Not the Foam Peanuts

Wow. Like stumbling into Orpheus at the corner bar. Dunno that I've felt that connected to the music since my acidhead days at the Filmore in another galaxy far, far away. He got inside my head…

Accept no substitutes.

Feeling pleasurably fatigued this morning as one does after good sex.

All in all an interesting string of days though I'm concerned that I'm waaaay behind on the practical end of things.
The Blues Festival was a complete blast. Not so much for the performances as for the sense of people having a good time, strutting their stuff in the dome of this perfect day. The dome effect was the result of an odd meteorological phenomenon – three days of high pressure was ending, and the marine layer was pouring back in thick buffers of white cloud. But the fog banks made a circle around the sunshine for optimal Xanadu effect. Like a party in a snow dome. Very surreal.

Heidi doctored her Diet Pepsi with liberal quantities of Bacardi before we left her house; I was straight. Heidi is a lot of fun when she's plastered. I begin to see the wild teenage girl who got pregnant when she was sixteen, told everyone, Fuck You – I'm Keeping the Baby and moved to a hippie hovel in Moss Landing.

"I never go back to Moss Landing now," she told me on the ride over. "Too painful."

The people at the Blues Festival were just amazing to look at. Beautifully dressed, proud, loud. This is who I am: get used to it. We wandered through the stalls – lots of fun to go shopping with someone who shares my tastes in gaudy fabrics and cheap Nepalese jewelry. A decade of dressing for success in the corporate world more-or-less beat the habit of buying that kind of stuff out of me. Plus I was never a sylph to begin with and I'm a Big Mama these days, however much my inner self is a frightened fawn staring into headlights. Entrenched class consciousness: big equals vulgar; I dislike my own ample self however much I know the postmenopausal tummy is the source of valuable endogenous estrogens that keep my bones strong and my moods buoyant.

"You look beautiful," said Heidi.

"I'm wearing make-up," I said. "I'm one of those people who looks completely different when they're wearing make-up."

Heidi cocked a speculative eyebrow. "I don't know that that's it. Do you remember Larry? The guy who was sitting with us at Ocean Thunder last week?"

"Vaguely," I said.

"He got up and sang, remember?"

"Take A Load off Manny." I nodded. The guy couldn't sing.

"He couldn't stop talking about you. 'Your friend,' he said. 'She's really something.'"

Bizarre to hear this because frankly I just don't think of myself as any kind of objet du désir. Recently, when Abe veered into that territory, it made me acutely uncomfortable even as I knew that it would be very easy to take that detour with him, that as complex and overbearing as Abe is, a part of me has been in-love – that perfect knightly love that T.H. White talks about – for years. That it would be easy to touch and transform him, la belle et la bête. I didn't do it for several reasons, many of which had to do with Robin and some of which had do to with owner's rights to my own mind. But at least one had to do with my own reluctance to be naked for the first time in front of a lover.

We ate calamari and french-fried zucchinis, we drank orange concoctions that tasted like Creamsicles, we pawed through stalls – I found a pair of tiny medallions with stylized portraits of the Dalai Lama that would have made great earring but that I did not buy. We listened to Lou Rawls. Bor-ring. By then it was time to meet up with Bill, who was playing bass behind John Broadway Tucker. Tucker's an old shyster whom (I suspect) supports himself drug dealing. The music makes a good front for money laundering though, and the man can sing. I thought he was better than Lou Rawls, more juice. It makes me happy that there's a real music scene in Quaint-town, that somehow real music-making bubbles up like an underground spring through the sterile desert Disneyland that corporate marketing tries to make of the individual imagination.

Bill drives an ancient LeBaron convertible that talks. Politely. If you open the front door while you're driving, it will say, "Your door is ajar. Please close it." When you close it, it says, "Thank you very much." He demonstrated while giving us a ride back to Heidi's car.

"When is a door not a door?" I asked. "What a great idea for a car. You could train it to say all kinds of things. Like when you're shifting: 'A little lower to the left.' And then maybe the seat could start vibrating."

"You should let Bill give you a ride home in it," said Heidi.

This, I knew, was the great Couples Test.

"Thanks, but no," I said. "I'm leaving the party with the girl I came in with."

From the look that passed between them, I knew I'd passed.

We met up again a few hours later at Viva's to listen to Bill play backup for a musician who's something of a local legend hereabouts called Tom Ayres. Tom's a local boy who fled Monterey for the Big City – the wrong Big City, I'm afraid: he went up to the Bay Area which hasn't had any kind of viable music scene in years. He should have gone to LA. For several years, he played lead guitar in a band called Persephone's Bees. Got some attention: Backup for the headliner on a couple of American Music Hall gigs, won some kind of local award Most Promising New Band. A la Blondie or No Doubt, the band was structured around a charismatic girl singer, Tom's wife.

When the marriage fell apart, so did the band.

Never saw or heard of the band before so have no idea how good they were. But Tom is just a phenomenal musician. Artistry, imagination and the ability to riff the moment. Effortless allusions between musical archetypes, and then back again to the driving melody. I'd never heard anything like it before. It was quite literally like being on acid without the sticky chocolate mess, that level of feeling connected to the music.

Of course, there were maybe five people in the bar. And then a drunken stag party stumbled in and for half an hour, there were maybe fifteen. The stag party members were all wearing shirts: The Bachelor Tour. On the back, under Past Dates was a long list of girls' names.

"So, Jimmy," I ask the husband-to-be as we're all standing outside between sets, taking a smoke. "What's all that about? Past conquests?"

"You got it baby," Jimmy chortles.

"Are you sure they didn't leave anyone's name off? I wouldn't want anyone's feelings to get hurt."

"Aw, maybe a few one-night stands. But that's the core group."

"Well, that's a relief," I say.

Tom has been schmoozing his public for all he's worth but just for a moment, he's standing by himself. Blank face. My heart was really breaking for him. How old is he? I wondered. Hairline receding, looking at forty. Knowing that he has something, but knowing that's not gonna be enough.

Back inside the bar, Heidi was on her third White Russian. "You know, this is the real thing," she says to me.

"You're right," I said. "Tom's a genius."

"No, I mean this. This." Her face is shining. "When you're drunk. When you're high. That's when you're alive. The rest of it's just – I don't know. Packing material. Cosmic foam peanuts."