Transcription
Around the Cosmic Campfire by Tony Wright
Chapter 30: The Wharf
I remember thinking when I first arrived to perform in El Paso that it seemed like a beautiful and friendly city to hang out in for a few weeks. Everyone seemed so laid-back and kind. Someone told me at the beginning of our stay that they had a lot of natural lithium in the public water supply. Lithium is a great calming mineral, and even the crime rate seemed unreasonably low, perhaps due to the water. My partner and I were there to play music at a nice seafood restaurant, The Wharf, which was a very rustic, sea-oriented place. Its restaurant served a lot of crab, shrimp, and lobster and had a staff of amazing waiters and waitresses.
It was great to be there. During the week we first arrived, we went into the restaurant bar in the middle of the day to just check out the music stage. We spent time testing how the sound would be after setting equipment up. We did what we would call a sound check, making sure everything was connected and working and that the acoustics of the room would be balanced for us. We were just an acoustic duo, but we always liked for things to sound perfect.
For our first night on stage, after the sound check, I noticed that my partner, Don, was sitting at the bar having a Coke and was three or four barstools down from a young man who was alone. This stranger was sort of hunched over the bar and was not very available for conversation, as I found out. No one else was in the bar at the time of the afternoon except the bartender. I sauntered over and sat down next to Don, and being the friendly creature that I am, I said hello to the man to my left. He barely spoke and had no intention of making eye contact with me. I didn't like the way he felt, and something seemed very off with the guy, but I shrugged it off, and we eventually all went about our business.
On Friday, we played our first night to a great little crowd who loved our wooden music, and we felt very welcome there. On Saturday night, we had an even larger crowd, and the lounge was full of people who had been in for dinner and were beckoned into the bar from the sounds filtering out through the lounge into the front lobby. It was great to have them all.
At the end of our night, we were singing our last song, which was a power song for me, which is how you want to leave a crowd—feeling touched, impressed, inspired, and moved. At the end of the song, we would normally climb down off the stage and go out and mingle with people at their tables and have a drink or two. This particular night, as my last note was ringing in the American folk trilogy, something shouted at me—yes, that voice in my head that I can hear inside of myself and outside of myself on a regular basis, but there is no body there—"Keep playing! Do not stop! Do not stop!"
It was allowed and similar to the voice I heard the night I was in the Skyline Lounge years earlier in the Midwest. I had learned to listen to that voice by now. On the first alert, I said to Don we needed to throw in another song. He looked at me like, "Really? I'm burned out." But we did another song. At the end of that song, I heard it again: "Don't stop now! Not right now! Keep playing!" I started in on my own with another song, and he had to follow; it was obvious he would not have just left me on the stage alone. After that song, the voice did not invade again.
I didn't know what it was about, but I heard sirens outside and a ruckus inside the restaurant while we were finishing our first/last song. A man had come into the restaurant through the front door into the lobby where patrons sit and wait for their tables—the same lobby just on the other side of our lounge door. He had a pantyhose pulled over his head, and he had a gun in his hand and was robbing the place. Apparently, a waiter who was rounding an opposite corner peered out quietly and saw the man with the gun, but the man did not see him. The waiter and the manager called the police immediately, and they were there fairly quickly. If we had not kept playing, there was a great chance that some of the people would have gotten up from their tables, since it was the end of the night, and would have spilled on into the lobby in line of fire with the man with the gun—the man with his face pulled down inside pantyhose, the man with dark intentions that no one could really know—what was he? What was he capable of?
I later heard he was a troubled man who was in the military stationed in El Paso. He was also the man sitting next to me at the bar on Wednesday who felt wrong to me. I saw his photo in the newspaper the next day, and he was one and the same—troubled soul. How did these things happen?
By now we should be seeing the theme of tuning one's radio dial into the right station, adjusting the static, finding the higher station, and listening carefully. In my particular case, it's certainly the guides who are watchful—the guides or angels perhaps I have invited into my life. They who show up in times of real danger to shout a message or two to me that I must hear and respond to. They seem to have control of the volume knob. I guarantee you, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I'm always grateful for the wisdom, the words that come through to me as gifts from beyond. I continue to listen with my whole heart and soul to the God station. I am so fortunate to be able to hear again and again. I say thank you to God for the help I receive to help others in this magnificent journey we call life.