Old Flicker, New Flame

It’s a cold grey morning. A workday. A school day. Burning diesel from the tailpipes of cars and trucks crawling along the 405, the 101, Sepulveda and Ventura floats over me as I pull out of my garage and roll off my driveway through a fine silty smog of morning exhaust.  I bring down my windows, take a deep whiff and coast down into the flats of the San Fernando Valley. It’s my turn to drive the kids to school. I hum an old rockabilly tune from my younger nights. I wonder where I left my bootleg cassette from the night Phil Alvin and his golden pipes opened for John Lee Hooker in the back room at McCabe’s Guitar Shop on Pico back in ’85. I worked the door that night. They used to give me twenty bucks and let me watch the show if I worked the door and broke down the chairs after the show. Phil wore a black Tuxedo for the occasion. Hooker wore a dark sharkskin suit, his trademark Homburg and dark sunglasses. He sat on a chair. It was a small room and I recorded the whole show on my Sony Walkman. That’s a one-of-a-kind cassette right there. I had instructed them – all of them – to never touch that cassette and if they did, to always put it back in its case. They say they hate that music, but I know they have something to do with its mysterious disappearance. They’re trying to make me slowly disappear.  They’re trying to light me up, burn me down and blow my ashes away.

I turn east on Ventura, mentally searching all the places I could have left the cassette. Last time I saw it was in the trunk of my wife’s old car as we were trading it in for a Minivan before the arrival of our third kid. Maybe I forgot to take it out of the trunk on the day of the trade-in. Even if that’s not where I left it, it’s good to think so because I need to stop thinking about it. I need to let it go. I’m trying to let go of things. I’m trying to accept things as they have become, not as they were and no longer are. I’m trying to settle down. In order to move forward sometimes you have to accept where you are moving forward from. Yes, that’s from a fortune cookie. But so what? Sometimes a little pre-printed phrase inside a fortune cookie is all you need to get by. Sometimes.

There’s three kiddie car-seats that have been professionally installed at twenty-six bucks a pop in the backseat of my car. They take up the entire row of my once elegant full-sized four-door sports sedan. I trick myself into believing it’s a dream-car. I bought it used at a fraction of what it would have cost new. I’d never be able to buy a car like that new. I don’t care too much about things being new. Pristine is not a virtue I give a shit about. Used stuff got me through my younger days. Used books. Used clothes. Used records. Used cars. Dingy, hollow, used up bars where there were no ropes, no bouncers, no lines, populated by guys like me and women nobody fought over or tried to do cartwheels for. That’s how I liked it. I was no fighter or acrobat or clown. My careerist friends accused me of having low standards; tried to hit me with those left-handed compliments, telling me I saw beauty in certain people or objects where others just saw plainness. I didn’t care. I got mine while they were standing in line practicing their tricks.

“Are you listening to what I’m saying, Dada,” asks my rambunctious strapped-in six-year old kicking the back of my seat.

“Of course I am, sonny boy,” I lie, catching his eye in the side-view. I wasn’t exactly lying. I had heard him in part of my head, while in another part of my head I considered other places I could’ve misplaced my Phil Alvin/John Lee Hooker cassette, while with the front of my head I negotiated eastbound traffic full of selfish texters and slo-mo stoners and harried parents and nervous office workers all clogging up the lanes on Ventura Boulevard, while with yet another part of my head I wondered if there would ever come a time when I would accept the hard facts: there’s no do-overs, there’s no going back, there’s only where I am today and there’s still plenty good roads ahead with side roads, unmarked roads, detours, pleasant bumps, fun dips and plenty of gas in the tank to get at all of it. But I had heard my boy too.

He was telling me about his dream from last night where he was lighting matches. He and his little girlfriend from school were lighting matchsticks and throwing them at each other. They were having such fun, he said, “and nobody came to stop us and the flames around us got higher and higher till the entire house burned down!” He yelled this last part with great joy, clapping his pudgy little hands together and slamming his strapped-in back into the professionally installed car-seat, almost making it come loose.

“Watch the seat,” I yell into the side-view. I don’t want to make another trip to the professional car seat installer.

“Whose house was it that you burned down with your little friend,” I ask.

“I don’t know, Dada. It wasn’t part of the dream.”

I go back to wondering where I left my bootleg cassette. My little thought-trick hasn’t worked. Still haven’t learned to let go, to accept that it was gone. It’s fine to look ahead, but what’s the harm in looking back at where you’ve been once in a while? That’s gotta be worth something too. I wonder if I could replay that night at McCabe’s in my head; if I could keep Phil’s golden voice alive and present by talking about it “Back in my day” style, like blowing on a dying ember to keep the flicker alive, to save the fire for later, when you might need it.

I drop the boys off and remind myself to hide all the matches when I get home.