Forebodings Ashore

Back?

Good. I left the service of QE2 on March 30, 2008, at the Port of Los Angeles, underneath the Vincent Thomas Bridge, a few hundred feet from where my career as a cruise ship musician was started in the early eighties. That doesn't mean to imply that getting off the ship was easy. Due to the incredible incompetence of one shipmate in particular in the crew office, the guys in the Princess entertainment office did not receive my request for an early out when we were as close to LA as Osaka.

I had to refile the form and more or less walk it through the stations of the cross. While I never served in the military, this is the kind of situation I thought only a branch of the armed services could botch this badly. One of the things I had to do in order to get this thing off the dime was to actually appear before this individual in the Crew Office. He was argumentative and defensive, aside from the general propensity toward advanced ignorance. And, he had a pronounced speech impediment, which caused him in his fury to ask, when I told him I had a plane ticket for Austin and would be leaving whether they had a replacement for me or not, "Are you fretening me?" Indeed I was not. I was just informing him, in the interest of advancing the cause. Fretening was the furthest thing from my mind.

No matter. Once the Princess office had the paperwork in hand it was a small matter to plug in a replacement for me. Los Angeles is a city noted for its out-of-work saxophonists and its international airport, so either bringing in someone local or flying someone in so from faraway places with strange sounding names is not trivial, but easy.



When we were in Hawaii, I was within range of my Sprint phone for the first time, so I arranged to have 2 parties pick me up: Steve, my trombonist buddy who I've been playing with since junior high or whatever it's called nowadays, and the family of my sister Cindy--Joe, her husband, a native of the recently-visited Kingdom of Tonga, and their son, Evan, who had been signed to play football for Southern Methodist University while I was gone. My thinking in the matter was that if I had two cars coming to collect me and bring me up to LAX, one would certainly show. (As it turned out, both vehicles showed up at very much the same time.)

The formalities for getting off the ship took two hours. My goodbye collection of photographs was taken entirely in the Staff Mess, where we tended to congregate whenever there were great waits in time to be tolerated. Of course, we had just cleared customs four days before in Hawaii. but no matter. We're fighting terrorism, and that means plenty of waiting around when it comes to cruise ships.

Finally we loaded up and headed out. Steve showed up in his early seventies Porsche 911, and my sister's family, not to be outdone, rolled in in a very fancy Mercedes Benz.

From the time we were in Singapore I was coughing. It was really nothing new, as the QE2 has a 40-year-old ventilation system. We all tended to pick up upper respiratory infections, a common ailment among the musicians on any ship, more so on the venerable QE2.

Thinking nothing of it, and not wanting to complicate my exit, I chose not to trouble the ship's doctor, but rather thought I'd be better off bringing my cough to my doctor in Austin. Trouble was, I had just a couple days in in Austin before heading to Atlantic City for a three-week gig at Harrah's, in the big showroom, playing the English ratpack show.

Jan and I only had a day and a half together before she jetted off to look after her folks in Alabama, who are in their nineties. The folks desperately need Jan to show up and do what she does best: organize.

As soon as she left, I started feeling bad. Sleep became difficult. But what could I do? I had to catch a plane the next day for Philadelphia, and then a limo--A LIMO--to Atlantic City. Three weeks work was nothing to sneeze at, and that was the deal I made with myself: the reason I left QE2 early was that I had booked these three weeks, to compensate for the lost wages.

My health, well, I'd take care of that when I got back to Austin. In the middle of the three weeks in Jersey, Jan flew out for a visit. I was short-winded, unable to sleep through the night, but I was really digging the gig. The headliners were American, the MD a very swinging Brit, and the remainder of the band was cats from New York City. I was playing alto, doing my best to do an authentic 1950's Marshal Royal lead sound. The trouble was getting from the bus to the venue was a bit of a struggle.

What I did not know was that my heart and lungs were filling with fluid, a process that must have started aboard QE2 with my presumptive upper respiratory infection. I was unable to walk distances or to sleep through the night because I was on the verge of Congestive Heart Failure.

And So I Went to Sea

I sought cruise ship work because there were fewer gigs going on, because my day gig had fallen apart, and because, not being a fool, I like the idea of knowing where my next meal was coming from, and the one after that. The kids had moved out of our house--two of them for Jan and two for me. I don't drive cars when I'm on ships. I don't see my wife usually, or our dogs either.

Anyway, I started to get itchy for living in a closet-sized room, connected with the music office at Princess Cruises, and off I went to the Caribbean (briefly), through the Panama Canal, and up the Pacific Coast to Alaska, where I spent the summer of 2005, one of the hottest on record in the town I live in, Austin, Texas.

I worked 4 months on the Dawn Princess, treading the waters between Vancouver, a wonderful city with more to do than I had imagined, and Whittier, Alaska, a town with two bars and that's it. In between we called at Ketchican, Juneau, and Skagway, and then into the frigid waters of Glacier National Park and College Fjord. The gig was mostly easy. We backed the acts. Four horns, three rhythm. The quality of the acts and of their charts was enormously variable, but we were getting good money to play music in one of the more beautiful settings on the planet. If I complained, I don't remember it.

Well, there were little inconveniences, like the guards who frisked us in Whittier, like we were going to blow the ship up or something. But that was minor, the usual Security post -9/11 theatre crapola.

I did my four months, came back and decided to do some more as soon as I could. So they sent me off to the Caribbean and the Baltic and the Caribbean again. I loved the Baltic, tolerated the merely tolerated the Caribbean. The bands were, well, interesting. There was usually a young tenor player who thought that life began with John Coltrane, not always though. Attitude means everything, just like it did when I was on the road with bands, living on buses. The pressure cooker nature of the gig, and having to face the same personalities and faces every day, just make it impossible for someone with a less than positive way of viewing the surroundings was just asking for it, and the cohesion of the band suffered in the process.

The hardest part of leaving home is leaving home, of course. My kids were out on their own and doing pretty well. That left my spouse and the dogs to fend for themselves. Jan and the dogs gave me special permission to see what it was like out there.

I had worked on cruise ships twenty years before, when I lived in Los Angeles. Cruise ships were relatively new then, and the cruise line I worked on was a real corker. The Azure Seas was the ship, and she went from LA Harbor all the way to Ensenada, twice a week. If it sounds like a grind, it was. Back then, in the early eighties, the only way that middle-class folks could gamble was to drive to Las Vegas, or to book a 3-day or 4-day cruise on the Azure Seas. We'd clear the Vincent Thomas Bridge and, after about an hour and a half, the casino would open.

I liked the gig, and I found enough to do on the ship to keep away from the usual temptations musicians fall prey to. (Unfortunately, my cabinmate was not so lucky. After I had left, he fell hard for one of the dancers, who didn't reciprocate, and in one final effort to change her mind, immolated himself on her suburban front lawn.)

That's why, after a I'd taken 9 months off (there's something you can't do in most jobs) I emailed the guy who booked me at Princess Cruises. He emailed me back several options on Princess' ships, but the thing that caught my eye was the historic last cruises of the venerable Queen Elizabeth 2. It was an unusual offer in several ways. On Princess, all my work was done as a showband musician, an all-purpose category that involves backing the acts, playing dance sets, and occasional forays into the Atrium, the territory of the solo pianists and guitarists. The work involves flyshit reading, a lot of doubling and a knowledge of musical styles that date back some years. On QE2, I would be the only saxophone player in a dance orchestra in the Queens Room (no hyphens please), whose bandstand served the largest dance floor at sea.

Even though they needed the spot filled in 2 short weeks, I went for it, and for the first time agreed to a contract of longer than 4 months. I'd be on QE2 for 6 months so I could do the last World Cruise. But I had a major hurdle to get across. I had to obtain a Norwegian Seamans Medical Certificate. The Cunard folks in England gave me no option but to go through a doctor in Houston, a hundred fifty miles from my house. The physical exam was extensive, and included a clean EKG. I was already taking beta blockers for marginally high blood pressure, which popped up when I was performing miracles for my last employer.

I have another blog, written while I was on QE2, that chronicles in reverse order most of that voyage. It's at this link that the narrative starts:

Click Here

By the narrowest of margins I got all my documentation together, tidied up my gig situation and kissed my wife goodbye at the Austin airport for a thrilling hop to Chicago Midway, followed by an even more thrilling ride to Heathrow, perhaps the two most insane airports on the face of the earth. In the process, I managed to lose my medical certificate and my joining papers. But I got my ass there.

100 Hours Under the Mask

I am guardedly optimistic that using the CPAP machine is doing something positive for my sleep. The problem continues to be one of adjusting to the mask throughout the night. And one more things (as Steve Jobs will NOT be saying at the Macworld Expo this year): I am taking a drug called Lasix as part of my daily pharmacological cocktail. Its job is to keep the fluids from building up inside me, and the means by which it does its job is my making my bladder very active. Some folks report a lessening of nocturnal bladder emptying, but Lasix doesn’t allow for that.

As a matter of fact, one day I realized that the Very Smart People who give names to drugs have named every pill I take in this pseudo-Nordic ur-code. Imagine the guy who says “Imagine a world where . . . ” with the big rumbly voice on the movie trailers saying “I AM”, followed by the name of a drug you might be taking and closing the sentence with “RULER OF THE UNIVERSE!”

OK, ready, everyone?

“I AM LASIX, RULER OF THE UNIVERSE!”

“I AM COREG, RULER OF THE UNIVERSE!”

“I AM ALDACTONE, RULER OF THE UNIVERSE!”

Of course, the one that doesn’t work in my pharmacopia is BABY ASPIRIN.

Anyway, sometimes it can be a struggle when I awaken with an urgent need caused by LASIX, RULER OF HE UNIVERSE, but I’m groggy and under the mask. The wind is howling under that mask as I struggle to disengage myself from the tubes which tether me to an 8 foot radius around the TV table next to the bed where my CPAP sits. No accidents to report, but plenty of comedic possibilities.

I’m just thankful they’re all pills. When all of this cardiac excitement started back in May I had to have Jan give me a shot of something called Lovenox (I AM LOVENOX . . . ) which had to be administered by my long-suffering spouse my means of shots to the abdominal wall, 3 times a day. It MUST be love when you have to do that to your partner.

Getting back to CPAP for just a second, I am sleeping deeper, the Lasix urges notwithstanding. I even take naps with the machine on.

And there’s a funny name for those of us who sleep under masks. We are called Hoseheads.

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.

24 Hours on the Clock

I’ve had three nights under the mask of my new CPAP machine, and the good news is I’m getting used to the mask. I have lowered the frequency of throwing off the mask at night to twice. That’s progress.

More importantly, I seem to be deriving some benefit from the CPAP already. I’m not waking up to use the bathroom as much as I was. Once I get to sleep--for that’s the struggle still--I’m out for the duration. Certain skin problems seem to be lessening. And on the other side of the ledger, I am quite a bit more alert and awake in the course of the day, notwithstanding my the need for a nap, courtesy of blood thinners prescribed to lower my blood pressure and metabolic rate.

What does all this have to do with the rebirth of the band? I’m trying desperately to get myself another stream of steam to power me through getting the demo done. My experience tells me that I’ll need all the energy I can summon to get to the point where I’ve got a product in hand to sell the band, and I was not heading in that direction before the machine arrived.

For the record, I survived a heart attack in May of 2008, soon after I got back home from nearly 6 months on QE2. I had an ICD installed in June, 2008.

I’m taking Lasix, Coreg, Aldactone, Digoxin, Coumadin, Crestor, Adacan, and Baby Aspirin. I nap twice a day, and the sleep study said I wasn’t doing enough sleeping when I was asleep.

If the CPAP machine can somehow break this cycle, it’ll be well worth it.

Keeping up with Current Trends

If there’s any doubt that I am a with-it sort of guy, I submit that last night I slept with a CPAP mask on my face. I know what you’re thinking. No I don’t really but I like the phrase.

It turns out that two of my younger siblings--Cindy and Jimmy--have been sleeping with these machines for years now for treatment of sleep apnea. My brother specifically was having episodes of the arrhythmia called afib, which I had back in the summer, after my ICD was installed. I didn’t want to get afib again. The doctors conk me out and use my ICD to jump start my heart. Traumatic, but not particularly serious. The doctors look at it as a boat payment, and I can hardly blame them. Anyway, as I came out of the anesthetic I promised I’d look into what it would take to avoid the reappearance of afib, and I was pretty surprised when my brother, who is usually talkative about his health challenges, had withheld this condition and its treatment. His doctor suggested a sleep study that might determine if apnea was causing his afib. And it looks like it was.

Being the slave to fashion that I am, once I knew that Jimmy had solved a problem I was having with a sleep study (and Cindy too, although she wasn’t specifically having arrhythmia) I decided to talk to my cardiologist about a sleep study.

Hold on a minute here and ask yourself how things have come to the point that I type “my cardiologist” like he was a personal attachment, like “my Corgi mix” or “My Opperman piccolo.” Well, money is a wonderful thing, and, through our insurance, we have been shoveling quite a lot of it his way, so I’ll ask your pardon if I feel a little bit of ownership. He’s quite a nice guy with a very dark sense of humor, actually.

So he set up a sleep study on one of the night that McCain and Obama had their first debate. In due time, they sent the results to my cardiologist (there it is again), and determined that I was having 39 episodes of blockage resulting in lack of oxygen per hour.

They requested another sleep study to fit me with a machine, and in due time it was done. Finally they contacted my cardiologist’s office and I went in for a fitting yesterday.

I’ve been following blogs and other web pages about personal experiences with CPAP, and I am looking forward to feeling the wonderous effects of this machine. But I’ve only slept with it one night, and I spent most of that night waiting for the wonderous effects to fall on me and wrestling with the mask. I had fun terrifying my dogs and my spouse who made the mistake of falling asleep on the couch while I was experimenting with fit.

What I’m hoping is I’ll have some extra energy to undertake the task of putting the band back together. That’ll be worth the effort.