You know I was born to travel
Can’t be sorry I’m not home.
Rand McNally wrote my Bible
Willie Nelson wrote my song.
Part I
Chapter One
The waxing gibbous moon is swollen and hanging too low to the southeast—a bag of birth waters ready to break. Living End. The band name alone evokes anxiety. In an antique wrought iron patio chair inside his sister Jean’s screened-in sun porch, Tony tries to let the holiday evening chill in the air cool his unease. But looking up at the moon, he feels like his own penumbra has gone a bit dim.
A lot can happen within the mind as one spends the time to recoup, recover, and otherwise amp back up to sanity. To clean up and get straight, like Tony is trying to do this Christmastime, isn’t easy either. In his case, this well-deserved time off, as have countless times before, hijacked the inviolable moment and forced him down. Down on a vivid excursion, another journey inward, to explore the lanes, ditches, and gutters that run through the labyrinth of his memories.
Oh God, I’m on my way to another lesson
There behind him, hidden so well it’s obvious, appears the headstrong trail that Tony alone had blazed that leads to a flat black cover of sadness as he realizes his aspirations and dreams have all fallen, thus far, short. But this trip never fails to take a turn, by offering a glimpse of what the future may bring, an enchanting or sometimes terrifying, always a powerful look into the shoulder blade of the Illustrated Man.
He sees before him times that look more like chores than challenges. No longer can he view his life as he once did so confidently, because the larger picture, once wholly constituted by all of the smaller portions of his existence, is no longer sufficiently substantial. His colors are running like a flag in the hands of an enemy.
Some call it soul searching, others, confusion, or even mental illness, but there’s nothing mysterious about it to Tony. It boils down to what his conscience presents the mind it oversees, and over which the soul passes judgment, the classically philosophical and rudimentary questions of the ages.
I didn’t plan to land here
It’s the morning after Big D’s annual Christmas party but the noise outside his green and orange hotel room door drones afternoon. How many afternoons after the party Tony cannot be sure. It’s familiar territory. He knows he doesn’t always wake up before sunrise, which means he cannot be sure that sleep lasted the course of a single night.
Scared once again and compelled by many similar vows he’s made before, he can change his ways. His innards hurt as if he had swallowed a harpoon-pierced swordfish and the directives in his head are loud and clear.
A vow to me, yet again, I shall! I shall wake daily, before sunrise, and, while the rest of my sick society slaves a Gregorian watch, I will simply watch the sun and the moon and celebrate solstice and equinox. Always on time, all ways.
It sounds heavenly, but Tony easily reasons that doing so reduces pure celestial elemental events to mere timekeepers, nonetheless. Still a slave.
The auditory delay of the words formed by Pression’s mouth wears off in a moment as Tony involuntarily jerks forward, realizing he’s in the middle of a conversation, without knowing how or when he had arrived.
“He shut me off, so I told him off,” Tony tells Pression inside of a yawn and morning stretch. She looks and sounds quite spirited for the day’s first words. She is slow in the morning, though not nearly as inherently sluggish as Tony.
“Like some creepy redneck, you told Big D he could just you-know-what your you-know-what,” corrects Pression.
She mocks, clearly incensed, but giggles at the very thought of having to utter the phrase, even in mere repetition. Pression, at the same time, shoots Tony an uncommon bristly eye to stress her relative disgust.
“You yelled at Big D, Tony, in front of his guests, and you really pissed him off.”
In his mind’s eye, Tony vaguely sees his bad little self, standing up to the grand, red man in the huge, green suit, inside the Irish and Latino entourage surrounding them. It was later but not that late, and everyone else was still drinking as far as Tony could see. He wanted another one, too; his mind spoon-feeding the information now.
What else but a drink could have possibly mattered to a special guest at Big D’s Christmas party, at his premier club in Miami, a town renowned for intemperance? Tony stumbles through justice — his own.
“You were turned away by the bartender,” Pression fills in the gaps. “Then you went right back to the bar, again, straight up to Big D.”
Echoes of laughter and the beautifully ugly faces that he can still see had brought with the rejection belligerent intolerance as Tony’s hearty barter for a last-call beverage turned into a trip over the edge of descent.
“I’m glad I wasn’t there to witness it.” Pression is an understanding girl, but last night was altogether too imprudent and stroppy for her.
All glamorization of what a low-life situation was already, dwindles as Tony imagines himself, eyes afloat, glazed, and unfocused, his body swaying rotationally, like Baum’s Tin Man during the intoxicative middle break of his, “If I Only Had a Heart.”
Tony wasn’t standing in the middle of the yellow brick road, though. Oh, no. Tony was standing in the middle of a human gauntlet of deep, dark Miami sludge, and his words sounded more like slurring variables just clear enough to label them vulgar, but on the inside, even self-deprecatingly so, Tony hides his ride on the guilt donkey.
“Someday, they’ll say I am lucky to be alive.”
Pression is not impressed with the branded humor because this particular incident could have easily turned worse. Things can most times be better, but she rationalizes two indisputable facts: Things can always be worse, and, there is always hope.
“I have a headache, Presh,” Tony murmurs and reaches for Pression’s rear end to round out his resolutions.
“Jesus, Tony!” Pression uncharacteristically spits, crying now into a flat, yellowing hotel pillow. “Go look in the effing mirror.”
He sees a face so banged up he’s not sure it’s his, but his Swiss cheese memory of the incident pumps him up, and the more Tony takes in his wounds the better he feels. A queued male ego, small beast-like, impatiently awaiting release.
The boys in the crew must be extremely impressed — but everybody else?
After all, it’s not every day some displaced Yankee – a hot wire at that – walks up to, and tells the original Southern Big Dawg – Big D – right up in his face, in the name of defiance, to “just suck my rig!”
“I accept this whole thing as pure comedy, not much more,” Tony believes what he is saying. “And I expect the same reaction from the group.”
No real harm done, Tony reasons out, it was simply a hazard of the business. Not much more than an extra bit of good free press for the band, and maybe not so undesirable press for the Big D’s chain either, for it is said, any press is good press. Media and ratings are hunger-driven, and people down Miami are hungry for trouble.
We’ll share an odd bit of humiliation, Tony legitimizes, and then the press will have been all but dead within a week. Big D is humiliated at having, against his better judgment, invited a rock band to his finest and favorite gala of the year in the first place, his top money maker, or not. He is most embarrassed, however, for having put up with the cocky drummer’s last-call nonsense in the second.
Tony’s humiliation is shown plainly on the ass he made of himself in overindulgence. Beginning by now to desensitize, notwithstanding Big D’s brand of punishment and discipline, that’s what bothers Tony most. He’s glad Presh was spared till the aftermath. Public humiliation, of course, makes Big D hurt worse.
Always does, a mobster ego
Tony, by contrast, is used to all that. Traveling with a personal roady had spoiled him somewhat, but Tony has eaten his share of knuckle sandwiches. The policy reads the crew does not step in, until or unless, the talent is hit or hits the ground first. This is not a band favorite clause, but it is agreed upon lawfully, as arising at all after hitting the floor can somehow build character. How long must talent lay still before the crew assumes there will be no ascension? The jury’s still out on that.
Tony doesn’t believe the oily, little grunt that slammed him in the face posed that much of a threat, but Presh cuts short his explanation.
“He hit you hard enough to send you backward eight feet, over the brass fence rail!”
Big D is an easy six foot five and two hundred-ninety pounds of solid, Irish bruiser. He was the larger threat – the body of the guarded – not the bodyguard. Known on the circuit as a hot little Yankee, Tony stands five-feet-nine in his boots, maybe ten with his hair blown Lyle Lovett high. A toned one-hundred-seventy-five pounds, born of northern Maine potato farmers, woodsmen, and French-Irish Indian boxers, Tony is full of Semtex and keg powder without an ounce of sissy. Mix all that up with a little alcohol and self-medication. Make that a lot of alcohol and self-medication.
All of Big D’s clubs have those maze-like entries in the foyers that lead to the action, though brass, not velvet. Stereotypically true to the theme, getting into a Florida Big D’s is reminiscent of a line for a Disney World attraction.
“Or, like a cow to slaughter,” Pression says. “If you’re a girl.”
“Or, maybe a good milking,” Tony forces a painful hoot.
“Son,” she puts on her best Farmer Brown impersonation. “In the shape you were in, I do believe that a one-armed, rubber-tittied, Johnson City fem coulda done just as good a job, pinkie extended and all.”
“I consider myself lucky that Big D didn’t haul off and hit me in his own defense — or offense if you like.”
“Early morning reports suggest,” Pression sounds like a reporter on the scene. “You sailed backward, failed to regain your footing, and before you knew it, had a gut full of brass rail …
“You scored a ten from the crowd after doing a good-old-fashioned somersault over the damn thing.”
With a crack and a splat, Tony hit those fucking Big-D-green ceramic floor tiles, dead weight, and face first. Mixing it up with kamikaze, pure white, and a head full of Ludes, as was the unfortunate norm, Tony was high, not hot. Higher than a Georgia Pine he was, until he hit the floor. From there, he’s no higher than fresh-cut timber, down, red sap running, ready to roll. He only needs to wait for the truck, like a log to the mill.
There’s no crew member in sight as he takes a token look around for support, so he stalks on, swaggering wide over to Big D, like the Duke to a pilgrim. With nary a thought besides a drink, he grabs a bulky, suited bicep, and with all his might spins the big man around. Bleeding all over the boss’s lapels, Tony forgives the thrashing, and barters on for the nightcap.
Tony, landing in the parking lot this time, isn’t sure who knocked him senseless, and no longer cares, but he feels the coccyx breaking ache in the seat of his pants, the kick off the tip of a Puerto Rican fence climber. He manages one eye open just in time to see Pression pulling around with the RV.
Tony falls up the steps and collapses on the deck with Hog cursing and grunting as he pushes from behind. Dolphin sits at the front cabin table ingesting a late-night dose of flake off the back of his ‘59 Telecaster. He’s alert, all right, but doesn’t bother looking up.
Tony’s wordless thought in a moment delivers him, finally, from brownout to black.