Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [150]
I took my mother to the doctor in San Diego and then took a walk down the street. There was nothing there, blocks and blocks of nothing. Not a bookstore, not a record shop, not a bar you’d care to enter, nothing but car washes and taco-stand franchises and supermarkets and parking lots and everything clean clean clean as if all them damn autos were farting out Windex. Finally I wandered, half-dazed by now, into a liquor store. Liquor stores in California are not like the ones in New York. They carry beer, which is good, but they also carry all sorts of other nonalcoholic detritus which renders them almost more like Kmart or a cross between a drugstore, a 7 Eleven, and a hardware store than any place a self-respecting drunk would want to be seen. I got confused, and wandered the aisles aimlessly The manager, sitting in some vast arena behind his cash register and four-sided counter, began eyeing me with open suspicion and hostility. Plainly, I was a Suspect, a possibly dangerous and certainly anomalous Character not from these parts and up to some kinda nogood for sure. An Outlander. I was dressed at the time in jeans, a normal shirt, sneakers, and with a brand-new haircut that I’d thought a little too short, though certainly not in the least punkish. I thought I looked like Andy Hardy. My mother said it best, probably, for the guy in the liquor store and who knows who else around them parts: “You look like an overgrown hippie.”
Went to a record store in midtown San Diego I used to cut school to ride the bus to when I was a teenager. The same guy worked there as I’d first met in 1962. I think it was either the ‘73 or ‘74 trip when I first realized that he was gay. I used to wait for those days when I’d ride that bus up El Cajon Boulevard with an armload of albums that I’d then sell for a dollar apiece, buying others from him for two dollars or walking a few blocks to plunk down a fin for the then-new Let Freedom Ring by Jackie McLean, Tijuana Moods by Mingus, or anything by Ravi Shankar. I’d always said hello to this guy, every time I’d entered his store before, going back at least a decade and a half. This time I didn’t. I didn’t buy any records there, either. I live in New York now. I’ve got everything. I walked out depressed.
One of my other nephews did manage to find a used 8-track to play in his machine as we cruised the freeways beering, though: Jimi Hendrix's Electric Ladyland. As I popped another Coors and listened to all those wah wah pedals while staring out at the bay and the shopping centers and missions and almost cloud-free sky, it suddenly occurred to me that Jimi had been dead only a few months shy of a good decade by now, and here we were still listening to this stuff.
Worse than that was my other nephew's house, where my mother was living. When I walked in they were watching the Olympics on TV; I thought it was the Ice Capades. There were incomprehensible magazines about how to spruce up your condo on the coffee table. My mother kept asking me if I wanted a tuna sandwich. Sometimes I said yes, sometimes I said no. Barely a word was exchanged between me and my nephew's wife the whole time I was there. I made one painful attempt to make a conversation happen between me and their daughter, who I used to carry around on my head and is now just about to become whatever sort of incomprehensible creature the adolescents of the Eighties might be; she resolutely refused to respond to anything I threw out. I finally decided I hated her. Conversation with my mother was intermittently enjoyable, as long as she didn’t start in again with that wheedling tone. She was all right, she was old. I became like child is father to the man in a way. But during the days, when my nephew was at work at the roller-skate store and I was stuck there in that house with the three of them, the absence of connection in the air sometimes congealed pretty