Somehow Going From Busking To Being Abducted As A Child...

I found the wrought-iron chair sitting there at the Lilly Pad at around 4:30 this Sunday afternoon. I sat in it and made, I think, 18 bucks and then, after having put the spotlight up and played into the darkness a bit, but quit when I saw the number of tourists had dwindled a bit from their earlier presence.

I rode the bike down after having laced a Bang energy drink with 2 shots of Amsterdam vodka, and a search of the block where the Unique Grocery sits yielded a pretty decent sized roach from out of one of the boxes that are planters that have no plants growing in them. I just imagined there being roaches in those things, like people would stand near the vacant planters and smoke their herb on their break or whatever, then just toss the roach into the thing, because it's dirt, and won't start any fires, type of thing...

So, there was the fat roach to go with the Bang and vodka drink; and at the Lilly Pad was the wrought iron chair, but with no drug dealer sitting in it...

I think I played pretty well in spots and I think I'm changing the way I approach something -maybe the harmonica- but I did a pretty decent version of "I Feel Fine," the Beatles song that a couple of ladies stopped to listen to; at which point I decided to just do it as well as possible; but that kind of meant taking a trip in my imagination to being a 10 year old listening to the song off a Panasonic "phonograph," I guess they had the specifications to call them; and singing along with John Lennon, myself and Marty Ryan. Moving the phonographic LP records (LP meant "long playing." I know CDs came along and had a good laugh at that boast) into the shade once the sun came up high enough to clear the woods behind our house. We could disappear into the woods behind our house and literally walk for more than a mile in certain directions; a veritable kingdom with trails leading to all kinds of storied spots. Places with nicknames like: The Hollow Tree; The Big Hole, Person's Personal Junkyard, and I believe one clump of bushes that would serve as a hiding place should you be a small kid and hear the approach of teenagers with ill intent; I think that was called "Ragweed."

We had menacing teen aged kids that lived in the vicinity and they would actually caputure us little kinds and hold us against our will. One thime they made me and my best friend, Dave fight each other under the threat that "Whoever loses, we're gonna beet the shit out of!"

So Dave an I went at it and I'm glad that we were too young to have known about the use of fist in fighting; we had our own staged fights in school where us kids would wrestle each other; no broken noses or anything. So, I was trying as best I could to win because I didn't want Mark Person and his friends, who all smelled of cigarettes and so, it wasn't a far stretch to assume that they would beat the shit out of the loser. I think I pinned Dave down, and somehow there was a diversion such as some other of their friends having returned with a six pack of beer, somehow; and we were let go, that time.

We would complain to our parents about the Persons. But, they were the care takers of the Jewish Cemetery, and they lived in a house that had a crude dirt road leading to a field that would someday be a part of the Jewish Cemetery. And they seemed to do all the work while the official Caretaker sat in the house, which was itself removed from the nearest paved road by at least a tenth mile long driveway.

One of the kids lost a finger or something making a pipe bomb in that house; and also one time a gun went off, wounding that same kid. The father had been cleaning it; it was an accident. End of story when it came to The Person's, I guess.

They had an older brother who played the electric guitar, but I only heard that music coming through the woods a few times when I was only about 6 or 7 years old, and he had moved out by the time I was being terrorized by his younger brothers.

The Person's and their gang employed a certain trick, which actually tricked us the first couple times they tried it.

It was simply that most of them would hide, off to the side of the path and let me and whatever friend I was with, pass by them. Then a little further up, Mark Person himself (usually) would jump onto the path a little ways in front of us; at which point, at least the first couple times, we would turn tail and start running in the opposite direction. Then the rest of the cigarette smelling school dropouts would descend upon us, making the capture. We might be made to eat worms or...worse.

We eventually learned to run "sideways" whenever Mark Person materialized right in front of us. We could make good enough time, through the thickets, to escape, since we made it our point to know those woods and its manifold paths.

We were actually safe if we went no further than a row of apple trees, which may have once been planted there as a marker, for thereabouts was where the cemetery property started. As very small kids we never went past that row of trees because, once past them, we couldn't see our house anymore; and that sent eerie sensations down our little spines, I guess.

My point, I suppose is that it was a pretty decent late afternoon of busking. I had called Lilly earlier, but she was in the middle of something and I didn't get around to mentioning the iron chair nor the 2 drug dealers that seemed to want to hang around me, perhaps to deflect suspicion about what they were doing out there.