I randomly ran into Tom Waits last weekend. I actually ran into him twice in the same day in two separate towns. What are the odds?

The first time we were both standing in an old second-hand junk store in Bodega staring into the same old display case. There were old antique ashtrays, daggers, belt buckles and such, everything reeking with that musty last-of-the-Mohicans presence. I would have never even recognized him if he hadn’t of started asking the owner a few questions about the stuff in the store.

“Are all those up there for sale or just personal?”

That haunting, gravel-blown voice stops you dead in your tracks and you feel like all of sudden the whole ragged pantheon of smoky characters from his long and twisted catalogue has just fallen out of the ceiling and are dusting themselves off all around you. Confetti from decades ago still faintly twinkling.

“Oh, they’re just personal… okay….”

I chose, wrongly perhaps, to keep my mouth shut and just move along. I typically don’t like to bother anybody. Plus what the hell are you going to say to Tom Waits? Let the man tinker. But you can imagine how stunned I was to see him again an hour later outside of a country grocer in another town ten miles away. He pulled up in a black Lexus station wagon caked in dusty mud. This time however he seemed somewhat antsy and worried. He picked up the pay phone outside the liquor store, glanced around, then hung it back up as if maybe he was supposed to call somebody or supposed to be somewhere but he couldn’t quite recall who or where.

Can you imagine living in a little rural Sonoma town where Tom Waits is running around like a fugitive, slowly succumbing to Alzheimer’s, ducking and dodging around town trying to avoid his own scary little puppet show?

Almost makes you want to leave the city.