Black Flies In The Backyard With Snowshoes

Chapter I

The Bitch Of It All In A Nutshell

2 December 2009

When the office phone rings, I’m there to grab it. Not to answer it, since answering it would involve screaming as long and as hard and as far into it as I possibly can. I just grab it. I don’t even know what I plan to do with it, but I want to feel it in my fist. I want it to feel its helplessness, as I consider its fate. I stare through it — its little warble babbling innocently that someone is demanding my time — and I don’t know why I’m giving them or this goddamn thing so much of my attention. The truth is, I’ve had it with everyone and everything.

It’s the fifth time it’s gone off since dinner, and this is after I’ve already notified everyone who has my number that evening calls are now off limits. Over the last few weeks or so, they’ve been coming out of the woodwork, and I’m tired of having to defend every sentence, every idea connected to this project. It’s getting ridiculous, and I need to reclaim my life from whatever the hell it is that I brought back with me from Manhattan. This infection that’s turned everyone I know into literary critics.

And it’s not as if anyone agrees with anyone else over why this manuscript sucks. If it’s not one person’s problem with the book’s focus, it’s the general tenor of the voice (the voice?) that’s driving someone else absolutely up a wall. But then, there are the problems that some are finding agreement over. Like too many celebratory references to irresponsible drug use, or the fact that the names haven’t been changed to protect the innocent — as if there are or have ever been any innocent people associated with this true-life account of the celebration of irresponsible drug use. Still, it’s good to see some of these pricks coming together over something. Even if it’s over a mutual disdain for what I’ve done to my buddy Al’s life story.

Hell, I can’t wait for the agent’s mark-ups. If this manuscript — this one that you’re reading — is as much of a failure as the panic suggests, then the flood of blood-red ink coming with his professional critiques will be legendary. An absolute fucking tsunami of it. That is, if those mark-ups ever come at all. It’s been almost a month since we sat across the table from that rep and shook on a partnership to put this mess on store shelves. I’m even getting shit for the fact that the guy turned into an urban legend as soon as we walked out onto the street. As if that’s my fault, too.

I look at the caller ID. Just in case. Maybe it’s some fellow loser who wants to protect my credit cards or something. It’d be nice to have someone who doesn’t hate me on the other end of the line right now. It’s Alan, and he’s 12 hours ahead of schedule. I was expecting this call to wake me up in the morning. I answer it anyway.

What the hell is this? he barks as soon as I say my hello. I thought you were just cleaning the manuscript up a little. This is a whole new version. What’re you doing?

I can tell that Alan is doing his best to be patient, but over the course of the last month or so, I’ve learned to recognize when that patience is all set to flip over on him. We’re not there yet, but we’re not far away either.

It’s just the opener, I reply. I wanted to take advantage of something that I just learned from one of those old news clippings I copied off you when I was out last week. I never knew the exact time line of that night. How it all played out when the feds finally caught up to you in New Jersey.

I got no problem with you putting something in there about the take down up front, but then you go and turn it into a ghost story. It’s like you’re losing control of the whole book right in the first goddamn chapter.

Ghost story? What ghost story? Where the hell is he getting ghost story from that chapter I’ve just sent him? Are you sure you read what I emailed you?"

Not all of it, but I read enough to know that I don’t like it. You’re supposed to be doing rewrites. Not changing the whole friggin’ story.

It’s still the same story, but now I feel like I have to explain why I’m writing the damn thing in the first place. This story isn’t just about you, y’know. Somewhere in here, I gotta explain why any of this matters to me.

You’re writing it to shove Bannister’s piece of shit book right back up his ass where it come from. At least that’s why you were writing it.

Yeah, well, packing Bannister’s ass isn’t a good enough reason for me to write a book.

To be honest, debunking Paul Bannister’s bullshit true crime memoir Deadly Deceptions — Twenty One Years Undercover Without A Badge was exactly why I’d originally agreed to write Alan’s side of the story, but no reader is ever going to accept something like that as a primary plot stresser. That’s not the kind of thing that carries a whole book. People aren’t that petty in real life. Okay, maybe in real life, but no one’s that petty in literary real life.

Kevin, I think you need to stop talking to people for a while. You’re all over the place on this book since we met with Peter. You need to wait for his mark-ups to come back. You’re getting crazy from the pressure.

But I need to change the beginning anyway, I say. He hates the first chapter. He already said he hates it. I’m just playing around with it until I get something solid to react to. Did you see how crazy that timing was between us that night? Didn’t that kind of freak you out when you read it?

Freaked out isn’t the description I’d use. To tell you the truth, it sounds like you made it up. No one’s going to believe it.

But, it’s true. All of it. Right down to the minute, according to the clippings and the police report.

The phone goes silent for few moments.

It just sounds weird, he says.

Yeah, it does. But that’s what’s so important about it. It kind of makes sense if you believe in that sort of thing.

But what if you don’t believe in that stuff? Then it sounds like it’s made up. This is a true story we have here. People aren’t going to think that part of it is true.

Alan, when the book starts getting into all the crazy shit that dropped into your lap from…who knows where…the sky, I guess, what makes you think they’ll believe any of that stuff?

They’ll believe it because it’s true. All of it.

Okay, I know it’s true, but that doesn’t mean that anyone else has to believe it. People lie in true story novels all the time. How about that Million Pieces guy on Oprah? He got caught lying.

Alan goes quiet again. That Oprah guy lied over a relatively minor amount of drug abuse in his memoir. Alan’s story has totally ridiculous amounts of drug abuse. They don’t even write fiction about the levels of drug abuse contained within Alan’s story. They know better than to think that anyone would believe it.

So that shit really happened to you while I was getting raided in New Jersey? Alan seems calmed down and ready to discuss this newest adjustment to the book.

Just like I describe it, I say. Of course, I have to tell my own made up version of what you were doing from minute to minute, but I make it clear that I’m picturing it in my head in the present. I’m not claiming to be psychic.

I like the part where I tell the broad that I’d rather get rid of her than the dog. That part’s dead on. I was so tired of her shit by then. The best part of that whole day was watching them haul her off. She was swearing and kicking them. It was worth eight years in prison just to watch someone else have to deal with her.

I look at the copy of the revision that I have before me. Are there any changes that you think I need to make?

I don’t know, he says. It just sounds too dramatic.

It’s supposed to sound like that. It’s the big drama introduction sequence. I’m trying to drag the reader into the book here. It’s gotta be compelling.

I don’t know. I’m not a writer, so maybe I just don’t know what to look for.

I take a moment to scan the piece as he makes some comments about this and that — stuff that I’m not really paying attention to. It’s the evening now and my ADD meds aren’t holding me fast to any particular train of thought anymore. The next shiny object will whisk me off. It ends up being that opening segment on the screen in front of me.

In my mind, I can see Alan’s dog, a large German Shepherd that he named after his lawyer, going crazy — barking and growling at nothing but sand and sky in every direction. All summer long, this little beach community of Ship Bottom, New Jersey has offered nothing at all to get excited about, but the dog’s been losing it most of the day, and by now, Al’s finally had enough of the damn thing.

Then again, he brought the dog along to alert him to what he wouldn’t be able to see coming. Like Federal Marshals or FBI, or ATF, DEA, or any other state or federal agency that might suddenly throw a SWAT team at him. The dog’s extremely capable and highly intelligent, and when Al got it, it was all tricked out and ready to go. A real star from the stable of a very reputable trainer. The problem is that its anxiety seems confused — its alerts lacking any sort of focus, and what the hell good is that? You can’t run away from everywhere.

I can hear Alan calling out from the bedroom of a tiny beach house rental to that rangy little blonde he’s been on the lam with since May. Hey Vivian, can you take George out for a walk or something. He’s driving me nuts.

She allows another full load of freebase cocaine to soak into her lungs before responding in a dirty blend of her native Kiwi and those bits of American mutt she’s picked up over the years. That goddamn animal almost ran off the leash on me this afternoon. He’s losing his mind. We might have to get rid of him if he doesn’t snap out of it.

Alan mutters something about getting rid of her instead, as he lights his own bowl of white rock and deep chocolate resin — the thick, sweet smoke pouring in over his palate. He’s gotten pretty fed up with that broad by the time this fourth month rolls in. Sure, she’s cute and all, but cute isn’t the same thing as agreeable. And agreeable is the key to being a good road companion — which, by all the accounts I’ve ever heard, she’s not.

Now, at this exact moment — and this is where it gets surreal for me when I think back on it — 250 miles north and east of Alan and his little runaway family, I’m onstage in a Cambridge, MA rock club called TT the Bears, and I’m in the middle of my own drama over getting my little garage-pop band’s 10 PM showcase started. Now days, TT’s is a legendary venue, but twenty years ago it wasn’t legendary. It was barely in business and its bag-of-shit sound system was making us late.

I remember being a real asshole, and using that PA system to give my sound guy, Jeff Shirley, an unfair rash of bitch heat over the delay. So, is this going to ever get together? I don’t want to be a dick, but if this drags on much longer, we’ll never get off New Band Night. I’m letting that question go out nice and loud over that system, hoping that Connie in the bar area will hear it, and not target me over the hold up.

Connie books the room, and she hates bands that try to delay opening slot start times in order to grab a song or two in front of the next band’s incoming crowd. Over the years, I’ve been plenty guilty of doing just that, but this time I’m actually trying to be good. It’s August 16th, 1989 — the 20th anniversary of Woodstock’s famous Saturday night and the 12th anniversary of Elvis’ death — and I want to honor the auspicious aspects of the night by coming across as a professional for a change. Cheating the other bands’ starts by delaying an early set assignment isn’t being professional, and even the suburb kids know that.

Besides, I’m already in an itchy mood. It’s been building all day, and as one piss-off after another insists on piling before me, I’m whipping up a real belligerence that could become a serious problem for myself and others if things don’t start working out shortly. Finally, Jeff gives us the go ahead for a full run through, and — I don’t know — for some reason, instead of counting into our usual sound-check number, I launch into a grinding, stripper version of Rock Me. Now, Rock Me isn’t a song we do. It’s blues, and we don’t play blues. Still, Rock Me is what I feel like playing, and I toss a look over to my bass and drummer that says If you don’t fall in with this easy 1,4,5 vamp I got loaded — at this exactly fucking moment — we’ll all be going home early tonight.

Meanwhile, back on the Jersey shoreline, Alan’s emerging from the bedroom and checking his watch. According to the paper, a total lunar eclipse of the full moon will be visible on the eastern seaboard. The guy’s always had this thing for full moons to begin with, and this one’s got that eclipse thing included tonight, so he’s decided that it’s time to check into it. Ten minutes ago, George finally gave in to the pressure to stop bothering everyone over those invisible concerns, and the evening has become quiet, with only a few light salt breezes clearing the small living room of smoke from time to time.

It feels like any other late summer night on the beach as Al walks outside and lights another hit from his bowl before looking up to see what’s so great about a moon that’s ducked out of sight. I refuse to believe that it’s much to look at, even though it’s supposedly pretty special. In my imagination of that moment, as with most things in nature, the big sky show immediately fails in direct comparison with the daily parade that my friend Alan’s been leading for the last seven years. But then, what would you expect? An eclipse is just the earth hiding the moon from the sun for a minute or two. It might be rare, but that doesn’t make it anything to get worked up over.

He takes in the sky, and then wanders back into the living room, where he pulls another deep hit from his packed pipe. That lung full of cocaine becomes the last he’ll ever exhale as Kevlar vests, helmets, boots, guns, cars, trucks, flood lights, and men’s voices pour from every opening the night has to offer. In my version of that moment, Alan is finally ready to call it a day, as he calmly raises his hands high and allows the entire spectacle to swallow him whole.

For George’s part in all of this, the dog did all that could be expected of it. It perceived the threat and alerted its master, but in the end, all that breeding and training provided no weight in the balance. The SWATs had been prepping all day long from every point on the compass. You can’t run away from everywhere.

Now, at the same moment that the night is erupting on that Jersey beach, I’m back at TT’s, ripping my sound-check to shreds in a visceral release that’s emptying the other rooms of the club into the showcase area due to sheer curiosity. TT’s doesn’t book blues, and yet, here’s a big violent blues blasting from the stage. I don’t even notice the influx as I blow my entire soul right through my hands and into the guitar — pulling howls, blistering flurries and full-throated bursts of feedback agony from my amplifier. The whole of it is slamming the vocal mics, resulting in an enormous reverberated spaciousness that this crappy little space has never actually been capable of.

For over five minutes I drag that room high across the raggedest peaks and deep into the darkest pits, until I’ve run my demons through every hell that they each need so desperately. Then, suddenly, I kill it all in mid progression, unplug, and walk off to the green room to finish my drink and to tune up. I’ve never known until now, but by that specific moment, Alan’s big excitement is over, and he’s finally safe and secure in the back of a cruiser. In Cambridge, the folks I just left have been stunned into silence. I can’t remember the set we played that night, but I do remember that, later, at the bar, Jeff asked me, Where the hell did you learn to play lead guitar like that?

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, I never heard you play like that before."

"That’s how I play, " I said.

"You’ve never played like that around here. Not that I’ve ever seen."

"My bands don’t play blues, I said. I haven’t played blues since I left West Albany Street."

"What’s West Albany Street?"

I looked up from my drink. It’s a band I was in back in New York. The W. Albany St. Blues Band. I played blues before I came out to Boston.

Jeff looked down at his own drink and tapped the glass lightly. You should play blues again.

The next evening, I learned that Alan had being taken down by a small army of government soldiers in an assault that didn’t have to go as well as it did. But it wasn’t until recently that I learned that these two events occurred simultaneously, and played out over the exact same small stretch of time. Of course, in my private mind I now connect our two experiences that night, and why not? The W. Albany St. Blues Band was Alan’s band — his heart and soul — and on August 16, 1989, it was still the only blues band I’d ever played in. When I left that band and moved from upstate NY to Boston, I left those blues behind, and until that night, I’d never looked back. I hadn’t even bothered with lead guitar — not to any extent anyway — until that night.

That moment, as I unloaded through that quintessential open jam blues standard during our sound check, I felt as if I was tearing apart something that had been building up all day long. An anxiety that I couldn’t define. All I knew was that I needed to attack — to just fight and clear whatever it was that was wrong, from the world around me. Recently, I’ve started to see that night from the perspective that while Alan was being inhaled by the Justice Dept., I was swinging at phantoms with what I had at hand, and — from what I’ve verified with the official timeline of events on the Jersey shoreline that August night — when I was finally satisfied that I’d done what had been so goddamn necessary for me to do, my friend was safe and unharmed in the backseat of a squad car. Maybe a couple bruises here and there, but still very much alive and no worse for wear. It’d been the best possible outcome considering what had been gathering in force against him all day.

I don’t know. To me, as I look back over all of this, the symmetry of that night means something, even if I have no idea what the hell that something is. I know it’s over-dramatic and all, but it feels like I was reacting in some way or other, fighting the worst outcome in the only way I could. Sending some lightning blues down to my pal when he really needed something to balance the moment out a little in his favor. Not to spring Alan from that trap, but maybe just to hold someone’s hand back in the middle of it all, and keep him from making an agitated impulse decision that we’d all regret. Maybe just to send enough violence from that stage to purge it from the moment elsewhere. Just to drain everyone’s nerves a little for a minute or two.

I do know that after that show, I shut down my rock career, and went back to being a fireball blues guitarist again. Making that big noise and drawing all that attention suddenly seemed like the right, most natural thing to do, and from then on, it’s always seemed like the right thing to do. I never really thought about it until recently, but I guess that once again, Big Al had shifted my life without even realizing it.

Alan pulls me back from my computer screen with a question that he must’ve already asked several times, if his inflections are any indication.

I said, is this the only part of the book you’ve been screwing with?

I have to think about it. I’ve been screwing with all of it, but most of what I’ve done is inconsequential. Most of it, Alan wouldn’t even notice.

I moved some stuff around, I say. We’re having this problem with tension and release, so I got a book about fixing it. It’s been pretty helpful.

We’re not going to know what the hell’s going on by the time that guy gets back to us. Jeez, I should’ve just yanked the book from you as soon as they set the meeting up. I don’t know what I was thinking.

Alan is being way too jazzed over this, and I’m pretty surprised at the reaction. He’s in for fifty percent of the take, but specific revenue streams have never been much of a concern for him — not that I’ve ever been aware of, anyway. In fact, even when the stakes were ramped to the ceiling — as in life, limb and liberty — Alan’s always been as casual as you could ever ask of anyone. I used to think that the only reason he lived on cocaine back in the old days was that it made up for his natural inability to experience rational levels of stress.

Hell, I remember that summer he was hiding out from the feds after walking off on smuggling charges in May, and even I got a phone call from him one night. I mean, he and I were friends, but in those years, we weren’t close friends. We were more like circumstantial-proximity pals back then. Any calls he would’ve made to me would have been bored calls. The kind of calls you make when nothing’s on TV and one else is home to answer the phone.

That one call I got from him seemed to suggest that he’d gotten tired of his life on the lam and was almost hoping someone would finally get around to finding him. He was having a technical issue, and while it was good to hear from him, I honestly had no idea why he’d turned to me for advice.

Hey Kevin, he began, blowing right past the small talk with his first words to me from the void of fugitivedom, I can’t get the reverb to work on this PA board. What am I doing wrong?

Alan, is that you?

Of course it’s me. Who else would be calling you about hooking up a reverb unit at 2 o’clock in the morning?

He had me there. Anyone else who might call with a PA configuration problem would’ve probably waited until after breakfast. Not that I would’ve gotten a call from anyone concerning a PA issue. At the time, I didn’t even own such a system, and certainly wasn’t considered knowledgeable on the subject.

Aren’t you…? I was afraid to actually say the word wanted, for fear of tipping off anyone who might be listening in, that Big Al Cancelino was reaching out to me from the shadows. I wasn’t worried about myself, but I didn’t want to be the reason he was brought down in a blizzard of federal gunfire. I already felt bad enough about the fact that he’d gone into hiding before I could pay him back whatever it was that I probably still owed him in cash and/or favors. But disclosure of his whereabouts didn’t seem to be a priority concern at the moment. Not for him anyway.

I’m in New Jersey! Christ, I need some help with this stupid thing. I know I have it hooked up right, but when I turn up the knob, I don’t hear it.

Suddenly I heard his voice booming in the background as he tested the microphone over and over again. Wherever Alan was in New Jersey, at that moment he was the loudest person for miles in every direction. He spent the next minute or so clanging away on his digital piano — also cranked to a surprising level — as I did my best to understand what was happening. I was on the North Shore of Massachusetts, just up from Boston, and if Al was in New Jersey, then we were both in the same time zone. That meant that he was blasting his voice and piano over a PA system, in some motel in New Jersey, at 2 AM, on a week night.

See what I mean? he said, exchanging the mic for the phone. No echo. No reverb. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.

I don’t remember what I said after that. I’m sure it was a scatter of useless crap that didn’t help, but what the hell could I do for him? I wasn’t there to physically verify the connections, to inspect the cabling, to figure out the signal flow, or to make sense out of the fact that Alan was sending 130+ decibels of reckless exposure into the small hours of the morning while actively on the run from four agencies of the federal government. The PA-reverb unit issue notwithstanding, at that moment, the only connection that I was concerned about was Alan’s connection with the specifics of his situation.

Eventually, he changed the topic. Hey, you gotta come down here to jam some weekend. Coupie’s been down already. We could record it. I have all that studio stuff with me.

Yeah, that sounds good, I lied, while allowing the conversation flow to proceed without specifics. The whole experience had taken on an other-worldly quality by that point, and besides, I didn’t think it prudent to ask for directions to wherever it was that he’d holed up. Like I said, my imagination had already put a panel truck across the street from the triple-decker I was living in. One of those spy trucks they have, with sonic ears, wire tapping thingies, and plenty of headsets to go around for the guys that’d been waiting there all summer for Alan to finally get around to calling me. We hung up without firming up anything, and the next thing I heard about him was that he’d begun his new career as an inmate.

I could’ve been distressed when I heard that he’d been apprehended, but knowing of his sudden plan to buy a boat and escape everything by sailing it with that nutty girlfriend to her place in New Zealand, I was sort of relieved that someone had shut that idea down before it ever got off the ground. Even life in prison offers the possibility for parole. Being food for however many fish — large and small — it takes to recycle your elements into the ecosystem of the South Pacific, is forever. I liked Alan a lot. As bad as jail would be for him, I was glad to know that I’d have a shot at talking with him again someday.

So, now it’s twenty years later, and we’re working on a book about those years. You’d think that reminiscing wouldn’t be as stressful for him as having lived through it all, but this book’s got him pretty edgy. I don’t know. I guess we all eventually find something that we care enough about to lose our cool over. To be fair, this project’s been a lot of fun for me, even if the last few weeks have been rough. I think that it’s the possibility that we might just pull a really large rabbit out of our asses with this book that has him pacing the floor and all these other idiots lobbying for — I don’t even know what they’re lobbying for. I don’t know that they know either. Maybe they just need to squeeze for the home team, and they don’t have any rally charms to play with as they sit in the bleachers and suffer.

Me, I’m so used to stumbling in the home stretch that there’s nothing that can intimidate me. Not even this verdict that I have to rework the entire book if I want it to have a chance to ever be published. In fact, that glitch might be the only part of this project that I can totally relate to.

It’s true. This entire effort has been much too easy, and the doors have opened way too fast for me to trust anything that’s on the other side of each threshold. But then I try to remind myself that everything that Alan has ever touched has reacted like this, so I shouldn’t get suspicious. I’ve watched it happen for him time and time again over the years, and after recently learning some of the details that I missed back in the old days, I’m more convinced than ever that God buried an IC chip in his skull that forces shit to work out for him in ways that just don’t make any sense at all. I even gave him half of the book’s profits, just so that it would have any shot at all of getting published. Seriously.

I’ll admit that I took this book on knowing that it’d be fun and that it might even make money if Alan was involved in it, but the main reason I wanted to help him tell his story, is because it’s a great story, and the world needs great stories. I also remember what I saw and what I lived through during those years I played in his band, and most of it was too unrealistic to be acceptable fiction. Al’s name might’ve showed up in print when Paul Bannister got some 3rd stringer to publish his tiny bullshit take on how the feds took him down, but the real story of the man needs to be finally written as well. I still remember how, as each madness tripped over the heels of the last one, I’d hear one of us whipping along for the ride say, Christ, someone’s gotta write a book about this shit. Well, here’s my book about that shit, along with Alan’s own first person account of his side of the story as I write it and I rewrite it and then I rewrite it again.

I want to