I knew this woman from college, she dated my one of my roommates and was always around. A great girl, terribly fun (no I never slept with her so that is not what I am speaking of when I say fun), smart and just always ran with the flow. One day out of the blue she gave me a call. In a pre-Facebook world it was a little strange to get a call from a woman you haven't spoken to in six or seven years so I was taken back and had no idea what she was up to in her life. As it turns out she was living in Laguna Beach and wanted to get together for a few days, since I was only an hour south in San Diego I decided to take the drive up. When I arrived at her place it was breathtaking and not in a typical McMansion-Orange Country-Douche Bag type of way.
She lived a few blocks off the beach on a hill above a three car garage. The front of the apartment was nothing but floor to ceiling window-doors with white curtains wafting in the Pacific breeze. The apartment stretched the entire length of the structure but was very narrow. Looking out one of the many windows with the kitchen to my left and a small bedroom down a narrow corridor I saw the currents of the Pacific obstructed only by a palm tree every few hundred feet laterally. The interior of the apartment was pure white with old deep burgundy hard wood floors, there was no TV only a long white couch pressed up against the wall. From it you could relax and view the sea.
We went to a cafe on a small cliff hanging over the beach. We smoked cigs, skulled Sapphire and Tonics and laughed about college and the stupid times we had, spoke of her ex boyfriend, my ex roommate and how he became a Catholic Priest afters years of debauchery. Spoke of our lives and what the hell we were doing under the soothing sun and standard Southern California Scenery. Those nights I would go back with her and sleep on her couch while she rested in bed. I never crept in there for some reason even though there was a bit of sexual tension running through the air and I was never one to turn down the hint of an advance. Rather I watched the curtains breeze in through the open doors and meditated on my surroundings. I drove her to LAX a few days later and never saw her again, can't find her on Facebook and her old number doesn't work. Last time I spoke with her she fell in love with a Brasilian man and was marrying him against her parents' wishes.
When I first heard this song I was living in Florida and had downloaded it the night before in a drunken music buying binge. I woke up still intoxicated and sweating in the sick humidity of July and hit the play button. After my first listen I was taken back to Laguna and that girl, the azure and sweet scent of flowers wafting through a pure white room. I walked to the store and bought a case of Pacifico ice cold, sat on my own porch overlooking Memorial Park and the St. John's river, clicked the repeat function on iTunes and didn't stop the music until the case was gone. With no company, no phone and nothing but two packs of Bravo Hotels (Benson and Hedges but that's another story...) I wasted myself with both physical pleasure of addiction and the mental jerk off session's pleasure of that week while Lucinda stoked my synapses until I came.
Come to my world and witness
The way things have changed
'Cause I finally left baby
I got out of La Grange.
Got in my Mercury and drove out west
Pedal to the metal and my luck to the test
Baby, sweet baby.
Lucinda Williams was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, her raspy, sultry voice honed by the same humid air I breathed in on my porch when I lost my musical virginity to her that day. Her father was a poet and a pianist, she spent her 20's in the Austin-LA-Nashville loop without much fanfare but privately crafted intensely beautiful songs honed by years on the road. Much like Tom Waits she is known in the circles that matter and not recognized by the pop-bullshit media machine known as the contemporary music world.
Baby, sweet baby if it's all the same
Take the glory and day over the fame
Baby, sweet baby
When I hear this song I think of those two days that are so different and so similar to each other in strange ways. I think about just how perfect life can be on perfect days that you don't realize are perfect until they are long gone. The fleeting nature of life passing by without consciousness like that tightly rolled shitty tobacco from a long Bravo Hotel. I think about how if I was a better writer I could capture it all and let people know just how cool those days were and bring those experiences to them. Or how sometimes you can wake up on the couch in the morning in an apartment you slept in with a fully beautiful naked woman lying feet away from you that you have never touched and be okay with it in some strange way while your animistic impulses are banging against the inside of your midbrain screaming demands that the Cortex ignores. But then again whenever I try to stand on the shoulders of Lucinda and this song I realize that perfection has already been written. That in this song a tat covered Louisiana girl sweating Southern Comfort and bleeding raspy tonality knows about what those two days are like and that many times she was that other women laying naked in the other room, waiting.
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