Part 2 - Continued excerpt from the end of
the book, 'Can't Loose, Can't Win, Can't Quit', by C. Livingstone.
(See here about the Book)
MTYD -- Part 2
My lawyer friend from my mining company of a year before, and of the
Vancouver mining company which still remains unnamed, came to the concert.
After the concert he offered to co-sign a bank loan to help get us going. I
purchased new equipment for the band and made the down payment on a new Ford
Econovan. It was the year the engine had been moved in between the seats to
shorten the front end and it was a looker.
Ford was looking for all the exposure it could get for the new line, the
lawyer was loaded, so it was a deal made in black to put it through. We
were one of the first in Canada to have one and it was good exposure for
Ford and the money was on the table.
But because I was so snotty about our great potential, it never occurred
to me to also ask to have money to live on until we got established.
So we continued to live poor for a while and consequently I missed a
golden opportunity for the band to get the music together in comfortable
style instead of with onion dinners in angst.
The main missed opportunity though, came just after the Yardbirds
concert. One of the big local disk jockeys had taken a shine to us and
had started making a point of phoning us on air every afternoon to talk
with the musicians. Publicity like that you can’t buy, not even today.
Terry D, now of MTV Much Music fame, called for about a week and a half,
and Vancouver was just starting to get the idea that something good was
going to happen in their midst. Then the phone got cut off because the
bill hadn’t been paid. I should have done everything in my power to get
it back on the air to keep the momentum going.
Instead I said something equivalent to, “Shit!” So we didn’t have a
phone for nearly two months. By the time we got it back the momentum was
gone. Like I said, “It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Stuporman”.
I missed another unrecognized mini opportunity at this time. But this
one would have been quite a stretch even for Goodyear. After we began to
get more regular bookings, the drummer used to buy the complete new
shelf of Marvel comic books every two weeks.
I actually had the very first issue of Silver Surfer in my hands as an
example. None of us ever dreamed of keeping them as an investment. Like
most kids of the era, the fun was in the reading not the having, and
hippies were kids with the best of them.
Actually, my missed cue with the Marvel Comics Empire started years
before when I was still just a young kid in Winnipeg. In the late
forties and early fifties I used to load up with two Donald Duck or
Marvel Comics every week with my two bits allowance. I had a neat deal
with a local pharmacy which was so old it still had old wooden floors
smelling of disinfectant all the time.
Pop was a nickel and comics were a dime. The comic book rack sat at the
front end of the store by the pop cooler. I would come in every Saturday
afternoon, buy a pop, and read every new comic on the shelf. Then pick
out the two best, pay for everything and head home. Every week he would
say, “Don’t do that again”. Every week I would do exactly the same thing
again. This went on for six or even years. Some institutions keep
humanity going.
The comics I bought I only read once or twice and never paid them
attention again. Today, five people could be rich on what probably
passed through my page flipping fingers. No doubt though, most people my
age could make the same complaint.
The band in the meantime continued to grow quickly in local popularity.
What had been driving everyone’s enthusiasm for the band, particularly
in its earlier stages, was that it played entirely from a female musical
point of view.
This didn’t mean that they wiggled their hips in tight little slips.
Rather, think of Male/Female in the same sense as Positive/Negative,
Projective/Inductive, Ying/Yang, i.e., as contra modalities.
Nearly all Western civilization music, from its earliest inception to
current, is based on a male modality mode. This means Western music is
executed in a metronommic reference to the beat. The structure is
logical in its expression and logically concludes. Nearly all music from
the Middle East, East, is female as a I describe the difference. All
Eastern music just goes on and on.
Think of Western mode songs like, ‘You are my Sunshine’ then extrapolate
that to all Western civilization music no matter how sophisticated. Punk
music is just the extrapolated extension of that without the tune part.
Yuck..
The main difference with female music is that you play by how you feel
at the moment. Whereby, since you never feel exactly the same way twice
in a row you don’t play the same way twice in a row. Yet in the male
music mode, playing everything by rote memorized lines exactly the same
way every time is exactly what’s required. If you don’t your piano
teacher raps you sharply on your knuckles.
Female music is expressed in the spaces between the metronomic beats.
It’s the exact opposite of male music. Female music has appeared in only
a very few, very brief glimpses in modern rock music.
Here’s a simple start. Charlie Parker revolutionized the jazz world in
the forties by introducing a saxophone style whereby instead of working
within tight little phrasings within set musical formats, he realized he
could express just about any kind of phrasing he wanted so long as he
stayed true to the chord. The results were sometimes jarring but the
point was made. The rote crystallized structure had been broken.
Lead guitarists glommed onto the style in the early sixties and it is
now the standard format of lead guitar instrumentation everywhere. A
similar effect is possible with timing and tempo, not yet formulated,
where any kind of time expression is possible as long as you stay true
to the ends of the bars and main chord change points. This means of
course you have to know what you’re doing but it’s there.
Base players in particular could play in the female modality were they
to wake up to the fact. Even more particular with respect to the part
about timing changes by playing like a slow free floating lead guitar in
an easy going jam session, thus making the timing flow instead of
thumping hard. A very positive musical doorway awaiting opening like a
stairway going up in an optical illusion instead of down.
The best example within current rock is the second half of Led
Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’. The band stops, gains a tempo, then
starts again completely in a back beat mode in which the music drives
along by flow impetus instead of thumping.
The second half of The Fifth Dimension’s, ‘Age of Aquarius’ does the
exact same thing in an even more exceptional way. It’s a forward tilting
beat instead of backward clinging. Listen to it again, then the Led
Zeppelin piece again for cross reference. Then figure out what I just
said.
A Montreal group called The Bells, stopped half way though a song which
was something about ‘rain, rain, go away’’, then went completely into
female-ish mode for the rest of the song. The song was ‘icky’ but
musically it was very definite another great example.
The Beatles were just starting to cross the threshold for a few bits in
their last album ‘Abbey Road’. Then the negative stepped in and ruined
the whole migration towards female by cutting off the show with a Zen
intervention.
In particular the Beatles treatment of ‘You don’t give me your money’
was getting real close to the point. It’s in the way the musical
structure flows along between the beats rather than thumps along that
I’m talking about. If the Beatles had been able to go even one more
album together, who knows?
The long and the short of it is, that if the bass player backs off as
the main methodic driving force of a song, and bounces off the melody
line in the same way that country pickers sometimes lay off and just
bounce little licks on and off the foreground, you can double push the
band and have it going both ways.
In particular, hold the notes, and slow dance around the frets to set up
the chord changes in advance using passing tones and triplet phrasings
instead of simply hammering away at a bottom line.
If this is just a little hard to digest, it isn’t an easy topic to
describe for there being so little material to go on out there. It’s the
other half of music which the western world has yet to discover.
The proper female musical mode transcends rock, country, classical,
jazz, and even eastern. The Eastern world hasn’t fully caught onto it
yet because they play like they’re constantly falling down stairs. No
kettle is black. No black is a kettle. The female mode will work equally
for all musical formats once someone twigs onto how it works.
If you’re curious enough to understand this better, just take the time
to listen to the references cited above and pay attention to what was
said. Even better if you play bass. Randy Bachman in the current Guess
Who, can and sometimes does play somewhat in this mode whenever the band
lays off their forebeat rigidity long enough to give him some wriggle
room.
Finally, if any of you lucky enough to catch Willie Nelson performing a
rendition of ‘Georgia on my Mind’ in an episode of the TV series ‘Monk’
in the middle of November 2002, watched a very near complete example of
the mode. One of the prettiest renditions of anything ever done... So
Willie, now’s your chance to up the ante now you know what ante to up.
Once anyone gets jiggy with the principle, they can effortlessly
transpose it to boogie, jazz, country western, blues, and even
classical. Just imagine someone one an alien planet somewhere light
years into the future and motivated enough to redo some of the old
standard classical symphonies into female mode. They would of course
need a copy of the Willie Nelson performance as template, plus time to
battle off the centuries of inertia. But it’s doable.
What I just took the long way around to pointing out, was that MTYD was
about ninety percent into female band mode. The band played everything
in the style of the Willie Nelson rendition of Georgia. Fast, slow,
didn’t matter it was pat and pretty. They also played all the time like
the little bit from the Beatles. Which in fact had the band comment,
“Sounds a bit like us” the day they got a copy of Abby Road in their
hands.
MTYD’s music at the time was therefore completely unique. Absolutely
great to listen to, even better to boogie. The drummer was the modulator
and everyone else just let fly cool and melodiously off his solidity,
particularly the bass who like I said was a franchise player and carried
the load.
Unfortunately, as they matured, they moved more and more back towards
the male mode in trying to become more and more impressively tight. Half
my fault actually because I kept getting them into harder and harder
equipment to hear themselves in without realizing it. So forcing them to
keep getting louder and louder and harder and harder in compensation.
By the time they disbanded in 1970, the touch was gone. They were just a
good rock band like ten thousand others. Even more sadly, we had never
been able to get more than about ten percent of their onstage sound and
feel onto record. It is a moment lost.
Another Vancouver band slowly developed in the background in the very
late sixties and early seventies. Amethyst was fully aware of the female
male distinction and were in fact to become the full knowing expositors
of the expression. I had a tangent to them as I had been appointed their
manager in the early seventies for part of their existence.
Unfortunately, egos prevented the band from getting it up to snuff and
the whole thing was called off. More unfortunately, punk rock and other
such simplistic male musical forms started to sidle in through the later
seventies and have kept a hard rock lock on rock ever since.
Today, the female musical mode is an all but the forgotten memory of a
few for now. Maybe all is not lost though. Maybe a reader will to these
comments by heart and decide to give them a try, and the mode will rise
again. Wouldn’t it be nice if some music faculty somewhere adds enough
andante to their allegro to set up courses teaching the female
distinction and becomes a world leading musical institute.
My three years with MTYD and a few years before, saw me rubbing
shoulders with the rich and soon-to-be-famous on numerous occasions.
Some of the rubs were warm and fuzzy, others were outlandishly
outlandish. In our second year, we were booked into one of Vancouver’s
two still running supper clubs as a backup act.
Izzy’s was one of the few true supper clubs of the old style still
running in North America outside of Las Vegas. The very risqué new
stand-up comedian Richard Pryor was coming to town as the headliner for
ten days.
The club decided to try something risqué themselves and booked us as the
backup act because of our reputation even though we were a so called,
‘hiss, spit’, hippie band. We watched our Ps and Qs like a hawk and
things went without a hitch. A couple of us even went to a local all
night restaurant with Richard and his new wife a couple of times after
the last show of the evening.
The last night of the gig, after it was all over, we stood around
shaking hands and saying goodbye. Richard looked at me for a couple of
seconds then suddenly grabbed me up in a great big bear hug of a
goodbye. Which I always remembered, not because it was Richard Pryor but
because it was sincere.
Two years before the band came together, the late comedian Pat Paulson
had been playing for a week at a small local folk club. His, um,
headline thing at the time had been hanging from his feet and painting a
canvas with his nose and hair.
Very sophisticated ‘do in a zoo’ stuff, but evidently very popular
because the club was always packed. Every night the paintings would go
on the auction block to the highest bidder for charity. Not a bad scene
actually.
Just in case you think some of these guys are all onstage, I had a house
party one night and Pat showed up. He spent the entire night sitting on
the chesterfield dry lining us out of our stomach contents with patented
dead pan “Who me?” deliveries that you never saw coming.
Every word, every sentence. The guy had a lightning fast razor wit like
nobody you ever saw. Like five cue cards in the air all at the same
time, every one a stop-your-breathing-gagger for laughter.
It’s probably why he got into comedy in the first place. After finding
themselves at the receiving end of his talents long enough, his friends
and family finally said, “Go into comedy or you die”.
The University of BC was also having its annual homecoming celebration
and Pat was the featured entertainer. Pat had been going out with a girl
chum of mine at the time so I drove them to the gig. The two of us sat
up in the audience while Pat got on with his show. Or at least tried to.
The gymnasium was packed with engineers. Talk about your tough room. If
you know campus engineers you know the problem. The only reason they go
to university in the first place is to be seen and heard, order
irrelevant.
Many engineers are from small towns where a new bridge or highway just
came through. So engineers are obviously the first impressive big timers
these guys see and become the object of their hero worship. So seeing
themselves at the same center of attention in some other small town in
their own right someday down the road, they can’t resist and decide to
go into engineering.
Being the only one from the town up for it, they get to strut a bit,
well a lot if the town isn’t very big. By the time they get to
university, they think they own the place. Now put them all together in
the same gymnasium as a bonded mindset and you see the problem sitting
in front of poor Paul. His fate was sealed.
For about twenty minutes he fought hopelessly trying to get the
conglomerate “Me” into his patter. Nada. All the remainder of the
audience could hear, who at least had come to see him because of his
rep, were the engineers’ constant ‘Here we are and don’t forget it” pep
songs. They didn’t even seem to notice there was an act onstage trying
to happen.
After about twenty minutes of basically delivering into a huge black
hole, poor Pat put his mike down, walked quietly off stage, and came
around up to where we were sitting. He quietly sat down, quietly put his
head in his hands, and quietly started to hyperventilate. He was
completely devastated. It was the first time in his life he had ever
yielded the stage.
We did everything we could to play the whole thing down.
“Ha, ha, ha, Pat, ha, ha, ha.
Look at the bright side, ha, ha, ha, you got paid big bucks for a night
off, ha, ha, ha”. But it was lame at best and poor Pat wasn’t buying. He
was convinced his career was ruined for good. Not without good reason.
These are very sensitive guys these comedians, and need the full support
of the audience to keep it going. Richard Prior would almost go into a
trance before going onstage in order to build up his intensity.
Similarly, not too long before the homecoming, a very popular comedian
of the late fifties and early sixties had been headlining Vancouver’s
other remaining nightclub, and lost the audience.
So Shelly did what any self respecting comedian would do in a situation
like that and had a complete nervous breakdown. Right up there on stage.
Right in front of everybody. It was your basic career breaker. Who would
ever book him, it might happen again. He never did get back up to where
he had been in popularity. Nowadays think of Micheal Richards and his
career ending N-word freakout.
So Pat was afraid word would get out about his being driven from stage
and it would be the career-ender he so covertly strove to avoid.
His only forthcoming ray of hope was that in about six weeks time, his
long time chums and buddies the Smothers Brothers had a break of luck of
their own forthcoming. Who were going to begin taping the first show of
their all new, hour long, specials for CBS. Pat had a small guest spot
on the show. The rest as they say is history. Pat even eventually got
to, um, run for President of the United States.
As much as there were many up sides to the life of a musician, there
were also down sides. A short time after the Yardbirds concert, our band
was booked for a big local high school concert just before Christmas
exams.
Because part of the population of Vancouver had become tied more than
just slightly to the cultures of San Francisco by then, the school had a
considerable teen contingent of somewhat hippie type persuasion. Of
course it also had its usual contingent of fully constituted
red-in-the-neck homeboys. In my old days of high school we called them
greasers.
Not too long into the dance, the homeboys had already starting coming
onto the hippies and not for dancing partners. After a while of this, I
went over to the two teachers chaperoning the dance to see if they could
do something about it. They said if it got any worse they would shut the
dance down until things cooled off. ‘Fine’, I said, and started back
across the gym.
As I headed back I was watching the floor so as not to attract too much
of the attention of the bozos on the sidelines. About half way back to
the stage, the front of my nose suddenly met the back of my nose by a
fist attached to the arm of the number one homeboy in the crowd.
He had evidently begun his momentous high speed journey to the front of
my face from the far reaches of the auditorium. By the time we met in
the middle of the gym, his fist was running full tilt into destiny at
the end of my nose.
When he connected, his fist carried not only the whole momentum of his
record breaking sprint, but also the full momentum of the punch which
had been thrown from way back over his shoulder. Since I never saw it
coming, it had about the same impact as as blind man running smack into
a solid brick wall at about sixty miles an hour.
I stood there for a couple of seconds in the middle of the floor
contemplating life in general plus the birds and stars flying all over
the place in the blazing white light in front of my face. Blood started
spurting profusely from a very broken nose.
All I could think of was how on earth could anyone hit someone wearing
glasses. After a couple more seconds, someone put their arm around me
and helped me into the washroom to try and stop the bleeding and start
cleaning me up.
After a few minutes in the washroom I started hearing what can only be
described as an almost fantasy rushing like roar of non-stop yelling and
screaming. The sound was half in consciousness and half out, just like
when half awake just before falling asleep, only real loud.
I’m awfully sure it would be very similar to the sound someone hears
when a tornado goes through the next door neighbor’s yard in the middle
of the night. I didn’t know for sure if it was real or just a reaction
to the colossal swot I had just taken.
Well it was indeed real because about two minutes later our bass player
came into the washroom with a likewise big splay of blood on his face.
Fortunately though, no broken nose. Apparently, seconds after I had been
led out of the gym, the enthusiastic homeboy who had put the sock on me,
plus three of his buddies, had leapt the stage to commence the same upon
the band.
A bunch of hippie types at the front of the stage had immediately leapt
up on stage to help them not to commence the same quite so freely.
Hippies were never cowards after all is said and done. Just look how
openly they walked around with flagrant long hair in a society which was
still high up on its toes by an undisclosed underwear wedgie about long
hair.
So the homeboy buddies of the homeboy buddies on stage had also leaped
onstage to help speed things long. One thing led to another and within
seconds everybody in the place was into it in one way or another.
Even the girls were in it. One girl from the hippie side, kept running
around beaning all the homeboys over the head with her umbrella. The
staff eventually managed to quieten things down and the cops were on the
way.
When I came back out, the band was ok. They had seen me get hit. So when
the rhythm guitar player Donnie saw the first contingent of homeboys
coming his way, he had quietly removed the microphone from the mike
stand and was standing ready. When the first homeboy hit the stage he
was met square on the noggin by the mike stand swung hard from the
shoulder like a National leaguer hitting a home run. It had decked the
guy out flatter than a pancake.
By the time the police arrived the guy was still out cold. One of the
police officers took one look at him, then the mike stand which was
still standing on stage bent in the middle like a C clamp, put two and
three together, then wrote in his report, ‘ran into a pole’.
I was taken to the hospital to have my nose attended. The news came that
two of the homeboys also had broken noses. The guy knocked out cold had
come in by ambulance but was ok. So that was three to one. The hippies
had won.
Fortunately, except for a couple of other close calls later on in the
band’s career, that was the one and only time I ever saw the other side
of being a musician. And to think that not too many years before, that’s
what life as a musician was all about in the fifties.
In the early days, if you played rock and roll or country western, you
had to chop as good with your mitts as with your guitar. Or be fleet of
foot because it was popular to take out the band at the end of a dance.
Especially in the rural routes.
The reason for this is probably not too hard to figure out
psychologically. To most women in an audience, most musicians in a band
are like god-like irresistibles. So for a good part of the evening, a
good part of the women would spend a large part of their time trying to
flash the godlike irresistible of their preference with the promise to
come later. This was very much to the concern of their stallion-like
dates who may have been stupid but not dumb, and were pawing the dirt in
abject consternation.
By the end of the evening, the musicians would therefore became very
real perceived threats to every homeboy’s particular self-esteemed
man-image of god-like themselves. Hence the rhubarbs.
In fact, even into the late seventies, years after my rock band days
were over and I was selling flowers in bars and taverns, I talked to a
country western band one night that told me about a club in the southern
US where they had just finished a gig. The club had a thick chain mail
fence across the whole stage, wall to wall, floor to ceiling.
The purpose of fence was to protect the band from the beer bottles,
which would suddenly start flying stage ward at the very first note of
the gig and continue unabated until the final last note of the night.
You could tell how successful you were as a band by how big the pile of
glass was at the end of the show. It was part of the charm and muster of
the place, and one of the rules you had to agree to in order to play
there. Of course the money was great which is probably why none of the
musicians ever complained about coming off the stage at the end of the
night smelling like skid row.
My broken nose turned out to be straight-forward and easy to set. I was
out of the hospital in a couple of hours. After a few days, a clump of
dried blood remained in each nostril. After a week, the one on the right
fell out but the one in the left stayed put, rattling and whistling
around as I breathed. The nostril, of course, was all but completely
plugged.
After a number of weeks it was still there. If I had a brain I’d be
dangerous since it never occurred to me to use tweezers to pull the
stupid thing out. So more than half a year later it was still in there,
rattling and whistling around. I kept expecting that the next day it
would fall out on its own.
Late that Spring, I caught the flu of all flus. Or maybe it was a
reaction to a too-heavy prescription of penicillin I’d just been given.
I’ll probably never know for sure for not being reactive in the
slightest to penicillin before or since. The reason I think it may have
been the penicillin though, is because the tablets I had been given I’m
sure were for horses.
At any rate, I lay on my back half awake and half asleep for four solid
days in the only true twilight zone of semi-consciousness I have ever
been in. My head filled with a non stop rushing sound, and my nose ran
like a non-stop water tap for the four whole days.
Suddenly on about the third day, as I was blowing my nose for the thirty
thousandth time, out popped the clump. Hurray, about bloody time. My
left nostril was completely free at last. But now my right nostril was
completely plugged up from the flu I was suffering. Yet once again,
can’t win , can’t lose, can’t quit.
After a few more weeks it was still plugged by about ninety five
percent. Twenty years later it was still plugged up about ninety five
percent. Talk about the ever changing never changing.
By fall of 1995, I figured enough was enough so decided to go to a nose
specialist to see what could be done. The specialist’s name was Doctor
Murphy. The name should have put me on red alert. Dr. Murphy took one
look at the X-ray and asked me if I had ever been punched in the nose.
The X-ray showed that the small bony tissue dividing the nostrils,
called the plenum for you non-scientists, had been perfectly
accordionned. Like I said, the guy had hit me square on the button.
The scrunched up plenum had been floating around in free fall enough to
have shifted from the far right to the far left and back again in the
first year. Hence the polar opposite switched blockages. Then it had
finally fused into place at the far right. Hence the now perennially
plugged up right side.
No problem at all to fix said Dr. Murphy. Completely routine. He did
about a half dozen such plenum operations a week so not to worry. I said
fine and the deal was set. I showed up the next week at the local
hospital to fill out the allergy forms and have the appropriate blood
tests done.
I had no allergies of any kind that I knew of except for Nutra Sweet
which discombobulates my bowels. The outputs come out something like a
cross between foam insulation and popcorn. Therefore I have never been
able to avail myself of the diet free universe everyone else has been
able to enjoy. Just as well if the reports that the universal blimp up
of Mankind around the world is caused by the inner workings of
artificial sweeteners are true.
At any rate, as far as my operation was concerned, I looked like a model
patient.
I arrived at the hospital the following Monday as a so called day
patient. This meant I would be in about ten o’clock in the morning for
prepping, into the operating room by about one thirty in the afternoon
for the main event, out of anesthesia about forty minutes later to see
if I was still alive, and back out of the hospital by about six in time
for dinner. Not like the old days where you were in for days just to
have your tonsils out.
I was required not to eat anything for at least twelve hours before the
operation. So on the Sunday night before going in, Greydie and I decided
to load up on pizza. Which is precisely when Murphy of Murphy’s Law
first got wind of a potential good one.
Since it was to be my last good meal for at least a day and a half, we
went whole hog and ordered two extra large, double cheese, fully loaded
pizzas, one each. When I arrived at the hospital the next morning, I was
therefore carrying a full load of extra large doubly loaded pizza
already starting nicely down on its run through the sugar refinery.
I was told afterwards that the operation had gone off without a hitch
and who was I to disagree? After going under the anesthesia I remember
dreaming that someone was counting five, four, three, two, one, and I
popped wide awake. Very slick.
When I was a kid, I remember going in for my tonsils out, and going
under the anesthetics smelled like a hundred million z’s worth of ether.
Waking up was like a hundred million z’s worth of ether fading away down
a hall. It was the sound of the machine you understand. But the smell
and the sound were as one in my brain. So that’s how ether smells for me
ever since. Like a hundred million z’s.
After waking me up with the count down, the nurse talked to me for a
minute or so to check out my reflexes and make sure I was properly all
back in the house.. Then I was wheeled to recovery.
After about three hours a nurse came by, said Greydie was waiting to
pick me up, and handed me a small plastic bottle with a couple of
tablets. The tablets were Tylenol 3 for nuking the pain in my nose in
case the pain became requite enough to require nuking.
The last thing the nurse said as I was leaving, almost pleading it
sounded like to me, was, “and what ever you do, what ever you do, don’t,
don’t, under any circumstances exert yourself or do anything which could
force blood to come your face or you could pop the sutures”.
Sensible enough advice I said to myself, deciding then and there to
never under any circumstances force blood to come to my face and pop the
sutures as I thanked her and quietly left the room and headed home.
I was fine the first night. By the next morning the nose had become,
well, a tad tender. So I took one of the tablets. No problem, the
discomfort went away and my nose stayed reasonably comfortable for the
rest of the day. The next morning, my nose was fine. That was the good
news.
The bad news was that I had suddenly received, as usually happens in the
passage of time, a rather not-so-subtle call from nature about the
pizza. The big clump of double cheese fully loaded which had been
heading into the refinery on the day of the operation, had now reached
the slag heap part of the process and was tapping on the trap door
signalling gently that it was time to be let out.
Not a problem I thought, dropping everything, then parting hastily to
the appropriate facility and dropping everything again. I’d been dealing
with this kind of responsibility ever since I had been potty trained so
knew exactly what to do.
As I had done successfully nearly twenty thousand times before, I
hustled to the room of appropriate accouterments, made all the necessary
preparations, and sat down on the appropriate apparatus in the correct
semi-embarrassing manner in preparation for the anticipated urging
purging to occur.
It must be a universal fact of life. Despite the fact that the
responsibility has been upon every living organism the same since the
beginning of time, you don’t want to be caught in the can with your
pants down. Take a look at the face of any pooch anywhere taking a poop.
They know.
As I was by myself, no problem except no boom boom, otherwise called
constipation, specifically known as the inability to unload one.
Worse. It wasn’t because there wasn’t any boom boom around, it was
because the trap door had absolutely and resolutely refused to open. It
was like the phone line from my brain to the mechanism had been
disconnected.
My behinder parts were as dead as a doornail. The hard drive had
crashed. The boat had hit a reef. The motor had blown a gasket. The
system was kaput. Having usually experienced relatively good success in
the boom boom department for most of my worldly life, I was duly taken
aback.
After a while, the boom boom in my lower groinal area again signaled its
presence, this time with a much more earnest desire to exit the
premises. Again I went through all the necessary preparations, expecting
all the due befallings. But again, nothing. No befallments of any kind,
not even the lighter than air ones.
After a short while things quieted down again, and again after about an
hour the call from nature came back. Only this time with a vengeance,
like I had for once and forever finally found my calling and it was to
go to the John and never leave.
I ended up sitting helplessly in somewhat hopeless despair. In
particular, I sat doubly helpless for remembering the dire warning the
nurse had made about not forcing even the slightest amount of blood to
my face under any circumstances whatsoever for risk of popping the
sutures.
If you’ve ever been there yourself, then you know that I was very
suddenly and very decidedly between a very big rock and a very hard
place. And don’t forget, this was not a problem about getting it out as
I’m sure everybody has experienced once or twice in their life in the
hours before the Exlax hit the pipes. This was a problem of nothing
happening at all. Like the telephone exchange had never made the
connection.
So there I sat, not wanting to contribute anything to the process more
than nature’s own gentle way of handling such things for fear of popping
the sutures. But needing to pop the sutures more than anything in the
world you could possibly imagine. I waited and waited and waited and
waited, my compelling friend in there becoming more and more sorely
ticked by the minute. But again, absolutely nothing. The trap door had
evidently gone to Tahiti on vacation and wasn’t coming back until after
labour day’s annual corn fest.
Things quieted down again for about an hour. Then my friend inside
suddenly signalled itself that it was a five alarm fire. The
irresistible force (clump), and immovable object (trap door), had fallen
into a cosmic do or die battle going on and it was going on in my lower
quarters. The Battle of Armageddon had finally arrived.
It was starting to feel like a ten pound ham in there clamouring to get
out. Don’t forget, this was a full-sized, fully-loaded, double cheese
pizza we’re talking about down there. Now all scrunched up into one big
wad ready to fire.
Women say that what I was experiencing was simply a day at the office
compared to what they go through sometimes in bringing forth you and me
kicking happily into the world. If so, a big tip of the hat from at
least one Male on the Planet who has at least some idea of what it must
be like.
In my case though, tipping the hat would’ve been wasted encouragement.
It was still no go. The trap door was out of commission and apparently
thought it should stay that way for the rest of my miserable life.
So after about, oh maybe three more seconds of this, I decided that the
prospects of popping my sutures would be trivial compared to the
prospect of splitting my seams which was beginning to seem an all too
real possibility. Don’t forget, you get gas down there too and gas
explodes.
So I, um, decided to force the issue a bit, causing a little blood to
come to my face. To my instant alarm and dismay it helped me not in the
slightest. It wasn’t that nothing was forth coming, it was that the trap
door still didn’t seem to be in the slightest bit aware of the program,
or that there was an all out championship football game going on between
my goalposts in there.
In these kinds of circumstances you’re in for a penny or in for a pound.
So I threw all caution to the wind and put everything I had into one big
colossal blood-to-the-facer. My face turned the purple of midnight. No
avail. Nothing happened. My sutures didn’t pop to smithereens only by
the apparent grace of God.
I was now beginning to question the whole philosophic topic of ‘nothing’
very seriously. During my philosophy days at university I’d read a
paper, which in one of the longest stretches of the English language
ever attempted, was titled, ‘The Nothing Nots’.
I can’t even begin to tell you what the attitude around the Philosophy
Department was about the ‘Nothing Nots’ at the time, but I was beginning
to think maybe the guy was actually onto something here.
In my case, the nothing was notting pretty evidently down in my lower
quarters and I was finally getting a colossal understanding of what it
may all have meant.
I was beginning to have real rapport with the idea of the nothing. You
know something like, ‘The Nothing nots, not because it wants to but
because that’s what nothing does’. If you substitute ‘no thing’ for
‘nothing’ throughout these last two sentences, it actually kinda, sorta
makes sense. At any rate, for the time being at least, my trap door sure
seemed to have gotten with the program.
At any rate again, by this time I also divined that I was probably in a
bit of a bind. So I hoped in my car and high tailed it to my family
doctor. I blew right past the receptionist like the winds of November
and straight into his office babbling helplessly about my modest little
problem.
He straight off asked me if the hospital had given me any Tylenol 3
tablets for pain killers. I said “yes”. He asked if I had taken any.
“One”, I said. Then he asked if I had ever taken Tylenol 3 before. “No”’
I said. “Ah”, he responded like the knowledge of the ages, “That’s why
you’re constipated”. “Say what”, I replied.
Tylenol it turns out has codeine as its main pain killing ingredient. In
particular, Tylenol 3 is the extra strength version of Tylenol, meaning
therefore it has an extra strong dosage of codeine. The problem with
codeine is that if you have never taken it before, it can completely
paralyze the rectum muscles. And now you tell me.
I asked the doctor what’s next. ”Nothing”, he said, not the favorite
explanation I’d been hoping for and sounding like maybe he’d been in
cahoots with the author of that philosophy paper. “The paralysis should
come out by itself by tomorrow and you’ll be fine”.
Concluding by now that he had probably never ‘bin there done that’ in
quite the same desperate circumstance that was now befalling me, I said
that tomorrow was never going to come and wasn’t there something else
could be done. So he gave me a couple of Cuban missiles and said if the
discomfort became too severe, just insert one.
Well sure enough, about seven o’clock that night, my whole world came to
an end. My hard clumpy friend was now so absolutely furious in the
winter of its discontent that my ears were starting to ring. So I threw
abandon to the wind and launched one of the Cuban missiles.
Exactly one hour later, the atomic bomb went off. The trap door blew
wide open and the desperate payload inside sailed smoothly out into the
cool awaiting receptacle as free as a bird.
Never, trust me never, was I so glad to see a grouchy guest leave quite
as much as this one. I gained even more relief from the now certain
knowledge that I now had a proven technique for dealing with any more
such apocalyptic visits if ever occurring, god forbid.
None ever did, not that I’m disappointed or anything. The only stuff to
follow the feisty clump was the rendered muffin the hospital had given
me after the operation in the recovery room as my meal for the day. The
Cuban Missile crisis was officially over.
The good news through all this though, was that the sutures had somehow
managed to stay intact even through all those strains of Samson. I have
no idea why. They must be making thread a lot better these days. And of
course, the operation itself was a complete success, although the
patiently awaiting pecuniarily handicapped patient isn't. Yet.
