I have my prime-time line-up pretty well mapped out. Monday nights is House and a DVR of last-week’s Idol. Tuesdays is Glee at eight followed by New Girl. Wednesdays is a live-stream of my basement at eight and then I switch over to Top Model promptly at nine whether Shiplosion is still broadcasting or not.

When Kai joined a party metal band, it was decided that they would practice at our house. I’m not going to get into the whole papal conclave process of how that decision was reached, but let’s just say that I for one had nominated some other spaces.

We moved some boxes of old clothes and Christmas decorations and the boys hauled in their gear: their amps, 3 miles of wires and cables, the drum set, mic stands, a naked, headless mannequin, and beer. Kai did a lot of work to check the sound levels around the house and make sure we weren’t going to piss off the neighborhood, but I was still concerned. Our closest neighbors have three kids under five. There are naps to consider.

As I left for work one day, I ran into Adam, our neighbor with the kids. I told him that Kai’s band would be practicing in our basement regulary and asked him to let me know if it was ever too loud. He replied, “No one’s louder than us.”  I thought that was a very nice way of politely dismissing my concerns and just rather neighborly of him. It made me feel like baking a fruitcake or something. I had never heard a peep from them, except for the occasional front-yard temper tantrum by their two-year old. Adam himself is barely audible even when he is speaking directly to us. I imagined it was louder inside their house with all those toddlers, but we can’t even tell when they’re home.

But no, apparently I had misinterpreted the statement.

Later that day when I got home from work, soft/classic folk rock was blaring from Adam’s house–and it continued for weeks. Weird music I didn’t even recognize and at a bizarre volume for the genre. We must have unwittingly laid out a challenge and “No one’s louder than us” was Adam’s way of taking it up. Very well then, neighbor, the gauntlet has been thrown.

Wednesday nights at eight–it’s go time boys!

Kai and I got our own apartment in Santa Cruz. Partially because I couldn’t stand living with Casey another minute, and partially because I couldn’t stand living without a washer/dryer another second. We moved to some non-descript place I can’t even picture anymore. Vernie moved in to some mansion near the beach–I really don’t understand how Vernie’s life works. I can only assume that the property owner just felt grateful for the opportunity to house him. Casey found a warehouse near the railroad tracks in which he installed a new nest and a practice space for the band and then sublet the back half to a fire-juggling acrobatics company.

Hidden Number @ Can Can
Seattle, 12 Jan 2012

I’m hesitant to write about Vernie because he’s too big for the page. Most girls I know would give up a kidney to have the beam of his attention on them. But no, Chicken Legs was the focus of the man, the legend, the guitar player in Kai’s band. Vernie is the Dos Equis guy and the Marlboro Man rolled into one. He looks like a Calvin Klein ad: he’s too skinny, he always has five o’clock shadow, he actually wears things like boots, cowboy hats, white tank tops with levis and big leather belts, and red bandanas around his neck–and it’s his true skin. He’ll lean against his motorcycle with a rolled cigarette hanging off his lip and it’s the most natural thing in the world. He’s a millionaire, jet-setter, male model, rock star, only he’s broke. He’s always been broke, but it’s like he lives in a world of some other currency. In the ten years that I’ve known him, he’s been in a motorcycle gang, spent a year in Barcelona for no discernible reason, weathered Hurricane Katrina while tending bar in New Orleans, homesteaded in Montana, sailed a catamaran to Argentina, moved to Alaska to be a bush pilot, and became a craftsman of wooden boats in the San Juans.

Anyway, this maverick Valentino, this love-child of Don Juan and John Wayne, this James Dean 007, once loved a reptile that was not long for this earth.

Chicken Legs, RIP 2000-2000

In the middle of the night, in a run-down apartment building behind a Safeway in Santa Cruz, I got in a screaming match with the lead singer of a band named A Million Fingers. I had just gotten up to pee. I lived in one of the two bedrooms with my boyfriend, Kai, the drummer. Vernie, the guitar player, shared the other room with his Chinese Water Lizard, Chicken Legs, and a host of refugee feeder crickets. The band was perpetually between bass players. The singer, Casey, nested in the living room behind a series of thin batik sheets from India. The snoring bodies in the sleeping bags which littered the hall and balcony were passers-through, there at the behest of the ever charming, ever-social, Casey. I had gotten up, stepped over people-sized lumps of bedding in the hall, and made my way to the toilet. Flipping on the light, I saw a bowl of water the color of Guinness and a naked cardboard tube on the back of the tank.

Casey believed in water conservation (i.e. not flushing), spiritual bathing (soaking in a bath water steeped with produce like a matzo ball), aromatherapy (patchouli oil in his armpits), and sharing all that you have to give (letting your home double as a hostel).

I believed in going to the 24 hr Safeway–literally next door to us–when your homeless friends deplete the toilet paper reserves because if your female roommate has to drip dry, she will find an excuse to call the cops on you.

Thus began my life with the band.