Back in Maine – my beloved Maine – is a bar where I used to drink. It’s called Amigos because it purports to be a Mexican restaurant. Word is, there’s a dining room upstairs, but everyone in Portland knows that
Back in Maine – my beloved Maine – is a bar where I used to drink. It’s called Amigos because it purports to be a Mexican restaurant. Word is, there’s a dining room upstairs, but everyone in Portland knows that downstairs, through the door marked “BAR ROOM” in cheap, somehow menacing adhesive letters, is a serious drinkhouse.
It’s perfect. Cheap drinks, a pinball machine, two dartboards (which I was prohibited from using – more because of the darts than the boards), and an adequate sound system playing great music: Alice in Chains, Johnny Cash, Social Distortion, Nirvana, Screaming Trees, Sinatra, the Rolling Stones, Tool, and Soundgarden.
When I hear those bands, I’m back at Amigos.
Unlike anything else, except maybe scent, music has the power to transport people across decades and miles. Hear a song you used to listen to in high school, and, for a tiny moment, you’re there again.
Music is transcendent that way. Soundgarden recorded Fell on Black Days in 1993, when Chris Cornell was 29. He sang into a machine which captured the moment – a moment – and ultimately distributed it around the world.
Machines shouldn’t be able to preserve the power and beauty that Cornell produced but, magically, they did.
Even more magically, hearing a few seconds of sound transports me back in time and delivers me to a barstool in Maine. I can smell Amigos, which is not always a blessing, and I can see my friends there, which always is.
Some of them, like Cornell, are gone now, but in brief moments that wash over me with sound, they live.
In Spring, the jacaranda tree across the street blooms. I sit on my little balcony 10 feet off the ground and watch the purple petals – so beautiful on the branch – flutter to the street and become trash. Once
In Spring, the jacaranda tree across the street blooms. I sit on my little balcony 10 feet off the ground and watch the purple petals – so beautiful on the branch – flutter to the street and become trash.
Once a week, street sweeping machines come and scrape them away. Parking Enforcement uses the occasion as an excuse to write tickets. In the morning, I rest my coffee cup on the railing. From my balcony,
I see drivers ignore the stop sign. I watch people praise their dogs for shitting – “That’s a good boy. That’s a good boyyyyyyy!” – and scoop up poo. As darkness settles, I watch the lights come on in Century City three miles away. I hear the rockers on Sunset Boulevard and the gays on Santa Monica. Sometimes I hear the squeal of tires trying to stop and then that sickening boom of metal hitting metal. When it’s windy, I watch the trees sway and I listen to air I cannot see as it rushes past.
It should be loud here in the city, but it’s not, at least not in my slice of it. Mostly, I hear church bells and conversations and birds and helicopters and trucks that groan in protest as they make their way up the shallow incline that is my street.
