Kinks

The first time I saw the Kinks at the old decrepit Phoenix Coliseum (a surprisingly excellent place to see a concert) it took Pete and me five hours to hitchhike home.

We walked from the I-17 to Cave Creek Road down Bell.

All of a sudden about an hour after we turned left and headed north a car pulled over and we jumped in and thanked our lucky stars for the kindness of strangers once in awhile.

The only thing I had going for me was my father fired me the previous afternoon so I didn't have to work in the morning.

The cops woke me up about a half hour before my father showed up and said why aren't you at work?

You fired me, I said.
Get your ass in the truck.

The cops thought I robbed a store.

I didn't but I did have a quarter pound of home grown laying in a box on my porch.

They asked if they could look around.
I said no.

They left and an hour later I was wishing I was dead digging a long trench somewhere out in the desert for a house my dad was building.

The next time I saw the Kinks I also saw the Ramones.

After the show I took a cab to my father's second wife's mother's house after watching a girl take off her clothes in a broken building I found in an alley behind the coliseum.

The next morning my father took me to the airport and I flew to Columbus Georgia for jump school.

For the next three weeks I lived in a barracks with no doors, got yelled at a lot, did about ten thousand push-ups, read the Bell Jar, saw the movie First Blood, pulled a shit load of guard duty and if that doesn't prove life plays mean tricks on you nothing will.

Last night I heard Celluloid Heroes on the radio while I drove a crackhead home after waiting in a parking lot of a dive in the way-wrong part of town for ten minutes while he scored I read a couple poems.