The San Diego Troubadour

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Hosing Down

The Price of Purity

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