The Soft White Underbelly (of my life)

Every Tuesday night, I drive to Federal Way. I leave at around 4 p.m., in the hopes of getting there by

5:30, and usually I do so, unless there’s a jam around JBLM – Joint Base Lewis McChord, the nearby airforce-army compound that can gum up traffic on Highway Five at all hours of the day or night. The trip to Federal Way is only about 40 miles, but it often takes well over an hour.

At first, I found this journey frightening and dull. It bothered me that there were so many slow-downs, and I felt alienated by all the exits I knew nothing about. In California, there is hardly an exit anywhere in the Bay Area I haven’t been down at least once, to go to a diving meet, or to see a friend, or to buy some obscure tool, or whatever. But here, it’s all a mystery, and everything seems a little sinister. My neighbor Kelly once told me that Lakewood is where they film all the worst episodes of Cops. My friend Jason told me that Pulluyup is full of Trump supporters and people with guns. Caitlin is keeping track of all the near-school shootings that have happened in Lacey and Dupont and other nearby communities, since there seems to be some kind of High School tribal hot line abut that. So driving down Highway Five through all these places – slowly – was initially a bit of a chore.

Now I like it though. I look forward to it, even. I like it because I charge up my ipod and listen to my favorite songs or to the latest episode of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me or S Town. I like it because for a long stretch just past Lacey toward Tacoma you keep seeing Mount Rainier peeking in and out of the horizon, and some nights it’s just beautiful. And I like it most because I am on my way to diving practice.

Diving practice ends at 7 and I always do the same thing: I call Vic’s pizza for a pickup at 8 and then I get in my car for the long drive home. Often traffic on the Five is still really bad towards Tacoma so I  take route 99 – the Pacific Coast Highway – through Fife. This  leads me past the Emerald Queen Casino, the Indian Bingo Parlor of the Puyallup tribe, and whenever I drive past an Indian Bingo Parlor, I fall into a kind of fugue state, thinking about those places and how they intersect with my past.

There are actually several other casinos on 5 towards Olympia, but the Emerald Queen Casino is the biggest. You can see it coming up for ages as you round the corner for Tacoma, because it has a giant flashing billboard sign advertising its upcoming shows as well as other important things – job openings, food specials, giveaways, boxing matches, all kinds of bingo parlor fun. I wait eagerly for those signs, because I have a weird fondness for Indian Bingo Parlors, born when I lived in San Diego and used to cover rock shows at the Viejas and the other casinos in El Cajon and San Diego counties. There was a period of time when I went to them fairly frequently, though the only show I can remember in detail was one by Jerry Lee Lewis. He played one of those shows like all those old guys do, where the band vamps for five songs and the artist comes on and plays, like, his three most famous numbers, and then goes off and the band vamps another five songs and that’s it.

As expected, Jerry Lee was an asshole, plus he could barely stand up and kick his stool out behind him during “Great Balls of Fire”, though he did manage to do it on about the third or fourth kick and being young a cruel and knowing his past as a wife-beater and not yet having been trolled into psychic oblivion,  I probably had a rock critic field day with that in the subsequent review I wrote. What I remember best about the experience, though, was that the ticket came with a free meal of BBQ and several side dishes, and as I was eating an elderly man came up to me and asked if he could have my baked potato. I am pretty sure that was the last show I covered at the Viejas Casino, but when, out of academic interest, I tried to look up the review the other day on the San Diego Reader archive, the only thing that came up was a letter the editor from that era saying: “Gina Arnold: Rape Victim or Bad Lay” that then proceeded to hope I was both. Those were the days, alright.

Like Viejas, the Emerald Queen Casino has rock shows too. On Valentine's day, they had a special concert with Air Supply that especially intrigued me, as did a subsequent one with Blue Oyster Cult, a band which I actually like. I went to see BOC last year with a friend from diving, and we put our index fingers in the air and yelled “more cow bell” and "go go Godzilla!" had a rollicking good time at it. It was at this terrible hard rock club in San Jose and we went to Applebys beforehand to get in the spirit, and my friend told me all about how he can play “The Red and the Black”. Later on, a Facebook friend who has made many records that I actually like mentioned that his high school band played that song too and I thought how perfectly odd it is that Blue Oyster Cult sits right there in that intersection between people with no discernable taste in music and people with MY taste in music. My Facebook friend is super leftwing, while my diving friend is one of those right wing, Harvard-educated Silicon Valley tech-millionaires who sold his shares out young and is in retirement. He plays in bands in a Paul Allen kind of way - in fact, playing alongside Paul Allen at a tech show hosted by Esther Dyson is one of his favorite band memories (they played "Brown Eyed Girl"). In other words, he and I had different agendas at that BOC show but we had a really good time anyway and therefore put paid to any idea that you can judge people by their record collection. And therein lies the mystery and magic of music. Or at least of Blue Oyster Cult.

But back to the Casinos. Every time I see that sign on Highway Five, I think, “Oh I should go,” but I just can’t face it – not Air Supply, or BOC, or next month's tempting act Randy Bachman either. Can you imagine having gone to the Emerald Queen Casino alone, on Valentine’s Day, to see Air Supply? I mean, it’s such an awful thought that it practically tempted me: I could have written the living shit out of that sucker, plus, I am actually dying to see the carpet there. (I collect pictures of casino and hotel carpets.) The problem would be, when I walk into places like that alone now I always get hit on. I didn't get hit on a lot when I was rock critic - unless you count writing letters to me hoping I’d get raped as a form of being hit on -- but nowadays, old men in their 70s have absolutely no problem asking if they can buy me a drink, even when I am not at Casinos. The last time it happened the guy was a former Marine who now runs fitness classes at an old people’s home. It was very disconcerting.

The other day when I drove by the Emerald Queen Casino I considered going there one last time, but I rejected it. I thought, ‘let’s not and say we did.’ After all, back when I was a rock critic, we did not have the internet. Driving around weird empty counties in California, infiltrating arenas where audiences congregated to see acts of yesteryear, and then opining cruelly on the whole phenomenon was, I see retrospectively, perhaps not the highest of callings. Today I can probably find out what the carpet looks like online, remind myself what hits Air Supply had via Wikipedia -- did you know they are Australian, and that one of them went on to form the Divinyls? -- or watch a BOC show on YouTube.

Compared to actually going, this method of writing about it would probably lack aura, and insight, and authenticity, but then so too would Air Supply’s performance. So tonight when I drive home from diving, I'm going to put on some music I actually like.