Goofy Grin, Rifle Arm, and Pathetic Little Men, Part III

 

                                                                            

It’s Little League baseball season in Hawaii, back around 1967, Kanewai Park.  There was this one kid on the “Senators”, he was a skinny kid with a goofy grin and a rifle arm – and I mean a rifle of an arm – no arc balls, no lobbing, those pitches came hissing at the plate – rising upwards a few inches from the backspin.  There were a few times when the opposing coaches had to drag a kid kicking and crying up to the batter’s box, because the kid was afraid of this wiry pitcher, who, by the way, never hit a batter- not once.  Well, the wiry kid’s parents moved, so the following year he had to play for the “White Sox”.  The coaches were two clowns who each had a kid on the team that apparently they wanted to make stars out of.  They had one on the pitcher’s mound, and the other on second base.  These kids had no arm, no gumption, no game, no talent, nothing.  The pitcher threw nothing but arc balls, which the other teams had no problem smacking all over the place.  The goofy grinned kid, well, he sat on the bench the whole time.  Oh yeah, there was also the termite on third base – who, on the rare occasion that he actually fielded a grounder, would toss the ball in the general direction of first base with all he had, where it would sometimes roll at the general vicinity of first base – other times it would end up closer to home plate.  And yes, the skinny, rifle armed kid with the goofy grin never saw one second of game time.

Fast forward to today, the city is Reno, Nevada, and it’s not baseball this time, it’s the music business – from which some of us have made a living for quite a few years.  The kid with the goofy grin is still as naïve as he was when he was 10, firing baseballs at the plate because that’s what he did – and not to show anybody up, or to threaten anybody’s manhood.  He makes music because that’s all he knows, and all he ever wanted to do.  He never sold out, and was never able to fit into western society as we know it.  I’ve been here almost a year and a half, and I have not been able to get a single entertainment director, a single owner or manager to return a phone call or email.  I’d be willing to bet that not a single one of them has even looked at my demo videos.  The acts that are working around town – in the casinos, they could easily be compared to the arc ball pitcher, and the second baseman who hit first base about two thirds of the time, and the third baseman who could not, under any circumstance, even come close to reaching the first baseman’s glove.  So far, in the many painful excursions to the handful of rooms where they hire solo acts, it’s been amateur night, street musician night, or the lounge lizard from hell.  One of the rooms just recently cut back from four nights a week of entertainment to three, and another is trying something different on one of the nights that normally featured the regular live entertainment.  For the record, there is a huge difference between bashing the “competition”, and reality.  If there were good acts here, I would be the first to say so, and I’d even shake their hand, but well, what I’ve heard literally hurts my ears, and makes my skin crawl.  The worst part of all this, though, is, as I said, the fact that not a single entertainment director or manager has answered the phone, returned a phone call, or returned an email in my countless efforts to make contact.  I don’t know if it’s a very tight knit Good Ol’ Boy network, or if there is something else behind this, but it’s gotten way past the point of absurd.  People who are smarter than me have said that they do not believe in coincidences – well, I agree with that for the most part, but, coincidence or not, this is way beyond reason or logic – it appears to me that there is, at the risk of sounding paranoid, something behind the endless avoidance, unanswered phone calls and emails.

I do have my new CD that has been sent to quite a few radio stations, including Sirius XM, and Pandora, but the reality is that there is a very slim chance that any of the program directors will ever get around to listening to it.

In case you would like to see Fid doing what he does, you can find him here:  http://thefidmusic.com/

It appears I must come up with another plan.  It’s a damn good thing that this is not a life or death situation, or I’d have been in the ground long before now, or at the very least, I’d be living under a bridge.  Being the town leper is not the most pleasant thing I’ve ever experienced – and holy hell, now that I think about it, five years of that is a bit much O_O .