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memnonofarcadia · 3 years

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Remembering Joey Bruno

Originally published in the Sacramento Jazz & Blues Quarterly Bedtime is sometime around dawn. Dinner is usually whatever you want it to be. Shall we go to Iceland? Festivals, fliers, wristbands, Sharpies on skin, smoke, grass, hash, molasses, sky, blue, crisp, clear sky. And yet I’m still writing all this within a grey airport terminal, locked into some kind of strange Druid-esque ritual with pen and paper. Deadline is tomorrow, where were you when you were supposed to be working? Don’t have any answers for now, just that I need to write and get it out to my boss within the next day. Or two. It wouldn’t have been the first deadline blown. But think, distract myself with the McDonald’s coffee and keep putting down adjectives and phrases from places I’ve been, things I’d seen, dreams I’d never have again with people I’ve never met and music I had. 40 minutes till boarding starts, I’ll be last, of course. It pays enough to fly but not enough to enjoy it. Been getting harder and harder to deal with the travel, at any rate. Starting to notice the spell everyone is under, the sleepwalking nature of the corporate employee. It had only been noticeable after it had been broken, which I had no problem doing, ever. When your home is a hotel you take your shots however you can get them, besides it wasn’t like you have to live in any particular town past a few days at most. Half-heartedly started keeping a list of rejections and their professions, making sure to note that there was only one waitress on the list, most were from bookstores or places where there was an escape for all parties. Don’t need to make it more awkward than it has to be. Sorry, I didn’t mean, then the words fade off into the ocean. On the edge of nowhere, like a little seaside town. Maybe that’s where I’d like to end up, like a lifeguard in the post-apocalypse, no responsibilities, just looking cool for the seagulls. How many life guards had I asked out? Not many, either way. Concerts didn’t go well with water, not in my experience. Can’t seem to find a way to write about anything other than something on the present times, life and times. I struggle, already flipped through the notebooks to jog the memory with some tit and tat that had to be discarded for the sake of length from another article. Or two. Or four. Or 12. Throwing yourself to the wolves, towards and into the meat grinder that one might just pay the bills with the right amount of ink in the right places on a blank piece of paper. Who cares about music festivals and pop culture when there’s McDonald’s coffee and the cold inside of an airplane to look forward to? Four times I’d attempted to ask about an airline attendant’s relationship status, thrice I’d been rejected. Once she’d pretended not to hear me and instead moved to the opposite end of the plane for the remainder or the flight. Understandable, no harm done. No harm done. By anyone, right? Who said this was ever going to be a love story, you and I?

College had been a breeze, not that I’m bragging. State schools were like that, at least then, and Californ-I-A’s were no different. No doubt now there’s better options available for where I was at when I had to decide where to go to school, but there you are. A degree in journalism is a degree in journalism, and I had little else to go on other than my love of music, substances, travel, female company, and a shocking talent at being able to string together sentences. In a way it’s always given me a bit of a guilty feeling. I never sat down and really worked at learning or improving with regards to writing, I just sort of could do it. That’s the short version of how I found my niche of a career, one I thought I could exploit anyway. Turns out I was right, and in a way it was everything I could (and did!) hope for. Except everybody’s got to grow up sometimes, and I did, regrettably. There’s only so many hungover mornings a human being can take before they’re permanently reduced to a shambling, sickly mess of what used to be a humanoid organism, and I had certainly put myself on that path. Got off of it, thanks to the countless AA meetings I made myself go to, but I digress. That had been the first mark on the wall of things that I could no longer enjoy about the gig, the fact that now I had to do the whole thing sober. The hardest substance I have confidence I can enjoy responsibly now is coffee, and even then the ugly demon of acid reflux put me back in my place before too long. Suddenly all the kids were much more annoying than usual, the travel a hassle, the food revolting, and the music itself just kind of bad, which was the real heartbreaker. Some days before it had been all to keep me going, minus the women, which were always a constant. “Festival sluts” is the term you’ll want to Google (or DuckDuckGo) if you’re curious about what I mean, also colloquially known as upper middle class girls whose parents were too busy working to devote anything past a friendly “hullo�� to their children, and thus succeeded in raising a bunch of hedonistic, attention-desperate, and morally naïve young people with excess income and too much time to spend it all in. Nasty ain’t it? But it kept me coming back for more, like the good-natured animal that I am. We all are. That’s the secret that I learned more than anything from the beat, we are all more simple and pleasure driven than we could ever articulate or realize. It’s what keeps the lights on at home, for everything and anything. Probably. Or maybe I’m just bitter. Most of the friends I made during college or were colleagues in my escapades writing about indie rock et al. around the globe are gone now. Burnt out, some burnt up, most just couldn’t hack it anymore and left to go get real jobs at real newspapers. The circus, or pirate ship, as is probably more accurate a nomer, is not for everyone, and rarely does it last forever. Bet you’re wondering where that leaves me. Still bitter, but still coming back for more, just like I was always going to. Always. So why don’t I quit? You tell me. Because I know why.

The finest writer I ever met was a journalist by the name of Joey Bruno, a guy I came across one of the many late nights I spent at the pathetic office of my college’s newspaper. I was editing a freshman’s piece about how the White Album was actually really bad, sighing uncontrollably the whole time, when Mr. Bruno walked in and struck up a conversation with yours truly. I happily engaged, as any activity that didn’t involve that stupid piece of writing was fine by me. He explained that he was friends with the real Editor , who was at his parents’ in Wisconsin for the weekend, and would drop by periodically when he got off work to help out where he could. “Why spend your time working on bad writing by dumb college kids?” I’d asked him. “Free beer, plus it can be fun sometimes. There’s been plenty of stuff come through here that I rewrote beyond all recognition just for fun, and nine times out of ten the original author doesn’t even notice. Good times.” Maybe so, I’d thought. In any case every other Friday or thereabouts I’d get a late night revising buddy to help cull the newspaper’s intimidating stack of submissions. It was in those early morning hours that I came to the conclusion that I wanted to become a music journalist, mostly from talking to Mr. Bruno about his own adventures. But I don’t think I listened, not really. Maybe if I had I’d be off this conveyor belt by now, but then again maybe not. Maybe I’d never have started. One night in particular while we were enjoying our cigarettes, coffee, and beer (all courtesy of the newspaper of course), he retailed me with a story of his long lost love, a girl he’d known briefly in the California punk scene of the late 80s. I was instantly entranced. “It was a magical time,” he’d said to me while stroking his magnificent beard. “But I’m glad it’s over now. It was getting messy there at the end,” I brought up how those little parts of the world, at that time were being romanticized an awful lot in contemporary media then. “And for good reason, too.” He’d responded wistfully. “A lot of great things happened for a lot of good people. It was about as close to the 60s as anyone came since then, I think. That much hope,” And this is where he began to tell his story, the story of “the rebel known as ‘Justine,’” as he’d put it. However it had happened, the two had come into contact through the various zines they’d each produced and sent out to the other punks in town. The closest thing to an internet forum for back then was to just be louder than everyone else, apparently. That was the only real way to get heard, to start a dialogue of some kind. That or take your chances at the shows, which they did anyway, but there wasn’t much talking going on there. Joey had written to Justine complimenting her on “Pop!,” which was her way of pushing her radical politics and militant-feminist views out on to the unsuspecting public behind the thin-façade of a bubblegum periodical. The art had been good, and the writing made everyone Joe showed it to laugh out loud, so he made a point to let the author know, whoever they were. There was an address included in the back for people to write in, so he did just that. He also included a copy of his own creation, the somewhat popular (in those circles anyway) “Buzz ‘n’ Stuff.” “What was it about?” I asked as my friend rolled himself another cigarette. “Nothing really, I just sort of made stuff about interesting things I found at the library then slapped it together in that. It seemed to work. I remember the one I sent her had something about how to get popped bubblegum out of your hair without cutting it all off, so I think that’s what got her interested. There wasn’t anything of value or substance in there, let’s be real,” Joey took another swig of his beer and reached into the cooler below his desk for another, being sure to throw me one too like a sport. “Thanks, boss. But continue, you got me interested now,” So he did. It had started slowly, really, with the trading of zines and letters, the occasional patch or pin by mail too. Eventually after a lengthy correspondence they made a plan to meet up at a concert, The Vandals to be precise. Joey had taken painstaking measures to show up in the most hip clothing of the day, studded leather jacket, combat boots, the whole nine yards. “I looked like a freak,” he told me with a chuckle. “But then I saw her,” Justine had arrived looking like everything and nothing Joey had expected her to. She had the familiar punk gear, Doc Martins and an army jacket covered in patches and safety pins, but the rest of what she had on departed from the norm drastically. It had been some bizarre cross between a punk, hippy, and cult leader all in one, macabre golden jewelry offsetting the “meat is murder” t shirt underneath. “It was great,” said Joey. “People were afraid of her at that show. She looked really scary,” They hit it off and had a jolly old time watching The Vandals play, and later they found themselves alone on a hill overlooking the suburbs, talking about the issues and passing a joint back and forth. It was all music to my ears, as it would be for most any young person, I suspect. “Tell me more,” I’d implored. These were fantasies that I needed fulfilled. Joey paused and rocked back and forth in his chair contently for a few seconds before he complied. My heart sank before he spoke. “We were inseparable after that first time. It really was something. We could go anywhere, do anything, and we would always end up on the same page somehow. It was easily the deepest spiritual, emotional, whatever you want to call it connection I’ve ever had with another human being, let alone girlfriend. But then a year or two later her Mom moved her and her brother up to Connecticut to be closer to the rest of their family. Last I heard she went to school in Maine, but that was it as far as we were concerned. Finito,” He smiled through all this as though recalling some rosy-cheeked memory but I was aghast. “What do you mean that’s it? You didn’t try to follow her or anything?” Joey just laughed. “Yeah, that was really an option at 17 without a car or money. It was just something that happened when we were kids, nothing really. I’m glad it happened at all, now.” Well then. What do you make of that? The conversation drifted pretty heavily after that point, as it always did when Joey and I got to jabbering and drinking, and as usual it was stories of the times he’d been on tour years later with Ozzy Osbourne or The Stooges or someone, then got to interview them endlessly and write about it. The usual vices were there as well in his stories, the drugs, the travel, the women, the glamor, the romance. But it all left pretty quickly once the novelty wore off, hence why Joey had quit after a few years and moved back home to Sacramento. When I knew him at the college newspaper he was a jazz correspondent, if you can wrap your head around that, for several of the snootier publications in the area. “I skipped to the fun part,” he told me. “The shows never get old, now. Plus jazz cats have the best shit,” he said with a wink. I probably just laughed, I don’t know, maybe downed the rest of my beer. I’ll be bound to have another once I get on the plane, off to Finland this time. Apparently it’s festival season in Scandinavia and its surrounding territories. Guess I’ll be writing about that all then though, from a different airport terminal that looks just like this one, with coffee and food and cigarettes and beer that shortens the life as much as the ones that came before. I could go on, but I won’t, for both our sake. There’s no moral to be gleaned from all this just a simple explanation of the reality, and how I’m passing the time in the airport by writing this, because I said I would. I promised. It’s my group now, and I have to go.

#fiction #short story #romanticism #gonzo #melancholy #bittersweet #literature #writing #wattpad

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