The Drawer, Part 2: The Drawer

Dear Friends,

Lauren is a wonderful singer. I think her default mode is 'plaintive musical theatre ingenue,' but she can croon, whisper, scream, rap, and belt. She can sound sultry, earnest, soulful, operatic, or vapid, and do so in almost any accent, if that's what the song requires. Still, sometimes it's nice to let her exist in her natural element, and this month's Hard Taco song, "Impossible," is one of those times.

Okay, now back to The Drawer. To recap last month's digest, my childhood bedroom has a desk and that desk has a drawer. Until recently, that drawer was home to things I wrote, things I drew, letters from friends, and letters from more-than-friends. The earliest dated entry is from when I was twelve... a D&D adventure idea printed in dot-matrix on three continuous, fan-folded pages.

Things slowed down when I left for college, but I always fed The Drawer fresh letters and poems when I came home from my Summers as a camp counselor. By time I was 20, The Drawer had reached its resting state. It was a prehistoric mosquito that had sucked my teenage blood and would spend the next several millennia trapped in amber.

This July, I finally caved in and packed the contents of The Drawer into grocery bags to bring back to Michigan. I put photos into Bag 1, things I wrote into Bag 2, and letters written to me into Bag 3.

The sorting was easy and engaging in the way that organizing a closet can be once you get into it. Bag 1 was particularly delightful. I got a huge kick out of the wallet-sized 8th grade graduation photos of girls in my grade... The fashion choices. The innocence. The feathered edges. The name of the photography studio (Worzella!) in cursive in the bottom right of each picture. It was just wonderful.

I was expecting the same pleasant rush from Bag 2, but getting inside the head of my 17-year-old self turned out to be less comfortable. I saw patterns, hints of who I am now. I recognized threads of fond memories, but they were transfused with an unfamiliar darkness and tension. 17-year-old brain was a confusing place where minor environmental stimuli triggered intense emotions. 17-year-old brain believed it could conquer the galaxy but was paralyzed by microscopic failures.  Logic was recognized but ignored. 17-year-old brain never got sick of Pink Floyd. It was so torn between expression and repression that neither was successful.

Bag 2 had an essay to no one that literally asked, "Why me?" There was the first draft of a letter I would eventually write to break up with someone. And there were dozens of Jaberwocky-esque nonsense poems. 17-year old brain wrote words that were crisp and ominous but came together to mean absolutely nothing.  

"My spattered stools" describes this whole thing rather well, actually.  

Isn't it nice to know that our Spiny Weavers are so cozy with each other?

But Bag 2 wasn't all brooding gibberish. There was some cheerful nonsense, as well, such as this song that was probably inspired by a Life Savers slogan. 

The artist's vision is that you will sing this entire thing exactly twice.

And on to Bag 3: Letters.

When you send an email, a copy of it goes into your outbox, so you're never really giving anything away. One of the reasons I love recording music (as opposed to, say, playing music) is that I end up with a thing that I can share and keep for myself at the same time.  A hand-written letter, however, is a true gift. It is a piece of the author's creative soul, given freely without any hope of finding its way home again.

Bag 3 had a hundred of these gifts, and reading them gave the false sense that these people who I had not seen in years or decades were in my life again. I laughed a little and cringed a lot. I announced to Lauren that we would definitely still be friends with so-and-so if we lived in the same city. I admitted to myself that so-and-so might be the exception.

Perhaps the hardest thing about Bag 3 was that the one-sided nature left me feeling a little voyeuristic. These letters were theirs, not mine. I was plundering other people's DNA from amber-encrusted mosquitos without their permission. 

So I went on Facebook and announced that I cleaned out The Drawer. I tagged people whose letters I had, and volunteered to return or share them. Some of the authors were brave enough to let me post snapshots of their letters sight unseen, while others asked for copies to be shared privately. More than half of the people I tagged didn't respond at all. Maybe they just don't get on Facebook very often. Maybe they already Mari Kondo'd the memory of me from their lives, and don't need the clutter.  Or maybe they just don't want to spend another terrible second in their teenage headspace.

Somehow, we all survived our 17-year-old brains. We weren't crushed to death by self-pity or kicked off the planet for saying too many dumb things. Congratulations, us!

With warmest regards,
Zach

The Drawer. Chapter 1: The Glove

Dear Friends,

This month's Hard Taco song, "I'm Too Tired," is our attempt at a Summer camp cheer. It has shouting, patterns, imaginary words, more shouting, the names of countries, and some shouting.

In September 1993, I moved out of my childhood home in Milwaukee, leaving behind a bedroom full of era-defining bric-a-brac. My favorite Bloom County comic strip was taped to the wall next to my favorite poster of a mediocre rock album that had great cover art. On the desk, there was a stack of Taco Bell ashtrays that I lifted from the Port Washington location the day before they banned smoking at all Taco Bells.  On the shelf were three shrink-wrapped VHS copies of "An American Tail: Fievel Goes West."

Like any lukewarm-blooded teenager, my pop culture tastes were my brand, and my childhood bedroom would be forever saddled with the 1993 version of that brand while I moved on with my life in other cities.

Everything came off the walls within a few years. My parents weren't secretive or malicious about it. In fact, they gave me every opportunity to liberate my fuzzy Led Zeppelin blacklight posters, but Led Zeppelin was not part of my 1996 brand, and neither was fuzziness, so down they went. New wallpaper went up, the desk was cleared off, and now my old bedroom was a perfectly presentable guest room. But I was okay with it, because the contents of my closet and desk drawers remained safe, temporarily, from trespass.

In 2001, Lauren and I married and bought a starter house on the most delightfully-named street in Ann Arbor, Roon the Ben.  It was the moment my parents had been waiting for. The seal had been broken; I could no longer cite lack of space as justification for leaving my crap at their house.

From then on, every visit from Rick and Roberta was punctuated with another box of knick-knacks. My Transformers. My comic book collection. My Dungeons and Dragons modules. The Commodore 64 and 300 floppy disks of pirated games. Each of these articles perfectly embodied the pack-rat's paradox: too valuable to throw away and too useless to ever take out of deep storage.

One year we hosted a family Chanukah party and my parents showed up with about ten bags of beautifully wrapped presents, none of which had cards or labels.  They were up for grabs, and any kid or grandkid could open them, with the caveat that whoever unwrapped a gift had to keep it or dispose of it. I loved this idea, in theory, but when the wrapping paper starting coming off I realized that most of these 'gifts' were the remaining contents of my closet... a cylindrical Quaker Oats box full of marbles, some cassingles, and my collection of M.U.S.C.L.E. figures.

They even had the gall to regift my precious fingerless glove! That same glove had warmed my right hand (or at least my palm) throughout high school. It always made me look tough-as-shit, even when I was sad, like in this yearbook photo.

While my nephews were squabbling over the marble collection, I quickly snatched up the glove. Even with two of the knuckle spikes missing, it still made me feel pumped for all manner of hard-boiled badassery.

Balding man taking selfie in kids' bathroom is geared up for alarming amounts of fingers-out punk rowdiness. 

As pleased as I was to reclaim my forgotten battle gauntlet, I was indignant that anyone would want to relocate my worthless memorabilia. It was as if a federally-protected wildlife refuge had been rezoned for oil drilling. Pieces of my former self were being peeled away relentlessly, and it made me feel like the Giving Tree. (You know, from that book where the tree is minding its own business and some dude keeps trying to throw away its collection of Taco Bell ashtrays.)

With the closet cleared out, there was only one unspoiled sanctuary left in my childhood bedroom, a drawer in the built-in desk. This drawer had enjoyed longstanding protected status, perhaps by virtue of being filled with an unorganized jumble of personal letters, creative writings, and doodles.

Every few years, when passing through town, I would open the drawer and run my hands through the heap of letters, churning them like I was playing in a leaf pile or sifting through a mountain of gold coins. Oddly, I never had the faintest urge to read any of them. It was just comforting to know that they were there, and that the impenetrable drawer would grant them perennial asylum.

Somewhere along the way, I wrote a little acoustic song called, "The Only Serious Thing." It opens with the line, "There is a drawer of letters, poems, and plays / That somehow survived a dozen moving days." That was in 2004, and I was already sentimental about this silly old drawer.

Lauren and I were in Milwaukee a few weeks ago, and my parents confirmed the rumor that they are thinking about downsizing. Perhaps they'll get a lakeside condo. Or maybe they'll move down to a retirement community in Florida.

(Just kidding: Rick and Roberta would rather be torn apart by scarab beetles than live in Florida. It's just not their brand.)

While no move is imminent, they have become fixated on purging non-essentials. The drawer that had been invulnerable for 26 years was now in the crosshairs.

And that, dear chums, is where I will leave you for now. Next month, we will unpack this drawer together and you can help me decide what is worth keeping, and what should be tossed out with the fuzzy Led Zeppelin posters.

With warmest regards,
Zach

Silly Manfolk!

Dear Friends,

  I have enjoyed working on the Hard Taco Project these last few years, but hopefully when I'm dead I will be remembered not as a second-rate musician, but as a great playwright. I took a playwriting course once, and I think I have a decent eye for it. Actually, the course was on Modern English Literature, but part of it was about plays and I took pretty good notes that day. Here are the basics...

1. A good play should have lots of flashbacks, or at least some scenes that are out of order. A great example of this is "The Crucible," by Arthur Miller. In the first scene, you see Danforth staring fearfully at a poppet. In the next scene, there's a flashback to the previous winter when he goes into the woods and sees a creepy witch named Tituba carrying a poppet.  That explains why he is so afraid of poppets in the first scene. 

2. Realistic dialogue and good grammar are often mutually exclusive. For example, real people say things like "Um, I could eat a whole nother Clark Bar." Nobody would sympathize with a character who says, "I could eat a whole other Clark Bar" and never says "Um" or "Eh."  You almost want that character to go hungry, or at least have to share the second Clark Bar with someone.

3. Most importantly, a good drama has characters who are deeply troubled, but (and here's the tricky part) they never come out and say so directly.  The audience has to infer that the character is troubled based on his actions (and to a lesser degree, his poor grammar.) I find that drawing on painful personal memories helps me create a more vivid tapestry into which many-layered characters can be delicately woven. 

  Here is the first Act of a play that I have been workshopping on. (That's playwright-speak for "working on.")  Please let me know if you have any constructive feedback.

"IRON RATIONS" by Zach London

(ACT I: Spring of 1989. My basement. Five awkward boys are gathered around a table, but in such away that they all on the same side of the table so that they are all facing the audience. They are playing Dungeons and Dragons. Excuse me, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. They each have their own 20-sided die. The table is covered with Swiss Cake Roll wrappers. I am the only one who hasn't gone through puberty yet.)

ZACH: The gnome leads you through a passageway into a little circular area where there's a bunch more gnomes. One of them comes up to him and whispers something into his ear. Then the main gnome... the first one, turns to you guys and says, "Glarg has decided to challenge you to a rousing game of Sprottle!"

JEFF: Okay, but it better be rousing! I'm not playing if it's not rousing.

DARREN: I shoot Alex with my Crossbow plus one! 

ALEX: Cut it out, you're such a baby.

DARREN: (Imitating Alex) You're such a baby!

ETHAN: We ask the gnome what Sprottle is.

ALEX: (Face reddens) I don't have to take this! Really!

DARREN: (Giggling effeminately, waving his hands in the air) Hee, hee, hee! Cut it out! You're such a baby!

(The doorbell rings)

ZACH: He says, "You've never heard of Sprottle? Ha! Silly manfolk. You're not from around here are you?"

ETHAN: No, we are not from around here. We teleported here, I think.

ALEX: I'm serious Darren. It's not funny. Does anyone think this is funny right now? (Darren giggles louder.)

ZACH's MOM: (from offstage) Jeff, your mom is here!

JEFF: (Getting up to leave). All right. Good luck on the PSATs tomorrow, everyone.

ZACH: You, too.

ETHAN: You know what? I should probably go, too. (To Jeff) Can you give me a ride?

JEFF: Okay. 

(Fade to black)

  In the subsequent scenes, I'm going to have ZACH gradually stop hanging out with ALEX and DARREN. Unfortunately, without them, there are not enough people to play Dungeons and Dragons, and the three remaining boys have to give it up forever. Initially, this is somewhat troubling to ZACH, but he does not expressly say so in the play. 

  Towards the end, ZACH realizes that he's more likely to meet girls by trying out for a chorus part in "Grease." 

  Finally, there will be a scene that takes place at the fifty year high school reunion. The five boys are now old men, and they barely recognize each other. This scene is an automatic tear-jerker, because they were so innocent during most of the play and now they've been through so much. They share a Swiss Cake Roll, except for ETHAN, who has diabetes. They reach an agreement that Dungeons and Dragons was not, in fact, a good way to meet girls. They will be busily patting each other on the back when suddenly they will all freeze in place. A narrator will come out and say that this was the last time the five of them met, and that they all died shortly thereafter. Then the curtain will drop. 

  I spent most of August working on that, but I did manage to squeeze out a Hard Taco Song, too. It's called "That's the Way it Goes," and it will be one of the first songs in The Hard Tack Medicine Show. This song is a bit of fast-paced exposition, in which all four main characters get introduce themselves in a cursory way.

With Warmest Regards,

HT