Slam

[Editor's note: I wrote this a few years ago and recently decided it could use some cleaning up. I've always wondered what happened to this guy.]

Keith Curley was a pizza delivery man in Pasadena, Maryland in the late-1990s, who moved into my friend Elliott's folks' bungalow down on Bodkin Creek the summer before our senior year of high school, which is how he came into our lives. He was a few years older than us, in his mid-twenties, tall and thin, with a nest of long red hair that was always hanging in one huge tangle on his shoulders. He wore baggy, drab clothes and sandals and smelled like patchouli and gangrenous feet. In short, he was like a posterchild for the burnouts who became labeled hippies, solely for convenience sake - the kind who solely refer to people as "brutha" and everything as "cool beans." The kind of guy who couldn't pick Timothy Leary out of a line-up but probably believed that Terrapin Station was a real place.

Keith fancied himself a big-time show promoter in the making, and the first we heard of him was when he delivered a pizza to Elliott's house while our old band was practicing. He offered his "services" to us, and without really knowing what he did, we took him up on his offer to have a sit down. We were 18 and didn't really know any better.

We met him at the bungalow, which he had only lived in a for a few weeks at that point, though he had already converted the hall closet to a greenhouse and there were dogshit stains everywhere, even on the kitchen floor. A filthy Lhasa Apso who smelled like a compost heap was tearing away at it's fur in the corner. "Althea!" he yelled, and the dog scurried away. I remember not wanting to touch anything.

Keith broke the ice by asking if any of us had ever taken a canoe across the creek, which of course none of us had. He proceeded to enlighten us.

"You go across there in daytime, man, it might take you an hour. But you go out in a thunderstorm, man, those waves are just like SLAMSLAMSLAM! SLAM! SLAMSLAMSLAMSLAMSLAM! SLAM! SLAAAAAM! ROCKIN' THE BOAT! SLAM! SLAM! It's some wild shit, brutha!"

From that moment on, Keith was known to us simply as "Slam."

Slam managed to get us a few decent shows in city bars that wouldn't normally deal with underage bands, and he always kept the money. Whenever we would come by the bungalow to collect the $60 or $80 he perpetually owed us, he would go to ridiculous lengths to pretend to not be home, even when both cars were in the driveway and we could hear him dropping things in the kitchen. Once, his girlfriend called for him to open the door while we were standing there knocking, and he simply refused to answer her. Finally, to settle the score, Elliott and Heath started going into the bungalow when Keith wasn't there - he never locked the door - and taking the loads of weed he left sitting out in the open. Keith never caught on. Later on, when Elliott would go through the charade of buying weed from him, Slam was always surprised by how little he had left. "Man, I could have sworn I had more in here yesterday - I must be getting burned out, brutha!"

One time Slam brought his best friend's band up from Annapolis to play a show with mine and Elliott's band in Pasadena. They jammed for an hour-and-a-half on what felt like the same chord, and then managed to convince Keith to give them nearly all of the money from the night because they were "going on tour" to Philadelphia the next night. While I was in the middle of a world-class conniption fit, the band's bassist ran in the hall with a terrified look on his face. "Keith, you gotta get out here - the cops are here!" I darted outside to see Keith's friends' band's van hooked up to a tow-truck, with half of the band in handcuffs on the ground outside a squad car. I was impressed at how quickly karma had acted. Turns out the local fuzz had made a sweep of the parking lot after the show and discovered some of the band smoking weed in their van - they arrested them and then had their van - and all their instruments - impounded. Looks like "tour" was being postponed! Keith was completely distraught as the van was towed out of sight. "Not cool, brutha - not cool" was all he could mumble to himself.

As the months went by and Slam made plans to move out and slowly stopped coming around, we would still occasionally run into him when we went drinking on Elliott's pier in front of the bungalow. One time, Kuhlman and I took Slam's canoe from beside the house and rode it across Bodkin Creek in the middle of the night. Every time the oars hit the water we'd yell, "SLAM! SLAMSLAMSLAM! SLAAAAAAAAM! ROCK THIS BOAT!" When we finally made it back, we were so tired that we simply left the canoe on the beach and walked away.

A few weeks later, we were drinking on the pier with my friend Dan, who decided in a drunken rage that Slam needed to be dealt with, for no real reason. He staggered onto Keith's deck and grabbed both of his trashcans and his recycling bin and threw them into the creek. Gathering steam, he then pissed inside Keith's grill and all over a pair of sandals he had left out on the porch before finally hurling a pair of Keith's shoes and a hackysack into the creek as well. Just as we were getting ready to bolt, Keith appeared out of nowhere, visibly upset.

"You guys happen to know who might have taken my canoe out last week?"

I prayed no one would sell me out.

"If I get my hands on that guy, there's gonna be some trouble. That asshole didn't even bring it back up off the beach, and high tide carried that motherfucker a mile downstream. I had to wade underneath some dude's pier to get it back."

We sat there in the dark trying not to laugh, watching Keith's trashcans float slowly up the creek.

"Anyway...anybody want some burgers?"

Deep Thoughts #1

1) When shopping for more than one box of cereal, you should be cognizant of how the different flavors will taste together, should you get to the bottom of both boxes around the same time.

Scenes from a High School #1

Actual exchange with a kid today:

"Ummm...do da lac neh monuh be ruh?"

"What?"

"Do da lac neh monuh be ruh?"

"Say it again - I can't understand you."

"Do da LAC neh MONUH be RUH?"

"I'm sorry but I still have no idea what you're saying. Slow it down."

"Damn yo. Do. The. Loch. Ness. Monster. Be. Real."

"Umm...yes."

Addendum

So yesterday Cardin held a second "town-hall meeting," this time in Hagerstown. And this happened.

Scenes from a Bar #1

[Int. Night. Dimly lit hipster bar. A band caterwauls in the background as a young man bellies up to the bartendress.]

Guy: No, I'm good. I think five's my limit. Thanks. [Motions for her to lean in.] Hey, I don't mean to sound sleazy with you working here and all, but I think you're really cute. My band is playing the Ottobar tomor-

Girl: WHAT??

Guy: My band is playing the Otto -

Girl: WHAT?

Guy: MY BAND! IS PLAYING! THE OTTOBAR TOMORROW NIGHT! THE OTTOBAR! TOMORR-

Girl: I have to work tomorrow. [Immediately walks away.]

Guy: Ok.

[Edit - This is an old one.]

Vitriol

Oy vey.  This health care business is about enough to put an infected boil on your ass, which I hear automatically disqualifies you from living, if Obama's "death panels" find out.  The stakes are getting pretty high.

I thought long and hard about going to the town-hall meeting hosted by Sen. Cardin at Towson University the other night, just to catch a glimpse of the rabble first-hand.  In the end, I stayed home and slammed my head against a doorknob over and over again, and after reading the Sun's coverage of the event - and the one that Cardin hosted in Hagerstown this morning - I'm not convinced I didn't end up better off.  I'm continually amazed at this nation's almost boundless love of ignorance - we love not knowing shit.  We are dangerously incurious.  We fear knowledge and facts because we like to believe that we are Masters of Reality and facts are immutable things that challenge that assertion, so we avoid them.  Collectively, we need to feel like we know everything at every given moment.  That feeling is our true American birthright.

Right now, a good number of Americans sound like battered wives defending their husband to the cops: "He didn't mean to hit me!  He's a good man!  Leave him alone!" while they're try to stop their nose from bleeding.  When did our current system become so unimpeachably perfect that the very idea of meddling with it provokes Chernobyl-levels of blind rage and hysteria?  How great are things really going when 46 million Americans don't have access to health care, and the ones that do can be dropped or have their rates raised at any time, or have preventative care denied for an number of unchallengeable reasons?  Alot of folks seem unnecessarily comfortable having the Free Market being the only thing standing between them and the uninsured masses they are really having a good time looking down upon right now. I don't know the ins and outs of the entire thing, but it seems to me that we ought to be able to hold an adult conversation about joining the rest of the industrialized world and guaranteeing every citizen a minimum level of preventative care.  Why is that such a scary concept?

For starters, about .05% of the people attending these mob gatherings have any idea of what the fuck is really going on.  They heard Glenn Beck say something the other day, and Hannity seems pretty worked up about it, and someone told them that Obama is planning to kill grandmom, shortly after he gets done making sure each illegal immigrant has one white slave a piece.  So there they are in all their buffoonish glory, shouting down reason, shouting down each other, and shadow boxing horrific specters that aren't really there, and not allowing rational adults the chance to figure this shit out.  One man stood up at a town hall meeting in Columbia, South Carolina last week and said "The government isn't getting it's hands on my Medicaid!"  And thats about all you need to know about who you're dealing with - ignorant white people, many of them old, who live in mortal fear of change, and have become incapable of independent thought.  I'm about to sound like an asshole, but I think if Thomas Jefferson knew how stupid the populace was to become, he might have had cold feet on this whole democracy thing.

But even beyond that, I think alot of this is the manifestation of stunted emotional maturity.  Some people never seem to grow socially beyond the age of 7, by which point directing your life according the maxim "I need to be the happiest person on the Earth, and fuck everyone else" should probably be revealed as juvenile horseshit.  Everyone wants all the toys to themselves, as though the reason that they were never on the outside looking in is directly due to their own efforts which began immediately at childbirth.  We're all functions of where and when we were born, and to whom, and those of us that were raised middle-class and white have been endowed with advantages that some people will never make up in their lives, no matter how hard they work.  That's fact, and you can point to fantasy scenarios of some kid born in West Baltimore and rising from the ashes to become a great neurosurgeon, but there's a reason why those stories make the papers - because they're really fucking rare.  Most poor people in this country - black and white - were born poor, they will live poor, and they will die poor.  And somehow, a lot of people have become entirely comfortable telling this huge swath of the country to just do without, for no reason besides sheer perversity.

We are a selfish nation and the only thing we love more than having something is being able to prevent someone else from having the same thing; we are like children, greedily grabbing as much of the pie for ourselves on the principal that "Might is Right."  These are obsolete impulses that may have proven evolutionarily advantageous thousands of years ago when we were fighting dodos for flax seeds, but it's time to grow up, and in the case of America in 2009, it's time to enter middle school and realize that there are benefits to making the world around you better, even if it comes at a slight cost to your having-shittedness.  Bill Hicks said "Evolution didn't end when we grew thumbs.  Now, its about an evolution of ideas."  And as always, the Man is right.

I had a conversation with someone in advance of the last election, that began with her saying "All us Obama supporters just need to band together and take over this nation."  This sounds very easy living in the East, where the concentration of educated people capable of rational, adult thinking is higher between Boston and D.C. than anywhere else in the country.  You are surrounded by people who, more likely than not, share some version of your vision.  But once you go beyond this Cradle of Civilization you are struck with the fact that there are an awful lot more of Them then there are of Us, and by "Them" I mean people who distrust the news because they can't process it, who are overworked and overworried and can only respond to base human stimuli, like hate and aggression.  People who will believe anything if Rush Limbaugh says it, because it makes them feel good to hear another well-off white person welcoming them to the fold.

In the run-up to the election, I also came across an article somewhere in which an evolutionary biologist was suggesting that the differences between liberals and conservatives might be biological, and the human race may be splitting into two sub-species.  He said that on a brain scan, we process information differently and respond to different stimuli, and we might be witnessing the beginning of a divide that will appear much more defined when we look back from hundreds of years down the line, when Brains and Brawn have completely divorced themselves from each other.  At the time, I dismissed it out of hand and tried to forget about it.  But since then, I've found myself unable to shake the idea that maybe we ARE different kinds of people now; that maybe we're not the same species anymore.  And whenever I see the footage of some flag-waving moron shouting that she refuses to go before Obama's "death panels," the idea haunts me anew.  There was a time when I thought that I understood their side but just didn't agree with it.  But now, I just don't understand it.  It's not in me like it is them.  I feel like Cutty in the Wire: "Whatever it is that let you do like you do, and flow like you flow?  It ain't in me no more."

And the real shame is that fighting these battles against organized insanity is sapping our energy and creativity, and holding back our evolution as a species.  The best and brightest among us have to spend an inordinate amount of time refighting The Dark Ages, so that the rabble don't elect another one of their inbreds to run this country even further into the ground.  Rather than trying to convince a wide swath of the populace that the government has no plans to summarily try and execute their loved ones, we ought to be going after the Big Questions - What is reality?  What is beyond the universe?  How did this whole thing start?  Then we might be able to place our humanity in a proper context, and then maybe so many of the illusions that have captured an embarrassing amount of us will be exposed for their fallacies, and fall away like wheat before the scythe.

I realize this has gotten a little bit out-of-bounds, but I just can't help myself anymore.  This country is willingly throwing itself against the shoals and I can't understand why.  I also fully expect any national health care system to be a fucking mess at first.  It's probably going to be a calamity for the first few years, and people are going to be righteously pissed off.  But this is a Big Goal and it's not going to be fully achievable in the next four years, or even the next eight, and maybe not in the next twenty.  But the choice that we're confronted with is whether this is a goal we need to be aiming for, and if it is, then we've got to start somewhere.  And the only way to know where we stand is to stop arguing fucking nonsense and debate the issue.  If we're not going to start going down the path of a more compassionate society now, then when?

I just came across a small sliver of paper that I had used as a bookmarker during this past semester of substituting.  I actually had about three of these that I moved from book to book, only retiring them when there were fully covered in scrawled notes to myself recounting my favorite overheard exchanges between students.  Once I learned to laugh with the kids, the job got a whole lot cooler.  

Here's what was written on this one, with some minor embellished details that I couldn't fit on the paper at the time, but remember somewhat clearly:

"Yo, don't mess with that turtle.  He bite you."

"Ain't no turtle gonna bite me."

"Yo, I'm telling you.  I got bit by a turtle once.  That's why I'm always biting my nails."

"Why?"

"'Cause a turtle bit me!"

"Um, we looking for some geese. [Points to ditto.] That a geese."

"They all geese."

"Well that a geese that chase you."

"Where's your homework?"

"Oh, you know...I just came off being sick and my eyes ain't working right and all..."

"Damn yo - I'd hate to be an animal.  Lying around all day, doing nothing, waiting to be fed.  Damn, yo."