Take Stock Week Day 1: Psychic Inventory

6 Strings
Originally uploaded by thegreatplotnik.

October 20-26, 2005, have been designated Official Take Stock Week at Plotnik World Headquarters and Meatball Kitchen.

For the next few days, The Great Plotnik will be taking psychic inventory. He has not been forced to do this on a regular basis since the years when he was hired each season to play the Two Most Depressing Gigs in the History of Music. One came two weeks before Christmas, and the other was on New Year's Eve.

The Christmas gig was for an association of funeral directors who never smiled. They wore the threadbare black suits with the white shirts and thin black ties. They did not dance. They did not tell jokes. They ate their Chicken Kroopy (the house specialty) like they were burying your Uncle Mannie. It was thoroughly depressing, but nowhere as bad as New Year's.

On New Year's Eve, The Great Plotnik and a succession of saxophone players (no one but Plotnik could abide the gig two years in a row) entertained at a mobile home park in Carson, an industrial neighborhood south of Stiletto City. While his fellow musicians were working for triple-scale in Malibu penthouses and Las Vegas hotels, eating Lobster au Beurre Blanc and drinking Manhattans with olives and tiny onions, Plotnik's eyes were fixed on the buffet line at the mobile home park, where the bill of fare was liverwurst, olive loaf and Mrs. Wright's white bread spilling unevenly out of the supermarket bag.

Orange soda was available in thin, crinkly plastic cups, as was champagne from Safeway. Their color was the same, but the champagne had more bubbles.

The party started at 9PM. The inhabitants of the mobile home park were old codgers. By 11PM, many of them were already sound asleep, gray heads grinding on aluminum tables, waiting for Rusty Crutcher (1984), or Ron Robbins (1985), or Jimmy Reeves (1986), or Paul Seaforth (1987) to play 'Auld Lang Zyne' on his alto saxophone at the strike of midnight. Once that was dispensed with, they could stumble back to their double wides and drop over dead.

Although The Great Plotnik knew it is never a good idea to make important decisions while holding an olive loaf-on-white and drinking Safeway champagne in a plastic tumbler, by no later than 9:15PM each New Year's Eve he would promise himself, with teeth clenched and fist-to-heart, not to accept the inevitable invitation to return again the following New Years Eve, no matter how hard the social director of the mobile home park, who was a different person each year but whose name was always Ed, might cajole and no matter the size of the tip.

Perhaps Plotnik was, even then, refining the concept of OOPH (Our Own Personal Hell), now a central tenet of the Plotnikkie religion.

All night long, as each hour passed, a succession of requests would issue from the two or three guests still awake, for country and Western songs from 1956 or before. Plotnik would find himself singing and playing them despite having never heard nor heard of the songs before that moment, and as he did so he would watch the poor saxophone player, who had started out the evening on a positive 'Boy! It's great to be working on New Year's Eve!' note, now becoming visibly buried under an avalanche of mind-altering questions like "You went to music school for this, Rusty Crutcher?" and "This party is the highlight of your musical year, Ron Robbins?" and "Olive loaf again, Paul Seaforth?" (Paul played the gig two years in a row).

And then, despite his vow, each new year at 1AM, as if the Eds had all practiced together in front of the mirror from January to December to make sure to get it right, the Current Ed, soul dripping palpably from his pencil mustache, would grab Plotnik's arm, hand him a white envelope inside of which lay a check for the night's entertainment, and say: "We are so proud to have you boys. You make our whole year. Our people ask about you from New Year's to New Year's. I wish we could afford to pay you more, 'cause by God you deserve it! But here's a little extra just to show you how much you mean to us. Now, you WILL come back to us next year, won't'cha?"

The Grand Patsy, we mean The Great Plotnik, with his brain screaming "NO, NO, GOD, NO!" would then find himself shaking Ed's hand while saying, "Well, I guess, oh SURE we will, Ed...though I'll probably have to hire another horn player."

Why, you might ask? Why turn down other lovely, lucrative New Year's gigs, year after year, where people were having, like, fun, only to headline the Prozac-Proof Evening of Gloom at the mobile home park in Carson?

It wasn't Ed's fault. The mobilehomies were nice, simple people. The problem wasn't even their execrable buffet, because Plotnik figured it was the best they could afford, and the reason for that was probably that they were paying him their entire entertainment budget for the year.

Plotnik was the problem. If he was going to agree to do the damned gig, then why let it lay him out so emotionally low, each year worse than the last, as a result of which by 1986 he was practically in tears during Auld Lang Zyne, and in 1987 a trailer trollop who, in her day, was probably the finest looking fox in Carson, which is only a little bit like saying the finest tamale in Afghanistan, saw the tears running down his face and grabbed him into her olive loafy arms and bestowed upon him a kiss with more tongue in it than a Number Three Combo at Stage Deli, all the while saying "there, there, Baby, don't you worry, Momma's here." It was then The Great Plotnik knew he had died and gone to Hell and Carson was Ground Zero.

As the minutes counted down, the Taking Stock would begin. Each year, with 1985 or '86 or '87 or '88 lurking just on the other side of Auld Lang Zyne segueing into Twist and Shout followed by In The Mood, there was always one question that would not, could not be avoided, no matter how hard Plotnik tried, no matter how much olive loaf or bad champagne he consumed, just to be busy chewing or burping instead of having to deal with it:

(Prelude) "You, The Great Plotnik, you who refused to change your music because you believed in its purity...

(Second Prelude) "You, The Great Plotnik, you who held out for so many years refusing to allow scabrous producers to skim credit on your songs, leaving you with an honest 100% of nothing when they went and chose your friends' songs instead...

(Third Prelude) "You, The Great Plotnik, who decided to learn and perform the songs people love who give weddings and funerals and barmitzvahs and triathlons and Christmas and New Year's parties because at least then you could earn enough money to feel decent about yourself, EVEN WHEN you could feel the vital soul of your own creativity, the kernel of uniqueness that had always made your songs stand out, oozing from your own heart like a dagger removed from a corpse...

(Chorus) HOW IN THE WORLD has THAT led you to THIS Mobile Home Park, in the toxic and polluted geo-epicenter of the Southwestern Rim, on what is supposed to be an exciting and confidence-inspiring holiday?

How? It took Plotnik five years to figure out what every show biz executive and every unhappy housewife already knows: because, whether you mean it or not, it's easier to say Yes than say No.

That's all it is.

It took Plotnik five years, but when he really couldn't take it any more, and when he had run out of horn players anyway, he finally said: 'No, Thanks, Ed.'

Ed smiled. "Well, that's OK. You let us know if you change your mind, hear?"

And that was it. Starting in 1989 The Great Plotnik discovered that Lobster au Beurre Blanc is, indeed, far better than olive loaf. It just is.

That, children, was the subject of today's reflection. Tomorrow we discuss family.