More Tales! |
sometime in the mid 80's
I was on my way home from a late shift at Sloppy's, my bike chain squeaking, my ears ringing from the music and after-the-gig yakking. The summer night is quiet and moist... not a car or person in sight on Simonton. The air is a blessed balm after the smoke-filled inferno of the stage in the pre-air-conditioning bar. I swear it hit 110 degrees and humidity sometimes. Guitar strings and hardware turned into piles of rust if you didn't hose 'em down with WD40 during the breaks, and you could slide off stage from the sweat if you weren't careful.
I turned up Caroline, ignoring the red light. All the cops were snoozing or visiting Mr. Donut. I glanced into The Mascot, which used to be next to Pepe's... it was a bar famous for shrimpers and brawlers... your basic fluorescentlit-jukeboxed-pooltabled-concretefloored-pinedisinfectant type hangout. It was eerily silent and apparently empty, but I thought I saw some white-booted legs sticking out from under the pool-table. Puzzled, I turned around, jumped the curb and poked my head in the door. It wasn't empty. Everyone, including the bartender, was passed out. On the floor. On the bar. At the tables. On the pooltable. And yes, under the pooltable. Just another night in Paradise, I sang out. Not a twitch. Time to go home, I thought, glad to have a bed waiting.
Copyright 1998, Dan Simpson
In my own small way, I am a local legend in my own time. I have this
odd ability to heal, or destroy, machinery. I don’t even have to
be present. I’ve had several instances of people calling me on
the phone and their equipment will start working when I tell them to
turn it on so I can diagnose it. I should really have a 900 number,
or a radio show... “put your tired, sickly machinery next to the
radio brothers and sisters...” The bottom line is, if it is at
all possible for a machine to work, it will do so in my presence.
This makes it extremely hard to diagnose broken stuff when people
bring it to my shop. And if it starts to work in my hands after being
dead for months as many customers claim in awe, what do I charge?
Usually, I don’t charge, since it's hard to charge for a fluke
of the cosmos, a mystical event, a spiritual gift, coincidence, or
whatever you may want to call it, but those with class donate
something to the cause.
This ability no longer surprises me, I just accept it and so do my
friends... but it can manifest in new ways. Sometimes, I will have a
broken piece of gear sitting around the shop for a while, and the
next time I plug it in, it begins to work... it’s as if I
radiate some kind of energy and the machinery soaks in it like a mud
bath at Dan Simpson’s spa for ailing devices. A particularly
weird version of this phenomenon took place last week. I was cleaning
up the shop, when I heard a beeping coming from way underneath some
shelves... I peered down into The Sargasso Sea of Dead UPS Units. It
was from a little 250VA Union Carbide box that I had given up for
dead about six months ago... it would not shift into charge mode. AC
was getting in, all the fuses were OK and the transformer was good,
there seemed to be nothing really wrong with it... it just refused to
work. Apparently, six months of detention were enough, it worked fine
when I plugged it in, and is still working today. Now I’m used
to stuff healing over time, but I am NOT nonchalant when they ASK me
to take them out of the penalty box. That’s all I need...
machines TALKING to me.
Earlier, I mentioned that there is a dark side to this force... that
I could injure machinery with it. This is a relatively new
occurrence... the first time I became aware of it was on a gig with
the Mike Kirk Group. Guitarist Fred and I were pissed off at each
other for some reason that I can’t remember. Maybe he was tired
of me playing bass with my eyes closed and whacking him upside the
head with the tuning keys and we had words. Whatever the reason, I
had a dark cloud building up to a thunderhead over my head... I was
feeling really grim. Fred’s amp stopped working in the middle of
a song. That was it for Fred... he stalked out. We kept playing, and
I must admit I felt better even though later that evening, to the
rest of the band’s amusement, the exit sign fell off the wall
and hung there sputtering as I passed by. The interesting finale to
that tale is that Fred’s amp was a new Peavey, and I am Key
West’s Authorized Peavey Service Center. When I checked it out,
all that was wrong was a blown fuse... blown for no apparent reason.
That was an easy repair. As far as I know, the amp is still working.
Copyright 1997, Dan Simpson
KRANG! The building shakes. My head jerks up from regarding the amplifier strewn all over my workbench. KRANG! KRANG! KRANG! KRANG! Outside the plate glass windows of Simpson Sound, I see a yellow Volkswagen microbus’ passenger door whack each steel pole that holds up the second story porch fronting Truman Avenue. After it passes from view, I hear and feel a mighty crunch. The night returns to silence (did I mention this was a long time ago on Truman Avenue?) except for the faint sound of music from a car radio. If there had been anyone there to talk to, I would have been speechless... as it is, I shake my head in a wubba wubba way and run out to see if anyone is hurt.
The van is embracing the final pole, it’s remaining lights on, the radio cheerfully rockin’ out, and a badly bent passenger door dangles forlornly by one hinge. There is no-one behind the wheel. In fact, there is nobody on the floor, in the back, underneath, in the street, or anywhere in sight. I am alone... the only motion is a stop light changing up on White Street. My hair commences to rise on the back of my neck. Being a SciFi fan, you can imagine the thoughts I am thinking. I am relieved, but no less confounded, when some cars come by, their drivers and passengers rubber-necking. Time to call the cops.
“Welcome to Key West” said the veteran cop to the wide-eyed rookie that just moved here from Ohio. We’d been scratching our chins and standing around staring at the apparition for a couple of minutes, and no easy solution to the mystery has surfaced. I reached in and turned off the lights and radio... “no sense running down the battery” I thought with the practical side of my brain. This small act of normalcy takes the edge off the eerie sense of doom that has enveloped me. As if in reward, the mystery is solved... a wailing, sobbing woman walks up the middle of the street to the knot of sleuths. Between sobs, the story comes out. The woman is the owner of a downtown restaurant. After closing, she picked up a hitchhiker at the corner of Truman and Duval. Around Grinnell, the hitchhiker grabbed her purse containing the days receipts and jumped out. The woman leaped out after him in hot pursuit, leaving the van to make it’s own way... it’s a whole block from CheChe’s to my place. The cops and I exchanged glances. I knew, and I’m certain they did too, that there was more than that to the tale, but in the finest Key West tradition, we accepted her story at face value. While her report was being taken, I grabbed a crowbar and pried the fender away from the front tire. Then I drove her home. It ran OK considering what it’d been through.
Copyright 1997, Dan Simpson
There are many tales about the Keys’ smuggling and drug dealing exploits of years gone by; cocaine being delivered to the police station in fast food chicken boxes, happy citizens pedaling home from the beach with bails of “seaweed” (bails of pot thrown from boats and planes during chases on the high seas) in their bike baskets, high speed chases through the Mangroves, and so on. Indeed, many of the Keys’ now-respectable establishments are rumored to have been founded with illegal dollars. Due to stepped up enforcement and tourism, an easier and legal way to make money, the heyday of the swashbuckling Conch smuggler is past, but you can see echoes of this tradition live on. I was witness to a particularly inept transaction one day last month as I waited for a sandwich and buche at my favorite White Street Cuban food dispensary...
The Cuban man pacing and fidgeting next to the pay-phone catches my eye. He’s dressed in classic smuggler style; expensive clothes and sunglasses, and enough gold accouterments to drown him if he fell into the water. Either a dealer or plumber, I muse. He swears under his breath as he dials a number, swears distinctly louder when he gets no answer and smacks the phone into it’s cradle. I notice he has a rolled up newspaper under his arm... in fact, he’s being unusually careful with it. He’s not holding it like a newspaper, more like a breakable object. My suspicious nature stirs lazily, opening one eye.
Suddenly, he stares east down the street and alerts like a dog seeing another dog a block away. Quickly, he calms himself and tries to act casual. My suspicious nature opens the other eye. I watch him as he tracks the progress of something up the street, it appears he is focused on a rather ordinary man on a bicycle. The cyclist stops at the traffic light, and the Cuban man quickly strides in front of him, and with a patently forced nonchalance hands the cyclist the rolled up paper and continues across the street, picking up speed, eager to be gone.
The expression on the cyclists’ face is priceless. He’s trying to look casually in all directions at once; his facial cast alternating between fear and forced innocence. He is holding the paper with both hands like a fragile porcelain antique, and he doesn’t know what to do with it. Slowly and carefully, he tucks it under one arm. Suddenly, he notices me staring at him with a big grin on my face, and he goes pale. I can’t help it, I bust out laughing. Hard. Almost doubling over. He looks like a deer in the headlights. Suddenly a car horn blasts behind him, and I swear I can see his heart bulge his T-shirt as he spastically jerks around. It turns out the light has changed. His ears burning, he pedals hard as he can away from my laughter with only one hand on the handlebars; the other cradles the precious newspaper close to his chest.
Copyright 1997, Dan Simpson
It’s a few days before Christmas, and our band is playing in a popular locals’ hangout on the waterfront. The usual assortment of Key West characters are making use of the holidays as a not-really-needed excuse to party in a serious and fierce manner, and some are even dancing. Most captivating among the whirling deadheads, drunken shrimpers and hippie mommas is a very attractive young prostitute that often shows up, dances wildly by herself for a few songs, and goes on about her business. Her dance style is totally freeform but graceful, and when she is deep into it, she seems only tentatively connected to our collective reality. Though very short, she has an incredible posterior and legs, and likes to show both off with skin tight nylon shorts and 5 inch spike heels. Her frenetic arrival usually causes the band to miss a few beats, but ultimately spurs us on to a higher energy level.
Halfway through the second song, a disheveled and very drunk Santa Claus pushes his bike up the short flight of concrete stairs, drops it in the middle of the tiny dance floor, and proceeds to stagger about wishing us all a Merry Christmas. His blurry eyes focus on the lady of the evening, the sole dancer left, who is dancing expertly around the fallen bicycle... she’s actually vaulting over it! Santa is smitten, I can see. He decides to join her, and stumbles about in a drunkard’s parody of dance, trying to get her attention. She ignores him, and it is a rather unique sight: the elfin, leaping woman being pursued by a sweaty, shambling Santa with delusions of Astairehood.
Tiring of the fruitless mating dance, Santa decides to advance his courtship by more direct means. He grabs her butt. This is a very serious mistake. He has broken her spell... what once was an annoying whine of a mosquito is now a major disruption. She slaps his hand away, and glares furiously, bristling with hostility. He is not perceptive enough to realize the danger, and attempts to get closer to her. A shapely leg terminated by a very sharp shoe flashes out with the speed of a striking Cobra. Santa is down, assuming the fetal position. All the male watchers grimace in sympathetic agony. Shaking her head in disgust, our annoyed dancer steps over the writhing Santa and exits to scattered applause. The band played on.
epilogue: Santa recovered enough in a few minutes to decide it was time to spread his holiday cheer elsewhere. Mounting his bicycle in an attempt at a grand exit, he headed for the aforementioned stairs, managing to stay mounted until crashing into the bar at their foot. I hear no one was seriously injured...
Copyright 1997, Dan Simpson
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