Reelin' in the Years

I texted my mom a bit ago the following: dude I should have gotten those Steely Dan tickets at the hotel that time.

I thought it was worth putting this down because it's been rattling around in my brain for thirty-something years.

When I was about 15 or so, my mom got a job at Edwards AFB in Southern California. Specifically, I should mention, at NASA on Edwards AFB in Southern California. When I asked her what she actually did for NASA back then, and she said "Well, I had to sign a lot of NDAs and stuff..." and so blah blah blah space secrets blah blah blah.

Anyway, because we had to move to Lancaster, California, to be near Edwards, we had to house hunt for a little while. Since we didn't have a place to live, we ended up in a motel for a few weeks. My dad was in Japan. We had three dogs, my baby sister, my mom, me, and my two brothers. Oh, and a couple of cats too. Needless to say, not many motels wanted to take us on, but we landed at one and settled in fairly quickly. It was a stressful time, but oddly, most of my memories of then are positive.

It had a pool, and I used to take my sister down to swim during the day while my mom was working. My brothers and I would take turns watching Delena (my sister) while the others went down to swim. We'd take the dogs for a walk in the field across the parking lot.

In the evenings, a lot of the time I'd go down and sit in the hot tub, just because, why not? I like hot tubs. I probably wouldn't do that now, in a motel, because gross, but when I was fifteen, I didn't know any better.

One night, I'm sitting in the hot tub and reading my Stephen King book, and this woman comes and sits in the hot tub with me. It's just me and her, and she's smoking a cigarette and I'm reading Cujo or something. She asks me what I'm reading, and I tell her, and then she starts talking about how Stephen King and Clive Barker and Anne Rice and all of these other popular horror writers are in satanic cults that sacrifice babies and other ridiculous crap like that.

So I keep talking to her, not because I think what she's saying is credible or even sane, but because it was entertaining. She was deadly serious, too. Then she starts telling me that she's a radio DJ and that she has a bunch of Steely Dan tickets she has to give away, and did I want any free Steely Dan tickets? I was like "NAH, I'm good on Steely Dan tickets! Good night Lady I'm Never Going to See Again! I hope Dean Koontz isn't hiding in your room to kill you!"

I get up to the hotel room and start telling my mom about the woman who believes popular horror writers are in a baby murder cult, and when I got to the part about the Steely Dan tickets she was like "WTF?! Get your butt back down there and get those Steely Dan tickets!" so I hurried back down but she was gone, and so were the tickets, and I never got to see Steely Dan back in the early 1990s.

Now, why did I turn them down? I had no idea who Steely Dan were beyond the fact that they were a musical group. I didn't know they did killer songs like Dirty Work and F.M. and Rikki Don't Lose That Number.

Oh well, I'm not as sad about that as I was when I saw that Tom Petty was going to play at the Hollywood Bowl when I was going to be in L.A. and I looked at tickets and was like A HUNDRED AND TWENTY DOLLERYDOOS?! NO THANKS, UNCLE TOM PETTY. But then it turned out to be his last show, and he died not long after. I sure regret not getting those tickets. I even drove past the Hollywood Bowl that night and bitched about all the traffic coming out of the Tom Petty concert.

You know what the worst part of that was? I decided instead to go to Lana Del Rey, and then I forgot which day it was and drove to San Diego the day after the concert. So I didn't get to see Tom or LDR.

ANYHOO. I'll stop rambling. I just wanted to talk about that.