MIXED MESSAGES

by Razz Trumble

I used to think that Steely Dan song went, "in the mornin you'll go runnin for the man who stole your wallet." I imagined some middle-aged dude, haggard and unshaven, tired from a full night of gambling at a darkened table in the back room of a restaurant in Vegas, off off the Strip, wearing a suit with a loosened tie, smelling of bourbon, smoking Pall Malls, the kind of guy who is perpetually pissed off and shows it by giving exceptionally annoying people very brief glimpses of the gun he keeps on his hip, the kind of guy who talks in monosyllables, if at all, and uses a gruff and scratchy voice when he does.

The Steely Dan lyric always made me think of this guy running out of the back room of the restaurant, surprisingly quick and catlike, chasing after some dunghead from the Midwest who sat in on the last game because the owner of the restaurant felt sorry for him and thought he had a nice face, but the dunghead was on a mission because he needed to make money quick because his girlfriend needed an operation to remove a tumor from her hair, which was causing her whole head to erupt in curly unkempt sparks from her follicles and this was inevitably causing problems at her job as a shampoo model and how could they have the twins they were planning on having if she lost her job as a shampoo model?

The dunghead from the Midwest had no marketable skills, except for baling hay, but he was in the West now, and there was no hay to bale and he wouldn't do it even if it was offered because HE WAS NOT HIS DAD'S CHILD ANYMORE, but neither was he a smart poker player, so when the gravelly-voiced guy with the gun at his hip took a leave of absence from the card game to go to the "john" and "see a man about a horse," the dunghead knocked the dude's wallet off the table and took off in a mad dash reminiscent of his final track meet in high school.

But the lyric isn't, "in the mornin you'll go runnin for the man who stole your wallet." The lyric is actually, "in the mornin you'll go gunnin for the man who stole your water." I suppose it's way more dramatic to be dehydrated than to be moneyless, especially if you're the gun-happy dude in Vegas, because, probably, you know people who can give you money, being a gun-happy dude in Vegas and all, but those same people might not have water. It's a desert, you know, Vegas is.

I also used to think Jimi Hendrix was saying, "'Scuse me while I kiss this guy." Which was nice, you know, the rocker dude banging out a killer song and stopping in the middle of it to kiss this guy he likes. So I always thought it was no biggie for one dude to kiss another dude because Jimi Hendrix is about as cool as cool gets and if he's kissing dudes, then kissing dudes is cool.

I also never thought I had these lyrics wrong because the first time I heard this song was when I was in the middle of a really intense and totally platonic love affair with F. Scott Fitzgerald and those guys he was writing about were always gay and smoking fags, which means they were really happy (rich) and smoking cigarettes and playing tennis, too, in clothes that were never anything but blindingly white, so you can imagine my surprise when I got to my first day of gym in high school and I found out that "smoking" a "fag" was something the creepy janitor did on weekends. Oh, these times, they are a-changin'. Anyway, I still don't see what the problem is with dudes kissing dudes. It's way better than dudes bombing dudes. But, whatever.