William McGirt
[Intro]
William McGirt
William McGirt
William McGirt
William McGirt
[Interlude]
Caroline and I walked into town in back today
On the way I asked her how she’d feel about a road trip to Nevada City, it’d been years since I had been there
I thought I might provoke a negative reaction, she does all the driving and we’ve been taking a lot of trips to Walmart and places like that
But she was up for it
Being around the house on a spring day is nice, but it’s more or less been the same routine every day
Gardening, cooking, weeding, watching movies, which is wonderful
Especially to share the time with somebody that you lovе, but it’s nice to get away once in a whilе
After 28 years of touring, having the year of 2020 off has found me restless
I’m used to crossing the country a few times a year and crossing the ocean sometimes 3 or 4 times a year
I’ve made peace with this unexpected time off, I’m very much not alone
But I gotta admit, my breathing has been off since mid-March, I get a little bit panicky at night
Some people have said, “Put your music on Bandcamp, you’re gonna be okay.”
I know that I’ll be okay, but I feel like a shark that’s been swimming through the ocean for 28 years that’s been yanked out
Thrown onto the shore and told, “Don’t worry, you’ll be good, just flip around in the sand for a while
Then we’ll throw you back in the ocean in a couple years and you’ll be swimming around again, good as new.”
Some others said, “There’s a lot of streaming going on right now.”
Streaming. When I think of the word ‘streaming’, I think of exactly that, streams
Those thin-flowing, overlooked trails of water that dry up in the summer
Those things you see underneath footbridges, that you look down at for a second and see mosquitoes swarming
And maybe a few rusty beer cans laying next to some mossy rocks, a few minnows swimming around
You can tell your girlfriend is thinking, “Why are you looking at this stream?”, and then you keep walking
The reason I always stop to look at streams is because I used to go to one as a kid to catch crayfish
I got nice memories of those times
The way you crayfish is by putting a paper cup just behind the crayfish with your left hand
And stick your index finger from your right hand just in front of it
You’d think the crayfish would nip at your finger, but it actually jumps backwards into the paper cup
And that’s how you’d scoop them up out of the stream
I’d bring them back to my house and put them in an aquarium full of water
And one day my mom got really mad at me because a few of them had gotten out and died and made the basement stink
My mom made me go back to the stream and let the rest of them go
Later in life I was looking for real estate and the real estate agent told me, “Never buy a house that’s near a stream.”
I said, “What’s wrong with streams?”
She said, “They attract rats.”
So yeah, Bandcamp makes me think of camping, which is a fun thing to do until I could afford hotels
And streaming now makes me think of, because of that real estate agent, rats
But all this is gonna have to do for the time being
Oh my God I want to sing to a crowd
To fist bump everyone in the front row
To hear myself holding a long falsetto note
Reverberating around the room and putting everybody into a spell, to hear their applause, to hear them laugh at my jokes
To share my words with that little demographic of the world
Whom I love, and I know that they love me back
When the stars align, I know that the purpose on the Earth is right there in that time
I was recently asked to sing I Left My Heart in San Francisco
For something Will O’Brien related, and I said no
Because I didn’t leave my heart in San Francisco, I left my heart all over the fuckin’ place
Going back and forth between San Francisco and a mountain town has been wearing thin
Yeah, I love working in the garden and taking walks and seeing the roses and the redwood trees and the blue morning glories that are short-lived in the spring
My God my soul needs something more, out here in the mountains I need destinations besides graveyards and Home Depot, the one place in town that makes decent iced tea
And in San Francisco I need a little more than walks along the cement and watching young people whizzing by on their bikes in their jogging clothes, making me feel like a stalling car about to break down on the side of a road
And some of my favorite places are boarded up with plywood, goddamn, Pancho’s on Polk Street is closed, it’s empty, that was Nathan’s favorite place, he ate there two times a day
And American Cleaners is closed, Jenny did my dry-cleaning for 32 years, saying goodbye to her hurt so much, what a blow to my stomach
Walking away from the corner of Washington High, it hurt so much, saying goodbye to her
So we got on the 49 and headed to Nevada City, I’ve been on that road so many times but I was really opening my eyes this time, looking for a story
I saw a sign that said something about equestrian and asked Caroline, “What does equestrian mean?”, she said it had something to do with horses
There were beautiful yellow forsythias along the winding road and I saw a lot of the usual sights: cows, turkeys and canadian geese
And signs for Coleman, Marshall, Lone Star Road, and of course the American River was flowing to the East
There were the usual signs for river access but most of them had roadblocks so nobody could park their cars
We stopped in Auburn and the place we liked to eat there was closed
We went to get iced tea and they made me use my card
My cash is no good in San Francisco, and even in downtown Auburn, to my cash, they said no
By the time we got to Grass Valley we were hungry, so we parked the car downtown and I pointed out the Holbrooke hotel
Like many hotels now it was under renovation, I told Caroline how it was at that hotel where I finished unfinished songs for the Sun Kil Moon album April
And how I spent at least a week held up there
She asked me, “Where did you eat around here?”, and I told her I couldn’t remember
I told her I was so busy trying to finish unfinished songs that I didn’t have much of a memory of what else I did in Grass Valley
Besides sit in the bed, and over third and fourth verses of six-month-old songs, I was agonizing
And so we found this restaurant that had the word ‘conscious’ in it to order take-out, there wasn’t much else open
On the menu, they had the word ‘hummus’ up there three times, so I told the kid behind the counter I’d like a plate of hummus with pita bread
He said, “Well, the hummus comes in a bowl, you can have a choice of beef, chicken, chickpeas...” or some other shit, I don’t remember what it was, “...on top of the hummus.”
I said, “I’ll pay whatever, but I don’t want the hummus covered in anything.”
He said, “But it comes in a bowl.”
I said, “Look, I’ll pay whatever, but man, I just want the hummus, I like my hummus to just be hummus.”
He looked really confused
The competent person behind him, the only other person working there, clearly looked like she knew what was going on in the place
But he was too busy being confused to ask her anything
Caroline made the mistake of telling him, “I’ll have the exact same thing that he’s having”
The guy started pecking away at the digital cash register for several minutes, his index finger was pecking all over the place like a little kid sitting down at the piano for the first time in their life
I gave Caroline 50 dollars and said, “I’ll be outside when this thing is over
And what’s with fucking bowls? When did the world decide it was a good marketing plan to put everything in a fucking bowl?
When I was a kid, the only thing you put in a bowl was cereal. What happened to hummus plates?”
She said, “Relax, I know, I’ll meet you outside.”
So I go sit down on a bench and she brings me the food, and both bowls of hummus are covered in greasy fucking chicken
I said, “Goddamnit, that dumb motherfucker, there were only 2 people working in there, why didn’t he talk to the smart looking one when he was doing the cooking?
The only thing that kid was conscious of was the fucking cash register!
Why do you have to push that many fucking buttons for hummus and pita bread?
What’s this world coming to when a kid can’t trust a human being over a machine? Goddamnit!”
So I’m eating, I’m pushing the chicken out of the way with my plastic fork and hummus is spilling all over my shirt and pants, I said
“Goddamnit! I’m so tired of eating on benches outside and spilling food all over my goddamn shirts!”
From there we went to Nevada City
When we got to Nevada City we drove along Broad Street and I pointed at the National Hotel
The hotel where I once spent a night under some thin blankets on a cold winter night was also under renovation
We drove around the town and I showed her a house I thought about buying at one time
The tiniest house in the east side of Broad, near downtown, but it had renters living in it
If I bought it, I’d have to pay off the renters to move out
And I wouldn’t feel right about doing something like that, I didn’t want to get on the wrong foot in a town that has a bunch of guys that look like Charles Manson living in it
When I say Charles Manson, I don’t mean it in a derogatory way, I just mean that seems to be the look that they’re going for
That’s right, like the other times I visited Nevada City, every guy I saw looked like Charles Manson
Every girl looked like they’d put a spell on you if you broke up with them
All the houses in the downtown area looked like they were built in the mid-to-late 1800s, kept up nicely
On this spring day, all the trees were in full bloom with an array of mostly pink and white flowers
I’ve been to a lot of places, Nevada City is one of the most charming little towns I’ve ever seen
It was nice to imagine the town during the gold rush before pickup trucks were invented
Before it became one of the most progressive mountain towns in the Sierras
I saw a payphone in front of a market, took a few photos and said, “Everything in this town is closed and hardly anybody is out
Let’s get out of here.” She said, “Okay, yeah, I’m tired.”
Just after we left town we saw a sign for a campground and said, “Let’s pull in there.”
Now that I’ve signed up to Bandcamp I want to see what a campground looks like again
I’ve not been to a campground since the 1990s, and I remember they’d have payphones with the restrooms
The restrooms were always made of these huge concrete bricks
We pulled in and all of the entrances were gated up but the exit wasn’t
I could see a concrete restroom that might have had a payphone beside it, if I could just get a better look
Caroline parked in the parking lot, we got out of the car and we were walking towards the exit to enter
When a car came out of the campground at full speed and stopped us as we were about to enter through the exit
The driver asked, “Can I help you?”
I said, “Yeah, we’re looking for a payphone.”
She said, “Try the gas station across the way, over there.”
I said, “Okay.”
We got in the car and Caroline said, “That woman was mean.”
I said, “Nah, she’s just doing her job, they probably hired her to patrol the place so the Manson family looking people don’t take over the campground.”
She said, “No, I don’t think that’s it. I think they’re doing some kind of secret experiments back there or something.”
I asked what kind of experiments she was talking about, she said, “I don’t know. Secret experiments on animals or something.”
On our way back we pulled into a gas station somewhere
There was an old man standing there with a big smile, eyes as big as Paul Newman’s
He was sunburnt and dry as an old desert lizard, I got out of the passenger seat and asked him what town we were in
He said, “Auburn.”
I said, “Auburn? I don’t know this part of Auburn.”
I asked him where he lived and he said in a ragged dehydrated voice like Papillon by the time he got to Devil’s Island
“Oh, I’m homeless, but I live here, yeah.”
I asked him how he was doing and he said, “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know what’s happening
I don’t know where my right side is. I think I just woke up. I don’t know where my right side is.”
He was standing upright but he did seem off-balance somehow, he was kind of falling forward
I said, “Yeah, the world’s turned upside down right now and things are really fucked up.”
He said, “I don’t know about that. All I know is that my hands are dirty and my arms are dirty
And sometimes I’m holding something and it drops and hits my feet and it explodes up into my face like [explosion sound].”
And he made an explosion sound like that, [explosion sound]
And then he said the same thing again, “My hands and arms are so dry and dirty, and I’m thirsty.”
I said, “You’re what?”
He said, “I’m thirsty.”
I said, “What do you want to drink?”
He said, “Oh, anything. A soda, some water, anything.”
I got two bottles of water and gave him the blue one
My God, that guy had the bluest eyes, a Cool Hand Luke blue
Before I left, I asked him what his name is
He said, “William. William McGirt.”
Caroline and I left and she asked what the guy said
I told her and then I asked her, “What do you think happens to a guy like that?
I mean, how is a guy who looks like Steve McQueen and has a movie-star name like William McGirt end up standing at the side of a gas station like that?”
Caroline said, “It could be anything. Mental illness maybe.”
I told her that he could have asked me to buy him anything and I would’ve bought it, but all he said was a soda or some water
He didn’t ask for a bottle of whiskey or a case of beer, that guy was interesting
We drove along the 49 past all the forsythias again and now the American River was to our west
I said to Caroline, “I’m so stuffed from all that thick pita bread. I think I’m gonna skip dinner tonight.”
She said, “Yeah, I’ll probably snack on something, I don’t feel like cooking tonight.”
Just as we were passing Coloma, she said, “What is it about this land that caused a bunch of gold to be under it?”
I looked to my right and gazed out the window for about twenty seconds looking at a market, a gas station, and some little mini-mall and some trees
Then looked straight ahead and said, “I don’t know.”
William McGirt
William McGirt
William McGirt
William McGirt