said no.

The Woman: So, why are you here?

Steinbrenner: Well, we kept on talking, and God was pretty straightforward in telling me He was tired of running heaven by Himself. Needed some help in the logistics: concessions, budgeting, the ability to shift around key personnel to suit their skill set. I told Him that if He let me run heaven for a year – not the heavy stuff, just the numbers – and it worked out, I could stay and not go back to hell. I could also trade souls with Satan at my own discretion, as He had heard of my acquisition skills and greatly admired them.

The Woman: You’re not going to trade me to Satan are you?

Steinbrenner: Oh, no, I’d never do anything like that.

Billy (whispering to the woman behind his hand): You better get that in writing.

Steinbrenner: Billy, open the gates. Let this kind woman in. She’s earned her way into heaven. Come on in.

The gates swing open, and the old woman enters heaven, magically transforming to a beautiful, raven-haired woman of 23 in a white robe. The heavenly choir breaks into “New York, New York.” In the distance a silhouette appears behind a cloud: the outline of Richard Nixon.

Richard Nixon: Checkers! Here, Checkers! Come here, boy. Pat, help me find Checkers!

The gates swing shut, and Billy Martin is left alone with his can of Bud. He lights another cigarette and stares off into the distance.

Billy: Fuckin’ Satan was right.