Jamie’s Jam

Since I became a technical grown up, I’ve been adamant about not having a “best friend.” I’ve many friends I hold most dear, and a hanai brother I cannot imagine life without. But I’ve recently come to understand that I do have a best friend, and I’ve recently had to welcome him into the club of peers who’ve lost a parent. I’m trying to make sense of it, to get a grip on the staggering losses suffered by those I’m fortunate enough to have as friends.

Shon has been with me through my darkest times for at least the past 15 years, and it breaks my heart to see him suffer in quiet, valiant dignity. He’s never wronged me, and he once taught me a life lesson when he was about 18 and I was 23. He spoke sincerely as we sat in his car after a night of partying, and his wisdom and insight into my behavior brought me to tears. I will never forget his lesson. In short, we’re here to lift each other up as friends, all of us.

He’s in The Club now, a concept my sister Shannon made me aware of a few weeks ago. I spoke briefly with Shon’s brother Zack, whom I’ve know since well before he became a big, handsome man. As I was leaving the service last night, I stopped to give Zack a hug. He explained to me that he’s aware of the bewildering sense of loss I’ve been through, and he made clear that it helps him to know that he and his are not alone in that emotional wasteland.

It sure is hard to be a grown-up.

Reading my last post, uploaded a year ago, I’m only now beginning to understand why I haven’t posted in so long. That year is a blur, one long day and one long night of pain and sorrow and inconsolable grief. Since that last post, I learned my mother had cancer, festering in her brain and in her lungs. I watched her fight like hell through radiation and chemotherapy. I watched her fight with a dignity and a good humor that I can only hope to demonstrate should I ever be forced with the inevitability of dying too early. Ma died in April, alone at home after chasing my father out of the house to a lunch appointment he wanted to cancel, because Ma wasn’t feeling well. I believe her words to him were “Goddamit, Jimmy, I’m not a fucking invalid. If I need you, I’ll call.” Ma was an extremely tough broad.

It was my sister Karen who found her. I got a call at about noon on Thursday, April 27. Karen was trying not to be hysterical. “I don’t think mom’s alive anymore,” she sobbed. I found, and continue to find it, a rather peculiar choice of words. Since then, someone quite close to me, and some not so close but certainly near, have suffered similar losses. It’s been a shitty year.

Chrissy, my “ex,” came out to visit Ma in February, a fine visit, and returned for the funeral. That was a source of hope for release from utter despair, but a week after her departure following Ma’s funeral, I got a myspace message from Chrissy telling me that she was letting go of whatever relationship we had agreed was worth saving, and that I should do the same. Nice.

I’ve been lucky to have someone new who cares deeply about me, someone who’s kept me from crawling into a bottle to die. I’ve got caring and hilarious housemates I know worry about me, but they aren’t overbearing and are more than happy to sit with me over beers at our patio table into the wee hours most nights, laughing at and relishing the little stories that have bound us. One of them also just lost her mother, and I now know the true difference between empathy and sympathy.

I’ve worked hard, although I went back to part time at my day gig, which is actually a night gig, to be able to spend time with my family. I’m part time there, but still work at least 60 hours a week with my other freelance and musician gigs.

I’ve had the band, my sole source of pure catharsis, and the company of fine friends to allay the anguish that stalks me relentlessly. Well wishes from my friends at Hawaii Threads have also been a source of invaluable comfort.

I’m not sure what’s got me started writing again here, but it may have something to do with having a party for my birthday on Friday, my first without my Ma. It began wonderfully enough, with a fine dinner at Murphy’s at a table with a permanent memorial for Ma and beneath a wee urn with some of her ashes kept above the finest Irish whiskies in all the world. About twenty of my friends showed up, some surprisingly, not because of any harbored animosity, but because of the disparities in the lifestyles of those who raise families, and those who raise hell.

Within 24 hours of the start of the party, three of the friends whom I hold most dear made clear, in no uncertain terms, a bitter and vitriolic contempt in which I’ve been held by them for what is apparently quite some time. The first was easy to walk away from, in light of the fact that the friend had been drinking heavily since before I woke up, drinking everything he could get his hands on in my house before I had even gotten out of bed. The second was my life-saver, with a vociferous berating about my inabilities to reciprocate the true love and affection she had, until that moment, been so generous to offer. The third was an argument with a band member that was the most hostile exchange I’ve been a part of for, well, a very long time. But, then again, it’s been a long year.

Apologies were made to and accepted by me (I’m unable to hold a grudge). Everything is okay again with everyone, and I’ve just enjoyed another night of witty banter and cocktails in the safety of my own house. I remain at once confused and certain, confused by how people who demonstrate such affection for me can explode into ad hominem attacks, and certain that I know that, for me, forgiveness is part of being a friend. I am as willing to give it as I am to require it. I have, however, been diligent in avoiding the need for forgiveness for drunken insults to inscrutable people. Yeah, I still turn to the bar for comfort, but I’m fairly certain I haven’t done anything to be ashamed of since my Ma went. Everyone that knows and cares about me is astonished that I didn’t crawl into a bottle or a baggie to die (the bottle worries I understand, but I’ve always been repulsed by real substance abuse). It’s not because I think my Ma is watching, which I do, but I do know that as I honored her while I still had her, the reasons I did remain.

There’s a whole world more to the past year, and I do want to write about it, but my priority tonight was getting started.

It’s quiet here at The Compound. Just the doves bubbling outside and a busy breeze moving the trees to fill my ears. I’ve elected to leave the TV off on a Saturday morning, something unusual for me, but it feels right.

Doolin Rakes played at Anna Bannana’s last night with Go Jimmy Go. Always a gas, that, despite the old ghosts that crowd my head whenever I enter the zip code (and I don’t mean the graying tipplers glued to their stools). My days at that bar stretch back fifteen years to a time when I could still believe that rock and roll held the promise of glory and riches. I know better now, and take the stage not for some naive dream of stardom, but for the simple catharsis a rock and roll show brings.

The only time I wasn’t thinking of Chrissy last night was when I was onstage. Pitiful. I guess it’s to be expected, as that’s where I met her, and where I spent the better part of my free time while she was working there. It’s a much different place now, but I suspect that I’ll always be chained to the radiator of my memories whenever I walk in there.

Fuck it. I’ve been through too much over the summer to start letting myself give in to the maudlin tenedencies of a man who has lost his love. The appendix thing was almost too much.

I had been suffering through some pain in my gut for about a week. I attributed it to my broken back, and gritted through it. I was at work on a Monday, and the pain had gotten bad enough to make call my doctor for an appointment that I presumed would go down later in the week. The receptionist, in an impeccable Ilocano accent, said they had a cancellation and that I could come in RIGHT NOW. So I told my boss and made the walk from Kakaako to Queen’s. I winced and groaned the whole mile-long trek. 

The doc tapped around my tummy, conjuring near screams out of me. Then he violated me. The last time anything was, well, inserted, was when I was ten or eleven and in the hospital for an operation to remedy a lazy eye. I had been over-anesthitized and was unconcious for 8 hours longer than I should have been. I woke up with a thermometer in my ass.

At any rate, after seeing the amount of pain I was in, the doc sent me across the hall for a CT scan. I was required to drink a gallon of an opaque potion that was to light up my innards. I got on the slab, where they pumped me full of a warm fluid that I could feel make its way through my body.

I went down and had some lunch when it was through, and made my way back to my doctor’s office. He told me that I had a ruptured appendix and that it was imperative that I was admitted immediately. He called a surgeon colleague. From his end of the conversation, I could tell that the surgeon was reluctant to take me on. “A week?!” asked my doc. Then he mentioned my sister’s name, and after a beat he said, “Yeah, that Winpenny. It’s her brother.” And just like that I was on my way to Admissions.

I was in the hallway between the Physicians Office Building and QMC proper when I almost had a total breakdown. The constant pain of the past months and thought of getting sliced open while unconscious was too much to bear. Tears started, but a couple of deep breaths and grim resolve overcame my desire to curl up in a ball and weep like a child.

The Floor Resident was a hapa haole lady from Maui. Maybe 30, 32. She was deeply attractive. She chatted me up about my symptoms, then casually asked if I had been given “a rectal.” I assured her that yes I had. Then she told me that unless someone on the surgical staff had given it to me, they had to assume that I hadn’t been given one. Then she violated me.

As I screamed bloody murder, my mother walked into my room. Thankfully, the curtain was drawn. “Jaaa-ame?” she begged, hearing my agony and thinking that I was in the throes of a painful death.

They pumped me full of morphine and percocet and left me to loll in my hospital bed until a definitive course of treatment could be determined. I learned that my innards were so badly inflamed that surgery was out of the question. They then pumped me full of antibiotics and a liquid hospital food diet.

I spent the next four days on my back and in a fairly constant synthetic opiate haze. I had visitors, the most notable being my cop friend Tony, who burst into my room in uniform with his service weapon drawn and shouting “Come out with your appendix up!” I smoked cigarettes outside with a cadre of apparent criminals and toddled to the cafeteria for lunch to pass the time.

It’s been a month since I was released. I learned yesterday that it wasn’t my appendix, it was some gastro-intestinal wierdness that is now passed. I’ll not need surgery, or even another visit to the surgeon. A bit of a bummer, that, as after four days in hospital, I felt better than I have in a year. I was rather looking forward to it.

I’ll just keep the streak alive and tap some characters into my blog. How many months running? Dunno. Drew’s been keeping after me. It’s the 31st. If it weren’t for the last minute, nothin’d be done. I got me plenty to discuss, but it’s far easier to innoculate myself against the germs of discontent with a guitar than it is to do it with wit. I have three guitars.

I’ll just keep the streak alive and tap some characters into my blog. How many months running? Dunno. Drew’s been keeping after me. It’s the 31st. If it weren’t for the last minute, nothin’d be done. I got me plenty to discuss, but it’s far easier to innoculate myself against the germs of discontent with a guitar than it is to do it with wit. I have three guitars.

I am absolutely dumbfounded. It never stops, this fathomless flow of complications. Just as I begin to bounce back from a broken back, I’ve been looking forward to a trip to San Francisco. It seeed so promising. My whole family, Mom, Dad, Karen, Shannon and I are going away on vacation as a family for the first time ever. San Francisco holds a special place in our familial heart. It’s were my dad underwent a space-age brain surgery to treat an anuerism that would likely have caused a stroke by now. I lived in San Francisco for a time, and in the Bay Area for 3 years. If there is any town in the U.S. that we could call “our city,” it would be San Francisco.

We’ve got plum seats for three Giants-Phillies games at SBC Park, something special for a family from Philly with three out of five members being rabid baseball fans. We’ve been dialed into the organization through various channels, with Murphy’s owner Mr. Murphy and some other San Francisco heavies rolling out sweet comps and, so I’m told, some sort of birthday shindig for Pa.

But, lo and behold, Ma and Pa missed their connecting flight to The City in Kona. I find this entirely inexplicable, considering the fact that the Kona airport could fit inside a Wal-Mart. I also find it to be not at all surprising in light of the fact that my dad’s karma is a study in Murphy’s Law. So now they sit, as far as I know, in the Kona airport with nowhere to stay and no luggage. I’m assuming that their inanimate luggage managed to find its way onto the plane bound for the City by the Bay.

So now Karen, who, to her credit, has planned this trip for seven months and pulled some serious strings, is hysterical. She called me from O’Toole’s, drunk, and told me about the folks missing their flight. Her use of invectives was impressive, really. I could hear the doppler effect of the band inside as she paced outside, screaming at the top of her lungs about how she’s “done.” Years of repressed acrimony and bitter resentment have surfaced like a submarine at full speed. Ah, the Irish.

I remain hopeful, if not optimistic. Every member of The Fam needs to get away, and I can’t think of a better way to do it. I’ve been wanting to return to The Bay since the day I left 6 years ago. But the complications have cast a pall over the proceedings, and the proceedings are not even two hours old.  The feeling now is not unlike the one that surfaces during the holidays, when an otherwise wonderful opportunity to be together as a family is tainted by how much of a hassle it is perceived to be.

I’ve arranged for comps to a sold-out Phenomenauts show at Cafe Du Nord, possibly the hippest club in the Western Hemisphere. Three members of the band are my former band mates, none of whom I’ve spoken with since a Red Session reunion gig at the Hawaiian Hut back in early 2001. No acrimony there, just time and distance.

On the upshot, I’m getting on that plane tomorrow, and if things go right, I’ll fly first class for the first time. That alone has me excited. “Why yes, I would like another champagne cocktail. And a foot rub. With a happy ending.”

We’ll be staying at the Hotel Mark Twain, and I’m hoping that sparks some sort of literary fire in me. The City has done that before. It’s too bad my manuscript was stolen from the back of a Mazda 626 belonging to a beguiling hippie bird, three weeks after I returned to Honolulu from The Bay in 2000. The manuscript and a guitar that belonged to someone that isn’t me. Actually, the owner of that guitar is the one who got me the Du Nord comps. Odd.

I’m looking forward most of all to the time I’ll get to spend with my family. Despite some dysfunction, we are very close and I choose to believe that our love for one another will win the day. Plus, I get to see Shannon, who I miss terribly. I couldn’t be more proud of her than I am, and I am indescribably happy for her and for the life she’s forged in the Windy City.

So, all I can do is hope for the best and do my best to be the remarkably charming and affable gentleman my family has allowed me to believe myself to be. No problem.

My buddy Drew on the Big Island has been after me to get a post in, lest I end the streak of at least one post per month since I started here at HS. As if he doesn’t have enough to do with an infant son, grown son and a full-time gig pampering the terribly well-to-do. His pestering has merit, however, and so I tap away again, trying to make sense of the past month or so.

All of June has seen me on my back, recovering from a compression fracture in one of my vertabrae. I don’t know which one is broken, but it hurt like hell the morning after I did it, and it has devolved into a constant, dull and stubborn ache. A simple misstep one late night after a gig, and I’m laid up indefinitely.

I’ve been able to work part-time from home, and my boss has been spectacularly patient and understanding in regards to my full time return. I’ve managed a few days in the office, but always with difficulty and subsequent agony. I want to get back to work because I am going slowly mad, laying on my couch all day. I’ve got nothing to do but have a mid-life crisis, something that has become an American birthright.

I could be writing the novel I’ve always known is in me, or troll the Web for freelance writing gigs, but for the most part, I’ve been inclined to do little but gape at the television and hobble to the patio for a smoke. My landlord is 190 years old and busy hackinig away in the yard outside, and I can’t even muster the gumption to do my laundry. Pathetic.

My family, neighbors and friends have been sympathic and enormously willing to provide any assistance I need, although I need little, if any. I can get around, albeit slowly and not without attendant pain. I’ve heard stories about back injuries, always told solemnly and with admonitions like “you’d better hope you never hurt your back.” Only now do I know the absolute incapacity of being laid up with a broken back.

 I can also see how people are so wont to become addicted to pain pills. They are a marvel of science indeed. To be aching to the point that it keeps me awake, take a pill, and then not feel pain is wonderful. Invariably, the two questions I’ve been asked when I’ve ventured out of the house have been “How’d you do it?” and “They must’ve given you some good meds!”

I usually answer with “crimefighting” and “yes.” But I have been staying away from the pills, and take them only when the discomfort cannot be ignored. They have lasted for a long time, but I sometimes go running for that little orange bottle with the white hat, when it gets bad. I ain’t no hero.

In my slide into madness, I’ve convinced myself that I’ve developed a telepathic mind control over the neighbor’s yapping dog. When it starts up, I work my Jedi magic with deep thoughts of “shut up” and “you will shut up.” I’ll be damned, but I swear it’s been working lately. If I could only work that magic on the bad internal rigging of my spine.

I haven’t been able to write much lately. And it’s not that I don’t have the time. I do indeed have the time, but when I have it, I’d rather do nothing. It’s not my schedule that keeps me from tapping away, it’s my need to do nothing.

 I reckon that the only time I’ve ever worked consistently more than 60 hours per week was when I was on the road with a rock and roll band. And even then, I spent most of the time on my back with my legs clutched to my chest, desperate to find a posture that mitigated the pain of a savage ciatic condition. Those van rides were brutal. It wan’t the hours under a seemingly leaden guitar that wore me out. Those hours passed swiftly. It was the long, tedious hours in the van in between that made it rough.

But now it’s the life of a Honolulu monkey suit that chips away at the firmament of my youthful convictions. Putting on a phone vioce and matching aloha shirt is proving to be far more difficult than enduring the inexorable inconveniences of the road.

 I have music and muses that keep me busy beyond the quiet routine of life in the office, and they consititute the real reason I’ve been lazy about writing. I’d rather think about how lucky I am rather than worry about maintaining the streak.

I’ve been able to play my guitars, and even write music. The words have yet to emerge, but my music and lyrics are in a constant battle for prominence. Right now music holds the high ground.

It was weeks of rain. Weeks. My house was spared, although I was convinced that while I was at work an ancient piano that steadies my porch would abscond on a flash flood and end up in the yard of someone that would be forced to use the antique as firewood or kindling for a fireside breakfast of fresh chicken eggs and leftover kalbi.

 I’ve taken a full-time gig for the money, and I wonder if I can actually hack it. I’ve done it out of a fear of living on pigeon meat, corn nuts and runoff water. I don’t want to be that guy you know but won’t look at as he rifles through a sanded ashtray.

 I have decided that every time I hear the word “literally” I will say “Bing!”

I met someone the other night who told me a story that reminded me of the reason I started this unlikely path to salvation. She told me a story that resonated with the improbable confluence of events that makes for great songwriting, poetry and politics.

Nevermind the politics and poetry, and nevermind the songwriting for that matter. When you hear a first-hand account of Michael Jackson barging into a recording session with a Super-Soaker full of tear gas and poisoning everyone in the studio with a stream of agony and protected by a military-rated gas mask, you begin to see the madness that money brings, and its commensurate illusion of power.

 It might be one of the greatest stories in rock to be able to say that you were gassed by Michael Jackson for no reason other than pure psychosis, but that shit still takes a day or two to wear off, and the gassed in question were probably day-jobbers that saved up everything to buy that studio time.

 According to the eye-witness, Jacko thought it was funnny. I find myself compelled to forgive Old Grabby. Hell, he did have the foresight to bring a gas mask, and from what my source tells me, he laughed like hell the whole time.

Hell, doesn’t everybody get my jokes either. But me, I like women.

I’ve been itching to get to this, but I’ve been hampered by an inability to find a way to get into it. I found it tonight. I had thought that after the St. Paddy’s Day lunacy I’d be able to elaborate here on the many vignettes that characterized a wild week of rock and roll, but until tonight, my insight has failed me utterly.

I’ll get to how amazingly together the band was on such a brutally impacted night of proximity and intoxication, but enter tonight a well-known State lawmaker, alone and thirsty for a glass of what appeared to be cheap Chablis, or maybe it was one of O’Tooole’s’ finer selections of grapen crap.

I sat among friends, pondering the the firing of someone near and dear. I’m well aware of the legislation the nearby elected official managed to get passed, a law that continues to piss people off to the point when they become at once enraged and complacent. I firmly oppose said legislation, but when you’re in a bar, I’ve always believed that it’s better to be a harmless sipper than it is to be a vocal advocate of something someone else in the room is bound to oppose.

I sent one over to “let’s call him McPalms,” who tried to seem surprised, although he arrived and ordered a Chablis with a look that begged recognition. If anyone recognized him, they ignored him and left me to be the sole provider of a complimentary adult beverage. Now that I come to think of it, the people who attend fundraisers can generally expect to pay for their drinks if they paid less than $500 for the get-in.

I had been, and remain, so beleaguered by well more than a week of rock and roll that even the presence of one of most perceivedly powerful Legislators we have in the “Ya Know Her” state left me bored and yet somehow fascinated. It ain’t platforms, it ain’t war chests, it’s timing that gets people elected. Fuck them. I have friends that have worked far harder and far longer than than the new breed of greedy, neophite politicians.

I bought him one with the full understandidng of who he was, why he was there and that he’d hope never to see me again. He didn’t bother to thank me. I realize now that it was because I am not in his consitituency. Fuck it. You can have your vassalship. To his credit, and to mine, there were no political conversations in which I chose to engage.

I found myself recalling the St. Paddy’s Day mayhem and the fact that my entire collective performed not only competently, but far above what could be reasonably expected of anyone under such extreme circumstances. Sitting there at the bar tonight and dodging dirty looks, I found myself comfortable. I stirred my cocktail, knowing full-well that I’d be leaving soon.

Now I’m home, teetering at the meaning of it all and listening to the rain pound outside. At least the precipitate drone keeps that yapping poi dog next door cowering instead of barking at falling leaves and cracking Budweisers.