Who's That?

Stack 26

Well, I’m back in Weatherford, back in the routine, dogs fed, coffee made, and the little crack of possibility that trip opened up has settled back down into something easier to maintain. Not gone. Just quieter. I’ll let it sit there for now and see what it wants to do with itself.

But I promised you all we’d get back to the story, so let’s get back to the story.

Last time I left you in the wreckage. John was gone, the bars were falling apart, I’d signed something I didn’t understand and was going to be paying for it for years, and most of the people I thought were my friends had already started disappearing. I was twenty-four, and I felt about a hundred.

A few months after John died, I was at Laffs, the home base bar in that whole operation, doing what I did most nights back then, which was work. Get off work. Drink. A guy walked in wearing a wrinkled polo shirt that looked like it had just come out of a suitcase, and he had that look about him, like he’d walked straight off a football field. I turned to my friend Ed and said something like, “who’s that?”

That was it. That was the comment. I wasn’t fishing for anything. I was just noticing out loud, the way people do when hanging out with friends.

Ed had two qualities that, combined, changed the rest of my life. He knew I desperately needed cheering up, and he had absolutely no fear. Before I could stop him, he was walking straight over to this guy, and a minute later he was walking him back to our table.

His name was Mike.

Now, I want to pause here because I know I’ve mentioned a couple of different Mikes in this story already, and I promise that’s not me being lazy with names. I just know a lot of Mikes. Mike Castle was Red Red Groove. This Mike, today, is a different Mike entirely. As I write this, we’re coming up on thirty-three years together, which still catches me off guard a little when I do the math. But back then, on that night at Laffs, none of that had happened yet. He was just a guy in a wrinkled polo shirt who Ed thought I should meet.

Anyway, we talked that night, and something clicked. Not fireworks exactly. More like the acknowledgment of some kind of common bond. He’d moved back to Tulsa to take care of his mom after his dad passed away, so he understood something about grief and about putting your own life on hold to take care of someone else. I was drowning in my own version of it, still sorting through what John’s death had left behind, still technically an officer of a corporation that owed the government six figures I didn’t have. We had that death thing in common, even if the shapes of our losses were different.

We started spending late nights together, just talking. And crying, more often than either of us probably expected going in. There’s a particular kind of bond that gets built at two in the morning when you’re both tired, and you just start telling the truth. That’s what those months were. Two people who’d both had the floor pulled out from under them, sitting together in the wreckage and slowly finding out they made it more bearable.

Somewhere in there, we became a couple. It wasn’t a single defined moment I can point to. It was more like a slow tide coming in. Then, suddenly, it was like it had always been.

About a year later, his mom met someone new and decided to sell her house and get married. So, Mike needed to find somewhere to live. He’d already been helping me with bills for a while by that point, quietly picking up slack I couldn’t cover on my own, so when the house sold, moving in together wasn’t really a leap - he was already there many nights a week. He just needed to bring the rest of his stuff. It was just the next obvious step in something that had already been happening for a while.

By this point, the bar stuff had finally settled, more or less. The bankruptcy was done. The corporations were closed. I was, in every sense that mattered, at the bottom. I was working at a hotel bar, making just enough to survive and not much more than that. Red Red Groove had fizzled without ever officially calling it. I didn’t have a band. I didn’t have money. What I had was Mike, a job that kept the lights on, and a stubborn little ember of hope that I’d get back into making music eventually.

Early in 1995, a coworker from the bar was throwing a party, and I decided to go by myself. Mike had to work that night, or something along those lines, the details get fuzzy after thirty years. I almost didn’t go as the anti-social thing was starting to settle in and I was tired in the specific way you get tired when you’ve spent a couple of years just trying to keep your head above water. But I went anyway.

At that party, I met a guy named Devin, a recent transplant from Dallas by way of Sand Springs. I didn’t know it yet, but he was about to become my next bandmate. It was the start of what became Frustrated Housewives.

I’ll save the actual story of how that band came together and what became of it for a future post, because it deserves its own room to breathe. But I wanted to plant it here, at the party, in the same stretch of time I was rebuilding a life with Mike, because that’s honestly how it happened. The personal and the creative were tangled up together again, the way they always seem to be for me. One relationship steadying me enough that I had the energy to go say yes to a party. One party leading to a band I didn’t know I needed yet.

Looking back at this stretch now, I notice something I didn’t notice while I was living it. I’d keep ending up at really low points right before something good showed up. John’s death led me to rock bottom, and rock bottom is where I met Mike. The bar collapse left me broke and directionless, and directionless is exactly the state I was in when I wandered into a party that gave me a new band. I don’t think there’s some tidy universal law at work here. I think it’s simpler than that. When you’re at the bottom, you stop performing for people. You stop trying to look like you’ve got it figured out. And it turns out that’s exactly the version of yourself that the right people actually want to meet.

Anyway, I was about as far from figured out as a person can be in early 1995. Broke, grieving, technically a felon’s worth of tax debt away from panic on any given week, working nights at a hotel bar pouring drinks for businessmen who had no idea what my life actually looked like. But I had Mike. And I was about to have a band again. Sometimes that’s enough to keep walking forward, even when you can’t see more than a few feet down the road.

Next time, I’ll tell you how Frustrated Housewives actually came together, what Devin brought to it, and what that band ended up meaning to me over the years that followed. It’s a good story. I’m looking forward to telling it. Well, most of it.

More road ahead next week. Make yours a good one.

Jeff

PS: I’m curious about something. Have any of you ever met someone important in your life during a stretch when you were at your absolute lowest? Not in spite of the timing, but almost because of it? I’d love to hear how that played out for you - feel free to add in the comments section below!

Audio credits: Intro/Outro music: Intro: Emotional Rescue by The Rolling Stones, Outro: Success by Duran Duran.

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