Gigantic.15

Bar Chords

Dan danced on the bar at the Vogue on Sunday nights, that’s where I met him. He and a handful of other scenesters lived in the same Belltown apartment building called The Rivoli not too many blocks from the club. One night, he gave me his number, told me an apartment was about to become available.

My first visit to The Rivoli, I met Dan’s brother, Pat, a professional model about to jet to Europe for a few months. He offered to sublet his apartment. My own place in downtown Seattle for $150 a month, hard to believe.

I’d already given Pat the cash when he told me the story of a grisly murder that took place in the building 15 years prior. It didn’t dissuade me, but maybe explained why the building felt haunted. In 1989, it was mostly occupied by pensioners, solitary types, drunkards, and a small assortment of artists and club kids.

When I first arrived in Seattle, I had perked up being in a new city. That newness had worn off, but moving downtown gave both Seattle and me a second chance.

A few days later, I left my buddy Joe’s apartment on Capitol Hill with my guitar on my back and the remainder of my stuff in a plastic Safeway bag. I’d recently started a new job at Cafe Mars which was only three blocks from The Rivoli. I dropped my stuff at my new place and headed to work. Got home at 4:15 am. After three months on a couch, I finally slept in a real bed.

It was a Murphy bed, a rollaway that pulled out from the wall like a big drawer and took up half the one-room apartment. The bed, the apartment, the whole building had barely changed since the Depression. It felt timeless, an uninterrupted continuum between past and present.

I also sensed that the building, in some way, was aware of its own potential demise. Seattle was changing fast, only the fact that the neighborhood was still dodgy seemed to preserve it.

When I woke up the next morning, I looked out the window and could see ships on the Puget Sound. When I ran the tap in the kitchen, it rattled the pipes in Dan’s studio, which was directly downstairs. He called me on the phone, knowing I was up.

We grabbed a coffee, he showed me his studio, then introduced me to a social services thrift store on the first floor called The Millionaire Club. Best thrifting ever, right in my own building. If I ran out of clean clothes, I could just go downstairs, use it as my personal closet.

First purchase, a mid-70s pair of yellow Converse track shoes, two bucks. I was walking down the alleyway behind the building two days later, a drunk pointed at my feet and said, “Those are my shoes.”

I’d been living at The Rivoli maybe a week, having coffee with Dan again when I found myself scratching an itch behind my ear that seemed to be spreading. I went to a clinic downtown and found out: I had chicken pox. I’d apparently caught them back on Capitol Hill when a boy had coughed in my face.

The Cafe Mars where I worked had a small staff, but they managed to cover for me. Being alone and sick 3,000 miles from home required a new kind of resilience. I was having trouble thinking straight, experiencing shooting pains. I was sweating from my eyes at one point.

Remarkably, Dan checked in on me every day. Since he was a stylish individual, my first instinct was to cover my chicken-pocked face with a bandana.

“If you don’t take that thing off your face, I’m leaving,” Dan said.

He convinced me.

Another friend, Joy, brought me food and visited every single day, even though she didn’t even live in the neighborhood. Not sure what miracle brought such kindness into my life when I needed it most, but I was in no position to question it. Without Dan and Joy I’m not sure how I would’ve gotten through.

In bed with nothing to do, as the aches became more tolerable, I rested the guitar on my chest, clamped the neck with my left hand, and held bar chords on the fretboard as firmly as possible.

Bar chords are the most unnatural hand position known to man. You need to press your index finger over an entire fret, then form the rest of the chord with your remaining fingers. Initial attempts will buzz and sound like crap, but unless you want to play Kumbaya for the rest of your life, you must commit.

In addition to practicing, despite being stuck in bed, I also found myself giving guitar lessons to a four-year old girl named Elsa who wore Coke-bottle glasses.

Her mom, Paula, lived on the same floor. She had this idea that Elsa should catch the chicken pox and get it over with. Not sure this plan worked, but Elsa sure strummed the heck out of that thing and kept me company.

Once I was well enough to get some air, I took my guitar up to the roof. Summer was approaching, the winter gray Seattle sky had turned blue. I was dizzy, but my grip was steely. I was ready to do my best Johnny Ramone, at least for three minutes at a time.

Tom, another Rivoli resident who happened to be on the roof, found this amusing. He was in the process of building a rooftop cabana where he intended to throw cocktail parties. Despite my bedraggled appearance, Tom invited me to his apartment and made me my first sit-down dinner in weeks, setting me firmly on the road to recovery.

A few days later, I cleaned up my act and got back to work at Cafe Mars. I was still a bit pock-marked, but just had to put my vanity in check.

I thought back to when I’d gotten sick in New York the previous year. My whole world had closed down and I couldn’t find the path forward.

In Seattle, I’d come through the chicken pox with five new friends and ten new chords.

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