THE SACRIFICE
From chapter 7
After watching that bass man thump away on his bass week after week, my musical energies started to build up, and I had to find a way to release that energy. It was war the "Nam" and suddenly a rash of soldiers was temporarily stopping over at my base before moving on to the "Nam". These troops were assigned willy-nilly to rooms in my barracks, so, suddenly I had a new roommate one day when I returned from work. He would to be there for a couple of weeks but co-incidentally he just happened to be a bass player. His name is Goss, from Wheeling West Virginia when he heard my story we hit it off right away.
The following weekend we went to the club to see Joe the bass man. He was fantastic. My new friend was impressed, and told me that he would call his mom and have her send his bass guitar to him. He offered to teach me how to play while he waited to be shipped out. It was a really lucky strike for me, a true blessing. I would find out later that the guitar had arrived in the mail in a couple of days. That’s when my whole life changed. I was the happiest guy in the world when I first held that guitar in my hands. I knew right away that I was going to learn this instrument and be good at it too. Each day after work he would give me a lesson and work with me for an hour or so. Unfortunately he did not stay around very long. He had to ship out a few days after the guitar came. He was kind enough to give me the guitar before he left. I will be forever grateful. I never heard from him again, but I would really like to see him again.
I certainly didn’t waste any time shedding tears as my temp roommate packed his bags and left for the flight line. I wished I could have gone with him, so I could have taken another lesson from him, as well as hang out with him as a friend. He was a cool dude, and I’m sure if I could have studied longer with him, I would have been even better than I am now. However, I did manage to carry on his kind legacy, by giving my bass guitars to the last two people I taught to play the bass. It was my third year in the air force, and finally my routine included playing a musical instrument as part of my life style. Every day I would return to my room ASAP to practice on my bass. I would practice for hours, or until my vision was blurred from looking at the vibrating strings, or my fingers became blistered and sore from plucking on the strings. Sometimes I would practice for six hours or more, and sometimes I would fall asleep with the guitar in my hands, and I would awaken and continue to pluck on the strings, un-aware of how long I had been sleeping. Some of the tunes I practiced to were; "Rescue me", Fontana Bass, all of Otis Redding’s records, Temptations and really everything I could get my hands on. I lot of the tunes were records I purchased when I visited my hometown or when I visited New York.
Once I had established my routine of practicing everyday, some of my other activities were cut back considerably. I was really serious about learning to play. Between watching the musicians in the local bands and picking up tips from other musicians, I eventually started to feel comfortable with playing the instrument. Soon the word was out that I was playing bass and that drew the attention of some of the other airmen on base. At some point I ran into a guy named Joe from Detroit, He was an excellent guitar player. He showed me a lot of exercises for bass guitar that were more advanced for me, but it was good for me. He came to my room to jam with me, even though it was a little painful for him, because I wasn’t as experience as he. I’m sure if there was someone else on base that he could have played with; he would have been there. But he tolerated me, because he knew that I had a lot of women friends off and on base. When I first met him, I suspected that he probably was more interest in the girls I knew than the music I was playing. I knew he was just using me as a springboard into my circle of friends, who were primarily “ classy” women.
When he would be teaching me, he would call me names sometimes when I made mistakes. His name-calling would make me angry inside, but he never knew it, I would just laugh it off, because I really was determined to learn. He was relatively new to the base and of lesser rank, so there was only so much pain he could inflict on me any way. Plus, his head was shaped like an off- centered polyhedron, and he was a hard liquor drinker and therefore would never fit into my group of high class port wine drinkers. Most of his grief was inspired by jealousy, because he just couldn’t understand how I could have so many beautiful girls playing bass the way I did. But he was an idiot, because he didn’t realize that I had all those girl friends before I started playing bass. Never -the -less, he was good, and subsequently earned a ride to New Bedford with me. Somehow, I had made some connections with a couple of nice girls who called themselves the Joyettes and they were fresh and cute. We went to their house to go over some tunes for some gig I can’t remember. The rehearsal went very well, even their mother was pleased, pleased enough to leave us alone with those very nice young ladies. I think that joker; Joe was nipping before we had arrived at the house for rehearsal, so I was stewing a little because of that. Since we made it through the session without any name-calling, I managed to settle down after a while. But something about being with that guitar player made me feel uncomfortable; I couldn’t decide which bothered me most, the hard liquor or the shape of his head.
I was always a little nervous about taking some guys around my lady friends, because I never really was sure how the guys would behave sometimes. I sacrificed this encounter for the sake of the musical experience. Actually, I really wasn’t that concerned, because I figured, "if you give a monkey enough bananas, eventually he will choke on one of them." Now that the rehearsal was over, we moved into the living room to have a little refreshment. Of course the monkey broke out his bottle of hard stuff, and I came out with my ruby red port. We started drinking at about ten o’clock, and the next thing I remembered was, standing on the side of rt. 6 in the pouring rain hitch-hiking my way back to the base. Eventually, a milk truck driver who was totally sympathetic to my case picked me up. Military guys know that even though you may leave the base together, that you are individually responsible for getting back to work on your own. Consequently, I don’t have a clue what happened to the other guy. I assumed he made it somehow just the way I did.