Respect

It was the early nineties, Ian and I were regulars at Toes Tavern's hand shuffleboard table, specifically on Wednesday night's "Big Wednesday," when if you brought in your official "Big Wednesday" plastic cup, beers were half price. I had long, wild, shoulder length hair, a slight beard and a Central California mid-winter tan and over the course of a few weeks I felt the eyes of one beautiful blonde repeatedly scoping. At some point I got the courage to saddle up to her and after a few Wednesdays I had casually implanted the somewhat misleading story into her British expat student's mind that being from Seattle meant I grew up with both Kurt Cobain and Chris Cornell, having spent summers fishing off Aberdeen when I wasn't surfing Westport. Let me be clear: she was out of my league. Not only did she seem slightly smarter and certainly prettier than me, but she was far more forward, and my embarrassment at having no place to take her at night (living in a Christian College dorm was not a sexy, or plausible, destination) eventually scuppered our budding non-relationship.

A year or two later, Ian and I would live together in a cabana in the hills of Montecito, working and surfing together and playing music. I remain a poor musician, but my ability to plunk out the baseline of "Hunger Strike" fueled more than a handful of jam sessions at various parties where the lyrics were changed to riff on the topic of Hushpuppies.