September 30, 2002 6:42 PM

The fires are damped; the smoke has thinned, clear sailing ahead. Look yonder! Freedom when we pass the Straits of Scylla and Charybdis.

I cleaned my basement this weekend. A small corner with deep piles of unnecessary books and accumulated papers (now stacked up near the street for tomorrow’s trash pick-up). Deep behind a bookshelf that leans like it belongs to German expressionist set, tables stacked with appliances, cups, glasses and utensils, a wine rack, there now lies a clear desk in the midst of a secret garden for wrapping myself, when several inches of blizzard snow are berating us from the west, and writing. It is autumn and soon the chill will chase me from the patio or my handy dandy summer made picnic table down near the woods where the West Nile Virus breeds.

I cleaned with a terrible crick in my back which has developed into creak enough to make me writhe in protest when I sit too long this way, or that. Post prandially I applied myself to this dark corner, popped a Martin Denny cassette into the player and now I sit as Quiet Village takes me, macaws and other jungle birds, down the river. My stomach, not unlike Charlie Olnutt's gurgles from the mounds of tomatoes that I piled into my salad. I hope that I don’t have to pass the Queen through a swampy mass of leeches. Why? You may well ask, Martin Denny? Some may even ask, who Martin Denny? Well it is terribly tacky, and although I don’t have any tiki lamps or bamboo evident in my décor (not a single purple mottled green delighted drink with an umbrella stir, not a saried maiden to relieve the tension of the day (I guess maybe such a maiden might well increase my blood pressure, negating the effects of all those lovely drugs that I take in the morning), but I do have Martin and his band of cawing musicians, with piccolo skratchers, chop blocks, triangles, tambourines, tambale bells and crashers filling my ears with the exotic strains of Hawaiian music (Aloha Oy!) and flattening my alpha rhythms to a dream like enough state that I can write irreverent and irrelevant forever.

Lackzoom (less Foley who was oozing from an attack of poison ivy) met last Friday at the Squirrel Cage. We, Marc, Dean, Phil and I, tossed down a couple pitchers and ate in the modified Lackzoom style that a couple heart attacks and delicate stomachs can now allow. We asked the waitress for a sampling of fine snack that adorned the back wall of the bar. We look too mature, too sedate, not a tattoo or piercing adorning us, the poor young thing took us seriously. So we guided her through a menu of gently baked not fried pretzels, sour cream and dazzle chips, we stopped short at the Pork Rinds. Times and physiologies just ain’t what they used to be. Let me explain.

IN THE OLD DAYS, After a performance we would unwind up at this Squirrel Hill Bistro. I can now state with great objectivity that you would never find anyone sitting close to us because our heritage would show, the guardedness of a Greek after hours club, the secret bitter sweetness of a Jewish religious ceremony, the raucous rambling of an Irish wake and the obstinate enrollment rites of Cosa Nostra. In short, we managed through the entire snobbery of our family camaraderie to be an almost totally unbearable group. Tolerable only to ourselves. We would laugh! Talk about the show and before the owners decided that they had enough and would toss us on to Forbes Avenue we would manage to eat Lackzoom style!

One of every snack from behind the counter, opened and poured on the table, mingled with the puddles of booze, beer, plastic bag and cigarette ashes in a frightful volcanic mound. In we would dive. Grabbing handfuls of the most redolent prepared snacks ever created by our western intellectual tradition. Yelling above the incessant beat of the juke box, talking over the mutters of neighboring tables, joking freely, discussing the universe of comedy discourse, making a bubbling boiling world, oblivious to the secondary world of our dulling senses. Sometimes the waitress got it, some times she didn’t. That was part of the grand blast! The other customers steered a course around us to the balcony seats or the rest rooms in the rear next to the pin ball machines, which still smell of the same urinal cakes.

By these tasty chips we are in hock to Senor Wences once again.