Back from the Sea

We’re back, and I have news that’ll be so obvious that I probably should state it. But here goes: Being a passenger on a cruise ship is ordinally better than being a crew member. There, I said it. Like Brent Musberger describing the way-obvious antics of the players in a football game.

The fact is that I started as a passenger. When I played with the Modernaires we got booked on the Viking Serenade on its winter repositioning from Vancouver to Los Angeles. We got passage for two, plane tickets from LAX to Vancouver for two, and no money, but we in turn got free passage for two in return for two shows on the sixth day of the seven-day cruise, one for each seating. When we arrived at the ship, the agent (Jay Gredon’s father Joe) had a proposition for us. “Uh-oh,” I thought, leaning on my memories of working on the Azure Seas. “here we go . . .”

Joe asked us if we’d do a dance set for a hundred, cash. Sure, we all said.

A little further up the road Jan and I booked a handful of cruises on her vacation periods, all in the Caribbean, one with Carnival out of New Orleans, the other out of Galveston just after 9/11, which was the best deal ever on a cruise. I had a “real” job then, and scheduled a vacation with Jan, who tends to have hard and fast schedules depending on the passage of the semesters across the calendar.

I will miss our cabin steward. I will miss having all my food prepared for me and served with great flourish by our Portugese waiter. Did you know that, here on land, you are required to PAY for food? There’s no salmon at the breakfast buffet either.

How I adjust to this reentry is anyone’s guess.

New Mexico: My Heart Problems Come to the Fore

From Blogger Pictures

I'd walked off the Queen Elizabeth 2 in Los Angeles on the 30th of March with a bit of a cough. Here’s a whole blog about my QE2 experiences and the great musicians who worked on her when I did. Then here are two links ( here and here ) that’ll bring you up-to-date, to where this episode begins.

It took a couple of weeks to gestate into something really impressive, with phlegm enough for an army, all day long. By then I was in Atlantic City, playing alto in the Ratpack show at Harrah's for a three-week run.

Returning to Texas, It took me until the middle of May to get an appointment with my doctor back in Austin. He chose Cipro—the Republican drug of choice when the Anthrax scare was happening—wrote up a 10-day course for me, and off I went to the H-E-B pharmacy.

I had about a week between arriving home from Atlantic City and leaving for New Mexico. I love New Mexico, and so does my spouse. She loves the quiet and getting away from her job. I like to rest. We stay at a place called Casita de Chuparosa in Abiquiui, which is about 40 miles north of Santa Fe. Marilyn and her son Jeff run the place so well that we just drop our bags and start decompressing as soon as we get there.

This year, we were leaving on Memorial Day, Monday.

The beginning of the weekend, I had a couple gigs with the family enterprise band. Saturday night was in San Antonio. I usually take a bunch of cats in my van, but this particular time I only had the trombone player, so we took my little black sedan. We stopped at the Starbucks just south of San Marcos for a break and I ordered something that seemed to have way too much whipped cream in it. As we approached San Antonio I started to feel very queasy.

I pulled into a parking space in the old bakery that had been converted into a party venue. I got out of the car to finish putting on my tux, and suddenly I was too weak to move. I was hyperventilating.

I called my brother, who had set up and was about to start, and told him I wasn’t feeling well. Because I was playing the King of Instruments, my baritone saxophone, the horn section could carry on without me. I told Jim I’d be up if I could. I was spitting a massive amount of phlegm, and kind of stumbling around the car in half a tuxedo. I could hear the band, but there was no way I could even crawl up the steps to where I could hear the band playing. The young trombone player was scared by what was happening, but I told him to go on upstairs and play the wedding. I spend maybe a half hour stumbling around the parking lot, spitting into the ivy. I then fumbled my way to the car, loosened up my bow tie, and lowered myself into the driver’s seat. I lowered the seat to nap, but I couldn’t nap because I was panting.

I didn’t make it out of the parking lot until the gig was over. The trombone player drove us home to Austin, and by that time my breathing had gone back to normal, although I still felt my heart was racing. I continued to spit phlegm out the passenger window all the way up I-35.

My initial thought was that it was a reaction between what I drank for Starbucks and my Cipro, which was down to two tablets at that point. Of course, it could have been something more serious, but it was a holiday weekend, so I decided to ride it out and not call my doctor through his service. I come from a long line of self-diagnoticians, and, hearing no objection from my long-suffering but very sensible spouse, I rolled over and slept. When I woke up, I knew we had another wedding, this time in Austin, at the Mansion on Judge’s Hill. I decided I was ok to play the gig, and told my brother I was when he called in the morning.

This wedding was the last gig with Tommy Poole and Casey Daniel, husband and wife saxophonist and singer (canary) so I was on baritone again. (Tommy and Casey moved to Kentucky.) I loaded up the van even though nobody was driving with me, and headed over to the Mansion. I was actually feeling pretty good and managed to squeeze out a 4-hour gig, although I noticed a certain lightheadedness and had difficulty concentrating.

By the time we were getting ready to go on vacation, I had taken my last Cipro. I wasn’t feeling much better.

Jan and I woke up early and headed to the Austin airport. We went on Southwest, stopping in Midland. Arriving at the Albuquerque airport--with the differential of altitude--I couldn’t go up the jetway with just my backpack and my alto. Jan and I took it real slow and easy, and in time we were in the terminal area. I had problems walking. I was winded. In time, we made it to the rental car. me making some excuses about the altitude. Jan drove our mini-SUV through the back roads to Santa Fe. We stopped in a tourist-trap art town and walked around, but I spent most of the last leg into Santa Fe sleeping. By the time we got to Abiquiui I was panting again, rather like one of my dogs when they were running in the summer heat. It was worse--far worse--when I tried to sleep, I alternated between hacking and panting. In the morning I called the doctor back in Austin and told him what was happening. Me, and him, for all l knew, were still thinking I had an infection from the ship.

As anyone who watches House on the TV knows, there are a great many things that can stand in the way of a true diagnosis. In my case, I had a bacterial infection that was masking a far more serious problem: Congestive Heart Failure caused by (we think) a viral infection of the heart muscle.

So I went to St. Vincent’s Hospital in Santa Fe and had an emergency chest x-ray. The results were shared with my GP back in Austin, and when I called my doctor in Austin his Physcian’s Assistant told me I’d better go to the ER and check myself in, because there was my heart was swollen and they had to figure out what was happening before I could be released into my vacation or fly home.

Jan, as always, swung into action as I was attempting to process the implications. When we arrived at the hospital I was wired for monitors to a fare-the-well. It was obvious that my heart was beating a lot faster than was normal and safe and that the rhythms were irregular. Jan had the good sense to let me make a joke of all this, and there were chortles among the staff, easing the get-acquainted period.

But the monitors I was rigged up to told a very serious story. I had a serious arhythmia happening. The first order of business was to drain the fluid from around my heart, which was accomplished through Lasix, a drug that could produce water in the Mojave desert. Or so I was told. My body reacted to Lasix not nearly as advertised, taking me nearly an hour to pass some water. (This was the beginning of my I AM LASIX RULER OF THE UNIVERSE routine, because it seemed like we were leaning a little hard on the drug with the Norse god name.)

After a couple of hours struggling with the monitors, their wires, and those for whom their results were a stock in trade, it was beginning to get a lot less funny. Jan left after dark to settle things with our hosts in Abiquiui, and I was in a ward room with a former lineman who had 20,000 volts go through him 20 years ago and was having a heart condition taken care of. I had to keep track of all the fluids I passed, and when I fell asleep it was like a cue for the staff to come in and take my blood or check my “vitals.” (I would have made a joke, but as I said this was starting to get non-funny.

Come dawn I was introduced to the Hospitalist--another of the twisted uses of languages that the medical profession has come up with recently. Marc was really a swell guy who obviously cared way too much about his patients. At this point I was being forced fluids through an IV (not an easy task for me, as my veins roll over and play dead better than my dogs). I was peeing into a measuring cup so the nurse could see how much was going out. I could use a little humanity, and that was Marc the Hospitalist. A hospitalist does the rounds for the docs who don’t. My observation is that you’re not getting out of there unless the hospitalist says so. Besides, I’d told my story to enough doctors that it was becoming an absurdist narrative. It seemed like Marc would be my last audience until I got home.

I stayed another couple days at St. Vincent’s, a hospital that benefits enormously from the nearby ski areas in the winter. Turns out that Marc used to practice in Austin, and once I was sorted out and drained, he made an appointment with the best cardiologist in Austin. Jan had moved into an motel room near the hospital and changed our departure on Southwest, and there I was squinting in the morning sunlight 4 days after checking in, at the patient pick-up circle. We spent the last night of our vacation in the nearby motel, then drove to Albuquerque in the morning.

Our flight stopped in Lubbock, but we had no change of planes.

Some vacation.

Facebook Strikes Again!

Just when you think that the past is safe, buried and long gone, there comes an old associate from the Glenn Miller Orchestra who had pictures of the "good old days." So far one of the pictures is of me in my short tenure with the band. The guy you see above is me in 1977, aged 26. I was four years out of UCSC, I had done a couple years of remedial work in the Cabrillo College Jazz Ensemble and I'd been scooped up by the Stan Kenton Orchestra. I'd left that band under a cloud, moved to Boston and played with what MUST have been the first Tower of Power tribute band (1975--Herb Lee's Player's Club, and yes, it meant that) and returned to Santa Cruz. Bored and without prospects, I decided to throw it all to the winds and flew with Peter Burchard on the red-eye to New York City to make it big. No vacancies were available in the saxophone player category, so off I went to get my very own hack license and become an official New York City cab driver, in the middle of the winter, with no knowledge of the territory whatsoever.

Sharon Wong (who was my spouse's roommate briefly before Jan left for Colorado) saved me by letting me move into the third floor of her house in Englewood, NJ. I was leading a perfectly brutal life as a hack, crossing the bridge and having various adventures including my first night on the job, when I picked up a man-woman team of private detectives who told me to "follow that car."

Then Laigh Langley and Jack Mootz flagged me down at Stryker's on 86th St, going downtown to a hotel off Times Square (not the Edison, just around the corner).

Laigh and Jack were on the road with the Glenn Miller Orchestra, on a night off, and had gone to Stryker's to hear some music. I was going to Stryker's to hear a band myself, and to hang with the cats in the band and run them downtown after closing. When Laigh flagged me I figured I'd take a quick fare downtown and deadhead it back to 86th.

On the way down to Times Square, we got to talking about this and that on the road: busses mostly. As they left the cab--and I can remember this with clarity that only a few events in my life have--I blurted out, "If you ever need a bari player, give me a call."

Laigh started laughing and said, "Our bari player is on the third week of his two-week notice."

So I ended up doing an audition, the other guy got sent home and, a couple days after I picked Laigh and Jack up, I was back on the road. The band was pretty good. Jay Cummings was the drummer (those are his drums over my right shoulder), Gary Tole led the bone section, and the leader, Jimmy Henderson, had the habit of introducing the two singers at the end of the night by saying, as he pointed at stage right and stage left, "Anita! Laigh! Everybody!"

In this picture we are I think playing a gig, one of several, with singer Frankie Laine, up in Canada.

Laigh and I work together, and he was kind enough to fly out to attend my son's wedding at the end of September. Jay (Laigh's roommate at the time) works for NCL, and I have a picture of him meeting some of us QE2 guys in the Canary Islands. Gary is on Facebook and so is Anita.

And leave it to Dan Riley to publish these photos on Facebook. Who knew that these still existed away from the Smithsonian?

The Worst Burglar in the World

I've managed to piece together what happened on my front porch last night.

Someone tiptoed up to the steps of our porch after we had been asleep a couple hours and thought he/she had scored big time, as there, on the porch, was a box from a US Postal Service Express Mail. The box was left there by my long-suffering wife Jan who had to move some stuff around in the front room. The box wasn't opened, because Jan knew what was in it and she wouldn't be needing it until the onset of next semester, 6 weeks from now.

Anyway, here's our stone steps, porch light not working. And next to the front door is a box, unopened and rather heavy. Sometime when my CPAP machine is on and Jan's sleeping too, someone makes the perilous trip up our unlit steps, snags the unopened box and hightails it.

Next morning one of my neighbors who was walking his dog calls on the house line and says he's found a bunch of accounting books alongside a box addressed to Jan, who he has Googled. So I load the dogs up and go to the corner of the old airport the guy told me about, and sure enough there is a pile of accounting texts that came from a box (still alongside) that was addressed to Jan at our house.

So, the worst burglar in the world takes the box thinking that he'd struck it big with, well, at least a fruitcake. No such luck. Accounting textbooks. A couple hundred dollars of accounting textbooks, some of which Jan wrote.

At this point I'm struck with the ironic content of this whole episode. The burglar abandoned the books, but if he/she could just see beyond the immediate needs which drove he/she to the crime . . . he/she could have used these books to study for his/her CPA exam and launched themselves on a career as a Certified Public Accountant.

But that's not how things go across the street at the Princeton Apartments (don't let the name fool ya), which did a nose dive when burglars and pimps moved in around 2005. Delwood II hasn't been the same since. Not that this was any big deal. We've lost a lot more than this through the years, and we've lost a lot less than some of our neighbors. Our dogs are the first line of defense, and I might have missed their barking last night when I was in my mask.

That's it for me too. I'm going to fix that porch light, and maybe add a security camera.