New keyboard, old scars in Normal entries

I’ve never actually said New Years Resolution Schmew Schmears Schmesolution, but I may have said Resolution my hairy hebe ass, give or take a hebe. The short version being my blood is jewish enough to pull that card when I feel like fighting with someone, verbally, physically and historically the guy who pulls that card winds up working for the pharaoh, the tsar, the fuhrer, guys like that. In any case this is not a resolution; it’s a keyboard.

Not yearly, not a yearly resolution, more like a quarterly resignation. Again, the short version, I learned to type on a manual typewriter. I don’t know what the horseshit about Hemmingway typing standing up is about, I mean I suppose it’s true but that doesn’t make it anymore give a shit worthy, but, whether standing, sitting or doing barrel rolls in a crop duster, you have to punch the fuck out of the keys on a manual. I had this Onion Skin paper I’d use, too, when writing love poems to cute girls (um, lots of ashes and fleeting mortality, but, you know, shit, I’d use the girls name) and things like O’s and D’s and Q’s (pretty much anything with a donut hole in it) would punch a hole in the paper.

My point, gun to my head tell us the point or die, is that I’m hard on keyboards. One of the few musical instruments I ever actually had lessons for was keyboards (well, a baby grand, but had I continued, well, I’ve never owned a house of my own that a baby grand would have fit in, assuming I also wanted a bed). One of the few musical instruments I can’t play is the piano. Well, I can’t play most stringed instruments worth a shit, but I can pick out a tune or two, not on the piano. I don’t think it was my ham fisted style that kept me from playing piano though, just saying if I did I’d be replacing them often.

There is no legend, myth or hard fact about how Hemmingway played the piano, if, in fact, he played at all. If he played the piccolo it has been suppressed, though, for all it’s high and squeaky none to masculine sound, it takes a set of muscular chops to get a piccolo to sing.

There’s this guy I recently became facebook friends with as part of my campaign to start admitting I’m in Michigan again, I went to middle school with him. He actually tagged me in this post, well, in notes on a post, and it’s not out of the newness of the facebook friendship, that’s over a year old and we’ve been ignoring one another, kind of.

The story I remember about the guy was this(I’ll try to keep it short); him and I and this kid who played piano started a band; piano, trumpet (the fb friend) and saxophone (me). The pianist was the smartest (as far as knowing shit) I was the most intuitive. So, with the sheet music for a sixteen piece band I decided how to pick the right the three pieces so the song would be recognizable. The piano part was a no brainer. I transposed the violin part, which in this rendition was the melody, and gave the second horn part to the fb friend which was the harmony. We sounded bad. The song was Monday Monday. FB friend thought it’d help if he sang it so we could hear it. He’d never heard the song. Heh, he sang it as though the lyrics were leading the harmony. Um, maybe you had to be there.
That’s not the thing he recalled. Someone asked him about his retirement and though I don’t think he was serious, he was explicit. He wanted to refurbish an old pinball machine, he mentioned me as the guy who taught him everything he knew about pinball. His comment was twice as long as this paragraph.

I added something like “Let’s just agree to disremember”. A bit later someone else who I obviously went to high school with as well added a remark and “I’ll never forget your pinball accident”. That I remember every detail of, except, that I remember it being a different person, but the comment sowed enough doubt in my mind to kick the memory into gear. Graphic story short; dude tripped trying to tilt a pinball machine and fell through a plate glass window, severing all sorts of nerves in his legs and making it look like the crime scene of a mass homicide. Everyone in the thread had the location wrong though and it would have been petty for me to point it out or point out the location they were calling it was underground and didn’t have windows, plate glass or otherwise.

Not to sound callous (though it’s forty years later and everyone lived) but what disturbs me about all that is why I would take him to the place it happened. I also remember the local cop who had it in for me prior to the incident, grilling me as though foul play were involved or, for instance, as though I owned the place and was in big trouble for negligence. I want to say I had called for emergency services, but I really don’t remember. I was, however, standing right next to him when it happened. Maybe I grabbed an employee. No one had cell phones in the mid seventies, well, no citizens did. It was not the kind of place I’d normally take a kid like him, or, for that matter, a kid like the one I remember having taken. Not only was it too fast a crowd for those guys, it was a crowd that didn’t cotton to outsiders. Um, to really shorten a story, I lost my virginity there. A lot of people took their first acid trip there. Even with forty five thousand college students across the street during a major cultural revolution, that place was the gray market for the area, maybe the biggest gray market this side of Ann Arbor or that side of Chicago.

There should have been ramifications for me, much greater ones than being grilled by a dumbass local cop. The owner of the place asked me if I was ok. The few shakers and movers of gray activities asked me if I was ok, one of them bought me a malted (yes, it was an arcade with an ice cream shop, not a bar. Bars had too many frat boys for gray market business, frat boys make too much noise and don’t know how to keep their mouthes shut).

I don’t mean to suggest this sleepy little hamlet was a hotbed of violent criminal activity, there wasn’t much violence for the most part. Some of the biggest baddest criminal element went white and woozy when seeing all that blood from my FB friend. I still can’t remember why the hell I took him there, but I’m positive I didn’t expect him to leave in an ambulance.

I surfed the many different worlds that made up public school cliché’s around here. I was good at compartmentalizing. Taking him there would have been like taking one of my young tough buddies to chess club, in one literal sense it’d be exactly like that; dude is the only person I’ve ever even heard of, let alone seen, sever nerves playing pinball. I assume if any of the young toughs played chess they would have told me.

For some stupid reason my respect for FB friend went up a notch or two as I remembered the story proper and my self respect went down a notch. Despite the frequent whining and occasional sincere humility, my self respect is several notches higher than it should be anyhow. I tried telling the GF this when we first met for the second time. She was, like fb guy, in the 4 point Oh good girl cliché, I was … not. Things would have gone badly back then, they didn’t. I had a school boy crush and a moment in the sun and then we didn’t have a clue what the other was up to until about four years ago.

I know that movies and cultural fads are very much driven by the joy and angst and raging hormones of the high school set. Shit, I’ve been typing cliché when I meant clique. Um, my high school experience had a lot of cliques, few clichés. Also, unlike in the movies, it was not the highlight of my life in any respect you can possibly think of, though I didn’t get picked on or denied, well, anything, I also wasn’t the star quarterback or valedictorian, and what I remember most about high school was wanting away so badly that I couldn’t bother with finishing up those last few months or showing up for the several months preceding.

Dude fell through a plate glass window and unlike good guys or bad guys in the movies he did not pop up ready to kick some ass he did however get a shot of demoral and it was legal.