I’m writing as I sit listening to roosters crow and tropical breezes blow through the trees here on a hilltop in Kauai. The garden island of Hawaii. Archipelago of enchantment, glassy waves, and ‘ohana. Do you hear the warm rain falling? I hope so. It’s very lovely.

Now that I’ve paddled out and surfed down in Poipu this morning, I’ve got some Kalaheo Cafe coffee flowing through me, and I’m back to my laptop, it feels appropriate that I post this story. Why? Because chickens are one of the themes, and there are A LOT of chickens on Kauai. Far more chickens than people, actually.

I do not eat birds and have not for a very long time. It’s been 35 years since a feathered creature crossed my lips. To find out one of the reasons why I don’t eat birds, read the actual, honest, true story here.

I write many true stories. Memoirs. Creative nonfictions. Real ass Bildungsromans and other yes-that-happened-to-me tales. But what you’re about to read is…not…that.

This is the second installment in a four-part fact-based fiction series of mine. Fact-based, because a lot of it happened. Like the chickens. Fiction, because a lot of it may have happened. Or I made it up. Which means it’s imaginary. Lore. Fairy tale. Mythology. But I leave that up to you.

The part about my name, which you may have read from the title, is definitely true. I was, indeed, named after a hitchhiker. If you read part one of this story series, you know that.

Be aware: The story you’re about to read will make the most sense if you’ve read the beginning. That is found here: part one.

You say that you read part one already? Fabulous! Hand claps and fist bumps! I very much hope you enjoyed it. It might be why you’re here to read part two. Being read by you, dear reader, is one of the main reasons I write, and I’m bashfully pleased to have you reading more.

Part two comes soon after my long-winded introduction.

Now, to those who didn’t read part one and don’t plan to: You’re someone who prefers to skip the beginnings of things. Someone who jumps right into the middle of a story, book, or movie. Go right ahead.

Skip part one, you wild child. Be a maverick. Walk the tightrope without first learning the trapeze. Watch “The Empire Strikes Back” without watching “Star Wars” first. I won’t judge. Part two, for you, it is.

Okay…the story continues below the bird down there, staring out at all of us. If Mr. Rooster freaks you out like I’m freaked out by him, then scroll past quickly, and read, read, read…

My relationship with chickens is almost as long as my relationship with my name. My fowl origin story began when I hitchhiked from Anchorage to Kenai, Alaska. My thumbing abilities had grown considerably since my teen years, and I made my way north to make some money and to “become a man then,” as the blue-collar Minnesotans said.

I got a job working on the docks throwing salmon, but it was not a good fishing year. To keep working when the salmon weren’t running, I was recruited to kill and skin 69 chickens in a day. Through the course of that long, bloody, fly-infested day, I learned that I was a good killer but an even better pacifist. Chopping off the heads of things would not be my life’s work.

I fed myself off my murder spree until the fishing season ended, cleaned off all the dried fish scales in a shower at the local YMCA, and flashed a thumb to get out of Kenai. I was picked up in a large, black, nearly windowless van by a young-ish man in a plaid work shirt and baseball cap who smelled heavily of weed he called Alaska Thunderfuck.

As we drove to Anchorage, over the rugged crags and near the dirty-white glaciers, I offered him the last of my cooked chicken inside a sad combination of shoplifted Wonder Bread and marmalade.

He was very thankful and said, “It’s a good thing I picked you up, man. I was getting paranoid, and you’re a good distraction. I stole this van on the street in Homer yesterday.”

I stopped eating chickens that day, and haven’t eaten them — or any other bird — since.

Had my poor mother known I’d find myself in situations eating bird sandwiches with stoned men in stolen vehicles, she may have named me Steve. Instead, in my pre-conceived past, she was deeply engrossed in conversation with Kip and Fern.

“Soh, whatcha doin’ out here east of the Rockies?”

Kip replied to her question with a hint of southern drawl, “Well, I have an uncle out west we were tryin’ to find.”

“Ooh, yah? Tell me about him.”

“I hadn’t seen him in a long time. Ewan Gentry.”

“What a greeaat name!” my mother exclaimed.

“Ewan?”

“Noh. The other one.”

I imagine my mom seeing my name in a dream state, as if she had discovered something that was lost.

Kip then floated up over the chords of Fern’s guitar and began to explain his ancestry, infusing his tale with dashes of crystal energy and New Age pageantry.

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He began, “A couple of centuries ago, my family lived in Scotland, and they were rich. Like…real wealthy. But mean, too. Meaner than they were rich. And greedier than all get out, y’all.

“They didn’t care about their farmers and their workers. In hard times, they pushed their people to work even harder than the times was. During famines, they gave ’em less. The workers protested, but I always heard my family didn’t care about ‘em.

“This one day, a young woman they’d never seen came right up to their front door. They opened it, and she stood still. Her dress was whippin’ in the wind, and she had a smile on her face. Just starin’ at ‘em.

“They said she might’ve been a Celt. Or somethin’ like it. She said a lot of words no one in my family could understand, turned around, and left. Where she was standin’, all the grass was dead and never grew back.

“After that, there was a fire. The house burned down. My family lost their home and half their crops. Children started dyin’. They tried to be better people after that. Tried to be generous to their workers, but it didn’t work.

“The workers revolted and killed some of my family. Almost everyone died and ended my line. They had a curse…an evil in them they couldn’t get rid of. They didn’t know what to do, so Great Aunt Maja went to Edinburgh to meet with a gypsy.

“The gypsy read her fortune and told her there were people who could help her, but they were in America. The gypsy told Aunt Maja about New Orleans and the Voodoo priestess who lived there: Marie Laveau.

“They didn’t have much left, so they used what they had, got on a boat, and headed across the ocean. Georgia was the closest they could get to New Orleans. They didn’t have enough money to go on, so they stopped in Savannah.

“It took a while, but Marie Laveau got found. And she helped my family…with a spell, blood, and ritual.”

My long-bearded father had been quiet most of the drive, intently focused on keeping all four travelers safe from dying. He steered around icy patches at the last minute and kept the van from being knocked off the road by the whoosh of semi-trucks roaring past them.

Now, my dad called out skeptically with his deep and gruff voice as he piloted the van, “Well, what happened to the curse?”

Kip said quietly and mysteriously, “I still have it in me. It’s just…got less power now.”

It was this lore that crept behind my head then. Before I was born and claimed my name. Shimmering like a ghost storyteller spinning a yarn in my ear.

Only two years after I escaped the stolen van in Alaska, I went to the UK. I had no reason; a magnetic force drew me there. My inner arrow pointed my compass east across the sea.

I found myself on a roundabout in the rain in early April outside Glasgow, and the sun was setting. The light was going out, and I had my right hand in the air with my thumb extended. I was picked up by a Ford Fiesta, and a Scot with an accent thick as Highland wool.

The Scot said he was worried I’d get pneumonia being out in the cold with cars splattering me. I felt no danger, so I took him up on his offer to go to his place. Upon arrival inside his dry flat, my host with a brogue lit up a strong hashish spliff in my honor.

No one died that night. Only merriment was had.

Was it gypsy Voodoo magic or human generosity that prevented me from being robbed and killed that night near Glasgow?

My questions have never ceased; they’ve only grown.

As I hover over the heads of my parents, Kip, and Fern in a memory I was never a part of, the snow whipping against the outside of The Little Volkswagen That Could, I ask myself: Did Fern have some skin in my game, too?

Fern only knew songs by Paul Simon, and he played many of them in the VW van that night as they sped down the interstate with the wind blowing 50 miles per hour.

After Kip’s story of Celtic curses eclipsed into eerie silence for a long while, my mother began to sing along to Fern playing Homeward Bound (aiming but missing the Art Garfunkel harmony).

And as my father narrowly missed snow drifts piling on the blacktop ahead, my mom and Fern sang, “Every stranger’s face I see reminds me that I long to be homeward bound,” together.

Were those lyrics paving the way for my own future? The yearning I would feel out on a winding two-lane? The desire to continue forward to the horizon ahead?

Just in case you want to read or reread part one, here it is:

Thank you to Pure Fiction for publishing this story series originally in June 2023.

You want to read part three? I’ll post part three of this story series to my Substack this June.

Gentry Bronson Media & Creative

You’ll find out more about the wonderful clients I work with and what I do with them on my website.

My site also has more of my own writing and information about my musical career, including my albums, EPs, and EPK.

Mark your calendars for this: If you’re in New Orleans on Saturday, July 25, I’m playing the AllWays Lounge & Cabaret. More about that very special show is coming soon!

I am a firm believer that truth is stranger than fiction. But I also believe in a great story. A good yarn. And by combining the truth with fiction, tall tales are born.

That said, all of the stories I’ve posted to Substack have been the devil’s own truth. Pure as the driven snow. Gospel facts. No tricks were used to convey my stories so far. Until now.

In this story, I combine my own name and what may or may not have happened prior to my birth. I was, indeed, named after a hitchhiker, and that’s part of what makes me into me. But how my first name came to be is part of the lore. And I love lore.

So, what follows is a tale that has a lot of truth in it and probably also some fable. I’ll let you decide.

This is part one of four interconnected fact-based tales. Parts two, three, and four will follow over the next few months. Read onward…and enjoy…

When my parents named me after a hitchhiker they picked up in a blizzard somewhere between Wyoming and Nebraska, I don’t believe they had the intention that I become a hitchhiker myself. But that’s what happened. I became someone who flings his thumb into the road at passing vehicles to travel from place to place.

On the blurry and flurried highway where my parents were driving in their Volkswagen van on a winter day years ago — before I was born or even conceived — the possibility was there that I would become a highway vagabond, but it wasn’t assured. By pulling off into the slush and sliding open the side door of their VW, my becoming a road tramp was certain when my parents decided to pick up and eventually name me after Kip Gentry.

It was the 1970s, and hitchhiking was considered a normal way to get around. By the time I began to stand on the sides of freeways and near on-ramps years later, the world had become less hitcher-friendly. It didn’t matter to me. My name ran through my blood like a back road became Main Street, and Kip, the wandering practitioner of many faiths — Southern Baptist, New Age crystal-ing, and Voodoo — is who I was named after. I became a hitchhiker before I was even born.

What my parents didn’t consider was that naming me Gentry had a dichotomous connotation. In addition to being nudged toward becoming a highway hobo, my name was the title of a bourgeoisie landowner. A genteel person from centuries ago. The landed gentry. Someone who you owed your late rent.

The (lowercase) gentry — aka the real estate tycoon, landlord, and conservative trustafarian — threw countless musicians out of their rehearsal spaces, evicted numberless artists from their studios, and put billions of families on the street. Then they bulldozed it all and replaced everything with parking lots, stadiums, skyscrapers, and other homogeneously ugly behemoths of capitalism. Gentrification was not a noun to be proud of — at least not for a soon-to-be hitchhiker, vagabond, musical artist, and child-of-hippies.

Despite the derogatory use of my name as a verb — to gentrify — it was in that very verb where Kip and I kept our hidden magic. Kip gentrified my parents. His mysticism, sorcery, and family phantasmagoria are what led to my being named after his last name. That — and chicken blood as it turned out — led to me becoming a thumb-thrower.

I would eventually gentrify and thumb down vans in Alaska, trucks in Turkey, two-door Fiestas in Scotland, and Chevrolets in Minnesota. I would flag down convertibles filled with blonds on stretches of Northern California highway, and I would open the doors of Dutch doctor’s BMWs with my gentrifications.

In Europe, a few hundred years ago, the estates, castles, servants, serfs, power, and jealousies of landowners hid behind high stone fences and walls. They were ‘the landed me’ — but they had no name yet.

The landlords and landladies were envious of the lower royales — dukes, duchesses, barons, and baronesses — and they moaned like impetuous toddlers to the higher royales, “I want my own name, too!” Fat with property and cash, they still didn’t have enough. They wanted the same toys as the royal kids in the sandbox next to them. They demanded a title. The tip-top royals — the kings, queens, princes, and princesses — decided to call them ‘the landed gentry’.

Kip’s family liked the title so much that they changed it to their last name.

Generations later, in a different country and a different century, my gentrification was already in motion. The noun ‘gentrification’ was not a dirty word to me, because, even before I was conceived, I was created.

My gentrification occurred a few months prior to my father and mother gettin’ busy in the back of their VW van during a Rocky Mountain sunrise. Before my mother’s nine months of pregnancy began — and before I could hitch a ride out of her womb after a long night of labor — there needed to be a new character to enter the scene. A roaming, long-haired young hobo had to stick his thumb out on an arctic road in the flatland between Cheyenne and Omaha.

It all started with Kip Gentry climbing into the side door of my parents’ VW and closing it behind him.

I don’t know Kip, and I’ve never met him in person, but I know him intimately through our name. Our name is stronger than most bloodlines, and his story was transmitted to me through sharing it. Our collective story was born in the very marrow of our name and in all its incarnations: forename, surname, noun, and verb.

Kip’s family moved to America in the mid-19th century, but they did not travel to the U S of A for religious freedom or land or gold or any of that malarkey; they came for Voodoo. The reputation of Marie Laveau, New Orleans’ queen of Voodoo, had traveled across the Atlantic to reach the Gentry family, who were looking for a way to get rid of a curse.

When I was born, my mother told me that the doctors in the maternity ward told her I was dead. She reminded me of this fact every year on every one of my birthdays.

For my fifth birthday, in addition to the Edward Gorey-esque reminder I received about my faux death, I received an old upright piano that had once lived a long life prostituting itself in a college bar near Bemidji State University. It was loaded into the old hippie farmhouse where my parents had decided to raise me. Little Gentry soon became quite good on the piano.

People sometimes said I was a prodigy, and others said I was a precocious brat. I didn’t have the heart to tell them I just made up music using the black keys as my bad guys and the white keys as my good guys. My music came from nothing other than playing pretend in my head. Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader worked pro bono to do my artist development.

As I grew older and better with harmonies and rhythms, to defend myself from the leering, evil, ice hockey-playing mutts that made fun of my musical talent, I quickly developed wit like a kindergarten Dorothy Parker. My accent resembled none of the local Scandihoovians, so the hockey puck bullies called me Maui Boy as a taunt, and I dreamed of the day I could hitchhike to the island in the Pacific.

When I did get my first chance to hitch, I was 14. It was to get to the Minneapolis suburbs to meet a girl. The winter winds had already begun in July, and I flew my thumb out to catch a Chevy pulling a fishing boat behind it. I was picked up by a man who went for my crotch within the first five minutes and wielded a large knife to get what he wanted. That day, I used my piano-playing fingers to gouge his eyes and ran out the passenger door into a grove of pine trees.

In those trees, I knew that someone was there watching over me. That day of my first hitch, I knew I was protected and would never be lonely — or bored — in my life.

When Kip climbed into the VW, he was also not alone. He carried with him the leftover parts and pieces of his family’s curse. He also had a sidekick: Fern.

Fern was a straight-ahead, born-again, Bible-thumping folksinger. He had a curly Brillo pad of long hair and carried a guitar with two strings missing. There were no E-strings on the top and the bottom of his acoustic axe, but he stroked the guitar and played only E-less Simon & Garfunkel tunes.

They both were frozen southern boys clad in snow-covered tie-dye tee-shirts, jeans, and leather fringe coats when my dad pulled off the road. They were now warmed by the hearth of my parents’ Volkswagen engine and proceeding to get high — and a little sick — from the van’s exhaust leaking in through a rusted-out hole in the floor.

My mom, wearing a giant smile of innocence and youth, climbed into the back of the van from the passenger seat and said, “Helloh,” with her long Minnesotan ‘oooh’ droning. The drone carried on under her next melodious trickle of words when she asked next, “What’s yer names? And where ya from?”

Sheepishly, Kip removed one snowy mitten, rubbed his boyish face, and said, “Kip. From Georgia.”

In terms of DNA, I was still a glint in the apple of my father’s eye and a shiny sheen on the skin of the orange in my mother’s eye. But, in the world of names, I was also the unfertilized egg in the eye of the chicken and the rooster’s family, who had helped rid Kip Gentry’s family of their curse.

Carry on reading part two here:

This story was originally published in June 2023 by Pure Fiction. I’ll be posting the entire story series over the next few months. So, look out for part two in May.

Learn more about me, my writing and music, and my creative and media agency at my official website GentryBronson.com.

Gentry Bronson Media & Creative

Life is like surfing. We paddle out into the water of our lives without knowing what’s going to come. Waiting there in the lull, looking out at the horizon, everything in the future is a mystery.

When the waves of life roll in, we do our best to catch and ride them. Sometimes, we catch a wave at exactly the right time, and we glide and move with success, romance, adventure, and abundance. High on that beautiful moment of magical movement when all is well.

Other times, we wipe out terribly and get smashed into the depths. Spinning in the washing machine. Underwater. When ill health, broken bank accounts, loss, and sorrow have us holding our breath. Until we can get to the surface. Then, we desperately gasp for air, look to the horizon, paddle out, and do it all again.

In my life, many of my worst waves were in my younger years. This story is about one of those big, brutal waves. And it was one I never saw coming.

Read on…

I used to run, and I loved it. When I was seven years old, I watched the very first televised Iron Man on ABC’s Wide World of Sports. The race was broadcast from Hawaii, and after I watched Dave Scott swim, bike, run, and win, I wanted to be a triathlete. It was February 1980, and my young, skinny body started training like Dave.

When I was eight and nine years old, I competed in several marathons and was a long-distance runner for track and field events at Westforest Elementary School. Running also helped me escape the various bullies that came after me on the playground and after school. My legs — and using them like a gazelle escaping a leopard — were my salvation.

My legs carried me over the narrow Minnesota farm roads that led to and from the haunted hippie farmhouse where I grew up. Over ice, through rainstorms, battling snow and hail, and against the brutal and constant wind that swept across the flat fields.

I ran until I was 14 years old. Then I was forced to stop because a miserably ignorant doctor gave me a terrible triple diagnosis. He told me I had a heart murmur, scoliosis, and kidney disease, but the foolish quack was wrong about all of it, and I suffered the consequences.

The doctor’s ignorance and lack of compassion caused me a lot of pain, but it sent me on a search to end my suffering and discover the joy of the water and the ocean.

It was my freshman year, and I’d just transferred to a new high school. I was an innocent kid with a mullet I’d grown out an inch down my neck to resemble Kurt, the fastest member of our cross-country team. I joined the team that summer and started running with them in advance of the school year to get in shape.

My heroes were all the older runners, and they coached and encouraged me while we ran.

One runner might call out, “Hey, Bronson! Lookin’ good, hey!”

And Kurt would coach me by saying, “Get on your toes more when you come in for the sprint at the end!”

When summer ended, I needed to get routine tests to let the school know I was healthy enough to run on the team. My birthday had just occurred and classes would begin soon. I was spritely and naive. A round-faced boy, only beginning to gain a chin, and also to recognize girls and the crushes I had on them.

That late summer day, I walked down the concrete campus and into the doctor’s office to get the results of my tests.

“Come in. Sit down, young man,” the bespectacled doctor said. He seemed to have a humped back under his smock, and his hair was parted in one giant lop combed over to cover his bare, white scalp. “I have some news. News you might not like here today now.”

I was alone and his words came out stilted. Cold. Emotionless. With a dull, aching accent straight from the heart of the Northland.

“Son, you have a bad heart, a bad curve of the spine, and kidney problems. Not good. Not good, all of it. You’re going to have to stop running, And you’re going to need to get more tests. You might need dialysis.”

It was like he was reading a verdict. My death sentence.

Then, he handed me a medical document in triplicate. White on top, then pink, and yellow on the bottom page.

He pointed at the document and said, “You’ll need to have your parents sign this. Then, you go follow up with these specialists here. Your parents will do that then, okay?”

I nodded, took the papers, and looked at them. There was my barely legible name on top and below that, his scrawl read:

Scoliosis. Heart murmur. Probable kidney disease. Diagnostic testing required. Not permitted to run or exercise.

Under that were various specialists’ names, phone numbers, addresses, check boxes, finger smudges, and a signature.

My heart dropped. My blood raced. Anxiety shot through my body like a machine gun was firing from inside my head. Whatever else the mad doctor said didn’t register because I was in shock.

I left the office and trudged to the school bus stop, then I rode home numb and wordless. Quiet in my horror as teenagers flirted and yelled and laughed together.

When I arrived home, I didn’t give the paperwork to my parents. Instead, I went for a run.

I laced up my sneakers and started down our quarter-mile driveway that hooked off to pine trees and paved country roads. Dirt crunched under my heels as I pounded each foot in the early evening humidity and heat of late August.

As I usually did, I began to count the telephone poles as I ran past them. I let each pole magnetically pull me toward it, letting each stride take me further away from home thinking maybe I can keep running.

But I knew I couldn’t run away from this. And I knew I would not get to become like my heroes Kurt or Dave.

I ran five miles and turned around to go home, but while I was gone, my parents received a call. They didn’t need to receive paperwork from me. The doctor called my school administrators, and they called my parents. Now everyone knew about my health issues.

When I returned, I was forbidden from running. Testing would soon begin.

The tests quickly ruled out scoliosis; my spine actually had a natural curvature. So, the humped doctor had missed the mark on health issue number one.

Then, tests determined my heart murmur was a sign that I had a very healthy heart instead of the bad heart I’d been diagnosed with. Doctor Quack had misdiagnosed that one in the opposite direction, too.

The problem was my kidneys. Tests confirmed that something was wrong but they weren’t sure what it was. The words disease and dialysis echoed and pinged in my brain, bouncing like racquetballs through my mind and nerves. Those words made me scared.

My problematic kidneys needed to be tested further in The Cities. The Twin Cities. Minneapolis/St. Paul. Where the specialist doctors with the technologically advanced machines were.

Going to the Twin Cities felt like going home when I was a kid. For a strange little hippie child like me raised on carob and government-issued commodity cheese, the city was where I wanted to be. Where the kids dressed cool and there were Target stores everywhere. Suburbs and freeways and Thai food and punk rockers and culture.

But that urban wonder changed rapidly when going to Minneapolis meant entering a laboratory and being prodded and pricked like a lab rat.

My first test was to quaff a large amount of radioactive liquid that tasted like purple Kool-Aid mixed with metal shavings. Then, I was required to sit very still and straight up in front of a large, round, buzzing machine. While I watched my kidneys and bladder fill up on a green, pixelated computer screen, I desperately needed to pee, but I was forced to stay in one spot for two hours. Then, I was allowed to relieve myself.

It was uncomfortable, often excruciating, and embarrassing, and it was a test that I needed to endure over six times.

When the doctors said I needed to collect my own urine in a plastic bottle all day, every day, for seven consecutive days, embarrassment became a pattern. I had to carry a bottle with me to the restroom at school, collect my own waste fluids, keep the bottle in my locker, then take it home, and do it again the next day.

Making friends and getting a date at my new school became a little more difficult after that.

There were a number of other tests that invaded holes, drew blood, caused bleeding, and also caused severe embarrassment, but they always caused fear. Fear that, eventually, they would find something very bad.

Finally, after a full year of testing and bodily investigating, the doctors determined that I had a birth defect in part of my urinary system. It would require major surgery and eleven days in the hospital, but it was not — and had never been — kidney disease. Three strikes and the good Doctor Quack had struck out. He was wrong about everything.

After the extensive surgery and by the end of my ordeal, I began to suffer from chronic pain. It began in the place where the doctors sliced into my body. They left a long, ragged scar. And next to it, a swollen, smaller scar where four feet of rubber surgical tubing had been inside and used to drain me of fluids.

Because of both scars and the resulting scar tissue, I couldn’t run anymore. The pain was too much.

But it didn’t stop me from living life in radiant color. Shimmering green, turquoise blue and foamy white became an essential part of my life. The colors of the ocean.

As soon as I turned 18, I moved to the West Coast, and there, I found the sea and taught myself to surf. By the age of 26, I was paddling out into beautiful twelve-foot waves at Ocean Beach in San Francisco, catching gorgeous walls of water at Salmon Creek in Sonoma County, and riding long, smooth swells at Steamer Lane in Santa Cruz.

I left the landlocked world of running behind and became a waterman. Living among the elephant seals and otters. Dropping in on waves where dolphins play. Letting kelp pods tickle my feet while I scanned the horizon for the next set.

If I had continued to run on the land, I know I wouldn’t have found the wonder of riding the ocean.

For the last nine years, my home has been in the magnificent city of New Orleans. Here, I paddle my stand-up paddleboard down the bayou, through City Park near the ancient oak trees, always keeping my eye out for gators. I swim laps at the University of New Orleans, flip-turning and backstroking and freestyling next to college students.

And I still surf. Florida is only a couple of hours away, and I celebrated my 50th birthday on Kauai, dropping in on epic waves. I’m returning to Kauai this spring for five weeks to catch even more waves.

I may not be able to run like a gazelle anymore, but I can move through the water like a fish.

My kidney scar is a war wound and a mark of resilience. A reminder of life lived.

I tell people it’s a shark bite. When they believe me, I smile.

This story was originally published by The Narrative Arc in September 2024. Thank you so much to the editor of this story and many incredible other writers’ stories: .

Also, a version of this story was published by YourTango in October 2024.

Listen to an audio version of my story and an interview with me, which was produced by the fabulous and . It’s available on . Click below to hear it on their podcast.

Blue Planet Stories

Gentry Bronson. My Life Was Changed by a Mysterious Health Issue

Today, we speak with Gentry Bronson. He is a writer and musician living in New Orleans. He began his musical life as a classical pianist winning competitions and awards during his teenage years…

Listen now

2 years ago · 10 likes · 2 comments · Alexandra Essenburg, Egor Korneev, and Gentry Bronson

Learn more about me, my writing and music, and my creative and media agency at my official website GentryBronson.com.

Find out who I work with, where I’m speaking next, listen to my music, read my writing, and find out how to book me for a show:

Gentry Bronson Media & Creative

Have any of you ever worked at a bar or restaurant? Whether you have or you haven’t, be very grateful you never had to experience the horror of having me as your server. My story explains why.

Read on…

It was my final table of the night. My back was in knots, my feet were throbbing, and I was sweating under my Hawaiian shirt when I opened the black checkbook. Rent was due in a few days, and I needed this tip to be a big one.

There it was. One dirty, rusted penny lay on the book in front of me. The couple I’d waited on at the table hated their service. It was yet another reminder that I was the worst server in the world.

At least it’s only Saturday, I comforted myself. I still have tomorrow’s day shift. Then, I sulked away to get a stiff drink from the bar to end my night.

I worked at the Bilgewater Grille on the second floor of an old, wooden building on the waterfront in Sausalito’s tourist area. The restaurant overlooked the ferry terminal, and beyond that, the Bay stretched to San Francisco.

Hundreds of tourists offloaded from the ferry every few hours from the city, and I watched them descend the plank. Once on the dock, they’d head into shops in the bayfront town to buy over-priced artwork, kitsch jewelry, and refrigerator magnets of the Golden Gate Bridge.

A gaggle of tourists from De Moines, Omaha, or Reno would appear in Alcatraz and Haight-Ashbury T-shirts. And packs of people from Toronto, Tokyo, or Beijing would snap photos and film with their handheld video cameras. On occasion, a group from San Francisco would decide to leave their neighborhoods in the Marina or the Castro and venture across the water.

After shopping, hunger would strike the tourists, and they would find the Bilgewater. There, they’d spend too much money on plates of Fettuccine Alfredo, fish ’n’ chips, and Cobb salads. While arguments ensued and huge voices laughed under the influence of drinking too many Bud Lights and terrible glasses of chardonnay, their children would run like tiny beasts among the tables.

I envied these people, and the last thing I wanted to do was be their indentured servant. My life’s goal was not to sling bacon cheeseburgers and garlic fries. But I would rather have been among them than serving them.

That was my problem. I had expectations for myself, and I was far from living up to whatever I thought they were.

Maybe if I were more like Wayne? I asked myself. Wayne always takes home good money. Or one of the other fresh-faced, early twenty-something servers who sashayed from table to table with grace. They like working here, and they think it’s easy money.

But I saw my job as hard money. And I did not sashay.

Instead, I was chaos-in-an-apron. I was a Muppet of a waiter. I was Grover, the furry blue monster, serving giant hamburgers on Sesame Street. Smashing through doorways and colliding with tables. Barely staying upright as I teetered and tottered with enormous trays full of heavy plates covered in chicken parmesan and cheesy bread. Unable to bring glasses of soda and sauvignon blanc to impatient patrons without spilling.

I’d bungle between tables like a drunken marionette — my legs warbly and my arms all akimbo. And when I’d stumble up to enter my orders at the touch screen computer, I’d have forgotten them on the way there or written them down wrong.

Martinis arrived half-empty. Entrees arrived lukewarm. Checks were incorrect and took a long time to arrive to my poor customers. They deserved better than me and my mayhem.

The other servers smiled and shone like golden cherubs at their tables. Their customers loved them. And on breaks, they’d secretly steal out to smoke weed or snort a line, but always return intact and professional.

I thought, if I got high on this job, I’d end up falling through a window into the Bay and be eaten by a great white shark.

Sometimes, with my head full of self-deprecating thoughts, I’d slink away during my own break to visit Marlaine at the bar next door.

“What can I get you, Gentry? You get canned yet?” Marlaine would ask. Her blue-gray hair sprayed up several inches over her head.

“Shot of well whiskey to wash away my life,” I’d say.

As she placed a shot in front of me, she’d say, “Your funeral.”

The drink would burn as it went down, and I’d return to the skipping broken record that had become my twenty-nine-year-old existence.

I wasn’t always that person. Before the Bilgewater, I was an excellent bartender. I’d poured piña coladas and crafted Rainbow Rum Punches in Key West, and I’d made Purple Hooters and vodka and tonics for Nirvana and R.E.M. in Seattle.

My nickname was G-man. People compared me to Tom Cruise in the movie Cocktail. And I didn’t mind. I loved it.

The era didn’t last long, but my bartending experiences stayed with me, and I romanticized that time.

Several years later, the world went dark. 9/11 happened two weeks after I returned from traveling in Vietnam. At the same time, San Francisco’s economy crashed. With little light ahead, I formed a band called the Night Watchmen, and I learned quickly that pounding out songs on a piano and singing under the brim of a shoplifted fedora did not pay my bills.

So, I decided I would play Tom Cruise as the G-man once again and get a bartending job. However, I discovered no one was casting that part anymore.

Before my return-to-bartending dreams were dashed, I went into a local brew pub, full of arrogant pride, and asked if they were looking for bartenders.

The dirty-blond hipster behind the bar said, “We’re not hiring anybody for the bar. But if you work as a server for a while, we might think about it.”

Optimistically, I took the job, hoping I’d be back tending bar soon. The pub gave me a black T-shirt with orange mountains and a fist holding a pint of beer on the front as my uniform. I started slinging clam chowder, club sandwiches, IPAs, and ales, and my optimism faded fast.

Routinely, I would go home with twenty dollars total in tips, and a promotion to bartender was not on the horizon. My band wasn’t pulling in much more than that at our shows in the deep recesses of the Bay Area indie music scene. To save money, I moved into a hippie house on a hill with four other people, and we shared one bathroom.

None of that was sustainable. I was a horrific server, impoverished as a result, and in poor mental health from everything combined. Despite the best interests of my mental state, I quit the pub and started waiting tables at the Bilgewater Grille because I thought I’d make more money.

By the time I’d received the dirty, rusted penny as a tip, I’d worked at the Grille for three months.

Receiving the penny propelled me to go to a local dive bar called Smitty’s that same Saturday night. It was frequented by sailors and nicknamed Shitty’s because many people ended up in that state when they went there.

When I woke up the next morning, my head felt like it was on fire. Then, over the sounds of Phish pouring from a speaker in the living room, I heard one of my housemates yell, “Hey, Gentry! Don’t you have to work the Sunday brunch shift today, bro?”

Still half-inebriated, I slunk out and into our shared shower. As I stood in the polluted tub, contaminated with a brown ring and numerous partially-used soaps, I tried to scrub off as much of Shitty’s as I could.

After I climbed out of the shower, I put on my mandatory Bilgewater restaurant uniform. I began with a brightly-colored Hawaiian shirt straight from Magnum P.I.’s wardrobe, and I tucked that into khaki pants that were too big for me. I finished off my costume with orthopedic black clown shoes. Then, I left with my head throbbing.

When I got to work, the Bilgewater was already a wild jungle. Each table appeared to be inhabited by different species. Creatures slurped and slopped and gobbled throughout the restaurant.

At the front, a line of storks and vultures were preening and sticking their beaks out, trying to get seated by the hostess. Inside, there was a table full of monkeys shrieking, led by one angry-looking baboon. A long party table was filled with wildebeests grunting, and a four-top of jackals in college sweatshirts were quaffing yellowish pints. Near them, three warthogs were facedown in troughs of salad that looked like insects.

My manager, Sheila, appeared in the middle of the animalistic melee. A short, wide-shouldered woman with a giant’s voice, Sheila looked up from under my chin and bellowed, “Gentry! You’re late! I’ve got you in section C. You’ve already got a six-top, a three-top, and Mrs. Abilene. Get your apron on.”

“Oh, man. Abilene?” I whined.

“Yeah. Get her some tea,” Sheila said, as she rolled off quickly into the pinball machine of restaurant madness that waited for me.

Mrs. Abilene was an angry, featherless owl who surveyed the restaurant from the corner, and I hated having to bring her tea. It required a teapot, teacup, saucer, honey, cream, and a series of packaged teas and sugars. She never tipped and sat at her table for hours, sipping with scorn.

By the time I got Abilene’s tea service, the six-top table was ready to devour me. It was a table full of colossal rattlesnakes visiting from Arizona. As I took their order, they slithered and ferociously eyed me, then I raced off to put it in the computer system.

Six orders were a lot for me, and it didn’t help that Wayne wanted to talk.

“You smell like booze,” Wayne said. “And you look like ass.”

“Awesome. Thanks. I’m busy here,” I tried to remember my order and type on the screen as he looked over my shoulder.

“Screw you, Bronson,” Wayne sniped and sashayed away.

I was finally ready for the three-top, and I was sure they’d be upset that I’d left them waiting so long. When I got to the table, I was relieved. Two handsome men and an older, sweet-looking woman who, thankfully, looked human.

“Hi. So sorry for keeping you waiting,” I said.

“Oh, it’s okay. It’s a busy day,” one of the men said. “My boyfriend and I decided to bring my grandma out for brunch. We’re from The City.”

He had short brown hair, and the other man had shaggier blond hair. Both were fashionable San Franciscans who looked relaxed, happy, and not irritated by my erratic service.

Grandma grinned at me and pulled her white cardigan sweater around herself. “It’s a bit cold in here,” she said.

“I’m very sorry about that,” I said, apologizing again.

“Oh, it’s okay, young man,” she cooed.

“What can I get you started with to drink?” I asked.

They were patient and lovely and made me feel I could take a breath as I took their drink orders. Two Bloody Marys and one mimosa. Get everything to them quickly, I told my mushy brain.

I rushed over and input their drinks into the computer to be sent to the back service bar, then I brought Mrs. Abilene a piece of tiramisu, and was able to get a plate of calamari to the rattlesnakes. I may not have been graceful, but I was flowing.

At the service bar, I picked up the drinks for Grandma, Grandson, and Grandson’s boyfriend. I took time to carefully place the mimosas and the two Bloody Marys on my tray next to three glasses of ice water. Then, I moved out to the floor.

The restaurant was full. Jam-packed. It was noon, and sunlight was burning through the windows. Dave Matthews was playing on the overhead speakers, and servers moved and bobbed between each other and their tables. I moved between it all with them.

My right hand balanced the tray of drinks on my right shoulder, and I walked down a short flight of steps toward the table. Grandma and the two men glowed angelically in the Sausalito sun. Just feet away from me.

That’s when the tray tipped. Forward. I felt it slip, and gravity took over. No. Oh, my god. No. Red and orange and ice poured down Grandma’s back and all over her pure, white cardigan sweater.

Two full glasses of spicy tomato juice, vodka, celery, olives, limes, and beans, along with a flute of orange juice and sparkling wine. Before I could stop it, ice water followed, running like a freezing cold waterfall on Grandma.

The stain that covered her sweater was a murder scene.

“I…am…so…” I stammered but didn’t get to the word sorry.

“It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay,” Grandson said.

He had already frantically gotten up and was wiping away what fluid he could. And Grandson’s boyfriend was taking off Grandma’s soaked sweater one arm at a time as it dripped.

“Let me help,” I said. And I took the wet, stained sweater under my left arm. It squished.

“You can throw it away,” Grandson said bluntly.

I rushed off to throw away Grandma’s destroyed clothing in the trash. As I did, the restaurant continued storming around me. A hurricane of food and drinks and music and talking and laughter and servers. I threw the cardigan in the trash, and I quickly returned to the table.

When I got back, they were gone. Ghosts. Phantoms. All that remained was carnage. Tipped glassware and ice cubes and blood-red liquid surrounded by pools of orange, all drying on a white tablecloth under the sun.

As I cleared the table, I waited for a guillotine to land on my neck. The restaurant had to fire me. This was unconscionable.

But nothing happened. And I told no one. I stayed silent, finished my shift, pocketed my measly tips, punched the clock, and left. Then, I went to Smitty’s.

The next day, I called Sheila and quit. She said they would miss me at the Bilgewater Grille, but I didn’t believe her.

My disastrous months waiting on tables were over. I had ended the nightmare.

The murder of Grandma’s white cardigan sweater was never discovered, but it haunts me. It should haunt me.

I am a chaotic Muppet when I carry a tray. A goofy disaster when I wear a restaurant apron. A ridiculous monster when I try to remember orders. I am the worst server in the world. And even one dirty, rusted penny is too much of a tip for me.

This story of mine was originally published in August 2025 on The Narrative Arc by editor Debra Groves Harman. Writers need editors, and I’m delighted to know and work with so many talented ones like Debra.

Read more of my writing, find my music releases, and learn about the work I do with my many talented clients at GentryBronson.com:

Gentry Bronson Media & Creative

To kick off the year, I’m writing about creative courage and vulnerability to produce excellent and impactful work.

I’m grateful to have made creativity and producing words, music, and many different types of projects my profession. I refer to myself as a creative and media producer, but I’m also an award-winning musician and songwriter, a performer, a writer, a developmental editor, and a raconteur who loves a good story.

My creative path began when I was a five-year-old classical pianist and storyteller, composing music on an old, upright bar piano and writing tales in the old, Midwestern hippie farmhouse where I grew up. That led to my becoming a professional creative, and I’ve been one nearly all of my adult life.

In 2023, I was asked to lead a video discussion for the Medium community on how to successfully take risks and be authentic to create your best projects. I followed my talk by writing an article to support it, and this month’s story is an updated version of that piece.

This piece is for any writer, musician, or other form of creative who wants to take a risk and reach new places with your work. Whether you’re a seasoned professional or just getting started on your creative path, I hope my article gives you insights into producing remarkable and authentic creative projects.

Read on…

Many creative people find it difficult to write and create honest work from their own experiences because they’re afraid to be vulnerable and show their inner thoughts and sensitive histories.

I believe the best creativity comes from real life, and the most authentic stories come from true experiences. It’s our job as creatives to tap into our courage and shine a light on our stories and our raw experiences for our readers and audiences.

What’s My Background As a Creative Professional?

I’ve been a creative since I was very young, and I enjoy pushing the limits of creativity.

I’m a classically trained pianist with a do-it-yourself punk rock foundation that came from being in Minnesota garage bands as an ‘80s teenager. I took that artistic combination to Seattle and became an alterna-rock singer, spoken word poet, and avant-garde composer in Seattle during the early ‘90s.

Creativity was my compass, and I was led to the Czech Republic in the mid ‘90s, where I became a DJ, spinning EDM in clubs in Prague and Berlin, and I was also an editor at Yazzyk, an Eastern European art and literature magazine.

Then, my creative path took me to San Francisco, where I was editor for Prosodia, a poetry journal, and soon fell into the ‘90s digital and dot-com world. There, I learned how to be a producer when I was part of the online and digital media explosion that occurred.

Music never stopped being a part of my life, and beginning in the year 2000, I wrote, composed, and performed a lot. I tried out all kinds of styles: alternative, indie, rock, punk, goth, vaudeville, cabaret, blues, jazz, gospel, singer-songwriter, Americana, roots, nouveau-classical, new age, cinematic circus music, and English adaptations of songs originally written in Dutch.

Without adhering to trends, I pushed creative limits based on what I wanted to make. My risk-taking and sometimes ridiculous ambition thankfully evolved into a prolific and successful musical career.

Eight albums, three EPs, many singles, many videos, seven European tours, too many U.S. shows to count, and many soaring highs and burnout lows later, I decided to step away from the microphone and piano for a while.

After wearing many hats and having multiple creative careers, in 2015, I decided to combine my various skills and help other creatives be successful. I’ve now run my creative and media agency for eleven years, and I use my experience and background as a creative artist when I work with all my clients.

I use my own experience as a creative myself, and my failures are often more valuable than my successes because I want to help people make the best decisions. I make recommendations by explaining what I did wrong, and I did a lot of things wrong. Thankfully, I also did some things right.

One of the things I believe I did correctly from an early age was to develop my work with creative courage and vulnerability.

What Do I Mean by Creativity and Being a Creative?

Many professionals refer to themselves as creatives because creating and producing things is how we make our living. But I believe everyone creates, which makes everyone a creative, whether they know it or not.

As a writer, you might write fiction or nonfiction. You might be a screenwriter, novelist, playwright, journalist, or poet. You might write in several genres, and you probably have multiple creative outlets that include more than writing words. Most creatives have more than one form of creativity.

Creativity, in my definition, includes every single thing you produce. Music, dance, sculpture, food, art, tattoos, graffiti, photography, theater. All of it is created by a producer, and you are that person.

Whatever it is that you produce, I believe your personal experience is what will drive your best creativity. For me, as both a writer and musician, my best-received work has often been my most honest and brave. That’s what I encourage you to tap into: your creative courage and your ability to be creatively vulnerable.

Creative Courage

When I work with my clients and when I develop my own work, I use models all the time. I call them aspirational and inspirational models.

Aspirational models are creatives you aspire to be like. They are your creative heroes, and they often work in your field. I believe in a cycle of heroism. If you aspire to become like your heroes, then you, in turn, can become a hero that others aspire to be.

Inspirational models are others who inspire you to develop your work. They might be from any field, but they light your creative fire. It might be a musician who makes you want to write great fiction or a photographer who inspires your screenplays.

To develop creative courage and authenticity, begin by thinking about one of your models. Think about the stories, books, music, films, or other work they’ve produced that you aspire to be as good at producing. Or think of work they’ve created that inspired you. It might be poems, short stories, or artwork that motivates and sparks your desire to make your own.

Did those inspirational stories and work come from a courageous place?

Do they show an aspect of their lives that is awe-inspiring, painfully raw, or extraordinarily risky?

Is their work deeply dark, hilariously tragicomic, both, or something else entirely?

This is a model for your own creative fearlessness. These are the writers and creatives you look up to. They’re aspirational because you want to be like them. They may also be inspirational because they make you want to be an incredible storyteller or artist yourself.

Now, what is something about you that feels risky?

What is something that very few people or no one knows about you?

If you have a story to tell that you’re afraid of telling, it may be the best story, poem, song, or script you have. It’s your job to find the courage to tell that story. How?

Creative Vulnerability

People can tell when you’re being dishonest. They can tell when you’re making something up that you know nothing about. Most readers can see and feel if you really know and have experienced what you’re writing about. Audiences can see through your mask.

Vulnerability combines with courage in an integral way. That helps you tell an authentic, honest story. No one has lived your life except you. Your story is completely unique and genuine to only you, and it can become an extraordinary piece of creativity if you open yourself up and tell it honestly.

How can you be raw, transparent, authentic, and honest with your work?

How can you be direct and tell your readers and audience who you are without hiding behind a veneer?

Five Steps to Develop Work Using Creative Courage and Vulnerability:

1. Free Write Uncensored

Sit down and free write whatever it is you’ve come up with that no one knows about — ideas that feel risky and daring. Don’t be afraid. No one has heard or read your writing yet, so no one can judge you or be upset by your work.

Free writing can be anything. Just take notes and see where it goes. It might be paragraphs, dialogue, or bullet points you write down on paper or type on a screen.

Don‘t censor yourself. Don’t be concerned about what people might think or who you might offend. Just let it flow.

2. Step Away

Now, step away from the work you’ve done. Take a break from the notes you took to develop your courageous and vulnerable ideas.

Let it simmer for a day, week, or month — even a year is okay. The key is that you dove into a topic you’ve never written about — one that few or no one might know about you.

When I do this, I find I come up with multiple creative ideas. Each idea springs forth like a tree with branches. These ideas become my future library of creative possibilities.

3. Return to the Work

After some time has passed, return to the ideas and concepts you’ve developed. At least sleep on it for a night.

Then, look at what you’ve developed and decide what you feel is the best story or concept you have. Choose something you want to tell and release to the world.

You still don’t have to be scared about the outcome of writing your ideas down because no one has seen, read, or heard what you’ve written.

4. Craft It

No matter how fearless or open you’ve been, you need to write and create well. You need to develop your stories, chapters, songs, and scripts into the best they can be. I strongly believe that the best writing and creative work rises to the top.

How do you take your vulnerable and risk-taking work and make something exceptional out of it?

Write to your audience. How? Choose who your audience is. Think of who you want to impact with your work.

It’s helpful to visualize three specific people, then ask yourself:

What impact do I want to have on my readers and audiences? How do I want them to feel?

Do I want them to laugh? Make them scared? Inspire them? Weep meaningful tears?

How do I want to affect them?

The words you choose to write should be targeted at your specific audience and should affect them the way you intend.

To do this, use your voice. Voice is a word that’s often used in writing and other creative work. But what does ‘voice’ mean?

Our voices come from the music and rhythms inside us. Voices are what we use to speak, sing, and write. What you know best is your own voice, your own experience, and the soundtrack you have inside. It’s how you communicate authentically.

I often joke that we all have our own theme songs inside us. But I do seriously believe that we each have unique, inner soundtracks that pair with our stories. Your authentic voice is the voice created by using your own unique experience.

No matter what genre or medium you write and work in, borrow from your own reality to develop your work, and it will reach your readers and audiences in a deeper way.

No matter if your genre is YA, fantasy, sci-fi, romance, or thriller. If you’re a hip hop, country, EDM, metal, or pop artist. If you are developing a staged musical, a multi-media performance, an art opening, a haiku, or a TikTok video, it’s the same.

Develop your characters, settings, and narratives based on your unique experience. These things should be based on aspects of you and the life you’ve lived because you know them best.

5. Release It

True courage and vulnerability take place when you release your work to be read, seen, heard, or experienced.

Bravery is when you submit, query, publish, perform, or put out an album. It takes courage to release good, honest work. Releasing means you’re ready to let go.

If you’re scared of releasing your work, ask yourself: why?

Are you frightened you’ll upset someone with your bold work?

Are you comfortable with that?

Being uncomfortable is not a reason to hold back. It could be one of the purposes of your work: to challenge yourself and your audience. Change-making work sometimes upsets people, but it also inspires them. Risk-taking writers and creatives make people think and feel in a different way.

Let your work go and be unattached from the outcome. Release your expectations of whether you’ll fail or whether anyone will like it. Just see what happens.

Three Questions I’ve Received About Producing Brave and Honest Work:

1) I want to write a memoir about growing up, and a lot of it is about my family. How do I write honest work without upsetting people I love?

If you’re afraid that you might upset them, then you may already be on to a very strong example of creative courage. Write it first and then decide if they’ll still be upset. If you think they will, you can edit your work until you feel they won’t.

If you really still think they‘ll be upset, you can send them the work and ask their permission. But you don’t have to ask for permission from anyone because you own your story.

Communication is separate from creativity. You have to choose how to interpersonally communicate with people before you release your work. Communicating is kind, courteous, and respectful, and it’s as important as creativity. But it’s only necessary to communicate if you believe it is.

2) I wrote something very honest, but I’m afraid to publish it because I think it could jeopardize my job or livelihood. Should I be concerned?

Anthony Bourdain wrote the article Don’t Eat Before Reading This about truths in the restaurant world and became an international success not too long after it was published in The New Yorker. He took a risk, wrote something courageous, and his career took off.

Often, we create fears simply because we are afraid of failure. We make excuses. We put invisible walls up in front of ourselves. That’s when taking a hammer to those walls is a courageous act. Taking a leap into the unknown might lead to the best outcome.

If you’re telling the truth about an institution or organization you work for, maybe the truth needs to be told. Maybe you’re making a great change-making decision.

If you’re still concerned about what people might think, you can use a pseudonym. However, I’m a fan of being transparent and standing behind your work with your real name.

Courage means taking a risk, and you have to define what that means to you.

3) I’m scared that if I write about this person or event, it might be dangerous for me. How do I write about it?

is an incredible writer who was my client a few years ago. She wrote a brilliant memoir about resilience after facing extremely challenging experiences during her younger life. One of those experiences involved an actual serial killer.

If your work might expose dangerous people, you might be making yourself and the world safer. But if you feel that you may be endangering yourself, a pseudonym might be best. Changing the names of dangerous people in your work is also smart and strongly encouraged. That’s what Jenny did in her memoir.

Creative courage is up to you to define for yourself, but there’s no reason to put yourself in harm’s way.

What is always important is to tell your story best by crafting it. Make it your best writing so that people read it. Jenny is a very good writer, and she crafted her work into a diamond by editing and polishing her manuscript with the help of editors, beta readers, and proofreaders. I’m proud to say I was one of them.

You Own Your Story

It’s your time to shine a light on your personal experiences and stories for your audience and readers. Tap into your creative courage and vulnerability, and create something remarkable.

No one has lived your life other than you, and your story is uniquely yours. You own your story, and it deserves to be told in whatever medium you use.

The world wants to read, hear, see, and experience your honest and courageous work!

Thank you to editor for publishing the original version of this article in August 2023 with the publication Age of Empathy.

Read more of my writing, stream and download my music, and find out more about the work I do with my talented and expert clients at GentryBronson.com.

Gentry Bronson Media & Creative Agency

I’d love to know what you’re working on, so leave a comment or get in touch. Maybe we can work together!

Aaah, the holidays. A time of the year when some people let their hearts be light, and all their troubles are out of sight.

During the early ‘90s, when I was working and playing in the nightclubs of Seattle, my holidays were a time of extreme hedonism in a beautifully debauched world.

I won’t say I didn’t enjoy it. Read on…

It was Xmas Eve in Seattle in 1992, and I had the night off from working at the Off Ramp. I also had pneumonia, so I invited Boner and Rat Boy over to my apartment to drink Jack Daniel’s. The sun had sunk hours before, but you could still see the city lights reflecting off the thick clouds that hung low over the Emerald City.

MTV flickered in the background on mute, and we loudly listened to Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger as Rat Boy cut up the last remaining lines of cocaine. We each snorted our line, downed the last of the whiskey bottle, and looked at each other like lost boys in a shadowy Neverland.

It was nearly midnight, and the evening was just getting started.

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Boner was an Italian-looking rocker with long black hair down his back, wearing a beat-up green overcoat, and he spoke with a stoner slur.

“Sooo, bros…whatcha wanna do now?” he asked.

Moving his face from the mirror, Rat Boy looked up. Long, blond hair framed his face, and he gnawed his square jaw. The buckle on his leather biker jacket jangled when he stood up suddenly and said with wide eyes, “The Vogue. Let’s go there, man.”

My pasty face lit up. I fiddled with my goatee, which resembled the twin blades of a satanic fork, then tied my long, shoulder-length hair into a ponytail. Tired, wired, bone skinny, sick as a dog, and inebriated, I yearned for more of the night.

I was barely out of my teens and wanted to push every limit beyond the edge. Music, art, intoxicants, naked bodies, gothic women with Bettie Page bangs, darkness, and moonlight motivated my movements.

The three of us were a part of Seattle’s music scene and looked the part. Like cliches torn from an article on grunge. The “g-word” was one I despised, but I loved the music.

We were all musicians with jobs to keep us afloat. Boner was a bartender at RKCNDY, and Rat Boy was a sound person at the same club. I worked as a bartender at the Off Ramp Music Cafe across the street, under the overpass.

It was an incestuous scene. All of us had multiple girlfriends, and our girlfriends had multiple boyfriends. Boner and I were seeing the same woman: a tomboy riot grrrl named Dana who wore a spider ring filled with pills. She had dated numerous musicians who were now touring the world. Seattle and other Northwest bands were washing the planet in a tidal wave of alterna-rock.

Waking up at 2:00 pm was normal for me then. I lived on lattes, veggie burgers, hash browns, and booze. But the free entrance and backstage passes to shows truly sustained me.

We were all broken and beautiful. A pack of faux and real rock stars, hipsters, scenesters, strippers, and junkies. A crew of misfits and orphans who loved each other and worshipped music like a religion in the great cathedrals where we prayed: music venues. One of those venues was The Vogue.

Rat Boy, Boner, and I emerged into the night and decided to walk the rainy streets from my apartment in the Regrade through Belltown and make our way downtown to 1st Avenue.

Getting closer to The Vogue, we heard Ministry’s dark, industrial music blasting out of the club’s open front door.

We walked into a nearly empty club room. Diehard Xmas Eve clubsters with nowhere to go. Behind the long bar, a man and a woman were dressed alike in matching black BDSM corsets, miniskirts, and fishnet stockings.

“Hey Monny, what’s up? Pitcher of Hefeweizen for us,” Boner said to the male bartender.

Pints were poured, and we all sat listening to burning electric guitars scrape over pounding drums bleeding together with distortion and feedback. A few cars slid by outside the open door, slopping against the wet streets.

Then, an old four-door sedan slowed and threw something inside the club. Immediately, the showroom filled with a strange gas, and everyone inside began gagging and coughing, eyes watering.

“What the fuck?” I choked.

“Tear gas, bro!” Boner spit. “We’ve been tear-gassed!”

We stumbled from our barstools out onto the sidewalk, and the bartenders and other clubsters followed. Coughing and wiping our eyes under the smear of rain.

Rat Boy looked up with crimson eyes and grinned. He had an idea. “Let’s go to Cheryl’s on Capitol Hill.”

Cheryl was Rat Boy’s sometime girlfriend and coke dealer. The need for cocaine superseded my need to rest and get over my illness. We flagged a yellow cab and made our way up the hill.

We buzzed the intercom on the street outside and were let in by a man with a deep and gravelly voice. Then we climbed up to the third-floor apartment and entered a rock ’n’ roll coke den. Music celebrities intermingled with groupies, all strung out on blow and booze and bong hits, gazing at us.

Rat Boy disappeared into a back bedroom with Cheryl, and Boner and I waited patiently for our white rails to appear. We nursed beer bottles of Henry’s while sitting on a couch in a haze of smoke.

Green River played on a low hum, and a few scenesters groped each other in the dim light. Tattooed arms in a tangle of bodies lay on the floor. Bodies covered in leather jackets, vintage clothes, and Doc Martens.

My head was floating with sick, fever, white drugs, whiskey, beer, mucus, and derision. I was in a heavenly hell.

Rat Boy emerged from the bedroom, and we finally got our drugs. Then, the hours moved quickly to sunrise. When the sun began slipping through the blinds, I realized I had to work the happy hour shift later that day and thought I should try to get some sleep.

Boner and I watched the morning sun trying to burn through the clouds as we walked down the hill to Dana’s empty apartment. She was at her family’s for the holidays. Boner and I never discussed that we were both sleeping with her.

We went inside, turned on the TV, watched John Goodman in Arachnophobia, and waited for the drugs to wear off.

I don’t recall sleeping, but I do remember looking at the clock to see that it was 2:30 in the afternoon on Xmas Day, and I needed to start bartending at 3:00.

Boner was dead asleep on the floor, so I rose off the couch where I’d been fitfully resting, pulled my black leather jacket and stocking cap on, and began the wet trudge to the Off Ramp at the base of Capitol Hill, a few blocks away.

When I got inside, the club’s heat hit my pneumonia-ridden body, and I broke out into a sweat. Lee, the large, bearded, gray, and gay owner of the club, greeted me and said, “Let me know when it’s time to get ice. I want a Xmas kiss.”

I liked Lee, but he regularly sexually harassed me and asked for kisses on the top of his bald head. To keep my job, I usually acquiesced. I prepared the bar, laid out ashtrays, gathered ice, placed my pursed and sickly lips to Lee’s head, and then Roger materialized.

Roger was a scrawny, older gay man with a salt-and-pepper mustache, missing teeth, and a feminine way of moving and speaking. I always enjoyed seeing him. He sat at the bar’s end, waiting for his first drink of the day.

Roger greeted me, “Hiii, baby! Merry Cunt Ass! What’s for drinks?”

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Lee crawled around the corner into a seat at the bar near Roger and said in his usual droll and dry way, “Hello, Roger. I’ll buy a round of kamikazes. Gentry, make us three. It’s Xmas, after all.”

I shook up the kamikazes, cheered with the men, threw mine back, and thought I could now settle into a day that I hoped would be an easy mirage. Coming down from cocaine, hungover, drinking again, and my head filled with a balloon of pneumonia, I hoped to play some Tom Waits and get through the day.

Roger said, “You look tired, honey. You want a Polish French kiss?”

“What’s that, Roger?” I questioned.

“Don’t ask,” Lee said.

“Oh, come on! Let us give you one,” Roger pleaded.

I brought my face close to his, leaning over the bar, and he grabbed my cheeks with both hands, then shoved his tongue up my right nostril. The inside of my nose was now covered in Roger’s saliva, and his tongue was covered in my sick.

“Oh, my god! Fuck me!” I yelled and pulled back.

“In the ‘70s, if you picked the right nostril, you’d get a good buzz!” Roger exclaimed.

I didn’t have time to tell him he would indeed get a good Xmas buzz from my nose and that he’d probably also get a nasty fever. Moments after Roger’s tongue assault, a dozen metalheads walked into the bar.

Disgruntled after their family holidays and hungry for booze, the metalheads demanded beers and shots, and then the meanest-looking one called out, “Play Motörhead really fucking loud, man!”

I didn’t have the energy to protest, and soon, Lemmy was singing Ace of Spades. My bar was full, and I was keeping myself from collapsing through sheer will.

At 9:00 pm, my holiday happy hour shift was ending. As the hour approached, the club filled more and more with revelers. I was in a haze, and my voice squawked through the cigarette smoke filling the club. I just wanted to go home.

At five minutes to nine, Chet, the bassist in one of my bands, appeared. He was a tall, lanky, dreadlocked, and acne-faced Bostonian, and his head seemed to float without a body over the Xmas Night partiers. He had just finished his shift at Carl’s Jr. and was happy to see me.

Chet had brought a large bag of psychedelic mushrooms and was ready for the Bugs Bunny Animation Festival in the U District. I had forgotten that I promised him I’d go to the festival and eat shrooms with him that night.

I was not going home yet.

At that young age, I didn’t know how to say ‘no.’ It wasn’t in my lexicon. Boundaries were not in my toolbox.

Barely able to stand, Chet and I took a bus across the city to the Neptune Theater, split the entire bag of shrooms, and watched two hours of Looney Tunes cartoons.

I recall occasional vignettes of Wile E. Coyote falling from a red desert cliffside into a puff of smoke, but very little else. By then, my mind and body had reached a point where they both shut off.

When we got back to my apartment, the hands of the clock were back teetering at the edge of midnight. Almost December 26th.

I put on Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock and let the music wash over me. Shadows danced on the walls as the atmosphere finally filled with calm.

Sleep didn’t come for a few hours until the shrooms wore off, but I was already dreaming. Alive and breathing in the Northwest.

Listen to a playlist that accompanies my story. Some of these songs are in my piece, and some are songs from bands and artists who were an essential part of my soundtrack then.

This is just a small sample of the wide musical tapestry in the early ‘90s. My real playlist from my long-lost record collection would be hundreds of songs long, each from a different band or artist. What a time it was.

This story was originally published by The Riff in December 2022. Thanks so much to Editor-in-Chief and all the fine editors at The Riff Magazine.

Read more of my writing. Listen to my albums, EPs, and singles. And find out about the work I do with my many expert clients at GentryBronson.com.

Gentry Bronson Media & Creative

This is about a time when music and the Seattle community around me meant more than anything. And then it ended.

The end was messy, and it was about more than the finality of a music scene. It was also about the end of who I was. And the beginning of who I would be.

Below this photo of young, long-haired, and goatee’ed me near the Space Needle in my old neighborhood, read about then…

I had just left my job at the Off Ramp Cafe and Lounge, an infamous club that had helped the early 1990s Seattle music scene rise, explode, and burn out all in a very short period of years.

There at that venue, I had formed a family with a pack of fantastic long-haired, tattooed, and pierced young miscreants. We partied late into the morning, made music and art when we came out of our haze, and saw as many bands as humanly possible under the damp, gray skies of the Northwest.

Bands like Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden had already become arena-rock-huge in 1993. But many brilliant musicians and bands of the scene were still performing every night around the city. I was one of them. But record labels were moving on, and Boeing and Microsoft were moving in.

As the scene began to crumble that spring, I booked a flight to Amsterdam, expecting to find new adventures and new opportunities as a young musician. I wanted more marvelous music, curvaceous women, and cavernous late nights.

But buried beneath my pretentious and naive desire for experience at my tender age of twenty was a mental and emotional fragility. That spring, my mind was starting to crack apart, and I wasn’t fully aware of my cracks splitting at the seams more and more each day.

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In 1990, I had escaped the Midwest a week after I turned eighteen, then I studied for nine months at the University of Oregon in Track Town and hated it. Afterward, I went to Alaska and worked on the docks for the summer. Then, I made Seattle my home and worked at Pike Place Market as a barista. It was a seasonal gig, so when it ended, I ended up down in the Florida Keys.

I hitchhiked to Key West and spent the winter there. That’s where I learned to bartend and how I later found myself behind the bar at the Off Ramp at the age of nineteen during the roaring and raucous, beautifully punk rock, debaucherously artistic, and brilliantly self-destructive early ‘90s music scene.

My plane from Miami landed in Seattle on the same night that the West Coast was set on fire during the Rodney King riots. It was a night of necessary action for the rampant racism in the U.S, but I was not a part of it. Instead, I was on LSD and watched the downtown blaze while standing on Capitol Hill. But it was fuel. A conflagration that only served to ignite my inner fire to create music.

The morning afterward, I was awakened from the floor of poet Steven Jesse Bernstein’s office by his girlfriend. She asked me to leave because Jesse had committed suicide the previous year, and I didn’t know I was in a holy space. I was sleeping in his well-deserved shrine. So, I immediately left out of respect and because I was a fan of his work.

Within days, I procured a job at the Off Ramp, first as a security guard and floor scrubber, then as a bartender. It was a miraculous time of drugs, drink, and all forms of music. Rock, punk, metal, grunge, hip hop, acoustic, jazz, instrumental, noise, industrial, goth. It was happening, and everyone worked together. There was no musical segregation in Seattle then.

The music was surrounded and suffused with the alternative literature, vintage fashion, and street art of the time. And piles of beautifully bruised young adults with long ’70s hair, Bettie Page bangs, baby doll dresses, combat boots, Doc Martens, black leather jackets, tattoos, and body piercings created all of it. I was one of them, and it was home.

When near-prehistorically strummed guitars, scratched records, and battered drums were our soundtrack, I looked for my soul in the art, music, fashion, and fornicating we did. And I found it mirrored in the rhythms, melodies, words, body art, and graffiti of the time.

Sadly, the scene began to die in the spring of 1993, and I decided to look for a new scene across the Atlantic. I was a scene-chaser, untethered by anything except what lurked inside me. My unseen nightmare.

That March, I booked a one-way ticket to Holland. I expected to find another gig at a club or bar, and, hopefully, playing music. I would worry about making my way back to the States later.

A week before my scheduled flight on April 1st, I went mountain biking just outside Seattle with my buddy, Bob, the drummer for Soul Museum. On a mountainside, we stopped to take turns on a makeshift rope swing that was tied from a branch that hung over a rapidly descending cliff.

I grabbed the rope and decided to give myself an extra boost and swing out wide in a circle, which was a terrible idea. By circling out, my body swung out and then back toward the tree the rope was tied to, rather than straight out and back.

It all happened quickly. When I saw that I’d need to collide with the tree or drop to my death down the ravine, I accepted my fate, turned my body, and let it smash into the giant cedar. My head snapped back into it. It knocked me out, and I fell fifteen feet. Luckily, I slid to a stop on the steep mountainside and momentarily lost consciousness.

When I regained awareness, I heard Bob calling, “Gentry, bro! You all right?! You all right, man!?”

I called up weakly, “Yeah, bro. I’m good. Coming up.”

After I gathered my senses and climbed out of the steep ravine, Bob and I sat down next to each other near the ridge and laughed about my choice to circle-swing.

Then, Bob asked me, “You excited about your trip to Amsterdam next week?”

I said, “I’m not going to Amsterdam next week, Bob.”

I had no memory of my flight happening in six days.

Then, I went black.

The next two days were a blur between my apartment and the emergency room.

During my amnesiac state, I felt like I was on Gilligan’s Island in a dream sequence.

During that time, I kept repeating, “I feel like I’m Gilligan.” Then, I would ask:

“Where’s Bob?”

“Where’s my backpack?”

“When am I going to Europe?”

It happened on repeat for 48 hours.

After those two days, my amnesia lessened, I began to have a continuous string of consciousness, and my concussion got better.

There was a going-away party for me where I felt very out of sorts, as if I was in a murky dream. It seemed like only moments after the party ended, my girlfriend and roommate were taking me to SeaTac airport early one morning in a haze of hangover, lack of sleep, and rising anxiety.

A leviathan was coming without my knowledge. So I boarded, and the plane took off bound for Boston and then Amsterdam.

The domestic part of the flight east was fine. It was six hours to Boston, and when I landed, I called an old friend in Minneapolis. I boasted of my rock ’n’ roll adventures, hanging out with rock stars, back-stage antics, near-death experiences, and my European journey ahead.

Back on the plane again, we took off over the Atlantic Ocean, and I began to think. And think. And think. My thoughts didn’t stop.

Having time to think was both a blessing and a curse. I had not given myself time to think for a while, so in the beginning, I mused about my misadventures. Soon, though, there were few blessings bestowed and only curses were cast.

My mind began as a stream. Then it was a river, flowing gently. Then rushing. Rushing over rocks and down waterfalls. Faster and faster until my mind became a cursed, raging river. A dangerous, seething rapids. And my emotions were being torn apart on the rocks.

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Thoughts came in one on top of another without any sense of direction or purpose. A chaotic machine gun of memories and feelings.

So many different names and then faces with names I’d forgotten. Women. So many memories of women. Hearts smashed. Doctors’ rooms. Abortions. Pennyroyal tea. Tubes. Fire. Pain. Piss. Eviction. Police. Lies. Handcuffs. Death. So many lies. Friendships eradicated. Loss. Screaming and fear. Violence. Broken glass. Broken everything.

I had no idea what was going on.

My heart wasn’t racing, and my breath wasn’t sped up. It was just my thoughts. My mind was a Speed Racer cartoon inside a horror movie watched in an empty, white room while snorting cocaine. Complete insanity. I realized I might be going crazy, so I rang the bell for the flight attendant.

She came over and was very polite to the young man in his black leather motorcycle jacket, Doc Martens, long pointed goatee, and pale face that had seen little sun in a year. I may have looked like a silly rock star, or I was just playing the part. She didn’t care.

“What can I get you, sir?”

“Wild Turkey. Two bottles and a 7UP, please.”

“Absolutely, sir. Right away.”

My drink of choice. It’s an international flight, so it’s free. Fantastic. It seemed like the most logical way to quell my feverish mind, and the attendant had no qualms about giving it to me.

However, throwing back airplane bottles of 101-proof whiskey did nothing to ease my inner suffering. I ordered two more and two more and two more.

Frantically looking around the plane, wondering what was going on, eyeing the sleeping passengers, I was wide awake and asking myself questions.

Why do they look so calm? Why am I flying to Amsterdam? Why am I leaving people I love?

I answered myself back.

Because you can’t go back. You burned too many bridges. You’re a liar, a cheat, a criminal, and a fucking conman.

Then, more memories would swim through my head. Charlotte and Lisa and strippers and pills. Hash browns and Bloody Marys and GG Allin and Rage Against The Machine. A torrent of weirdness blew through my brain.

Ecstasy and music studios and dark bedrooms and blue-water bathtubs with naked women laughing. Port wine and police cars and little people and sirens. Pioneer Square and ice cream cocktails. Crucifixes and Buddhas. Egyptian scarabs and tear gas and Mudhoney and madnesses that doubled over each other.

I came to. I’d finally passed out. Now, I had a headache the size of a small moon. I had managed to throw back at least ten airplane bottles of strong whiskey during my trip across the sea, finally passing out and waking up at Schiphol airport on the taxiway.

Outside the plane, I was met by Ruari, an old British friend, who had come over for a holiday to meet me. He had no idea what was going on inside my brain; he just wanted to smoke some hashish.

We took the train into the city and walked out of the station into the bustle of Amsterdam. It was a city I would later call a home, but not that day. That day it was a hell.

The cold and rain bristled my skin, and every person I saw drew me in. Animal-shaped faces in a convex lens, using languages that grunted out like woodland creatures. The scowl of a homeless man magnetized me, and he leered in, asking me for money in five different languages, all spoken in a row.

Near the homeless man’s corner, we settled into a cafe and ordered some hash. At first puff, I knew something was wrong; I couldn’t swallow. Drinking beer or water was impossible, and I knew we had to go to the emergency room. My second emergency room in two countries in one week.

At the Dutch emergency room, the nurses explained I had pneumonia and gave me pills. My next five nights of insomnia and panic were mixed with fear, fever, and an inability to swallow. This should have sent me home with a one-way ticket back to Seattle, but I never bought that ticket.

I had no understanding of what a panic attack was, but I’d been having them during my flight and my illness. Despite my nightmare, I made it through those hard, cold nights in Holland and took a ferry with Ruari to Newcastle in Northern England. From there, we hitchhiked to Glasgow, Scotland, in the mid-April rain.

It was not until I was in Prague several months later that I began to think I was dying. The extreme months of travel and what followed put me on the road to discovery.

My life changed after that first panic attack on a one-way flight to Amsterdam from Seattle in the spring of 1993. I wasn’t aware at the time, but my dark plunge into what felt like insanity began my road to mental health, calm, and well-being.

My long road to becoming mentally healthy and spiritually aware had begun.

A version of my story was originally published in June 2022 by editor Ryan Fan at the publication Invisible Illness.

Read more of my writing, find my musical releases, and learn about the work I do with my many talented clients at GentryBronson.com.

Gentry Bronsom Media & Creative

I work with many different types of clients, and I would love to help you produce your work and make it successful.

If you are a creative of any kind, be it a writer, artist, musician, business owner, or anyone someone who is looking to create something, send me a message.

Over the last month, my beautiful partner, , and I have been traveling in many places. We had rich, unforgettable adventures in Boston, Croatia, and Holland, and got to share our experiences with many friends from around the world.

We’ve just returned home to New Orleans, so I hope you’ll forgive me for not posting a story in September.

Over these weeks, I thought about how wonderful it is to have my friends around this big, sometimes broken, and always beautiful earth, so I decided to post this story.

I wrote it earlier this year. It was published in July on The Narrative Arc by the wonderful and talented .

This story is both about and dedicated to my dear friend, Matt. We shared a lot of our lives together until he moved on from this world to wherever he may be now.

Enjoy reading about a couple of pirates, our misadventures, and our infinite friendship…

The hallways of the nursing home were a labyrinth on the day I went to visit you for the first time. I walked the industrial-carpeted hallways with walls covered in paintings of farms, fishermen, and lakes. A combination of disinfectant, cafeteria food, and air fresheners hung on the air.

Each elderly person I passed was using a walker or being pushed in a wheelchair. They were at the end of their lives, and it was strange to think you might be one of them. Because you were only thirty years old.

I was lost, so I stopped at a miniature kiosk built to resemble a log cabin. A young nurse with brown hair and an older nurse with blond hair were talking. They looked up at me when I approached.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m looking for my friend. His name is Matt — ”

Before I said your last name, the blond nurse brought the clipboard she held up to her chest. She bashfully smiled and said with a husky Minnesotan accent, “Ooh, you must mean Matthew. We know him real well. The young one. He’s in room 357. Right over there then.” And she pointed down the hall.

Women always liked you. They even did when you were paralyzed, unable to speak, and in a semi-vegetative state.

I said thank you and walked toward an open door. It was very loud in your room. The sounds of televisions blaring on September 11th, 2001.

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Inside the room, you were lying in a bed with huge, glassy eyes. Like a fish. Both of your eyes stared forward at two televisions in each corner of the room.

The screens were showing different scenes. Planes had crashed into the World Trade Center towers five hours before, and the buildings were gone. TV commentators spoke feverishly, and even though you could not move, you were laughing maniacally. Out of the side of your mouth, like a pirate.

Your mother was sitting next to your bed, and she had been waiting for me. We’d made an appointment a week before so that she could be there when I arrived. She wanted to see how you’d react to an old friend.

When she saw me, she brightened, then darkened, and said, “Matthew loves the chaos today.”

Her voice had the same tone and cadence I knew from when we were teenagers. Filled with the music of a Jewish New Yorker.

That’s when you looked at me. You turned with your bulging eyes. Like you’d become a subaquatic creature. And there, underwater, you grinned at me.

Even though you couldn’t say so, I knew you were happy to see me. And I was glad to see you, too.

It had been seven years since we last spoke. I lived in San Francisco then, and you were in Granite City. It was after you got busted for selling heroin.

“By the feds, Gench,” you said. “They arrested me in Washington and Minnesota at the same time!” You laughed, and so did I. You were high on pills of some kind.

We talked on the phone for an hour, and before we got off the phone, I jokingly said, “Remember, man…life’s too long not to sleep.”

Now, in that bed, in that nursing home, in that Granite City suburb, on September 11th, you were wide awake and cackling like a swashbuckler, unable to move.

The last time I saw you in person, walking and talking, you came over to my apartment in Seattle. The one in the Regrade near Lake Union. Before they started calling it Belltown, below Queen Anne and the Space Needle.

You brought Mystic Jeff with you, and my apartment was filled with Minnesotans that rainy afternoon. Even though I loved you both, it wasn’t cool for the two of you to go into my bathroom and shoot up. That was a rule of mine: I didn’t let junkies in my house. But you did it anyway, and I was angry.

I forgave you because I was no saint. That’s one of the reasons we got along so well.

You were always better at doing and dealing drugs than I was. When we met, you’d just returned from living in France with your father. Europe had taught you all about the latest intoxicants, New Wave and post-punk music, and skater fashion.

I was just an innocent fourteen-year-old punk, and you were a year older. So, I wasn’t sure why you sat down next to me on the school bus and put your Walkman headphones on my ears. I heard U2’s The Joshua Tree for the first time that day, and we were instant friends.

That winter, you made me deliver newspapers with you on your paper route at five o’clock in the morning. It was a brittle cold day in February, and you got me deliriously high.

Thirty degrees below zero and completely dark outside, we shivered in an alley behind a dumpster. By the banks of the Mississippi, frozen and white. You stuffed your metal pipe full of weed and lit it for me.

After we snuck back into your house, I was so relieved because I was so cold. We prepared bowls of cereal, careful not to wake your mother, and we ate them upstairs in your bedroom while we listened to Black Flag on low volume. My fingers were so frostbitten that I could barely bring the spoon to my mouth.

When summer came, we rode the roller coasters at Valley Fair for our birthdays, just one day apart. Then, they threw you in lockdown drug treatment, and I had kidney surgery. I wanted to see you when I got out of the hospital, but they kept you locked up for six months.

While you were self-tattooing yourself in rehab, I lost everything in a fire, broke my leg, and started singing with my first band, The Eviction Committee. You didn’t seem to care about my leg or the fire after they let you out, but you were jealous of my garage band. So, you became a lead singer, too.

We were ridiculous, you and me. You, shaking your long, black, Jewish mane of hair and doing your Robert Plant impression with your band, The Horsemen of Orpheus. And me, acting like Jim Morrison, cigarette and microphone in one hand, while I sang and screamed with my round Charlie Brown face.

Few people knew we were both classically-trained musicians. I didn’t make a show out of being a pianist, and you kept your violin skills hidden. Instead of sharing stages with our adolescent rock bands, we could have played Mozart duets.

But that wouldn’t have been as cool. Or as dangerous. Or what young women wanted. We had priorities, you and me.

Our teachers said we were smart, but you were obscenely intelligent. When we took our college entrance exams, neither of us studied. I was sober and nervous, and I did pretty well. But you were cavalier and on LSD, and you scored higher than anyone.

That summer, we met those two biker women in their early 20s. In the parking lot after The Cult and Metallica concert. They invited us to their apartment in Minneapolis, and we had a bacchanal.

It was the same night when Nathan parked his car on the railroad tracks and waited for the Burlington Northern train to come. He had begged us to take him with us.

His funeral was a week later, and you were at the service, but I missed it. So, I drove to the cemetery, went to the open grave where he was going to be buried, and I apologized for leaving him behind.

When you arrived to see his body lowered in the coffin, you lit a cigarette, and asked, “So, what are we doin’ tonight, Gench?”

There was a darkness to your mischief then, and I was drawn to it. But our acts of debauchery caught up with us.

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A month later, we parked behind the bakery in your Mazda RX7 in East Granite City. You’d been dealing coke out of your car while you delivered pizzas. That starless night, we were there to cut up the 8-ball you’d just bought and snort a few lines.

You’d already hoovered up a significant amount of blow, because when the headlights from a half dozen police cars rained down on us, you leaped out of the car as if you were a giant frog.

We went to jail, and I don’t remember how I talked my way out of it. I know you were furious that I walked. I know you thought I rolled over on you. But you must have made a deal because you only spent three weeks in a halfway house.

I’m glad you were released. I needed you. Driving through the country backroads blasting Tom Petty’s Full Moon Fever with you made me feel better after I’d had more run-ins with the law.

So, when you smashed into the side of the freeway coming off the on-ramp in a thunderstorm, I was sad to see your RX7 be put to rest. But I was relieved you survived, uninjured.

We may have been criminals and delinquents hunted by the boys in blue and the redneck bullies in that northern factory town, but we made it out. There were warrants out for both of us as we sped west, electrified on Rocket Fuel.

I apologize for not telling you that the Fuel was a mix of herbs and numerous hits of blotter acid. It was Mystic Jeff who gave it to me. But let’s call it even. You should have told me your four-foot-long iguana could get out of its cage into the station wagon while I was driving.

In the end, you avoided hitting roadkill on your Japanese crotch rocket, I pulled your lizard off my bare chest and out from under the dashboard, and we didn’t die when that blue Volkswagen van exploded in the painted mountains. We got to the Northwest and made it our home, for a while.

To celebrate our birthdays that first year, I drove up from Track Town, Oregon, to visit you in Olympia. After getting high on your Washingtonian buds, we decided to go out to Denny’s, because they let customers get free breakfast on their birthdays.

I ordered mine at 11:55 pm, and you ordered yours at midnight. Grand Slam breakfasts. And we requested that everything be replaced with hash browns. Even the garnish. Our waitress hated us, and we giggled like devilish children during the entire meal.

After that, I didn’t see you much. I moved to Seattle and got deep into the early 90’s music scene, while you became a Deadhead and got deep into heroin.

Before I visited you and your mother at the nursing home in Granite City that dark day in September 2001, I spoke to your father on the phone, and I learned what happened to you. It wasn’t drugs.

“We were getting Matthew’s health insurance arranged,” your dad said. His voice was academic and intimidating as it had always been.

“And he had a stroke. Right there in the office. Before the papers were signed. I rushed him to the hospital, and he was okay at first. But they found a brain aneurysm, and no doctor would operate. It was too much of a risk, they said. Three weeks later, he had a second stroke. Now, he is in the state he is in.”

Just weeks before, I’d been chasing my father’s wartime ghosts traveling in Vietnam, and I’d broken my brain in Southeast Asia. Now, I was listening to your mother talk small talk there with you.

She took us both out into the courtyard, away from the TVs and the missing towers. You, in a wheelchair, and me, walking wounded beside you.

You’d always had the quickest wit. The sharpest tongue. Ready to do battle with only your mouth and your intellect, and now we were both silent and broken in our own ways.

I left the nursing home that day, and I cried like a newborn. I had no idea how long you would be alive. And I wasn’t sure about myself either.

As I drove with tears rolling down my cheeks, I saw a bar off the highway. I took the off-ramp and went there. After ordering a drink, I wrote a song called Bootleggers, and I put you in a lyric:

I wrote this song on the back of a bag that once held a bottle of gin
Now you gamble somewhere between heaven and hell, waiting to cash it all in

But you didn’t cash it all in. You didn’t die. And neither did I.

When I said goodbye that day at the nursing home, it was the beginning of a new chapter for us. There were no cops or drugs anymore. Just you and me and the pieces of who we had become.

Slowly, our pieces grew back together, and we became different people who loved each other even more than before.

When I entered your room the next time, your mother wasn’t there. The blond nurse was in the room with you, and she excitedly said, “Oh, you’re here to see Matt again! Well, okay then. I’ll leave you two alone.”

Your boombox was playing Sugar Magnolia by The Grateful Dead, and you turned your big, bulging eyes at me and widely grinned.

“Hi, man,“ I said. “What are you listening to? You know I can’t stand The Dead.”

It was a joke. Between the man in a physical coma and the man in a spiritual one. Your sideways smile grew huge, and you laughed hard, shaking. Saliva ran down your lower lip onto your chest. I cleaned it with a tissue.

A new version of our friendship had begun.

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I visited you every time I was in Minnesota. Sometimes, I would find you in a new room, down some dull carpeted hallway near where bingo numbers were being called. In your room, The Simpsons would be blasting on your TV. And the moment you’d hear me say your name, you’d find my face and beam.

At first, I visited you for you, but quickly, I started to visit you for me. You listened to my words, not because you had to, but because you seemed to want to. There were times when you’d drift off into some otherworld, your eyes reaching for elsewhere, but you always returned.

I held nothing back when I talked. I told you about my breakups and chronic pain. Being broke and being broken. You liked my darkest, most chaotic stories best. I guess you never lost your desire for danger, even if it was being lived vicariously through me. So, I told you about everything.

When I brought in a new record I’d written and produced, watching you listen to it was mystical. I got to see you enter the music like it was a physical space. You listened to what I created, and you left the body you were trapped in.

After that, I played you all of my latest songs or albums, and you were the greatest audience I ever had. I’d press play, you’d inhale and exhale a huge breath, and then settle in to listen. Sometimes, a tear would roll down your cheek. I hoped it was a tear of joy.

I’d ask, “Do you like my new record, man?”

You’d find my eyes with yours to say silently, Good work, Gench.

After all those years of drugs and drink, music and women, handcuffs and nearly dying, there we were, you and me, just sitting together.

Years passed, and your salt and pepper beard became distinguished, your fish eyes glassy and tranquil, and you emanated more and more wisdom. As I grew up myself, I learned to swim with you in your undersea world.

Every time I entered your room, you looked directly at me and you smiled. And every time I left, you cried.

“Well, dude, I gotta go, Matt,” I’d say. “I’ll see you next time.” Your smile would drain as you turned your eyes away from me. Then, tears would roll down both cheeks.

Our visits became a place of confession for me. As you got older and grayer, and your belly grew, and your skin became more glossy, your smile and contentment also grew. Your sense of calm increased, and you became a peaceful oracle.

You had found a way to connect with the world while you were a prisoner to your body. Gradually, you gained a sense of tranquility in your forced solitude. I envied your calm when I was in chaos.

As we entered our forties, I once said, “You know, Matt, I think you figured something out, being here all these years. I think you know far more than most of us now.”

By 2016, it had been almost thirty years since that day you sat next to me on the school bus. In the beginning, we were hoodlums and criminals, running through the streets, taunting authorities, and rattling stages with music.

Then, you were frozen in place, and it seemed like you’d been thrown in a horrible prison. But you were too strong for a cage to hold your mind. During those fifteen years in the nursing home, you found something transcendent, and I got to share a small part of it.

I was in New Orleans when I received a message from your younger brother.

He said, “Matt’s only got a few days left. It’s his heart. He won’t last long.”

After I heard from him, I called the nursing home. Your father was there with you. He asked me, “Do you want to talk to Matthew?”

“Absolutely. Put him on,” I said.

Your father held the phone to your ear and let me talk to you one final time. As I spoke, I heard you laughing on the other end of the line.

You sounded like a pirate, and it was beautiful.

Read more of my writing, find my musical releases, and learn about the work I do with my many talented clients at GentryBronson.com.

Gentry Bronson Creative & Media

If you are a creative of any kind - be it a writer, artist, musician, business owner, or anyone someone who is looking to create something - send me a message and let’s start talking.

I work with many different types of clients, and I would love to help you produce your work and make it successful.

Here’s a tale of one of my many hitchhiking adventures. This one happened in Europe when the 90s were roaring forward. Hitchhiking is in my bloodstream, and this story gives you some background on why that is.

Read on and enjoy…

It was hot in the mid-morning sun as I waited along the side of the autobahn with two German policemen rifling through my belongings. Nearly everything in my backpack was spread across the hood of the two-door Škoda car I’d been riding in. My heart raced, and I rocked back and forth while I considered what the inside of a jail cell might look like on the Czech/German border.

My driver, Tomáš, stood nearby and spoke no English or German, so he didn’t know what was going on. He’d picked me up hitchhiking just outside Ústí nad Labem and knew me for less than an hour.

His eyes bulged with fear and fury when he asked me in Czech, “What is happening?”

Half-convinced that we were going to jail, I tried not to look nervous when I reassured him in his native language.

“It’s okay. I’m not a dealer,” I said.

We both looked at the pile of my things being searched. Various shirts, jeans, shorts, socks, underwear, a bright red hipster jacket, a Walkman, several cassettes, a paperback of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, rolling papers, half a dozen packs of Gauloises cigarettes, and a journal were all littered across the top of the car.

A stern-looking, brown-haired policeman with a matching brown mustache held my passport and kept slapping it into the palm of his other hand. His blond partner, clean-shaven and hefting a significant beer belly, pulled a large, paper-wrapped package out from the bottom of my backpack.

He turned to me and asked in English, “What’s this, you?”

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Hitchhiking was in my blood. I was named after a hitchhiker by my hippie parents. Before I was born, they picked up a man named Kip Gentry in a blizzard somewhere between Wyoming and Nebraska. Later, I received Kip’s last name as my first.

So, it wasn’t the first time I hitchhiked, but it was the first time German cops were threatening me with jail time while getting a ride.

Twenty-two years old, I was sweating and anxious in my steel-toed boots, cut-off jean shorts, and white tank top. The goatee under my chin matched the color of my short, Caesar-cut hairdo, which was combed downward toward my deep-set eyes that always made me appear stoned. I looked like a drug dealer, even though I wasn’t.

I was hitchhiking from Prague to Amsterdam to sell a literary magazine, and I hoped feverishly that there was nothing illegal hiding in my backpack. I certainly wasn’t a saint, so anything was possible.

It was late June 1995, and I’d been living in the Czech Republic for six months, working as a club DJ. I was also an editor and marketing manager for Yazzyk Magazine. The publication was an independent East European art and literature periodical with a small budget, and we were hoping to enter the Western European marketplace.

Magazines were rarely published online in 1995, and we didn’t have the money to ship copies, so Yazzyk asked me to travel to the Netherlands and get the new issue on the shelves. They said I could keep the revenue to pay for my travel expenses.

I was a naive, young American looking for adventure, so I volunteered to travel to the capital of Holland, and I decided to hitchhike most of the way to save money because I was broke.

Tomáš was my first ride of the day.

Several hours earlier, I used the inexpensive Czech train system to get me near the border, and I boarded a 5:00 am slow train from Prague. I arrived in Ústí nad Labem three hours later, threw on my heavy backpack, and walked to the edge of the small city where the highway ran.

The summer sun climbed into the sky among the green hills as I trudged until I found a place on the roadway. Then, I turned around and stuck out my right thumb near an on-ramp.

It was past 9:00 am when Tomáš pulled over, and I threw my backpack into his car, which was strangely empty of backseats.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“To the Netherlands. Rotterdam by tonight.”

As we rolled down the road, he didn’t smile much, but after exchanging names and learning I was from San Francisco, his curiosity grew.

“What do you do in my country?” he asked.

“Many things,” I said.

“Me too,” he said. Czechs often had several ways to make money. “Like what?”

”I’m a DJ and I work for a magazine.”

“Why are you going so far?”

“I’m selling the magazine in Holland. But first, I’m going to a music festival with my Dutch friend. Pleasure before business.”

Tomáš nodded with understanding and continued driving quietly.

My Dutch friend was another DJ named Sacco, and I was meeting him in Rotterdam for the festival. Sacco had asked me to bring the Gauloises and rolling papers because they were cheaper in Prague.

When Tomáš and I got to the border to have our passports stamped, the tobacco items were one of the reasons why the police pulled us out of the car. They thought it was going to be used to roll spliffs. Cannabis was illegal in Germany then.

The other reason we were dragged onto the asphalt to be searched was my passport photo. My picture had been taken two years earlier when I worked and played in the rock clubs of Seattle during the grunge years. The photo was far from flattering; I looked like a junkie.

Once the police took a look at the pasty white, long-haired young hoodlum picture on my passport, they demanded we exit the car. And after they found the rolling papers and cigarettes, they thought I was trafficking something.

With the large, suspicious package in his hands, the heavy blond policeman waited impatiently for my answer to his question.

I said, “Those are magazines. I’m selling them in Amsterdam.”

He rolled his eyes and immediately tore through the paper. When he looked down at the colorful cover with foreign authors’ names on it, he looked confused.

Then, they let us go.

Tomáš was silent when we drove away, and he dropped me off before we even reached Dresden. Visibly angry, he never said another word. He just had me get out at a rest stop and roared off in his Škoda.

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My backpack felt even heavier when I stuck out my thumb again. Muscle pain was a chronic condition I suffered from, so rather than standing in one place, I’d walk up the roadway and back to make my back feel better, careful not to walk on the fast-moving autobahn. When I heard a group of cars approaching, I’d flash my thumb near the on-ramp.

It was 900 kilometers from Prague to Rotterdam, and it took nine hours to drive by car. At that point, I’d traveled only 150 kilometers.

The next two hours were long as the sun rose higher. Cars whizzed past me, and my back was in agony. No cars wanted to pick me up. I grew tired, frustrated, and ached with each step.

Without warning, I heard a buzzing engine behind me, and before I could turn around, a white Volkswagen Beetle raced past, then squealed to a halt on the side of the road, kicking up gravel.

I walked to the passenger door, opened it, and a round-faced, middle-aged woman turned and said, “Hallo!” followed by German words I didn’t understand.

“Rotterdam?” I asked.

“Okay!” she said gleefully. “I am Anna.” And she waved me inside with a generous expression.

We began driving, and I managed to use the only German words I knew. Anna giggled at me, bounced in her seat like an aged cherub, and switched on the radio. ABBA was playing, and the song Fernando filled the tiny car.

Exhausted from the day, the music was a disco lullaby, and I fell completely asleep.

When I woke, I had no idea how long I’d slept or how far we’d gone, but the car was stopped. Anna was quietly idling, grinning, and waiting anxiously for me to get out of her car in the middle of nowhere near a farm field. I felt like a lost toddler as I rubbed my blurry eyes, got my legs into the road, and pulled my pack out just in time as she pulled away with the car door flapping.

The entire ride felt imaginary; Anna was the strange driver of a carriage ride in a fairy tale.

With no idea where I was, I started walking back down this strange side road. My left leg was cramping when I saw a sign ahead that read Leipzig.

I was still over 650 kilometers away from Rotterdam. It was 1:00 pm, I had a long way to go, and severe bolts of pain were shooting down my back into my left hip and leg. There was no way to go but forward.

Several long hours passed until I saw a gorgeous, charcoal-colored BMW ahead. It was humming and waiting mysteriously for me by a petrol station.

I got to the side of the vehicle, and a darkly tinted window rolled down, revealing a handsome, older man wearing John Lennon-styled round glasses behind the wheel.

“Can you roll cigarettes?” he asked with a Dutch accent.

I replied, “Yes, I can.”

He smiled.

“Good.”

Then, he popped the trunk. I put my backpack inside, walked back to the passenger side, got in, and slid into the seat next to him. It felt like a soft leather cloud under me.

“Comfortable?” he asked.

“Very.”

“Where are you from, and where are you going?”

“I’m from San Francisco, but I live in Prague. I’m going to Rotterdam tonight and eventually to Amsterdam.”

“Okay, San Francisco,” he said as if the city were my name. “Toward Rotterdam then. I hope you like to go fast.”

He got back on the autobahn, and we took off at the speed of sound.

I had no idea how far my Dutch driver would take me. There was never a way to know who might pick me up when I was hitchhiking. Each ride meant strange, new characters, who took me an unknown distance and deposited me on the roadside. Putting my thumb out invited possibility. During each ride, I always hoped for the best, but I stayed vigilant and aware because I’d been in difficult and dangerous situations.

As we flew by cars, we were going absurdly fast. My driver kept his left hand on the wheel, reached for the glove box with his right, and said, “I’m Dr. Roland.”

He pulled a packet of rolling tobacco out and dropped it in my lap.

“As long as you keep rolling me cigarettes, I’ll take you to Utrecht. I’m headed home from a conference. My wife is waiting for me in the Randstad.”

I brightened with excitement. This was great news. Utrecht was close to Rotterdam.

I began to roll a cigarette, and Dr. Roland slid a CD into the car’s stereo. Then, I heard a familiar sound: the opening guitar riff of Jethro Tull’s Aqualung. I knew every lyric. It was an album from a band I loved. Released the same year my parents had picked up Kip Gentry hitchhiking on the side of the road.

The music swelled up in rock ’n’ roll splendor, and I handed Dr. Roland the rolled cigarette. He lit it, took a drag, and blew a dragon tail of smoke out of his cracked window. Afterward, he settled back into his seat and increased our speed even more.

Afternoon eased into dusk, and few words were spoken as both of us were lost in rapturous classic rock. Hour by hour, we listened to Jethro Tull.

When the sun went down and Thick as a Brick faded out, Dr. Roland said, “Let’s get some food. I’ll buy.”

We pulled into an odd, dimly lit, American-style cafe with orange booths. The menu was in Dutch. That meant we had reached the Netherlands. We were outside Arnhem, Utrecht was close, and Rotterdam was just beyond.

Dr. Roland looked over the top of his menu and said, “So, San Francisco, I still don’t know your official name.”

“Gentry. It’s a pleasure to travel with you, Doctor,” I said.

“Aaah, the pleasure is mine. We have arrived in Holland. Let’s get some Dutch apple pie.”

Our orders arrived, I dove into my slice, and Dr. Roland left to make a call.

I was nearly finished when he returned and said, “I called my wife and I’ve told her I’ve been delayed. I’m taking you to Rotterdam. She can wait. I will get you where you need to be.”

The doctor’s generosity was a gift. I had nothing to offer but rolled cigarettes and companionship. Just a fellow traveler nodding his head in time to magnificent, old songs.

He was only my third ride that day, and he took me into the heart of Rotterdam. It was a seven-hour drive, and the doctor got me there in five. Then, he tipped his glasses as a gesture of goodbye and drove off into the night like a wisp of cigarette smoke.

Sacco and I went to the Metropolis Music Festival the next day with incredible sets by EDM acts Zion Train and Mad Professor, and we slept in a record store owned by a friend that night. When I woke up in my sleeping bag between the aisles of vinyl, I knew I still needed to get to my destination: Amsterdam.

A train took me to the center of the city, and I found my way to the Museumplein. I had the address of an interested vendor at a kiosk there. The bright-eyed and bearded old Dutchman who owned it decided to buy every Yazzyk Magazine I had with me.

When I watched him place one of the magazines on the shelf with the cover facing outward, I felt accomplished. Then, I turned and walked away with a much lighter backpack slung over my shoulder and my pocket full of Dutch guilders.

As I walked through Amsterdam, I knew I needed to get back to Prague soon. I was booked to DJ the Yazzyk release party.

A week later, I threw my thumb out on the road and hitchhiked from Amsterdam back to Prague with Sacco. Moving one ride at a time. Open to possibility at every passenger door.

Thanks to magnificent editor , Parasol Pubs, and The Narrative Arc for publishing this story first in December 2024.

Read more of my writing, find my musical releases, and learn about the work I do with my many talented clients at GentryBronson.com.

Gentry Bronson Media & Creative

WHAT’S COMING:

I post one story per month here on Substack, so look out for my next piece in September!

I wrote and published a version of this article in January 2023, and it’s still a story I believe in today. Maybe even more so now.

As you read, if my piece resonates with you and you’re moved to just shut off your phone or close your laptop, do it!

I won’t mind. In fact, that’s the whole point…

This morning, I was awakened by my two dogs, Johnny and Eva, with generous licks to my face and paws on my body. Afterward, I climbed out of bed, moved down the stairs, opened the patio door for the dogs, and fed them. Then, I put a pot of coffee on, had my vitamins and medication, and did the dishes from the night before.

After I cleaned the kitchen, I prepared a cup of java with a generous amount of half ‘n’ half, grabbed a banana, and sat down in my favorite chair. I started up my laptop and my mobile phone, and once my screens came on, I began to open apps and windows.

There they were…the same old media pages and websites. Gmail, Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, Substack, Medium, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter (X). I started checking, reading, clicking, and scrolling through texts, emails, posts, stories, messages, photos, videos, memes, and words.

All moving before my eyes at once. Doom and hate and death and violence and sex and talk shows and rock stars and kittens and politics and want and need and desire and look at me, look at me, look at me!

For me to do this every day is absolutely, ridiculously insane. So, I stop. And I recognize the pure, unadulterated insanity of my actions.

And now, more and more, what I try to do is to be aware of my digitally negative behavior and end it quickly.

I’m certainly not perfect. I catch myself throughout the week doing this same stuff and habitually scrolling through the digital world with toxicity, but I do my best to be mindful and stop my sometimes strange relationship with devices and screens.

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I’m a writer, a musician, and I run a creative and media agency. My work as a developmental editor and media producer requires me to look at screens. I need to use digital devices and run Zoom meetings and share Google Drive folders. Media is part of my daily existence.

Nearly all of us need our devices, no matter what we do. They are our primary communication tool.

But instead of diving headlong into a world of social media, texts, emails, and the blogosphere, I try to step back and prioritize what and who is most important. Then, I do my best to keep that focus throughout the day.

Mornings usually involve some work, but they also involve reading and meditation. Later, I swim laps, write, and spend time with people and animals I love. Work and using screens will come, but I just try to be aware of when I let it happen in crazy and unbalanced ways.

Millions of stories have been written, discussed on podcasts, and shows can be watched all over the media about how the world is falling apart right now. So, I recognize that there is much to freak out about. I’m a progressive and a pacifist, and I can’t stand so much of what I read, hear, and see, so I don’t bury my head in the sand.

But it’s very easy to pick up my mobile phone and go down a rabbit hole. Doom scrolling into oblivion. Constantly shocked by headlines that tell me the apocalypse is at my front door. Chicken Little is screaming that the sky is falling every moment online. And hate and vitriol are a viral plague.

Many of us have become slaves to our devices. Self-flagellating and prostrating ourselves to strange, digital gods who do not love us back as much as we love them. Staring into the abyss of our screens is an invisible nightmare we’ve created for ourselves.

The constant need to look at media that we unconsciously believe will fulfill some longing, some need. We are screen junkies. Digi-addicts.

What I’m writing about is so prevalent that I published this story on Substack because nearly all of us read and get information from our screens!

But what if you just stop reading this? Right now.

Put down your phone. Close your laptop. Shut off your tablet. Turn off your device.

If you did that, bravo! You are no longer reading this. That’s excellent. I love that about you and your choices today.

If you’re still reading, you may be curious what I’m getting at. You may be wondering: what’s next? What happens when there is no screen to look at?

Yesterday, I told a friend in San Francisco during a conversation on the phone, “Our revolution is our joy.”

I believe that fully, and it’s healthy and productive to remind ourselves of that every single day. So, I choose to turn away from my devices because I’m happier and more joyful without them being on constantly.

Instead, I go outside. I remind myself that my backyard is gorgeous, filled with green and lush plants, trees, and vegetation. My above-ground pool waits for me in the humidity and heat of summer, and the Olympic-size pool at the University of New Orleans is less than a mile away, waiting for me to plunge in to swim laps.

I talk to my partner, Whitney, who is beautiful and powerful and loving. I think about my many fabulous and freaky and marvelous friends. I pet my silly and affectionate dogs, who are always delighted to see me.

I walk and drive and bike through the streets of New Orleans, and I see the diversity of people and the art that they make. Every race and gender and age, creating and living and loving around me here in my city.

So, I create time away from devices to recognize all this, and I work, play, and live better when I do. I stop and I look up at the billowing thunderstorm clouds of summer that circle through the blue sky, and I remind myself that the earth still turns beneath my bare feet.

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If you’re still reading and you want to feel the same way, you don’t have to get rid of your devices. They’re still a wonderful tool. But how do we stop our toxic digital behaviors? How do you change your screen habits from neurotic to something better?

First…breathe. Take a deep breath in and then let it out.

Isn’t that nice? If it felt good, take another breath.

You can breathe seven times — a good way to start meditating — and you can continue sitting and focusing on breathing. You’ll need to keep breathing whether your devices are on or off!

Now that we’re all aware of the first wonderful necessity to live, keep breathing, and read about some very simple things you can do with your devices off:

Move. Movement is essential. Wherever you are, at least once an hour, stand up and walk across the room or across the space you’re in. If it’s painful, walk five steps and back. If it feels good, keep walking. Walk outside and look around.

If you can’t walk, do whatever it is that feels like walking for you. If you’re in the water, swim. Water is my home because I’m a lifelong water person, so I always seek out water. And when I’m in the water, there are no devices in my hands.

Read. Read something solid. Not a screen; something made of paper. I know you have a book around. Maybe a magazine. A letter or a card from someone who loves you. A newspaper. A weekly rag. Even the inside of a vinyl album sleeve.

It feels really good to read something tangible you can hold. I love holding a book in my hands and turning the pages.

Look. Open your eyes and look around you. Take in the colors, the art. Notice everything where you are. Every single thing you see was either created by another human being or came from nature. Are the things you’re seeing pretty, ugly, fascinating, silly, or something else?

Just look and be grateful for that ability. You can see! If you aren’t able to see, then you have other magnificent senses to use to explore the world around you.

Feel. How do you feel? Are you warm or are you cold? What is the space like that you’re in? If you’re inside, go outside and experience the feeling. Is it windy? Sunny? Rainy? Humid? Dry?

Let the sun shine or rain fall on your face. Close your eyes and feel the air. What emotions are you having? Whatever you feel is completely okay.

Smell. Breathe in through your nose. What does it smell like? Are you inside or outside? Are you in the city or the country? The suburbs or a village?

Are you by a body of water? Under skyscrapers? Sitting on the sidewalk? On a beach or the docks? In the mountains, the desert, or on the bayou? In a field or forest? Is it fresh or dirty-smelling? Does it stink?

If you’re home and it stinks, clean it!

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Clean. Make your space clean. Make your bed. Wash the dishes. Sweep. Do the laundry. Scrub the sink and the toilet. Organize your world so that it feels best for you.

How about your own body? Are you clean? If you’re dirty, wash yourself. Focus on that and not a device.

Wash. Showering and baths and water itself are a luxury for many people in the world. Clean, running water is a gift many of us take for granted. If you are among those who are grateful to have clean water and plumbing, go enjoy it. Listen to the sound of the water and feel it without any distraction.

If you already feel clean, have a glass of water.

Drink water. Drink a glass of water and really enjoy it. It’s not only good for you to drink many glasses per day, but it’s also how you survive.

We all need water, and you have access to it. Be grateful for that! Take your time and savor a tall glass of water. Just you and that glass. No selfies and no live chats!

Create. You’ve quenched your thirst, so now pick up a piece of paper and a pen or pencil, and write. If you don’t have or can’t find paper, use a napkin or paper towel. You can borrow a pen or write with a crayon.

Write anything. You’re the storyteller, the poet, or the lyricist. Don’t censor yourself, just let the words go wherever they go. If you’re visual, then draw.

Be courageous and be vulnerable. No one needs to read what you write or see what you draw. Take risks. Go anywhere in your mind and create anything you want. Real life, fantasy, or a combination of both.

You get to create any character in any setting with any story, song, poem, or picture you want. But do so without using a device. You can get to that later.

Remember that when you do any of the things I’ve mentioned, do not look at a screen. Do not play or stream music. Don’t start streaming a video so it’s playing in the background. Do not put on a podcast.

One of my favorite things to do that’s even better than music or sound and doesn’t involve a screen is to listen.

Listen. Listen to the space you’re in and pay attention to the sounds of the world around you. Birds singing and insects buzzing. Dogs barking and the wind blowing through the trees. Cups clattering and people talking. A furnace humming and the dishwasher running.

Rain hitting rooftops and horses clomping by. Airplanes flying overhead and children laughing. Cars passing and buses picking up passengers and trucks picking up trash. Tractors in fields and construction in cities. Lawnmowers and seagulls and horns and roosters.

Maybe music is playing, but it’s something you’ve never heard before or haven’t heard for a very long time because it’s coming from down the street or from a neighbor.

It’s all there to hear. Wherever you are. An entire symphony of sound.

If you’ve read this entire piece, then now is the time. Once you’ve turned off your devices, you won’t see any of my words anymore, and that’s totally cool with me.

See how long you can go without looking at your device. It’s an experiment. See how it feels. You’ll most likely need your devices and the screens on them eventually, but see how long you can comfortably be device-free.

I believe the world is far more fascinating and beautiful than what’s on a screen. I hope you agree. Or that you’ll discover the same thing soon.

Thank you to and for publishing the original version of my article in January 2023.

Read more of my writing, learn about the work I do with my many talented clients, and find out about my albums and musical life at GentryBronson.com.

Gentry Bronson Media & Creative

I don’t celebrate the Fourth of July the way others do in the country where I was born. I’m no patriot; I’m a pirate. And my anti-authoritarian ways began when I was young, inspired by the way I was raised.

This year, I’ll do as I do every year: I’ll listen to The Star-Spangled Banner like a lot of other people in America. But my version will be by Jimi Hendrix.

Read on and fight the power, people…

I’m the child of hippies. Counter-culture, flowingly-bearded, long-hair-parted-down-the-middle, love children from the Midwest.

My mother got pregnant with me after my father returned from being a soldier in Vietnam. And I was named after a hitchhiker named Kip Gentry, who my parents had picked up in a blizzard somewhere between Wyoming and Nebraska in their Volkswagen van.

After I was born, the three of us traveled around the U.S. in our van for a few years, then settled in Minnesota, where I grew up with a mane of long blond hair. Until I turned three, the only thing that helped people decide whether I was a boy or a girl was looking between my legs, which was easy because my mom let me run naked in public all the time.

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My dad was in Vietnam when Woodstock happened. For my parents’ generation, that music festival was a cultural lightning rod. For many, it signaled the end of one era and the beginning of another, all tied together with music.

The list of artists who performed is legendary: Joe Cocker, Janis Joplin, Santana, Joan Baez, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and Richie Havens all had magical performances. But, the final performer of the entire festival on the morning of August 18th was Jimi Hendrix.

My dad told me that GIs weren’t allowed to see the Woodstock documentary in Vietnam because they might riot. He and his buddies once barricaded themselves in a bunker and listened to the live concert album.

High on psychedelics and whatever else they’d acquired, the sounds of those bands were a strummed, electric revolt against the hell the soldiers found themselves in. It was their punk rock; their acid-flavored rebellion far from home.

When I was five, my family and I moved to a farmhouse in the country. Many hippies retreated to farms in the 1970s, and my dad found respite from the world. A quiet escape. Out on The Farm, he wore his army jacket and let his freak flag, long hair, and beard fly well into the late 1980s.

The Fourth of July after Ronald Reagan was elected — when my dad spray-painted Reagan’s Here, The End Is Near on the front of his VW van — he and I spent a boys’ weekend together. My mom and baby brother were off camping, and it was just us that long summer weekend.

Despite my severe hatred of Minnesota winters, I loved the three months of summer. I lived for the time when our farmhouse would be surrounded by lush, green trees and fields full of corn and wheat. The black and white world of gothic snow and desolation that had lasted for months now turned into a melange of colors.

Birds sang, grasshoppers leaped, crickets chirped, and mosquitoes hummed a low drone. The marsh around us filled with muskrats, geese, and ducks. The grass got high around the barn, the pig shed, and the garage, and I didn’t mind getting stung by stinging nettles looking for lost baseballs behind the buildings.

The thick humidity and warmth of summer were a beautiful cocoon. Hours spent building ramps out of wood pallets and jumping over them on my bike. Setting up Star Wars battles in my treehouse with my action figures. I lived with boyhood fantasies dancing through my head.

And for that weekend, I got to hang out with my dad. We had a difficult relationship, but I was excited. He worked nights as a guard at the prison, and for those few days, it’d just be us boys, eating junk food, staying up late, and watching what we wanted on TV.

I was seven years old and playing in the farmhouse. It was hot, and the day had slipped into dusk. Air conditioning was far away, over in the suburbs and the cul-de-sacs, across the fields. Out in the country, we used box fans. I was lolling away the hours, staying cool in front of a fan, driving Matchbox cars between the kitchen and the living room.

I lay on my belly under a framed and glassed series of my dad’s medals and photos from Vietnam. My mom had made it. Even though my dad hated every aspect of the war and had suffered ever since, the memento stood out with its strange, patriotic pride.

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Nearest to me was a living room centerpiece: the Pioneer stereo system Dad had brought back from Vietnam. A stereo receiver, a turntable, and a reel-to-reel player sat inside a makeshift console made out of plywood two-by-fours balancing on gray cement blocks. The speakers were heavy wood beasts that flanked the room. Stacked in front of the stereo was a series of colorful vinyl albums.

Janis Joplin’s Pearl, The Moody Blues’ Days of Future Past, and The Beatles’ Abbey Road. Jethro Tull’s Stand Up, Led Zeppelin II, and Iron Butterfly’s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson in an embrace on the 1976 cover of A Star Is Born reminded me of who I thought my parents were. And Cheech and Chong’s Los Cochinos indicated what they got up to after I went to bed.

For me, there were Sesame Street records, Free to Be…You and Me with Marlo Thomas and friends, and several John Denver albums with his smiling, stony face and grandly goofy glasses.

Buried in the stack was the triple live album Woodstock: Music from the Original Soundtrack and More. That night, it would make a grand entrance into my young life.

We had one telephone in the kitchen. A large blue phone with a dial you’d crank with one finger, slowly pushing each number forward and then letting it slowly roll back. The cord connecting the phone to the wall was a series of ringlets that had tangled on itself many times, spiraling and twisting like a knotted serpent.

The phone rang loudly, then I heard my dad yell from outside through the screen door, “Gentry, get the phone!”

I got up from my racetrack on the floor and went over to the phone on its fifth ring.

I answered like I was a polite receptionist at a telephone company, “Hello, this is Gentry Bronson. May I ask whose calling?” My over-the-top and over-exaggerated manners had been instilled in me from a young age.

“Hi, Gentry! It’s Kern. How are ya? Is your Dad home?”

“Hi, Kern. I’m doing fine. Happy Fourth of July. I’ll get my dad.”

I went outside, and my dad was working on his VW van. In the summer, he seemed to always be doing that or working in the garden. My parents had a flourishing garden that stretched the length of a Little League field, filled with every vegetable you could imagine, like a rabbit’s dream in Watership Down.

“Dad! It’s your hippie friend from California or the Rocky Mountains or something!” I called out precociously.

Dad came in wearing soiled denim overalls, his beard flopping and his long hair blowing. I knew he also had no underwear on underneath because he rarely wore them.

He took the phone from my hand, and greeted his friend, “Hey, Kern!” and I slipped back to my toy metal cars I was using to create an imaginary demolition derby.

I didn’t pay much attention to the men’s conversation as I played, but after fifteen minutes, my dad came over to me and said, “Kern wants me to play him a song for the Fourth. He wants to be reminded of what this day is all about. Can you hold the phone while I put the record on?”

I looked at him quizzically as he thumbed through the stack of albums, producing one with the image of two people hugging under a blanket with a crowd behind them on a hill. He slipped one of the three vinyl records from its sleeve, placed the record on the player, then carefully found a spot on the album for the needle.

As the needle settled into its groove, I heard the sparkle of static and then the beginnings of complete chaos. Guitar bombs dropping and snare drums beating. A cacophonous flame of sound rose from the speakers, and my dad cranked it up loud. Really loud.

As he turned it up, Dad said thunderously over the music, “Bring the telephone in here!”

The room vibrated, the floor shook, and amplified feedback burned through the room. I was a young pianist and had played The Star-Spangled Banner, so I knew the song. We had also sung it in school, but this was like a version played in outer space during an intergalactic war.

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I pulled the phone receiver as far as I could into the living room from the kitchen, stretching the cord and handing the phone to my dad. He stood and held the receiver out, placing it as close as he could to one of the speakers.

Music drenched every corner of the room and poured out into the kitchen, through the screen door into the yard and the garden. Out into the fields and up into the night sky. The enormous fury of Jimi Hendrix's playing exploded throughout my world with rockets’ red glare.

When the song shifted into Purple Haze, my dad just continued to stand there, holding the phone to the speaker. The entire room became a booming acid rock concert. Guitar, bass, and drums bellowing out fire, smoke, and steam.

When the instruments broke for an instant, Jimi sang, “Is it tomorrow or just the end of time?”

It was the beginning of tomorrow for me. The red, white, and blue were never the same. Freedom was carved out in a new musical and revolutionary way. Led by pirates carrying instruments. Jimi had helped me steal my own anthem, and it would never be an American one. It went beyond that. Music burned all invisible boundaries.

When Jimi finished after twelve minutes and the turntable needle settled back home in silence, Dad went into the other room to finish his conversation with Kern.

Shellshocked in the living room, my skin vibrated as the evening heat cooled. I stopped playing with my toys for the rest of the night. There was something new coming for me, but it wouldn’t arrive fully for a few years. I couldn’t give it words yet, but it was music.

Jimi Hendrix and my dad gave me those loud, crashing, electric sounds that summer night. Sounds that hovered in the air like the hum of a phoenix from a future burning world.

Music would save me, and it would nearly kill me. It would be an essential part of my storyline as I walked the tightrope between salvation and destruction. Clown and criminal. Scoundrel and songwriter.

Thank you to editor and master music writer for publishing this story originally with The Riff on June 29, 2022.

Read more of my writing, learn about the work I do with my many talented clients, and find out about my albums and musical life at GentryBronson.com.

Gentry Bronson Media & Creative

I won’t mask the fact that I’ve frequently done stupid things in my life. Many of those things were done as a younger man, but I’m mostly proud of my Gen X high jinks. And I’m still here and alive to tell you about a few of them.

This story is about one summer day in the Midwest with a couple of my friends, and what we did to occupy ourselves in the factory town where I grew up.

It’s dedicated to Tim, who celebrates his birthday in a few days. Here’s to many years of ridiculous adventures together, my friend…

The Mississippi River ran through the center of my hometown, and sitting on the riverside watching it flow was an escape from my small, landlocked city. The river rolled from Granite City to mysterious otherworlds, snaking southward under the giant Minnesotan sky to everywhere my imagination could conjure.

I was sitting by the river on the day I decided to swim across it with a broken arm. It was a decision that began earlier that day when my friend, Tim, woke me up at noon by throwing a can of beer at me.

I was still asleep in bed, and after he threw the can, he commanded, “Wake up, Gench!”

I sat up against the wall behind me, wiped my long hair from my face with my left arm, and looked at the beer sitting on my futon. Then, I picked it up and used the same arm to crack it open with one hand.

“Stroh’s, huh? We’re drinking good beer today?” I sarcastically asked.

“I’ve got a case of them. Figured we could go to Riverside Park before I have to work at the mall and make pizzas.”

Tim was freshly nineteen years old and although he was too young to buy beer, we always managed to acquire alcohol somehow. It helped that he looked like the clean-cut Catholic boy he was raised to be, but I knew his ruse.

Tim sported short, dark hair with a slight mullet that hung down over his fashionable sweatshirt and wore cut-off jeans rolled up just above the knee. Even though he looked polished, I knew he was a teenage scoundrel like me, and I loved him for that.

It was the summer of 1989, and Tim’s last months before he would head to college. We were both aimless teenagers living in a conservative, northern city. Although we managed to get good grades in school, other than playing music and working minimum-wage jobs, there was little to do but find trouble, and we were good at that.

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I pulled myself up out of bed, stood up, and tied my hair into a ponytail. It was down the middle of my back and reached my chest in front. I hoped my look mirrored a combination of Michael Stipe from R.E.M. and Chris Cornell from Soundgarden, but I was only sixteen and had a round face that barely grew a light mustache, so I looked more like a juvenile delinquent Charlie Brown.

“I gotta wake up Ruari. He’s still asleep,” I said.

“You both out late last night?” Tim asked.

“We were playing around with a bunch of English girls in Munsinger Gardens. I think I broke my arm more.”

“I don’t think you can break your arm more, man,” Tim said and cynically grinned.

Ruari was a seventeen-year-old British exchange student who was staying with my family for a month. I had been fortunate to go to the UK the summer before, and I stayed with Ruari and his family in Newcastle.

My experiences in England and Scotland radically and positively changed my perspective on the world, and I was never the same again. Afterward, the world became a wonderfully large place, and I wanted to see as much of it as I could. I was bursting at the seams to get out of Granite City.

I wanted to reciprocate my experience for Ruari, but Central Minnesota felt incomparable to Northern England, except maybe for the violence.

During the second week that Ruari stayed with me, he and I were out with a pack of my colorfully punk rock and theater kid friends, wasting time downtown. That night, we were jumped by a marauding group of redneck college students from Granite City State University.

The giant beefheads wearing football jerseys managed to get a hold of our friend, Paul, and planned to kill him for being Korean-American. As they beat his head into the sidewalk, I taunted them, they released their grip, and they came after me instead. Before I could flee to safety in a nearby alley, they broke my right arm.

As I walked down the hallway to Ruari’s bedroom, my arm was in a purple sling. The break wasn’t bad enough to require a cast, but it was tightly wrapped.

I knocked and said, “Get up, you Geordie bastard.”

The door opened, and Ruari was already dressed and smoothly put together for the day. Like Tim, he neatly presented himself with short, coiffed hair and stylish clothes, accompanied by a blazing white smile, which showed no signs of the hoodlum he really was.

“Another day of adventure awaits!” Ruari exclaimed.

No one was home at my house, so we slipped out easily into Tim’s green Bonneville parked in the driveway. Our beautifully belligerent trio headed out to the river that flowed along the lush, green banks of the city in June.

Summer was the only time of year I enjoyed living in Minnesota. It was when I could celebrate having survived seven long, subarctic months of winter. Those frozen months of whipping wind and blizzards made the landscape a barren wasteland of black and white.

During winter, I dreamed of the day when the layer of ice over the Mississippi thawed, and when I saw the river running again, it meant summer was near. That June day, as we drove, summer had arrived in full color.

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I rolled the car window down and let all the colors and warmth of summer fall on my face. The warm wind blew through my long locks while we raced by the Fingerhut warehouses, the Frigidaire factory, and the veterans hospital, where the trees were full of leaves and the grass was bright green.

There was always a soundtrack to our lives, and we were on a classic rock kick then. Tim popped a cassette of Fragile by Yes into his tape deck, and the song Roundabout blasted through the car speakers. We sped by water towers that rose over our heads, and beside railroad tracks with lines of Burlington Northern cars, until we pulled into Riverside Park.

The three of us got out and cracked beers. Tim and Ruari played frisbee while I drank and smoked cigarettes sitting on a fallen tree. The music sounded dazzling and blended perfectly with the taste of Camel smoke on my tongue.

When the song Heart of the Sunrise faded, Tim called, “Hey, Gench! Flip the tape!”

The other side of the cassette was Traffic’s Mr. Fantasy, and the sounds of 1967 surrounded us. As I drank more cheap, watery beer, my ears time-traveled to a past I’d never lived. While in my present, I felt the coarseness of the tree bark under my partially broken body, and my mind wandered to the future.

Tim was leaving for college, and Ruari would return to the UK. I had a year remaining in our suffocating city and another winter to survive before I could get out and get away.

I’ll head to college in the West, I thought, and then I’ll travel everywhere.

My naivete, impatience, and youth made me feel like a thousand-pound weight was chained to my ankle. I wanted exploits. Movement and music. Beautiful people and better beer.

Then, I saw the river ahead. A bruised, blue ribbon rolling to somewhere else.

“Let’s go swimming!” I yelled.

Ruari and Tim stopped throwing the frisbee and looked at me.

“I believe you have an injury,” Ruari said, his posh accent smooth and controlled.

“Yeah, Gentry. Probably not a good idea,“ Tim concurred.

“I’m going,” I said and started walking toward the river’s edge.

The beer in my brain was giving me tipsy courage, and my sling felt like a security blanket when I put one tennis shoe-covered foot in the water. I never wore socks when it was warm, and I didn’t care about getting my shoes wet.

I was up to my knees quickly and already thirty feet off the bank when I heard, “Hey, John Denver! We’re coming with you!”

It was Tim using one of his many nicknames for me.

I replied with one of my nicknames for him, “Get in, King of Cartoons! It feels good!”

I was moving slowly, but the water had gotten to my waist. My sling and T-shirt were dry, but my cut-off jeans were soaked. Tim and Ruari had all their clothes on, too, but none of us seemed to care. They sloshed forward and caught up to me fast.

“I wonder how far we can go?” Tim questioned, speaking to no one in particular.

We had no plans to cross the river that day, but after those words were uttered, I knew we were going to try to cross it. No one said it out loud, but the three of us had a nonverbal pact we would.

The Mississippi River began in the Headwaters area of Lake Itasca, just 150 miles north, so it hadn’t grown that wide when it ran through Granite City. But it was 250 yards across where we were, and that was a lot of moving water to cross for three half-drunk teenagers and one with a broken arm.

When we arrived in the middle of the river, it was only up to our chests, and I could feel the sandy bottom. I was encouraged and thought maybe we could just walk across. But the current was getting stronger, and the further underwater our bodies were, the more we were being pushed by the strong and steady flow.

I saw Granite City State’s academic buildings ahead on the opposite side of the river, and to our right, there was the loud sound of the hydro dam. Downstream, it was just the river, which bent and disappeared into the horizon.

I hadn’t noticed my arm much since I’d gotten in the water. Beer and adrenaline were good painkillers, and my desire to make it to the other side was greater than any discomfort.

With only one arm to pull myself forward, I decided to let my sopping-wet wrap and sling fall off and slip into the moving water. I watched both of them float downstream and swam forward, the coolness of the shallows had become ice-cold in the deep.

We were at our necks and smiling ear-to-ear in the afternoon sun. Nerves, combined with stupidity, surrounded by youthful swagger.

“Do Americans do this every summer in Minnesota?!” Ruari called out.

Tim and I just laughed.

That was the moment I kicked and felt nothing but the river underneath me. We were too deep to feel the sandy bottom anymore, and we were being quickly pushed downriver by the current.

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Anxious, I kicked harder and my broken arm started shooting bolts of pain, so I pulled forward with only my left.

“You okay, Gench?” Tim yelled.

“I’ll make it, man!” I said.

Bodies floating and flowing, we pulled and kicked hard, further and closer to the opposite bank. Struggling and moving until Ruari touched sand.

“I feel the bottom!” he cried out, excited and happy.

The bottom grew shallow fast, and I watched Ruari climb up and to his waist. Tim followed on his heels. They whooped and screamed back at me, laughing like insane, giddy, young men.

“Come on, Gench! Come on!”

I needed to make it to them. I needed to make it across to the other side and stand on it. I pulled and kicked one final time until I felt the riverbed under one foot, then two feet, and then I was walking up toward the shore and the high grass growing there.

We were all soon sitting on the riverside together, looking back from where we’d come, dripping wet and exhausted.

“We did it,” Tim said.

“Yes, we did,” Ruari agreed.

I rubbed my throbbing arm and said, “Let’s get back over the bridge to the car before the cops show up.”

We made it back to the park and to Tim’s Bonneville. Our clothes were dry by the time we got in the car, but we still smelled like the river. Marsh and mud mingled with moss, metal, and grass.

The day dove into dusk as we drove home listening to R.E.M.’s Green. Tim dropped Ruari and me off at home, and he made it to work at the pizza place in the mall on time.

Ruari flew back to the UK a few weeks later. Our summer was filled with exploits, but none were quite like crossing the Mississippi.

After Ruari left, I returned to the doctor for a follow-up. He examined my arm and said, “I don’t know what you’ve been doing. I have to put you in a full-length cast, and your arm will be in it for another month.”

I knew what I’d done, and I didn’t care about the cast. It was a heavy plaster badge of honor I wore as a reminder of our accomplishment that day.

When my two young friends and I were high on beer and summer and music. The day we made it to the other side of the river.

This story was originally published by The Narrative Arc in June 2024. Thanks to fabulous editor and writer .

Read more of my writing, get information about my music, and learn about the work I do with my many talented clients at GentryBronson.com.

Gentry Bronson Media and Creative

Key West is a place like no other. It’s where pirates mingle with drag queens, and the ghosts of writers like Hemingway drink cocktails with the phantoms of musicians like Jimmy Buffett.

Closer to Cuba than it is to Miami, it’s a place where beautiful, lost people hide out, playing in the sun until hurricanes make landfall. Where US Route 1 ends at the southernmost point, then it drops into the sea.

I got to live in Key West once, and it’s where I learned how to be a scoundrel. This story is about then…

When I was nineteen years old, I lived at the southernmost tip of the continental U.S., two blocks from Ernest Hemingway’s old house in Key West, Florida. My home was a one-bedroom shotgun bungalow with four other young bohemians. Two of them shared the bed, two shared the closet, and I was the lucky one who got the couch.

Despite my good fortune as the scalawag who landed on the couch each night, I didn’t sleep at our bungalow often, because I was lying in the beds of three redheaded enchantresses. A perfume paramour from Connecticut, a snake charmer from San Francisco, and a Georgia peach from, well, Georgia. And I was in love with each one.

But before I became involved with them, I learned to tend bar from a handsome, pepper-bearded older man named Daisy at a restaurant and dance club called Mangoes off Duval Street. It’s possible I was in love with him, too.

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Daisy was a self-described old queen among the flock of fabulous queers who worked at Mangoes. I was the youngest of them all, and the only one to call himself straight. The staff all seemed to wait impatiently for me and my young, skinny self to change my sexual preference. At least to something more fluid.

But I was devoted to young women then, and each night, after my shift ended at midnight, I would rendezvous with the perfumist, the charmer, or the peach.

I had left Seattle the day after New Year’s Day, 1992, and drove down the coast in a two-door Corolla with a Wiccan priestess and a broken-hearted acrobat. The car’s transmission was going out, so I held the clutch down halfway with my foot for the one thousand miles to San Diego, where we stopped to party with a pack of surfers, and then we turned east.

After a week spent with methheads in Phoenix, we moved on to Kerrville, Texas, and the transmission stayed intact long enough to reach our destination. There, we helped destroy the last of a wine cellar from a bankrupt restaurant on the river. Afterward, the priestess and acrobat returned west, and I continued east with the restaurant’s former proprietor, Alaska Dan. His family lived on Big Pine Key halfway down the Florida Keys.

Soon after our arrival with Dan’s family, I discovered that his parents were apocalyptic, rapture-driven, born-again Christians who were hoarding large amounts of ant-infested food for the end times. So, I slipped out early one morning while everyone was still asleep and hitchhiked south to the end of the Keys.

Sporting long hair and a goatee like a rock ‘n’ roll pirate, carrying a heavy metal-frame backpack, and wearing wingtip shoes, I arrived where US Route 1 stops. The end of the road…in Key West.

Upon arrival, I knew immediately that my shoes had to go. I bought a pair of Huarache sandals for fifteen dollars on the waterfront and found a room at a hostel under the palm trees. There, I met a cadre of young bohemians from around the globe, and four of them became my bungalow mates.

Deadhead Micah was a clown who made balloon animals on the waterfront at sunset for tourists. British Bryan was teaching himself to play guitar while looking for work, so he didn’t have to return home. Tina from Phillie was bookish with fashionable glasses and searingly intelligent, and she cleaned rooms at a local motel. And Steve the poet was a cook at Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville.

The five of us moved into our shotgun near Hemingway’s ghost and the many descendants of Ernest’s cats who lived around his house. We couldn’t afford electricity, so we ran a long, brown extension cord to a neighbor’s house and stole power so that we could play our stereo and turn on our one single-bulb lamp. The shower ran only cold water, and music always played.

Each day, buses filled with tourists drove by on a historical tour. Before they rounded the corner to Hemingway’s, they would discover us and our friends hanging off the front porch, dangling like smoking monkeys. Tropical hoodlums, hippies, and alt-culture punks waving hello to the tourists became part of the tour.

I was running out of the measly amount of money I had saved from working as a barista at Pike Place Market in Seattle, so I had to get a job. One afternoon, I wandered down Key West’s main drag, Duval Street, peering into various establishments, until I saw Mangoes.

It was a beautiful outdoor restaurant, with tables under white tablecloths, a long, elegant wooden bar, and ceiling fans gently blowing. It was Casablanca with Leonard Cohen playing through the overhead speakers instead of Sam at the piano. Far from the frat and sorority parties down Duval toward Margaritaville. It was a magical place filled with Europeans and queer New Yorkers on holiday.

Sauntering in with my shirt open, I looked like a reject from Alice In Chains. Inside, the bar manager, Glenn, was cleaning the mirror behind the bottles. He was gruff, short, and flouncy.

“Who are you?” he asked with a groan as he wiped.

“Gentry. From Seattle,” I said. “I’m looking for work.”

“And…you want to do what?” he growled with a sparkle in his eyes.

“Bartend,” I said. I was cocky and under skilled.

“Well, we do need someone for the bar. Can you start tonight?”

“Absolutely.”

“Change your filthy clothes and be here at 3:00. You’ll be barbacking for Daisy. He’ll looove you.”

I procured a pair of khaki pants and a billowy white shirt that accentuated my pirate-ness, then I returned to the restaurant. Naive and spirited. I was entering a new world, and the eccentricity of the employees at Mangoes drew me in quickly.

There was The Contessa, a bearded and obesely overweight queen with a sparkling attitude and extraordinary wit who worked the back bar. In the kitchen, the head chef was Tony, a Sambucca-quaffing Italian who never cooked anything, and he was surrounded by a line of long-haired, tattooed cooks and dishwashers. Smoking a cigarette in a shadowy corner of the bar, there was a skinny, pockmarked Cuban who was always grinning and greasy; he was our restaurant manager, Raul.

Playing, serving, and twirling among all of the customers were a myriad group of extremely good-looking party boys. Chiseled and coiffed. All business at the restaurant, but afterward, drinks flowed, music pumped, dancing began, and ketamine, cocaine, and Molly were snorted and swallowed.

On my first night, standing behind the bar like the regal queen he was, Daisy was waiting for me. Early-50s, strikingly good looking, with short brown hair, needle blue eyes, and a cocky and feminine swing of the hips.

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Daisy taught me to make everything. Sidecars, Grasshoppers, Brandy Alexanders, Negronis, Pina Coladas, chocolate liquor-based ice cream cocktails in tall glasses, and tropical rum rainbows in bowl-shaped stemware. While he instructed, I did all the work. He never picked up a bottle and never poured a thing. He just leaned against the bar, watching me lean over the beer cooler to pull out Amstel Lights and bottles of Chardonnay. After each customer paid, he also picked up every tip.

“You’ll see what you get from our tips after I see what you’ll do for me later,” Daisy said that first night.

At the end of my shift, I got to pour myself a stiff Tanqueray and tonic. Then, Daisy said, “Come over to my bungalow. It’s in the jungle. I’ll give you your money there.”

“Aaah…okay. But I do have friends to meet later,” I said.

“You can meet them afterward, honey. I’ll put on a Liz Taylor movie. You like her, I’m sure. And I have some outfits I want you to try. I don’t want them anymore, and I want to make sure they fit you.” Then, he nonchalantly winked. “It might get you a bigger cut of our tips.” As he said the last part, he made sure to punctuate tips.

At 1:00 am, we walked slowly to his bungalow in the jungle; Daisy pushing his bicycle and me walking beside him. The house was small and densely covered by palm trees.

Before we opened the front door, Daisy said, “I collect dolls. But you might not like them. They’re kitsch. Remember that.”

Inside, it was a small, cozy, and covered in collectibles and old dolls. Aunt Jemima, Little Black Sambo, and other teddy bears and dolls in black-face from the early 20th century sat on every surface and the few pieces of plush, vintage furniture.

Daisy had been sober for several years and offered me nothing alcoholic. To keep me there, he intended to ply me with hipster clothes from previous decades. To get them, I was asked to model. I went to the bathroom, stripped down, and changed, emerging to pose as Elizabeth Taylor yelled at Richard Burton in the background on the TV screen.

Finally, after much flirtation and many wardrobe changes, I was given a small percentage of our total tips, and I left the bungalow at 3:00 am. Though my evening take was small, I still had time to get to the bars, which were open until 4:00 am. I ran out into the sultry night carrying a small pile of clothes and a wallet filled with cash to spend on cocktails.

That pattern continued for the first several nights I worked with Daisy.

Each morning after just a few hours’ sleep and before my afternoon shift, I’d climb off my couch and walk several miles around a fenced-in military base to get to the locals’ beach. The ocean and the sand were my sanctuary. I’d drop my towel and plunge into the warm water, then slowly stroke backward as the small waves rocked me. Thinking of Seattle and music. No matter how far away I was from the Emerald City, I dreamed of making music there.

Then, I’d swim back to the beach and let myself dry off while I wrote lyrics and poetry. Scribbling strange and pretentious phrases as I lay on a towel on the soft sand. I focused on the words flowing off my pen onto the page until I fell asleep. Usually face down.

I’d wake in time to walk back, take a cold shower at the bungalow, put on my pirate’s bartending costume, and head back to Mangoes to tend bar, then gather my tips from Daisy in the jungle, and party with my friends until the sun had nearly risen.

It was a magically inebriated, carelessly lyrical, and hard work-filled time.

Then, Anathea, the perfumist, appeared during one of my late-night romps.

Anathea was twenty-two years of attitude, and she strutted through the bar I was in one night. Her long, muscular legs poured into high heels that seemed to make her nine feet tall. Ravishing red streaked her hair and bounced over the diabolical look in her eye. A succubus from the Northeast.

She walked directly up to me, parting my friends like a sinning Moses might a sinister sea, and said, “Hi. I’m Thea. I like you. You look like one of the Lost Boys.”

“The movie about vampires or Peter Pan’s friends?” I questioned.

“Both,” she said. “Buy me a drink.”

And I did.

That night, a tropical storm rolled in, and as the wind gusted and the rain fell, Thea took me by the hand to the end of the dock at the southernmost point. There, we drunkenly had mad sex like sea creatures as the waves banged the dock and covered us in water and foam.

After that, nights with Thea multiplied. I’d end up in her bungalow after work, where she would tell me I was too young for her. In the morning, after a rousing morning of sex, she would dress for work and head out to her Aromatics and Parfum Shop, which she owned.

Before she left, she’d say, “Leave the key under the conch shell outside.”

After only a week, she told me she loved me, then she put a cassette in her boombox and played Nirvana’s song Come As You Are. As the song played, Thea sang her own lyrics.

“Anatheeea,” was sung over Kurt Cobain singing, “Memoriiies, yeah.” And when the song ended, she said, “No matter what happens, you will never forget me.”

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Daisy was both unimpressed and jealous of my new paramour, but Glenn had promoted me to a full bartender and moved me to the back bar in place of The Contessa, who was busy preparing for a drag show. So, I no longer needed to depend on my flirting in the jungle surrounded by racist dolls to get my full tips.

One day, I showed up to work and Daisy had dyed his hair red to match Thea’s. He had fallen for me as I had fallen for Thea, but both loves weren’t meant to happen.

After a full moon party, I ordered a round for Anathea and me at a rickety sailor’s bar we frequented, and then I went to the bathroom. When I returned, I discovered that she had stiffed me on the tab and left without saying a word.

The bartender looked at me and said, “That girl’s wild. She went to Miami Beach with a girlfriend to meet boys.”

Devastated, I left and wandered Duval Street in a drunken daze.

I was sliding down the street diagonally when I gazed into an open window. Standing by a black baby grand piano in a cafe, with a long waterfall of blazing red hair to her sumptuous bottom, wearing a short, flowery dress, was the snake charmer, Elyss.

She turned to see me standing there in the street. Piercing green eyes swallowed me. “You coming in?” she asked.

I smiled and weaved my way through the swinging wooden doors.

Inside, I played the piano, she brought me drinks, and then Elyss took me home to her room, which was a converted garden shed. She put me in a small boat in the canal behind her house, and after I was too wet to wear my clothes, she removed them and had her way with me for much of the night.

Elyss was a twenty-six-year-old hippie goddess. I called her the snake charmer because she owned two boa constrictors, her skin seemed to crawl like a snake’s, and her eyes entranced like one, too. Afraid of snakes since I was a child, Elyss and her serpents were a dangerous infusion of sex and death.

Like Thea just days before, Elyss and I became linked quickly, and I began to spend most nights with her, only stopping at my shared bungalow for a different pair of pants.

Elyss and I whirled through Key West and beyond. We took ecstasy and watched The Contessa perform opening night of her drag show at The Copa. We drove Elyss’ Dodge van to Bahia Honda to skinny dip in the daytime sun, where we filmed having sex by strangers on the beach. And we took a trip to tour the Salvador Dali museum in St. Petersburg, then saw Pearl Jam at a small club that night.

I had moved from one redhead to another quickly. Anathea to Elyss. Hungry, horny, and nineteen. It was all drugs and drink, lust and the beach. I was driven by desire and the need for more. For experience. For life to open up wide and swallow me whole. Living like Sonny Crockett in Miami Vice, all while behaving like a pirate gigolo at the edge of the world.

So, it strangely made sense that when I met the Georgia peach, I fell in love with her, too.

Heather was a character straight out of a Tennessee Williams production. Twenty-one years old with a shy-but-come-hither attitude and a coquettish Southern accent. All giddy and giggling, hips and curves, swerving through life in the Keys under a tousle of strawberry red curls. I was the bad boy. The scoundrel. And she liked that.

“You’re from Seattle? Like Nirvana?” she asked, several cocktails in at an Irish bar.

“I am. Well, I lived there. Before I came here,” I said.

“And you’re a musician, too, huh?”

“Yeah, I am.”

“If I find you a guitar, will you play me somethin’?”

“I’m a terrible guitar player. But I sing. And I’m not too bad on the piano.”

“If we can’t find a piano, then you can sing for me, baby.”

Heather and I found ourselves on the bathroom counter of her upstairs bungalow. The water was running in the shower, and we intended to get in it together. But we had become distracted by each other’s bodies, so we didn’t know the shower was overflowing and flooding the downstairs neighbor’s shop until we heard pounding on the front door.

It was that simple. Innocence mixed with lust. A third redhead (not counting Daisy) had entered my life. My sensuous chaos continued.

I continued to have affairs with both Heather and Elyss. When one worked, I played with the other. When I worked, I played with Daisy and all the pretty boys at Mangoes.

Moving from woman to woman and partying like a faux rock star, I began to not know what I was doing, but I was a young man, driven by want. The small sliver of land called Key West felt like it was closing in on me, and it was my fault that I felt the claustrophobia.

When Thea appeared at Mangoes one late Saturday afternoon just before Easter, she said she had gotten pregnant, had had an abortion, and wanted me to pay for it. We had never been exclusive, but it certainly could have been mine.

I didn’t give her any money. I was brash and naive, and I still held a grudge about her leaving me high and dry. And I had become a scoundrel.

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That night, the Mangoes club had a dance party, and the DJ was pumping. Whirling from Thea’s news, I decided to get out of my head.

I danced with all the sweating boys and girls on the floor, flying high on the music. When my friend Don, an alt-rocker from Wisconsin, and I were offered fantasy, I didn’t say no. Fantasy was a psychedelic mixture of LSD and ecstasy, and Don and I decided to take it at 3:00 am, just one hour before the club closed.

As the fantasy began to elevate our senses, the lights came on, and all of us clubgoers were asked to go home. It was 4:00 am, and we were left to the night’s leftovers and the hum of the tropics with drugs dancing in our systems.

Don and I spilled out in the night and made our way to the two-story, tin-roofed bungalow where he was staying, and where I was sleeping with Heather.

We didn’t want to wake anyone up when we arrived, so we went out to the patio overlooking the street, hoping to relax in a hammock. But I was restless, and the whir of the drugs was increasing.

“Let’s get naked, man,” I said, buzzing wildly, the world opening and closing with tropical breath.

“Aaaw, no way, man. No way,” Don mumbled.

“I’m doing it. Then, I’m getting on the roof.”

I stripped naked and climbed onto the steeply slanted roof of the bungalow. It was silky and soft under my hands and feet, the metal warm to the touch. I climbed up as high as I could and lay my naked body across its warmth near the peak of the roof. Then I spread my arms wide open, inviting the world in.

Time had ceased to have measurement, and I stared out at the night above me. It was thick, dark, and molasses.

Don peered up at me from below, whispering, “Man, I can’t get up there. It’s too smooth. How’d you get up there?”

I laughed, arrogant, young, fearless. Then, I felt raindrops.

Moments later, the sky opened on both of us. A tropical storm had burst and was pouring down on my naked body. I was elated. It pounded on my skin and rained a blanket down on the roof. Don hid under an awning, and I laughed between the huge, heavy drops.

Tropical storms came quickly and left even faster. This one was gone in twenty minutes, and when the rain stopped, the clouds broke open. Streams of sunlight blazed through the clouds’ parting, burning down on my naked body. Day and its light had arrived, and church bells began to ring, echoing through the streets.

I realized that it was Easter morning, and I was naked on a wet, tin rooftop in Key West, lying in a crucifix pose aimed toward the street at sunrise.

My chemical-fueled mind was burning with esoteric questions. Who am I? Am I a sopping wet sinner? Crucified for the sainthood of all the party boys, all the redheaded enchantresses, and all the other scoundrels like me?

That’s when I realized the roof was too wet for me to get down. Sliding down was a bad option because it was too slick. Then people started emerging from their houses to go to Easter Sunday church services.

It turned out that the answers to my internal questions had nothing to do with being a soaked messiah. Oh, my god, I thought. I am a drug-addled ignoramus. I am a dumbass.

Don whispered loudly up to me, “Gentry! You gotta get down, man. There are people. People everywhere, man!”

“Oh, shit,” I hissed to myself. “Shiiiit.”

I got myself prepared to slide down the side of the roof, possibly breaking bones. It was very steep and very wet, so I did my best to get my feet ready to land. I wiggled until my momentum began and I rocketed down, too fast to have time to be concerned about where I would hit, and dropped onto the patio hard.

“Fuck! You all right?” Don asked.

“Yeah. Damn, man. We gotta get inside!”

We slipped through the patio door and into the living room, panting, soaked, high, swiveling on our own thoughts, gravity changing, and then I remembered I had to work the Easter brunch shift at Mangoes’ main bar at 10:00 am. That was only a few hours away.

Easter Sunday was a dark mirage among all the colorful clothing and smiling customers. Elyss and Heather appeared at the bar, each separately, happy to see me. I thought, they have to know about each other, and they probably did. At least, I tell myself that now.

The next day, I went to a travel agency and bought a one-way ticket to Seattle, but I didn’t tell anyone, except for Glenn.

He said with a sneer and a smile, “The season’s almost over, and I think it’s time. Work your last week of shifts. Then, go make music. And don’t grow up too fast.”

People learned about my departure shortly afterward, but I kept it a secret that I wasn’t returning.

There was an impromptu going-away party thrown the night before I left. Micah, Tina, Don, Bryan, and Heather were all there. We drank like a hurricane was coming, I received many drunken hugs and kisses, and music pumped into the night.

Steve the poet was not there. After we learned he plagiarized all his poetry and was addicted to ketamine, he stole Bryan’s guitar, drove west to save Los Angeles, and was later thrown in a mental institute.

Elyss was also not there. We got together before the party. A goodbye for just us. She said she’d see me when I got back, but I knew she knew I wasn’t returning.

Anathea never appeared again other than in gossip and rumor. I still wonder if the pregnancy was mine, and I think of her when I hear Come As You Are.

Daisy was sad to see me go, and I was sad to say goodbye. His hair was still red when I left. Seven years later, I learned that he succumbed to AIDS and died in his bungalow in the jungle.

Heather got me to the airport at 5:00 am on that last day of April, still half drunk on scotch. Her lips were the final lips I kissed in the Keys. Then, I stumbled out onto the tarmac and walked up the short stairway into the plane.

I landed in Seattle on the day of the Rodney King riots. Paradise displaced by revolution.

As I watched the city burn that night from Capitol Hill, I thought about gentle waves, the smell of coconut oil, and the enchanting curves of all those I loved, on the opposite side of the continent, where the road ended in Key West.

An early, two-part version of this story was published by The Memoirist in April 2022.

This is dedicated to Daisy. Thanks for teaching me how to make the rainbow in a rum punch, you handsome, old queen.

Read more of writing, listen to music, and learn about the work I do with my incredible clients at GentryBronson.com.

Gentry Bronson Media & Creative

I always like to leave a note at the top of my stories. It’s my brief interlude before the music begins. The music of the words. It may sound silly, but when I write words, they feel like I’m composing a song.

In this series of words, I write about nearly dying. I guess I’ve nearly died a lot because I’ve written about coming close to death numerous times. But I’m still delightedly living.

There was a time when I thought my death was near as I lay in a room in Turkey on the Syrian border. During that time, I made an enemy out of a rooster, and after I survived, there was chocolate, a family of Turks, and the Mediterranean Sea.

Read on…

I was lying on my back, staring straight up at a bare light bulb hanging from a long, naked wire. The light was off and the pension room was dark, but I could see the headlights of cars trail across the ceiling and walls around me. I wanted to close my eyes, but every time I did, my stomach churned and my head pounded, so I followed the headlights to distract from my agony.

The sheets under me were soaked, and I was covered in sweat. One minute, I was shivering and cold; the next, waves of heat seared under my skin and made me feel I was on fire.

My second-story window was open, and outside, I heard the blare of horns and distorted music. Turkish pop star Tarkan was blasting from blown-out speakers, and in between songs, I heard the constant crow of a rooster. The bird bellowed out a wickedly high-pitched song. A piercing death knell. It had been incessantly crowing on a loop every one of the three long days I lay poisoned at the Star Pansiyon in Kızkalesi.

As I lay there in anguish, I spoke through dry, chaffed lips. I said to no one but the room, “Let me die. It’s okay to die here.”

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I had been traveling in Turkey for two months during the summer of 1995. Falling in love with the country and its people had been easy. I’d had adventures down the Aegean coast from Istanbul and back, and then all along the Black Sea to Trabzon.

I slept on a rooftop in Istanbul facing the Blue Mosque, and was nearly swindled by a coin dealer in the early morning at Ephesus. An Aussie rambler and I looked for mermaids for two weeks while sleeping on a seaside cliff outside Fethiye. A family took me in near Samsun for a week, and one night at a full moon party of belly dancers, a drunken uncle grabbed me by the shoulders and called me Indiana Jones.

After spending my 23rd birthday at the 1,600-year-old Sumela Monastery built on the steep cliffside of a mountain 4,000 feet up, I made my way south. First to Ankara, then Cappadocia, and down to Adana. I was running out of Turkish lira and needed to return to Prague soon for DJ gigs, so I decided to spend my last days by the sea.

Kızkalesi used to be the ancient city of Korykos. It was 200 miles from the Syrian border on the Mediterranean coast, and I’d heard there was an island castle there, so I took a bus to the tiny seaside town.

When I arrived, the dirt roads were filled with Turks and soldiers from Adana in the desert heat. Cars, buses, and taxis sped by, stirring up dirt, and merchants called out from a market near the main street. I bought several large bottles of water from one of the merchants in a small bazaar and tied them to my backpack. Then, I found the Star Pansiyon.

There was a young, clean-shaven man at a decaying front desk. He greeted me with a smile and said, “Merhaba! Hello. Welcome! I am Akif. How many nights you stay?”

“I’m not sure yet. Maybe one or two,” I said.

“You have passport?”

I handed it to him.

“Aah, American. Business, travel, or maybe soldier?”

“I’m traveling.”

“Yes, yes. You like my country?”

“Yes, Akif. Türkiye çok güzel.”

I’d said those words many times. It meant ‘Turkey is very beautiful’ and it was the truth.

“Thank you! And here you see heaven and hell,” he said with foreboding darkness.

“I’m sorry. What?” I asked.

“Here in Kızkalesi, we have Cennet ve Cehennem. The caves of Heaven and Hell. Very beautiful.”

“Oh. Well, maybe I’ll see those. Thank you. Teşekkür ederim.”

With those final words hanging in the air, I put my backpack in my room and went to the seaside to find the castle.

I could smell how close the sea was, and the sea breeze led me to the beach. The castle sat on an island far from the shore. Floating ghostly on the horizon.

The beach was nearly empty and I decided to have a swim. When I was in the water, the ocean surged, and my head started to spin. I immediately began to feel dizzy and nauseous, and I got out of the water quickly.

When I got onshore, I could barely use my legs. I was weak and wobbly, and my head seemed to fill with helium and pollution. I thought I have to get back to my room now, and I stumbled back to the pension. After getting up the stairs and through the door, I collapsed into bed and started sweating profusely.

It felt as though poison entered every part of me.

The next hours were a blur as my thoughts jumbled more and more. I fell into a dark oblivion, and when I had moments of lucidity, I tried to figure out what was happening.

I’d eaten some goat cheese, pilav, and lentil soup at the bus station in Adana. None of that seemed bad or rancid. No one I’d met in the last few days had given me anything, and I’d taken no drugs or drank any booze. I’d been living clean and sober since I left Prague and my life as a DJ many weeks before.

I had been on a spiritual quest in Turkey. One where I meditated daily, visiting mosques and many ancient holy places. Muslim, Christian, and Greek gods all accompanied me where I went. I was purifying myself of all those late nights spinning Trip Hop and Acid Jazz in dance clubs.

But now, my journey of purification had led me to a nightmare.

The hours grew into two days of agony. I spent half of it in bed and the other half hovering over the toilet. Constantly getting rid of every single thing in my body.

Outside, I continued to hear the ear-piercing cockle-doo-doo of the rooster. Crowing its mad song nonstop. Taunting me.

“Shut up, bird,” I breathed out through parched lips while lying in bed paralyzed by pain. “Shuuut uuup.”

Then, I would pass out for several hours. Day blurred with night, and my dreams blurred with my waking thoughts.

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On day three, all my bottles of water were empty, and I knew how bad that was. I couldn’t drink the water from the tap in Turkey, and my body was completely dehydrated. I had to get fluids. I had to get to the bazaar.

First, I needed to stand.

It felt like years before I could process how to sit up, and more years to actually move my body. After I finally sat up, the Earth rotated. Its axis shifted, and I was a satellite without an orbit, spinning outward to infinity. I found the gravitational pull again, and in my delirium, I convinced myself to fly down the stairs and into the market outside.

I may not be able to walk, but I can float, I thought. In my mind, it was better to be a ghost than it was to die.

I rose and stood, the room teetering, and I began my hallucinogenic quest for water. I ventured out of the room and down the hall. Everything was diagonal when I reached the stairs, so I used the white walls to propel myself to enter the blisteringly bright and busy world.

Cars were speeding, and people were everywhere. Men sat smoking and playing backgammon and drinking tea. It was chaos, but I was in slow motion. I moved down a passageway and got to the first shop with a few tables under a tent.

Standing beautifully in a row inside a refrigerator, like green magic potions, were bottles of Sprite. My mouth would have drooled if I had any saliva. Next to the soda were plastic bottles of water on a table, and in my haze, near the water, there was a dark mustache, and it was moving. I heard Turkish words come from under it.

Connected to the mustache was a worried merchant. He looked at me with great concern, put a bottle of Sprite and two large bottles of water into a bag, and charged me nothing. He just motioned gently with his hand that it was okay.

Floating back to my room was no longer an option because gravity had suddenly increased, so trudging foot by foot, I made it. When I got inside, I sat down on the bed and opened the Sprite, slowly sipping the sweet bubbles and letting them pop on my tongue. Then, I passed out.

I slept for a thousand hours and during that time, my fever broke. I became conscious a few times, drank water, and it stayed in my body. The sweating stopped and after fighting with my sheet for hours — once discovering it wrapped around my neck like a noose — it now rested over me like the wings of an angel.

On morning four, I woke up and was very weak, but I no longer wanted to die. The noise of the street was still relatively quiet. There were cars and buses, but no music. And then, I realized, there was no sound of the rooster either.

I stood up and went to the open window. I put my head out and looked down. The rooster was there on the ground, lying with its wings sprawled. A scrawny bird with dirty black feathers. It was being eaten by a calico cat. The cat looked up at me, we acknowledged each other, and it went back to eating the rooster.

I went out and visited the merchant who gave me Sprite and water the previous day. He seemed very happy to see me alive.

I bought some freshly baked bread, yogurt, and honey from him and gave him extra for his life-saving gifts the day before. In my room, I ate five or six shaky spoonfuls of yogurt with honey, and I saved the bread for later. Then, I packed my things and went to the front desk to pay for my stay.

“Did you visit Heaven and Hell?” Akif asked.

“One of them,” I said.

He looked bewildered but said nothing more. I paid and left.

I’d spent nearly all my money staying extra days and knew I’d need to find a rooftop or some other cheap place to stay in Istanbul before I flew back to Prague, so I decided to try and hitch a ride. Hitchhiking had worked for me many times in many places before and I had nothing to lose now.

I walked wearily but optimistically out to the edge of Kızkalesi, turned around, and swung my right thumb out.

As the mid-morning sun rose, the heat rose with it and my backpack felt very heavy on my weak body. Thirty minutes went by with many cars and buses passing, but no takers. I ate a little bread and then kept thumbing for another half hour. Still, no one stopped.

Then, a small truck with an Ülker chocolate logo on the side drove past me, slowed down, and pulled over.

As I walked up to the side, the passenger door swung open. A young, smiling boy peered out. Then, a second boy tumbled over the top of him, laughing. With both boys hanging out of the truck, I heard a man’s voice. When I reached the door and could see inside, I saw three Turks beaming at me with smiles made out of magic.

The younger-looking of the two boys asked, “English?”

“American,” I said.

The two boys giggled, and the man’s eyebrows raised.

“I am Turgay,” the man said, and pointed to the boys. “My sons. Ali and Eren. Where you go?”

“Istanbul,” I replied.

“We go beach! Then, Istanbul!” he said with excitement.

I climbed into the truck with Turgay, Ali, and Eren, and we went to a nearby stretch of beach with turquoise water.

I swam with the boys and played tag with them in the shallows. When I grew tired, I sat down on the beach next to Turgay. He was a quiet, handsome man who smoked Samsun cigarettes and let the sun play on his face. Turgay offered me a cigarette and we smoked together in the calm, listening to the waves, and watching Ali and Eren make sand castles.

Few words were said because they spoke very little English and I spoke very little Turkish, but we were a family of happy vagabonds that day.

When the sun dropped toward the horizon, we started toward Ankara. It was an eleven-hour drive to Istanbul. We drove until it was dark and the boys were asleep, then Turgay pulled off into a parking lot where buses and a few other trucks were parked.

Without saying anything, he got out, opened the back of the truck, and gestured me inside. I was his guest, and my bed was among the many cardboard boxes filled with chocolate stacked to the ceiling.

I wasn’t completely well yet, but when I lay among the boxes and boxes of chocolate, everything felt blissful. Then I drifted off and was awakened by the sound of the truck door rolling open hours later.

The early morning light streamed across our faces on the road to Istanbul. Ali and Eren sitting on either side of me and Turgay humming along to Turkish music on the radio.

When we arrived, they dropped me on the Asian side of the city. Turgay shook my hand, placed a hand on my shoulder, and said, “Goodbye, American friend. Mashallah.”

“Mashallah, Turgay,” I said, returning his blessing of good fortune.

He got in his truck with Eren and Ali waving through the window as the boys tumbled over each other, and they drove away.

I never ate any of Turgay’s chocolate or learned how I was poisoned. I also never saw the caves in Kızkalesi, but I did experience heaven and hell during my last days in Turkey. It was possible to do that in a place where ancient met modern, East met West, and many beliefs were born, blended, and thrived.

In that mystical country, heaven and hell existed, castles floated on the sea, roosters sang sinister songs, being a ghost was better than death, and a family driving a chocolate truck took a young hitchhiker all the way to Istanbul.

Thank you to marvelous editor and writer , who expertly helped polish my story and published it originally on Travel Memoirs in August 2024.

There’s more to learn about my writing, my music, and my work with clients at GentryBronson.com.

Gentry Bronson Media & Creative

Life leads us all down some unique paths. When music was the core of my life and how I made all of my living, I went down a long and winding road filled with wild, wonderful, and strange circumstances.

One of the turns I took got me invited to sing at Oakland Coliseum for a Major League Baseball game.

Step onto the field with me on a warm summer night filled with electricity…

I stand alone on the shimmering green grass of Oakland Coliseum, between the pitcher’s mound and home plate. Blazing bright floodlights pour down through the night sky and illuminate the field. My legs quiver when I look up anxiously at the rows of people in the stands. Soon, there will be a pitcher, batter, catcher, and an umpire in my place, but for this moment, it’s just me.

When I bring my right hand to my chest over my pounding heart, my veins pulse like tribal drums. I feel the same driving rhythm in the fingers of my left hand as I bring the wireless microphone up to my mouth. My body is an electric wire that races with current, while everything in the coliseum seems like it’s slowed almost to a stop.

As one drop of sweat rolls down the side of my face, I take in a deep breath and begin to sing. Music vibrates out of my lungs, throat, and mouth into the 35,000 seats filled with baseball fans.

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The Oakland A’s were playing the visiting Texas Rangers that night. It was a warm and pleasant June evening in 2012. Perfect for a game of Major League Baseball.

I had loved baseball since I was six years old when my family brought me to see my first game. The Minnesota Twins played the Kansas City Royals at the Met just outside Minneapolis. Before the Metrodome was built with its indoor air-conditioning, I watched Rod Carew play against George Brett under the stars. Little me with my baseball cap pulled down low just the way I liked it.

Scraping melting scoops of ice cream off a wooden spoon with my teeth while I checked for splinters with my tongue, I watched the game intently. Waiting to quickly put on my glove to catch a fly ball or a home run. The slow splendor of the game under lights. Big and bold and beautiful.

It was my first time experiencing the romance, the drama, and the glorious rhythm of baseball. Played at its own tempo with no time limit. No clock. Just nine players on a field versus the other players at bat, on base, or waiting in the dugout. Like music, baseball was played, but instead of a song, players used their talents to play a game.

By young adulthood, I no longer followed baseball. All my baseball cards were destroyed in a fire and my life was swept up by music. But I still got excited when I went to a game.

I watched Kirby Puckett and the Twins win the World Series twice. I caught the Diamondbacks while I was performing on tour in Arizona. And I celebrated the Giants when they won the Series for the first time in San Francisco. Every time, I savored the melody, beat, and beauty of baseball.

When that June night at Oakland Coliseum arrived, I had become an award-winning songwriter and musician with six full-length records, three EPs, and numerous singles and music videos. I had a discography of over 100 songs, I’d toured throughout the United States several times, and recently completed a sixth European tour. My career was on a high.

A friend of a friend of a family member who worked for the A’s knew who I was. He’d heard about the galavanting international piano guy, thought I might be good at singing the national anthem, and asked me to send a demo to the team. I jumped at the opportunity. So, I booked time at a studio I worked out of, sang a quick a cappella version of the anthem, and sent it off.

The A’s sent me an email a few weeks later. They wanted me to sing for them and I was elated. I became an excited six-year-old again, soon to return to the magical, mystical, romantic world of baseball, but this time as a singer. And the coliseum would be the largest venue I’d ever performed in.

Suddenly, spinning in a sea of nerves, with imposter syndrome rearing its head, I questioned myself. Why me? Why had I been allowed to sing at home plate?

My confidence shook further when I questioned the material. I’d never been a patriotic person; I was a counterculture, anti-authoritarian punk. The press called me the barefoot punk pianist, and now I was going to open the game by singing the U.S. national anthem.

What made me feel more secure was that Barack Obama was president, and I loved him. As a Progressive from birth, I would proudly sing the Star-Spangled Banner when America had our first Black president who was also an articulate, intelligent, and great leader.

Imposter syndrome remained. Could my voice do the task? I was a songwriter first; a pianist and a performer second. My voice — heavily influenced by other non-trained-yet-successful singers like Tom Waits, Michael Stipe, and David Gray — was merely a tool I used to tell the stories in my songs. I knew that my voice would be on display by itself.

And the Star-Spangled Banner was difficult. It jumped musically in strange ways, so it was important to choose a key that worked for low and high registers.

If I was Beyoncé, it wouldn’t be an issue. But I got my start singing on stages behind barns in Midwest farm fields and punk rock stages fronting alternative-rock bands, so I rehearsed constantly for a couple of weeks.

As I practiced, I realized that the song’s lyricist, Francis Scott Key, had written some complicated stanzas. I understood that it was a poem from 200 years ago, but we didn’t use words like ramparts in common language or lyrics anymore. Also, I discovered that it was in 6/8 time. That meant the song was sung in threes, as a kind of waltz or pub song.

Despite my overthinking, I knew that none of that crossed the minds of half-beer-drunk, peanut-gobbling adults or six-year-olds with baseballs sparkling in their eyes. After the anthem’s singer had sung and disappeared from the Jumbotron screen, fans could take their hands from their hearts, watch the players take the field, and wait for the umpire to yell, “Play ball!”

That June afternoon, as I drove deep into Oakland on Interstate 880 with the coliseum rising in front of me, I was the one who’d be on the Jumbotron.

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I arrived with my longtime drummer and friend, Alex, along with Cindy and Cameron, my media duo. After we entered the coliseum, the three of them were shown their way to their seats, and I was whisked back into the bowels of the great and expansive building.

My only experience at the coliseum up to that point had been seeing The Rolling Stones in concert. Now, I was deep inside the buzzing Major League Baseball rooms and offices. Signing paperwork, receiving payment, and being given my assignment.

The young woman behind the desk was pretty and blond and all-business. She’d done all this before. I was just another singer.

She said, “Okay. So, we’ll bring you out on the field while autographs are being signed. That’s when they’ll take your photo.”

“Where will I be for that?” I asked.

“On the field. By the mound.”

The pitcher’s mound, I thought. Oh, man. I was giddy.

Dressed in dress slacks, a button-up shirt, and black dress shoes — wardrobe as requested by the A’s — I was used to performing without shoes. As the barefoot pianist, it was part of my schtick.

“Are you sure I can’t sing barefoot?” I asked, trying to persuade her.

“No.” Her answer was quick and sharp. “It’s time to soundcheck.”

She escorted me through rooms that went through doors that went into halls that went into other rooms. A labyrinth. Large groups of fans appeared and disappeared as I was escorted by people in baseball uniforms and past others in giant, furry hot dog costumes. There were ice machines, racks of baseball bats, and janitors pushing carts of trash. Then, down some stairs and back up a ramp that led onto the field right between the dugouts.

The lights were like the sun. Electricity pulsed. My heart was pumping like a locomotive, and my mind was shoveling coal into the furnace of my anxiety. Nerves mixed with excitement and that added to the complete psychedelic irrationality of where I was.

On my left from the dugout, I heard players call out in succession:

“Hey, man!”

“Singer, what up!?”

“¡Oye, cantante!”

It was the A’s. All in uniform. Green and gold and white. Josh Reddick and Yoenis Céspedes. Jemile Weeks and Kila Ka’aihue. Even Craig Gentry was there, sharing my name and ready to play against the Rangers.

I didn’t know if the players were greeting me or poking fun. It didn’t matter. Jocks had often teased and bullied me for being the piano-playing geek, and I still felt partially like that person. I may have been a baseball fan, but I was a horrific player, and, as a kid, I’d generally been picked last for most teams. But that night, I would be the one starting the game.

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A sound tech greeted me and brought me out between home plate and the pitcher’s mound. I turned around and looked up through the netting at the thousands of people in their seats while she put monitors into both of my ears and gave me a wireless microphone.

“We’re going to need you to sing some after we get the monitors working,” the tech said, smiled at me, and added, “You’re gonna be great.” Then, she walked back into the coliseum.

My head spun, but that was quickly interrupted by my ear monitors. They cracked, buzzed, shorted out, and came back in.

Then, I heard, “Yeah, ready to sssss…”

The sound was in my right ear, then my left, then both ears.

“Soundcheck ready.”

Silence.

Then, “Wait…okay. Go.”

It was all instinct. I knew how to soundcheck. So, I started singing the first stanza of the Star-Spangled Banner.

My voice resonated in my monitors, and then it echoed out into the 35,000-seat outdoor space and returned. I heard myself bounce off the coliseum five seconds after I sang, and my voice crossed over what I heard in the monitors packed into my ears. It was disconcerting.

Soundcheck ended and I walked around on the field with Stomper the Jolly Elephant and a two-legged palomino horse named Rangers Captain. Mascots for both teams. Children were sandwiched together with extra large bank checks. Graying men in dark suits smiled, shook hands, and looked serious. I found my friends and media crew — Alex, Cindy, and Cameron — in the stands and waved.

Everything was in slow motion and fast-paced at the same time. One moment, I was taking photos, smiling, and posing like I had a thousand times before at my shows, then I was in a small room, by myself, waiting to be brought back out onto the field.

There in the room, I ran the lyrics over and over in my head. Americans had all been trained to know the words to the Star-Spangled Banner, but did anyone really know them? When faced with singing the song for a massive coliseum filled with baseball fans, the words “O’er the ramparts” seemed like a foreign language. An alien tongue.

Rapidly, I was escorted back out and under the explosively bright lights that lit up the field of green with straight lines of brown dirt and white paint. Colors that seemed to be from another planet, and I was the astronaut who had landed there. About to sing in the language of the planet’s creatures.

I stood beside the Ranger’s dugout, careful not to look at the visiting team, and watched the first pitch being thrown by a middle-aged man with a smile the size of the sky. He was extremely excited to be there and his pitch bounced before it made it to the catcher.

I felt a gentle shove, knew it was time, and I walked out to the space between the mound and home base. My legs were rubber. It was like I was getting ready to take a swing on a three-two pitch with bases loaded and down by three runs at the bottom of the ninth. But I was ready to play ball. To play music. To use my voice and sing.

The announcer returned and said, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, to honor America…please rise and remove your caps for our National Anthem…as performed by Gentry Bronson!”

I took my stance, held my right hand to my heart, pulled the microphone up to my mouth with my other hand, and began.

My breathy baritone was purposefully low at first. Time slowed, words slid from my mouth, and I heard the lyrics bounce back seconds later.

Careful not to be thrown off, I gained momentum when I sang, “…and the rockets red glare…” Then my left ear monitor started crackling. But I knew to never stop in a performance — not even if something went wrong — so I carried on without a pause.

When I got to, “…land of the free…” I heard my left ear monitor disappear completely. But I was nearly there, nearly to the finale, and I held out the word “free” for a good long exaltation of achievement. The crowd cheered. And I touched back down to earth when I reached “…and the home of the brave.”

With applause and whoops raining down, I lifted my arm to the sky, looked up into the stands as if I’d just hit a home run, smiled, waved, and started off the field.

I hadn’t knocked it out of the park. It was more of a ground ball single, but I’d made it safely on base. Instead of an operatic aria, I’d given an alterna-rock everyman performance that was all me, and I’d proudly given it all.

That night, when I walked off the field, my baseball heroes and musical inspirations came together. George Brett and Tom Waits. Rod Carew and Michael Stipe. Kirby Puckett and David Gray.

Under the big, bright lights in Oakland, I sang the national anthem in front of thousands of people and brought together my lifelong love for music and the game of baseball.

As I made my way past the dugout, up the ramp, and into the coliseum, I heard the umpire yell, “Play ball!”

Thanks so much to editor and writer extraordinaire for working with me on this story, and for publishing it originally with The Narrative Arc on November 3, 2024.

Find out more about my music, writing, and work with creative, change-making, entrepreneurial clients at GentryBronson.com.

Gentry Bronson Media & Creative

I’ve done a lot of touring as a musician. My musical life has taken me to performances all around the United States, throughout Europe, and to Mexico’s Yucatán.

Many miles have rolled under my tires. Cramped planes and busy airports have whizzed by in strange blurs. And I’ve watched lots of landscape pass by from train windows. But I’ve only come close to dying in an explosion once while on tour.

Join me on tour in the Southwest desert to find out about that hot and combustive day…

When we left Santa Fe, it was an extremely hot June afternoon. The radiator in Greg’s red hatchback was leaking water badly, he was out of his bipolar medication, and I was late for a gig in Albuquerque. My first set of show dates in New Mexico turned out to be far more explosive than I had imagined.

I had finished pre-production and was getting ready to enter the studio to record my No War album. A break before recording seemed like a good idea. A good friend from college suggested I do a short tour in New Mexico, and I took him up on the offer.

Greg was a professional gonzo journalist, self-published author, and lunatic. A bisexual Hunter S. Thompson. A brilliant, edge-of-sanity mix of Truman Capote and Alan Watts. I loved him dearly. He booked me a series of last-minute show dates, and I flew in from San Francisco, excited but with no expectations.

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I played a couple of small solo gigs in Albuquerque, which included musicians from the area sitting in. One of them was the brilliant multi-instrumentalist Dave Hoover. Our musical meeting sparked a beautiful collaboration that led to recording in his studio a few doors down from Greg’s apartment.

In just two sessions, Dave and I recorded our Santa Fe Sky album. An ambient, instrumental record with a meditative storyline to match the wonder of the New Mexico skyline.

My trip felt like magic was in the air. But magic is conjured by forces that can change fast. Whimsical djinnis blown in by haboobs and ancient Native American spirits can turn on you in a flash. I learned that quickly.

The heat of the city was really getting to me after a few days as it rose to 108 degrees. Partying until late hours and then going to the local amusement park in the morning didn’t help. I was thankful when Greg said it was time to go to Santa Fe.

When we got to the artist enclave in the high desert, it was a great refuge from the oven-like heat of Albuquerque. I did a few more gigs there, surveying the landscape and thinking about what the land held in its mystical red clay mountains.

Greg was an excellent tour manager, but I could see that he was suffering. His frayed edges were unraveling. His manic side had slipped, and his depressive side was becoming his constant mood.

I was no amateur to the world of clinical depression and anxiety myself, so I did my best to have empathy while moving from apartment to home, and from gig to gig, sweating and maintaining my relatively new persona as the barefoot punk rock pianist. I had retired my fedora when I disbanded my previous band the Night Watchmen, and was now trying to reinvent myself.

Greg and I were fans of each other’s work and had been since meeting in 1994. I was very impressed by his affiliations with the early cyberpunk world: Mondo 2000, RU Sirius, and The Well. All San Francisco internet institutions of digi-anarchy before the capitalist rise of the late 1990s web. Greg had also written for Macworld, The Industry Standard, and lots of music press for various artists and venues. His help to me was invaluable.

I knew Greg enjoyed being around the music world, too. He had climbed on stage with me and the Night Watchmen several years before in San Rafael, California, for a drunken spoken word tirade with my band, and I loved it. We had continued to spur each other on over the years using art, words, and music.

On tour, even for short periods of time, the blurry-eyed become blurrier when you perform consecutive nights, party afterward, and sleep less and less. At night, things seem slippery and easy, but during the day, the increasing blare of sunshine and ineffective cups of coffee begin to grate on your sanity. Those with an increased chance of being on edge get edgier.

Things began to grow to a pulsing head in Santa Fe when Greg ran out of his bipolar medications. Out of nowhere, he would cry one moment, be furious the next, hilariously laugh, and then hide in a fetal position. My anxieties were growing but I was keeping them at bay and anticipating the next show. That night, I started to slip myself.

I performed a show in downtown Santa Fe, and at 2:00 am, when I put my Yamaha electric piano in the back of Greg’s car, I didn’t shove the hard travel case back far enough. As I shut the hatchback, the back window met with the case and completely shattered. Glass spread everywhere, all over the parking lot and throughout the back of Greg’s car in the hot desert night.

The next day, we found a back alley repair shop to put new glass in the rear window of the car, and I spent all my show wages to cover the cost. Then, I convinced Greg to get his prescriptions refilled and we rolled over to the pharmacy en route back to Albuquerque for an impromptu gig I had scheduled with Dave Hoover.

Before leaving the house, we made sure to fill up the radiator and bring along two plastic gallon jugs of water. The small-sized leak had grown to a large one, and we hoped that we’d only have to stop once on our trip back to Albuquerque to fill it up.

As we pulled out of the pharmacy with Greg’s medications, the car was filled to the brim. In it was my keyboard and cords, my backpack full of clothes and music merchandise, Greg’s suitcase, a bag full of his prescriptions, and a vintage amp we had borrowed from Greg’s stepfather Jerry. The amp was especially valuable because Jerry was a well-known cowboy-poet, singer-songwriter, and musician who had once taught Bob Dylan to play guitar licks in the early ‘60s.

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There was only one main interstate between Santa Fe and Albuquerque; a 65-mile-long stretch with two lanes on either side. We lurched down the road, watching the temperature gauge. When the needle started pointing toward the red, the plan was to pull off in the first place we could.

Nervously, we sped down I-25. I was behind the wheel and Greg was piled in the corner of the passenger side. I hoped his drugs would kick in soon. We were about halfway, beyond La Cienega but not yet near Budaghers, when the temperature gauge climbed very fast.

It was above the ‘H’ and solidly sticking in the red when I saw the engine start smoking.

I looked at Greg and said, ”We gotta pull over, dude.”

He glanced back sullenly and silently at me. Black smoke began emanating from the car.

“Seriously, Greg. Now. I’m pulling off. This is bad.”

There was nowhere close, so I pulled off on the shoulder of the interstate. Cars whizzed past, and a few honked. I got out already sweating. I hovered over the hood of the car, and when I looked down, the paint was bubbling.

Holy shit.

I yelled, “Get the fuck out of the car, Greg! Get out now! The car’s on fire!!”

As Greg stumbled out of the passenger door, he was wide-eyed. I ran to the back of the car where the back glass had just been replaced, opened it, and pried my heavy keyboard in its case out onto the dusty desert ground. It weighed the same as four guitars combined. I frantically rolled it out on its tiny wheels through the scrub brush, leaving it 50 yards from the car.

As I ran back for more of our things, I passed by Greg. “What’s going on?” he asked, looking scared and confused.

“Fire, man! Fire! Just run!” was all I could exclaim.

My shirt was now sopping wet with perspiration and I thought, fuck me fuck me fuck me. The car’s going to explode. Any. Moment.

I pulled Jerry’s vintage amp out, threw my heavy backpack over one shoulder, and carried them both out into the desert where Greg now sat on the ground, mesmerized but safe near my music gear.

Then, I went back for Greg’s suitcase. The entire time thinking this car is going to blow up in my face. But I managed to get there and get back with Greg’s things before the first tire exploded.

BOOOF!! The radial blew out into the desert. Flames had reached all parts of the car, and they were leaping high into the blue sky. Then another BOOOF!! Another tire exploded. Cars going in both directions on the interstate had now stopped, and lines of cars began to gather in both directions for a half-mile.

Greg began to cry. Then, I remembered, I forgot to get his medication. All of it was gone now, consumed by fire.

We watched until Greg’s car was a smoldering wreck, a conflagration leaping skyward, smelling of oil, gas, and rubber in the heat. The two lines of cars stretched a mile or more now, and the smoke was thick and dark rising above us all.

During the long time that we watched the car burn, Greg called his stepfather on his cell phone. Somehow, Jerry arrived before the fire trucks, driving down the shoulder. When the firemen and police arrived, Greg gave a brief report to them. Then, we loaded everything into Jerry’s car and left in a pile of stink, chalky desert, and sweat. The smoke still rising in the distance behind us.

We went back to Santa Fe, and I missed my gig that night. Instead, we sucked down many margaritas at a hotel bar.

We did eventually acquire more medication for Greg, but further drama ensued when we got back to Albuquerque. He was hit by a bicyclist while walking and ended up on his back, slightly injured, and screaming in the street. A high-pitched shrieking banshee, naked except for a dirty tee-shirt.

Later, my own fuse blew. I became a broken toddler, throwing spaghetti and red sauce at the white walls of Greg’s apartment. Then, I ran off to a strange corner of the city with a random woman from Alabama I’d briefly met at one of my shows.

Despite everything, Greg and I remained friends.

My first tour performing in New Mexico inspired the creation of an album that people still tell me they love. It also nearly incinerated my friend and me. We created and we destroyed, like mischievous spirits in the mysterious desert.

This story was originally edited by rock star music writer and published by The Riff in June 2022.

Listen to the full album Santa Fe Sky written and produced by Dave Hoover and I on Spotify:

More of my music is available on

• Spotify

• TIDAL

• Apple Music

• Amazon Music

• RadioSparx

• Insight Timer

• other major platforms

• and on my website at gentrybronson.com/music

A long time ago, but not too long ago, I moved to a city along the Pacific. A place once called the Barbary Coast. It was San Francisco in 1994. I was broke and young and hungry for everything. In my first few months in the City by the Bay, I explored everywhere I could.

One Sunday, I went to the Saint John Coltrane Church. It was a real place that sounded made up. But, trust me, it was real, and they celebrated and worshiped by playing the music of jazz legend John Coltrane.

The church still exists, but it’s moved. I’m not going to tell you where it is because it’s worth trying to find it on your own. If you do find it, maybe you’ll have an experience like I did.

Scroll past my fingers playing the keys to read about the first time I discovered the Saint John Coltrane Church…

Grove Street was quiet in San Francisco’s Western Addition. The booming bass and smooth rhymes of Snoop Dogg coming from the projects half a block from my house had quieted a few hours before. The fog was nearly burned off as I walked up the hill toward Alamo Square Park in the late Sunday morning calm. I was headed to the Saint John Coltrane Church.

I’d heard it was an actual place of worship, and they worshiped by playing jazz. The city had only been my home for a few months, so I hadn’t been to the church yet, but I was a fan of the late, great saxophone maestro, John Coltrane.

I was a twenty-one-year-old musician and classically trained pianist, and Coltrane was one of my musical heroes, along with other jazz titans, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, and Duke Ellington. Despite my love for the music, I was timid about my jazz skills, so I didn’t plan to play.

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I moved up the steep hill and walked across Fillmore Street. I passed a series of Victorian houses straight from tourist postcards, and then I entered the park. It was a beautiful spring morning under the eucalyptus trees, and I noticed a photo shoot taking place. I decided to stop, sit down on a bench, and watch.

A photographer was circling three ballerinas in intentionally torn and deliberately sexy pink tutus wearing clown makeup on their faces. The colorfully costumed models were playing Twister while photos were being snapped. The photographer was encouraging their lithe and alluring bodies to become more and more entangled on the Twister mat.

The Coltrane Church opened its doors at noon, and since musicians were usually late, I figured a jazz church would be no different. So, I sat there in the sun, my short-sleeve, button-up shirt open, enjoying the entertainment and grinning gleefully. I was a clandestine voyeur…or so I thought.

When one of the ballerinas peered upside-down between her legs at me and called out, “Hey, pretty boy! Wanna join us?” I didn’t think she meant me.

“Yeah, you!” she called again with muslin frills in the air and her pigtails dangling. “Come on and join us!”

The two other ballerinas giggled, and the photographer beckoned with a free hand for me to come over.

Before I realized what I was doing, I was bashfully skirting off through the park like an embarrassed squirrel. I quickly made my way down a hill across Scott Street to Divisadero. The entire time, I wondered what wonderfully wicked opportunity I had missed out on.

I scolded myself all the way down the busy street until I got to the front door of the church. It was a plain building with curtains covering the windows and a sign above the front door in Old English font that read St. John’s African Orthodox Church. A metal gate was open to an alcove, so I walked forward until I could hear rumbling from behind a wooden door.

After I walked through that door, all my regrets about leaving the ballerinas behind quickly disappeared.

I went inside and through a thick velvet curtain, then I emerged into a twenty-foot by forty-foot room. It was packed with people standing and sitting on six rows of hard, wood pews. The room was hot, humid, thick with breath and bodies, and filled with the sounds of symphonic jazz cacophony.

People of all races and genders were there. Wearing fedoras, dashikis, oversized jerseys, and fuchsia-green dresses. Church ladies, hipsters, cholos, queens, and young white boys like me, sandwiched between dapper black men in double-breasted suits, dangerously curvy Latinas, and nerdy guys in bowling shirts. All playing instruments of different types.

Six different saxophonists with baritones, altos, and sopranos were blowing. Five percussionists with timbales, congas, and bongos in the front row were beating out rhythms. A trumpeter and trombonist were locked in musical lines in one pew while other musicians shook tambourines or played flutes in others.

At the front of the church, on a one-foot-high stage, a drummer, an upright bassist, and a B3 organist held down the beat and back end for the entire symphony.

In front of the trio on the stage, a tall, dark-skinned man wearing a regal purple robe that reached the floor faced us. He was the band leader, the conductor, and the archbishop, perspiring profusely while he blew the roof off with his alto sax. His eyes were closed, and he was soloing over the massive wall of sound.

Everyone was playing Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. Everyone but me.

I made my way into one of the back pews and looked around. There were no windows, but the walls were lined with five-foot-tall, Baroque-styled pieces of brightly colored, iconographic paintings. Nearly all of the artwork was John Coltrane with a gold leaf halo around his head and a sax in his hands.

To the left of the low stage that served as a musical pulpit, and under one of the paintings, there was an upright piano. No one was on it. The bench was empty, and it called to me.

The music turned a corner from A Love Supreme, slowed down, got slightly mournful, and then the upright bassist began a repetitive line. A thumping mantra. I recognized the song. It was Africa being played in A minor.

I went over and sat down in front of the piano. I played nothing at first. I just kept listening.

Horns began to enter the song and quickly started to wail. People started whooping, banging on the pews like drums, and swaying or dancing where they stood. On the stage, the archbishop took in a breath and let it go into his sax, releasing lines upon lines of gritty, gorgeous melodies.

I knew it was time for me to play.

I started with quiet and gentle responses to the archbishop’s sax using simple chord clusters. First in the center of the keyboard then building to higher registers. Taking more chances as I played. Developing my minimalist chord structures around the massive orchestra of noise and texture that filled the room.

It was hot and thick in there, like a jungle or bayou. My hands struck the piano hard in the humidity, my head bent down, and my body arched over the keys. A drop of sweat fell off my face and landed on middle C. Then more sweat dropped off me. The keys became wet, and I used their wetness to slide my fingers over their slick surface.

A powerful spirit of music took over. I rose up over myself and saw myself playing at the same time, completely inhabiting the piano. I was inside the instrument, dancing with the hammers as they struck the strings. Grooving and moving and shaking and rattling with the room.

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That’s when the archbishop looked my way.

He caught my eye, winked, and smiled. Then he called something I couldn’t hear over the musical fray, but I could tell he was conducting me. I lip-read the words, “Go! Go! Go!”

He wanted me to solo. And I did. I let it fly like a comet streaking across a Coltrane-created cosmos.

Digging in, I pounded my left hand and drummed up rhythms, swaying in time on the bench, hunched over the keys, and going for it. I used my right hand to create harmonic minor runs as if I were rolling down the River Nile, constructing phrases and stories with my fingers. Then, I found the flatted fifth over and over. The tritone. The devil’s chord. And it became angelic. Lifting me up in the saintly music of John Coltrane.

“Yeah! Yeah, man!” I heard someone cry out.

I kept at it, running my fingers over the ivories with melody lines, until I knew I needed to trail off and let another player take over. In my place, a burning trumpet took over my musical space, and the organ played a game of call-and-response with them.

Minutes became months became millennia. I was carried into a calm sea of sound. Surrounded by music and the community of making it with others. No spotlights and no audience. Just us playing for us in that tiny church room.

The only time we stopped playing was when the archbishop brought us all down and conducted us into silence. He spoke from the stage. A sermon and a poem interlaced. His voice commanding and gentle at the same time. I don’t recall the exact words but he spoke in a non-denominational way about the mystical, spiritual quality of Coltrane’s music.

Then, a beautiful woman with skin like a moonless night sky took the stage, and the archbishop stepped aside. She began singing with the onstage trio. In the pews, I saw some musicians with tears. Their watery eyes were joyfully listening to the tune.

Calmly standing at the edge of the stage while the woman sang, the archbishop looked my way and waved me over. I got off the piano bench and went toward him. When I did, he stepped off the stage, opened a heavy curtain next to him, and invited me behind it. I slipped behind the curtain with him into the shadows.

In the tiny space, he looked at me with warm eyes, smiled with a mouth of huge teeth, and said, “You’re one of us now.”

Then, he embraced me deeply.

The hug lasted long enough for the music to change, and I heard the opening lines of a new song. A new pianist was playing and I heard the opening chords to Equinox.

When our embrace ended, the archbishop held me by both shoulders and said, “Come again anytime and play. Anytime.”

I was deeply honored but couldn’t find any words except “Thank you. I will.”

We went back into the room, and the archbishop returned to the stage.

Instead of returning to the pews, I slipped out through the door I came in. Even though I knew the music would go on until almost dusk, they had a new piano player now.

I’d been at the church for two hours, and it was time for me to go. I rolled out into the San Francisco afternoon. Into the bustle of the city on a Sunday.

As I walked back up the hill through Alamo Square, my fingers were raw, and my ears were buzzing. The ballerinas were gone, but I could still hear the echo of their giggling. Their delicious laughter was mixed with the memory of a burning and beautiful John Coltrane symphony now.

That day and the music we played abides. It’s more than a memory; it’s a feeling. A feeling of inclusion. A feeling of getting lost and being found. A feeling that was saintly and sinful and everything in between.

This story was originally published by The Memoirist on July 24, 2024. Thanks so much to editor Cindy Heath for helping to polish my piece.

Go to GentryBronson.com to find out more about my music, writing, and work with my creative and media agency clients.

GentryBronson.com

There’s no reason for me to hide. I’m no innocent angel. I have embraced sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll in my life. My lifestyle has occasionally been dirty, dark, and near-deadly. It sounds like a cliche, but it’s true.

Although I’m now a practicing Buddhist and have always been a spiritual seeker, there have been times when survival, seediness, and escaping death, disaster, and law enforcement were a part of my life.

This road story is about survival at the speed of sound on the highway when I first left the Midwest for the West Coast just after turning eighteen. I was accompanied by my friend, Matt, who moved on from this world in 2016. This piece is dedicated to him.

Read and enjoy the ride…

When we left Central Minnesota for Olympia, Washington, it was 5:00 pm the last week of August. I had a vial of rocket fuel, a twenty-four-pack of Mountain Dew, and The Doors playing on a battery-powered boombox beside me. Shirtless, with long hair down to the center of my back, and very nervous. I had turned eighteen years old just a week before and had a warrant out for my arrest.

I was driving a bright yellow Subaru station wagon with no working car stereo. Numerous cardboard boxes, backpacks, suitcases, and music gear were either tied to the top or packed to the roof inside. Among the boxes was a cage with a four-foot iguana inside named Grimace. Matt, who owned the iguana, was driving with me, hunched over his Japanese “crotch-rocket” motorcycle nearby.

Matt had been my friend since my freshman year of high school and was the smartest scoundrel I knew. He was the only Jewish kid in my homogenous Midwest town filled with German Catholics. Neither of us had accents like those we grew up with and didn’t look like them either. We had been taunted, teased, and hunted by the natives. The violence of our hometown was only overshadowed by the searing cold of its winters.

We had celebrated both our birthdays a week before at midnight because he turned nineteen the day after me. We shared a number of other parallels that sometimes ran into each other. Matt was a classical violinist and I was a classical pianist. I had started singing in punk bands first, but he quickly mirrored me and became a singer himself. He found drugs first, and then I followed him down that rabbit hole.

Matt also had a warrant out for his arrest.

We crossed the county line, headed north then west, and crossed over the state line making it as far as we could into North Dakota on Interstate 90 before it got too dark to drive. Matt was concerned about not being able to see roadkill, hitting it, crashing, and dying.

I was concerned about the fifty-mile-per-hour wind blowing sideways into the side of the un-aerodynamically packed station wagon, which caused me to grip the steering wheel like a Nascar driver. I was also concerned about not being able to see out the rearview mirror because the station wagon was too packed.

We were both concerned about the police.

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We reached the western side of North Dakota just after Bismarck, slept for the night at a motel, and left in the morning. Before driving off, I offered Matt some rocket fuel, and we both took two large droppers full. I didn’t tell him that the rocket fuel was a mixture of caffeine, guarana, bee pollen, and ten hits of strong LSD — but he didn’t ask.

Our second day’s drive was uneventful at first, but by the time we hit Glendive, the rocket fuel started to really kick in, and things were getting interesting. Buzzing. Flying down the interstate feeling as though pieces of the car and everything inside were flying off. My pulse racing.

Matt liked to drive fast. Going ninety was nothing to him. In the station wagon that resembled the Beverly Hillbillies in their overpacked truck, I could barely get to seventy. That changed as we got to the purple-tinted hills of Montana.

I would creep up the side of one hill at fifty, get to the top, then race down the other side going ninety, one hundred, one hundred and ten miles per hour…gripping the steering wheel harder and harder. The Doors playing Roadhouse Blues on cassette as I lost then caught up to Matt. This game went on for miles.

Then I heard rustling behind me.

I wasn’t sure if my mind was engulfed in audio hallucinations, if the strange sounds were created by the batteries wearing out in the boombox, or if I was really hearing something behind me. That’s when Grimace the iguana jumped from the back of the station wagon onto my chest.

“WHAAAT IN FUUUCK!!!!???” I screamed like a man who had left sanity behind, swerving at high speed. “JESUS CHRIST! AAAAAH!”

The escaped lizard had scraped its long claws into my bare chest and I was bleeding. I regained control, then pulled the lizard off my chest as it wriggled out of my hands and up under the steering column.

“Oh, shit. SHIT!”

As I kept the car moving straight, I looked down under the steering wheel and all I could see of the four-foot miniature dragon was the end of its tail.

I tried to maintain control of the car as I thought, Oh, my god, I’m going to crush the iguana with the steering wheel. What if it dies down there? What if it attacks me?

Despite my growing fears, I decided it was best to save Grimace and I kept my right hand on the wheel while using my left hand to pry the lizard out from under the dashboard. It skirted around, bending and writhing, then hissed and slithered out, across my body, then up and into the back of the station wagon behind me.

It was back there now. Somewhere. Riders on the Storm was playing. The wind whipping. The veins in my hands began to swell from gripping the steering wheel so hard. My chest bleeding. Paranoia increasing. Were the police behind me? I couldn’t check anything but the driver’s side mirror to know.

My mind was electric wire taut and sizzling.

I have to catch up to that asshole. He said the lizard was locked in his cage.

I pushed hard on the gas to catch up to Matt screaming down the road bent over his motorcycle.

When I pulled up beside him, I started gesticulating so he could see me through the driver’s side window saying, “Pull the fuck over, man! The fucking iguana is loose in the car with me!”

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Within a few miles, we came to a gas station off-ramp, both drove off the interstate into the station, and pulled up in front of the pumps. I opened the car door expecting to be angry, but when Matt pulled off his helmet and I saw his pupils, I thought otherwise. Even though he was an expert at taking drugs, he looked shocked and somewhat terrified to have been dosed.

As we filled our tanks, the gas station swelled around us, pulsing and shimmering. Both of us looked filthy. Matt’s motorcycle had started spitting a lot of oil and it was covering his legs. I was bleeding down my chest, now half-dried, and mixed with sweat and car grime.

At that deeply long moment, we both looked across the station to the other pumps near us. There was a beautiful, glimmering, deep ocean blue Volkswagen bus being filled with gas, and outside the bus four elven hippies played, laughing and smiling. Clean and shiny and magical.

There were three young men and one young woman, all gorgeous. The woman looked at us and said smilingly, “Hiii! Where are you going? We’re headed to Oregon.”

I stumbled over my words but managed to say, “I’m headed to Oregon, too. But first to Washington…to Olympia…for my friend.”

“That’s coooool,” she responded. Her accent had the strong lilt of a second-generation hippie. “We’re headed to the river nearby to cool off. Do ya wanna go with us?”

Matt said nothing hiding behind his sheepish and demented grin.

I said, “Um, yeah. Ok.”

“Follow us then!” and she leapt into the bus, grinning with sunshine and tie-died innocence.

We followed the elven hippie princess in the bus with her elven boyfriend as a caravan. Their two elven friends, who looked like hippie twins, were driving a Toyota pickup parked nearby. The pickup followed Matt and I.

The river was the Yellowstone and it was azure and tranquil. I plunged in naked, letting all the dirt and filth rinse off me. The group of elves played nearby. We didn’t talk much but everyone was jubilant, the sky blue and broad in the Montana hills, the breeze light. Matt stood smoking a cigarette, smirking, and taking in the scene.

When I climbed out of the water, Grimace was laying on the dashboard of the station wagon. He had found a place to bathe in the sun. His leathery, green dragon skin moving and swirling. I was transfixed for what seemed like a very prolonged period of time. When I pulled out of my drug-induced haze, that’s when I knew I should get rid of the rest of the rocket fuel.

I offered it to the four gleeful elves and they all took it willingly as the sun began to drop.

The princess and her boyfriend said goodbye, and the rest of us sat watching the sun sink. I hoped to come down at least a little to be able to drive with the lizard on the dash. The elven twins were hoping they’d start to feel the rocket fuel and they were letting the VW bus get ahead. It had been having mechanical trouble and needed to be driven slow.

After the blue of the sky had gone nearly black, we all climbed back into and onto our vehicles and started driving. Rolling along, I heard Jim Morrison singing, “The west is the best, get here and we’ll do the rest”.

We drove for about an hour and had seen no cars. Then in the middle of a snaking stretch of interstate, there was a long line of thirty cars stopped on the road. Ahead of them, in the sinking purple glow of the hills, was a line of smoke from the right side of the interstate.

We stopped behind the cars and got out. The light was too low to see much, but in the ditch, we could see that a vehicle was on fire. We walked forward and found the elven princess and her boyfriend standing at the side of the interstate, eyes both mesmerized orbs from the rocket fuel having kicked in.

The boyfriend said, “That’s our bus, man. We heard a line break in the back of the bus, then it caught fire. We pulled off and jumped out before the whole thing…” he trailed off then returned, “…before the whole thing caught fire. That’s everything we own.”

Then the princess spoke, “We have to wait for the propane tanks to stop exploding. They’re three more. Everyone’s…waiting.”

Then one of the tanks went up. BOOM! My eyes bulged from the light and the sound. We all seemed to shake, flames leaping into the dark.

Matt and I looked at each other. Insane, lost, little long-haired boys from Minnesota. We had fed these innocent fairy creatures our drugs and now they had lost everything they owned, yet we could offer them nothing. No ride, no help, no money. The station wagon too full and our minds too broken.

I said meekly, “I wish…we could help. We don’t have any room.”

Matt finally breathed, “Yeah, man. We…want to help. We just…can’t.”

Then, we walked back to our cars. As we did, we walked by the Toyota truck and the twin elves. They were in shock and the rocket fuel would just be coming on. We cracked broken smiles but there wasn’t much to say.

We sat and waited for the remaining propane tanks to explode as dusk turned to dark, then we drove through a gateway of smoke into the Montana night. Grimace the lizard, eyeing me from the dashboard, as I followed the single taillight of Matt’s motorcycle.

We were in purgatory. Somewhere between the caged Midwest and the freedom of the West Coast. Or so I thought, as the rocket fuel began to burn off.

Thank you to magnificent editors and for originally publishing my story in Redemption Magazine in February 2022.

The stories you’ll find in Redemption Mag are amazing, and they include some spectacular pieces by Paul and May.

You can also find out more about my music and writing, and my creative and media agency on my official website:

GentryBronson.com

The ocean - being near it, riding its waves, paddling on its surface, and breathing underwater surrounded by it - is one of my happiest places on earth. I am a water person through and through.

When I was twenty-four years old, I learned to scuba dive in Honduras, and I was never the same again. This story is about that experience.

Plunge under the ocean and into its wonder and depth with me…

We were twenty-five feet underwater when we heard the fishing boat coming. A dive flag floating on the surface indicated we were below, so no craft was supposed to drive near us. But the whir of the engine was getting closer.

The other divers started going deeper to avoid the boat. Instead, Nina went up and I followed her. It was a dangerous decision. We should have been going down, too. The boat was coming closer and we were moving toward it.

I was twenty-four years old, and Nina was even younger. We were in training for our Open Water Diver certification, and she was my dive partner. Everything we’d learned at Alton’s Dive Shop was to never leave your partner, so I started up after her. It wasn’t smart.

Nina started kicking up using her fins and I began doing the same. Then, I heard clink, clink from our divemaster Joep. He was just below me and was warning us by tapping on his oxygen tank. Joep’s eyes were petrified saucers behind his dive mask.

It all happened quickly. The engine noise grew and Nina was only feet from the surface. There was nothing I could do but try to go back down as fast as I could. The rumbling engine sound became a roar as I nervously tried to get deeper. Time and the water became a blur.

Nina and I had met while studying Spanish at an immersion school in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. She was a cute Scandinavian redhead who passed the time singing lilting Norwegian folk songs about trolls. One of her songs ended each refrain with a sweetly sung, “Ug, puff!”

I convinced her to travel with me to Honduras and learn to dive.

We’d arrived on Utila a week before. The westernmost island in the Bay Island chain. A series of three Honduran islands in the Caribbean along the world’s second-largest barrier reef. The perfect place for young backpackers like us to learn to scuba.

I was pickpocketed in San Pedro Sula, so when we arrived in the port town of La Ceiba, I was even more broke than when I’d begun my travels from Mexico City a month before. Thankfully, I still had my passport and enough Honduran lempiras to book passage to Utila and find a cheap place to learn to dive. But I was watching my centavos.

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In La Ceiba, the ferry to Utila had already left, so we searched up and down the docks for a different way to cross. As we looked, a fisherman with skin leathered by the sun approached us. His name was Lopez, and he asked if we wanted to go to Utila on his skiff boat. With no other option, we agreed to take Lopez’s tiny boat across the sea.

The small skiff skidded and bounced over the beautiful, blue water of the Caribbean, and we grabbed the sides as massive sprays of seawater pelted us. We were sopping wet, but Lopez was dry and smiling brightly as he piloted the boat, speeding northward.

As we slid along the water, I looked out. Three dolphins jumped and played alongside us. Their backs arching and bodies leaping told me I had made the right decision to learn to dive on Utila.

We arrived and pulled directly up to a dock that belonged to Alton’s. We were greeted by Joep who said it was $160.00 USD to get dive certified, and that also paid for a week-long stay in the huts built on the docks overlooking the Caribbean. Since we were already there, I thought it was serendipitous, and we decided to stay.

Each light blue hut was covered in a tin roof, painted lime green inside, and sparsely furnished with two beds and a fan. Nina and I shared a rustic hut.

Four other young travelers were staying and learning to dive at the shop. Adrian and Chris from Seattle, Dan from Montreal, and Matteo from Florence, Italy. We quickly became friends while we sat inside a wooden shack and learned the basics of diving.

Our first day was consumed by watching VHS videos, studying laminated dive planning charts, reading Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI) handbooks, and answering quizzes with tiny pencils. Our dive instructor, Jake, was younger than all of us, but he had a serious demeanor while he scrawled on the blackboard and made sure we were attentive students.

At night, Jake, Joep, the rest of the aspiring divers, and I went out drinking. We walked down the one narrow road that ran the length of the island through the jungle. A half mile from the dive shop, we got seats at an outdoor bar on an uneven wooden dock overlooking the Caribbean. There, we drank Salva Vidas, ate baleadas (a traditional Honduran food made with flour tortillas, refried beans, cream, and cheese), and listened to reggaetón music until it approached sunrise.

Joep was a sarcastic blond Dutchman, and at the bar, he told us, “Don’t worry. Diving gets rid of your hangover. It’s the oxygen.”

But I learned that knowledge didn’t help much when we were in the classroom in the morning with puffy, red eyes and headaches.

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After several days of classroom study, and beer and baleada dinners, we did a couple of easy dives in the ten-foot shallows near shore. We got used to breathing underwater, and how it felt to take our gear on and off during the gentle surges of the sea.

Then, we were ready to head out to do our first real dives. First, dropping down to forty feet. Then, to sixty feet.

The boat left straight from the dive shop, and Joep drove with a Cheshire Cat’s grin as wind and spray blew. Everyone’s faces looked nervous but excited to begin our first real descent.

We jumped in the water and our gear was thrown in after us. We put our gear on at the surface. Then, we checked in, gave each other thumbs up, released the air on our inflators, and began submerging. My ears gave me trouble on the way down, but after some adjustment, I figured out how to clear my ears, relax, and float into the watery universe.

As the surface slipped away, I watched the blue world open up. A beautiful, surreal world. An environment that looked like a setting drawn by Dr. Seuss. It was like being an aquatic astronaut on a different planet, but I immediately felt at home.

Kelp moved through the water as if it were being blown by a breeze. The reef systems were packed with colors of all hues. Green, blue, violet, and red exploded. And life was everywhere, swimming and living in the reef and hiding on the sandy bottom. We saw massive schools of fish, sea turtles, moray eels, sting rays, puffer fish, nurse sharks, and octopuses. 

As a completely new diver, I was still a frenetic fish in many ways. I used up my air too fast from excitement and moving too much, and I thrashed more than necessary to move forward or stay in one place. I was envious of Jake and Joep who could just float in mid-water. Sitting in one place completely relaxed.

After a few dives, I realized that I could fly and hover. Breathing in meant I would go up and breathing out meant I went down. Choosing to go up ten feet was as easy as breathing in and giving a kick. Being underwater was the most meditative place I’d ever been. I was at ease deep beneath the sea.

I was infatuated with the sport right away, and I wanted to get all the PADI certifications available. But on our final training dive, I needed to survive and not be hit by a fast-moving fishing boat. The boat that was driving at Nina and me.

In the struggle to get down and away from the engine’s roar, the seconds passed like minutes. I realized that I could be hit by the boat and its slicing propeller at any moment. I got several feet down and my body was facing the sea floor when I turned to look back up at the surface.

I saw Nina above me and the boat coming at her. She must not have heard Joep’s warnings because she continued to go up. The water was churning and her body was in line with the boat. Closer and closer until it was on top of her.

I heard a loud clank! It echoed through the water. Then, the boat slowed. Nina was floating nearby at the surface.

I checked myself to see if I was okay even though nothing had touched me. Then, I felt Jake grab my arm and point up. His eyes were angry and scared. I felt silently scolded like a little boy in a mute world.

Careful not to go up too fast and get the bends, the whole group of divers made our way to the surface. I scanned for blood in the water as we went up.

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When we got to the surface, Nina was there, bobbing and smiling.

“Hello!” she called out nonchalantly in her sing-song voice.

The wind blew across the water and it was choppy. There was an eerie and tense quiet as we took off our masks and took our regulators out of our mouths.

Jake turned to Nina and asked urgently, “You all right? What were you doing!?”

Nina was silent.

Joep swam over to the fishing boat and harsh words could be heard. While Joep yelled at the fishermen in Spanish, we all loaded our gear and ourselves onto the boat.

As we started driving back to the dive shop, I saw Jake and Nina talking but their words were drowned out by the engine. Nina lowered her head more the longer they spoke.

When they were finished, I got close to Nina and asked, “What happened?”

Nina said, “The propeller hit my tank.” 

She looked scared and realized she had come inches from injury or death. Had I continued to follow her to the surface, I might have been seriously hurt myself.

“You’ll be okay, Nina,” I reassured her as the sun dropped heavy into the late afternoon.

Nina didn’t dive again after that. She packed and took the next ferry to the mainland. I never saw or heard from her again.

The near-accident rattled me, but it also made me even hungrier for the excitement of the sea. The danger of the depths. I was all consumed and I didn’t want to stop diving. 

I stayed on Utila for another week along with Dan, Chris, Adrian, and Matteo, and we all got our Advanced Open Water Diver certifications from PADI. Jake and Joep also forgave me for my dangerous stupidity.

The ocean became my home, and I became a lifelong scuba diver, surfer, and waterman. The close call of that day became a valuable memory. Death had eluded me, but the brush with disaster was a constant reminder to always be aware when I was in or on the sea. 

Days after Nina’s departure, I was night diving. Then I was dropping to 130 feet and staring down at the continental shelf plunging into the darkness of the deep ocean.

As I looked into the big, blue oblivion, I was calm and flying and free.

This story first appeared in Travel Memoirs. Thank you to editor and writer for working with me on my piece and for publishing it in May 2024.

You can also find out more about my music and writing, and my work as a Creative and Media Consultant, on my site:

GentryBronson.com

This piece is about my departure from the Midwest and my arrival in Oregon days after I turned 18. Some places are best not to visit again, but they do make a good story. I hope this one entertains you.

Take a step back in time to rainy Track Town with me…

I stood in his bathroom with a bucket, a sponge, and a can of Ajax bleach. He was in the doorway. A strange and angular-looking middle-aged man staring at me through wire-rimmed glasses with a lascivious grin.

My skinny body was nervous, but I was broke, and I needed the money. I was 18 years old and arrived in Track Town weeks before. Fresh off the boat from the Midwest with a Campbell Soup Kid’s round face and a long mane of wavy, brown hair running down the center of my back.

“Maybe you should take off your clothes,” he said and paused. Then, he sputtered, “So you don’t get wet when you clean the shower.”

I looked at him and replied, “I’ll take off my shirt.”

I took everything off except my worn jeans and spent two hours cleaning his bathroom while he watched. Scrubbing every corner and tile while he hovered over me drooling like a wolf. Gathering as much of me into his imagination as he could.

Afterward, he asked, “How much money do you want?” He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and grinned. “Is $15.00 enough?”

“Sure.”

It wasn’t enough, but I took the money, got on my bicycle, and rode home. I’d be able to afford dinner at Albertsons that night.

That was the moment I knew I needed to leave Track Town. It was September, and I would last there until May.

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I was an awkward immigrant in Oregon. It was never planned. I stumbled into the state because I was luckily accepted to the university late that summer. It gave me the chance to escape Minnesota after spending the previous year being a hoodlum and a debauched criminal.

After my final adolescent summer, I made the trip across the U.S. I was accompanied by a friend on his crotch rocket motorcycle, a vial of rocket fuel, and a four-foot-long iguana who shared a station wagon with me. After leaving the lizard and my friend in Olympia, Washington, I traveled to the state below.

It was 1990. I was a greasy Midwest fugitive who hadn’t figured out how to say “soda” instead of “pop” yet. Oregon was a bizarre place to me. It was illegal to pump your own gas and people spoke with long West Coast drawls. Oregonians resented the Californians moving northward and the Seattleites moving southward. But no one seemed to care much about Midwesterners like me.

Track Town was in the center of the state and an hour from the Pacific coast. It was a college town with a graveyard just off the center of campus. Phil Knight from Nike had made a recent donation to the university, and I learned quickly that athletics and the ghost of Steve Prefontaine running on their track was more valuable than learning to the academic administration.

Next to Track Town was Springfield. Both towns smelled like a mixture of bong water and flatulence, but Springfield also had a paper mill that produced toxic smoke, which gave everyone a headache. I lived between the two towns in a suburban wasteland.

It was there that I learned what loneliness is.

I found my home on a bulletin board at the student union, which is where I found my skeevy bathroom cleaning gig and numerous other jobs I worked to survive. I moved into a modest home with a Sikh woman named Navleen who dealt weed and did closed-door massages in her bedroom for men only.

I lived just off the living room in a bedroom upstairs. My ceiling was only five feet high so I could never stand completely upright. I moved around my room like an ape, crouching to move from my futon mattress to my Korg keyboard to my wooden desk.

A 33-year-old amateur boxer lived in the bedroom just below me and he had a punching bag attached to his ceiling. Because his ceiling was my floor, each afternoon when he practiced throwing punches, my entire bedroom became an earthquake.

To escape the shaking, I visited my housemate, Shaefer, whose room was directly across from our shady landlady. Shaefer would get me high on Navleen’s hallucinogenic Oregonian weed, then play one of his many bootlegged cassettes of Grateful Dead and Frank Zappa concerts. With my long hair, I looked like a hippie, but I wasn’t. My musical tastes were more punk rock, Prince, and Peter Gabriel. I didn’t enjoy Shaefer’s music.

I had come to Oregon with visions of West Coast wonder. Where I expected people to throw their arms open and embrace me. Where music and art would be diverse and widespread. Instead, I was trapped in the ‘burbs listening to space country jams in the palace of alone. Solitude and loneliness became my best friends in Track Town.

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During my first months, I went to class, drank beer, and tried to meet romantic hookups like most of my college classmates. I was a lustful, young man who craved the many pretty, young women around me. However, none of them wanted to give me the time of day.

Most of my time was taken up studying or looking for work. I was not very good at studying but I was good at finding weird jobs to pay the rent.

I sold weed for my landlady for a few weeks, but I got too paranoid that I’d be busted. Following that, I did security for Oregon Ducks football games and the university’s reggae and rock shows. Preventing underage students from drinking booze didn’t improve my chances of making friends, so I took a job as a vendor selling samosas on street corners.

I eventually got a job at a laundromat that tripled as a dry cleaner and post office. During those months, I mailed packages, took shirts in to be pressed, and made change for laundry machines while I made sure no one shot up in the bathroom.

My existence was awkward.

I didn’t have a car and I rode my bicycle to all of my jobs and classes. That was fine in the beginning, but by November, perpetual gray rain clouds hung low, a thick mist was constantly in the air, and I caught walking pneumonia.

When Alan the Rasta, who did security with me, heard my cough, he said, “You’re going to lose a lung, man.”

I sniveled, “I know. I can’t stop coughing.” Hack, hack. “It sucks.”

“You should go to the YMCA, man. Sit in the steam room. Breathe in the steam.”

I could barely inhale through my mucus, so I decided to take Alan’s advice.

I bicycled to the YMCA, stripped off my wet clothes in the locker room, put on my swimsuit, and maneuvered into the steam room. Everything felt like a mirage. There were two naked men inside the hot, windowless room. I sat in a free corner and sweat poured out of my sick body immediately.

I was only there for five minutes when the bearded man sitting against the wall across from me began staring. Then, he started stroking himself. I was in a strange state caused by my illness, so I wasn’t sure what was happening at first. He was suddenly very erect, and I was suddenly very uncomfortable.

Turning to my right, I looked across the room thick with steam. The other naked man was clean-shaven and sitting on the steam room bench with his hands on his knees looking my way with a smile. He was also very erect and his erection pointed directly at me.

I got up, left the steam room, and went into the showers to consider what was happening. I was young and naive, but I wasn’t dumb. It became evident that Alan the Rasta had sent me to a YMCA frequented by men as a hook-up spot with other men. I figured that out as I stood in the shower while a man in the shower next to me got himself off with his right hand.

That sexually-charged, all-male environment was new to my young self, and having pneumonia didn’t make the situation a time for experimentation. I went home, slunk over monkey-style into my room, and made my way to my futon where I stayed for several days until I was well.

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When I could walk without coughing, I decided it was time to cut off my long hair. I intended to reinvent myself by getting rid of the locks I’d had since I was 14 years old, and I made an appointment to be shorn that Saturday afternoon.

That weekend, I also planned to go out and find friends to end my loneliness. I decided to look for them at a fraternity party. Track Town was where the movie Animal House was filmed. In the same fraternity houses where John Belushi and his gang partied on the screen, real frat boys had real frat parties.

On Friday night, I went to the area where white columns adorned the outside of frat houses. I heard music and whooping inside one house from the street where I stood. Behind those columns, there was a party, and in my mind, there was no reason I needed an invite to go.

I walked inside the house, found a keg and a stack of plastic cups, and poured myself a beer. Then, I looked around. Young, drunk men in sweatshirts were swilling and football-playing and posing for their sorority girlfriends. Not my usual crowd, but I made conversation with a few of them and it seemed like I was being included.

I went out onto a veranda overlooking the backyard and sipped my beer feeling good about my decision to be at the party. Then, I felt liquid on my head slipping down into my long hair. I looked above me and a pack of frat boys were on the patio above me coughing up as much green, gooey saliva as they could. They had been letting their chunky spit slide onto my head from above.

One of them yelled down at me, “Hey, hippie! What do ya think yer doin’ here? Why don’t you go take some acid and get outta here, dirthead!”

The crowd above me laughed as I felt the spit sink deeper, through my hair onto my scalp, and down my back. I slunk out of the party and went home.

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The next day, I had all of my long hair cut off. I was a new person who would be embraced by the town and I would prove it when I went to a party at a collective that night.

The collectives were the Deadhead equivalent of a fraternity house in Track Town. Inside, groups of young hippies lived together. Some had to work to go to school like me, but many were Trustafarians who lived off their family’s money. Despite some of the economic gaps between us, I assumed this group would be open-minded and allow me into their community.

On that Saturday night with my short hair styled, I went to one of the larger collectives and saw a handful of men and women in tie-dyed clothes dancing behind the windows. Some I recognized from class. Most of them looked like they were at a party in 1969. Like the frat party, these weren’t normally my people, but I was longing for connection. I was open to becoming friends with anyone who could end my solitude.

I walked up a few stairs and reached the front door where two door people were collecting money and letting partygoers in. The doorman was a long-haired guy with a thin, patchy beard and the doorwoman wore a bright orange dress with the logo of a Grateful Dead bear dancing on the front.

I said jovially to the guy, “Hi…looks like a fun night. What’s the cover?”

He glanced at his female companion and she nodded at him. Then, he turned and looked at me with a sneer.

“Nothing for you, man. We don’t let GQ in here.”

“What?” I asked. “GQ magazine?”

“You, man. We’re not letting you in. You’re clean-cut, man. You’re probably a narc. Get outta here!”

“Yeah….you’re probably a narc, man,” the woman said with a stoned, snobbish air. “Go find a frat house. Or a police academy! Ha, ha, ha!”

With my new short hair, the hippies at the collective wouldn’t let me into their party. At least they hadn’t spit on me.

I walked away, through the graveyard, and made my way home in the dark.

During the spring semester, I made one friend in a poetry class. Jeff the drugstore cowboy. He was the same age as me and had just spent four months in jail after being arrested for writing his own prescriptions.

Jeff and I carved out our own tiny niche. We hung out in cafes, acted like pretentious young men, smoked cigarettes, listened to Brian Eno, and wrote. Neither of us wanted to be in that soul-crushing town, so we left that May for Alaska.

After working on the fishing docks in Kenai for the summer, I returned south to the “Lower 48” and moved to Seattle. I found my people by getting lost in the Emerald City’s dark and wondrous early 90s music scene.

A piece of me still lives in the places I’ve called home. But there is no remnant of me left in Track Town.

This story was originally published by The Memoirist on August 30, 2023, with special thanks to editor, writer, and artist for working with me on my piece.

Find out more about me, my writing and music, and my creative and media agency at my official website GentryBronson.com:

GentryBronson.com