Mama Kin & Obvious Children
The cross is in the ballpark
It’s the late 90’s. Somehow my friends Kenny and Adam have talked me into driving in Kenny’s old Toyota LandCruiser1 from Salt Lake to Boston, where we’ll spend April through August, living on Mass Ave in Roxbury2—poetically all of us would end up working on the same street (Newbury St.) and sleeping on the same floor (unnamed, but just this side of hygienic), in a Jenga-type arrangement of mattresses-on-the-ground. It wasn’t luxury. But it was independence. It was a carpe-ing of at least a few diems. It was striking out on our own.
Speaking of which, I almost struck out entirely. Adam and Kenny, within days, found jobs as waiters, while I was pickier (actually, I just knew my introversion and anxious disposition would flail in the service industry). I applied all over, mostly retail—City Sports, Banana Republic, Guitar Center, but eventually, in desperation, even a small Brazilian restaurant in Cambridge and a smoothie place near Fenway. I was whiffing for a week or two, often not even getting an interview. My Hail Mary (and my dream job) was the great big three-story Tower Records3 on the corner of Mass Ave and Newbury Street. When they called me in for an interview, I was probably about three days away from hitting cash-flow-negative and needing to seriously consider going back home to Utah, tail between my legs.
Phew. Employed at last. Gainfully, even.
Now, I wasn’t coming back to our apartment with wads of cash4 on the weekends, like Kenny and Adam. But I loved my job. LOVED IT. I loved talking music all day with other music nerds (the rockabilly guy with the pompadour and wallet chain, the hardcore dude with a heart of gold, the goth girl I had a merciless crush on, the jazz head who humored my jazz tourism, the electronica expert who hit on me one night when he wandered into the store while buzzed, the hip hop guru with one pant leg constantly rolled to his calf, the old—40something lol—dude with surprisingly good taste5), learning about genres that were blind spots for me, recommending music to customers, I even liked the OCD aspect of making sure all the CDs were organized neatly (and often making sure to display most visibly the ones I liked most). It just didn’t pay all that well. Even after I got surprise-promoted to manager after just a month (the bar for management in a workforce full of flaky musicians is not high), the pay bump was nothing special. Let’s just say, I got pretty good at subsisting on rice and spinach and eggs (this was pre-Covid, when eggs weren’t the meal of royals). Grain. Protein. Something green. I probably had orange juice too, just to keep the scurvy at bay.
But I’d save money for a few things: 1) employee-discount CDs, 2) concerts and Red Sox games, and 3) going out on the weekends with Kenny and Adam.
One of our first weekends in Boston, I made the guys go down to Landsdowne Street, directly behind legendary Fenway Park.
You might think, “Oh, that makes sense: Paul is a Red Sox fan.” Which is true. But my motivation was (takes deep breath, tries to stave off the cringe): I wanted to go because there was a bar there owned by, well….Aerosmith.
Yep, I fell for the tourist trap. The bar was called Mama Kin6 and was owned by the dudes in Aerosmith, which apparently was reason enough to make a pilgrimage one Saturday night. It wasn’t for the drinks (I don’t drink). It wasn’t for the band (they weren’t there and whoever was, was bad).
I don’t know what I thought I’d find. Maybe I thought I’d catch a glimpse of singer Steven Tyler slinging drinks? Or Joe Perry sitting in on some local band’s version of “Train Kept A’Rollin’”? Or at least, like, the drummer passed out in the corner? I dunno. I was 22 and I guess I thought Aerosmith7 might be in charge of something….awesome8.
It was not awesome. We went in for about 10-15 minutes before realizing it was not our scene. In truth, it wasn’t anyone’s scene. The bar opened in 94. Won a Boston magazine award for Best Club in 95. And was closed—on permanent vacation, you could say—by 99.
So we walked back outside, admitting defeat and milling around on Landsdowne Street, which was a long row of bars and thus crowded with people on this particular Saturday night.
Having struck out (poetically, just 100 yards or less from Fenway’s home plate), we were standing there, trying to make a plan for what to do next. Kenny struck up conversation with a group of locals. They were nice guys and asked where we were from (perhaps noting our accents or the fact that we’d come out of Mama Kin).
“Utah,” we replied, a little sheepishly, knowing that Utah wasn’t really on the radar for a lot of people on the east coast, at least non-skiers.
”So…you guys Mormon?”
”Yeah.” we replied, a little sheepishly, knowing that there were bound to be some questions about polygamy and how three Mormon kids ended up standing—stone cold sober—outside Mama Kin on a Saturday night.
“That’s cool. You guys got temples, right? Well, this (points to the vastly tall back wall of Fenway Park, known as the Green Monster)? This is our temple.”
We all kind of shared a laugh and the conversation rolled for a little bit before we all went our separate ways, trying—in the words of Tom Waits—to get to the heart of Saturday night.
But I’ve never stopped thinking about what that meant. THEIR temple.
Now, he might’ve just been drunk and joking around, trying to connect, or maybe even trying to poke at us, antagonize, get us off-balance to see what we’d say.
But over time I’ve come to think it was pretty profound.
A temple should be a place where people find meaning. Find connection. Spiritual, for sure.9
And for the Red Sox diehards that means Fenway Park. You could say the same of Yankee fans that go to Yankee Stadium or FC Barcelona fans that go—religiously, even—to Camp Nou. The arc of the human experience: promising beginnings, frustrating endings, rebirth, renewal, the joy of victory, the gut punch of defeat, maybe a decent (or terrible) hot dog in there somewhere to keep things interesting. And back then, back in 1998, half a decade before the Red Sox finally put the Curse of the Bambino and its 86-year championship drought to rest, there was an awful lot of shared suffering. Mutual loss. The bonding that can only happen when you hurt together, but still show up for each other. That’s sacred, wherever you are.
Togetherness is sacred. Whether it’s singing hymns or singing whatever family songs you all love. Whether it’s watching sermons or watching baseball or watching season 2 of whatever show you all love. You can break bread over a dining room table, but you can also break bread in the cheap seats of Fenway or in Central Park or in a Toyota LandCruiser crossing the Iowa state line. The point is togetherness.
Shared suffering. Quality time. Togetherness. Showing up for one another. Faith. Doubt. Joy. Sorrow. We lay them on the altar of the temple, bring them to the temple in hopes of something….transcendent. We don’t always get the transcendence. But when we do? Hoo boy.
I could go on.
But as has become tradition here on Substack, I’ll let other writers I love tell the story better than I can. The rest of this is all from Amanda Petrusich10’s recent article in The New Yorker about Paul Simon’s intriguing, mystical new song cycle. I read it last week and it captures what I think I was hoping to capture myself. She starts off quoting Simon’s 1990 song “The Obvious Child.” Take it away, Amanda.
And we said, “These songs are true
These days are ours
These tears are free,”
And hey
The cross is in the ballpark
The final line of the verse can be read in several ways. Perhaps Simon is suggesting that we’re capable of locating God in anything we love, including baseball. Perhaps he’s making a point about how religion is inextricably stitched into the cultural fabric of America. It may be an allusion to Pope Paul VI holding Mass at Yankee Stadium, in 1965. He could be saying that, although Christianity is not foolproof, it’s close enough. Or maybe he’s simply suggesting that faith—in the world, in ourselves—is always within reach. We’re never so far from mercy.
The cross is in the ballpark.
Including one restless sleepover in the parking lot of the Walmart in North Platte, Nebraska.
We knew Roxbury wasn’t the best neighborhood in Boston, but didn’t realize it was genuinely rough until:
a) our first weekend, we went to the park kiddie-corner from our building to throw a frisbee around on the grass, like we’d done a million times in Salt Lake City parks. As the sky darkened to dusk, a police car drove up over the curb and across the grass to us. The cop got out and asked, “Uh, you boys from around here?” We pointed to our building, mentioning that we’d just moved in. “Well, it’s getting dark and you ought to go inside.” Eyes opened.
b) two days later there was a stabbing about 18 feet from our apartment building door.
c) we told our co-workers where we lived and their eyes got wide. (To be fair, it was the very edge of Roxbury and a mere 20-ish minute walk to Newbury Street where we all worked. Even faster by bus.)
In the old days, children, there were these things called “Record Stores.” People loved music so much that they would actually pay real money to buy it. These “record stores” were a place where people could go to find the music they liked. They would then buy the music in the format they preferred. The name “Record Store” comes from the first format most people bought: records (which are circular vinyl discs that, when played on a “record player” would play music). The music industry cycled through a few formats: 8-tracks (look it up), cassette tapes (vastly underrated), and compact discs (circular like vinyl but smaller and shinier). A great “record store” with great employees would feed your love of music and open your eyes/ears to music you’d never heard before, whereas a bad/cool “record store” with elitist employees would look down on you with no pity/all condescension and make you wish you’d never been born.
The benefit of a tip-driven wage is the chance of a positive variance. I never went to work wondering how much I’d make that day.
Bob. A lot of the hipsters made fun of his “boring” music taste, but I dug it. He introduced me to the underrated Mavericks (and the voice of Raul Malo!) among a whole bunch of others. We talked Dylan and Neil Young and the Flying Burrito Brothers and Emmylou Harris.
Named after the second-most-popular song from their 1973 self-titled album. I couldn’t sing you a note of it, to be honest. Not back in 1998. And definitely not now.
2023 Me isn’t really a big Aerosmith fan. I won’t be going to their farewell tour (their Get A Grip concert at The Delta Center in the early 90s was probably the worst-sounding show I’ve ever been to—just a swirl of cacophonic distortion and noise where I had to strain to figure out which song they were playing). I do still love “Sweet Emotion” and contend that “What It Takes” would make an absolute killing if some young buck from Nashville turned it into a country song. Still, I have to cop to my Aerosmith bona fides:
- I own three Aerosmith albums: Toys In The Attic (solid), Get Your Wings (Zeppelin Jr.), and Pump (the middle of the ballad era). I also own a Run DMC album that featured singer Steven Tyler and guitarist Joe Perry on a rap version of “Walk This Way.”
- Like I said, I saw them once in concert and it was a mess. I think Jackyl opened the show.
No defense except that my prefrontal cortex was as yet underdeveloped?
I would say a temple ought to be “peaceful” too which would disqualify sports arenas/ballparks/stadiums. But let’s not require the parallel to be note-perfect. They so rarely work on every level. A smarter writer than me would just have left this out and a) let the parallel seem perfect, or b) let the readers think they’re brilliant for poking a hole in my comparison.
Is Petrusich my most mentioned person over my 50-plus posts? Does that make Bono feel insecure? (Good.)
Dang, Paul, I'd forgotten, ahem, that you rooted for a certain New England team. ;) But my estimation of you recovered learning that you once worked at Tower. Oh how I miss it so.