Close Encounters Of The Rasta Kind

It was just supposed to be a trip to the local swap meet... that's all.

Through the misty haze of time and space, I recall it was either 1981 or 1982, hard to know for sure, but definitely somewhere in that vicinity. Waaaay back... before I'd met The Artist, before my then Soon-To-Be-Ex-Wife dumped me and all my belongings on the curb in front of our apartment building, before my counseling-inspired epiphany about WTF was going on in my life that was making me such a miserable and depressed wolverine.

On yet another tense Saturday morning, I'd convinced the STBEW that it would be a good idea for me to take our Awesome Daughter (then 3 or 4 years old) for a mellow morning stroll at the Foothill Drive-In Swap Meet in Azusa (CA).  I really just needed a little daddy/daughter time away from the apartment, away from the anger and hostility, away from her cigarette smoke choking up the place, away from... reality.

So there we were, me and the AD, her just barely holding my hand, straining ahead with excitement as we walked along the long aisles of furniture and clothing, tools and stacks of old Playboys, knick knacks and used underwear, the excreta of so many garages and storage rooms and exasperated lives that needed some extra cash. The sun had just popped over the high peripheral walls of the drive-in, but the cool of the morning still demanded our hats and sweaters and cups of coffee or hot chocolate or whiskey, if you were so inclined.

We meandered along each aisle, criss-crossing back and forth from one side to the other, one hump to the other, stopping at some booths and passing others by, focusing on stuff that I didn't want or need but was interesting to look at. Natch, the AD was drawn to the used toys and headless dolls and anything shiny and pretty and light enough for her to grab and show me, shouting "LOOK, DADDY!!", putting a smile on my face as only she could.

At the end of each aisle, more people selling their stuff were lined up along the high walls, taking up the periphery with a vengeance, begging us to see their piles before doing a u-turn into the next long aisle. Of course, we always looked at their stuff, because they were there, and we were there, and it was a way to kill some time on a Saturday morning because there was no tension, no unspoken words of derision, no snarky comments, no fucking cigarette smoke.

About half-way down the asphalt grade, we passed by and stopped in front of one booth along the vengeful sidelines. There were lots of books and records, some interesting clothing,  furniture and other household stuff, like so many other booths. What pinged me was the music... it was reggae music, that much I knew, but I had no idea who was singing a tune about not rocking his boat. After a moment, I glanced at the seller and noticed his long brownish-blonde dreadlocks, which were something of an anomaly at the time.  The more I looked at him, the more I realized that... hey, I know this guy!

He was selling something to another dude, finished up and walked over to where me and the AD were hanging around when I realized exactly who he was.

Me:  "MAX (not his real name)... is that you?"

Him:  "Oh wow... Bob, is that you?"

And that's how we began our Close Encounter of the Rasta Kind.

Max and I had been classmates all through grade and junior high school, sharing the same teachers and pre-teen schoolyard angst that was so much a part of growing up in the 60's. We'd also been fast friends and belonged to the same Boy Scout Troop, with countless camp-outs and hikes and shared scouting experiences between us. He lived only a few blocks from my house, sharing a home with his older sister, Mom and Step-Dad.  I knew it was his step-dad because his Mom had a different last name, and his folks were always really nice to me because I used his house (along with several other friend's homes) as my hideout when my own jail grew too stifling and scary.

Max loved music like me, but he was far more in-tune with the musical context and meanings than I was. His room, a place where we hung out quite a bit during junior high, had black walls and psychedelic fluorescent posters and black lights and incense burners and lots of Beatles posters on the walls.  He was smitten by the whole Sergeant Pepper phenomenon, and we'd lounge on the floor, listening to vinyl records spinning, incense burning, curtains drawn, black light on, day-glo colors bouncing on the walls, dreaming of pretty hippie girls. He introduced me to music I was barely aware of, music that would become integral to my life's journey:  Cream, Doors, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Steppenwolf,... and The Beatles, he always played The Beatles.

As we grew older and started high school, we drifted apart as childhood friends always do, me to my hot-rod cruising and Drama groups, him to the crew that hung out in a notorious walled-in area of our campus called 'The Patio' where all the stoners and hippies gathered, smoking cigarettes and daring the narcs to bust someone. We never friended again, our lives rocketing in different trajectories.

Until we met again at the Foothill Drive-In Swap Meet.

It was a great reunion, he so glad to see me with my daughter, me so glad to see him looking so weird and wonderful, with his freckled face and crazy dreads. We stood there, talking and talking, my daughter happy to play with some toys and sitting on the carpet, shouting "HELLO!!!" at all the grownups passing by.

Him:  "You daughter is so beautiful... you are truly blessed.  I hope that someday my wife and I will be blessed with a young one like yours."

He and his wife were living with (I think) her Mom, trying to scrape together the dough for their own place, so he was here selling reggae records and tapes, Rasta hats and clothing before it was cool, personal items and the detritus of a life in flux.  I felt a sense of happiness at being with him again, my old friend, there with my daughter in tow and a sea of humanity swirling around us, buying crappy shit and shitty crap.

Him:  "Hey man... wanna toke up?"

Me:  "Here? Now? Won't we get, you know... in trouble?"

Him:  "Naw... this place is totally cool, everyone here is just enjoying the vibe, don't worry."

So he pulled out a fattie, lighted it up and we stood there, sharing some weed on a Saturday morning at the swap meet, enjoying our cosmic reconnection, feeling like we owned the world. Eventually he started telling me more about his musical spiritual guide, Bob Marley, whose music he played almost non-stop that morning, music that had grabbed my attention to begin with. With the buzz in my head and the sun in my heart (I was so high!), I felt like I had connected to the music, for the first time really taking in the reggae beat and the sun-shiney songs speaking about oppression and salvation and redemption.

I bought my first Bob Marley record from Max right then and there, titled 'Kaya', which displayed a gigantic burning roach surrounded by pot plants on the album cover.  Perfect.

After about an hour, I knew it was time to head off and leave him to his selling.  We hugged and traded phone numbers and promised that we'd get together again.  As the AD and I slowly walked away, my head turned to glass and my hand filled with my daughter's hand, I felt like it was OK to leave this place and head back to the adult prison I shared with the STBEW.

Max and I never got together again.  I called him a few weeks later but the number was disconnected, so he likely had moved on to another space and place. Soon enough, my own life came crashing down in front of the apartment, my crap strewn all around me, sitting on the curb, lucky to have a borrowed car that I could stuff with my stuff and roll on down the road to... somewhere else. Gone was my married co-habative life, my beautiful daughter, any semblance of normalcy.  I became a semi-vagabond, scratching for places to stay, a couch here, a spare bedroom there, sometimes even sleeping in my borrowed car parked in a friend's driveway, too ashamed to ask for shelter.

But it got better. I got better.

I tossed away so many things during that time of flux, but I kept my stereo, my tapes, my records... and my copy of 'Kaya'. My devotion to reggae music and Bob Marley, sown at that swap meet, began to grow into a forest of one-ness with the world, that beat pulsing with my own heart, speaking to me as a catalyst to always be upright, always be moving, always be seeking better things. To this day, I've quietly thanked Max for his musical stewardship and introduction to Bob Marley's world vision through his music, and it has always left me inspired and invigorated to live my life to the fullest.

Robert Nesta Marley died in 1981 from complications of an aggressive cancer that was secretly taking over his body until he noticed a lesion under his big toe, a symptom of a much larger problem, and he rejected traditional medicine for a holistic approach.  Sadly, it did not give him comfort, and he died right around the same time that I discovered him via my good old school friend Max. It's humbling to imagine what Bob's life would have been like had he survived his battle with The Big C, but it's also a fool's errand to speculate like that.  He's become iconic... a musical and spiritual Kahuna, speaking to us all from beyond the ether.  Maybe that's how it was always supposed to be.

But wait... there's more.

Fast-forward to this very year of 2015, to a world of instant digital gratification, social media, Twatters, Snapfucks, Instapoo, FecesBook... all of the digital media we crave with a mindless fervor that makes us think it's OK to cruise the freeway at 80mph while looking down at a text on our device (not me... never me, I swear). As so many do, I look on FecesBook for old friends, school chums, scouting mates, people I knew and liked and loved and cared about.  One day on a whim, I typed in Max's name and BOOM... there he is! I messaged him, waited a few days and sure enough he responded, shocked yet extremely pleased that I thought enough to find him.

We've traded some messages, filled each other in on our things, and it sounds like he's still neck-deep in the musical world, managing reggae bands and promoting concerts.  His dreads are still natty, his face is still freckled, and like me he has some miles on the odometer that have given us both the patina of experience. I made it a point to remind him of our chance encounter so long ago, and how important it was to me then and now. He thought that was pretty cool.

Will we hook up again any time soon?  Hard to say, but we've reconnected again, through time and space and across the vast gulf of our own individual lives. And one thing is for sure: we both still have a deep and sincere love of Bob Marley and his music, a love for reggae that connects us in ways that nothing else can.

I hope that someday, I'll be able to imbue my Grandson with the seed of the Rasta musical spirit, so that he can swim in that ocean of connectivity to the world in a different way than his peers. I feel confident he'll have the same Close Encounter that I did, all those years ago.



Lead image, gracias de journalofmusicalthings.com; Bob Marley 'Satisfy My Soul' video, muchismas gracias de youtube.com.

Thicker Than Water

I miss my brother Chuck.

Four years younger than me, he died in 2005 from complications of alcoholism which included a ruined liver, failed kidneys and finally gangrene settling into his wounded legs. His death was ugly and painful and tore up everyone who knew him, because he was well-loved by many. I was especially slaughtered over his passing since just a couple of years earlier we had forged a long-overdue truce and became closer than we’d ever been. Dad still grieves over the loss of his second son. Thus is how it always seems to be for the families of alcoholics.

That being said, I find my memories of Chuck are mostly good ones, even great ones, spread across time and space. Years we spent first as childhood antagonists, then as distant adult siblings, and finally as seasoned brothers-in-arms, united against the stupidization of America. In his final years, we would have long phone conversations about politics, auto racing, music, family, business, women, pot, sports, television, our mutual and separate pasts… the subject matter always changed, but the best part was that we were, you know... talking.



It wasn’t always that way. The bloody internecine battles we humans wage can be a lifelong struggle for dominance, often at the expense of those we love most. My wife and I laugh often about the fact that honestly, every family is dysfunctional to one extent or another. No one is exempt from the petty silliness that can come between siblings, mates, extended family members. It usually blows up after years of quiet tolerance, clenched jaws and strained neck muscles, yearning for release and revenge. The revenge part is the most devastating and satisfying… as one sage commented, ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold.’

Chuck was a force of nature, as smart as a whip, yet he never graduated from high school. He read several newspapers each day, absorbing information that would be filed away in his cerebral hard drive, ready for withdrawal at a moment’s notice. He could talk at length about complex social and political issues with certainty and a great eye for the absurd. He was the funniest guy I ever knew, coming up with quips and comments and observations that would put me on the floor. He bore a complicated soul, with internal demons that most certainly lead to excessive drinking as his way of dealing with them.

In 1995, while our Mom was unconscious in a hospital intensive care ward due to alcohol poisoning (yeah, her too), I convinced Chuck to fly down and see her because I wasn’t sure she was gonna make it. He was silent during the very brief visit, holding her hand and just looking at her lying there, with a feeding tube down her nose and IV's stuck in both arms. On the way home from the hospital, he asked if we could make a stop. At a liquor store. Yeah. He came out with a bottle of Hornitos tequila and a six-pack of Dos Equis. I was stunned.

Me: "DUUUDE... how can you even THINK of pounding down so much booze after seeing Mom in the hospital, pickled and comatose on cheap vodka?"

Him: “Don’t worry, I’m a big boy, I know what I’m doing”.

He flew home the next day.

It was the last time he ever saw Mom. In early 2005, she was languishing in a nursing home with another feeding tube stuck in her belly (see my previous essay titled ‘The Long Pink Tube’). I drove up to where he lived in Northern Cali to try and drag him down to see her before she died, but no dice, he refused to go. I soon learned that he too was extremely ill, liver failing and stomach ulcerated and weight shedding from his frame. He couldn’t bring himself to see her in the final throes of her life, because it would have been a cruel mirror, reflecting his own pending demise. Mom died in April, Chuck seven months later in November. I reckon his actions made sense to him, but I didn’t understand it then. I certainly do now.

But guess what? As stupid and cruel and pointless as Chuck’s self-destructive behavior was, it pales in comparison to the incredible goodness of his heart, the way he ALWAYS put the needs of others above his own, how those he cared about were the center of his attention, often to his own detriment. His loyalty and friendship and love wasn’t in vain, as demonstrated by the hundreds of people in attendance at his memorial service, a standing-room-only affair that was filled with laughter and tears and a really great soundtrack. Six years gone now, I recall someone had suggested that his mini-truck be parked out front of the chapel, windows down with the stereo blasting Metallica, as if he had just stopped in for a minute. Did that happen? Can’t remember… was in too much pain… but if it did, it RULED.

Chuck was a music freak like me, and he was the one who turned me on to bands like Grand Funk Railroad, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple… rock stalwarts of the early 1970’s. For some reason, it took his early-adopter musical taste to get me hooked, and that hook is still set deep and strong. The really funny thing is that he absolutely LOVED The Jackson Five (5ive?) during their heyday, a fact that he was loathe to admit as an adult. Yep… a total J5 fanboy. T-shirts, posters, every album and 45 they released. He knew every word to every song and played them incessantly on his crappy little record player, their vinyl banned from my badass (ha!) turntable.

To burnish his musical fanaticism, he attended literally hundreds of concerts in his lifetime, surely more than anyone I’ve ever known. He collected souvenir t-shirts from those shows, and although I don’t know what happened to them once he’d passed, I know his closet was filled with concert t-shirts on hangars. He wanted to be able to grab one with precision if the subject came up and could tell you the date, place and level of inebriation he attained during the event. Although he was always what I would consider a heavy-metal/hard-rocker type, his tastes began to range widely in later years. During my last few visits to his home, I found music by Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Los Lonely Boys, stuff like that. His last musical crush was on songstress Diana Krall, whom he’d seen once in concert and became obsessed with her look, her sound, her style.



You know, I don’t want this whole thing to sound maudlin, but the more I think about Chuck, the more I keep getting images of him in my head, memories both banal and special. Weird. Chuck was a big guy, owing to the gene pool from Mom’s side of the family. When I say he was big, I don’t mean he was a fat slob or anything like that. He was mebbe 6’3” or thereabouts and somewhere North of 250 lbs. at his best fighting weight, but he’d fluctuate and began to shrink as he grew ill. For most of his life, he was a big, burly mammoth dude with a full beard and semi-long wavy hair… I always likened him to a Mexican Steve Reeves. At family campouts and gatherings, Chuck was ‘The Enforcer’ and used his imposing hulk as a warning to outsiders looking to crash the festivities. In reality, he was an extremely kind and gentle soul, only showing aggression when he was drunk.

What really drove me towards this subject was the darker side of Chuck’s life, the internal struggles and torment that gave him the rationale for his downfall. I think it really started when he was only about 14 years old and got kicked out of Dad’s house after lots terrible behavior and trouble. He stayed with friends for a while, then crashed at my apartment and used it has his party central. I’d come home at 1AM from my swing shift job and find him and a bunch of his friends, all wasted and sprawled on the living room couch and floor, the refrigerator emptied and a heavy cloud of pot smoke filling the room.

I never found out if he could have gone back to Dad’s on his own accord, but once Dad moved to Northern Cali, that option was eliminated. Methinks Chuck took the ousting as a serious rejection, one he never got over. Eventually he moved to Northern Cali and worked in Dad’s restaurant, but the jagged little pill of rejection had grown into a massive spinning carbuncle of razor blades, shredding his insides so badly that only copious amounts of booze and pot could numb the pain.

There’s more to the story… much more than I want to delve into now. Suffice it to say that Chuck was slaying demons his entire life, both real and imagined, and he was only partially successful. During that horrible summer of 2005, after Mom died and before he followed suit, my wife and I were sitting in his living room, talking and laughing and working hard to be upbeat. He was jaundiced and ill and had bright yellow eyeballs and his skin was only slightly less yellow. With her typically direct manner, wife asks “So… Chuck… knowing your health situation and all, was it all worth it? All the booze and drugs and partying… was it worth it?”

He didn’t miss a beat. “HELL YES it was worth it. I’ve spent my life partying and working and going to concerts and being with my friends and having fun. If my life is over, so be it. At least I’ve had a great time while I was here.” I remember thinking he was speaking with a bravado that masked his fear of death, but that was him to a tee. He rarely lifted the curtain on his secret personal life, always giving off the air of confidence and self-assuredness. He wanted others to view him with respect and admiration, regardless of the truth he held closest to his soul.

I would only see him alive once more, lying in a hospital bed after yet another bout of alcohol poisoning, boasting that he’d be able to get a liver transplant and would beat the odds by getting sober once and for all. Didn’t happen. Sucks.



Here’s the really funny part of all this: I UNDERSTAND. The whole arc of Chuck’s life makes perfect sense to me, all of it, start to finish. I sit and think of him and remember flashes and images and scenes. The summer vacation road trip when, as a 9-year-old, he held the map the whole time and calculated the mileage between each of our stops, dead-nuts every time. The half-hearted attempts to get him interested in the Indian dancing activities that our Boy Scout troop excelled at, which he HATED. The rare vinyl records I had stashed in my apartment closet which he snagged and sold to buy more weed and beer. The glasses of milk and half-eaten bologna sandwiches he’d stash under his bed for days until the stench got Dad’s attention. The washed-out Polaroid image of him and me, aged around 5 and 9, wearing scratchy new sweaters, Mom in her Red dress, all standing in our Grandma’s driveway in East LA, beaming on a Sunday morning.

The apartment neighbors from Oklahoma who were convinced the baggie of oregano he’d sold them was Class-A weed.

The ’71 Chevelle he and his friends painted Flat Black with spray cans, a car that barely ran but sure looked BAD-ASS rumbling down the street.

The video of my in-car racing driver school sessions he constantly ran in his restaurant, telling his friends ”DUDE… THAT’S MY BROTHER!”

The way he looked on his wedding day, decked out in a light Blue tux with tails, wearing white sneakers.

All of it. His incredibly loud laugh, the same one I let loose out of my own big pie hole. His goofy smile and angry scowl and the passive stoney stare when he HAD you, man. OK, now it’s getting to me, so I think I’ll stop before I go all gooey and start to weep like a little girl. Yep, there will never be another one like him, and I dunno if that’s good or bad, but it doesn’t matter. Like all those who I’ve loved that are now gone, he is with me right now, telling me to get bent, blowing smoke in my face and laughing that laugh.

Each of the songs I've posted in this essay were played at Chuck's memorial, and whatever they meant to me before, they now bring him closer to me each time I hear them. He did that to people, weaseling his way into their hearts and souls until they NEEDED him in there, man. Like a junkie needs a fix.

I miss him. Dammit.



'Samba Pa Ti' by Santana, 'Temptation' by Diana Krall, 'In My Life' by The Beatles, 'I'll Be Around' by Joan Osborn... todos muchismas gracias de YouTube. La Puente scout image, muchismas gracias de Manuel Macias.