Out of The Slammer And Into The Fire-- part 5

(Yes, there are 4 parts below...)

This story about Mitch is really a story about a lot of different people. The points of contact and how all the connections came together would take me forever to spell out and would be quite tedious.

Suffice it to say, from a divorced mother of two stitching together custom made beds on the side of the road, came everything. Even how I came to be living here in Oregon came from that encounter with June, a long legged Germanic Canadian gal with big blue thyroid eyes, but she wasn’t too relevant to this story so I won’t go into her. I’ll just say that when she was in her early twenties, an Arab man in an Arab desert once offered her then husband Marvin three camels for her while she did nude cartwheels in the dunes.

So she and I got along just fine. {June and Marvin both told me about this, but Marvin’s version ended with the lament- “I should have taken the camels!”}

Depression, though, does play a big part in this story, so I’ll tell you a bit about that. I was sitting poolside in the Hollywood hills watching Paris Hilton wannabees acting out life in the most phony of fashions while a girl I had been absolutely crazy about since I was a teenager acted like she barely knew me. The details of how I got there and why are pages and pages long, but lets just say what I thought about reality and what I knew about reality ripped open in a matter of minutes, though it had taken months and years leading up to that moment to make it happen. Suddenly, I wasn’t thinking clearly, I felt completely disconnected from my body and I literally felt as if I were seeing the inside of every moment as if time were a train streaming past me and I were a man sitting on a bench blinking fast enough to make the train stop car by car, letting me really see inside. The girl I had loved for so long in my head wasn’t real. These people weren’t acting real. None of it made sense to me, and my life trapped inside my role as a carpenter felt like a vice pressing in on my chest and a pile of piano parts perched on my head.

There were no drugs involved, either. The drugs all came from inside of me. I had had almost zero sleep for a month, since the day I had bumped into this girl at a friend‘s wedding. She was a girl I once knew as a teen who just miraculously came back into my life, climbing into the back of my van after the wedding and reminiscing the night away, and I was immediately filled with the gooey substances that ooze around your brain when one is almost fatally in love.

She went back to LA that day and I was sleep deprived and crazily in love until I made the drive to LA on a whim where I was then jilted beyond all expectations for the shallowest of reasons.

There I sat, in an Adirondack chair with an ottoman, crashing in on myself and having what some might call a “psychic break” or others might call “a nervous breakdown” or others would simply claim “getting your heart broken.”

It truly came out of nowhere and was more or less a chemical flood coupled with some really intense sadness that over-ran me and pretty much brought my personality to its knees.

And the thing of it is, intellectually, it only lasted a few weeks. In a few weeks, I was pretty much OK with everything again. I had fallen really hard and fast, hit the bottom with a bang, and then climbed back up again, thinking “What the hell was that?”

But the chemical depression would not go away. My body had changed inside and every waking moment of every waking day felt like I was wearing a lead pellet suit. You know those chest protectors they put on you at the dentist when X-raying your teeth? A suit like one of those. It was unbelievable. It was completely out of context for me, and it was really hard to push myself through each day, getting up feeling heavy and detached from myself, never really waking up, going through my days working as hard as I knew how, hoping that I would just wake up one day and I’d feel normal again.

On the outside I had a smile and a joke and a story for all, but on the inside there was a war going on. Lay down and surrender vs. Get up and fight your way through it.

It was about the second month into my depression that Mitch first walked into that garage I was converting into his living space, and then five months into the depression Mitch was released from parole and we went out and celebrated at a bar where Norman Greenbaum drank on Friday nights.

I never thought to go in and get medicated. I have a rough and tumble aversion to doctors and medication in general, opting to tough things out whenever possible and accepting pain and all discomforts as part of the carpentering life. So I soldiered on. The world swirling around me at high speed, and me just trying to keep enough focus going to get my work done, which was oddly earning me references and word of mouth advertising that I couldn’t keep up with.

So that's much of the context of the phone call Mitch got from old friends.

The biggest money-making rock band in America needed a keyboard player and hired Vee (I don't want a bunch of googlers here, so please let me use these references so that my story can be honestly told without hurting anyone. In other words, don't go blurting out the answer to the mystery!) because he had chops and could sing the high harmonies.

Vee had been living in a room over a barn with his wife Lulu, for years and years, living off of the royalties Vee earned as a keyboard player for another band that peaked in the early eighties. They owned a country property and rented out the house to... Mitch, back when Mitch had 100 dollar bills. In the room above the barn, there was Lulu's racks of clothes, a bed, and Vee's piano. It had been that way for almost ten years before Vee got the call and we got the call, and Mitch took me over and I met Vee and Lulu and a bunch of other once famous or sometimes famous or attached to famous folk, and we had an amazing meal catered for free by another new friend, a Chinese woman who cooked Asian Pacific cuisine to die for...

Lulu had been given a huge financial advance by the rock band's organization, and she had bought a 15 acre old horse ranch with a run-down house built in the sixties on it, sitting on the top of a long and windy driveway with a great view down into a small valley.

There was one three acre property at the foot of this property, where two kids and Mitch's wife-to-be lived. Other than that, Vee and Lulu had the seclusion that they would now need, given the nature of fandom...

"I need you." Lulu kept telling me at this get together. "I need you to fix up my house."

(to be continued...)