While Posting My Schedule...

I was stapling my performance schedule to a telephone pole in the small burg of Short Term Memory, when somebody jabbed me on a wingbone with a sturdy fingertip. I spun round to find a short, bull-necked man in a Tommy Hilfiger polo shirt, Dockers slacks, and penny loafers.

"What'cha nailin' to my pole?" he said.

"Performance schedule. How do you mean: your pole?"

"Well, it's in front of my shop," he stabbed a thumb over his shoulder at a little ice cream and pastry parlor, crowded with chatty patrons, some of whom were shouldering cell phones even as they continued to talk with their snacking companions. "...obstructing the view of my patrons, so it's essentially my pole."

"I see." I went back to stapling.

"So what are you, a performer? You in a band?"

"I'm a singer/songwriter."

"Mm hmm. What's that? You write songs and sing 'em? You don't play other peoples' music?"

"Sometimes."

"What else do you do?"

"FedEx ground delivery."

At this his chin went slowly up, like his neck hid a hydraulic pump, his mouth popped open, and his tongue probed his cheek. Now he got me.

"So you don't do music for a living..."

"No. I'd like to."

"But you don't."

"No."

"Then why do it at all?"

I looked at the flyer with my picture and my schedule, impaled over other similar flyers amidst a sea of rusting staples where countless other fleeting flyers had hung. In the distance, storm clouds were gathering. Rain would come. The flyer might have the life span of two hours. Three at best. Why did I do it?

"I mean," he said, "I don't mean to get personal, but since you're freely utilizing my phone
pole to advertise your services, I felt I had a right to ask. So, why?"

"Why do you sell ice cream and pastry?"

"Easy. People want ice cream and pastry. Shop's full, you can see it's full. I don't have to advertise. It's like that movie, baseball movie, if you build it they will come. People like to eat. They like to eat sweets. If you make it, they will eat. Do they come to hear you when you play?"

"Sometimes."

"So, by implication, sometimes they don't."

"That's right."

"So they must not like what you have to say. Sometimes. I mean, it doesn't matter if people like me or what I have to say or not. They like Rocky Road. They like Heavenly Hash. They love raspberry danish and hamentash. They come. They leave satisfied. I'm like a Santy Claus who gets paid. What're you? What're you to the few people who show up to hear you, sometimes, that you feel you're important enough to tack this poster to my phone pole? What're you in the grand scheme of things?"

"I'm a threshold, Mr. Ice Cream Man." It burst out without my having to think about it.

"Yeah. That means. What? People trample on you on the way to getting somewhere else. You sit in a corner and strum a ukelele and moan, 'Oh my woman left me cause she don't understand why I'm a whiny, music-playin' man,' as the patrons of some restaurant or cafe file past you, ignoring your -- I don't know, your verse -- ignoring you, on their way to what they really want, an ice cream cone, or a scone, or a Yuengling lager. Right? Boyohboy."

"Sometimes it's like that. Yes. But other times, the times I live for, I'm a threshold to places they don't ordinarily go, where they can share lives they wouldn't ordinarily peep into, walk a mile in shoes they might otherwise never get to try on, and that can be a threshold to humanity, man, it can be a summons to life change, an awakening. It can be uncomfortable. Like exercise. But the end result, I believe, is that if you allow yourself to cross the threshold into the worlds that I lay out before you, you come back both hungry and a little satisfied. You get fed, not on ice cream, but on a kind of bittersweet manna that expands the heart and cleans scales of complacency from the eyes and reminds you that, hey, life can be more than just your forty acres, your mule, your wife, your idiosyncracies, your shop of confections, and the stuff you usually call wisdom which may be nothing more than a system of rationalizations for a way of life that you know is steadily choking off the wonder, openness, and honesty you had when you were still a kid."

He chewed it over.

"And then, yeah, other times I'm the noise polution on the way to the crumb cake. But I'm trying to sprinkle that fairy dust that'll take your imagination to the places I believe it was created for. It's up to you whether you let it affect you or not. The priest chants the mass and swings the censer, the incense fills your nostrils, the bells chime and the veil parts for you to set aside your animal lusts, and your industry concerns, and your debts and debtors, to go to a place unsoiled by the business, social, and political facts of the moment, where you can nurture a part of you that gets ignored 99% of the time; but a part which, in those moments when you let yourself be transported, you know is real and vital and necessary. Do you stay put with a gallon of good, solid ice cream in each hand or do you go on that journey?"

"Yeah, all right. Okay. Plus you deliver packages to people with legitimate businesses. Go ahead and leave the poster up. You want a ice cream or somethin'? I'll cut you a deal. "

I nodded. Hell, I like ice cream as much as the next citizen. Before following him into his shop, I looked once more on my flyer, with fondness and pity, even as the rain began to spit the grunge off the streets half a mile a way, carried by the wind in my direction.

It read:

Red Light Run

I was blowing through downtown Pittsburgh the other day, hurrying to pick up Camille after work. It was one of those late afternoons when the sun is so bright that the cityscape looks like a photo with way too much contrast -- all flashlight golds and chasm shadow blacks, and little in between.

The sunlight flared around the traffic light ahead and all but eclipsed it. I missed it altogether, focused on the next light further ahead. I was in the center lane, and just as I noticed a cop cruiser behind me in the curb lane, I saw that I was passing under a red light into the intersection.

My eyes frantically darted in every direction, then back to the cop in the rear view, even as I crossed the intersection, shook my head at my mistake and gestured one palm up in the air -- where the cop could surely see it -- as if to say, "What the hell did I just do?"

And in the rear view I saw that the cruiser, too, had crossed the scrimage line into the intersection.

Then the light turned and the cop pulled close behind me. We made eye contact in my rear-view, and I pointed to my head then thumbed toward the curb. "Should I pull over?" He didn't respond, but turned the cruiser to the curb and eased to a stop. So I followed suit and waited just ahead of him.

As he strolled up to my passenger window, I pushed the button and it whirred down, letting out the precious air conditioning.

"Man," I said. "I didn't even see that light!"

"I know," he said. "I ran it, too." He let out a little cough of a laugh and shrugged. "Don't worry about it. No harm, no foul."

"Thanks."

"What're all those?"

He was leaning on the passenger door now, nodding down at the box full of my new CDs in the seat.

"Those're my new CDs."

"How come they're all the same?"

"No, I mean: they're CDs I just made of my own music?"

"You jaggin' me?"

"Nope."

"So, 'zat you there on the cover?"

"Yeah."

"So, what are you, a musician or somethin'?"

"Well. You know: I try to be."

"Cool beans. What kind of stuff you play?"

"Oh, I don't know. Lots of different styles. This 'un's mostly like folky stuff. Blues, some folky, country-type..."

"I always wished I could play an instrument and sing."

"Mm hmm."

"Think I could?"

"I'm sorry?"

"I mean, do you think it's too late to start? Can anyone just do it, you know, any time in their life if they really put their mind to it."

He had me there. It's a question I hate to even pretend to answer. Sometimes I think, yes, anybody could do it. Then the IFs start seeping into the equation: IF they temper their thinking and emotions in the right direction. IF they're willing to unlearn a relatively great amount of false ideas. IF they're disciplined. IF so many other, deeper, necessary things are focused on and steered toward.

Which then often leads me to think, then, NO, anybody can't do it.

Then there are all those people who've told me that they really tried to become a musician, or a songwriter, and that they wanted nothing more than to be creative, and to be able to share something they'd made with the rest of the world, only to discover they just didn't have it in them.

This all passed through my mind, a stale rerun of contemplations past, in a nanosecond. NO, I thought. I'm sorry, but, I don't think anybody can. Not anybody at just any point in their lives. NO.

But looking into his hopeful face -- the puppy eyed face of this samaritan who had just absolved me the sin of running a red light, (lest ye forget) -- I tried very hard to find a more ambiguous answer. Who the hell am I to trample on hope. Maybe he would be one of those who, however late they came to the flame, would be surprised to find that their aptitude equalled their desire.

"I think everybody has it in them to create..."

"Because, I have this idea for a song. Been runnin' through my head, lately, based on a sermon my preacher gave last Sunday. It's about how -- I mean, I don't know if you believe in God, or you're a Christian or anything; and I don't mean to... Well, anyway, it's about how if you believe in Jesus, you don't have to stress, you know, sweat the small stuff, try to figure everything out. Because Jesus already knows everything."

"Really?"

I was suddenly impatient. My mother would believe this was the devil nudging me in the ribs to "persecute" one of the faithful. But it wasn't that. It was that I had just tried to pound my somewhat painful thoughts into an answer he could live with, out of plain human empathy, and after I had tortured my sense of integrity for his sake, he had just cut me off and switched gears to religion with more than a smidge of presumption as to the universality of biblical truth.

"Yeah. Why? You don't believe in the Bible?"

"I believe it exists. But, let me ask you something: You say Jesus knows everything, right?"

He nodded.

"Well, then. How come he never mentioned Polar Bears or Armadillos?"

"Why would he?"

"I'm sayin', Look at the, in the parables, look at all the examples Jesus uses of different kinds of animals, plants, professions, and they're all related to the time and place where he lived. He never mentions any type of creature that didn't exist or wasn't already known to the people he was talking to."

"Maybe he did and it was left out. He knew about stuff that hadn't happened yet, like the temple being torn down. That didn't happen till like thirty years or more later."

"Yeah, but that particular gospel wasn't even written until the temple had already been destroyed. So it was easy for the writer to put the prophecy into Jesus' mouth of something that had already taken place by the time he wrote it."

He stepped back from the door and reached behind him.

"What're you doing?"

He pulled a ticket book from his back pocket and a pen from his shirt.

He said, "You ran a red light."

"Wait, wait, wait. Ho. So did you."

"Not all the way."

"Okay, whatever. Do what you gotta do, officer. But look, take that song idea you've got and sing it into a tape recorder, shape it up a little, then memorize it."

"Why?"

"Because I'm playing this Saturday night at MOJOES Coffee House in Mt. Lebanon, and if you show up, I'll accompany you on guitar while you sing your song, and..."

"Accompany me where?"

"I'll play the chords and you can sing it. I'll give you a nice introduction, and I promise it'll be a real warm, welcoming audience."

He thought about it.

"You wouldn't be tryin' to bribe me?"

"Hey, I ran a red light. Whatever. But I feel bad, I don't know... I try to imagine what I'd need to hear if I just now got a dream to be a singer, you know? And so that's my answer. It may not be the greatest, but it's the best I can offer. Unrelated to the ticket, to Jesus, etc."

"Okay, where is this place?"

I told him. "You show up, we'll try your song."

He wrote down the info on the back of the ticket book, then flipped it over and scribbled me a warning. I was getting very late to pick up Camille.

"Don't count on it," he said. "But maybe I'll show."

"Hope you do."

"Watch the traffic lights, sir. And remember, Jesus loves you."

"He has my sympathy."

Bull Mastiff

I was lying very still on my back in a junk-cluttered yard, breathing very carefully, expanding my abdomen instead of my rib cage. The mastiff standing on my chest made it difficult to keep up my air flow, and the pain from having been tackled had only begun. There were bruises on my chest from his paws, and on my back and legs from the large river rocks on which I'd landed. Fortunately for the mastiff, I had broken his lunge.

His maw was only inches from my face. A great frothy, glue-like beard of thick drool slowly oozed from his wide, rubbery lips. He wasn't quite growling, but kept showing his formidable teeth with a silent snarl that wrinkled his wide, wet snout. His breath was like a sugared bouquet of Alyssum flowers, except the opposite.

When this went down, I was a meter reader for a gas company in Los Angeles. I'd had extensive training on dog safety, the golden rule of which was: Never Risk Contact With Any Dog. Period. Well, okay. But this house had never had a dog before. The first time I'd approached the six-foot high wooden fence, I'd followed procedure and stood a foot away from it with my back to it while holding a rectangular mirror aloft and using it to scope the yard. There had never been, then or since, any sign of a canine.

Until this day. This day when I nonchalantly threw open the gate and stepped in trusting blindly in the universal continuum of status quo. I was three strides in when I saw the blur of fur to my right. I managed enough of a turn that I was facing the four-legged battering ram with teeth head on when he leaped and paw-punched me in the chest.

And then I was on the ground in a lot of pain, trying not to move, trying to breath. Mastiffs
were used by the Romans as dogs of war. They're between 26.5 and 30 inches tall and weigh anywhere from between 160 to 200 pounds. I'd put the one on my chest in the median range. A Roman soldier would have looked at my mastiff buddy and seen a carrion-making machine.

I looked into his eyes for just a second. That was the only time he growled, a basso profundo promissory note of bone-crushing bites to follow. He didn't like eye contact.

So, I employed a trick I'd learned from Al Pacino. I'd read about this technique in an interview. He was asked what he did to so believably seem blind as his character in the movie Scent of a Woman. He said he learned to focus completely on peripheral vision until he honestly didn't see anything in the normal scope of his sight funnel. I was an actor at the time and practiced all kinds of odd ticks and mannerisms in my spare time, just in case a role ever called for them. Playing blind, Pacino style, was one I'd mastered. I put on my best blind face...

And considered my options. Sudden movement wasn't one of them. And sudden loud noise was probably a bad idea, too. If I yelled for the owners, I could be pretty badly mauled before they got to me, if they were even home in the first place. We meter readers carried long, thin metal rods with a hook on one end and a square of leather riveted to the other. The leather was for excitable dogs unexpectedly and suddenly met. You were supposed to proffer the leather for them to chew on as a substitute for your flesh. I'd used it. It worked. But this "tool" was about six feet to my right, fumbled during the tackle and now unreachable.

I didn't want to hurt the dog. Or maybe I just resisted the desire to do exactly that. My father, while often citing his belief that he was a peacemaker, a gentle spirit, had taught me mainly how to punch, kick, bite, gouge, knee, elbow and claw my way out of any given bad situation. I knew how to break a dog's leg by the time I was ten. I had long ago begun to believe that I was fearless, but the fact was that I had developed a taste for fear; an adrenaline addiction. I knew how to channel fear to my own advantage. There was a small knife attached to my belt, inches from my right hand. Small, but the blade was razor sharp. If I detached it's clip from my belt smoothly with the first try, I could have the mastiff split up the center, from groin to sternum, in about one second.

(A lot of folks think this is testosterone at work. They're simplistic in their conclusion. And eluded. It's adrenaline. It's human. It's something called the flight or fight response that has kept us around as a species for countless years. And in West Virginia, where I'm from, I'd known many women who had stabbed abusive husbands to death because they were facing the threat of brutal damage, with their flight options removed from the equation.)

But like I said, I didn't want to hurt the dog. I just wanted to get away from him. I knew the fence was five or six feet behind me, that the gate had closed and latched after I'd entered. I knew I wasn't going to disembowel my attacker, and probably wouldn't break his leg.

I needed to relax and think. I began expanding my belly further taking longer and deeper breaths. I tried to remove my mind from the fear of the crisis at hand. Now maybe it was the strained breathing. Maybe it was some chemical released in my body for coping with pain and/or near-mutilation experiences. But I had a sort of vision.

I saw through, beyond, the large dog to the sky above. And as I watched, the heavens
darkened quickly, as though some all-powerful stage manager were dimming the lights before a stage play. And lo, as the sky grew black as the pupil of panther, four stars shone brightly in the middle of the firmament. And the four stars descended slowly, on a gentle arcing path, over the curve of the earth. And as they neared, each star began to assume the form of a person. Three were male, one female, and all were endowed with golden flares of passion, and searing eyes of truth. And while they were still too far off to be positively identified, they stayed their descent, blazed gloriously and a note of celestial music, in four-part harmony, vaulted from them across the face of the earth and beckoned with such urgency and might that every living thing bent toward their station in the heavens. Every tree, shrub, man, woman, child, guppy, and newt cocked their necks as though listening, enchanted.

And then the stars receded with the sudden return of daylight.

The mastiff was still on my chest. But in the vault of inner calm I found magic item. A forgotten possession of infinite influence over dogs of all sizes, at home and abroad. In my left pants pocket was a ziplock baggie containing a fat sandwich generously plumped with peanut butter.

I gingerly stuck two fingers in my left pocket and pried apart the ziplock. A second later, Mr. Mastiff's sniffer went into hyperspeed. For the first time since our abrupt introduction, he took his eyes off my face and cast about for the source of the scent. As he did, I drew the baggie out of my pocket and flung it to my left as far as I could. It bounced off the fence and landed in the ground on a pile of ashes and sand. Using my chest as a spring board, he pounced after the morsel, widening the radius of the paw shaped bruises and causing me to exhale with a sharp pang.

And as he jettisoned off me, the beard of gluey saliva plopped from his chin and splattered on my face. I swiped it off my eyes and walked backwards to my little tool. After I picked it up, never taking my eyes off the dog, I sidled toward the fence. The mastiff was chomping the sandwich, baggie and all. For the moment, I had ceased to exist. I let myself out.

Now this incident held a valuable lesson for me as a writer, whether of songs, of true accounts such as this, or any other work of fact or fiction. And the lesson was that the thing to write about will always come from within me. I never need grope about in the atmosphere for inspiration or material. A childhood of proverbial mastiffs waiting behind every fence, and of skies peppered with back-broken semi-saints and tainted angels would never fail to gift me with the stuff of story and song.