Part 1: Dude, it’s me. Mortality. Let’s hang out.
I’m haunted by my own stupidity. They say you get over it. Wouldn’t it be nice… For a guy who prides himself on not living in the past, I’ve been thinking a lot about the past. Going way back—way, way back—I can’t believe my dumb luck.
Okay, I was 18 at the time, but that’s not a complete excuse. There was a warrant out. For my arrest. It’s not like some law enforcement bloodhound was actively on my trail, though. It was more pathetic than that. I’d gotten a ticket for canvassing without a license and failed to appear for the court date and that “failure-to-appear” grew up into a warrant. Not that I was self-righteous about it, like, “Man, I blew shit like that off every day.” It wasn’t like that at all. The court date just kind of came and went.
I’d picked up a canvassing gig on the job board at Diablo Valley College. It was a cork bulletin board with 3x5 cards thumb-tacked to it. I looked at the board nearly every day between classes.
I’d had luck scoring paying gigs off the job board before. Like working for a caterer at an old folks’ home. The job description read: “Must have white dress shirt and black tie, black slacks.” Done and done! I wore a lot of black in those days. Black hides a multitude of sins. And I could spot-clean that white shirt. I worked the floor filling and refilling the residents’ coffee cups with Sanka.
There were other gigs too. Less dignified ones like hovering over a steaming sink washing dishes at an Italian restaurant in San Ramon. Gross. That’s low-man-on-the-totem-poll stuff if there ever was one. But I should say, even that job wasn’t all bad. In the industrial fridge in the kitchen there was an ever-present supply of chocolate mousse pie. I would open the door to the fridge, so it blocked the view to the front dining room, and carefully remove one of those triangle shaped slices from the pie tin and slowly push it down my throat and bite down. God damn! I can picture it now, all that gooey rich and creamy chocolate sprinkled with dark chocolate shavings. I could get three quarters of that thing down in one huff. And slowly, like a coke drip, it would hit me: the sugar rush. And when it did, I could hear music.
Then there was the canvassing gig, the one that led to my life of crime by ignoring the warrant. A door-to-door 100% commission hustle. Our boss drove a gold champagne sparkle Cadillac Coupe DeVille. And he would have us meet him on Saturday mornings at the Denny’s out there on Monument road.
He held court in a corner booth. All cool-like. Like a kingpin.
“I'll have the Grand Slam. Eggs over easy,” he’d say. When the waitress came around to me, I ordered the same. (“I’ll have what he’s having!”)
I remember these details. How? Why? I can hardly remember my ATM pin number! I guess in some way I was studying the kingpin. How does one get a car like that, I wondered. Why would you want a car like that? It gave him status, clearly. I mean, he ate pancakes and cruised around in that ride, while we went out there and did the hand-to-hand combat. This dynamic ended up preparing me for other vocations and realities. Who knew?
Bob Dylan saw Buddy Holly perform in Duluth, from three feet away. Buddy looked at him, and Dylan knew from that moment on he didn’t want to work for anyone. I knew that feeling, too. In that Denny’s. At least, looking back I think I knew it. But at the time, I was very much under the thumb—and the spell—of Mr. Grand Slam Breakfast.
One morning I had to ask him, “What’s the deal with the gold Cadillac?”
He said, “I have to drive a Cadillac. The clients need to see that I’m successful. I gotta project that shit.”
“It’s like an image?”
“Yeah.”
“I get that.”
He’d take us crew guys to a neighborhood somewhere and drop us off and pick us up later. We’d go door to door trying to hawk these car-care coupons.
People didn’t always answer the door. I could hear them in there watching Wheel of Fortune or whatever. One evening I got frustrated and stupidly put my finger over that little spyhole on the front door. A dumb impulse that didn’t go over so well. Within a few minutes, a cruiser showed up and calmly gave the whole crew tickets. Canvassing without a license.
Around that time I acquired a three-on-the-tree 72 Plymouth Comet. (No gold Cadillac for me.) It was like driving a fix-it ticket on wheels.
As it turns out, my Plymouth was a real cop magnet. I was pulled over and had to perform a sobriety test in the parking lot of the crappy apartment I was sharing with my girlfriend, Kara. (So close!) I stood on one foot. Did the heel to toe. All of it. And managed to pass, by some miracle. Afterwards, the officer just kind of looked around and fingered the windshield wipers on my Plymouth and said they were not up to code or something. He wrote me a fix-it ticket.
In retrospect, I realize I was in the Whiteness Protection Program. Yes, “white privilege.” People think of it as being born with the proverbial silver spoon. It’s more than that. It’s a kind of privilege where if you get pulled over you can be pretty confident that the worst thing they’ll do is run your license through the system and maybe give you a ticket. I know I was born with certain advantages. Even when I was stuck like the monkey in the middle of a series of crappy minimum wage jobs, it wasn’t like I didn’t have opportunities.
That Plymouth was bad luck. I mean, seriously. More on that later. And on how the canvassing without a license ticket became a warrant and came back to bite me.
Eventually, cutting my losses for all the bad luck the Plymouth brought me, I ended up selling it to Johnny Gel of the Gels. A punk band from Pomona. Maybe he had better luck with it.
But wait, it occurs to me that if you made it this far, you could be taking some kind of mild interest in the goings and comings of this great newsletter experiment. In which case: Why not become a paid subscriber today, if you’re not already? It would mean a lot to me. Or you can just carry on with the free model. Either way, we are happy to have you.
Onwards,
– CP
P.S. Join us February 14 at the Swedish American Hall with the Make Out Quartet. Bring your honey and celebrate Valentine's Day with us. Where rock 'n' roll rams up against conservatory nerds for a you-had-to-be-there night. This will be a seated one night only show. Spoiler alert: it's going to be epic. Tickets at chuckprophet.com
P.P.S. Here I am behind the wheel. Not sure if it was a Satellite or a Comet, or that it was a 1972. Go ahead and fact check me. I’d like to know.