My beloved brother sent me this one. He plays the electric bass as well as this fellow plays the guitar. I… make end tables better than this guy. At least I hope I do.
I used to meet guys like this out in gin-joints every once in a while. If you were in Nashville, or Los Angeles, or New York, or Boston because Berklee College of Music is there, they’d be playing for short money in crummy nightspots. Wedding bands. Things like that. Danny Gatton in front of the dartboard reminded me of ten guys right off. Every once in a while I’d be playing in some pick-up band cobbled together at the last minute for some execrable function, and some guy would just start blazing away like that. You’d sheepishly wonder what the hell he was doing playing with you.
Then some drunk would walk up to you in the middle of whatever song you were playing, and demand that you stop, and play: “Green Grass and High Tides Forever,” or maybe “Radar Love,” because that was his wedding song, and you knew exactly what you were all doing in there: Making a living.
[Updated: Reader and commenter Bissage points out that Danny Gatton committed suicide a decade ago. A damn shame. Who knows what’s in another man’s heart?]
When he was young, his father would take him. His father never taught him anything. No use in talking to a man unless you were his jailer. Father showed him. It’s all a man can do.
His father was long done with the business of this world. He’d got all that was his due, and surrendered without a fight. He didn’t owe the world anything, and the world had given him all it had to offer a contemplative man. Now it was his turn.
The other fellows took it as an opportunity for cameraderie, and drinking and laughing and so forth. Civilization is for that. He wanted the wilderness.
As soon as the brambles gave up their passive fight, and he got in where the sun couldn’t beat its way past the canopy of the trees, he could stand for a long minute and change himself. Back, back, back.
The animals do not trouble themselves about the future. It’s all now with them. They feel pain and fear, but don’t ever expect them. He must put himself in that place. He has to do that alone.
He’s seen them like no other sees them; warm and dead in his arms. He sees the ticks dug in their hides, and the abscesses and scars of the world dragged along their flanks without caring. He sees the world reflected in their dull eyes. It’s a harsh world, maybe; but it never troubled such as they, who lived right in it — right to the end.
Who’s Justin Gotta, you ask? Why he’s your consultant for house design, decorating, work, home, play, finances, politics, childrearing…
Let me explain.
I’ve discovered a rule of thumb that has carried me through my life without disappointment for many years. I came to these two realizations, this two pronged observation, observing customers’ as well as employees’ behavior. I realized only later that it applied to almost any stripe of life as well. Here it is:
Part 1: When the customer uses the word “just” in a sentence, you’re going to hear something dumb.
Example: “Why don’t you just build the second floor first, we have the lumber for that, and slip the first floor under it later? Why can’t we just do that?”
Or: “Why can’t we just make the house two thousand square feet bigger for no money?
Part2: When an employee uses the words “I gotta” in a sentence, it’s going to be followed by something stupid, or a lie, or a toxic admixture of mendacity and foolishness.
Example: “I can’t work today because I gotta…”
I’m not going to bother finishing that sentence, because it doesn’t matter what follows; it’ll be really dumb, or a fib, likely both, I assure you.
On one hand, I’ve had employees come to me and ask me if they could please leave work fifteen minutes early on Friday afternoon, because they had to go to chemotherapy. They scheduled their treatments on Fridays in the afternoon so they could recover in time for Monday.
People like that never use the words “I gotta.”
The “I gotta” is a sort of a vestigal verbal tail, left over from the teen years, used for trying to weasel out of your obligations or get treatment you don’t deserve by appealing to a deus ex machina, an overriding imaginary obligation that makes further discussion or disputation impossible:
“But I said I gotta have Wednesday off! Didn’t you hear me? I gotta! It’s not like I have a choice in the matter, I gotta pick up my brother and go to the casino and get loaded and then I gotta get another day off in a couple weeks to go to court for missing my child support payments that I blew at the racetrack on the way home from the casino and the barroom.”
“I just gotta.”
Keeping a watchful eye out for those two terms has served me in good stead lo these many years. And I always give as good as I get, so I’m careful to beware of them lest they appear in my own sentences.
Customers, beware the just and gottas on your own end, as well. Like an accusing index finger, the just and gottas generally have a malefactor on both ends of them.
If you hear: “We were going to work at your house this week but we gotta…”
Oh no. We gotta. The “we gotta” is an especially virulent form of the virus, and has been known to wipe out entire work weeks. Beware.
“Can’t you just pay us in advance? Because we gotta…”
This is the equivalent of the plague sweeping a medieval town. If you spot the dreaded we gotta, in the same sentence, or egads, the same prepositional phrase as can’t you just?, abandon all hope. There is nothing left for you but prayer.
I began to notice that the rule applied to everything in life, not just work. It’s as close to the Golden Rule as I’ve ever gotten, and I’m no philosopher. Think about it.
It’s charming to remember a time when that jug-eared martian from Texas, Ross Perot, was a legitimate presidential candidate, and whose whole party platform consisted of saying “Why can’t we just…?” about everything. Why can’t we just tell those Palestinians and Jews to knock it off? Why can’t we just raise the gas tax fifty cents? Why can’t we just run the federal government out of a Motel 6 in Austin?
And so forth. It’s a testament to the attraction of the “just” and “gotta” that he got as far as he did, and likewise a testament to the good sense of the electorate that finally realized he just a cross between your boss saying: “Why can’t you just work on Christmas eve for free?” and your plumber telling you he couldn’t come for two days because “I gotta wax my boat”
And so dear reader, remember, when someone says: Why don’t you “Just do it?” tell them you don’t “just” become a two hundred and seventy pound mass of muscle who runs as fast as a sprinter by buying shoes. When you hear: “Why don’t we just get five gay men to decorate our shabby apartment on television, or: “I gotta talk to the president again and dictate American foreign policy from a ditch by the side of the road, why can’t we just ..,” caution is called for.
Of course I was occasionally drunk in them, that’s true; but not all that often. I worked in them, mostly. It’s a different animal, working in bars. People imagine that show business is the same, only better, if you’re on a stage. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Anyway, you had to find a way to pass the time in a bar, without getting loaded, if you were working in there but idle for a time. I learned to play darts. I got pretty good at it. It never hurt that I was six-two with long arms; to the short fellows I appeared to just be leaning over and inserting them in the bulls-eye. I was so very much built to do it that the tip of my nose is exactly the height of the bulls-eye from the floor. When I worked constructing nightclubs, we used to hang dartboards using me for a ruler. Darts were a fun way to pass the time.
My son found my darts, in a little velcro pouch, and was fascinated by them. They have the appearance of weapons to a grade schooler, which they always find compelling. Dad, what do you do with these?
It’s been 15 years since I played at all. I used to like to play a game called Cricket, which has lots of strategery possibilities because you can rack up penalty points that your opponent has to overcome. Any game that allows you to simply win, or crush your opponent to taste, is the game for me. There’s almost always hope in such a game, as there is always a way to change tactics to suit the situation.
The real players don’t play that, they play 501. In 501, you have to simply throw the darts into the little slivers of the board marked with the numbers 1 through 20, with the thin outer ring counting double, the thin ring toward the center triple, and the bulls-eye rings counting 25 or 50 for the very center. You subtract the total of your throws from 501. To finish, you have to end on a double; so for instance, you could subtract the sum of your throws down to 40, then hit the double 20 at the very top of the board to win. It seems counterintuitive to most onlookers, but the center bullseye is worth less than a triple 20. In 501 you essentially ignore it.
I was good at this game, but I found it boring. It’s the reason you see a list of arithmetic posted next to dart boards, outlining various combinations of throws that will lead to an “out” based on your remaining score. It’s too much like work.
My son wanted to see what playing darts was like. YouTube to the rescue. Here’s a World Championship in 1974. Look at the size of the crowd.
Well before my time, of course. But I tell you, with God as my witness, I would have murdered either one of these guys. I was shocked at how bad they were, even taking into account their rather old-school darts. How could they be competing at such a level?
Like many things, as soon as there’s enough interest — and some money– that which is casual becomes very, very serious. And so, thirty years later, look at how good you have to be to win:
You know, I’d love to just snicker behind the back of people like this. Riding in a limousine, reading a crummy script he’s considering to make a few hundred lousy grand that’ll keep him in cigars, booze, and hookers for another month or two –or at least until his beluga caviar and suet diet makes him pop like a zit– but I can’t. That’s a luxury, like most luxuries, that I can’t afford. I can’t because I’m the sort of guy that these old grandmothers want to trap in amber, or plunge back into poverty, because they’re desperate to avoid “overchoice” in our lives. And by “our lives” he means “your lives,” of course, not his. Remember, being a big deal is a zero-sum game.
But what if you buy the wrong stuff? What if you spend your money on braces for your ugly kids or renting a jet-ski for your two-week vacation, instead of plane fare to Davos or a PAC contribution? You boors. You untermenschen. You proles. Get back on the tram to your concrete dovecote and wait for the crummy teleplay I’m reading in the first scene of this bedwetting fearfest to to come on your black and white TV and ennoble your miserable existence.
Look, you cutting edge monomaniac scaremongers: it doesn’t make a dime’s bit of difference to me that you’re the obverse of a crabby old senile grandma now: Take off your sweater, dear, because I’m hot! I’m pushing fifty and I’ve heard your apocalyptic paralytic mewling half a dozen times, already, no matter what flavor you’re peddling — this cataclysm is too cold… this millenarian vision is too hot… this bovine flatulence threat to the arctic circle is just right! –and I’m sick to death of all of them. And I’m sick to death of you, and your mouthbreathing messianic messengers, too.
Listen, all you Throckmorton Arnold Devonshire-Smythe IVs: please join the country club like decent people used to and complain about the little people through clenched teeth. Wear pants with whales on them, just like everybody that flies on a private jet should, and leave the people with more spine than trust fund to navigate the foaming seas of “over-choice.” We promise not to let the real world intrude on yours, and we’ll keep those greens looking sharp, if you’ll just shut the hell up.
Month: September 2007
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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