Google Fails, Memory Prevails
In which I use my brain as search engine for folks with no digital footprint
As omnipresent as Google seems, it can’t reconnect me to everyone I once knew. I find both comfort and melancholy in that. Yes, I’m curious about those who’ve eluded the appropriately named ‘net, but I’m also OK with not knowing more. Because what I retain is pretty rich.
I still try, however. And when Google fails me, I do what humans have done for eons: I call up a face and, if it’s still there, a name, from my mind. The memories unspool, often with surprising intensity. As in a dream, time and space contract. I am with absent friends again, while also missing them.
Of course I understand some of these memories are likely faulty. And I reckon some folks are, in fact, dead, like so many from my past, and that’s why I cannot tweeze even a crumb of their data from the World Wide Web.
Then again, maybe they’re just legit off the grid somewhere, and happy. Because I lack information, I choose to think that. In any case, while I still can, here I honor a trio of bygone friends using only the database of my memory.
NICK
Nick G. was a regular at King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, where I tended bar intermittently from 1985 to 1990. Darkly handsome, of Greek descent, very funny and chatty in the cigarette smoke haze. Thick black hair, receding. Friends with the owners. Big brotherly. Always alone.
Nick radiated both streetwise intelligence and book smarts. I don’t remember his job. (Contractor?) He drank brown liquor. Swarthy, bespectacled, leaning over the bar, gesticulating with a lit Camel, rakish smile, exuberant laugh.
I’d discovered Leonard Cohen through the ‘88 LP I’m Your Man. I raved about it to Nick. (Indeed, that album would change my life.) The next time he came in, Nick brought Cohen’s first two LPs for me to “borrow.” As a Greek, he took pride in the fact that Cohen wrote a significant amount of classic material in a spartan house on the isle of Hydra.
In turn, I “loaned” Nick my copy of The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor, which he loved. He also gave me an LP of rebetiko music heard primarily in hashish dens of urban Greece. I’d been to Athens with the Fleshtones, but I’d never heard music like that – dark, cacophonous, keening, raw. I told him it sounded like funeral music. This wasn’t a criticism, but I could see my comment made him unhappy. I still feel bad about that. In my defense, I was not yet twenty-five.
Nick and I commiserated about unintended intimacy with neighbors. I told him about the exhibitionist across the courtyard from my wife’s and my East Village apartment. This woman routinely paraded nude in the day, and engaged in loud marathon sex with her boyfriend at night in front of an un-curtained, open window, in the glow of a bedside lamp. One did not need to spy, it all just transpired like a movie playing while we minded our business in the kitchen. Nick told me about the time he and a girlfriend spontaneously made love on a hot afternoon, not realizing they’d left the blinds up and the windows open. Rising from the bed afterwards, walking around naked, they heard giggling. Several sets of eyes – all kids – were spying on them from an open window across the alley.
Nick rarely got shitfaced. He could hold his liquor. But one night, just before the owners – his friends – sold the place, Nick drank to excess. There was a pall over King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut. The 90s were coming, change was afoot, our little community would soon splinter, and everyone knew it. AIDS had taken so many. Gentrification was coming. Nick eyeballed me and gruffly said, “Robert, I am never returning that Flannery O’Connor book. And you are never giving me back those Leonard Cohen albums. Let’s not bullshit each other, OK?” Although smiling, he seemed irritated, sad. Then he shrugged it off and ordered another. I said, “If you say so,” and went about my barman business. As ever, he tipped me well.
He was right, of course. Thirty-five years on, I still own every LP Nick passed across the bar to me, as a “loan” and/or a gift. I hope he still owns that Flannery O’Connor collection. After I quit King Tut’s, I sent postcards announcing my various gigs to Nick’s NYC address, but I don’t recall him attending one. In fact, I never once saw him outside King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut. I have no idea what happened to him. I just Googled his name again and… still nothing.
But within me, still definitely something.
BONNIE
Bonnie D. was the fifteen-year-old lead singer of Little Dreamer, the first band in which I was paid to play. I was sixteen, and riddled with cystic acne. To this day, I’m pretty sure Bonnie was the best singer I’ve ever shared a stage with. No documentation of Little Dreamer exists – no photos, no cassettes, no video. But the memory of Bonnie’s huge voice coming out of her little body, amplified through subpar sound equipment, still thrills me.
Little Dreamer specialized in Heart covers like “Barracuda,” “Even It Up,” “Crazy On You,” “Kick It Out,” “Straight On,” and their arrangement of “I’ve Got the Music in Me.” We also offered Pat Benatar (“Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” “Heartbreaker”), Jefferson Starship (“Jane”), Led Zeppelin (“Rock and Roll,” “Whole Lotta Love”), Ted Nugent (“Hey Baby”), Quarterflash (“Harden My Heart”), and REO Speedwagon (“Music Man,” sung by me). We also played “Wipeout.”
The first time I heard one of my own songs played and sung in a room was at a Little Dreamer rehearsal. Everybody loved “No Good Kid,” a Pat Benatar-inspired rocker, one of my first efforts. Bonnie slayed the vocal. “No Good Kid” would be Little Dreamer’s only non-cover. It exists now solely in my head, in Bonnie’s clarion voice.
Bonnie was blue collar beautiful. With some cosmetics and the right footwear, she could (and did) easily pass for twenty-one. Straight, shoulder-length, light brown hair, feathered like Heart’s Ann Wilson, circa late 70s. Big hazel eyes, radiant smile. Bonnie arrived to windowless basement rehearsals with her older, black-haired sister, Stacy, both nut-brown tanned in gym shorts with piping down the seams, sweaty tank tops, and flip flops. They exuded athleticism, each in a halo of scent – shampoo, a delicate smidge of floral perfume, and the tang of perspiration common to all Atlantans with no AC. (I can only imagine what I smelled like. I’m sure it was not great.)
Bonnie had dropped out of high school, and lived in a cramped duplex with Stacy and Stacy’s mustachioed boyfriend, who “managed” Little Dreamer. We nicknamed him Hollywood. I can’t recall why she dropped out, or if she had a job. She and Stacy and Hollywood were very Southern, with thick drawls. The sisters were tough.
Of all the songs we played, Bonnie particularly shone on the Heart material. Any vocalist, regardless of personal taste, will tell you Ann Wilson, in her day, was peerless. The other musicians and I, ranging in age from sixteen to early twenties, were pretty good. But Bonnie nailed it. She possessed both alto richness and stratospheric high notes rendered smooth. She delivered familiar tunes with distinctive personality. Bonnie was a natural.
One hot summer night, post sauna-esque rehearsal, Little Dreamer got some pizza and a couple six packs of cold Lowenbrau and sat in a circle at the Duck Pond, a little park close to my home. Nearby streetlights illuminated this little tableau. It was only the second or third time I drank beer, but it was the first time it tasted good. I feel sure we planned where each of us would sleep on the tour bus.
When my junior year of high school began, I amicably quit Little Dreamer to “focus on my schoolwork.” This attitude would not take. The following summer – 1982 – I would “go new wave” and play clubs in my first all-original band, a teenaged trio inspired by The Jam called The Latest.
Around this time, I attended a Little Dreamer gig. Their set was unchanged. I was not jealous of my replacement. I’d moved on. Seventeen felt very different from sixteen. Bonnie introduced me from the stage as the writer of their next song: “No Good Kid.” She winked at me, grabbed the microphone, and proceeded to sing the shit out of it. Much applause ensued, people patting me on the back. That was the last time I laid eyes on Bonnie.
In my subsequent forty-something years playing music in all manner of situations, I’ve crossed paths with only a handful who seemed like vessels bringing energy from some other realm. Bonnie was one of those.
This gift does not guarantee fame or financial renumeration, and it doesn’t always come with drive (now called “grit”), or luck, but it does create for other people indelible memories. I didn’t grasp the value of that when I was a kid, but I do now.
If I could find Bonnie via Google, I’d thank her. But so far, I can’t. So this will have to do.
CYNTHIA
Cynthia W. worked at a museum on the campus of the University of Georgia when I lived in Athens in 1984, the year I turned nineteen. I think Cynthia was in her mid-twenties. I’d moved to Athens to be independent with low overhead, and to play bass in the band Go Van Go. Cynthia and I met at a party and immediately clicked. We spent a lot of time together that summer and autumn. Long, epic conversations. People often incorrectly assumed we were lovers. But although she once opened the door to her home clad only in a white towel, she did not make a pass at me, per se. And although I found her attractive, I was wary of physical attachments. Due in part to a recent cataclysmic breakup that involved the Grady Hospital emergency room, the notion of a “serious relationship” did not sit well, and I was never good at the “friends with benefits” thing. Had Cynthia and I crossed that line, I daresay my life would be quite different. Although we never spoke of it, Cynthia intuitively understood.
Cynthia was blue-eyed, with a thick mane of dark blonde hair, already with some silver in it. Her smile etched dimples into her cheeks. She looked fabulous in Levi’s 501’s. When Purple Rain opened, we went together. It was sold out. She squirmed next to me during Prince’s famous/infamous performance of “Darling Nikki,” in which he mimes fucking the titular Nikki onstage. Quite dramatic. “That is the sexiest thing I have ever seen,” Cynthia whispered huskily.
One of our more memorable adventures was spending the night at Reverend Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden in nearby Summerville.
Cynthia’s friend, artist, Athens icon, and former Warhol superstar Jerry Ayers was living at Paradise Garden, helping rehab the long-neglected grounds, and writing grant proposals for Howard Finster. Because REM had championed Finster, shooting their “Radio Free Europe” video at Paradise Garden and using Finster’s art for their Reckoning album cover, Jerry knew international fame for the outsider artist was imminent. He implored Cynthia to come to Paradise Garden before its funky character was smoothed, before there was a gift shop.
Cynthia invited me to come along. We drove to Summerville on an Autumn day. Jerry met us in the rutted driveway, grinning like a hillbilly pirate. Paradise Garden rose around us: decaying buildings, a couple trailers, art everywhere, a car carcass covered in religious characters and Bible verses, bicycle parts, scrap metal, plywood, and many dogs.
Jerry squired us around. We marveled at the twisted tower of bicycle parts, the paths beneath the stately oaks, the painted faces everywhere, all spreading good news about salvation, a world unseen. Angels. Elvis. George Washington. Jesus.
Laughing, bespectacled Howard came out to meet us, resplendent in a polyester sport coat over a flannel shirt, ever-present liter bottle of Coke in hand. Cynthia asked if he would tell us a story, and he said yes. Like children, we sat on the floor before him in his outbuilding studio. He told us of a woman he knew who put her son’s jacket on a hook when the boy went to Vietnam. She said she wouldn’t take it down ’til her son returned. And then Reverend Finster wept. He told us the jacket was still there, to this day. We sat speechless.
That night, Cynthia and I slept on a terribly uncomfortable fold-out bed in a ramshackle tower Finster had designed with instructions from God. I remember the hum of a heater, the warmth of Cynthia beside me, a feeling of being very lucky. I was – and am – so grateful Cynthia had brought me along. Everything Jerry predicted would soon come to pass.
I moved to New York City in February of ‘85. In early spring, Cynthia and some other Athens friends drove up in a convertible to visit various folks, including me. I was working some shitty job for minimum wage and I was miserable. They implored me to join them as they drove around bright, sunny springtime Manhattan with the top down. I said no, I gotta go to work. They sped away. That night I was fired from that job. There hangs one of my Top Ten Regrets.
Cynthia and I would maintain a rich correspondence for a couple of years. She was an amazing letter writer. I would see her once more in Minneapolis, where she and her boyfriend moved. I was passing through with the Fleshtones in early ‘87. She and I had a moment. Soon after, we fell out of touch.
I think I know the city where she lives, but I’m not sure. I’ve asked folks who knew her in Athens, and no one can yet give me any solid intel on her work, her health, anything.
What’s clear is she does not want to “put herself out there.” I only knew her for a short time when we were young and just starting our lives, but even so, it doesn’t surprise me that she’s rejected all that comes with creating a digital avatar. Cynthia was unusual. That’s one of the reasons I remember her.
your memory is STUNNING! writin' too!!
These three friends now have the grace of being embraced in your personal web footprint.