Soozy Bridges vs. Seal Rock

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

I had a dream last night that starred my friend Soozy. We were sitting at a round table, outside. Patti & Evan were there, which made sense. Even George’s wife Sue wasn’t completely out-of-place. But the fact that Diana was there was a clear sign from my subconscious that this was indeed a dream and not a half-memory or some pre-sleep notion. Weird how our subconscious minds play those little practical jokes on us…

I don’t remember anything else about the dream except that we were all in real-time (our current ages) except for Soozy who was represented as a younger version of herself—the version I first came to know in the very early 1990s.

We met in Seattle. I was the singer in a heavy metal band and she was freelancing variously in management & booking, freshly graduated from the Art Institute. Soozy is a highly-intuitive person, and has always had a very keen ear for talent—talent that isn’t always apparent to everyone else. As a result, she would often take on projects. Considering the nature of the inventory, many of these projects were tortured & unreliable at best. Deeply talented, sure– there may even have been a bonafide genius or two in the flock. At their worst, however, they were startlingly self-destructive. Some of us made it through. Others didn’t.

Trashed again, NYC 1991

Soozy was fifteen years older than us back then. To be clear, she’s still fifteen years older than we are. At the time, though, in our mid-20s, the fifteen years seemed more significant than now. Among Soozy’s favorite roles was that of spiritual mentor. Some of us were more skilled than others at absorbing the less-linear elements of her coaching– but in the end much of what she was doing was herding cats. We actually were quite a bit like kittens or puppies in those days– clumsy & playful: mischievous yet adorable. We often fell down in big piles, rolling around on the floor panting and drooling, unable to get up. Soozy might have wished we weren’t such a complete collective mess all the time, but she loved us anyway and saw in each of us a superpower that in many instances we ourselves had no inkling we possessed. I often said Soozy was like a rock and roll den mother. She liked to party at night, but perhaps her greatest gift was recovery. I’m not talking about longterm recovery; but rather the daily kind.

“Take these,” she’d say, “and drink two beers as fast as you can.” And though a beer might not have been exactly what you’d had in-mind right then, I’ll be damned if by the middle of the second one you weren’t feeling pretty much better and actually considering a third.

I still didn’t know Soozy that well when we found ourselves in California in the summer of 1993 trying to promote Panic’s largely unpromotable second record. We had squandered a better previous record deal and a much more muscular previous management deal, and Soozy was doing what she could to keep the band afloat. But it was getting late and it was clear that the ship was taking on water. I remember getting on a plane the morning after the last show of that shameful California tour– while the rest of the band was still asleep in heaps on the floor at the Phoenix Hotel in the Tenderloin– knowing in my heart that the bitchin’ disaster we’d been humping furiously for most of the previous ten years was winding down.

My Mom picked me up at the airport in Little Rock and drove me back to her & her husband’s house in Hot Springs where I fell asleep on the couch watching the Allstar Game. In the morning, I got to work picking the weeds out of the cracks in the driveway with a screwdriver. It was 102 degrees and 97% humidity, but this job had to be done because the house was going on the market the following week. I finished the driveway and a few other tasks in-time for my mom to take me back to the airport to catch a short flight to Norfolk where I served as Best Man in a high school friend’s wedding (jumping into the fountain in a rented tuxedo w/ the marriage certificate in back pocket). My only other friend from high school (coincidentally not friends with the newlywed friend) picked me up the next day and we drove to Washington DC where we saw the last song of the Sister Double Happiness set at the Bayou in Georgetown. We didn’t even know they’d be playing—we were just hanging out at the Bayou! We then stole a half-night’s sleep at the Ramada before catching a train into Manhattan where we walked around the Village rationing what little money we had left. We caught a late train back to DC, got in the car, and drove without sleeping to friend’s house in Eastern Tennessee where we did sleep. After a few days, Andy put me on a midnight Greyhound across Tennessee and Arkansas, back to Hot Springs where by this time Mom & Art had moved into their new house. This house had a beautiful, cylindrical copper fireplace in the middle of the living room, like a Lyon’s Restaurant. It also had a smooth, modern driveway. So instead of soul-smashing driveway torture labor, we tooled around Lake Hamilton in their party barge drinking bourbon and pretending to fish for bass. After a few days, Mom took me back to the Little Rock airport. I flew back to Seattle and we broke up the band.

The afternoon before fleeing California, though, was a beautiful summer San Franciscan day. I’d had something else to do that afternoon, and the plan was for me to meet the band at soundcheck. I arrived in a red minivan, rented to the band (probably on Soozy’s credit card). We were playing at the historic I-Beam on Haight Street. It wasn’t called the I-Beam at the time, but it was the same room. I knew immediately upon walking in the door that something was not right. The club wasn’t open yet, and there was no house music playing. The only noise came from the sound crew setting up mic stands and the bar staff filling the ice bins in preparation for the evening. Normally, I’d walk into a setting like this to find the band & crew crowded in a booth laughing and smoking and killing a pitcher. But today, everyone was scattered in different corners of the club. George was slumped in a corner booth, his back to the stage. Jack was upstairs losing a game of pool to himself. Pinky was curled up in the fetal position on a roadcase backstage. And Marty was tucked up onto a high shelf above a coatrack in a service corridor between the kitchen and bar, sound asleep. I found Soozy.

“Um,” I said, tentatively. “What’s going on?”

“Shhhh!” she hissed, looking around as if someone were listening. “They’re on the cookie!

The author drinking in bed           with Sheila Rene, 1993

Soozy had been promising this experience the whole time we’d been in California, though it had largely fallen on ringing, deaf ears. Soozy was our mentor; and she in-turn had her own mentor—also the source of the mythical cookie. Sheila Rene was a publicist by trade, but definitely a fully-vested member of the Old Guard Bay Area Rock and Roll Aristocracy. She had a flat in Pacific Heights stacked with all manner of rock memorabilia, including a framed picture of herself with everyone from Duane Allman to Frank Zappa. Sheila always had a silver tobacco box on her coffee table stocked with what she liked to call ‘Left Wing Luckys’ and we smoked pot with Sheila any time we went calling there. We smoked pot with everyone in those days—all day every day, we smoked pot. It’s just what we did. Our tolerance was high and I sure as hell was not going to be intimidated by a 2” diameter home-made molasses cookie with a Hershey’s Kiss pressed in the middle, wrapped in wax paper—much less HALF of one. (Soozy claimed a whole cookie was too strong for any one person…)

I snatched our cookie from Soozy’s hand and ate my half in one bite. I handed hers back to her and said “let’s go for a walk.”

I don’t pretend to understand the physics of eating marijuana even now, in the golden age of cannabis. But back then– in the early 1990s– our experience with eating pot was probably limited to a Cheech & Chong routine or some other urban myth about brownies from an Afterschool Special. What me and my mates dug at that time was smoking pot and drinking whisky. We played in a heavy metal band. Eating pot cookies seemed like something our parents’ wilder friends might do, or else homosexuals. I rolled my eyes.

Of course it took about as long as a stroll from the I-Beam down to the intersection of Ashbury Street and back to understand just how powerful half a molasses marijuana cookie could be. By the time we got back to the I-Beam, I felt like this was the Haight of 1968—Stoney Baloney. Just higher than fuck, in a way that I wasn’t accustomed to being high. The last thing I wanted to do was go back into the club. The keys to the red van were still in my pocket, and I said “Soozy, there’s something I want to show you.”

We got into the van and I drove west on Haight, turning north on Stanyan before looping around the Panhandle and easing into Golden Gate Park. I was born in The City, and had spent a lot of time in the Park as a kid. I gleefully pointed out the landmarks of my childhood as we wound through the narrow lanes of the interior of Golden Gate Park, the afternoon light filtering down through the Eucalyptus trees. Soozy was singing, her head out the open window, just like Mr. Bear would later do.

The aerodynamic Mr. Bear

There’s the Bison range. That’s the archery meadow. Kezar Stadium. Oh, my god—the Aquarium!

Soozy was raised in Raymond, and she’d seen plenty of the Pacific Ocean. But when you break out of the woods at the western exit of Golden Gate Park, past the windmill and first catch glimpse of the majestic 10’ breakers of Ocean Beach—it’s always as if you’re seeing it for the first time. This day was no different, and in fact extra powerful. Duh. But it still wasn’t what I’d come out here to show Soozy.

I turned right onto the Great Highway and started the gentle ascent to the Cliffhouse, where I found a spot and parked.

“This is what I wanted to show you, babe,” I said, turning to grin at Soozy. “Seal Rock!”

Soozy gleefully jumped out of the van and ran across the sidewalk to the rail. I remained in the driver’s seat rolling a cigarette. She returned to the van and flung open the driver’s door.

“Dude!” she beamed, her eyes wild, the ocean wind blowing her hair. “It’s so fuckin’ beautiful! And it’s just covered with seals!”

I got out of the car and made the rail, beholding the monolith. It was indeed so beautiful— just as I remembered as a child, with the afternoon light shining on it and the surf curling around its base.

But there were no seals on it.

“Sooz,” I said, lighting the smoke, “That rock is covered with seagulls.”

She looked at the rock and then back at me and we both dissolved into hysterics and stood there laughing and smoking till the sun sank into the Pacific and to wherever it goes when it’s no longer visible from here. China, or wherever. In fairness, they might have been pelicans. But I learned later that the seals split Seal Rock for Pier 39 after the World Series earthquake of 1989. That was the end of an era of sorts. But that evening, standing at the rail in Land’s End was the beginning of a different era—the era of my friendship with Soozy Bridges.

Happy Birthday, Soozy. Get well soon. I love you…

Teatro Zinzanni, 2003?