Chapter 3
The surfboard was a statement of sorts. Declan and Lucas wanted it to stay affixed to the Fairlane roof all of the way across the country. We had envisioned driving through Kansas with the surfboard on our car.
Declan fooled with the radio trying to get some music . . . anything. A weak “Tijuana Taxi” by Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass came through momentarily but fell out to a mixture of airwave static and someone speaking in broken Spanish. I remembered as a teenager getting that same album as a birthday gift with Herb and his band standing in a huge field of yellow flowers on the cover. I wondered what had ever happened to that album now, for it was no longer with me. I thought about how my large album-filled apple crate that I had dragged out to California was now heading back east again to my parents’ house on a United Parcel Service delivery truck. But Herb Albert hadn’t been in that crate collection for many years; he was lost.
The California coast keeps going on, I thought, as we passed through Atascadero State Beach with waves hitting the shore endlessly, mostly unwatched. The waves pounded the hard sand to the left of us as shiny aluminum-roofed farmhouses sparkled on our right, glimmering like the shiny pop-can sweet ocean itself does in the hot, forever sailing sun. Behind the tin-roofed barns was a mountain curtain backdrop, with mountains all in a row, rising up from the two-lane highway we rode upon and stepping back into America.
“Tijuana Taxi” came back for a few more minutes and then statically mixed into a song from a group called Ambrosia, “Holdin’ on to Yesterday,” which caused me to reflect, once again, upon losing Colette. What a miserable wreck I still was three months after the breakup. Lucas told us that this song was about Billy Pilgrim, Kurt Vonnegut’s time-traveling eccentric in his novel Slaughterhouse-Five. Billy had been kidnapped by aliens and taken to the planet Tralfamadore. The Scientologists and Shirley MacLaine believed that aliens walked amongst us all.
Music had become a part of my being, my soul, for after all, I was a Beatles-generation kid. Music was important to all of us who had grown up in those baby-booming times; it was woven into our days, reminiscent of all of the good times that we had. I was an imaginary rock star and dreamed often when my mood was down. But after losing Colette, it was those songs of love gone wrong that really brought me down.
As a kid, Declan had taken piano lessons from a nun when he attended Catholic school in Ohio. I, myself, had taken clarinet lessons for eight long years. Once a week, I took the bus to downtown Lowell to Bob Noonan’s Music Studio on Central Street; the place was upstairs from the old Rialto Theatre. The Rialto had been converted into a bowling alley before those times. Bob Noonan was probably in his fifties back then but had the thickest gray hair I had ever seen on a human being. He used to use this crazy hair-thinning comb while I sat there practicing my clarinet trills. It was funny because I was already starting to lose my hair, yet Bob Noonan had too much of it.
During my weekly lessons at the music studio, I learned how to play “Flight of the Bumblebee,” trilling those clarinet keys fairly well. I guess I was pretty good at it. At least my father thought so as he sat in the waiting room and listened to me sometimes. He thought I was so good that he would make me take the clarinet with us on our Sunday trips to see his aunt, Auntie Sister, where our whole family had to sit around and visit her in these big, huge, stale rooms of the nun convent. The convents always smelled of mothballs and bleach back then. I remember the big, scary mansion rooms of the Julie Country Day School, where Auntie Sister was mother superior. I’d have to break out the clarinet around midvisit and play for them all in a big, echoing room, with lots of nuns inviting themselves in to hear me as I sat there drilling the woodwind to “Flight of the Bumblebee.” It nearly killed me. When I got into high school and told my father Frank that playing in the marching band wasn’t really cool and asked him gingerly if I could quit the clarinet, he reluctantly said okay. It must have secretly killed him. I quit the band, and Bob Noonan, the clarinet teacher, died of a heart attack shortly after that. Poor Bob Noonan left all of that thick hair behind.
After quitting band, I began running track because running (from things) was something that I was always really good at. I wrote things too. It was around that time that I wrote this song, “Reincarnation of a Rock Star” after playing air guitar one day to The Stones in the parlor on Eighteenth Street.
The days, he stays inside
He isn’t trying to hide
His dreams are heavy screams, alive
They allow him to survive
His tools are vocal jewels, he sings
A harvest, running springs
A band silhouettes the stage
A lion on his cage
While lights go on
Fingers born, the frets are worn
The days, he stays inside
He isn’t trying to hide
No social suicides
No more
I loved dreaming. I could be a world-class surfer in my dreams. Right down the street from Bob Noonan’s Music Studio was The Strand Theatre where I first saw the 1966 Endless Summer documentary with my friend Ray Champeaux. I was mesmerized watching these guys chase the summer around the world, surfing the oceans of our crazy earth. It made me realize that it could always be summer for me. And while these surfers chased the sun, the sun was always warm. I truly wanted to feel the warm sun forever as I surfed upon these oceans of life. How comfortable and crazy it all seemed to me now.
Our own surfboard was now knocking its bungie bondage as we passed the long, distant beaches on our left. I felt like I was James Thurber’s Walter Mitty, living the life of a double agent, secretly leaving Colette or whatever else I was leaving in Los Angeles and slipping away to a top secret assignment somewhere in the East.
I was a singer in a rock-and-roll band. Back living in Huntington Beach, I occasionally sang with a group of Vietnamese guys that I worked with in the circuit board factory. Minh Nguyen and Bang Tran played the instruments, and I sang with them in their garage somewhere in Garden Grove. I knew the words to Billy Idol’s “White Wedding,” and I could sing it in perfect English, which was good enough for them at first. Declan tried to sing it one evening with me, and that’s when these Vietnamese guys decided not to invite us back for practice. They decided that they would rather learn the English words themselves because Declan and I could hardly carry it; they were getting better, and we weren’t. I always thought that I was a great singer, but isn’t that the way that these things always go?
And so it had come to pass that all three of us, Lucas Coppens, Declan Brady, and I, looking for something more, had planned to collectively move on till we found it. We would go together or separately. It was planned that August 24th would be the day we all would quit our jobs, and we did. Declan quit his newspaper ad sales job at the Daily Pilot (he always referred to the paper as the Daily Planet). Lucas quit his job as a mechanical engineer with the government, and I left my temporary job at the circuit board factory. We were off across the zigzag country and on to Europe.
“No more conventional jobs! No more 8 to 5! No more break rooms filled with cigarette stench and coffee cups!” Declan yelled aloud as Lucas rolled down his own driver-side window in order to let out a shrill, seemingly everlasting, scream from the meandering roads that skirted the cliffs just to the south of Big Sur.
Declan finally gave up on the radio and pulled out a cassette tape from Lucas’s amassed collection. Changing colors moved both above and below us; there was all of this turquoise water, the greens, and grays of hills above, and the rocks so far below. Waves crashed on the hard coast thousands of feet beneath us while the cassette deck played the Rolling Stones’s “Tattoo You.” The song “Heaven” came in with the crescendo of the waves that skirted the coastline. I sensed the waves below rolling to the beat of the music. I heard Jagger’s overlaid, calming, psychedelic voice and rare guitar play hitting the soft shore with Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts backing him up.
Sal Caprissi and I, God rest his soul, with Taboo, the pit bull, had “Tattoo You” playing on our tape deck all of the way across country on our way out to California in 1981 because it was the only tape we had with us. The Stones were touring that year, and Sal had bought the tape before we left Lowell. During our traveling dizziness, we changed the words in every song. We made every song about Taboo, the pit bull. For “Little T&A,” Sal would sing and dance with Taboo’s paws in his arms. The dog sat in his lap in the front seat of the Comet as Sal tried to drive, almost going off of the tired road sometimes. Sal really loved his dog. When Sal and I had left Zane in 1981 and landed in Orange County, in order to get an apartment to live in, Sal had to give his little rock-n’-roll pit bull away. After that, Sal Caprissi was never the same again. He thought back to the happy times that he shared with Taboo in the Dracut apple orchards, Taboo lying in the cool breeze on her golden stomach. Sal wondered after that if Taboo was happy. Had he done the right thing for her? Three months after he had to give Taboo away, Sal Caprissi packed up his things and hitched a ride back to Massachusetts, homesick and dog-less. He left me a large loaf of white bread and a large bottle of ketchup in the empty refrigerator.
It wasn’t long after that I began rooming with Declan and Lucas, all of us college graduates and California orphans in the 1980s, all of us looking for something that we couldn’t put into words.
Driving north now, our day was filled with Caribbean colors, with the waves still assaulting the cliffs below us as we drove on. We listened to more rock and roll. During a stop, Lucas seemed undaunted in his demeanor as he stood on the edge of a 1,000-foot cliff overlooking the ocean in order to scream a shrill scream once again, a ledge he had crawled to like some Native American spirit, to get one last look at that great western rock-breaking ocean before traveling eastward home. The smell of Pacific pines awoke my closeted camping memories as the keenest of my senses brought them in deep again and then in a bright flash of day, the whole Pacific was gone.
Eric Clapton was on board with us in the Fairlane as we drove. Derek and the Dominos belted out the classic “Layla,” with the beautiful soft keyboard instrumental ending it all; it ended the same way every time; it was amazing. How did he do it? There was the slow bleed of the guitar that quietly faded in and took it all over. It was such a sweet song that accompanied my driving dream.
East of the Pacific Range, as I awoke momentarily, we encountered the August brown Northern California hills; giant, golden, short-haired pit-bull-skin hills. They appeared to have been formed by the drop of some giant ruffled pit-bull-skin blanket. I imagined a giant Taboo waking up and turning to confront us on the winding roads, almost like Clifford, the red cartoon dog, turning our little car with the surfboard on top over with her nose and then pounding away to go look for Sal Caprissi elsewhere.
“He isn’t here,” I said to the giant imaginary dog outside of the car window. “He went back to Massachusetts two years ago, regretfully, without you. I’m sorry. It was probably my fault.”
Taboo was upset at me. If it wasn’t for me, Caprissi would still be with her, running in random apple orchards and lying in the cool, late-summer breezes of rural Massachusetts, both of them scratching their ears in the Dracut meadows and watching the puffy-shaped clouds blow by.
We got into Sunnyvale, at the bottommost part of the San Francisco Bay, right next to the heart of Silicon Valley around nine thirty at night. Roni, my friend from Lowell High and UMass, and her friend Elizabeth from San Jose (and Elizabeth’s basset hound, Cloey) were at the house anxiously waiting for us. We were the three weary travelers that had called ahead with our mad plans just a few days before. For this big trip, we had called ahead and asked everyone we knew, all of our past acquaintances who were all spread across our great continent, if they might have a place for us to stay for a night or two.