09.12.07

Miles and Miles

Posted by Bowman at 9:20 pm in street performers, guitar, bike rides, and college

One of the things I got an awful lot of credit for in Plano was my bike rides. Often, people ask me how I do it. So, here is my ’strategy’ in brief:

• Push yourself physically to build strength
• Always be careful and courteous to pedestrians, drivers, and other bikers
• If you have nowhere to go, just start riding and don’t stop

That last reason has always been critical to me. Perhaps this is the reason that the other day, I got on Congress Avenue and just kept going South for an afternoon. This is what happenned:

Good view, isn’t it? But you haven’t seen the half of it.

It was the afternoon, so I really had nothing to do but cross the bridge, something I hadn’t done since I went to Target to buy some sheets and a blowdrier. I never really heard much about southern Austin, save for comments on the apartments down there and the complain that it seemed like all the Targets and Walmarts were either south of the river or north of the highway. It was a rather interesting ride - the tall buildings disappeared in favor for suburbia, intersparsed with trees, giving me a sign of the hill country surrounding.

I was wondering how far south I would find myself going, passing a school for the deaf and a number of restaraunts, before I happenned to get a call from my friend Jeffrey. Having to get off my bike for a minute to answer the phone, I was standing only a few feet away from a man, perched on a chair at the edge of a parking lot, who was busily strumming his guitar and singing. After finishing my call and hanging up, I hesitated for a moment to get a look at the man who sat there next to me, when he himself suddenly stopped to compliment my bicycle and ask me how much I had bought it for. Surprised, I had to simply tell him that my parents had bought the bike as a gift, and he understandingly smiled and remarked, “When receiving a gift, one should never ask the price.” So, in a moment of sudden conversation, we introduced ourselves - my name was Michael, and his name was Miles.

He looked at me for a moment, and told me that I looked as though I played guitar, which came as a rather great surprise, for he was wearing a Hawaiian shirt, some boots, a straw hat, and a rugged and loose old pair of denim jeans while I stood in sandals, a tight fitting pair of dark green-blue jeans, and a small white t-shirt with sweaty yet froofy, shaggy hair. Perhaps he saw the tiny callices on my fingertips, because as he picked up the guitar and told me to give it a strum or two, I saw his own rough skin all over his fingers and palms.

He casually told me to play whatever I felt like as he sat back for a smoke break. He offerred me one, but I declined; he told me I shouldn’t get started and laughed, revealing his own rather loosely-populated gums, telling me he was fortunate enough to kick drinking a few months back.

I was a bit nervous, but, comfortable with his shiny guitar (bought at a surprisingly cheap $50 from a pawn shop), his broken plastic plate makeshift pick, and the content as he puffed at a cigarette, I began to play a little bit “When You’re Dead, You Are Dead” to see what he’d think. With his harmonica and southern accent, I feared he would simply twitch an eyebrow or smirk at something without a hint of a blues feel to it, and I resisted singing any of it, but, as I played the little verses of it, he smiled and nodded, seeming to verify that he might have actually thought it was as clever as I did.

 So I played some more - without singing; and he proudly puffed at a cigarette as pedestrians stopped and stared momentarily at the bizarre sight of the city-boy and his bicycle with this wisened minstrel as he relaxed on the curb. I played little bits and pieces of everything, from my other little compositions to some hits of David Bowie, as he struck up a conversation with another odd acquaintance, a 22-year-old young man (whose name I have forgotten) who, for all his manners, fashionability, and efforts to keep his middle class, hadn’t the money to go to college and simply was trying to make ends meet on his own.

When they had relaxed, and I felt the confidence, I played a bit of “Alabama Song” with the singing along, and, when I was done, Miles recognized it from the Doors rendition. He noted that one of his greater brushes with celebrity came when he had snuck into a club in L.A. and had his face pressed against the window of a room where Jim Morrison was enjoying a plate of chicken wings. Miles stared hungrily into the room at the wings, when Jim Morrison suddenly noticed him and splattered food against the window to frighten him. Later, the club owner came out and offered Miles and his friends a few bags of chicken wings, apparently courtesy of Jim Morrison.

I talked with him about college, and that I was planning to be a Radio-Television-Film Major. Intrigued to hear it, he told me of a former UT student named Dustin Robins, apparently of some kind of Asian and Hawaiian descent, who, for a class project, had produced a documentary about vagrants, hobos, and street musicians living in Austin not too long ago. He had apparently befriended Miles, who had acted as his guide to the gritty world of streetlife. Miles told me that they had gone on many little adventures for the film, like meeting local legends such as “Dogman” and camping by the railroad tracks along with other musical nomads. In the end, however, Miles never saw the film, as I suspect Dustin had graduated not long after the project was finished and gone on to do other things.

I took it upon myself then to find the film and somehow get a copy of it - Miles told me that he works on that little corner seven days a week, so I should be able to find him again. With that, I realized the sun was setting, and, handing him back his guitar, shook his hand and said goodbye.

Before I left, though, he demonstrated to me that he had the bizarre talent to play two harmonicas at the same time. This can only be described truly by this following picture:

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