Saturday, November 20, 2010
Charlie Tang's Drum Duel
“I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.” Sir Marcus Aurelius Antonious Twain
Hello and bonjour. I know a guy named Dongo. He’s actually a close and personal friend of mine, and he tells some truly amazing stories. In my opinion, Dongo is the most interesting man walking the face of the earth. Admittedly, I only know a handful of people walking the face of the earth, so, yes, I guess chances are that there may be a whole gaggle of people way more interesting than Dongo, but hell, I can’t talk about people I don’t know personally, can I? Dongo knows a Moroccan man who has been working in the tanneries of Fès adding colour to cured animal skins. And check this out: Dongo once shared a train seat with bassist John Deacon, who is perhaps the least interesting member of Queen, but still, it’s kind of cool. To me, my pal Dongo is more interesting than John Deacon and the old man who works in the tannery because, although life in Morocco sounds interesting, as does laying down the bass line for Dragon Attack, Dongo is my only direct point of reference to each scene. So, hell yeah, Dongo is an interesting dude; dare I say way more interesting than the Facebook kid, and certainly one hundred times more interesting than Bono Dingus. But what makes Dongo so extraordinarily interesting? It’s the fact that he is so extraordinarily ordinary. He’s just an ordinary cat who falls ass-backwards into the most bizarre situations.
Dongo’s a good natured guy; one of the very few people that I know who remarkably still believes in the innate goodness of people, continues to have faith in the political process at all levels, and is always ready to give someone the benefit of the doubt. Like The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also known as the 9-11 Commission). Dongo is a model citizen (which actually makes him a little dull come to think of it).
“A duel?” I asked.
“Yeah, man.”
“And you couldn’t just walk away?”
“What? From a duel? No, Kevin. There are times when you have got to take a stand.”
“Damn, I wish I could be more like you.”
“How do you mean?” He looked at me, his head tilted about 45 degrees off his right shoulder. He can dislocate his shoulder whenever he wishes, which I find both interesting and kind of disgusting.
“I’m so apathetic it should actually be outlawed,” I answered picking at a tiny scab on one of my knuckles.
“You should think about changing your attitude,” he said.
“I would, but I seriously don’t give a shit,” I said.
“Damn, you are apathetic,” he said.
“Don’t judge me you bastard!” I huffed and puffed with righteous indignation.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re absolutely right and I apologize. I should not have called you apathetic.”
“Well, I am apathetic, but still man, that’s a shitty thing to call someone. It’s a damn good thing I don’t care,” I yawned. We sat in the living room beside the aquarium with the hermit crabs. Just two old pals with the crabs.
“Okay, Dongo, so what’s the deal with the duel?”
“It really came out of nowhere,” he said flipping through an early draft of my manuscript about Gods, bogs, dogs, Q Rays, X Rays and chewy-chewy gamma rays. He read a few words absently, shook his head and tossed it back on the coffee table. Dongo, due to his hyperactivity, is unable to read anything that contains more than 50 words; personal circumstances I find interesting. “I was at the grocery store buying a pumpkin.”
“For Halloween?”
(WARNING: PRODUCT PLACEMENT #1) “No, I just like pumpkins, and they only seem to come once a year. So, I’m in line with this wicked pumpkin. It must have been like fifty pounds, and it’s the only thing I have. I feel like Atlas trying to hold this thing. Then this guy jumps the line, and he’s got a cart full of stuff, which I can appreciate totally. I mean, sure we have to eat and there was an awesome special on Campbell’s soups. All kinds. Tomato, mushroom, cream of cauliflower, chicken noodle, low-sodium chicken noodle…”
(WARNING: PRODUCT PLACEMENT #2) “I get the picture. Campbell’s makes many fine products.”
“So, he jumps the line. I mean, I have to step back so he doesn’t run over my foot. I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he didn’t see me holding my delicious gourd. I would have left it at that. But he looked at me and says – he buddy, wanna step back a bit. I made a casual observation on him jumping line, and that’s when he says that he heard around town that I was going around saying that I was the best drummer in Mattawa.”
“You are an awesome drummer.”
“Thanks man. I appreciate that. But who can claim to be the best at anything? You know how much I love jazz, and be-bop jazz drumming is way different than standard 4-4 rock drumming. Apples and oranges.”
“And pumpkins,” I add.
He laughed. “Anyway, this guy just keeps pushing it. He tells me he’s a drummer over and over and challenges me right there to a drum duel. Say’s he has two kits at his house and that I should come over at dawn and we’ll drum it out to the death.” Dongo bites into an apple.
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| Banjo Boy before the riots. |
“A drum duel? Man, I’ve heard of dueling pistols, dueling guitars, and banjos, but to be challenged to a drum duel while buying a pumpkin is the damndest thing I’ve ever heard. So, how did it go?”
“Well,” he laughed. “I went over at dawn, like he said. I knock and nothing. I knock again. Nothing. Then I turn to leave, realizing how ridiculous this whole thing is, but, like I said, when you’re challenged to a duel, you really have no choice. So, I’m just about to get in the car when the door opens and he’s standing there in his underwear and his hair’s a mess and everything. He was obviously sleeping like most people do at dawn. He calls me in and says that the duel was supposed to be for next week. But, I never mess up details, like when to show up for a duel, and he definitely said tomorrow morning at dawn. Not next week at dawn. “
“Plus,” I added, “Who the hell would schedule a duel for a week later? It’s kind of a hasty thing, right? It doesn’t take a whole lot of time to plan, like a class reunion or a wedding where everyone has to fly to the Dominican and the best man has a criminal record for smuggling drugs.”
“Exactly!” he snaps. “So anyway, he tries to call it off, but I tell him I can’t make it because I’ll be in Deep River. So, he scratches his ass, puts on coffee, and we go down into the basement where he has all these posters of Guns and Roses and RATT. Oh and Jethro Tull. But there’s only one drum kit and it looks pretty old. A real shit kit. I ask him where the other one is, and he says that he lied about having two kits and that he didn’t think I’d actually show up.”
(WARNING: PRODUCT PLACEMENT #3) “He clearly didn’t think this duel business out,” I said flipping through the satellite menu. A biography on Colonel Sanders was coming up. That should be interesting, I noted.
“Obviously. He says that he’d been challenging people to drum duels for years, and that I was the first guy who ever actually took him up on in, but I wasn’t there to show him up. The only reason I went is that I believe in the sanctity of the duel, regardless of the form.”
“So, okay, what happens?”
“Well,” Dongo sighs. “It gets kind of sad. He says that he’ll go first and then I can get behind the kit then he’ll get his wife, who is upstairs still sleeping, to come down and she’ll declare the winner.”
“Wouldn’t she be a little biased?”
“That’s what I said. But no. He tells me she would be impartial, and gets a little angry over suggesting that his wife would be anything but one hundred percent objective. So, I figure, sure why not. He has all these weights and stuff with a bench press, so I sit with my coffee and he sits behind the drums and starts banging away like an animal. Just crazy. No beat. No rhythm that I could figure out. And no sooner than that, I hear this stomping upstairs. BOOM. BOOM.BOOM. And down comes his wife in a crazy yellow bathrobe. She starts yelling at him and looks at me like I’m some type of agitator – some type of agent provocateur. Well, that was that. I left them yelling at each other and split. The sun was barely up and the duel was done before it even really got started. Then a few days later I’m at the post office and Adam Gurks comes up to me with this grin and says that he heard that I got my assed served to me on a platter by Charlie Tangs.
“Who the hell is Charlie Tangs?”
“I guess that was the guy that won the drum duel.”
True story. Amen and holy shit.
Your father’s in the back yard burying the gravy under a full-on double rainbow
Oh, why hello. I didn’t see you there but I must say that it is certainly nice to see you. How do you find yourself? Well? Are things okay? Yes? Family? How is Stuart doing now that he’s on his own? Yeah? Well, that’s just terrific. No, I mean it, that’s really swell. Now, if you don’t mind, please indulge me for a moment while I heap some misdirected abuse. You see my dear reader I just feel the urgent need to clear the air before you decide to bail on this column and pretend that everything’s cool; that everything is swell; that everything is as good as it gets. You see, I had a birthday a few days ago. Yes, that’s right. You forgot. I know. How do I know you forgot? Because I waited by the phone. I waited in the dark in my big fat faux leather ‘waiting-by-the-phone’ chair that I bought at the Brick six years ago and still have yet to begin paying for. This is precisely how I know that you didn’t call with your well-wishes. No, hang on, let me finish. I will actually go one further and suggest that not only did you not call, but that you didn’t even try to call. There. I said it. Pow! Blam! I bet you didn’t see that coming did you? No. You didn’t. I guess you were all too busy googling and carrying on with all that new-age stuff. No, wait, I know, maybe you were all too busy watching the leaves change? Hum? Eh? Chasing full-on double rainbows and unicorn dreams, yeah? Never mind. You can put all your sorrys in a sack and bury it out behind the barn or way back in the pet cemetery. Yikes. Sorry. I seem to have turned into a grumpy old bastard, which I must admit does hold within it certain perks. Now I can park on sidewalks and scream at punks on skateboards. I can pretend I’m deaf when it suits me and may be eligible for one of those fancy walk-in tubs with the little doors and jets and such. Soon I will receive some type of pension that pays pennies for every dollar funneled into it over the years, trusting the Canadian Government to take real good care of everything.
I turned 42 on this the day of my birth which is still celebrated in many countries. It is a national holiday in Chile, where they really know how to throw a birthday party. Sadly, this year my birth was overshadowed by those glory-hogging rock star miners. Sure, it was a good news story and all, but you would think they could have just stayed in that crypt for another few weeks or something.
Refer back to the Farmer’s Almanac for 1968 and you will find that the day of my birth was a glorious one indeed. It was smack dab in the middle of a King’s Harvest. I was born with a serpent in each fist, smoking a big-shot cigar and cursing while distant fires glowed in the smoky autumn night, and so forth and so on. He who is not busy being born is a busy dying. So, there have been 42 King harvests that have come and gone, and let’s just say that since my birth there has been some cool shit that has gone down which I can’t help but take full credit for.
Before I was born it was not unheard of for some quack doctor to drive into your town with a little black bag containing a hammer and a spike, and then proceed to give quickie trans-orbital lobotomies. Dr. Walter Freedman pegged mental illness to overactive emotions and was thusly easily cured by cutting away the capacity to feel any emotions, which was apparently a win-win scene that everyone could dig. Dig? Freeman performed over 2,500 ‘ice pick’ lobotomies all over them there United States of America before his death in 1972, which was four years after the year of my birth. Ice, ice, baby! Hum. So, I like to think that my birth somehow had something to do with the halting of this barbaric sideshow practice.
Let’s see, what else? Oh, since my birth, there were a handful of advances made in space exploration. Then there was the whole thing about most people having their teeth fixed by dentists instead of making their own out of lead. I would suggest strongly that this is a good thing and deserves at least a cheap card from Mac’s? No? Well, there has to be other stuff as well. I think I may have eradicated demonic possessions somehow, or at the very least, reduced the instances significantly, but only on the Western Hemisphere and north of the watershed, whatever the hell that means. Since my birth someone invented shrink wrap. Enough said. Oh, and time travel is now something people have begun to take seriously, thanks to Michael J Fox.
YOU ARE NOT EVICTING TIME
This year (being 2010 AD) I thought I was turning 43, which is incidentally the second time in my 42 years on planet earth that I overshot my age by a balls-out 365 days. This is the second occasion for on which I have successfully manipulated time. My own Event Horizon. Now, that is some quantum shit right there friends. The first time was when I turned 39 fully thinking that I was turning 40. Stephen Hawking is a punk wannabe! Wormholes my ass! On that birthday, as with this one that just passed, my wife waited to tell me the difference a full 24 hours after the blessed day. Anyway, you all should really wish me a happy birthday or something. That's what normal people do. I read this somewhere in a book written by a doctor who drives from town to town with a black bag containing a hammer and an ice pick. So, bake me a cake. Send me a card. Buy me some type of garment. I'm not picky. Just make sure it's expensive, elegant and impractical.
Let’s use the word SEGUE to jump into a totally
unrelated anecdote. If there’s time maybe I’ll get around to something about books or maybe not.
SEGUE
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| The Waltons moments before the riots. Notice how happy everyone is. Grandpa always said there was no way to delay that trouble comin' everyday. Then again, he was always paranoid when liquored up. |
Thanksgiving on Waltons Mountain was always a special time for the Waltons down on Waltons Mountain and so forth and so on. Don’t believe me? Watch the reruns on Vision TV. This year for thanksgiving my dad buried the turkey gravy. The gravy now rests about three feet under ground way down the beaten path in the heart of the pet cemetery. Why did he bury the turkey gravy? Was it some type of strange Mattawa tradition like hiding the egg on Christmas morning in Leutonia? Or did my father bury the turkey gravy in an open act of social defiance or spite? Perhaps he has gone completely demented? He does have those crazy eyebrows that grow up like horns. But, no. It’s simple. He buried the turkey gravy because my mother asked him to get rid of the excess grease and goo left from the fully cooked turkey. Follow? My dad buried the turkey gravy which was in a pot thinking it was the pot containing the turkey grease and such. See? But, why then go to the extraordinary effort of actually breaking ground? Easy; because of the bears that congregates in a somewhat menacing fashion. They smoke cigarettes, roll dice, talk about subversive things while whistling at all the chicks, and eat garbage. My dad buried the turkey gravy, thinking it was turkey drippings, in a hole dug in the backyard as to not attract bears.
“Mom, where’s the gravy?”
“Your father buried it in the back yard.”
“Oh, okay. Where’s the cranberry sauce?
Tied up in the basement?”
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