Paramythia

Paramythia (pa-ra-mee’-thi-a): An expression of consolation and encouragement.

“Don’t worry baby, everything will be all right.” It was The Beach Boys. It was 1965 or ‘66. They had cars and surfboards and their own rooms where they could sit alone and think about their lives. The only car I ever had was stolen from Acme Supermarket parking lot and driven to Vinnie’s Chop Shop which was called “Vinnie’s Royal Repair.” His top “mechanic” could turn a car into parts in 45 minutes. It was amazing to watch—it was like the car fell to pieces in some kind of reverse assembly.

While I technically did not “have” a surfboard, I had lots of surfboards. I would go down to the shore and go to places where the surfers parked their woodies or parents’ cars—like Denny’s. Me and my sidekick Yammer would cut the surfboards loose from the carrier racks and shove them in the back of my parent’s station wagon, cover them with a blanket, and take off. When we got enough of them stacked up in my parent’s garage we would rent a Ryder truck and drive to Sunset Beach, California, where we sold them to an old surfer man named Chip who had lost his nose to skin cancer. When he talked he sounded like a porpoise. It was hard to understand him with all the squeaking. But he had mountains of cash—that’s all that really mattered. For the return trip we would load up on serapes. They were catching on back East. Hippies would wear them when they took LSD and claimed they conjured a rainbow portal that opened into another dimension of “being.” I saw it happen once at a Grateful Dead concert called “Butter Bullets” at Asbury Park. The people wearing serapes were flying around over the stage and “bombed” the Dead with “love, peace, and happiness.”

It was wild. The Dead played non-stop for a week. Jerry Garcia grew to at least 30 feet tall and sang “Box of Cars” while he tossed VWs into the audience. Miraculously, nobody was injured—it must’ve been the drugs. When the Dead stopped playing “Box of Cars,” Peter, Paul, and Mary crawled out from under the stage an joined the Dead in a rendition of “Puff the Magic Dragon.” The crowd went mad! Jerry Garcia shrunk back to his normal size and lit a foot-long spliff. Mary had to hold it with two hands to take a hit. The flying serape people started skywriting brief quotations from Nietzsche’s “Twilight of the Idols.” It was nearly too much for my head and I was only there for the last day of the concert. Those were the days.

But, after all that, I found solace in my room, just like The Beach Boys. I loved my room. It was so ironic that my father thought he was punishing me when he sent me to my room. It contained my soul. I had “special” magazines stored there under a seat cushion—“Sunbathing,” “Stag,” “Spree,” and more—very tasteful and artistic. Aside from contemplating my magazines, I wrote poems and played my electric guitar and sang. I liked Pink Floyd, but it was challenging with just one guitar. So, I would invite 5 or 6 friends over to jam. It drove my mother crazy so I switched over to the tambourine and got one for each of my friends. We were unique and actually played a couple of gigs as “The Tamborine Men” but we broke up over artistic differences.

The best thing about my room was laying on my bed with my hands behind my head thinking about things. Sometimes I would be worried about getting caught at my various scams. That would last less than a minute. Then, I would think about dinner or the war in Vietnam. I heard you could get out of the draft if you faked bone spurs. Supposedly, there was a doctor in NYC who would diagnose you for bone spurs if you gave him an extra $50.00. Then, I thought about God and dying. I jammed those thoughts out of my head. But God was especially vexing. I thought of God as just a word, but a word with every meaning of every word inside: tugboat, enema, checkers, beer—everything. In a restaurant, I once ordered “God, medium rare.” They brought me a steak.

If I had it to do over again, I would change everything, except. my magazine collection

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

Buy a print edition of The Daily Trope! The print edition is entitled The Book of Tropes and is available on Amazon for $9.99. A Kindle edition is available for $5.99.