Jerry Wick & Jenny Mae: part 50–Two Funerals

Two Funerals: 2012.

With the flicker of lights and  widened eyes, I learned of the tragic death of a childhood friend’s wife this week. Scrolling through many mindless electronic updates of photos of food, electronic ironic cards, political outrages aimed at the choir, and links to music videos I caught one that stopped my mind for a moment. The wife of one of my oldest friends, Mark, had  fallen down the stairs and broken her neck. She had died. My first thought was of their two young boys and then of Mark himself, and how the suddenness of empty space can cripple us. How would he manage? Staring at the computer screen, contemplating phoning my brother, I did nothing except send an electronic message. My stomach hurt. Shifting on the brown leather couch, the football game seemed suddenly trite, grown men banging into one another while somewhere across town two little boys were trying to sleep without their mother to tuck them in.

On my way to work the next morning, I thought that I needed to phone Jenny. Her companion, Dale Chandler (not William, as I have previously named him in this blog) was in hospice care and I had promised her I would take her to see him, as she is confined to a wheel chair and has no transportation available. The cell phone shuddered. It was Jenny.  She croaked, “Dale just died, about five minutes ago. The nursing home called, he just died. I’m so sad. He died.”

“Oh Jenny, I’m so sorry.”

Through tears she matter-of-factly explained the obvious, “Well, we knew it was going to happen. Shit, his eyes weren’t even straight anymore, he didn’t know what the fuck was going on. But it still fucking hurts. I’m not going to see my Dale anymore.”

“Listen, I’m late to work and I have two meetings, but I’ll leave early and see you.”

Sniffling, she said, “Really, you don’t have to do anything. Nothing can be done. He’s dead. They’ll call me from the nursing home. I’m not going to fuck up though. I got my paperwork together for my state hearing tomorrow to get my Medicaid turned back on. Thank God I did it last night.” In the travesty that is the American safety net, populated by regulations that are constructed by (mostly) men who have never seen poverty up close, Jenny had managed to lose her Medical insurance because she missed an appointment. She had missed the appointment because she was in the same nursing home that had initiated her Medicaid application and despite having  had spent nearly three weeks in intensive care and then transferred to the nursing home, she was denied for the sole reason of making an appointment she was physically unable to attend.

Dale Chandler Jr. was in his late forties or early fifties. He grew up in West Virginia and walked with a gait that smacked of a life breathing intoxicants in and out, as if the trees themselves were pushing them through the veins in their leaves. Even when sober, he looked drunk. Dale was a light-skinned African American with glow-in-the-dark blue eyes that watered at the wisp of the wind. When he smiled his white teeth sparkled like the tips of a wave in sunshine.

Some people dip their toes into eternity while others dive into it as if it were a baptismal pool, shunting the cares of the world to swim with the ghosts of the past. With a life fraught with reckless behavior, Dale slowly lost the use of his mind, his organs, and later his extremities. Tall, with a thin frame that must have, at one point, many years ago, supported the adulation of cheering crowds on the athletic battlefields of his youth, he was gentle, to a point. When drinking, he could grow coarse, his mood like sandpaper rubbing against burnt skin, and woe to those who crossed his path.

Jenny had fled the confines of Weigel Hall, which she had called home for a few weeks in the summer and fall of 2005. The faculty of the Ohio State University did not take kindly to a former student living in one of the practice rooms of the building, though, and so she soon hit the street. First she found refugee with one of the daytime barflies of Bernie’s, but soon he became aware that this sad singing woman would not be leaving soon nor did she have the money to pay for the vast amounts of alcohol she needed to get through the day. He chucked her out as if she were a bucket of water. She weaved her way up north, sleeping in our back yard a few times and then running into an old friend who, like her, had found himself living through unfortunate times. They slept near the river, in a small tent, but soon she discovered that he had an insatiable taste for crack cocaine, which turned kindness into spastic paranoia, and she found safety with Dale.

Dale protected her like a lioness over her cubs, and soon they moved into a homeless camp just north of the Ohio State University. Being homeless is a difficult existence, harder if you are a woman, albeit a woman who is well educated, sassy and the wits of a coyote, but with severe alcoholism and, at times, debilitating mental illness. Dale had done time in prison during the 1990s. He explained to Jenny that it was for manslaughter for a man who had molested him, although on the streets it is sometimes better to take any criminal history and blow it through the special effects of imagination. Jenny had also connected with a man named Brian—a very tall, thin man with eyes that breathed like the devil’s breath and whose tongue danced the dance of cons perfected during long years of thieving and consumption. He was a dangerous man who was prone to jealously and had truthfully taken a man’s life. He had blackened and bruised Jenny in an eruption of envy and emotional desperation. He would lurk around the camp like stench on spoiled milk, and the seven or eight men and woman there felt terrorized by this man, who in down times looked like a subdued Snoop Dogg, albeit one who would make a better spokesman for the ravages of smoking cocaine than the fun times smoking five blunts a day. Dale eventually used a splintered, cracked two-by-four to pummel Brian and soon thereafter Brian’s frightening tactics disappeared.

When the homeless outreach workers of Columbus put their resources towards housing those in the camp, Jenny and Dale had already fallen in love. Their love was built around mutual safety, but Dale idolized Jenny. Unlike most of her previous paramours, Dale did not challenge Jenny in any creative capacity, and his worship at times prevented her from moving forward in her life. It was as if they were submerged in a quicksand that only went up to their waists, but as long as they would not smother in the iciness of the dredge then everything was okay. Both insisted on being housed together, and soon they were given a small, one-bedroom apartment, nearly eight miles from the campus area and one mile from the nearest bus stop. They had no food stamps, income, or phone. They would get up every morning and walk the three miles to the freeway, where they would fly signs. That is, they would stand by the off ramp holding a sign that stated that they were homeless and ask for money. While technically not homeless, they had no income and no way of garnering an income. Both, with severe alcohol and mental health issues, were unemployable. Their clothes were ruined by months of homelessness and they lived off the charity of church groups and the discarded wares of neighbors. Jenny had perfected the art of dumpster diving.

When they would fly a sign, they ran the risk of getting arrested or being issued a ticket that they would never be able to pay and soon a warrant would be issued for their arrest. On average they would collectively make about $25 a day for five hours of work. This money was spent on food and, more importantly, alcohol, which prevented them from going into alcohol withdrawal. Several times during this period, Jenny had severe seizures when she did not have access to alcohol and the neighbors were called. Dale would do the dirty work when they needed alcohol. Because of his own mental illness he would sometimes get lost for several days, usually when they would travel to the OSU campus so Jenny could watch the OSU Marching Band before football games. They would end up drinking all day and usually slept outdoors with friends they had once been homeless with. Dale would sometimes not make it home, either lost or arrested.

The first apartment was a sub-basement dwelling, with a large piece of plywood covering one of the windows where one of the local dope boys kicked it in, mistaking their apartment for the one in back of them. “Open up you chicken shit motherfucker! Gimme my fuckin’ money, bitch! We gonna pop you one, motherfucker! You can’t hide from us, we know you in there!” Dale hid in the closet. Jenny was getting forty-ouncers at the carry-out and the young men dispersed as she walked up, staring at the broken window while she crossed the street.

“What the fuck?” she said to herself.

“You gotta problem with somethin’ bitch?!” she heard behind her.

“Nope.” They never bothered them again, but Jenny said they beat the shit out of the guy who lived behind them, and soon there was an eviction notice on his door. And Jenny and Dale soon got an eviction notice for the broken window, I helped them pay for a new one so they would not be back on the street.

Sprawled across several frayed couches and a coffee table piled high with uncurled, spent cigarette butts was a collage of spent vodka, malt liquor, and carry-out wine bottles, shuffled together as if they were chess pieces ready to be played in a sick game of chess. In one corner of the room was a bent coat hanger tied to the curtain rod, a delicate balance that was one drunken slip to a splendid crash. A stray cat came and went with the same mannerisms as the “tramps” who frequented the apartment.  With a heart almost as big as her liver, Jenny felt compelled to help anyone and everyone, even to the detriment of her health. The tramps, who she grew to know on the streets, would find their way to Jenny and Dale’s, crashing when the weather turned sour or the cops cracked down. Dale did his best to match wits with Jenny, although it was apparent that something was cognitively amiss with him. Although Jenny later found that he did indeed graduate college, there was little evidence in his slow, mannered speech. His search for words would end in a trail of mumbles and then, finally, a gasp of a smile.

After several years, they moved with the help of their housing case manager, a Nigerian with the compassion of Jimmy Carter, into a larger two bedroom apartment smack dead in the middle of urban violence that kept most neighbors entrenched in their apartments while gun shots and gangs roamed the streets with aplomb. “Fuck Bela, this place is better than the other one cause there’s a Dollar Store just a block away, but I swear to God, they are killing people over here. If it wasn’t for Dale, I’d be dead. I’m the only white person in the whole complex.” Jenny, who grew up in the midst of rural Ohio racism, in the worst underbelly of the American Midwest, where the sagging pride of a once-proud work ethic had ebbed into a fear of the unknown, was safe in the arms of the only man who would protect her, a tall African-American man with a debilitating mental illness and an addiction to alcohol that would take his mind and body to the sea of death.

Dale went into a nursing home this past year, a fading cloud of his former self, his essence obscured by a declining liver and a brain riddled with the holes of dementia. He would struggle to name the year and the name of the President while his body was just a vehicle, torn asunder by decades of poverty and suffering. Jenny called me one day and asked, “Hey, do you know anyone who needs Depends? They just dropped off  Dale’s supply and they must have fucked up, because they brought so many they are literally stacked to the ceiling. They kept bringing them in. I was like, hold on, he can’t even shit this much for the rest of his life.” His life would not last much longer.

Dale went into a nursing home in the spring of 2012, unable to stand on his own and feed himself. After several hospitalizations it was determined that a nursing home would be best. I discussed possible placements with Jenny and Dale’s social worker at the hospital and recommended a very caring nursing home that they decided to send him to. A few months later, after her own issues with failing extremities, Jenny was also taken to the same nursing home after being in intensive care for two weeks. Their rooms were around the corner from one another. Jenny’s mood brightened. She made the staff adore her as well as the sad-sack residents, who she would wheel by and devastate with her quick wit. Off of alcohol for nearly three months her mind was quick, and although she never really regained use of her legs, she appeared more hopeful. Meanwhile, Dale sunk deeper into a swamp of death. Most days he was unable to feed himself, but when Jenny wheeled in he would flash a crooked smile and his cloudy eyes would  flicker with a spark of recognition.

Dale passed away, silently and alone, in September, without even with Jenny by his side. She was unable to get to his bedside—yet another cumbersome aspect of abject poverty. I had phoned her the weekend before he passed, when he was in hospice. Jenny said, “I saw him yesterday. He didn’t know nothin’, he has no fuckin’ idea where he is. I don’t know if I can go back, it breaks my heart.” She spoke under the slurred words of pain, paralyzed by alcoholism. I offered to take her to see him the coming week, but she demurred. “We’ll see, I can’t take another death. What the fuck will I do?”

“Survive, Jenny. That’s what you’ll do. You’ll be fine.”

A deep breath, followed by an exhale, “I know that’s what ole Jenny does. At least I got a lot of Depends if I need them.”

There was no service for Dale. His family, from whom he had been estranged since he went to prison in the early 1990s, did not want to have a service, let alone drive from West Virginia to see his body interned in an indigent’s grave. Jenny had no money so there was no obituary. His death was only spoken of—a few whispered words from social workers to psychiatrists and, finally, to other caring professionals. He had no friends. And when he left the world as we know it, a sigh may have escaped his parched lips or a spike of fear may have been in those cloudy eyes, but in the end he was alone.

At the other end of town, a small gathering converged in huddled grief as a mother, wife, daughter, and friend lay before them, encased in a $9,000 box to be covered in dirt. For five days, relatives, co-workers, and friends cried and laughed, desperately trying to unfold time from something that was unbelievable into something believable. In the contours of pain, the loss of those we hold deep, the ones we tell our biggest fears and our tallest dreams, seem to fall away—a reminder that we all stop, that reality is unreal. I put on my dark shirt, slid a razor over the white whiskers growing under my chin, mussed my hair as I have done for the past twenty-five years and drove to see one of my oldest friends, Mark, in all the dark glory of grieving. His mother had changed as I had grown older. I hadn’t seen her in over thirty years, her body smaller as I stood taller. I hugged her as a full grown, middle-aged man and  she recognized me immediately, the goofy unsure grin that I had as a fifth grader unchanged by fifteen thousand experiences. His father, who recently turned eighty, looked spry, with the body of someone years younger. Finally I hugged his two brothers. The older one, still fit after all these years, looked like a track coach, his body aging as a fine athlete’s is supposed to. His other brother  gave me a hug and asked me to help look after his baby brother, now a widower with two young sons.

Some are supposed to die young, with the itching of immortality pinning us against the well of our breath fueling the gallop to the end of their lives. Some live each moment as if it were a child’s game. Tag and you’re dead. The world spills into another moment and the past plays a fruitless game of catch up while memories get trampled underfoot. Jerry died on a bike, a fact that my children ask about almost daily when we speed past the spot where his body, in the end, was no match for a hurtling mass of metal and glass just a block from our house. Others have also died young, where the wish to seduce death was done with an easy grace that only the flamboyant can pull off. Chris Wilson, Richie Violet, Jim Shepard, Dale Chandler, Ted from Torque, and others whose addictions kept the fear of abandonment away but in the end chewed them up like a paper in the gears of an engine. Bone, blood, and snot laying on the pavement, some die more gracefully than others. But in the end, thoughts of them keep ricocheting in my skull.

Jerry Wick & Jenny Mae part 42: Outsider

Outsider.

Ohio lays flat in places. Just west of Columbus it has a skyline the size of the Pacific Ocean, blanketed with fields of soybeans, corn, and wheat. There are a few larger towns in western Ohio, most notably Dayton and, of course, Toledo. The rest of the wide, smooth land is mottled with small towns. These towns are glorified as small town heartland America. They have large brick courthouses at their centers, several ice cream shops, and hardware stores that have every widget known to man, complete with kindly old gents who know the names of every kid in town. A homegrown sense of Americana sprouts in western Ohio like the farms that once helped feed the steelworkers in Youngstown and Cleveland and the academics and policy-makers in Columbus. There among the one-traffic-light towns there is a sense of nostalgia that for most of them, has only existed in a vacant dream-state, one that is hazy and filled with apathy and a strangulated sense of loyalty of something, like diminishing smoke, that has only vaguely existed. Most of the residents no longer feel. The belief in the American Dream that was long ago crushed by the greed of capitalism still stands proud every Memorial Day and Fourth of July, but a cursory weekend drive through any of these towns reveals the deflated dream of Middle America, from the empty store fronts to the lack of children playing baseball, football, or kick-the-can. When I arrived in the tiny burg of Catawba at the age of fourteen, my cynicism about romantic fantasies like the American Dream had already been ripened by my experiences of broken homes and the reality of attending over eight schools by the age of fourteen; I had an ingrained mistrust of platitudes.

We moved to Catawba in the summer of 1982. I had discovered Adam Ant, the Clash, and the Ramones during my eighth grade year, before we moved to Catawba. New wave was the only thing that MTV was showing, aside from Quarterflash, and it had just started on cable in Athens, Ohio. Catawba did not have cable television, and some of the kids hadn’t even heard of MTV, let alone Adam Ant, Elvis Costello, or the Clash. I was pegged, and rightfully so, as a nerd of the highest degree. A wave of nausea washed over me as we drove through the Ohio hinterlands, a sick feeling that would not leave my stomach for the next four years.

I missed the colors of the hills of southeastern Ohio as well as the excitement of the college town, where a stroll through the streets that sunk down below the uptown shops and the greenery of the campus exposed the passerby to music playing on lawns where college students played Frisbee in shorts, laughed, and drank beer. I went to late-night movies as a middle-school student in Athens: Rock and Roll High School, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and An American Werewolf in London. My older sister Erica, a high school senior who was dating a “townie” who was a freshman at Ohio University, took me to many of these. Being exposed to this atmosphere provided me with experiences that I soon discovered that my classmates at my new high school did not have. In the truest sense, among the fields and the slow everyday movement in Catawba, it was easy to imagine that the both land and the people who lived in this rural community had grown fallow and dormant, perhaps proudly so. My first day of school, I heard the hushed tones of my fellow school bus riders as they eyed me as if I were foreigner.

“Wow, look at that new kid. He’s so small.”

“Bela?! What the hell kind of name is that?”

“Are you even American?”

“Isn’t that a girl’s name? Are you sure you’re not a girl?”.

I felt isolated even before I arrived at school. The dread I felt was so thick that I could have balled it up and stuck it in my pocket.

Living parts of my childhood years near a college campus gave me opportunities that most of my classmates at tiny Springfield Northeastern High School never had. I was used to seeing a cross section of different cultural backgrounds. My mother was friends with many Nigerian students, and we had many students in my grade school who were the sons and daughters of foreign exchange students. At Northeastern, I was shocked to learn that there were no African-American students. It wasn’t until later, when I met Jenny Mae’s mother, that I learned that there had not been an African-American student at the high school for over twenty years. On my first day of school, I felt as if I would never fit in. The school was rampant with racism, although there were no African-American kids in the school, one could hear the word nigger throughout the day, on kid of Mexican descent was referred to as a “sand nigger”, I wanted to shout at some of the kids who said these things that the slang word for Mexican’s was “spick” but I didn’t thought they would miss my point and take me seriously. It wasn’t just the students who espoused racist attitudes on several occasions I heard both our principle (Donald Smith-thankfully retired) and football coach (Mr.Wasserman) tell racist jokes to our wrestling team and biology classes respectfully.  I felt as if I were in a time warp. Growing up, we were taught under any circumstance to never use the word nigger or any other type of derogatory slang. Whenever my brother and I would use the word redneck, my mother would remind us that our grandparents were from Appalachia, we would roll our eyes at her political correctness but we took the slandering of other races to heart.

I have a photograph of myself, circa 1976, standing in the backyard of our new house in Newport News, Virginia. It was our second house in Newport News, and in reality it wasn’t a house. It was a new sort of condo that is now prevalent, with a “brick” façade hiding the particle board innards, as if this apparition of strength could hide the fragile, cheap-as-hell construction of the building. We had moved from another part of Newport News because of concerns about the urban grade school I was attending, where I didn’t have a single friend. The condo community we moved into was filled with the families of Navy personnel and working class families. I had a small room that I shared with my brother, my sister had a room just next to ours, and the bathroom connected to the hallway to the master bedroom. The yard was roughly ten feet by ten feet, big enough to catch a lizard in and that was about it.

In the photograph, I am wearing a red and white Washington Redskins t-shirt, although I was already a Steelers fan like my big brother. Perhaps I was trying to find my own identity as an eight year old, or perhaps others were trying to find it for me.  The photo is faded like so many photos from the seventies; instantly dated, as if the picture was taken behind marbled glass. It gives the impression that the whole world was slightly askew and blurred. When looking at photographs from the nineteen thirties and forties, it feels as if the poverty that gripped the thin, weathered faces of those who managed to survive the Great Depression was more severe in black and white—as if the world had never been in color. Blurred and fuzzy, I stood in the backyard in that picture from the seventies, knowing that even if this was yet another new house, new school, and new friends; I would forever be tethered to the feelings of isolation that I felt at that moment.

In the spring of 2004, I had received a message from Jenny. She was back in Columbus, at least temporarily, and she was drunk, incoherent, and lost, as if the map to her inner soul had been doused in gasoline and burned. Over the phone, her voice sounded as if it were being wired through the ages from a time that had long since passed. It was broken, brittle, and frayed. If her message had been a photograph, it would have been faded, black and white, with eyes staring towards the lens with all of the effort of a dustbowl victim.  Jenny sounded small, huddled into herself; the message spoke of desolation and the crazed chaos of alcoholism, mental illness, and the misfortune of loneliness that is only magnified by alcohol.  “I don’t know what to do. I’m borrowing some girl’s phone. She must think I’m nuts.  What can I do without him? I need help.” Click.

I had no idea what time Jenny had called and I sure where she was. I had been rebuilding myself for a few years at this point, living back in Columbus, working at Used Kids, and plunging headlong into various kinds of volunteer work to help other drinkers. I was ill prepared to offer solace to Jenny. With furrowed brow, I took to the stairs of Used Kids, passing the timeline of flyers that line the walls of the stairwell, a cornucopia of brazen and hectic nights of my life. Pavement, New Bomb Turks, Thinking Fellers Union, Love Battery, All-Male Mowdown, All-Girl Hoedown, Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, The Great Plains, Scrawl—a virtual testament to my twenties that marked my trajectory from young, feisty indie-punk to cynical record-store drunk to grizzled befuddled optimist, the walls captured and dismissed me at the same time.

I headed to Bernie’s, where Jenny had struck up several romances since returning to town. I assumed that she had borrowed a phone from some future barfly there who had not yet dipped her life into the inkwell of wretchedness that years of bar sitting can bring, but Bernie’s in the daytime was a good as any place to start. Poking my head into the bar, the bartender glanced at me and said, “She left about three hours ago, and she was a mess, yelling at Nate about some craziness. She is off her fucking rocker. I told her not to come back for a while. She is scaring some of the customers.”

I glanced at a bearded man with bits of egg in his beard and four inches of stretched belly hanging out over a belt that longed to be put to sleep. His t-shirt was blanched and threadbare, with dollops of pizza stains and pocketed with small stretchy holes that barely contained his daily-beer-drinker’s girth. He raised one eyebrow, hoisted a Pabst Blue Ribbon tallboy, and slowly nodded his head in agreement. I gazed at another man sitting two seats down, decked in a faded leather jacket with a chain wallet dangling against his bar stool as if he were tethered to it like a dog. He looked up from his tallboy and said, “Bela, that chick is nuts.” In the background, Homer Simpson mirrored this same scene at Moe’s Tavern.

Crossing High Street, I entered the OSU Music Building and climbed the stairs to the top floor, where the university kept the practice pianos. I crept quietly and listened. I heard the vague plinking of the Beach Boys’ “Surfer Girl.”  Opening the door, I found Jenny, hair matted, filthy and clinging to her skull and shoulders, and a thin dress drenched in sweat sticking to her arms and back as if it wallpapered onto her. She was braless, with the contours of her breasts exposed revealing not sexiness but total sadness. She gazed up at me, tears streaming down her cheeks, with a bottle of vodka stashed between her legs and the overwhelming odor of sweat, booze, and depression blanketing the air. “Oh Bela, what am I gonna do?” She turned and tried to play “Lady Madonna”, but only made it through the first several lines before switching course and attempting “Maybe I’m Amazed.”  Gurgling, she croaked, “That was his favorite. He loved Paul McCartney. I would play that over and over.”  Of this, I had no doubt, as she once told me that they had spent $275 playing David Bowie’s “Major Tom” over and over in a hotel while on a two-day-long coke binge.  The other half of the “they” was Jim Williams, her boyfriend who had passed away only a few months ago. “You know,” she slurred, “we saw Paul McCartney five times. We flew across the county to see him. Jim was like that, once he became obsessed with something he did it to death.”

My first thought, which I managed to keep in my mouth, was “like cocaine.”

Taking a pull off the warm vodka bottle, she said, almost to no one in particular, “You know, they threw out all my stuff when he died. His brother and that bitch sister-in-law, they went to the boat I lived on and dumped it all. Even my pink records.” The pink records were the Guided By Voices split she did, the one that had been reviewed in Spin magazine only seven years prior, where Charles Aaron called her “astonishing and one of the best bohemian song-writers alive.”

Frozen, I simply said, “I’m sorry.” Inside I was angry, upset that anybody would discard somebody’s possessions with such impudence. Although Jenny could be difficult, she didn’t deserve that. Peeking under the cover of madness takes skill, an unwavering sense of determination, and a smidgeon of courage, all of which I lacked at that time. My skin felt like science fiction, sweat dripping down my back. The room was an oven—don’t they have air conditioning here?  “Jenny, why don’t you go somewhere and get some help?”

Plinking on the piano, she whispered, “You can’t help, you never wanted to help. You just want to tell me what to do. Leave me alone.”  Not wanting to fight, I left, a hole inside of me shuddering as if another shovel of dirt had been lifted out and dumped onto the pile of unhappy memories that littered my life. I thought of that picture of me, taken so many years ago, feeling like an outsider at the age of seven, and I realized that there is nothing sadder than being an outsider in your own life.

Jerry Wick & Jenny Mae part 35: Songs part one-Now, back to the suffering.

Songs. Pt one: Back to the Suffering, thank you.

We collected songs the way some people collect comic books, baseball cards or shoes, holding each song close to our hearts-an immediate mood changer. Everything was about either setting the mood, matching the mood or of course changing it. Growing up, feeling separated the sounds of music provided an elixir to a sometimes utter feeling of isolation that helped many of us through the suffering afternoons and evenings of adolescence. An opportunity to escape in our bedrooms, or when we hit sixteen in our cars, feeling a sense of escape as bald tires lifted us from the mundane often cruel existence of high school, forming rapid distance from a parking lot of rusted junkers and peers that were only peers by age not interests. An album was like a vacation, a chance to step into the life of someone bigger than life, who told a story that we could relate to and at times only dream about.

At the end of my fifteenth year, as another Ohio summer slowly cranked the humid grind of days, I heard Lou Reed for the first time as I picked meat off of fifteen boiled chickens in the kitchen of a small hippie Mexican restaurant in Athens, Ohio. Within two weeks I had half his catalog and later that summer Polygram released the long out of print (only fifteen years or so at that time though) Velvet Underground records. Providing my achingly boring existence with colors I thought only capable by moving to New York City, which seemed a million miles and countless years away. From there, I discovered a mountain of underground sounds such a R.E.M., The Replacements, the Lyres and a host of other bands arising from the underbelly of the vapid clean sounds of commercial radio. I was hosting my own radio show at Wittenberg University by the end of the summer, where I was exposed to even more music such as the Minutemen, Black Flag and English pop like Echo and the Bunnymen, early Adam and the Ants and Joy Division. I was prone to like the more pop oriented stuff associated with the Paisley underground,  the Long Ryders, Beat Farmers, and Let’s Active, my punk-rock credentials have always been more of an attitude than a sound.

When Jenny and I began dating within a year and half of my musical revelation, I suppose I appeared exotic, at least as exotic as a lonely but confident seventeen year old can appear in rural Clark county Ohio can appear. After school, the gravel parking lot of Northeastern high school would be filled with the canned sounds of Def Lepard, Hank Williams Jr., and early bland banal sounds of early hair metal which in one fell swoop took any danger left in rock and roll and bottled it for the safety of every Spencer Gift shop in every mall in suburban America. It was the bane of my existence, and I took it seriously. Jenny climbed the stairs up to my bedroom on our first date, as I had no job, no money and nobody at home to watch what I did. We carried a six pack of Pabst Blue label and I opened her eyes to the sounds of early R.E.M., Lou Reed and early Bowie which she had never heard. I had about seventy records at that time, and 100 cassettes, she had never seen so much music. Perhaps it was the sound of the unknown that propelled her to fall in love with me. She had never heard any Rolling Stones besides the hits off of “Tattoo You” and “Satisfaction”, so hearing “Some Girls” and “Sticky Fingers” helped lay the ground for me to present myself as someone who I wasn’t quite sure who I was to the funny, eccentric girl of seventeen.

All most of us wanted to ever do was to listen to music, to have temporary deliverance from the reality of our surroundings, an atmosphere that at times inflicted tiny pointed darts of pain in all of our lives. Witnesses to the bruised and at times, bludgeoned emotional lives of our parents, music was (and is) the balm that allowed a mind to turn off and get lost in the wonder of being. It helped that our parents were either unavailable or scattered in the morasses of their own lives and insanity that they couldn’t pick up on the comical dangers of the Ramones or tender loss of the Smiths, it was our own secret. At times, this was the equivalent of hugging a building for redemption.

As the door to the bedroom or car shut, the stereo turned to ten, head bouncing, cracking-out-of-tune voice bellowing out the words to “Bring on the Dancing Horses”, I was fortified for moment. And when the song ended, it was back to the suffering.

Jerry and I met, we immediately found the kindred spirit of songs, of a hook that could flinch you away from now and fling you to there. There being, the space between emotion and dreams, of feeling pleasantly lost while three chords matched whatever feeling you had. For Jerry, his musical upbringing was graduate school compared to mine, by growing up in Parma, at the metaphorical foothills of the Terminal Tower in Cleveland, he had the luxury of hearing first hand (while in high school) such wonderful sounds as the Mice, Death of Samantha and Spike in Vain and was only a few short years removed from The Dead Boys, Pere Ubu and the Pagans. Jerry was a romantic at heart, whose hope for a life that only existed among the sung and written word would always tragically disappoint him. This romantic ideal would always show when he played solo under the moniker of “The Cocaine Sniffing Triumphs” (itself a homage to The Modern Lovers), as he always covered The Ramones “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” and Johnny Thunders’ “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory.”

and:

Jerry Wick and Jenny Mae part 29: Ohio

Ohio

Growing up in Ohio is different for all Ohioans, most because, like so much of the United States, Ohio is both vastly rural and also contains some of the largest and best known cities in the country. Everybody has heard of Cleveland and Cincinnati two large cities with history and reputations. Cleveland was populated by a large ethnic population from Eastern Europe, with massive Serbian, Hungarian and Czech immigrants who traveled west-ward to boil away their lives in the steel mills and manufacturing jobs of Northeastern Ohio. Cincinnati is nestled in the southwestern part of the state, just across from Kentucky; it is metaphorically across the invisible mason-Dixon line of Ohio. Hamilton and Clermont counties are two of the most conservative counties in Ohio, and while much of the state has overcome many of the racial tensions, Cincinnati with several large riots in the past two decades appears, at times mired in the early 1960’s.

Columbus would be that invisible Mason-Dixon Line, most people have heard of Columbus, the largest in terms of population of all the cities in Ohio it is mostly known as the largest college town in the country. A city that lives and breathes Ohio State football, which was mired in a multi-decade hangover after repeated defeats in the Rose Bowl that costs the saintly Buckeyes numerous National Championships. Even the smaller cities of Ohio are known, Toledo, Dayton, Canton and Akron have all garnered space in the minds of national citizenry, even if it is for such pop-culture phenomena as Corporal Klinger, the Wright brothers, the Pro Football Hall of Fame and rubber tires.

Then there is small town Ohio, with images of Sherwood Anderson, unlocked doors, county fairs filled with cotton candy and first kisses. An idealistic concept that feeds into the basic American dream that a small-town anybody can arise from corn-fields and hidden glens to climb into space like Neil Armstrong or John Glenn, the Presidency (seven of them-all mediocre hail from Ohio, or the silver screen such as Paul Newman and Clark Gable.

Because of its history and rich tradition, Ohio ranks fifth in colleges and universities which logically lead one to believe this is the reason it is home to so many artistic and inventive people. In spite of all of this, when one grows up in Ohio, one has the feeling of being the underdog, of someone who always just comes up short.

Ohio is known and felt as an also-ran, an area known for what it almost has but never had, and in fact never will. For an ocean we have a large lake, for mountains we have foothills and we are forever defined by our collective losses. Our sports teams are known for despair, in Cleveland it is brought out in such slogans as The Fumble, The Drive and losing the World Series with one out to go. Cincinnati is tethered to a football team better known as the Bungles and Ohio State Football went thirty years between National Championships and is better known now for losing two in the past five years. We are in our hearts cynical but lovable malcontents.

Musically, Ohio is rich, especially when it comes to punk rock, with an abrasive arty sound that helped birth the movement. Helped by the ample liberal arts colleges that dot the state, such as Oberlin, Kenyon and Antioch and huge state universities such as The Ohio State University, Ohio University, Kent State and Bowling Green. The arts scenes have always burped out terrific and idiosyncratic fare such as Pere Ubu, Devo, the Wolverton Brothers, the Dead Boys, and Guided by Voices. In the late eighties each town had its own brand that helped define and nurture the other bands and artists. Cleveland had the most excellent and under-appreciated Prisonshake, the Mice, Death of Samantha, My Dad is Dead and Cruel, Cruel Moon. Dayton had Guided by Voices. Cincinnati had the aforementioned Wolverton Brothers whose shambling country-art punk is as twisted as anything from a David Lynch movie, the Ass Ponys and the Afghan Whigs. Athens birthed Appalachian Death Ride and Geraldine, two sinister bands that would be at least marginally famous if they resided anywhere but Athens, Ohio.

In Columbus, we first had Jim Shepard (Vertical Slit/V-3), Scrawl, the Great Plains, the Gibson Brothers, Royal Crescent Mob, Boys From Nowhere and Mike Rep all made up of various odd-balls and characters who would play a huge role in the development of what is somewhat now being regarded as a high point in the Columbus underground scene. The specialness of that time was mostly due to the large and fanatical friendships and respect we had for not only one another but also for those bands that set the stage. Jerry Wick and Jenny Mae would both be besides themselves to share the stage with any Ron House fronted band and the same would be said for the New Bomb Turks who would open for any band they deeply respected, whether it be the Fastbacks (from Seattle) or Prisonshake.

We put stock in ourselves and to a large part, our friends. Friends who would carry the torch of loneliness offset by a burning desire to be heard and to hopefully lay next to another congenial soul by five am. Our hopes, crashed as theirs did when things did not quite pan out as we had planned. We were prepared for it, as it is in an Ohioan’s soul to step up to the plate and be called out by the proverbial sinker ball. Three strikes. The Trip. The Fumble. The Drive. Etcetera and so forth. Nobody got famous, nobody ever really made a dent in any product counting mechanism like Billboard, The College Music Journal or MTV but we loved and cherished one another as if our lives depended on it, night in and night out. What we discovered was the result wasn’t the prize; the prize was the friendship and the making of art for fuck’s sake. That is what an Ohioan does, not always stylish but always sincere.

Jerry Wick and Jenny Mae: Part 24 “The Trailer”

Athens: 1990

The trailer sat roughly ten miles outside of town, half-way up a small Appalachian foothill in Athens County. Athens is a small college town, nestled within a high poverty area of Southeastern Ohio, that at one time consisted of many Eastern European immigrants who worked in the high sulfur coal mines. In fact my brother’s pee-wee football coach went by the name Bela although he had a very distinct Appalachian accent. It was known as “The Trailer”, and bore the reputation of an almost living breathing entity, some of my friends in Athens who knew little about my brother had heard rumors and tales of  “The Trailer”. It was a standard size trailer with two bedrooms, a small living area that easily connected to the cramped kitchen area. It was situated in a flat area of the hill, and was completely surrounded by trees. The small drive that widened up the steep pitched hill was basically a smoothed over mud patch, more suitable for BMX biking than driving a car. It’s a wonder how the trailer was moved up to the spot where it rested, perhaps a UFO had plopped it onto the hill.

My brother is a year older than me, he choose a much different career path than me, and he joined the service, became a Green Beret and then proceeded to go to college and became an officer. He is still in the military today. After he returned from his first overseas stint in Germany he went to get his undergrad at Ohio University. For a while Jenny and I would sometimes visit with him when we went to Athens although we generally ran around a much different crowd in Athens. He tended to hang out with his rugby buddies (who engaged is all sorts of unmentionable bar-room activities) and we would hang out at the Union bar and get plastered while watching local and national bands such as The Cows, Guided by Voices and Thinking Fellers Union.

It was odd when my brother decided to move into “The Trailer”, it was a setting that was not conducive to studying and his future roommates where ones whom the term “baked” had nothing to do with bread. He had been all over world because of his career choice, growing up in Athens with a father who was an ex-professor all of us children had assumed we would attend Ohio University. My older sister attended OU for what amounted to an extended burp and Zoltan waited until he was already in his mid-twenties with a military career already full-go. I had used Athens as an escape from my life that was already centered around escaping itself.  Zoltan always had a loyalty that was much more bountiful than my own; I was one to stick with a few ideas and friends while Zoltan could remember every classmate from first grade. When he went back to Athens for school he settled in with the townies, a group of home-grown locals who, at times had a skeptical view of the imported student population but took part in all the extra-carricular activities the student population brought. These consisted of a downtown that consisted of more bars than actual retail businesses, huge block length parties and an abundance of locally grown “spices”.  Just outside of the town limits the environment turned impoverished, with a huge contingent of poverty stricken low-income whites that piece-mealed a sustenance together, cobbling together enough hard work and luck to just get by. The farms that flecked the rolling hills were small and barely large enough to eke out a promising existence.

The trailer was owned by a boyhood friend of my brother, a good-old boy from a traditional Midwestern family that farmed a small plot of land. Danny, was red-haired and large, prone to drinking too much alcohol on a daily basis (as many in the area are) who was cast adrift after completing high school. For many in the area, although they grew just shy of the large state university, college was not a choice. This is not uncommon in most of the Midwest, where even in a largely populated state like Ohio that is filled with a plethora of higher education opportunities, there exists little career opportunities for high school graduates. In Springfield, where we went to high school, one had the choice of working at the large International Harvester, Honda, farming or most likely a shitty fast-food job. In Southeastern, Ohio the two previously mentioned job opportunities were not available.

Many, if not most of the recent high school graduates, schlepped around for a few years, moving through their early twenties unmoored until they either got somebody pregnant, got pregnant or somehow managed to wrangle a suitable job from the hollow economy of the area. For many, life was an endless weekend as opportunities were spaced far between cases of Pabst-Blue Ribbon Beer and bong-loads. With each passing year, life could grapple the ankles of fortune and pull a poor boy down into a pit devoid of favorable circumstance. This was the population my brother gravitated to upon returning to Athens. The trailer housed Danny, my brother and an old grade-school friend named Brian. How my brother accomplished reading one book in the trailer is beyond even my broad imagination, some of it may have to do with his ability to live in a swamp for a week with one knife, one match, one piece of rope and a live chicken.

Jenny and I would visit the trailer on our monthly visits to Athens, although we would never stay very long, for it would reawaken the very recent memories of a high school period surrounded by good-old boys (i.e. rednecks) and the blunt immediacy of personal confrontation. Where manhood could be summed up in loud vocal tones and one’s ability to discuss the ingredients of a powerful engine. I was always looking for a way out. The muddy path sloped up the crooked hill, with hesitant and hic-uppy stops only a large truck or earth moving vehicle had the hopes of climbing up that treacherous driveway. At that time Dominoes Pizza would offer a free pizza if they could not deliver your pizza to you under thirty minutes, on rainy nights they boys would order a few pizzas knowing full well that a car could not drive up the impassable drive, and they would get the pizzas for free. Soon enough, Dominoes refused to deliver pizza to the trailer.

Our firs excursion to the trailer happened on a Friday night, I had just gotten a new car, a 1984 blue Chevette, complete with an AM radio and stick shift. I had bought it off my former step-father for $400 and was proud of the small, compact and ugly machine. On the way down, Jenny and I stopped at a McDonalds to get some coffee to chase the 40 ounce beers we had. While waiting in the drive-through window line she asked to drive, I said “No, you can’t drive a stick. You’ll ruin the transmission.” She protested, saying “my dad taught me how, last summer.” I knew this was a bald-faced lie, I taught Jenny how to drive and not in a stick-shift. In fact, I took her to get her driver’s license in my former car. “Jenny,” I smiled “you’re lying, I taught you to drive. You can’t drive a stick.” Smiling back, “yes, he did. I promise I know how, I won’t mess it up. I’ll make it up for you.” I knew what this meant, a sexual favor. “O.k. but be careful.” We switched places and as she tried to pull forward she grinded the transmission, making a horrific racket, all of sudden with eyes bulging out and me screaming the car shuttered to a spasmodic halt. She looked over to me and proceeded to hand me the shifter. “Oops….here.” I was dumbstruck as I held the foot-long stick shift in my hand, staring at the oily end hovering above my lap. “What the fuck?! What the fuck?! What the fuck?!” I yelled. She said matter-of-factly “maybe you should drive.” With that she got out of the car.

The car was in second gear and somehow I manage to stick the shifter into the grimy black hole and get it into third gear. We ended up driving the rest of the way, praying that we didn’t hit any stop lights. I silently wept for the first twenty minutes and Jenny talked and drank beer as if nothing had happened. We eventually got to the imposing hill, as muddy stream of water cutting down the center of it. I managed to get the haggard Chevette half way up the hill where eventually because I could not downshift it stalled and rolled back into a small sapling. The night was going to be a disaster. Climbing out of the car, our shoes quickly filled with mud and we trudged up the hill, with each step our feet became enormous globs of mud. I went from a size eleven to a size thirty in three steps. Next to the trailer sat a large 4X4 truck that was left for dead as evidenced by its bed housing a mountain of empty beer cans that towered over its cab like an aluminum tower.

Opening the door, our boyhood friend Brian laughed at us, as did the living room full of townies. The living room had two couches and several chairs with a small table that was overfilled with empty beer cans and liquor bottles. My brother got up, and said “that hill is a trip isn’t it. Should have told you to park at the bottom and walk up.” I handed him my stick-shifter, “we had a little trouble on the way down” I said glancing over at Jenny. Danny jumped up, laughing he said “sorry for laughing at you trying to master that hill, I can fix that for you now.” With that he disappeared into the wooded darkness and reappeared several minutes later, “all fixed”. He did it with nary a tool as his hands were covered in grease. “It just kinda pops back in. It should stay that way.” I went to use the rest room, peeing I looked over and saw a fork lying next to the tub. After rinsing my hands in the filthy sink I grabbed the fork to take it back into the kitchen. As I walked into the living room everybody howled “Oh, shit put that back and scrub your hands” and “shit, do you see what he has?!”  I held up the fork as if it were an unexploded grenade. “This?” “Yes, that’s our pube remover.” I was confused. “What, your pube remover? What the hell is that?” My brother got up and bravely took the fork from my hands and escorted me back to bathroom. “Be, we use that to pull the pubic hair from the drain.” As I scrubbed my hands I murmured “obviously.”

When we left the rest room, Zoltan motioned to the room off to the side, “that’s my bedroom, you guys can stay in there but I should warn you we saw a black snake in there last week.” I decided then we were going to stay with Chris Biester in town. Sitting on the couch my backside nearly touched the floor. Everybody noticed my clumsiness, and explained “we cut the legs off all the couches because guys were just shoveling their plates underneath and squirrels were getting in and eating the food off the plates.” I offered “why don’t you just wash your dishes?” This drew cackles. I then noticed the shotguns lying next to the couches, there were four of them. I asked what they were for. “Oh, in the daytime we take bets on who can shoot a squirrel from the couch. Whoever misses has to go on the next beer-run.”  “Oh, makes sense.”

Jenny and I sat on one of the couches, we were handed fresh beers, directly to my left sat an older sandy haired man named Tommy. I knew everybody else which consisted of childhood friends Danny, Brian, Mark, and my brother’s younger girlfriend Sandy. Tommy shook our hands and winked at Jenny. He was a Vietnam vet and was very pleasant at first. We drank beer and played drinking games and after an hour Tommy switched, he looked over at my brother’s girlfriend and grinned, with clumsy syntax he stuttered “you, my dear are quite munch able.” Zoltan chimed in “Hey, Tommy cut it out, that’s my girlfriend you’re talking about.”  Tommy looked over at Jenny “I must say, you are too.” That was it; my brother stood up and demanded an apology from the drunken vet. They faced off; one broken ex-Vietnam vet whom, I later learned had spent a great deal of time in prison, and a large young buck of an Army officer. Circling each other, Tommy baited my brother, “hey you may be Army but you ain’t really army till you kill somebody. Going to Germany ain’t nothing like getting’ shot at.” Zoltan, who towered over the smallish thimble of a man, was keeping his cool, “Tommy you can stay if you settle down and apologize.” Tommy sneered, “fuck you, I can take you. Fuckin’ pussy.” Being mindful of all the shotguns, that I assumed didn’t have their safeties on we moved towards the kitchen. Finally, Tommy left. I told Zoltan that we needed to meet up with our friend Chris in town. We left with minutes after Tommy left. Things just didn’t seem right.

Later that night, Tommy came back brandishing a handgun which he shoved into my brother’s stomach. As the other inhabitants of the trailer scrambled out of the way, ducking behind legless couches and grabbing their own guns my brother managed to talk him down but not before Tommy needing to prove the severity of the situation fired several shots into the woods. Tommy would later die in prison; my brother forgave him and sent him letters and books while he was incarcerated. Zoltan would soon after move to First Street where he lived with a cast of other characters and eventually he too would see the havoc of war. We never returned to the trailer.

Jerry Wick and Jenny Mae: Part 15-Athens, Ohio; Monster Truck 005

1992-1998

I had started to take road trips to Athens, Ohio where I spent the majority of my childhood.  Even though I had found a community in Columbus, a sense of belonging there was still a part of me that felt that only a part of me was accepted (or was that accepting) of the scene I was with in Columbus. Even though I was burnished with a sense of growing confidence inside of the insular world of the underground rock scene in Columbus I still yearned for something else, I wasn’t sure if it were to be found in the form of a woman, of music or another collective community. In a sense I wanted to merge all of these together although I could not seem to blend even one of these with the other in my own life. I had been trying unsuccessfully ever since I was a teenager. My busted up and fractured relationship with Jenny Mae had taught me several things, one was that trust was something that stabs like a cactus and the more you rub the needles the more imbedded they become and that putting all of your hope in one person was not a real bright idea. In the mid-nineties I was still figuring this out.

I had always loved Athens; it was the most physical place that ever reminded me of home. A small mid-western town, with a large courthouse the rose off the top of Court Street like so many other small-town courthouses that dotted the landscape of Ohio, Athens was different from the confining invisible walls of such similar tiny towns in Ohio like Findley, Urbana and Xenia, and this difference was solely due to the Ohio University. The first land-grant University west of the Appalachians. Ohio U. is a big college with over 20,000 students but is dwarfed next to its colossus cousin to the north in Columbus, The Ohio State University. While OSU was known for football, its law school and farming, Ohio U. was known for partying and its counter-culture way of life. Jerry always referred to Athens as “that hippie town” which I thought was odd since he attended Kent State which I also considered a “hippie town.” The big difference for me was that the scene in Athens appeared tighter, more organic in a sense and the music was reflective of this.

Appalachian Death Ride was the biggest band in Athens during the nineties, led by my childhood friend Chris Biester they could be devastating live, especially in the cozy confines of the Athens club scene for which they ruled the roost. They were basically the house band of the Union, an old biker bar in the nineteen seventies that was now how to the counter-culture scene in Athens. A diverse scene made up of film-makers, artists, drop-outs and hate rock purveyors with names such as Torque and God and Texas (who moved down from Columbus around 1991.) Thing moved slower in Athens, shows didn’t start until almost eleven or later and didn’t end until three am. Even out of town bands that frequented the town appeared bothered by the late start times, I remember speaking with Chuck Cleaver from the Ass Ponys and Bob Pollard from Guided by Voices who both were frustrated by late starting times. It all worked for a relaxed scene that did not appear to have some of the competitive mannerisms of Columbus. It was not uncommon to see a crowd dancing in Athens no matter the type of music whereas in Columbus it was more common to see the more standard hands-folded-across-the-chest pose of so many self conscious independent rockers.

I loved my drives to Columbus; I would leave work at Used Kids usually a few hours early on a Saturday, and stop and get a six-pack or a few forty ounce beers for the hour and a half drive down. Even though I brimmed over with self-confidence during this time in my life, I realize in hindsight how uncomfortable I really was with myself as I reconsider my reasons for needing to drink so much by myself for these drives. By the time I would arrive in Athens, I would be half drunk, the sun would usually still be shining and I would head over to my brother’s house. My brother, Zoltan is a year older than myself and has spent a lifetime in the military, at that time he was pursuing his undergraduate degree at Ohio U. and was still active in the Army. He was a green beret and lived in a house that had a revolving cast of characters that included redneck townies, conservative college republicans and died-in-the-wool hippie bong loaders. At any given time there were at least four dogs living in the house. In the middle of this was my brother, who worked and played well with others for most of his entire life.

Next door to his dog infested home was another small cape cod with an assortment of characters, three women and Pat Humphries who was the tall bearded bass player of Monster Truck 005. Pat was a fixture of High Street, the complete opposite of his brother John who fronted the animalistic but precise hate machine known as God and Texas. Both were giant, over six-two with lanky but muscular frames, while John would not look out of place in the polished sheen of “A Few Good Men”, Pat, on the other hand looked like an extra from Jeremiah Johnson. He had times a ratted flowing beard and hidden within all that hair was a disarming smile, a grin that no doubt flowed from a well thought of concoction of intoxicants. Pat drove a truck that resembled a crossbreed of a huge Army Jeep, Hummer and an ancient semi-truck. It was quite literally a Monster Truck. Pat was reserved but goofy, he had a gentle voice but when drunk and dark he could appear spooky due to his unmannered looks.

The early nineties was a time of hair, so to speak when the sounds more echoed the ghosts of The Stooges and the demons of Altamont there appeared to be an indirect correlation to the non-fashion sense the late sixties/early seventies. We wore thrift store clothing because we were broke, and avoided combing our hair because it was a drag. Flannel was in because it was cold in Ohio, or Chicago and Seattle. In Ohio it is not uncommon for the weather to change like the moods of a drunken step father, at one point breathing warm air and the next day to be frigid and chilling. Pat was a perfect example of this. My last sight of Pat was him driving that beast of a car of his, turning wildly onto High Street, yelling my name and holding a whiskey bottle out of his window. It was noon on a weekday. That was most likely 1995.

It was not uncommon to see Pat and my brother sitting on the couch watching the Cleveland Browns or Pittsburgh Steelers with beers in their laps, a stark contrast of styles breaking bread, as it were to the great American religion of professional football. I had been seeing a woman who lived in the house that Pat dwelled in, she was like many of the women I knew, more of a comfort than a relationship. One who, if her room was not already occupied when I arrived would let me curl up next to her and feel accepted. She was nice, pretty with long black curly hair and like so many of the women I have known had her share of demons that one may never have guessed by her forgiving accepting demeanor.

Jenny Mae understood my longing for Athens, which no doubt drew for the long lost feeling of home and safety that I had as a child growing up there. In an era where people in small towns did not have to lock their doors and instead of video football we scrapped together every kid in a three block area and played football in muddy grass with stained knees and torn t-shirts, each one of us a miniature model of our own gridiron hero—Terry Bradshaw, Sammie White or Brian Sipe. She would travel down with me when we were a couple and later when she was married her and her husband would accompany me on a few trips. She wrote the song “leprechaun” off of her first album from a time she went to Athens on Halloween and took a hit of LSD. She had witnessed a custom-goer getting squished in the Court Street mob and wrote the song in her head.

Jerry too, would accompany me on several of these trips although he liked to say at times he loathed Athens, he always enjoyed the trips away from Columbus. Athens, reminded him of Kent and he also had an old girlfriend there whom he would hook up with. Although he wasn’t the biggest fan of the Athens music scene or of Appalachian Death Ride, we saw them play the Dugout on one of these trips and after they had burned through several nuclear versions of “Pale Blue Eyes” and “American Girl” he turned to me and said “they are fucking amazing.” Jerry couldn’t drive; he never had a license so it was always me who did the reckless drive to Athens. We would smoke cigarettes and drink cheap beer and talk about girls and music. It was a magical time when one could leave behind any responsibilities for twenty-four hours and not be frightened of the consequences.

It is a ramshackle of an evening, filled with at least three clubs in Athens and weird afterhours that is winding down. I am past stumbling and into slow motion land swimming, the afterhour has been declared over and people are hustling to grab the last few drinks and free hands that they can scrounge up. The desperation is palatable. The evening lottery from loneliness is ticking away; I clumsily open a beer with a lighter in the dark. I manage to get the cap off the imported beer but also the tip my right index finger. I laugh at the blood and drink the beer. Jenny and her ex-husband Dave laugh alongside of me; we are oblivious to pain at this point. A small blonde woman winds her way through the dissipating crowd, she is older than me, most likely in her late thirties even in the dark I can see the wrinkles forming around her eyes. She says nothing to me but grabs my right hand and sucks the blood out of my finger. Feeling alarmed, horrified and weirdly turned on I stare back at her. I can see Jenny and Dave off to the side, the whites of their eyes almost illuminating the room. Their heads are shaking.

The woman takes my finger out of her mouth and asks me if I am Bela.  Shocked that she knows me, for I have never seen her at the Union or any other club in Athens I affirm her answer. She tells me her name and says “you used to work at Case Que Pasa in the eighties with a bunch of high school guys didn’t you?”  My first job was cleaning chickens at the hippie-Mexican restaurant when I was fifteen, looking older than I was I would drink St. Pauli’s beer and listen to Lou Reed’s “New Sensations” and The Talking Heads and pull boiled chicken off of the bones. “Yes, that was my first job.” The woman then goes on to tell me that she worked there and that the women there had a bet as to which one of them could get me and my two friends in bed first. All I can think of is “I spent my fifteenth year summer trying to lose my virginity to no avail and now you tell me this.” We talk some more and I my curiosity is peaked. Eventually she offers me a ride to her house and I explain that I have Jenny and Dave with me. She offers her couch to them. We follow her home in my car, Jenny incredulous says “You can’t fuck her; she sucked your blood without even knowing who you are.” By this time, I had gathered enough information from the woman to know that I couldn’t sleep with her in a carnal manner. She had divulged to me that her divorce was finalized that week, this lead me to the conclusion that as much as I would like to believe that it was my own charisma that had reached back ten years to 1985 that had silently seduced this woman in actuality it was her own broken heart and desperation that prompted her to try to heal the bloody index finger of a drunken boob.

When we arrived at her house, Jenny eyed me and mouthed “you have to fuck her.” I shook my head; I had enough hang-ups with intimacy that I promised myself that I wouldn’t take advantage of this woman. She made a bed for Jenny and Dave and we went to her room. She approached me and we kissed but I informed her I couldn’t sleep with her. We crawled in her bed and held one another and kissed a few times. Finally she asked me if I thought she was attractive, she was in fact, quite lovely. With a small frame, slim and a bob haircut. “Of course” I replied, “but I can’t sleep with you tonight.” I looked skyward, perplexed and noticed that the bedroom door was slightly ajar. I looked past the woman and noticed Jenny and Dave crawling across the floor. After about five minutes of silence, with my back turned to the woman and my head facing the wall the woman nudged against me and offered “can I at least suck you off?”  Giggles emanated from the far side of the room. “No, but we can hold each other” I offered.  The next morning on the way back to Columbus and for the next several months Jenny and Dave would ask me “can I suck you off?” and release the giggles again. A few months later, I saw the woman eating lunch by herself in a bar in Athens; she was reading the paper and looked right past me. I thought to myself, “That is loneliness in action.”