Under the Marquee Moon

Sometimes here in Oly, I think that Caitlin and I have been cursed to live in the wilderness, like Moses in the Bible, for sins we were not quite cognizant of committing at the time. I don’t think this on a day-to-day level, because Oly is pleasant enough (and anyway I brought this on myself, and besides it's almost over). But I think it when I go home for a short visit. My mom is always begging us to do it, but going home is so disconcerting. In some ways, it’s easy and cheap. In others, it just hurts our feelings.

This was especially true the first time we went, in October. The sunshine – after three straight weeks of rain – was luminescent. The foods (curry, sushi, ramen, etc.) so much tastier. Diving was perfect. (Diving is always perfect.) Then I went up to San Francisco to see a concert – Television at the Chapel – and I felt played. I love Television, and I love the Chapel, but I didn’t have any fun at the concert and here’s why: it made me question every single decision I ever made in my life.

To begin, the walk up Valencia – past zillions of hipster stores, bars and restaurants, fabulous smells, fabulous people, a truck with a piano on it, Day of the Dead stuff everywhere, a place selling Donald Trump pinatas, a car with hot ipads being sold out of the trunk, a food truck from C.R.E.A.M. (Cookies Rule Everything Around Me) …who the fuck does San Francisco even think it IS? That’s not what I would have thought last summer, but living in a different state changes you. Instead of just thinking how cool everything was, I couldn’t help but think how lousy the rest of the world seems by comparison, and that just…it doesn’t seem right somehow.

At the door of the club, I got carded. ME. You’d think that would make me feel good, but the person ahead of me was carded too, and it was Chuck Prophet, so I figured it was just a policy to make us feel good. You know: more of the fake-nirvana of living in San Francisco…we’re all perennially youthful here, there is no such thing as old age!

Inside, I found a nice seat on a step at the back, where I could sit with a perfect site line. (As for sound, due to the ceiling, the Chapel is an awesome place everywhere sounds good.) Presently the band comes on and starts tuning up. You know TV - they need to do that – and besides, the ticket had said, “Instrumentals, improv and maybe some vocals,” it very much DIDN’T say, “…playing Marquee Moon.” Anyway, who cares? Hearing Tom Verlaine is a privilege devoutly to be wished. Even his tuning up is about a hundred times prettier than 99% of what you hear in a nightclub. Just the timbre of his guitar takes me somewhere different, and anyway it was what I expected.

  

And then, a jarring thing happened. Someone yelled “Free Bird.” Can you even believe it? FREE BIRD. I wanted to die of second hand embarrassment. Thankfully Verlaine ignored it, because, I mean who wouldn’t – (A: Greg Dulli, who I once saw rip the yeller a brand new asshole at the Vis Club for doing it, which is why I, for one, would not dare to yell it out at concerts by notoriously cranky guitarists) -- but then an even worse thing happened, which was the person sitting RIGHT NEXT TO ME yelled, ‘HURRY UP AND START PLAYING.”

Oh. My. God. I was just beside myself. At the time that it happened I wanted to sink through the floor and die on behalf of the yeller, but now, post-November, I realize it’s just part of the new reality. Only a truly terrible person would yell “HURRY UP AND START” to Tom Verlaine, but we live in a world of truly terrible people now, you know what I mean? Violators. Plunderers. Rapists. Neo-Nazis. People who think they can boss Tom Verlaine around. This is where we live now, and that must be why that at that exact moment I felt like I was waking up from a lifetime-long dream. 

In my dream, the world was a soft and pleasant and everyone around me liked the same things and got the same jokes and even those who didn’t were at least trying to be chill. In my dream, you could bash Donald Trump pinatas and get carded at age 50, and listen to Tom Verlaine in peace, and all the daily and nightly equivalencies of those actions, and nothing really bad would happen to you on purpose. In my dream, one rainy Easter Sunday afternoon many years ago, I went to a bar called the Lakeside Lounge in the East Village with my brother and we listened to all of Marquee Moon on the jukebox and chatted with the only two other people there, a lady who'd brought her cute dog in and the bartender, and it was such a nice experience that my brother pretty much moved to New York on the strength of it. 

In those days our love for stuff like Marquee Moon was a comfort and a pleasure and it made us form these communities of solace. Now those communities have  been infiltrated by the vandals and goths – not in Podunk America, where you might expect it, but exactly where it shouldn’t happen, on Valencia Street in a bloody chapel, for god's sake.

I stayed for the rest of the set, of course, but I was deeply unsettled, and to make matters worse, the drunk lady next to me was heckling Tom throughout, so I had to move, and once I moved, I couldn't see, and once I couldn't see, I tried to tweet ("People are heckling Tom Verlaine, please make it stop!") and once I tried to tweet someone shoved me in the back and hissed at me, like I was the problem and not the solution.

Maybe I was. Maybe I am. Anyway, that was the end of it, my love affair with my bohemian history, and you know: whenever you break up with something, you kind of wonder why you went out with them in the first place. You know how people say it is better to have loved and lost? I've never been too sure about that one.