Pearl Under the Shell: Remembering David Kimm "Doc" West

David West was sitting on the couch at the Dry Dock on Greenwich Street in San Francisco one day when I walked in, not too long after I moved here in the fall of 1987. In time I learned he lived just down the street, at 2906 Van Ness, with his cat and, he discovered while moving, a whole lot of mold. He might not have noticed it because a cigarette was burning most of the time. He quit some years later, but he went back.  Cigarettes were among David’s friends. And if you were a friend of his, he stuck with you.

The Dry Dock was an old house that had been converted to a sort of Twelve-Step rooming house, with meetings in every room save the one where David was sitting. That was where everyone, no matter what their affiliation, met and talked. David kept himself a bit apart in those days—well, he always did, in a way, but this was what I would call his “crabby” period. He could be ornery, as anyone who knew him will attest, but at this time he made a habit of it. It was tempting to keep a certain distance from him. But if you stuck around, you got to know the guy beneath that surface. Under that shell was a pearl.

Not everybody bothered to look. David (was he “Doc” by then?  I always called him “David”) and I auditioned for the same band. The bandleader told me, “You know if I could put this band together without musicians, I would do it,” and said of David, “I hope I didn’t offend him nearly as much as he offended me.”

David changed as he healed from the effects of a hard life: he’d left home at fifteen, knocked around the streets, come to San Francisco and joined a group where one night he finally persuaded a band mate who didn’t want to give it to “the kid” to let him try something. His new love, heroin, took him for a ride that ended with a nightstick on the head when he resisted arrest, and in the hospital every addict’s companion, fear, kept him for two days from the surgery he needed. In that time, some of the injury became permanent.

I learned all of this down the road. I was never much of a drinker or fond of drugs; I’d seen what they could do to people. So I never had the pleasure of hearing David speak at meetings, where I imagine the raconteur in him held forth. I heard some of the stories from him, eventually; if he was in them, they were always self-deprecating. He was never a hero to himself, and he didn’t want you to see him as one. He was just a guy who, by the grace of God, was clean and sober today.

Neither of us was chosen for that band, and I was sore at him for the way he’d treated the bandleader, who I never saw again. David kept popping up, often at Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners at the Dock, and we would nod at each other. 

I honestly don’t remember how we ended up talking one day or exchanging phone numbers, but suddenly my life just included David—first as an acquaintance, then as a collaborator (we wrote some songs I’ll post as soon as the recordings are fine-tuned; I have to be extra careful now, since I can’t run them by him first), and then, over time, one of my closest friends.

But David could be prickly, even up to a few months ago, when we were all begging him to keep trying to find a doctor (the local “health providers” wouldn’t take his insurance. He later told me he’d been trying to get a biopsy since he got to Nashville ten years ago, and the clinic he went to kept telling him he just needed blood work).

 

“I don't want to talk about it!” he said. 

Fortunately, someone finally prevailed upon him to call five doctors a day until he found one who would see him. But by then the Hepatitis C (a vestige of his former life) had led to cirrhosis, and the next test showed possible cancer in two parts of his liver. He didn’t live to find out for sure.

But uncertainty was another friend David lived with for life. He had no time for easy answers—though he did make plans (he was one of the most organized people I ever met), and he worked the Twelve Steps. “Work” was the operative word here. David believed in it. 

“Don't worry about how you feel,” he’d say, when I’d call him in distress, telling me he’d long since realized his first take on things was not to be trusted. Or “F--- a bunch of feelings.”  He taught me that, no matter how ripped up I might feel about something that had happened, what would get me through it was taking action on things that mattered. He would listen, some, to a story about an incident.  But especially in the early days (he mellowed a bit as time went on), he’d often say, “Stop.” “No, I don’t want to hear that,” pushing me until I learned to tell what I call the “David West version” of stories: short and sweet. Once I said to him, “David, you always get right to the point. How do you do that?”

“I just figure everybody’s busy.”

David was often busy, gigging (he’d taught himself to play all over again after the injury. Given what an ace guitarist he was, I can’t even imagine what he was like before it happened), practicing, playing weekly duets with a friend, going to meetings, and working with sponsees. Later, you could add to that list work on his cottage and, at one point, teaching himself to repair furniture. (Typically, David found fault with himself for the fact that he wasn’t farther along on these things, rather than giving himself credit for whatever progress he had made.)

That cottage was in Nashville. A family member had died, and David had inherited enough money to finally buy something and keep the wolf from the door. Not at San Francisco prices, though, and so we lost him. Neither of us is very good at goodbyes, and maybe that’s why he left a message on my finicky answering machine saying he had left his newer model on the porch for me to pick up. The next time I saw him, and the last one, was when he was in town for some recording and we met for coffee.

That might also be why, when I asked him last week if there was anything I could do to help him, he said, “Be happy. And go for your dreams.”

Not the way David usually talked, to put it mildly, and, busy asking when he would know the latest test results, I missed the signal. David was saying goodbye.

It’s a miracle that he was saying anything, really. The injury had left him unable to talk. People meeting him in Nashville might have assumed, as I did, that he was from that neck of the woods. No. The guy who had helped him learn to speak again, all those years ago, was a Southerner. David was an Angeleno.

But while he spoke and played music beautifully, the injury had made driving impossible. He was enough in demand as a guitarist to get work anyway, but it made things harder, and it made buying a place in L. A. out of the question.

I’m sure everybody drives in Nashville, too. It may be that David wanted to let his home state go. He came to love Nashville, and I gather that folks there loved him back. I was looking forward to seeing his cottage, recording with him, letting him show me around Nashville. Not to be. But he showed me something bigger. He showed me his heart.

For many years now I’ve been avoiding answering the phone on my birthday, so I could save David’s latest birthday song. His songs were always funny; half the time he’d be making them up as he was singing.

Once when I was worried about some little thing I was sure was a big one, I called and read from what I would call an “herbal-derbal” book in my library (I believe in casts for broken limbs and arnica for twists and turns). He listened for a minute and, having heard me talk about the book before, said, “I think you should throw that book out.” I didn’t (though it’s been rooming in a box pretty much since then), and a couple of weeks ago I asked if he wanted to hear some of the things it said about cirrhosis. Okay, he said. I read him some of the entries, made some other suggestions, and he said “Thank you.” But he didn’t say, “Thank you” the way most people do. He said it with the emphasis on the first word.

That was David, grateful for whatever he was given. When he finally found a doctor, he said, “I’m so glad to be back in the system.” As to the illness itself, he just said one of the results was “icky.” He didn’t complain, and he wouldn’t let you do it, either. He had no patience for self-pity. When I would talk about things I hadn’t achieved yet, or things I should have done, he’d say, “I’m a failure, too. So what?” He wanted to know what you were going to do next. 

And if that thing was music, it had better be good. You’d call him with a song you were sure was really good, the best thing you’d ever written, all ready to record, and he’d say, “That’s got promise. Keep working on it.”

So I did. And one day, to my amazement, I sang him something and he said, “Oo-wee!” After he heard another one he liked he said, “You’re not kidding yourself.” I was over the moon.

Aside from piano lessons as a kid, a few voice lessons, and a couple of classes over the years, I’m self-taught as a musician.  I've always had an ear (I could play what I heard on the radio) and some sense of structure (I transposed my first song when I was eight and composed my first one not long after), but my knowledge of music theory was limited. I announced to David that I was going to work on this and he told me to just get a book out of the library. 

He loved telling the story of how he’d thought he was great shakes and one day a guy in one of his first bands said, “Hey, kid, you’re pretty good. Try this”—and handed him a metronome.

I called David a few days after getting the book. “I start reading it and my mind closes down.”

“What book is that?” 

I told him.

“Oh, that one,” he laughed. “Everybody that picks up that book thinks, “I don’t know a thing about music and I’ll never be able to learn!” 

“So should I get a different book?” 

“Nah,” said the Marquis. “Just know everyone else feels that way, too.”

He told me once that he'd always wanted to be a writer. I’m convinced he would have been a fine one. William Stafford said that the difference between writers and other people is that writers pay attention. David paid attention.

A few weeks ago I came home to find a message on my voicemail. It was David, calling to say he was about to turn in but didn’t want to go to bed without apologizing. This was probably for being abrupt with me when I was the umpteenth person to call and noodge him to go to the doctor.

But for David, the focus was always on his own actions, on what needed to be done to make things right.  He wasn’t doing it to try to puff himself up. It was like that ship you hear about at sea, always adjusting to stay on course. It was the pearl under that shell, peeking out.

©2012-2015 Laynie Tzena.