So this one will be happier, that last piece I wrote pissed some off...ah, I'll continue to upload my life on here...regardless of what others think.
I was thinking on some of the best moments of my life and my first concert comes to mind, Frank Zappa. Yeah, it's an odd one but I had been bitten by the bug only because my brother would buy his albums and try to learn the leads. At first hearing of Zappa, you think, “What the fuck is this shit? It's awful!” But since it was playing in the background all the time, it slowly worked its way into me. I had been used to the 120 beat from 70's mainstream rock and the ever present disco, so Zappa took some time to “get.”
I was 14 and had thought I knew everything there was, till we hit the Providence Civic Center that night. I had never seen, in real life, a throng of freaks and weirdos like that were there. No one was violent, in fact, it was probably as docile as a Grateful Dead concert, but I had only seen hippies and freaks mostly on TV and none at the Civic Center were from the Manson Family.
The ticket cost..and you're going to throw up, $7.50. You can't get a decent burger for that now. Once we got through the ticket style and passed the security guards, we found our seats and of course, being the first time in there, I thought it was huge. Then it may have held 13,000 people and I had never seen that many in one place. The seats weren't bad at all, we saw the stage w/o too many obstructions considering they still piled the sound equipment on the stage, those line arrays they hang from the ceiling today hadn't been invented yet.
The lights go down and a few seconds later, a spotlight hits Zappa and he rips into “Keep It Greasy.” Everyone stands up including me. About 20 seconds into playing he stops and says in the mic, “Hey, sit down all of you, you'll be here as while, you're also fucking the PA up!”
By the end of the song, my brother had passed me a joint and then about three more were passed between him and me two other of his friends that had come. I was fairly baked. And that's when I could stand being high. Not now..oh noooo.
It's an old maxim but you can't just hear rock music, you have to feel it colliding with your chest as well. The song City of Tiny Lights has a guitar solo and what I liked the best, a deep synthesizer following up. That just thumped into my chest and then I knew why you go to concerts.
The half time intermission comes and the main lights go on and I saw this, a massive slow moving cloud of marijuana smoke drifting inside the place. I had looked at a Providence cop who was stationed on the floor and...he didn't care. That was a first for me. With the lights up, this was my thought because I had never seen a crowd like that assembled before. “I bet Roman Emperors felt like I do...before the crowd..in awe...happy...” I imagined that I was Caesar, soaking it all in. Don't forget I was 14 and stoned to my gills.
During this half time, another joint was lit and by the time it got to me, I had it in my lips and for some reason I looked over my left shoulder and while sucking on it, I see a women three or four rows back staring back at me, my Goff Hr High English teacher.
“Oh...fuck.” I think as I turn away fast.
I turned back to see her again and she was staring straight ahead like I had never existed.
“Whoops..” I thought.
Looking back on it now, what the hell was she going to do? She was a Zappa concert and a fairly young teacher to boot. She was 70's “with it.”
The concert finishes up and I can remember walking back to the car, commenting on how my ears are ringing and asking my brother will it ever end? I was assured it would. I thought I'd be deaf forever.
We ended up at Sambos restaurant in EP after. Yeah, I know, it's in poor taste but there was such a place then and the food was good. I sat there, still stoned retelling all the songs I heard to my brother over and over again. The waitress was amused as well. First times for everything!
**
The next day was a school day and I had wondered, what, if anything, would transpire between that young English teacher and me when we met in class. So I go, sit down and she comes in, scans the class and our eyes met. I think we looked at one another for, what felt like a good 20 seconds, each sort of acknowledging last night and...then she just went on with the class. OK good, no news is good news.
There was one thing she did a week later that made me suspicious a long time after. Teachers were great for sending another teacher, usually a close work friend, notes. They'd recruit one of us kids to be the courier and it was a nice five minutes out of class.
So, English teacher asks me to deliver a sealed envelope to a Miss Van Dale, a blonde teacher all the young teen boys were enamored with and to wait to see if there's a response. No problem, I'll do it.
So I go into van Dale's class, watch her rip it open, read it and then she shoots a look at me I can't understand. It was sort of a mouth half opened, surprised look on her face. No teacher had ever looked at me like that. She just stares at me...then finally regains her composure.
“You want to send a note back?” I ask her.
“Uhhh....Noooo...” she says haltingly.
I leave wondering, “What the fuck was that about?” and forget that weird episode five minutes later.
I wonder if the note said, “This is HIM...This was who I saw at the Zappa concert”
Mind you I was an A student with a boring, stable reputation at Goff. My second life around my neighborhood was a different matter that the school need never know.
**
Here's another example of how I was sort of found out, wrecking the preconceived notion of who I was. No drugs are in this story...
As I said before in my last piece, the other kids in the class thought what I did to easily learn class material was “magic” to them. One day in Mr Agililo's science class, the kids are asking me how the hell I can take a test so easily. Mr. Angililo was there, leaning against a chem table listening to this.
So I decide to tell the kids how I do it.
“OK, imagine a test question asks, “What color is the sky?” Let's say you have NO clue to what the answer is but you have heard it before, you just can't think of it now. You have four choices, “Blue, Turquoise, Black or Polka Dot.”
“You have to wean the answers down....tell me...which answers do you know are wrong right off the bat?”
“Black and Polka Dot!” they tell me. “Good..you're right.”
“Now, out of the last two, which is it, still make believe you don't know the real answer is 'blue'?”
The kids struggle...talking to one another about it, the pros and cons of each. Meanwhile, Angililo is still listening to us.
“If you struggle with the answer..fight to find it...you'll never get it right.” I tell the kids.
“Huh?”
“Here's what you do, relax, stare at the last two answers...breathe slow...slow yourself down...sort of like you're falling asleep....and keep repeating the two answers to yourself quietly...Blue....Turquoise...Blue...”
“Eventually, one of those answers, will come forward, make more sense...it'll drift from from the back of your head to the front....quietly.”
“That'll be the answer you choose.”
It was then Angililo pipes up.
“You know, that's a very Zen answer, what you just said.” he says.
I was taken aback by that and before I can answer he asks:
“You practice TM? (Transcendental Meditation). This was the late 70s so it was very popular, though many still thought it to be just more whackadoodle California hippy shit.
I don't answer right away because if I do, I'll be exposed to all these blue collar Irish, Polish and Portuguese Catholics who would probably would think I worshiped the Devil himself. I knew they never had heard of TM in their lives. If this gets out then I'll have to explain a whole lot more too as their suspicions of me will grow.
“Do you?” asks Angililo again.
I cave in...”Yes.”
One kid, a L. Amaral, shouts out...”Whoa! You take Tai Kwan Dao or something too?”
One kid understood it.
That of course gets the entire class all curious and ask her a million questions about it...then to me.
Shit, now I have to explain this...they ain't gonna get the first lines to the Tao Te Ching at all.
**
A week later, four of the kids come to me and say they got a higher grade on the last test Angililo gave. Ok, cool, 4 out of the 15 that were going to fail anyway managed to “get it.”
Do I still meditate? Not as much as I used to, but it's great in the dentist chair to keep me from panicking like I had always done before. Dentists are Nazis anyway, who can blame me?
If you know me in real life, you'll know I can spool away a story, from a vast amount I have, I love telling them. My memory from those years past is silly scary clear. However, while typing this out, I had to wonder did I take the ground beef out to defrost. I had to get up to make sure and yes, I had. I just damn well forgot I had done so. Short term memory is a problem for me!
Here's the first song I ever heard live, "Keep It Greasy." This girl reminds me of my brother who used to do the same thing, try and learn Zappa.
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