June 5 2009

③ After turning the computer and printer back off and re-plugging my bedside light and radio back in and lying back, I found that I still had more thoughts in the way of a letter-to-Arnold Gross, as promised.

     I may have already mailed you these two chapters and if so, please accept my apologies. It was really truly a monstrous relief when, in June 2005, after obsessing the book-writing experience for five interesting years, the table the computer was on got snagged on my hip bone as I arose from sitting there and literally crashed the computer and printer to the floor. 'Well: Fukkit then,' enters the scene at this point and I took a three and a half year 'sabbatical' from any more book-idea obsessing. If there is anything that can be called luck in this, it was after a fresh full printout of what manuscript I had ;fixed' up until then, so I had it bound and occassionally laid down dome blue, red, or pencil lines, arrows, XXXs and penciled or oenned word-substitutions, additions, and my ever-changing impressions of what might be more-acceptable punctuation, sentence re-arrangement, and stuff like that there. Now here, in this 2009 thingy, son Jerit brought me another computer/ word processor/ printer set up and, though I have yet to type the whole darn thirty-few thousand words of what I have into the computer, I have been re-ordering parts and trying to come up with what might pass for missing pieces of this supposed book I am supposedly (trying to be) in-the-process-of-writing/ re-writing. 

     My already-referred-to slow brain guy keeps getting lost in the sometimes seeming overwhelming magnitude of such a project that I keep trying to separate the book idea from my real experience; as well as from the boatlife experience book, and the essayist's tirading at the machine, into each their own cubbyhole but the body-of-experience files keep sliding out from their overflowing cubbyholes and getting shuffled into the mix on the floor that I must resign myself to the picking back up of the mess and yet another attempt at trying to sort the various aspects of everything that whomps upon Adam Hardway's inner spirit into 'sensibly labeled' compartments so that maybe I might be able to deal with them seperately without 'interference' from all the other memory holes' subject matter. They say: write about what you know. Well, I know what I wrote about is about all I know about the waterborne wooden boatwright, salvage & sailors' experience.

The only possible true antagonist is/ was the sea itself and its ever-present threat of nasty weather conditions. Juvenile/ adolescent theme: all rosy; happy ending; no pirates; no suspense, mystery, overt sex or foul language—minus one fuck and a shit or two-- the more sensible seeming of my many natures 'says' to me that: It'll never sell, so why bother? I could respond with: Why not? and leave it at that, for I have less than zero real clue as to why I bother; really I do—uh: don't. Like mister Popeye says: I ams whut I yam.

     I walked the whole shore of the Sausalito waterfront from Gate Six to downtown, (running into three old chums from the 60s/ 70s waterfront days who're still there, still living aboard their boats. “Boats” (Wayne) Bishop and Ale Eckstrom) where I jumped on local bus for ride back to ④  gate five where Joe Tate has himself enscounced in the Becky Thatcher, now high and dry upon the bank at the Gate Five parking lot and where I slept for the two days I stayed there. Shoshaunna, the now ex-bellydancer still owns and lives in the first houseboat I built in 1965, now up on a cement barge in space #4 of “C” or the “Main” dock. And Penny Woodstock in same boat on the peoples' dock at gate six. At the point of Gate three in my morning walk along the waterfront, and where once was the Deak Field vacant three acre lot of where the chap.8 party took place and upon which much of this chapter is/ was based, I paused to reflect upon this particular party once again while astride the raised mound of manicured lawn at the water's edge where we, thirty-9 years ago, had a pretty wild party! Ah, youth, eh? & one intrigued old feller here still wondering how that all became to be as a part of my life. Was it a right move for me to go boating? Probably not, but I was fairly well-qualified for service in the people's navy, as we always used to think of ourselves as. & besides, in my mindset of that era: shore life sucked

     Though I haven't had an instrument of my very own to play on ever since the mice ate my little piano here in 2000, I found that with my old music-making chums, nothing in my musical-memory brain failed me and I had the ultimate most possible dream piano-playing-while-singing music adventure!!!!!!!!! All original members of the redlegs band were in attendence and we played quite well for how long we'd been apart. And then my mind got smashed as smashed can be when Maggie came over to me after the gig as I was pushing the spinet (short) piano back into its corner, and gave me $102 with a big friendly smile and a kiss. I hadn't even considered that there might be money involved—had committed myself to spending $300 on the adventure—I had only focused upon how great fun this was gonna be and ended up being just that, in spades, you could say, thank Joe Tate very much for having the drive, wherewithall, and resources to assemble us all like he did.        Josie or Joesephine, still from Gate Six, now palsied by too much high living and in need of a girlfriend or two to keep her steady on her feet to dance, leaned over the low piano's top and gave me the slobberiest wettest kiss I'd ever experienced—she drools, too—leaving a thick viscous layer of slobber all over my foot-long beard, already wet from sweat, which I did profusely while performing. The rest of the band, and Maggie is still such a fox!, was on the foot-high raised stage 'behind' me with me on this short piano out in front on the dance floor is how come Josie got to me like that. Gentleman that I try to fake being at all times, I laughed it off and hugged her later, during which she tucked a ten-dollar bill into my hip pocket!

     I find it 'funny', the whole resurrection and re-creation of the band for just a one mo' time. Funnier still how well I performed in-tune and on-beat, and sang probably 70% of the words in harmony with Joe and Maggie. Realize how special of an event in my life this experience represented a very major huge catharsis (is that the right word?) for my spirit; helped out a monstrous bunch of repressed musical-desire—3 decades' worth! Well one and a half decades, anyway. I did get major musical performing ya ya s in the mid-90s in Portland for a year and a half there. So I'll print this out and then the Mayday chapter from the earlier book-writing effort.