Boat People

Rebellious Palpitations - Spinnerette (mp3)
Red Wine & Whiskey - Katrina & the Waves (mp3)

At a shindig with several other couples, I recently made a comment about Boat People. I said people who weekended frequently on their boats in the lake seemed like their own unique and freaky sub-culture.

There's something about daisy-chaining your living quarters right up next to seven or eight other boats you might or might not know. That's weird, dude. It's like going to an RV park and happily connecting your RV up to a bunch of other RVs so everyone could hop back and forth between RVs whenever anyone got the notion. Maybe RV People do that. I don't know. RV People are freaky enough without the daisy-chain thing.

Anyway, my wife and I have had only a couple of random days and nights on the lake in the company of Boat People, and we always left with strange vibes even though nothing blatantly off-key occurred. We felt a little bit like Fox and Scully, like there was something lurking in the shadows that we just couldn't see.

The reaction I got from my comment was unequivocal. The two women who were sitting with us on the deck, smoking like chimneys, totally backed my theory. They both shared stories of going to boat parties and seeing weird things. Words like "sex swing" and "group sex" and "doing drugs off other guys' wives' bellies." Not them, mind you. Other people at these parties. The Boat People.

The following week at work, two coworkers are talking, and a man's name is mentioned, and it just so happens his name was brought up in the Boat People talk of the weekend. That inspires me to have a conversation one of them about Boat People where I express my theory, and my coworker enthusiastically nods.

"My ex was a Boat Person," she says. "I remember waking up one night, everyone was drunk -- everyone was always drunk on these boats -- and I had to go to the bathroom, and he had these friends who were older and very overweight, and I walked out of the bedroom, and they were just sitting there in the floor doing it doggy style."

My eyebrows naturally raised.

"I think I let out a little bit of a frightened squeak, but they didn't care. It was pretty gross. They just kept going at it," she said. "And my ex just told me that wasn't anything compared to the stuff that goes on some nights." At least those two were married to one another, was his general point.

Apparently, Boat People have two lives. On land, they're just like the rest of us. They work. They drive. They eat. They sleep. But on the water, they unleash these secret lives of lurid and verboten activity. Drug dabbling. Sexcapades. God knows what else, perhaps cat juggling or other such heinous crimes.

And I'm left to speculate: do they go to the water to unleash this hidden mutant form of themselves, or does being out on the water mutate them over time?

Meanwhile, another coworker talked over lunch about her friendship with a very promiscuous gay man who lives in her building. He claims to have sex with, on average, four or five different men each week. He has a separate email address used specifically to communicate in some kind of way with other men just wanting to get laid.

"Many more than half" of this guy's partners are married men, she said. He goes to their offices late at night. Or he meets them in one of several semi-secretive public locations.

My coworker said all of this has left her neighbor - brace yourself for this one - jaded about things. He's seen so many secret lives and revealed lies and shattered illusions that he can't help but start wondering if there's anything about the world we pretend we're living in that actually has any truth to it.

Are we all boat people? Is there, above the water, this gorgeous collection of rooms and seats, a well-tended bow and stern, polished and gleaming in the sun? Is there, meanwhile, hidden beneath the surface, the ugly mildewed hull and the propeller that actually moves us and motivates us, churning away in the water without those around us ever actually paying attention? Are there piranhas in the water, in 3-D?

Would we be better off if we acknowledged the entire boat instead of just the part above the water's surface? Or did we try that, and it was called the '70s, and it was horrifying?

I don't know. I just know it's getting harder and harder to act shocked - shocked! - that all of this happens so frequently right under our noses. Maybe we're just happier being a Culture of Gilligans: ignorant, naive, kinda sorta happy, and if that means running our boat into the rocks, so be it.

Perhaps it is the inevitable nature of a boat that some unseen vital portion of it must sit under the surface, out of sight but essential to keep us afloat. Cue the Jaws theme.

All aboard the drunk express
Bottles of wine in excess
Lines of gold to fill your holes
Holes so deep
Well no one knows
              -- Rebellious Paliptations, Spinnerette

Ah, Grasshopper

Another Country - Tift Merritt (mp3)
Tell Me True - Sarah Jarosz (mp3)

Dorm duty.

Every night of the week, in every dorm, an adult is responsible for shepherding the little lambs from dinnertime to bedtime. Most advisors live in the dorm. A few, like me, don't. For nine years, I've spent one night each week walking dormitory halls, sitting at a hallway desk for 4-5 hours, striking up the occasional random conversation with adolescent males.

Friday night was the second-to-last night of dormitory obligation. Tonight will be my last. Fitting that my tenure concluded with an encounter that reminded me how full the teenage years are of awkward, uncertain, personality-altering conflicts and experiences.

One of the boys in my dorm -- let's call him Billy -- is a solid student and fairly unassuming guy. Bookish, but not homely or too introverted. In the last month or so, he has become increasingly dismissive of dorm life rules, and his personality in our interactions has shifted in a negative way. Little things here and there, which all speak to a passive-aggressive attitude towards authority.

My last two nights of duty, his behavior has reflected the typical red flags of drug use. Dilated pupils. Locked doors at random times (their doors are supposed to remain unlocked unless they're gone). Goofy or spacey or plain ol' odd responses to standard conversation. So, late on Friday night, I pulled him into a vacant room and offered my theory that he might be making, what we like to call on our campus, "bad decisions."

I hit the barn but missed the target.

Billy has a girlfriend. His first ever. They've been dating almost five weeks. Which, for Billy, is four weeks and six days longer than any other gal-pal he's ever had. The hope of this relationship, of escaping his bubble of dorm life and homework and XBox, rinse and repeat, inspired him to stop taking two very important drugs. He's all but ceased taking both his anti-depressant prescription as well as the meds he takes for ADD.

"The ADD stuff... it really does help me focus and stay on an even keel and avoid distractions, but it makes me feel like a fucking --"

I tilted my head. "Oh. Sorry."

"Thanks. Go on." I'm no prude, but I don't particularly think we're preparing them for life if they feel comfortable hurling naughty words willy-nilly in the presence of adults.

"Adderall makes me feel like a robot. Does that make sense?" (He asked that a lot over the course of our 45-minute conversation.) "I know I need it for my grades, but it feels like it's killing the rest of me. I get this girlfriend, and I wonder if the grades are even worth it anymore."

"You feel more social without the meds?"

"When I take them... I feel removed. Like I'm watching everyone on TV."

What happens often, when adults dive into an intense conversation with a teenager, is that you get more than you had expected, and in entirely unexpected ways. I confronted him expecting a conversation about his own drug use; I was getting a flashback into my own awkward miserable adolescent soul. Except thank God I never had to deal with all those damn meds.

Billy said the girlfriend was negatively affecting all his other relationships. His parents, with whom he often talked several times a week, felt him growing distant. His friends were annoyed with his goo-goo eyed attitude. His teachers were frustrated with his lost focus on school. I was annoyed with his personality change.

"All because of a girl," he said. "Does that make sense?"

Christ almighty, I wish it didn't. "Unfortunately, yes," I said.

His reply: "Well it doesn't make sense to me."

Billy went on to explain that his step-brother was 30 and barely getting by because he'd spent his adolescent life experimenting with drugs. Watching this older brother screw up and witnessing the havoc it wreaked on his life helped Billy know that drugs weren't a particularly wise option. [The irony: he's expected to take two "acceptable" mood-altering medications daily.] Because that so closely mirrored my own reasons for staying away from "bad decisions" in high school, I instantly believed his sincerity. (Sometimes we determine others' honesty by nothing more than how much their statements reflect our own reality... which is rarely the best way to judge it. But I digress.)

Then he offered up the Big Kicker: his new girlfriend was a serious pothead who frequently dabbled in other drugs. LSD. Cocaine. Significant amounts of alcohol.

She just turned 17.

"I know she's bad for me. I know this can't last."

I didn't say anything.

"So... why can't I give her up?" Billy asked, fighting back tears. He managed, the entire time, to be always on the verge of breaking down without ever actually losing composure. It was quite moving. "It's so stupid. I feel so stupid."

It sounds absurd because adolescence is absurd. The cruelest part of learning is the lessons from which no adults can save you, no textbook can prepare you, no test prep can adjust you, no ADD medication can fix you.

Billy spent most of his adolescent years trying desperately to catch a girlfriend. Finally, at long last, he caught one, and instantly everyone is telling him to throw her back and keep fishing. But how long will he have to go fishing to catch another one? A month? Five years? Never? And who's to say the next one he catches won't be equally fucked up? There's plenty of fish in the sea, sure, but that's hardly comforting if you suck at fishing for them.

Billy waited and waited to have someone whose hand he could hold, someone to kiss, someone to sit across from him at a downtown restaurant or with whom to dance at a school dance. He was patient most of the time. Occasionally he probably resigned himself to having no shot. But then... then he found one! And he's supposed to give her up immediately because she's bad for him? Yeah right.

Ironic that all of his problems surround the gaining of a girlfriend, yet acquiring one makes him feel more isolated than ever. His life, previously routine and robotic and boring, has been electrified by this blessed chance at a coveted relationship, and his Frankenstein-esque cadaver has come alive and finally fits into the social puzzle... yet it's all wrong. And there's no clear path towards a happy ending. All roads lead to (temporary) downfall.

As if being 16 and 17 wasn't miserable and frustrating enough, but to throw in the drugs and the alcohol... I dunno. Maybe there's some reward in numbing your adolescent brain from all of it. Diving into a psychadelic distraction from the angst and loneliness until you can emerge older and more capable of handling it. But I don't buy it. Attempting to dodge the misery by postponing it seems to only give the hydra more heads and make them more venomous.

It feels like small concession that he shared all of this with me. Maybe just getting it all out to an adult helps. Maybe.

But being miserable and unsure and (maybe) in love and lonely and desperate to experience a better, cooler life beyond textbooks and classrooms... not all the talk in the world with an adult is going to change or numb those desires.

As adults on the periphery of their lives, the absolute best we can hope to be is a temporary balm.

Maybe that's enough.

Eric Clapton Was God And Then Finds God?

Roy Buchanan--"The Messiah Will Come Again" (mp3)
Steve Cropper--"Big Bird" (mp3)

I'm pissed off at Eric Clapton. Recently, I've spent time with him in various airports and countries, working through his life story as told by him. Ultimately, it bored the crap out of me.

Maybe you don't know about the adulation heaped on Clapton in the 60's and 70's, when "Clapton is God" was written on walls all over London. Sure, Hendrix was otherwordly and there were other great players coming up, but E.C. was the one people worshipped. Maybe he's writing away from that because it contributed to the drug use that nearly destroyed his life. I don't know. All I know is that those are the interesting years and that finding God and the love of a good woman is not nearly as engaging a narrative. Sorry, this isn't Oprah; it's rock and roll.

A brief synopsis: man learns guitar, man gets fame, man takes drugs, man covets neighbor's wife, man takes more drugs, man marries neighbor's wife, man takes more drugs, man tries to clean up, man drifts apart from neighbor's wife, man takes drugs, man has a lot of women and drugs, man's son falls out of window, man tries to clean up again, man finds God. I thought this guy was supposed to be a musician! He spends more time talking about auctioning his guitars off for charity than he does about playing them.

Here's the bad news, Eric. Anyone who has an interest in music and picks up your book wants to know one thing and one thing only: How did you come up with the music of "Layla," both song and album and why did the interplay with Duane Allman work so well? We get about a page and a half of that. He does acknowledge that when the band went on the road without Allman, things fell apart. But he doesn't address the rumors that Allman was the creative force behind the incredible music produced on that album. He doesn't explain who did what. Well, maybe I don't blame him for that, especially if Duane was the spark.

But Clapton seems mystified or unwilling to discuss either his songwriting process or the evolution of his playing. He has more to say about recording Bob Marley's "I Shot The Sheriff" than he does any song he wrote himself. Maybe I expected too much--but he is a musician and I was hoping for a musician's biography. The album Slowhand, one of his last great moments, barely gets a mention, except for how he dashed off "Wonderful Tonight" while waiting for Patti to get ready.

Of course, I'm probably the one who is out of the mainstream on this one, as usual. How many books could Clapton hope to sell to guitarists? Not as many as he can to those looking for a middle aged tale of sin and redemption, that's for sure. Heck, my mother-in-law was talking about this book and Clapton's appearance on the talk show circuit a year or so ago, and I doubt she's ever heard even one of his songs, except in the background of a supermarket.

The other reality, to me, is simply that I don't find the last 25 years of Clapton's life particularly interesting musically, and so the other details don't come alive either. I mean, heck, for a couple of albums he reliquishes creative control to Phil Collins! He goes through a lot of women; his muse, Patti Boyd/ Harrsion/ Clapton doesn't hold his interest much once he gets her. He goes through a lot of drugs. Some years he barely makes it out of his house. So I guess it's a tragic life, a lot of it, and one that he barely remembers. But, I guess that doesn't make him that different than the rest. With the exception of some Dylan and some Neil Young, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of creative juice left in the old guys, so most of their last 25 years ain't too fascinating either.

By contrast, Clapton's early years, which usually bore me in biographies, are among the most fascinating. He's a bastard who has to pretend that his mother is his sister and that his grandparents are his parents in order to preserve dignity in a small town. That's got to be tough. He finds solace in the guitar. He pins down one embarassing experience as the key to a variety of sexual problems later on. He mentions bandmates and songs and explains why he quit the Yardbirds at their peak. But then, those are years that he remembers the best.

If you want to read a great rock "biography," may I suggest the never-gets-old Hammer Of The Gods about Led Zeppelin. It probably won't make you like those guys, but you'll understand better how the music and the self-destructive, hedonistic lifestyle feed each other. They also got someone else to write it.

For all you kids out there thinking about experimenting with drugs, learn from Uncle Eric. If you plan to tell your story someday and you use a lot of drugs, you won't be able to remember the interesting parts. And then, like James Frey in A Million Little Pieces, you'll have to make them up. And then you'll have to face Angry Oprah, not Supportive Oprah.

Other guitar gods like Roy Buchanan and Steve Cropper have their music, in various forms, available at Itunes.