LNOYL

I could only walk thirty meters at a time until my fingers would slip or arm would give out. I’d have to put it on the ground, switch arms, then go another thirty before doing the thoracic limb switch around. I became an obstruction on the ramp leading back to the ferry, and a cause for sighs on the set of stairs leading up to the ramp. The first time I saw Marty when I moved out west, he lived in a rental on the mainland, right off of kitsalano beach. I was a bit nervous being there, because it wasn’t like it was before. Our friendship had stumbled into a frictional transition phase, and as such, the rules of conduct became uncertain. The linear cause and effect we had established over many years was no longer, so what once seemed straight forward and effortless had become complicated. The beaches at night were calm though. Marty decided to lend me his guitar amp as I ferried back to the Island, so I could use it for recording. It was this huge, newer generation fender tube amp. It was so heavy.

I met Marty mid way through high school. I was the short, quiet, introverted, awkward kid with braces and bad hair. Not really overweight or chubby, but in possession of that lack of testosterone fleshed out appearance. Marty was the very tall, underweight kid with huge, dated eighties rim glasses. Marty and I met because we were bottom of the barrel and looking for a way out of it. Marty cast a rope up and over the side, and we helped each other out and over. We had an instant predilection to be consumed by the effects and inner workings of music, and we forged a friendship over stratocaster guitar tones and guitar hero’s. In the beginning, I had the guitar, and Marty had a k-car and basement that we could play in. Marties basement was like our own sealed diefenbunker. It was our underground tree house, and as the years went on, we’d put all sorts of stuff we could find down there – cassette recorders, drum machines, radioshack mixers, flood lamps and mirrors. It was pretty ghetto by todays standards, but in the 90′s, even the cheapest recording equipment and digital gear was very expensive, sparse, and out of reach. Purchasing a box of high quality cassette tapes meant we were set for a few months in the basement. I had no interest in recording whatsoever. Marty, who was more technically adept, put all that together.

We started breaking things. It lasted for about a year. Other kids got high or drunk, played video games, had girlfriends, were good at sports, or did well in school. We had or did none of those things. We played guitars and broke stuff. It started upstairs – Marty had just got this new acoustic guitar. It had high action – meaning that the strings were so high off the fretboard, playing the instrument was painful and limiting. We were listening to “Are you experienced?” on the boom box in his room, when I picked up the acoustic guitar by the neck, swung it into the air in an arc, but gently slowed down so it harmlessly bounced on the bed. Marty got up out of the corner. He had this funny look on his face, and I thought he was pissed that I’d swung around his new guitar. He grabbed it out of my hands, swung it high, and flung it towards the ground. He smashed that guitar until it was in 30 pieces. We got into his k-car, and proceeded to drive around the city, throwing pieces of acoustic guitar out the window as we went.

It must have been infectious. Id’ say for about a years time, if something we owned didn’t quite meet a certain musical standard, it ‘got broke’. Cassette tapes, if they were “cock-rock” hair metal or artists we did not like, got unspooled. About the term “Cock-Rock”; Rupicola peruvianu is a species of bird, that show a “cacophony of bright color and frenzied activity filled with very strange sounds”, and instead of working on building his nesting chops, “the male’s energy instead is devoted to very elaborate display rituals, that show off its magnificent plumage”. The common name for these birds are “cock of the rock”. I can’t make any of this stuff up.

We broke a lot of his sisters tapes (sorry Vicky and Lisa). Some tapes didn’t deserve to break (i.e. we were to immature to appreciate what they were at the time), but they ‘got broke’ anyways. It was never planned, and always spur of the moment. Bad music on CD’s got splintered by throwing them like ninja stars against the basement wall. I have a vague memory of Marty swinging a 10watt guitar amp, by it’s 10 foot cord, round and round in the air, then watching the amp fly away to a rolling destruction. The amp didn’t sound good, apparently. The worst was when there was this radio-cassette thing we were trying to use to record with. We were in the basement, and it ruined perfect take because it got all warbly. It got broke. I think Marties mom found it later – we had literally swept it under the rug downstairs, and it would go crunch when you walked over it. Every week, something unsatisfactory would bite the dust. Teenage angst, testosterone, boredom, bottom of the barrel and no girlfriends, mixed with family dysfunction that had seeped into the works. We didn’t have the tools to articulate our issues back then, so it was get it out into the music, or become Lou Ferrigno: “hulk, smash”. Ironically, after trial, error, and even repeating a year in highchool, Marty became a brilliant earthquake engineer. He ran a gigantic shake table at a university while getting his Phd, designed to break huge buildings on a large scale. He knows how to prevent things from being destroyed from the inside out…

Even though we were only a ferry ride away, we only saw each other three times in all the years I lived out west. We had both dug up opportunities and elements within our personalities that we didn’t think were possible or could exist ten years earlier. We didn’t need each other the way we used to, because the bottom of that barrel was long gone. You want to find fault in why things are not the same, and because of that, misunderstandings happen along the way. It took me a long time to figure that out.

I made it back to the golden trailer with Marties guitar amp. I needed to reinvent things in my life again. Is that how people stay happy for a long period of time I wondered.