Papa was a rolling stone

I don’t want to leave anymore in search of something new.

I don’t need to go to the other side of the world to find out who I am.

I am no longer desperately searching for something… anything… something. 

What I want is to exist. And then I want to exist more. And bigger. And brighter. And on and on. And I want my reality to grow larger and stronger and my movie to change the other movies.

I want to create a world, in just one place, that is so vibrant and colorful and wonderful and weird that I never want to leave.

Instead of my energy being used to adapt and survive, it will be my energy to create. I want people to laugh for me and because of me. I want to make them smile and offer them some small respite from the dark corners of their own realities. To show them the movement behind the light and in the shadows.

I want to rock your gypsy soul 

I don’t want to be a stranger in a strange city where I don’t speak the language and don’t understand the culture and am only there to grasp at something I can never truly hold, certainly not in a week, or month, or year, or a lifetime.

I want to find the city that is the perfect fit for me. I want to have an apartment in that city where I can see the art, and listen to the music, and drink the wine, and eat the food, and watch and be with the people.

I’ll have a little cabin in the woods too, away from civilization, where reality is only what I dictate - a place to relax and breathe and listen to the silence. There we can be alone together, our realities intertwined.

I don’t want to go on a vacation to meet people; I want to meet the people that make every day a vacation.

I want to meet the people who make me want to be better, to try harder, to believe in humanity, and I want to make them love me too – as much as I already love them. 

The First Time Girls Tried to Beat Me Up

My senior year of high school I was at a party in a field, burning stuff.

“Leah, could you come with me to jump my car?” asked Steve, a boy two years older than me. 

“Sure Steve, let’s go jump your car.” Steve and I began walking towards the cars.

“That girl said she was going to jump Heather!” I heard a girl yell from behind my back. She was from a neighboring school and had been hanging around my school’s boys while her fiancé was away at war. She and her friend Heather had matching tattoos that said, “Bitch,” on their bellies. They were classy broads.

             “Hey, bitch!” the girl yelled at my back.

“Who? Lil old me?” I turned around and tried to bring everyone’s attention to how adorable and non-threatening I am.

“Yeah, you. You said you were going to jump Heather!”

“No, I didn’t,” I whispered, terrified.

“Yes you did! AND you said we were lesbians just because we were making out with each other for attention all night!”

“No, I didn’t! Even if I had called you a lesbian, and let me reiterate that I have not, it would have been a respectful objective observation. I’m jealous that I’m biologically programmed and socially conditioned to like men and not women! Please, don’t beat me up!”

“Let’s beat her up!” the girl reiterated the plan, rallying behind her a group of good men prepared to do nothing.

“Steve,” I said to Steve, “We were going to go jump your car right? Not Heather?”

“Yes,” Steve agreed. Despite logic being on my side, the girls were going to beat me up anyway.

The music reached a crescendo as the story barreled forward in to the climax. It was dramatic.

The party formed a circle around us, and the girl lunged at me, trying to claw out my eyes. At the last minute, I pulled out my secret shank and stabbed her in the heart! She fell to the ground. Then, I opened my fuel tank, siphoned gasoline out on to her convulsing body, struck a match, kicked her, then I dropped the match. As she went up in dancing flames, her energy made useful for the first time in her resource suck of a life, I did the electric slide.

“Anyone else want to take a stab at beating me up?” I screamed in to the night, laughing at my clever double entendre, my eyes crazy with primal blood lust. “Also, does anyone remember the next step to electric slide after the grape vine?”

Fear and respect for me permeated the air that was thick with burnt flesh. The dead girl’s friend Heather sat crying, and I laughed in her face and told her, “That’s what you get.” Then I spat on her and walked away to sit by the fire and toast marshmallows for s’mores. A boy Andrew came to sit beside me.

“You know they just tried to beat you up because I think you’re pretty, and I like you,” said Andrew. “They liked me, but I’m interested in you.”

“Well, Andrew,” I paused as I looked in to his hopeful, horny, young eyes, “Please get away from me before I have to put some more uppity hoes in their place.” 

And that was the first time girls tried to beat me up. 

Paul McCarty: all that jazz and the death of my friend

Almost two years ago now, one of my best friends, from a past life growing up as a country girl in rural northeastern Ohio, passed away.

The summer he passed, I was a new Ohio State graduate, broke, living out the rest of my lease in Columbus, Ohio. I was busy trying to save up money from working promotions in order to pay for a poorly planned, almost-sure-to-fail, move alone out to Las Vegas, Nevada. I couldn’t make it home for his funeral, because I was working a summer long promotion for these new Kool-Aid tablets that fizzed up in water, and I really needed the 13 or 15 or whatever they were paying me an hour. Actually, I ended up being fired from that job, as seems to be the case with almost every job I’ve ever held, and I could have made it home for the funeral, but I didn’t know that until it was too late.  This time, I maintain that I did nothing wrong to be fired and was, in fact, the victim of a jealous harpy’s wrath. Other times I’ve been fired from jobs, I have not been nearly so innocent. I seem to have problems following rules and respecting authority figures…

“Write something about Paul McCarty,” my father cajoled me over the phone. “You always do such a nice job expressing what we’re all feeling.” No, there wasn’t time, I had to hock Kool-Aid to the thirsty masses, and more profoundly, I didn’t have the words I needed to express the depth of what I was feeling. He’d been so very special to me, and I feared anything I wrote at that time about my dear friend would sound contrived.

Paul McCarty was my high school band director, and for years, for a minimum of an hour and a half, five times a week, under his fatherly gaze, I’d honk away on my saxophone. (Alto, tenor, bari - I’ve played and loved them all.) The first 45 minutes would be the regular band, those just then learning instruments or filling a credit, and then they would leave, and the last 45 minutes was all that Jazz. The Pymatuning Valley Jazz Band, the real music geeks, those of us in it for the love of playing music worth playing, would stick around for the real fun.

He had blond hair, and glasses, and a big jolly Santa belly. He played the trumpet, which is the coolest wind instrument – after the sax obviously – and I loved him – we all did. The man was music, and there’s not a single thing I don’t love about music. 

“It’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind,” he’d say with a mischievous head bobble whenever his beloved children, his PV Jazz Band, would complain about a change in song selection or whatever modification he’d flippantly made at the last minute.

He told us one of the silliest, most inappropriate, most band geeky jokes of all time, and of course it’s remained one of my favorites and most oft told to this day.

“What did the flute player say to her saxophonist boyfriend?”  Carty asked the entire jazz band with a twinkle in his eye.

“I dunno Carty, what did she say, oh King of the Band Geeks?”

“Ouch! Pull out! You’re sharp!”  Hahahahahahaha!

If you got this joke, then take comfort that at least you’ve got rhythm – you’re a band geek through and through.  Additionally, this joke is the only way I’ve been able to remember how to correctly adjust my mouthpiece to get my instrument in tune. That dirty old man sure knew how to teach.

One year, he took us to see the jazz legend, trumpet player, Maynard Ferguson and his band play. What other band director from such a small isolated area could possibly be so groovy?

I was the only little Jewish girl in my farming community, and every year I’d complain to Carty that we only played Christmas songs and never any Hanukah songs.

“It’s religious intolerance, is what it is. I feel persecuted,” I’d say to him while skipping class, hiding out in his office. (He’d always be game to vouch for me and sign fake passes saying that it was regrettable, but necessary, that I skip calculus to sit joking around with him in his office.)

My junior year of high school, I lived for a year in southern Brazil as an exchange student. I don’t know how lonely all of you were during high school, but at that time in Brazil, my Portuguese was still so-so, and it doesn’t get too much lonelier than not only not being able to fit in but, literally, not being able to speak the same language as your classmates. That December, I received a package from Paul McCarty in the mail. Inside there was a CD, and recorded on that CD was the entire band, having rehearsed for months, playing the song “The First Night of Hanukah.”

“Happy Hanukah, Leah!” A world away, Paul McCarty had used his authority as our teacher to have the band shout for me, wishing me a happy Hanukah. Bless that man. In the days before Facebook and Skype, when I felt very much alone at sixteen on the other side of the planet, he made me feel loved and missed.

And I sat down today to write something else, but with jazz playing in the background, I had Carty on the mind, and I wrote this without thinking, in an improvised style, because I finally, years later, knew what I wanted to write for him. Hopefully this will appease my father.

Rest in peace, Paul McCarty, my dear friend, the man who taught me to love jazz – you are not someone easy to forget.