Perhaps the one thing I'll most remember about 1983 is the Seminole Jr. College Lab Band's trip to El Paso, Texas. What an insane couple of days those were.
The reason for the trip was ostensibly to play at the "whatever-football-bowl-game-there-is-in-El Paso" Parade. I don't know how we got that gig because we sure didn't have much of a marching band. Granted we did take along a decent sized flag corp but there's no way that could have made up for the incompetence of the band in general. I didn't even know the music to the songs we played...I just made stuff up on the spot as we marched.
It was a fun ride down to El Paso, which is saying a lot because that's a long, long ways from Seminole. I had to leave my wife behind because she wasn't involved in any of the band stuff (I guess that's obvious). I recall buying a bottle of wine to drink during the trip. Unfortunately I had no previous experience with wine and their many varieties so I wound up buying chabli, which I can now tell you is NOT the kind of wine one gets drunk on. I maybe should have found some Boone's Farm or even a quart of Thunderbird would have been a lot better and gotten the job done. Mad Dog 20/20 (is that what it's called?). Chablis is a dry wine and to my vino-virgin tastes it was pretty awful.
I brought a "ghetto blaster" along with a lot of batteries with which I became the sole musical entertainment on the bus. I guarantee I was playing music from bands most of them had never heard of. That was my claim to fame. I was always "hip" to new and upcoming groups.
Apparently the guitarist in the band had beaten his girlfriend on the night just prior to the trip. She was the singer and also a member of the flag corps so there were a good number of people on that bus who were justifiably pissed off at him. I'm not sure how that all turned out. He seemed to appear chastised so who knows.
His name was Shawn Macelhaney (sic) and I knew him better than most because I had gone in 50/50 to rent a house with the guy. A chinsy little one bedroom place, it nevertheless served the purpose of being within a reasonable distance of the campus. We divided it in what I think I recall was an amicable manner in which he chose the actual bedroom while I put a twin bed, my meager belongings and an old "den-style" stereo into the front room area. Which was all good except that I was forced to have to walk through his bedroom to get to the bathroom or the kitchen.
I'll never forget the time him and his girlfriend were having sex, knowing full well I was in the next room and could hear everything going on. I don't why this bothered me so much but it did. I had to do something...so I took my copy of George Crumb's "Ancient Voices of Children" and put it on the stereo, playing it at a decent volume. This record was probably the strangest I'd ever heard up until that time (I had not been introduced to Peter Maxwell Davies' "Eight Songs for a Mad King" as of then). My intent was fulfilled. It freaked them out.
I was working at a convenience store at the time, Doyle's Quick Stop. It was an easy job but gave me way too many opportunities to descend into the kleptomaniacal behavior I had a real problem with. I stole so much from that store it was a real wonder no one figured me out. Not content to drink sodas from the fountain, which were free, I always drank cans and bottles. I ate microwave sandwiches for dinner practically every night I worked. On slow nights I even stepped out long enough to fill my car up with gas. I took beer by the case. But the thing I always remember about all that was all the "dirty magazines" I stole...
Doyle's sold those kinds of periodicals and he sold a lot of them. His selection was HUGE. You would not have believed it. Only at an adult bookstore could you find more. The guy who supplied them came once every two weeks at which point Doyle's wife, as well as the manager, would fill up a paper sack with all the new titles and take them home to their husbands who, one must assume, had HUGE collections of this stuff. What they didn't know is that I was taking my own sack full of porno magazines home with me. I may have been a little pickier in the titles I kiked but there were still enough that only a fool could fail to notice the shrinkage of inventory.
When I left Doyle's it had nothing at all do do with my theft. It was because I chose to play a basketball game with the college band instead of coming in to work one night. The band thing was, if memory serves, mandatory, but I could be wrong about that. I do know that I had called the management at Doyle's and told them that I had this commitment. They gave me the choice of doing the basketball game or losing a job. I've never been too smart about all this, so I opted to stay in the good graces of the band...
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