Tag Archives: Americana

Down and out in San Francisco and Las Vegas

There is an apartment frenzy in the Dogpatch, the scrappy former industrial dock area of San Francisco but there is no one around except food delivery people trying to find obscure addresses and pick ups of laundry, because even thoug your $1m apartment has a washing machine and drier you are just too busy. Incongruously there is what appears at first sign to be a large luxury hotel, or is it a member’s club, there is security at the door and two valets for parking. No, its a furniture store in a building the size of the White House, its “The Gallery at the Historic Bethlehem Steel Building”, of course it is, this is San Francisco.
There are lots and lots of new buildings around The Chase Center and mix of bioscience and residential- still no shops or bars so the desert is soulless. The old bars like Rock Island Resort and Ramp must be killing it after the Warriors and the concert crowd arrived, their land was worthless when it was empty shipyards and broken windows but its the pulsing heart of Mission Beach now.
Where I am staying, in the old residential heart of the Dogpatch, wine bars and brew pubs abound on 3rd and some old dive bars still survive like the Dogpatch Saloon and The Star Bar from when I was living in SF and dating Rachel. Magnolia Brewery is gone and is now Souvla which is a Greek cum Mediterranean, I missed their beers and bbq on metal tins like at War Pigs in Copenhagen.
The inhabitants are classic Bay Area folk: Earnest young white men with large but trimmed Mormon like beards, lots of Carhartt and shiny brown leather boots still. Just as many cool young active Asian kids, predominantly in work out gear. The homeless tents and camper vans have self agglomerated on wider access roads and in SOMA so as much as it is deserted it is not overrun like some end of days movie.
The spontaneous food truck gatherings are now in controlled fenced entertainment zones near the apartments around UCSF.
Also spotted The American Middle Aged Male – nominatively casual above the ankle, hoodie, jeans, clunky wallet chain clip on belt loop. But where did they find those brown slip on casual shoes so effortlessly matched with branded black sports socks – usually a minor brand like Reebok or ASICS bought in a 10 pack at Target or Walmart? Cocktails are in but we are no longer in the Age of Cocktails. These are artisan cockertales, hand crafted and as such are sipped referentially and veeeery sloooowly so you can get from sitting down aperitif to the main course with one and then relunctantly add another to cruise thro to post-check escape.
Unwritten class divide continues…well-educated white graduates are waitresses, taking orders, doing the recommendations, enjoying the jokes and land grabbing the tips. The Latino guys bus and work the hot iron in the kitchen, the Latina women do some food and drink delivery and bus. And this is at a women owned and managed place with a Latina head chef.
Face masks are the new backpack – having a heavy fabric base mask on while walking the dog in March 2023 is the equivalent of the Herschel backpack of 2014 to establish your cool credentials in a post anti-vax world, you are woke and you are post-Covid-sensitive individual. Or you are wearing a crappy cheap blue Chinese-made mask and are part of the poor working class who is just scared shitless of getting sick and losing pay, again.
But it was noticeable to leave a Europe of large reported Covid deaths and arriving in the land of the free to see how traumatized the blue part of the country still is by the ‘civil’ discourse around how to manage a public pandemic or at the least how to score political points. I went to see Tortoise, the ne plus ultra of post rock at the Great American Music Hall, an establishment as venerable as the Fillmore. The audience was obviously mainly male and white and a touch of grey abounds, as well as the young and hip. And there was a fair spread of masks, some which ended up as chin bands after a couple of beers but it is part of the standard attire here. The GAMH is, as it says on the can, an old music hall with balcony and ornate gold trim. It has its regulars who sit up in the balcony with their twin stereo mikes and camera on a stand openly recording each and every gig, a dead head tradition. It’s marginally in the Tenderloin altho technically Union Square. It’s the shittiest part of Union Square and to get to it you have to pass through the tenderloin and my Lyft did the full dystopian tour crossing 6th in SOMA. There is a sad and dangerous world covering an area of 4 blocks by 6 blocks where the desperate live and die on the streets. Hostels, liquor stores who all cash money orders behind their armored tills, functioning bars and eateries dotted amongst them but all with heavy security. Multiple variations of crazy are on display, the naked, the shouting, a plethora of wheel chaired usually in the road, the dazed and the hustlers, male and female all trying to make enough to score. Trash on the streets, literally and figuratively.
The new Chinatown station is open now. It is the final link of the above the ground T line on Muni that snaked south through the Dogpatch and former industrial lands of the south side of the San Francisco Bay down to Hunter’s Point and Sunnydale. Now it goes underground at Bryant to new stations at the Moscone exhibition center, Union Square and stops on the top of the hill on Washington street smack in the middle of Chinatown. Real Chinatown, not tourist shops and lanterns Chinatown. Stores selling boxes and boxes of roots, ginger or ginseng I have no idea, store after store with all signs in Chinese characters. Stores selling everything you would find in a Safeway but compressed into a space the size of two phone booths. Lots and lots of restaurants, snack shops, coffee shops, bubble-tea shops. Most with frayed and faded pictures of their proud culinary offerings with bad English translations. Crowds of generally elder Chinese with wheelie shopping bags, a blue and white striped plastic bag of some food treat hanging from one wrist. Always wearing sneakers, not for any desire to suddenly sprint away but because they are the cheapest shoes available. Chinatown is not wealthy or aspiring it is where people who have no English language skills or any other skills survive in their own community, cheaply. There is a communal square off Kearney called Portsmouth Square for some reason. It has a quasi temple shelter and raised beds and benches. It is populated with mahjong playing old Chinese geezers, occasional Tai Chi exercises and social events. Like any open space in downtown SF it is shared with some homeless men, with their worldly possessions in a shopping cart and their woes on display. Portsmouth Square sits on the border of the Financial District where my office is. The FiDi has seen better days. The remote work option combined with awful prior commutes has killed the area, stores have not reopened since the pandemic, windows are boarded up and there are more signs saying To Let than there are toilers in the now dark offices. There is a shoe to drop soon as the leases – which the super greedy and sharp landlords kept short so they could keep jacking up the rents expire and the rents come tumbling down at the same time as the loan financing costs of the commercial property market are going up. Maybe a good potential outcome from this debacle is that the offices get converted to cheap apartments, something SF desperately needs.

Cheap rooms are not in short supply in Las Vegas. As the plane circles over what is left of Lake Powell and banks towards Vegas the context of its desert surroundings is in your face, flat scrub in all directions until the salt flats run up against the Sierra mountains to the west. From the air the urban sprawl is evident which provides the cheap housing for the worker bees that keep the facade of the wonder of Las Vegas humming along. I was staying at the Mirage, an appropriate metaphor for Vegas, aging, a bit battered and down at the heel, unloved and relying on its former glory. The Hollywood entrance to a Vegas hotel is that you drive up in the convertible to the shiny loud entrance foyer and valets rush out to take the keys, grab the bags and the beautiful couple sashay into the bright lights of the lobby to join the other beautiful people. The reality is the arrival in a line of cabs fighting through the baffled Ubers being turned away in the direction of the parking garage, the families discharging from minivans and the harassed dads trying to work out where to park. The hustling porters are juggling the departing and the arriving with equally cheery calls of “Welcome to the Mirage” and “Come back and see us soon” and for every seasoned business traveler on convention duty in control of their wheelies there is a family with mountains of bags, strollers, pillows ( seriously who travels on a plane with their own pillows?) and backpacks.

I didn’t see anyone scream to a halt in the Red Shark on its over-inflated tires and Hawaiian shirts seem to have been replaced by dark hoodies as the de rigeur costume of choice, partly to deal with the freezing A/C. Once inside the hallowed halls of this gambling paradise it is never bright and airy, thats not the vibe. Its permanently 2 in the morning. Its dark but illuminated by the non stop wall of flashing betting machines, pinging, ringing and strobing us with enticements to take part in every game of chance, every TV show game, every cartoon character’s demonic gambling twin encouraging us to just try our luck. It is also a journey back into the 70’s as people are smoking all around you. They cannot smoke in the restaurants, common areas or non-smoking floors but in the gambling areas and bars. Those A/C systems run on overdrive trying to suck the cancer our of the air for the majority who do not want it. In Vegas’ defense there are 4 or 5 smoke free ‘resorts’ but most business events take place at the run of the mill for whom smoking is still part of the code of malpractice. 

The casinos throb with people for 20 hours a day. People on the move from the rooms to the food outlets to the pools and theaters and convention spaces. People checking in, people checking out, people passing through, there is no room to run and you sure can’t hide. 

If you missed it Vegas is now a place for families. Why anyone thinks children really want to be inside a behemoth smoke filled gambling machine surrounded by the old and desperate is an interesting question but they have been successful. At least in terms of persuading vast numbers of parents that the pizzazz will wow the tots. There are random kids characters around the Strip, Goofy-like giant dogs hi-fiving the kids to reinforce the “Fun!!” vibe. However they seemed to be outnumbered by the semi-naked young women in platform boots and giant headdresses offering selfie photo-ops and free passes to Clubs scattered around the rim of the city where more nakedness and intimate entertainment is offered. They are technically clothed but in a classic Vegas move having large artificial boobs protruding from a bodice covered in repurposed pantyhose is ‘clothed’ but walking towards you in broad daylight it is more an act of display than one trying to dissemble. Outdoor speakers along the strip blare out Uptown Funk and half the strolling holiday makers are carrying a drink as they amble from one shopping mall to the next, as they boulevardier from Paris to Venice.

The family groups look predominantly recent immigrants of all hues, Vegas is America writ large and they have come to celebrate their success in being there and having the money to enjoy it. Las Vegas is not in anyway a cheap experience. The rooms can be a deal for sure. I was staying at corporate rate of $149 for a room that was larger than most European 2 bedrooms apartments, in fact my bathroom was larger than a San Francisco studio currently renting for $3500 a month. But….everything is Vegas priced. Breakfast was $50, drinks are $15, dinner main courses start at $45 with the median $80 and when the bill arrives the tip choices are laid out for you 22%, 25% or 30% with the correct amount shown to help you if the drinks have slowed down your mental arithmetic.

There are lots of entertainment options which is part of the draw. From the never aging kings of magic like David Copperfield, the never aging kings of pop like Donny Osmond and Rod Stewart and the never aging kings of rock like Foreigner and REO Speedwagon. Big acts continue to bolster Las Vegas’s reputation as an entertainment center for the aging boomers but you have to be really big for the numbers to work, Adele is there now in residency, which surprised me but in a way it encapsulates her fame, she is a global star. Muse will be there for a two week stint, I was less sure about that but I am sure they know what they are doing. There is a rotating roster of ‘global’ DJs headlining sets at the clubs and the EDM scene is alive and kicking, but there is less surprise about that with middle America being the biggest market for the big beats and easy access to the drugs that make that repetition more ecstatic than tedious.

As you leave the airport is well manned and efficient. When you get through the super quick security you understand why as the casino experience continues in the concourse. Surrounded by more of the 21st century versions of the one-armed bandits, people are desperately stuffing notes and credit cards in to make that last winning bet that will wipe out all the losses, the luck will turn if only one you take one more chance, imagine if you stopped and the next person sitting down at your machine wins the jackpot? So with all that they don’t want people stuck in long security lines, time is not a wasting in the Harry Reid International Airport. Which Harry would have been happy with, after all Harry was a man who famously took every dime the government could be persuaded to shovel Nevada’s way or his way for that matter. He was also a believer in UFOs, and why not, its Nevada.

As a not quite stranger in an increasingly strange land I was happy to take off and head back to the old world, I was afraid of it and yes, I loathed it.

It is 5AM and you are listening to Los Angeles

Looks like 2010

“My Dad got a Fender Telecaster when I was 7, before that he would goof around on a crappy keyboard and a drum set, he got from a surfer buddy, but the look of that Telecaster, man, I was hooked.” Nate Wrigley didn’t get his own until he was 22, he had played cheap copies, “Walmart guitars” as he called them. He didn’t mind as he liked the trashy sound. He had never decided what he would do with his life, therefore was hesitant to attend college. After high school, Nate wrote songs and played with bands in the preternaturally surf obsessed backwater that was Pacifica. His comrade in arms in the struggle not to conform to the corporate drudge was his cousin Kyle.

Kyle grew up surfing in Seal Beach. His mother, Nate’s aunt Amy, had settled there after college and married a handsome and democratic-leaning refugee from Orange County. Kyle was smart like his Mum, and got into Long Beach State University and chose without much thought to study Marketing. The one thing he had enjoyed at CSULB was volunteering at the performing arts center, the school had a quietly impressive performance space sponsored and named after the Carpenters, who were alumni. The arts and artists themselves were, as you would expect, targeted at wealthy locals rather than the students so it ran the gamut of Al Jarreau, the Beach Boys, Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion and the odd classical artists not able to make the big leagues in LA. They would sashay up in their Lincoln Navigators and E-Class Mercedes convertibles with the casual SoCal mix of blue jeans, (men and women), sparkly tight shirts and big hair for the women, suit jackets, open neck dress shirts with bouffant chest hair and chains for the men; deep tan compulsory for all. This was Long Beach after all, not real LA and yet it somehow could never create its own identity. People made good money there in the port and real-estate but never Hollywood money, never stupid money. Kyle liked working the sound board and backstage. Even if he was not a big fan of Al Jarreau or Journey getting to work alongside their roadies and technicians was a good learning and like Nate, he was into music and playing drums or bass guitar. He never played at the Richard and Karen Carpenter PAC but played the working bars down by the container port at weekends with various short-lived bands. 

They played bar-room rock, 60’s covers and in the summer of his junior year Nate had spent the whole summer crashed at his apartment and they both played with what was basically the band Wavves, but missing a couple of folks. Wavves were a band that had some success the year before but were having to take a hiatus after the abrupt cancellation of their first European tour, after the lead singer, off his face on valium and ecstasy insulted the Spanish crowd, started to fight the drummer midway through their third song and got driven off stage with an avalanche of water bottles. So Kyle and Nate played drums and guitar and did some vocals with the rest of Wavves while the lead singer and main man did some long overdue rehab at his record company’s expense and the drummer left to join the Scientologists. They got to taste touring life, as in driving around Southern California and Arizona in a rental van, staying at Motel 6s and playing larger bars and clubs as the warm-up act the Broken Wavves.

That came to an abrupt end in September when, rehab successfully completed, the mainman returned alongside two old buddies from Jay Reatard’s band and promptly fired Kyle and Nate after their last gig as Wavvers in Barstow. They got paid off but their career in the lights came to a bumpy end as they had to go home via Greyhound, Nate’s Walmart guitar in its carry case, the drums were the band’s luckily, so that was one thing less to schlepp across the Imperial Valley.

Nate went home to Pacifica and nothing much and Kyle finished his last year at CSULB. After 4 years of learning about 20-year-old ad campaigns for detergent, cars and cereals and mid-20th century management science he graduated. He looked around at what the world was offering a young man in 2008 and the answer was not a lot.

He tried out for several ‘marketing’ jobs but that seemed to be code for him sitting in a Dilbert cartoon doing call center work with a bunch of equally desperate young graduates trying to really get excited about their monthly call quotas. The world of Monday morning sales ra-ra sessions with bad muffins, neon orange juice and coffee strong enough to strip paint may have worked briefly as a motivation tool during the 1980s but it was a self-parody by the time Kyle was in his third customer service job. It was servicing a TV cable and internet bundling giant, and of course it wasn’t actually a good job with benefits for the actual giant, publicly-listed company. It was an hourly paid job for an outsourced service provider, working out of an anonymous 5 story office building in an equally anonymous office park without sidewalks, or stores or places to eat, in a suburb of Reseda.

The San Fernando valley was hardly the place of your dreams, unless they were pornographic. It seemed far from the beach and the SOCAL lifestyle he had grown up being part of, but the rent was cheap. He shared a condo with Kent, a college buddy in Canoga Park who had an accounting job in a shiny glass office building with manicured lawns and a fountain out front in Westfield Village. Still no sidewalks, or stores or places to eat but that was standard developer chic and its LA, so everyone has a car to go and get some food to bring back to their desk and eat, quickly and guiltily. His roommate was chill, low maintenance and being Korean American had family in the Valley. Kent would be away most weekends with them and would bring back mounds of Tupperware containers, full of insanely good homecooked food; as long as you didn’t mind chile, spice and garlic you were golden. With his roommate gone he could practice drums for hours, he had to use pads to prevent the neighbors from wanting to kill him but technique wise, it taught him better control than just pounding with hammers.

After they had been in the apartment for a year Kent came up with a strange proposition. It turned out he had a girlfriend Shayla, who he had actually been spending most of the ‘family’ weekends with. Shayla was a petite, bouncy, blond Mormon from east Texas who he met waitressing at the Applebee’s near his office. Kent’s deeply religious parents wanted him to marry a Korean girl, who had a degree in a real subject like accounting or life sciences and who was evangelical in outlook. Shayla was striking out on all three of these so she had become the secret girlfriend. Kent’s cunning conundrum solver was to have Shayla pose as Kyle’s girlfriend and for them all to move in together. They talked it over some brewskis and the deal was sealed. They would move into a larger house and Nate became the 4th roommate. If and when Kent’s parents came over to visit, Shayla was Kyle’s life problem and in return Kent got regular guilt free sex, Shayla moved out of her shithole converted motel and Nate could get the band together again.

They rented a down at heel large 3 bedroom 1950’s ranch-style house in Northridge with the only items of mid-century life style that no-one , other than the Maytag Guy, to this day wants: a 1950’s electric stove, washing machine and fridge. More importantly it was detached and had a garage which became the practice room. Shayla decided that maybe she would learn bass as her shifts were mainly evening now, she got better tips, so she had time in the day to futz around and practice chords. She had no noticeable musical talent but stuck at it and she had a pretty good sense of rhythm. Kyle kept up the customer service job listening to the elderly customers struggling with the switch from the cable box that had not changed in 40 years to a new controller and all the joys the newly accessible interwebs brought them. Mostly they just wanted someone to talk to and Kyle would do that. He was compensated for talking to people and as long as he got high service scores, which he did, he would listen to their gripes and family concerns, just as if they were technical issues to be resolved.

Nate got a job in Kinko’s, doing photocopying for harassed parents working on their kids’ homework projects, solving minor technical issues for the many realtors working out of their homes, accepting parcels, selling office supplies, generally being nice.

They started writing songs, in their minds crappy pop songs about their crappy lives but their relentless optimism cut through and when they got asked back to play the same pubs, bars and small rock clubs around the Valley people liked their songs. They played a couple of times as the Beach Bunnies then found out someone else already had a band called the same, then settled on Tiny Bunny. They played 2 or 3 gigs a week, all booked by their own efforts asking for slots, then promoting with their own hand designed and laid out posters, luckily they knew where to get printing done cheap. They didn’t exactly build up a following or anything but they noticed, even as 3rd on the bill at Country Club in Reseda or the Glass House in Pomona, people would actually listen to their set not just studiously ignore them and shout, talking to their friends with their backs to the stage. One night the following summer Kyle, Nate and Shayla had come off stage to almost a round of applause after their 20 minute 6 song set of self-penned instant classics. They were finishing their free beers with Kent, who by this stage was booker, roadie and manager by night, still staff-accountant by day, when an unattractive guy in his lost 30’s sporting a Road to Ruin t-Shirt and a bleached white denim jacket came over to them and said “Caught your set guys, you write this stuff yourself?” When they managed to nod affirmatively he introduced himself. “I’m Jake Gaines, I do A&R for Mom and Pop Records, we are looking for rock pop acts so we might be able to help each other, can I buy you a drink”.

The fact that he said the magic words A&R and drinks ensured they were all smiles and they took their drinks out back to the smoking room, more commonly called the garden. Kent did most of the talking in his manager role. He looked the part as he didn’t dress like the others because he had come straight from work and had basically removed his tie from his button-down work shirt as the only nod to casualness. Nate’s sported his surfer dude meets Kinko’s look and Shayla and Kyle’s more obvious efforts to be pop stars was mainly on-stage attitude rather than a look but they went as far as the ubiquitous black t-shirts, jeans and Chuck Taylors.

Kent got slightly pissed when Jake spent most of the time addressing Shayla’s chest rather than look at him or the other two. But Gaines dropped the right names of bands he had signed Freelance Whales, Tokyo Police Club and Shadow Shadow Shade, who they had supported a couple of time as Beach Bunnies, so they felt at home to be associated with, if not kindred spirits maybe folks they admired.

Two days later they found themselves in the downtown offices of Mom & Pop. The address was actually in Culver City but as they drove through the shiny skyscrapers atopped with big media company names they exchanged glances and “Dude!” exclamations.  The four of them were a little disappointed when the directions turned them away from the glitz and glamour down a slightly seedy back street and to the office. It was a beige, 2 story 1970’s office building that would not look out of place hosting a dry cleaners or a realtors, not very rock and roll at all. The record company was actually based out of New York so the LA office was smaller, on a cheaper budget and more sleepy than they expected. They were greeted by the receptionist and walked through the 3 quietly working young kids to the brown glass Board Room and offered sodas and coffee. At least in here it was a bit more R’n’R with 2 framed gold records (not anyone they had heard of) and framed tour posters of acts on the roster. Jake walked in wearing a slightly sheepish grin followed by a heavily tanned and gold chain bedecked slim guy in his 50’s wearing what could best be summarized as pimp casual. “Marvin Klein, heard a lot about you guys, thanks for coming in today, you got coffee, soda, what can we get you?”. He welcomed them, sat them down and told them how excited they were to have them sign to their label, how much Jake had sung their praises and how their accessible pop rock sound was something that’s missing from their label. Jake then excitedly jumped in and explained that they would start promoting them on YouTube and getting them touring slots with real stars, and threw out names Andrew Bird, White Stripes, The National, LCD Sound System. This was starting to sound more like a teenage dream rather than a business meeting. Marvin asked whether they felt they had enough material for an album. Nate tended to be the mouthpiece, so he explained they had 10-12 songs they really liked that they had played live, and the audience liked, and they had been playing with some new ideas adding a keyboard and effects. The others sat there oscillating between sheepishly looking down in their laps and checking out the ridiculous showbusiness style and way of talking that Marvin had, holding court. Shayla again got loads of eye contact and Kent squirmed. He felt a fraud as the pretend manager, which was not helped when Marvin described how he would get them a real manager who would help them “monetize your merchandise and get your brand going, we gotta get several revenue streams going, get you exposed on all the platforms like Spotify and I-tunes”. After what seemed like the whole morning flew by, but actually turned out to be 48 minutes from entering the door and falling back through it into the morning sunlight, they stood on the sidewalk with a 14 page document that they should take to their attorney and if ok, sign and send it back, “so we can get going and make Tiny Bunny the hottest band around, make you guys famous, and make us all a shit ton of money!”

They stood outside and looked at each other, no-one said anything for what seemed like a moment in time frozen until finally Kyle, who had not said a word finally said. “I don’t know guys, I would go on tour, but I never really took this as a serious job up until a couple minutes ago. We have to decide if we really want to make an effort at it. It’s been a real long, slow practice over the years to get here, I am not sure I am ready to just do this. What if we fuck up? What if I fuck up, what if I am just not fucking good enough? Nate and I have been doing this shit since we were kids and we don’t have 10-12 songs we have 7, 7 fucking songs after what? 10 years?”

It was all giggles, applause, and stage lights in the eyes as a break from mundane day jobs until then. Now it was a job and none of them had really trained for it. What sounded so carefree and fun in the room with gold disks and the smooth guy with gold chains and silky speech now seemed like a slip’n’slide to serious work and growing up.

“What the fuck are we going to do?”

“And the award for being a good sport goes to Devon Newgarden!”

It was tough being the child of an overachieving sportsman when your sporting genes seemed to have gone missing. No hand eye coordination, no unusual stamina or long power, perhaps a total absence of ‘quick fire’ muscle. As the son of a man who was 6’4”, who had reached 6’ by the ripe old age of 14 Devon felt short all his life. He had a very fascinating internal world going on inside his head at all times and even eating tended to get in the way of his enjoyment of that, so he had never been a big eater. Devon was the small guy in every group of California school kids he was ever part of. He knew he was loved by his Mom and Dad but he also knew how much he disappointed his Dad. His Opa, Carl Senior, did not give him much respite either. The first question out of Opa’s mouth on his frequent visits up from retirement in San Diego was wanting to know how his current sport activity was going. At Elementary school the teachers worked out that Devon had a pretty severe case of short sightedness, probably by his inability to answer any question involving the blackboard but exceling at every question involving the textbooks. Devon had not wanted to make a fuss and the general fuzziness of life was not something he found unpleasant. Even with his newfound 3D detailed vision he was still uncoordinated, and he valued his new glasses and the various sporting efforts his Dad and Opa encouraged seemed more likely to damage them.

They were patient in their group exploration of the limits of Devon’s sporting prowess, they tried every possible sport to see whether something odd like horseshoes, which his Dad also excelled in, was the sporting vein of gold. T-ball, Pop Warner Football, Soccer, Baseball again just in case in the 2 years since he sucked at T-ball he had grown Ted Williams-like resolve, Volleyball, Ice Skating in the hope that maybe Ice Hockey would then naturally follow and Soccer, just one more time. Devon actually enjoyed soccer more than the other forms of torture in so far as the field was pretty large and he could amble around in a space on his own, exploring the grass below his feet or imagining the insects weaving their way in the turf. The general noise from the shoutingly encouraging parental scrum could be tuned out and he got a medal at the end of the short season, although the award was just for participation, he still carried it home with much pride.

His Dad was stoic if somewhat disappointed as his goal was for Devon to have the same fun that he had growing up but their obvious differences in both stature and coordination and general sportiness grew more apparent as Devon grew, or didn’t grow as Carl had hoped. He made one last effort with swimming. Their home was in a development with a shared sports club including a pool and a swim team. Devon could swim enough to save his life in case in some throwback to his grandfather he was ever torpedoed but he enjoyed the pool more for the coolness of the water in the East Bay heat of summer. He loved nothing more than to close his eyes, sink to the bottom and imagine an undersea world of quiet bliss while bubbles slalomed to the surface barely disturbing his private sensory deprivation. Swim team was a different world, his Dad would gamely drag him out of bed at 6.00 am 5 days a week and with his coffee mug in his hand walk a shivering, stumbling son across to the swim club then returned home to read his paper and get breakfast. Meanwhile Devon would be forced into the endless repetition of swimming up and down his lane with the kids slightly younger but the same size as him for an hour. Devon had real trouble seeing much without his glasses, so he often ploughed straight into the end wall of the pool if he was pushed to do practice races. After 6 weeks of this daily auto-da-fé the first swim meet of the year duly arrived against several local swim clubs including the home club of the famous Spitz of Olympic hero status. Carl was new to this ritual but approached it with excitement, to share with Devon in a sporting moment of reward for his hard work and diligent effort. The Saturday duly arrived and they were there early at 7.30 am with all the other willing and game parents. They checked out the race schedule and Devon had a 50m free stroke, Boys Under 9 race at 11.20 on Sunday and a Boys Under 9 free style 50 m relay at 3.50 that Saturday afternoon. They watched and cheered gamely as race after race of splashing children were roared on by the partisan parents, they ate the doughnuts, they chatted or at least Carl chatted with the other parents while Devon rested his head, his cap on his head ready to go, on his drawn up knees and swam off into his private world of imagination. They got hot dogs at lunch and soda and applied some more sunscreen. Devon’s Mom and his sister Melissa came for lunch, then went home but promised to come back for his race. Finally, as the sun started to be shuttered by the stands of Eucalyptus trees around the swim club the Under 9’s Boys’ Freestyle race ticked around on the card, a mere 20 minutes later than planned. Devon and the other Under 9s stood on the starting boxes and awaited the starting horn; swaying ready, set and off they raced. Boys that age are not exactly cutting sharply through the water, it’s more of an egg-beater meandering gamely up the lanes, the turns are not slick tumbles and Devon had not actually mastered the tumble turn. He swam until he crashed into the end wall then turned around and went back the other way. It was game, it was tiring and even with all the Newgarden family cheers of support Devon came in 8 of 8 and half a length behind the winning boy from Alamo, who they noticed, when they got out of the pool, nearly a foot taller than Devon.

They gave him lots of support and ice-cream for desert that evening and Devon went to bed relatively early, exhausted from the weight of the expectations if not the physical exercise. Sunday morning was bright and his Dad was right there at 7.00 to get him up and breakfasted ready for his next race. Carl understood the parental code of everyone being there all day and supporting every swimmer on the team, not just your own kids so they were there at 8.00am with everyone else in time for the first races. Devon’s relay race did not go any better, in fact it was worse as their team were in the lead after the first 2 swimmers before Devon hit the water and for all of his brave egg-beating frenzy he came in last of the 3rd swimmers and his team finished 7th. There was only so much Devon would be able to do and his Dad understood that, he finally conceded that maybe sports were not his thing and he was honest enough to himself to realize that he had no stomach for sacrificing complete weekends to watch other people’s kids swim up and down. They talked it over on the way home and his Dad and he agreed that maybe swim team was not his bag, so when he got home Devon had a big smile across his face.

Carrie Newgarden was a happy upbeat woman, a believer in the power of positive thinking and keen on developing various skills while being very content with her role as a full time Mom. She would drive the kids around from one activity to another and they would all sing along to the pop music on the radio in the station wagon. The kids both loved to sing, and she noticed Devon only had to hear a song once and he knew the melody cold and most if not all the words, as she would hear him later in his bedroom singing to himself. With Carl’s sporting obsession now well and truly lanced for Devon if not for Melissa she wondered if maybe Devon would like to develop his musical knowledge, perhaps that was where his talents were?

One of the women, Cathy Lee, she played doubles with at the tennis club, was the wife of one of the local OBGYNs, her and her husband were originally from Hong Kong. She described how she was making both her kids play piano as part of a general learning discipline. With her desire to give Devon a musical outlet she asked Cathy where her kids got their lessons and Cathy gave her the number of a Mrs. McAlister. She warned her that Mrs. M was a disciplinarian, a follower of some slightly nutty version of Christianity but a reliable and well-trained teacher, with a Master’s in Music Theory. She gave lessons from her home up the road in Concord, the slightly down at heel dormitory town for the industrial chemical complex on the Delta at Martinez and home to an under-publicized storage facility for the Navy’s nuclear weaponry.

Carrie took Devon to meet Mrs. McAlister the following week after a short phone introduction. The house was quite pristine in a mixed neighborhood of ranch style homes on large lots. There seemed to be a bit of a menagerie in the back yard but the zoning in Concord allowed the keeping of animals for domestic consumption, something Pleasant Hill specifically restricted. From Cathy Lee’s description of Maggie McAlister Carrie had some trepidation and expected to find a dour version of Church Lady, all twinsets, pearls and bibles. However, both she and Devon were welcomed by a pretty, smiley woman in her 40’s and her house and music room were tidy and quietly focused on all things musical; scales and keyboards abounded. Tea and cookies, home baked and healthy, were presented while she asked Devon about his musical attainment. When she discovered this was virgin territory, she was encouraged rather than the opposite, She was keen to start the transition of Devon from a non-piano playing member of humanity to one of the keyboard cognoscenti. Devon spent 2 hours a week in that house every week for the next four years, holidays and high days excluded. He progressed fast and practiced at home on the first of several electronic keyboards that he was bought, they were not as good as a piano but it gave him something to work with. He enjoyed the discipline of the practice and learned to read music quickly. As his skill grew Maggie stretched him and had him perform more and more complex pieces. She staged a twice-yearly performance where her student performed in the garden for the gathered parents. The kids changed constantly over those four years as many get burnt out with the mindless repetitive practice of a music they have little affinity for, but Devon became a dependable presence and over time a standout performer. By the time he was pushing 12 Maggie thought he needed someone who would be able to take him to the next level and so suggested to Devons’ Mom that she would recommend him to David Keppler who had a studio and classroom in Lafayette, and a real concert grand for Devon to work with.

Devon duly said goodbye to the McAlister music room and backyard menagerie, the handwritten signs and acronyms for scales, the smell of home baking and the sweet smell of cinnamon in Maggie’s frequent herbal teas. His dad was happy Devon had found something to occupy his time with and had started, belatedly, to coach his sister Melissa in softball, so he in many ways lost touch with Devon. They lived in the same house but occupied different worlds. Carl rose early to drive into San Francisco and traveled a lot and when he was home, he was watching sports or coaching the girls. Devon scrambled out of bed at the last possible opportunity to grab a pop tart on the way out of the door to go to school. Every afternoon he wrapped his homework around the 2 hours a day of practice on his new keyboard while wearing headphones in his room, the sound of the clacking keys becoming an ever-present ambient sound in the Newgarden home. He folded his life around the 2 lessons a week with the serious Mr Keppler. Mr Keppler spoke at a level barely above a whisper. He hinted, harrassed and guided his students relentlessly but always quietly. Picking up their errors, not as they occurred but in review after a piece was finished, going through every slip, fumble or gaff in precise order so the student had not only the false sense of success but then the arduous task of remembering when and how each slip, fumble or gaff had occurred so they could avoid the same fate next time. Devon bent his nature to the will of Mr Keppler, he concentrated and he avoided the screw ups. The progress was not celebrated with cups of herbal tea or cookies. It was celebrated with “Mmm, better, better.” The one glimpse of creativity that had been glimpsed in his first few months in Keppler’s wooden hall of a studio was not the Bösendorfer in its shiny black gilt-edged grandeur but the rows of serious looking electronic keyboards around the walls. Keppler kept him playing the standard practice fodder of Debussy, Bach and Mozart as that was needed to be mastered for the various levels of qualified success that charts the pianist’s life. However, towards the end of the second year of working together Keppler introduced the occasional jazz standard with the excuse that, as much as it was not performance music it introduced a new technique or time signature for Devon to master. 

Carrie was proud of her son in the same way that Carl would have been if he had been an All-Star, hitting home runs. There was less to show off about it with family and friends but it pleased her to see Devon so obviously happy. For his 14th birthday she thought it was time to get him a real piano at home, not a grand piano as they didn’t really have the room but an upright. She talked to Carl and he was supportive, he was doing well at work and getting a good bonus that January so she went to see Keppler to ask his advice. She explained what she wanted to do for Devon and he sighed, put his chin on his finger in a slightly camp way and said he would think it through and talk to some people, and get back to her.  He called back later that week and said if she was serious about buying him a piano she should understand that for it to have the proper effect on his practice it should have a full size action and keys, that generally means a ‘professional’ upright. They are $6,000 to $25,000 normally. At which point Carrie nearly fainted as in 1990 this was the price range for a small family car. But before she could try to tiptoe her way out of the conversation Keppler said that he had a former student, Donald Judd, who had been very successful in getting a new sponsorship from Yamaha and been given a new baby grand only 1 year after buying a really good professional Weber upright. Keppler had persuaded him of Devon’s need, and he was happy to let it go to a good home on his recommendation for $3500 and so he had agreed on her behalf that it was a bargain too good to miss so they should arrange to pick it up this Saturday. Carrie mumbled her thanks and scrambled to find a pen to write down the address in Piedmont and wondered how to break the news to Carl.

Carl was actually pretty relaxed about the price which was a pleasant surprise, but he was never cheap and respected good equipment, whether for golf or skiing so his son having a good piano made sense. He called in the help of a couple of the younger stronger guys who worked for him to pick the piano up, rented a U-Haul with a loading ramp, padded blankets and lashing ropes and with Carrie leading the way in her Toyota the convoyed through the hills of Oakland to Judd’s house. The young man met them at the door and lead them to the garage where the piano was standing in the shadows, next to an unused Weber kettle barbeque. Carl could not resist the crack about this was a lot of money to be paying for a Weber and made as if to take the BBQ. Judd didn’t seem to get it. The driveway was a square of typical red bricks so the piano wobbled its way down the drive, and the 3 guys heaved and hoed and the piano was padded and restrained and the door slammed shut.

Back home in Pleasant Hill they released it from its temporary restraining order and using the U-Haul ramp got it up and into the Newgarden’s house. Beers were drunk in celebration of the day’s hard work and the guys from work, Wriggles and Leach, headed off to enjoy the rest of their Saturday and Carrie set about to work out how to hide a large piano to maintain the birthday surprise. Her solution was to find a camping tarpaulin and cover the ebony and then layer various camping items on and in front of it. When Devon came home from piano lesson later, he walked straight by the mess in the den and into the kitchen, opened the fridge, took out some cheese sticks and went upstairs to his room. The elaborate cover story of looking after a neighbor’s camping equipment during a garage floor sealing exercise stayed in her pocket.

Monday rolled around and Devon’s birthday dawned and for once his Dad woke him up with a mug of coffee. “I’m heading out of town to Chicago for 3 days but wanted to have a birthday celebration with you before you go off to school, get dressed and let’s get a real breakfast all together, your Mom’s doing pancakes!” Devon duly showered, threw on some clothes and arrived down in the kitchen for his birthday breakfast to be greeted with a rousing, if off-tune, rendition of Happy Birthday from his sister and parents. They slathered the pancakes with syrup and as it was his birthday he got to have cream whip on them as well. When that was done they all looked at him as if he was supposed to do something but then broke the ice by saying we have something for you in the Den and proceeded to blind fold him and led him through to the other room where the scarf covering his eyes was removed to the cries of “Surprise!!”and in front of him was the shiny patina of a seriously big upright piano. Devon was a boy of few words and was even more lost at the surprise, but he managed to hug his Mom, then his Dad, then Melissa and mumble thanks, thanks, its awesome. He then asked whether they got a piano stool for him, which of course they had not so they got his desk stool from his bedroom and he duly started to play to hear and feel how it played and he fell in love with it, and cried and mumbled thanks guys over and over. Carl went off to Chicago, Melissa went off to middle school, Carrie to clear up the pancake mess and Devon never forgot that morning.