I turned 40 in the early fall of 1993. On that day I got in an argument with my then wife, during which she informed me she didn’t love me anymore.
It was painful, and it was definitely lousy timing. But it wasn’t surprising. We’d been incessantly quarreling for months, and going days at a time without even speaking to each other. What made it worse was that our son, Anton was still a toddler. I knew how my first divorce had affected my daughter Molly. I didn’t want to put Anton through such pain, so I tried to hold the marriage together for the next few months.
But it never got better. In the spring of 1995 my wife and I went to a marriage counselor. The woman asked us each an embarrassing question: “Do you still love each other?”
I believe we both answered with a hesitant, “Yeah … but …”
I was miserable and Molly was miserable, and though Anton was too young to be totally aware of the sad situation, I’m sure the tense situation at home affected him. So, just days after seeing the marriage counselor, I moved out. I went alone to our second appointment and told her what had happened. I forget her exact words, but it was something like “Yeah, I was afraid of that.”
By early July I filed for divorce. (Ironically, the exact date was July 7, 1994 — exactly 15 years after I married Molly’s mom.) But, while filled with regret for failing in marriage twice and having two kids who had to endure those failures, this wasn’t a particularly sad time for me. Instead, it was a relief, like a painful rotten tooth being pulled.
I was broke and it took me three or four months to be able to afford my own place. I moved into the home of my old college pal, “Boo Boo,” who had just been through his second divorce.
And we had a blast that summer.
One night, just a week or so after leaving my wife, I met a very sweet recently-divorced woman at a concert. We had a brief, but happy romance and though it didn’t last long, I still have fond memories of her.
That summer basically was a brief return to our crazy college years. On the nights I didn’t have either of my kids, “Boo Boo” and I usually spent hanging out at the Green Onion bar, often playing closed-circuit TV barroom trivia games with our friend Martin Medina, whose trivia game moniker was “McPig.”
Medina, who has since died, and I decided to have a mano y mano music trivia showdown on a Saturday night, which I publicized in my music column — with pro-wrestling style taunts, i.e. “Lay on McPig!” When the big night finally came, the Green Onion was packed. Martin and I were lucky just to get in.
The contest was neck to neck up to the final question, in which Medina choked. I don’t remember the exact question but it had something to do with this album:
One thing that helped me was that my 40th year came during a good, creative time in rock ’n’ roll. I was going to a lot of concerts during this time. I went to my first Lollapalooza in Denver a couple of months before my 40th birthday. My lead for the subsequent feature I wrote for The New Mexican was “I was the oldest guy at Lollapalooza.”
And while I wore an Elvis T-shirt to that festival, I referred to another rock ‘n’ roll founding father in my story:
“…if I had to choose a personal theme song for my Lollapalooza experience, I would probably turn to Jerry Lee Lewis, who back in the ‘70s had two relevant hits, `Middle Age Crazy’ and `39 and Holding’ …
“Both songs were about slightly pathetic men doing their best to not act their age. … I get the feeling that this is how some of my peers view me regarding my work as a rock critic in general and my trip to Lollapalooza in general.”
A few weeks after that birthday, I saw Nirvana play in Albuquerque. I took Molly to see Pearl Jam soon after that. And after that show we went to the old International House of Pancakes, where we saw Gibby Haynes, the singer of the opening band, a little combo called The Butthole Surfers, holding court at a table. For years, we referred to that place as “Buttthole Pancakes.”
That next summer, 1994, “Boo Boo” and I went to Phoenix for that year’s Lollapalooza. Around the same time I went to see The Grateful Dead (three shows over three nights) in Las Vegas with my friend Alec and his brother Will.
Also in ‘94, I met Gregg Turner, a former member of The Angry Samoans, who had moved to Santa Fe to teach math at the old College of Santa Fe.
Gregg had called me and had left a message with my editor. When my editor told me that I’d received a call from some guy in some group called The Angry Samoans, I responded by loudly singing, right in the middle of the newsroom, the opening verse of this song:
Turner and I remain good friends to this day. And often Gregg calls me to sing a warped duet of “I Got You Babe” at some of his gigs.
And this was the time I became active at KSFR, Santa Fe’s public radio station. In the late summer of 1992 I began my first show there, a monthly (!) 30-minute program called Terrell’s Turntable. But by the time I turned 40, hosts like Robert Winson, Dwight Loop and David Prince — damn, I just realized that all three of these guys are dead now! — frequently called on me to substitute for their shows. (I didn’t get my own weekly show there until after Robert died in late 1995.)
Looking back, it’s clear now that this period was my midlife-crisis/middle-age-crazy/second-childhood summer. (“Boo Boo” even had a hot tub in his backyard. Good thing there was no tax on cliches.)
It was a time of pain but also a time of fun, the good memories outweighing the bad.
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