Damon

I moved in with Damon and Jake in May of 1998. Although I had been in a band with them for a few months, I can’t say I particularly knew Damon that well. He struck me as an emotionally guarded individual who preferred indirect communication, which explained his passion for poetry. In our band, Rinse, he exhibited moments of intensity coupled with insecurity, such as the rehearsal when he threw a tantrum and unplugged his microphone when it was suggested his vocals were turned up too loud.

At first I thought his hobbies consisted only of writing, singing and especially drinking, but I soon learned he hid away in his bedroom when he thought nobody was listening and played guitar. I was intrigued by the interesting rhythms he used, especially since Carl, the guitarist for Rinse, often relied on a couple predictable (but effective) rhythm guitar patterns. When I asked him about it, Damon explained that his guitar playing was indiscernible, at least according to the prior drummer in Rinse. Incredulous, I offered to attempt to play with him. The result would eventually become the band known as JimRobbie; after Rinse imploded from the competitiveness of all of its members but Aaron, the perpetually stoned bassist who somehow stoically held our musical masturbations together.

When we weren’t practicing, Damon wasn’t home much at first. He had this girlfriend whom I found to be a manipulative, deceitful, petty, self-absorbed wench who lived two doors down from Poor Richard’s, a bar that was also conveniently located across the street from the sub shop where he worked. If I needed to find him, I called Poor Dick’s (as we called it). I bet if you had looked closely at the ground in 1997, you could have seen a 200’ path where he had worn out the pavement between those three places.

Despite his predilection for predictable patterns (Stan Lee’s unavoidable influence on my writing is becoming more obvious), Damon was an extremist; oscillating between vivid cynicism and delusional optimism. He viewed his posse as neo-beats, and aspired to become the next Jim Morrison. I surmise that, like me, he spent a lot of time trying to prove himself to himself in those days, but he was willing to test his own limits much further than I.

Sometimes he and his girlfriend would break up, and then he spent much of his spare time on our magnificently dilapidated front porch drinking 40’s of Mickey’s and listening to a tight rotation of Grateful Dead, Blind Melon, Bob Dylan’s “Bringing It All Back Home,” a crappy Tom Waits album and Blind Lemon Jefferson, an influential delta blues guitarist from whom he conjectured Blind Melon had derived their name. His favorite hobby while drinking on the porch besides playing his guitar in the nude was mocking the judge across the street who was constantly maintaining his perfectly manicured lawn.

In an unanticipated twist, Jake and I both got girlfriends around the same time Damon finally permanently dumped his. I also received a promotion which meant I had to be at work every weekday at 5 o’clock am. Jake virtually disappeared, and my girlfriend moved in with us. Introducing an opinionated female to a stereotypical college bachelor pad was bound to shake things up, and I don’t think Damon and Amy got along very well. Damon began hosting nightly all-night parties at our place, which did not fit well with my work-imposed sleeping habits. We immaturely relegated ourselves to passive CD player volume wars.

In May of 2000, Jake and his girlfriend moved to Colorado, Amy and I moved to California and Damon moved to either Arizona or Texas. The only time I’ve seen him since was when I was a groomsman at his wedding in Tucson a few years back. We had a wonderful time hiking on Mt. Lemon (just before it burned), which for all I know was also named after Blind Lemon Jefferson.

I cannot help but laugh at this rather dry and somewhat snide depiction of a complex poet. Fittingly, he recently insinuated that my blog was generally uninteresting, an impression with which I don’t disagree. Despite my persistent usage of past tense, he’s not actually dead. I miss him more than I ever could have anticipated when we apathetically parted ways, a fact that has been influential on my perception of love. He and his wife still live in Tucson and now have a kid, and he recently had a poetry book published which can be found here, although he’s said he’d rather have them bought from him personally. He generously sent me a copy and of course I enjoyed it, but frankly I am too close to the subject matter to be an effective judge, although I did particularly appreciate Empty Vessel. I was tempted to reprint it here, but I don’t want to get sued.