How To Get Ass

Being at my grandmothers funeral service in Pennsylvania last week reminded me of something I wrote long ago. Well, it wasn't my grandmothers funeral per se, but it was seeing a plethora of coal mining town skanks trapsed all over some fellas at the local town festival that, quite frankly, in my world, wouldn't be able to get a piece of ass if it were on special at the local Denny's.

That and...

I'm too busy (see: too lazy) to write a new one. But, its a good story, so read the bastard already.

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When I was about nine or ten years old, I was visiting my grandmother in Pennsylvania, as I usually did during summers of my youth. I used to trapse around her old home, a row home built on a hill like many of the other homes in coal mining country, a home that my father and his brothers and sisters grew up in many years before.

When I wasn't hanging around my friends and relatives, playing baseball on non-busy street cornes (we could do that back then, we even didn't wear helmets when we rode our bikes, gasp!) I was usually searching around trying to find old stuff around the house, digging through the attic that at night time, scared the living shit out of me, but by day was nothing more than a dusty remnant of the house with tons of old memories.

I'd often find some funny shit up there in that attic. Pictures of my old man and his brothers playing baseball in the backyard, or my dad sporting a perm in the 1970's a la Mike Brady. I once found a collection of old record albums with the likes of Elvis Presley's "Pot Luck" and a old 45, "Blowing in the Wind" by Bob Dylan.

But my prized find was an old Gibson J-45 acoustic guitar that had collected a mountain of dust and was sitting in the corner or the back room in the attic.

My grandmother had no idea that a) I was dicking around in her attic and wondered what the hell I was doing and b). had no clue it was there, the afterthought of a family since moved away to move on in life.

I held onto that thing all summer, tried picking away at it and even pretended like I was John Cougar Mellencamp or prancing around like I was in Journey. I freaking sucked on that thing as a player, but it provided hours of entertainment and even led to me contemplating my taking lessons to play.

Alas, none of that came to be and I, to this day, can't play a lick (other than the first notes to Silent Lucidity) and I have no idea what the hell happened to that old guitar.

I wish I knew why I let it go.

I tell you that story to tell you this one.

I was tuned into Dee Snider's "House of Hair", a syndicated radio program designed to bring us all back to the glorious days of hair band metal. Lucky for me, it was on several different stations along the way, so I got to re-live the days of Ratt, Guns n' Roses and Ronnie James Dio the entire two hours.

Fuckin' awesome, I tell you.

A friend of mine called me along the way, long since moved on to her life in the South, but someone I consider a good friend (one of a very few) from my days in High School. She dated a guy back then that played guitar, and when she heard what I was air jamming to old shit along Interstate 69 (sixty-nine...hahahaha), she let out a loud snort and the times came a-rolling back.

Now, I often wondered what a person of her looks and personality did dating a guy that looked like Slash, since the guy she was soooo in love with then had the brains of asphalt and the personality of a garden snake. She couldn't pinpoint why, other than he played guitar in a band.

And the truth, as the conversation went on, came out.

I still don't get it.

I asked then, what is it about guys that play guitar, or even in a band at all, that gets women all sopped up in the meat curtains like they'd just sat in a vat of KY Jelly?

She had no answer. None.

I mean, if you go back twenty years ago or longer, ladies, would you be willing to fawn all over a guy that looks like Gary Cherone from Extreme?

Or how about Steve Perry from Journey?

Don't forget Ric Ocasek.

Do you mean to tell me that Steven Tyler, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in a random bar in your local neighborhood, not famous, would get you all hot and bothered? So much so that you'd volunteer to lower yourself onto them at a moments notice?

Bull. Shit.

I surmise it is the whole "starfucker" potential. You never know at the time when guys that played would make it big, and the potential and the lights must be overwhelming to young women that dream of being the next Pamela Des Barres, or a world famous groupie.

So, where does that leave us normal dudes? We don't play any instruments, passing back in the day to play sports, get good grades in school or be regular assholes. Just once I'd love to hear, "Damn, that Zerox copy repair man really get my snail tracks a-sopping when he fixes that machine." or "Did you see that UPS driver today? Boy, if that zipper didn't hold him back I might've sucked him like a circus seal."

The truth is, it rarely happens. Strike that. It never happens. Unless you read Penthouse Forum.

And it made me think that I'm a fucking idiot for not taking those guitar lessons and continuing on with my band from when I was ten called, "The Desert Snowmen".

And maybe I should've kept my mullet.

I think of all the ladies I would've had. And all the STD's I've missed out on. There ain't nothing like combing through ones cabbage patch looking for rampant crabs, or so I am told.

Oh hell.

I miss that guitar.

Some rant, I know. But I want answers. Why do guys in bands, especially fugly looking dudes that weigh in at 120 pounds and snort coke like Tony Montana, get all the ladies?