Steve, one year later. March 2024.

 Watching scattering snowflakes from the passenger window, they swirled and looped, taking their own time to land. The dance they performed was a gleeful dance of teasing the brown dried husks of corn, bending down to touch them, then letting the wind carry them back up and around, a bait and switch that nature plays with itself. When they landed, we are already  further down the state route, onto the next corn field, the next barn emblazoned with fading Mail Pouch Tobacco signs, another trailer park on the road from the parsonage I lived in, mostly by myself that final school year of 1985-86 to my mother’s new house with her boyfriend in Galion, Ohio.

I was in that difficult space between childhood and manhood, where I was not quite ready to be on my own but so close I could taste the freedom that eighteen brings but still dependent on people I was still angry with. This predicament made me angrier, more resentful as I most did whatever I wanted to do but when there were times I couldn’t, when my mother would wave her wand of matronly responsibility, I would seethe inside. A blend of anger mixed with a yet-unknown silent hurt of her abandoning me once more. She had picked me up in Catawba, my stepfather back in the psychiatric hospital 50 miles away from home, she wanted me to see her new house. A condo she was renting with Steve whom she had met at Maryhaven a rehab center in Columbus. She an administrator and he an alcoholic/drug user who was trying for what felt like the hundredth time to quit. I had never met him and was none too pleased to be meeting him this weekend. 

She talked to me from her side of the car while I stared outside the window at all the things that make an Ohio winter something that is as desolate and terrifying as the dead-end future can be for kid that only wanted out of everything that small town Ohio could offer. All of which was basically fuel to want something different. My eyes burned, there wasn’t a catch in my throat but more of a fireball that I kept inside lest it erupt into the front seat of that blue Chevy Cavalier and turn my mother into a stammering, crying puddle. I knew her limits. I just listened and looked. We arrived in the small town of Galion, in the center a  small courthouse, gas stations, hardware store, a feed store at the edge of town my thoughts drifted to my girlfriend who I would have to wait to see in a few days. I pined for her. My mother brought up me moving up for the rest of the school year, “no way,” I replied, “I’m not living in this shithole of a town. I’m almost done with school, so I’ll just finish it out.” Sighing in a way that she perfected, she put her hand on the back of my left hand. I flinched, taking her hand away she softly asked me “think about it. I think you will like Steve.” I rested my head against the window, feeling the cold glass against my forehead, “Jesus Christ mom, you are still fucking married” in a whisper she would be able to hear. We drove the final few minutes in silence.

Steve opened the door to their new condo, it had new furniture and Native-American art on the walls, and Steve had a small stereo in the corner next to it was a large wooden cassette holder and a stack of worn LP’s underneath it. This caught my attention and Steve came out of the kitchen and shook my hand, “I’ve heard a lot about you, your mom says you are pretty funny and like music.” “Sure” I headed towards the bathroom with my lungs in my throat and heat rising in my cheeks. The bathroom was decorated with a candle, sea shell molded soap and new hand towels. This was nothing I had ever grown up with. It smelled like cherry blossoms. As I splashed water on my face, I noticed my hands were shaking, I wanted a beer but they wouldn’t have any. Steve was sober. 

That night we went out to eat in nearby Mansfield, to a chain casual dining place—maybe it was Applebee’s, TGIF or something like that, it was the sort of place I had never really ate at as we were poor, going out to eat was only done if we drove to Columbus to see my grandparents and uncles. It was small talk, Steve mostly remaining quiet while my mother asked me about school, my girlfriend and filling out college applications. “I dunno mom, maybe I’ll go to someplace near Columbus.”  “I thought you were going to go to OU, that is what you have always said, to go home to Athens. You could live with the Zudak’s” The Zudak’s were my middle school best friend, Eric, his older brother and sisters and his mother. Eric’s father had moved out of the house a few years before and I would go down to Athens on most of my spring breaks throughout high school, wander around town, hitting the bars and drinking in shitty cars. “I’m not sure”, I wanted to near Jennifer who was going to Ohio State. “You could move up here with me and Steve and go to a community college?” “Mom, stop I’m  not going to live with you.” The rest of the dinner was quiet and when we got home, I went to bed. Over pancakes as we went out to eat (again!), Steve talked about music not really asking me what I liked but sharing how much music meant to him. “When I moved to Columbus, I probably spent more time going to concerts than I did in class.” “Oh, who did you see?” This was a test, in retrospect it was really a test by Steve to try to understand me, not win me over—he never tried to do that. His goal was to identify with me, he understood I was deeply wounded in my childhood, much of it by my mother even though I had very little insight into this hurt which at this time in my life mostly manifested itself as anger, frustration, and quiet rage. “I saw Lou Reed at the Agora, he had bleached hair and wrapped the microphone cord around his wrist like he was going to shoot up some dope. I thought that was the craziest thing I had ever seen.” “Steve, he doesn’t need to hear that” my mother piped in. Rolling my eyes, “mom I know what dope is, and Lou Reed is one of my favorites. Who else did you see?” I was impressed. “I saw the Rolling Stones in Cleveland on Mick Jagger’s birthday and they played so long they cut the power on them, I thought there would be a riot. There was a giant inflatable penis that went over the crowd.” Many years later he told me he was on acid at that Stones concert. We talked a little bit more, he had seen The New York Dolls, the Velvet Underground, Kiss opening for the New York Dolls, Neil Young, Dylan;  so many artists that I had discovered during high school. That day we went for a small walk around the town, I begrudgingly realized I liked my mom’s new boyfriend. 

On the way back from walking my mother and I argued, “just take me home.” Feeling like a dog in a cage, trapped and annoyed that I was helpless and at her mercy. “I don’t want to be here no matter how much you think I will like your new life, I don’t give a shit. Take me back.” In her bedroom I heard my mother cry, mournful wails and I felt no pity for her, no remorse. Eventually she came out of her room, face flushed, eyes reddened from crying. “Steve is going to drive you back, I don’t feel well enough to make the drive.” A part of me felt a tinge of being abandoned  yet again, “Ok.” But what I was thinking was, “fuck, you are going to have your boyfriend drive me back to the empty house I share with YOUR husband? You are kidding me?” I swallowed that thought and fetched my clothes from the spare bedroom. Steve had a small pick-up truck, we rode in silence except for the tapes he let me feed into the dashboard, John Prine’s first record, David Allen Coe’s greatest hits, Dire Straits, and Lou Reed. He dropped me off in the alley next to the parsonage, snow gentling falling around me as I got out of the truck. Steve leaned over, “Nice to meet you Bela, your mom really loves you.” He drove off as I turned towards the house, darkened and empty, a place that was home but never really felt like it.

Over the years as we all worked our way into time as if it were a field of sawgrass, cutting our ankles, a slog into middle age for me and a slow sunken decline towards death for the generation before me and my siblings. There were break-ups, fuck-ups, children and my own struggles with misty sorrow that has seemed to follow me like a sick-feral cat. A walking disappointment was what I felt like much of the time, even though I had enough confidence in myself to live the kind of life I desired (mostly consisting of music, drinking and laughter). But  when it came to my family, I would have sooner not have to let them into my world. The fact that I didn’t really attend college but opted to work in a record store, which didn’t seem like work at all—either to myself or to my family. My mother, father and my brother would pine for me to try college again, Steve never did, just encouraged me to do what I liked to do, “Susan, he will figure it out for himself and if he needs you, he will ask you.” This was as true a statement as has ever been said about me, Steve was the wisdom of our family. A solid towering tree that stood tall in the middle of our brushfires, he felt the wind at the top of his branches and the cold of the winter in our lives, I was gifted to come and sit among the wooden limbs without ever feeling judged. I never heard him raise his voice and living with my mother was a way to practice dealing with frustration on a daily basis. 

Time is tracked in various ways, tracking the stars in the universe their flickering light coming from billions of miles and billions of years from the past and as their lights land upon the eyes of stargazers many will have ceased being billions of years ago. Their sparkles a sort of gravestone etched in the sky for us to gaze up. We mark time through the books we read, a collective history made from the drawing in caves, on stone walls, through the ancient Egyptians  utilizing papyrus over 5000 years ago, to the development of papermaking by the Chinese to the present where digital pixels contain the entirety of humankind at the touch of fingertips. I tracked the age of my children by pencil, every six months they would stand still against their bedroom wall or against the door in my bedroom apartment while I drew a straight line at the top of their head. These inch increments showed them how age can be measured, they quit doing it a few years ago and my son, aged 15 is now taller than me—it is as if the tracking is no longer needed; he has won the contest. Boxes of photographs fill my basement and in corners of my house, shoeboxes, wooden boxes and cardboard boxes carry the information of my past, the past of my ancestors stacked upon one another as if they were ping-pong balls in a lottery machine. Black and white, Polaroid and faded colored photos from the early 1970’s that have grown their own age spots, blotted with fuzzy white and yellow globs that may overtake my siblings, myself and Santa. My whiskers are mostly white now, if I don’t shave then I will look my age so I run the razor over my skin, the skin that is not as tight as it once was and with that razor I make myself younger, anyway this is what I believe. So many ways of tracking time although in my mind I see the universe swirling like a giant whirlpool swallowing up everything all at once, and in this grand whirlpool people are smaller than a droplet of water rushing over Niagara Falls and then become mist. And when I die, my memories die with me and perhaps for one or two generations I will be remembered for a few things in my life but not for the mundane or what my daily interactions were like, not the cuddling of my dog nor the pride in my children or the laughter I was a part of, so much laughter that it caused people’s head’s to turn. I track the days of Steve’s death by my memories of him, there are moments when I breath in and at the bottom of my breath in the tiny flicker where it stops before turning inside on my out breath, it is in that speck of time where I feel a panic and I yearn for him, for my mother the most. 

I have a dream, a recurring one that sometimes comes in different scenarios, always weird because dreams are strange, baffling, and weird, it is the very nature of dreams. As if reality is witnessed through a cracked kaleidoscope. In the dream I am leaping into the ocean, sometimes I’m wading in with the sun hot on my face, other times I am heaving myself into the water from a dock or a boat both and sometimes it is from a cliff like the Mexican divers who hurtle themselves over the rocks below to split the waves in half. The split is spitting into death’s face, “take that mother fucker.” I leap into the water and break the waves and then the waves break me, so they think but I’m already broken. Not whole. Not half, but a million shards of me, each one reflecting something else and in the ocean, they look like diamonds scattering in every direction, carried away. 

Steve lives through my body, my thoughts, this is what I like to believe and when I play the music, he so cherished I feel him in the notes, the yelps of the singers and the bubbles of sound that carry me to a place where I usually feel safe. I know he listened for the same reasons I did, for comfort, for connection. Nobody dies instantly, we all die and live by degrees. Some are just closer than others, some can taste the bitter richness of whatever that unknown darkness carries. I miss you Steve, perhaps more than ever.

FATHERS DAY/I CAN’T DRIVE 55 (years old).

She died 11 miles from her house, the week before she said she wanted to stay home as her children visited, her husband tending to her every need. Exhausted, Steve wasn’t sleeping much as he watched his wife slowly sink into her bed, her body twisting into itself as if were parchment paper tossed into a fire. Just a month before her death, Steve was diagnosed with liver cancer something he had somewhat expected due to a long-term IV drug habit that he kicked over 35 years ago with the help of my mother. They met in treatment; she was an administrator who chipped in running groups and he was a patient. They fell in love quickly, something that was not supposed to happen and married a few years later. She had helped him recover from a life of alcohol, drugs and being as wayward as a person could be without going prison, jail—yes, but nothing more. He told us, his somewhat adopted adult children through tears shortly before her death—“your mother gave me a family I thought I would never have, a family I never thought I deserved.” His devotion to my mother was immense, a true bodhisattva whose purpose was to provide comfort for his wife. Unlike her children, Steve was hopeful until that last week when his exhaustion caught up with him, when the Hospice worker told him that there was really nothing more to do, and like the exhaustion Steve felt within his body, his emotional and spiritual self, they had exhausted everything that was possible to extend her life. Her life had been a slow drip into oblivion, at times due to the lack of oxygen her brain was getting. She was childlike, pointing at things outside her window, on her walls, remembering memories that one would have thought had long dissipated with the rolling of the years. Then when the internal bleeding she had been suffering from got under control and her oxygen level returned she would be a woman in pain, in sporadic moments able to ask her grandchildren questions in a weakened voice and then yelling at Steve to give her some pain medication, water or any sort of comfort. 

            Her body grew more limp, she was accumulating bed sores and rashes, it took two of us to roll her over, to change her into comfortable clothing, the mother who was morphing into an infant before her children’s eyes. When hospice came with their transport, she realized she was leaving, “don’t let them take me, Steve.” We reassured her, told her we would try to bring her home soon and she nodded, gently trying to hold onto her hands. I sang her “Go Tell Aunt Rhoady” and she smiled and squeezed my hand, “you were always her favorite” my sister joked while my mom smiled a mischievous grin. “Not true” she breathed, a wisp of voice escaping her oh-so-dry mouth. She could no longer swallow, so Steve and my sister would insert water with a small thin dropper or put a little crushed ice below her tongue. She has sores in her mouth and her teeth were hurting, the body that had carried her for so many years was shutting off the lights. 

            Steve had taught himself to use a lift and pully to put her in a wheelchair, rolling her out into the living room or the patio so she could watch the birds they both loved so much. “They are better than TV” Steve joked to me, he had become more enamored with nature as he grew older, at times watching the small cameras various research groups had attached to Bald Eagles, Hawks and Owls nests in the wild, he would show these to my son who would call me and tell me about his grandfather’s fascination with watching these winged animals tend to their young. He taught my sister who was spending hours at the house to help roll her over, wash her and administer her oxygen. When I was there, I helped with these things, and just talking with my mother who was resisting death every step of the way, including a refusal to discuss what was happening with her. “I don’t want to talk about bad things” she would murmur.  All the while Steve was struggling with his own health, at first, the prognosis for his cancer was good. The tumor was (thought to be) small and operable. And if not, he would be eligible for a liver transplant by summer if the tumor would shrink. He was hopeful as we all were, and after my mother passed away, he turned back into some of the things that she would get upset about. Mostly playing music incredibly loud, he listened to the music of his younger years, The Rolling Stones, the Velvet Underground—especially the noisy “White Light White Heat” album, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith as well as the raggedy blues of Blind Willie McTell, Lighting Hopkins. The dissonant sounds of Alfred Schnittke and Dimitri Shostakovich shook the house, no doubt there were days when he was playing these classical composers louder than anybody else in the United States at that moment. 

            Steve died in March, all of the treatment we had been holding onto were either not possible or failed, it was not unexpected but the gravity of his death has been—while he was my stepfather he was a centering force in the lives of our family. More than my mother I struggle with expecting him to pick up the phone, or to send me a link to a new favorite piece of music he discovered or knowing if I needed anything I could just reach out. I miss his wisdom, I miss his smile and even the way he ordered pizza, always going overboard to make sure everybody was satisfied. 

            Since the fall of 2021 I have been living In between the gears of a watch that is scrapping and tracking time in the increments of moments, with a worry that I thought only happened to some but would not fling itself at my door and into the mechanisms of my mind. There are days when I feel as if I am living life behind a screen door, fingers gently touching the small metal windows that form both an opening and a barrier to the world. If I lean in close, I can see through one, breath in the outside world and feel I can be a part of it. When I got sober, I wondered if I would ever laugh again, that one of the benefits of alcohol was the ability to laugh outrageously, the idea of sobriety meant that the world would turn from Techni-color to grays, blacks and whites. Of course, I was mistaken and soon I was laughing more than ever, never having to force a laugh—I became more comfortable with myself. When I met my partner, we laugh and we continue to do so, she is one of the funniest people I know, a wit that comedy writers would be envious of—I have counted on her to lift be through the screen but I have a guilt that my wit has been subdued, dulled by the fact that I have continued to feel so much loss and the continual worry that has settled in. I do the things I have always done, the things that have worked, meditate, exercise, walk, music and of course, write although the writing is darker—trying to make that screen made up of hundreds of wired windows into something else, of cutting the screen out. My mother has been dead over a year, on this day, my second birthday without my mother and the first Father’s Day without Steve I am thinking of them. Thinking how my mother would write me a $50 check every birthday, and the last one she wrote for me she giggled and said, “sorry I write like an old woman now. I guess I am one.” Imma going to make sure I laugh today. 

Death, smoke and birds. Mom-2022

Mom started dying, real dying not the dying that people tend to nonchalantly mention in conversation, “well, we all start dying the minute we start breathing”, not that kind, but the dying dying kind when the mind tends to go, and muscles tremble from the weariness of age. Age that stalks us like an oak tree that finally overcomes a house, dwarfing it under its shadow, bearish and spindly limbs scratching the windows like fingertips. “I am here” is whispers when the wind shows its might, pushing even the mighty oak into submission. I am here, indeed. Death seems to start with an event, sometimes they are obvious like a car crash, a stroke and other times they are so small they appear insignificant, perhaps a fall in the bathtub, or in my mother’s case a very minor traffic accident that broke a small bone in the top of her leg. She was in her mid-seventies when it happened, sitting in the passenger seat of my sister’s car. In fact, I was talking to my mother when the accident happened, they were rear-ended by a distracted driver—my sister’s car, a thinly made Toyota Yaris, was damaged but not too terribly and my mother complained about her leg, her back which was injured way back in the 1970’s when a New York City bus hit her car. Back pain plagued her for years, much like the depression and auto-immune diseases that draped over her life like a shawl. After the car accident she had trouble walking, and it wasn’t very long after she had her first fall that sent her to the hospital and soon to an assisted living center to rehabilitate all of these tiny chips and dents in her body, and as we would find out in  the coming years, her psyche. 

            For her, a woman whose depression and anxiety had at times kept her in bed for days and isolated her from life until she was able to shake it off with the help with life partner, the trip to the nursing home brought on more anxiety, and more fear that she had ever known. For those of us who loved her we pleaded with her to finish the rehab, we could see the writing of the future every day she didn’t complete her exercises, the frustration we felt came off as annoyance, judgement—we wanted more for her but perhaps, we did not fully understand the depths of her depression—who wants to acknowledge that our parents are depressed, have mental health issues. It might rub off on us. Her room at the assisted living felt like a department store display for a nursing home, sea scape painting (check), mounted television (check), wide bathroom door with handicap friendly safety measures (check), white walls (check), Bible next to the bed (check), smell of feces and urine from the hallway (check). It felt more like assisted dying than assisted living. She hated it, she wept, cried out and made a nuisance of herself to the nurses who responded in kind. She wanted to go home and had giant temper tantrums, she threatened suicide if she couldn’t leave and after a week of exasperation my stepfather took her home against medical advice. We all held our breath, we passed judgement, we gossiped but my mother got better, at least mentally—her mood picked up and she engaged in physical rehab at home and was soon standing up, walking with a walker and cooking dinner. “Come down and see us” she would say into the phone during my daily phone calls, and we would pack the kids into the car, drive the 100 miles to Cincinnati, jump into their pool, eat barbeque or burgers on the grill, chat on the patio and head home, relaxed and sunburned. Soon though, her physical therapy took a step back, the water rehab remained unfinished and her depression, that came and went like a bell that rang at the top of every hour returned. 

            My stepfather, Steve worked hard on the garden–both he and mother loved to watch birds and he constructed bird feeders all over their yard, in each one there would be different types of food for the variety of birds that would visit, some feeders were elongated screens filled with peanuts and others were more traditional, filled with small pellets and seeds—in the morning it was busy, sort of a rush hour of feathers and busy squawks, chirps and songs- with wings fluttering and chests puffing for the food. My mother enjoyed nothing more than to sit in her chair and look at these beautiful animals eat breakfast every morning. The back yard was filled with plants and flowers that Steve tended too, my mother would sit on patio and point out flowers she wanted him to cut, or a hummingbird or a chipmunk that had scurried out from the small red shed, its hesitant nose sniffing the air for danger. Theirs’s was a far cry from the life that they had led when they met over thirty years prior to her death, he was in drug rehab trying to beat a deadly taste for methamphetamines, heroin and alcohol while my mother was trying to coax recovery out of him. They fell in love, and while I was living forty miles away, a senior in high school they quietly moved into a small basement apartment near The Ohio State University campus. She had a chair sort of a throne-ish recliner that sat next to Steve’s although he very seldom ventured into it, a whirl of completed chores in his wake. She would look out the window at the birds while she devoured books and magazine, a stack nearby that she was working on or completed, she ate words like a vacuum. 

            The last month as she slowly seemed to melt, every day she slunk towards death ,her life seeming to pool around her, first her legs went—after a few weeks into her decline she could no longer walk or pull herself up, shortly thereafter most of the basic self-care was out of reach for her—like she was trying to catch a cloud in her hand.  Every day brought another humiliation from the universe about the fragility of our bodies, they are are destined to be destroyed. Mom knew this, she realized what was happening but she did not want to talk about it, she did not want to embrace death although it was obvious that she could no longer embrace life, at least the things about life that brought her great joy, her ability to even converse with what made her happy, her husband, her children and grandchildren was being whittled by the great woodcarver in the sky, with his sharpened pocket knife, stroking the life out of her in thin shards that fell around her, we were trying to pick them up. Small slips of her scattered around us. 

            Steve had put her in the sling, wheeled her carefully out into the living room and gently placed her in her yellow chair, she could see out into the front yard to the birdfeeders. A brown plush blanket covered her legs which were at this point, only causing her pain, swollen and sensitive to the touch, even moving them sideways brought stabs of pain the moved up into her lower back, and the blanket stretched up to her chest. Her long gray hair framed her head, her sparkling green eyes were translucent at this point, they struggled to focus, and she would stare into something, trying to make sense of an environment hat was changing around her as if she were gazing at the world from underwater, even though the water was crystal clear everything was washed out, blurry, slow moving—too far to touch. She was not getting enough oxygen to her brain, and her heart was overworking as was everything else in her body, her feet suffered and her ankles would swell up and painful to the touch but not as much as her mind which would slip into a haze, losing all sense of time and space. She began hallucinating. 

            We talked, although she was confused, she wanted to tell me things and she enjoyed hearing my voice. “Mom, what do you want to talk about?” I asked, as she sat quietly. “I don’t know….I’m not sure but I want you to talk with me.” I sat on the other side of the room, on the far end of their brown leather couch, the pillows bulky and soft, next to me another endless cup of coffee that helped me through my days, my afternoons, my evenings. “Why don’t we talk about Long Island” she asked me. She knew I loved Long Island, perhaps my favorite place where we lived when I grew up, I went to ten schools scattered around Ohio, New York and Virginia. I have written a great deal about my love of Long Island and the life we had there and even though we lived there for just under two years, it made such an impression that every day when I look up into the sky, I think of the vastness of the ocean I saw so much of in Springs, New York. “Yes, of course. You know that was my favorite place where we lived growing up.” She smiled, her eyes beaming, “Yes, I know—and guess what, it was mine as well. I want to tell you how much I liked it…..” and she lost her train of thought.  The birdfeeder shook with a cardinal trying to scare away a wren, the hum of the air-conditioner was a soundtrack. “Mom, what were you going to tell me about Springs?” “I don’t know.” The cold air blew out of the vents. “Why don’t you tell me, Bela. What you remember.” I got up and fetched another cup of coffee and sat down. “Well, I don’t remember much of the house, I shared a room with Z. I think Erica’s was across the hall and you and David slept downstairs. I remember having a very high fever, 104 or something, and you called the doctor asking what to do. You and David put me in the tub with cold water, and I remember you stroking my hair in bed while I went in and out of sleep. You kissed my forehead; your hair was long, and it draped over me like a red-haired canopy. I remember all of that and how close the ocean was and the forest in the back of our house, and you could cut through and be at a small harbor. Mom, you told us to never go there but we did anyways.” My mother was smiling as I told her this. And I waited. Feeling the space between us, small moments fell to the side. After a while I asked her if she wanted me to tell her more. “No, it’s ok. Maybe we can play a game?” she asked me. A game? “Sure, what would you like to play?” At that moment my mother transformed into a six year old girl, she was innocent, devoid of pain but filled with wonderment, trying to use her brain she looked around the room, eyes wide—you could feel her mind working on finding a game to play, her answer was sweet and when she mentioned it—I too was transformed to a six year old boy but with the knowledge that I was a middle aged man, a parent and in what happens to only the lucky, a son who was given the opportunity to parent their own parent. 

            “I know Bela, why don’t we count the pictures on the walls? That could be fun.” Moving he head slowly she scanned the walls of the living rooms, where she spent most of her days the last ten years of her life, reading her books, sewing, scanning her iPad, drinking coffee, tea, eating the sweets that she loved so much and of course, looking outside at the circus of birds that visited at all hours. This yard in southwestern Ohio was an oasis of food. As she moved her head, looking around it was as if her eyes were like the sun light moving across the walls, the floor as the day rolled by. “That sounds like a fun game” I replied. Smiling she asked me, “who should go first? Why don’t you start Bela?” On the wall across from me, above her head was a painting by a Native-American artist that Steve and she bought many years ago when they went out west, next to that above Steve’s chair was a Charlie Harper print, this she loved. Harper a native of Cincinnati made colorful paintings of birds and animals, she loved his work and I had always wanted to buy her one of his paintings, but they were too much for my social worker salary. So, she had prints, jigsaw puzzles, coffee mugs and clothing of Charlie Harper’s work, they were not the original, but they were, perhaps better because they were everywhere, reminders of nature—and the playfulness that it brings into our lives. And really, if one can drink out of a coffee mug of something you adore, what could be better? Above the fireplace there were photos of our family, a grand picture of my sister and mother, noses nuzzling each other, a mother transferring generational beauty to her daughter, middle aged both women with long gray hair touching, their smiles stretching past time as only love can do. They are smiling. Across the top of the picture window, Steve and Erica hung photographs by laundry clips so my mother could see her children and grandchildren, it is nearly impossible to feel lonely when in the present of children. By the front door next to a closet with large folding doors hung another painting, bought in a moment of shared interest and love by mother and Steve, across the floor and walls the sun made shadows, moving pictures. I started first, there were seven pictures hanging on the walls, I went slowly and gazed over the room, intentionally moving my head towards each item on the wall so my mother could see where they were. She was looking at me, staring intently but with a soft smile, her wide eyes swallowing up my gaze. “Ok, I have counted seven moms, see how many you can count.” There was a pause from her as if she were psyching herself up, “o.k. Bela, I am going to start” turning her head towards the east wall, the picture above the fireplace, “there is one” she moved to the next wall and quickly counted another one and then waited a moment, turned her head to her left, “I know there is one above me and that one,” which hung over Steve’s chair, she moved to another one above my head, “I think that is five or six” her eyes roamed the room and then they settled down, her face went blank—she turned quiet. Silence. “How many mom?” Looking up, she sighed, “I don’t know. What?” “How many picture are left on the walls?” She was lost. “I don’t know, what were we doing?” “Are you tired mom, do you want to stop and just sit?” She was childlike, still my mother, “yes, I think so.”

Mom.

My bathroom window looks out from the second floor into the backyard, the alley filled with broken glass, empty pizza boxes and tipped over recycling containers. The blinds mostly remain open, except for when the kids are with me, not for any sort of sexual kick but because my body craves the sun even if it comes in small gulps through the grubby window. Paint has flecked off the windowsill, occasionally I must scrub the mold from the rotting wood, careful not to get any splinters. The bathroom is quite different from the one from my previous house, we had just finished remodeling the bathroom when I moved out, and we got a very deep tub that I would stretch out and submerge myself under the water, small foothills of bubbles over my head. I only got to experience two baths before I moved out. One day I will have a deep tub again. Every few months I bleach the shower curtains from the discoloration that crawls up their side, rental properties don’t have shower doors, neither do the poor, we get by with Ikea or Dollar General flimsy curtains that collect filth like cheater slicks on the back of semi-trucks. Rehanging the bleached curtains brings me back to childhood where my mother would scrub the bathroom out with a bucket filled with bleachy water, sunshine pouring in through every window, Jim Croce, Joan Baez, or Carole King providing the perfect soundtrack for Saturday morning chores. It is here, in the small spaces of self-care, the cleansing of my body, folding of the laundry—where the memories unfold.

                I am fifty-three, peering ahead of me while not really trying to look back, the past can be pockmarked with regrets if it means one is unhappy today, but it can also be guided by favorable choices, or shall I rephrase it to makers of acceptance—memories can be monuments of connection, where we felt another deeply. “I’m as old as grandmother when she died” is a phrase I hear now, or it could be the person’s parent and I am thinking of bending this, reversing it to something like “I am the same age as when I knew my grandmother, my mother.” Although this would not be the case with my father whom I have a very distant relationship with, I might as well have a relationship with the moon that is how far apart we are, and even then I allow myself to be washed in the brightness of the moon when possible, I like to feel tiny but not small. That may be the difference between those relationships. My grandmother died while my uncle Pablo held her hands, I sat by her side, watching his pain as his mother slipped away. She smiled before she left the room, happy to see her “mommy and daddy and all my sisters and brothers” and of course the baby Jesus. She spoke these words in English, not Hungarian her native tongue or Spanish the chosen language of her sons. Which struck me as odd, she lived a transformative life, as a wealthy Hungarian girl, married young to a man nearly twice her age, and then the displacement of World War II cast them across the Atlantic to remake themselves as Venezuelans, something she never cared for. Then in the early 1960’s she reinvented herself again, this time as an American that also allowed her to be passionately Hungarian. Perhaps my grandmother did the most American thing an American can do, she reinvented herself over and over. She grew tomatoes in her front yard and had birdfeeders outside every widow of her house. She would speak to the birds every morning, sometimes in English, sometimes in Hungarian and sometimes, which was devastatingly adorable in bird. “twveet-twveet vittle birdie” I would hear her while I washed her dishes, even her bird was spoken in a Hungarian accent. I see the photos of old women in Ukraine, and in the photographs, they are called peasant women although it is now almost a quarter into the new century but yet, even on my phone the images of these women are of peasants. Although the blurriness behind them reveals the outlines of cars and power lines, they are from another time. Shawls wrapped over their shoulders, scarves covering their heads as if the gray sky above them will wrestle the hair from their heads. And always, their backs are stooped. I realize that many of these women are my age or just a few years older, their husbands pot-bellied with thick callused hands that have been constructed from work—real work, the kind that ignores the weather, and wears grease, oil, and filth like proud tattoos. I look at my hands, soft, almost like wool, my partner jokes that my hands are so soft they could be cut by handling a ridged potato chip. My grandmother was always old in my eyes. Even know as I have hopped over the age she was when I first met her.

                I have lived all over Ohio, and for periods of my childhood along the east coast and for a brief period in my mid-thirties I had a transformative year in Florida, one that like many American’s allowed me the opportunity to transform myself, I was not reinvented, that is too strong a term—I was by all accounts (mine being the most important here) transformed into somebody who behaved differently, and thus came to think differently.

                My mother has grown smaller, she is tiny in her bed, new bedding pulled up around and her sparkling blue-green eyes are watery not from tears but because that is their natural state. I kiss her fore head, her skin is thin—like paper from the 19^th century, but my mother is from the first half of the 20^th Century, barely—she was born into a house without indoor plumbing in Southeastern Ohio. Her “daddy” as she called him was really her stepfather, her own father bailed on his young family and lived a huckster’s life around the country, fathering at least eleven children by a variety of women from Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia and into the far west. By all accounts he was an asshole who did prison time in Indiana most likely for being, well, an asshole and crook. Austin Davis raised my mother and my Aunt Cheryl as if they were his own and they soon had a baby sister, my Aunt Candy who arrived after they moved to Columbus. A city that had indoor plumbing, electricity in every house, paved roads, and jobs. Grandpa Davis realized that Appalachia didn’t offer much for a WWII veteran with minimal schooling, so they moved soon after my mom turned 10 or 11. She went to a high school called Linden McKinley which was predominantly a white high school her freshman year and four years later she was one of a handful of white students left. She went to prom with a black classmate, and just a few years later she would be active in the civil rights movement although she was limited as to what she could do, tying her rope to an oddball Hungarian/Venezuelan man who was prone to talking to himself and eating raw onions. This, of course was my father and their marriage was doomed from the outset. She had to do her protesting on the sidewalks of the college town we lived in, she had three children before she turned 25, sometimes the Appalachian in us calls the shots.

                She stares up at me, asks about her grandchildren. Bruno my thirteen-year-old son comes into the bedroom, his hair curly and floppy as he strides into the room. “Bruno! Your hair, I love it!” she calls him over and he allows her to kiss his forehead, her fragile hands running through his thick as a briar patch hair. “Hiiii, grandma” he says as he looks at me—he does not like to be kissed or touched. Did I mention she is tiny in her bed; age has not only made her smaller but in many ways younger almost childlike. She is my mother. On the drive home, Bruno and I take turns playing song he sings along to the ones he chooses and sometimes to the ones I play until he grows bored and returns to his phone, his headphones and I switch to a podcast for the next fifty miles. When we do this, I always think of playing “Wendell Gee,” the last song on R.E.M.’s “Fables of the Reconstruction” for my mother in her blue Chevy Malibu. It had a tape deck, and I was sixteen or seventeen and she asked me what it was about, we played it, rewound it, and listened to it several times. “I don’t know, but it makes me think. It’s like a poem” I recall explaining to her how the song hit me. We talked about books, songs and how important music was for me. I then played her Lou Reed’s “Pale Blue Eyes” from a tape I had made at the college radio station I was DJ’ing at every summer. She drove in silence until we got to Maryhaven, a treatment center she was working at in Columbus. I think she was picking up her boyfriend, who would eventually become my stepfather. And much later, her caregiver. Oddly, I came to accept Steve into my life through his love of Lou Reed and John Prine, he had seen Lou in a former life. I don’t know if my mother ever knew just how important those songs were to me but that interaction in the car is stamped in my head. I have learned that life isn’t about surviving joy and pain but about appreciating the mundane. Joy, pain and the mundane. The middle parts are just as flavorful if we notice them.

                I went back to college at thirty-five, I was still a freshman when I took my second  ever college English class at Columbus State Community College, by far the oldest person in the room except for the instructor whom I didn’t make a very good impression with on that first day, when she mentioned there were not any older female composers and I shared that Clara Schuman who was married to Robert Schumann was a very well known pianist in her time who championed her husbands work and had a very successful career. She sniffed at me, and things sort of went south from there, as she made snide comments throughout the semester. I persevered through her ick to earn a B+ in the class, although English was the only class, I had ever consistently earned A’s in most of my life. I finished my two-year degree in two years, my undergraduate degree just a year and half after that, graduating with honors with both degrees and I then started my Master’s program at the age of forty, the same year my mother went back for her Master’s. Life took her another route though and she moved us from Athens, Ohio to a more rural area after she remarried. She finished her coursework for her Master’s degree in Geography but her final thesis sat in a box in the parsonage we moved into for the next four years. I like to believe my earning my MSW at the age of forty-two was for both of us. All of her children have graduate degrees and all of us have or are teaching at the University level. That was her work and not the influence of our father who chose to do his parenting in silence that grew over the years into nothingness which is to say he was never in our lives after 1982.

                I found something post fifty that I had not enjoyed since I was in third grade, when my desire to hold hands was almost completely snuffed out by yet another move—we had moved seven times in my short life by then and wanting to hold hands with my mother, father or anybody took a backseat to any sort of physical contact until I started humping at the age of seventeen. “Hump at it Bela.” When I was married, I did like to hold hands but not as much as my children’s mother, my hands were prone to sweat, and I never knew if I was doing it right. There was nothing better though when my children would slip their tiny fingers into my palm, knowing that I transmitted safety to them—I felt needed and that I had a role. This was blissful handholding, now they are teenagers, I still want to hold their hands, and cuddle but there is now the reluctant hand holders—as most teenagers do not really want to even stand next too their fathers, to hold his hand would be asking too much. But now, I love to cradle my partner’s hand, she folds it in mine, when we drive, I like to drop my hand into hers and steal smiles away from her and I cast them into the clouds so I can always think of her when I look. But don’t tell her this secret. When I was younger, I would tell people I couldn’t wait to be drunk but in hindsight I wanted to be in love-to be loved and to give love. 

I held my mother’s hand yesterday, it needs to be held, she needs to be held as I did when I clutched her waist and thigh as a child, hiding my face into her legs, inching around so I was behind her skirt—even at the age of four I wanted to be invisible. Her hand is soft, it will cut itself on the thinness of air at this point in her life. I lean down, kiss her cheek and whisper, “I love you mom.” “I love you too” she whispers back.

March 2002-March 2020: Sobriety, depression and laughter.

March 8 2002-March 8-2022.

                When the sunshine brings itself into the house, dust floats both up and down, circling the room as if air were water and each particle was a miniature fish swimming through the living room, the dining room and everywhere—it is teeming with dust. There is little anything to do about it, the old apartment had a furnace at least forty years old, parts of it incased in asbestos and one reason the rent is so cheap is because of the effort it would take replace it. We all die every moment, some die  just faster than others. Have at it asbestos spewing machine. The flowers add color to the shelves and stacks of books, the walnut furniture and, of course, the giant wall of records and compact discs that line the walls of the dining room. They demand attention, and why not-they most likely have saved my life on many occasions. Lifting my mood or matching it, tiny grooves brought to life by a needle and electricity. I have heard that the majority of dust is human skin, my house would seem to have the skin of every inhabitant that has ever walked the scuffed wooden floors the past hundred years, long after people die parts of then literally continue to swim around us.

                There are days that tug at me from the inside, pulling around the ankles of whatever it is that rests and propels me forward. A soul? A conscious? A sub-conscious? A river of tiny electrical outlets connected by cells and nerves inside my body? A tug this severe can  be an ache, and over the years, it started around the age of nineteen, hit several peaks when I was twenty-one, thirty-three and fifty—these peaks towered above me, but they were the edge of annihilation, like wind slicing through the branches—the ache can be violent or soft, almost undetectable except for the small wisps of the leaves. It is those moments I crave, when it is silent, more of a whisper than an insurrection in my mind—repeating itself like a 100-person choir coming to the chorus now.  I have resisted joining the choir for most of my life, and at other periods the metaphorical church doors were closed and my hope was that it was demolished, wiping out the sounds. The Depression (it deserves a capital D) was planted in me before I was born, like cicadas  already burrowed deep in the ground before my parents even met, it has existed in our family genes much longer than I can even guess—and for some in our family it has sprouted inside of us as if it were a doomsday vine, roots growing inside, and as we have aged so has the vine, its arms reaching deep into our psyche and some of our experiences sprout new buds. At various times in my life, I have been able to prune it, through love, through mediation, music, writing, running and through the past two years walking several miles every day. But the roots are there, entangled at my core, one person I know compared it to a giant pool of black water that feels I am drowning in.

                The asphalt basketball court at East Elementary was baking from the spring time heat, balls were bouncing in an out of the baskets, in the far corner of the court, a small courtyard held a particularly vicious game of dodge-ball, the thick plastic red ball with its red bumpy exterior, zinging unlucky victims—red welts a testament to their lack of mobility, being slow on an elementary school playground can be a deadly trait. The hill at the other end of the court dipped down into the swings, the monkey bars and a giant half buried tractor-trailer tire that smelled of urine and the fidgety moments of first kisses traded after lunch. I had been a quiet child, moving every year had taught me to be silent, wary of friendships and I was always the smallest kid in my class—shy—I tended to stay to myself, keeping myself fortified with Marvel comic books and my early interest in the records I started collecting in third grade. The baseball field was dotted with fourth and fifth grade boys, swinging wooden bats—trying to impress girls and the other boys by knocking a leather ball out of the infield. I stayed back, if it were football season, I would have partaken in the boys’ games but, being small, uncoordinated with limited hand-eye coordination left me quite happily on the sidelines. There, on the side of the black sheet of play I found a voice that I would come to rely on for most days of my life. Several teachers, including Ms. Houska who would vacillate between calm and empathetic to being witchy and loud was there along with one of the student teachers, a blonde woman whose name is long gone and may well be a granny at this point, and of course, there were the other kids who didn’t play dodgeball, basketball, baseball or want to hang on monkey bars and had outgrown the metal swings the past few years. These were, for the most part- girls. In this moment, I developed an instant character, a sort of hippie who spoke in a high-pitched voice and while I didn’t really know what marijuana was, I pretended I was high-my voice a high-pitched sing-song voice—they all cackled. The student teacher doubled over in laughter, and as we sauntered back into class, I felt charged, a bit tired but excited. Several of the girls, one of whom I had a fourth-grade crush on remarked how funny I was, and I felt her eyes on me. From that day forward, I used humor to help placate the sense of isolation, an outsider in my own world that would later take the already seeds of depression into those blossoming vines that would later wrap and choke my life.

                The clatter of the plates, knives, forks, a vase full of flowers surprised my first wife—“what the fuck is wrong with you?!” she screamed, our entire relationship was one long scream, her screaming, my screaming back at her, the broken bits of our house and squealing of tires. “You are fucking with me! Get off my fucking back!” I yelled back, shards of glass and ceramic on the floor— “Watch your step! You broke my plates! What the fuck?” tears streaming down her face, hands against the table-holding herself up. “Our plates, they are our plates!” I yelled back at her as I scrambled for keys and slammed the door shut. Soon, she would move out, the failed experiment of our short lived (more like deathbed) marriage abandoned in that small two-bedroom house on East Patterson Street. “You ruined my life” she said as her friends from work hauled out furniture, she got the keys to my small white Metro, and I was relieved that it was all I lost, the failure of the relationship sat on a throne in the back of my skull.

                The months that followed were a period of shrill fear that I skidded through, nights at various bars, my bedroom floor littered with clothes and records, there were bottles of beer on every piece of furniture in my room, cigarette butts that had burned the corner of my dresser, the table next to my bed—somehow I was never alone—the feeling of being alone brought a desperation that motivated me out of my house. I was a wanderer in a five-block radius. I soon fell in love, and that relationship lasted over twenty years—with chaos, another dip into the deep black water that almost drank me up—a night in a motel contemplating the metal of a gun in my mouth that turned into sobriety that I still live today. There were trips all over country, to Europe which felt like a home I never really had, a house and of course, two children. That marriage ended in 2018, a period where the blackness came oozing to the top and although I was sober, I felt bereft of myself. At times, I would wake up in my bed, my small dog snuggled next to me turn my head and weep into my pillow—I forced myself to work, to exercise and to show up. She and I talk frequently, we have too—the children we created are the center of our lives, and when we part—sometimes we hug and the love the built the children is there, different of course-but there—and it stretches outward into the kids lives, dreams morph, like clouds and I am ok with this. When I see my children, I see all the love I ever feel walking, talking, making me laugh and of course, causing me worry.

                Depression is something that is like a fog, but a fog filled with monsters, it pours outward like a gushing waterfall that heads for the ocean. At times it has felt like there is a snake trying to get out of my throat, but it slithers inside of me, choking me and it finally decides to stay, coiling inside of my guts waiting to spring out when the opportunity arises. Suicide is something that some people live with on an everyday basis, a taste that will not leave– like the bitterness of a lemon, but it never leaves. Add some sugar it makes it easier, but it only dilutes the acid. I get jealous of the branches on the trees that I stare outside my window, I imagine their bravery as the wind whips and rattles them year after year, and when the sun is out they drink it is as if they had never tasted shine before. Their roots hold them solidly, growing up into the sky and deep into the earth and then I walk in the woods and I notice the ones the collapsed under the weight of living too long, the wind catching it just right or a crack of lightening choosing to crawl up its spine and it lays on the soft floor of the forest, for the rest of the trees to see, it’s carcass now a home to insects, moss and critters. Of course they are just trees, with no mind to think of these thoughts that I transfer onto them. They have no eyes to see but they do feel in some ways, their roots communicating in what is called mycorrhizal networks, a language of survival they chatter to one another through fibers intertwining with one another, finding nutrients, water and the ability to let other roots where stones may be a barrier. The complexities of this provides hope, an opportunity to feel small for it is when I am small that I can experience the world, when feeling too full a person can’t learn any more. There is no room.

                A friendly nod, followed by a cold bottle of beer being pushed my way, the cool condensation streaming down its sides was a comfort. An easy way to feel differently, to slip into something else from what I wanted, and predictable. For certain I knew what would happen when I tilted the bottle to my mouth, first the small smell of the alcohol seeping into my nose and quickly followed by the beer. I always took a long drink, letting the beer go directly to the back of my throat, my ability to drink almost half of the beer in one long drag off the bottle was a practice, my mouth craved the cold bath of five p.m. I learned without ever thinking of it. Most of my regular bartenders usually had another one set up by time I could even position myself on the bar stool. Putting the bottle down in front of me, the taste still in my mouth, fermented with a touch of sting, I could already feel the change in my body—it was as if my brain was telling my body to have a head start, the buzz started almost immediately. Twenty years later and I can still taste the beer on my lips, the scent still buried in my mind. Sometimes it feels like I was drinking yesterday. The club was always open in my mind, living near a college campus in the middle of a large city provided shortcuts that gave myself permission to duck away, to squeeze a few minutes of change that was needed, or so I thought at any given moment but usually I only allowed this to happen in the late afternoon. In my perception, I was a disciplined drinker. Eventually if I didn’t treat it, I grew grumpy, agitated and morose—these were the danger zones, an internal DMZ that could prove dangerous for my partner and myself. Drinking was a slow courting, eventually we were married, the bottle(s) and I, although for me it was a private matter that I tended to announce publicly. The Anyway Records tee-shirts during this time had an unofficial slogan on the back, “Buy Me a Beer” which was our joyous secret handshake to one another and for those who didn’t get it, well that was the point.  But like all relationships, they must change, or they become dry, brittle and bitter by the time I was in my early thirties, with a gathering pile of dead friends and brokenness gathering around my path and with my own love story headed towards an oily ditch I had to make a choice.

                At the edge of the slim hospital bed at the Shands detox center in Gainesville Florida, I grappled with the fact that it might be time to break-up with alcohol, which was terrifying as most break-ups are, and I was a person who avoided confrontation, plus I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. Who would take my place of the various barstools in Columbus, Athens and to a lesser extent, Gainesville? What would those bartenders do when they pushed a Black Label towards and empty seat, I was creating ghosts. There were the conversations I was having with myself, in retrospect it was both silly and tragic, this is where my behavior had taken me—constructing make-believe scenarios around liquid. But it was scary and coupled with depression and the burgeoning sense that a big part of my identity (I had tee-shirts made for Christ’s sake!), was being discarded, I was not only petrified but also on very shaky ground. Although later that night in the large cafeteria a sea of alcoholics, sitting on hard plastic chairs, sipping coffee from small Styrofoam cups, mixed with powder cream and packets of sugar that always seemed to spill half of their contents on the fake wooden fold up tables, I was offered and accepted hope. Although these small saplings of optimism were like virga, precipitation that evaporates before it hits the ground. So, the trick was to make sure that I had to feed the clouds so to speak, every day before the entire clouds of promise vanished. My years of going to bars, nightclubs and pubs had oddly equipped me with some of the behaviors I would use to stay sober, mostly that while a depressed introverted sort, I really liked being with other people, albeit at a distance, sometimes that unspoken space was a bottle of beer or two inches of Maker’s Mark. I used this learned behavior, the one that allowed me to feel invisible to do something different, to show up—to become a vessel that could water the cloud. Even though I very seldom trusted myself, my inability to fully understand my motivations was naked, raw and I borrowed other peoples, or should I say I copied it. After a year or so of sobriety, I investigated Buddhist practices, mostly meditation but did a great deal of reading and journaling—-and they worked, for many years afterwards, the depression left, evaporated into nothing. There would be moments of lucidity where I noticed the emptiness of where the depression had been like noticing a scar that has dissolved over time, and the relief I felt was an akin to a giant metaphysical sigh.

                The rate of suicide attempts for children of parents who have completed suicide is 400% higher than those whose parents don’t complete suicide, and for people who experience a suicide in their lives, with friends and other family members there is a spike and it isn’t uncommon to see small mushroom clouds of despair that surround a completed suicide, the waves reach out and tap everybody within its orbit and then they too ripple around. If the person is a public figure the ripples continue far into the future, and for most these people it is the first remembrance of that person’s life, more so than even their greatest achievements whether it be music, acting or politics. The act provides a quiet permission that taking one’s own life is an option, it operates like a virus—thus the shame people feel when it is an ever-running option in their minds, as well as the shame for the people surrounding them. There is judgement, self and by others that presents itself as a solid stone mountain for dealing with those thoughts and especially the emotions that they come dressed in. Welcome to the Ball. For many substance users, for people that experience trauma and abandonment at an early age—we feel the actual physical environment differently than others, and this stems from an early age—we seek comfort from even the rooms we walk through and for me the primary one has been music, and it is the safest one. Even to this day, there is nothing more than I enjoy than driving my car listening to music and at times I want to sit in my partners drive way and hold her hand while I listen to Neil Young, Waxahatchee or any piece of music that comforts and inspires me, meanwhile she wants to get in the house, feed the kids, let the dog out, do things and I just want that little hand in mine and to listen. Or when I go to the gym, sit on the elliptical dance/running five or six miles to a soundtrack that I have created. I couldn’t not imagine living in the world pre-Walkman or phonographs. All those poor motherfuckers who lived before the mid-twentieth century, having to wait for wandering minstrels, or being able to afford orchestras—Jesus Christ how they must have suffered not knowing about the future of being able to listen to something whenever you wanted. But of course, it wasn’t just music I fell into to relieve my internal pain, it was alcohol, sex, the internet, buying things—even food—but all of them brought a different heat and different number of consequences, mostly feeding the black pool that has resided inside of me.

                “Hurry up Bela, Jesus you are so slow,” Jenny was yapping at me while I looked for my car keys, summer was coming to a fast close, we were driving from Columbus to her hometown of South Vienna, I didn’t want to go—really had no intention of returning to anything that was near my high school. In my mind I had left the trappings of that building behind when I walked out the door just a few months earlier, and besides Jenny’s family and me soon to be divorced stepfather there was very little I wanted to see in that area save for a few friends. “I have your keys Nerdla!” she was already outside, yelling from the sidewalk—“C’mon!” While the fall brought the end of summer it also welcomed school, new friendships, football, and a change of clothing. She wore a short summer dress and sunglasses, her hair was still long—almost big but more scattered than most of the hairstyles that were so common in the mid to late eighties, mine was long and curly, I had not cut it for nearly seven months—since my senior pictures which was also the last time I have ever combed it. We drove the 40 minutes, listening to R.E.M. on the wheezing tape deck in my car, the fields of soy and corn waved and danced at us as we passed a forty-ounce Milwaukee’s Best between us, “should we stop and get another one?” she asked as she drank the last swig near London, Ohio. We sill had fifteen miles to go. “We can get some at Shoemaker’s” I said, referring to the now long closed supermarket in South Vienna. Jenny’s older sister worked there as her husband’s family owned it, years later after the giant Wal-Mart opened up six miles down the road the store came to a slow, sad and shuttering halt as if it were a slow-motion tumbleweed turning over in the wind. It was the annual South Vienna Corn Festival, something I had never attended while I was in high school, and while most of the other kids in school flocked to both the Corn Festival and the Clark County Fair, these were events that were a bit much too busy for me, if there is anything that makes an outsider feel more outside its an event that is filled with people. The more people there were, doing things I had no interest in the more I wanted to flee—-I’d rather be somewhere, anywhere else. But I was 18, in-love and so we went. Moving to rural Ohio from Athens, Ohio—yes, a small town but also a college town was difficult and in hindsight, almost traumatic for me—going from being able to walk everywhere, hang out in record stores, be privy to college students blaring music on their lawns while suntanning, drinking and laughing instilled the idea of a wider bigger and exciting world. I left Athens at the age of 14, in the early 80’s—and by that time I had discovered R rated movies—I had seen An American Werewolf in London, Apocalypse Now, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, heard Bob Marley, The Clash, The Ramones and Devo. Suddenly I was transplanted into cornfields, and I felt like a scarecrow.  At the Corn Festival I ran into my friend Chris Biester who was home for the long weekend from Ohio University, he had his guitar and played a few songs on the sidewalk—most notably “Sugar Mountain” which he explained was meaningful for him as he just turned twenty. At the time, on that hot September day—for those five minutes everything was alright, Chris’s voice and guitar held the air around me and while some of the passerby’s were no doubt looking askance at him, I never noticed. Twenty seemed far away from me even though I was 18, I would soon be stepping out of adolescence and Chris was already in adulthood. It was exciting, nerve wracking. I drank more beer.  

                The trips back to Western Ohio got less and less, in a few years Jenny and I had broken up—-she would return often as she struggled with homelessness and her mental health she would come back and stay with her mother—these were always short lived, maybe a week or two at best. One time, when she returned from an ill-fate trip to Miami where she had convinced an old bar-fly friend to fly her down to escape the streets of Columbus, a trip the ended with her being forced into Jackson County Memorial Hospital after being found wandering around delusional and drunk, I picked her up at the Columbus airport. “Well. I don’t think I can go back to Miami—there is nothing there for me. Not sure what I’ll do but I can stay with mom for a while.” Shortly though, she was back in Columbus—ducking in and out of Bernie’s and North Campus bars and taking up refuge in the ravines of Clintonville. “I can’t stay in South Vienna” she said one day as we walked towards the Tim Horton’s that sat between my house and her tent, “I’d rather be on the street than feel cooped up there.” “Maybe just staying with your mom would be good for you? You can quit drinking and there are less temptations?” “What if I don’t want to quit? Besides, there is nothing to do, just Mom’s boyfriend and the dog—what am I gonna do, work at Shoemaker’s?” Oddly, I saw her point. She had travelled all over the world, been to Europe countless times, lived in Spain for a few months, not as a student but she had run out of money and a kind Spanish woman welcomed her in until she finally got wrung out by Jenny being Jenny and bought her a ticket home. This was in the early nineties, another adventure Jenny had that peeled under the wheels of her life. Jenny had lived a million lives by the time she arrived at her mothers in 2005, broken and bent—she knew she was becoming a shell of her former self, the bits and cracks of her were dropping off of her everywhere, every night she went. “I love mom, but I’d rather take my chances in Columbus.”

                There were times when we would talk, especially when she was really suffering—her skin bruised from the kind of living she did, she fell a lot—especially the last ten years of her life, not just from the alcohol but she was slowly using the use of her legs, she body thin from anemia and the inability of her to keep food in her body, it would erupt out of her when she tried to eat—it seemed she lived on vodka and Gatorade for most of her forties, “I can’t eat Bela, it doesn’t matter because I’m never very hungry.” Her hair was thinning, falling out in handfuls at times, the only part of her that seemed to be unchanged were her blue eyes, that still glowed while everything around them went dark, her body a leisurely collapse into nothingness, hers  was like an abandoned village near Chernobyl, with only the trees still growing. She would look at me, disparage my depression as if I had some control over it, “I can’t understand why you want to die sometimes Bela, I just want to live soo much—-I wish I could still do the things I used  to do.”  She wore herself out trying to live, later—when she was near death, she told me just a few weeks before she died, the final almost continuous run of hospitalization was like a grotesque version of a baseball player’s hitting streak, “I can’t do this anymore, I just hurt so much. I don’t have it in me .” I could say nothing, just nod in silent agreement, she was battered—the thinness of her living had become too parched, the booze she had tried to quinch it with had only withered her insides.

                Other times I would feel guilty when she said these things to me, as if I was robbing from her by being depressed, that one’s enthusiasm for living could be traded like a commodity. Later, I realized that moods are something I must learn to manage, that every day I drew away from my last drink was not always going to be better—I would have to encounter and persist through some dark times—but I knew if I had a drink it would allow the possibility of my inner doomsday machine to be activated. So, I haven’t. And I fill my days with laughter, regardless of how I might be feeling inside, I am always laughing, even alone—in the shower, on my walks, everywhere—I think if you know me, you know this much about me. I remarked to my partner recently that some people are like cut flowers, they sacrifice themselves to bring their beauty to others, cut at the stem, placed on a mantle, a coffee table, by the window for people to see-to smile, a courageous act. “There’s nothing courageous about it, they don’t have a choice to be cut—somebody just cuts them and sticks them in a vase.” Considering this, I thought about it, and just realized there is an acceptance then, it’s not aways a choice but there is beauty in existing and even in the slow melt of being in a vase, cut at the stem, brightly shining petals until they fall off. On March 8^th, I will celebrate 20 years since my last drink.

Uncle Pablo 1943-2021

“Hey! Hey, Bela! Open up” there was someone banging on the front door, I was sitting on the small couch reading a book while music played from the other room. I stood up, walked towards the door, and saw my Uncle Pablo holding up a six pack of Black Label beer and gesticulating with his other hand, “Open up my man!” he yelled through the window. From the upstairs my wife shouted down, “who’s here, you didn’t tell me anybody was coming over?” Her voice had a hint of irritation, it wasn’t uncommon for me to surprise her by not coming home if someone popped into the record store from out of town or invited me for a drink after work. Many times I would fail to call her until deep into my fifth drink. As I opened the door I turned my head, “it’s Pablo” and I could feel her sigh from the top of the stairs as he climbed through the open door. “I brought beer, let’s go to Larry’s.” He walked into the living room, “Heelllloooooo Merijn” he sang up the stairs towards her. “Hi Pablo, I’ll be down in a moment.” The apartment was a duplex with the front room holding all my records and shelves built into the wall to hold the massive amount of compact discs. Art books lined the opposite side of the compact discs, sort of his and hers matching shelves. The living room had two small tan couches that faced each other and a small coffee table, the walls were bare as the shadows from the sunlight made it’s own pictures that did a slow crawl across the room during the course of the day, in the evening the leaves from outside would cast themselves as waving and bending shadow puppets and the street lights provided the perfect background for them to do their lonesome nighttime dance. The kitchen was in the rear of the house, and I placed the beer on the counter, pulling out the bottle opener I cracked open two of the Black Labels. “What are you drinking now?” Pablo asked, raising his bottle to his mouth. “I was just drinking a tea while I read.” At this point in my life I was trying to abstain from drinking at home, it never ended up well and after a few I would be back out on the street and heading to a bar. Putting the rest of the beer into the fridge I asked him if he had eaten, “I had some bread at my mom’s” he said. I knew he quite literally only had bread at my grandmother’s, “we have some leftovers” and I pulled some mashed potatoes mixed with carrots out of the refrigerator, “Merijn made carrot mash and sausages tonight,” I plopped a cold sausage on his plate. “Thank you, no need to heat it up—do you have any mayonnaise” he tended to eat a lot of things with the white creamy stuff. “Have a beer Merijn” he offered as we moved into the other room. “No thank you, I am going to bed soon—I have to be at work early.” She stood for a moment, stared at me, and asked, “you will let me know if you go out, right?” “Yeah, not sure if we will nor not.” I knew this was a lie. Pablo was going to want to go out. I was his wandering late night partner, when he needed to be out he needed someone to go with him for as isolated he was he craved social interaction.

                Soon we were out the door, draining those first six beers only took a short while Pablo cleaned his plate, I washed up the dishes while he talked incessantly about what he did that day, running errands, going to the library, buying cheap books from the library store and dealing with my grandmother who was in the midst of a slow decline that would lead her to a nursing home in the next few years. Pablo had given his life over to care for her, spending most of his time in Columbus the past few years while her health declined and the other time in his home in Venezuela where he had a large apartment in Caracas and where he also owned a small marina in the middle of a massive nature preserve—it was here, on the beaches of the Atlantic that he felt most comfortable. Some one who appreciated nature without being curious about nature, in the same way I love opera—I don’t really care what the opera is about but I know I like to hear it. We first went to Larry’s where everybody he once knew had left years prior for new lives—marriage, kids, dive bars that would quicken their decent into alcoholism, but he scanned the bar nevertheless, like a dog that keeps searching the floor for crumbs. We only saw Jerry at the end of the bar, “hey Pablo” he raised his bottle and took a pull off his cigarette and snapped the pack of Doral’s back and forth with his hand while a cigarette shimmied out of the crumpled pack. Pablo who never bought a pack himself helped himself and let Jerry light it for him. Both him and I smoked occasionally, but we were awkward doing it, as if our faces were trying to walk with high-heels, we just couldn’t smoke elegantly like some others could. “What is going on” Pablo asked Jerry, the cigarette bouncing back and forth as if he were a seagull holding a flopping fish in its beak. Jerry answered with a nod, which didn’t answer his question and we got our drinks and headed to a booth where Jerry joined us, this was a trying time for Jerry-when he was wrestling with the decision to sign with Warner Brothers but it was also a trying time for my uncle who had decided not to pursue another job in chemical engineering and try to earn a living solely by operating the marina. By this time in his life he had sunk much of his life earnings into this project and there was little to show for it. Pablo told us stories of his time at Larry’s during the sixties and early seventies, “we would eat a stick of butter before parties so we could drink more,” “Bill Moss, Jim Williams and I would go from Charbarts (bar) and go to these parties and Bill knew every woman at every party—we would to the east side–after hour bars—the parties would last for a few days, I never went to class.” Bill Moss later started the Cap-Soul label and worked for the City of Columbus, Jim Williams was a Vietnam veteran who was one of Pablo’s best friends until he disappeared. “I don’t know what happened to him, he did a lot of drugs—I went to Caracas one year, came back the next year and nobody knew what happened to him” he said. Years later though a friend of mine in AA said Jim was his first sponsor, that Jim got clean and sober in the early eighties and devoted the rest of his life to helping fellow alcoholics and addicts. When I told Pablo of this he seemed relieved that he didn’t die from drugs. “A good man” Pablo whispered.

                Soon the bar closed, and we headed out to my car, it was late and I knew I would hear it the next day from Merijn. “Hey, let’s go to my friend’s house” Pablo suggested as we got in the car, a take-out six pack in our hands. Popping off the cap with a lighter, “Man, I don’t know. I’m tired” I handed him the bottle and did the same to another one. “You will like him” he tapped the glove compartment and started humming “All My Loving.” We drove for about ten minutes to an old mill that sat in the middle to Columbus, “he lives here, this motherfucker can drink my man!” Pablo was in a good mood. “Are you sure he’s up?” I asked, it was leaning towards 2:30 am and the lights were out. Pablo was already out of the car by time I got the words out, sauntering across the gravel parking lot, his silhouette rocking back and forth to the inner songs of the alcohol sloshing inside of his body. He knocked on the door. Nothing. Knocked some more. Nothing. Then I saw him pounding and yelled out. “Pablo, let’s go. Nobody is home” I poked  my head out the window. Suddenly, a light came on and the door opened. A hunched man with a beard leaned forward towards Pablo, the man looked like a shadowy Ichabod Crane as the moonlight lit up the two old friends. I could see them laughing and after a few minutes Pablo trudged back to the car, “let’s go!” As we pulled out I asked him what happened, “Oh, he wanted to talk about Jesus. He hasn’t had a drink in over ten years.”

                Pablo grew up in Caracas, my grandparents fled Hungary during the Second World War and ended up on a boat that chugged across the Atlantic while my grandparents hurriedly learned English and my grandmother breastfed her three children as there was so little food on the boat. My grandfather nearly died on the voyage, a skeletal shadow of his former self, a well to do engineer and college professor. He weighed less than a hundred pounds when the boat docked on the other side of the mountains from Caracas. Life was difficult for them, as my grandmother did not attend college after she graduated from a Sacred Heart Boarding School in Austria, her father was wealthy, and she married my grandfather shortly after high school and was soon pregnant with my father. The newlyweds did not like each other very much, they had little in common including their age which was fifteen years apart. My grandfather was an introvert, known for his brooding and darkness, he would take solace in painting, butterfly collecting and reading mysteries. My grandmother was the opposite, although a fiercely religious woman she loved parties, drinks, and dirty talk although she would never use a curse word in her life, she took great joy in reveling from others telling their bawdy stories. After Pablo was born my grandfather built my grandmother an a-frame house on Lake Balaton, nearly two hours outside of Budapest where he kept an apartment. Soon though, the war would force them together, their flight from Budapest across the country into Austria could be a movie, but like millions of others during that time survival makes strange bedfellows even if the bedfellows are married.

                Upon arrival in Caracas, my grandmother went to work for Price Waterhouse, and my grandfather gained employment as  structural engineer and just like they lived in Hungary he moved to a town several hours away. Grandmother soon found her social footing, there was a large Hungarian and European population in Caracas and she made fast friends, including the wife of the President. As a child I would marvel at the black and white photos of my grandmother at glamourous parties and smiling like a movie star but underneath this elegant veneer they struggled. My grandfather was not good with money and Grandma Isabel pined to live in the United States, most specifically Southern California. In the end she could not move to California and ended up in Columbus to be near her sons who were attending The Ohio State University. My two uncles, Pablo and Peter moved in with each other, living in various rundown apartment buildings around the Ohio State campus, both struggled with grades, attending class and it took them years to graduate. Pablo was kicked out of the university several times for academic shortcomings, he bounced around several of the nearby liberal arts colleges in the area before returning to OSU where he finally graduated in 1975, twelve years after he first entered. He managed to earn a degree in Mechanical Engineering despite his propensity to drink, it was not uncommon for him to spit up blood or double over in pain when he was younger. Pablo was also dyslexic which must have proved difficult for him as English was his third language, at the time there were no educational supports for him to succeed and even if there were he would not have accepted it.

                During the nineteen eighties, when my brother and I were in high school both Pablo and Peter would watch our wrestling matches, slip us money and knowing we were poor, Pablo bought us an Atari gaming system. Our father had abandoned us a few years prior and the two brothers stood in for him, at times driving us to Columbus, indulging us with White Castle hamburgers and letting us partake in a bit of drinking at Peter’s house. When my sister visited from California, Pablo would make sure to spoil her as well, when she brought her newborn for baptism Pablo arrived in our small, one general store town with my grandmother and beamed from the back of the church. He was not a religious man and his politics ran to the left of the left, he witnessed the crushing blows of American foreign policy in South America and was vocal when politics came up.

                It was just after Christmas in 1985, my senior year of high school was galloping towards it’s end—just five months to go, I was mostly living alone in the parsonage. Surviving on fifty-cent frozen burritos, hot dogs, and instant mashed potatoes, I was grateful when I drove to Columbus and Pablo took me out to eat at a diner and as we scarfed up biscuits and gravy he asked if I needed any money, at the end of the meal he slipped me a hundred-dollar bill. The next weekend I drove to Dayton to my second cousin’s house, Istvan who was my father’s cousin—he and his wife were physicians who fled Hungary in the late seventies, and after arriving in Ohio where he worked as a cab driver before obtaining their medical licenses. They lived in Kettering, a wealthy area of Dayton, I arrived excited to see them and my uncles—and upon stepping up to the front door I encountered a large puddle of vomit and before I was able to knock Istvan opened the door. Laughing, “watch your step Bela, your Uncle Pablo just vomited—he’s already had too much to drink! Welcome to our house” he shoved a long-neck in my hand and showed me in. Pablo waved from across the room, a drink in hand, oblivious to the fact that his body had just reminded him not to drink anymore. That night I got in my car, my head twirling like the snowflakes that were fluttering around the car and drove the forty miles back home, all of my seventeen year old brain turned up to eleven with beer, rum and cokes and the money Istvan and Pablo slipped me. I would have enough beer and gas money to tide me through January. The kindness of Istvan and Pablo followed me my entire life.

Uncle Pedro, “Uncle” Istvan, Uncle Pablo

                My grandmother’s large body had sunk into her bed as if she had been melting over the last few years of her life, a pool of flesh that had coalesced into her sheets. Her head was always propped up by a stack of pillows, her small room covered in photos of her family, a large painting of her father hung on one wall and on another hung several paintings of flowers my grandfather had painted for her. On another wall, next to a small closet door, the kind that is made to look like wood but is as hollow as a Styrofoam cup were photos of her children and grandchildren. Even though she knew she was dying she was always smiling, and we visited her every week—sometimes bringing her ice cream or flowers she would want to reach out and hold Saskia’s hand. Saskia who was two or three would stare down and her great-grandmother’s hand, skin as thin as soup– it was if it were made of the most fragile glass but her hands were always bruised, dollaps of green and brown spots appeared every morning as if they were mushrooms blotting out her once pale skin. Even her hands knew the end was coming. Saskia would look up at me while my grandmother would remark what a beautiful boy Saskia was, and I never felt the need to correct her, that Saskia was in fact the most beautiful girl in the word. “She will be dead soon enough, let her have this” I would think. Pablo was now staying in Columbus full-time to care for his mother and it took a while to convince him that, finally, at one point when her often replaced hips could no longer hold her or be replaced again that she would need to be moved. It devastated him. He was aimless as he watched her sink into her bed the last few years of her life, “did you go see your grandmother?” he would ask me. “Yes, I was out there yesterday.” “She told me you weren’t there, are you sure it was yesterday.” My father’s side of the family was always prone to paranoia, thinking everybody was lying and conniving, “Yes,” I would sigh, “I brought her flowers, they are by the window. I think she forgets things. She told me yesterday you were leaving for Caracas.” “Why would she say that?” he would ask. “Because she’s eighty-five years old.”

                When she got ready to die, she knew it. “I want to see my daddy and mommy” she would whisper, her once booming voice just a soft echo of her former self. The day she died, both my uncle’s split the day in half, as Pablo had grown angry with his younger brother and, sadly, did not want to spend the last days of his mother’s life together. My father had been down the day before she died to say his goodbyes, I stayed away when he was there—no need to have an argument in front his dying mother. The entire day I sat next to my grandmother unless Pablo or Peter wanted to hold her hand and whisper to her. Pablo was broken, tears streaming down his face, “oh mommy, dear mommy. Mommy, mommy mommy” and she smiled at him, “don’t cry Pauli, I will see you soon.” She turned her head to me, “Bela, tell him not to cry. I am happy.” As the day moved on she grew wearier and tired, soon her eyes closed as her breath became more laborious, but she responded to voices, squeezing our hands with those paper fingers until finally she stopped breathing in two long separated gulps. We held her and then Pablo looked at me, silently crying and walked out. He did not return and I took care of the transportation of her body to the morgue, working with the nursing home staff and saw him later that night. After her death, he retuned to Caracas more frequently but sent me an email message when I was vacationing in the Netherlands. “Bela, I have breast cancer. I know it is weird but it has spread to my lymph nodes, I should be ok.” I hung up the phone, at this point Pablo was not only one of my closest family members but also a friend. He had stepped in when my father stepped out and we shared some of the responsibility to care for my grandmother. I phoned Istvan to ask him Pablo’s chances and Istvan explained that they were not very good as breast cancer in men is dangerous, most men who develop it die as they do not get checked. Pablo survived but contracted scleroderma, a hideous disease that turns muscle into scar tissue, it would most likely be the leading cause of his death years later, he was a shell of his former self when he died, labored breathing his esophagus a tunnel of scars, like an hundred year water pipe filled with rust and deposits. He would suffocate to death.

                I am fifty-three, my parents are still living but my uncles are gone, both passing away within months of each other. They made amends a few days before my uncle Pedro died, wherever she was their mother was smiling and I’m certain some flowers instantly bloomed somewhere in the world. My children both met Pablo, who would drop by the house, no longer carrying a bottle of rum or a six-pack of beer but a gallon of vanilla ice cream and root beer to make Brown Cows—which he loved. The stories of my family are like hearing the wind against the eaves at night, just brushes of something to hear—shadows scrapping through their imagination while for me, they are turning into these things as well, almost nothing except uncertain memories. Both my uncles were sick for a long time when they died, I was able to see my Uncle Pedro last summer, spending time by the ocean and eating with him while I had not seen Pablo in years, even though he would travel to Miami for medical appointments he was proud and did not want his family to see him small, shriveled and just a thought of his former self. We would talk on the phone, his voice a weak creak and the last time I spoke to him I told him I loved him and he whispered “you too.” It was the closest he ever came to saying these words.

                I grew up displaced, not just from moving around the Midwest and the east coast as a child but emotionally, where my father would pull us in close then push us away with his anger, his paranoia and religion which he used as a brute force to try to carve his children into something he believed in but ended up bludgeoning  me, his take on religion was one of fear and not forgiveness one built upon his fear of others. He eventually abandon his children, each one of us when we entered puberty, his take initially was it was our mother, then us and then sin that drove us away from him and in reality it was his own mental state and the fact that maybe, just maybe he isn’t a nice person. My uncles, both undoubtedly scarred from their own lives of displacement tried in their own way to help my brother, sister, and I whether it was with food, welcoming us into their homes or slipping us money. They always reassured us our father loved us but we felt otherwise, their love was enough. I think about Pablo quite a bit, his death was not sudden and when his wife messaged me a few weeks ago I did not flinch and it took me a few days to weep which came suddenly, at a stop light like a spring shower that erupts for a moment when the sun is still shining, but the time the light changed it had left me. A few deep sobs and that was it. I was expecting more.

                He lived life at arm’s length and didn’t marry until he was near death, always waiting for something I think that emotionally maybe never came—his father was cold, a man who kept to himself and lived for much of his children’s childhood away from them perhaps for all the losses he had encountered in his life. The Second Word War loomed large in our family, it was a ghost that stole from the family, the stature of my grandmother’s family—the hotel she was born in, her privileged childhood, and the ultimate death of her father (Karoly Gundel) who was a figure larger and more brilliant in our world than anybody we had read about in textbooks. She mourned him daily, a famous chef in Hungarian history-who, based on the story our grandmother told us went blind when the Russian Army burned his treasured cookbooks in front of him. The painting that my grandfather painted of him hung in her living room. Blind smoking a large cigar loomed over our family gatherings, he may be dead but he was still the focal point in my grandmothers, thus in all of our lives. Pablo identified as Venezuelan more than Hungarian or even American (he became a US citizen in the 1990’s) and he lived his life closer to the Latin culture of Caracas and South America, one filled with dancing, multiple women, relaxing and friendship. I think of him, how he must have kept things at bay inside of him, his side of the family did not talk about suffering, only endured it—he was a figure in my life, one I will cherish who had large outlandish dreams, lived an absurdist life and was funny. My uncles offered me advice over the years, advice about sex “always lick the asshole”, drinking “eat a stick of butter before you drink, it was allow you to drink for hours”, self-care “when you wipe your ass, stand up, bend over and wipe from the top down”—one of the uncle’s actually enacted this act at a party I had thrown, eating “wipe the mold off the top, bake it and then put ketchup on it—it will be fine” and “do you want to drink or eat, good choice—booze will fill you up.” These were not the things that one would hear from parents, probably not from very many people but I have them, they make me laugh—even now—with their passing.

Springs, New York 1974-2021

“I think we turn here……or maybe it was back there, one of those other roads” I said scanning the woods surrounding the car, the map on the phone was an excellent guide in trying to get to where we wanted to go but, in my mind, I had no idea where this was, so we drove one way, turned, and drove in another direction. None of the houses looked familiar, they were larger, set back into the pine trees and wealthier than what stood on this point of Long Island over 45 years ago. Springs-Fireplace Road winds from one end of East Hampton to the other, looping through all of Springs, New York like an unraveled garden hose. My memory of living there is formed in clumps, nothing linear just emotional pockmarks nestled deep in my amygdala, they are all lovely and safe, so it makes sense that I wanted to go back here, to find the place where everything was perfect for a year or at least felt that way. We drove from Ohio on my own mission that my partner was able to indulge me in, with care, love and most importantly understanding how I have needed to do this. We listened to a very long playlist I have been adding to for the past year, comic/crime podcasts and laughed as we went across northern Pennsylvania in one “straight-shot” (moves arms back and forth quickly as if performing a jujitsu move.) I had been planning of returning to this brief childhood home since I became an adult and started travelling to New York City in the early nineties although almost all the trips involved seeing music or on those earliest trips a girlfriend, there was not any time to explore the haunting of my childhood, the globs of childhood that spoke from deep within my mind were easily wiped away by concrete, amplifiers, and sights of the city. Besides, I was usually too drunk or too hungover to want to drive 100 miles for something that may not exist any longer.

                Leading up to the trip I began experiencing vivid dreams, most involved the ocean and some that were filled with the anxiety of travelling, of waiting to arrive but not yet being where you are headed. I had also received a message from my estranged father who turned eighty this past spring, and in a moment of clarity I realized that I did not want our final correspondence to be one of anger, which it had been—our last correspondence one of sharp words that left no doubt where I stood on our relationship—me, as the protective father he never was. And, so I sent him an email in some ways trying to offer something akin to a truce—and allowing him the opportunity to meet his grandchildren who are now teenagers. There was no answer to my email until a few days before my fifty-third birthday and about two weeks before the trip to New York. There was nothing different in his tone or his thoughts, it was the same as it has been for the past forty years and while I realize as a middle-aged man, he can no longer hurt his son, it stung like a small soul pinch (a soul titty-twister) and then I moved on. (Sigh), I tried. It was this event that loomed over this journey backwards forty-five years as we are straight shotted across Interstate 80 while Everything but The Girl and Lou Reed bounced around my white Volkswagen sedan.

                My mother and my former stepfather David had moved us from Youngstown to Springs in late 1974 or early 1975 where he got a job as a marine biologist working near Montauk, for David it must have felt as if he was going home. He grew up in Brooklyn, went to Syracuse on a football scholarship, joined the military, ended up moving to Germany for his PhD and ended up meeting my mother in Athens, Ohio as her marriage was falling apart. He took a job in steel mill in Youngstown in 1973, maybe doing mindless blue-collar work would help him make sense of his life and after a year he moved us to Long Island. The time we spent there has made an indelible print on my life as the soft ease of living in the woods, near water that was so large to me at the time it appeared that the sea could swallow the sky in several gulps and without the arguing of my parents during the first five years of my life—for me, the memory of Springs has been one of calm and discovery—like watching a nature show narrated by David Attenborough, while there was some danger in the bush everything would be alright and, in fact, everything held beauty. There were deep walks in the woods behind our house, where we would find box turtles, and with the ocean only minutes away we would walk after a heavy rain and stare at the crashing waves, the violence of the water holding my gaze because there was nothing else to do. When one sees such authoritative beauty one can only watch. I fell in love with the ocean during that time in my life, it’s attraction still holds me today, when dreams of water—of traveling over it, and succumbing to it as a blanket covers a bed still arrive with regularity. Ohio has no sea, we do have Lake Erie—itself mimicking the ocean in it is midwestern manner—it too has a temper, as well as lighthouses, barges, and fishing, but it is miles from Columbus and when one knows something is an imitation, it will never hold the same power as the real thing. So, I continue to go back to the Atlantic Ocean of my childhood.

                “Let’s go to New York City” I mentioned to her one night, we were trying to plan our summer, both of us having a busy July and August planned, while trying to juggle children  and all after a global pandemic. Looking over dates we choose one and she asked me about Springs. I told her about my hopes of always wanting to return, to fold out the wrinkling brittle map of my childhood and see if I could connect the emotional dots by seeing the proof of when I felt a certain type of joy and calm. “Let’s go!” she said, kissing my forehead. “But it’s a far drive from the city—it is literally on the longest end of Long Island,” I explained, “probably a two- or three-hour drive.” “I always like driving with you” was her answer followed by another kiss. For my birthday she procured a motel room on the beach and off we went. Love is indulging in the other’s dreams. So we drove and drove and after a day in the city drove again out to  Springs, battling traffic and the male Australian voice from the Google Maps app on my iPhone  seemed to grow annoyed by my ignoring his advice. At one point I was expecting him to just say, “well fuck it then, find your own way mate.” We found Springs, and the ocean for which we tried to swim in—I was braver and stayed in longer, making several efforts before the cold water pushed me away so we collected shells, watched the clouds, and in one beautiful instance watched two deer climb upon the sand dunes to our left, their bodies holding our gaze until they slipped away into the darkness.

                That evening as we searched for a house that no longer exists, I phoned my mother asking her if she remembered the address of the house, “I don’t know Bela, let me think….if you go down Springs-Fireplace road and see the Pollack-Krasner House the road we lived on was right after that but I can’t remember the name—but the houses on our street were tiny they were probably destroyed for new builds. Our house didn’t even have insulation. Lee Krasner had another house that was next to ours, but she wasn’t there much—she was elderly if I remember correctly. I wish I could remember.” I can picture my mother looking up, trying to remember but drawing a blank.  I texted my brother and sister, but they could not remember, we were children, and it was so many years ago. We kept driving and soon realized that we may have driven by the place where the house had stood and in fact, the entire road may have been removed for the development of these newer houses. She touched my face as I drove, “are you ok honey?” I was and replied, “perhaps it’s best we didn’t’ find it, I don’t think it matters if we found it or not.” We went and got dinner at a seafood diner that had a list of famous people who had eaten there, and I fried seafood and had a chocolate egg cream.

                The next morning, we drove into Montauk where we ate pancakes that were not as world famous as the sign out front claimed there were, more like Mediocre Famous but the post-COVID interaction of the crowd inside meant for delicious eavesdropping and we played finger tag on the countertop and grinned at each other. We then journeyed to the  lighthouse that didn’t appear how I remembered it, nor did the drive to the end of the island but we paid the extra amount to walk around the lighthouse and gazed out over the rocky cliff into the boats below us, the swirling water and felt the sun against our faces. We held hands. “How do you feel?” she asked me midway on the drive back, “I feel good, it was worth it—thank you for indulging me.”

 David passed away about a year and a half ago and with his death some of the questions about Long Island and my time there are now lost, although my mother remembers some things, the long stretch of time since that period of our lives have grown so thin they have disappeared in places, invisible except for the emotions that come when I see the waves and smell the salt of the ocean, when I plunge my head into the waves I can taste my childhood, the salt sitting on my tongue from 45 years ago. It isn’t important if I saw the house or visited the library in East Hampton where we would watch black and white horror movies on spindly film reels, munching on bowls of popcorn, or even driving on the same road—the connection is there and although I would have liked to see it, to touch the places I once played there isn’t a need to do that. It is here, in my heart and I hold them inside of me. This summer my children will not be going to the Netherlands as they have for almost every summer of their lives, because of the pandemic they have another summer in Ohio—but this may be one filled with adolescent memories as they discover crushes and new experiences, they are pulling away from their parents and learning who they are. Everyday is something new for them, and while I want to pull them back—to have them laugh at my dad jokes from the backseat, this is their time to create new safe spaces of joy that will carry them through life.

Secrets

                As I made my way through the crowd of people, squirming, dipping my shoulders and ducking my head I went in one way into the crowd that hung over and around me like vines in a jungle and soon I appeared at the other end, like a rabbit running through a tunnel. I rose from the mass under a light but not in the shine of the sun but a beer light. I nodded towards the bartender who slid a bottle of beer towards me, raised on finger and pushed a shot of Jim Beam in my direction. He held up two fingers, for two dollars and I put a five on the bar another showed my palm to let him know to keep it, turned around towards the stage and quickly downed the shot. Grabbed the beer and made my way towards the restroom. As I stood at the urinal and drained the beer in two gulps while I peed, the beer fell deep in me and I felt good. Sparkling.  Soon I went back towards the front of the crowd, doing the same bent dance through all the sweaty bodies and sidled next to my girlfriend who eyed me suspiciously, “you were gone a while” she yelled in my ear, “did you get another drink?” She handed me the half empty bottle of Black Label she had been holding. I was not supposed to be drinking more than what I had agreed on before we arrived, two or three beers tops. I promised. “No, I didn’t get another drink” I felt like rolling my eyes. “O.K.” she answered, but her eyes said she did not believe me. I thought to myself, “no, I had two drinks.” In my mind I was not really lying, I was just omitting.

                “Please call me when you get home, from the show” she was calling from Gainesville and I was in the small bedroom apartment I was renting with my friend Kent in Columbus. I had arrived back in Columbus after fourteen months in Gainesville, with  just over a year of sobriety, and the apartment that Kent lived in was on the corner of 5^th Avenue and Hunter anarea that was quickly being gentrified but we were both in early sobriety—he was working at the residential treatment program he had completed the year before, I was back working at a record store—the apartment had not yet been upgraded to the rest of the neighborhood. It was dusty with musty carpets and a faucet that was always dripping. “I will, I’m coming right back to the apartment after the show.” The plan was to see the show, and head home. My routine was to get up early, hit the gym, then go to work, hit a 12-Step meeting at noon, back to work and then another 12-Step group and then home where I would read before bed. It was working for me, the temptation to drink was dissipating by degrees as was the years-long depression that hung around me like a stench. I had actually started attending a gay AA meeting that was just down the street from our apartment, because there were no women there, I would not be tempted to engage in the other secretive behavior I had been involved in besides sneaking drinks. “I’ll call you when I get home, it shouldn’t be late—maybe twelve or so.” She instructed me not to call if it was too late, “I have to teach in the morning, but if you get in before midnight go ahead and call.” We told each other our love for one another and hung up.

                The show ended fairly early, somewhere between eleven and twelve—people were milling about, the band was loading out-with the exception of the primary singer who was standing at the bar receiving congratulations and getting a beer. I had not been back in Columbus long, and friends I hadn’t seen in almost a year were coming up and chatting—at this point, I had realized that I was a bit uncomfortable and had not yet made the connection that one aspect of my drinking had to do with the underlying social anxiety I experienced for most of my life—this revelation took some years to discover. We laughed, told stories and a few offered to buy me drinks, one person brought me a beer that I politely declined and shared that I didn’t drink any longer-a brave step for me. “That’s a good one, here you go.” Smiling, “no, I really don’t drink anymore. I quit over a year ago.” The beer sat between us, he hesitated, “I guess I’ll have to drink both!” he backed away as if he walked in on someone using the rest room.  There was a woman who I was talking with, we had flirted over the years and as we laughed, she inched closer to me, our hands nearly touching as we stood in a small circle of friends. “What are you doing after this?” she grinned, her smile a little off, her words a slushy slur. She had perfect teeth. Suddenly it hit me, my intention to stay at that point had drifted past seeing the music, of enjoying what I had loved so much and slide into the part of me that yearned for female companionship. Realizing that I could have gone home with her, I stammered, “I need to go home. It’s so great to see you but I need to get up early.” “Are you sure?” her eyes beamed into me. “Yeah, I do need to leave. It’s late.” I said my goodbyes. Everybody except me was wasted. As I got ready for bed that night, opening a book that helped me with self-reflection and hopefully pour some wisdom into my brain I had the realization that I was more tempted by the companionship than by the alcohol.

                There is a vail that we carry, an inherited invisible garment that is constructed from generation to generation—some  by words and some  by actions that never appeared, only stuck in the shadows of familial relationships. I learned secrets early, some I did not fully know the meanings behind, when a parent closed their door and there was a stranger with them on the other side. A fist fight in the front yard between my father and my uncle, both men spilling the others blood in the snow while my father hustled my brother into his car in the middle of the Christmas party. “What happened dad?” we didn’t want to leave, the latin and disco music carrying over the heads and into our famished ears, this was an experience we looked forward to every year. “Your uncle Pablo is an asshole” my father’s voice was gruff and stabbed through the car which seemed colder than the freezing December chill outside. He held a handkerchief to his nose as the blood dripped around his mouth onto his lap. His glasses crooked on his face. “We want to stay” my brother was cross with him, “we have all our stuff in the bedroom.” “O.k., then stay but I’m not.” Hustling into the house, the party hadn’t let up. Everything was a shimmying normal. My father picked us up the next day, in a bustled hurry he grabbed our things and barked at us to get in the car.

                This past year my partner asked me if I thought my daughter read this blog, “I don’t think so.” She asked me why and I explained that I don’t think she interested in what her father has done, and besides she is fifteen—she is discovering her own interests. “If I could read about my parents when I was fifteen you better believe I would” she smiled at me. “Do you think your kids will read your writing, your poetry?” I asked. “Yes, at some point.” Recently I received copies of my first book, a large heavy box appeared on the front porch while I was in the middle of a meeting. Bruno opened it up and held a book up, “wow dad, it looks pretty cool.” He yelled upstairs, “Hey Saskia, dad’s book is here!” She came downstairs and opened one of the hardcover copies, “this looks neat dad” her hand pressing against the dust jacket. Dusk jacket. “Are you going to read it?” I went into the kitchen, pulling a can of Diet Coke from my decrepit fridge. “Yes, of course!” she had moved to the heat vent in the dining room, her body wrapped in a blanket, she was turning the pages. “I’m happy you dedicated it to us, my name is in a book!” “Of course, it is” I turned the record over, the needle from the turntable was hic-cupping in the run-out groove. “Bruno are you going to read my book?” He was headed outside, skateboard carrying him across the wooden floors. “Nope! I don’t read dad. Let me know where we are going tonight” and the door shut behind him. Later, after taking Bruno skating while I went to the gym we came back to the house. Saskia was still on the vent as I walked through to fetch some water. “Still reading?” I asked. She was staring straight ahead and it had looked like she had been crying. “Dad?” I set the water down, chose another record and put it on the record player. “Yeah?” my back turned to her. “This was a weird book to read.” I turned around; she had a slight smile. “Why is that?” “It’s really sad but also funny at times. Plus, it’s strange to read about your dad getting blowjobs” she laughed. “Well, there aren’t any real descriptions of blowjobs” I replied in a matter-of-fact voice, I didn’t want her to be frightened of sex or talking about it—I had enough sex shaming when I was a child that I did not want to pass this along to my kids, “but yes, there are some sad parts, Jenny lived a sad life—one of desperation but she was also funny as was Jerry. Plus, hopefully there is some redemption in there.” There was a pause from the vent, “I suppose, but I liked it. I don’t think I’ll tell my friends to read it.” There are a lot of secrets revealed in those pages, it is easier to write the secrets than to say them.

                 The dance of lies that we learn takes us through truth and out the other end, sometimes like a bullet and other times like a soft cloth, but it’s always a dance that gets more complicated with more steps every passing year. I am a magician at times holding out one truth that acts as an inverse mirror, so strong that I believe it myself—but on the other side the truth dims under the layers of avoidance I learned to bury and fold into myself. There is a saying in Buddhism that that present is a shadow of the past, the future is a shadow of the present, the cause and effect of my drinking taught me subtle ways to avoid the truth although I tried to live my life honestly—to follow up on my word, the complexities of learning to live honestly was difficult even if on to the outside world I was honest. I was raised to tell the truth, it was hammered into us as well as to be mindful of those who suffer, stick up for the little guy, be true to your convictions—give of yourself. These stuck with me and my siblings, as we grew up these are things we did, challenged bullies, befriended the kids who were picked up, don’t follow the pack—live truthfully in your heart. I’ve challenged authority most of my life, and in high school it got me tossed out of class (for instance, when I told the biology teacher in the middle of class that using the n-word was offensive) or slammed against lockers by bullying teachers. I didn’t give a shit as I knew I was right, my daughter is the same way although she is wiser than me, she reads feminist literature, communist theory, Angela Davis and others. I gleaned my philosophy from Woody Guthrie, Kurt Vonnegut, the Clash and Huck Finn. When I was in my mid-forties, my marriage was disintegrating like a cardboard box left out in the rain. We were both unhappy but loved each other in such a mammoth way—it did not seem possible that two people with so much love could live in such emotional silence. I had been sober for nearly fifteen years and finally, out of dire depression went back to counseling. The edge of the bed is where I would sleep, my wife slept on the other edge and some nights I would creep downstairs and log into my computer searching for some connection or I would slip into Bruno’s bed and listen to his soft breaths next to me and stare at the ceiling. “Why do you leave our bed in the middle of the night?” Merijn would ask me in the morning, her eyes pleading and her voice taunt with anger and tension. “I don’t know, you are always mad at me” and while I would flip it back on her, a dangerous emotional game of ping-pong I truly did not know was transpiring between us.

                After talking with the psychologist who was an expert in the subtitles of what I was going through he explained to me that I was not uncommon, that he had many people, mostly men who had been sober for about as long as I had whose lives had slowly unhinged emotionally. My subconscious was operating on a different level than the rest of my brain—I was being powered by a screaming voice that was telling me things that simply were not true. Mostly that I did not matter.

                I imagine we are born with a massive empty space, one that is gleaming with shine, a polished universe devoid of anything but truth. The space is slowly filled, redesigned like a manic interior decorator constructing staircases to rooms with only one entrance, one room here then another until the rooms are all wedged together like slums on the side of a mountain. On top of the rooms, packed together as if they were shove-stacked into grandma’s junk room there is still the truth gasping for air as if it were the vacationers in the Poseidon Adventure, bobbing their heads above the rising water while the capsized luxury liner tries to drink in the ocean. But the truth slides between the rooms, like air and works it magic by slowly dismantling each room, acting like wind against sandstone. When the rooms are finally leveled, they leave a scar almost a ghost limb within our psyche—still there but not at all.

                In addressing my alcohol problem all those years ago, there were moments when clarity struck me dumb although dumb is not the correct word here, they actually struck me lucid. There were many experiences that happened, small discoveries—innocent like a child’s eyes ingesting a flower, a turtle poking her head out of her shell—small but transformative. One afternoon I was sitting in my office when we were living in Gainesville, my ex-wife was teaching at the university and I was alone amongst my records, the vintage clothing I was selling on ebay waiting for the dial-up internet to slowly load the photos of ancient Brady-Bunch shirts to sell. I was in the midst of working on my Third Step of AA, I had to complete it for my treatment program and for my AA sponsor. This was an odd time for me in terms of my spiritual life, I had come to the realization that my theistic beliefs no longer worked for me—if they ever had-the discovery of Buddhist philosophy smacked me like cold water from a shower—I was awoken to something new. “Made a decision to turn our will and lives over to the care of God as we understood him” is the third step but I didn’t believe in God, it was a dilemma, but it wasn’t really at all. My rooms were being slowly dismantled and tiny explosions were popping up in my brain, tearing apart the walls of those secret rooms—on that humid Gainesville morning, as sweat clutched on the back of my calves, my thighs sticking to the vinyl office chair I came to the realization that most of my actions, mostly non-actions in terms of my non-drinking changed me in subtle ways—time and space changed my mood if I allowed it. Running every morning helped a great deal, putting on my headphones, sliding a mix tape into my bulky Walkman I would be transformed by one step after another, one drum beat after another while I ran around Gainesville, exercising my secrets with the help of Superchunk, Springsteen and the Wedding Present blasting into my skull.

                I kept my secrets in a safe space, underneath walls constructed of guilt, bewilderment, a bit of shame tossed in along with a belief that everything was alright. Now. For years, the community that I discovered was the safety net I felt pulled onto, a joyous exercise of living that eased the rest of the hardships of life behind. An insular world was the one I was a part of, but it was outside of the world that that I was supposed to be a part of—one where personal responsibility—personal choice was dictated by how loud you played your music at night and if you could make it to your slummy job by 10 am. Nothing more. Nothlng less. Guitars were our bible, and amplifiers were the locomotive engines that powered us for far into the night that our ears and bodies still vibrated the next morning until the third cup of coffee pushed the last note out of our bodies the next afternoon. So, when it was time to get sober—to get real with what my ingesting alcohol had done for me for the past fourteen years it was frightening, a lot of rooms were constructed out of liquid and everything that came along with it, the broken relationships, the sex that left me wanting more but without the intimacy of a partnership—life had become, finally harder than what I thought it could be.

                Around one pm every afternoon in Gainesville, I would get home from the noon AA meeting I attended, and I would do my push-ups, slide into my running shoes, put the headphones on my head—checking to make sure that the batteries were working and start my run. It didn’t matter how hot it was, in fact the hotter it was the better it was as the anxiety that ran up and down my body was visible, eyes furrowed, I was restless but my daily seven-mile run did wonders. I would get back exhausted. At times when I was running the undisclosed parts of my marriage would burble up, twin spikes of betrayal would leave me shouting during these runs although the music was so loud, I could not hear myself. I would come back exhausted. Spent but always. Always. Always feeling better. Changed. There are times now when I look for a change in how I feel, there is never a longing for alcohol but there is a wanting to change the way I feel, to connect the feeling of disconnect to something the feels better, and the simple curiosity I felt on finding something new—besides alcohol, in those searing Florida days in those days that now stretch behind me like bridal train forgotten in the chapel,  and I forget what that period was like. It is simple to view the past as something that was something it wasn’t, remember the good times is a phrase that is uttered but my bones and cartilage only seem to recall the mutterings of anxiety, of the stark fear of aloneness.

                My father would pack us into his scarlet-colored Malibu, and we would drive into the hills of Southeastern, Ohio. The state route and back roads, zigzagging over the lumpy miniature mountains and fledgling woods that yearned to be forests but fell short because, well, this is Ohio where even the woods aren’t forests and the cities are still small towns. In the trunk were paints, watercolors, thick paper, jugs of water, empty jars, and if we were lucky a few bottles of warm pop. The two-lane roads would blister in the summer heat, newly laid asphalt would cover the potholes and short stretches of the road, at times it looked like chunks of black rocky caramel corn and would stick to the bottom of my father’s $500 car. “Shit” he would whisper to himself as he drove through a patch, the asphalt clicking under the tires only to get stuck on the bottom of the car like industrial freckles made by God. It was an escape for him, and for my brother and I. Although the twisty roads always made me car sick as my stomach dropped and jumped until he found a place to park and we would park at the side of the road on into a small dirt road so we could paint a barn, or field. He would turn the car off and pull everything out along with a few folding chairs. In my mind, this memory that has been boxing out so many other experiences that crowd the sky of my brain this experience happened a lot. The drives that we made to go painting but when I do the memory math, it didn’t happen very often. I only lived with my father from the 4^th grade to 6^th grade, two years and while I visited him every summer before fourth grade, I seldom spent time with him after moving out. And certainly, never painted with him after the 6^th grade. But although these excursions only happened 5 or 10 times, they were joyous for me—the made a mark, an impression just like my comic books and my favorite records. Remember the good times. But the other side of this lies the violence of my father, not just the physical violence but his words—which could be hateful and cruel towards my siblings, my mother, myself and to so many others whom he felt threatened by. It was there, in those words he spit and yelled that I began to construct the rooms made for my secrets, that I had no idea that they even existed. There were trapdoors being created that I didn’t even know would be there until I fell through them nearly thirty years later. “I’m not falling” I would tell myself and the chill of ancient scars tugged at my ankles, trying to yank me to the bottom of the river. Kicking up, I leave the mottled green and brown slimy bottom, upwards towards the sunlight—bursting through the thin line of water into the air. Open.

                There are usually three parts to my secrets, me, the other and then the secret formed between us—an invisible wall that now pushes out in its flexible partitions in my brain—it breaths as if it had just run a race, hands on hips, cheeks blowing in and out—this secret reminds me that there were times when, I felt not only frightened but excited. When there were two of us birthing this yet unknown experience, we may have laughed into each other mouths. I climbed on top of you and you climbed onto me, leaving us gasping. A giggling, furtive act and as we laid staring at the ceiling afterwards you held my hand, finalizing the walls of that concealed room we had just created. “I feel evil.” I did not know if that was spoken in giddiness or remorse. Probably both.

My marriage had fallen apart, a slow sinking that took years, the foundation built upon quicksand, so much of my life felt like quicksand but at the beginning we were sure we were different. She was different, European, two parents still married, finishing her Masters degrees, more beautiful than any person I had ever seen—in real life or a movie, she spoke gently to me her voice a soft touch on my busy mind. A quieting gesture every time she spoke to me. And although the years before our marriage were filled with hidden lies I got sober within a year of our civil agreement—a commitment to transparency. But over time, after the children, after my own graduate degree, our voices turned sharp towards one another, we grew wary, I slept on the far side of the bed. I looked for other connections to feel alive—no longer the bottle but searching again—I was suffocating under a soft pillow of searching that had begun from the moment I fell into the world. Anyway, afterwards, both time and distance uncovered much of the rooms in my head, in my tiny two-bedroom apartment that I stuff with cut flowers whenever they are on sale (because I can), with stacks of records next to the blue turntable that spins from love, a gift, I unpack the rooms I created. Opening the light.

                Last night I walked with my partner, her small hands folded into mine, her blue eyes stealing small peeks at me as the April wind blew into us –we talked about our children. My daughter is fifteen, straight A’s, funny, creative—she loves to bake for her friends, she has good friends who also get straight A’s, they walk together and talk politics—feminist theory, a good kid. “Dad, if you want to sleep at Maggie’s this week when Bruno is at grandma’s you can” she volunteered the other day. I bring this up to Maggie who smiles, “well I know what I did when I was fifteen when my parents went out of town.” Me too, in fact my daughter is aware of it through my writing, “do you think she would do the things we would.” Concerned that my fifteen-year-old might be constructing her own scrumptious secrets while her father is across town, “you think she would do what we did?” Am I this naïve? “I’ll talk to her mother about being careful” I say, satisfied with my own answer. We cross the busy street and I pull her hand close to me, keeping out the worry of things I will not longer be able to control as if I could at all. Saskia asks me often about my friends, many who are no longer of this world, and mostly what I remember is the laughter, how funny they were, and sweet—everyone I remember was sweet. A hearty chuckle as Jerry Wick once sang. His was more of a hearty cackle that made the rest of the room feel both welcome and small. An incredible talent in and of itself. Jenny left a void but in that empty space she is still there, a ghost of broken dreams and shattered laughter. Edo with his warm smile, his soft eyes searching outwards. My grandmother, her eccentric beliefs and mischievous laughter. They all felt the world more than anybody should, they were the small hairs on the roots of trees searching for nutrients. “We laughed a lot” I tell Saskia, this is my explanation. I tell her that she needs to laugh a lot during life. It breaks down the things we unknowingly create. As we turn the corner into the neighborhood, my partner leans close to me—whispers a joke that only we will get as we riff on something absurd down the sidewalk for several blocks these secrets are ours and they are filled with our truth.

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Bee Thousand 1992-2000

Bee Thousand. 1992-present.

photo by Jay Brown

                I recently pulled out my vinyl copy of Guided by Voices “Bee Thousand” which I had not listened to on vinyl since at least the mid-nineties. This doesn’t mean I haven’t listened to it, I had an advance cassette that lived most of it’s life in the Ford Tempo I drove at the time, it may or may not have migrated to the small pick-up truck I had in the late nineties. I also have a CD of it and have streamed it on my phone. There has been a reluctance to actually put the vinyl record onto my turntable, as well as some of their other records from an era that I feel an emotional attachment as well as a bit of hesitance too, I’m not sure why. There are a few other records from this time that have this same sort of push/pull attraction to, the names are not important—they all hold something within me that I cannot quite understand. One may think I hold something for them, but music only gives—it doesn’t take so I receive its gift and it may or may not curl up inside one of my cells and keep itself ready for duty whenever I call upon the special talents it brings.

photo by Jay Brown

                That time in my life, from the late 80’s to the late nineties are alike a painting full of smudges, all of them smushed into one another so I can’t recall what year is which and it really doesn’t matter unless I give my memories that much power—as if I got the date wrong it will negate the feeling associated with it. Autumn is a difficult period for me, one on hand it is one of my favorite times of the year, the shedding of leaves, the teeming colors of the trees making the landscape burn with a cacophony of red, pinks, yellows, oranges and yes, black. The rot in the branches set everything aglow, I am drawn to it—a certain part of me feels whole in the discord of change. A comfort. It also brings in the wisps of winter depression that, like my favorite songs live in my cells and burst open like morning lilies when the wind slips under my windowsill brining in the nips of winter.

                When I lived on North Campus, so many houses throughout the eighties and nineties, it seemed every other summer I was hauling my records from one block to the next block. I had finally ended up on East Patterson Avenue from 92-96 or so, a small clapboard house that stood in the shadows of Holy Name Catholic Church, a church where my brother had been baptized years before. I would walk to the record store, my Walkman in my hands listening to mix tapes that were built to shoot emotions throughout my being, tying both brain and body together, kicking leaves all the way to High Street. I had gotten an advance copy of “Bee Thousand” on a cassette, the cover just a piece of plain white folded paper like so many advance tapes of that time—they looked like a cassette version of Generic brands. I don’t know if Matador had sent it or maybe Bob Pollard had given it to me, but it was lodged in that Tempo’s tape deck. In May of that year a friend from Athens, Ohio had overdosed, and he was airlifted to Columbus. It took Ted about two weeks to finally die, and during those two weeks I fell in love with my first wife. At his funeral I played “Esther’s Day” on repeat, wondering what he felt like before he died—surrounded by his family and his friends while wires ran in and out of his body as if he were an appliance. And I also thought how I was going to extract myself out of a brief relationship I was involved in as I knew I was falling in love with another person.

                I was an uncommitted sort; it was difficult for me to move forward in love—something within me resisted feeling loved—it was easier to make someone smile than to lean into love. I held back and retreated into what I trusted, mainly records and alcohol. They were much safer than a relationship, less commitment, which was something that I knew little about—the sacrifices needed to be accountable and present. I would go home and wrap myself in records, playing them one after another, cracking open one beer and then the next until I hit that magical moment of bliss when my feelings melded with the songs. We were all one, the song, the alcohol and me. Or so I thought. Being broken has its advantages, looking for the glue to patch the cracks can be a lot of fun but the introspection it involves when stepping away and looking into the mirror is like holding one’s hand into the flames of the universe, at times I feel like the skin of a toasting marshmallow bubbling before I my burst into a small inferno.

                Robin and I married the following May, she moved out in October and I started sleeping with other people the week she left. We divorced that February; the marriage did not even come close to making it through the fall. I met my second wife the April following the annulment from Robin and we fell into each other immediately, and as I danced, crawled and galloped through shows she followed me, all the while as I tried to bow into our relationship I was falling out of myself, the music and alcohol had quit working. It felt like I was decaying in slow motion, parts of me lopping off and making metaphorical thuds onto the floor of my life. We married five years later, and she moved to Gainesville that fall, while I spun my way into the bottle. My life had become like a corkscrew. That autumn was a parody of my life up to that point, but instead of racing to records, I raced from woman to bottle to woman to bottle, each one I used as an oar to keep moving through the sea of my life but the sea too violent and the waves would cause the sutures I was providing myself to decompose after a night or two. The beast of depression was roaring within me and I thought I would die. I got sober shortly after moving to Gainesville and for a long time our love supported each other until, well, when it quit. Music had not worked for me in a long time, although being a father, meditation and writing helped, I was still pulling away. Never leaning in, only pulling away and invisibly apart-year by year, hiding although I had not realized it. The depression had resigned me to the far end of the bed, I had taken to sleeping in my son’s bed, listening to the soft hum of his breathing to feel alive. I moved out in October of 2018 and started another relationship. Always searching.

                Moving into a small two-bedroom apartment, located just blocks from the home we had created together I slowly started to breath again. The record and CD collection is always within reach, my television is intentionally upstairs in the bedroom, music fills my house all day long. The kitchen is small, my partner refers to it as a “one-butt” kitchen, with cramped quarters, jerry-rigged cabinets are shoved next to one another-the largest appears to have been found in an alley and  is shoehorned into a corner. I cracked my head against constantly my first year living here, at first a subtle reminder of my failed marriage until I finally learned to just make sure the cabinet doors are shut. The dining room is lined with a wall of records that face three tall shelves of compact discs that I won’t sell—I humorously refer to these as my walls of loneliness, of course it is only half a joking. Every weekend I take the stack of vinyl that sits next to my turntable and put them away, the stack is usually at least a foot or two high-they tell a tale of my mood during the week. And on Sunday I start a new stack.

                When “Bee Thousand” came out I was living in a tiny two bedroom house with a room-mate that worked at Kinkos and Stache’s, he was a great roommate who would help me out by printing flyers and xeroxed record sleeves for Anyway but also kept to himself so while we got along we both had our own lives that intersected but didn’t travel together. He would later marry a woman I had dated. I worked six days a week at Used Kids and the schedule in retrospect was a bit nuts but working there never felt like work, in fact it was where I usually wanted to be besides Larry’s, Stache’s or Bernie’s. Nevertheless, the weeks could grow long and the days at the store were made easier because we could drink there, chat with the regulars and listen to music all day long.–it was advantageous to someone who both enjoyed drinking and felt lonely a great deal of the time. I would cover myself in music, at home I would put on a record, crack open a beer and let the music smother me until the world outside disappeared and my insides would match the buzzing in my head. Bob Pollard, his brother Jim, and the rest of the band had been working with Mike “Amrep” Hummel on engineering and mixing their previous records Propeller” and “Vampire on Titus” over the past few years at the record store, and “Bee Thousand” was their first record with Matador which was akin to being asked to the prom by the prettiest girl in school. I was exceptionally happy for them.

                I’m more than half a century old, closer to death than birth where every year seems to flow by quicker, like the ending of the escalator getting eaten up by the floor—I am aware of my gliding towards annihilation. I have gone through much of life feeling a confidence that I would be ok, that with the help of music, books, and laughter everything was ok as it was. I never wanted for more, I have been content in many ways—not needing to feel the need to impress others. Although the search for companionship has always been there, a needing to feel loved does not always square with feeling unlovable, a cellophane wrap of self-doubt has covered me since an early age. It is like when someone purchases some new electronic equipment and there is a ribbon of plastic covering it but it never is removed. I was in my mid-twenties when it came out, had been through two difficult relationships—where my heart had been squeezed to hard, like a sponge being wrung out and had left me even more apprehensive. My favorite lovers were records and live shows, they couldn’t really leave a larger hole in my life like lovers do and I knew what to expect when I held them tight in my mind. Love though, was fraught with doubt—the worst imposter syndrome a person could have, a pursuit and, ultimately a rejection of what I wanted the most. “Bee Thousand” was a celebration of what I held dear to myself, that is music that filled holes in my life made my friends that in turn, helped jell the community we were all in. Like a secret handshake, it united many of us but also helped us to just feel better. I listened to it as well as the next several Guided by Voices records incessantly, which may sound like a lot but I listened to music continuously during that period of my life. I didn’t own a television for several years and never have never had cable television as an adult, my chosen salves have been records and books. Near the end of the 90’s when disappointment rose, the death of Jim Shepard and others were stacked next to the failures of many of the bands I worked with, a failed marriage, the splintering of who I thought I was—all trying to be sewn together with alcohol, records quit working. There was only so much room I had in my life, alcohol, and my hopes for having a “real” relationship was nudging the rest of the world out. I felt the pain of disappointment when I listened to different records, “Bee Thousand” being one of them—not anything to do with the music but, perhaps for the promise I felt during my early twenties, it was all smoldering by the end of the decade.

photo by Jay Brown

                Recovery lit something up in me, the first few months were terrifying—the shedding of the skin of alcohol that I had worn for all of my adult life was fast but left me exposed not only to the world but to my own inside world. Thoughts were frightening, like apparitions that floated from my brain down in the heart they towered inside of me, a metaphysical happening that exacerbated the anxiety I was feeling but it also provided an opportunity to remake myself to what I had once been, or maybe could have been. A rose color itself. Gainesville, Florida is always growing and decaying—every inch of earth sprouts life and while some of the life blooms almost daily some of it is gobbled up by larger and stronger beings that prey upon what ever lays in their path. A walk through the swampy area reveals large spiderwebs that stretch from tree to tree, flashing miniature rainbow diamonds constructed by the sun—it was both invigorating and challenging. I was running a lot then, this was a continuation of the long distance running I had taken up in the late nineties and early two thousands, a way of telling myself my world wasn’t splintering—a marathon runner can’t be an alcoholic. I would get up early, after Merijn left for work, log into the computer—drinking coffee and walk the dogs up through our neighborhood and out to Lake Alice, it was dangerous to let them all the leash as there were alligators on the golf course we lived across and they were dug in deep in the waters of Lake Alice. One beast devouring another, so we would walk, the two animals soaking in the sunshine while I soaked in the music on my Walkman. It was one of the only peaceful moments I may experience that day. Then I would log into my eBay account and sell records or the clothing I would find in the yard sales and thrift stores that dotted Alachua County. Central Florida is thumb-printed in poverty, a large county with the University in the middle, middle-class neighborhoods extended outward from the campus of Florida until the outskirts of town where a large state prison sits and just beyond for miles are ram-shackle houses, home-grown vegetable stands and mobile homes line the state routes. Many of which have every-lasting yard sales that line the road, tables of junk, old clothing and battered furniture pulled from the houses and garages and set on the side of the roads. One would wonder who would actually stop. I found it depressing. I would then attend a noon 12-Step group which would get me through to five or six o’clock where I when I would make dinner and then attend another 12-Step group to help quiet my brain. I listened a lot, and slowly felt comfortable enough to share what I was feeling and found my voice. Back home my records sat in a little office, my turntable had lost its needle, so I played CD’s and felt the pull of Ohio as I progressed through early sobriety. It was a year of growing out but also growing small. The biggest growing pains happen inside, and sometimes they happen long after our limbs have stretched out into the world, our ankles defying gravity as they move slo-mo towards adolescent. We can’t wait to grow older, grow out of our stumbling awkward selves even well into our lives, I found out that looking ahead or glancing backwards impedes whatever I am supposed to feel now.

photo by Jay Brown

                “Bee Thousand” came on the heels of “Vampire on Titus” which, I think, was mostly out-takes from “Propeller” which may be my favorite one of theirs. It sounds like it was recorded in the coolest treehouse on the block, the one that you could slip into, sneaking cigarettes and swigs of beer while your mother called you in for dinner, all the while you pressed play on the boombox and let Kiss “Destroyer” play. I idolized the kid across the street from my father’s house when I was ten, he was in high school and must be sixty now but he blared Boston, Kiss and Cheap Trick out his front door, he showed me his record collection one day after I told him I got “Hotter than Hell” with my birthday I money, “This is the good stuff” waving the dust jacket of the first Boston record, he had a cigarette in his hand, the dark shag carpet in his house smelled like must and cat. The next record I bought was Boston’s “Don’t Look Back” just because of him. I not only wanted to be cool but I wanted to be wrapped up and hugged by the music I listened to—be taken away from what ever it was that was making me sad and alone. Even now, when listening I feel primitive—as if the cosmos gave us this trinket called music to pacify us and give language to the way we felt, the indescribable. “Bee Thousand” and the records preceding it and the couple that followed felt like the kind of embraces I had always been yearning for but not only that because of the nature of the songs and the joy in the music, it felt like a collective experience with whomever you listened to it with, or saw them with. Which for me was my closest friends, lovers and of course, myself. It was made more intense because it was something I not only close to but a part of, and as the decade bore down on me a few years later, the fear that was but a kernel in the first half of the nineties had now turned into a shifting monster that was chewing me from the insides, the music became too much for me. My friends were dying, and I was adrift, not even music could save me. I stored the records away, so many records that kept me dancing and screaming with glee throughout my twenties. Guided by Voices, Gaunt, the Grifters, Jon Spencer, Teenage Fanclub. I did not listen to them for years, instead of lifting me I felt the soft underbelly of hurt and I did not know why.  

Bela and Merijn 1997

                I climb the elliptical, with mask on and pump my legs to the music I blast through my headphones, the ones that have the plastic ear coverings taped on because I sweat so much when I work out and for an hour I try to block out the world. It’s not even the running that carries me away as I work the machine it is the music; it has always been the music. I tend to go back to what I always have listened to, Bruce Springsteen, Superchunk, Teenage Fanclub, Built to Spill, almost everything with guitars—somethings really do not change. What moves us moves us unless we block it out. Sometimes on the nights I sleep alone, the dog stands next to me and nudges the blankets with her nose and I let her crawl under and she curls next to my chest, sighs a giant breath and falls asleep. When I moved out a few years ago to live alone for the first time in my adult life an empty bed to face me and my decisions-my mistakes every night there was a fear the crept in but also a bit of courage that I would be ok. For many years the solace I would search for came in the form of hard vinyl cylinders, where the crackle of the needle would spin me into feeling something differently or better articulate whatever emotion I was feeling, putting a spotlight and elevating it into something more magical than my brain could sort out. I also found solace in the women I was with, but in the end the hurt of loving someone usually made me push away, sadly I didn’t know any other way. Recently I went on a walk with my ex-wife, we laughed and watched my dog (that used to be our dog) scamper through the woods near my house. We talked about our current relationships, with no hint of jealousy and I told her I feel happy. That I reach for my partner’s hand unconsciously, that we laugh more than I ever have with anybody—and that I am trying to lean into my own fears and into love. “I’m glad you like to hold hands now” she said, as I used to pull away from her, unconsciously—maybe when the unconscious becomes conscious that is where change can start to really happen.

                I listened to “Bee Thousand” on repeat a few weeks ago, it sounded great and it felt better. There was no nostalgia or the tender pain of the disappointment I felt towards the end of my twenties, of that heady time in my life when there seemed to be an endless supply of drinks, laughter and bodies to clutch. There were many expectations I had for my friends, not so much for me, I wanted to be the fuel that helped get them to where I thought they should be but we all exploded in our own ways on our own gasoline that burned some of us down earlier than we should and scorched the rest of us. The hope that I once had changed, morphed into something else even though I didn’t have any idea that is what was happening. “Smothered in Hugs.” Make sure I close the cabinet doors.

Pearl

• Bela Koe-Krompecher
• Christmas
• death
• Jerry Wick and Jenny Mae
• Jon Solomon Christmas Story WPRB
• Mom
• Music
• Poverty and the Mentally Ill
• Sasha the Mouse
• THE CHAIR

COVID Clouds.

“I think I lost my job today, I think” yelps Jerry Wick on the Gaunt song “Hope You’re Happy Now”, I remember the circumstances surrounding the line from this song. Jerry was working at Used Kids and even though he lived only five hundred feet from the record store, in his sparse one room apartment above Larry’s he had a difficult time making it to work on time. We were lax with time, me more so than Ron or Dan, both who arrived early and took great pride in this fact, a marker to show that no matter how much a person drank, arriving at work on time meant that there was not a problem with alcohol. I had only missed one day of work due to a hangover, and this was only after calling off as I was dry heaving in the back alleys as I groaned towards the shop. But Jerry was late, constantly and he did not have a phone. “Why would I get a phone, I can just use the store’s” he would reply without irony. He was in the midst of breaking up and breaking in with a woman whom he wrote the two best Gaunt records about, she worked a professional job of which she would tell Jerry, “I have a real job Jerry when are you going to grow up?” Working at a record store allowed Jerry to pursue his art and live the lifestyle that was better suited to his philosophy of living on the edge and being non-committed. He was able to tour with Gaunt, record his songs during the night and afternoons he had off and still make enough money to pay his meager rent. He mostly ate at the record store where lunch and dinner was provided by opening the cash register. He didn’t eat much, hence the name of his band. At one point Dan and Ron got sick of his tardiness, I would try to stick up for him but he would basically force every one around him to question their relationship with him, it was as if getting close to him was a dare. Get to close, have any expectations and he would burn you and scorch himself. He eventually got fired.

 

I left my job recently, one that I loved a great deal, that provided a sense of duty and mission. The work I do, while satisfying can be exhausting, at times I am complimented for the work I do, “it’s amazing you can do that job” but the day to day work of helping the homeless, addicts and mentally ill is never very tiring, everything else that comes with it is what I find taxing-working with systems that are not geared to help the less-fortunate but actually do the opposite is what would keep me up at night. This past year I developed insomnia that has prevented me from getting more than five hours of sleep a night, I experienced chest pains, shingles and finally vertigo that has ended up costing me thousands of dollars in medical bills but that I finally have a treatment that has kept me vertigo free for over two months. COVID has only increased worry and anxiety but it has also provided something far greater than existential fear of the future and the anger that has arisen from living in the breathing callousness of the world we are living in. Sometimes some of the worst circumstances have the power to transform us into something greater and more human than we have thought possible. I have learned what is important for me, while working from home half the time has put pressure on me in a variety of ways by always being on call, always feeling the need to check email, write a report or finish a training, all from my evening couch, I have also enjoyed and relished being with my children almost all day long. Making them lunch, going for afternoon walk breaks with them, finding other ways of connecting that I didn’t notice before. I realized that I liked my smaller world and wanted to refocus, to realign myself with my family and those I care about. I was losing my ability to keep these things my priority.

There are periods where the world keeps itself too close, pressing in until it feels as if you have swallowed in all in a giant bite and the feeling of choking becomes overwhelming—like the Chinese proverb of the boy who could swallow the ocean until it burst forth from his cheeks and killed his brothers. I have eaten my world bit by bit until I have retched on my own inner greed and pain, what I drank to relieve me was killing me. In my twenties, there were periods where I lived in panicked emotional state, drunk dialing, pulling my dogs in close, never going long without someone to share my blankets—it wasn’t so much as sex but as not wanting to be alone. I had a list of late-night friends I would call, Gretchen, Chris Biester, Katy, Haynes, Michelle, Jenny S., almost all of them women and none of the lovers. Maybe the lovers knew me in ways that prevented my from reaching out at 2am, I needed tethered to something to keep me grounded until I could finally sleep-most likely the edge of sex would have tainted that simple quest.

 

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If I ever own a house again I want one with as many windows that can let in the sun as possible, to invite the outside world in and to invite my inner world out—I don’t want to have anything to hide not to the neighbors, not to the wind, not to the moon or trees, all are welcome. I have been learning to watch the clouds, I have an excellent teacher—someone whose eye for detail is almost mathematical but without the numbers, who as someone in the 19^th Century has the “touch”, that is, she is gifted on a higher level in the language of emotion. “There’s a good one” and I don’t even have to look at her, I only have to look up to see what she is pointing to, and there it is, an entire ocean built in the sky, every cloud a pigment of some heavenly cosmic paint. “Yeah, wow.” I find myself trying to say something but how does one say something that is unspeakable without sounding like an idiot? So, I usually, touch her back or lean in and kiss her. I am now cloud watching all the time and, in the evenings, when walking my dog, I gaze at the moon, as if it were a companion walking every step in the damp grass along with me. A few nights ago, after a day of inhaling the world in deep gulps—I was brittle and tired, and I got into an argument with the kids. Nothing of consequence, perhaps it was the dog not being walked, or one of them simply asking for specific groceries but it was the last leaf in the barrel that caused it to overflow. An eruption that was lit over generations in my family, a coarseness and sense of self-righteous fairness that left much of my own childhood with me being not only being bewildered by my father’s rage but more importantly being scared as fuck that an adult would act like this. I knew, even as a ten-year-old, that something was amiss. As much as I have tried to temper and smother that flame inside of me, it’s there—mostly a small smoldering speck but it can transform rather quickly if my mind isn’t in the right place, if I am holding the world in my cheeks. I blew up, unable to come back I raged in the car, at the kids, at the dog who is compelled to bark “FUCK YOU!” at every motorcycle we pass on the street except her “Fuck You” comes out as a high pitched bark that blasts through ears like a bark-y explosion. In the back yard, I sat in the parked car—the kids went inside, no doubt wondering and thinking the same thoughts that I had about my own father over forty years ago and I sat, I listened. I tried not to hear the sounds of depression, of wanting to be annihilated, to submerge myself under waves. To call it out while sitting in my car, breathing, each breath one more step away from that wanting to be engulfed. Bruno knocked on the car window, “Dad, Saskia is yelling at me. I cleaned the living room.” He held up a can of Pledge and a dirty sock. “Will you come in soon?” Closing my eyes, “I’m not quite ready yet, I will though. A few more minutes.” I watched him stroll back to the porch, his bare feet climbing the steps and he disappeared inside. I listened some more. I looked up and saw the moon, a haze in the city sky but a comforting haze, my blurry companion. I saw the clouds, rolling over the sky in slow moving waves, and I let myself be engulfed but by something far more powerful than the depression that has nibbled on my insides all my life. After a few more minutes I went inside, said my apologies to my kids, that I was wrong to yell. An apology was something that was not offered by my father, he only handed his children blame, a cruddy way to live life and in my own growth something I never want to do. We got in the car, we laughed, and I pointed out the moon and we drove through the drive-through where I managed to make them laugh. Not everything has to end the way we feel they might. I left whatever future scar I might leave my daughter on the front seat that night and traded it in for take-out Chinese that we ate and laughed together with.

I love my new job as well.

 

 

 

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