RL415 - Natural Strawberries

This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: John is a resolute soda finisher, referring to John always drinking up his can of soda while his daughter often abandons it before finishing it.

The show title refers to Lilly, a girl John knew / dated who had natural strawberry blonde colored hair.

John starts the show singing Merlin’s name like in the old days.

Raw notes
The segments below are raw notes that have not been edited for language, structure, references, or readability. Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first! These notes were not planned to be released in this form, but time constraints have caused a shift in priorities and have delayed editing draft-quality versions to a later point.

Merlin cleaning out his garage, making the hard things easy (RL415)

Merlin cleaned out the garage over the weekend and he inhaled a lot of dust and feces dander from the mice. He found his copy of When I Pretend To Fall on CD, a once popular media, but John wouldn’t want to know what he did. There were only a couple of cans of half-consumed fizzy water. John remembers that Merlin used to go down the stairs to the garage and put his half-consumed can of fizzy water into various little nooks to continue drinking it when he came back, but then he would forget it was there and open a new can. Merlin does not see himself as a beverage-abandoner, he finishes most of them, sometimes too fast and then he will have too much fizz.

Merlin took a Home Depot 5-gallon bucket and put a bunch of Seltzer and ice in it. That way he had a treat down there. One reason we don’t succeed as well as we would like or why we procrastinate is that we lack infrastructure. Last Friday morning he will wake up and make a list of all the things that he needs to take down to the garage, all the things he needed to make this something he looked forward to doing. It had stuff on it like:

• Bucket of Seltzer
• Utility knives
• Sharpies
• Two kinds of tape
• HomePod to listen to Power Pop
• String or rope

One reason Merlin thinks why New Year’s Resolutions tend not to succeed is that people who make that big wager about the person they think they want to be lack the infrastructure to support that. For example loosing weight: If it really mattered to you, then you would already have done it, you have probably done this more than one year and it didn’t stick, you are making a plan to lie to yourself, and step one is to identify the foods that you think make you a fattie and get them the fuck out of your house. Then get foods that you enjoy eating, don’t buy stuff you are not going to eat just because it is healthy, get you some beef jerky, boil 12 eggs.

Before you dive into something that you are in no position to actually commit to, you must first commit to identifying why you are doing it, what success looks like, and what is the pathway to make the right thing the easy thing, as Jeff Veen says. You need to build an infrastructure that makes you look forward to doing the thing that is difficult. To make the right thing the easy thing is very hard for John to do because it is against his nature. He doesn’t want to do the easy thing! ”Make the hard thing harder” is what they say right on his candy bar wrapper, called Lumpies.

John working at The Off Ramp, the guy with the Monkeeys tattoo on his forearm, tattoos (RL415)

John’s daughter is a soda-abandoner, but John is a resolute soda-finisher. You could walk across the rice paper and leave no trace of your passage inside of a soda John has consumed. Does John have the branding marks on his arm for picking up the pot? Keye Luke was the Asian-American actor on M*A*S*H who ran the bar or the laundry (neither of those) and he is Kwai Chang Caine’s master (in the 1972 TV series Kung Fu) and at the end he goes into the Darth Vader room and has to pick up the hot pot with his forearms and that makes dragon burns.

John used to work at The Off Ramp, a gay Grunge Rock bar that had been a gay bar for decades after it had been a whore house. The owner had decided to cash in on this Rock’n’Roll thing that was happening and they had some Rock bands a few nights a week. Merlin’s New Wave night in Sarasota was also at a gay bar. The Off Ramp had formerly been a big club that had formerly been a 2-story hotel with a big theater, restaurant, and several bars inside, but then upstairs had become flophouse apartments where a couple of them had all their windows covered with aluminum foil, and some people who worked in the bar lived up there.

The owner’s name was Lee Rae who used to own a Pontiac dealership in Poulsbo and when he retired he divorced his wife, he had always been gay and now he was free, he took the money that he got from selling the dealership and went to Seattle, hot-bed of intrigue, and he was going to buy a gay bar in a at the time seedy area down by the freeway and now he was going to live his whole life, his boyfriend was going to be a meth head, he was going to have young people living upstairs. He only lived another 15 years, but he really sucked the marrow out of it.

He was an angry guy, a mean guy, and a bad boss, but he created a culture there. It was a cult if you were gay and John wasn’t, so he was outside the cult aspect of it, but he was definitely inside the first couple of straight kids to work for Lee Rae and pioneered that.

Lee Rae hired a bunch of young people all of a sudden. In the past it had been an old bar where they had leather night, Court of Seattle night, lesbian night, dance night, open night, and now they had Rock night and Second Rock night. Everybody had a leather jacket, even those young people, and it was easy to see who could work at the Off Ramp, they just had to have a leather jacket. John didn’t have one, although you could look at him and know as well.

One guy John worked with was just a little bit older than him, he was from the gay side of The Off Ramp and he had gotten out of the Navy. In the late 1980s / early 1990s there were still a lot of guys who weren’t sure they were gay, they thought that they would grow out of it, it was a lot harder to be gay back then, and this club was a place where people could be themselves. He got a job at The Off Ramp and he was dating a bartender in the back bar who was a beautiful elf with platinum-blonde hair, part of the leather culture, but he very small, he wore chaps, a leatherette.

There was nothing leather about this guy that came out of the Navy and he was a funny guy, and one of the things that characterized him was that on the inside of both of his forearms from his wrist to his elbow, on his left side he had The Monkees logo tattooed, this was 1990, before they had gone through their resurgence. Merlin thinks it is a bit like getting a Scooby Doo tattoo, it has to be based in an older thing, you don’t get a full forearm tattoo of a revival. If you have Lynyrd Skynyrd tattooed on your arm it is not because of the 1990s reunion.

He was still wearing the glasses that he got for free in the Navy and he got this Monkees tattoo and he was dating the leatherette, the chaps-elf who was very quiet, very demure, not a flashy person at all, maybe the loveliest person in the bar, but also the one John got to know the least because he was so shy and retiring.

The right arm of the Navy guy was tattooed with The Monkees logo backwards. It was the guitar case logo. When they first shook hands John asked him if that was a reference to Kung Fu where he picks up the hot pot, and they guy said: ”OMG, nobody else ever gets it! That is exactly what it is!” (see OM188) It is like the drinking fountain, he had the same personality as Eric Spurlock who invented the ”every time you look at the logo on the drinking fountain you are going to think of me!” (see RL268) and John thinks about that Monkees tattoo. He didn’t understand tattoos at the time and he only slightly understands them now.

Lilly who moved to Tangier and met Paul Bowles (RL415)

John knew a girl at the time whose name was Lilly. She had strawberry-blonde hair that she kept in a pixie cut and she was the inspiration for the song Shane that John wrote at the time about her boyfriend Shane who lived in Virginia and who kept intruding in John and Lilly’s relationship. They were both on drugs and she kept telling John that Shane was moving to Seattle and when he got here this is all going to stop. It sounded like he was always coming out here, but never came out here.

John wrote a song called Shane as part of his original repertoire that had a bit of a Jazz-y / Funk-y vibe and many years later he was trying to rewrite it, which he used to do, like he rewrote a bunch of Western State Hurricanes songs for his first Long Winters album, but in this case he rewrote it so significantly that it became Unsalted Butter. Lilly had a tattoo of a white Lilly on her upper left shoulder blade and at the time in 1990/91, and at one point she said that she hated it, although she had other tattoos at the time, because it was too literal. It is like being named Shanti and having ”Shanti” tattooed on your neck, which is what she did (see RL387 about Shanti).

Lilly was working at a bookstore in the University District and the owner was a super-creep. He always had young literary drug-addicted girls working at his store in an era where you could be a creep, everybody knew it, all the girls who worked there knew it, but they still worked there. It was totally a thing. The first time John ever saw the original Nirvana demo cassette tape was behind the counter at this book store where he had taken it in trade for something.

Lilly stole it, brought it over to John’s house and they listened to it on his boom box. It was all the songs from Bleach, but original recordings that were not professionally done and that they wanted to sell at shows. Polly was on it somehow. John had never heard it referenced and he had never seen it sold, but he listened to it and he still regrets he didn’t make a copy before she snug it back into the store.

One time the owner came to her and said he had $25.000 in a bag and he wanted her to go to Paris with him. She replied she wouldn’t do that in a million years for any amount of money, but it sparked an idea in her head and she saved up however many dollars it took back then and actually moving to Tangier. She was a junkie and she she already had enough problems. John doesn’t know how she saved the money, but she was the type of person who could have taken $2000 out of this guy’s bag and by the time he noticed she was in Tangier.

She got there and because she had strawberry-blonde hair in a pixie cut, a tattoo of a lily, she wore gauzy clothes that were cooling in the summer in the Mediterranean, she found Paul Bowles, ingratiated herself into his world, and became a member of the circle of young people who always pilgrimaged to him, (Allen) Ginsberg, (Lawrence) Ferlinghetti group. He was one of John’s favorite authors, he loved his incredible short stories, and he is the reason that Mohamed Mrabet was translated into English, he was illiterate and couldn’t write, but he would tell stories and Paul Bowles would translate his stories. John didn’t really like The Beads, but he loved Paul Bowles (see RL29).

All of a sudden Lilly lived in Morocco and was friends with Paul Bowles and she became a runner who would go up to the bookstore on the Rive Gauche in Paris that was Bead central and go back and forth a lot until she became a drug mule who was loading up on drugs in Morocco and was muling them up to Paris with the alibi that she was part of the Bead book store circuit between Morocco and Paris. The last time John saw her she was coming back to Seattle 5 years later when she was 26 and she very specifically went through channels and searched for John who at that time was sober, so many people told her that he had fucked off and is not around anymore.

But she found John and they met in Pioneer Square and spent a whole afternoon walking around, not talking about anything, not about the fact that she was a drug mule for Paul Bowles, it was surely heroin, there wasn’t another drug she would have been interested in. Merlin thinks that one short viewing of Midnight Express can really change your mind about moving drugs to the Middle East, except she was one of the charmed people, a red-headed pixie cut can go a long way in this world.

It wasn’t even an Auburn pixie cut, but natural Strawberry Blonde, which was very unusual looking, but in a way that was very usual looking. She just seemed like a little magical creature and she was breezing through customs in a time when there weren’t a lot of people who looked like her, especially going back and forth between Tangier and Paris, but she had a look like it couldn’t last.

John doesn’t know why she was looking up him, it wasn’t to say: ”Whatever happened between us, why didn’t we…”, which is what John does, and they didn’t talk about anything except they spent the afternoon talking. She was apparently living with Janet who moved and was living in that building next to the other building that was down on 3rd Avenue Annex that cuts off, and at that time it was a scary street, it still is sketchy, and there were no apartment buildings but it was a warehouse.

John told her: ”This can’t last forever!”, and she blew him off as she had always done. He wishes he knew what it was about and why she came looking for him because he doesn’t know if she is alive and she might have wanted to talk to him about something, but didn’t get around to it. It must have been a significant piece of the puzzle. If John were in Tangier right now and met someone who used to work for Paul Bowles, he would absolutely ask for her, or if he were in that bookstore in Paris, but it hasn’t happened.

The guy with the Mercury Breezeway (RL415)

There was a guy who was part of that scene who used to drive a mid-1960s Mercury Breezeway car where the back window was cantilevered in instead of going flat out and it would roll down electrically. It was incredible! It is a terrible idea because it sucks the exhaust right back into the car and in case of an accident it would probably kill you. The car was as big as a kitchen and even in the early 1990s you could buy one for $500 from a guy and when you were driving down the highway you would still see cars from the 1930s. You would see raddy Mustangs fairly often. Something happened in the regulation world, probably emission standards, where in one 5-year period all these cars went away and people replaced them with new plastic cars that looked like a Lozenge.

The guy who drove that car was extremely Punk and John keeps waiting for him to find him, to get an email. All these people were part of the Punk drug literature universe, they were working in books, they weren’t bar people, they were dry junkies, they didn’t want to get drunk and be a slob, but they wanted to pass. The vintage book world used to be a haven for people who were real fringe actors. Merlin wonders how all those many used book stores made any money, they were probably a front for something, but then they traded in rare books, and there were books in a case and when you wanted to buy it they would tell you that you couldn’t.

All those books might have been hollowed out and full of drugs. John was never a junkie and he wasn’t invited behind the counter. Needle drugs are a bridge too far. People got started by smoking heroin and then you wanted it to work a little better and you would end up shooting, but John didn’t want that extra problem.

John Popper, Blues Traveler (RL415)

John Popper, the guy with the harmonica vest and the hat from The Goodfellas (actually Blues Traveler), they are all from New York. Harvey Danger’s old tour manager Neil ”Fisher” Essenfeld was in charge of the B3 organ for the John Popper band. There were a lot of keyboards in that band. When they came through Seattle John and Sean (Nelson) went to see them because Fisher was their keyboard tech, and they went on their tour bus, but it turned out it was just the crew bus.

They were headed up to Vancouver, but John Popper and his band would get two hotel rooms in Blaine Washington right over the border from Vancouver, one of them to put their weed, and one of them to put their guns in order to get them out of their tour bus, and then they would come back and pick their weed and guns up again.

John at a party in the house of a guy from Blind Melon when the two guys wanted to get heroin (RL415)

One night John was with two dudes that he really liked, they were smart, they had arrived in Seattle from some university, and they ended up at a party together with the guitar player for the band with the song about the girl in the bee costume (No Rain by Blind Melon). The guy’s name was Shannon Hoon and he didn’t want to move to Seattle for some reason, even though reputedly when Kurt Cobaine killed himself Shannon freaked out in his hotel room and threw his TV out the window and then was dead of heroin not very long after.

Two of the guys in Blind Melon decided they were going to move to Seattle. They felt like Blind Melon was too lumped in with Spin Doctors, the same way that everyone saw Harvey Danger in the same family as The Offspring, but Harvey Danger hated them and wanted to be allied with Pavement. They guys saw themselves as Grunge and as part of the Seattle thing, but they were just a year too late and they saw themselves more as Stone Temple Pilots people. When Merlin thinks of the roots of Grunge he thinks of the Melvins and Mudhoney who made the song that goes Keep It Out Of My Face (You Got It), but just because you had a record after Grunge was big and you had long hair doesn’t mean you are Grunge. It is much more in the spoodely-dee Spin Doctors corner.

John was at the party at this guy’s house from Blind Melon, the guy wasn’t there, he had an apartment in the top floor of the Biltmore, the really nice apartment building that had fallen into disrepair and was full of Grunge rockers, and the guy John was with said that they were super-tight and they could party there any time, and then the door opened and the guy came in who was supposes to be on tour and he was upset that all these people were in there and he didn’t even recognize the dude that John was there with.

They all got chased out in a grab-your-pants style. The guy from Blind Melon had just come back from tour and was with a girl, came from the airport, and this is what he found. John met two dudes there, not the guy that got them in, and they got out of the house, they were tall handsome guys who had come from an East Cost college, very much like Steely Dan, except they were handsome, and they had arrived in Seattle and were scene tourists who wanted to move to Seattle to ”live it”.

As they were walking out of the apartment, the more handsome of the two suggested that they should go find heroin and shoot up. At the time John knew a lot of people in that world, but he had made a very studied plan to never do that. He didn’t want that in his life, and the people he knew who tried to manage it were successfully manage it, but John didn’t want that, he didn’t want what they looked like and he didn’t want to stick drugs up his bum and go from Tangier to Paris, as romantic as that sounds.

This guy was tall and beautiful and his hair was perfect and he made the case and John said he could take them to the people they wanted to meet, he himself didn’t know about it though, although it was the time when he considered it the most. John walked them over to the guy he knew who claimed to be a carpenter and an EMT, but who was really a drug dealer. He later came into John’s house and stole a guitar from him. Merlin never got paid from the guy he sold his Telecaster to and he wishes he still had that guitar. You don’t forget your first Telecaster!

John once loaned a Telecaster to the girls in the band Catfood and later on he ran into their guitarist and reminded her about the Telecaster and she said: ”That was the nicest thing anybody ever gave me, that was such a great gift!” Catfood was real (reference to Cat Butt was real, RL62) She probably knew how to take control in that situation. It was a purple Telecaster, they were a 3-piece, they put out a 7-inch and they thanked John in the liner notes, but misspelled his name and forgot the ”e”.

John took these guys to that guy and at the last minute he said: ”You all have fun! You all go to town!” and he bailed and turned on his heel and got out of there. That was the closest he ever came to heroin. Merlin finds it interesting that there seems to have been something in John that this was not for him. Through all the years that he was risking his life all the time, doing drugs, doing dangerous things, getting beat up, sleeping outside in the city, he always wanted to survive. He looked like he had a death wish, he reped like he did, if they were standing at a ledge he was the first to jump, but he wanted to survive.

He did all those things always with confidence that he would survive because he felt like he was bullet proof and immortal. He had a future and there were some lines, heroin was one of them, where you think: ”This is not the choice you make to have a future!” There were plenty of people who also wanted to live who chose it because they felt that you had to do it and go through that if you were going to have truly lived during this time, but John just knew that he wasn’t in enough control to manage it, he was already going to a third location with somebody he shouldn’t have gone to a second location with, and he always stopped. This was the night when John went to the door and walked right up to the edge.

This guy that John took the other guys to constantly wanted him to try it. One time John fell down, he was all fucked up, he had crashed somehow, he was covered with blood, he was hurt, and he went to this guy’s house because he was an EMT and he needed to be stitched up and he was the guy John knew who could do it. He got into drug selling because he had all these drugs from being an EMT. John was there and he was stitching John up, but then he turned around to his medical kit and came back with a hypodermic needle, but said it was just Morphine, and the syringe was not made of plastic, but of silver, like it had been in his family, like when Sherlock Holmes would give himself cocaine.

He was Metal Goth, he had a bunch of Goth stuff, but he also had surveillance cameras all around, although he lived in an apartment, not in a house. The fact that he was a drug dealer, junkie and stole a guitar from John didn’t keep John from thinking that he was otherwise pretty cool. John didn’t want it: ”Don’t fucking put a needle in me!” - ”Okay man, whatever you say!” When John eventually brought those two guys to him he said: ”These guys fell down and got hurt and they need your assistance!” and the two guys were very eager-beaver and new to the scene, and the Carpenter/EMT loved noobs because he loved to school people, to be the guru.

John said: ”I got to see a man about a horse, but not you about your horse!” and he left them there and never saw those two dudes again. They might be with Lilly because in a Bokononism (fictional religion from the book Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut) kind of way they should run into each other at some point. They might be riding the great horse in the sky and Mohamed might be riding the Buraq (John said Burka) up to heaven. ”Is that Cat Steven’s new name?” (No, that is Yusuf Islam) - ”The Human Face Horse!”