The Milk-Gut Kid Meets Her Match.

Violet and I have been doing this thing where she won't look at me. She looks over there at the lazing dogs. She looks up here at the books in their dust on the shelf. Coffee dripping spoon on the counter: she looks. Speck of afternoon sunshine on the floor: looks. Facebook: looks. Lunch meat: she looks. Paint on my shorts after work: looks. She looks at everything with wide-eyed curiosity until I try and sneak me into her eyes. Then she looks away. At a piece of popcorn on the couch. Or a stupid empty Diet Coke can on the coffee table.

It was beginning to hurt a bit. Deep down I knew it was nothing. I hadn't given much reason to not dig me. We haven't had time for that yet. And I sort of knew she was just taking in the world. I mean, I want her to do that. See things; love them.

But still. I started to wander into the bathroom with her in my arms: park us in front of the mirror.

"Hey, Peanut! Who's that in there? Who's that baby in the glass case?"

She'd look. Smile with half a heart. Then I'd watch my baby daughter in reflection as she moved her eyes to the toothpaste drip smeared at the side of the sink.

Finally, today, I'd had it. Fucking dough I'm spending on this kid. She is gonna look. At me. I turned her toward me on my lap on the couch. She looked/looked away. She started to wriggle around...trying to gain bigger perspective. Paradigm Shifter. World Turner. But, I nipped that in the bud. Grabbed her tiny ass and tilted her back toward me. She came along for the ride.

I leaned her back against my knees. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I gulped in wads of air and moved in whimsical slow motion. To her belly. I planted my lips right in the middle of her Phillies Phanatic onesie and started vibrating/buzzing her milk-gut with all the spazz in my soul.

Brrrrrrrrrrzzzzzzzzzzzbbbbbbbbbbbbbbzzzzzzzzzzrrrrrrrrrrrrubbubbaubbaubbarrrrr!!!!

Her lovely cackle filled the room and I could feel her arms and legs skitzing out in every direction at once. So I kept doing it. Laughter/flailing/tiny fists slamming into my head with pure joy.

Then. I pulled back. Looked at her. Her eyes.

She was staring. Her cheeks were pinned to her temples. She was elated. Ecstatic. Smiling at me and looking into my eyes like she was saying: do that more/now/always. I watched the ball soar 600 feet into the upper deck, three rows from the lights. I'd homered after a trillion K's. I nearly shit my pants with new flavors of excitement. I never wanted someone to look at me so badly before.

Of course: I do it some more. Lots . To be honest I only stop buzzing her tiny fat rolls after the thought occurs to me that I might end up giving her a fucking hickey or something. There's always something, ya know? Something to dribble hot piss all over the greatest ten minutes I've ever spent. So I stop.

We are two gunfighters in the middle of the only road through town. The Mexican sun beats down. Steamed winds slash a feral dog with whips of ancient dust. The pulverized bones of starved jackrabbits and lizards rise and fall at the mercy of each cruel passing gusts like lost ghosts in Hell.

Danger Violet's lip quivers.

A tumbleweed stops.

I blink without blinking.

A freckled boy drops his peppermint stick into a puddle of consumption spit.

Violet. Me. Our eyes locked.

She flinches and I move like angels in space, I pull my trigger, and I am buzz/kissing her belly one last time and she is giggling wildly and thrashing hysterically and it's all over in an instant. But she's laughing. And she's looking at me.

And I win.

Radar Love.

If I was a hawk or a falcon I would just be out flying one Irish Spring morning, imbibing the cool chill in the air and looking around at mutts in their yards and people hanging laundry or working on their cars and then SHAZZAM!!!: I'd drop out of the bluebird sky: stone-dead, embarrassingly enough. I'd land in someone's pool, probably. An above-grounder. Or just thud down on some grade school bus stop. Kids would start crying, throwing up from nerves. A cop would have to come and poke me with a stick from the gutter to make certain I wasn't just a sleeping raptor. Ugh.

The whole thing would be a friggin mess. People don't wanna deal with dead birds of prey. It's too unusual, not to mention that its pretty damn unsettling too. Those birds are supposed to be wild and free; symbols of savage liberty. Of back country wisdom. Of survival. And they're downright big when you see them up close. They're like miniature people, really. So, you know, to have to come over and pick me up with an extra big beach towel or something, it's just so unseemly. Little dead birdlets on the front walk are sad, sure, but they make sense somehow. They're easy as pie. But the golden eagle dropping eighteen pounds of death down onto the neighborhood. It's just not acceptable. It lacks dignity. And honestly: it's fucking weird.

Still. That'd be how I went. Sudden. Soaring with majesty one sec/choking on a regurgitated seed in the middle of the only cloud in the sky the next. It's how it is with me.

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Over the past few years I had a few sexy moments. I'm not sexy mind you. But I had a couple times here and there when the moon was lined up with Jupiter and Venus was behind the sun. Or whatever. Decked out in my stage clothes and sweaty and sipping a bottle of beer, I had some nights where I could tell I was a SpellCasting NightWizard
with powers I didn't even know how to handle. Bottled Semi-Truck powers. Insatiable heat. Shark lust. The goods.

I'd roll out from backstage and turn on my radar. Oh, my radar. Poor restless thing, powered down for so many hours each day as I sat in the drivers seat of the van and steered the band and all the equipment and all of our filthy saltish slutty clothes down Highway 40 and up Highway 81 and under Highway This and over Highway That. An off radar is so sad and dumb but that's how it had to be. You can't be scoping for action in truck stops and WaffleHouses and at rest areas on turnpikes. Unless of course, you give yourself over to the Serial Killer Winds. They're there, always blowing hot dry gusts across Oklahoma parking lots and behind Ohio State Sponsored Urinals. You taste their madness on your lips. You feel their hunger in the powerful beckoning hot blowing through your face. They invite you to let go, to trust them. They beg you to follow them down the highway forever, only ever pulling over to piss and shit and grab some sandwiches. And kill.

So, no thanks. I'd power down my radar in the early morning Motel 6 room. Leave it off until we'd rocked the show.

Then, yeah, there were nights...many nights/I'm not gonna lie to you...when nothing really happened. I'd emerge from backstage and out of the crowd or the stragglers or whoever was out there drinking and laughing, there would come hustling up to me some dude/s who wanted to talk music/albums/guitar cords. And I could never really blow them off. They were someone to talk to other than people I spent my life with in a van. So we'd chat and sip drinks and before you know it I had to reach down inside myself and turn off the radar switch. Give up for the night.

But, my oh my, on the nights the radar went off beeping and wailing and glowing with blinking lights and all. Dear Jesus are there some sexy sweet ladies alive in the night in this world. Candy smelling perfume and never heard of your band before and you guys rocked and I've never been to Philly and twinkle twinkle little star in your eyes my god THIS IS HAPPENING.

I was young. We were young.

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Fast forward. Why is my stupid fucking radar just hanging around my slumping neck like some heavy dead bird of prey, its feet tied together to form some crazy-ass necklace of absolute unsexyness?

Am I dreaming?

Is this thing on?

We Were Here.

As Violet was napping I decided to wade out deep into YouTube. I mean deep, people. When I go in: I go in. Bobbing up and down through elaborate keywords. Swimming hard out past those leads and into choppier waters. Submerging. Grabbing onto tiny buoys that promise but don't deliver. Yet I cannot give up. Ever. I swim out through an evil riptide of digression, hold my focus with everything I've got and voila. I'm at a massive rock festival at Castle Donnington in Leicestershire. Then I'm traveling and moving back through time and space. A few successive videos succeed in wiping the age off of some older men's faces. It's magical. They turn into nothing but boys, really.

And so there I am, ending up in the most fascinating and unexpected place. On a corner in London. Covent Garden. It's 1976...a great year in music and movies and historical parades. And there are the guys from one of my favorite bands, AC/DC.

Lads. Angus looks like he's twelve. Bon Scott has a banana sticking out of his Daisy Dukes. For real. And no shirt, or shoes.

It blows my Monday mind. Time travel.

And after a couple unfocused minutes it hits me. I'm thunderstruck. They are standing on a corner that I know very well. Hot damn. You probably would recognize it too, if you've been to Covent Garden. It's down the street from the Tube station I think. So yeah: there's AC/DC looking insanely young. They're probably hung over. In '76 they were in the middle of their LOCK UP YOUR DAUGHTERS TOUR and more than likely they were feeling rather invincible on a sunny summer afternoon in London. If you go find the video and watch it you'll see what I mean, I think. They're sort of dripping with satisfaction. With YoungManLife. Rock'n'rollers far from home and playing like ten nights at a theater in town plus a lot of other dates all over the UK. Rock'n'rollers eating catered spaghetti bolognese and sipping styrofoam cups of lager in the back halls of dank dungeon-esque backstages amidst clattering amp cases and roadies speaking in Pirate tongues. AC/DC. A still young band. Smoking fags by fire exstinguishers. Laughing. Kissing teenage chicks they met in Portsmouth or Leeds, who've come down on the train to see the band.

What happens on a corner at any given moment is such a wonderful thing to consider. Any second someone might saunter by unseen on their way down the block to change the world somehow. I've seen stilt-walkers and nutshell hustlers on that very corner myself. Gods knows who else has stumbled through. Hell, you could spend a lifetime just dreaming about it. I do that shit a lot. Churchill on a little bender? Maybe. Some people running from bombs dropping out of the winter night? Probably. Boy George Christmas shopping in a light evening snow? Why the hell not?

I've stood out there in that part of London a bunch of times. Mostly by myself. I can remember feeling overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of people heaving around me more than once. Crowds moving in every direction with no real flow to follow. Bus groups from Wales. Kids watching sword-swallowers and breakdancers. I would just bounce around, ricocheting off of lovers making out and elderly Germans moving slowly through the human forest. That damn corner. I can remember standing RIGHT there as I tried to figure out what to do with myself. Lonesome Serge in one of the most congested places on Earth. If only I'd known that AC/DC had once been strolling around right where I was standing/smoking/staring at shit. It would have made it so much cooler.

A few years later after the video I watched, AC/DC's singer was dead. In a car outside a flat on some back road in some far-flung section of the same city. But in the video I came across dying is obviously/deservedly the furthest thing from his mind that day. He's giddy. Super 70s'd out. Maybe stoned. Probably stoned. But he's a joy to watch for a fan like me. I like knowing he was there once. And that later on by coincidence I was there too.

I like knowing that certain corners are just impromptu stages from time to time. Stages where people once stood feeling downright fucking good or horrible or extremely alive or sad or whatever. They laughed there, with friends. Or cried alone. Or gawked at strangers and failed to connect with anything or anyone. Maybe they ate a hotdog there and somebody walked by and said Kennedy had just been shot.

I hope someday to be able to take Violet to some of the corners I have known. In London and Philly and Manhattan. Madrid and Hamburg and Pavia. Crickhowell. Norristown. Conshy. What an excellent series of afternoons that'd be.

"Here's another one where I stood, cupcake." She'll stand there as I make her hold my hand. She'll yawn but try to hide it a little.

"I stood here all dazzled by the spinning city. By myself. Years and years ago. Before I knew your Mom. Way long before you were around, Peppercorn."

Violet will turn away and watch a unicycle rider juggling florescent bowling pins.

"Ahhhh, but baby I still remember it like it was yesterday."

Her thoughts turn to a snack. Maybe a boy she has a crush on.

"When I was a young rapscallion moving through London unnoticed. Like a secret spy. Or a great novelist."

She'll look at me, melt my heart with her sweet sweet eyes. Eyes that yearn to jet.

"AC/DC stood here once," I'll tell her.

If I play my cards just right in the precious God-given years hurdling my way: her face will explode in astonishment and smiles when I say what I say. And with that, that corner will carry on being one of the awesome ones.