(Still on a deadline—in fact I'm behind. So I'm updating and reposting this blog post from 2014 about character, and how it's where you find it! Back in two weeks with all new content!)
So I know this guy.
70 years old.
Recently retired elementary music teacher for the past two decades.
Married three decades. Father of two.
He is one of the most interesting characters I know.
Really.
Seriously.
He is.
Go back and re-read the thumbnail I just gave you.
Now let me elaborate.
All of the above AND...
Thirty years a professional musician (including opening for the Grass Roots at age 15 in 1965!).
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| So, these guys. And yes, the dude second from the left really is Creed Braxton from "The Office." |
So of course I ask him, "What were they like?"
("They" being the aforementioned Grass Roots.)
He smiles and says, "They were dicks."
He doesn't dance. Ever.
When I ask him why not, he says, "I never had to."
"Why not?"
"I'm the drummer. I never needed to dance to get girls."
(Note: the guy's wife is a knockout and they have been happily and faithfully married for the above-referenced THREE DECADES)
He once took a gig in Guam for four weeks that wound up lasting six months.
He knows an uncle of mine who is the amazingly-not-yet-dead black sheep (and then some) of our family. Their paths crossed years before I got to know him, back during his playing days. I'll leave it to your imagination how he knows him.
(And you're RIGHT!)
I once referred to someone we both know as a "hot mess." His response?
"I played in a band called 'Hot Mess'..." followed by reminiscences about same.
(This has happened more than once and is always entertaining.)
He once hid out in Alaska for over a year. This after getting stranded in the Queen Charlotte Islands on the way there. I infer that there was a girl (or several) involved.
I convinced him to go to a Rush concert with me (I'm a HUGE fan). He is the only drummer I've ever known who attended a Rush concert and came away much more interested in what Alex Lifeson (the guitarist) was doing onstage than in what the then-world's greatest living rock drummer (Neal Peart) was doing behind his drum kit.
He's clean and sober now, and has been for years, if not always continuously.
He is one of the most painfully honest, most loyal and gentlest souls I have ever met.
I have seen him with blood in his eye and murder in his heart over the treatment of our society's most vulnerable members. I am hardly a conservative, and yet he makes me look like William F. Buckley.
And yet he lives on a golf course (It's a long story!) and sports a significant handicap.
All of the above is true.
I started this blog posting intending to wrap it up by saying that I had a great idea for a character based on this friend of mine, but no story in which to insert him. And then a funny thing happened.
I remembered a story he told me once about this woman he met, who turned out to be married, and....
...oh, forget it.
Wouldn't want to give away the ending!
Characters can come to us from the strangest of places and by the most indirect of routes sometimes, can't they?
See you in two weeks!
A few years ago, I was at a family funeral where I met a number of people who knew the deceased who'd died in his late eighties. These four or five gentlemen had worked, golfed, sailed, BBQ'd, and just lived life with the guy in the box and shared with me, a much younger man the various exploits of the man in the box. End of May, as I outlined a cast, I remembered those guys and all their comments so I started quilting this joker who will be my main character's mentor and secret lifeline. He come through as a retired state trooper so I've got a nice angle there, too. Yes, eyes open and stay alert. Thanks for the post.
ReplyDeleteHe does indeed sound interesting.
ReplyDeleteWilliam F Buckley… These days he'd be a voice of reason. He'd never imagined the board of National Review would kick out his son for not being extreme enough. What a bizarre climate.