The Story of Therapy Dog Tails 576
Where Everyone Gets a Dose of Puppy Love
BACKGROUND 253: JLHS Part Two 26
Mon., Oct. 8, 2007, Columbus Day
… I heard from Mandy and her husband that she has a big singing voice and loves to sing and would like to come out and do some recording. I mentioned to her something about the community service and she is already backing out of it, saying that she doesn’t have the time since they are looking for an apartment. They live in a fairly big place in Brooklyn but it’s being renovated and causing them trouble so they’re looking in Manhattan. She told me about going into the Peace Corps overseas (forget where) and then going to Texas and meeting her husband and then going to Japan to teach for a while. I think she is originally from the Washington D.C. area but met her husband in Texas.
I heard that Lisa Ray is also from Texas and just decided to make the daring move to come to New York. She heard about the teaching fellowship program in Texas, I think. Since music was being discussed and she said that she had played some bass in a band somewhere and she looks to be about the same age as Amanda, I mentioned that I’d been taken to a couple of concerts the past couple of years. That’s when I found out that Lisa not only had heard of but likes both Ben Lee and Sufjohn Stevens.
I suddenly got a call from Ian McDonald. I had not heard from him in months. The last time I talked to him was when I was refusing to pick up his phone call and he faked me out by calling from a different number. He just wanted to know where Luz was but he clearly got the idea that I didn’t want to have anything to do with him or that. So it was a surprise to get a call this night while we were at Havana Central. He said he was walking up Broadway somewhere. I told him where we were and told him that Luz was there and invited him to come over. He implied that he might but never showed. He was just checking to find out if I was with Luz and maybe he believed me. Maybe he talked to her. She had told me that she had not talked to him in a long time and maybe that’s true. But I guess when he got the impression that she was with me, he gave up on her.
On the other hand Luz said that she was going for the 3rd or 4th night of a facial when we left that place and maybe she was. She got into a cab and some others headed home leaving a contingent to move onto the comedy club where I’d been a couple of times with Lizze and Segal’s friend Dave, who by this time had also joined the group. Karl had come in by the time we left, too, so it was those three, Mandy and her husband, Keely and me.
We didn’t see any comedy but had a couple of shots and then some more beer at a table inside this place where I was walking around with $1800 in cash in my briefcase and by this time was drunk enough to tell Dave about that. Dave is very cool. He likes to lay back and observe the scene, which he did when I got into it again about Tarantino with Mandy’s husband (don’t recall his name). He thought that my claims that Tarantino is immoral were hilarious. It reminded me of that sociopathic boyfriend that broke up with Amanda on her birthday. He, too, argued with me about Tarantino. I pointed that out to Dave. I reminded him of that and implied that time would tell about this guy.
Keely made contact with someone from Columbia and we found ourselves at an apartment party that was something out of a Woody Allen movie - a bunch of people crowded into a couple of rooms, standing room only. They seemed to be talking about various academic things while we were just drinking. I’d even taken up two six packs of beer. I think I ended up spending about $150 this night and it was not money that we have lying around. But Keely was annoyed by the people there. I remember her making fun of them at one point so we only stayed long enough for Dave to hook my iPod into the sound system to play a little Jimi Hendrix. Somehow I managed to walk out of there with it back in my pocket although by then I was pretty drunk. The two shots at the comedy club were taking their toll on me.
We headed for the jazz club that Lizzie has talked to me about over the past year or so. Amanda had been up there at least once with them. By this time, ca. midnight, we were down to Lizze, Karl, Keely and me. I couldn’t tell you how we got there or even where this place is but I was coherent enough to carry on a conversation about racism in education with a black guy at the bar who immediately began to harangue me about this as soon as we got there and I tried to order a beer around him. That is all I remember about that place. There was some music going on when we walked in but they took a break and I didn’t notice when they started up again or who or what they were. I guess it was some sort of jazz. I spent more than an hour talking with this guy and that was making Lizzie mad. Another black guy who was less ballistic joined in at some point. But it was just a discussion and it never bothered me. It just took up my time there.
The next thing I knew, Keely was standing outside on the sidewalk having a smoke and Lizzie was telling me that we had to get out of there. They were throwing all four of us out. Keely had gotten annoyed - Lizzie told me this later and then I heard it from Keely Friday night at Ron’s Irish bar - and when they pushed her to get away from a poster on the wall, she just turned and ripped it down. So we all became persona non grata. I didn’t make any attempt to stay or to do anything else at all but at least I walked out of there with my briefcase on my shoulder, my iPod in my front pocket and my wallet, which had about $300 from paying for the drinks and food at Havana on a card and collecting cash the way Amanda used to do for me, still in my back pocket. It’s really amazing actually that I got home from this with everything in tact.
Lizzie tried to get me to stay at their place and I even went upstairs with them but then insisted on going home even though it was at least two a.m. and I knew I couldn’t catch the last train out of Penn Station. Karl walked me to the A train and I had to stand up to stay awake. There were two kids at some point trying to pickpocket me - the first time anything like that has ever happened to me in New York so I guess I’m getting too old for this sort of thing. But then this was the latest I’d been out in a long, long time. I remember a couple of really drunken nights on trains late at night back in the 80’s but nothing like that in the last 20 years or so.
I don’t remember waiting for the 4:30 train at Penn Station. I must have gotten there at about three o’clock and kept walking. I called Luz a couple of times and she called me a few times to keep me awake on the train and that worked out somehow. I went straight to bed and got up around noon or so, I guess. This, of course, was not what I’d planned, especially carrying that cash around. I’d left most of it at school but it would have been tough to lose $1800 this night.
So there it is. That’s about it for this school year so far. I’ve typed all of this standing here in the living room. There was a problem with the Olds that turned out to cost only $35 for a new ignition piece. That got taken care of today. But I’m generally depressed today because of the way I got treated by Luz this weekend. She just wants me to perform all of her voodoo and I’m tired of that bullshit. She abused me last night for not carrying a box from Home Depot down to the basement yesterday. Then she left her clothes on the bed and I threw them on the floor and told her this morning that I’d done that so she bitched more this morning before getting out of here to go to work. I tried to ignore her but that is not possible. She depresses me more than she makes me happy. Every once in a while she makes me happy but most of the time she just makes me miserable. I can’t take much more of this. I’ll try to cheer myself up a bit with the music. I’m still going through the whole thing putting in LPs. I just put in the Buckingham albums, all four of them. One of them is playing right now. I hope I’ll be able to write the letter to Yael that I was hoping to get written yesterday but we’ll see. I’m in no mood right now to do anything at all. I left the notes from Dale’s trip at the end of the September entry and maybe I’ll never get around to writing that up.
Sat., Oct. 13, 2007
Sun., Oct. 14, 2007, 6:24 a.m.
Well, friend, no sooner did I get the date written there yesterday then Geoff waltzed down here and agreed to do some recording. That must have been around noon or one o’clock and he had a plan to go to a party in Brooklyn, a birthday party for someone from Kean. In the end he didn’t go to that but what it meant for me was that we went right up there and put down a basic track for Those Already Dead. The idea is for all four of us to play some acoustic guitar on that song and since they are supposed to be coming out here today to work on the songs that we practiced again on Thursday at the 47th St. Jam - Sadie’s Shell, It’s 3 O’clock and Ballad of the Lost Blueblood. There is also Those Already Dead but since the band only plays the ending together and that consists of the same three chords played over and over with an occasional stop time, it doesn’t require a great deal of rehearsal, nothing like what Sadie’s Shell needs. It will take some sort of a miracle for us to get a good take of that song down because there are so many variables. I mean, friend, it maybe be the same four chords repeated over and over, the same four chords, I might add that make up the hook on From Now On, not to mention that they are also the opening to House of the Rising Sun and hundreds of other songs - it might be the same 4 chords over and again, I say, but that only makes it harder for us. There has got to be an ebb and flow in that song that we cannot pin down in an arrangement. So it will be hit and miss ….