Daron's Guitar Chronicles Volume 12

1052 Wherever I May Roam

Wherever I May Roam

The reception was in a function room on one of the upper floors with large windows overlooking Boston Common. You know the story of the Common, right? Back in Ye Olde Colonial days it was the common area where everyone in town kept their cows and livestock. Supposedly the reason Boston's streets are so crazily tangled is because they evolved from cow paths. I don't know if that's true or if it just sounds good. The Orpheum was a couple of blocks in one direction and the hotel where Carynne had given up trying to get me in bed was in another. Come to think of it, the vegetarian Vietnamese restaurant where I'd officially come out to her was also a few blocks away. So was "the block" where the gay hustlers plied their trade. All these things were within a five minute walk.

Which just goes to show how small Boston is. Here I'd toured most of the other continents, crossed the oceans and trekked the miles all over this country, and yet so many things had happened within an area smaller than New York's Central Park. The loft where we'd recorded 1989 was on the edge of Chinatown a few blocks over from the vegetarian Vietnamese place. And from this hotel you could basically see the spot in the park where Bart and I had been busking the day Ziggy jumped in with us. I felt suddenly what a tangled knot my life was to have all those threads criss-cross in the same place.

At the door of the reception, a hostess in a black cocktail dress and white pearls gave us pin-style name tags. Mine read "Daron Marks" and my sister's "Courtney Marks, Graduate." Inside the room was quite a crowd, already abuzz with liquor, though the overall sound was more sedate than a typical industry party in LA. It was still Boston, after all.

The first person Court latched onto was her own thesis advisor, who was a woman who looked vaguely familiar to me and who shook my hand and congratulated me, as if I had anything to do with Courtney's accomplishment. I guess I sort of did, both in that I footed the bill and in that she'd turned my career into her project, but it still felt like I didn't deserve the sort of congratulations you'd give a parent on their kid. Maybe she was on autopilot, though, having said something similar to dozens of parents already that day.

She had someone she wanted Courtney to meet, another former student of hers, and so I trailed along until we reached the open bar, where I got in line and waved to her that I'd catch up.

I got a club soda and a ginger ale and a wink from the bartender (does it even matter at this point what the gender of the bartender was? No, it does not). I caught up with Court and the professor by the windows where they were talking to another woman who reminded me, somehow, of Jonathan. It was partly her hair color and partly her overall look. She was tall and angular, her sandy blonde hair haphazardly wound around a pencil at the back of her head as if she'd just come from her desk where she was on a deadline.

And, apparently, she was taking time off from music journalism to write a novel. I almost laughed when I heard that. Then she reached out her hand to be introduced to me and I had to figure out which drink to give to Court. "You want the ginger ale or the club soda?"

"Club soda, thanks," Court said. "It's nuts that the club soda companies aren't marketing themselves as a diet soda alternative. It's like a big fat market share just waiting for them, and they're leaving all that money on the table."

"It's probably like light beer," the woman said. "Beer companies know a huge part of their market share for 'diet beer' is women, but they are afraid if they market directly to them, they'll lose their traction with men who will start thinking of it as women's beer. Club soda and seltzer are marketed alongside hard liquor in the beverage distributors. I don't have to tell you what a macho business that is." She took my now-empty hand. "Liz Markham. I saw you at Madison Square Garden."