Dear Joey: june 11th, 2009
First, there was this woman who plucked me--bodily!-- up off the piano I'd been playing (down on the dance floor) along with the country rock band up on the stage, and flung me around the dance floor like I was rag doll for the next three fast songs. Turned out that she was just my age, 54 at that time, and my height, but weighed in at a pretty hefty 190. Now, in my desperation to hang on to whatever was handy in that rag doll fury in my attempt to keep from getting totally flung away, I managed to get tons of 'feels' over that surprisingly rock-hard body, and it was all hard! Even her substantial ass was rock solid. Needless to say, I am pretty blown away by this outstanding and astounding series of events. Done in, and I guess she was done in enough to give it up and invite me back to the little round bar table where sat a pitcher of beer and her girlfriend—well: woman friend. Another pitcher is set before me as I sat down. Hard lady introduces herself—and to this day, I just can not remember her name, drat. Boldly, I ask her how come she's so hard all over. She responds with her having grown up with her fishing man father and a couple of brothers in the Alaskan fisheries; working 35 years at this before finally teaming up with a husband farmer and retiring to become a farm woman. Adds that her boat which she built with some family help, and fished for twenty-two of those years, was now high and dry in her backyard, and if I was curious to go see it, she'd be happy to show it to me . . . I'm mulling this piece of information over, when she lets it be known that, by the way, she is the elected bouncer for this Eagles Lodge hall out in the boondocks north of Portland.
As I was working split shift courier delivery and pickup driver day job, starting up at 5 am the next morning, I had to decline her tempting invitation to come and see her boat. Plus my original desire to go to this hick place was to get to see and hear a fellow I'd come across who not only played pedal steel guitar, but also owned and knew how to play dobro, (slide style) which was and still is my main unfulfilled musical intrigue. It seemed 'in the cards' that if I stuck with him for a while, that I might not only find musical employment, but more to my desire was the possibility of getting my hands on a dobro in the presence of a guy who knew what to show me about playing it. So: I had done the extra driving (after my 200 plus mile daytime driving job) to go see what's his name—I'm worse than awful with remembering names—play. First having gaged that what the band was doing was instantaneously translatable to my musicbrain-driven fingers—simple cover tunes of recognizable country and rock songs—the upright piano over against a side wall wasn't long before yours truly had the lid and front cover boards off and it cocked more toward the (raised) stage and the two-guitar/ bass/ drum quartet of wannabe country-rock stars doing the Eagles Lodge circuit—the bottom rung on the bar-band circuit racket, mostly under the control of certain mafia-related musicians' union agents in the Pacific nothwest. And I'm wailing away having gleeful interlude when grabbed in the middle of some song like maybe Jambolaya and flung about—literally!--by this 190 pound rock-hard R. Crumb-like dream keep-on-truckin woman.
Never saw her again, but her visage—that impression her power left upon my spirit grew to where, some years later, I wrote a poem about it which then got some chords added to its meter to become a song in my limited repertoire of stuff that I will still and ever-more throw the effort into performing. This was not enough, it seems, for when I shortly thereafter, found my amazed self scribbling down a book-length 'literary' (ha!) effort, wherein the poem/ song's hardbody transmorgified itself into a statue of stone of a female half-awash about three miles west and north of the Golden Gate; better make that four miles, because another mile off the turbulence of the four or five hundred feet in diameter whirlpool that never stops swirling around where the statue of my book once stood proud, peering seaward, a familiar, though potentially deadly, friend to the sailor trying to get back into the bay and shelter from bad weather. After clearing the northern headlands at Point Bonita, a right turn (north) along the shore, say a mile out, just off Tennessee Cove is where folklore says that a lone washrock existed that looked very statue-esq, but was dynamited in the late-1880s because too many ships were running into it in the often-foggy approaches to San Francisco Bay.
So this now lays the groundwork for Reddy's references to the statue in the Chapter I hereby enclose. I have long since deleted the Statue poem song words from the book, but its general flavor gets described as the text progresses along its merry way.
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