Growing up in The Bay Area, The Tubes were one of my favorite bands, and long before I ever became one myself, their song White Punks On Dope was anthemic for me. Back in the day, it wasn’t their over the top stage show which included; gigantic pills with legs, soft core porno cheerleaders, platform boots so high that KISS wouldn’t go near them, and a maniacal ring master who called himself Quay Lude, that compelled my adoration.
Music starts working its magic at your ear hole and if it doesn’t happen there, then all of the fake blood, and laser lights, and satin spandex in the world isn’t going to turn things around. To this day, the bands that I really love make it happen with sound, and when they can add some wild theatrics to the mix, that’s just gravy.
By the time I returned to the West Coast in the early nineties my buddies from high school had discovered The Grateful Dead. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the traveling circus that the Dead had become by that point, it is difficult to convey with words what these shows were like. The best way I can describe it is that they took rock and roll as far as it can go each and every night, and that those of us who were lucky enough to have been there for the ride relished every damned minute of it.
At the Dead shows the audience wore the costumes and acted like fools, while onstage the boys in the band took the crowd on a ride that felt like sex on a roller coaster. Not only was everyone high at the shows, we were all high on the same batch of drugs. Jerry eventually died of a heart attack in a rehab center while trying to cure himself of his heroin addiction, but at those shows he played that music as though charged by God himself with the task.
Eventually I lost my mind and my innocence all in the same night at one of those shows. Knowledge is a tricky business, and I have spent the majority of my adult life yearning for the ignorance of my youth. Once something is known, it can never become unknown to you again and on one fateful night I learned that the old adage is true, you really cannot ever go back again.
Humans are stubborn, and as one, I have proved to be quite tenacious when desire wells up within me. It is not surprising that I continue to refer to the blissfully mindless days of my youth as good old ones. Thanks to you tube, nostalgic dalliance is right at our fingertips and wasting the day away remembering the moments that were has become an international pastime.
I suspect it would be a strange feeling to randomly encounter myself in a video of an event from my past that has long since been forgotten. I know that it was pretty wild when my brother’s face filled my computer screen unexpectedly not long ago, causing me to leap excitedly up from my chair like a maniac before I called everyone in my family to validate the reach of our brave new world.
It turns out that Grateful Dead Parking Lot was filmed by a couple of guys named Chris Corsello, and Mike Patterson who lived on the same floor in the dorms over at Cal State Sacramento as my brother. Bill isn’t even the same guy anymore as the one who appears at 4:54 in the video wearing a tye dyed “Space Your Face” tee shirt that I had bought just prior to melting down, and that he inherited from me.
He has kids, and is a business man, and he likes guns and expensive tequila, and he is not going to be stoked about this post. Back then it was all duuuuuude, and sweeeet, and totally maaan. Nowadays the guy is all business and that’s the way it has to be when you have three kids and a mortgage.
Somebody said something about the penalty for not recollecting the past is that you are forced to repeat it over again. Thanks to technology we are able to relive history on demand regardless of whether or not we can remember it, and sometimes those images from the past don’t jibe with what we have become. We have created a situation where our past can return unannounced and sometimes the version that returns to us is the one that we wanted to forget.
The house in Wallingford was a scene, with guys coming by starting at about nine in the morning until midnight on working days, and intermittently here and there on the other days, but they never saw me or knew that I lived there. Frankly the furtive existence did not suit me or the ginormous personality I carry around with me and that is my curse. My arrival in Seattle to be the houseboy and live in lover for the woman who owned the house and coordinated the whole operation, turned out out to be less fun than I had anticipated.
Two girls and I lived in the house that, like many in Seattle, is built into a hill, but there were at least ten or so others who worked out of the place. It had a finished basement with two massage rooms and, in a third larger room that was once the garage, a hot tub platform where most people park their car at night. We lived upstairs and all of the business went on down in the basement of the house that is situatuated at the intersection of two pretty mellow residential streets. The house was purchased specifically because of it’s easy access to 99, a main thoroughfare, and because it’s corner spot simplified the process of directing clients there.
My relationship with the woman ended badly and there was a lot of mutual hostility between us but she was crazy and controlling and that didn’t work so well for me. Later I learned that after I left she finally went through with her plan to completely outfit the house with white security bars and beaming spotlights that illuminated the entire place with the intensity of the sun all night long. Of course with the amount of illegitmate traffic that came and then went everyday, and enhanced security measures that made the house stand out like a sore thumb in the neighborhood, it din’t take the po po very long until they also paid a call.
Tammy, the girl who also lived in that house with us, filled me in on the details of the bust one night when I randomly encountered her at a bar downtown. She was on her way to San Francisco with her boyfriend. I was drunk when we saw one another so I cannot remember if she told me that she was still living at the house when it all went down. Tammy and I laughed as we recounted the desperation of that house, behavior we witnessed together as a result of fate’s simple twist.
This guy that I know recently lined up a pay to play situation with a woman that he found on craigslist and when the dough came up out of his pocket, the vice squad busted in and arrested him for solicitation. He had done this sort of thing before and there hadn’t been any trouble but this time, like on Dateline To Catch A Predator, the police used the internet to get their sting on. He has to pay a bunch of money and do a ton of community service hours, but he doesn’t have to register as a sex offender because, unlike on Dateline To Catch A Predator, he is was not trying to get his freak on with a minor.
Like the war on drugs, the idea that sex for pay can be abolished or even discouraged, by enforcing laws that really should be determined by an individual’s personal moral code, is absurd. Sex is money. So long as humanity endures, the sacred prostitute, like death and taxes, will continually remain. Sex is a demand that is genetically programmed into all of the animals including humans and it is a hunger that does not diminish. Money is empowering because provides opportunities for those who have it.
Continually attempting to eliminate an irrefutable constant of human existence is akin to trying to murder a shadow, it just is not going to happen. Only when the governments of the earth declare that they will no longer be collecting a portion of their citizenry’s income will paid sex become an outdated concept. If the unlikely day ever arrives that money stops being exchanged for sex, it will certainly be heralded with bold headlines in newspapers around the globe. For sure, if that day should come, the other big news will undoubtedly be that science has found the way to immortality.
