beautiful, funny, sad & true

For the last couple of years that I lived in Yakima, mountain biking became my Thing. Yakima itself may be a dump, but it’s close to lots of beautiful mountainsandtrailsandskiingandhikingandbikingplaces. So there you go.

In order to get my strength and stamina up for our weekend jaunts to the mountains, I started riding my bike to my job at LocalComputerStore, which was about four miles each way. My favorite way to ride home was the dirt road along the railroad tracks that went through the older, historic parts of town.

Oh yeah. In order for this story to be funny, you need to know that back then I used to have my hair pretty long, in a mullet. Yes, a mullet. I usually kept it in a ponytail, though. That’s gotta count for something, right?

So picture this. I was riding along the tracks, with my ponytail and my helmet and my T-shirt and my long shorts. These two guys in a battered white Ford pickup came up behind me and honked, and PassengerSideGuy rolled the window down to yell, “Hey, nice tight ass!”

As they slowed down and pulled up alongside me, I looked over and laughed, which is when PassengerSide saw my five o’ clock shadow and glasses. He turned to DriverGuy and said, “Oh, dude. . .it’s a GUY. GO GO GO GO!” and he did that rolling motion with his index finger as he said “go go go” that made me laugh so hard I just about fell off my bike.

I was also glad, in that moment, that I wasn’t a girl riding by herself out in the middle of nowhere, because things would have likely been very different. Then again, if I was a girl who looked like I did at the time, I would have been a very scary-looking girl indeed. Hairiest legs in the world, for one thing. Scraggliest hair and biggest glasses, for another.

Sorry I’ve been so absent from blogging this week. I’ve had rehearsals almost every night, and I had a gig somewhere in there too. I should have a little more time this weekend for writing about more ‘real’ stuff than this. But in the meantime, I hope you enjoyed this story.

My brother sent this to me the other day, and I just about fell out of my chair laughing.

I did some nosing around to find out that this is a serious ad, brought to you by the Washington Wine Commission. They have the same type of ad running in lots of the wine-producing towns throughout the state (Woodinville, Prosser, etc.). Which is fine. Heck yeah, let’s promote the region as the great up-and-coming wine producer that it is.

But Yakima? The envy of France?

Words fail me.

If you’ve ever been to Yakima, Washington, you may or may not know about Ron’s Drive-In at 16th and. . .uhh. . .Lincoln.

My family moved to Yakima in 1971 from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Suffice it to say that I still wonder why we ever moved. If I’d had any say, I would have happily chosen to stay in Cambridge, rather than a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, but whatever. It’s all water under the proverbial bridge, and I have a really good life now, in Portland, so it all works out.

I know, I know. All my Yakima stories start that way. And this post started out as a witty, insightful memoir! Le Sigh.

So anyway, Ron’s Drive-In. They were famous for chocolate and vanilla swirl ice-cream cones, so one hot summer day while my brother and I were driving around, and we stopped at the traffic light in front of Ron’s, we looked up to read their rotating sign. It said,

“HAVE YOU HAD YOUR 1 AND 1 TODAY?”

Then there was a space, and two 2’s almost underneath the 1’s. We sat at the light, confused, reading aloud, trying to work out what it said.

“Have you had your. . .one and one, two and two. . .one-two and one-two. . .one-over-two, one-over-tw–ohhh. Half and half!” I wish I could excuse our ignorance by telling you that we were too young to know any better, but in all honesty I can’t. I was in high school and my brother was in junior high.

Boy, did we feel intelligent that day.

In case you didn’t know, I grew up in Yakima, Washington. It’s a very isolated town in the middle of Washington. People who live there may tell you that “well, it’s a good place to raise kids” or whatever, but I was a kid growing up there, and I feel like it was a difficult place, particularly compared to the city in which I was born.

It’s long been one of the drug hubs of the entire nation, and that’s especially astounding when you consider that fact per capita. I used to have a little Honda CRX when I lived there, and I’d always leave the doors unlocked, because otherwise the windows would get smashed out by drug addicts looking for things to steal. It used to get rummaged through almost every single night. In fact, I was thrilled on the rare occasions when I’d go outside in the morning and NOT find the glove compartment open, the seats pushed forward, the carpet pulled up, the little storage hatch open, and the hatchback popped open. Very often, I’d find that all of those things had been done. Seriously; Yakima’s a shit-hole (and I don’t normally throw terms like that around, either), and I hated living there.

A friend of mine saw this a couple of days ago, in McSweeney’s, and e-mailed it to me. I had to laugh. I wasn’t at all surprised to learn that Yakima is now the meth capital of Central Washington. It’s been called “Crackima” for ages, since the 80’s, when crack was the Thing to Do. Even the mayor’s son got busted for using and selling it, back in the day.

Can I just say how much life has improved since I moved to Portland? It really feels like I’ve lived two entirely separate lives, even though Portland is (I’ve HEARD) the meth capital of the whole Pacific Northwest. I will always appreciate where I am now, and how much I enjoy life now, because I spent so many years wondering why life was even worth living.

Books saved my life; “The Little Prince” came along just when I needed it. Movies saved my life; “My Dinner With Andre” and “Mindwalk” came along just when I needed them. My piano saved my life. My guitar saved my life.

Glad to be outta there, Yakima. Good riddance.

When I was in high school and early college, my friends and I had a band called Iron Horse.

Blaine used to make these hilarious tapes, where he’d sing and play guitar and make up songs on the spot, and bring them to school for me and a handful of other people to listen to. I can’t begin to describe them, but there were studio ones, mock radio shows, “live” shows (where he’d use his Casio keyboard to sample crowd noise, then he’d set up his amp and PA and everything on the back patio and sing to the hillsides behind his house). . .yes, some of those tapes still exist.

Long story short, I thought the tapes were great, and wanted to play guitar with him on some of them. Of course, this changed the sound dramatically, so we started writing “real” songs, instead of improvising. We would use a four-track tape recorder, a drum machine, and a keyboard to make some surprisingly decent recordings, and work out our ideas.

After collaborating for a while, we thought that the natural next step would be to start a band. Russ was a neighborhood friend of Blaine’s who had a really high singing voice, and he also was learning to play bass. So he was in. Eric played drums amazingly well, and after just one ‘audition’, on everything we could think of (including a tongue-in-cheek rendition of “Bark At The Moon” by Ozzy Osbourne), he was in. Tony was a friend of Blaine and Russ’s from the church they went to. He’d done lots of singing and acting, he had a really strong voice, and he could also play rhythm guitar, so he was in.

We had to come up with a name, at which point we had a problem because the tapes that Blaine and I had been making, under the name “Iron Horse”, were starting to get a little bit of attention from The Kids. So since we couldn’t come up with anything better, we decided to go with that name, even though we knew it was kinda cheesy.

Once the band was formed, we set out rehearsing and playing shows, like bands do. Incidentally, the first time I saw the movie “Donnie Darko”, I cracked up to myself. You know how its chapters are different days in October 1988? Every time one of those came on the screen, I’d think, “Hey, that’s when Iron Horse played this one show. . .!” or whatever. Hilarious.
Anyway. . .we made a good go of it for about a year and a half as a full band. If you count all those early tapes, then it was probably more like two and a half, or maybe even three years. Our lives pulled us in different directions and locations, as often happens, but we all look back fondly on that time.

We’ve gotten together a couple of times over the years, and we even filmed one of those reunion “performances”–it was really a one-off rehearsal, but we sounded better than ever, after not even playing together for six years!–and put it on television, where it ran regularly for a few months after that.

So why am I telling you all this now?

Because at some point recently, I realized that 2007 is the twentieth anniversary of the formation of Iron Horse. Blaine and I were e-mailing each other, and I mentioned that to him, and we thought it would be fun to do all new recordings of those songs. You know. . .in all that free time that we have. Since Blaine and I are both semi-professional producers and recording engineers these days, we’ll be able to make it sound really great, and have a blast doing it. The working title of the project so far is Iron Horse – XX.

Yes, I KNOW you want to hear something, or see something, or both. I don’t have a way to transfer video tapes to my computer—at least not without a lot of hassle and expense–but I do have a box full of old cassettes and CD’s floating around, and a book or two full of pictures, so I’ll find some good stuff and post it soon so you too can capture the magic of the “rock and roll juggernaut.” No. . .the magic of “Central Washington’s rockin’ machine.”

Yes, that’s it; THAT’S what we were. Or so we keep telling ourselves, even after twenty years.