I’ve used up all the lyrical content from the particular The Supremes song that has themed this run so far. It’s appropriate soon as I do, I’d drop into writing about one particular prized Supremes B-side. There’s plenty I could choose from. The one I chose to weave themes upon actually comes a year in recording session and release than the one I could have chosen in a different season of life. The first asks the question to the audience, the second one directly addresses in 1:1 intimacy. Just like life, we may want to hear the Greek Chorus give us the truth rather than negotiating directly with the subject of our inquiry and insecurities. Once I get past this series, I might discuss the preamble another day.
Most likely if I ever have a wedding day, if you’re invited, you’ll see that I’ve basically lived out my intimate life to a plethora of Supremes songs. I worried quite a bit that the last 3 years have played out too much like the parade of topside hits and misses. My 3 weeks in the hospital lead up to my ICD surgery day within days of The Supremes releasing “My Heart Can’t Take It No More” 60 years before. It would be a bit too hauntingly on the nose to read into what that meant about my life until I nearly died.
There’s decidedly themes of “A Breathtaking Guy” and “When The Lovelight Starts Shinging Through His Eyes” that picked up on themes of possibility through the rest of 2023. There’s still people that will tell me to “Run, Run, Run” from this storyline. I’d rather just let it be and get off this train before I gotta sing “Love Child” as my actual life story.
How I truly feel more often lives on those Supremes B-sides. I walk through this summer knowing that “He’s All I’ve Got” has been a realization I’ve come to. There’s a little hope that many will heed the call to “Put Your (Them) Self In My Place” as I head into this fall. That’s where we meet this B-side, before the uptick becomes resolutely more dedicated towards ‘happier’ outcomes. To blaze into 2027 blazing through “There’s No Stopping Us Now” would be priceless. If I can step off the carousel on the last Holland-Dozier-Holland single both singing “Forever Came Today” that throws a kiss back to 1962’s “Time Changes Things?” I’ll know I’ve gone the right way.
The reason I love so many old chestnuts is they’re more often than not the love letter has already been written for you. There’s nothing new under the sun. You can just memorize a set of lyrics written long ago and rekindle a fire in someone’s heart. A song shared, clearly, allows you to speak to someone with words you that sum up what you already feel more neatly, cleanly than any new sentences you can bother to string together. I might be a human being fumbling towards the future with the intent to create something new. The only blueprint I have is to look back at stacks of vinyl to cure any doubts that I’m moving in the right direction.
The emotions I experience are as old as dirt. I sit in the luxury of being in a point of the space-time continuum where I can look back at cycles contained on circles spinning at either 33 & a third or 45 revolutions per minute. Time and time over again the lessons are so clear, so clean. Sure, I can also, and do, listen to them coded as the binary of 01010101010101010010101010101 or whatever, but there’s something far more rich and ritualized to the physical record of, well, a record.
I have to make the effort to listen, I have to make the effort to stop and select. What is my mood? Am I trying to identify something within myself, or something in another that I can’t exactly match my own words to? It’s a significance when someone parrots one back to you, perhaps asking a version of the same question. Life is a hall of mirrors. I didn’t realize that flesh and blood was more of an accurate, complex mirror than glass could ever be.
This is where a song will haunt you. When someone notes it to you over and over again as the tune that reminds them of you, knowing it’s one you know very well. You hit replay or adjust the needle back to the outer ring of the grooves so you can study it once more. You try to find what commonality it has in-between the two of you. More often you’re frightened with the results. Perhaps you stop playing the song, but it echoes in your head. It reminds you that our concept of time that we live in is something absurdly out of sync with the variations of natural rhythms. Sometimes you find yourself nocturnal instead of diurnal. Sometimes you find yourself wandering the middle of the night to figure out what you can’t see in the glare of daytime.
We meet Diane Ross, Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in January 1965. The chilling vulnerability of a Detroit winter somehow can bring poignancy on a late summer day. The song wouldn’t meet public consumption until 60 years ago this October, underneath their terse 8th #1 Pop hit, “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.” Hauntingly, both those sides of wax tread and weave on the same common theme, at different tempos.
The Supremes – Remove This Doubt (1966)
It’s hurtin’ me, it’s hurtin’ me
This doubt is hurtin’ me….
Earlier in the week, a mouse scurried from under my record credenza into the small closet to the left of my fridge. It’s the crevice that hides my water heater in my kitchen near the door between the kitchen and living room. Thursday was giving way to Friday, only the dim light of the low watt bulbs of my nightstand lamp giving any light to my apartment. In the darkness I heard a snap, then a squeal. Then more. Others for hours.
The trash cans sit in front of my apartment. The neighboring studio is occupied by the hell of the annoying white charter school teacher/burner chick a decade younger than me that might be a hoarder. There’s plenty of opportunities for innocent pests to sneak in my nearly 100 year old apartment. I’m perhaps always on guard. I’m forever tense and not quite relaxed in this overpriced mouse trap. For all the resources I gather from the world, I’m the only one protecting what is my unfair share.
I noticed that the crack in the stucco is a gaping fault line mimicking the Hayward Fault that I drive upon to get to bi-weekly swimming this summer. It radiates up to the roof. It seems to bulge under the weight of concrete on the non-existent land below. Peralta Creek daylights itself right behind my kitchen door. The actual creek runs diagonal underneath my bedroom, underneath the same record credenza that sits between the wall of my living room and kitchen.
Stability is a figment of my imagination. I crave it even as I feel the not so subtle shifts in the environment around me. It’s why I laughed off when the beloved not so jokingly joked about renting the studio next door as a step in a direction of co-habitation. It was bad enough we both suffer through the penalty of once believing the Bay Area was ‘it.’
I couldn’t let him be foolish to think being next to me in the remnants of Great Depression Jenga was an upgrade. I just gave him a key to my shoebox so he could test what was strong and what was a house of cards. The apartment is on Bridge Avenue for a telling reason. You don’t park in the middle of a span. You keep moving until you get to the other side.
That other side best be as far east from the Hayward Fault as possible.
Yeah, yeah. Philadelphia is still the goal.
More squeals echoed from the kitchen. I get that mouse was asking why it was in a trap. I know what death feels like. I know what it feels like when one’s body protests making one in an eventual series of missteps. I’d like to think I’m smarter than a mouse. I have to believe I’ve avoided the most premature of fatal traps. I’m human, and sometimes not too kind. I find it easier to be humane to spiders than mice. Spiders provide a service with their honest webs. There’s no deception or disease I can really think of if you give them their space.
They keep more daunting pests at bay, mostly preferring to keep to their life’s work. I haven’t found in my life much affection for mice that take the easy way out by running amok in a house. Still, each time I find myself having to deal with the consequence of taking another mammal’s life, I sit with the reality of why I have to do it. I doubt my intentions of self preservation.
Then I think of the realities of being prey in a society set up as a mouse trap. My current landlord could not be such a slumlord that’s overcrowding a set of studio and one bedroom apartments to the point that trash overflows in a courtyard right above a creek. The landlord before that could have just acknowledged that he shouldn’t have been renting old shipping offices as live-work lofts. California, if not the whole united states turns generations of people into Machiavelli.
My dad could have not been hoarding 4 lawn mowers on a screened in patio where mice could easily make nests. All of these were traps made by men to exploit me and those beholden to them. I laughed 3 weeks prior as a Raccoon picked and ate the plums from the plum tree that shades my porch. Raccoons are also ‘nicer’ and long as I leave them to their fruit, they’ll leave me alone in my bed watching them go about their snacking.
I couldn’t take the squealing that kept me awake.
By the time it stopped, it was 3am. I realized that I’ve have to face the inevitable of burying another mouse. In the weirdness of being an apex predator, I was surprisingly hungry. I was too amped up and nervous to try to sleep. I laid in bed, then rose to close every door that might have forced me to see what I ‘had’ to do to keep my place in this society. I wanted to run from the crime scene that most wouldn’t think of carrying out. Yet, there is nowhere really to go sit down in Oakland to eat or drink at 3am anymore.
There is Colonial Donuts.
I wanted something more substantial that a stale apple fritter and bitter coffee to soothe my nerves. Colonial also doesn’t have seats in any form or fashion. I also didn’t want to run across any cops. There’s always Jack ‘N’ The Box, but I didn’t want to court suspicion by eating in a parking lot.
The neurosis of wondering if it is even safe to be out on your own overnight when we have no clue, no consistent data to where ICE is and who it is snatching up had me worried about being without the watchful eye of the rest of the zombies out at night. There’s way too much police presence to just randomly park in a Corvair on the street in the wee smalls and munch on curly fries dipped in existential dilemma.
I looked to see what was open in google maps. I kept expanding the radius. First 5 miles from Fruitvale. Then 10. The options pointed to San Francisco. For some reason I didn’t feel like fleeing westbound across the Bay Bridge. I widened the map to 15 miles, then to twenty. I wasn’t opposed to an decently long early drive. It would be the second one in as many weeks.
It wasn’t the first time that I couldn’t sleep this summer. The last time I couldn’t sleep, it was closer to 5am before an 8am oil change appointment. I had to get the most out of putting Seafoam™ in Gracie’s crank to get gunk off the cylinder walls. I had already gotten a pre-dawn Donut fix. I try my best not to repeat patterns. My memory from the previous weeks reminded me the donut from Tommy’s on Mission Boulevard didn’t satiate my appetite anyways.
I wanted, therefore I waited for a waffle. I took the long long way back from Hayward down Doolittle Drive through industrial San Leandro. At each stoplight, I’d floor Gracie for all she had. 60 miles per hours routinely shows up in about 13 seconds. These are ‘poor man’s Porsche’ numbers; a classic 356 is none too faster getting to a mile a minute. These little bread crumbs of knowing scattered through my life allow me to outsmart the mouse trap of this society. If a Corvair is as competent as a expensive vintage Porsche for even more of a discount in 2026, shouldn’t it be a cheap, car loan free way to have a motor vehicle in the modern world?
I’m not trying to keep up with my own (made up anyways) last name. I can choose to be picky about what I do for ‘work’ right now. I can make sure more things line up for this inevitable move. Teddy saying I ‘won’t be alone’ echoes in my ears daily. I replay his confidence against my doubt that he’s actually right. Closer the inevitable comes into view ahead of me, the more I realize how uncomfortable I am with the concept of fulfillment. It’s a death of sorts. I’ll have to drop a fair share of armor. I can admit that I’m afraid that he’s right that I’m not headed for a trap of guaranteed death this time.
So remove this doubt from my heart, little boy
And let me live my life knowing you care
Remove this doubt from my mind, little boy
And let me breathe again, feeling my love you share
I passed the last stoplight that takes you into the Oakland Airport compound. I dared myself to scoff at the law and see what all out I could do against the drawing dawn light. How fast could I coax my Corvair up to before I hit the next light? Somewhere between Speedometer error and nearing redline, I think I matched what Car Life Magazine got out of a similarly equipped Corvair in 1965; not quite 100, perhaps 98 miles per hour.
Full throttle, you get the roar of that massive magnesium fan, then a clunk of the Powerglide moving into high gear. Then there’s another set of wind moving so fast that you don’t get a chance to adjust yourself to the fury of movement. It’s none unlike how “Remove This Doubt” itself starts with a clunk of piano before soaring strings sting you ear with melodrama that haunts.
Then CLUNK as the strings re-enter again, cascading down the scale. At the 13 second mark, Diana Ross’s lead vocals enter. Then you glide away at a set tempo on a bed of piano work as Florence Ballard haunts from the ether. It’s smooth. Sometimes frighteningly so given how both The Supremes and Corvairs are not looked at as sophisticated works of art. You’re left with the intricacy and delicate nature of moving through life via movement sonically or physically. Little flourishes keep the proceedings of even footing interesting; the surge of horns here and there, the strings billowing in the foreground sometimes pave the road ahead of you.
I slinked into Alameda. I parked at Crown Memorial Beach as the sun rose. I greeted a few joggers that said ‘nice car’ before I claimed a waffle and a side of sausage at Ole’s on Park Street. The servers at Ole’s are not friendly at all. They took a smooth 15 minutes to offer me any coffee. There’s always subtle reminders that Alameda is still a ‘Sundown Town.’ I got a stale reminder that close to sunrise why I’ve never made an effort to really connect with the city that’s barely not Oakland because of a small swath of water.
Each time we meet
You make me feel so incomplete
There’s no joy in the air
I just don’t think you care
It’s nearly 7am and fully bright outside by the time my check arrives. I begrudgingly tip. The waffle syrup in all of its corn syrup glory got too sweet towards the end. I could have received more sausage to pair with it. Last time I was here, I thought the Bacon was absurdly salty to the point that I fought my way to finish the paltry portion of pork on my plate. Each time I give the spot a shot, I end up woefully disappointed. I think of the last time I had a solid waffle in the middle of the night.
There’s a Waffle House in Albany, Georgia that was across the street from the hotel I stayed in. I get a slight pang at the times when I was literally a ‘social justice warrior’ crossing the country in the name of food and farm justice. It was another ‘career path’ that I was forced out of due to egomaniacal non-profit leadership. Another pang arrives in my soul as I think of who would have loved to be on the road with me, saving the world, one waffle and scrambled egg with a side of sausage and drip coffee alongside me at a time.
I wonder how many times I didn’t say it out loud. I wonder how many times he had the same doubts. I wonder how many times he cycled back to The Supremes Sing Holland-Dozier-Holland digitally. I eventually gifted him the LP so he could listen in the solace of his basement. I think of the times he sent me “Remove This Doubt.” I always think now that I was wrong when I just assumed that he thought ‘cool Supremes B-side’ when there’s oodles to choose from.
Very few of them suck ass in the ‘bad’ way. I guess I shouldn’t have doubted that he wanted me to suck on his in the ‘good’ way. Ole’s was not playing any music as 6am became 7am. My brain, my soul or both filled in with enough haunting that those strings from 1965 started stirring inside of me. For all the vibrant, well preserved vinyl in the eating venue, each time I sit down in it, it’s remarkably devoid of the life that makes a ‘diner’ one of my favorite places to pass time.
I realize I’m actually now a little bit short on time to drop off Gracie to the delighted to see her again hands of Weilynn at AMA Auto. In my quest for early morning starch, I left the new oil filter at home. I’ll have to navigate admittedly lighter than back-to-school season commute traffic. He has to remind himself that I don’t, as of yet, have the Offenhauser aftermarket oil pan attached to her. I’m a little bit forgiving that he might have overfilled her crankcase once, leading to the leak she developed sitting at SFO for a month 4 months ago. The aftermarket oil pan and a new gasket are on their way now.
Returning to 3am 2 weeks later I find myself frustrated that there’s nowhere within 16 miles for me to sit and enjoy a meal anymore. Oakland feels as dead as the mouse underneath my kitchen countertops as my body didn’t allow me to sleep. Sure, I could have gone to the Denny’s in San Leandro. I didn’t want to be haunted by old wee-small-hours dates from 20 years ago either. I also know I would have been less than satisfied with the food options. I haven’t been really able to stomach national chain food restaurant foods since before COVID.
At mile 17 northbound I did have an option.
I kept scrolling Google maps until I landed on Nation’s Giant Burgers. There are, ironically locations in Alameda, Oakland and Berkeley that are daytime hour options. Something about the narcolepsy at the center of the urban Bay Area prevents them being open 24 hours anymore. The nearest 24 hour location is in San Pablo, nearly 20 miles north on the Eastshore Freeway. It’s worth deciding whether I want an early burger or pancakes, with a side of pie, bacon and/or fries since I’m indulging stifling my emotions with nocturnal roaming.
I go get gas, then head north on 580 ‘til it meets the Eastshore. I turn off on San Pablo, not realizing that the main reason this Nation’s is still open 24 hours is the reality that the Lytton Casino, also 24 hours, sits right across the street. There’s surprisingly more consistent life out in the suburbs. It’s mostly fueled by the desperation of being at the fringes of society. The fringes of society become glaringly apparent when you can’t sleep because you can’t cope with the act of rodent murder on a Friday morning in August.
I step in, and Nation’s San Pablo is fluorescent bright and pretty full of life. There’s one cashier/waitress taking orders both in person, and over the phone. She’s kindly telling the orders over the phone that their burgers or breakfast platters will be done in 20 minutes. A parade of sanitation workers and bus drivers plod in and out, intermingling with those blowing paychecks or whatever cash they have at hand on the fantasy of 3am fortunes at slot machines. I wait my turn as dude clearly already served barks…
“I need to speak to your manager!”
We all cursory look at, well, a white man demanding to speak to a manager at 3:30am with suspicion. We all wonder how sideways the entitlement can go. It’s the last thing any of us want. She wants to just keep the traffic under control. I just want a grilled piece of ‘beef’ topped with salty pork, onions, lettuce, tomato and cheese that has nothing to do with any damn cows between two warm buns. I want to drown all the doubts in my mind about what I’m trying to do with life with as little static of interference as possible.
“…cause honey you need a raise for how well you’re handling this!”
The hostess with the mostest bemoans that all the praise will never be heard. She’s never met the manager of this location since she works the graveyard shift. She returns to the phone, taking another Bacon cheeseburger order. She could frankly solve all of the problems of the western world if she could fill these booths with people in power and showed them how smooth an operation of burgers, fries and pies operates during the darkened 3rd hour of the day.
My tab did come out to over $40. I didn’t quite understand why, even if Nation’s is consistently on the pricier side of chain restaurants these days. They have to make up for the aggressive competition from others somehow. I get that I ordered Key Lime Pie as my pie, but it’s not that special of a pie. I look at my receipt to see our hostess put in half as in half a pie.
Nation’s notoriously offers their slices as 1/8ths or 1/4ths. I assumed that I had ordered the 1/8th portion as a half. This location, especially in the wee smalls requires me to expand my vocabulary. I laugh in relief that I didn’t say whole when she asked. I didn’t need a whole ass Key Lime Pie. As I settled in my booth I recognized what the Bay Area is hiding in these corners away from the core.
First a few booths away from me was someone older and white. By the amount of belongings she had parked alongside the booth, I groaned at the fact that I recognized this symbolism of societal status. I remembered a similar grey haired lady roaming in the darkness from my days working at Hudson Booksellers some 22 years ago in the International Terminal of SFO.
I know the wee small hours signs of having no home to go to. I searched my eyes across a broader scope of the dining area to see what looked like a Black mother younger than me with her daughter clearly in her teens reading. I didn’t want to think she was doing homework. They clearly had nowhere to be that belong to them other than the transience of Nation’s San Pablo either.
I wanted to have doubts about where I was in the world. I had ran away from my own crime scene to see where we all are caught in a mousetrap in this society. Everyone in the restaurant had made a social agreement not to bring their problems to each other. We all quietly sat there and ate our food, lucky that at least one place was giving us refuge from the everyday choices we make. They may seem right in the moment, perhaps they truly are. In a little light in the darkness, we get to sit with our doubts a little bit until we sort through what we will do next. It’s no one else’s responsibility to remove doubts but our own.
Close the door of doubt forevermore
And may it nevermore make me unsure
Turn the key and lock away this doubt in me
Keep it in the dark, not in my heart
There are secrets that I’m holding from after midnight conversations I’ve had. There’s 2am stumbling into mutual vulnerabilities and unfulfilled desires I’ve never talked about and perhaps won’t elaborate on further. I didn’t realize that we were sharing hopes in a storm of doubts. I was told directly that feelings were being held close to the chest.
I held my cards as well, running with the assumptions based on the fact that I wasn’t chosen once upon a time. I assumed that I was assigned a certain role. I considered myself no longer a possibility. It possibly caused a lot of casual observers confusion. I think it made some others watching the muted melodrama concede their chances at making a play.
I let doubts reign supreme for nearly a decade before I found myself in a 24 hour diner wondering what could have been. We could have been in a better place than the mouse trap that was my apartment. We coulda been listening to “There’s No Stopping Us Now” in a basement in each others arms. I wouldn’t be searching for answers from them in the elaborate mouse trap they find themselves in either.
I wonder what truth we could have said to each other had the conversations happened not in their trap? What could have been possible had we had the courage to meet up with each other in one of our favorite neutral zones? What could we have stood for side by side instead of in separation. What if we ordered our preferences off of a vast diner menu and asked each other what really made each other tick.
I feel so alone, recognizing that as I’ve always teetered to being closer to needing a space of neutralized non-judgment. I’d rather be like someone homeless in a suburban diner in the taint between night and day. I’d drown in a gilded loveless cage that someone isn’t equitably sharing with me. I can see how that could cast doubts on sustainability of loving me.
I sat there and ate my food that I’m lucky I can afford. I looked at half the pie and thought I should share it with someone. I was lucky that I got to go back to an apartment 20 miles southbound, despite the cracking plaster, despite the murdered mouse on shoddy laminate floors. I hate that I have to bear witness again and again to how cruel this society is.
Every moment that I felt a pang of romanticism for what I was doing, it dissipated into recognizing my tendencies for juvenile detachment. I had a hard time dealing with the fact that I was cosplaying a sob story amongst the horrors of American society at this moment. I was wishing I was still flirting with someone over an greasy meal at an ungodly hour. I still had a mattress to return to, even if the loneliness I felt was my own self-constructed prison.
I walked out at the same time a group of gamblers did. I thought to do a long exposure, but the bacon grease was going to my brain. I couldn’t find the shoe to put my Pentax on the tripod. I pulled my Olympus and told myself maybe I’d be back, maybe I wouldn’t. My nerves were calmed. I pointed Gracie southbound back towards Oakland. The traffic started to thicken up with commuters, but I still made it home in 20 minutes.
I was able to sleep. I let my body invert my sleeping rhythms until 9:30am. I grabbed my broom. I swept the evidence of my crimes into the dust pan. I looked at my ceiling, noticing more cracks in the plaster above my couch as I opened the door. I looked down once, the murdered mouse’s eyes locked but not clouded over in death yet. I lifted the lid of the culprit of this fucked dynamic and returned them to their origins as I await what comes next for where I will live, who I will live with and all of the dilemmas I know the heavens above me will force me to confront this Fall.
I don’t want the heartbreaks of the topside.
Be more tender
Completely surrender
Your love to me
Be sweet and not discreet
I had another slice of Key Lime Pie for lunch.
I’m forgiving the few pounds that stress eating in the long long night have given me. I know there’s enough action ahead to make them melt away like butter. I want to enjoy the splendor that lies on the side that’s in the dark just as much as the brilliance in the middle of the day. Surely, I have to deal with devils in the details while fumbling through the dark. I’m surprisingly used to it. There’s actually plenty of pie for everyone.
Remove this doubt from my heart, little boy
And let me live my life knowin’ you care
Remove this doubt from my mind, little boy
And let me breathe again, feeling my love you share
Once he gets his slice, we’ll be able to share with the rest of you.
