max raze max might be the worst liar i've ever known. he was always calling in sick to work. when he ran out of believable ailments, he told his boss his brother almost died in a car accident. that worked until one of his coworkers ran into max's brother at a house party. "you look amazing," she said. "it's a miracle you recovered so well. how are you doing since the accident?" "what accident?" max's brother said. max forgot to brief him. he didn't know he was supposed to be almost dead. after that, he said his grandma had epilepsy. his grandma was already dead, but no one knew that. when he'd used up all the goodwill that lie bought him, he said he was the one with epilepsy. a girl he worked with believed him. she cried when he told her. he put his hand on her shoulder. "it's okay," he said. "i'll be okay." his girlfriend told him she was in love with his potential. i thought it was a cruel thing to say until i got to know him better. he was always saying something thoughtful like, "you've got a bit of a paunch there," or, "you should cut your fucking toenails." he tried to talk me out of buying a cheap classical guitar from the music store he worked at. he looked at me like i was stupid. he didn't understand. i knew it wasn't a good guitar, but that thing chose me. the same way a love-starved animal chooses you in a shelter. the same way the friends who become your family choose you. it ran me a hundred and fifty bucks. some of the best songs i've written wouldn't exist without it. max worked with a girl named sondra. when i told him i thought she was pretty, he laughed at me and called her "piranha face". he showed my dad his scrotum once in a public place. just for something to do. "it was horrid," my dad said. "it looked like an ancient, ugly face." but when max played upright bass and i played piano, something special happened. we would sit down without even a skeleton of an idea, we'd improvise together, and it was magic. every time. musical telepathy. that's what it was. i loved winging it while recording, capturing the music alive in the act of discovering itself. max thought we needed to map things out so we knew everything we were going to do before we did it. that would have killed the mystery. and the mystery was half the point. he was convinced we needed to bring in other musicians to thicken the soup. i didn't think we needed anyone else. i just wanted to make music. he fought me every step of the way. we played one live show together. adam put on an ambitious cd release show at the fm lounge with a bigger band than he needed to get his songs across. he just wanted to show everyone how big his dick was. we opened for him. i wasn't just the opening act. i was playing piano and singing harmony in adam's band too. first there was a stripped-down all-ages show with adam in the afternoon. i played my set with max after it got dark. ten minutes after that, i had to get back onstage and play adam's songs again with the full band. the stress made me sick. but i felt invincible on that stage with max. everyone froze. it felt like time stopped for forty-five minutes. i was going to bring some equipment with me to record the show. adam told me not to bother. he said he was taking care of that himself. a few days later, i asked him for a copy of the soundboard recording. "there isn't one," he said. "i was never planning on recording the show." maybe it was his way of getting back at me for upstaging him. i don't know. but i don't think i'll ever forgive him for that. we opened with a long, slowed-down, jazzy take on bruce springsteen's "state trooper". we did "do the mountain hop" with max dragging a bow across the strings of his bass. we warped "water to town" into a whole new song that incorporated mendelssohn's "wedding march", and dove deep into atonal noise at the end of "capricorn cloves". i played piano with one hand and bugle with the other. i did "your sweaty golden mouth" on my own and watched the audience push closer to the stage. we closed with "a well-thought-out escape" and almost threw enough energy into it to break the song in half. gone. all gone. when we were finished, max gave me a sweaty bear hug and said, "we fucking nailed it!" and i thought, "he gets it." the next day he was talking about getting other people to play with us all over again. he showed up one more time. i never saw him again after that. he kept standing me up or cancelling on me at the last minute. somewhere i still have my wall calendars for 2009 and 2010. between the two of them there are something like forty days where i wrote max's name with a question mark next to it and crossed it out when he broke the plans we made. he didn't tell me he had epilepsy. he didn't tell me his brother was in a car accident that never happened. i wasn't good enough for his best lies. i just got a bunch of half-assed bullshit. one day he called me and said he wanted to come over that afternoon so he could record some of his own songs. he wanted to try and snag a gig with someone he was willing to show up for, and he thought he could leech some free recording time off of me. that's all i was worth to him. i stood him up that time. we haven't talked since. i saw him say something about how great the mary_margaret o'hara album "miss america" was on facebook once and i wanted to put my fist through the computer screen and rip that music out of his life. because i introduced him to it. i wanted to take it all back. everything i gave him when i thought he was my friend. these days he bills himself as a folk-blues singer, imitating dave van ronk and calling it his own thing, selling a whole new line of shit to people too young or ignorant to know what they're hearing is the sound of a ghost having his pockets picked by a con man. he tours as much as he can so he can forget about his wife and kid and sleep with whoever he wants. then he comes back home and everyone tells him how great he is. last night someone stuck something in my mailbox. it was a pretty little handbill. it said max was going to be playing an outdoor house concert at the end of my street on sunday. the show is supposed to help call attention to someone's new little_free_library, but that's not why max is going to be there. it's another opportunity to get paid for ripping off a dead folk singer, and another excuse to stroke his own over-fed ego. so_this_is_what_it_takes to get him to show up. ten years after the fact. the handbill went straight in the trash. fuck recycling that shit. he doesn't deserve it. 211117 ... raze the concert never happened. one of two things happened here. either the show was cancelled because of the rain, or he flaked out on the people who hired him to play on their lawn. i know it's petty, but when it started drizzling half an hour before he was supposed to start, i laughed and said, "even the clouds think you're a jerk." 211121 what's it to you? who go blather from