Scaring people seems to run in our family.  One of our older nieces went through a scaring phase in which she mercilessly victimized her several younger siblings in contravention of strong parental admonitions.  From what I’m told, her reign of terror got so awful that the littler kids had to walk the halls in twos, constantly afraid of what was around every corner.  When your kids lose the ability to freely traverse the hallways and other passages of your house, family efficiency declines noticeably, because the mom can no longer send kids to grab this or that from the basement, or tell them to go to bed, etc.  Thus, the petty fears of a few little kids become a real family problem.  When this issue threatened to effectively shut down the smooth operation of the entire household, they implemented a new rule effective immediatly.  The no punching rule that is the basic foundation of all other kid rules in all families was lifted for a period of time, limited to scaring situations.  Now there were couples of children roaming frightening halls in terror, but they had their fists clenched, and they were ready to swing.  I believe the scaring ended soon after the new punching regime was implemented.

We had our own scaring epidemics growing up in our big, basementy house.   My little sister used to be terrified of going down in the basement when she was little.  My mom and dad wanted to help push her through that fear, so one night they sent her down to grab something from the storage room (the scariest place in the house, because it was unfinished.  Bare concrete is sooo much scarier than drably painted sheetrock.)  It took a lot of coaxing and real prep-work to get her ready, and they assigned Kook, five years older but possibly more jumpy than she was, to accompany her down into the underworld.  All of which gave me plenty of time to hide in the dark corner at the bottom of the stairs.  When the brave fellowship got to the bottom step after several minutes of a one-step-at-a-time descent, I jumped out and scared the living daylights out of them.   Eliza crumpled instantly to the ground and melted into disconsolate sobs while her trusty guardian high-tailed it back up the stairs at superhuman speed and disappeared without ever looking back.  That left me to enjoy my joke with a weeping, terrified little girl (I still have that image in my head- she was bent over a stair wearing a pale blue nightgown, waiting to be eaten whole by whatever monster controlled the basement).  She wasn’t much fun, and I didn’t get near the enjoyment out of that prank as I had expected to.  My dad called me upstairs and read me a scripture about people who mistreat little kids getting tied to a millstone and thrown into a river.  It was sort of effective.

See, some people just don’t like to get scared.  Eliza is still jumpy to this day, possibly because of some childhood trauma.  One that none of the rest of us had anything to do with, presumably.  And that explains why Macy has campaigned so hard against Lucy’s scaring tear too.  She’s never been able to come up with a principled position against scaring, and her attempts to do so convince no one.  The real point is the scaring has to stop because it’s so effective on her- it startles her and that makes her mad (just like some people are happy drunks and some are mean drunks, some, like my mom, are giggly-startled, and some, like Macy, are angry-startled.  Ten bucks says Eliza is still weepy-startled).  I sort of find myself taking Lucy’s side on this one, because I’ve always enjoyed the gratification of watching someone freak out when startled, most of all Macy.  This began late one college Friday night on a group date.  Several girls had asked out a bunch of us guys, and to avoid getting asked out by one of them, but still be around to watch the awkwardness, my buddy Greg asked Macy out and slithered his way into our plans (his nickname was the Gila Monster, based on a long history of slithering away with other peoples’ girls).  We all ended up at the home of one of the girls, which was large enough that the couples wandered around on self-guided tours when we got there.  Knowing well enough not to let Macy (unattached but a person of interest to me at the time) hang out in a darkened basement with the Gila Monster, I snuck down there while they were looking around.  When they rounded the corner I jumped out and scared them.  I still remember the scene of Macy jumping high in the air and landing in sitting position on the ground, convulsing like her legs were being electrocuted.  It was really cute.  I sort of think she fell for me right there, while simultaneously alerting Greg that she was a little too jumpy for him.  It was a win-win.

And that’s why I don’t mind Lucy going around scaring people in our house.  Sort of takes me back to those sweet early times of being on group dates with Macy while she was with one of my friends.  I guess I’m more of a romantic-startled kind of guy.

A patented kid-attracter

Grandpa brewed the root beer every year at the annual summer party joined by both my Mom’s and my Dad’s families. There was plenty going on at the party, but honestly, the root beer solidly anchored at least the first half of the the slate of events for the evening.  It was not just some drink (as evidenced by the fact that Davis has already extolled it here).  It was sort of a living thing with a presence all its own.  The big white bucket that held it was faintly translucent, revealing the dark profile of the thing lurking under the loosely placed lid– a seething opaque presence roiled by dry ice bubbles, exhaling fog far too ominous for a bright July twilight.  You could sneak up on the table and inhale the steam, and get a fake root beer buzz that made you cough back into the giant vat.  You could try to sneak past Grandpa with a little foam cup and get the first sticky sample from the little black tap at the bucket’s bottom.  Best of all, you could just hang around watching the thing going through its tempestuous metamorphosis, and listening and laughing at Grandpa’s jokes, even the ones you didn’t understand.

Then at some moment that could be divined only be grandfatherly intuition, it was done.  The signal was perceived instantly by every kid under the bowery, and within minutes the group’s collective blood sugar spiked hard.  The concrete under the bucket turned sticky and brown, and soon most kids could be heard walking across the cement with sticky smacking sounds from repeated trips through the puddle.  The root beer keg was the center of the party for the first hour, and grandpa was always there, just behind the root beer.

I grew up a little, and went on a mission to Portugal.  There is no root beer in Portugal.  The Portuguese who have tried it say that no one there likes it because it tastes like medicine.  I can only imagine that long ago some doctor mixed up a medicine to taste like root beer as a way of getting little kids to like the medicine, and that by some weird stroke of luck, the medicine became hugely successful in Portugal, while root beer never did.  Now, the whole country has been innoculated against the taste of root beer because some medicine everyone had as a kid had that same taste.  Missing root beer, I wrote home for some root beer extract.  I’d dump it in a bottle of European sparkling water, only to find that adding sugar to carbonated water causes a geyser reaction, making me lose all the extract I’d added.  I finally discovered liquid sweeteners over there, and became a kind of missionary root beer bootlegger, always a secret flask at hand.  My requests home for more extract became so frequent that Davis still thinks it’s funny to mock me for it.  He never wrote home for a small piece of his grandpa to keep with him on his mission, so he lashes out at people who did. (Kook’s version of this was writing home wishing he could still undress in public, the main thing he and Grandpa had in common).

The perfect missionary accessory.  Now you can carry your root beer IN your Bible!

Grandpa died the Spring of ’07, a few months short of the summer party that year.  I expected to be sad about missing out on the root beer, but still looked forward to the get-together.  When I got there, though, there was a huge thermos at the end of the head table.  Tell-tale wisps of white carbon dissolved down its sides just before several little kids could inhale them.  My dad was manning the root beer station.  He used updated equipment, (there was no translucent visibility), but the stuff was still just as sticky sweet, and I still drank just as many cups as I did when I was fifteen.  So Dad took over the legacy, and his root beer is just as good, though it doesn’t have that subtle taste of cranky eccentricity it always had when I was a kid.  Maybe it’s the big orange thermos he uses now, but Dad’s root beer doesn’t seem nearly as mysterious as Grandpa’s either.  But the kids still hang around to watch the dry ice perform.

Less foreboding, but better insulated

Last weekend I was in charge of putting together a party at the park for some Church people.  The first decision I made was that there would be root beer on tap.  I got the recipe from my dad, in an exchange that felt like  a coming of age ritual.  Lucy helped me stir all the sugar into the tap water before it was carbonated, and then she dumped the whole bottle of black extract in and watched it stretch out in tendrils and take over the water.  When I tossed the big squares of dry ice into the bottom, she shrieked and jumped up and down and had to go get the other kids.  They stood around and listened to the raucous bubbles, and startled when I fanned a big cloud in their faces.  Molly was entranced by the smoke and the way my hand half disappeared when I stirred it made her nervous.  We took it to the park and set it up at the end of the head table, and people drank a ton of it, and Rex said it was good but it was soooo cold.  It was slush by the end of the night, and there was enough to take home and keep in the fridge.  But the kids didn’t want the pitcherful.  They kept sneaking out to the back deck and sticking their mouths under the tap of the big thermos for the really cold stuff.  I sat and told them jokes while they bent over to drink it, and even Molly laughed at the jokes she didn’t understand.

Let’s see, should I wow ‘em with the Tigers Come at Night, or blow ‘em away with Part of Your World?

Sitting there eating my lunch in the caffeine-free cafe off to the side, I started pondering the elements of the Mormon Style in greater depth.  I’m sure someone has analyzed the aesthetic in much greater detail than I am capable of, but the best summation I can come up with is to say that the Mormon Style is an amalgam of whatever happened to be hip or attractive in the larger cultural milieu five to eight years ago, cleansed of all edges and rough spots, mixed with the the florid tastes of a slightly-more-up-to-date-than-average grandmother.  Temple Square is the bastion of this style, where the LDS Church tries, for good reason, to be both beautiful in the broad sense, and spiritual in its own parochial way.  Other outposts of the LDS Church apply and develop the style in various ways, but these elements remain consistent throughout– a nod to beauty as defined by extra-Mormon sources, and a subtle Mormon spin to both clean up and dilute the original material nearly beyond recognition.

These ponderings took me back to the formative days of my youth, and the form that at one time gave the Mormon Style its greatest mode of expression: The Road Show.  The influence of Road Shows on the modern Mormon Church is in steep decline.  I haven’t heard of one being done for years.  But a few decades ago, this was a pretty popular activity.  The Road Show was an exercise in which the artistically inclined or attention deprived within a congregation would come together to create from scratch some sort of musical production involving a large cast, original stories and scripts, hastily assembled sets and costumes, and risible attempts at comedy.  In my day, several groups would plan their own plays and then come together in one big night to put them all on in sequence for one audience.  It was awful.

I think you get the general idea

I was involved in several road shows, all very much against my will.  One was a fanciful retelling of the story of how the development of Utah was aided by the introduction of silkworms.  The silkworms in the cast were the lucky ones.  They were extremely condescending to us mulberry bushes.  But everyone learned a valuable lesson about worms, and their important part in helping the pioneers develop the silk industry which has remained a huge staple of Utah’s economy (that’s not remotely true).  For another road show we enacted the ancient parable of the Star-bellied Sneeches, which actually had some dignity about it.  For the road show the following year, the entire youth corp was forced to memorize the words and harmonic parts to Whitney Houston’s One Moment in Time.  I was around 15.  My religious leaders thought it would be a good idea for me to stand in a chorus among my peers, in front of an audience of a few hundred, and sing Whitney Houston’s One Moment in Time as an emotional finale to our inspiring revue. This is why anyone who grew up Mormon will tell you without hesitation that Mormons do not believe in infallibility when it comes to their leaders.  Now, with the distance of many years and through the prism of adult maturity, there is still no song in the world I detest as much as Whitney Houston’s One Moment in Time.

The artistic high water mark of Farmington Road Show accomplishment

I just asked Macy if she has any memories of involvement in road shows.  Her instant response was “Yeah.  One year I was a tap-dancing chipmunk.”  Exactly.

My worst experience was at age 18.  I was forced to go down and take part in the road show.  New format: “we’re casting, writing, staging, rehearsing, and then performing the road show all in one crrrrazy Saturday!!!  Think how old you feel when you’re a senior in high school.  I had a girlfriend, and the beginnings of a little chest hair.  The next oldest cast member was 15.  I’m pretty sure Davis even weaseled out of it somehow.  It was horrible.  Despite an audition where I mostly tried to just be invisible, I was cast as the lead– an acerbic, comically modern Noah, who received revelations about the coming flood via fax.  Most of the script consisted of puns between ‘fax’ and ‘facts,’ and my (Noah’s) wife berating me while Paul Harvey (whom no person in the cast had ever heard of) narrated.  After we resolved a contrived conflict with the cardboard-costumed livestock, I had to do a solo dance to I Can See Clearly Now the Rain Is Gone, apropos of jack squat. I tremble with shame and self-loathing as I type this.  It was honestly one of the most painful experiences of my life.

Anyway, for all its kitschy feel to outsiders, the Mormon Style is worth something if only for the sacrifices its pawns have suffered to bring it to pass.  Which brings me to one final point of interest.  You may have noticed on the sidebar of this blog that there’s a plug for a book called The Road Show. This is the debut novel of our brother, Braden Bell, and is just hitting bookstores now.  Braden has written an extremely readable and engaging book also focusing on a road show, populated by people drawn into the production every bit as unwillingly as I ever was.  His characters have real problems like depression and alienation, and manage to find some peace through a moving process involving, yes, a road show.  I do not believe any of the characters’ difficulties were nearly as challenging as what I’ve described above, but still, it’s a very human book with intense focus on experiences that are universal, and universally interesting.  Let me be the first to say (because my brothers clearly don’t care) that this book is very worth reading.  You can find it on Amazon, or in other places where LDS books are sold.  Note: This is a religious book.  This blog will never be about religion, but if you subscribe to any brand of Christianity, you will find definite uplift in this book.  Hope you enjoy it.

It was a grievous burden to bear.  I actually liked mowing the lawn, once I got going.  But I usually spent an hour or two each Saturday avoiding it.  That is, I spent two hours each Saturday morning doing all the rest of my work before I even got to the mowing.  True, at least half of that time was usually taken by the highly complex ritual dance of finishing the weeding, getting my mom to come out and ‘check’ it, going back over to get all the weeds she’d pointed out, having her check it again, pulling out weeds that had just appeared since I finished the last round, submitting it for scrutiny again, and so on.  This was a grueling process, but it taught me the lesson of hard work.  I.e., never do work for someone who cares about how well you do your work.

Ah, those carefree childhood Saturdays, in the gulag.

So by the time I was ready to start the mowing, I was usually exhausted and cranky.  And exhaustion is the mother of deception, as they say. Many a Saturday, instead of just going out and firing up the mower, I’d sit and scheme about how best to get out of it.  Sure, there were a few sudden onsets of inexplicable illness, but that was a pretty bush-league move, and often ruled out any chance of fun for the rest of the night, my parents not being idiots.  Other efforts were more creative.  Like the one time I went out and adjusted each wheel of the lawn mower, raising the blade so it wouldn’t touch the grass.  When my dad came home and asked why I hadn’t mowed, I said I had.  He wasn’t buying, until he went out and inspected the lawn mower, only to find that some ne’er-do-well passerby had nefariously come along and raised it, so that all of my sweaty work had been in vain.  Not my fault, but too bad. We’ll get it mowed next week, Dad.

Another week I noticed that most of the lawn growth was clustered around the eight sprinkler heads scattered around the yard.  When my dad went down for a nap, I grabbed the yard sheers and clipped all the grass around the sprinklers down to the level of the rest of the yard.  Again, Dad was skeptical about whether I’d really mowed, but there was something honorable about him that made him not want to accuse his favorite son of lying.  I think we understood each other that way.  Plus, I still learned the value of hard work, because it probably took me twice as long to hand-clip the overgrown areas as it ever would have taken to just mow the yard.

Such a great way to save yourself the time and effort of just mowing the lawn

But still to this day, I don’t think I’ve ever confessed the most brazen of my lawn-care avoidance schemes—to anyone.  Dad had once shown me the fuel can that was only to be used to fuel the trimmer.  This was a mix of oil and gas, and would not work in the lawn mower.  Why would he tell me that?  I sort of think this was meant as a kind of winking invitation.  Whatever his intentions, there was no way this little piece of intel could go to waste.  On a particularly hot Saturday, after a particularly grouchy session of weeding-litigation, the oil-gas mixture somehow made it into the mower.  The mower started, then immediately petered out.  I thought the half strip of perfectly mowed grass in the middle of the yard was a nice indicator of my good faith intention to complete my work.  If only that cranky mower would have worked properly.

I went and found Dad.  He tried to start it up, but couldn’t.  Then he saw the small gas can sitting there open.  After a few frustrated questions, and a few innocent, baffled answers, he was down in the gutter tipping the lawn mower over to drain the tank, and I was in on the couch watching Greatest American Hero.  I still remember it so clearly, watching him labor over that upside-down machine.  Knowing I’d done some damage, but sort of feeling justified at the same time.  I still don’t know how I was capable of that kind of treachery.  But treachery isn’t all that was going on there; there was plenty of ingenuity too, which I think would have made Dad sort of proud.

I feel different about yard work now.  I really enjoy the mowing, weeding, and gardening.  Maybe that’s because yard work is all mixed up with the exhilarating feeling that somehow I’m sneaking something by somebody.  Thanks Dad.  All those efforts to teach me to enjoy working have finally paid off.

The foothills of the Wasatch Mountains, before we came along and prettied them up with our subdivision

We put a house right down in the middle of all that. There wasn’t a fence, and there weren’t any immediate neighbors, except for the one house on the west side. At the property line, the grass just ended, and the adventure began. All that empty mountain expanse was crawling with displaced nature, and we were there to master it. While Davis and Braden (the two with the grandiose, competing visions of themselves as masters of the wild domain) had their seasonal turf wars and power struggles, I was just out running up the hills and pulling down dead trees and digging up snake holes. Sometimes I’d come back and there’d be a new king, but the frequent political upheavals never seemed to have much impact on daily forest living.

Whenever he took a break from fending off the usurpations of younger brothers, Braden showed a knack for tracking down and making use of the local wildlife. Not in the way a hunter would. More in the way a slightly malevolent wizard would. Like the time when he showed me, to my utter amazement, how to hypnotize an army of grasshoppers. Grasshoppers were by far the most common creatures to be found in our area. In the dusty summer months, you couldn’t walk through the crisp fields without dislodging hundreds of crackling dry grasshoppers in all directions. They could jump huge distances, and were tough to hold on to. Unless they were hypnotized.

Braden and I would capture twenty or so of these, and then he would render them to his hypnotic water chamber. It was a large plastic bowl with a few holes poked in it. He would then fill the chamber half-full with water, put a lid on it, and shake it violently for a few minutes, until most of the water had leaked out. When you have shaken several handfuls of grasshoppers in a bowl full of water for a few minutes, you can take the lid off and they won’t hop away. They just sort of stumble around for a while. Because they’re hypnotized. It was all very wizardly.

When you wake up, I want you to bark like a dog whenever I say ‘Margaritaville!’

A kid who’s aiming for the ‘Dark Warlock’ aesthetic needs the right kinds of animal companions. Braden wasn’t interested in the frequent rabbit sightings or deer tracks that fascinated the rest of us. He favored things like ferrets, and salamanders, and had a few of each. He told me about this kid who could lift up a grate somewhere and pull out salamanders on demand, which could be brought to reside in Braden’s swampy window-well, presumably to add to the macabre aura of his lair. I’m not kidding– Braden had a salamander guy. No one ever thinks about it, but half of wizarding is getting your supply lines in place.

I think it was this taste for the slightly off-beat that led Braden to first bring home a snake—another of the common creatures in the area. The one I remember best was bigger than the usual garters and blow snakes we’d see. He had it wrapped over his shoulders like a stole, the better to show it off to the nervous neighborhood kids. They were gathered under the big tree in the back yard when I came out to see his new pet. He handed the snake to me, his most trusted minion, and it promptly bit me on the forehead. Although it didn’t break the skin, it was quite odd, since blow snakes usually don’t bite you.

A very faithful recreation of the incident

I took it again, a few minutes later. This time it broke the skin—sinking its fangs hard into the flesh of my forefinger. I handed the snake carefully back to Braden, and then ran crying into the house. My dad surprised me by being sincerely agitated. He examined the multiple punctures in my finger and wiped the drizzling blood away. After a minute of hesitancy, he took me over the laundry room sink and began sucking on my finger. Suck and spit. Suck and spit. He didn’t explain, and he didn’t have to. I knew the kids were still in the back yard playing with that snake, but I couldn’t distract him by telling him that. He was sucking venom out of my hand.

We went out later and examined Braden’s snake. Its tail had clearly been chopped off. Whether that meant we had a rattler disguised as a blow snake or just an abnormally aggressive blow snake, I’ll never know. Whatever it was, it liked the taste of my blood. My dad didn’t seem to enjoy that taste quite as much, but he took it like a man (though he rinsed his mouth out pretty well afterwards). Braden was forced to send his snake friend back into the wild, but that didn’t stop him from continuing to hold himself out as sort of the mystical neighborhood beastmaster.

My parents told him if he got his Eagle badge, they’d give him something nice. He told me secretly that he planned to ask for an aviary, or maybe a full menagerie. That’s why I was just as disappointed as they were when he never got it.

I had a tight-knit group of friends at that point, all of whom were Dude to me.  I was Dude to them as well, which was right and proper.  As the group of friends expanded, each new friend was Dude in turn, through high school, a time when friends seemed to just make themselves.  In time everyone was Dude, even a few of those girls whose charm was casual enough to hide under a guise of friendship for a day or two until you realized you never cared to be just buddies.  Dude drew boundaries and pledged allegiances and said whatever kind things teenage boys were never willing to just come out and say.

Dudes

It stayed with us in college, expanding wherever we could find the right mix of casual camaraderie with any new friend.  But even before then it had clearly come under attack. Not long after Dude came to our part of the world, it became tired, overused, and then—the death knell for any good slang word—was found in the mouths of overeager adults seeking esteem in the eyes of youth.  When a lady church leader saw us coming down the hall and said “Hey, look at those Cooool Duuuudes!” I wanted to abandon Dude forever.

But Dude never abandoned us.  Graduation came, we grew up and most of us moved away, and people expected us to start just saying whatever it was that Dude was letting us not say.  So I stopped.  I made plenty of friends after that, and hardly any of them was ever Dude.  I felt nearly certain that those years after college would make me get rid of it for good; that moving on was the price of growing up.  But right at that moment, when it was about to go for good, it didn’t go.  I saw my old friends on visits home or visits to each other, and I was surprised to find that they were all still Dude.  And Dude meant exactly what it had all the way back when it began.

Dudes (example no. 2)

So I put my trust back where it had always been.  Close friends were never made as often as they once had, and they were intermixed with a far larger share of acquaintances and polite friendships than ever before.  But every once in a while I still came across a new friend, the real kind, and Dude would come right into the friendship as if it were 1990 all over again.

I am surprised to find myself still using Dude, and still finding new friends deserving the title, some 20 years after Dude came along.  The circle of people in my life bearing that honor is small—smaller than it was all those years ago.  But it is steady.  My co-writers here, a group of old friends, a handful of new old friends, and just three or four companions around the office.  When I dropped my first workplace Dude a couple years ago, I realized that the title was neither lightly used nor, I think, lightly received.  People who did not grow up in that crucial time may never understand the depths, the multivariate meanings, the subtext and implications of the term, nor the status it conveys.  But to those of us who did, Dude remains, strong as it ever was.

I think I was in 7^th grade when a new family moved into the house down the street: The Allens. Remember the “One of these things is not like the other ones” song on Sesame Street? That’s what comes to mind when I think of the Allens. The immediate distinction was their obvious un-Mormonness, but we had a few non-Mormon families in the neighborhood, so that didn’t quite explain it. And I still can’t quite explain it.

I don’t know where they had lived before, but it must have been someplace like Southern California or Italy or Hawaii. I don’t say this merely because of their permanent tans, but because they were possessed of a type of cool not indigenous to Utah. And it wasn’t an establishment cool, but a very independent, working class cool.

I think the dad had a little masonry business, or something in construction. He was bald and bearded and very friendly, and he wore Magnum P.I. shorts and his birthday top. I’m sure he was aware that his hairy beer-belly, huge German Sheppard, front yard drinking, and basically everything else about them was foreign to the fair-haired LDS kids biking around, so he went out of his way to smile and wave. I appreciated that. I liked Mr. Allen. He and Mrs. Allen had an aura about them that said “I’m slaving away this summer to be able to spend the fall in Cabo/Havasupai/Key West with our laidback, leathery friends and Budweisers on our boat Monkey Business/Endless Summer/Sailor’s Delight.”

I knew things were going to get wild when their youngest son, Brian, introduced himself to everyone at school as “Bra.” That was what he insisted being called. There were a few crazy things about this. 1. Bra was obviously a potty word and this was Farmington Jr. High. 2. A bra was a girl thing and if anyone else would have asked to be called Bra he would have been labeled as a homo and picked on for the next 5 years.

Brian even insisted to the teachers that they call him Bra. That was a big deal. I clearly remember getting the fourth-hand scoop on how old Mrs. so-and-so refused to call him Bra and how he had argued that that was the name he went by and she relented! But Bra was the one guy who could pull it off. He was very big for his age (a year older than me), although not a jock, and he had this swagger that the brown brick halls of Farmington Jr. High could hardly contain. I’ve never seen that swagger since. It was in the same family as the magic James Dean had.

Bra had an instant crew of flunkies right when he showed up. It was like 6 or 7 guys from the stoner and skater orbits saw him walk through the door and thought “Yep, there’s the one I’ve been waiting for. That’s my new leader,” and then walked over to him to see what was next. I tried not to be too in awe of Bra, because I thought I was sort of cool too, and this was my home turf. But looking back now, I see that he was Johnny Depp and I was Don from Napoleon Dynamite.

And if you were impressed with Bra, you were in for a ride, because he was really the radness-runt of the family. The oldest of the three kids was Jake. Jake was about the most handsome, friendly, confident, curly-haired Greek god you ever met as a kid. He was probably 6 years older than me. One of the nicest things that has ever happened to me was when Jake asked me to play on the competition roller hockey team he coached (I wasn’t always 7’3’’). He had seen my moves around the neighborhood. I refused. That seems so weird to me now. I could have spent all this quality time with my hero, and the league was in Ogden so we would have all that driving time together. But I turned him down, I think because I was intimidated and nervous. To top it all off, Jake had taken an old Chevy Bronco, spent countless hours customizing and fixing it up, and ended up with the most boss 4×4 south of Layton. It had a gorgeous yellow body, huge 36 or 37 inch tires (your family suburban probably has 30 inch tires), wench, roll cage, the works. Jake was the man.

Jake’s sister of similar age (maybe they were twins) was his equal in every respect. Except she wasn’t nice, which added to her allure. She was beautiful, very tan, had rich, long dark hair, and looked like something of a hippie queen. I assume there were at least a few exchanges between Compton Bench moms about this new immodest, car-washing threat to the neighborhood. From the 3-second glances I caught of her while whooshing by their house on two, four, or eight wheels, I could tell that she thought she was way too good for this Podunk Pleasantville she was stuck in. And she was right. She belonged in Hollywood or Paris or touring with the Grateful Dead as head groupie. I never exchanged a word with her.

I can’t remember when or where they moved, but my later memories of the neighborhood find them not living there anymore. To me the Allens represent my curiosity throughout my life about what it would be like to be someone else. I didn’t necessarily want to be an Allen. But I wondered what it would be like to live a totally different life. I still wonder that.

(Yeah, sort of like this)

The movie, being live-action, does not take place in rock and roll spacetime.  It actually takes place on several couches gathered together in the middle of a pretty large warehouse in a very authentic looking part of a hardscrabble city.  There are some grapes and melon slices on the table.  Jack White tries to impress The Edge by showing him the custom guitar he commissioned, in which he had a vocal distortion microphone implanted directly in the body of the guitar on some kind of retractable cord.  So Jack can pull this thing out of his guitar mid-performance and start singing in distortion.  The Edge admits to playing the wrong chord on one of the verses of something.  They jam dramatically on their guitars, Jimmy Page pasting a 26 year old’s callous pucker onto his septuagenarian face, and after a while you think “hmm, this needs a little more . . . Robert Plant.”

The movie isn’t bad; I actually enjoyed it.  But somewhere in the middle, I got the feeling that everything was hollow, that for some reason, all of this artistry and attitude lacked something.  The best way I could sum it up is that this movie made no case for the idea that what these men have done is consequential.  I’m not judging them on some moral scale, I just didn’t get the feeling that Whole Lotta Love and Icky Thump mean as much to the world as perhaps some of us, including Jimmy and The Edge and Jack, assume they mean.  (And yes, every time I type ‘The Edge’, which is a name of a person, my computer’s custom ‘ridiculous pretentiousness’ macro sends 50 volts through my body.  Thanks, The Edge.)

Rock and roll wasn’t always inconsequential to me.  I used to jam in high school.  Seriously.  Once a few of us showed up at Chris Hepworth’s house (I hardly ever spoke to Chris Hepworth before or since, but he had a bass), and sat down to play a few tunes.  I think Wade played the intro to Under the Bridge, and then when it was my turn I absolutely wailed out Golden Slumbers on the piano.  No one was good enough to play anything anyone else could play, so the group jamming was mostly theoretical, except for the tune-ups.  But another time we were in Ferg’s basement and things came together.  Wade had a melody that I figured out fit well as the chorus for one of my tunes.  I had the lyrics I’d written for the song there with me too, so we laid down a track on the spot.  Now that really feels like something important, singing lead over your own guitar and two others, with Lochhead on the bass and Ferg on the drums, everyone more or less in sync.

We took the tape to school and played it around for people.  When Spence Matthews- one of Davis’s friends, who was younger than me, but could play more chords- said he thought it was a pretty cool song, I spent a few minutes thinking that this was exactly how careers started.  The words I was writing in my yellow legal pads (the same yellow legal pads that Paul Simon writes all of his lyrics in) started getting more authentic and more fraught.  People were bringing their guitars to school, but playing them in small groups of exclusively males, not like the wannabe guy who did it in the halls just for attention.  We were serious.  The high school felt like it was entering a golden age of nascent rock experimentation.  We’d take drives to Guitar City in Centerville and gravely handle the Fenders.  This one kid was mastering Sting’s whole catalogue.  Crazy stuff like that.  I even stumbled on some freshly-penned lyrics in Davis’s room once (though I could tell easily that he didn’t have what it takes to make it in the business.)

(That’s a lot like what we looked like, but maybe not quite that cool)

You know what happened then?  Nothing.  The Principal didn’t kick us all out, and we didn’t have our most talented guitarist forced out of the band by a parent worrying about him getting into West Point.  No one had anything to fight against, and then somebody started a weekly Friday afternoon football game behind the old junior high.  That semi-formal band that put together the killer track never got together again– not once.  I have no idea why, except that we were teenagers and there was more to figure out than how to get the right reverb on your new guitar hook.

I was thinking about those high school jams the other night while I watched Jimmy and The Edge and their striving shadow Jack.  Those guys are probably better than we were.  But they had that same unconquerable distance between them that we did.  You watch them try to connect, and the different styles and eras and tastes and neuroses make it too unwieldy, like trying to move through a crowded room while wearing a long musical instrument on your chest.  Turns out Rock Gods can safely get together and jam without igniting the atmosphere with purple dragon flames.  The surprise is that I don’t really find that disappointing.