I first met
Slowfrye some months ago when we were introduced in the parking lot of a big
casino in North County. She was to be my personal assistant throughout the
shooting of a video for a song "Playing Poker for a Living," which had been
written, produced, and recorded by my friend Jason Mershon a few weeks before.
Actually, he had more accurately supervised the recording and had sung a lot of
the backing chorus parts, having hired your dewy-lipped and flaxen-nippled
writer to sing the lead vocal.
Slowfrye,
the only crew member dressed appropriately for such a brutally hot day, showed
me to an air-conditioned trailer near the casino entrance. As soon as we got
inside she pulled a chilled 40-ounce Magnum from an ice chest, removed the cap,
stuck a long red straw down its mouth, and offered it to me. I felt like
kissing her thong. Then she spoke, accusingly.
"Jason tells me you're the gambling dude
singing the song, but that you've never been a gambler."
For some
reason I felt the urge to impress her as she nonchalantly removed her bikini
top and pulled on a "Playing Poker for a Living" tee shirt.
"No, I've
never gambled - in the accepted sense. But for some people, life itself becomes
little more than a game. And for every one of them, taking chances becomes as
natural as breathing. We're all at the same table, basically, and deal in our
own way with the hand we're dealt." Nice one, Hose. How I admired myself at
that moment.
Her eyes
glistened, began pooling as she came closer to me. She hesitated, stared at
either my lips or my chin before confessing, "Jason told me you were deep.
[Right on, Jason!] I wonder how deep you can go...!"
"As deep as
any talent I possess allows." Yes!
A knock on
the trailer door, and a voice outside: "Hose, they need you inside in two
minutes."
"Okay,
thanks," I replied bitterly, yet with grace.
"Why do
they call you Hose?" Slowfrye asked innocently, her eyes never having strayed
below my neck.
I took the
high ground, imagining its vegetation more abundant. "I have a tendency to
clean things. Leave them better than they were before," I lied, accidentally
dropping the Magnum bottle and allowing it to explode on the floor.
"Don't
worry, I'll take care of it," Slowfrye entreated as she gently led me out the
door, then screamed into the heat, "I need a mop and a broom and some towels up
here. Now!"
During the
first break in the shooting, when I returned to the trailer, I found it
spotless and sparkling and smelling of Heaven and Slowfrye, who told me confidentially
that her real name was Solanda Frye and that she had decided to be a singer on
her sixteenth birthday, when some freak boyfriend of hers had given her a copy
of Education and Outreach, the second
album I had done with the Troy Danté Inferno. She said she liked it better than
the cleaned-up second version of the same title, and that maybe that's why we
were different: she digs raw, I dig clean. That's not necessarily true, I
offered; I actually preferred the somewhat nastier versions of those two or
three songs we'd later changed and augmented. The later issue became the more
popular one only because it had become unfashionable for a white guy to refer
to his girlfriend as his "bitch" so much, even in so endearing a fashion.
Slowfrye
pulled a CD from out of the back of her thong. It was a rare bootleg of a live
recording from a club in Washington D.C. when I was a member of the Lou
Christie Minstrels. "Where did you get this? I haven't seen one of these in
ages!" I gasped.
"Look at
the back, Hose."
I could
recognize my own handwriting anywhere. "For Christine," it said and continued,
"Always embrace your talent!"
It all came
back suddenly, clear and clean. "That was 1971," I sighed. "You know Christine
Daniels?"
"She was my
mom."
Later that
afternoon, we had completed a shot with Jason and me standing with guitars on
top of a poker table, two gorgeous dancers at our sides, the seated players
surrounding us happily yelling along to the chorus and drooling on their cards.
The director yelled, "Okay, perfect! Now the export version!" As the two
beauties carefully descended from the table, they were replaced by Slowfrye and
another comely young blonde, both entirely topless and looking good enough to
gamble for. I hadn't known that my new friend was going to be appearing in the
video at all, especially in this raw "foreign" version.
I suddenly
felt protective. I grabbed a magic marker and wrote "talent" across Slowfrye's
chest, the T's futilely attempting to conceal that which modern American media
rejects. Then I gave her a hug before the first take and she kissed me,
whispering, "I assume you'll make sure this washes off...."
Suddenly, I began feeling dirty
again.
To hear or view or
learn more about "Playing Poker for a Living" without feeling dirty, go to
playinpokerforalivin.com