Ron's was next to a ball-diamond. At night during the winter I would stand in the snow in the middle of the ball-diamond just for some sense of space.
Jim from Britnell's lived around the corner with his daughter and British wife. In the winter I would schlep my guitar to their basement where Jim would teach me the C-major scale. “You can play solos with this scale. See?” I could not, but that hardly mattered.
Jim had shoulder-length gray hair and a Cockney accent. He hated people who abided by class structures. One of the grimmest days of his life was when Peter Ustinov came by the store and his Publisher handler demanded Ustinov be addressed as “Sir Peter.”
“’Sir Pete,’”snorted Jim. “I’ll call him that, alright.”
Jim regaled me with stories from the 1960s. Jim missed the ‘60s — especially the sex. “You should have been there, Darrell. It was great!”
Jim slowed me around the Hogtown house. There were pictures of the young bride and groom looking very squiffey-eyed indeed. Wow, did they get stoned!
Eventually I found my way outside to the darkness and the snowy sidewalk where I pressed my face to the outside glass of a large window to a Chinese diner and watched a fellow coat thick rice noodles with a black bean sauce. I was very hungry but understood the food was not for me.
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