Coat and Tie (and All That Jazz)

Tomorrow, I do it, wear a suit where it's ridiculous to do so.

If the batteries in the digital camera are charged, I'll provide you with photographic evidence of this charade. But with what I spent at the Men's Wearhouse, I might as well wear it. I said in an earlier post that I've only worn it to a wedding and a funeral, but I thought of one other time: I wore the suit when I went to fight a bullshit parking ticket. I was the only guy in the court room with a suit on. I would have fit in better if I had dressed from a thrift store.

More importantly, I had another lawn mowing epiphany today. I detest mowing, it makes me want to move to New York, live in an apartment surrounded by maintenance-free concrete. Never mind that I've never been willing to share walls, the first place I rented was a microscopic house. And forget that Frau Lobster is allergic to New York (and most other big cities). She also has these odd notions that our children should run and play in an outdoor setting. It's freakish, but she tolerates my presence so I have to make allowances...

I'm still ironing out 'Wealth Effects.' For that matter, it seems to get more wrinkled as time goes by. It's over three years since my heart attack, and I was already in progress on it when that happened, so this is a project that's four years going on five.

But I'm mowing the lawn and a whole other novel just kind of inserts itself into my imagination. Rapid fire ideas that required me to spend three hours just jotting outline-type notes. I couldn't let it go. Even the title came to me, 'John's Fake Book.' Done in a type of cover to mock the 'Real Book,' which is so underground that legit publishers have successfully ripped it off.

Because Elliott (he's the 'John' of the title but can't admit it for good reason) doesn't use a fake book. All this shit just flooded into my mind, his exile from New York, his heroin habit that is kept under wraps at great expense, his homosexuality and marriage of convenience to a woman who needed a husband to get full custody from a hostile ex (in a 1950s setting). And a ton of other stuff I won't blog about because I just spent hours typing it into a word processor, and because I think once 'Wealth Effects' is put to bed, 'John's Fake Book' will be the next opus.

I like the 'fake book' as a motif for this, because Elliott's ear is so good that such books are useless to him; at the same time, he's living a necessary fiction not because he's a homosexual, but because he shit his nest in an extraordinary and permanent way when he was in New York where, even in the 1950s, you could bat for the other team if you were smart about it.

I won't let this derail me from 'Wealth Effects.' I've got too much time and effort invested in it to throw it over like Tom Cruise discards Hollywood beauties. The odd thing is the genesis.

I'm mowing grass and sweating it up, and I picture a junkie who wears long sleeves year-round, to cover track-marks. He wears a coat and tie, but that's less and less probable as time goes by...

Looking at the bruise where they drew my blood for a lipids workup, and my blood isn't easy to draw (the blood bank quit calling me because guys who faint at the finger prick test for anemia are more trouble than they're worth). And I remember seeing somewhere that Kurt Cobain said that the most needle-phobic person on earth (he must have been speaking of me) would crave one if it had heroin in it. That's the nature of addiction.

And I can relate: when I smoked, I got to where I coughed in the morning until I yacked, and then I lit the first cigarette of the day. In any case, Bird Pepper has it's second title by me in the bag, all I have to do is write it. I mean, I sort of did this evening, a few thousand words of summary and sloppy dialouge with names that changed as the story evolved...

The 'Real Book,' the underground version, is something that was a rite of passage for me as a teen. You get an archtop, a Real Book, a Polytone amp. You learn the errors int he Real Book from a master. This illegal, piracy-of-a-piracy was singularly important in my musical development. Pat Morrissey, the late-great trumpet player, was at a jam session I had no business at and I was trying to keep up on Caravan. He said to me, 'They're not using that arrangment, they're doing it like the Jazz Messengers. Its...'

It was better I sat out. He didnt' say it to me, but since I couldn't process all the information he was giving me, and I couldn't follow the band on paper, I kenw I'd get the figurative cymbal thrown.

But the fake book think, that's something that could cut both ways for a secretive junkie, a closet homosexual, and a man who is wanted in a relatively casual way for murder a few states away...