Sitting home on a Saturday night, eating chocolate ice cream and watching a summer time repeat of
Rookie Blue.
That’s as lame as a bald guy comb over!
What the hell has happened to my life?
Back in the day, Saturday night was the night.
As Elton John once sang: “Saturday night’s all right for fightin…get a little action in.”
You’re right about that Sir Elton. Back in the day; Saturday night was Big times! Big Plans. Hit the town! Hit the bars. Meet the girls, hang with the boys.
It was motorcycling up PCH. It was frat parties over at UCLA. It was late night showings of Pink Floyd’s the Wall in Westwood. “hey who sparked that dubey?” It was dancing on stage at Madame Wong’s in China town. It was the revolving rooftop bar at the Bonnaventure downtown.
The old mental war chest is filled with memories.
Now I’m sitting in the dark, alone, banging out this sad ass allegory on the lap top. Except for the brilliant glow of this interminable white page, my space is dark, like a cave without all the stalactites and bats.
Where is everyone? The teens are out doing what teens do. As long as my kids have 3 bars of reception and a cell phone with half a battery, they’re good to go. And then there’s the significant other who isn’t so significant, glued to another TV in a room that might as well be a thousand miles from here.
So for tonight, my Crazy legion, it’s me, the cats, and the vivid memories that fuel my soul.
The rookie cop show isn’t half bad. It’s mostly eye candy about a curvaceous female cop having trouble working a sting where she is a prostitute. She is acting and all, but mostly I think she is wearing a crop top shirt and a short skirt. At least that’s all I’m picking up on.
I stare out the window and watch the moths buzz around the porch light. A hundred. A thousand. They fly wildly into the bulb, bouncing off the miniature sun, then orbiting the mass of insanity, awaiting another chance to smash into the bulb again. What is the purpose I wonder as I stare at the mass of buzzing confusion.
And then it hits me. What is the purpose? What is the purpose of this flying mob of moths? Is this what they do? Is this all they do?
So what is my purpose? It can’t be to sit here by myself on a Saturday night irradiating my pupils in the glow of a summer time TV show, is it?
My legs are cramping. My senses are churning. I think back to the days of being 21, back to being in L.A.
That’s when life seemed to be alive. Life was the light bulb. I was the moth. I buzzed wildly around it in an orbit not determined and not pre-destined. Like the moth, when I crashed and burned was anyone’s guess like a roulette wheel spinning and the ball bouncing and just where it’s gonna stop is a mystery.
It was 20 plus years ago, but the best memories in life don’t fade easily. On this night of ice cream and computer screen incandescence, I pop open my mental vault and remember the good ole days.
It was 1985 and I was the king of South Central L.A.
No girlfriends. No kids. No money. No bills.
I was free as the wind in my hair in an open convertible. I could go anywhere the sunset went. I was the moth, crazy, unpredictable, standing on a cliff in Mexico staring at a senorita at Rosa Rita Beach.
What do you wanna do tonight? one of the boys would ask.
That question almost always had an interesting answer. I don’t remember anyone ever saying, “how bout we sit in the dark and eat chocolate ice cream”
So me and my boys would go to Marina Del Rey, hit a club like the Red Onion. Girls from the beach cities would flood the joint. The dance floor was a glowing replica of Saturday Night fever. Women were everywhere, moving like a giant feminine amoeba, a collective undulating mini skirt with go go boots. Get a spot at the bar, hold down a base of operations. Everywhere you looked a swim suit model, a wanna be actress. BUMMER for you guys reading this in Iowa huh?
Those were the days. Didn’t even hit the clubs till ten. Plenty of time for chocolate ice cream right?
Last call for alcohol around 1:30.
You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.
Sometimes we’d go to an after hours club. Sometimes we’d grab a case and go to the beach. In the summer when the Santa Anna’s are blowing, it’s still 75 degrees at 2 am. It doesn’t take a lot of liquid encouragement to strip down and hit the surf. There’s something invigorating about being naked in the moon lit water staring back at the city of Angels. You are a child floating on the waves, things swimming, glancing by your feet in the darkness. The surf crashing, the distant sound of a siren. A scream of stupidity from Mike Gilmore who would never shut up when he was drinking. Now that’s a Saturday Night.
I remember once, we left a frat part with their keg. We tapped it in the ocean and swam with it, taking hits off the spigot as we floated on it like Dr. Doolittle riding the great pink snail. How many people swim with a keg a hundred yards off the beach. That’s just crazy.
Back in the day, long before the Twin Towers would fall, words like Al Queda didn’t exist in every day lexicon. It was the years of Reagan and Clinton and there were other issues, but terrorism wasn’t one of them.
Sometimes on a crazy Saturday Night, after the chocolate ice cream was gone, we’d drive to the Los Angeles International Airport and watch the planes take off and land over the Pacific.
We’d pull up to the access road on South Pershing, that runs parallel to the ocean. Many citizens would sit in their convertibles and enjoy the cool breeze and the roar of power flying in and out of LAX.
That wasn’t good enough for me. Back in the day, when terrorism was only a glimmer in Osama Bin Laden’s eyes, we’d crawl under the fence that separated Pershing from the runway. Back in the day, it was nothing more than a chain link fence, the kind that exists at your child’s elementary school playground.
The bottom of the fence was buried in the sand, but all you had to do was dig into the sand and scoop it away and slide under. It took five minutes to get 4 guys and a case of beer under the fence and on to an adventure that few people have.
From the fence, it was a short run, maybe a few hundred yards, through the scrub grass and through the radar towers. We’d find a sand dune at the end of the runway and we’d hunker down.
From where we sat, you could see a bright light turn onto the runway and then begin moving. The runway was a mile long, so the light was small. At first it was tough to tell if the light was even moving. But then it grew wider, and then the sound caught up to the light. You knew a jet was coming. You felt the anticipation in your body, tingling. As the light grew brighter, so did the roar. The question was, was it a Jumbo?
That was why we came. A jet taking off is anti-climatic. A regular jet is smaller and uses less runway. By the time you hear the thrust, the plane has engaged flight and by the time the smaller jets get to the end of the runway, it is hundreds of feet over your head. It’s cool, but not cool like the Jumbo. No, we were here for the Jumbo. And the Jumbos only came periodically, sporadically. To be caught in the jet wash of a Jumbo was a life moment.
Like fishing, you just have to be patient. We’d kick back on a warm summer night, the orange haze of LA obliterating the night sky and drink beer. We’d talk about life and what it all meant.
Then the light would enter emerge at the end of the runway, and our thoughts would turn to what if? Could this be the Jumbo?
As the light grew wider and the roar grew louder, and the machine was still barrel assing at us; it was clear this was it.
The mighty 747 Jumbo Liner was heading to Japan or France or Istanbul and it was going to need every inch of this mile long run way to get it’s billion pounds of girth into the ether.
We’d clutch our beers and hunker down knowing that this was the big one.
As the mighty Jumbo churned up the runway toward us, the light would grow to a blinding flash, like a train beacon emerging from a dark tunnel. The sound was consuming, drowning out the ocean, and all ambiance from the surrounding city.
Then with a few hundred yards to spare, the mastodon of power would slowly jerk its front nose off the asphalt and in a mighty rush of man made thunder, would leap from the Earth, defying gravity, and begin its slow, powerful climb.
As the jet crossed over the top of us, it was barely a football field away. It was phenomenal. You could see people in the windows. You could see the massive tires retracting into the fuselage. The blinking lights would illuminate the ground for a moment then disappear. Then the engines would roar all around you, like you had put your head inside a cannon. Talk about a rush. When a Boeing 747 thrusts into the sky a couple of hundred feet over your head as it starts its voyage to Tokyo, man that is exhilarating. It’s like being inside of a flying drum solo, that blows your hair back.
The beer in your bottle would foam and the bones in your face would vibrate. As the plane passed over and began it’s slow turn over the Pacific, you could literally feel the engines in your soul. You somehow felt a part of that plane, the passengers, the inertia and energy that aerodynamically helped it defy logic and gravity and sail on to some foreign land.
Saturday night on the LAX runway?
OR
2 week old chocolate ice cream melting in the bowl, with the cats yawning at me.
Life changes dramatically over 20 years. Reckless youth gives way to pensive responsibility.
Endless nights that culminate in the Pacific Ocean with no clothes, now seemingly never begin.
I miss the Pacific and the roar of the Jumbos. I miss wet t shirt night at the Red Onion where 2 for one beers and half naked women float across the bar like so much cigarette smoke.
As I watch the moths and a sad ass HBO movie, I wonder how it all deteriorated into this bland taco of dull.
Saturday night’s all right for fighting, get a little action in.
I think it’s time to start fighting to get those Saturday night experiences back.
That’s not so crazy, is it?
Life’s Crazy™