Equilibrium

EQUILIBRIUM

3:40 am and I can’t sleep. I’m in a hotel room being mesmerized by the sound of the climate control. Set to medium, it’s not quite white noise, more like pink. A constant unchanging drone in the key of Amazing Grace and I can’t sleep.

It doesn’t help that they’re bowling in the hallway. Or curling maybe, using their wheeled suitcases as stones. Who are they? A bus tour just arriving. Five sheets easily to the wind they are whooping it up fumbling to make their room keys work and dropping a curse with each failed attempt.

There are children too, being herded and barked at with their over-tired whimpers punctuated by banshee shrieks. 

I can only hope that one of the childless couples, if there are any, will occupy the room to the left of mine. The one with the connecting door. Locked, of course, but those doors are like funnels of noise. The whining of kids is the worst but any phone conversation, the click, click of high heels, the moans and bed sqeaks of passion……whatever, can pass un-baffled through the hinges.

Not to sound brow beaten or world weary but I know that the chances are slim to none I’ll win that childless couple.  

Within minutes I hear at least one young lad enter the room with his parents and go straight for the connecting door to see if he can open it. 

After discovering the knob doesn’t turn and being informed that there is probably a  hotel guest trying to sleep on the other side the little shit starts making pig snorts and gurgles right into the latch. This quickly changes to fart noises and hysterical laughter.

I know the wee snoop is also trying to peek through the gap and this gives me an idea. Earlier, room service had left me with one of those plastic squeeze bottles of mustard. It’s about a quarter full. I add some water, shake it up and proceed to observe his pattern. Each time he makes a fart noise he follows it with a high pitched three syllable lunatic laugh while looking into the gap. A few dry rehearsals and then:

“Phrappp! Hee, Hee, Hee  SQUIRT…what the?!?! WHAA  DADDY!”

When I was a kid I got kicked around a lot. Every time  bullies would rub my face in the snow I would devise sinister and macabre plots to get back at them ………..for ten minutes tops……. vengence was too much work. It cut into quality TV programming. So many cartoons, so little time. I thought like an economist in considering the time allocated for television to be a limited resource and wasting it, any of it, could throw off my balance. With less TV, reality would have too much weight. I viewed the real world as a stand-off, an uneasy place in which peace was possible only so long as life’s  polarities were pointing a gun at each other.

It’s obvious that growing up during the Cold War had much to do with my philosophy.

Revenge only seemed to be worth it in the heat of the moment. The best time to even a score (the only time as far as I’m concerned with a few notable exceptions I’ll explain later) is right when the offence occurs. 

There’s an interesting loop-hole in street scrapping honour that is allowed if you’ve obviously been bullied by a bigger kid.  I’ve employed it successfully more than once. You concede by saying “I give” “uncle” or by quietly giving up your lunch money. A precious moment!  The bully that just had you face first in yellow snow has his defenses completely down and you kick him in the cojones. As in golf and many other sports the follow-through is important. 

Kick as if kicking was your art. Like a dancer. Then leave.

I don’t hold grudges. Never have. However, there are a few people from my past who deserve a pie in the face. Two nuns at least, a monk, two priests and a real asshole in eighth grade who had the nerve to call himself a teacher.

“Now, now Mikey, they meant well”

Over the years I’ve travelled with at least a score of bands and until I began hooking up with higher profile acts I had to share a hotel room  with one and sometimes two other musicians for weeks on end. If ever there was fertile ground for conflict, that room had to be it.

Yet I don’t remember one problem. Not one. And I roomed with some real whack jobs. 

Geetz the guitar player who would dump everything out of his suitcase onto the bed as soon as he got into a room. At night he would sweep everything onto the floor so he could sleep and in the morning pile it all right back on the bed. 

Maudlin Mike, the barfing bass player who would regularly drink red wine until he’d cry and then yack it up in a trail to the toilet. 

A drummer who could exude arrogance like most people perspire, was having an “episode” one time and  two guys walked into the elevator behind him, kicked the crap out of him and got off at their floor. 

A black bass player who drank a bottle of whiskey a day and claimed to be able to seduce any white woman he wanted and set about to prove it. He was mostly talk but he was successful enough that I completed an entire New York Times crossword puzzle book in the lobby of a hotel in Vancouver during one libidinous week. 

Howie the keyboard player who would adjust his stool so that he could put his dick out on the lower manual of his Hammond B-3. This was great sport for him and he would try to get the rest of the band’s attention and have them enjoy it with him.

And These Weren’t Problems?

Particularly the horny bass player and the weeping barfer? Sure, who wants to sit in the lobby so your roomy has privacy or needs to do some carpet cleaning? I’m talking about head-butting personality and ego conflicts. I lucked out. Despite their quirks and grotesque habits, despite being domestically challlenged, even the worst of them understood compromise. …….which is balance. 

“Life, like physics, like music, seeks equilibrium but it is not the attainment that is interesting. It is the process”

So sayeth the great Irish-Chinese philosopher  Foo O’shit who was drunk at the time.