“Henry,” my cousin Brad yelled.
“Hey, Brad,” I greeted him. “Good to see you.”
My cousin Brad was a couple of years older than me, and we were fairly close, until he moved to Iowa when we were teenagers. I saw him about once every five years now, and I caught him on Facebook now and again, when I ever got on that detestable thing.
But I heard Brad owned a bar and did pretty well for himself. Kudos to him, although it was a far cry from how we grew up. Brad was an artist. He filled books and books with sketches, and they were all really good. Then, as we got a little older, he branched off into graphic design, and I couldn’t keep up with him. He was a genius on PhotoShop, InDesign, or whatever software he was into at the moment. Then he knocked someone up in Iowa, went to bartending school, and worked his way up. Now, his Facebook was all about liquors and wine events.
“How’s it going, man?” I asked as Vicki and I approached the stoop.
The music was pumping from the inside now, and it was difficult to talk. Brad stood outside smoking with a few other cousins.
“I quit drinking,” he replied.
I raised an eyebrow. “Is that right?”
“Yep,” he chuckled, “I’m a real live twelve-step recovery monkey.”
“Congratulations,” I told him, but I wasn’t even aware his drinking had ever been a problem.
“Thanks, man,” he replied before his eyes flickered to the woman beside me.
“Brad, Vicki.” I gestured in a shorthand way of introductions, and the two greeted each other and shook hands.
“What does recovery do to your professional life?” I asked.
He laughed. “That’s why I’m here. I’m giving up bartending, and I’m moving back.”
“You’re moving back to Sedona?” I asked. “Why on earth would you do that?”
The comment came out of my mouth before I could stop it, and I thought I really had no room to talk.
“I’m getting a job with the film festival,” he said with a shrug.
“No kidding?” I chuckled.
“Hell yeah,” he replied.
The Sedona Wine and Film Festival was a massive annual event that took over the entire town for about a week. People came in from all over the country to attend, and every man, woman and child in Sedona participated in the festival in some form or another. It was such a big event, there was a full time board that worked on it all year. This year’s festival had just ended a couple of months ago, and our firm had gotten dragged into a massive legal mess of backstage politics surrounding the event.
“There was a big scandal this year with the festival funding,” I told him.
He smiled. “I heard about that. I also heard you came in and drained the swamp, so to speak.”
He wasn’t wrong, but I wouldn’t have put it that way. A city councilwoman had been embezzling money from the festival accounts for decades, and I helped to uncover it all.
“I’m just glad they got new leadership in there,” I said. “I think it’s got some good fresh blood.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “I’ll be doing a lot of work with the media department, they told me.”
“Well, then we’ll see you guys around a lot more, huh?”
“Yep,” he replied. “Me and Ozzie are moving in with my mom for a while until I can get settled.”
Ozzie was his ten year old son, and the fact that Brad and his baby mama named their kid after the infamous bat-eating rockstar says everything there is to know about those two.
There was a loud cheer on the stoop, and Brad and I turned to see another handful of our cousins throwing lit fireworks at each other.
“I don’t even think you can do fireworks out here,” I muttered to Brad.
“Tell that to them,” he chuckled.
“No thanks,” I said. “I’ll just wait for them to get arrested. Shouldn’t be long.”
“Eh,” he shrugged, “I think most of them are on a first name basis with all the cops in town.”
“I wouldn’t doubt it,” I laughed.
Vicki and I headed inside, and there were people everywhere. My parents, Saffron and Moondust, were fairly popular in town, and when the Irvings had a party, it was a party.
My dad was a pretty kick ass guitarist, and in the 1970’s, his band was offered a recording contract with Columbia Records. They would have toured with Creedence Clearwater Revival and been legit rock stars. But, shortly before the deal was signed, the drummer got offered a job as a backup drummer for Led Zeppelin. The drummer took the job, and long story short, the deal with Columbia was rescinded.
So, the remaining band members took a pilgrimage out to Sedona to cleanse out the negative energy or whatever at the vortexes. They studied under some guru, where my mother also hung around. She read a lot of Jack Kerouac and talked about traveling the country and exploring Zen Buddhism and whatever else. The guru eventually married them in a ceremony on Cathedral Rock, and that is the story of why we’re from Sedona. When I lived in L.A., sometimes I would look at the rock star kids my age, and think about what a different life I almost had.
But now my dad played in bars and bands and knew every musician in and out of town, young and old. When we had dinner parties, they all came out of the woodwork.
Tonight, the festivities were well underway, and right now the song was nothing in particular, just long and involved “jamming,” with distorted electric guitars and a drum set, and someone threw in a keyboard this time.
Kids ran around, some I knew, some I didn’t, and paper plates dotted conversation circles all
