John Coltrane John ColtranePt4

This po' boy huddled down for a long night.  Just before midnight, I decided to put a record (a round, grooved, vinyl object used to store sound) called A Love Supreme by a saxophonist, John Coltrane on my brand new component stereo (you have to understand that this is what the audiophiles used to hear Jimi move his sounds back and forth between speakers and you could adjust the bass so it shook the floor of the apartment above you till the fat tenant would slam his foot on the floor and jump your needle and you'd mumble, "What a bummer, man") At that point in my life, my exposure to jazz, particularly progressive jazz, was limited. I had heard Dave Brubeck's Take Five in college and thought it was, in the vernacular of the time, "far out, man." But I was a soul man who thought My Girl was one of the great American songs(it was).  I had also broadened my religion to include The Beatles, Stones, Bob Dylan, and Jimi Hendrix. So how did I come to possess this album(a synonym for record)? Time for another digression that will eventually bring me back to the life changing moment I think I promised somewhere in this series of blogs. One of the students I met in Cambridge was a golden boy from California. If my memory wasn't destroyed by my youthful dissipation, I'm pretty sure he even knew how to surf (& if my memory isn't accurate, it makes a better story & as we've recently witnessed when we're talking memoir, it's the story, stupid). You have to understand that I grew up in New York City (well, Queens, but that's an official borough of THE CITY). When the Beach Boys were harmonizing about blonde, tanned beauties and woodies, I was wondering if a woody was some kind of sexual act these beauties might bestow on a surfer boy.).  Jeff's origins were a mystery to me. To add to his mystique, he had gone to Stanford, one of those private, non-Catholic colleges somewhere in California. I had gone to Fordham on Fordham Road in the Bronx. It was/is a Jesuit school where you had to take four years of theology and philosophy and in your senior year had to wear a robe to philosophy class like you saw Oxford or Cambridge students wearing in the movies. It wasn't till sometime after I graduated that I had the AHA moment and realized they wanted us to to feel like the limeys had nothing on these Catholic kids from immigrant ancestry.  In fact I had spent sixteen years in the parallel universe of New York Catholic schools. In our minds they weren't private schools but an educational refuge for the Catholic  middle class(originally, the poor catholic kids of Irish, Italian and other European nationalities from the paganism of the public school system). Stanford was a completely different world, similar to the one I was in in Cambridge but filled with sun, sun, sun and fun, fun, fun. Harvard (I have tried to hide it, but that's where I was going to school. However, I won't accuse others of being bitter and clinging to their Uzis and Bud Lite that according to their recent commercials has won brewing awards in foreign countries when times get tough)(I'm getting lost in these parentheses) was weird but Jeff was even weirder. We were both intern teachers in the Boston Public Schools (which were Catholic schools disguised as public schools. I knew that most of the teachers were nuns out of habits. My sixteen years on the inside made that obvious to me.) The internship was part of our graduate program. He spoke with this accent that I couldn't identify. It was only years later when watching some surf flick on TV that I was able to pin it down. In the middle of a Northeast winter, he dressed like he was at the fuckin beach in Santa Monica ( even now, I'm not sure if there is a beach in Santa Monica. California stops at San Francisco, the southern tip of Ecotopia). He even wore sandals. What really blew me away was that he was living in a caretaker's cottage on a sheep farm just outside of Boston. Since I live in Oregon, the weirdness factor over his living situation is negligible now, but then it was "far out, man"! He invited me to come visit his "pad" one weekend. I didn't have a car; in fact, I didn't even know how to drive, so he told me he'd give me a ride. That Friday, he pulled up to my door, driving, of course, a Volkswagon bus (you probably thought it was going to be a woody, and maybe when I publish this as part of my memoir it will be). I hopped in, and he handed me a joint. I thought this would be weird but hell, why not.    I gotta stop now - time for Idol. I think the kid who turned the Mariah Cary song into an edgy emopunk dirge is gonna win unless all the subteens vote for the guileless or crafty as a fox David Archuleta (watch out Josh Grubin!)