FlamingText

3 Bus Stops: Stop #1

   He asks me if I know the time and I give my best guess. I never carry a watch. I can tell it's just a conversation-starter anyway, because everybody knows that the bus will get here when it gets here no matter what your watch or the timetable posted at the stop may say. While many wait for the bus, the bus waits for no one.

   He is dressed in denim from top to bottom, denim jacket and boot-cut jeans tapered over his black cowboy boots with the toes that come to fine points, the kind we used to call "cockroach killers." He's tall and lean, with a neatly trimmed goatee and black hair greying at the temples, a handsome devil but for the slight telltale glimmer in his eye that signals "slightly unhinged" to me in the language of bus stop acquaintances. The bus won't be here for fifteen minutes at least and I can tell as soon as he asks me for the time that he will soon be regaling me with tales from his rich and adventurous life or else expounding upon his own personal philosophy. I have that effect on certain people. I think it's the way that I don't aggressively stop them when they start talking to me.

   It’s ten-thirty at night on Market Street and I’m waiting for the one bus from Ballard to the University District, where I will catch the bus home. I’m only a little bit hazy on account of I’ve been partying in Ballard, but not till the wee hours, so I’m mostly coherent. * Still, I’m in pretty good spirits and willing to listen to a marginally sane person tell me all about life and art. He tells me right up front that he is an artist, specifically a poet. He asks me if I am an artist. I don’t know what the tip-off is, if it’s my threadbare clothes or my happily glazed eyes or the fact that I’m talking to him at all. Maybe this is his leading question with everybody, an opening for him to start talking about his favorite subject, namely art and his lifelong devotion to it. I tell him I am a musician (indeed, I was playing music not twenty minutes earlier, before I looked up at the clock and realized I had a bus to catch) and he is off and running.

   Keith Moon, he tells me, was the greatest rock drummer of all time. I don’t actually agree with this, but I like Keith Moon’s drumming so I allow that this might be so. Certainly, I say, Keith Moon’s style was very distinctive and, from what I’ve been told by drummers I’ve known, nearly impossible to duplicate. I've always attributed this to what I like to call the “falling down the stairs” school of drum fills, that is to say Moon's fills sound haphazard and out-of-control but somehow manage to land perfectly on the beat, like a pratfall that at the last instant resolves into a neat little forward roll and sashay down the carpet. I have no idea what epitaph is written on Mr. Moon’s grave, but if I had written it, it would read “I meant to do that.”

   Keith Moon is the greatest rock drummer who ever lived, the Denim Poet informs me, because he was a true artist. He was self-taught; Once, when he tried to find an expert drummer to teach him some technique, he was told not to bother, that his own way of doing things was far more interesting than anything somebody else could teach. He could never have been a session drummer because session drummers have to conform to the demands of the music they’re hired to play and not stand out as individuals, and no matter what he did Moon’s playing could be spotted a mile away. So says the Denim Poet.

   He then begins to elaborate on his thesis, which I can tell has been shaped and sculpted through years of repetition: True artists follow their own lights and stay far away from the beaten path. Nothing original ever came of trying to imitate others or do what has already done. Exhibit B in this discourse is Jim Morrison, another mind-blowing True Artist according to the Denim Poet. And here I have to bite my tongue because aside from a brief period in high school I have never given Jim Morrison much credit for being anything but a good-looking drunken blowhard. Those “Jim Morrison, American Poet” posters strike me as hilarious. That’s not to say that I see no merit in the Doors’ music: As I said, for a brief period in high school I derived some enjoyment and I still on occasion have been known to tolerate it. But to me Jim Morrison represents an entirely different archetype: the sullen, brooding film-school student who is far more concerned with other people thinking that he is an artist than he is with actually producing worthwhile art. I believe the word is “pretentious.” But I’m sure it went over like gangbusters in late-sixties L.A., which to me speaks volumes about the tendency of pop culture from that era to take it itself a little too seriously.

   He brings up some other icons of Rock and Roll individualism who flamed bright and then flickered out, the usual suspects; Janis and Jimi and Kurt Cobain, tacked on at the end as though he’d been on the bill at Monterey and not Lollapalooza, but that’s the thing about dying at twenty-seven -- you’re twenty-seven forever. This allows romantics like my new bus-stop friend to picture Jimi and Jim and and Kurt all jamming together in Rock and Roll heaven, forever young, playing solos while they float on a cloud of reverb and heroin. Kurt stepping up to the mike and letting loose with a bloodcurdling scream while Janis takes a break to knock back a few slugs from a bottle of Jack that never gets empty, because this is heaven after all.

   I tell him that I can’t help but notice that all the True Artists he’s mentioning seem to have died from drug overdoses, and he glares at me:
“Now you’re just judging me, man.”

I throw my hands up in the universal sign of “hey, look, I’m not holding any weapons and I’m backing slowly away from you” and he relents a little bit.

“I’m just saying.” I add.

“Do you know who Michael Schenker is?” he asks. I answer that I think he was a guitar player in the Scorpions.

“The Scorpions and then UFO. But he left all that behind and formed the Michael Schenker Group. Everybody wanted him in their band, Ozzy asked him to be in his band, Aerosmith, everybody. He turned him all down because he wanted to do things his way. Greatest guitar player I’ve ever heard. Nobody sounds like him!”

“The point is, you gotta be your own person, and be the best. If you want to make Art, you’ve got to set out to the best, you’ve got to believe you're the best, and you can’t settle for anything less than the best. It’s not about taking drugs, it’s about intensity. It’s about not giving a fuck! It’s like how I am with poetry, man – I don’t give a fuck. I just write from my soul.”

“So would you say that you’re the Michael Schenker of poetry?” I ask.

“Yes! Yes, exactly! I’m the Michael Schenker of poetry.” He seems pleased with this.

“Hey man, do you like Vicodin?” he asks, reaching inside his coat pocket.

“No thanks.” I say. I’m wondering if this might be the means by which he supplements his income from poetry royalties. Is he an independent pharmaceutical retailer?

“Seriously, I’ve got some. Here man, I'm giving it to you, I'm not trying to sell you anything.” He is thrusting a little white tablet towards me. Out of the corner of my eye I can see the bus approaching. It is three stops away.

I again refuse politely, but he won’t take no for an answer. Finally, after two or three more overtures, I accept his gift and tuck it in my pocket. Wondering how crazy I’d have to be to actually take a pill offered to me under such circumstances. (Answer:Crazier than I am, but not crazier than I've ever been.)

As the bus approaches, he demands my assurance: “So you’re a singer, huh? Are you the best there is? The best in the world?”

“I’m pretty good,” is my response.

“No man, you’ve gotta be the best! Pretty good, who cares about that? Here’s a flyer – I read poetry at this place in Belltown every month, you should come by.”

It's a flyer for a poetry reading, and next to the event and venue name is a picture of a dead cockroach.

When I get home later I tell Mr. Galt my story and we sit down at the computer to look up the markings on the pill in an internet database for prescription pills.

“Well, I’ll be damned. Yup, it’s Vicodin alright.”

And that is the story of the time I met the Michael Schenker of poetry.

Next: Stop #2

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Loosening the Church's condom policy?

   Rumors have been circulating among Vatican watchers for weeks that the church might be preparing to issue an exception to its longstanding policy against condom use in cases where one member of a married couple is HIV positive. With HIV infection rates at epidemic levels in much of sub-Saharan Africa, transmission between married couples has become a significant issue in the growing Catholic population there. Relaxing the Church's prohibition on condom use for married Catholics in such instances might be regarded as "the lesser of two evils," according to former Archbishop of Milan Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini. The former archbishop offered this comment in response to a recent interview with Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan's in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica where he indicated that the Vatican planned to release a statement on this in the near future.

   The evil to which Cardinal Martini is referring is not necessarily the evil of latex. After all, lambskin condoms have long been available and slaughtering lambs is certainly very biblical. No, in this case it is the evil of birth control that is at issue. But even that isn't strictly the case, because the Church has long allowed married couples to practice the rhythm method. * So strictly speaking, the evil represented by condom use is that of effective birth control.

   If the rumors are true and this policy finds its way into church doctrine, only married Catholics with deadly sexually-transmitted diseases will be allowed to practice safe and effective birth control. All other married couples would still have to stick with the aforementioned rhythm method or, as it's commonly known in reproductive healthcare circles, "waitin' and prayin'."

   It's thinking like this that has made the Catholic Church one of the fastest-growing faiths in the developing world today. To reinforce the underlying teachings, on Tuesday the pontiff delivered the following message from the balcony of St Peter's Basilica in Rome to an assembled crowd numbering in the thousands:

"Make more Catholics!"

The sermon, which was delivered in thirty-three languages including Portuguese, Swahili and Mandarin Chinese, was received with thunderous applause.

   In other news, sex is naughty and dirty and wrong. In tonight's Action News lifestyle exposé, we find out why local marital aid retailers are reporting that for the tenth straight year running, plaid skirts and kneesocks remain the most popular accessories for couples looking to put the sizzle back in their relationships, outselling all other ensembles by a factor of two to one! Tune in for film at eleven. Long, lingering, soft-focus, low-angle film, as we take you inside specialty retail store "Amour du la Mall" to check out some of their top-selling outfits and ask "What does it mean?"