Story Of A House

A house can take it out of you. When we got it, almost thirteen years ago, it was in a horrible state - a foreclosure, abandoned by the previous owners who apparently fled to South Carolina leaving behind debts and mountains of junk. We never knew how many of them there were - it’s a slow process of casual detective work. We've been able to tell a lot from the mail that still sometimes arrives for them. 

A neighbour told us he sent his kids to daycare at the house - another neighbour used to drop them off and bring them home. One day he picked them up himself, saw inside the house, and never sent them here again. He said the place was filthy. We knew that already - it took us years to clean it up.

There had been an above ground swimming pool but another neighbour took that when the house was empty. He also took the patio bricks. He came round shortly after we moved in to explain himself. He stood at the front door with a cigarette in a cupped hand, the burning end facing inwards - a jailbird smoke - and explained that he had worked for the previous owners, maintaining the property while it stood empty. As payment they had given him the patio bricks and the swimming pool. I said I wasn’t aware the banks paid neighbours to maintain their foreclosed properties, but he hardly noticed. He waxed lyrical for a moment: 

‘When we got that pool home and set up lil Danny’s eyes were shinin’…’ 

He broke off, took a clandestine drag of his cigarette, his eyes darted around, he lowered his voice: 

‘I don’t know what the neighbours around here have been telling you, but none of it’s true.’ 

‘Oh’ I said with a magnanimous gesture, ‘they’ve had nothing but good to say about you.’

We never were friends. He died a year or so ago. We sent a consolation card but we never heard back. We’d see Neighbour Dan, as we called him, busy cleaning his gleaming white pick up truck in the autumn sunlight when we were raking leaves. ‘Just imagine every one of them’s a hundred dollar bill’ he’d yell, and we'd reply with a sort of ahh whaddya gonna do? gesture that one of Amy’s brothers, who has lived for years in a suburb of Pittsburgh and knows how to handle these things, taught us. 

I sometimes thought the only reason for having such a large back yard was to keep the neighbours at bay. We could see them - keep an eye on things - but they were way off in the distance.

Neighbour Dan’s neighbour, an Italian American called Denise, ran a daycare next door to them. Seems like everyone ran a daycare. From our bedroom window we could see processions of cars in the early morning, pulling up, discharging children, driving off. Denise would sit on her front step and conduct telephone conversations that rang through the neighbourhood. She sold up and moved away last year. No more daycare. There are new people now, we haven’t met them but they’re having their basement done - you know these things when you’re a neighbour. We’ve seen a truck in their driveway with All Things Basementy on the side.

We absolutely loved our next door neighbours, Al and Tammy and their son Alex, who used to cut our grass. Tammy grew up in the house. Her mother, who was in her late eighties, lived with them. We’d see her on the back deck smoking a joint. Tammy told me her father had been a pharmacist. He distilled gin in the basement. In one of our earliest encounters she told me how on her eighteenth birthday he had presented her with a phial of grade A pharmacutical cocaine and told her to go and enjoy herself. She grabbed my sleeve: ‘Eric, I nearly shit my fucking pants!’ And to underline the point she reiterated: ‘I…nearly…shit…myself’. All this in a loud voice in the street. She was my first experience on an American neighbour. I was thrilled to bits.

One day during our first summer there I asked Tammy if we made too much noise. She said not at all - she really liked hearing us play music - they loved having us as neighbours. She said it was the first summer in years that they’d been able to open the windows on that side of the house. The previous owners kept dogs in a kind of dog pound in the back yard. Apparently they hardly ever let them out and they never cleaned the cage. Then there was the swimming pool - Al told me it was full of stagnant, green water with frog spawn in it, but the kids still jumped and splashed around in it. I thought perhaps they were trying to get clean having spent too long in the house. He agreed that that was very likely.

A wily old lady called Roberta lived on the other side. The kids were all scared of her. She knew everything that went on, and on the occasions that we talked to her she told us every detail, right down to her friend in the next street, the one with the prolapsed rectum.

Roberta had a clear view of our driveway from her back deck. When the hillbillies, as she called them, moved out the junk they left behind was hauled away by the truckload. A twenty foot dumpster was parked in the driveway, and when that was filled up another took its place and that was filled up too. They were hoarders. The basement, which they’d tried at some point to turn into a party venue, was filled with their crap. They’d built stud walls down their, insulated with fibreglass roof insulation, and lined with with plasterboard. The house had no gutters so the rain water drained into the basement and turned the walls of the party basement into a rotting, rancid mess.

In the first month we lived there I cleared out the basement as best I could, tore down the sheet rock and removed the soggy insulation. I dismantled a hideous structure that was intended to be a bar - it was built out of left over two by fours and offcuts, held together with four inch nails. It was probably meant to look charming and rustic, but it was just a filthy mass of nailed wood. We dealt with the basement most of the time by keeping the door shut and only going down there when the heating furnace broke down and had to be coaxed back to life.

Eventually we got hooked up to gas and waved a less than fond goodbye to the old fuel tank. We ran out of fuel on a regular basis, dug our way through to the tank through three foot high snowdrifts, and poured in red diesel from the gas station, five gallons at a time, in blizzard conditions. The mains gas hook up was absolute paradise after a few years of that.

We had the roof replaced, and when we’d got over the shock of that we had work done in the basement to make it dry and watertight. We finally made the effort and got rid of the remaining junk that was left down there, most of which was a large, rotting sound system left over from when the previous idiots tried to make it into Catskill’s most happening nitespot. While I panelled, painted and finished things that we’d left half done Amy painted the basement walls with special basement paint in fresh shiny white, and having done that she painted the entire basement floor with utilitarian grey floor paint.

I used to find the house quite daunting, but only if I thought about it too much. For ten years I would lay in bed, morning and night, and plan how I would replace the bedroom door with something that wasn’t the horrible, brown-varnished hardboard slab that wouldn’t close properly because there was no door frame for it to close into. I’d do the job twice a day in my head. It became an immense undertaking, a constant irritation, a niggling daily depression, a testament to my failure as a homeowner and as a human being.

One morning I could stand it no longer. I took the door off it’s hinges, carried it downstairs to the garage and came back up with the panelled door I’d been saving for all those years. It only took three hours to build a door frame and hang the door.

Now I lie in bed staring at a slight imperfection, a gap between the top of the door frame where it doesn’t quite run parallel with the low attic ceiling, and dream of pieces of trim that might somehow even it up. I shouldn't be hard on myself. I built everything in the place - walls, shelves, the front porch, the entire kitchen, and even the dining table. The house has worn us out and could quite possibly drive us insane if we stayed there.

But now it’s official - we’re leaving - we’re gone. We have a realtor, or estate agent if you’re in the UK. We’ve spent the better part of three months making the place into a saleable proposition - mending, finishing, cleaning, painting, decluttering… 

The other week I took the definitive step of I dismantling and packing up the studio ready to roll it into a shipping container. It took four days and I found it emotionally draining. It was a great sounding room. I made a lot of records in then - A Working Museum with Amy; my last four albums: 'amERICa', Construction Time & Demolition, Transience and Leisureland; The Old Guys for Amy; her latest album Hang In There With Me due out of Tapete Records in August; an unfinished reworking of my 1985 album A Roomful Of Monkeys; plus a whole load of tracks for compilation albums and tracks and albums for other artists. 

The room looks wonderful now, with only a Wurlitzer electric piano, a celluloid bikini mannequin, and a couple of armchairs and a coffee table added by the realtor, but it sounds like the acoustic disaster it was when I first tried to record in there. I remember driving hooks into the ceiling and tying an old quilt above the drumkit with string meant for wrapping Christmas presents. It sounded a lot better but it looked dreadful. It stayed that way for three years until I took the matter in hand and built some nice looking acoustic panels. It took years to get that room sounding right.

The sale listing went live just yesterday. We love the place but it’s time to start a new chapter. We couldn’t stay any longer - everything we needed was in storage and quite honestly the place was beginning to intimidate us - every smudge, every speck of dust… I’d love to live in such a beautiful place, but it’s up to someone else now. Here's a link for the listing in case you're interested in buying the place, or if you're like us and enjoy looking at houses for sale:

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1-Orchard-Ave-Catskill-NY-12414/30494760_zpid/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR0b57ReSUpw7qFFUtntCWfHkIeWAnY2slxmHCFYs9qkPg-i1w9g22xQH7w_aem_AfnKfWXgKABOZ8KkcwB1KbD_XbKkEO6oIxskTEvxaHEkzwt-B0_iQg31bH9P6nI1u-gn41Xqv8MPxiZ5muhlZVuo

And here's a list of tour dates:

May

17 KINGSTON UPON HULL - Wrecking Ball TICKETS

18 HOLT, NORFOLK - Community Centre TICKETS

30 SUTTON, SURREY - the Sound Lounge TICKETS

June

01 NORTH SHIELDS -Engine Room TICKETS

o6 BIRMINGHAM - Rock n Roll Brewhouse TICKETS

09 COVENTRY - Just Dropped In TICKETS

20 LONDON, WALTHAMSTOW - Rock n Roll Book Club TICKETS

 

Quincy, Recording, A Wedding Anniversary & A Run In With The Law

I keep writing stuff and not posting any of it - the world lurches from crisis to crisis and what I write quickly becomes irrelevant, inappropriate at at the very least just plain glib. I won’t write stuff about what’s wrong with the human race, and tell everyone how to put the planet to rights because it’s really not my place to do so, and most of the people who read what I occasionally write would probably agree with me on everything I’d have to say, so there’s really very little point.

And there are the others, the ones who disagree. I get so jangled by internet confrontations. I used to be stronger than I am now, but since having Covid and a heart attack in quick succession, and dealing with this thing called Long Covid, I’m not tough enough to take up the fight. Though I handled it coolly, a Facebook dust up with the daughter of a friend who told me my post was a fucking disgrace and I shouldn’t be in a creative industry left me depleted for the better part of a week. 

It was a joke concerning Eric Clapton in the wake of his anti-vaccine proclamations. I said that after careful consideration I was banning him from attending any of the shows on my US tour last October. It gave rise to a lot of anti-Clapton vitriol. I didn’t join in but as far as this person was concerned I was to blame and had relinquished any right to be in a creative industry.

 

Whatever the word in means in this context, and whatever industry it is that I’m supposed to be in that might be at all creative. 

The tremors, the palpitations, the extreme anxiety and upset that this sort of thing incurs just aren’t worth it. So from that point of view I’ve decided to be a human cabbage. 

I’ve been recording , and I’ve been recording, and I’ve been recording. I just finished mixing a song I recorded together with Amy for a forthcoming compilation album, a tribute to Badfinger. I’m never sure about these kinds of projects but I can never resist an invitation to participate. I had to work hard at it because I wasn’t sure the song had much going for it.

We started out with a random bass synthesiser loop, Amy played the Wurlitzer electric piano while I played an electric guitar with a load of delay and reverb on it.  We strummed a couple of acoustic guitars together around one mic and then overdubbed a couple more. We recorded a track of brushed cymbals and started on the vocals.

We sang in harmony - I sang it, then Amy sang with my vocal, then I replaced my vocal. The lyrics meant nothing to either of us. The track sounded great but the vocals were prosaic and lacklustre. At various points I wanted to give up on it but we kept going. I sent my vocal out through a Boss vocoder pedal and into my wonderful Moog Opus which Amy played. The result was other worldly and decidedly creepy. We put some oscillator noises on it and a casual bass guitar here and there and it suddenly came together. 

I wish I could do that with some of my own tracks. I spent bits of yesterday wrangling a track into shape in between celebrating out fourteenth wedding anniversary. It was a great day. In the morning we somehow got onto the subject of Quincy, played by Jack Klugman. I can’t imagine how we got there but Amy asked me if I’d ever watched the show. 

I was a huge fan, possibly for a lot of the wrong reasons, but I’ll readily admit to it. I watched it for the outfits - you never knew what he was going to be wearing next: loud checkered sports jackets with huge lapels; chunky V necked pullovers; windcheaters with elaborate collars and complicated arrangements of buttons or press studs. Every scene was a fashion shocker. Re-runs of Quincy were required late night viewing through the nineteen eighties.

We watched most of an episode involving the illegal dumping of toxic waste, featuring Quincy in a succession of golfing jackets and a big suede affair with sheepskin collar and cuffs, and patch pockets. Amy said she can see where I get my fashion sense. I hadn’t realised how much Quincy had rubbed off on me. I’d like to think that if he really existed we could be friends, maybe go thrift store shopping together.

It felt very decadent to be watching Quincy at ten o’clock in the morning, but it was our wedding anniversary after all.

Later on we decided to go for dinner and chose a restaurant down in Rhinebeck that looked suitably upscale and disgustingly expensive. We set off in my old Mercury Cougar talking enthusiastically about the writing of books, the making of records, and, of course, our rediscovered hero, Quincy. Amy usually keeps a check on my speed but she was having a night off. It was a country road that I’ve driven on many times. The speed limit changes every couple of miles. The Cougar was running perfectly and we were bowling along when I saw red and blue lights in the rearview mirror. I slowed down and prepared to pull in so he could pass me. Only he didn’t, he pulled in behind.

‘Have you any idea why I stopped you sir?’

‘I think it might be because I was going a little too fast…’

‘You were doing seventy-seven miles an hour in a thirty-five mile an hour zone.’

‘Oh wow! The car really is running well tonight…’

He asked where we were going and we told him. Amy took the opportunity to mention that it was our wedding anniversary. He asked how long we’d been married. I stuttered a bit over the answer to that, as you do, but I think it gave me a bit of guys together credibility

All this time we’d been trying to find the registration but for some reason it wasn’t in the car. I was having visions of celebrating our anniversary alone in a jail cell. He took my licence and headed off for his patrol car. He came back a couple of minutes later, handed back the licence with a smile, wished us a happy wedding anniversary, and told me to watch my speed.

I thought how different this encounter might have been had we been young and black instead of old, white, and heading for the stodgy town of Rhinebeck.

I don't usually drive so fast in thirty-five mile an hour zones but this one wasn’t exactly populated and I didn't see the sign. I’m usually more mindful. I don’t drive through neighbourhoods at breakneck speed.

Dinner was no great shakes but we enjoyed it anyway. There were an inordinate amount of waiting staff including a young man who kept coming around with a bottle of tap water. He topped us up and said Enjoy. He did this three times. The main or most prevalent waitress put me in mind of a shark with a ponytail. Vicious in her determination to do the absolute minimum.

It made us happy to be up here in Catskill. We’re lucky.

We came home and watched the last episode of the Warhol Diaries. Amy promised she wouldn’t cry but I think she did anyway. It was a happy sad ending.

I lay exhausted on the sofa. Amy googled Jack Klugman and we listened to him talking about the beginnings of Quincy. No one thought it would last more than four episodes, least of all Jack Klugman. But his cynicism turned to belief and it endured for eight seasons between 1977 and 1983.

Amy wondered why Quincy was such a success. 

The answer came to me in a flash from somewhere in the mists between awake and sleeping: those moist and soulful eyes, almost unable to bear the latest injustice, this week’s wrong which must be put right. Quincy is a good guy, the kindest, most tenacious, and fair-minded man that never existed. He lives on a boat with a vast collection of sports jackets and windcheaters. He’s a latter day male version of a fairy godmother. The world needs someone like Quincy. How could he not prevail?

Just To Be Clear...

I don’t have a vote here in the USA. I live here, own a house here, pay property taxes and make a tax declaration every year, but I don’t have a vote. I have a green card entitling me to long-term residence but with no voting rights. Some might argue that it’s taxation without representation which is unconstitutional, but considering the current president has clearly never read and understood the American Constitution that argument isn’t going to take you very far. 

People have asked me why I haven’t applied for citizenship. I was going to, I really was, until just under four years ago. A friend of mine got citizenship and I saw a photo of him standing next to the Stars & Stripes holding his right hand up in a salute of allegiance with a framed photo of President Obama behind him. I would have been ok with that but things changed, and now the only way I could give that salute of allegiance would be to have three fingers on my right hand amputated leaving just the middle finger. I need those fingers to play the guitar and other instruments, so I remain a green card holder. 

This doesn’t stop me from having an opinion and taking a political stance. I’m really heartened to see that so many people have already voted. I hope that most of these votes are for Joe Biden. I know Biden might not be the ideal candidate or many people’s preferred preference but he’s what we’ve got at this point. A non-vote or a vote for another candidate who has no chance of winning is effectively a vote for Donald Trump. As we sang in Vote That Fucker Out: it’s the devil you can work with or the devil you hate… 

I should have become an American citizen but I’ve spent the past three and a half years wondering if I actually want to be a citizen of a country with such an abhorrent administration. And then I had Covid and an attendant heart attack, and then it was too late. So I’m still just a green card holder and I still don’t have a vote. 

Maybe you’re reading this and you haven’t voted and you’re thinking you’ll just stay home and not bother. Maybe you think there’s no point because whatever will be will be, or you think it makes no difference anyway - you’re wrong about that, it does make a difference, but only if you actually do it. So if you’re one of those you could do me a favour - on Tuesday take a walk to the voting station and vote for me.

Evinrude...which yacht is yours?

All boat mechanics are called Mike. In fact anyone who has to do with the running of things in the boating community is called Mike. They have to be: there’s Mike who runs the Bliss Marina in Catskill where we park/moor/dock the boat (never sure of the correct term), there’s Mike the boat mechanic at the Hop O’Nose marina, and there’s Mike across the creek at the other marina. 
Then there’s Larry - he’s obviously the exception that proves the rule. But he’s down near Poughkeepsie where the rules are probably different. One day, when his time isn’t taken up with delivering the posh Closer-To-New-York-City boating crowd from disasters like having their floating gin palaces sink due to the batteries that drive their bilge pumps going flat in the wake of torrential rain storms, Larry is going to sell me a reconditioned Johnson Seahorse outboard. He just needs to find the time to recondition it. 
In the meantime Mike the mechanic twiddled with the motor last Friday resulting in a weekend of boat trips up and down the creek and out onto the utterly terrifying Hudson river. It was all quite wonderful but Monday evening came around and it became evident after thirty or so pulls on the starting cord that the Evinrude is settling in for a week off.
I think the two stroke ratio is off. Everyone says 50:1 - that’s fifty parts gasoline to one part two stroke oil. If I was ploughing up the creek at a forty-five degree angle with the motor on full throttle, terrifying myself and everyone else, the ratio would probably be fine, but I hardly ever push it above a steady five mile an hour chug so the plugs keep oiling up.

The guy I bought the motor from told me 100:1 is the correct ratio and there’s a sticker next to the fuel intake that says 100:1, but I bowed to the superior knowledge of men called Mike because the guy I bought it from was called Scott, so what would he know? 
I’m thinking Scott might be right.
I took a can of gas down to the boat and diluted the mixture. The damned thing almost started up but it gave up and so did I. So it’s back to Mike the mechanic. He’s promised to drop by and have a look at it. I think he’s impressed by my tenacity.
Amy and I went down and took a sedate row across the creek. As we paddled slowly alongside a large moored up yacht a man looked down at us:
“Outboard not working eh? Which boat is yours?”
I didn’t immediately understand what he meant but Amy caught his drift straight away.
“This is it” she said, “we don’t have a real boat, just this.”
He thought we were using it to row out to our own massive yacht. He looked slightly taken aback and went back to what he was doing, which was attending to a barbecue.
Amy asked him what he was having for dinner.
Hamburgers, he was grilling hamburgers.
“Imagine,” I said, ‘having a boat large enough to grill hamburgers on.”
We sloshed away in our tin tub with its defunct outboard hanging off the back.
The dismal sound of the same four chords being played over and over on a ukelele wafted across the creek. It appeared to be coming from the house that until yesterday had a large banner hung off its balcony that said Get Aboard The Trump Train 2020. Today the banner is gone. Perhaps they watched the Republican Convention. Or heard our latest track: 

Smoke On The Water

I keep writing stuff and not posting any of it - vast tracts bemoaning the state of the world, the UK government, the horrific US administration, police and my interaction with them since the age of thirteen when I was a juvenile delinquent, being beaten up in police custody, racism, sexism, injustice, the virus... and I realize more and more that there are other people much better qualified than I am to write about these things in a way that might inspire people and bring about a change. All I’m going to do is preach to a small congregation of believers and bring people down.

I think about what we want to achieve and the conclusion I come to is that we want to see an end to basic human misery. Ok, it’s an impossible goal but I’d prefer to be part of the solution than part of the problem. I’m still in a fairly precarious state of health and I’m certainly not ready to man any barricades but people seem to be uplifted by my Instagram and Facebook posts about my exploits owning a small tin dinghy with a somewhat unreliable Evinrude outboard. So I’ve decided that for the most part I’m just going to write about that instead. It doesn’t mean I don’t care or that I’m oblivious, please don’t think that. 

I bought the boat with the money I was going to spend on getting the transmission repaired on the car I use for touring, a 1997 Buick Le Sabre with an interior that smells like an old auntie and the best sound system of any car I’ve ever owned - Concert Sound System it says under the speakers. It doesn’t look like I’m going anywhere for a while so it’s got to go.

Here are a selection of random posts: 

July 22 

Lowering the tone at the difficult end of Catskill's most charmingly shabby marina. Now the Evinrude's working again other motorboat people actually wave at us which is something I'd prefer to discourage. A man with a yacht got very snippy when I pulled alongside to let him pass. "That's my berth" he said without moving his mouth. Really squire? I'm not a bleeding clairvoyant, and anyway I can't hear you over the noise this here motor's making... 

But I did get a compliment on my rowing from a fellow motorboat-ist when the motor cut out and I couldn't be bothered to restart it to get the twenty yards or so to my own decidedly un-yacht-worthy berth at the unfashionable end of the slip near the portaloo.

August 5th 
I haven't been able to start the Evinrude for a couple of days but I went down and fiddled with it this evening and it started on the third pull. It must have heard me negotiating a trade-in for a rebuilt Johnson Seahorse. 

I called Amy and she rushed down to the Bliss Marina. As soon as she came in sight the Evinrude stalled. I think it's bashful - it's not a natural performer. I gave it a minute and it restarted on one pull. We chugged up the creek, went under the bridge, turned around and chugged back down again. The water was a dark muddy brown after the recent torrential rain storm. There were no boats out on it which was strange because there was twice as much water as there normally is, so you'd think that people with boats would want to take advantage of that but it seems not. I imagine they were fearful that the post-storm muddiness might soil the pristine, semen-white finish of their expensive plastic pleasure craft.
We chugged and racketed our way past our mooring with the sun at our backs, past big green buoys on our right (did we go the wrong side of them?), past oyster-shucking diners at the Port O'Call restaurant on our left, and out into the vast waters of the mighty River Hudson. We became fearful, executed a U-turn and headed back into the safe familiarity of the Catskill Creek. 

But for a moment we were intrepid. 

August 6th

I think I've discovered a trick to starting the Evinrude - take the lid off and let the air get to it for a few minutes. I stumbled on this idea because the catch that holds the lid on became loose and was in danger of vibrating off in mid-voyage and being lost at sea, or creek more likely, seeing as how we're usually too timid to venture further than the eddying and shapeless weirdness of the creek flowing into the Hudson. 

I made the repair, secured the lid and started the motor with three pulls on the starting rope. I quickly untied and made a real hash of setting off from the dock. Fortunately I've moved to the far end of the slip where no one can see me making a spectacle of myself. The downside is that by the time I've walked from the gangway to this far flung outpost of patched up pontoons I often feel a little queasy with motion sickness and it's a relief to get into the comparative unwobblyness of the boat.

I puttered up the creek, performed a wide sweep and headed off towards the river past Mike, the owner of the Bliss Marina, who has a new found respect for me: 

"You never told me you were a rock star..."

I mumbled something suitably British by way of a reply - "Um, well, yes...ah..."

"Guess it never came up eh?"

"Hmmm" I thought as I wobbled down the pontoons, "it must be pretty damned weird being me."

Seems he has a son who reads my posts. 

If you're reading this one: hello Son of Mike - please don't laugh at my abberational boating skills! 

It was a glorious afternoon and I made it all the way down to the Point which used to be an island belonging to native Americans who swapped it for a pile of blankets when Henry Hudson came sailing up the river in 1610 or whenever it was. I may have got my facts wrong there but history was never my strong suit - I'm almost better at boating than I am at history. 

I chugged and puttered back up the creek and tried for an effortless berthing that went very wrong. I slammed the motor deftly into reverse and pulled it back into neutral, but something was off with my deftlyness and the boat never left forward gear leaving me sailing past the berth and on up the creek. I cut the motor and rather sheepishly rowed back to the mooring. 

I had to rehearse with Karen Schoemer late of The Schoemer Formation for a show Karen and I are doing together in the socially distanced parking lot at TSL over in Hudson.

After the rehearsal I dragged Amy and Karen back to the boat and repeated the whole exercise, this time with a crew. 

Amy drank wine while Karen gazed around in wonder. 

August 7th
It was overcast and humid and it had been raining half the day. The rain had stopped in the afternoon so by about seven o’clock I thought I should go and bale out the boat. I wobble-bounced along to the far end of the slip and sure enough there was almost a foot of water in the back of the boat. The half full gas tank was floating in it. I’d been clever this time with the bilge pump, made sure I’d left it on the dock side of the boat where I could reach it rather than having to lasso it with a mooring rope or climb into the boat to get it, ankle deep in cold rainwater. 

It isn’t easy operating the manual bilge pump from outside the boat but for me it’s preferable to getting my feet wet. I’m afraid I'm not much of a mariner - I can’t stand cold water and I hate walking around with wet feet. If I’m not careful I end up slapping around in sodden footwear because taking my shoes off and then having to put them back on seems like too much of a project. So there’s something you know about me now - I’m not just unsuited to marine living, I’m lazy as well. 

But not when it comes to the bilge pump - I had the boat pumped out in no time at all. I’d had the foresight to take the cover off the Evinrude so the air could get to it - I think it suffers from condensation. I got in the boat and primed the pump thinking I was probably wasting my time seeing as how damp it’s been, but I had to try.
It started on the fourth pull. 

I untied and probably because there was no one around to see, cast off perfectly. I chugged off up the creek into the sinking sunlight and had to steer a course around a large, white plastic yacht that suddenly appeared from behind the promontory. A woman and two small children were reclining on the prow. They gave me a joyful wave across twenty feet of open water, blissfully unaware of the near collision which had just taken place in my mind. I imagined a dad, masterful, authoritative and alone in the wheelhouse. 

But do those things have wheelhouses? More likely a seating area, high above the water, all white pleather and big beverage holders with a dial-encrusted panel and a chromium steering wheel as a centre piece. Not like my old river cruiser, the Desert Star - thirty-five feet of seasoned and rotting mahogany, adorned with leaded lights and Art Deco features, car tyres for fenders and a four cylinder Perkins diesel motor below. Now that had a wheelhouse. 

I took a couple of turns up and down the creek and tied up with the sun going down. A family were fishing off a boat moored further back up the slip. A little girl caught a catfish. She looked thrilled and astonished. Her dad got the hook out of its mouth. She held it and just as another dad took a commemorative photo it slithered and jumped out of her hands back into the creek. 

August 8th 

Amy’s daughter Hazel is here for the show at TSL - Hazel is the opening act, TBHQ. What better way to start the day than with a boat ride? It was already too hot by the time we got to the marina. Everyone got aboard while I set about starting the motor with all the confidence of a man who thinks he’s got it down with the Evinrude. I primed the pump, pulled out the choke, set the throttle and pulled the start cord until I was exhausted. I re-primed the pump, fiddled with the choke, verified the throttle setting, took the engine cover off to get some air into the thing, sprayed Quick Start Miracle Outboard Motor Starter Spray into the carburettor, pulled a few more times, put the cover back on, pulled again, and again, and again... and finally gave up. It was too hot out there anyway.

We did the show at TSL. They've built a stage outside the front door next to the parking lot with a big screen for projecting movies. The screen is actually big sheets of plywood supported by a wooden frame and painted white. It's all quite ramshackle and I'm in rapt admiration of their pioneering spirit.
Chairs are arranged six feet apart in all directions on a grid, each chair placed on a yellow spray-painted X. The PA system is somewhat underpowered but it's a parking lot in the middle of a residential area so I'm happy to take what we're given. 

Setting up and soundchecking in the heat of the blazing sun was a living hell that I could have done without but what can you do? Nothing's ideal, we have to work at it, do some reinventing. It was a fairly sparse turn-out - it would have been good to see some of the people who bemoan the lack of live music but I imagine they were at home watching a Zoom concert in air-conditioned luxury. The show went well and I'm glad we did it even though I was wiped out afterwards. 

August 9th 

I tottered down the pontoons determined to bring the Evinrude back to life. It was a beautiful evening down there on the creek if a little hot and humid. Perfect weather to cruise up to the bridge and back. I took the cover off the motor to let the air circulate, tightened up the catch that holds the cover on, replaced the cover and took the neccessary steps to prepare the motor. It almost fired up on the first pull. Except it didn’t. I gave it several more pulls and there was the occasional splutter but mostly it was barren, impotent, infertile and thoroughly disappointing. 

I gave up before I wore myself out and did a bit of rowing instead. But rowing isn't much of a thrill once you've experienced the open-throttled roar of the Evinrude, and anyway it was way too hot and I was tired so I rowed back, tied up and sat in the boat content to be bobbed about by the wake from the occasional homebound yacht.
Two large white plastic pleasure cruisers were weaving up the creek. They appeared to be lashed together. The idiots on the boats had a police siren and were shouting abuse at other boaters through a megaphone. They shouted something at me that I couldn’t quite hear but I definitely caught the word asshole. 

A mean looking man in a motorboat asked me if I knew them. I told him I didn’t and he said he was going to go after them because they’d been harassing him and he was going to mess them up. He roared off up the creek, a man on a mission. I was quite pleased about this but he needn’t have bothered because I have a truck in the area and the crew are already taking care of it. 

Let me explain…

A few years ago I was booked to play at a wedding in Glasgow. The PA was being supplied by the Ceilidh band who were also supplying the disco - they were that kind of Ceilidh band: professional entertainment. They didn’t seem to care that I was also booked to play even though it had been agreed in advance that I’d be using their PA and would have certain requirements and stipulations of my own. They arrived late, set themselves up and then gave me no help whatsoever with the PA system except for a directive that I mustn’t change anything on the mixing desk and that I should use Kevin’s microphone to sing into. 

Somehow I struggled through. Weddings are tough - the bride and groom usually love you and that’s why they’ve booked you, but it doesn’t really occur to them in the excitement of planning the thing that this is not going to be Great Aunt Muriel’s cup of tea. And why would it? It’s their special day after all. There are also brothers-in-law, best friends from school, best friends from uni, mates from the pub or the rugby club, and always a squadron of small boys being aeroplanes. And quite often a five year old in a party frock who’s just been sick, standing in front of you with her fingers in her ears wearing a just been sick expression and yelling at you to shut up. 

There are variations on the theme but that’s generally about it. The best thing I could do in these situations is to somehow make Whole Wide World last for thirty-five minutes. That’s what Norman Greenbaum did with Spirit In the Sky - no one was interested in his other stuff so he just did Spirit In The Sky for forty-five minutes and then another five minutes for the encore. Spirit In The Sky lends itself to that kind of treatment, Whole Wide World unfortunately doesn’t. Wedding guests don’t want to hear songs about Sysco trucks, or songs with broken fridges and burned-out cigarettes in them, or songs that ask quite simply how the fucking hell did I get here? So I’m a bit stuck, but I do the best I can when these occasions come up, and at least the bride and groom are usually happy.

At this particular wedding the Ceilidh band didn’t even wait for me to pack up before they were back onstage. One of them made an announcement: And Now Back To The Entertainment! And they were off, dashing the white sergeant and stripping the willow, kicking up a regular penny whistle din while I crawled around their feet gathering up my cables.
I saw a set of Irish bagpipes laying on the floor waiting to be deployed into some sort of shrieking hell, and it occured to me that I could fuck this lot up very nicely with a can of expanding foam.

I resolved to always travel with a can of the stuff. Just a squirt here and there…
Flutes: no problem!
Bagpipes: silenced!
Exhaust pipes of the promoter’s car: sorted!
Hotel plumbing: fuck you!
I could run riot with this stuff.

I went to have a look at a house that some friends were considering buying. The owner had a foam insulation company and every timber in the attic and basement was covered in layers of the stuff. I’d already decided I was going to buy a twenty-four can contractor pack but when I saw those timbers that idea fell by the wayside. What I needed was a truck, a foam insulation truck with a tank of the stuff on the back and a hose that could be unrolled and shoved through the letterbox or catflap of - let’s say - the headquarters of a particularly odious record company. Fill the building with expanding foam, that’ll fix 'em! 

Then I thought well why stop at that? What I need is a fleet of these vehicle - don’t fuck with me or I’ll send a truck… 

So if anyone pisses me off that’s just what I do. In my mind I have an expanding foam insulation business with a large fleet of trucks. Anyone upsets a friend of mine I say: "Don’t worry, I’ve got a truck operating in the area…" 

I’d send my trucks down to Washington DC to attend to a certain address there but it’s not a practical proposition so Amy and I have made a record instead. A troll has already berated Amy about it on Facebook before anyone has even heard it. He called it a juvenile rant. We know you’re going to love it. Here’s what we need to do: 

Things Like This Happen To Other People (part one)

Things took rather a sinister turn last week - I had a heart attack and spent the weekend before my birthday in intensive care. 

I felt good when I got out of quarantine. A few days later I suddenly didn’t - we went for a walk and I got very out of breath - I had to sit down. It kept happening and it kept coming and going. Other virus sufferers told me they had exactly the same experience - the recovery is long and drawn out. I kept reading about the comet tail - recovery from the virus can be slow and fraught with setbacks. 

Apart from being short of breath, on occasions I started to feel quite nauseous. And then the chest pains started. High up, either side of my shoulders. Then they'd subside and I’d feel tired. I’d curse the virus and try to get on with things.

Obviously it was going to get better. Except that it didn’t. I had a day when I felt pretty crappy just about all day. The following day I got up and felt vaguely well. I sat and drank peppermint tea and enjoyed Amy’s latest homemade granola experiment. I felt tired - maybe I just needed to lay down for a while... I went up the stairs and felt the pain, an acute discomfort, grip me. I lay down and after a while it was a little better so I got up, got ready and went out with Amy in her car to run a few errands.

We were up north of Hudson where some friends have a farm. It was good to be out in the country, in the sunlight enjoying a socially distanced conversation.

I felt unwell. I had to excuse myself and get back in the car.

We set off to go home and I started to feel really unwell. Amy suggested we stop off at the hospital but that seemed to me like a drastic step, an admission that something was seriously not right. And that’s the last thing I wanted to admit to.

Amy said ‘I hope you’re not having a heart attack,’ and I laughed it off and said ‘No, that would be completely different to this.’ It couldn’t be - everybody knows a heart attack is when there’s something like a fist gripping a large stone in the middle of your chest and you get tingles and sometimes a shooting pain down your left arm. I didn’t have any of that so it couldn’t be a heart attack. And anyway, me and a heart attack? It’s not possible, it’s a bad fit. Heart attacks happen to other people and possibly to me in some dim and distant future when I’m very old.

I was quietly freaking out and trying to keep a lid on it because I didn’t want Amy to be upset. My head had turned into a hot, fuzzy mush, my rib cage was squeezing itself inwards, I had a fairly excrutiating pain each side of my chest and my arms had turned into nonsense. It became imperative that we get to the hospital. I’ve never seen Amy drive so fast.

We skidded into the ER parking lot where there was a barrier and one car ahead of us. Amy jumped out leaving the door open and the engine running. Everything was blurring by this point. I saw an exchange taken place but didn’t know what Amy was saying. I found out later it was ‘My husband’s having a heart attack.’

There was a team running across the concourse and I was in a chair being wheeled through. I think I told them I’d had the virus.

‘He’s Covid-positive!!

‘Room seven?’

Yeah, room seven.’

We crashed through to the back of the hospital and into a room containing a whole team of medical workers. They dumped me onto a bed, clustered around, fired questions at me - allergies, medications, date of birth… A nurse who said his name was Scott told me I was going to be ok and he was going to give me an injection. They gave me pills to swallow, tore off my shirt and stuck a whole bunch of electrodes on me. They put a tube in my arm, gave me the injection and siphoned half a gallon of blood out of me. 

Scott asked if I wanted a chaplain.

‘That’s the last bloody thing I want!’

A woman in a lab coat bustled in with some apparatus and announced that she was going to test me for Covid-19. The apparatus looked like something you might use to artificially inseminate a goat - two small wiry looking probes - I tried not to look too closely. She plunged them deep into my nose and I could feel them in my throat. It was unpleasant but it was over very quickly.

They gave me oxygen tubes and I began to feel a lot less alarmingly like I was about to die. I had four over-riding concerns: 

I wanted to someone to go and tell Amy how I was - they gave me my phone and I called her. I had no recollection of this until later. It went something like: everything’s ok here - apparently I’m having a heart attack. 

I wanted to pee really badly - why didn’t I have the sense to go before all this happened? 

I mustn’t die because tomorrow was the second anniversary of the death of my daughter Luci’s mother, and I really didn’t want to bring this on her. The timing was not good and at the very least I could hear her saying: why are you making this all about you? And quite right too.

I was three days from my sixty sixth birthday and I didn’t want to spend it in isolation in a hospital.

Bit by bit I was divested of all my clothes apart from my socks - I went through the ensuing twenty four hours wearing my socks - how quintessentially English - he died with his socks on… They put me in a flowery robe that didn’t button up at the back and it occurred to me that they weren’t planning on letting me walk around anywhere for a while, not in that garment, and anyway I was hooked up to too much machinery. 

I was going to be transferred to Albany by ambulance. I was introduced to the paramedics who were going to take me there, two large and baggy looking men in black satin bomber jackets. They were called Duane and Shane. They seemed quite proud of the comedy aspect of their pairing.

They swaddled me in blankets, strapped me down to the trolley, loaded me into the ambulance and off we went with the siren wailing, Shane at the wheel, Duane busied himself with a few things then sat with me in the back. 

‘So, what do you get up to in your spare time? Are you into huntin’ and fishin’?’

It was going to be a long ride to Albany. 

******

There's obviously more to come but it's a long and twisted tale. Look back in a day or two for the next installment.