Brakeless in San Diego

I attended a two-and-a-half hour Zoom writing group this morning – hoping for inspirations and instigations and the end to all internal roadblocks – Anyway, 45 minutes of writing and then sharing if you felt for it, positive feedback and the usual stuff. What follows is the last third or so of what I wrote. If you feel for reading it, great. If not, that’s cool. The actual name “Jazzmaster Skeedaddle” slipped into my head while I was meditating hours before the writing group and I used it as a prompt and just let my fingers dance without editing and brakes. Cause I dig that. Anyway:

Jill Covington, who was an emergency room nurse’s aid at City Hospital was shaking her head – “It doesn’t seem right to use the words Hope and Divorce in the same paragraph, even, in the same week even, like I’m not dissing what you’re saying, Jones, I’m just saying I feel you and the sadness and I also know sometimes people get it wrong – right? – Like, you know, people tell their friends, Oh, I finally met the one. And their friends get all googly and funsy and even happy for who’s telling it and they say, “Really, the one?”, and whoever’s saying it says yeah and then in four years it doesn’t feel like that anymore. Jill swiveled toward Jazzmaster. What do you say? But Jazzmaster, who’s parents had also split apart and he’d grown up on background noise of arguments, never wicked, never physical like you hear so much and sometimes you can even look out the big windows down on South Street and see that shit live and in person, anyway Jazzmaster wasn’t shocked when the parents sat him and his sister down and gave them the news and they were civil with each other then and it turns out they didn’t stay like best of friends but still friendly, so in other words, and all this had been thought in his own head, silently, another of those just-me dialogues, so he looked over at Jill and said Sometimes I see both sides and he swung halfway around the group to Jones and said, I feel you, brother. And if you hearing this think there’s any sense of trying to have it both ways or, worse, punking out, you don’t get Jazzmaster because he tells you something, he means it.

Speaking of Jazzmaster, last week a new member joined this get-together, Robin brought a friend and introduced him as Ricky Fleming, and they were all doing their “Dinner with Andre” thing and all over the place, like the way Hansel and Gretel followed breadcrumbs, you never know where you’re going, it’s just the next crumb, Sis, so it wasn’t unusual or disruptive when Ricky Fleming asked Jazzmaster how he got such a name – since there’d been introductions of a rather formal nature going on when a new person showed, it was their way, all of them, and you hear the same things about someone a lot and if you remember the conversation about love – well, there you go. Anyway, Jazzmaster – and many of the cats and kitties there had heard this story on previous occasions – he explained to the new guy that his parents might have qualified as what were once affectionately called hippies – before society and corporate czars and tv and everything made being a hippie, like, a bad thing, and of course Jazzmaster couldn’t swear personally whether his parents were hippies or not because he was not even born quite yet when this particular event occurred, but how he understands it is that mom and dad were puffing up a storm with the evil weed – hah, love that – and they were partying with friends and someone said what are you going to name your very first kid and somehow they hadn’t talked about it much and they began throwing out names which may in fact indicate hippie proclivities – flower, silkweed, butterfly, bubble, waterfall – and his dad was tired, not one had rang the bell of electric “yes”, “that”, and he got up to go crash and his eyes fell around the room and over onto his guitar, which the sharp ones first hearing this tale will go “Ah”. Yup, a Fender Jazzmaster, and there you go.

Oh, if you’ve hung in this long, Skeedaddle was an official down-to-the-court-house name change from Davis, kind of a goof on what they’d be doing if the man ever came around, this was the 60’s and they weren’t playing with busts and such then. So, they went from Mr. and Mrs. and little Jazzmaster Davis to the Skedaddles. And Jazzmaster shared that with Mr. Ricky Fleming last week and I told you about all the love conversations because it’s really real here, and somewhere the ghost of proper grammar is whispering at least get the typing right, Brah – and the night ends with that taking place.

(Blogger’s note – Interested in the entire story? The first 2/3’s are all about love. Let me know and I’ll get it to you. Thanks for subscribing.)