Wednesday, November 15, 2017 – When you’re working as a freelance writer or entrepreneur, your pace is anxiously rapid. You’re driven by ideas, possibilities, strong emotions, reckless perfectionism and fear. Fear that you’re not good enough, that you’re failing at something. Then you slow down the pace, have a drink and forget about the work. The next morning you’re regretting that drink and you drink to stop regretting it and the next morning you glue the broken pieces in a hot bath and you promise yourself you’ll work harder than ever. And then you do it again.
“Oh this is just a mess, I’d best keep it under my hat.” Looking back, I realize that the mess is all part of the creative process.
– Michael Palin, in an interview with the Guardian
Sometimes a great inspiration rises from these states and sometimes just emptiness. There was this guy called Norman Collins and he grew up in Northern California. He was a pre-Jack-Kerouac-On-the-Road guy travelling across the country with a strong sense of adventure. He learned tattooing from a man named “Big Mike” and Tatts Thomas and practiced on drunks brought in from Skid Row. Later he sailed the Pacific and opened in Honolulu Chinatown the world-famous tattoo shop in the 1930s. He would later become known under his artistic name Sailor Jerry.
There’s a great story and even bigger memories behind this bottle with a hula dancer upfront and the Sailor Jerry spiced rum letter font and the taste. While I’m waiting for my wife to get a hair cut across the street, I’m sipping it up in a cheap bar downtown and it costs 1.5 bucks a shot. I got together with my old friend, excellent Cuban musician who was teaching me play salsa and son on timbales and cow bells and who I haven’t seen for a long time.
He used to come to my place and bring all kinds of things and we would practice drumming, listen to music, eat and drink and sometimes he would stay for days sleeping on the couch. Evenings, we would go out and chase women in bars or go salsa dancing. It was a time when I was healing from a failed love relationship to which I gave more importance than I should have and his company was a much needed medicine like the Sailor Jerry rum which we poured in our glasses and emptied with jokes and laughter. As Cuban he didn’t appreciate any other rum or cigar that was not from that island but he drank it anyway and smoked any cigar he would find in my apartment.
I remember him playing jazz on the piano and me baking croissants for breakfast. As the cannon hit noon we would turn to cheese and rum and other things and a drumming lesson. Three years later, we’re both married and forgot about the past and he became father and disappeared out of my life and that was fine with me because we always drunk too much.
He has just returned from the toilet.
“Go to the bathroom. There’s a paper there and beneath it I left you something.”
I frowned and went reluctantly and didn’t want to offend him and when I returned, my wife was already in the bar talking to him. We had couple of shots of tequila and arranged a dinner with wives and everything, sometime this week.
It was nice a to meet him after long time. Although I’ve never become much of a drummer I wonder if this all was wasted time or just living and enjoying something that one day will turn out a precious story to tell.