Daron's Guitar Chronicles: Vols 1-3

126 I FEEL YOUNG TODAY

“What took you guys so long?” Carynne said to me.

I laid my coat over the back of an empty chair. “What, like I was supposed to be on time for my own surprise?”

Christian shrugged and took one of the chairs across from me. “We couldn’t hurry up too much without making him suspicious.” Bart took the chair next to him and Ziggy put his coat on the chair next to me, then went down the table high-fiving people. I didn’t have time to wonder about whether he really intended to sit next to me before Carynne slipped into the chair.

“Well, are you surprised?” Carynne tugged at my arm, her maroon lipstick smearing as she grimaced.

“Yes, yes I’m surprised.” Colin was taking beers out of a paper bag and passed one to me. I guess the nameless restaurant was also a BYOB kind of place. The table was actually four smaller tables pushed together, paper placemats in front of each chair showed a map of Cape Cod. Watt caught my eye and waved from the far end and I waved back. A waiter who looked like he doubled as a cook, his Popeye forearms showing from his pushed up sleeves, stood in sullen patience with an order pad while we looked at our menus.

“What, you guys didn’t read the thing before we came in?” Chris chided and ordered a broiled blue fish dinner without looking at the list.

“I’ll have what he’s having,” I said and the waiter nodded like it was a damn good thing I wasn’t making this any harder on him.

Once the chaos of ordering was done, more Popeye-ish waiters brought baskets of prefab rolls with hard frozen butter pats. Everyone took their assigned seats–Ziggy sat down next to me and I said to Carynne, who was now directly across from me, “So you planned this whole thing.”

She held up her hands. “No, no, it was Chris’s idea.”

Chris talked around a mouthful of roll. “Was not. Bart.”

Bart shook his head. “No, it was Carynne alright.”

“You guys,” she said and put her attention on buttering.

The beer was Sam Adams, some special brew, dark and nutty. Honestly, it didn’t feel that different to be drinking today versus yesterday when it was supposedly illegal. Not that I had expected to feel different. I did kind of hope to get carded at some point because now I actually had a card, but it wasn’t like I was in a hurry to prove it.

Marilynne swapped chairs with Ziggy for a while and talked about bass-playing with Bart, from which conversation I gathered she was thinking about doing something more than singing. Colin said nothing about it and I wondered if maybe their band was splitting up. The girl I didn’t know, it turned out, was Lars’ girlfriend Roxanne. She had taller hair than anyone else at the table but not in a punk way, in a kind of Jersey shore way. The guy I didn’t know was talking to Watt and sipping a Sam Adams, too. Later, after we’d eaten, and a long round of musician jokes had been told (How many bass players does it take to change a lightbulb? Five. One to play the solo and four to beat back all the guitarists who are trying to push him out of the spotlight. How many drummers does it take to change a light bulb? None, they have machines to do that now…), Carynne introduced the guy as Gary. By the way he held her coat for her I gathered they knew one another somewhat better than mere acquaintances. Consensus decided we should troop back to the house instead of the studio to finish all the beer. The two of them also went off to a car together.

Okay, I may be a workaholic but that doesn’t mean I don’t know a good time when I see one. At the house we ended up sitting around the living room swapping stories about all kinds of shit, the kind of stuff musicians always talk about I guess, and laughing a lot. Lars told the story about how Miracle Mile, Christian’s old band, got themselves stuck in Columbus, Ohio with a dead water pump and ended up playing an extra gig there for a weightlifter’s convention party when the local band who were supposed to do it had to cancel when their iron-pumping lead singer slipped a disk trying to show off in front of Arnold Schwarzenegger. “They’re total metalheads, these lifting dudes!” he said, “but they kind of do this ultra-stiff dance move…” He demonstrated hiking up both elbows and thrusting his head forward. Ziggy told a version of our long-ago publicity trip to the Hollywood Walk of Fame with MNB, either heavily embellished or I’d forgotten most of it. Both things seemed likely.

Eventually the beer ran down and people went home. Michelle took Bart and offered to give Ziggy a ride but he demurred, saying it was too far out of the way for them to go back to the Fenway and then out to their place on Comm. Ave. Chris went up to his room while Colin and Lars hung around the living room with Lars’ girlfriend whose name I had already forgotten. Then she and he went into his room and Colin went to his room and that left me and Ziggy standing in the kitchen while I drank a glass of water.

If you’re hearing some kind of ominous soundtrack music right now, well, I’ll admit, so was I.