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That Time When All the Sad People Came and Stayed at My House - Part Two

By Adam Rapp

James Ingalls hasn't left his home in Pollard, Illinois in 14 months. It's his father's house; dad's long since retired to Florida with wife number three. James, meanwhile, has lost his ambition and his wife. Sheila Anne left him just days after his brother was killed in Iraq. He hasn't taken off his robe in more than a week. And more importantly, he hasn't restrung his guitar for a year.

The band is -- or I should say was -- called The Third Policeman (an homage to Flan O'Brien's masterpiece) and we made a pretty good go of it here in the Midwest, mostly playing college bars and occasionally opening for some indie/new school band out of Portland or Akron; some slack-haired, waif-thin copycat quartet brimming with wit, a lazy live performance habit, and unwarranted industry irony.

The Third Policeman, on the other hand, was a well-aged, anti-industry jam band with a penchant for outro pop harmonies and the occasional punk vibe. I mostly fronted, wrote a good share of the lyrics, and played a vaguely informed rhythm guitar. We released an EP and two LPs on a small label out of Madison, Wisconsin called Foundry Records, and spent most of our time after the release of the first LP ("Argon Lights") touring highbrow music towns and making the occasional college radio appearance. At our best we were as tight as anyone, and when our drummer Glose wasn't fucking us (and himself) over during his huffing stage (as in airplane glue), we looked like a band that could break through the ranks and make a real go of it on the national level. Before Glose wound up in an emergency room in Lawrence, Kansas, Foundry had planned a month-long European tour for The Third Policeman that would have surely taken us to the next level. The shame about Glose is that when he had his head on straight, watching him drum was like witnessing someone operating a flying machine.

Besides Glose's erratic episodes, which included shoplifting, public nudity and several fistfights, our biggest weakness was our lack of focusing our ambition. We were creepily Chekhovian in this way. Our Moscow was New York and L.A. and we talked about testing those large markets with emphatic music in our voices. But whether our handicaps were financial (no one made more than $300 a week), romantic (what became fondly known as The Third Policeman's "Yoko Factor"), spiritual (depression, lack of artistic faith, fear, etc.), transportation-related (no one ever seemed to have a large enough car for two guitar amps, a bass amp, drums, and a bunch of gear, or good enough credit to rent one), we couldn't manage to get our shit together.

Everyday distraction is a kind of syndrome that can cripple any band, especially one with four members. At least one of them has to be the organized one and keep things rolling with the booking guy, the label rep, website maintenance, silk-screening the T-shirts, the tour manager, etc. Of the four of us, Morris, our lead guitarist and king of the inspired punk incantation (one of The Third Policeman's signature bits), was that guy, and he knew it and didn't like this fact. I could have been that guy, but I was too in love with Sheila Anne and my priorities had already started to shift away from the band and toward the false ether of married life. Glose most certainly was not that guy for a thousand reasons and Kent (our bassist) had a hard enough time balancing his own checkbook.

Sitting here at this moment, it is somehow Morris I miss most; Morris "The Cat" who ran a 10.8 100 meters in high school and was the first white male to win the state of Ohio in that event in almost 20 years and who turned down Division I track scholarships to three Big 10 schools to attend the very unathletic, highly cannabis-saturated Reed College in Portland, Oregon for the sole purpose of having the opportunity to study with the poet Gary Snyder; Morris, the left-handed "White Hendrix," enigmatic master of the upside-down imitation Danelectro with which he could make more exciting noises than a guitar jock with a $5,000 axe and a 900-part pedal rig. Morris came to Pollard to live cheaply while writing poetry about power stations and the encroaching dominance of what he called "the radio trees." How he sought us out is anyone's guess. I ran into him playing an open mic at a poetry reading. He was using a delay pedal and reading some of his work and it might be the purest form of human expression I've ever witnessed. For over a year I courted him to form a band with me and when he eventually did I thought I had discovered a great secret that would solve at least three percent of mankind's foibles. After the band split up he stayed around and played in my basement with me for a few months but eventually left town without a goodbye and is currently teaching Language Arts at a junior high school in Durham, North Carolina.

There were four of us in The Third Policeman and we all had day jobs. Glose handed out meds at the local mental hospital. Morris did sod work for his father's landscaping business. Kent worked at the library re-shelving books and sold homegrown weed to high school kids that looked like dehydrated Japanese noodles. I wrote a column for the alternative weekly, the Pollard Pigeon, mostly charting my experiences, opinions, and attitudes about the local and national music scene and how it related to just about anything. I was a creative writing major in college (Loras College, Dubuque, Iowa), so my byline gave me the false sense that I was actually applying an otherwise wasted higher education (yes, I'm still paying the loans back).

Pollard, Illinois is a small town, of about 25,000 people, whose chief source of industry was for years a flourishing steel mill that was eventually squeezed out of the market by the Koreans. Since its demise, the town had been in a long economic decline until the arrival of a pair of gambling boats, which are now parked on the Blackhawk River like two enormous floating pastries. Now people from miles in all directions descend on Pollard to play slots and try their luck on table games.

For reasons I don't completely understand, my ex-wife did not take Dennis Church's last name, although she did take mine. We were Mr. and Mrs. James Ingalls for exactly four years, seven months and 22 days. I quantify my number based on the Thursday evening she walked out of the house, not on the post-marked date featured on the divorce papers, which arrived by certified mail almost exactly a year after her departure. She now uses her maiden name -- Glavine -- and mine has been deleted from her identity like a smudge wiped clean from a bathroom mirror. Sheila Anne, who was for years a serious photographer, has been hired onto an elite sales force of a leading pharmaceutical company. I imagine her walking around New York City in mannish suits, carrying an expensive leather attaché full of brightly colored psychoactive samplers that might do a world of good for yours truly.

Although she travels often and makes frequent visits to nearby St. Louis, I haven't seen my ex-wife in almost two years (688 days to be exact).