The following is a re-write from months ago. I'm trying to get it published. Please CLICK HERE TO LEAVE ME SOME ADVICE

I studied Cut Creator's press photo. He posed with his hand resting under his chin like "The Thinker" and his head was perfectly round except for a lump in the back that showed prominently against the white background. In the picture he was a few years younger; thirty-two perhaps. "Can you give that back to me after you're done using it." He requested, between train wreck mixes and rusty turntable tricks. "It's the only press photo I've got."

Long ago, LL Cool J immortalized his childhood friend and DJ in the song, "Go! Cut Creator, Go!" Now LL concentrates on his movie and TV career. Music is secondary. The duo still keep in touch, but LL doesn't need Cut Creator for much anymore.

Cut Creator's search for post-LL meaningfulness led him to Tampa and a 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. Sunday night slot at Tampa's questionable commercial hip-hop radio station, WILD 98. Though Cut Creator isn't the shiniest star in the galaxy, it's rare that even a third-tier celebrity would come to roost in Tampa. So I interviewed our new Tampa neighbor at his marginalized radio show.

During the interview I flaunted my knowledge of his glory days. He was impressed. But he might not have been impressed with me at 13-years-old when the other white kids called me a freak for drawing the logo from Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing," in puffy paint, from my hip to my knee. Cut Creator might have cheered on the honky that took a swing at my acne-plagued visage, for wearing my Public Enemy jacket. Or tripped me in the hallway for wearing a leather Africa medallion (the same kind the MCs wore in the Self-Destruction video: red, black and green representing the blood, the brothers and the land) around my long, splotchy neck.

I was a grotesque irony. Horrific to gaze upon. But more inadvertently absurd than racially offensive. Not a poseur. Not a wigger as we know them today. Had I tried to mack, or lamp, or chill, or bug, that would have been whack. I spoke no differently. I didn't act hard. I remained myself: a red-haired, zit-faced, pink/white boy. But for some reason I just loved black people and expressed my love in a way I still don't fully comprehend. Now that I'm normal.

The black kids never came to a unanimous decision about me. But they dealt well with my awkward appreciation. If I had gone to Middle School with Cut Creator, he probably wouldn't have asked me to sit at his lunch table, but he might have slid me hip hop mix tapes, like some of the other black kids did when their friends weren't watching.

And the knowledge I contracted in more impressionable times, impressed Cut Creator so much, that in the weeks after our interview, he called me at work, to talk about music. One time he put me on hold and when he came back he said: "That was Chuck D. on the other line. I told him about you and he said if you ever want to interview him I can give you his number."

Other than Tony, and several women he'd met while DJing at Tampa clubs, I was one of his few friends in town.

During our conversations, it came up that I played music. So, Cut Creator told me his secret idea: "We played at The Grammies a few years back with a 12-piece band. " he recalled. "And ever since then I've had this idea for a group…a rock/rap hybrid."

'On the other hand,' I thought. 'we might have been best friends in Middle School.' His 'concept' was out-of-touch. But he was real, he was sincere, he was my friend and he was famous. So, I put together a band to back the Cut Creator.

The four-man 'band' held its first meeting at a café in Ybor City. As we sat at the bar drinking and waiting for Cut Creator, I silently studied my musical friends, wondering what Cut Creator would think of Aaron's greasy hair and sideburns like Brillo pads. I wondered how Cut Creator would react to a whiff of Damon's often horrible, too-cool attitude. I hoped that our fourth member, Henry, a clean, diplomatic, Asian guy, would guide us through our unlikely situation.

At 9:10, Cut Creator was two beers late and I felt the pressure of disbelief from my friends, who had yet to even meet this grand Cut Creator.

"So, where's your boy?" Damon sneered without looking at me.

I answered with nervous laughter, pessimistically remembering every musician who ever got my hopes up at a bar at 1 a.m. by slurring, 'Yeah, we should jam some time, let's start a band. Just gimmee a call.'

Another beer later, Cut Creator walked in, "Sorry I'm late, man, I was at the car dealership and I'm…"

"You're an hour and a half late," the three beers in my blood interrupted, "That sucks, you owe us each a beer."

"Uh…O.K…what are you drinking?"

We sat down at a table and after two more beers and Cut Creator's stories of touring the world, playing The Grammies, hanging with LL Cool J, we all got along famously despite Aaron's sideburns and Damon's attitude. But I held my breath as Cut Creator expressed his aspirations for a rock/rap band as if it were a groundbreaking concept. His frame of reference was, surprisingly, limited to old school hip-hop and radio music. Had he not been Cut Creator, the table would have cleared when he mentioned Limp Bizkit as some vague template. But instead, when he got up to use the restroom, Damon said, "We'll worry about it when we actually get down to playing music. We'll push him in the right direction." Aaron and Henry nodded agreement.

Cut Creator returned from the bathroom: "I've been talking to people about this lately, and I have things lined up. We'd definitely have funding for a tour and some nice equipment," Cut Creator said with no bravado, "If we can pull it off, we have built-in support."

Our obtuse crew got up from the table with yes's all around and walked toward the exit of the café. Cut Creator stayed sitting. "I'm going to use the phone," he said, "Michael, call me Monday." I turned around to respond to him and my heels caught on the rubber welcome mat and I tripped backwards through the doorway, out onto the sidewalk, smack landing on my palms. The bar inside went silent. I looked around for my friends but they were already a block up the street.

"Yeah, I'll call you Monday." I promised into the bar, blushing and rising to my feet, my hands still stinging.

- - - Damon and Aaron live in a huge, but decrepit house in Tampa. It used to be a daycare center and the vast back room of their trash mansion was once the kid's cafeteria where children ran between long rows of tables; their hands spitty and hunting-orange from regimented Cheetos feedings. But under Damon and Aaron's rule, the cafeteria is now a playground of musical instruments: three drumsets, a massive percussion set-up, two Moog synths, six guitar amps, two bass rigs, four organs, a Wurlitzer electric piano, various Casios, a Darth Vader mask that filters the wearer's voice to sound deep and menacing, a P.A. system, a mixing board, a digital recorder, dozens of microphones and effects and other equipment of mysterious purpose and origin. It's an impressive mess. Damon and Aaron call it Romper Room. They spend their lives there, taking bong hits and making music to forget their day jobs.

Aaron can play anything he hears, by ear, on most instruments. But unfortunately, neither he nor Henry joined us for our first practice with Cut Creator. It was to be just me and Damon and Cut Creator, or, Jay, he told us, was his real name, which relieved the anxiety I had been having about how to address him: 'Cut Creator'? 'Cut'? 'Creator' sounded sacrilegious.

I was nervous as hell before practice. But Damon wasn't sweating it. He aspires to nothing if not detached cool. He often comes off like a judgmental and conservative. But he is a left wing drummer: ambitious, creative, unafraid, inventive and unique, with an elegant sloppiness. He thinks he's a lot better than he is, but he's bad. Meaning good.

But Damon's coolness, coupled with my pre-practice jitters, suffocated me as we waited for Cut Creator to arrive. I practiced the bass. I had played six-string guitar for many years, but had taken up bass only recently, to fill the space in The Cut Creator Band. So I was still, repeatedly, upon looking down at the bass, experiencing moments of disorientation, expecting a guitar.

When Cut Creator showed up (only a half-hour late this time) I remembered the stories he'd told us when we were drunk at the bar. I remembered that the last band he'd played with included James Brown's horn section, at the Grammies no less. Intimidation grabbed me. 'Hey guys,' Cut Creator greeted us, waving as an equal, but I couldn't meet his gaze. Instead I looked down at the shiny knobs of my guitar, surprised again to find a bass.

While digging through his chord bag, Cut Creator suggested that Damon and I warm up together. Damon slapped out hard funk beats and ignored me as I ran and stumbled to keep up. He laughed. His coolness became a third musician playing off key, and too loudly for me to hear myself. I stopped. Damon kept on.

Cut Creator nodded his head and looked around, impressed at the musical junk. He sat down behind the Wurlitzer and landed two warm jazz chords. Damon hopped on them lightly. I stood blankly. The warm keys and Damon's soft funk sounded right. The cloud of immature basslines between my ears sounded wrong. I felt like I was losing a High School talent show.

Damon locked in solid and authoritative. "Play something man!," he shouted to me over his clanging drum kit. I turned to Cut Creator. He nodded at me and I averted his eyes again, reaching down and turning up my… 'Hey, why I am I holding a..? Oh.' I finally, sheepishly played: Pedestrian. Un-alive. The hip-hop in my heart wasn't helping.

Cut Creator and Damon had a conversation with their eyes as they played. It went like this:

D: Me and you sound good…

CC: Yeah, but what's with your boy…?

D: He's not my boy, that's your boy.

CC: No way man, that is definitely YOUR boy.

Cut Creator stopped playing the Wurlitzer. "Alright," he turned to me, "Play something like this…" He hummed an odd timed melody.

Damon nodded, seeming not un-happy to see me struggle and blush: "Yeah man, if it's going to be funky or soulful," he said to me. "you gotta play on the offbeat,"

Cut Creator continued humming and resumed playing his jazz chords. He was very patient. He still seemed to like me. Damon locked down and I slowly peeped in with the bass line Cut Creator hummed. I sounded good! I felt like Steve Martin in The Jerk. I wanted to wake my family and share the bassline. I hadn't made it up myself, but it was smooth. And the success let some air out. My ears popped like the plane was taking off as we rode the phrase in harmony and smiled at each other proudly and played it and played it and played it again. After a half-hour it began feeling as if the plane might never land: I was as afraid to get off the riff as I had been getting on. 45 minutes into it we all hated that once beautiful two-chord progression because we had ridden it into the dirt. We stopped. Cut Creator immediately started packing his equipment. My splotchy neck flushed. It was over.

And I had been so excited about playing with Cut Creator that, in days previous, I'd told everyone. I'd even told my father. Last time I spoke to him on the phone, he asked me, "So, are you still playing in that rapping band?" Now I was going to have to tell Dad and everyone that I got kicked of the band because I wasn't good enough. We hadn't even been a band long enough for our break-up to matter to the music media:

"I am no longer involved in the Cut Creator project," Welch, the founder of the group, stated to the press as he emerged through the front door of the house in which they held their first practice today. Welch sited "artistic differences" as his reason for leaving the band. "The other guys in the band are artistic," Welch said to the reporters, "And I, myself, am not."

"I gotta run back to the car dealership." Cut Creator said, pulling the strap of his DJ bag over his shoulder. "So, normally, you play guitar, right?" he asked me.

"Yes." Looking down, unhooking the bass from my shoulder, I carried it across ROMPER ROOM and set it in its stand with the same enthusiasm one might have for burying a dead family pet. I returned and stood in front of him and finally met his gaze: "Yeah I play guitar like a motherfucker." I answered. My failure on the bass had me feeling as if maybe I did indeed play guitar like a motherfucker.

"Next time we get together: you play the guitar, man," said Cut Creator, "You need to do what you're comfortable doing so you can have fun. And you will sound better if you're having fun. Right now, you sound uptight."

During our jam, I had been expecting Cut Creator to get up, jump in his new car, and jet. I was surprised to hear him speak of "next time". "I'm not even thinking about where this is leading," he continued. "Right now we just need to jam and have fun. So, next time…you play guitar. Don't worry about it."

- - - I'd learned from many bad first dates, not to call afterwards. But days later, Cut Creator called me in the newsroom.

"Hello, Michael."

"Hey…Creator…uh, Jay. What' s going on?"

"I'm producing a track for this Bay Area R&B group…Hispanic kids… they're called VALEZ. Can you come down and help us with the track…play some guitar?"

My head was a question mark: the DJ who had composed and produced the canonized LL Cool J hit, "Rock the Bells," was asking me to lend my talents--after having proved myself so very un-funky? Realizing that I'd regret passing up a production credit with Cut Creator, I overcame my insecurities and conceded to go in the studio. He gave me directions.

I implored him to let Aaron accompany us.

"Seriously, Aaron is masterful." I exaggerated.

Later that week, Aaron and I met Cut Creator outside the studio in a warehouse in the middle of nothing but metal fences and shiny, heat-breathing blacktop. Florida was brutal. Cut Creator was eating a Big Mac when we got there. He helped us unload the truckload of instruments we'd commandeered from Romper Room.

Our sweat dried inside the air-conditioned studio break room with its coffeepot and mini-fridge. As we entered Tony, stood over three, good-looking 15-year-old Hispanic boys, dramatically opining about the industry: "And they got nothing, no money, no credit. And that's how Foxy Brown got the track for Hot Spot…" Tony said. The boys hemmed and hawed and then faced me and Aaron and went silent. Cut Creator introduced us and the boys got up and shook our hands with tight smirks under their thin, almost-mustaches. The VALEZ boys' lips were pursed in suppressed laughter at, I assumed, Aaron.

Then Cut Creator introduced BLACK STAGE DAD who was far more effortlessly creepy than dirty Aaron could hope to be. BLACK STAGE DAD had iron-straightened hair and powerful, impending "stage mom" disappointment in his eyes. Over the next few hours, BLACK STAGE DAD would draw loud parallels between his boys and every banal, popularity of 1998. As we worked on the music, I ignored my unsettled stomach as he talked about "Boy bands!" and "The Latin music explosion!"

Cut Creator and I programmed beats as BLACK STAGE DAD ran his mouth and the boys studied Aaron and whispered to each other in Spanish. Within 5 minutes, Cut Creator had constructed a dated beat with well-worn samples. I suggested several other things only to be met with a loud look from Cut Creator, like: "C'mon…don't make this complicated." So I stopped helping and sat quietly thinking about how, between Cut Creator's lack of ambition and BLACK STAGE DAD's opportunism, the VALEZ boys would come away with an unhealthy image of music and what it means to be an artist.

When the beat was ready, BLACK STAGE DAD outlined our musical plan:

" The boys here wrote this song …I helped em…It's gonna be the big hit…it's gonna be like Puff Daddy!…it goes like that Madonna song (hums a few bars of, 'La Isla Bonita')…and they…we…made up some words to go along…it will definitely be big with the Latin crowd…the Latin explosion!"

I shot my 100th glance at the oblivious boys. They didn't get the joke that was definitely waiting to be got. Helpless, Aaron and I drank BLACK STAGE DAD'S beer, our only payment, as the boys sang their future #1, to the tune of Madonna's "La Isle Bonita":

"last night I dreamt of Puerto Rico…

It all seems like yesterday not far away…

(next couple lines in Spanish)

PRE-CHORUS: I miss the flags that wave so high,

...Latin music as cars go by,

I'm in American and don't know why.

La Isle Puerto Rico……

Don't you know that it's a sin,

To judge a man by his skin,

they look at you and say you're for-eign

…may I stay here no longer…"

"They usually sound much better." Said BLACK STAGE DAD to Cut Creator. "They just nervous."

We dragged our equipment into the vast recording room and proceeded to learn 'La Isla Bonita' on guitar and keyboard as Cut Creator, Tony, BLACK STAGE DAD and the boys, sat on the other side of the glass.

"What key would you like us to play it in?" Aaron asked at the glass. They didn't respond.

"Can they hear us in here?" I asked Aaron. "They must have the communicator off."

Once we realized we were out of their range, we let ourselves laugh a little. It felt good. We needed it. But it escalated. And soon, we were both incapacitated by the momentum of rolling laughter like girls at a slumber party as the crew looked at us quizzically from the other side of the soundproof glass.

We calmed back down. We felt better. Between relapses, we learned the chords and came back into the main control room, and played the skeleton of the song as VALEZ warbled along timidly.

BLACK STAGE DAD bullied them with a smile, "Speak up! Sing!" The boy's faces flushed, and their mouths opened wider like baby birds.

They should have been in their high school bathroom practicing until their school talent show where someone might ask them to sing at their birthday party and so on: slow and natural. But BLACK STAGE DAD was attempting to prematurely extract beauty from them. Aaron and I didn't laugh for the rest of the day.

After much fruitless repetition, Cut Creator and Tony, and BLACK STAGE DAD needed to talk alone. They sent me and Aaron and the three boys into the next room with the refrigerated Heinekens.

We were all used to each other by now. After seeing Aaron play keyboards, the boys seemed to admire him.

"So, Puerto Rico must be something else?" Aaron asked them.

"We've never been there." Said the member who could not sing.

"Seriously? When are you going to visit your country for the first time? I hear it's…"

"We're not Puerto Rican." Said the boy with the healthiest mustache.

"I am!" Said the one with the second healthiest mustache.

"Your mom is, but your Dad's white." The bad singer corrected him.

"That means I'm Puerto Rican…"

"Well, we are Spanish…" Said the healthiest mustache.

In the grand surreality of the day, we saw no reason to pursue this minor detail. So we discussed working with Cut Creator.

"I was watching USA Network when I was at my parents house this weekend," I told them, "And I saw the scene in Krush Groove where Cut Creator and LL Cool J go into that record exec's office with the boombox and…!"

The boys had never heard of Krush Groove.

We told the boys how lucky they were to have his name associated with their music; whether we believed that or not. We discussed our favorite hip-hop groups and the boys seemed to have a sincere love for music. I feared for the safety of their love. The more beer I drank, the more I wanted to stop the boys' impending artistic death.

"You know what sucks?" I blurted out. "Groups like The Roots play all their instruments and really care about music, but they get no airplay."

The kids hemmed and hawed and concurred and lamented. One of the boys commented how he wished he could play keyboard like Aaron.

"So do I." I told him. "Cause no matter what, man," I took turns meeting each boys' gaze, "No matter what, it's more important to be artistic than popular."

More hems and haws, nods. Aaron and I took synchronous drinks of our beers and I continued: "I'd rather starve than make some whack shit you know it's like all these…" I stopped as BLACK STAGE DAD came in the door behind the boys.

"What are you guys talking about?" BLACK STAGE DAD eyed me.

"Nothing," said us five in unison.

Once back inside the studio, it was decided that we would lay down the music first while the boys practiced singing. I took my guitar back into the soundproof room, wrapped the headphones around my head and strummed into the microphone. My ears filled with the sharp, magnified sound of my own playing. Cut Creator's played-out beat came in behind and I strummed along. The tape ran. I sounded sloppy. Looks of discontent from the other side of the glass. Pressure. Stop the tape. Make excuses. The tape ran. My rhythm guitar screamed high-pitched imperfection in my sweaty earphones. I didn't sound good close up. For a half-hour, I listened to myself choking on a tune. Stop the tape.

"Can you guys turn me down in my headphones?"

After forty-five minutes, they stopped the tape for good. "You guys should just let Aaron do this." I admitted with earsful of sweat.

Aaron played the keys. Then the rhythm guitar. Then the shakers. Spotless. Later, I overdubbed a half-ass "Latin" guitar solo and finally, we were done. I packed up all the equipment I'd brought but hadn't used. My face flushed red again and again as I bent over, picking my shit up off the studio floor. I never heard from Cut Creator again.

Over the next couple of months, Aaron went back in the studio several more times to help VALEZ and Cut Creator and BLACK STAGE DAD finish the project. For $8 an hour, Aaron hauled half of Romper Room across town by himself, to toil over their music. I thought I heard tears in his throat as he described waking with "La Isla Puerto Rico" in his dreams. But I'm not sure if tears were what I heard. My ear's not that great.

Several months later the LL Cool J, man-eating shark flick, Deep Blue Sea would feature a Latin hip-hop, R&B appropriation of "La Isla Bonita."