Embryonic Journey

I would've liked to have been just a guitar cinnamon, excuse me, just a guitar singer man. It didn't work out. A friend died in a drunk driving crash. A friend killed himself. Something bad blossomed in my brain and I couldn't get it out of my head. I moved back to Milwaukee. I had a crush on a woman who worked in a vegetarian deli. She told me, Jorma Kaukonen is coming to town. He's the guy who plays "Embryonic Journey," that Jefferson Airplane song. Oh yeah, I know that song, I said. Buh dee dee buh dee dee duh. Buh dee dee buh dee dee duh. That's a great song.

Jorma's guitar broadcast across the nondescript club with the force of 100 canoes paddling into a bay at dusk. I started putting steel pics on my fingers. Now I was broadcasting brightly on the Washburn sunburst guitar. I started playing four hours a day, six hours a day in the attic room. It was the only way to avoid the death storm of feelings and pictures in my head. I could play the guitar and be on a canoe in the middle of a calm lake, while fires raged along the shores. And I never wanted to paddle back to the shore. I kept on playing the guitar.

I was walking down Brady Street with another guitarist who worked at the print shop with me. He could summon birdsong on his fat hollow body jazz guitar. I felt something go "splat" in my thumb. That didn't feel right. I kept smiling and laughing as we walked.

I returned to the attic room and my thumb didn't work anymore. I played anyways. Then I couldn't even chop an onion or write my name. My girlfriend said, Go to to the Social Security Office. The clerk said, You can't work in the print shop because of your hand, is there any job you can think of that you can do? I paused. I could work as a security guard, I said. My friend Jim does it.

I walked through empty water meter and steel tank factories for $5.50 an hour for three years. The guy who trained me on where to find the keys in the pressed steel plant for the key clock that hung from our necks like Flavor Flav was named Gary Bach. Harpsichords, cathedrals, steel tanks for oxygen or scuba diving, great furnaces for shaping the steel, shirtless men wearing safety glasses, flames surging and whooshing.

And the 1990s were just getting started.