Rendezvous with an Old Mistress

Breaking up with your one true love is hard to do

Today, I met up with my cousin, who plays bass for a hard rock band. I haven’t seen him in years, which is mostly my fault because I have made myself too busy with a million-plus things. But today, I met up with him because of a “business proposal.” I have been considering going into business for quite some time now and have explored so many ideas that I do not know which one to start. My latest idea was to start a royalty-free music production company and I thought my cousin would be a good fit for a business partner.

I arrived at our meeting spot in Orange County wearing the hat of an entrepreneur. I was prepared to pitch my idea, discuss growth strategies, outline marketing tactics, and plan logistics. As if I knew anything about that kind of shit. But I prepared to wow my cousin and act like I knew what the hell I was doing.

Our meeting spot was in this old industrial office complex. There was nothing exciting about it and I thought that I was in the wrong place when I arrived there. But then my cousin showed up and I was reassured. After exchanging “What’s up’s? and fist bumps, my cousin jangled out his keys and unlocked this dank and abandoned looking office.

“You own this place?” I asked.

“No, we’re just renting it,” he said.

“Cool.” At that point, curiosity began to seep in. “I thought you were renting a studio for a couple of hours or something like that.”

“Oh no, we pay a monthly fee here, you know, like an apartment,” my cousin said as he opened one of the rooms.

He opened the door and there was a lot of stuff in there. Drum sets, guitars, amps, ash trays, broken drum sticks, and half-consumed beer. Suddenly, I had this weird feeling that is kind of hard to describe except that it is the kind of feeling you get when you run across an old flame that you have never been able to get over no matter how long you have been apart. It was a surreal experience, being in there. It was a dingy old place and I fucking loved it.

We both lit a cigarette as I stood mesmerized inside that room.

I ended up proposing my business idea, which only took about two minutes of our discussion. My cousin agreed to help and that was that.

The majority of our conversation centered on music, playing live, and odd time signatures. We jammed for a bit — he played bass and I played drums — and smoked a couple more cigarettes. After that, a guy from another practice room came and asked, “What’s up?

I would later be introduced to this guy named Joe who played avant-garde classical jazz. He would talk about his music in jargon I could not understand. But I would listen and feel that whatever he was saying was important because of how passionate he was when said it. My cousin, the long-haired rockstar in the making, was able to catch up with old Joe and was also speaking in jargon. Meanwhile, I, the entrepreneur, was lost in all this. It was upsetting in a way, because I felt like I was locked out of a country that I had once been a part of.

You see, eons ago, I played in a band called Daimos Killed Betty Boop. We played alternative rock. We made a whopping 100 pesos from almost a whole year of playing, but we were able to get around, enough to ogle some of the prettiest girls in Manila and drink good alcohol most weekends. But when I left the Philippines in 2006 to migrate to the United States, I also left a passion and a lifestyle. I modified my mindset when I arrived to the United States. Suddenly, I was no longer the libertine lead guitarist of a young up and coming alternative rock band.

I became the college student who, despite some naughtiness on the side, was generally a clean-cut kid who had his entire life all planned out. I went through this shift partly because the plane ride to Los Angeles messed me up so bad that I wanted to forget whatever made me happy back home, but also because I began to see music as an unsustainable life path. I didn’t stop loving it; I just had to start thinking about other things, like groceries. So I shelved the whole rock star dream, finished off my degree in the oh-so-safe public administration field so I can work as a bureaucrat with good health insurance and early retirement. But I soon realized after college that public administration is not such a safe major after all because you need two years experience just to push some fucking papers.

I went around hopping about seven dead-end jobs, tried my hand at online freelance writing and made $4 an hour for a couple of months, got fed up, went back to school for an even more oh-so-safe degree in nursing while working as a nurses aide, got a decent paying job thanks to hook ups, bought a nice car, then realized on October 5, 2014 that no amount of success or failure in my life would change the fact that music, the dirty mistress of my past, will always be the love of my life.

Raymond Aguirre studied journalism at Mt. San Antonio College and received a bachelor’s in public administration from California State University Fullerton.

This story is a part of a special alumni series. Students who have graduated or transferred from Mt. San Antonio’s journalism program are featured weekly.

Substance is a publication of the Mt. San Antonio College Journalism Program. The program recently moved its newsroom over to Medium as part of a one-year experiment. Read about it here.