MUSIC,
MADNESS
AND AN APPRECIATION
FOR THINGS
LEFT UNDONE
By Ed Teja
Smashwords Edition
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This book is a work of fiction; the places are real, but the events are not, except of course for Ted puking on the Corvette. But mostly everything is used fictitiously. Well, almost.
The cover photo of Santa Monica (a real place) is courtesy of Guy Prentice, good friend and talented composer as well as photographer.
A thick layer of gray hung over the city for days. At night, the heat radiated by the concrete tried to escape to the coolness of the black sky but the clouds slapped it back down along the asphalt where it began reheating the overheated city. Air conditioners snapped on by the thousands, sapping the life from the city’s energy grid and dumping the collected heat, along with the heat the air conditioners themselves generated, down into the sweltering streets.
Los Angles often got warm, but this was hot; an unrelenting simmer that never let you forget the heat. Inside this natural and manmade convection oven, the inevitable turmoil could be seen after three days: the city began losing its precarious and precious balance. The swelter amplified everything that was jittery, anxious and edgy; and there was much on the street that was jittery, anxious and edgy. The nights became a time for thinking, especially about what was wrong. And about what could be different.
From a simple statistical perspective, the pragmatic results of the heat surprised no one. In the inner city, brains fried by prolonged heat, upped the ante on gang hassles, rape, looting, and general mayhem. Up market, in the consecrated grounds of the rich, random violence racked up bad numbers too, with news commentators reporting a noticeable uptick in freeway shootings and domestic violence. If nothing else, this seemed to prove that owning an air conditioner didn’t make you immune from the heat-induced weirdness. In fact, there was no escape from the heat or the madness that went with it, beyond the expediency of leaving the city. Everyone who stayed fought the same battle. No socioeconomic group, no governmentally sanctioned, nor unofficial, ethnic minority or majority had genes strong enough or technology adequate to hold the craziness at bay. At the best of times, summer in the city, the cops will tell you, is a bitch.
At that low point in my life, I had two people near me who were each worthy of the title friend. Perhaps that might have been enough at other times, but friendships do not tolerate the heat much better than other volatile and fragile creatures.
Not that I understand friendship in any precise way; in fact I avoid trying to understand anything precisely. Somehow, it seems to me that precision might complicate things in an unnecessary fashion. It also seemed a bit unhip. God forbid I should be unhip.
Despite this lack of clear definition for friends, I knew that Ted was one, if for historical reasons only. Ted the moneyman he was to us then. Living and working in LA for a lifetime, he imagined himself at peace amid the city’s many chaotic binges. Life in general is what gave him migraines. Severe migraines.
Despite his commendable uniqueness, Ted was, in many ways, not atypical of native southern Californians. For instance, he was driven by a desperate hunger, a longing. It complicated his career path that he had willingly spent many years living as a quietly desperate man. He had sat by the road of life, like some unmined gem stone, hoping for the discovery (of his intrinsic worth to the world at large) that he never doubted would come, but that he feared might come too late to be of any solace or even to let him scream “I told you” at all those idiots voted most likely to succeed at excess.
For years he live in mortal fear that his appearance on the main stage might not happen until late in life, say well past his thirtieth birthday. At thirty-five, he was struck with spine-numbing dread thought that it might not happen until his forties. What good would validation —external vindication, that is — of his intrinsic worth be then? For to a child of the youth culture, old age was little more than a use for the past tense and beyond thinking about or taking seriously.