In the Bastard Lounge

I was 19 years old.
I had been travelling around the country for a few years, my friends & I would kind of do a yearly migration all moving in large flocks from one city to another. We'd stay in one place for a couple of months, drink beer & do drugs, collect food stamps, government assistance, spare change. Then we'd move on to the next closest city where we knew someone, or knew where someone might be. We were alot like the lice that lived on us back then, just in it for the free ride and the fresh blood.  It was early summer & we were in Cincinnati; this was unusual because summer mostly meant New York or Minneapolis, cities too cold for the houseless during the colder months. We had descended on the one lonely girl with a job & an apartment that found us charming, which was our usual M.O. and spent our days panhandling & drinking cheap 40's of malt liquor. Writing on walls with fat black magic markers, the angry slogans which kept us fueled as much as the booze.
  The weather was nice and the kids were out, seeing our crew and figuring on a good time, our party always turned into a larger party until all of the bars on Vine St. would be nearly empty as everyone in the city it seemed was drinking at this girls house. The girls name was Darci, and while it was nice to have visitors and feel all popular, Darci was beginning to feel betrayed. I forget who it was that we sent to sleep with her, but that's how we usually did it. Get one of the cool guys to fuck the girl, so his friends could have a place to stay.
 All I know is that it wasn't me, I was from Cincinnati & knew Darci from grade school, I feigned standards.
Her apartment was directly behind a club called Top Cats, there was a metal fire escape that led up to the roof, because there was so much commotion in the club, they never heard us climb up there drunk every night to share hidden 40's or to discreetly make out with some young punker chick.
  Darci threw all of us out one evening, Hell, I can't blame her, she had to have figured out the scam by now. And all of the dreadlocked figures reeking of beer sweats and body odor sleeping on pizza box beds around her tiny apartment had to piss her off, she had a job after all.

 Having nowhere to go, but it being a nice night and all, we started hauling lumber and loose boards up to the roof of the club behind Darci's place. We had pallets, cardboard boxes, milk crates, pizza box mattresses, street signs, someone even came up with a door from somewhere.  We spent a few hours fashioning all of this refuse into some sort of haphazard refuge on the roof of the bar. The sounds of the Reverend Horton Heat blared from the club below our feet, they never heard us. When we were finished we stepped back to look at our creation, a vision of modern architecture, a Frank Lloyd Wright fever dream, a Palace Flophouse someone instantly dubbed "The Bastard Lounge".

 It stood as our home and our symbol of solidarity for about 2 weeks, until some asshole (Big Jim I think) got kicked out of the bar at Top Cats below and said "Well Hell, I'll just go to the bar on the roof! Much more fun up there anyway!"

So it was Johnny Naffah & I; Royal Brougham I still think we were calling the project. We had Luke Steitz interested in playing the drums, and he brought in his friend Mike Puglisi who we initially slated for bass. I had been kicking around using the name Bastard Lounge for a project for a while. I had flyers made up for the first show of a band that had self destructed before their debut performance using that name, and I was still partial to it. A kind of reverence to my nostalgia of that era, yet still descriptive of the spoken word thing. When we all met up at the University St. train station to take the bus down to the studio, it was obvious we were a bunch of bastards, so it fit.
 Puglisi, guitar god that he is, was not happy to be playing the bass. Johnny, nice guy that he is, attempted to over compensate, opting out of his solos on a few tracks so the rhythm could take over the sound. We mostly worked on a piece in cadence to Mickey & Sylvia's 1960 hit "Love is Strange". It didn't get nailed down that evening, listening to the session now, there's something missing from the cohesiveness of our sound.
What does come through is the raw, the visceral, I'm not about to say it's bad, but it sounds like a garage punk poem band doing do-wop covers. And mister, that don't really fly at my age. I aint punk.

 Writing ones life, you come up with an odd problem. You are only telling what you remember from the story, and things change within the confines of personal perception. How I remember something is not necessarily how it happened. There are moments, phrases, a lilting breeze, a certain song playing, a scent, or how someone pronounces a word that become bookmarks to that moment. When you recall them you recall them from your perspective. Something might have been deciphered differently than it was meant, you reacted in a different way than you would with the clarity of hindsight.  It makes the personal narrative exactly that. There is a redundancy in always saying "this is how I saw it" or "it seemed to me", so you just say it. If a writer worries about getting every detail correct from every perspective, or not upsetting anyone at all, he will never write a word. The responsibility is too large.
 David Carr wrote an interesting memoir. he is a journalist and an ex-coke addict, he went over his past like an investigative journalist, interviewing everyone he knew from his using days. The way he remembered things were never the way they were relayed to him. the book is called "Night of the Gun", and who ends up holding said gun on the night in question ends up as much a surprise to the reader as it is to the author.


Next up.
Introduction to Johnny Naffah, & "we suddenly aint all bastards anymore"