Water is my happy place. The sound, the motion, the feel. I love floating around in the stuff, especially the ocean. It was a very particular crime that in my teenagehood I saw the movie Jaws. It didn’t happen when I was fourteen, the year it came out, but somewhere around the time a person thinks they’re a tough-ass and wants to prove to their friends how they can handle anything (Exorcist, sure. bring on the tubular bells. Walk across that train trestle in the dark, well why not. Swim in the ocean as the sun sets, let’s do it.). But then I saw that damn movie and when someone suggested a midnight plunge into the Pacific, I had a million-and-one-excuses why not. Because I was smart. Also because stories affect me, whether fictional or otherwise. Case in point, when I’ve been in particularly gnarly situations during my working life, I’d think, Someday this will make a good story. If I live through it and keep my sanity intact. And, depending on your definition of sanity, I mostly have.

The Pacific ocean is the one I grew up on (and the one I’m staring at right now), but when I moved to NYC, the Atlantic was the place to visit if you wanted waves and such. I didn’t get there often. I had the Hudson to stare at if I just needed to see some undulations. But when I did visit the Atlantic, I became acquainted with its different personality. To me, the Pacific is bonfires, puka shell necklaces, passing a bottle and/or a joint. The Atlantic more boats, Hermés wraps, cocktails with gin. But still…I love me some ocean and was happy anytime I had an assignment that would take me there.

In the mid-nineties, after I’d left SPIN, I was director of video promotion for Elektra records. There had just been a change in leadership and more R&B artists were coming on the scene. One of those was an Adina Howard. Her album Do You Wanna Ride? was just out and since I was responsible for getting her video seen on MTV, when they asked her to do a live performance on the beach in Miami, lip-syncing her single “Freak Like Me“, well that was my cue to go to work. We would fly down for the taping, One day on the beach, two overnights, then back on the plane.

I figure all of us know a little about imposter syndrome. I had a pretty good dose of it going on. I’d also come to understand that when I was a journalist, artists treated me differently. With a certain amount of deference or familiarity because I was in charge of interpreting them to the world. But at the record company, I worked for the artist and they mostly treated me as such. And there was no doubt where the power dynamic was leading in this particular scenario. The ladies (Adina and her dancers) were perfectly civil, but they had some demands and I had some marching orders. First, I’d been told in no uncertain terms by my boss that Adina was not to be allowed to commander the car service that had brought us in from the airport. That seemed a pretty easy thing to do. When we pulled up in front of the beach-side hotel the first night, we all got out, the bellhops took our stuff out of the trunk, we went into the lobby. I began to check us in. They were lounging in reception, or so I thought. After getting all the room keys, I went to find them and was told by their manager that Adina and the ladies had taken the car into the heart of South Beach. Wait…what? So that was the first thing. From there it got better.

We had a dinner scheduled with a radio station that night, which until three minutes before we were meant to leave, I was sure would be blown given they hadn’t returned back to the hotel. This was a pre-cellphone time. Big stress. When the car, same one that had brought us from the airport four hours earlier, same driver, his hat slightly askew, pulled into the circular driveway, I was relieved, but also still terrified. I can’t remember the meal. I can’t remember whether I slept. I do have a clear vision of me the next day gathering them in the lobby and walking down to the beach where the taping was happening. A technicolor slice of memory at having to run back up the beach and into the hotel for something Adina or one of her dancers wanted for the performance and only having under-five minutes to get it. A visceral sense of me sweating, not being able to find whatever it was I’d gone back for, possibly being on the verge of tears and knowing that the taping was now delayed, that somehow I should have known how to circumvent this. That I was no doubt going to lose my job. Then a flash in my mind of it being over. Me raiding the mini bar in my room, stepping out onto the balcony and seeing Adina and her dancers getting back in the damn car service they’d been told not to call again. And driving away.

I think I lived in a pretty constant state of tension back in those days. A buzz of crainess that was the opposite of relaxation. The thing I look for when staring at waves and endless blue water. Not to mention, I don’t care for Miami. Or maybe it’s that the Atlantic and I don’t have a super good relationship…oh, hurricanes. But yet, my beloved Pacific can have its issues too…I just can’t fully remember them all right now. Nor am I going to try. Instead, I’m going to take my swim mask and paddle around for awhile, leave the memories behind.

Today’s audio: the waves&birds