Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Miles Davis and Me

When I moved to Hong Kong in my mid-twenties, I had the good fortune to work with a guy named Jim Shaw who was the editor of the magazine where I was the marketing manager. Jim was about 30 years my senior and had lived all over southeast Asia as a correspondent for the Stars & Stripes newspaper, a publication for U.S. military personnel which has been in print since the Civil War.


Jim was a raconteur and quick with a quip. He didn't hand out compliments easily nor suffer fools gladly. He had a limitless supply of stories, and he'd laugh at your jokes if they were funny. He was the kinda guy you wished was your uncle.

Jim and I got to be friends, and on several occasions I had the pleasure of being invited to his home where we'd sit in the living room with our shoes off under the slowly revolving ceiling fan which was painted with zebra stripes and listen to hours of jazz on Jim's reel-to-reel tape deck. His wife, Kaoru, would bring us bottle after bottle of beer, while Jim regaled me with stories of life in Japan and Vietnam.

When he heard that Miles Davis was coming to town, along with Herbie Hancock, you'd have thought they had announced an encore performance of the Last Supper with the original cast. Jim insisted I buy a ticket to see one of the all time jazz greats, and because the legendary trumpeter was a notorious heroin addict, there was a good chance this might be my last chance to see him perform. The concert was great...and Jim, who had seen Miles play before, remarked that he had been uncharacteristically generous...facing the audience instead of performing with his back to them!

After the show was over, I was standing on the sidewalk in front of the concert venue, when I noticed a subterranean garage door opening, and a long, sleek, shiny stretch limo pulling up the steep driveway. I don't know what possessed me, but I held up my hand, motioning for the car to stop. When it did, the rear passenger window silently rolled down, and there, in the pitch black interior of the limo was the expressionless, ebony mask of Miles Davis, a guy even the Devil himself would be scared of.


What does one say to Miles Davis? I think what came out of my mouth was something completely inane like "Great show, Miles! Thanks for coming!" 

Without changing expression, or saying a word, he held up the palm of his hand...whether in silent benediction or as a gesture for me to shut the hell up, I'll never know for certain...then rolled up the window and disappeared into the night.

Monday, April 27, 2009

Grand Theft Auto


Rodney and I were itching for a joy ride. We were 18 years old, high school was almost over and our bodies were twitching with testosterone.

There were just two problems: neither of us owned a car, and the driving age was 21. We lived in Hong Kong, and our parents were Southern Baptist missionaries. The cars they drove were owned by the mission, and we were strictly forbidden to drive them.

Our caper was as well-planned as The Great Train Robbery. We scoped out the cars of every missionary who lived in our neighborhood, and discovered that the preacher's car was the only one with an automatic transmission. We at least had the good sense to steal a car we could drive without stalling.

I nabbed my mom's purse, removed the keys to the mission office, then rode my bike to a lock smith nearby and had them copied. I replaced the originals on my mom's key ring before she noticed they were missing, then set up a time to meet Rodney to begin phase two of our plan.


This involved going to the mission office at night, letting ourselves in through the main gate without being noticed by the night watchman or any of the missionaries who lived there, then getting into the office itself. Once inside, we made our way to the glass case which housed a duplicate set of keys to every car owned by the mission, labeled with a little white tag bearing the license plate number.

Using a flash light, we scanned the rows of keys until we found the one we were after, then I pried the locked sliding glass door open with my finger tips just wide enough for Rodney to slip a bent coat hanger through the narrow gap and fish out the keys we needed.

We were in the middle of this precarious operation when the night watchman came by on his rounds. We had to drop the key and stand as close as possible to the wall, so that when he shined his flashlight through the window he wouldn't see us. Our hearts pounded as the beam swept the floor a few inches from our feet....if we got caught we'd have a hard time explaining what were doing in the mission office after hours with a bent coat hanger sticking out of the case where the car keys were kept.

Once we were sure we had been undetected, we fished the keys out, took them to be copied, then replaced the keys, all in the same night.

With uncharacteristic patience, we waited a few weeks to make sure that no one had seen us coming and going and reported this to our parents, and then I asked my folks if Rodney could spend the night. About 3 a.m., we snuck out of the house, walked the half a mile or so to where the preacher's car was parked on the street, and began our adventure....Rodney drove first.

After cruising around for a half hour or so, we decided to go through a tunnel which would take us out of the city and into the New Territories...the part of Hong Kong which joins Kowloon, where we lived, to mainland China, and where there were fewer traffic lights and less likelihood of encountering any cops.

Or so we thought.


By this point, I was behind the wheel, and no sooner did we emerge from the tunnel than we spotted a police road block ahead, looking for illegal immigrants sneaking across the border from China. I instinctively hit the brakes and slowed down, which of course attracted the attention of the police, who motioned for us to pull over.

As I pulled onto the shoulder, I glanced around and noticed that there were several green- uniformed members of the Royal Hong Kong Police, but no police car! I floored the accelerator...spraying gravel all over the cops who were chasing us on foot and easily out-running them in their futile attempt to catch us.

We took the long way home, circumnavigating the mountain range we had just driven through, knowing that by now they had used their radio to issue an all points bulletin for our arrest. We got back to our starting point a couple of hours later, the fuel gauge dangerously close to empty, parked the car and high-tailed it back to my house, slipping in the back door without waking anyone.

A couple of weeks later, Rodney's family was invited to lunch at the preacher's house after church. Rodney was a couple of bites into his mashed potatoes when the preacher announced that every time he left the house, he got pulled over by the police, who told him that his car had been spotted running a police road block at 3:30 a.m, driven by two Caucasian males.

Rodney just about choked on his food, but held his breath waiting for the other shoe to drop. Was the preacher about to reveal the identity of the 2 culprits? As it turns out he was as mystified as everyone else in the room...and Rodney managed to swallow his food without asphyxiating.

It's been 30+ years since our escapade,the preacher has long since crossed over the River Jordan, and the two car thieves are still at large. Here's a photo of Rodney and me taken last year when he flew in from Florida to buy a used garbage truck, but that's a story for another time.

Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot...


When I was a senior at Hong Kong International School, I had a huge crush on a girl named Paula.

We were in Expository Writing Class together, where Mrs. Chern had us arrange our desks in a big circle. I always tried to sit across from Paula, where I could gaze at her long legs, her tight-fitting school uniform, her full lips and her long hair that I desperately wanted to walk through bare-footed.

Paula had more curves than a 17 year old girl ought to have, and her boyfriend, who was as handsome as she was gorgeous, was over six feet tall and the captain of the rugby team. Needless to say, I was no competition for this good-looking, athletic, über-cool cat.

I graduated and moved back to the States for college. The summer after my freshman year, I returned to Hong Kong for a visit, and to my surprise and delight, Paula was also visiting, without her pesky boyfriend, and I managed to wrangle a date with her.

I took her to an expensive restaurant at the top of Victoria Peak, overlooking Hong Kong harbor, and spent way too much money on Chateaubriand for two, Caesar salad for two, and some kind of expensive dessert, all ordered by Paula. In my effort to accommodate her expensive tastes, I played along, and didn't say a thing when she hardly touched her food.

After dinner, having set the stage for a romantic ending to the evening, I led her up to the balcony overlooking one of the most spectacular skylines on the planet...and she chose that moment to let me know that she had a boyfriend back home.

Crestfallen, and feeling like I had been taken for a ride, I made some lame attempt at continuing the conversation, but the wind had been knocked out of my sails...so I walked her to a cab, and never heard from her again.

Until facebook.


Having been contacted by many of my former high school classmates, I thought I'd give it a try. I did manage to find a woman with the same name as the Paula I knew, but her picture was one from childhood, so I couldn't be certain it was her. My curiousity got the better of me and I sent her a message asking if she was the Paula who attended HKIS in the late 70's and if so, to please contact me.

Weeks went by with no response, until today when I received this message:

"Yes, I went to HKIS until the middle of my junior year (1977), when I came back stateside. Sorry for asking this, but were you in my same grade? I should pull out my yearook, blame it on age!"

I guess I won't be sending her a "friend request" after all.

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

James Taylor, Duct Tape and Helicopter Rides


Last night I saw James Taylor in concert for the 8th time. The first time was July 4th, 1976. The last time was in Rome, Italy. He's my all time favorite musician...his songs never fail to move me, despite having listened to them thousands of times over the last 40 years.  

And seeing him live always reminds me that despite doing two stints in a psychiatric hospital, and years of struggling with heroin addiction, he seems to have found some peace, and has brought so much pleasure to so many people for so many years.


The summer between my sophomore and junior years of college, I worked as a roustabout on an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. This was in spite of the fact that my mother spent weeks pleading with me not to and sending me newspaper clippings of oil rigs catching fire or articles about horrible accidents in which people had been maimed or killed. 

The first morning when I reported for work, I asked an old-timer at the front gate where I needed to go to catch the chopper to the Pennzoil rig.  With the three and a half fingers on his right hand he pointed and mumbled "Over there".  Even though I didn't play the piano, I hoped I'd still have enough digits by the end of the summer that it would at least be a possibility.

Each week, I'd drive to Galveston, board a helicopter and fly 80 miles out to the rig, where I'd work 12 hours a night, from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., 84 hours a week. I'd try to sleep during the day, with helicopters landing above me, and the rig shuddering below me.

And then I'd fly back to shore for a week off. I spent my days off trying to get my circadian rhythms turned around, so that I could sleep at night and be awake during the day, just in time to go back out on the rig again and work all night and sleep during the day. It was miserable.


Because I didn't own a car, I borrowed one from my college buddy Bill Hailey, who loaned me his Ford Galaxy, since he was going to Japan for the summer. The car had an AM/FM radio and cassette deck which I suspended from the underside of the steering column using about a half a roll of duct tape. Each week when I'd pull into the parking lot where the helicopters took off, I'd tear through the duct tape, place the cassette deck in the trunk, grab my hard hat and rubber boots, and head out for another week-long hitch on the rig.  


I didn't own any cassettes (vinyl albums and 8 track tapes were still the norm) and because money was in such short supply, I wanted to buy a tape that I wouldn't get tired of listening to all summer. The choice was simple. The music which kept me awake on those long drives to Galveston at 6 o'clock in the morning was James Taylor's "Gorilla". I still love that album, and I every time I hear the song "Mexico", it evokes memories of the round trip I made each week and the grueling job that paid for my junior year of college.

Thursday, April 2, 2009

Water Cooler Gossip


Sometimes my water cooler talks to me.

Yes, that's right...my water cooler talks to me.

After days of silence, it'll let out a loud "GLUG GLUG GLUG" for no apparent reason. And when I look over with a startled expression, it just stands there, acting as if nothing happened.

My refrigerator is usually pretty reticent, but on hot afternoons it gets irritable and starts buzzing with an annoyed tone. This sometimes gets a gurgle from the water cooler but not always.

And once those two start chattering away like two Tri Delts at a sorority party, the trash can just stands there and glares, keeping a lid on it.