Nonphenomenal Lineage
When I found out my great grandfather could have opened the dealership in Palo Alto I was aghast. He had two choices — Palo Alto and Hollister, California — and he chose Hollister. What the fuck, Frenchie? (People called him Frenchie for reasons I’ve never been able to ascertain; he was born in Greece, not France. I never met him. His liver gave out before I was born.) Hollister was a shit kicking, cow fucking town filled with crops and cops I resented from jump. No mall, no modernity, no hope. My high school mascot was a haybaler [sic] — as in, a man who bales hay.
Yet there was technology at Teledyne, a military contractor on the edge of town planted next to endless fields; a microprocessor emerging from the dirt. My father commuted two hours a day to his IBM job in San Jose. This act was considered ludicrous at the time but is now common practice. Computers then were simple, intuitive — his community college degree did more than enough to prepare him for the task of programming them. I could do what he did. Because he taught me. In it I found an out.
To pass the time, John and I threw shit off the parking garage no one ever parked in onto the granite lot below. We almost hit a police car with a shopping cart once. When we didn’t actually escape to San Francisco or Los Angeles (that’s the beauty of Central California — while the wasteland that surrounds you is stifling, the hope-giving humanity that exists above and below is easily accessible if you own or can somehow borrow a car), we escaped through music. It was one of our only interests, other than watching movies and committing petty crimes. It was another out.
John was cool. His dad smoked cigarettes in the garage and his mother wore a swimsuit as clothing and listened to Neil Young extremely fucking loud while she painted flowers. John wore a “My Aim is True'' shirt in his fourth grade class portrait and worked at the only decent video store in town. John was my man. I’d forgive him anything and often did. Many Fridays we’d cut last period and drive to Los Angeles, where we’d perch on the pavement outside Largo for hours waiting for the doors to open in order to exchange $20 bills for a semblance of amity. We’d sit in that cramped room and watch Jon Brion construct a song out of thin air, tracking in real time, and lose our goddamned minds. He’d come out after the second set and we’d talk his ear off, rambling about music with the unbridled enthusiasm only youth (or cocaine, but we were too young and lame to do drugs) could provide. He’d allow it because we were children. Afterward we’d find a place to park the car, usually somewhere in the hills, and sleep in spurts until it was time to drive home. On the five hour car ride back to Hollister we’d excitedly discuss what we had just witnessed, knowing no one else we knew would give one iota of a fuck.
Once, while toiling for minimum wage at Mountain Mike’s Pizza (a job I eventually quit by literally walking away from it, telling no one and avoiding all subsequent phone calls), the music video for Grandaddy’s “The Crystal Lake” appeared on the projection TV and I stood there, holding a pitcher which still held an inch of stale beer and five pennies, my tip, and stared, transfixed. The song’s refrain, “I gotta get outta here,” echoed through my ears.
I found out the band was from Modesto and my undeveloped brain exploded. John and I saw them open for Elliott Smith at the Fillmore and they made the audience wait for what felt like hours but was just one, blaring classical music over the PA while letting a plastic bird on a string artificially flutter round and round the stage. I wrote them a fan letter and they sent back a postcard all about Hollister — the migrant farm workers and the ranch style houses and the Steinbeck connection and they got it, they got me. Granted, they had also figured out a way to actually LIKE Central California, but they also liked trucker caps, something I’d never be able to abide.
They understood that just because you’re surrounded by dirt doesn’t mean you don’t know your way around a computer. You fuck with the tech while your elders till the land. The t-shirt I bought at their show was a robot version of the John Deere logo.
They gave me hope that my zip code wasn’t a death sentence — so did listening to Pavement on my Discman in my grandparents’ kitchen while staring out the window at the gnarled apricot trees while waiting to be driven into town for school every morning. The primary difference between Grandaddy and Pavement was that Pavement didn’t LIKE Stockton, they escaped it as soon as humanly possible. If they could make it out, I thought, so too could I. Both bands taught me it wasn’t impossible to enjoy myself while still surrounded by ripening fruit and dying dogmas.
It used to be, back in my day, when you grew up and you wanted more you were alone, grasping at straws. I was from a cow fuck town, but that didn’t make me a cow fucker. Still, you could only watch “Stop Making Sense” on a tube TV in a video store owned by the guy who wrote borderline socialist screeds in the local paper (Bob Valenzuela I love you, Bob Valenzuela, rest in peace) so many times with your best friend while planning your next escape before the bleakness crept back in. We wanted a closer something, anything, and all of a sudden it emerged: on the bulletin board in the music store sat a divine offering. Someone wanted to start a band. Their influences were Guided By Voices, T. Rex, and Television. John and I couldn’t believe our eyes — here in our podunk town sat someone else, someone like us, and we had no idea. Fuck. We ran out of the music store, peeled ass back to my mom’s house and called him. He was down to jam. Good. We couldn’t do anything but jam. We were as talentless as we were earnest.
For our first meeting, we sat in his Saturn behind the strip mall Starbucks where he used to work. I got shit house on lukewarm cans of Rainier beer and stumbled across the parking lot to the Burger King where my mother used to take my sister to play in the fetid ball pit when she was still alive. I ate the cheapest hamburger I could buy and immediately threw it up in the bathroom.
He called himself “The Velvet Touch” (I still, in spite of it all, have the self-released CDR he gave me with an inkjet printed sleeve. I listened to it last night; it is a shameless, direct ripoff of early GBV but somehow recorded even more poorly) and he had a girlfriend and she was cool and they had an apartment in the part of town you knew people lived in but never met a resident of, by the hospital I’d soon work at once reality informed me you actually had to try in high school in order to attend college. They had a picture of Kim Deal cut out of an issue of Spin Magazine framed above their front door — how long have they been here? I remember thinking while bewilderingly staring at it. How have they eluded us? I have the same picture above my bed now.
We jammed a couple of times. I was awful at the drums and I still am, twenty plus years into playing them. It didn’t matter, though. We were doing something in the middle of nowhere. But then he went AWOL, completely unresponsive to our calls and texts. Occasionally I’d drive past his apartment but no signs of life were ever evident. When we needed him, he bounced. A ghost. It was almost as if he had never existed in the first place; like he was just a desire we had somehow wished into brief existence. We assumed he had escaped. This, in a way, gave us hope.
John tracked him down months, maybe years, later, working behind the counter of an Enterprise Rent-a-Car, sweating through his company polo. He looked worse for wear. John yelled at him for giving up on us, for giving up on the future. He just stood there behind the counter and took it.
Time went on and I, too, velvet touched my way through a series of worthless, uncreative existences. I moved on, but I forgot hope. It doesn’t matter if you’re a fuck up, I told myself, so long as you’re not a fuck up in your hometown. The only thing that mattered was that I made it out. This isn’t necessarily true. But I believed it at the time.