Chapter Three

I grew up with music pretty much all the time and everywhere. Some of my earliest memories go back to that playpen in Yokimura Music and I swear I can still hear the voice of KKAS (Kickass!) DJ "Hot Rod" Shimley presenting the greatest rock and roll tunes ever, from Cream and Zep to the Stones, U2, The Flaming Pigs, Crenshaw, Jimi Hendrix, you name it, if it was awesome, if it was kickass, it was on with Hot Rod. My dad really loved that stuff, "vintage", he called it, and it could be "vintage" no matter what era it came from. Vintage was essentially anything my dad liked, and if he liked it, it was playing in the store.

The other people who worked there had their chance as well of course. They played the music they liked as long as my dad didn't hate it too much. He tried to keep himself under control. You could see him sometimes muttering in the back about Marshall's undue love of jazz, or Carrie's excessive devotion to reggae. He had his limits. If it was classical, it was unbearable, as far as my dad was concerned, and that meant classical anything - European, Persian, Indian, Chinese, Japanese (especially Japanese). If it was made for kings (that's how he put it), it was shit. It was kind of political with my dad.

It's funny but my mom was never really that into music of any kind. She loved my dad in spite of it almost. At home she demanded quiet, "peace and quiet" was how she put it. That was one of the reasons why my dad spent so much time at the store; so he could listen to his music. He especially liked to get there early, before anyone else, so he could really crank up the radio, and at night after everyone had left as well. He'd go home for periods during the day - he wasn't totally crazy - and he used to make time to do things with my mom and me outside the house and store. I know it sounds funny, but my dad was really torn between the three great loves of his life - my mom, the store, and me. I think it got easier for him when I was working in the store - I mean the time after he'd fired me and I got the whistle and came back. The first time around when I was trying to do the security guard thing, that was the hardest time for him.

I mean, I couldn't really help the customers too well. For one thing, I'm kind of shy and for another, I can't talk. I did - and do - a lot of stock work too, shipping, receiving, restocking, stuff like that, so it's not like I'm just a security guard standing there by the door all day. I only do that when it's busy, or when there's suspicious people hanging around, which is way too often, really. I just like to call myself 'the mute security guard'. It's like my superhero name. And I suppose I gave the wrong impression about my dad "firing" me too. It's not like he totally actually fired me. He just made me stop doing the security guard thing, and I cut my hours too because of that. It was kind of hard on him, I know. I felt bad about it so that's why I cut my hours back and got the coaching job, so he wouldn't feel so bad too.

I could go on and on about the store and it matters too because a lot of what happened came through there. For example, Joey Anthony Francesco was our UPS man for awhile. Marshall used to joke about Joey Anthony being a powder keg but I never saw it. Heck, he was the UPS guy! UPS guys are the friendliest, nicest people you could every want to meet. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a UPS guy. You go around, giving people things they want, and you don't even take their money. One thing that always bothered me about working in the store, and especially at the cash register, was taking people's money. I know they wanted to give it to me in exchange for the stuff they wanted to buy, but I felt weird about it. I would rather have just given them the stuff. That is one of the reasons why my dad is probably not going to leave me the business when he dies.

Another reason is that I don't want it, and he knows that. I expect that one of these days I'll pick up and doing something else completely different. I don't know what that is yet, but I kind of know it somehow. I feel it coming. Lately I've been getting more motivated but I still don't have the idea yet, the one that's going to point me in the right direction. In the meantime I spend my days with the kids coaching track or at the store with dad and Marshall and Carrie and the part time people, or at home where I live in a little room they carved out of the garage downstairs.

I'm twenty nine years old, single, and never really had a girlfriend. There was Cindy Parker a few years back, but that wasn't what you'd call a genuine romance. It was more of a "she was there and I was there so there we were" kind of thing. After a few months we weren't there anymore. I like women all right. There have been others but nothing that stuck very long. I do think about them. Sometimes I think I write my songs with some woman in mind, that she, whoever she is, will listen to them someday and know that they were written for her. I suppose it could happen. In the meantime what I do is run a lot, and work out on my cardio equipment, and play music. I play the piano pretty well, the guitar well enough, the drums a little bit, and the bass. It's always the bass when I play with other people, because nobody else wants to play the bass and I don't mind. It's clean and it moves me. I feel like part of everything when I'm playing the bass. I'm inside the drums. I'm under the vocals. I'm right along side the guitar or whatever.

I've played in bands since middle school, but none of them were really any good. Mostly I went along because of my friends. I liked them but they weren't especially talented. Some of the bands could do reasonable covers of your basic rock and roll classics or the blues. In high school I was with the Scorchers and we did fairly decent surf music, good enough to play at The Beach House on Saturdays in the summer. That was with Jimmy Picket on guitar, Sam Alaya on vocals, Corey Dunbar on the drums. I also played with Corey in another band, Crunchtime, and Jimmy in a different one from that. These guys were always looking for a bass player, so that is what I did. I was never very comfortable at shows. You would see me trying to hide behind the amps! Fortunately no one gives a shit about the bass player, which is another reason why I played it. The other guys got most of the attention. I just got to hang out, play, enjoy myself. The money was no good. My mom always figured that eventually I'd hook up with someone really great and that would be my ticket. Maybe she's right. She wasn't, this time.