northwest snapshots

By Robbie on December 23, 2009

I'm slowed to a crawl at the entrance of a long bridge on Highway 16 near Tacoma. It's rainy and, though it's only 5:30PM, inky black. Many cars ahead of and around me, few behind. Then: skreek...crash! Then: louder, closer crash! I'm caught -- can't move the car substantially in any direction -- constrict my sphincter, grip the wheel, and await my fate. But the two skidding vehicles careen off sideways, missing my car by several feet, and slam into a wall. The cars look pretty totalled, but everyone inside them bursts out at once, kind of a staggering burst. So I move on, over the bridge, where I see some more accidents, but only in aftermath form.

A source of some ongoing anxiety for string musicians travelling by air is what will become of their instrument after successive encounters with a ticket agent, checkpoint TSA personnel, a gate agent, a baggage handler assigned to last-minute gate-checks, and several flight attendants. Will the irreplaceable and beloved thing end up safely onboard in the overhead or somewhere darker and colder, and how many devious stratagems will be needed in the effort to keep hold of it? In the days after 9/11, getting anything out of the ordinary onboard was hard. Then the AFM negotiated an official exception to airlines' size restrictions for guitars and other smallish musical items. For a while I travelled with a copy of the AFM letter listing the new allowances, thinking naively that it might come in handy; but the persnicketiness of the gate agent and stewardess was still the deciding factor, and it was all a toss-up. Then, for some reason, things largely relaxed, and now I'm able to get my guitar on 19 times out of 20, as long as I avoid certain airlines, like USAir. I might have to add Delta to the list. In Milwaukee their agent takes my double-O to stow below. This in itself is legitimate, since I am one of the last to board and space is really out. (I'm puzzled by the statement, "You should have boarded earlier"; is their policy that an outsize carry-on entitles you to jump the line?) But then they tell me that they can't bring it up to me after the flight, that the guitar needs to stay with the baggage apes for the next connecting flight out of Minneapolis as well. Seven hours of vague unease ensue.

On my way home, I fly USAir. Yikes! I look back over the years to many unprofitable and tiresome discussions with USAir staff. In Portland the gate agent tags my case and tells me to surrender the precious wood to the gentleman at the end of the jetway. Here we go again! I wrap my hand around the case handle so as to conceal the tag and, doing so, trundle smoothly past that worthy. But now the stewardess sees me coming. "There is no room for this...flight 100% full...not an inch...." I respond gently that I would really prefer to fly with it if I may. She sighs, instructs me to step aside out of the line, and walks along with the row of people boarding toward the back of the plane to talk with someone there, presumably about my intransigence. Amazingly, after five minutes, she signals me to come back, nodding gravely. As I walk the length of the craft I pass many compartments with space enough for a guitar. But she has for me a compartment above the back row with one-and-a-half times the necessary space. She has to move a few people and revamp some assignments to get me seated near it. But it's on, I've made it. Three hours later, on the connecting flight, the gate agent is shaking his head at me. I point out to him he has allowed two other guitars ahead of me onto the plane; he says he hasn't. So, again, I palm the tag and approach the jetway mascot, looking innocently past him and around the corner. But he reaches for the case. I pull it away: "I'd like to see if there's room on board, please..." -- "Sir, the flight is full!" -- "I'll ask the flight --" -- "No! She's only going to tell you the same thing!" But now I'm near her, and I ask very, very sweetly whether I may check for room. She has the look of a mastiff. What will happen to this piece of luthier's art by which I make my meager living? The mastiff says there is absolutely no room -- but feel free to see for myself. Hooray! Insincere sweetness has won the day. I place the guitar quietly overhead (not too far from where the other two guitars are), and take my seat, and she promptly forgets all about me.

These are some eye-glazing non-stories, no? And yet this petty struggle is a centerpiece of my on-the-road life. The degree to which my livelihood and personal happiness depend on the actions of randomly encountered Comstocks and uniformed shrews is striking, if you ask me -- a little eastern-bloc-like.

I am going to offer a comment about hotel porn, which I hope you will accept in the scientific and dispassionate spirit in which it is tendered. Less than ten years ago, you might be offered a dozen titles on your pay TV menu, and often they were a special Holiday Inn kind of pornography, lovingly scrubbed of all close-ups and the expected, consummatory "wintry mix." Now there are sixty or so choices, all very graphic, and with such attention to exotic fetishes as to boggle the mind. Scrolling through the sentence-long descriptions helpfully guiding customers to their "adult desires," I am dazzled at the richness of subcategorization: outdoors, underage, overage, amateur, cheating, point-of-view, oral, Asian, group...and what is this? Three feature films of women with strap-on devices ramming gentlemen in the anus? Yes, three. If you were "holed up" at the Space Needle Holiday Inn for a week, you could watch TV sex for four hours, at a cost of $45, and never need to leave the ladies-fucking-men's-asses plantation. This late-capitalist, have-it-your-way perversity gnaws at my mind, long into the night, costing me much sleep. Who are these people whose faculties of sexual delectation demand this particular scenario, over and over? Do they really constitute a market? In the morning I seem to see these dildonic ass-rammers all up and down the hallways on my way to the elevator and at the free breakfast. I am not of this tribe, they are not my people.

I have troubling dreams at the house of a couple I don't know very well. (I can't sleep for more than three consecutive hours the whole trip.) The house is a little like where the Peggoties live in David Copperfield, down by the river, crammed with trinkets and pictures and bicycles and kid-things. There's a small warren of rabbits in the room next to where I sleep and some chickens outside. Anyway, the dreams. On the wall outside my room is a picture of the lady of the house's father. It's 1974 and he is walking like a jaunty giant down a pastoral hillside, wearing a white suit, his big eyes ablaze, his kinky black hair exuding an Elliott Gould-ish sensuality. At his side strolls a hippie girl who is his wife and from whose shoulder hangs an infant, my hostess. Around dawn I rise, or think I do, and head down the hallway. Around the corner at the end, there he is, the father, at his present age, his Gould mop clipped short and white, his left eye gruesomely distended, rheumatic and wet. He is staring hard at me. He knows I can't stop thinking about that picture from 1974. "I put on that white suit just for the picture," he tells me, grinning. "I took it out of mothballs."

"Do you want these shirts?" my music partner, Jenny, asks me as we arrive at the club in Seattle. "You can just bring one of them in, please," I say. They're my "show shirts," all gaudy and ironed and with buttons, and they're laid across the back seat, three of them. "Pick the one you think is best for Seattle." She looks at the colors, pausing. "In Seattle," she muses, "it's not good to wear all black." One of those things she sometimes says that appear tautological or inscrutable or just silly, but have just enough weight that they might mask something half-visible and profound. "Why," I ask her, "should you not wear all black in Seattle?" She muses a little longer, then says: "It would be...rubbing it in." To me, this is awfully amusing. But, when I share it with the audience at the show later, as a little story between songs, they respond to the punchline with a low ripple of disapproval, or actual offense. Sometimes audiences and I just aren't on the same page.

Speaking of laundry, I'll close with a note that I hope won't come off as airing some. I've played at the Mississippi Studios in Portland for many years, and enjoyed it. But now it's a different and bigger room, aimed at a younger thinner audience, with production expenses disproportionate to my hardy little group of Portland fans. Last Monday's show went well enough; the staff was attentive, the turnout was nice, and both Jenny and I were happy with how we played and how it sounded. But in the future I can't afford to play here. I say this with regret, because I like coming to Portland. It's a nice town to hang in, and pairs up neatly with Seattle for a weekend's work. So: if you run a club in Portland that could use a hundred middle-aged country-music fans on a weekend night, drop me a line. Or if you know of a venue that might fill the bill, feel free to drop them a line and tell them how great I am. You know it's true.