The Dry Side of the Pond

By Phil Wich

Like Albert King wrote in 1967, Ravi Dane was born under a bad sign. Son of an overindulgent young mother and his guitar-playing, drug-addicted father, Ravi stood little chance at surviving, much less succeeding, at life. His stolen first breath would be the only card cleanly dealt to him. Out-of-control circumstances robbed him of the life others would enjoy as he grew up sidestepping an abusive stepfather and finding acceptance and safety in friends that would protect and love him throughout the rest of his life. A retired guitar hidden under years of dust and disappointment unlocked innate musical ability commonly found on stages and in concert halls throughout the world. The love of a young woman hiding in plain sight and the four members of a garage band would ferry Ravi into the world of rock and roll and the destiny always in his cards.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
• Release date: Sep 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798887314082

Book preview

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Overture

Verse 1

Verse 2

Verse 3

Verse 4

Verse 5

Verse 6

Verse 7

Verse 8

Verse 9

Verse 10

Verse 11

Verse 12

Verse 13

Verse 14

Verse 15

Verse 16

Verse 17

Verse 18

Verse 19

Verse 20

Verse 21

Verse 22

Verse 23

Verse 24

Verse 25

Verse 26

Verse 27

Verse 28

Verse 29

Verse 30

Verse 31

About the Author

cover.jpg

The Dry Side of the Pond

Phil Wich

Copyright © 2023 Phil Wich

All rights reserved

First Edition

Fulton Books

Meadville, PA

Published by Fulton Books 2023

ISBN 979-8-88731-407-5 (paperback)

ISBN 979-8-88731-408-2 (digital)

Cover: Marjama Pond, Hockinson, Washington

[e-mail]

Model: Chelsea Smith

Printed in the United States of America

To those hiding in the shadows of everyday life

For Cindy, Olive You

Thanks, Mom! You know why.

Overture

The traffic signal turned red as a Datsun 240Z screamed through the intersection, a yellow canary hell-bent on escaping its cage. Headlights flashed and horns bleated as the car swerved through oncoming traffic, narrowly missing a Buick full of blue hairs headed to a Pat Boone concert.

Inside the cramped car, a baby trying to escape the confinement of his mother's womb wriggled and kicked, attempting to grab purchase for the final push into the new world that awaited outside.

Dank smoke from a joint propped in the ashtray wafted through the open sunroof, intermingled with the bassline from the James Gang's Funk #49 and the screams of the soon-to-be young mother writhing in the worn-out bucket seat to his right. Stevie ignored Rachel's wails as best he could while trying to navigate through a fall rainstorm unleashing the torrent held captive overhead just seconds ago. A wet head would dry in an hour, he reasoned. Busted eardrums were forever.

Jesus H. Christ, get the hell out of my way, Stevie shouted, banging on the dashboard in frustration. This baby ain't gonna wait much longer!

He knew yelling at a bus was about as futile as trying to explain to his bandmates why they couldn't light up around Rachel while she was pregnant. Rush-hour traffic wasn't cooperating. Every stoplight seemed stuck on red, and every overly cautious driver appeared bound and determined to slow his progress. The hospital felt hopelessly far away. Finally, the bright-crimson emergency entrance sign loomed into view, cutting through the darkness like a beacon of hope. He shoved the gas pedal to the floor, intent on finding a doctor or nurse. He'd even settle for a janitor at this point, anybody who would finally shut Rachel up.

It's coming out! she was screaming now.

Car and passengers screeched to a halt in front of the entrance, tires sliding on the rain-slicked asphalt. Steve wrenched the door open and bailed out, shouting for somebody to either get this thing out or put it back in!

Verse 1

Rachel Ayn was born in the summer of 1974 to William and Marlene Hood in Erlands Point, Washington, a small town perched at the western end of the Olympic Peninsula roughly six miles northwest of Bremerton. William worked at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyards as a master welder and shift supervisor helping to construct the floating armadas that would protect America throughout the end of the Cold War and well into the age of global terrorism.

Rachel was educated in a public school in the Erlands Point-Kitsap Lake School District, where God and country ruled, not only on the local public airwaves but also dominated the conversations at the B&B Bakery and Beauty Parlor. Her teachers would remember Rachel as a good student who should have applied herself more in class rather than behind the bleachers, where she earned the nickname Mount Hood after the Northern Cascades peak in the neighboring state of Oregon. Kids can be cruel, but they rarely beat around the bush.

You couldn't really call Rachel a tart, but she did run fast and loose despite the upbringing her parents worked hard to instill in their only child. During her senior year, she indulged in a lesbian affair with an older woman. Rachel believed sex was a natural part of the human experience regardless of gender or moral disposition. Indeed, throughout her high school years, she would enjoy the attention of many lovers of both sexes, which further validated the nickname she ran with. Erlands Point held little for Rachel and for that matter, most young people who had any desire of discovering the world outside the spit of land they felt trapped upon. Like the majority of those in the class of 1992, she could not wait to move out as soon as she graduated from high school, a promise she made her parents.

Erlands Point was a great place to live if you were a child unaware of life outside the small, tight-knit community or retired with little care for the world outside your view. The Hood family lived on five acres of wooded land, including a lush meadow that attracted a variety of wildlife. There, white-tailed deer and ruffled grouse held dominion over their human neighbors.

The drive from the Hood farm to the shipyards in Bremerton took a mere fifteen minutes, but the world beyond their five acres might as well have been on the moon as far as Rachel was concerned. The Hoods were practicing Friends, a modern-day branch of the Quaker religion who practiced direct communion with God. The Quaker community believed that faithful devotion to the Risen God would bring them closer to the Abba Father. Simply put, the Hoods believed it was their duty to live the Gospel rather than merely regurgitate it back to one another on Sundays. These were good, kindhearted folk who put stock in their fellow Friends and lived the life they preached.

Rachel had been raised in the Friends community and as a child, believing that the relationship she shared with God was foundational to her life. She had been active in the church and participated in community functions, but her faith and trust in the Gospel had weakened as she reached her teenage years. Slowly, she began to draw away from her Quaker family to take a peek behind the curtain that had until then separated her from the rest of the world.

It was no surprise to the Hoods that the high school years were difficult for their daughter. The ever-present temptations in the world outside their community were a constant pull on the soul of their adolescents just as they were in the secular world. Strong religious belief and a pious lifestyle did not distract from the fact that Rachel was an attractive young woman who turned the heads of boys afraid to make eye contact as well as older men who knew better but were helpless to look away.

Her first attempt at intimacy ended poorly, hands fumbling wildly as both participants tried to act on instincts smothered beneath blankets of Biblical teaching and innocence. It was hard to say who suffered more: the young man who fled the embrace embarrassed by a premature delivery or Rachel, who felt all dressed up with nowhere to go and no idea how to get there alone.

It is said that in life, practice makes perfect, and as Rachel became intimately acquainted with her body, she realized the sway it held. It did not take long before the older boys found her and took advantage of the willingness to give and receive the pleasure God had prepared for her to share with her husband on their wedding night. Once opened, the door to a carnal world would never again close for Rachel. She had found a friend in pleasure and courted it as she assumed her father had courted her mother many years earlier.

Not long after graduating high school, Rachel and two girlfriends left the cloistered safety of Erlands Point for the big, bright city just beyond the horizon. She was fresh meat for the innocence grinder and would never again be the same. Life was about to get interesting.

*****

Give me some drugs! Rachel demanded, bursting into Bay Two as another contraction tore at her abdomen. I don't care what they might do to the baby! Give me some goddamn drugs! This was followed by a litany of swear words, mingled with half-hearted apologies directed at anybody within earshot.

I am sorry, miss. We can't give you any drugs, one of the attending nurses said. In case you hadn't noticed, you are about to give birth. The time for medication has long passed.

The emergency room nurses and physicians had the impending birth well in hand. The situation was decidedly more positive for Rachel than for her roommate, the victim of a hunting accident who was hemorrhaging a disturbing amount of blood. A thin gauze sheet suspended from the ceiling was the only thing separating them, which was unfortunate for the gunshot victim. A passerby gauging their respective prognoses based on sound alone would deem Rachel's outlook grimmer. Her agitated screams bounced off the walls, while her companion was noticeably quieter.

Goddamn it, I am going to kill someone tonight if you don't get this thing out of me! Rachel yelled, her cheeks red with fury. My crotch is ripping at the seams, and all you can do is tell me to breathe! Fuck you, Nurse Ratched, you bitch. I want drugs!

After the contraction passed, Rachel would beg forgiveness until the next one began, then the cycle would begin anew. Stevie was of no help. The hours they'd spent together in Lamaze class had apparently been a waste. He'd propped himself up in the corner, trying his best to stay out of Rachel's reach, positive she would do her best to make his dangly bits hurt like hers if he wandered too close to her hands.

As pregnancies go, Rachel's landed squarely in the middle of the bell curve of pain and suffering every mother-to-be had to transit. She had been told by her gynecologist that her pregnancy should be fairly routine. She was young and limber like Gumby, able to stretch beyond the point of no return, then snap back with only a few stretch marks to show for it.

Her friends told her that giving birth was like passing a bowling ball through your vagina. What they failed to mention was that the bowling ball would be wrapped in barbed wire and lit on fire.

Par for the course, Stevie—her newly promised husband—was about as useless as tits on a boar hog. He was always on the road playing some dive in front of hormone-fueled teenagers and their equally horny mothers. She could see that this pregnancy would be a one-woman show from the get-go. Living on the state-provided loaf of pasteurized cheese product, discounted groceries from the nearby Safeway, and Chinese takeout in a two-room apartment over the liquor store was not the Ozzie-and-Harriet lifestyle she had pictured, but this was the bed they had made; she and Stevie would have to lie in it.

Eight months and two weeks into their new life together, the contractions began as she and Stevie were finishing dinner. Rachel did her best to ignore the spasmodic activity in her abdomen as the first trickle of amniotic fluid made its way down her left leg. She thought nothing of it until the dam broke upstream, sending a river of uh-oh onto the floor.

Stevie, it is happening!

Rachel would eventually call her parents and inform them they were now grandparents. They had that right, even though the three of them had not shared a meal or conversation in over a year. Stevie had agreed to a shotgun wedding. He didn't really love Rachel, but this child, his child, would not be born a bastard as he had been. The two of them made an appointment with a justice of the peace at the courthouse shortly after Rachel informed Stevie that she was going to keep their child regardless of the hardship it put upon him. The baby was growing inside her, not him, for Christ's sake.

Ravi James Dane was delivered to the world on October 28, 1993. The wind-driven torrents of rain pelting the windows of the emergency room softened his first cries and cleansed the room of the pain and suffering God had ordained with each new birth.

*****

Stevie Dane was the lead guitar player for a seventies cover band touring the Puget Sound area when he met Rachel backstage after a gig in a small dive in Seattle. Until that moment, Stevie had spent his time free balling through life like a sailor on liberty call, not particularly concerned with the consequences of his actions. Rachel and her friends had read about a group called the Fade in an article in The Rocket, a local publication that covered and promoted homegrown music in the Northwest. The group became local favorites of the young adults that filled the clubs and small arenas around town, playing everything from Procol Harum to Cream and Robin Trower.

Stevie was a Kidal, Gauche, Chapool—a lefty from birth just like his idol James Marshall Hendrix, Jimi to his friends and the millions of adoring fans. He fashioned his playing style to mimic Jimi's, down to inverting his Fender Stratocaster and turning a right-handed guitar into a left-handed version by restringing the neck and changing the nut.

Playing had not come easy for Stevie. He spent the better part of his adolescence holed up in his bedroom skipping high school classes to master the only thing that did not tell him what to do or talk back to him. Midway through his junior year, he decided that school was of little use to him and dropped out to focus solely on the guitar. He would tell himself that every song ever written was hidden in the space between the neck and strings of his beat-up Fender. He would do his best to find them all.

Rachel loved rock and roll and the skinny, tattooed guys that played and gyrated onstage. The rebellious nature of rock and roll struck at her core, releasing pent-up emotions buried beneath the shallow crust of self-denial and religious teachings. After her shift at the printing company (where she coerced the owner to hire her as she bent over to tie his dangling shoelace, revealing two perfectly matched bare breasts peeking over her tie-dyed tank top), she would gather her girlfriends and make the trek across town. There, an abundance of nightclubs and bars dotted the dimly lit back streets of Bremerton. They would sit in the front row sipping fruity drinks, lips overdecorated with strawberry-red lipstick pulsing with each beat, vying for the attention of the boys on the stage.

It didn't take long for Rachel to be noticed by the man whose name she would eventually take—if not by love, then by necessity. Rachel wasn't a groupie. Those girls gave themselves to any musician or roadie who came within arm's reach. She maintained some of her family's values and would not give herself up that easily. She would wait until the end of a set, ears ringing from the amplifiers onstage, then strike up a conversation with a band member while hoping for an invitation backstage after the show. She was irresistible in her tight jeans and white halter top that left just enough to the imagination. Few men could resist her. Stevie was no exception.

There was a spot left between the scabs and blowouts of the past week he could still fix in his right arm, not his left. That was the moneymaker, the one he needed to keep clean and free of the self-inflicted wounds of a junkie. This arm he favored like no other part of his abused body. He used it to pick his favorite Fender and couldn't risk pissing it off, not even for the fix he needed.

Stevie sat on the beer- and vomit-stained couch backstage and took out his kit, fingers finding the tools of his addiction as they had for more years than his abandoned mind wanted to remember. He bummed a lighter from a roadie and cooked his load in the bent spoon given to him by his last girlfriend just before she overdosed in his lap. He tightened the tubing around his arm just above his skinny bicep, holding the end of it in his teeth and slapping the bend in his right arm, raising the uncooperative vein to reluctant attention. The well-used needle found its way through the tough skin in the bend of his arm, the flash of blood back into the syringe confirming his aim. The plunger slowly injected the warm brown liquid into his vein. His jaws loosened, releasing the tubing as the heroin seeped through his bloodstream. The rush was almost instant as he finished the load. Nothing would be wasted or left in the syringe for someone else to steal if he passed out.

He uttered a quiet hello to his old friend and slouched back into the sofa as the outside world faded from view. He had thirty uninterrupted minutes until the next set, plenty of time to enjoy before he would be called onstage. He lit a cigarette and closed his eyes.

Years later, it would be the rock and roll three-way that brought Stevie and Rachel together: sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Coke was the boss, the driver of the bus that carried its passengers to that place where the world melted away like an ice cream cone in the hand of a smiling child on a hot summer day. The key to survival was just how far and often you dared ride the bus.

Stevie Dane grew up in a modest home where his mother raised him and his sisters after their drunken, deadbeat father ran out when he was nine. Thrust into the role of man of the house at such a tender age, he never stood a chance at a normal life. Young Stevie saw life through the eyes of a child cowering beneath the kitchen table with his sisters as Dad kicked the hell out of Mom for sport nearly every night. He had once stepped between his father and cowering mother only to be rewarded with a cut on his cheek from the jagged ring on Dad's calloused middle finger, a scar that was still faintly visible beneath the youthful stubble he let grow to cover it through his adolescence.

Grade school friends were hard to come by when classmates learned you were the son of a wife-beating skirt chaser. No wife or daughter was safe, and an open beer didn't last long around Mr. Dane. It wasn't uncommon for Stevie's father to be AWOL for weeks at a time chasing tail and dodging irate husbands, but this time, it was different. There were no late-night phone calls to bail him out of jail, no drive-bys to scour his mother's hiding places for beer money, and no after-hours beatings. Mr. Dane was gone.

It would not be an exaggeration to say the family was better off without Stevie's father. Life would continue to be austere and difficult, but Mom and the kids could live without fear of violence and intimidation. Alley cats don't change their habits and will always seek out the shadows, taking whatever they need while staying one step ahead of the pack. It is likely that Mr. Dane would remain in the shadows and on the run for the remainder of his miserable life.

*****

The ride home from the hospital was far less eventful and considerably quieter than the previous night's trip. Separately, Stevie and Rachel questioned how they were ever going to raise the little life that lay sleeping in the back seat, strapped into a car seat they'd found in a dumpster outside their apartment. Neither had the skills or life experience necessary to get all three of them over the chasm between lives of self-indulgence and the life awaiting them at home.

The stoplights that had blinked red last night all seemed to turn a vibrant shade of green as the car bearing the fragile family made its way home. Both Rachel and Stevie knew that once they left the comfort and protection of the hospital, life as they had enjoyed it would be over. Late-night parties would be replaced with midnight feedings. Beer and fast food would have to fight it out with formula and diapers.

What the hell does he want? Rachel screamed frequently as she adjusted to the new role of mother. I have fed him, burped him, changed him, rocked and sang to him. I don't have anything left to give him!

The phone call Rachel had dreaded making since she discovered she was pregnant was mid-ring when her mother lifted the receiver from its cradle atop the nightstand. It had been an uneventful evening in the Hood home until her scream startled Rachel's father from the sound sleep he had worked all day to enjoy. William, that was Rachel. We are grandparents!

Verse 2

Breakfast at the Hood's kitchen table resembled a Saturday Evening Post cover complete with a platter of eggs fried sunny side up, a rasher of crisp bacon, fried potatoes dug from the garden, and a cold bottle of fresh cream waiting to be shared with the pot of freshly brewed coffee. Serious conversations were saved for the morning meal as Marlene believed any consequential decision would be best debated and decided after a good night's sleep before the rigors of daily life had a chance to sour one's disposition.

Rachel and Marlene had decided over the phone that the upcoming weekend would be a good time for the two families to get acquainted. The next three days would give William time to sort out his emotions and work up the courage to accept his daughter as the mother she had become regardless of any misgivings he might have.