December 22, 2020

The Time Capsule

I received a call this morning from my old friend Howard Rothman, who was now a neurosurgeon at Barnes Jewish Hospital in St Louis, Missouri, excitedly announcing that they were playing our song on the radio. Until he called, this story wasn't a story: it was just something that had once happened. It took over forty years for it to become a story.

In the summer of 1980, I became the road manager for a band that had set out on a scheduled ten-date tour of towns which lay along America's famed Route 66. The band, a trio, was made up of two former yeshiva students, Howard Rothman and Max Simons, who had been thrown out of school for selling hash to their fellow Rabbinical hopefuls. The lead singer, a Janis Joplin-esque lead singer they had plucked from the Monday night folk music showcase at the Free Times Café, was called 'Eating on Yom Kippur'. The Joplin ringer, whose name was Esther Weinstein but who insisted, for reasons which were never clear, on being called Wonder, was the only member of the group with any real talent, still, her voice was so powerful and sultry it overcame the obvious musical deficiencies of the rest of the band.

The bass player, Max Simons, was a friend of a guy we played basketball with down at the Jewish Community Centre, and we had once gone and caught a set at the Horseshoe after our game. They weren't terrible. Mostly covers. Think Springsteen's Blinded by the Light or Dylan's Ballad of a Thin Man but much, much, much worse. Wonder's voice though somehow made it work. I stayed late to have a drink with the band, hoping to make acquaintance with Wonder somehow. When Max introduced me as I came to their table with a pitcher of beer, the first words out of her mouth were: "We are only going to be friends."

That night she was wearing a red beret at a tilt which covered her curly auburn hair. She had a lot of hats. Fedoras, cowboy hats, and baseball caps. She must have repeated them but, if she did, I'm not sure I ever noticed. She wore a Detroit Tigers cap once and I asked if she was from Windsor - the Canadian town that was directly across the Peace Bridge which separated Detroit and Canada. She looked at me as if I had asked if she was from Timbuktu. A few days later she gifted me the hat but it came with a warning that she had rescued it from a dumpster. I wore it anyway.

I began hanging out with them - catching sets at both the Horseshoe and Lee's Palace. We would often be seated for 1 am Chinese food at one of the restaurants on Spadina. Wonder always asked the waitress for extra dumplings. Then sometimes, for some more. We had all become pretty good friends. The band had a bit of a following and had even cut a single they had written themselves, a John Lee Hooker-inspired dirge called 'Afikoman Blues'. Now they wanted to tour in order to support the single. Their fans were mostly based around Toronto but the guys, who had labored in the cloistered Yeshiva environment for years, had more than a touch of wanderlust and ached to spread their pick-laden wings beyond Canadian borders. They settled on the road made famous and infamous in song and sonnet - Route 66. They had access to a van, to instruments, to amps, and to Max Simons's father's credit card. But what they didn't have was anyone with a driver's license. This is where I came in. I had no plans for the summer, and with fledgling thoughts and dreams of becoming a writer, I thought a road trip, in Kerouac manner, might lead to inspiration and maybe even a book.

Also, I thought Wonder might change her mind.

The 1980 'Eating on Yom Kippur' tour only played two shows. Once, after an eight-hour drive from Toronto, at Shep's Tavern in Joliet, Illinois, where we opened for an Irish music band called Fair Play to You Suzie in front of a crowd of 12 people - seven of whom were Suzie and the rest of her band. Suzie asked Wonder to join the band. She knew all the words to Star of County Down. And the next day, after a six-hour drive, where we had a pretty good set, in front of double the crowd, at the Devil's Elbow Inn on the outskirts of an old logging town with the eponymous name of Devil's Elbow, Missouri. The road manager, yours truly, whose incompetence in booking venues was matched only by his wretched harmonies when he joined the band onstage for Afikoman Blues, would no doubt have been fired if not for the fact that the Yeshiva rescinded the boys' expulsion and effectively broke up the band the morning after the second of the ten planned shows. I think we were all more relieved than disappointed because other than having driven a long distance for more or less nothing, we were no worse for wear and would now avoid what would surely have been the disasters and disputes three weeks on the road would have brought.

That morning, after a breakfast of bacon and eggs, which neither Howard nor Max would ever eat again, the newly reborn boys loaded the van while Wonder and I explored what little there was to explore. We walked to the iconic bridge which spanned the Big Piney River and threw pebbles into the water at the spawning fish which drew fishermen and sportsmen to the area - twenty-four of whom sat through a session of Eating on Yom Kippur's eclectic set list the night before. I never told anyone what then happened on the levee of the Big Piney River.

It was only a kiss.

I'm still not sure how or why it happened.

Just a kiss.

Afterwards, Wonder pulled my cap down over my eyes and said, "Just friends" and we walked wordlessly back to the inn where we found Max and Howard talking to a lanky, long-haired teenager who I immediately recognized as having been in attendance the night before. "We are giving lan a ride to St Louis," said Howard. "Cool," I said. What's the occasion?

"My cousin's high school is doing a time capsule. Everyone is bringing an item that will be buried for fifty years. Something which will tell people in the year 2030 what 1980 was all about."

"Very cool," I said. "So, what did you choose?"

Ian held up a record album. It was the Clash's London Calling. We all nodded in approval. Even then we knew it would become one of the most important and influential albums of all time.

Ian fell asleep five minutes after we hit the road. I guess Route 66 was not as interesting to him since he lived on it. When he woke up, about an hour later he said "What's an afikoman?" So we did our best, I suspect our best was not enough, to explain the concept of the middle piece of matzah which gets hidden from the kids during the Passover seder. Ian's eyes glazed over so Wonder said.

"It's about losing something that you aren't sure you will ever find again." And that seemed to satisfy him. "I liked that song man," he said.

We drove Ian to Roger Musial High School on the west side of St Louis. Max needed to go to the bathroom and the rest of us wanted to stretch our legs so we parked the car in the school lot and got out. A line had formed in front of a large oil drum and people were dropping plastic enveloped items into the drum. There were people of all ages so Wonder got in line and dropped a copy of our record into the drum. Then we got back into the van and drove home.

I saw Max and Howard once after we got back to Toronto. We went out for kosher Chinese. Then we went our separate ways. Once in a while, I got updates about weddings, kids, and even grandchildren. I was excited to hear from Howard. He had married a woman from St Louis and moved there after medical school. And now he was on the phone.

I asked him where he had heard the song.

"They pulled up the time capsule." Said Howard.

"It hasn't been fifty years," I said to Howard.

"Covid," he said. "They thought unearthing the capsule could be a socially distant event which could help bring some much-needed joy and distraction to the community."

"How did it get on the radio?"

"Our old friend Ian," he answered. "He became a DJ. He has a morning show. He was the master of ceremonies for the unveiling. He got a kick out of finding the record. He has played it every day this week."

"You heard it on the radio?"

"While on my way to the hospital this morning. I almost drove into a tree."

"Does the tune hold up?"

"It ain't The Clash."

"You tell Max?" Max was now the director of the Yeshiva.

"Nah. I think Max would prefer not to be reminded he was once a member of a band called Eating on Yom Kippur."

"Right, right. And Esther?"

"Lost touch years ago. You hear from her?"

"Yeah. From time to time."

"Anything to report?"

"Nah, I decided it was finally time to move on."

Howard laughed and said, "You can't live in the past."

"True that brother," I replied.

We hung up, promising to stay in touch.

I then sat there, phone in hand, almost in a trance, for what may have been 5 or 50 minutes, thinking about days gone by. I finally snapped out of it and decided a walk or even a run, might do me good. So I quickly made my way to the front door, stopping only to put on my Detroit Tigers hat.

The end.