He’ll call me around 6 from Streetlight Records in San Jose, telling me he’s found the vinyl he was looking for. The night is young and it’s ours, only us, but I run through the house in a delightful frenzy kissing the boys in one room, only to meet them across the house seconds later to kiss them again there. I always worry they will fall asleep without brushing their teeth. Or fall into the bathtub. Or involuntarily kill each other…those last minutes are restless. But once I’m on the road, it’s all good.
In fifteen minutes I’ve woven a peaceful thread around pedestrian traffic along the creek trail. My muscles are warm and loose and my soul is finally free. I sit at an outdoor table and order a pint of ale under palm trees and tall buildings. A crow flies directly across the peach evening sky. The smoke lingers, still without a smell; affecting no one, it exhumes the sun, a giant apricot, into its velvet folds and I sit there squinting in my chair with a foam moustache. Damon rides up alongside the table, golden with sweat and grinning. All eyes are upon him as he leans his bike next to mine against that palm tree. It’s hard not to swell with affection for this man.
We stay for another round, then bolt through traffic on into San Jose, where we stay a while eating red beans and rice, cajun shrimp and Turbodog to the beat of a blues trio. And then another round.
The trail, at night, is dark as pitch and it’s easy to spill over a catfight. So we slip out of the void and back onto the street, where we glide past rows of underlit palms and pawn shops and good folk waving us on. It’s a righteous pass through the soul of any city, un-tucked for the night but singing itself to sleep. There are no pretenses, just us laughing down the street half-drunk and whizzing off and on curbs because we can and because we should.
