Who Asked Me?

I was talking with my niece about Rolexes on Christmas night. I developed an interest in watches some years back as one does when he runs out of things to be interested in. I’ve purchased quite a few of them but never a Rolex. I could probably afford a low-end one if I pooled the resources from selling the others I’ve collected. But what would be the point in that, other than unloading some crap? This was what I was trying to get to with her — the idea of ‘value’ and what it constitutes. Getting rid of things has, in fact, come to represent value. Recently I’ve found trips to the dump intrinsically rewarding. Ironically, one needs things he doesn’t need in order for this to be true. Although the Truckee dump (officially the ‘Tahoe Truckee Sierra Disposal’) is worth the trip even absent a truckload. Point is, she is interested in Rolexes and I’m more interested in the Youtube videos about guys who buy and sell them in New York.

I used to talk about this ‘value’ stuff quite a bit with my late Scottish friend Denis Munro and probably would be doing so now were he alive, instead of cranking out this tripe. I valued our friendship. With age comes the awareness of value’s fragility. Denis liked to quote poetry, and always the ‘plain-spoken’ variety. I get mine mostly from song lyrics and lately these have been running through my head: “Carmen must’ve been the Devil’s daughter / at least he taught her how to wear her clothes.” They’re by Joe Ely, who died earlier this month and one day after film director Rob Reiner. Ely had been ill for some time and Reiner was knifed to death by his thirty-two-year-old son. He apparently set the kid up with most anything he needed — perhaps even a Rolex or two. Of what value could a Rolex (or any material possession) be if it doesn’t prevent you from being knifed by your kid? Life, as A.J. Soprano famously mused, is absurd. Predictably, injurious insult was quickly added by our nation’s bronzed president, who speculated that Reiner’s death was somehow related to his obsession with all things Trump. Reiner himself admitted to checking into a facility for “peace and relaxation” in order to “heal (his) pain” post-election. Trump’s remarks were subtle as parricide (which, in a rare ambitious moment, Reiner’s kid qualified for by taking out his mother, too.) Like A.J. Soprano and to my supreme discredit, I find value in all of this tragic absurdity. But I’m fucked up that way. As proof, the unironic thought “at least you didn’t knife your parents” has crossed my mind several times.

Getting back to more pleasant things, the other Joe Ely lyrics that have been circulating with me are from “If You Were A Bluebird.” Butch Hancock wrote the song, but I like Ely’s version best:

If you were a hotel
Honey you’d be a grand one
But if you hit a slow spell
Do you think you could stand one
If you were a hotel
I’d lean on your doorbell
I’d call you my home

Shines better than any Rolex.

I had a vague plan back in 2004 to move to Scotland. It came to me while sitting in a mostly empty Upper West Side sublet on West 86th in New York City. I liked the place and added some tall red curtains to cover the large street-facing windows. I also bought a few dishes to go with the non-stick cooking set my mother shipped from California. I had an air mattress and an old, blocky living room chair that the landlord helped me carry up from the basement. He was a dude in his 30s who bought the building with two investor buddies. They hoped to sell it to developers looking to demolish and construct luxury apartments matching the height of the taller installments on either side. Not sure how that worked out. For me it worked out for about two months, which was as far ahead as my planning extended. I have just one video, accidentally recorded on my pre-smartphone, from that period of time. It’s a shot of the sun coming through the windows and red curtains, which are partially drawn. And my voice can be heard uttering “Fuck you and all of your bullshit ..”

This video could’ve been just before or just after the Scottish idea was conceived, but I’m betting on the former. There was some loose logic to the plan; I’d taken bartending lessons in New York and sat in for a few guest stints in Manhattan. I’d also been offered a full-time gig at a bar in Red Hook, Brooklyn, but chickened out after exiting the interview and spotting a dead dog near the bus stop. Anything can be granted omen status when you really don’t want to do something. Scotland had a more romantic flair that paired nicely with my delusional thinking: I would return to my mother’s homeland in glorious novelty, having conquered Gotham. But in short order the whole idea, like me, collapsed. This is the other moment I recall vividly from that time, despite (thankfully) having no video documentation: Me, slumped to the floor of a shitty Scottish kitchen where I was storing my clothes in pantry drawers, and sobbing “I’m sorry .. I’m sorry.”

It was a pointedly modest and somewhat run-down flat on the High Street in Perth that my parents had purchased for my mom’s folks back in the 80’s. In recent times there had been a number of tenants and the previous lot had removed all of the light bulbs from the ceiling fixtures, twelve feet up. If thrift can be measured in the effort one goes to in order to sustain cheapness, these folks were plenty thrifty. The place, like my Upper West Side digs, had no furniture. I installed a rubber shower head in the tub that offered little more than a trickle.  And once again I purchased an air mattress with sheets and a duvet. But unlike New York City, something about Scotland wasn’t clicking for me in that particular time and space. I knew I wasn’t in Kansas anymore when I strolled by a small, indoor shopping space with street-facing sign boasting “Now Open Late Night Thursdays Til 7pm.” My diet was confined mostly to dining at the local chippy once a night and washing it down with a few cans of Tennent’s lager. There may have been some other drinking involved at the local pubs where the regulars may or may not have welcomed me as an affable outsider. Then back to the kitchen floor for more collapse. Pathetic yes, but this routine along with morning runs around the South Inch perimeter had me looking rather trim. There’s a reason the Desperation Diet, while effective, polls consistently second to the Atkins. It’s a wonder I didn’t get fat sucking all the romanticism out of Scotland.

The thing about coming in from the cold is it doesn’t necessarily need to be cold out. Nor does one need to be without options. Nor is one guaranteed any “lessons” from such experience — that’s just bullshit that old people lay on you with the heat blasting. It’s more than twenty years since those New York red curtain / Scottish kitchen floor days and I’m only slightly wiser. I know more dead people now, which, to quote Paul Simon, is “not unusual.” And most of them seem to speak to me in some form, some combination of me and them. But even this is absent anything you might call ‘wisdom.’ It doesn’t matter if you shimmy against the fading light or take the wife/kids/white-picket-whatever route. To quote Steve Buscemi from ‘Trees Lounge’ : “Everybody’s fucked up, but nobody wants anybody else to think they are, but everybody knows they are anyway.” It doesn’t get put any more accurately than that. Woody Allen also had something as Cliff Stern in ‘Crimes and Misdemeanors’ when he tells his niece: “Don’t listen to what your teachers tell you. Just look at them and see what they look like, and that’s how you’ll know what life is really gonna be like.”

One other small bit of garnered wisdom is that it’s time to wrap up when I start quoting film lines or song lyrics. “Oh good — this is the part of the evening where Rick quotes song lyrics.” This to quote my good-naturedly acerbic pal, Dave Glass. Not exactly imparted wisdom, but still words worth remembering.

John Spears died a few Saturdays back. He had various handles: “John Costin Vincent Spears,” “JCVS,” or, more often than not, simply “Spears.” I knew him well and yet could probably count on one hand the number of times I called him John. There were other less formal tags, some but not all applied by me: “Spud,” “Mo” (short for ‘Mo Cheeks’ from his College of Marin hoops buddies),“George Clooney,” (not quite, but almost a Cockney slang offshoot) and “Herbert Viola” come to mind to name but a few. Spears was a character in multiple senses. His personal attributes were unique and distinguishing. I regretted not having written more about him in the immediate aftermath of the sad news. But then I came across some old drawing pads with hundreds of depictions, sketches, and panel cartoons all featuring Spears as the main player. 

Spears in: “What The World Owes Me.”
Spears in: “Edgy Runt.”
Spears in: “Life With Ellis.”

They were not always flattering and sometimes his initial response would be annoyance. But then he’d scrunch his face down close to the page with his thick, prescription lenses and exclaim “Oh MAN. QUITE good. QUITE good ..” Spears, while of average stature, had an outsized ego. But he also possessed the most unique of personal attributes: that which allows one to put self-image aside and be objective when presented with a successful creative effort. He knew that being interesting enough to be satirized eclipsed the sting of said satirization. 

The first time I hung out with Spears was shortly after starting as the truck driver at Monaco Labs back in the mid ‘80’s. I was fat and keeping to myself having dropped out of college following an uneventful if psychologically damaging two years in southern California. I had two tickets to a Warriors basketball game and this was back when we got near front-row seats from my dad’s connection to ownership. “Ask John Spears,” Dad advised. “He won’t say no.” He was right and when I repeated these words to Spears in my spot-on impersonation of the old man, he broke into genuine laughter. Nobody short of my brother was ever as keyed-in to such things. It’s rare to meet someone who “gets it” after years of knowing you. It’s another to come across someone who is in that groove from the get-go. Whatever my ‘it’ is, Spears both tolerated and got it.

Spears was an artist. It’s a word I don’t care for, right up there with ‘lover’ and ‘gutted.’ But it applied to him. I’ve known those who could draw and paint far better; those whose guitar skills surpassed his own. But many in that category give up. Ego and ambition crush output and lack of recognition kills the deal. Spears did it because it was in him, because he had to. Most of his attempts at painting were seen by few outside of me. I have one of them framed on the wall up at Tahoe. His style was crude and earthy, pencil strokes pressed into the page. He played guitar in similar fashion, often out of tune and with a heavy hand. Yet he knew music theory far better than me and was better read. I wish I could have combined his instincts with my own. The most I ever retained was his mnemonic device for tuning guitar strings: “Every Able Dwarf Gains By Effort.” This is what I kept from a guy both knowledgeable and often out of tune. 

He had a similar influence on my musical tastes. I was familiar with The Kinks before meeting Spears but he clued me in to their Muswell Hillbillies album in a big way. Ray Davies (“the limpest wrist in the business” according to John) had a sensibility that fit the boy. From “Have A Cuppa Tea” :

Tea in the morning, tea in the evening, tea at supper time
Tea when it’s raining, tea when it’s snowing
Tea when the weather’s fine
Tea as a mid-day stimulant
Tea with your afternoon tea
For any old ailment or disease
For Christ sake have a cuppa tea

Spears had spent time in the U.K. as a military brat and moved all over the States, too. His education was rooted in experience. His occasionally antisocial instincts didn’t change the fact that he could relate to many. 

I hadn’t seen him for a long stretch going back to when I first moved to New York in 2003. We spoke once on the phone, he in Oregon and I in Brooklyn, in 2008. And then another sixteen years came and went before we picked up the conversation again just last year. He was living in Lompoc, California with his brother Alan.

Me: “Spears .. Rick Monaco here.”
Spears: “Duuuude.”

He asked about the people who had died in between and I did another spot-on if somewhat exaggerated impression of my parents’ respective last words. Again, spontaneous laughter like driving to the Warriors game in ‘86. We also spoke, briefly, about getting older and dying. He was quite matter of fact, even pleasant, concerning the idea. And we made vague plans that I would drive down to see him. Predictably, this was the thought going through my head the same day I got the news of his death from his brother Jay: “I’ve got to get in my truck and get down there to see Spears.” But this sort of thing is typical and ordinary and Spears was not. Jay told me that John was up early in the morning, feeding the cat, when he was struck with an aneurysm. The ambulance driver reckoned he was likely gone before he hit the kitchen floor. This is where I’d typically try and wrap up a blog post with some kind of pithy observation but I think I’ll just leave this one here. I hope Spears would approve. 

.. they say teamwork makes it dreamwork – Post Malone

Damn straight, Post Toasty. To start with you lifted the opening riff from T.P.’s “Learning to Fly.” If you’re gonna steal, steal well, I always say. We all need a little help, particularly with those white boy hip-hop to country transitions. Everybody seems so angry these days, like their very lives depend upon it. Charalamagne tha God dished the hate for Malone early on calling him a “fake future.” Wish I could be relevant enough to be anyone’s fake future. Have to give Char credit for something other than his novel spelling of “the.” Post is a difficult celebrity to hate from what I’ve gathered. Perhaps it’s time to check in with ‘tha God’ again, now that White Iverson has leaned plugs-first into country. But so it is as we hurtle toward November.

Country always fit my sensibilities. Not because I’m some truck-driving tough guy but more because my mom turned me on to Johnny Cash and “A Boy Named Sue” when I was a kid. (Shoutout to Shel Silverstein.) In fact I am driving a truck these days and that works, too. Better than the pricey German sedan I leased a few years back and could do 120 in an eye blink. Impressive acceleration notwithstanding, I found myself getting called “bitch” a lot by other guys on the freeway. I’ve reached the age where you feel the sand slipping through your fingers and realize that 120 in “Sport Mode” is no sand-stopper. Cash, like my mother, had Scottish roots. And country music has some serious black roots with much lifted from the field songs of enslaved southerners. As George Carlin once noted about addiction “Mother’s milk leads to everything ..” Ricky tha Philosopher .. yeah, that’s the ticket.

The one solid ticket I punch faithfully of late is a morning walk. I find myself looking forward to it more than seeing it as duty or obligation. This can’t be said about much these days. I read where completing a certain number of daily steps is correlated with not dying of a heart attack during said 24 hours. But you read a lot of crap like that and sometimes it’s just better to take a walk. I do plug in the earbuds pre constitutional which is somewhat isolating but makes employing another of my mother’s habits easier: She always seemed to have a smile on her face. I perhaps rejected this in my own persona as an angry young man (read: wiseass.) She was an attractive woman and her sunniness may have gotten her more attention than she was shooting for. I do recall being bothered by the near-predatory stares from passing men as she held my hand in Petrini’s supermarket. Couldn’t they see she was with her child? But that was their problem and her smile paid dividends. I don’t have as much to back it up as she did but, generally speaking, it seems to work while stretching my legs. It helps that said grin is “in motion” so the idea that I might want something if they smile back is less threatening. I did hear a groan from a feminist jogger the other day when I had the earbuds out but I figured that was her problem and perhaps a bit of indirect karma from the supermarket creeps. What can you do, besides keep smiling?

I worry that Post Malone’s affability may also be his liability but he’s under 30 and the internet puts his net worth around 60 million. Still, you can’t buy sunniness; it has to radiate from within. It’s a real kick in the pants to think that the more you’re worth the more you have to guard that radiator. I think he goes kind of hard, too. That’s always a wicked combination — someone who goes hard but always has a ready smile and a warm word. Life is a balance and it’s no cake walk. And all the while it’s slipping through your fingers.

“I’m back ..” – Ace Frehley

It temporarily wipes the slate clean. Makes you forget old regrets like backing down to Bill Shubin in eighth grade or letting Dave Rios call you ‘fuckface’ in front of Michelle Giacchino at high school scheduling. Erases the times you should have pulled the trigger but didn’t, opens that fistful of cowardly instincts to the wind. Gone are events over which you’ve died a thousand deaths. More substantive missteps vanish too; wasted potential, relationships taking bad left turns and jumping the rail with mangled front axle. Replaces “old” with “upright,” “shy” with “what?” Jackhammers the surrounding cement from your old man’s “place of love” observations and blows the hardened dust helplessly down Seventh Avenue on a cold December day. All bullshit conjured in your fat head salt-grained like instructions whispered from some wannabe county fair hypnotist. This is returning to New York City after a four year absence. This is being thrust into the present.

It’s Friday morning and I’ve gotten here, which is four-fifths the battle. Inertia’s grip clamps down like an Iron Sheik choke-hold when you toss in funerals, pandemics, lockdowns and not having to move. But it goes in both directions, inertia, as a West Village shrink once told me. And then it’s like that pop on a frozen pickle jar right when you think your wrist is going to snap. Pushing past airports and people and $130 Uber rides from JFK, to check-ins and tricky elevator key cards and some trendy Chelsea hotel called “Motto.” Mine’s “it’s like riding a bike,” or maybe falling off one, this city. But, (and this one’s bigger than Adele’s on a super chunky Jif bender) there’s no other like it. So I take the subway to Brooklyn this first morning for breakfast. Because I used to live here and I can, which should cover all things going forward.

Local, Express, Uptown, Downtown. “Any retard can melt cheese,” to quote the great Hank Kingsley. This is all one needs to know about the Metro, about how to navigate a world class city. I depart at Court Street Station, take the elevator up and exit to Montague Street, where Bob Dylan once sensed “revolution in the air.” It’s corned beef hash and eggs over easy I’m sensing at the Grand Canyon Diner, an establishment with menu so large it carries footnotes and citations. A functional diner with booths and competent waiters, something so seemingly simple yet increasingly difficult to find in places outside Brooklyn. Somewhere an early seventies man of modest means can sit for a spell without being hurried and pick up the tab for his older friend if so inclined. Two women past child-bearing years huddle and discuss the conflict in Israel over coffee and toasted bagels. “My niece is Palestinian .. they sent her home from school Wednesday.” Their tone grows hushed and the waiter knows to increase the time between refills. All so extraordinarily ordinary; wouldn’t raise an eyebrow unless you’d lived anywhere else.  I drop my wallet in the gents room on the way out but return to find it laying conspicuously on the mopped floor. I flash it to the owner who’s asked with concern, both of us relieved, and I place my hand on his shoulder before leaving. I used to live here. I belong.

Saturday night and the flashbacks grow stronger, more pronounced. I’m with Mark Street — my original Brooklyn connection and ex San Francisco coworker — at Peter McManus pub, a storied joint conspicuously devoid of morons in red outfits on SantaCon night. We’re talking kids and brothers and drinking and agoraphobia .. hitting on all the highlights. Then it’s a short trot uptown to an actual Saturday night Christmas party, Street joining me despite aforementioned subject matter. More of my past crashing back in living color. But it’s good, festive even, and good to be remembered. Alli and Nicole karaoking “Let’s Give Them Something to Talk About.” “When are you girls going to grow up?” I ask to bursts of ironic laughter. I slip back to the Motto before things get out of hand, a stately older gentleman who knows how to get when the getting’s good. You can bask in the middle of New York’s electric charge or just sit with it all playing out thirty-nine stories below the hotel glass, as my dad loved to do, coming here. It’s all good; all New York.

A kind of heavy sadness overtakes me leaving here. This is the price you pay, shaking inertia’s tree. The ride to JFK departing always feels different than arriving when you no longer live here. Back home it’s suburban-dead and quiet, too. “Wherever You Go, There You Are.” So read the bumper sticker on George Stratton’s Volvo, a stern junior high teacher who liked to warn about the evils of dope, of not growing up. He’s dead now too, I’m guessing. Just like Greenbrae, California on a Monday night. But New York City most certainly is not, and that’s a good thing to know.