Main St. Blues, Pt.2

Welcome to Main St. U, S and fucking A, just another small town in another state with the exact same name as an-other. There’s the same old McDonalds, Burger King, KFC and Shell, with few pedestrians and plenty of Jeeps and SUVs – it’s quiet and broad, yet the serenity on Main St. is terse, tense, pumped full of tension, flowing in staccato. Exact same happenings, they would also argue, those city dwellers. But for me it’s unrepeatable, it’s all too real – like when you stare into the mirror and the brutal reflection disperses any delusion you harbored about yourself. Ugh, not another patch of acne, another squishy pimple. We have plenty of pimples on the surface of Southampton: dilapidated, crumbling houses interspersed with solid brick ones, sometimes only a street away, staring each other down the eye. Nice chimney smoke rises from the million-dollar homes during winter season, while funky smoke emanates from the shoddy buildings all-year-long. If I was Santa, I’d be heading into the latter to puff the magic dragon and shoot up “sugar” instead of getting milk and cookies on Christmas Eve. But life’s too real and I’m too old to believe in Santa, let alone become him. It’s all too real – a statement that could go multiple ways. The nose-tickling, burnt-rubber like sizzling asphalt combined with flame-boiled burger scents wafting on a moist, searing summer day is too real. Sitting in front of his apartment, the man chilling on the sidewalks with a can of Bud Lite and no job is too real; the man that walks and mutters unintelligible whachulookinatjaysuschristaintyouknowtheendisnighthosemothafockasneverlisten curses or blessings or whatever is too real. Pushed around and rustled by the wind, cracking, un-raked autumn leaves dancing – tornado-like – in the streets is too real. Almost surreal. But not unreal. So are the random acts of violence near the strip of Main St. between Birch and Charles: an old man stabbed by a gang of middle-school brats in front of supermarkets, or townies beating up college kids over a disagreement related to the Patriots and the Giants. Gushing rigorously, sucking warmth and moisture, the malicious winter snow, the bearer of static-electricity is too real. So is its companion, the winter air by 2:00 AM, that thin, razor like air so sharp, you can taste it on your tongue while it cuts your nostrils, simultaneously invigorating and enfeebling. Fast-forward to 2 past midnight in February, and you open the window – whoooogh, whoooogh goes the wind– can you taste it now? Take. A. Deep. Breath. Now breathe out, quietly, gently: what comes out from that whisper?

(The Southern Tier Sodomizers was unreal.)

Neither Gavin, Jill nor Benson were unreal. They were, and are, little ants of the crumbling hive that is Southampton, each marked as workers by their pheromones. I am no exception: we are too real, too fragile, too insignificant. Semi-condemned to a life of Sisyphean labor so the princes and princesses may fuck-in-flight, the glide of their lives, apparently, we can only watch from the ground as their ecstasy takes them further up, defying gravity until they reach a climatic explosion – A singularity. A black hole comes into being. But when the four of us gathered to make music, there was something in the sound, like a chemical signal, that triggered Jill’s transformation into a queen from a worker. Whether the duration was 1/1000th of a second or 60 minutes, the maximum length of our sets, it didn’t matter. Metamorphosis occurred. Well, what about the other two, you say? Gavin, Benson and I were high-school classmates, a good-for-nothing gang of three. Head-banging in the cafeteria to air guitars while spilling people’s food trays. Throwing tater tots at the principle’s office window. Smoking into the bathroom vents. Stealing the school’s fancy-schmancy guitar amplifier for the Jazz band – they had a 30 Watt Marshall, not a weapon of mass destruction like the JCM heads & stacks, but something for rock, not jazz, nonetheless. It was a brilliant purchase by clueless music teachers, who were out of touch with the real world beyond school gates. High-school music teachers do seem to be the most stuck-up, self-restrained, tense bunch of musicians: their vigor and passion, if there were any, had long been doused and domesticated. Oh, peeing on Mr. Hermann’s trombone case was also a blast. That was Southampton High School. While I had the fortune (or misfortune) to attend HIGH-er education, the two hustled on in life. Benson was a car mechanic, quirky, emotional and uptight, while Gavin, a pothead with the occasional penchant for harder drugs, hauled ass at Wendy’s. The three of us met her – ah, if my memory serves – here, in The Selmer, the beginning of the end of the beginning of all, in my senior year of college. Our gang of three was good at nothing, not life, not school, not music – we were all fairly skilled instrumentalists and individually adept, but 1+1+1 doesn’t add up to three, it regresses into negative infinity. The desirable connection needed lubrication, magic, or an aphrodisiac. We drowned our frustration over pints of Yuengling: no, not pints, but kegs. Another groundhog week, another Selmer night; that night, when we were almost done with our kegs of misery, we heard her sing – in drunken elation, Bacchus fueling Athena. O hail the Olympian heathen gods. Maybe not the hypersexual father that is Zeus, though. Some perverted deity he is, having a reverse zoophilic fantasy and the power to make it come true, but that’s irrelevant now; Jill’s voice comes crashing through, that’s relevant. Loaded on Jack Daniel’s, her preferred source of inebriation, her melody vibrating through the smelly, crowded bar, drowning out the silly party rap:

WHO LET THE DOGS OUT? WHOOT? WHOOT? WHOOT? And so it is, WHO LET just like you said THE DOGS OUT it would be…WHO? The shorter story, WHO? No love WHO? No glory…No hero in her skies! I can’t take my eyes off you. I can’t take my eye-------------s off-you. I can’t take my eyes off you

I can’t take my eyes off you…this came from Jill, another uncharacteristic worker, who was the perfectly average girl walking down the streets of Southampton, never warranting another look or a whistle. When her rendition of Damien Rice punctured my ear drums, I hurried into the bathroom, convulsed and puked at least five minutes straight. All that Yuengling, all the regrets, they had to leave my system if we were to propose a musical conjugation, a new start. Gavin and Benson apparently didn’t wait for me to complete my esophagus-immolating catharsis, and asked her right away, while I sprawled myself over the toilet. She agreed instantaneously. The Sodomizers were born in that very instant. It didn’t mean anything to the quantum universe, but it was Our Big Bang, a privatized black hole, singularity occurred. If I remember correctly, Jill had scraggy dirty blonde hair and perennially under-slept eyes. She wore cheap, washed-out jeans and black nail polish; nothing special really, compared to my Ex. The Sodomizers started kicking into full throttle around the time I broke up with her.