Diver Down

When I got in my car after work this evening at 6:00, I thought, "The first thing I better hear on the radio is some Van Halen."

Thank you, 98Rocks. You never disappoint.

"Oh Pretty Woman" from Diver Down.

After station identification and the intro to Golden Earring's "Twilight Zone," I switched over to Spotify and what had quickly become THE playlist of the day: This is Van Halen.

I opened the sunroof, both front seat windows and cranked it. All the way home. "Dreams," the signature song of Mena High School's Class of 1987 was kicking off as I turned onto E 17th Street and pulled into my garage.

Dreams - Original Blue Angels Video

I continued through this playlist all through preparing dinner, taking my bath, and now...it still plays.

I was well aware of Van Halen from their beginning, but I didn't own an album (cassette) until I got 1984 for Christmas in...1984...because EVERYBODY owned a copy of 1984. (I did have a copy of Thriller, and EVERYBODY had been so excited about Eddie Van Halen playing the solo on "Beat It." That was HUGE news back in 1983.) We'd all seen the video to "Jump", "Panama", and "Hot For Teacher" over and over and over...not on MTV in my hometown but "Night Tracks" on WTBS played them A LOT.

I considered 1984 the first real "hard rock" album I owned. (I would eventually graduate from Air Supply, Tina Turner, and Bryan Adams to Motley Crue and Scorpions in 1985 but that's a whole other blog.) I used the title track as an introduction to our variety show lip-sync act, and I think we used the "Ice Cream Man" solo...

Anyway, my favorite song from 1984 is this one: "I'll Wait"

My first "concert" t-shirt was Van Halen - I bought it from one of the game trailers at the Polk County Fair/Carnival in August 1985 because there was no way I could have actually won it. I think I paid seven dollars for it. It was really cheap; crappy rough fabric that completely lost its shape after I washed it once. But I kept it for years - neck and sleeves cut out and about 2 inches cut off the bottom.

I thought I was soooooo tough. For years I would go into the beauty shops with pictures of Jon Bon Jovi, but I always seemed to come out with hair like...Eddie Van Halen. I'm sure I've got pictures somewhere...

In 1986, my good buddy Christine Cooper and I went to Texxas Jam and got to SEE the first incarnation of Van "Hagar" on a REALLY hot day in July. EVERYONE had waited for the 5150 album that year and it was the third Van Halen album I owned, because of course I bought the first album. That was a great show - I remember Hagar telling the lighting crew to turn off the stage lights and then for everyone to light up their cigarette lighters. That was really, really cool...and they put on a fantastic show. So I consider myself lucky to have seen the great Edward Van Halen in all his glory, even if he was entire football field away and looked like he was only about 6 inches tall.

I wish I still had that concert T-shirt...that was the real deal. 

(I like the Hagar years - but I'm not getting into the whole Roth versus Hagar thing.)

I bought 0U812 in '88. For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge in '91. I became a real adult shortly after that and didn't have money for CDs so I missed Balance and the ill-fated Van Halen III. A dear friend of mine from college had made some cassette bootlegs of Fair Warning and Women and Children First for me, which I recently noticed I still have. That's where my other favorite Van Halen song is located:

And the Cradle Will Rock - On Bandstand, no less

The Groovetones actually made a stab at the "Oh Pretty Woman" version in our heydey...

Several early Van Halen tunes feature prominently in the Rockin' Heaven Down "soundtrack," the aforementioned "Panama," "Unchained," and "Runnin' With the Devil."

Sometime around 2012 when I was finishing my doctorate I went on a Van Halen kick and bought every CD I could from Amazon. I still don't have the last three. Looks like I need to pick those up.

The news of Eddie's passing today made me very sad. I knew he'd taken a turn for the worse and was hoping he'd pull through this one, too. Despite his shortcomings, he seemed like he was genuinely a "happy" guy who was very serious about his craft. I'm not even a guitar player, but no one played like him, before or since. I told my students today (some of whom actually knew who I was talking about) that he was the most influential and innovative guitarist in the last 40 years, following Jimi Hendrix.

There is no one carrying that torch. I think Eddie broke the final mold. EVERY guitar player from the 80s on owes him pretty much EVERYTHING.

Even the legends before him...Tony Iommi, Brian May...were paying their respects today. Musicians everywhere are heartbroken. And so am I. Gone too soon and too young. My condolences to Alex, Wolfie, Valerie, and the rest of his family and friends.

So raise your Goblet of Rock, y'all. Rest well, Edward. 

Bottoms up!!

Back At It...(Or Just Thought I Was)

I was trying to remember when I started this post, and saw a date to the right side of the screen with this date: May 7, 2019.

Yikes. That's sad, y'all. Pandemic done got me thinking a year and almost 4 months didn't just fly right by me and all. That totally bites.

But here's my problem: I came up here to my home office (where I actually did my real job for two months this year) to finish my latest "masterpiece" and just ended singing along to the "Rock Opus 2" Spotify Playlist and scrolling through Facebook, after I corrected four typos in the manuscript. Now I'm staring at that marker in the middle of a Word Documents that says "Add RAUCOUS sex scene here" and I got nothing.

You gotta be kidding me. I had a whole quarantine to finish this. What's going on up there in that brain o'mine?? I used to write scenes that would make Jude Devereaux proud. And they were ten times better than those Grey books.

Oops. Did I just write that out loud? #sorrynotsorry

Let's see what was stirring back in May 2019:

I wrote some last week. And it was awesome.

Well, the content may not be overwhelmingly awesome (to some), but it felt good. Feeling that Cersei Lannister moment: "I drink wine because it feels good. I kill people because it feels good." 

(Actually a writer can do that and not get arrested. Kill people, I mean. Isn't that nice? Her creator does it quite often. I wouldn't do all those things she talked about, though. Because some of it is really inappropriate.) And I don't have a brother. Just sayin'.

Anyway, all writers know that anxiety of the blank page. I guess I don't think of it quite like that, because I know at some point I'm going to fill it up. Maybe not right that second, but I know...one day...

I even bought a package of loose-leaf paper Saturday (NOTE: This was 2019's Free Comic Book Day/Star Wars Day/WineFest. Two of which were cancelled in 2020. Those were good times....). Pastel colors. It was only three dollars at Office Depot. I won't go into my spiel about how great office supply/stationery stores are. I think that was another blog I wrote a few years ago. Brand new notebooks or sheets of paper are like a gold mine for me. Always have been. So many possibilities. I have three notebooks in my backpack right now. (This is still true. Always true.)

Writing fiction was a challenge after I finished my dissertation, which involved four years of writing dry, pedantic, academic drivel. Well, I won't say "drivel": it was nominated for Dissertation of the Year, so it must have been pretty good. But it was hard to switch gears and write fun stuff again. I'd sit down with the previously-named "Opus 2" and think, wait a minute...none of these characters would ever use the word "efficacy." I hope I will never use it again.

I think what has affected my writing of recent days is a different kind of fear, and I started to feel it creep in as I finished a rather lengthy sequence last week: The fear of being sucked in to my fictional world and being unable to come back out. Or instilling fear into those who interrupt me while I'm there. That's probably scarier. I don't do well when others break my concentration.

At all. You've been warned. Refer to Cersei Lannister quote.

Back to 2020. Cersei Lannister is "technically" dead now. So's my creativity apparently. Damn you, 'Rona.

From the Author

As I've stated before:

Thirty-five years ago I started writing a book (1985 - I was sixteen years old). I finished it 21 years later (2006 - I was much older). Eleven years after that, I published it myself via Amazon (2018). That's a long time to accomplish something. It wasn't laziness, really, it was just....life.

I've sold 350 copies total. 324 of those were free giveaways. That was my all-time record for freebies. I even charted. On the Erotica chart. It's not even an erotica book. It has sex scenes but it's not erotica. I topped out at #32, in between "My Husband's Boss is Touching My Butt" (#31) and "Campers Swap"(#33). I'm honored, really.

*MASSIVE FACE PALM* Moving on...

Fifteen were purchased Kindle versions, 11 were paperbacks. (I sold two paperbacks in July and didn't even realize it until August.) In almost two years, I've made a whopping $125 roughly.

Woohoo!! I'm inspired to quit my day job!!

No.

I did not expect to become an international best seller, not by any means. I just wanted to put it out there. I didn't want to make gozillions of dollars; I wanted people to read it. That's why people write. Or at least, that's the main reason most writers write. They want to tell stories.

I'm really an entertainer by nature. I did the whole "rock star" thing. Been there, done that. Not quite at the superstar level I dreamed about around the same time I started writing this book, but I was a big fish in a little pond for a while and that was pretty cool. And speaking of what I dreamed about when I started writing this book, that dream was the reason I started writing the book because that was the best I could do the time, in addition to jumping around my room with a tennis racket pretending to be Nikki Sixx screaming "Shout At The Devil" at my closet door. (I didn't have a bass guitar yet so I had to make do until that Christmas.) It was something I always did: if I wanted my life to be a certain way, I'd write a story about it. I did it when I wanted to buy a horse (4th grade). I did it when I wanted to be an Olympic ice skater and a teenage model and a nurse (5th grade). In that order. When I wanted to live in a cooler town besides Mena, Arkansas. When I wanted to travel into space...live on the Western frontier like Laura Ingalls Wilder...travel to Oz...

I could go on and on with this. I have those stories, some of them even finished, in a plastic tub in the garage. I doubt I'll publish any of those - they're kinda dumb.

Anyway, I wrote the rock band story. And finished it. The reason I finished it is because I nagged my friends into reading it and they all wanted to know how it ended. I wanted to know how it ended because even then I didn't really have a clue. And to be clear: Even though a lot of what's in that book is derived from some of my own experiences in the music industry, it is NOT my real life. Not even close. That's why it's called FICTION.

It's not thought-provoking literature and I don't care. But it's not just sex, drugs, and rock and roll either. There's plenty of that in there, but it's about a lot of other things, too. A love story, of course, but there's friendship, humor, ambition, honor, brotherhood. There's also heartbreak, jealousy, addiction, mental illness, family drama, tragedy. There's a somewhat dashing hero, a beautiful heroine, a nasty villain, a goofy sidekick, and a (sort of) band of merry men: a chain-smoker, an intellectual, a dude with major blonde moments. There's a grumpy father figure who throws clipboards. And to add to the mayhem: a really cool soundtrack that you can listen to for free on Spotify. The music drives the whole story, and it's not just "hair metal."

They don't really write books like this anymore, which is a bummer, but big "family sagas" were a thing in the 70s and 80s. Not that I'm anywhere close to on par with Michener or Clavell or Colleen McCullough (you know, the ones who wrote the "mini-series" type books?), but those were long, complicated stories involving people and their ambitions and their relationships. Mine isn't "just a romance", and it certainly didn't start out that way. It ended up that way but not in the same sense something by Kathleen Woodiwiss or Jude Devereaux would write. That's why it's been hard to justify its market. No vampires, no zombies, no aliens. Definitely no 50 Shades (*another face palm*) or any of the other really weird sub-genres I've come across.

My husband told me he was sorry my book "didn't catch on." Well, I wasn't really expecting it to. I just want to be able to write "the rest of the story" because it continues to float around in my head. And it's not just about the music which influenced a lot of my life, but it's about people. 

That don't own tigers, okay? Not those kind of people.

Stay tuned, y'all....

Valentine's Day - A Bittersweet Memory

February 14, 2019 was an incredible day.

I had just turned 50 years old on the fifth. I was in Madrid, Spain on the trip of a lifetime. I'd spent the three days before zooming on the bullet train to Barcelona where I saw La Sagrada Familia and visited the Ciutat Vella and the Barri Gotic, viewed the aqueducts of Segovia and the Alcazar, toured the University of Salamanca and the walls of Avila. I spent the morning of the 14th touring the Prado and seeing the works of El Greco, Velazquez, Goya, Picasso. That night we were going to a Valentine's Day dinner at Al Mounia, a Moroccan restaurant. I'd had to remember my Spanish and was finally starting to get comfortable with it again.

However, before we got out of the taxi back at our apartment, a tiny Air BNB that overlooked the entrance to the Plaza del Sol, Don asked me what I wanted to do, and I said I needed to go straight back to the room. Once we got there, I went into the bedroom and I broke down into tears, because my best friend had died.

I had awakened at about 3 a.m. that morning, Madrid time, and just happened to check my phone, which I usually have turned off at night. I noticed a message from Lisa Henry who was also good friends with Christine and she said Christine's brother Chadd was trying to get in touch with me because Christine had become very ill and was in the hospital at Little Rock. Things weren't looking too good.

This was a shock to me. She'd posted on her Facebook page that she was battling the flu and wasn't happy about it at all. She'd also just lost her cat Rusty, who'd been with her for several years. I didn't think things had taken such a turn for the worse. If I remember right, Chadd sent me message soon after saying she was on life support and I asked him to please keep me posted. He knew I was on vacation, but he wanted me to know what was going on. He didn't want the situation to ruin our trip.

About an hour later, he messaged and said she was gone. I went numb and didn't know what to do. I didn't want to wake Don, so I just drifted in and out of sleep, thinking maybe I'd dreamed it all.

I told Don as soon as we got up and I managed to hold myself together during our lightning fast tour through the Prado. Luis, our guide from the Tapas tour we took our first night in Madrid was gracious enough to lead us through and was one of the coolest people we met there. There was a moment as I was standing in front of an El Greco (I don't remember which painting) when I almost didn't think I was going to get through it. But when that was over, and Don and I were back in the room by ourselves, that's when I lost it.

Christine was my best friend through most of high school. She moved to Mena when I was a freshman and she was a sophomore. Her family also went to our church at First United Methodist in Mena. Here we are on the trip to Washington D.C. we went on with a student group in June of 1985, sitting in a mock space capsule. I was already practicing my "I'm going to be a rock star someday" look. She just looks tired. Probably of me. We put a picture of Nikki Sixx wearing nothing but a towel on the wall of our hotel room and thought we were being so..."rebellious."

We were pretty much inseparable, listening to hair bands and watching MTV twenty-four seven, until we had a slight falling out when I was a senior and she was a freshman at Henderson. Stupid stuff, really, but things happen, and friends sometimes just take different paths. She was the reason I went to Henderson; I'd been looking at Arkansas Tech up until she'd started there. I saw her briefly right before she graduated with her bachelor's degree - I still had two more years to go.

Anyway, the years went by and social media was invented. We found each other again on Facebook and kept up quite a bit. I even introduced her via the web to another friend of mine, Lynn Milam, in Killeen because they both loved Christian Kane and the show Supernatural. Christine and I had a short visit in person up at Mena when she and her mom were in town visiting with the Rousseaus. And then she moved back to Mena to start a new job there. Yay!! She went with me and my mom to see American Made, the movie about Mena that isn't really about Mena at all, and we hung out up there several times. She came to the big Riddle Family Christmas shindig in 2017 and got to meet all the "Younglings" (my grandchildren) and some of the Groovetones (my bandmates). When she had to look for a new job, I encouraged her to apply at my college where we had several openings at the time. That didn't work out, but she did get her daycare job in Arkadelphia so she was still close by. She came and celebrated Thanksgiving with us in 2018. She brought a Marie Callender's apple pie. (She didn't really like to cook or bake! Lynn was teaching her via the web.) We watched Solo, the beginning of The Last Jedi and she was introduced to all my cats, because we always loved our kitties as much as we loved hard rock music and Star Wars. We both owned Siamese and orange tabbies at various times and were always sharing pictures of Renegade Ted, Cherish, RC, Rusty, Reno, and Felix. She came to my birthday dinner in Mena with my parents at Chicollo's. She gave me a Barnes & Noble gift card. I still haven't used it.

We made plans to do a lot of stuff together. I was making plans to go see bands that I never saw back in the day and she was going to come with me. But now she's gone, and I am heartbroken.

When I was able to pull myself back together that day in Madrid, I used Don's phone to call Chadd to find out what really happened. She'd had the flu, yes, but she had also developed pneumonia and was having trouble breathing. Some other issues arose, and they did all they could do. The family traveled from Alabama to Little Rock, and a pastor from Arkadelphia was there, so she was surrounded by those who loved her there in the end. Before all this she'd been anxious to see the pictures from the trip and had enjoyed the ones I'd posted so far. I really wish she could have seen them all.

Don and I went on that night to have a fantastic dinner at Al Mounia and were even entertained by a belly dancer. I found the djembe player rather attractive myself - and I know Christine would have also😄.

We bought a bottle of wine and raised a toast in her honor. I know she would have enjoyed the atmosphere, if not the food. I don't know if Moroccan would have been her style. That night Don posted that the sky in Madrid was a little less blue that day. The next night, our last in Madrid, we stood outside the Royal Palace at dusk and listened to the two brothers who were playing violin and guitar on the parade deck. They played "Time to Say Goodbye," and it was terribly bittersweet. It was time to say goodbye to Madrid, but it was also time to say goodbye to my friend. To feel such elation and sorrow all at once; to experience a dream vacation and such loss simultaneously.

I find it terribly ironic that Christine died on Valentine's Day. She HATED Valentine's Day. The minute the stuff went up after Christmas she'd start complaining. Christine never married and didn't have children, though she loved them greatly. She had once been engaged but that fell through; I'm not really sure why and I didn't ask. (I'd met the guy and didn't particularly like him, but it really wasn't any of my business.) But she still despised the holiday. I always told her anyone or anything could be your "valentine" - her family, her friends, her cats. In typical Christine fashion, she kinda harrumphed me, that kind of "easy for you to say!" thing. It just made me laugh. "But I'm your valentine!" I'd say, and I'd get that eyeroll.

As memorial arrangements were being made, Chadd contacted me about the service. Christine had been cremated, but they were gathering at his home around Florence, Alabama and would be holding the service at the Methodist church in Killen in March. Would I get up and speak? Absolutely.

I think it was the morning of the day we were going to leave for Alabama, because I had dropped off Renegade Ted, the 15-year-old Siamese, at the vet to be boarded. Christine was a huge fan, and she named him that after he used to go on adventures out in the woods at my rent house in DeQueen. I was coming up Texas Boulevard and Mötley Crüe's "Home Sweet Home" came on the radio. She and I were HUGE Crüe fans, much to the chagrin of our parents, and it had me reaching into the glove box for some Starbucks napkins to wipe my face. (She and I were also Starbucks fans.) I had to stop at CVS for...something...and for some odd reason was compelled to buy this $1 plastic expandable bracelet with blue beads and a rhinestone heart charm and it reminded me of her.

Don't really know why - I just bought it. I wear it to the shows I wanted her to see with me. I wore it to see Whitesnake, KISS, Heart and Joan Jett, Y & T, even the Gary Allan concert. (I don't think she understood my acceptance of country music. But having had to learn to play it, well, I developed a new appreciation for it. Traditional country, not that Hick-Hop stuff. And Gary Allan is more crossover - I think she would have enjoyed it. Especially the guitar player wearing the Ratt T-shirt. She was with me there, whether she wanted to be or not!).

It was great to see my other family at that get-together at Chadd's. I saw my other mom, Jean Ann, and Scott, and Chadd, and his beautiful family. We shared stories of Christine - her loyalty, her humor, her stubbornness, her health struggles, her no-nonsense approach to life. It wasn't hard to come up with things to talk about at the service, but it was hard to get up and really say it. I told the story of how we followed Robert Sweet, drummer of Stryper, around Six Flags for about ten minutes but we were too chicken to speak to him. That was the first metal band we were ever allowed to go see.

Though my friend has moved on to another place, I gained friends in the process. Her friends Carla and Mekey were there and introduced themselves. I remember Christine telling me about Carla when Christine first moved to Mena. She always said Carla and I were a lot alike. I saw George and Marge Rousseau there. I met her nephew and nieces who loved their aunt dearly. There were many others there who loved Christine and her family and were just as in shock as the rest of us. I got through the speech, and tried to relay the fun times, the good times, the times that were probably too good that most best friends experience in their late teens, if you know what I mean.

Christine was the first person to ever read the first novel I published. Out of a green Mead three-subject notebook with college-ruled paper. When she finally got a Kindle, she downloaded "Rockin' Heaven Down" the minute it became available. She texted me when she finished it and was the second person to review it on Amazon. When we were hanging out in Mena in the spring of 2018, she told me: "You changed some stuff!" And..."What exactly have you been DOING all these years??!!" I reminded her, "It's totally FICTION!!" We went on and on about Paul Hackman (Helix) and Tommy Lee and all the other rocker men we used to swoon over back in those days, and I told her I was working on the sequel. And she was ready to keep reading, because I'd been posting chapters in another blog I'd started. I would send her new scenes I'd written, and she always had good feedback. She was a big fan. She's even the inspiration for one of the characters. That is why the ebook is free on Kindle this week: to honor her as my first reader back when I started in 1985.

Well, I dropped the ball. I didn't have the first installment ready last year. But the first thing that popped in my head as we drove back to Arkansas after her service was "Finish your books." And "Go to your concerts". And "Learn new things." And "Take care of yourself." And "Do the things you enjoy with the people you love as often as possible, because you just never know." So that's what I'm doing, as much as I can. She would find it crazy that I'm learning to ride a motorcycle, but she wouldn't be the least bit surprised.

For the past year, I've had those moments where I think, "I need to tell Christine this," but I have to catch myself. I may not be able to say it physically, but she probably knows what I want to tell her already. I know she's somewhere talking to some of those rocker dudes that have passed before, petting a multitude of our previous pets, and never having to worry about Valentine's Day ever again. She's also most likely enjoying as much Starbucks coffee she can drink and as many Cinnabon cinnamon rolls she can eat. In fact, I picked one of those up at the Pilot in Arkadelphia today. It's not on my diet, but I'm eating it. 

I also may watch an episode of The Librarians with Christian Kane, or an entire season of Supernatural. I'll read another book in the Lillian Jackson Braun "The Cat Who" series, because she loved those. I started them last year and I'm on number four, "The Cat Who Saw Red", which I found at the Friends of the Library Bookstore the last time I worked there. I've started collecting them, like I did the Sue Grafton Alphabet series.

I'll definitely be petting my cats. I was happy to know that her cat Felix, who was a foster cat she eventually adopted, was able to find a good home. I will do all of these things, because they will always remind me of her. 

Another Valentine's Day has come and gone, so rest well, my friend, until I see you again. In the meantime, have fun hanging out with Paul and Robbin and Michael Jackson and Prince and Elvis and Carrie Fisher. I know you’re hearing an awesome show every weekend!