Meander Belt by M. Randal O'Wain

Author:M. Randal O'Wain [O'Wain, M. Randal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000 Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs
Publisher: UNP - Nebraska

At the van, parked behind a McDonald’s, I smoked and waited. The band had recently bought the van collectively; the loft bed we’d built before our first tour—Vancouver, British Columbia, to San Jose—still smelled of sawdust. The LP would be ready when our U.S. tour began that July. Heartened by the record, by our solid reception in California, Sicarii had seemed impenetrable before my father’s news—What does a slipped disc even look like? Little jelly sacks between bones. I could no longer trust my optimism.

Soon the demonstrators were more than a mere hum in the air. The sound grew closer, amorphous, lovely as an ocean.

“Let’s go,” Eli said, appearing suddenly at the passenger door.

A preplanned human barricade blocked street entrances. We pulled onto Plum and parked in the far lane. Unloaded our musical equipment and a generator. Quickly set up our amps and speaker cabinets. A circle formed at the intersection where the courthouse, police station, and McDonald’s all met. I watched officers try to push through, but they could not get to us. It would later be noted in Seattle newspapers that numbers of marchers were considerably higher in Olympia. A photo of Sicarii playing made front-page news on the Post-Intelligencer. Our band name was misspelled in print—Sickari—but the energy captured by the photographer is apparent. I’m not in the picture. I’m off to the side, out of frame. Eli’s drumsticks are raised, and he is smiling. Parker’s and Tammy’s mouths are open, screaming into microphones. We barely have standing room, because the demonstrators are so close. I recall feeling embarrassed, flippant, when someone stopped me on the street a couple of days later to show me the newspaper. She’d been carrying it around, she said, waiting to run into one of us. I took the paper from her and mailed it home that day.

*

The wide garage-style door of his storage unit is open, and my father sits on a wooden stool, staring past the weedy alley at the large chunk of chain-link security fence that has been cut away. Beyond the fence is an empty lot where he can see a dead raccoon bloating in the sun. The fence is supposed to keep crime out, keep his tools safe, but chain link is no match for a motivated thief. Nothing, thankfully, has been taken from his space. Not yet. He doesn’t plan on staying long, just until he can get his new business off the ground, but the pain in his neck, chronic and ever present, has a tendency to spike and then seize, forcing him to wait, nearly immobilized until the spasm ends. Sometimes he can’t walk, his legs tingling as if they’ve fallen asleep. His arms do the same. “Wait at least six weeks before going back to work,” his former primary told him. But that doctor stopped seeing him when Todd pulled his insurance. Fired me like I’m nothing. Todd bought him two weeks’ worth of chiropractic adjustments and then put him out on the curb like worn furniture.

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