Olympia

Day 1

I've been planning this trip for months, have been looking forward to leaving, seeing new places, playing music for new people, but actually making that first step, getting into the car and driving away, was more difficult than I ever imagined. There should be some sort of ritual to cover that awkward moment of departure, something to dictate what I should do and how I should act. As it was, there was a great emotional void as I stood with Rachel by my truck. I said "Well. . ." she said "Well. . . ." Then I got in and drove off, feeling nothing but terror.

All the way down 101, I was sure I would never make it the 96 miles to Olympia. My beat up '78 pickup [1] had passed its pre-trip exam successfully, yet I lived through a thousand breakdowns in those few hours. The car didn't sound or feel right. My last long-distance trip, it was the tires -- I was sure they would blow. This time, I had put on four brand-new radials. This time it was the suspension. I could vividly picture a tie rod breaking, sending my car careering into oncoming traffic [2]. I imagined Rachel's grief as the police came to the door to tell her I hadn't even made it to my first gig.

Anytime I imagine my own death, it's not myself I worry about. My first thought is for the bereaved, as if staying alive is something I do to avoid causing my family and friends pain. It's a strange sort of guilt to bear, born of conceit or denial or some other neurosis that I don't have a name for [3]. Whatever the cause, I was sufficiently preoccupied that I didn't think to note my pre-trip mileage until Quilcene. 107700. None down and, at my best guess, five thousand to go.

Vinny and Amy, my hosts in Olympia, live in one of those residential areas that is right on the edge of affluence. Driving there, you go through street after street of beautiful homes thinking, hey, these people have done okay for themselves. Then you make that last turn and find the houses suddenly shrunken and dirty, with battered cars parked in cracked driveways.

When I arrive, Vinny is just home from the state legislature where he drives a computer, and Amy is starting dinner. Vinny slouches on the sofa while I change my guitar strings, and we reminisce about François, who died of cancer last year [4]. François and I were supposed to play together at the Quincy Street coffeehouse [5] the week he was diagnosed [6]. Vinny and I played instead, as a benefit, and were amazed to find that we had raised over $400 for François' family. Meanwhile, in Seattle, François was receiving the first of many unsuccessful chemotherapy treatments [7]. That benefit was the beginning of my musical association with Vinny.

After dinner, And after the three kids had been put to bed, Vinny got his guitar out and we played the songs we used to do when I was in Vinny's band [8]. I'd forgotten how much I loved to play with Vinny, how good a songwriter he is [9]. We sang harmony together, Amy joining in on "Quiet Times," about Vinny's experiences as a young man in Canada. "Quiet Times, soft fresh snow/Cabins in Ontario/Oh, so many ways to go/Footprints like a painting of what I have just been/Sweet memories of soft comforting days. [10]"

[2] This in fact is what happened when "Carmen" was destroyed. A man was driving his black Corvette down my street, when suddenly a tie rod in his suspension system failed. The car became unmanageable, and he plowed directly into Carmen, stoving in her whole left side. The Corvette went on to do minor damage to at least two other vehicles before it came to rest in the next block. I was in the house, but had no idea what had happened until my next-door neighbor[19] came to the door, asking what had happened to my car. I got some satisfaction from the fact that the street was littered with pieces of black fiberglass from the body of the Corvette, which had sustained far greater cosmetic damage than my Ghia.

[3] It has become quite clear to me that my mother suffers more when I am ill than I do. When I was twenty-one, I took a trip to Sequim, thirty miles up Hwy 101 (I took the bus, as I did not yet have a car or a driver's license)[20]. During this trip, I ate some mushrooms that landed me in the hospital[21]. My mother had to drive to Port Angeles to pick me up, after an unexpected call from me which must have scared her half to death.

When I was twenty-six, I was hospitalized again. I had been sick with a flu for ten days[22], had eaten almost nothing, and was both throwing up and having diarrhea. At the end of that time, I looked in the toilet, and saw what appeared to be blood. The entire stool was liquid and a dark red. I called Gabrielle into the bathroom to see. She agreed that it looked like blood. We put some of it into a jar, and she drove me to the emergency room. The tech who brought me in and began collecting my payment information didn't seem concerned that I thought I had blood in my stools. Neither did the lab tech who came to collect my stool sample. "Eaten any beets lately?," he quipped. When I handed him the jar, his smile vanished. He called a doctor over. From that moment on, everyone I dealt with had a poker face. The doctor ordered a whole list of tests, and began grilling me about what I had eaten, my health history, allergies. One of the things he mentioned was a parasite that exists in raw fish. This frightened me - I had served several friends[23] sushi that I had made with raw salmon only a few days before I got sick. The thought that I had made several other people sick as well made me feel extremely guilty. "We're going to keep you," the doctor said. "So am I going to live?" I asked, jokingly, tying to make the doctor crack a smile. "Well, we'll run some tests," he said, dead serious.

When I had been x-rayed, and moved into a room, I had the nurse bring me a sheet of paper and a pen, and I wrote up a will. The nurse signed as a witness. My mother was there, as well as Gabrielle, and it was obvious that she was extremely anxious, more so than I was. By the next day, I was getting used to being there, but my mother was still obviously suffering. I began to feel worse for her than I did for myself, and I didn't know how to make her feel better. Sometime during the night, Eric, a hospital worker who was a roommate of Rachel's, poked his head into my room, a concerned look on his face. "Could you tell Rachel I'm here?," I asked, "and ask her to stop by if she gets a chance?" He promised he would. The next day, I was scheduled very early in the morning for a flexible sigmoidiscope coloscopy [24], and before the procedure, they wanted my innards clear, so they sent a nurse to give me an enema. She loaded me up with fluid, and asked me to hold it in as long as I could. I very quickly began to have the worst intestinal cramps I had ever had. Gabrielle was there, and she squeezed my hand as I grimaced in pain [25]. The enema came out dark and bloody. The nurse loaded me up again. The pain was even worse. We repeated this procedure four times, but the fluid still wasn't coming clear. By this time, I was exhausted from the pain of the cramping, and I begged for a break. When we began again, it was with a different nurse, as the shift had just changed. The nurse came in with the enema bottle [26], and put it in the sink first thing, immersing it in warm water. She was shocked to find that the previous nurse hadn't done this. "No wonder you were having cramps," she said. The warm enema was quite a bit less unpleasant than the prior four cold ones. Later that day, Rachel came by, and sat with me for most of the afternoon. The following day, she called in sick[27] and spent the entire day with me [28]. By the end of that day, one of the tests had come up positive - for Campylobacter Jejuni, a bacteria that, I was told, was becoming the second most common foodborne illness [29]. I was put on Erythromycin, and had a solid stool about four hours later. The next day, I was released, after signing papers promising to pay my bill [30]. As Gabrielle was busy scrubbing the house from top to bottom (as I had asked her to do), she asked Rachel if she could take me to her house until she was finished. Rachel did so, letting me soak in her wonderful large bathtub, then settling me into her bed. Not much later, she was lying next to me, and we were cuddling and stroking each other, deep in lust[31]. Within forty-eight hours, Gabrielle had seen a change coming, and left for her parents' house with her car packed to the ceiling[32].



[4] When Vinny recorded his album "A Child Awoke," he paid his musicians with gift certificates for massages with me[33]. During Francois' massage, we talked about his recent health history. He had a very strange rash of dark-colored bumps on his rump that concerned me. He said that he had had a history of kidney trouble, and I speculated that this might be the problem. Speaking with him further, he enumerated other symptoms which made it clear to me that he had some sort of general systemic problem. I advised him to go to a naturopath[34]. When I saw him for his second massage, he told me that the naturopath had given him some vitamins. This made me angry. I told him he needed to find out what the problem was that was causing these symptoms. In addition, he had injured the same hip while practicing Aikido, and there was an enormous swelling there. He had apparently gone to a sports medicine specialist, who agreed that the swelling was caused by the injury. This didn't seem right to me. Only a few days later, he wound up in the doctor's office again, and was admitted for exploratory surgery, which revealed a huge tumor in his thigh. He was scheduled for chemotherapy immediately, and packed off to Seattle.

[5] This began as a temporary center for the Port Townsend Nuclear Free Zone campaign. Called the "Free Zone," it was a nonsmoking coffeehouse where local musicians performed to raise money for the legal battle to have Port Townsend declared a Nuclear Free Zone[35]. After it had fulfilled its purpose, Singer Cici Dawn, and photographers Susan Cicotte, and Michael Liss, kept it open as the Quincy Street Coffeehouse, where it became a haven for local musicians and counterculture types[36].

[6] The show would have been on March 17th, Francois' and my mutual birthday.

[7] Francois went into remission for about half a year, during which time, I was able to record one of his pieces for the Port Townsend Dreams compilation album. After that, the cancer returned, and had metastatized, spreading into his kidneys. Francois decided to shun the medical industry, and tried to beat the disease using natural healing methods. He died on March 13th, 1990, a few days before his birthday.

[8] Vinny and The Heroes[37]. Vincent Pollina - guitar, vocals, Deborah Shomer - backing vocals, Percussion, Ray Speck - bass, and myself on lead and rhythm guitars.

[9]. I actually enjoy playing in acoustic bands as a sideman as much as I do being a soloist or frontman. There is far less pressure, I am not on the spot, and yet I have an opportunity to add to the music, to be creative, to transform what the artist has created so that it becomes a co- creation[38]. Nevertheless, although I have made it clear to many people that I enjoy this, I am almost never asked to join bands, or to play on other peoples'recordings. This produces two contrasting feelings. The first is paranoid - that I am no good, that nobody wants me to play with them because I am not good enough. The second is conceited - that nobody believes that I would really want to play with them, because I am too good.

[10] Vinny always preceded this song with a story about times that he spent in that cabin in the woods. He had quite a variety of stories, from the time it was so cold that ice formed on the inside of the walls and they had to go out looking for the cat, to the time he took LSD and went canoeing. He would always judge the audience beforehand, gauging which story would be best suited to the crowd. Often, the story would go on longer than the song.