On Saturday, I hung out in Keene, NH, for the first time in a few years. The occasion was the annual WKNHers & Friends Summer Get Together, at which folks who worked for Keene State's radio station in the '80s and '90s, and those of us, like me, who consorted with them, ate, drank, were merry and passed around vials of Geritol.
All hopped up on too much of Jack Kerouac's 1957 novel, On the Road, in which he details numerous road trips he took with his crazy buddy Neal Cassady in the late '40s, and Neal's wife Carolyn Cassady's Off the Road, in which she writes about the trials and tribulations of her marriage, as well as her intimate relationship with Kerouac, I was anxious to make the two-hour drive to hang out with my buddies Pete and Ken from The Toastmen, as well as other good folks from college (and many who I didn't meet until after I graduated). I made an iPod playlist a few weeks in advance; that shows you how excited I was for a little overnight getaway.
The drive up went pretty quickly, with Janis Joplin's "Half Moon" kicking off my playlist:
As I approached Keene, the skies gradually darkened and the winds picked up very quickly. I called Pete on his cell phone and we discovered that we'd both hit town (he came from Portsmouth) at the same time. He was buying a guitar at Retro Music, so I told him to meet me at Cobblestone Ale House, which I just happened to be driving by as we spoke.
After one pint, I checked my voice mail and saw that Ken had called. I listened to his message and was bummed when he started out saying, "I've got bad news, I'm not gonna be able to make it to the party." Well, that's a bummer, I thought, and kind of lame.
"Because a tree fell on my house," was the next part of the message. Pete and I huffed it over to Ken's place as quickly as we could and couldn't believe our eyes.
We hung out with Ken and his wife and daughter for a while, marveling at the damage to the roof and the kitchen. While we were there, a tree removal crew and a contractor arrived to survey the damage and talk about getting the tree off the roof, putting tarps in place and making a plan for repair.
There was nothing Pete and I could do, so we went to the store, bought some beer, ice and steaks and headed to the party, which just happened to be right around the corner from Ken's house.
The party was a bit smaller than ones I'd been to in the past, but I had a really god time hanging out with my friends Mike and Lenore Smith; the hostess, Cindy, and her husband Bret; Mike and Nicole Caulfield; a guy named Jimmy who I hadn't seen in probably 25 years; and a few other folks.
(Nicole and her husband Mike, Pete, Bret and Cindy)
(Mike and Lenore Smith flank Jimmy Bensinger)
We listened to Mike C's '80s playlist, which included everything from Mission of Burma, The Smiths and New Order to Husker Du, Dinosaur and the Butthole Surfers. Great stuff!
I had planned to stay the night at Ken's, but obviously that plan got scuttled the instant a lightning bolt scorched the tree in his backyard and dropped it onto his lovely little ranch house.
Bret and Cindy offered to let me sleep at their house, but I decided I'd rather wake up in my own bed. So just before midnight, I tanked up the ol' Mazda 5 and hit the highway.
One of the tunes that got me home was fIREHOSE's brilliant cover of Blue Oyster Cult's "The Red and the Black":
I felt like Neal Cassady as I bombed through small towns in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, little traffic on the road, windows wide open and tunes blaring, except I wasn't "digging jazz" or making my way to Mexico or blabbering away to my fellow passengers. Otherwise, exactly the same.
I got home around 2:00, putting a bit of a scare into Beth, who wasn't expecting me until about noon. I didn't get enough sleep, but I was, as predicted, happy to wake up in my own bed.
