02 A Horse With No Name

There I was, on my tenth birthday, clammy with fever in the Florida February breeze, on a bench outside of a grocery store in Kissimmee with my older brother Aaron, jumble-headed, waiting for the rest of the family, feeling like death, like a horse with no name.

It is a memory that has stuck, this child’s dose of bleak dread, the excruciation of waiting, the fevered amnesia of feeling like you will feel the way you feel now forever, plenty enough to frighten a boy who had just turned double digits too sick to eat cake. 

I say a horse with no name because it, America’s song, has always meant dread to me, ever since I had a quiet panic attack in the back of the family station wagon when I was seven while the song was on.  A few months prior, I had another visceral reaction set to song—a half lucid nightmare of sinking into my bed while falling asleep listening to Twisted Sister on headphones.  I was later embarrassed that it was Twisted Sister that had frightened me so much, when it was the Iron Maiden Live After Death tape that I was really scared of.  I woke up in the night and went to my parents’ room and put them in the uncomfortable position of trying to explain death to a 7-year-old who is bawling his eyes out, doing that hiccupy cry breathe thing. 

Just last week I witnessed Milo doing that hiccup cry breathe thing when he was overtired, refusing sleep, and in a bawling rage telling me that he can’t stand his life, his life is weird and everything is annoying.  The crickets were too loud and driving him crazy he said, it’s always just the same thing over and over and over.  He refused to live in a world with those crickets, and wished there were no crickets anywhere.  I told him that it’s just the music that the crickets make and he said, well their music is awful.  When he started in on the hiccupy cry breathe thing he got even more worked up because he thought he was having an asthma attack, which he has had twice before in the night where he had to go to the ER.  I got him a drink of apple cider to calm him, but it was too sour, and he raged on until finally falling asleep, and in the morning he didn’t remember any of it, just me turning off the TV.

A year ago he told me of his ‘superhero plan’ where everyone else in the world would die, but not anybody in Bloomsburg.  We were drawing rocket controls and taping them to the wall, which he said must be kept there until “the universe ends” or “we run all out of love”.  A few are still up.

I’ve had similar panic attacks off and on for months during my senior year of college, which was also the year I got married, and the one outside that grocery store in Kissimmee on my tenth birthday, and the one when I was 7 in the station wagon, listening to “A Horse with No Name”.  I don’t have them anymore, not for years. 

America were from England—three U.S. Army brats, but British enough to have recorded “A Horse with No Name” in the Puddletown, Dorset home studio of one Arthur Brown.  You cannot read that without sounding British.  America had already released their album to little acclaim in Europe, and were out to save themselves by recording a hit song to tag on to the stateside release.  The song was written by band member Dewey Bunnell, who supposedly drew inspiration from the hot, dry desert of a Salvador Dali poster on the wall in Arthur Brown’s Puddletown studio, coupled with an Escher horse drawing, and Dewey’s memories of car rides through the New Mexico desert as a child. 

When the song was a hit in the States, most figured the song was about heroin, the horse a lot of rock stars were riding in on, and it was banned by a scattering of radio stations.  The controversy only seemed to help America.  The song soon became #1 and platinum selling. 

It makes perfect sense to me that the song came from family car rides Dewey Bunnell went on as a child, because that’s exactly how I came to know it, countless car rides with my family, crammed in a blue Plymouth Reliant.  There were always only ever two tapes in the car, So Far by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and History:  America’s Greatest Hits.  An ironic pairing in that when America arrived on that no name horse, they got a lot of flak for ripping off the CSNY sound, particularly Neil Young’s, who coincidently is listed as one of the original members on America’s Wikipedia page, with “inspiration” listed as his instrument.  Another coincidence, and the cause of much of the flak, came when “A Horse with No Name” hit #1 and unsaddled Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold”. 

I knew a lot of Neil Young from an early age, and did not mistake Dewey Bunnell’s Young-aping tenor for the real deal, though a lot of people did back in ’72 when the band made its debut.  The Neil Young I knew the most was After the Goldrush, which was my mom’s favorite, a pillar of my early taste alongside my Dad’s favorite, Fragile by Yes.  My mom had a small stomach for prog rock, and I think it was her tastes that determined the folky ease of our car ride listening choices, though she would always insist on fast-forwarding through America’s cover of “Muskrat Love” midway through side A of the tape. 

My parents met hanging out in the high school art room during lunches, listening to Led Zeppelin records.  My dad played in bands, wired himself a quadraphonic speaker system in his van.  By the mid 80’s they had more kids than hands and had moved on to greatest hits collections.

My family went on car rides all the time when I was a kid, the six of us crammed in, driving around the Columbia County countryside as my parents fantasized about living in this house or that, driving over a supposedly haunted bridge where my dad would make the car stall to scare us, or otherwise wasting gas in the name of family recreation.  I remember all the rides being a quiet kind of bonding time—we were never ones for family singalongs, and I remember listening to America more than I do any conversations we may have had.  The car rides were mostly time to think, look out the window, and ignore each other, together. 

            “A Horse with No Name” ranks among the most covered songs in rock, helped by the fact that the entire song is barely two chords.  The song’s gotten a lot of ridicule as well, particularly for banal lines like “the heat was hot” and the wtf wording of “there ain’t no one for to give you no pain”.  While I have no good explanation for that last one, the lyrics have always struck a chord with me.  I remember being fascinated by them when I was young and first heard them, and even now, after hearing them hundreds of times and singing them myself, there are certain lines that I find charming.  My favorite is “There were plants and birds and rocks and things”, the ‘things’ as silly as singing “et cetera” instead of finishing a thought, but it is precisely the vagueness of the “things”, how unnecessary it is for anything other than how it sounds, which lends the word its charm.  There is also a certain despair to it as well, being namelessly alone.  When you are one of six squeezed in a Plymouth, there is an attractiveness to that kind of isolation, a sad sort of contentment, with no one there for to give you no pain.  The la la las to me always seemed a little sad themselves, a resigned but aching, lonely attempt to stir some sort of singalong.  “La” has to be one of the easiest words to sing, over and over, and not sound like you’re crazy, which is why there are la la las in possibly millions of songs.  So, anytime a singer can sing la la la and still coax some emotion out of you, they’ve got something good, and Dewey Bunnell’s la las have still got it in my book.  Though, for the record, the saddest use is in Rod Stewart’s “Lady Day”, when he forlornly sings, “I get scared when I remember too much / la la la lala la la la”—one of the best lines ever, in my opinion.

So how did I end up standing outside of a grocery store in Kissimmee, Florida on my tenth birthday, clammy and feverish, feeling like a horse with no name?  It all began with the car ride from hell, February 1989.  The six of us, the station wagon, the usual, except this time it was all the way from Berwick PA to Florida.  First to St Augustine, the purpose of the trip, where my dad, who worked New Construction for Borden snack foods, whose factory in Berwick made the summer air in town, and my dad year round, smell like potato chips, was to help build the machines that would bring Wise Chips into the kettle-cooked game, with Krunchers and New York Deli chips, regular or jalapeño.  He had to work there for two weeks, so we all went with him, and he took his vacation time for the week after, so we could go to Disney World. 

The drive also happened to be perhaps the only time neither America’s History or CSNY’s So Far was in the car.  In fact, inexplicably, there was only a cassette single of “Waiting for a Star to Fall” by Boy Meets Girl, which because of bad radio reception, or a merciless God, we listened to over and over and over and over, through state after state, the whole way there.  I cringe to think of it, because I have heard it so many times that the mere thought brings that godawful song up crystal clear in my mind. Conjuring not even a twinge of nostalgic fondness, it is a song I hope to never hear again.  It is my “Muskrat Love”, my crickets that wouldn’t shut up.  To experience it yourself, listen to the song until you start to gag with nausea, which for me is about 20 seconds in, as soon as that insipid sax starts bleating, then listen to it 200 more times, in a row.

I somehow survived and we made it to St Augustine and everything was fine.  Motel living was a thrill, the weather was warm, and the days flew by until it was time to pack it up and head to Kissimmee, to Disney World.  I start to get sick, a fluish wooze draped over me, a turn in my stomach that for a while I blame on honey roasted peanuts.  That afternoon, sitting in front of the grocery store, I felt miserable.  Being sick is a strange and isolating experience as a child, in the way it alters how you see things, your ability be in the world around you.  It is especially bad when it is your birthday and dreams of Disney World are fading in the distance.  My mom was in the store for an eternity.  It was getting Dali out.  The heat was hot, my mouth was dry, and the air was full of sound. 

By the next morning I had willed my way to health convincing enough to keep the Disney trip a go.  My youngest brother Kevin, barely two at the time, was starting to show symptoms, so my mom decided to stay with him at the motel, leaving my dad to take the other three—me, Aaron, 11 at the time, and my brother Nick, who was 6 after also having a Florida birthday, back in St Augustine, on what is Groundhog’s Day to us Pennsylvanians.  So off we went, my Mom never trusting in my Dad’s care-taking, so likely thinking there was at least one of us she would probably never see again.  After feeling so much better, out of adrenaline and necessity, by the time the highway started widening and separating into 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 lanes approaching Disney World’s imperial gates, unsettling waves of sick began creeping their way back through my body.  I said nothing, staved them off as best I could, and by the time we were in the park, the adrenaline was back and I was feeling good again.  Then, waiting in line for the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, Nick turned a sudden green and puked all over my leg, and the shoe of the stranger in front of me.  It was all I could do not to throw up myself at the sight and the smell.

We abandoned the line and headed for a restroom for cleanup.  After things settled Nick claimed he felt all better, trying not to make the delusion too obvious, a struggle I sympathized with, as pissed as I was about my now wet pant leg.  My dad bought it, again, probably not knowing what else to do, and we eased back into our fun, heading over to where Mickey’s Birthday Party was being celebrated, giving Nick’s stomach a chance to settle before jerking it around on any rides, or perhaps to hide out from the guy whose shoe Nick puked on.  A mere few minutes into the birthday celebration, Nick started turning green again, and, in desperation, my dad handed him a ziploc sandwich bag, which did little to contain what came forth.  This time Nick got some on Goofy’s shoe.

The day was cursed.  The desert mirage of rides and magic and escape and things had turned into a sea of green.  We took a tense and dismal monorail ride back toward the parking lot and headed back to the motel.  On the plus side, we just dropped Nick off with Mom at the sick tent and headed back, still managed to hit up Space Mountain, the works, but I never remember the experience as being fun exactly, a little too shaken and still trying not to be sick, the ghosts in the Haunted Mansion more resounding than usual, and too much time to wait and think in line for the next ride.

As for Dewey Bunnell and his boys from Britain, they are riding that nameless horse to death, still touring to this day, playing 100 shows a year, and their first and biggest hit at each and every one of them.